Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson, and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.

Roger Marshall: Well welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast ministry of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marshall, the Vice President of Content and the Executive Producer here of the Family Talk broadcast and podcast.

The topic for today's program is one that has been a core foundational principle of Dr. Dobson's and it continues to drive our work here at the JDFI, and that topic is the education of our children. As you know, Dr. Dobson was a lifelong educator. First in the public school classroom and then on the university campus. His wife, Shirley, also served for many years as a public school teacher as well before leaving the classroom to care full-time for the Dobsons' two young children.

The desire was the same as countless parents, and it was to raise kids according to biblical principles so that they might shine the light of Christ in the culture. Sadly though, it is no secret that the same culture that we're talking about has undergone a radical ideological change in recent years. The biblical worldview, which once guided the morals and values of Americans, is no longer favored by the majority.

Media openly mocks biblical Christianity while championing the cause of the so-called progressive interpretation of Scripture, and politicians and media influencers who embrace that platform are often platformed so heavily that the less discerning can often fall victim to the half-truths upon which it is based. Many believers are growing more frustrated with the spread of these lies, but they also feel helpless as to how to stop them. One Bible scholar though has done an in-depth study on this topic and he joins us today here on Family Talk to discuss not only its impact but also to bring some practical solutions of how to undo things, if you will.

Today on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, we welcome pastor and educator, Dr. Corey Miller, to the broadcast. Dr. Miller has a fascinating personal testimony, having left Mormonism to become a Christ follower nearly 40 years ago. Since that time, Dr. Miller has served on the staffs of four different congregations. He's also taught philosophy and comparative religions at Indiana University for more than a decade as well as serving for nearly a decade as well for Cru's Faculty Commons Ministry at Purdue University. Boiler up.

He's the author of numerous books and currently serves as President and CEO of Ratio Christi Ministry. His latest work is called *The Progressive Miseducation of America: Confronting the Cultural Revolution from the Classroom to Your Community*. Corey Miller and his wife, Melinda, are the parents of three children and they make their home in Indiana. Dr. Corey Miller, welcome to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.

Dr. Corey Miller: Roger, I am really excited to be here with you. Thanks for inviting me on.

Roger Marshall: We have so many different aspects of your life to talk about. Can we first get into the how many generations of Mormons were ahead of you before God got a hold of you? I mean, did you really grow up thinking, "Okay, I'm in the LDS Church and this is Jesus Christ and this is my Savior," or what was it that kind of led you in the different direction?

Dr. Corey Miller: No, I've written three books on the topic and I had no idea what kind of a healthy past I had. My family says that I come from healthy stock, and that's because I'm a seventh-generation Mormon, and one of my ancestors was a bodyguard of Joseph Smith. Someone said he wasn't doing his job very well, however.

But my story of conversion is I was invited to go to California one summer to spend the whole summer at the beach, but my friend's father said that we had to go to this non-denominational Christian camp for one week, and he would pay for it. And I didn't go there trying to look for a new religion. I had my religion. But I went there, someone spoke on hell, I tell people that scared the hell out of me and heaven right into me.

I saw the love of Christ for the first time and now grace made sense for the first time in my life. And so I moved to California my junior year of high school where I was discipled and came back my senior year to graduate in high school from a Utah high school. And that's when the pressure was really on because now I'm being told to reread the Book of Mormon for the sake of truth and not just seven generations of tradition.

And when I did, I found it to be severely wanting. It had many different kinds of problems that I ran into, and I was glad that I left Mormonism ultimately. But now I had to ask the question, what's next? Because I grew up believing that the Bible was one of our standard works of Scripture, but it was always problematic. It didn't matter because we had a living prophet and apostles. Now I don't believe in those anymore. What am I going to do with this Bible and this Christian experience? How do I know God even exists and if so, which God? And that's what sent me into a three-decade trajectory into philosophy and comparative religions.

Roger Marshall: Wow, that's fascinating. The reason I wanted to start there with Dr. Corey Miller, before diving into the nuts and bolts of his brand new book, is to just underscore the fact that there are so many people right now, it seems like—George Barna's statistics are just breathtaking—the number of people who are professing faith in Christ, "quote-unquote," and yet not realizing that they really don't know the true God. And here you were, a legacy member of the Mormon tradition, saying, "Well I've got this already figured out. I know this. I mean, are you kidding? We have family history literally going back that far."

And yet once the light of Scripture was opened to your eyes and it opened the eyes of your soul, the fact that then that led you on the pursuit. I think this is a road less traveled for a lot of even contemporary Christians today. Maybe people who are feeling the same way: "Well I grew up in the evangelical church so I'm good," or "I grew up in the Catholic church so I'm good." But we don't really know how to defend our faith. Talk about why it's so important for us to be able to literally 1 Peter 3:15, not focus too much on the gentleness and respect—that's important—but always be able to give an answer to what's really in Scripture and why we believe it.

Dr. Corey Miller: Right. If it's not true, we have no business believing it. Why not become a Mormon? Why not become a Muslim? Why become a Christian? Why not become a Hindu? Why not become an atheist? I want to believe what is true. It does no one any good to hold false beliefs. We want to have true beliefs because our beliefs are the rails on which our life is guided, and we don't want to have false beliefs about anything, much less ones that have such eternal consequence.

Roger Marshall: Yeah, and it's interesting when people think in terms of, "Well what's happening here? What's going on in the world?" and how many people are utterly convinced that they have the truth. I mean, they really do know it and instead of being able to answer a challenge, they will just kind of revert back into their, "Well I'm going to dismiss you altogether."

And I wonder how much of that is taking place in the place where people should be learning how to think, which is on college campuses. Dr. Corey Miller's latest book is called *The Progressive Miseducation of America: Confronting the Cultural Revolution from the Classroom to Your Community*, and we have a link for the book up at JDFI.net. Dr. Miller, let's talk a little bit about your work. You were in pulpit ministry for a number of years with a number of different congregations. Were you teaching concurrently at that time or did you move from the pulpit to the classroom? Talk about that part of your journey.

Dr. Corey Miller: I was always doing a little bit of both. So I was pastoring while teaching at a Bible college and seminary. I earned an undergrad in theology and then a master's degree in biblical studies and then another master's degree in philosophy and comparative religions, all from Christian institutions. And then for my PhD I went to Purdue University where six weeks into it I'm getting prank calls at 3:00 in the morning mocking me for my faith.

And by the end of my fifth year when I was all but dissertation, I had my PhD sabotaged and told I had too much of a faith perspective. And so I had to terminate with a five-year master's degree in a field that's supposed to be about the pursuit of truth and debate and open engagement of the free exchange of ideas. And so I had to go on for a second PhD. I saw what happens in the universities at the highest levels and that's where I started beginning to see the Marxism that was going to be coming down the pipeline rather quickly into America, leading us into the cultural revolution that we're in now.

Roger Marshall: What year was this when you finished your PhD?

Dr. Corey Miller: I started the first attempt was 2004 to 2009. Took a year off to raise support when I went on staff with Campus Crusade's faculty ministries to go after professors. And so from 2010 until 2014. So I got my PhD in 2014. Two months later, Ratio Christi called with a job opening and I took it and then I asked, "What is it?" I needed a job.

Roger Marshall: It seemed like a good idea at the time. It's a cool Latin name. Let's talk about the ministry for just a moment because I think this is important foundationally to help us understand why we see the college campus going completely left and that seems to be kind of the petri dish for where the culture is being blown up. But you are part of a ministry right now that literally means the reality of Christ. I mean, you're taking this to the college campuses and as you just mentioned a moment ago if I heard you correctly, challenging professors like the ones who tried to derail your PhD at Purdue.

Dr. Corey Miller: Right. I mean, I was a professor and I had to go through legal proceedings because I had one of my students, a former pastor who turned gay, charged me with creating a suicidal environment. And I had to get Alliance Defending Freedom to help me out with that. I went through legal proceedings on more than one occasion in my own career.

But with Ratio Christi, which means the Reason of Christ, we've had about 160 legal inquiries, four federal victories, five appellate court victories, two SCOTUS assists, and before Joe Biden left office we gave him a four-year victory in the Department of Education. And that's not what we do full-time, Roger. We do equipping students and professors to give historical, philosophical, and scientific reasons for following Jesus Christ.

And our vision is thoughtful Christianity transforming lives on campus today, changing culture tomorrow. So we have a high school division that works in tandem with churches and Christian schools and homeschools. We have our standard bread and butter college campus ministry which is like a Special Ops ministry that focuses intently on apologetics evangelism.

And then we've got a professors' ministry and we have a Special Ops PhD student ministry where we are literally providing funding for PhD students, Christian PhD students that get into top 100 universities to launch Christian PhD student-only chapters so that in the next 40 or 50 years we can begin the long march through the institutions to reclaim the universities that we lost.

Roger Marshall: I appreciate, Dr. Corey Miller, the fact that you are playing the long game here. I mean, you're dealing with the immediate, but I think too often we in the body of Christ, we'll take a—I'll just throw a popular example up—Roe v. Wade was overturned. Yay! So there we solved the abortion problem. And not realizing that four years later there are more abortions performed in America than there were when Roe v. Wade was actually the "quote-unquote" law of the land.

The fact that you're looking at this in the long term and talking about the progressive miseducation of America, that title is so compelling because to my eye and to my ear and heart, when I see and hear this, the first thing I think of is, "Wait a minute. I'm trying to live a good biblical life, raise my kids," and we're thrilled with the prospect of being able to speak into this. But basically with the title you're basically telling us in essence, Dr. Miller, "Hey this is not a neutral game where you can just kind of sit this one out." Everybody's involved in either we are getting good education or we're being miseducated. Is that an accurate statement?

Dr. Corey Miller: No, absolutely. We are in a cultural revolution. Not all revolutions come with tanks and guns, but this is no doubt a cultural revolution that we're in. This is no longer Grandma's America. Everybody sees it whether you're conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat. Something is happening to the foundations of America and everybody knows it.

That's why you have crazy things like two recent presidential candidates of the Democratic Party are now serving on the Republican cabinet: RFK and Tulsi Gabbard. Lifelong Democrat and transhumanist Elon Musk is now full in on the Republican ticket. You get Joe Rogan moving in on that area. You've got Bill Maher, you've got Caitlyn Jenner, Bruce Jenner, who ran for the RNC's Republican position for Governor in California.

It's crazy what's happening right now because the Republicans and Democrats have a lot more in common—at least yesterday's Democrats and the Republicans over the last 25 years—have a lot more in common than what you see in the contemporary Democratic Party, which is largely been taken over by postmodern cultural Marxism. And a lot of the Democrats noticed it and that's why they got out. Others got conscripted and adopted not the Left, but the New Left, which is the Progressive Left.

Roger Marshall: The book by Dr. Corey Miller is linked up at JDFI.net. It's called *The Progressive Miseducation of America: Confronting the Cultural Revolution from the Classroom to Your Community*. And today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk we're having a conversation about this new book. You have a chapter in the book where you describe what you call a case of sexualized and genderized insanity. Help us understand how severe this is because I know a lot of people who are listening to this program right now are saying, "Well all we have to do is get back to one nation under God, indivisible," all men are created equal, which is from the Declaration of Independence but constitutionally we've kind of been moving in the wrong direction for a long time. I mean a lot longer than just maybe the last 25 years. Is that accurate?

Dr. Corey Miller: Yeah, I mean who would have thought that we would ever get to see the day that a Supreme Court justice could not or would not answer the question, "What is a woman?" And then finding our middle schoolers coming home in droves "transing." It seems like there are more middle school trans kids today than there are middle school kids in existence.

And so they come home with all this rhetoric behind them that they've learned from school or from TikTok, and it's "Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter? You choose." And the parents or the grandparents, just to hang on to a shoestring of that relationship, oftentimes end up going progressive themselves to do so. So even the parents and grandparents are being manipulated by the kids who are getting their education from TikTok or from the school system.

But of course the K-12 is getting it from the universities in the same way that the politicians are getting it from the universities. Roger, politics is downstream from culture. Culture is downstream from education, and at the apex of education is the university. As goes the university, so goes the culture, and today as goes the U.S. university, so goes the world.

Roger Marshall: That's a grim reality that we're facing today here in the United States of America, but there is a little bit of good news. Before we get into the good news though, I have to touch on one other area that you write about in your brand new book, *The Progressive Miseducation of America*. Dr. Corey Miller, talk about the fact that we see this in universities, we see this in the scientific community, but we're also seeing it among Christian ministries and something that you describe as mission drift. Talk about why that can be possibly even more dangerous than what we're seeing in the college classroom right now.

Dr. Corey Miller: Right. So I do give the case for mission drift in the churches, in the campus ministries, in the Christian academic societies, and in the seminaries in the first third of the book. In the second third of the book, I tell how we lost the universities. And it was really the universities—academia—where the revolution began in two stages.

And their goal was always very explicitly to go through academia, then media, then *ecclesia*, the church. Because that makes up in the Western world part of the soft tissue of culture. It's what Antonio Gramsci, the most famous or dangerous of the cultural Marxists, talked about when he said that society in the West is difficult to conquer in a revolution like in the Russian or Chinese revolutions.

Because in the West it's divided up into political society and civil society. Political society is like government, law enforcement, military. But civil society is the soft tissue of culture: academia, media, *ecclesia*. And until they ensconce themselves into the soft tissue of culture, i.e., cultural Marxism, then the frontal assault for the revolution will never take place in the West. And so that's what they needed to do. It was a long time, very patient methodology of infiltrating our institutions.

And now they've done so, and I can say this as someone who comes from Campus Crusade, as someone who took a graduate degree from Biola University, as someone who's been a pastor in churches. All of those have been impacted by this new revolutionary ideology that it's almost like we didn't even see it coming. The shepherds did not guard in the pulpits because we were too consumed with skinny jeans and fog machines or other kinds of methods to get a larger congregation.

And then in our seminaries, we didn't pay attention to the philosophical nuances coming out, and it's like how we lost Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. Now it's Calvin, Wheaton, Biola, universities like that for the second phase. The first phase gave us liberal Protestant theology and the social gospel. The second phase has given us social justice, which is not justice or compassion.

Roger Marshall: Not at all. I mean and then we start having to look at things like toxic empathy because people look at the church and say, "Well you should be supporting these things if you really care about women, if you really care about different ethnicities," and things of that nature. What is it like for you, Dr. Miller, to look at one of your alma maters like Biola? And I have a family history with Biola too that's kind of not the same as your seven-generation Mormonism, but it goes literally back to Bible Institute of Los Angeles days.

What's it like for you knowing that you earned a degree there, a graduate degree there that you thought had some weight behind it, and now you look at the school kind of playing what a lot of other Christian schools in California and all across the country are doing. We've got parents and grandparents listening to this show saying, "Gosh we realize we've got grandkids who are thinking about going to school. If we could just get them into a good Christian university, a good Christian college," but where are they anymore? I mean that's a big question.

Dr. Corey Miller: Right. I mean when I mentioned Campus Crusade earlier, I don't know that 20% is accurate, but someone from an inside standpoint said that they think probably in the last eight to 10 years they've lost 20% of their field staff because the wokeness infiltrated that campus ministry, which would make Bill Bright turn over in his grave. Well, the same thing with Biola, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles.

I was part of a petition about five years ago to try to get the attention to the donors that woke ideology was infiltrating every flora and fauna of that institution. And it pulled back a little bit and then corrected itself to a certain degree, and then it started advancing again. And only recently, because the spotlight has been on it, they finally got rid of their LGBT club. And it took that to get the attention.

So I think parents that are involved at these universities as far as being donors, that speaks to university presidents. We cannot afford to continue losing all of our institutions. We started these universities, and I'm talking about all of them, Roger. When we are looking at the founding of Harvard, just a decade or two after the pilgrims or the Puritans landed, we started Harvard and its motto was Truth, quickly changed to Truth for Christ and the Church.

Lasted for 300 years from 1636 to 1936. And for 200 years, almost every president of every university was also a member of the clergy. And now today the ratio of liberal to conservative at these secular universities is 12 to one for those retiring, 23 to one for those who just got tenure. If you're looking at having your kid go at an Ivy League school, it's 27 to one.

Places like Yale, it's 78 to one in their social sciences and humanities. And at Yale Divinity School, they have an entire course on Queer Theology where they make it very explicit that they're not talking about theological texts, they're talking about reading books on queer critical theory. They're talking about queering God and queering Christianity. And then at Princeton you have a professor there who believes that it's okay to have intercourse with animals so long as it's mutually consensual and there's no harm inflicted on the animal.

Roger Marshall: Unbelievable that that would even come out of a place like Princeton. I just—staggering to think that that's how far they've devolved.

Dr. Corey Miller: Right. It's crazy. It's like the Emperor's New Clothes. That's the culture we're living in today.

Roger Marshall: Incredible. *The Progressive Miseducation of America* is the brand new book by Dr. Corey Miller, *Confronting the Cultural Revolution from the Classroom to Your Community*. We have a link for it up at JDFI.net. We are just scratching the surface on this conversation, but we need to wrap things up for today's program. Dr. Miller, I know there is some good news that you do write about in the book as well. Would you be willing to join us again next time so we could put a more positive spin on what you've discovered?

Dr. Corey Miller: If people are still alive after all of that bad news, I would love to. Yes.

Roger Marshall: Alright, great. Thank you. Well, that certainly was a sobering look at how far the cultural drift in our universities really has gone. But be sure to join us again next time when Dr. Corey Miller will talk with me once again to share some encouraging solutions to all that we have discussed on today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.

We featured part one of a conversation with Dr. Corey Miller, President and CEO of Ratio Christi Ministry and author of *The Progressive Miseducation of America*. If you'd like to listen to the program again, you can go to DrJamesDobson.org or JDFI.net. And once you're there, you'll also find a link with more information on how you can get a copy of Dr. Miller's book. Again, that great title: *The Progressive Miseducation of America*.

And don't forget, the work of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute truly depends on the generous support of friends like you. We are committed to equipping parents, strengthening families, and defending biblical truth in the culture, and it's all made possible by your financial partnership. To make a secure donation, go to JDFI.net or call a member of our constituent care team when you dial 877-732-6825.

Well I'm Roger Marshall, and on behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for joining us today. Be sure to join me again next time for part two of my conversation with Dr. Corey Miller as we discuss *The Progressive Miseducation of America*. That's coming up right here on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love.

This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.

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