[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everybody. Welcome along to this special preview snippet of our monthly Conversations Interview podcast. In this episode, we are talking to Deacon Harold Burke Sievers. He is a deacon, a former police officer, a former law enforcement trainer, a former Catholic monk who is based in the United States, and who also happens to be a fan of Iron Maiden. It's a whole lot going on in this episode. You definitely don't want to miss this one if you want the full episode. So you're just going to get a snippet here in this little preview. But if you want the full 90 minutes episode, then all you need to do is go to Patreon.com Left Footmedia and become a $5 monthly patron that gives you access to this episode and all of the other exclusive patrons only content that we publish every single week. So patreon.com left Foot media. In the meantime, enjoy this special preview snippet from our conversation with Deacon Harold Burke Sievers.
Welcome to Conservations, the podcast which got its name by literally combining the words conservative and conversations, which is exactly what happens on this show every month. Each episode we host a conversation with at least one other guest where we go in depth on a topic or hear about their experiences on this journey we all share together called Life. The aim of this show is to foster and promote dialogue which cultivates goodness, truth, and beauty, and in doing so, unpacks the richness of the authentic conservative tradition. My hope is that you'll find these conservative conversations intellectually engaging and enriching and that they will draw you ever more deeply into an authentic, truly flourishing and more meaningfully lived human experience. In this month's episode, we are going to be talking with Deacon Harold Burke Sievers. Known around the world as the Dynamic, deacon Harold Burke Sievers is one of the most sought after speakers in the Catholic Church today. He is a powerful and passionate evangelist and speaker whose no nonsense approach to living and proclaiming the faith is as challenging as it is inspiring. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Business Administration, along with a Master's degree in Theological Studies, and he co hosts a national weekly radio broadcast in the United States, as well as hosting and co hosting several popular series on the Eternal Word Television Network. Oh, and did I mention that he's a fan of Iron Maiden? Well, you'll find out more about that during our conversation in this episode. So without any further ado, let's have this important conservative conversation with Deacon Harold Burke Sievers. I hope you'll enjoy the conversation as much as we did.
Now let's talk about this issue of law enforcement. And I mean, we're going to talk about racial issues because you've written a book about this and I'm really intrigued. I'm very interested in this.
But the question of law enforcement, just something you said just before got me thinking because I've had this theory for a while as an outside observer who does not live in America. But my sense is that there has been an increasing militarization of American law enforcement and that is really creating a sort of a problem in some areas. Am I correct in that, or is it something else altogether that's really driving a lot of what we're seeing?
[00:03:48] Speaker B: Yeah, so what I think is going on is when I went through the academy and then at teaching at the academy, is that they don't train or test for bias. So, for example, you take a psychological test, you do all this kind of testing, physical fitness test, shooting tests. You test your fitness to be able to do the job. But one thing they don't train for or learn to detect is bias. So, for example, in traffic stop school, when they teach you how to do traffic stops, you're supposed to treat every person motorist the same way. But the problem is, if someone comes in with a preconceived racial bias or a racial prejudice or is just outrightly racist, that is going to play into how they do that traffic stop. Sure. See, so what we have to do is find ways to detect that, okay, we see this within this person and be able to deal with that and train the person out of that way of thinking or kick them out.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Yeah. If it's too ingrained, if they're just a hardcore hillbilly racist or something, you.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Just can't to they need to I.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: Mean, America is a melting pot of racists. So I'm assuming that's not just black and white. That potentially could be people stopping Asian drivers, all sorts of things, right? Potentially. But probably primarily black traffic stops would be assumed probably by people have a bias to be criminal.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Yeah. It's not the traffic stop thing. It's what happens during that stop and the shootings that have been taking place and things like that.
Why aren't they using less than lethal methods and things like that? And some of them are not justified at all shooting. Like the one incident where the young man was running away and he got shot in the back. I mean, come on, you can't do that.
Or some of the other things I've seen. It just makes your stomach turn. Even the George Floyd thing, I was watching that video and I was literally yelling, get the hell off his neck. Yeah. The thing is, look, no matter what drugs he was on, what his past has nothing to do with how you're treating him in that moment. So obviously he was causing a problem in the back of the car. They took him out, but he was on the ground, he was cuffed. And why was the guy kneeling on his neck for ten minutes? That makes no sense.
We're not trained to do that. No police officer is trained to do that.
So the question is, why was he doing it? And the other officers standing around allowing that to happen, they should have stopped, and they should have said something.
So I found it, as a law enforcement officer, problematic, because what that does, that puts a huge stain on all of us who put our lives on the line every day for people we don't know.
But that becomes the picture of what law enforcement is, and that's just the wrong picture.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: Yeah, it really struck me, particularly because my father, who died a few years ago, a beautiful man, but he suffered from schizophrenia for most of his adult life. And there was one incident I remember, just for my 12th birthday, and he'd gone off his medication. He thought, God has healed me. And he was sure he was healed. He wasn't. And he woke up one morning and thought he was the king of Ireland a couple of weeks later. And so the police had to be called to commit him for a psychiatric assessment and get him back on medication. And the police arrived and knocked on the door, and he shut the door first, then he shut it a second time, and then he punched the first officer, and the three tumbled back down behind him. My father had been a farmer, big guy. And the next minute they're in there, and he was in a state where, with schizophrenia, you get delusional. And so they got a police officer, one each arm, trying to bring his arms together to cuff him, and one swinging off of his neck and pulled out a billy club. And they tried to use that. At one point, he just calmly turned around and said, please, would you stop doing that? I don't like that. And they got really worried. And then he saw my mother and dropped his hands, and they cuffed him. But they stopped, right. They got him under restraint, and then it stopped. At that point, it didn't carry on.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: That's right. And I remember once I saw as a police chief on a university and a young man who was on some meth or some kind of drug walked into the girl's dormitory and said he wanted to have sex with the coeds. And so I had installed panic buttons underneath the desk, and so the button was pushed. The alarm went to our office, and I heard the call on the radio, officers respond. I didn't respond. Okay, they'll take care of it. Next I know, they're calling for backup, and they're describing this kid, about 19 years old, scrawny. I'm like, Why didn't he backup to deal with a kid like this? So I get out there with the sergeant, and he's throwing my guys off of him.
He's tall, he's skinny. I'm like, Wait a minute. And so he was on something. So it took four of us to restrain him, and I did have to kneel on him and stuff like that to get him under control.
That kind of action happens so that the person is not a danger to themselves, a danger to you or the danger to anyone else around them. And once the person is secure, everything stops. So I'm thinking it took maybe eleven or 12 seconds for four of us to get this young man cuffed so that he was no longer in danger to anybody around him. And once we did that, everything else stopped.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: Do you think fear and adrenaline can kick in? They're like shooting someone in the back. Is that a combination of bad training and other things or is it someone who freaks out and doesn't know when to stop?
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Well, it seems someone like that shouldn't even be on the street. Yeah, you got to screen people like that. You can't just take because yeah, you have to make very quick decisions in a very short amount of time and things can escalate very quickly. You think you have a situation under control and next thing you know the person is lunging at you or they're reaching for something because you're always trying to look at people's hands. And so when people don't comply, that raises up another level of awareness and danger in your mind as an officer because your job is to go home to be with your kids and your wife or if you're a female officer, your husband when you get off of shift. And so, yeah, your adrenaline is going. But you're supposed to learn to control that and to think.
Yes, your adrenaline is going right now, but you have to think in the situation.
That's why what I did, I practiced a lot or trained a lot of my officers in verbal deescalation, recognizing that, yes, this person right now that we're dealing with is frantic. They're angry. But your job is to first listen because as they're talking and you're listening because they're not angry at you, they're angry at a situation. But now you're representing an intervention into this situation. Now in their mind, you're a problem. So if you just say, look, I'm just here to help, tell me what's going on, and just listen to them, allow them to get their thing out. And as they're talking, they're coming down, they're coming down, they're coming down. And now they're in a situation where you can deal with whatever issues going on. Now, if the person has some kind of mental issue or is on some type of drug or is drunk, that makes things a lot more complicated. Then it becomes a safety issue.
You want to secure the person first and then have a conversation with them if possible.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah. I have an uncle who is now deceased, but he was a police officer in New Zealand and so I sort of had insight through him about his entire career with law enforcement. And in New Zealand, it's just so different. He was part of something we have here called the Armed Offender Squad and it's like, I guess the equivalent of SWAT team. But you're not full time. You get called up. A regular police officer gets trained, special training, and then when they need you with an armed incident, that you get called up into that situation.
And he did work on the drug squad and the homicide squad here as well. But one of the things I remember him telling me about was an incident where he had to sit for 4 hours beneath a negotiator trying to talk a man down with a shotgun who was in a domestic situation and he was threatening to kill himself. And for 4 hours he had a sight on this guy and he said the whole time it was the worst 4 hours of his life. He said, because if he raised the gun, I had to shoot him. And he said, I just didn't want to do that. I did not want to do that. And to me it struck me, I remember that story and seeing some of the stuff in America going on around policing and I feel like that us versus them mentality. In some cases, it just ramps the stakes up even more, right?
[00:12:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And you don't see the humanity in the person.
And that's why I always tried to recognize you don't want to be stupid and keep your guard down so much that you're not aware that you're putting yourself in danger. So we walk up to a car. To me, it doesn't matter who was driving, what color they are, I have probable cause to pull them over. And of course, the first thing I want to do is see where their hands are. Are they reaching for anything, that kind of thing. Because hands can kill. That's one of the first things you learn in law enforcement. But I try to treat every single person the same way. Of course people don't like being pulled over, right?
So I give them a reason. Like some officers will say, what did I do wrong? Driver's license, registration, proof of insurance. Yeah, but why'd you stop me? Give me that. Okay, I'll tell them why I stopped.
Okay, can I please have your driver's license, registration, insurance? Here's. Why I stopped you. And let me just go back and check things out. If there was a guy, you'll just give you a warning or something like that. Just try to not be a jerk. But again, you have to have your P's and Q's up the person. If they're reaching for something, if they look nervous, if they're not following directions, if they look like they're impaired. You have all these things going on. You have to make a judgment because what you're trying to do is to help keep other people safe. Because if the person should not be behind the wheel, then it's your job to make sure that person is not a danger of anyone else.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: One thing I'd love to hear your thoughts on I feel like there's a false dichotomy that often happens whenever you have these questions around police shootings and police use of force, particularly in the American context. And it feels like sometimes the people who rush to the aid of the police don't help either. Just like people who want to blame all police, they're always at fault. The flip side is people who try and defend the indefensible. Do you think that's a fair sort of assessment of what happens? Even the commentators who feel they have to defend the police at any cost?
[00:14:18] Speaker B: Right? And you have to look objectively at it as well. Like I said, I was highly upset at some of these incidents because the officers were there was no defense at all for the actions that they took. There's no way you can defend it. So you can't defend the officer because the action they took was ridiculous and was uncalled for. And people got hurt or killed because of the and they were prosecuted.
They were fired and stripped of their law enforcement authority, and they were brought to court, and they were found guilty. And rightly so. And rightly so. So you have to look at this on a case by case basis. And if there is something, a pattern, something that looks systemic, which, again, that's why I think we have to train and I tried to identify bias at the academy level because someone like that cannot be out on the street trying to deal with people when they have a racial bias in their mind. Well, this I'm just going to deal with black people this way. I'm going to deal with this person this way. No, you have to treat every single person the same. So a probable cause for not why'd you pull me over? Were you in the wrong neighborhood? What the hell is that? What does that even mean? I have a right to be wherever I want. If I'm not I'm not doing anything illegal. I'm not doing anything wrong. We mean I'm in the wrong that's not a reason to pull anyone over. That's ridiculous.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: Yeah, gosh. Tell me before we this is probably a good segue to start talking about race, but before we get into that, I know there's been a Supreme Court case around Harvard admissions and affirmative action. You often hear that a bit around law enforcement and other professions. Do you feel that's affected the law enforcement profession as well? Just in general, not along racial lines, but just in general? Is there a risk of lowering of standards from that as well?
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Well, hopefully not at all. In fact, what some departments have done, they've actually upped the education requirement because they want men and women who are able to and the thing is, the more educated they are, the more you're able to think clearly and discern what's going on in a particular situation.
So the Supreme Court decision and the thing is this.
I'm not a huge fan of affirmative action in the sense that, well, we have to lower the standard so that we can allow these other people no, we have to educate people to rise to meet the standard or exceed it.
I don't want someone to hire me because I'm black. What the hell is that? I want someone to hire me because I am the best person for that position. I'm the most qualified person for that position. And if you don't want me there because I'm black, to hell with you. I'll go work with somebody else.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: So do you feel that as a black man, do you feel that the sort of the tokenism of it? And so it seems to me that you sort of see that as, like, an insult, like, well, do you not think I can?
[00:17:02] Speaker B: Yeah, of course. It's a slap in the face.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: What you're saying is I am not capable to reach this standard, therefore we have to lower the standard so you can meet it? No, we have to be able to educate people to meet the standard. So what happened? The schools are failing our young people, so we have to make the schools better.
For example, one of the big controversies is the voucher system. So if you want to send your kid to a Catholic school or to another private school where the education is much better, some states won't allow you to do that because all your tax money is going toward a public education system, which is what? Which is failing our children, which is teaching transgender stuff in kindergarten, which is pushing an agenda. I don't want my kids to be part of that. So let me take the tax money and put it toward something that's going to really educate them and bring them opportunities that I may not have had as their parent that's going to give them opportunities to succeed in life and become productive citizens for the common good. That's what should be happening before we.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: I agree with you, by the way, there, and I'm saying that as a father of five kids, your kids are like, you'd die for them, and there's enough ideologues out there trying to intervene in ways that are not healthy. Tell me before we really get into I want to talk about the racial issues in this book that you've written. What are your experiences like? Because you're someone you are black, you're black American. It's sort of the world feels like it focuses right now on racial issues in America all around the globe. We hear about it a lot. What's your take as someone who grew up in the States and as someone who's, I guess, at times maybe has had to grapple with those issues? How would you describe america?
[00:18:49] Speaker B: Yeah, so I was born in Barbados, actually, we immigrated to the States, but and lived in the state of New Jersey and was educated in catholic grade school, high school, university and graduate school, Catholic institutions. My mom was the first Catholic in our family. She was a convert as a teenager, and I'm the oldest child, so I'm the first baptized as Catholic.
My mom, she was a nurse, but as far as the faith, she wasn't very well educated on the faith. But what I saw was her witness, right when my dad left our family and I helped my mom take over, I saw the sacrifices that she made. I saw the meaning of Christ crucified and loved through her.
Those are back in the days where the nurses wore the white outfits with the white starch hat and the white shoes. And I remember my mom going to work with holes in her shoes and runs in her stockings because the kids, we needed stuff. So she sacrificed, and I saw that. And so for her, education was the way out. So she always pushed education. She worked so much overtime to pay the tuition to send us to a Catholic institution, so we can create opportunities that she never had.
And so I never forgot that, and I never forgot the sacrifices that she made. And so she would always teach us to treat every single person with dignity and respect. And so I grew up in a black neighborhood, but I was Catholic, so we had to go across town to go to church at the white.
So the school I went to was there weren't many black kids in the school. There weren't many black families in the parish, and it wasn't an issue for me. I mean, I was in Boy Scouts. I was a Boy Scout in that parish, and we just all got along back then. It wasn't a lot of that whole racial thing, so I just learned to appreciate everybody for who they are.
But unfortunately, that's not we see what happens is this. You're not born racist. Unlike what critical race theory teaches, you're not born a racist because you see why anecdotally you see little kids playing on a playground, right? Four year old, five year old, I'm not going to play with you because you're Chinese. No kid does that. They're all playing together, right?
[00:21:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: So what happens over time? You learn prejudice. You watch television, you hear jokes from your parents, you social media, hear your friends talking, and you see the way people and cultures are depicted in these different arenas. And you come to make judgments about someone even though you don't know them. You start to make judgments about someone. So, for example, all you see on television is that black people in neighborhoods wearing hoodies are dangerous. When you go out to the real world, you see a black person with a hoodie, oh, my goodness, they're dangerous, because I saw and you don't know where that comes from, but you're being taught that. So my whole thing is, if you can learn it you can unlearn.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. I grew up in a very poor family and what we call New Zealand, a low decile school, poorer sort of areas. And it was interesting to me as I got older and my career and meeting people who hadn't grown up on my side of the tracks, who were white and they had all these assumptions about people who were not. White in New Zealand because they'd never even been around them to experience and understand. Just like what you're saying about stereotypes and things you see in the media and the assumptions that people just they consume them and they absorb them without even realizing it's happening often.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. And so we carry these prejudices into life and into the real world. And so when you're applying for a job, like someone's sitting across from you, for example, I remember if someone's applying for a job in my department, I would always be the last interview, you know, because they go they go on ride alongs and see how things work. And, you know, then the the sergeant and all the people, they kind of assess the person, then bring it to me. Then I would decide whether I want to interview the person or not. And someone comes in, they're sitting across from you. And this particular person was from a background, a religious tradition that doesn't see black people in the best light.
So I said, hey, would you have problems working for someone like me?
And they hesitated on their answer, and I said, okay, no, they're done.
If you have to hesitate about that, then again, I raised a question to my man. Are you going to be able to take orders from me? Are you going to be able to follow my lead in the way I want this department run?
If you're here because you don't want to, because unis are safer environments than working in a municipality, working on the streets, dealing with bad people every single day. Here you're dealing with students. And my attitude was, these students are coming to this university to get a quality education. They're going to learn in the classroom well, their interactions with us. They're going to learn from the classroom of real life. They're going to make mistakes. So you have these 18, 1920 year olds who are considered adults, and their adult clothes are too big for them. And so they're going to spend these next several years learning to fit into their new adult clothes. So when they make mistakes, we have to hold them accountable and teach them that right now, yes, you made a mistake. You messed up. It's better to tell the truth and be honest about what happened and accept the consequences for that action. It's better to do that right now, in this environment than to not learn that lesson and then make a mistake later in life that's going to cost you a job. A career, a reputation, a family. You see. So what I'm my officer is I said we're teachers in the classroom of real life, and that's what I want our young people to experience with us.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: The school of essential. Exactly.
It seems to me when I look at America and the race issue, like, America has its own unique complications. Every nation does in this regard, things like antebellum slavery and the civil rights struggle. It's actually still fairly recent.
But I look at America and two things strike me. Number one is it feels like at the moment we are exporting American racial issues that are unique to America into other countries where they don't actually exist, but we're acting as if all of those issues are in every country, and that's not helping. And number two is it sort of feels to me like and I'd love to hear your take on this I don't know, even something you said earlier. It feels to me like America has sort of gone backwards in race relations.
I was a young kid. I was born in the as someone through the felt like America was starting to progress. There was a sort of a genuine dialogue and a balance coming in, but then it's gone swung wildly into areas where it doesn't feel like it's progressing forward. It's gone backwards.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: No, I would absolutely agree with that. I think it has gone backwards. And I think part of the reason for that is things were progressing when you had figures like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, okay? And so here's what's happened. Since he was assassinated, there really hasn't been anyone to take his place. Right? Because what did he do? He gathered the people around himself, black, white, no matter what, because it was the ideology that he espoused. It was the peaceful way that he said, let's enter the dialogue.
But you have nobody like that now. So it's created a vacuum and a void. And so with no one to fill that void in the spirit and ideology of Martin Luther King, you have all of these pseudo cultural ideologies and individuals and institutions.
And their whole underlying thing is not racial healing. They have an underlying agenda which is being carried under the facade of racial justice and equality. But it's really a Trojan horse. What's inside is a completely different agenda which has nothing to do with that, but they're using it as a vehicle to move another agenda forward, which is fairly consistent.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: And I think let's talk about that because I know in the Pracy to your book, it sort of makes a distinction that I read there between critical Race theory and Black Lives Matter. And obviously, underlying that, there is the Marxist thing that's just sitting there boiling away beneath the surface as well as part of those movements. But you make a distinction between those two. Tell me about why that distinction is there.
In the review of. The book.
[00:27:48] Speaker B: Yeah. So the book is not about those things. I know what's going to happen. I told Ignatius Press this when I submit the manuscript. I said, look, when this book comes out, everybody's going to want me to talk about Black Lives Matter and critical race theory. The book is called Building a Civilization love, a Catholic Response to Racism.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: Right.
Now, I originally want to put those in one chapter.
But the thing is, when I started learning what critical race theory is, I'm like, oh my goodness, this is so huge, I have to give each their individual chapter. And the only reason I even mentioned those things because there are different elements within the Church, there are different people within the church who are trying to bring these ideologies in and say, hey, this is helpful in this discussion. So I said, okay, well, I'm not really sure what these things are about. Let me learn and let me assess objectively because maybe there is something here I don't want to enter into polemics. And then, well, this writer says that it's bad, and that writer says it's bad. Well, let me see for myself. So what I did was I bought the books of the people who developed, like, critical race theory. So Derek Bell, Richard Delgado, Janine Stefanik, Kimberly Crenshaw, and I read what they have to say for themselves about what critical race theory is. I bought well, not the books, but I read a lot of the literature. In fact, there was a young woman who wrote about Catholicism and the Black Lives Matter movement, how they're actually, they dovetail beautifully together.
Black Lives Matter is just an extension of Catholic social teaching. She wrote a book about that. So I said, okay, well, hold on. Let me take a look at this. Look, objectively, maybe there's something here. I did saint through liberation theology. So the common thread in all three is this Marxist ideology. So let me explain critical race. So critical race theory developed from critical legal theory of the 1970s, which looked at critical legal theory that even though the laws on race have changed, it hasn't really changed the attitude or the situation with regard to race. So just by changing laws doesn't mean you change attitudes.
[00:30:07] Speaker A: And that's Derek Bell and Co, isn't it?
[00:30:09] Speaker B: Yes, that's correct. And so that necessarily is not bad in itself, right. But the way they go about bringing about the change, that's what the issue is. Now, critical Leaguer theory comes out of critical theory from the 1920s, which comes out of Karl Marx, and interestingly, not Engels, but Freud with dialectical materialism, which comes from Hegel's dialectic. So Hegelian dialectic says that there's a thesis, right? And then there's a counterantithesis. And the tension, conflict and struggle between thesis antithesis leads to a new synthesis. So Marx took that along with Freud and tried to apply it not hard sciences, but soft sciences. Freud to psychology, Marx to economics and sociology and history itself. Right.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: Each epoch is that struggle being resolved.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: Yeah. So his dialectical materialism says, okay, you have the bourgeois on one side, the proletariat on the other side, and the tension, conflict and struggle between bourgeois and proletariat leads to socialist communism.
So that kind of thinking has carried itself forward into critical race theory today, where the idea is in order to affect change, you have to have tension, conflict and struggle. My argument in the book is that's not the gospel.
And the thing is, critical race theory has nothing to do with faith. They didn't build their theory on faith. They don't approach it from a faith perspective. They could care less about faith at all. So I'm thinking, why are we even bringing this into the conversation when it's not meant to even be there? We're trying to force something into a position where it doesn't belong. And even though, again, that's why I read the books of the people who wrote it, they're not interested in faith, and neither is the Black Lives Matter movement. They're not interested in faith.
So even that's okay. Maybe there's something here we can take and adopt and incorporate it into a faith perspective, but we just can't. At least not right now.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting that two things that really strike me as a big difference is I was actually telling a group this the other day is that Christianity isn't actually into revolution. We go on mission. We want to see the world improve. We do it through that mission of self giving love rather than tearing everything down.
And yeah, also the sense in which Marx makes everything political. Everything is political. Even your relationship to God the Church becomes a tool of oppression.
In actual fact, I would argue not everything is political, nor should it be, because that just leads to tribalism and everything else, all the awful excesses we've seen over the last hundred years or so. But everything is definitely relational. We're beings made in the image of the Trinity. We are relational. And that's Dr. Martin Luther King. From my perspective. He sees the common humanity. It's our relationship first. Then we use that to launch exactly.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: That's the point of my book. That's the whole point of my book.
We can't go about trying to change structures and organizations, but without first changing people. Right. Because the people are the ones who make up these organizations and structures.
And so how do we try to destroy the structure? We try to destroy the structure by destroying ideology and imposing your ideology into someplace where it doesn't belong and trying to force people along. So, for example, in the critical race theory definition of race, it has nothing to do with biological or physical characteristics or distinctions within a species. So it's not about black, white, Hispanic, native American, native New Zealand, or anything like that. And it's not about Italian. New Zealand. Aussie. French. Right. For them, race is a social construct, and where the predominant race exercises authority, dominion and control over the lesser races. That's their definition of race, of what racism is. So, again, domination, not looking at the human element, the argument I make in my book when I talk about the Catholic response to racism, number one, the very first thing that we have to do is exactly what you said. We have to be able to see the image and likeness of God in the person standing in front of us. And I did read I mean, now we all know who Martin Luther King is, right? But be honest, I never really read a lot of his know, so I read his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I read letter from a Birmingham jail.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: Oh, I love that. I've got that myself.
[00:35:02] Speaker B: And I was like, this guy gets it, man.
And that's why he was able to bring people together of all races, because they got the message, which basically was the gospel. So I'm not trying to say in this book, I'm trying to fill that void to be new Martin Luther King. I'm not saying that I'm just a simple Catholic evangelist. What I'm trying to do is say, if we really here's the thing. I think the Church can take the lead in this issue because, let's be real, the Church always comes from behind, right?
In the United States, the so called redefinition of marriage, which didn't define anything because God determines what marriage is, not the state. But when that happened, what did we do? We said nothing, really. Maybe a few bishops said some things, but they really didn't fight it that hard. And when the Supreme Court made the decision, then they started issuing statements. It's too late.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: So I think with this issue of race, for once the Catholic Church can take the lead. So for once, people can say, hey, look what the Catholic Church is doing. Let's follow their lead, instead of, oh, we're coming from behind. I think part of the problem is because the sex abuse scandal, a lot of the moral credibility of the bishops have been undermined. And so they're afraid to move forward in issues like this that are considered controversial because they, you know, we have no moral standing anymore, but the Gospel does. So instead of focusing on that's why I don't talk about reparations all these other things. It's not the gospel.
Let's first do what St. Teresa of Calcutta did. See Jesus Christ standing in the person in front of you.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: Yeah. For me, what I find really interesting and frustrating about it all is I see it sitting in a bigger cultural crisis in a sense, particularly in the west, like when Kimberly Crenshaw writes her essay in 89 about intersectionality. And there's truth in this, what she's seeing those black women at General Motors who are last to be laid off. And so there is a disadvantage. There's something that's unequal. The solution is the problem.
What she's doing is she's seeing issues within a culture that is now more and more embracing, like Enlightenment liberalism, which liberalism wants to keep the fruit of Christianity, but it doesn't want to tend to the tree. And so all of a sudden it's powerless when Marxism comes along and says, well, we've got the solution because we've all been told to be liberals. Keep Christianity out of the public square.
And it's all about the individual subject making up their own truth for themselves. And here comes this group of political advocates and activists who are claiming that they've actually got a real answer. And that's marxism. And we're very vulnerable, I feel, to it because liberalism, which we've all sort of embraced, leaves us very vulnerable because it doesn't give us an overriding religious concept of reality or who we are, right?
[00:37:53] Speaker B: And so you start to define and shape reality into your own image. So instead of seeing being made in the image likeness of God, we're making God into our own image and likeness. Like her idea of intersectionality.
What defines you? Right? So in critical race theory, so what defines you is I am a white lesbian Democratic teacher or whatever. So that's what defines you. It's a social construct.
How do you define yourself? I am a son of the living God. That's what defines me. People say to me, you're a black Catholic. I said no, I'm not. I'm a Catholic who's black. Yeah, what's the difference? You're denying your black identity. I'm like, no, when I stand before Jesus Christ when I die, he's not going to ask me how black I am.
Did you pick up your cross and follow me? Did you multiply the talents that I gave you for my glory? Where's my tenfold, 50 fold, 100 fold return on the investment I made in you? So does that mean I deny my black? No. I love my Caribbean heritage. I love our food, I love our music. I still speak our dialect. I love everything about that. But unless I am able to see the image and likeness of God in you, I can't appreciate all the other beautiful things. That because everything else becomes a caricature, you see? But I have to see you first the way God sees you and appreciate that and all the other gifts that you bring. Now I'm able to appreciate that much more, better, because now I'm able to see you the way God sees you.
[00:39:29] Speaker A: Thanks for listening. I really hope you enjoyed this preview snippet from our latest episode of Conservations. If you want to hear the full 90 minutes episode with Deacon Harold Burke, sievers just become a $5 monthly
[email protected] left footmedia. Not only will you be supporting all of our important work, but you will also get access to our exclusive patrons only content that we publish every single week. That's Patreon.com left Foot media. Thanks again for tuning in. Don't forget live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I will see you on next month's episode of Conservations for another one of our conservative conversations with a new and interesting guest.
Sam. Sam.
