Latest / Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo / Corey Miller: Confronting The University-Driven Cultural Marxist Revolution
Transcript
- 0:00Welcome to World View Matters, discussing controversial issues, discerning current events,
- 0:10defending biblical Christianity.
- 0:13No topic, off limits.
- 0:16And now, here's your host, David Firazzo.
- 0:19Hey friends, thank you so much for tuning in and as always, praise God for you guys
- 0:25sharing the podcast and getting us out there.
- 0:28It's been growing and that's out of my control, but I'm just so thankful so we appreciate
- 0:33you very much.
- 0:34Got another great guest today.
- 0:36Man I talked to several years ago in another format, but it's so good to have them on World
- 0:41View Matters.
- 0:42But before I bring in Corey Miller, I want to mention a brand new book coming out that you
- 0:46can pre-order, another very important book.
- 0:49He says, as goes the university so goes the world.
- 0:54The book is called the Progressive Miss Education of America.
- 1:00I know we had Sam Sorbo and Kevin Sorbo in studio a few weeks ago.
- 1:04The miss education was in the title of that podcast.
- 1:08So this is a very important topic, especially for us here at Freedom Project.
- 1:12But Corey Miller, if you're not familiar with his ministry, he grew up in Utah as a seventh
- 1:17generation Mormon.
- 1:19He came to Christ, later became a pastor, philosophy professor, campus minister, and
- 1:24now serves as president and CEO of Rossio Christie.
- 1:29The website is rossiochristy.org.
- 1:33He's authored or edited five books, holds three masters degrees along with a PhD.
- 1:38He got in Scotland and his thought is centered on the intersection of faith, reason, and
- 1:46culture.
- 1:47Stuff we love to talk about here on World View Matters.
- 1:50So Corey Miller, good to see you again, brother, thanks for your time.
- 1:54David, it is so great to be here with you.
- 1:56Thank you for inviting me on.
- 1:57Yeah, well, and thanks for putting out this book.
- 2:00As I mentioned, it's right up our alley.
- 2:03And I want to talk about your background and what you've been doing through the years
- 2:07with Rossio Christie.
- 2:08Before we dive into the book, I've got a lot of questions about the book, but I just
- 2:12do want to read the description.
- 2:13It says, the Progressive Miss Education of America is an eye-opening look at how our
- 2:19universities have polluted the cultural landscape we live in today, and how Christians
- 2:26can respond strategically.
- 2:28And you bring a lot of insights and ideas that people can take action on.
- 2:32So I'm thankful for that.
- 2:33And then there are bullet points.
- 2:34But before we dive into that, people, you can go to Amazon.com, look up Progressive Miss
- 2:40Education of America.
- 2:42And did I mention the, no, I didn't, the subtitle, confronting the Cultural Revolution
- 2:49from the classroom to your community.
- 2:52I love that.
- 2:54So brother, great book coming out that people can pre-order.
- 2:57So now let's talk about Rossio Christie, because this is a lot of people are probably
- 3:02newer to when I was doing radio years ago and heard you when I interviewed you.
- 3:09So tell us about Rossio Christie and then how for, you know what, wait, let's back up
- 3:13a little bit.
- 3:14I just recently had a former Jehovah's Witness on.
- 3:17I want to know, you were, you were a Mormon or did you grow up with your family being
- 3:23Mormon?
- 3:24Yeah, I was a seventh generation Mormon.
- 3:26Okay.
- 3:27So how did you get out of Mormonism?
- 3:30Let's go back.
- 3:31Right.
- 3:32Some of my family who have done genealogical work for me say that I come from healthy stock
- 3:36and what they mean by that is that one of my ancestors was a bodyguard of Joseph Smith
- 3:42and the very first split and at the highest level of any split in Mormonism out of 400 splinter
- 3:49groups was engaged with my family.
- 3:53So he had five wives, 36 children of which I'm a descendant.
- 3:57But when I was in high school, I had a friend in California that invited me to come for
- 4:01the entire summer.
- 4:03I could go to the beach for the whole summer.
- 4:05I thought it would be great, but his dad conditioned it on one thing and that is I had
- 4:09to go to this non-denominational Christian camp.
- 4:12I went there, the speaker talked about hell.
- 4:14I tell people it scared the hell out of me and have an intimate, very life-changing.
- 4:19But it was that experienced, David, that made me start thinking about the foundations
- 4:24of truth.
- 4:25I didn't care about truth before.
- 4:27I had a living prophet.
- 4:28Let them do the work on that.
- 4:30And now I'm challenged with, how do I know the Bible is true?
- 4:35I've been told it was false my whole life, but how do I know it's reliable historically?
- 4:40It's true.
- 4:42I don't know, God didn't exist, and I'm so, you know, which God then?
- 4:46And so that sent me on a three-decade trajectory of where I'm at now in philosophy and comparative
- 4:51religions.
- 4:52Wow.
- 4:53So what was the time frame of that process from when you went to that camp or when you
- 5:01went to a Christian church and then that, because it takes apologetics, it takes a lot
- 5:07of investigation into how that you can be comfortable with leaving Mormonism, believing
- 5:13that the Bible is true.
- 5:14What was that time frame in that process like?
- 5:17Well, my junior year of high school, I somehow, I think, I convinced my mother that I was
- 5:22going to live with this family in California.
- 5:24So I did.
- 5:25I got discipled that year.
- 5:26I'm still friends with the youth pastor and the senior pastor of that church who was
- 5:30my age.
- 5:32And we just hit it off and I resonated with this new Jesus life, but I came back my senior
- 5:38year of high school at the graduating Utah and that's when my extended family and my friends
- 5:44and my culture started putting the pressure on and it really pushed me into skepticism
- 5:48for a short period of time until I was able to come across this thing called apologetics
- 5:53reasons for the faith.
- 5:55One thing led to another, God gave me a desire for evangelism and a mind for strategy.
- 6:01One off to Bible college and then seminary and then another seminary and then switched
- 6:06to philosophy from biblical studies and eventually went on for a PhD, not once, but twice because
- 6:13from hostile activity at the university where I was at, I had to terminate with a five-year
- 6:19master's degree there.
- 6:20So I've had my fair experiences at the university now and taught at Indiana University for a dozen
- 6:29years that gone, went through the gauntlet of all the legal proceedings both personally and
- 6:36in my organization having four federal victories, five appellate court victories, two scotas
- 6:42assists and we gave Biden a going away present his last month in office with the Department
- 6:48of Education.
- 6:49So I'll work out there.
- 6:53So let's talk about Russia, Christie now.
- 6:55Then did you start with Russia, Christie and you've been, I think it's many years now,
- 7:00right?
- 7:01Yeah, it's 14 years old as a 501 C3, I've been here for 10 of those last years and we
- 7:10have a high school division, a international division, a professor's division where now
- 7:16we're funding PhD students getting into top 100 schools in the nation to launch Christian
- 7:23PhD student only ministries, wife the top 100 because they will get first round draft
- 7:30choice on the job market, get back in and not just integrate faith and reason, but infiltrate
- 7:36back into academia and then we have our bread and butter which is the core university students
- 7:42that we go after in addition to an RC press now where we give printed and digital materials
- 7:49for churches and individuals and that we use on campus.
- 7:52Wow.
- 7:53Praise God.
- 7:54Again, rachiochristi.org cultivating thoughtful Christianity on campus.
- 8:01I was watching a program last night and the night before where Charlie Kirk was doing
- 8:07an interview and the work that he has been doing, getting out there on college campuses
- 8:12in a hostile environment across the country.
- 8:15What did he say?
- 8:16It was some just astronomical number of campuses that he goes to every year.
- 8:22I don't want to misquote him, but it was just higher than you would imagine because for
- 8:27someone as busy as Charlie Kirk with Turning Point USA, but does that ever intersect with
- 8:34what you're doing?
- 8:35I mean, he's not directly apologetics driven because he talks about anything, everything.
- 8:42Can you share a little bit about that and other speakers that come on and try to do that
- 8:46kind of work?
- 8:47Yeah.
- 8:48I was just, I'm next to Purdue University's campus in West Lafayette, Indiana and he was
- 8:53at Purdue about two months ago.
- 8:55So I went to that rally and engaged a lot of the fun people in the audience as well.
- 9:00And then Lucas Miles is his division director head of TPUSA Faith and Lucas has endorsed
- 9:08my forthcoming book as well.
- 9:11Yeah, we do have some engagement with them and you're right, it's not primarily apologetics.
- 9:15In fact, it's more conservatism, but it's now engaged with the faith a bit more.
- 9:22So what separates us from the standard apologetics ministry, David, is that we are on the campus
- 9:29and what separates us from the standard campus groups and ministries is that we do primarily
- 9:35apologetics evangelism.
- 9:37So trying to overcome obstacles for people to lead them to faith in Christ and then see
- 9:43them go out and become world changers.
- 9:46One of our students from UC Berkeley went on to law school and just last week she wrote
- 9:55the Amicus brief that was the key one I think that was cited in the recent Supreme Court
- 10:01case through Tennessee that upheld their right to ban puberty blockers and gender hormone therapy.
- 10:11So we get some of our in officers that go on to clerk under Brett Kavanaugh to become
- 10:18philosophy professors to start study centers, doctors, lawyers.
- 10:23We're engaged in thoughtful Christianity.
- 10:26We want the head, the hand in the heart, but at the university we emphasize the head
- 10:30of Christ.
- 10:31Awesome.
- 10:32So again, love the title of the upcoming book, The Progressive Miseducation of America.
- 10:39Great cover, too, by the way, with the graduation cap in the middle and that funky maze there.
- 10:45Corey, do you see a shift at all?
- 10:49We mentioned the hostile environment.
- 10:51If you are a Christian or conservative or maybe even Republican, when you go to some
- 10:57of these universities, do you have you noticed any shift to more, maybe more openness because
- 11:03it used to be there was so much intolerance of the biblical worldview and even a willingness
- 11:08to talk about these things, whether it be Christianity, the faith, what you present, apologetics,
- 11:14defending the faith, what have you noticed over the last maybe couple of years?
- 11:19Is anything changed?
- 11:20I mean, I have taught in the classroom and had a former pastor who turned gay, charged
- 11:26me with creating a suicidal environment.
- 11:29I had to get legal representation for that.
- 11:31I had two of my atheist students defend me along with the lies defending freedom.
- 11:36I have been disinvited or canceled from numerous universities being called logical fascist
- 11:42and things like that.
- 11:44What you're seeing right now in culture because we've had an election spin, you know,
- 11:50MAGA in the morning after you're starting to see big things happen, you know, DEI heads
- 11:56rolling University of Pennsylvania just last week is now saying, we're sorry, we're
- 12:04sorry.
- 12:05We're going to take away the medal from Leah Thomas and give it just to girls and girl
- 12:09sports.
- 12:10Today, this Supreme Court announced they're taking up that case in this next year.
- 12:16That happens with the changing of the guard in politics and I'm convinced that many of
- 12:21our legal wins have happened because Trump changed the judiciary as well.
- 12:27But what you're seeing in the universities right now, no, no, no, no, no.
- 12:32That's putting lipstick on a pig.
- 12:34These guys have not had a come to Jesus moment.
- 12:37The recent statistics out of Yale, for example, and their social sciences and humanities,
- 12:4398%, 97% of their campaign contributions from faculty went to Democrats this last year.
- 12:56And their ratio of liberal to conservative professor is 87 to 1.
- 13:01Harvard, in the recent election, it was 96% of the campaign contributions across the
- 13:08nation.
- 13:09The left to right professor ratio is 12 to 1 now for those getting ready to retire.
- 13:17It's 23 to 1 in the New England area, 27, sorry, among those who are just getting 10
- 13:25or 40 and under 27 to 1 in the New England area.
- 13:28And then in religious studies, it's 70 to 1.
- 13:32So these administrators are, and faculty, they're not having come to Jesus moments just
- 13:38because Trump is requiring them to do new things.
- 13:42I know what's going on in there.
- 13:43I see what's happening in universities.
- 13:45I have friends that are faculty.
- 13:48Just in the 90s, it was 2.3 to 1.
- 13:50So radical things have happened and a new secondary revolution has taken place in the universities.
- 13:56And these guys have been at this methodologically patient and very tactful for decades.
- 14:05They're not going anywhere soon.
- 14:07So we're putting chlorine downstream and it's helpful in politics.
- 14:12But politics is downstream from culture, culture from education, and the apex of education
- 14:17is the university.
- 14:18If you want to change the culture, change the university.
- 14:22The progressive miseducation of America, you say decades, I say half a century.
- 14:29And even before that, if you look at John Dewey and how the education machine got rolling,
- 14:36and there's so many other players we could mention, we've got to take a brief pause.
- 14:39Again, friends, you can pre-order the book on Amazon, we're with Corey Miller of Rossio
- 14:43Christie.
- 14:44We'll break back on World View Matters.
- 14:46Today's show is brought to you by Harbinger's Daily.
- 14:50World News Biblically Understood.
- 14:52Stay informed at harbingerstaley.com.
- 14:55Friends, right now Freedom Project Academy is enrolling students for this fall with live
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- 15:20You can visit FreedomForSchool.com, that's FreedomFORSchool.com, use the code David15
- 15:28to say 15%, that's David15, to say 15% on all courses at the Judeo-Christian Freedom
- 15:36Project Academy.
- 15:38Corey Miller is our guest today, Rossio Christie, fantastic organization.
- 15:43Some other things I was reading about, you say, losing the American universities to post-Christian
- 15:50secularism is one of the greatest debacles and tragedies of world history.
- 15:56That sounds like a pretty grandiose statement, but I absolutely agree.
- 16:01Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit more, Corey?
- 16:04Now, we launched the universities.
- 16:07I give the whole history of the universities in the book, as well as showing how we lost
- 16:11America, but we point to the universities, beginning with Harvard, and for 300 years,
- 16:16that Otto was truth for Christ in the church, but 1880 to 1930, we had no graduate programs
- 16:24in the US.
- 16:25We sent all of our people mostly over to Germany, and they came back with the higher criticism
- 16:29and various viewpoints, came back, and that was the 50-year battle from 1880 to 1930.
- 16:36Dick Naturalism was the first revolution that happened in the universities.
- 16:40They took over, we got kicked out, started our new institutes at that point, and so it's
- 16:45been going on for some time, but in the 1930s, again, over in Germany, something strange
- 16:50was happening, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender
- 16:55Theory, Critical Queer Theory, Critical Pedagogy, et cetera, et cetera, down in the south
- 17:00in Italy, Grampsi and Antonio Grampsi, who is the most influential Italian cultural
- 17:06Marxist, and his views, he never got out of prison, but they got mediated to us right
- 17:11here in my home state of Indiana by a Marxist professor at Notre Dame, Joseph Buttigieg,
- 17:17the father of Mayor Pete, and then the founding of postmodernism, which came about 15 years
- 17:23later, Foucault, Derrida, Leotard, and others, they all, if they were postmodernist and
- 17:29they're relativist, you would think that they would span politics from left to right,
- 17:33but they're all hard left to the first and second generation, and that is because they
- 17:38were all members of the French Communist Party.
- 17:41All the leaders of those three states that access power, you might say, have come over to
- 17:46America over the last century in our top universities, and now we're looking at potentially the
- 17:52most successful Marxist revolution in history, again, politically, we've got a new regime
- 18:00that is helping us for American jurisprudence and free thinking in the First Amendment, but
- 18:06that only lasts four years, who knows what's coming four years from now.
- 18:11We need to infiltrate the cause of all of this, and that is the universities.
- 18:16Yes, and the churches have to be engaged too, that's a side issue, but that's such a major
- 18:21problem with the lack of biblical worldview and the declining, just biblical illiteracies
- 18:27off the charts today in the church.
- 18:30But anyway, Corey, you said something you mentioned Harvard, I'm glad you did, I always
- 18:33like to harp on that because Veritas Christo Edeclizier, truth for Christ in the church,
- 18:40became simply in their badge, Harvard's badge like the logo shield, it's just as Veritas
- 18:47now.
- 18:48So my question is always, okay, you remove Christ, and you remove the church, and whose
- 18:54Veritas have the university's been pushing, and John Harvard, Pastor John Harvard would
- 19:00be flipping in his grave if that were even possible, that bones don't flip.
- 19:05But there's an expression, if he knew what happened to his university where you can register
- 19:12as one of, I don't know, dozens of genders or whatever expressions or pronouns at Harvard
- 19:18and just the craziness now, the wokeness, it's just insane, isn't it?
- 19:24Yeah, and that's part of the second revolution that has taken place.
- 19:29From the scientific, now it's postmodern cultural Marxism, and that's where everything from
- 19:34race, class, sex, gender, ethnicity, and so forth come from.
- 19:37Truth now, no longer means what the Puritans meant when they founded Harvard, capital T truth,
- 19:44truth is reducible to power, and everything's about power dynamics, privilege and power.
- 19:49And so this is what we're seeing in this new revolution, poor Richard Dawkins and his
- 19:55ilk of the new atheism, he was sort of the apex of a century long reign of science, and
- 20:03he was part of the reign of terror. He was like, you know, the French revolutionary that started
- 20:09the guillotine, and then he got guillotineed himself. And now he wants to call himself a cultural
- 20:14Christian and be friends with us again because something worse is in the room. Robespierre, that was
- 20:19the name. Man, this sounds like an amazing book, and I think I'd like to have you come back on
- 20:27in a couple of months, Corey, because there's so much more to talk about. We're going to,
- 20:30I'm not going to get through 15 to 20% of the questions I had for you, but one of them,
- 20:36let's go back to DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, concepts that sound very good on
- 20:42the surface. Now, the Trump executive order is wonderful, but as you said, that doesn't take
- 20:50them out at the roots, whether that be corporations or colleges at the University of Level Talktus,
- 20:56a little bit more about DEI, how these weaken a society.
- 21:01Yeah, again, in Harvard, they have almost 100 commissar officers, political officers,
- 21:10their DEI officers. These are full-time positions. Many of them, six figures. They're not going
- 21:16anywhere. They're doing other things. They're restructuring the names or whatever, but I don't call it
- 21:22DEI in the book. I call it D-I-E for rhetorical purposes, number one, but as a trained philosopher
- 21:29and theologian, I think about things from a philosophical viewpoint, because that's what this is.
- 21:37Reality is at bottom, and then how I know about reality, and how I should then live based on what
- 21:41I know about reality. That's philosophy, and it's three main branches. What does the D stand for? What
- 21:46is the I stand for? And what is the East stand for? Respectively, the D for diversity means to go
- 21:52out and identify the various power dynamic groups, identity politics, and in race, class, sex,
- 21:58gender, ethnicity, as to whether they have or have not an oppressor or oppressed, victimizer or
- 22:06a victim. And then the I inclusion, you include only those groups that are woke whose eyes have been
- 22:11opened, because only they have the lived experience to know their oppression. And so they have moral
- 22:19authority then to get platformed, to get all the new jobs at the top departments, and corporate
- 22:26leads, and so forth. And anyone who's part of the oppressor class, like say a white Christian
- 22:32male, heteronormative, cisgender, viable leading capitalist, you just listen and learn and lament.
- 22:40And then the ethics of it, all the E, it's not equality, it's equity, equity used to be a
- 22:46financial term. Now it's a moral term, wherever inequality exists, there exists injustice. And so
- 22:53we need equity to balance this power dynamic through coercion. If the problem is social oppression
- 23:00at the bottom of human relations, known only by the woke whose eyes have been opened, then the
- 23:05solution is social liberation, i.e. social justice. That's what social justice is. That's what
- 23:13they're doing from research justice to reproductive justice, to climate justice, to any kind of
- 23:19justice you can possibly imagine. Wow. This is one of those podcasts, friends, I wish we had more time,
- 23:27but that's why I really need to bring you back, Corey, if you're available. There's, I got it
- 23:32down to there. There's so many other questions, but I want to just narrow it down to one more,
- 23:36we're down to four minutes already. Let's go back to 1840, because in the book, this is a quote from
- 23:42the book, up until 1840, all university and college presidents in the US were members of the clergy.
- 23:53It seems maybe surprising, but I guess if you go back that far, so what, I mean, we've only got a
- 24:00few minutes left bullet point, condensed that for us, what happened?
- 24:04Well, in a Mark Noel wrote a book about 30 years ago this year called the Scandal of the Evangelical
- 24:10Mind. And the scandal is that there isn't much of an evangelical mind. That's not the case for the
- 24:14history of Christianity in the last 2000 years. We started all the universities. We begin with a
- 24:19worldview that starts with mind. Jesus was called the Logos in John 11, the logic. We throughout
- 24:26the life of the mind, we abdicated our own responsibility and high culture and secularists came in
- 24:31through two different ideological revolutions. And now what I'm calling for is a third ideological
- 24:37revolution. And that is us. So it's a clarion call at the end of the book, the last third of the
- 24:42book, really, to pastors, to parents, to philanthropists, to paratroopers, to political allies,
- 24:49and prayers. All hands on deck. It's the university stupid. Even if you are not called to the university,
- 24:55everybody needs to prepare for the ideological poison coming downstream from the universities
- 25:02down into our homes, our churches, campus ministries, and into our closet. You can't even go into
- 25:08your closet to hide anymore. Wow. We do have time for one more question. In the book, you say that
- 25:16the menace of mindless Christianity has to go. What do you mean by that?
- 25:23This is what did it. You know, Bertrand Russell was famously quoted as saying,
- 25:27most Christians would rather die than think, in fact, they do. And so here we are on a good day.
- 25:35We're looked at as pedophile priests. On a bad day, you know, that's the bad day. The good days
- 25:40were brainless believers, right? We started the universities. We started the hospitals. We started
- 25:48representative government. Christianity is good for the world. This menace of mindless Christianity
- 25:54has killed us. Jesus commanded us to love God with our mind. And in 1 Peter 315, we're commanded
- 26:00not suggested to give the reason for the hope that lies within us and do it with gentleness and
- 26:05respect. Head, hands, and heart Christians. Amen, brother. Boy, there's so much more, but friends,
- 26:15the progressive miseducation of America. I'm sure there's so much information in here
- 26:22that even a lot of us who think we're informed need to catch up on, need to understand what's
- 26:27happening. And Cory, thank you for putting out this book. If you want to change the world, change
- 26:32the university, Christians have a lot of work to do. Regardless of who's in office, you made that
- 26:37point. Thank you. We have four years. It's not a reprieve. We better work harder than we ever have.
- 26:43Who knows what could happen after the midterms? Who knows what could happen in 2028? But
- 26:48Cory Miller, russiaakristy.org, a book is on Amazon. I will reconnect with you and see if we can
- 26:54get you on again in a couple of months. Talk more about this because there's so much more in the book.
- 26:59I know and there's so many more questions I have. So brother, thank you for your time today.
- 27:03Good to see you again. Thanks, David. Appreciate it. Take care. Yep. You too. All right, friends. Another
- 27:08good one, the progressive miseducation of America. Lord willing, we'll talk again with Cory in
- 27:14the very near future. Thanks again for sharing the podcast and for praying for us. And as always,
- 27:19God bless you and keep speaking the truth about things that matter.