Doug Wilson Talks Worshipers Being Arrested/Sex Robots/Postmillennialism
This is The Babylon Bee Interview Show. In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to Doug Wilson. Doug is a pastor, author of over 90 books, most recently of Ride, Sally, Ride, and the host of Man Rampant. His church got in the news recently for a non-socially distanced, unmasked Psalm Sing in Moscow, Idaho that landed several members of their church in jail. They talk about what happened at the Psalm Sing, churches disengaging with the culture and politics, and why a Christian would write a book about sex robots. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans. This episode is brought to you by Faithful Counseling. Get 10% off your first month. Topics Discussed: The Moscow Psalm Sing The Doug Wilson Cult and complex in Moscow The Fight, Laugh, Feast network Churches being politically active and engaging the culture or not Churches meeting or not because of COVID-19 Partisan politics- is it a sin to vote for Joe Biden? Dead people voting Controversy surrounding Doug Wilson Slavery, William Wilberforce Revolution vs. Reformation as means of change, applying this to abortion Postmillennialism in the year 2020 Mark of the Beast going on facemasks Writing books about sex robots like Ride, Sally, Ride Appropriateness of lewd, shocking things in Christian art Subscriber Portion What the heck is Federal Vision? Doug Wilson's respectful relationship and debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens The Ten Questions Doug tells an awesome fistfight story Kyle and Ethan de-convert Doug Wilson Kyle and Ethan Post-Show
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Wow, Ethan, do you see the afterglow on my face?
From what?
That sounds weird.
What are you talking about?
You know what afterglow is?
Yeah, but I usually associate it with inappropriate things.
That's not what, no, afterglow is when Moses comes down from the mountain and his face is too bright.
So he has to wear the veil over his face.
There was a Calvary Chapel my friend went to that had afterglow services.
They called them.
Those are the best.
You know what I'm talking about?
They would do like, I think Matt was Matt Carver.
He told me about it.
My cousin actually said friend.
Okay.
But they would do like the late, like they would do their actual worship service, then they would go to like 10 p.m.
The afterglow.
And I think it's weird.
Like it was expected that you would speak in tongues and stuff like that.
Oh, you're supposed to go crazy.
No?
Crazy.
Go crazy, but not necessarily tongues.
Like burn things.
Tongues is a subset of crazy.
Just rip your skin off.
Sentimental.
Sentimental and emotional.
Anyway, afterglow.
We just talked to Doug Wilson.
Yeah, we just talked to Doug Wilson and we wanted to introduce it.
That might be blasphemy.
Sorry, that was just a joke.
What?
I said it might be blasphemy to say like did we talk to Doug Wilson?
Then I have afterglow.
Oh from talking to Doug Wilson.
That's what I was trying to say.
Oh, really?
Yeah, because it was interesting.
We were going to have this interview and it was one of the more controversial guests that I brought up.
I was like, hey, we should talk to Doug Wilson.
He's got a book out.
He's got a beard.
He smokes cigars sometimes.
He lives in Idaho and has kind of like a compound.
It's crazy, but it seems like something we like that people would not like mostly, most people, but then also we'd like it.
And you're like, well, Doug Wilson.
It's like the most like you're like doing this with your collar care.
Well, just to be clear.
I, as the editor-in-chief, I see myself as kind of, I don't know if I'm the captain.
The face of the Babylon.
No, no.
I don't know if I'm the captain.
You saw the New York Times article.
But I might be like I might be like the admiral, you know, like looking at all the ships and being like, you guys are going the wrong way.
Right.
No, like a shepherd, maybe.
Like Ethan strays off.
Am I the one sheep?
I have to go pull him out.
Stray off into some horribly violent bear joke.
So unfortunately, I have to be worried about like perception.
And I'm like, I have to think about how things will look when they're up on the site.
Something and okay, I will interview Doug Wills.
And people have this weird assumption that if you interview somebody, you're endorsing.
And we've always wanted our podcast to be kind of like we talked to people that, and they were like, oh, that's interesting.
It's also probably like if we interview somebody who clearly doesn't agree with us, like an atheist or something, then people kind of get it that way.
But if they're kind of closer in views, then you start to go, oh, they're on that guy's team, huh?
Yeah.
That's probably very true.
But I enjoyed the interview.
What was your thoughts after you interviewed Doug Wilson before and after?
Well, I was just mostly disappointed in the technical issues.
We had a really bad technique.
We should warn people a lot of the time he was talking, we couldn't actually hear him.
So, if we're making weird faces, it was a really bad Skype connection.
But he recorded his end, so you won't be able to tell there's bad voice issues, hopefully.
And I just love now that we've done more in-person interviews, I just love the in-person interview.
That's so much better.
When we had Diana Glier on with the Tolkien, when we had Seamus on with Freedom Tunes, it's just you're here and we need more subscribers so that we can afford to fly these people out here.
Yeah, if we could, Doug Wilson was visiting here for whatever reason.
Yeah, it'd be great.
We'd have him here.
It'd be amazing.
Yeah.
He's actually very, like, I think when he's preaching, he goes up to the pulpit and, you know, he puts on this persona.
And then I think when he's engaging secular culture, he's like, he sees himself as the standard bearer that has to go and fight.
And because there's so many squishy pastors and stuff, he sees himself as this guy who has to be moral.
Like they fear controversy.
And he, not that he, I don't think he embraces it for the sake of it.
Some might argue he does.
But he is definitely he almost feels like he needs to be the one taking some bold steps because no one else will.
Yeah.
At least that's, I think that's how he sees himself.
Yeah.
And I think I'm kind of split on it.
Like on the one hand, I'm dangerous in that.
On the one hand, I think you can go too far.
And it's probably not Doug Wilson, as it is so much as some of the people who follow Doug Wilson that end up like, oh, he's, he's doing the cultural engagement thing.
Boom.
And they go out there and belly flop into the culture wars or whatever.
We get those, right?
You see the comments and it's like, we got their belly floppers.
They're like, yeah, they act like they're agreeing with you.
And you're like, yeah, man, racism.
No, no, no.
That's not what it is.
Right.
Yeah.
You're always going to attract like the extremes.
And so I think that you see that sometimes with Doug Wilson, but that's true of anybody.
So, but maybe just because he's that kind of magnetist, what's the word?
Magnetic personality.
Ethan's usually the one who does it.
Magnetic personality.
Incestuous personality.
That was a throwback.
That was a throwback to a different episode.
I liked him.
I was going to go on record saying I liked him.
I like to talk to him.
And that's what I'm saying.
It was interesting that you kind of see him as like this fiery guy.
It's going to be.
And he was just a very calm, normal answer.
You're more plugged into that culture of pastors and stuff.
So for me, I was always kind of sound from a distance.
I watched his show on Amazon a little bit.
I enjoyed it, which we didn't plug.
But yeah, so here's our interview with Doug Wilson, whether you like it or not.
All right.
Enjoy.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Babylon B Interview Show.
I'm Kyle.
I'm Ethan.
And we're talking to a kind, gentleman, the least controversial person in Christendom, Doug Wilson.
How are you doing, Doug?
Oh, hi.
How am I going to live up to that?
Yeah, I was like, hey, we should have Doug Wilson on.
And Kyle was like, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hold on.
We interview atheists.
We interview anarchists.
But then it's weird, right?
I don't know.
All I know is that, you know, I've just seen you on stuff.
Well, you got a beard.
That's all I know.
Bridge too far.
That's a bridge too far.
We're all squishy.
We're squishy, soft evangelicals.
So let's talk Moscow Psalm Sing.
So you go out there and Relevant Magazine assures me that you guys went out there kind of as a stunt.
Is that publicity stunt?
Is that accurate?
No, that's not.
We've done psalm sings.
Every year we do Christmas Carol Sing and Friendship Square.
We've periodically in the summer do psalm sings outdoors at the same place.
So we've done them for years.
And it's just an open invitation being public about our commitment to Christ.
And we had this masking order that was extended for no reason, basically extended for no reason.
And we've had no deaths in our county.
We've had no deaths, minimal hospitalizations, and just this random extension.
So we responded to that with a psalm sing at City Hall.
So it was intended to be public.
And if you don't like it, it's a stunt.
If you like it, it's a protest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I agree.
Yeah, so the video kind of went viral.
I think Gabriel Rynch, maybe a couple others got arrested.
President Trump tweeted it out.
Yeah, we had three people were arrested and two people were issued citations.
And the video of Gabe being arrested and the Bonets, a married couple being arrested, that went viral.
The protest was on a Wednesday.
By Wednesday night and Thursday, it went viral.
It wound up with the president retweeting it, which is the, I'll tell you frankly, that's the first time that's ever happened to any of our psalm sings.
Arrests or citations or retweets from the president.
Yeah, viral is right.
Is it normal to do it in front of City Hall or is that unique?
No, it was about a block or two away from where we normally do it.
We normally, Friendship Square is the central square in Moscow, and the City Hall is about two blocks away.
So we just moved over slightly.
And so we were responding to the mandatory masking orders that the city council had placed on the whole city unnecessarily.
So we did it at City Hall.
Right.
So yeah, it was purposeful.
Yeah, we're going right in front of City Hall.
It was purposeful, intentional.
And we wanted it to be seen, but we were doing it out in public because we wanted them to see us.
We had about 300 people there.
And if we said, now we want this to go national, to go viral, if someone had said to me, hey, would you make this go national?
Would you get the get Gabe Rench on Laura Ingram and all that?
I'd say, you know, I don't think we have that kind of clout.
I don't think we can pull that off.
And then the mayor of Moscow said, here, hold my beer.
Yeah, I've been to Moscow, Idaho, and to be able to make national news from there is pretty impressive.
It's pretty impressive.
But the stunt part of it, or the circus atmosphere of it, that was not done by us.
That was done by the police department being forced into doing something they didn't want to do by our city officials.
So the circus atmosphere was not our doing.
We were just doing what we normally do when we have a psalm sing.
The circus was provided by others.
Yeah, so you didn't charge right up to the gates and be like, arrest me.
Right.
We were just, what we were doing is singing.
And we were singing not six feet apart and without masks on.
But what we were doing was singing.
The federal building, the federal building is another block in another direction.
And if we had gone over there and thrown Molotov cocktails at it, I think that a lot of people would be prepared to defend us.
All right.
That's not a stunt.
That's a protest.
Well, it's when you start singing psalms that it's a stunt.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
So you guys are constantly making waves there in Moscow.
There's the college, the Cannon Press, the publisher, the church.
Yeah, thanks for publishing my book, by the way.
You're welcome to never met.
Yeah, thanks.
I want to come up there.
It seems like you guys have quite a word cult, but it seems like the awesome version of a cult, like a bunch of guys with beards, beards, and a cult that Bibles.
Yeah, we're a cult of talking now.
Drinking smoking cigars.
What's it like?
Give me the paint the picture for me of the Doug complex up there.
Well, I smoke the occasional cigar.
I'm not deep into cigardom, but it's a lot of people, it's a truly functional Christian community here that the Lord's blessed us with.
A lot of people doing a lot of things.
And the thing that we're accused of is me running everything or me owning everything, which I don't.
If I owned everything, then I'd be driving a better truck.
Well, plus, you've written like 90 books.
How do you have time to do all that?
You're just probably in a closet riding all the time.
Yeah, with my hair on fire.
What is the Fight, Laugh, Feast Network?
That is something that grew out of something my colleague Toby Sumter and Gay Branch and David Shannon have done with their cross-politic show.
And that has grown, it's grown up.
They just had their first national conference in Tennessee, Franklin, Tennessee, a few weeks ago.
It was great.
And they're building a network of like-minded individuals.
But that's something that started here as well.
It sounds like the male answer to the Lifetime Network or something.
Girls have the girl wash your face thing.
Yeah, girls wash your face.
They can go wash their faces.
We'll fight, laugh, and feast.
Yeah.
Yeah, boy, grown hair on your face.
Like it's like the Viking devotional earth.
I don't know.
I'm just reacting.
So a lot of churches in this time are kind of like not meeting, hunkering down, not really engaging.
There's this aversion to pastors being political, you know, on any level, you know, whether it's talking about the candidate they like or like just talking, encouraging Christians to be culturally active.
But your church kind of does the opposite of that.
You're politically and culturally active.
What do you think it is that causes so many of these churches to kind of shy away from engagement?
Well, I think one of the reasons they shy away from it is because it gets you in trouble.
People call you all kinds of names.
They circulate falsehoods about you.
They, you know, they come.
Basically, when you start engaging, at some point, the enemy starts to shoot back.
And a lot of people just don't want that.
They would like their church to be a religion club that meets on Sundays with attendance high enough to be able to pay the bills and pay the staff, keep the lights on.
But they're not thinking in terms of the Great Commission at all.
They're not thinking in terms of discipling the nations or teaching them to obey all that Christ commanded.
And so engagement is risky.
And I think a lot of people would prefer to stay, would prefer to stay out of it for that reason.
Another, there are others who are cautious or wary about political engagement because they've not distinguished political engagement, which I think is inescapable on the part of the church, and partisan engagement, which the church should avoid.
So I don't think there should ever be a sermon of a vote for Murphy variety or have candidates coming in and taking Sunday morning time to why you should vote for me.
That would be partisan.
And I don't think the church has any business being in any political party's back pocket.
But I do think that what we do as Christians is inescapably political.
It has ramifications for the definition of marriage and the right to life issue.
And, you know, you can't, you can, you could have the separation of church and state if you're talking about state government and church government, but nobody wants the separation of righteousness and state.
So can you support praying to a candidate?
Like asking Trump into your heart?
Absolutely not.
Make counseling great again.
That's what I always say.
Yeah, because man, it's really gone downhill lately.
Yeah, all those atheist counselors, Satanist counselors, demonic counselors.
Yeah.
You don't want that.
So you're looking for a counselor that has read their Bible.
Yeah, that knows what a Bible is.
Yeah, at least knows who has it on their shelf.
Yeah.
It's like, oh, yeah, Jesus.
I've heard of that guy.
Right.
Things are hard right now.
Quarantine.
You may be locked down.
You might be depressed.
Depression's way up.
I feel sorry for people without families.
I don't think about that.
It's like, you're just like, I got nobody.
Yeah.
Imagine people locked in their houses for months with nobody.
Yeah.
What you might need is some faithful counseling.
Faithful counseling is online professional Christian counseling to deal with depression, stress, anxiety, crises of faith.
Correct.
You can text, you can chat, you can phone, you can video anything.
Because, you know, a lot of us, we have our certain method of communication we prefer.
I hate when people want to talk on the phone to me.
I would text a counselor.
Yeah, I like texting.
I don't know if I want to go show up in person.
But it's affordable.
Faithfulcounseling.com slash Babylon B. Listeners get 10% off your first month.
Yeah.
Do you think counselors use emojis?
Probably lots of smileys.
Yeah.
They probably wouldn't send a lot of like crying.
Well, maybe they're trying to sympathize.
Like you're like, oh, I'm so sad today.
And they would send the sad.
I would feel good about that.
I feel weird about a counselor using emojis, but to each their own.
They probably accommodate what they're doing.
But we're not guaranteeing that they use emojis because we don't think we don't know.
But it's not, yeah, that's not a guarantee that they make.
But you can get started today.
Faithfulcounseling.com slash Babylon B. Do it now.
Now.
So I don't think that we're told in the Psalms, a couple places in the Psalms, Psalm 118 and later on in the Psalms, put not your trust in princes.
And I think that that I think no Christian should give himself over to an adulatory following of any politician, any king, any president.
I just think that's out of line.
Only Christ is not going to let you down.
Here, here.
Is it a sin to vote for Joe Biden?
Yeah.
It would depend.
I think it's fine to vote for Joe Biden if you're dead.
Spiritually or physically?
No, physically dead.
You know, if you're physically dead, if you're dead and deep, you've been buried, and people vote for Biden on your behalf, which is going to be happening quite a bit.
You know, a lot of dead people are going to be voting this time around.
I don't think that's a sin at all.
I'm going to have to check that against Facebook's election guide Section, whatever it's called, voter information, official section and see.
Feel free to do it if you're dead.
All right.
So, as a, you know, what's the word for reporters that are really good at being a reporter?
Intrepid reporter.
I, you know, did some research on you by Wikipedia while you were talking.
And it said the most controversial work in your whole thing you've ever done is about this thing.
Wait, Oh, can you guess what you're doing?
Yeah, can you guess what it is?
Yeah, I think I could.
You want to give so that somebody's like, hey, Babylon B is interviewing this guy with a beard, Doug Wilson.
We should let him look him up.
What the heck?
What's this?
Yeah.
So then you would give your Doug Wilson side of the story.
So I'm filling in.
I'm guessing that slavery.
Pamphlet.
Slavery as it was.
It says.
I'm going to give you the 32nd version.
Slavery, yay or nay.
Okay.
So slavery as an institution was overthrown by the gospel and good riddance.
So William Wilberforce, who helped to outlaw the slave trade in the British Empire, I regard as one of the great heroes of the faith.
So as far as the elimination of slavery as an institution, that is something to be celebrated, and we should honor the people who were involved in doing that the way the gospel requires us to do it.
So that's my view on slavery as an institution.
Every country in the Western world eliminated slavery without a war, except for us.
We eliminated it with a war in which we killed 600,000 people.
And we still haven't recovered from the way we got rid of slavery.
We're still dealing with it.
And we're dealing with it because we attacked an evil in a revolutionary way instead of the way the New Testament requires us to attack it, which would be a reformational way.
Okay.
So if someone says that Doug Wilson is an apologist for slavery, that I think slavery is a good, like food, air, and sunshine, I just simply deny it and say that people ought to stop lying.
The issue is how you deal with a corrupt or a fallen institution like slavery when you inherit it, when you find yourself with it.
So many people don't realize that the New Testament is filled with instructions to Christian masters and Christian slaves.
Philemon, Anesimus, in the book of Ephesians, in 1 Timothy, the Bible has explicit instructions on how we're supposed to deal with this institution that is capable of monstrous abuses.
And the way we dealt with it was here in America was not that way.
So basically, I'm a critic of slavery as an institution, and I'm a critic of the radical methods of the abolitionists.
That's what it boils down to.
Gotcha.
So basically, like, I mean, back in Bible times, I mean, you know, slavery was like a, almost like a, to some extent, it was so much more common, and there's biblical rules as to how to handle that in a moral way where you're not owning a human being, but they're working for you, all the way down to how corrupt it became in the times of America.
Right, correct.
Right.
And what you want to do is You want to sow the seeds of the institution's overthrow without everybody hating each other for 200 years after the fact.
So when Onesimus stole something apparently from Philemon, Philemon was a friend of Paul's.
Onesimus runs off.
Paul meets Onesimus and leads him to the Lord, apparently, and then returns him to Philemon with the strong encouragement and broad hints for Philemon to release him to go back and serve Paul.
He does it, basically, he does it peacefully.
He does it peaceably.
And that's what I'm talking about.
So, and when I first wrote that booklet that he brought up, Southern Slavery as it was, the reason for that was Operation Rescue was going on at the time.
And there were some extreme elements in the pro-life movement, Paul Hill being one of them, who wanted to be the next John Brown.
He wanted to ignite a civil war.
And Paul Hill had been a seminary classmate of Steve Wilkins, who co-wrote that book with me and that booklet with me.
And he was in our circles.
He read our magazine, Credenda Agenda.
Paul Hill did.
A friend of mine was a pastor of a church that excommunicated him before he shot the abortionist.
So we were dealing with elements in the pro-life movement that wanted to ignite an actual shooting war.
And so we doubled down on, look, we have to deal with these social evils the way the New Testament tells us to deal with these social evils.
And so we went back to slavery as a test case.
So you're making an argument for people not to like shoot up abortion clinics and then we got in trouble for it.
Right, exactly.
And the thing that's astonishing is if someone says, how dare you think that we should eliminate slavery peaceably?
And I would turn it around.
So you think that we should eliminate abortion violently?
And all of a sudden, they'll back away, start climbing down.
Well, wait, look, be consistent.
Paul Hill was consistent.
He supported a violent overthrow of slavery in the Civil War, and he supported a violent overthrow of abortion by means of shooting abortionists or bombing clinics.
So my question for the people who are hating on my approach to gradual abolition, peaceful abolition, by doing what the New Testament said to do, I would say, so then you think that the National Right to Life Organization and all the people who are involved in the pro-life cause, you think they should go home and get their gun?
And if they are, if they're silent at that point, then they've exposed their radical, I would say, hypocrisy.
Because the slaughter of the unborn is a worse travesty than American slavery was.
We've murdered more blacks under the abortion regime than were ever killed in the slavery regime.
What we're doing is worse.
So should we attack it violently or not?
Am I going to be a good person?
I have thoughts.
So it's the year 2020, crazy year, and you're still a post-millennialist?
Yeah.
Any thoughts converting to dispensational premillennialism?
No, it's not when they put the mark on the masks, that's probably when I'll start revisiting it.
That's when you'll rethink it.
But yeah, it's been a crazy year, but I believe that God, I'm preparing a sermon for this coming Lord's Day, and the title of the sermon is These Are Tumultuous Mercies.
I think that we are living in a tumultuous time, but I believe it's a very, very merciful time.
It says at the end of Hebrews 12 that God shakes those things that can be shaken so that what cannot be shaken may remain.
And then it says, we believers are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.
So when God shakes everything and higher ed is rocked and the medical establishment is rocked and the airline industry is rocked and everything is shaking, well, that's not where our trust is anyway.
We are Christians.
We follow Christ.
And when God shakes everything up, it's for our good.
So I think that we should be confident and cheerful.
And I think we should have this disposition.
I have it within this post-millennial framework, but I've not seen anything that has made me want to rethink that.
Because in the long run, stupidity never works.
That's a good quote.
Put that on the quote, guys.
Put that on the front of the interview.
Stupidity never works.
So it seems to me like your post-millennialism really informs the way that you and your church engages culture.
As a dumb person, can you tell me about post-millennialism?
Oh, yeah, why don't you tell us what post-millennialism is?
Okay, so in a nutshell, post-millennialism is the view that the great commission will be successfully fulfilled, that the world will be brought to Christ, the nations will be baptized and taught obedience to everything Christ taught, and then the end will come.
So it's basically, it's a historically optimistic view of the history of future history.
So Gary North once said the two views are basically optimillennialism and pessimillennialism.
So you either believe things are falling apart and will continue to fall apart until the end, or you think that things will gradually improve, but not because man is basically good.
It's only because of the gospel.
Okay.
That was for the dumb people, not me.
I feel bad for dumb people listening.
So my smart question was, that was a dumb question.
The smart question is, how does your post-millennialism influence the way that you and your church engage in?
We're a satire site, Kyle.
I got to stop being so serious.
Okay, so you've written like almost 100 books.
Wait, I was really asking that question.
Are you done?
No, I was asking the question.
Oh, I thought you already asked it.
I never answered.
Oh, okay.
I'm running time.
I'm happy.
I got more questions.
You relate.
So if you aim at nothing, you hit it.
If you aim at nothing, you're going to hit it.
If I believe that the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, and I believe that is going to be true of Idaho and true of Moscow, then the things we're doing right now will make a big difference 200 years from now.
So I believe that we need to be getting to work.
We need to be focused on the future.
If you believe that everything is going to hell in a handbasket and everybody's going to be helicoptered out of here within the next 20 years, you don't have a basis for building anything to last for 200 years.
Good point.
Interesting.
Never thought of that.
Can I ask my question now?
Yeah, you can ask your question.
Okay, so you've written almost 100 books.
You're crazy.
You're just writing books left and right.
So at some point, you had your giant pile of ideas, and then you're like, oh man, look all these sticky notes I've gone through.
And you get to one, you're like, it says sex robot on it.
You're like, all right, get some writing the sex robot book.
So what was the impetus of that one?
How do you get a new book?
What were you thinking?
What was I thinking?
So I like to tell people that I write books to make the little voices in my head go away.
And it's not working.
This Ride Sally Ride book came out of a conversation with a friend here in Moscow.
His name is Darren Doane.
He's the one who did the collision movie that I made with Christopher Hitchens.
And Darren Doane was saying, he was just thinking out loud, saying that we need a film or some sort of visual portrayal of a Phineas moment when in the Old Testament, when Phineas ran the couple through that were sitting in a high-handed way in front of everybody or in the face of Moses and the people,
he was saying we need a Phineas moment that would be a catalyst like that.
And we would do it in the modern world.
We do it through film or some sort of story like that.
Well, that was his great idea for hook.
And his idea was like the destruction of a sex robot somehow in film.
And because of one thing and another, the film part of it, the film short, didn't happen.
But I went back to him later and said, hey, can I use that hook for a novel?
That's a great one-sentence hook.
Young college student destroys a sex robot and then gets charged with murder.
I think that I was the one who supplied the gets charged with murder part.
And so I took that hook and the robot part and developed it into a novel and dedicated the book to Darren Doan.
One thing we talk about sometimes on the show is Christian art and how we tend to write really tame stuff that doesn't offend anybody or, you know, I don't know.
Like C.S. Lewis just writes the Jesus Lion.
And, you know, that's all we, and then we all just have imitated that for 70 years, like doing these allegories or things that are really safe.
And obviously, you know, you're willing to use like this lewd, kind of lewd subject matter that might kind of shock people in order to communicate your message.
How does using shocking language or humor factor into Christians using art to communicate their message?
Well, you know, honestly, I think that if I'd written this book 30 years ago, it really would have shocked the Christians.
And I think I really would have run a good chance of getting run out of town, right?
But the response to this novel, I was braced for a negative blowback from a lot of Christians.
And we did get it from some Twitter trolls and people like that who said it was pornographic, which it isn't.
And, you know, there was the predictable response from trolls.
But from people, from Christians who've actually read the book, I've gotten far less negative feedback from them than I was actually anticipating.
And I think it's because of the year in which it released.
We are so used to bizarre, outlandish things happening to us on the evening news that this seemed like a sane response instead of an insane provocation in an ordinary time.
This seemed more like a sane response in a sane response in an insane time.
So were you disappointed?
Like, oh man, I was trying to get everybody a little more riled up.
No, it's not that I want people to get mad at me.
I'm not angling for personal abuse or anything like that.
I really...
I really want to instruct and teach and get people to see connections.
And one of the comments or one of the criticisms that has been repeated to me more than once is this novel's set, let's say, 20 years in the future.
And people are saying, what do you mean 20 years?
It seems like more, more like two months in the future.
This seems like now.
It doesn't seem like it's that much in the future.
Well, we're running out of time here.
Let's go to our subscriber portion.
What?
Can we?
We even have time for it?
Let's do it.
Let's go to our subscriber portion.
The book is called Ride Sally Ride.
Where can people get it?
They can get it from Canon Press, get it from Amazon.
They can get it where what?
Find stores everywhere.
Well, no, probably not find stores everywhere.
Sears catalog.
Yeah, Nordstrom's.
Try Nordstroms.
It's worth a try.
All right, perfect.
Dive into our subscriber portion.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
We're always interested in people who are friends, even though they disagree with each other.
And you and Christopher Hitchens seem to have this respect for each other.
Hey, can you tell us what the heck federal vision is?
Calvinist or Arminian?
So I said, okay, I'm in it now.
And so I said, Jesus loves you again and turned the other cheek again.
And he hit me again.
Bam.
No.
He just said, no.
Well, that's my first denial.
We usually convert everybody.
We deconverted Doug Wilson.
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