Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is your program
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featuring religious
liberty news, views,
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and evaluation on things
that are happening in the US
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and around the world.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
Editor of Liberty Magazine,
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and my guest on this program
is Carmela Monk Crawford,
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the editress.
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I feminized it
on another program.
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The Editress, that's funny.
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Editress of Message Magazine
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which is...
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Well, it's hard to describe.
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We had a whole
program on it recently.
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But it does have a
minority emphasis, doesn't it?
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There's no
question. That's right.
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It began that way.
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I'm an Australian, and I came
to this country as a teenager,
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and studied history,
and literature, and so on.
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And I've always been
interested in the US.
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And one aspect of it that
many people in other countries
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sort of speaks a lot to
the beginnings of the US
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of what used to be called
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the Negro
Spirituals, beautiful music.
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And yet you only have to
listen to one or two of them
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to know that there's a
lot of pain hidden there.
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What's your take on
the black experience
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as played out through music?
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And I'll give you a cue
of where I'm coming from.
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It's very heartwarming.
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In our age, we doesn't
play the spirituals much,
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but when they were
played, heartwarming, you know,
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that's nice Christian
expression, but to me,
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there's a hidden story
of repression of religion,
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and an imposition of a
religion of the oppressor.
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How did that dynamic work?
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Well, Lincoln...
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How can we redeem it in our age?
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If I had said it like that,
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I don't know if I could get away
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with saying it like that.
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But you are very right
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in that the
wealth of the spiritual,
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I think many years
or at least early on,
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people were not making
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that astute
observation that you are.
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People always thought
that the music of the Negroes
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was so happy, and it took
us to such a wonderful place,
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and it was so lovely to
hear them sing joyously.
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But hidden into the
meaning of the Negro Spiritual
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where everything from directions
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about how to escape,
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and how to subvert,
what was being done to them
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and done under them.
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But more than that,
the theology was correct,
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the theology was correct.
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And it is amazing to be
able to look back and to see
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how the Holy Spirit
was able to teach people
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who were subjected
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to the most cruel
inhumane treatment,
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and under the guise of
Christian practice and faith,
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and see the true Jesus,
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and what He had
in mind for them.
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One thing, you know, I
talk about this sometimes,
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I believe it's beautiful.
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So many of our beautiful songs
that we've all coming with,
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in our hymnals.
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They come in that minor key,
"I want Jesus to walk with me,"
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"Sometimes I feel
like a motherless child."
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There's one that's
not a Negro Spiritual
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but American spiritual,
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"Sometimes I feel
like a Wayfaring Stranger."
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And that beautiful minor key wit
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to someone else or
to the casual observer
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seems like such a
bluesy or a jazzy feel to it.
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That is a deeply
restorative sound.
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You'll notice at the
end of most of those songs
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that we have reversed
back to that major key,
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but there's something
in that beautiful music
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that is handed down.
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I don't know why
you asked me this,
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but this is a
very big thing for me.
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Something that
has been handed down
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from generation to generation,
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and I believe it is spiritual
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because I
believe as we got to know
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and as we get to know
Jesus, the man of sorrows,
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acquainted with our grieves,
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it is in those
times of deep need
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and serious drive in crisis
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where you come
to walk with Jesus,
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and know Him, and
that is why it is sweet
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and it can
resolve on the sweet tone.
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You didn't ask me
about that, but...
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There's a very good
spiritual lesson from it
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which of course
is where we end up.
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And anybody that comes
to Christ, no matter how,
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they find great stuff.
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Yes.
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And also, and I need
to put a qualifier in.
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A lot of hymns in general,
since it root the poetry,
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and a lot of poetry
comes from hard anguish,
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and disappointment, and so on.
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Yes.
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There's not a lot of
hymns if you really think
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that are super
triumphant and sunny optimism
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regardless of whatever.
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There's an element of
solemnity and the blessed hope
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of something beyond this
vial of tears in old hymns.
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But it really is
hardly ever spoken
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about how peoples
brought from another country
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with other religious, you know,
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animisms, I know
but it's still religion,
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other views of the
universe, and here,
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it transmogrified into
a Christian expression.
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And it's sort of
obvious to me that even today,
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there are elements of other
theological view points adrift
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in the American experience
that came from Africa.
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But you know, how did
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in such a repressive atmosphere,
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they adopt, many of them,
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the majority
perhaps, ultimately,
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a religion that was in its worst
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form connected
with the very situation.
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And we don't, in America,
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sort of look
south and draw parallels
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to what the Catholic
Spanish adventurers down there,
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you know, they forced
religion on the people there,
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repressed the native expression,
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and it turned out
a little differently.
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But the dynamic
is not different.
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So how would you relate that
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on the level of
religious self-determination
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of not forcing
religion on other people?
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It's a question
hardly ever is asked.
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Yeah.
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And I'm having a hard time
trying to focus in and zone in
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on just one
particular aspect of this.
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I do believe that the experience
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of the
African-American in this country
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had a uniquely emasculating,
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dehumanizing nature to it.
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And the beauty, as I said,
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I believe that in that space,
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the Holy Spirit
worked in a way to speak to
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and nurture and
hold up many people,
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African-American people.
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Last year, I had the opportunity
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of being at the
Hampton Ministers' Conference,
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and they had a great seminar.
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And during the seminar,
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they had representatives
from the new Smithsonian
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for African-American
History and Culture,
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and several other scholars.
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And one of the
things that was brought up
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during that
seminar was the report.
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You know, for many decades,
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they've reported
and recorded information
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from formerly enslaved people,
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recorded whatever they
could to piece together
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genealogies and
histories and things like this.
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One interesting strain
that people would report
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was that they
were taught to read,
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and they believe by angels.
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What am I trying to say?
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I'm trying to say...
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A divine element
in all of this, yeah.
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The divine
element has to transcend
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what is going on here and now.
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And I believe that is our focus.
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When we look at
human rights, civil rights,
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religious liberty rights,
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is that it has to transcend
the dialogue and the debate
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that is happening on the ground.
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We have to act for what
we know we are called to
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rather than
what's just here now.
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You're right.
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I think, anyone
with a spiritual affinity
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can discern God's
Spirit moving through history.
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But, of course, unfortunately,
in the fallen world,
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it's not the
dominant force there
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or the counter forces.
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But let me throw the
question at you in other way.
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Come again. Come again.
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Since we'll stick to the Bible.
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The Exodus, 400
years in slavery.
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And I'm trying to think
of the American experience
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wasn't quite that long, was it?
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But 400 years,
that's long enough.
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It's almost prehistory
for those 400 years later.
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And if you read
carefully in the Old Testament,
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you can see that the overlay
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of the religion of Egypt
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was hard to remove, it
took many hundreds of years.
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And in fact, in some ways,
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still lingering even
in the New Testament.
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So what do you see in
the American experience
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that is a forced marriage
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between other religious
traditions and Christianity?
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Did it just...
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God's Spirit moved
a whole people away
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from something else
to discovering Jesus?
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And then, of course,
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it moved beautifully into
the civil rights movement,
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Martin Luther King,
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and Baptist
leadership in particular,
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they applied those
biblical principles.
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But has it gone?
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How can one religious tradition
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totally replace another?
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That's a loaded
question and a leading question
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I'm hearing you say.
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And you want to
give an answer for this.
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But it's worth
thinking about. Yeah.
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And I believe, in
subtle ways, it shaped America.
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You tell me what is it
that you've seen it shaped.
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No, I don't want to
say. You don't want to say.
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You don't want
to say. I believe...
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But it's a thought experiment.
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It's a thought experiment.
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I do believe
that there would be...
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I guess, I look at
it from a different way.
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You know, if you
make the parallel to Egypt
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and we make the parallel
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to the
African-American experience
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in which, you know, I'm
very interested and keen on
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continuing to explore,
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I see the biggest detriment
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or the biggest
carryover is a mindset
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and is a dearth of understanding
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of where you are.
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Now some people say
that could be very spiritual.
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But I also
believe that, you know,
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that has other implications
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that go to both your profession,
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your family life,
everything like this.
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I believe that the destruction
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that has happened
to people's inside,
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in their mind is a carryover.
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Even now, we talk
on just a simple basis
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of trying to elevate
our diet and our health.
00:11:56.34\00:12:01.28
There is no reason to eat
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the way it has
been passed down to you.
00:12:03.75\00:12:06.32
Now God has given you
a ticket out and freedom.
00:12:06.35\00:12:09.86
And so we've been talking,
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I left Brooklyn
a couple weeks ago
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where I was in there
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and talking to an
African-American couple,
00:12:14.90\00:12:16.97
vegan couple, said, "You know,
00:12:17.00\00:12:18.83
we've got to get away
from this sort of thing."
00:12:18.87\00:12:21.04
This is a new phase of
the resistance where that,
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"I'm not part of a killing."
00:12:25.44\00:12:27.74
On an Adventist
level, you are correct.
00:12:27.78\00:12:29.51
Yes. Yes.
00:12:29.54\00:12:30.88
And Adventism
adopted the health reform
00:12:30.91\00:12:34.12
as a direct
connection to spirituality
00:12:34.15\00:12:36.22
and to clear thinking,
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and to move back
to God's basic ideal.
00:12:39.22\00:12:41.79
But when you're talking
US history, as you well know,
00:12:41.82\00:12:45.86
you can see the...
00:12:45.89\00:12:49.50
If you look at diet,
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it's an overlay of the history
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that goes back
to antebellum days.
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What people eat
today is a product
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of what was going on then.
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Not much longer though.
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That's very...
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That's changing a lot.
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And even back...
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Well, I'll go back to
Genesis, not Genesis, Exodus.
00:13:11.39\00:13:14.82
Remember, in the
desert, they were saying,
00:13:14.86\00:13:16.56
"We wish we had the leeks
and the onions and all those,"
00:13:16.59\00:13:21.73
the great food of Egypt.
00:13:21.76\00:13:23.10
Right. The food of slavery.
00:13:23.13\00:13:24.83
The slave diet. Right.
00:13:24.87\00:13:27.27
So yeah, all of
life is interconnected,
00:13:27.30\00:13:29.60
what that tells us...
00:13:29.64\00:13:31.04
So it isn't just
what church we go to
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or what holy book we
read, it's a package.
00:13:33.84\00:13:36.88
And the ancients knew it.
00:13:36.91\00:13:38.38
And we're in a dangerous path,
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I think in our country
that we may be moving back
00:13:41.92\00:13:44.92
to a uniform
sort of a religious,
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national religious viewpoint.
00:13:47.26\00:13:49.92
There's a logic to it,
00:13:49.96\00:13:51.29
but there's a
horrible danger from history.
00:13:51.33\00:13:53.66
I can see we're
near our break point.
00:13:53.70\00:13:55.40
So we'll take a short
break and be back to continue
00:13:55.43\00:13:58.40
what I think is an
interesting discussion,
00:13:58.43\00:14:01.57
reaching back into
history of plucking things,
00:14:01.60\00:14:04.04
maybe even at random.
00:14:04.07\00:14:05.41
Yeah. Stay with us.
00:14:05.44\00:14:06.78