Is America A Christian Nation? No. But, Also Yes | Justin Dyer On The Babylon Bee
Justin Dyer comes back on the The Babylon Bee Podcast to talk about The Classical And Christian Origins of American Politics and to ask the most important question that can be asked: What would Aslan do about drag queen story hour? Justin is the executive director for the Civitas Institute at The University of Texas at Austin: https://civitas.utexas.edu Justin Dyer was on The Babylon Bee Podcast to talk about C.S. Lewis and Natural Law before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K09CZU-CQE His new book is The Classical And Christian Origins of American Politics: https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Christian-Origins-American-Politics/dp/1009107844/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
This is the second time, I believe, that he's been on the podcast.
Good friend of the podcast.
We love Justin.
We had a great conversation with him last time he came in on natural law.
Just like what?
Like, apparently, I don't remember at all.
Well, if you read, yeah, the beginning.
It's like C.S. Lewis's moral argument and like where does the beginning of mere Christianity come from?
Where do morals come from and all that?
Yeah.
Yes.
Right.
And this time he has a book that he has written on the origins of Christianity of America as a Christian nation.
Is America a Christian nation?
Is not a Christian nation?
And he comes away with a definitive response of kind of.
You're going to have to tune in to find out.
But it was a very concrete response.
Yeah.
It was a great conversation.
It ranged from what are we talking about?
We talked about America being a Christian nation.
A lot about Aslan.
We talked a lot about Aslan.
What would Aslan do?
Yeah, WWE.
D.
Yeah, we had a lot of that.
Favorite C.S. Lewis books.
Yeah.
He's a jiu-jitsu guy, so that's cool.
And most importantly, we talked about Buckies.
We did talk a lot about Buckies and how he don't want to give it away.
He has an opinion about Buckies.
We come out swinging with the hard-hitting questions.
Yeah, I mean, really.
We got deep.
You know, honestly, though, he's kind of brilliant.
Yeah, I only understood about a third of what he was saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was a little high on Nyquil.
On Nyquil and like a Moxicillin.
And I was, there was a moment I was staring at him and he was talking about, you know, classical education and stuff that I was seeing like dragons like floating around.
I don't know if it was that pixel art thing or if it was, I don't know.
I was, there was a moment where I was like spacing out a little bit.
It was funny because I looked over at you at one point.
I could see you kind of glassing over.
I thought for sure.
That is so funny.
I'm like, he's in a Nyquilian stupor.
I got the sinus infection.
I've had it for like two months and it's like it keeps coming back, you know?
Yeah.
So I'm hoping to kick it this time.
Let's kick it this time.
I'll kick it this time.
Anyway, Justin Dyer was great.
And this is one of the best conversations that I've ever had while high.
So here we go.
Justin Dyer on America, Christian Nation or not.
Well, thanks for joining us today, everyone, on the Babylon Bee interview show.
Today we're talking to Justin Dyer.
How are you doing, Justin?
Doing well.
Justin has some controversial opinions that we're going to dig into today.
The first of which is that he doesn't like Buckies.
Yes.
That's true.
So do you want to defend that?
We're just diving right in.
We're going right in.
Buckies.
We're not going to let you.
So I'm six months ago.
I moved to Texas and knew to the Buckies experience there, but it's been talked up so big.
And so I went and I was on the way to the Chiefs game in Houston with my son.
And we thought we were going to go to Bucky's and this was going to be an experience.
And we got out of there.
We paid a lot of money for our food.
It was like a dollar barbecue sandwich.
And it felt kind of like I went to a Walmart with a gas station, which is fine.
It feels like home.
I like it.
So Walmart has a barbecue pit in the middle.
That's fair.
Well, they serve food there, or maybe not Walmart, but a Sam's Club.
They've got the little food court off to the side.
It's not a barbecue pit.
Not a barbecue pit.
Not a barbecue pit.
So you're a big Buckies enthusiast.
As you can.
Right.
Maybe.
So what is it about Buckies that you like?
Surmise.
Mostly the Beaver.
Yeah.
It's a Beaver.
Just the marketing branding strategy of Buckies.
They also have good high-quality, really high-calorie snacks.
They have good snacks.
That's true.
They have a great snack collection.
So here's the thing I do like about Buckies.
The restroom is phenomenal.
Okay, yeah.
So you want to compare it to Walmart.
Okay, it's not quite Walmart.
I don't want to get into trouble with Walmart or Buckies right now.
What, 20 urinals, maybe?
Maybe more.
It's always more than 20.
150.
150 urinals.
It's on the sign.
Yeah.
Bucky's pretty nice.
It's good.
It's got a bronze statue.
Well, you don't see that at Walmart.
Yeah.
No, and the thing about Buckeyes too is people love it and they will go out of their way.
They'll add like an hour on their road trip in order to hit the Buckeys.
So that was, maybe it was the expectations were so high.
people talk this up it has to be viewed in context that if you've been driving across texas which is very flat and boring for like hundreds of miles and you see a bucky's sign yeah it's like and you can get like a deer stand and some deer feed That's true.
And barbecue sandwich.
A onesie.
Wind chime.
Onesie.
Yeah.
All in the same spot.
That's right.
That's fine.
You can eat home decor.
Home decor.
You can get a car wash.
Get your gas.
All of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And new friends.
And new friends.
You can meet some people there.
Do you think an $8 barbecue sandwich is expensive?
An $8 barbecue sandwich at a gas station is more than expected.
The quality of the barbecue, though, was high enough to pay $8 for it.
I thought.
I thought it was good.
Have you had a barbecue sandwich from Buckeyes?
Is that what you got?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was fine.
It was what I would expect to pay at a barbecue restaurant.
And I didn't have my mind geared up for a standard of barbecue.
Well, we are.
Yeah, we're in the middle of Texas.
It's a barbecue capital there.
I guess I see these criticisms.
This makes sense.
Yeah.
Was America founded as a Christian nation?
We're just diving right into that one.
So I think it depends on what we mean by Christian.
And I want to hear your thoughts on this.
So we can think about how is America Christian?
In what sense is it Christian?
Was it not Christian?
Anti-Christian?
So here's a way in which it was not a Christian nation.
The founders wrote a constitution that gets rid of any kind of religious test for public office.
So you can't ask somebody whether they're a Christian or not before they become an official in the U.S. government.
So we get rid of that.
No religious tests for office.
We don't combine the offices of church and the offices of state.
So our senators are not our bishops and our president's not picking who our pastors are going to be or vice versa.
So there's a separation of church and state in that way.
But there's this other way, I think, in which America is influenced by Christian ideas, clearly.
And that's one of the big debates right now is to what extent is America actually influenced by Christian ideas?
Or is it on the other end, and you hear arguments about this, is it founded as a secular country where it's really designed to make a hard break from a Christian past and to take us into a secular future.
And these are the things that conservatives are debating right now and have been a long part of the debate in America.
Are you part of that group that believes that kind of where we started is where the natural, this is where we have ended up because of where we started?
I'm not.
So our argument in this book and the thing that I've been thinking about is that there's been not a straight line from the American founding to what we see today.
And so some of the arguments that you get are, you know, people like Patrick Denin at the University of Notre Dame had a book called Why Liberalism Failed.
And it essentially just argued that there is, for him, what he means liberalism is this broad intellectual tradition that informs the founding, influences people like John Locke and others who the founders are reading, that liberalism fails because it's true to itself, because it actually makes good on the promise of protecting individual rights, not emphasizing community values, emphasizing individual will, all of that kind of stuff.
And then what you get is a society of cartmans who just do what they want, you know, from South Park.
So you have that on the one hand.
Was South Park founded as a Christian?
There's some Christian ideas.
We might be able to make that argument about South Park.
And so you have that argument.
There's a straight line from the American founding to everything that we see today and the things that we want to criticize about our society.
And I don't think that's true if you look at the American Founding.
I think it's more complicated than that.
Think they were influenced, the founders, in making the decisions they did influenced by classical and Christian ideas, much more than scholars normally understand or appreciate.
But there's also a nuance there that I think is often lost in the popular discourse of people who are arguing that America is founded as a Christian nation or should be a Christian nation or still a Christian nation or something like that.
And I think there's a lot of nuance that gets lost because it's complicated.
They did, they protected religious liberty, they separated church and state, they had an emphasis on reasoned arguments and arguments that could be accessible by reason.
But they are also doing that within this broad Christian tradition that they're influenced by and that they're a part of.
Now, a lot of what you talk about, you're talking about right now, is in the book that you brought with you today, which is The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, Political Theology, Natural Law, and American Founding.
And the American founding.
And the American people.
You got to say the whole thing again.
Oh, okay.
The classic.
I'm just kidding.
Okay, so that is by Justin Dyer.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, that's really good.
So you're talking about that now.
A lot of the conversation that we've been having lately has been about Christian nationalism.
And so, what is it?
Like, can you define it for us?
And why is it a problem?
Why is it not a problem?
What do you think about that?
So I think the question is: what do we mean by Christian nationalism?
What does it mean for there to be a Christian nation?
And it's in the press all over the place now, this idea that people are influenced by Christian nationalism, that there's a resurgence of Christian nationalism.
So I think we need to define what it is and try to think through that.
On the one hand, there's an argument that people make that's a pretty basic, straightforward argument, that God will bless a country that is dedicated to him or his purposes, or somehow has a population that's oriented toward serving God in some way.
There's kind of ambiguity in what we mean by this.
But that references the population, the people, more than it does the form of government.
And so what I would say is that America is not a Christian nation if we're just talking about numbers, right?
We could count the number of people who identify as Christian and have some argument about the religious diversity in the nation as a whole.
You know, is it a Christian nation?
Is it not?
But you do have a way in which Christianity clearly was a dominant intellectual influence on the founding of the country in the way that the government is structured and operates, the way that the ideas, the political ideas are being put forward in the education of the American founders.
And so there's this nuance that we're trying to get to where we're saying that the intellectual influences of the American founding are clearly Christian in all sorts of important ways.
That helps us to account for the American founding.
It helps us understand our form of government.
But in all sorts of other ways, that conversation that we're having right now about America and whether it's a Christian nation seems to be a distraction from that underlying understanding of American government, how it operates, the foundations of religious liberty and things like that.
Was Narnia a Christian nation?
That's a good question.
I don't know how to get at Narnia being a Christian nation.
So maybe in some ways, Narnia was a Christian nation.
Certainly it had to be, right?
It was Aslanian.
Yeah.
I mean, Aslanian nation.
Aslanian nation, and he is the king.
He was the king.
Right.
But he didn't show up all the time.
You know, he allowed the Calmarines to kind of take over sometimes.
That's right.
That's right.
It's almost like Israel.
You're waiting for a new Narnia.
A new Narnia.
You're waiting for the Christian country.
The deep country.
Yeah.
One of the ways this gets into, I think, the political questions today is about citizenship.
So how do you understand what it means to be a member of that country?
You might think of it in Narnian terms.
Can you be a citizen of Narnia and not declare allegiance to Aslan?
Can you be a citizen of the United States and not declare allegiance to Yahweh?
That might be a way to think about it.
And in that sense, I think you can see how problematic it would be to have some conception of American citizenship that was so closely tied with Christian allegiance.
It's just not, one, it's not plausible.
It's not practical.
It's not true, I think, about the founding of our country.
But we still have to give some account of how it is that we can share a country with and political citizenship with people of such monumentally divergent political and religious views.
I think this is the problem that we're facing today.
And people are trying to figure that out and they're kind of working through it.
And I think one source of wisdom, not the only source, but one source of wisdom is to go back into our past and try to think about how the founders address those questions, think through those questions.
What's the system that they set up?
And we can, of course, be critical of that.
But before we're critical, we need to understand.
What would Aslan do if the public schools in Narnia started teaching queer ideology and keeping their kids' new identity secret from their parents?
So the question of the citizen and their role in society and in influencing their public institutions, don't you think they would get involved?
Aslan?
Yeah, you'd have to.
Well, what would Aslan do or what would citizens of Narnia do?
What would Aslan do?
Either one.
Aslan would probably preempt the local school board decisions and impose a new curriculum on them.
He would probably growl.
Yeah, he might.
Remember that scene where he growled at Lucy?
Maybe that was just in the movie.
Right, right.
He kind of growls because he's...
Yeah, because she was getting critical of her.
Yeah.
Yeah, as Mr. Beaver says, he's not safe.
He's not a safe lion.
He's not a safe lion.
He's good, but he's not safe.
Queer ideology is not safe from Aslan.
We're deep in conversation.
Profound.
What would Aslan have done if Lucy came home from school and declared that her name is now Luke?
I don't know what Aslan would have done.
So I don't even know.
I thought you were the Aslan.
I don't even know how to do that question.
I'm a C.S. Lewis guy.
Yeah, so I have the book on C.S. Lewis.
The Chronicles of Narnia.
Yeah.
Have you read The Chronicles of Narnia?
I read the Chronicles of Narnia.
I know these are good Aslan questions.
But the politics of Narnia.
So where do you, you know, what is Aslan going to do?
So this is an interesting question, though.
You have Aslan as what exactly in Narnia is.
Aslan, the lead political sovereign, the executive.
Yeah.
I know.
I shouldn't be the expert.
I've never thought about it from this perspective.
I've never asked these questions.
There's another book.
So you've got Aslan, who's a king and is a kind of political ruler, right?
And so what do you do with these kinds of questions?
But it's a different question from what we're asking for our society because we don't have a king.
We have a different kind of government.
And we have a government where the citizens should be involved, should be sovereign, and should be involved in these kinds of decisions.
Citizens are kind of the king.
Citizens are the king.
The people are sovereign.
And so the question, not what would Aslan do, but what should the people do?
I think it's maybe a different kind of question.
What would Aslan have you do?
Whoa.
In your life?
What would Aslan do?
Which is different than what would Aslan do?
I also don't think C.S. Lewis really developed the politics of Narnia that much.
No, I don't think so.
He just wanted the story to teach us something.
That's right.
A little lazy.
That's right.
I don't know if I'd call him lazy on that.
Well, he's lazy old Lewis.
I mean, compare with like Tolkien, you know, develops all this.
That's true.
And he was just like, yeah, you know, talk in line.
Right.
It's pretty cool.
Right.
Yeah, he liked that.
And Tolkien was critical of his mishmash of characters and everything that he puts in.
Santa Claus.
Santa Claus just shows us.
That's the spring Santa Claus.
Why not?
That was a weird moment in Narnia.
Merlin was a weird moment in that hideous strength.
That was, I mean, and I like that book.
Yeah, but Merlin just shows up and you're trying to figure out.
You're like, why Merlin?
That's what's going on with that.
I know he likes medieval stuff, but it's so weird.
Right.
Yeah.
And Tolkien thought just from a literary perspective, that didn't make any sense.
And he's under a rock.
Right.
Well, that's the whole thing.
They're trying to resurrect Merlin the whole time.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
I think I don't know.
We should bring Merlin.
He hates that hideous strength.
That's terrible.
So there's not really in Lewis a deep political theory in Narnia.
You know, look at Narnia and you've got kings and queens and you've got people who are ruling for good or for ill and they have to think about being political leaders and the children grow up to be co-heirs and co-sovereigns.
But you don't have a real detailed, you know, go to Narnia for wisdom about how to address your local school board.
You know, it's something altogether different.
But I think the promise, and you find this across Lewis's other works where he actually does talk a lot about natural law.
He talks about reason.
He talks about human nature and morality and all those things have to do with politics.
But it's how do we reason with each other?
So if you're going to go to a local school board, you want to offer reasons to other people for how things should be arranged, which we should be teaching.
Is there any basis for us to talk to one another, some common standard?
And the promise of natural law for Lewis was always that there was, that there was a common human reason rooted in human nature, that you could address people not based on religious convictions or giving them religious reasons or a common basis of faith, but that you could actually appeal to their reason.
Now, that seems harder and harder in our world in the sense that we seem pretty far apart.
It doesn't seem that easy to just appeal to somebody's reason because that common basis doesn't seem to quite be there.
Now, whether it was ever there, I don't know.
Lewis is writing in the middle of the 20th century when the world's being torn apart by World War and Cold War after that.
And it's not like there was unanimity and everybody agreed on everything back then either.
But nonetheless, he's always making that case that we've got this common human nature.
But even that claim is one that ultimately is founded in some kind of a theological or religious outlook, right?
So if we have a common human nature, how do we come about getting that common human nature?
If we can reason about things, why is it that our reason corresponds to reality in any meaningful sense?
Why is it that we can appeal to each other in that way and expect that there are some things about the world that are really good and some things that aren't good according to the kinds of beings we are and how we're designed to function and what it means to be happy and to flourish?
And all those questions, I think it's really hard to get at without some overarching vision of human nature and our place in the cosmos and what we are and how we're designed.
And I think this is a lot of what's going on today in our politics is that people get that.
A lot of the conservatives who are critical of what broadly we call liberalism think that liberalism essentially doesn't address those questions, that it tries to pretend like you can do politics without asking those questions or without addressing them.
And so it tables all the most important fundamental questions.
And so you have a lot of people who want to bring that back in.
But by bringing that back in, you run this danger.
This gets back to the Christian nationalism thing, whatever we want to call it.
There's all sorts of different names.
But if we try to reunite or reintegrate church and state or religious authority and secular political authority, if you try to bring those things back together, there are all sorts of dangers there.
I mean, all sorts of dangers about creating a kind of heretical government that is spouting theological positions and views that citizens must hold that aren't true.
You have all sorts of dangers about coercive theocratic power.
You have all sorts of dangers about impositions on people's religious liberty and all sorts of things that could go wrong.
On the other hand, it's probably responding to a real problem or a real challenge, which is you can't really do this.
This whole question of how do we live together?
How do we organize our political communities?
What is our school board going to adopt for a curriculum for our kids?
What are our policies going to be about gender identity and all the other things?
How do we talk about those questions without some deeper vision of humanity, what we are, how we're designed, how we function, what it means to be happy and to live well?
And it's really hard, I think, at the end of the day to divorce all those questions from the deepest questions about meaning and existence.
And that's where I think all these challenges with politics is how can we do this?
And we have such different views of those things as citizens.
What are your thoughts on Waffle House?
What's wrong with Waffle House?
Well, I don't know.
Like you said you didn't like Bucky's.
I was just assuming that I love Waffle House.
You do?
I think Waffle House is great.
What about Whataburger?
I like Whataburger.
Yeah.
Whataburger versus In-N-Out?
I haven't had In-N-Out yet.
Oh.
Yeah.
I need to.
I haven't had an In-NOUT burger.
We've got an In-N-Out in Austin, and I need to go to it.
But Whataburger is the Texas thing.
In-N-Out's the California thing.
We don't have a Whataburger.
We don't yet.
Whataburger is pretty good.
Haven't.
We went to Texas, and I was supposed to try one, and I didn't.
I feel very bad.
It's very average.
Is it?
It's like Carl's Jr.
You're supposed to try a Whataburger?
Yeah, I watched Dude Perfect last night.
They had somebody on and they compared In-N-Out to What?
What Burger is like a hard user of Carl's Jr.
How do you, where do you put an In-N-Out burger on there?
Top.
Oh, yeah.
Top.
Way better than that.
Oh, for sure.
Oh, I think it's even better than Carl's Jr.
Oh, yeah.
Way better than Carl's Jr.
It's not even a comparison to any other fast food junk.
It's not.
Except for the habit, maybe.
The habit's pretty good.
Yeah, it's really not.
It's like, you know, you talk about theocracy, natural law, it's theocracy.
They have Bible versus on the cups.
That's true.
It's so much better.
You got to ask that question.
Is Chick-fil-A better because it's Christian?
Yeah.
Everything else is just a shadow on the cave wall.
Because of how good Chick-fil-A is?
No, I was talking about In-NOW.
Did you talk about Chick-fil-A?
Science-fil-A is a Christian.
You're just talking about theocracy.
Is Chick-fil-A a Christian restaurant?
It's a Christian restaurant.
It's been saved.
Is it a restaurant that's covered by the blood of Christ?
It's influenced by Christian ideas.
Maybe we should cut that out.
Yeah.
That's the hairstyle.
No, we're leaving that in there.
I didn't even hear what you said.
Okay.
That was one of my favorite articles was the Chick-fil-A sauce on the doorpost.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
It was such a good one.
Yeah, that's a good one.
And a memorable one.
What would Aslan do if, you want to direct your attention here?
What would Aslan do if this car pulled him over?
Is this real?
That's a real Miami.
I think it's Miami.
The real Miami.
The real Miami cruiser police car.
I don't know what Aslan would do at that.
Do you think he would growl?
He might growl.
I think he'd be an angry.
I would expect like 17 cops with clown noses to pop out of that thing.
I think they would be afraid to pull him off.
That's what would happen.
Anytime anyone got around him, they'd be scared if they weren't on his team.
Yeah, it's interesting.
That's a tough one.
I don't know.
These are some pretty hard hypotheticals about Aslan.
You didn't come prepared to get away from it.
We're very prepared for specific.
Very specific hypotheticals about Aslan.
We love Aslan around here.
Aslan's good character.
Yeah, that's William Neeson.
Well, it does seem like the culture and the government in particular right now is they've chosen an unproven philosophy to espouse as truth.
So then we have our Christianity, which to them is an unproven philosophy.
So really, it's this war of ideas that we can't, I mean, like, how do we, how do we, what basis do we have to come together and how do we, how do we win, how do we win that war?
Yeah.
Like, what do we do?
And is it better to win the war?
Like, you know, like.
And is there a natural law argument to stop, you know, drag queen story or like that kind of stuff?
You know, like, is there something that actually makes sense?
Or do we have, is it a war of ideas?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's, I don't know if war is the right metaphor for this, but there's always this contest of ideas going on.
And at the bottom of it, as you mentioned, there seems to be something that's unproven, that you have some really basic foundational axioms that we live by that we sometimes think about, sometimes don't think about, but there's a kind of assumed worldview, it seems like, behind a lot of what we do.
And right now, you do see the pulling apart of different worldviews and the implications that they have for all sorts of things.
And then the things that are that are in the headlines that seem to be the most salient for us all have to do with children.
And so, you know, we're thinking about kids.
And once you're a parent, you have to think about all those kinds of questions.
You want your kids to be happy.
You want them to flourish.
You want them to live well.
What does that mean?
And what does that look like?
And we have some really different visions as a society right now, what that is.
So is there a promise of natural law for giving arguments and reasons?
I'd say, yeah, I think so.
I think it's not simply unproven assertions that people are making.
I think there's things that are observable.
Right now, the language of well-being is what people often use, but it gets at the same kind of idea.
So the ancients, when they talk about natural law, would talk about words that we translate as human flourishing and eudaimonia, yeah.
And so you have this idea that people, they're designed a certain way.
Once they live according with how they're designed, they inculcate these real human goods in their lives, things like friendship and religion, family life.
Onomatophyea, nomenclature.
Once you get those things in your life, you're living well.
And there's a kind of observable, testable hypothesis about these things.
You can look and see how people's lives are when they neglect friendship or they pursue wealth at all costs or they just pursue a life of pleasure.
It's all the same questions that the ancients were asking.
We're asking it today as a society.
But I don't think we're in a place where there's no right answers or we can give no reasons to other people to persuade them.
And so we have to make the case.
And I think part of making the case is the work that you're doing.
You're trying to shape culture.
Think about these questions.
And you make the case for a particular vision of human nature precisely because you care about and love your fellow citizens.
You want them to live well and you want to do this all together as a community.
Now, what kind of diversity is allowed within that?
So you also want people to have liberty to pursue their own lives and interests and make their own decisions.
At what point do you prevent people from doing that?
And at what point do you have such divergent visions of what the good life looks like?
And I don't, it's a, that's a hard question, but it really comes down, you know, the school board stuff becomes big on that.
These are big questions.
You know, what do you want your kids exposed to?
And how do you want them taught and shaped and educated?
Yeah, that's interesting.
And just talking about all the gender stuff in school, Switzerland this last week just codified the gender binary.
Did you see this?
No, I didn't.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
So like from the top down, they codified the gender binary and said if you're in Switzerland, you're either a male or a female.
And it's weird because that, to me, Switzerland is one of those progressive countries that you're like, you know, why would it seem like they're moving the direction we want to go that direction as the United States?
So what do you think about Switzerland or maybe Europe in general that's sort of rejecting these ideas?
Like you find it all over Europe where they're just like, nah, we're going to go back now.
Do you think it's something about the founding of those countries, the history, the culture?
Like, what do you think about that?
That's an interesting question.
I don't, so I don't know how I would respond for all of these European countries, but I do think there's something unique, for whatever reason, something unique in the English-speaking world.
And so the whole British Empire, you know, Canada, England, the United States, Australia, you do see these ideas travel, it seems like, travel quicker and farther in those countries than others.
And then you have Europe as well, but you don't have it anywhere else.
You know, you don't see the same kind of traction for these ideas in South America or Africa or Russia, obviously.
You know, we've got to kind of go in a different direction there.
And even in Eastern.
Europe as opposed to Western Europe.
It looks a little bit different.
So all the things.
I don't know.
When it comes to some of these European countries, you do see very different approaches to these things in Sweden or France or some other places and places that you wouldn't necessarily expect to be bastions of conservatism, but they do seem to be rethinking some of these issues that are going on right now.
There's something rational.
They're like, well, rationally, this isn't working out.
You know, we tried it.
doesn't work the cheese we see it on probably what it is um Their abortion politics are much more moderate than ours.
And you see it on some of the trans issues, just in terms of medical interventions for children.
It goes much farther in the United States or Canada than it does in Europe.
And I don't know if that's rooted in the foundations of those countries, you know, and some of the ideas.
I don't know exactly what's driving that, but it does seem.
The chemicals they put in the water.
Could be the plastic bottles.
Yeah.
Something going on.
Right.
So here, I was thinking about the Babylon Bee and your mission.
And I'm actually curious if you think we're living in Babylon.
So this goes to the Christian nation question.
I mean, Babylon's not a Christian.
Well, okay, so that's the original idea behind the name, you know, is that we are kind of living in.
It's like dispatches from Babylon.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
It's that we're kind of living in exile.
And, you know, when the Babyloni was founded in 2016, we definitely felt like that.
You know, we had been Obama for eight years.
I think a lot of us were disillusioned with the wars with the Bush era.
Before that, you had Clinton.
It was like, we're so far removed from our parents' America that was, you know, ragged and World War II.
And, you know, like, I don't know.
Like, it feels like, it felt like at the time, like, we were just all kind of disillusioned with the country.
I don't know.
Like, we did a very early article on the Babylon Bee that was like pastor longs for the day when America pretended to be a Christian nation.
Yeah.
You know?
And it's like, I still think there's a ton of truth to that, you know, that you still kind of had these pastors that were like, you know, back, you know, when I was a kid, everybody loved God.
And it's like, that wasn't true.
It's like, you just had a lot of people paying lip service.
And I think there was a sense in which God kind of sifted through that.
And you had a lot of people that were just pretending or just going through the motions fall away.
And you do have much more of a hardcore remnant now that is like, especially through the pandemic and stuff, the people who are going to church now are like probably more likely to be actual believers than the people that were going 20 or 30 years ago.
Even two years ago.
Two years ago.
Well, even in two years ago.
Yeah, there's been a sifting in the last couple.
But I do think it's more complicated than just that, just like you do.
Yeah, but there's a reputational cost to being a Christian in a way that there wasn't at some point in our history.
Well, then also the other side of it, I've come around a little bit on the fact that it was probably more pleasant to live in America when more people pretended to be Christian.
You know, like I think, like, yeah, that's a bad thing from a faith perspective, but from a societal perspective, it's like everybody kind of, I don't know, I'd like to live in a place where we don't have to open up on Sunday to do business.
Yeah, where you didn't have like pornography everywhere and, you know, like you didn't have all the dirty stuff that's going on.
It's weird because I agree.
I think we are.
They weren't true believers.
It's like from a right.
If there was this social pressure to kind of be good, right?
You had to follow the law or whatever to be a good businessman.
You want to cheat people because you'll get a bad reputation, whatever it is.
You want to be a good person.
That stuff was always, I think that's good for society.
It really is.
But I also think we are living in kind of an exile.
We're visitors here.
You know, this is not our home.
We're citizens of heaven.
We're citizens of another country, a deeper country.
Narnia.
Narnia.
We're citizens of Aslan's country.
And so we so there is a sense in which I think we are kind of in Babylon, in my estimation.
And I think that's where the Christian nationalism conversation can be dangerous.
And we were talking about that.
If you have people who are confusing those things, if they think that somehow American citizenship and your citizenship in the kingdom of God are the same, that those things are fused in some way, then that becomes really challenging.
And I think it distorts people's theology.
It distorts their priorities.
It distorts their loyalties.
And it's probably not true.
It's in the sense of it's not an accurate picture of the United States in terms of where we are right now.
And you were talking about being in Babylon.
It depends on your starting point for your analysis on this.
On one hand, you feel like we are in exile.
We're in Babylon.
This is not our home.
What room then is left for patriotism in that?
Is there a kind of love for, and maybe there still is.
And even in that biblical metaphor, Babylon, you can be called to love your community, to seek the welfare of those around you, to help others flourish, even as your ultimate loyalty is not to your nation or your nation state in our example or in our context.
But on the other hand, there is a real way in which America grew out of and was part of a broader intellectual tradition deeply shaped by Christianity.
And so we shouldn't lose sight of that either and also lose sight of what could be lost if those intellectual foundations are lost.
But right now we have people, you know, just all across the board.
I think it's a really interesting, fun debate because so many people are part of it right now.
But you have on the one, you know, one starting point, you could say we live in Babylon.
And the reason we're in Babylon is because the founders were pagans, essentially, who, you know, they're kind of secularists, deists, or maybe pantheists who develop this system that is going to be totally divorced from any kind of underlying religious foundation.
And that's where things went wrong.
And so what's the solution?
It's let's try to piece those things back together.
We'll move forward and try to create or build some kind of a Christian nation.
You know, that becomes one response.
Or the other is just, you know, junk the whole thing, reject the founding altogether and build something new.
And it's not clear what that new is.
But when you push people on it, often who are making these kinds of arguments, you get back to the things that you're talking about.
Well, let's build a society where we can get rid of porn or let's build a society where we can have local authorities say no to drag queen story hour or whatever it is.
And I guess my response to that is you could do that for a long time in the United States.
I don't think the American founding is responsible for porn or drag queen story hour.
You know, I don't think there's a straight line from any of the founders to those things that we have in our society.
It's a cultural issue.
You know, there's a culture that we share and we share it with 330 other million Americans.
And that creates room for all of those things that we see.
And we have to do the hard work of trying to shape culture in a healthy direction, I think.
And there's just no silver bullet.
So you don't see a straight line from like individualism and the enlightenment and classical liberalism to everybody just, I'm a drag queen and I want to read it the kids.
Like you don't see that because people on the other side will see that connection.
Coming up next, for Babylon D subscribers.
So if by liberalism.
You're never going to get a job as like a talking head on Fox Dude.
I know.
You're just too nuanced.
I just like, yeah, you know, it's on both sides.
You need to be like that.
Drag queens are evil.
And that's why Fox doesn't have me on.
So if you think about these ideas.
So there's one way in which you can say, look, it's all individualism.
It's individual rights.
And you go straight line John Locke to everything you see in our culture today.