Doug Wilson is at The Babylon Bee to talk about his case for a Mere Christendom and making America a Christian nation with Christian laws. How would Christian Nationalism be different from Sharia law or would it be? What would Christendom mean for religious and civil liberty? They also talk about Christian use of satire and whether you can mock somebody for Jesus. Things get spicy in the full-length, ad-free, subscribers-only podcast when Doug is asked about his writings on slavery and the Federal Vision! He is also subjected to the second set of Ten Questions! Use promocode 'PODCAST' to get 20% off getting access to the full podcast at: http://babylonbee.com/plans Doug has a new book coming out. Pre-order now: https://www.amazon.com/Mere-Christendom-Douglas-Wilson/dp/1957905573 Jarret mentioned The Serrated Edge: https://www.amazon.com/Serrated-Edge-Biblical-Trinitarian-Skylarking/dp/1591280109
Now, if it's inescapable that morality is going to be imposed, and that's what law is, is the imposition of morality, then which morality?
Do we want a corrupt one, a corrupt morality, or a good one?
And now it's time for another interview on the Babylon Bee Podcast.
Hi, guys.
Welcome to the interview show of the Babylon Bee.
So great to have you.
With us today is Sam always with me.
I'm Jared.
And this is Doug Wilson is with us today.
Such an honor to have you here.
Thank you so much for flying all about.
You got up at 2 in the morning to come here.
I did.
Such a big thing.
That's an event.
Well, not that big, but I mean, yeah, but it was kind of nice.
It's kind of a big deal.
Anyway, so you are all about cross-cultural Christian classical education.
You have written a million books.
You are in the reformed camp of Christianity.
And you are a controversial figure.
You have a university.
There's a lot of things going on for you.
And so for our audience, can you just explain who you are a little bit?
Sure.
Yeah.
I live in northern Idaho, up in the Panhandle, in Moscow, Idaho.
I'm the pastor of Christ Church.
That's my day job is pastor.
And I serve on the board of New St. Andrews College and on the board of Logos School and on the board of Cannon Press, which is our publishing arm.
So I serve on different boards, but my central task and calling is that of a preacher and pastor.
And then I write a lot.
You were saying that before you write like you, like a dog barks.
I write for the same reason dogs bark.
I can't explain it.
Constantly writing.
Well, I need to.
Very prolific.
I have to write.
Yeah.
A fun naming convention note.
We had some friends who moved up to go to Moscow to be at Christ Church, and we threw them a little going away party, and we'd made on the letterboard signs, you know, those signs that are so hip these days.
It said to Moscow with love.
Oh, that's great.
There you go.
Now, from up there in cold, cold Moscow, Idaho, you all have, I mean, we at the Babylon Bee, we're a joke factory, but we also try to go where the center of gravity is in the conservative Christian cultural conversation.
That's why we're in Southern California.
So you all, in cold, cold northern Idaho, have driven the Christian cultural conversation, or you've at least shifted the center of gravity towards this topic of Christian nationalism and now Mir Christendom.
What's the distinction between those terms?
Is that a rebrand?
Are they distinct?
I see you have your Mir Christendom book.
What's it about?
And then what's Stephen Wolfe's book about?
So Stephen Wolfe's book is sort of like a test case of Christian nationalism in a particular nation.
What does it look like in one nation?
Not what does it look like in America as the chosen nation, but what does it look like in one nation?
And Mir Christendom is expanding.
So it's just think of Mir Christendom as zooming out.
So what happens when you've got three nations that confess the Lordship of Jesus Christ?
What's their relationship to one another?
So the first Christendom, you had all these different nations that were Christian and they knew that they were Christian and they were at odds with each other sometimes and at war with each other sometimes.
And you had all the normal nation things, but they thought of themselves as a unit, Christendom, as opposed to the Islamic world, let's say.
So basically, it's not a rebrand.
It's simply taking the conversation a bit larger.
And it also helps to negate one of the accusations against Christian nationalism, which is that this is just a theological version of America first.
No, it's not America first.
It's nothing to do with that.
So Christian internationalism, did you write it?
So that puts to bed the idea that maybe you wrote it because all the people were chanting, Doug has sold his thousands, but Stephen Wolf has 10,000s.
It wasn't a jealousy thing.
No, it wasn't.
Okay, so you're thinking now for the person that is a little bit less educated on maybe some of what Christian nationalism is, because this is a really hot topic in culture right now.
We get accused of being Christian nationalists.
I don't think we are.
I think there's a lot of, especially coming from the Christian left, there's people that are accusing people that are saying, say, for instance, like our pro-life, that we're Christian nationalists, or like we have different positions that are more conservative that we're Christian nationalists because we're forcing our religion on other people or something like that.
Sure.
How would you describe what Christian nationalism is?
And why is it a good thing in your mind or why is it a bad thing?
So you're touching the thing with a needle.
This is the essential issue.
When people say you're trying to impose your morality on other people, I say, yeah.
Exactly right.
Yes.
But I hastened to add, so does everybody else.
All law is imposed morality.
It's an inescapable concept.
It's not whether you impose morality, it's which morality you impose.
So if someone says, well, you pro-lifers want to impose your morality on the mother, well, I say, yeah, yeah, we are.
We want to say, you can't kill your baby and you can't kill your baby because God said to Moses that you can't kill the baby.
So that's an imposition of morality.
But that's not me coming in here to spoil the secular party where nobody's imposing morality and me coming in to ruin everything by imposing morality.
Because before I showed up, the mother and the doctor were going to impose their morality on the child.
Somebody, at the end of the day, someone has morality imposed on them.
Now, if it's inescapable that morality is going to be imposed, and that's what law is, is the imposition of morality, then which morality?
Do we want a corrupt one, a corrupt morality, or a good one?
And that's what it boils down to for Christians.
So here's another way of coming at it.
All societies, all cultures, all societies, all corporate groups of humans are moral organisms.
Any body of people that makes decisions can make bad ones, can make evil ones.
So a corporate...
Except for Sam.
No.
Total depravity.
I'm a capital T.
Oh, that's where you're McCarthy.
Total depravity.
Total depravity.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
No, not absolute depravity.
Total depravity.
So if you have a nation or a college or a corporation or any social unit, that unit is a moral organism and it makes decisions.
And those decisions can be praised or blamed.
And then my favorite question is: if you praise or blame by what standard?
What standard are we using to praise or blame?
Now, if it's the standard of God Almighty, the true God, the living God, the triune God, ta-da, Christianity, welcome to Christian nationalism.
Right, right.
Okay.
If it's not the standard of the living God, it's the standard of an idol.
And why would any Christian want to support the imposition of an idol's standard?
So what about pluralism?
Like, as we live in this society, an American society that's supposedly supposed to be pluralistic, obviously, we're struggling with that right now.
But what do we do with that?
Like, how is this any different from the Christian version of Sharia law?
You know?
Well, the difference is the religion is different.
Yeah, it's just different.
Is it really?
I'm just kidding.
I'm kidding.
Well, people think that here's an interesting thing.
There was a Supreme Court decision in 1892.
And the name of the Supreme Court decision was wonderfully named the United States versus Holy Trinity, which is scary.
Well, Holy Trinity was the name of a church, and this church called a British minister to come and serve in their pastorate.
And then there was a law that prohibited the importation of laborers, cheap labor to work on railroads and that sort of thing.
And so there was a court case that came out of this where the church was fined or attempted to be fined because they hired a British minister.
And this case went all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The name of the church was Holy Trinity in the United States.
And the Supreme Court, I've read through this decision, the Supreme Court in 1892 determined on the merits.
They said, no, this was not the intent of the law, blah, blah, blah.
So they found in favor of the church.
But then the Supreme Court went on to say, and furthermore, we can't have any truck with this nonsense because the United States is a Christian nation and always has been.
And page after page, starting with the charters of the original colonies and the fundamental orders of Connecticut, the Declaration of Independence.
So the Supreme Court of the United States in 1892 determined that the United States was a Christian nation.
Now, what I want to tell you is that in 1894, two years after that, it wasn't the handmaid's tale.
Yeah.
Are you sure?
I've only seen the first 20 minutes, but Florida.
Florida's the handmade's tale.
I couldn't finish it.
Not seeing any of it.
But I know how that works.
Those red outfits.
I know how the trope works in our culture.
They say, if you allow for this, the first thing you're going to do is get some reformed weirdbeards, reformed ayatollahs chopping off people's hands and stuff.
But that's a different religion.
That's Islam.
I'm not advocating for Islamic law.
I'm advocating for Christian law.
And Christian law is not something that's this unknown thing.
We ran it.
We had it for centuries.
It's not this new, newfangled idea.
And the next thing is, and this ties into your pluralism question, there's a good kind of healthy kind of pluralism and an unhealthy kind of pluralism.
Healthy pluralism is something that Christians invented.
So it was our Christian roots that hammered out the doctrine of liberty of conscience.
We're the ones who invented religious liberty.
We're not the ones who are showing up late in the day to take religious liberty away.
That's our baby.
We hammered that out.
We developed that.
That was something that came out of the Reformation.
And so what I'm arguing in Mere Christendom, another way of saying this is Christendom 2.0.
Christendom 1.0 made some serious mistakes.
There were blunders and crimes and things that we don't want to do again.
We don't want the Spanish Inquisition again.
There are things we just don't want.
Well, okay, we learn from that.
But here's the thing.
There were a few thousand people in the history of the Spanish Inquisition.
There were a few thousand people executed, vilely, awfully, bad, wicked.
But a few thousand people executed.
I mean, that's Planned Parenthood on a slow afternoon.
Okay.
And the Spanish Inquisition did what they did.
Their crime was spread over a few centuries.
So the issue is, what do we have going on now?
We're imposing morality now.
It's just a wicked one.
And so that's what this whole tranny debate is.
Yes.
Okay.
Tell it what it is.
That's good.
Automotive repair.
That's why it was.
Oh, were you talking about something else?
The whole tranny.
That's what I was talking about.
By transmission.
By brake pads, transmission.
It's all kind of pause.
I'm just not sure what I'm going to do with this.
So bleep it.
Don't bleep it.
Keep it.
So we're in the middle of hardcore debating over fundamental issues of life, sexuality.
If you can't answer the question, what is a girl?
Then how on earth are you going to answer the question, what is a human being?
And if you can't answer the question, what is a human being?
Then how on earth can you know what human rights are?
The answer is you can't, right?
So we are headed for a hellhole, and we are headed for a hellhole with our eyes open on purpose.
And if any Christian pops their head up and says, hey, guys, this is not a good, that's the way to the abyss.
This is, we're going to go over the lip of the abyss, and that's not going to be good.
But then there's other Christians that pop up like David French.
Right.
I'm just going to say that.
In contrast to that.
Yeah.
Well, so here's the thing.
When David French says that we want to preserve our institutions, I say, okay, yeah, I'm all for that.
Who's burning them down?
Right?
This goes back to Aristotle.
Do you want behavior that democracies like, or do you want behavior that preserves democracy?
Okay.
And we're in the middle of a cultural revolution.
This is the kind of thing that Mao launched in 1966 or thereabouts, and it continued until his death.
We are in the early stages of a cult.
This is not culture wars anymore.
This is a cultural revolution, red guards and everything.
And if you pink guards.
Yes.
And so when you have something like that appalling attack on a Christian school, six people murdered, and the White House press secretary says something like, well, the trans community is under siege.
Are you kidding me?
So this is sort of up is down, down is up.
This is Orwellian or Orwellian language on steroids.
And so when someone says, like David French, well, we have to preserve our institutions, you know, say, haven't you, don't you realize that they're all blasted now?
Don't you realize how much of it is in rubble now?
Don't you it's like Pharaoh's advisor saying, don't you know that Egypt is ruined?
So it's very, I don't have any problem at all with us fighting for the religious liberty of Muslims and Jews and people.
Again, this is a Christian invention.
So, like a neutral public square.
No, no.
Because the one thing a neutral public square can't do is preserve religious liberty.
Right?
Because here's another illustration that I like to use.
To illustrate how Christians have been snookered by the false kind of pluralism.
Bamboozled.
Bamboozled.
I like to say it.
Yes.
Have been, yes, bamboozled.
That's the perfect word.
So if, let's say Walmart announced religious appreciation week and Monday the Buddhists got 20% off and Tuesday the Muslims got 20% off and Wednesday the Christians got 20% off and suck your tongue Monday.
Yeah.
Did you hear about the Dalai Lama?
Yeah, that's what I heard about.
Yeah, gross.
Bleep that.
Sucking Mondays.
So, yes.
We all heard about that.
But we're not going to hear about it for very long.
We're not going to hear about it.
If it was a conservative Christian minister who said that, we'd be hearing about it for years.
Forever.
Forever.
I'm sorry.
I interrupted your thought.
You were talking about Walmart.
Walmart, and they have all these.
Most Christians.
I love this.
Most Christians would be excited that they got a day.
Yeah.
Okay.
And they say, well, see, Walmart's playing even-handedly.
They're given all these different religions a day, right?
So we have a neutral, this is sort of a picture of the neutral public square.
Satanic Fridays would be weird.
Yeah, and that's what we're going to get.
That's where it's going to wind up.
Before you get to Drag Queen Saturday, Drag Queen Saturday, before you get there, you have to back up and recognize that Walmart's doing this for a reason, and every day is Money Day.
Every day is Mammon Day.
In other words, you can't go to some place where moral choices disappear.
And then as soon as you're making a moral choice together with your fellow Americans, the Christian has to ask, is this moral choice something that pleases God or doesn't please God?
If you want it to please God, you're going to be accused of Christian nationalism.
If you say it doesn't matter if it pleases God, you've sold out.
It's almost like you're saying you can't serve God and mammon.
Yeah.
You're quoting the Bible there.
I would quote Dylan.
You got to serve somebody.
You got to serve somebody.
There you go.
Dylan Mulvaney.
Yeah, Dylan Mulvane, he said that.
So a couple of callbacks because, you know.
I was talking about the Dylan from my generation.
Our generation is way better than the Dylan.
We have a Dylan too.
We have a Dylan heard of him.
So a couple callbacks.
Number one, I like it when Jarrett name drops David French.
That just blesses me.
At the end of the Christian nationality.
I'm talking about the Squistians.
The Squishians.
So at the end of Wolf's book, he all but name drops David French.
He might have just been going for a more evergreen book, and he says there's always going to be a controlled opposition where they check a pro-life box, but then in every other way, they'll eternally punch right, and they will have as many weekly columns as they want.
The left will gladly have them as the punching right guys.
Right.
But I do like that Jarrett name-dropped book.
How can a conservative, how can a conservative write for The Atlantic or write for the New York Times?
You got to be full of crap, man.
There's no way if you were writing there and were effectively conservative, they would grab you where the pants hang loose and march you to the curb and kick you into your Uber.
I imagine David French wears very tight pants.
That's what I've always thought.
So as you tease it out and elaborate, I think to the untrained ear, or maybe to the trained ear, who knows?
I'll put it this way.
To the untrained ear or to the untrained eye, the book looks and sounds scary.
The Christian Nationalism book, it's got a map of the U.S. with a cross spreading over it.
And of course, if there were a hammer and sickle or some other religious imagery, it would look scary.
But I think you've softened it with Mere Christendom.
May I recommend a further softening, country Christianity.
Or country of Christianity.
It's got some nice Doug Wilson working on a banjo.
Sounds like the untrained beard.
The untrained beard.
To the uneducated.
To the uneducated nose.
One of the things I'm trying to resist, and one of the things that is apparent in this project, and Wolf's book and mine are part of the same general project.
You know, we've got Stephen Wolf is a Thomist and I'm not a Thomist.
And there are intermural differences.
But I like follower of the person.
For them.
For them who might not know.
Not us.
Not for me.
I know.
A Thomist is someone who buys into and utilizes Thomas Aquinas' system of theology in analyzing ethical issues and the issues of theology and so on.
So I'm a Vantillian, Cornelius Van Til, and Vantillian.
And Thomism is more reliant on natural law.
And I'm more biblicist, but I think there's room for natural law and natural revelation.
So like I said, intramural discussions.
But I was very happy with Stephen's book and want to keep the conversation going.
And in order to keep the conversation going, you have to anticipate and answer objections.
Now, also, you have to keep out of the well-worn groove.
And the well-worn groove that I want to avoid is the God and country groove.
Because there are places in America where if you were just a moderate, squishy center-left evangelical and you went to a Fourth of July service in Alabama somewhere, you would have plenty of material to say these guys really are theo-fascists, flags and fighter jets.
We had that up until like two years ago down here.
Let me just shoehorn this in because this is very important.
A lot of conservatives like to talk about American exceptionalism.
And that's part of the God and country thing.
Well, there's real problems with it.
And I do grant that our founding generation, when our country was founded, I do grant that the founding was exceptional.
There really was American exceptionalism.
But the exceptional thing about American exceptionalism was that the founders knew that Americans weren't exceptional.
And this is why.
If you're a Martian or some foreigner and someone just gave you a copy of the Constitution that's just a year old and you read through the Constitution, what's the subtext of that Constitution?
The subtext is, never trust an American.
Right?
Especially someone in government.
Especially an American politician.
They weren't writing the Constitution against the British.
The British were gone.
They had all these firewalls in place.
The separation of powers and then dividing Congress into two chambers and then having the federalist system where you have all the states have all this power that if it's not granted to the federal government, it is reserved to the states or to the people in the 10th Amendment.
They divvied up the power and spread it as thinly as possible.
And the reason they did that is they didn't trust American politicians.
They didn't trust us.
And that was exceptional.
So every empire in the history of the world, Babylonian exceptionalism, Persian exceptionalism, Roman exceptionalism, British exceptionalism, every empire on the top of its game thinks that they're unique.
The founding of America, our founders knew that we weren't unique and that we were as corruptible as anybody.
And they built a system that was designed to retard and interfere with that kind of corruption.
And the reason they did that was because of Christian nationalism.
They did that because of a Christian doctrine of man.
Man is a sinner.
Right?
And that's what Madison says in the Federalist.
He says, basically, you have to give the government enough power to enable it to govern the people and at the same time devise a means to enable it to control itself.
Because every person who takes office is a sinner.
Every person who's sworn into office as a president is a sinner.
And power is going to go to his head.
And you want to have a system that gets in the way, gets underfoot of any kind of power grab.
And it was a genius move.
And it took a couple hundred years for the termites to eat through the floor joists.
But we're there now.
We are.
We're there now.
And that means Christians have to replace the floor joists.
And what I'm saying is that if we don't install the floor joists right, if we don't do it the way they did it the first time, it's going to collapse after five years.
It's just, it's not going to work.
So Christian nationalism is not a rah-rah America thing.
Well, you've got the ism on the end.
And I think, again, the ism makes it scary to folks.
But I think the deeper, I think the reason it's going to, you said it's raised objections, but you also said it's meant to forward the conversation.
I think the reason it's proving to be such an inflection point in the conversation is because it is grappling with real issues, like the silent majority seeming more and more like a myth, as well as the as, well, I'll put it this way, as well as the movement from positive world to neutral world to negative world.
It used to be, at least in the U.S., a positive world towards Christians.
And then, you know, it was a neutral world.
This is what Strand was saying recently on our podcast.
It's okay that you're Christian, but now the negative world, it's bad that you're Christian.
I think those realities have made this particular topic a hot topic.
So here's my question.
Is Wolf's book and your book, are they meant to activate or persuade or both?
Both.
Both.
What material would you use for the floor joists?
Just as a 3D code.
It would be pressure-treated wood or termite.
That's what I would use.
More termite-resistant.
Yeah.
We're going to try to find the pressure-treated wood right now.
One of the things I like to tell people, you know, if I were president and what a glorious three days that would be, I would want a bunch of process reforms, not just content reforms.
Of course, I would want pro-life and protection of kids from the transsexual movement and all that.
But I would also want structural things that our founders put in, but additional ones like term limits or requiring elections if that every ballot has to have none of the above on the ballot.
That's funny.
And if none of the above wins, you have to have the election over.
So basically, you have to give people options where they're not just narrowed down to the mutton chef choice again.
So Those are process things that sort of get in the way of the people who are professional handlers of other people's lives.
And that's the thing that we need to figure out.
Now, you asked about motivating or activating or persuading.
Activating or persuading.
And I think it has to be both.
Because when someone is going into action, if they say, yeah, I felt this way for years, man, you've stirred me up.
When they go into a conversation, people are going to ask them questions and they're going to need ammo.
They're going to need responses.
And so what I've done and sought to do since 1988, it was in 1988 that I picked my target audience.
Who am I writing for?
Right.
Who am I trying to, what am I trying to do?
Who am I writing for?
And that would include this book.
I'm writing for the average evangelical who is really distressed by everything he sees going on around him and can't quite articulate what's wrong with it.
He knows that something's wrong with it, but he's not sure how to phrase it.
And so I want him to read what I write and say, that's it.
That's what I didn't like about this.
I wanted to fill out an instinct.
Right.
Well, if I may, filibuster for a moment to give you a chance to get some water.
There was a clip that went around when they came up to interview you, and it was a 60-minutes type segment where they were looking and they were talking about Moscow.
And I remember the clip that either the Canon Press Boys or someone else, there was a clip where she said, well, Roe v. Wade is the law of the land.
And you said, or it was.
And then they put the little thug life sunglasses on you and the little hat and everything.
That was a moment where I just wondered.
And forgive me for the directness, but I think it's worth letting you articulate it out loud.
Your whole schema is peaceful, correct?
It's within the current laws.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, yes, absolutely.
So no Christian in his right mind would wish for or agitate for or try to bring about civil war.
Right.
I have been warning people for decades that that's not the restraint that the other side has.
I read something, I just quoted it the other day.
Aaron McIntyre wrote, the current strategy is for the progressive left to kick the dog until the dog defends itself so that they have a reason to shoot it.
To put it down.
To put it down.
Yeah, that makes sense.
So that's why I think we're being insulted and exasperated.
And I keep saying, look, you guys, if you keep this up, this is going to get ugly.
And nobody is going to be able to restrain the forces that you're trying to provoke.
But am I trying to provoke them?
Absolutely not.
So the thing that I've wanted to do is have the leaven of the gospel work its way throughout all society and have these things accomplished peacefully.
I remember when you were, it was a few months ago, actually maybe about a year ago, we were talking about one of the January 6th celebrations that we had.
It was like the second year, the annual.
Anyway, but it was.
Let me get to the question.
Oh, yeah.
So you said something like, don't take the bait.
He's like, you know, do not take the bait.
This is what you were, and I loved it.
That clip came across my feed as well.
I love that.
Yeah, because you were expecting them to poke the bear or something like that.
That is at that point.
Please don't take the bait.
That's what's happening over and over again.
That's your advice, right?
My advice is don't take the bait.
Don't take the bait.
And in line with your question, so if we don't take the bait, what do we take?
If we don't take the bait, I love my country.
I love my people.
I hate what they're doing to everything.
What do I do?
If I don't take the bait, what do I do?
And I think the answer has to be reformation and revival in the church.
Basically, you cannot have.
Jesus says if salt has lost its savor, it's worth nothing except to be trampled on by men.
Now, for modern Christians to come in and say, so why is the salt being trampled on by men?
This is a deep mystery.
We've lost our savor.
We've lost our savor.
We don't taste anything.
And the savor is going to be restored with the preaching of a hot gospel, true reformation in the church, true revival in the church that isn't being aimed at a political end.
It will have a political consequence, but that's not what you're doing it for.
So you would not say, remember January 6th and keep it holy?
I would not say that.
And you would say, well, you used the word exasperated.
That came to mind to me because it was supremely exasperating to me when, right after the tragedy in Nashville, Carrine Jean-Pierre's, the clip that went around was of her saying the trans community is under attack.
To me, it was the equivalent of her standing over kids hovering, huddled under their desks and reminding them, don't forget the trans community is under attack when they're the ones being literally attacked.
I think exasperating was the right word.
Again, to me, it felt like the equivalent of her going to the funerals and reminding everyone what the real story is about.
So your solution is mass repentance and mass revival or starting in the church and then it's spreading.
Starting in the church where basically the people of God in the pews calling upon their elders and pastors to take a stand, grow a backbone, take a stand.
And I've mentioned earlier that we're heading into a period of cultural revolution.
This is my read of the cultural circumstance.
So take it for what it's worth.
But I believe that the whole lockdown masking thing was a beta testing for tyranny.
Okay.
So how compliant are these Christians?
How soft are they?
How easily will they go over?
Well, it turns out that we folded like a cheap card table.
And there's a few standout exceptions around the country.
And those standout exceptions have seen explosive growth because Christians are hungry for some sort of Christian leadership that isn't craven.
But I think the real test is coming.
And I don't know what the issue is going to be.
It could be transsexual rights.
It could be, hey, you can't worship.
You can only worship once a month because of climate change.
That actually doesn't sound that far off.
I know.
I know.
And this is why I've written satiric pieces for decades, and this is your wheelhouse.
This is what you guys do.
And you know what a challenge it is to out, you know, you write some satiric piece, and then the week after it comes true.
It comes true.
We have about 100 prophecies fulfilled, and we have a sketch about it where we're sitting around two satire writers trying to write satire, and they can't because the Democrats have already done it.
There's a great thinker, Malcolm Muggerich, was a book.
He used to be the editor of Punch, which was a satiric magazine.
And Khrushchev was coming to the United Kingdom one time, and they wrote up a satiric itinerary for him, right, to make fun of all the things that they were going to have him do.
And then his actual itinerary fulfilled like half of the things on the satiric one.
And it's like, okay, how can we keep pace with this?
Now, we're in the middle of clown world, right?
And some Christians take. encouragement from the fact, okay, we're in clown world.
We're in a battle with clown world.
That's the good news.
Okay, fine.
The bad news is the clowns appear to be winning.
Yeah.
And they have chainsaws.
Yeah, and they're creepy clown world.
It's creepy.
It's creepy clown world.
It's like not scary farm out there.
And so what we have to do is say, okay, parishioners, Christian, call upon your elders and pastors to take a stand.
These are times when the Christian pulpit ought to be a place where it requires courage to preach.
And the fact that it doesn't require courage to preach in many places means that a lot of men are not doing their jobs.
So I think that the church needs to send a clear signal that we receive our commission from Christ.
We are called to disciple the nations.
We are called to worship him.
We are called to do certain things.
And we don't require your permission to do those things.
Right.
There's a little obstinance about it.
I feel like I feel that way.
I kind of came to this revelation a couple of years ago.
I've been in ministry for like 17 years, and I came to this realization that I wasn't really able to kind of speak my mind a lot, even in the service, even in church.
And so that's when I joined the Babylon B.
And now we found out what you were thinking all those years.
This is what I actually think, everyone.
It's been a little divisive.
I've told everybody that I want inscribed on my tombstone.
I was holding back.
I was holding back, everyone.
Okay, so you're talking about Christian leadership.
Yeah, go ahead.
If I may.
Yeah.
And I'll get to the Christian leadership thing.
Perfect.
Don't let me forget because I like.
I won't let you forget.
Okay, thank you.
The satirical piece, I was mulling over it yesterday because a friend notified me of an area of, we'll call it imbalance.
No, it was rank hypocrisy.
California is weighing the outlawing of Skittles, hot tamales, and double bubble at the same time that they're stockpiling abortion pills.
And they're, you know, they're considering outlawing candy for toxic chemicals while they're safeguarding health care, abortion pills.
The backwardness and the clown worldness of it was such that I could not quite push my brain to make satire.
I thought this is satire already.
Were they banning Skittles because of the toxic chemicals or because of the underrepresentation of certain colors?
Was it a color thing or probably both?
I threw that in there.
Back to you, Jared.
Oh, yes.
I love it.
Well, you're talking a lot about Christian leadership and the need for brave Christian leadership.
And this is a great time for it.
And also moving forward when you're talking about your vision of what New Christendom could look like, you're calling out Christian leaders.
I'm a leadership scholar.
I love leadership.
I think it's really important.
I guess I have two questions, but one of them is, what's your philosophy of leadership?
And then secondly, in the new kingdom, can I be, even though I'm a Credo Baptist premillennial dispensational Pentecostal?
What a combo.
I'm just kidding.
I'm actually only a few of those.
You guys get your very own state.
You're like, you just stay over there.
That's right.
That's great.
Actually, yay, that's great.
One of the things that Stephen Wolf says in his book, and I think that he said, he raises the question, is there a place for Baptists in this Christendom thing?
And he says, yes, there absolutely is.
But given his Presbyterianism and his background, he said, I'm not the guy to do the theological heavy lifting to make that work.
And the reason that's an issue is because in paid a Baptist communions, like Presbyterians, Episcopal, and whatnot, it is easier to have a relationship between the government and the churches because everybody born in this area is sort of part of the deal.
I thought you were going to say it's easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than for them to enter in.
No, I wouldn't say that.
And I'm interested in the answer to Jared's leadership question.
Yeah, so with Baptists, Baptist ecclesiology and soteriology together means that the congregation is a voluntarist body.
A parish is not.
You were born here, kid.
You're one of us.
And we're going to teach you what that means to be one of us and what it means to be faithful and stuff.
There's a whole theological divide.
But I think Wolf is right that there is a Baptist case to be made for what we're talking about.
But it would have to be developed by convinced Baptists.
But there need not be, I mentioned earlier some of the errors of the first Christendom.
One of them was Christians persecuting other Christians, which is not what you want.
It was like the French and the English, and they were all Christian nations, right?
Right.
Fighting each other.
Yeah, sometimes at wars, sometimes persecutions, that sort of thing.
And Baptists have long memories.
And if someone says, if someone raised the question, where was your church before the Reformation?
Now, a magisterial Presbyterian would say, well, where was your face before you washed it?
My church was the medieval church with all the grime, and we needed a reformation.
Isn't that what all Protestants would say?
No.
Baptists would say, where was your church before the Reformation?
Baptists would say, hiding from you guys mostly.
Trying not to get drowned.
It'd be associated with the truth.
Yeah, we'd trail the blood.
We've been hiding in caves and that sort of thing.
We're the true church, and you guys have always been.
So there's that.
And here's the thing.
I think every intelligent student of church history has to look at each one of these groups and say, everybody has a point.
The Baptists are skittish about religious liberty issues because Patrick Henry, for example, could recall the time when a Baptist minister in Virginia was flogged for being a Baptist minister.
We don't want that.
So we want if I could be a rude guest here, but I just want to interact with one thing.
Part of the reason this came about is because you interviewed Scott Clark on the same on the same topic.
And in the Westminster Confession, chapter 23 on the civil magistrate, there's a British version and the American version.
On this issue, I am historic, confessionally reformed.
So I'm more comfortable with the American version of chapter 23.
Our church subscribes to the original British Version of the Westminster Confession, which allows the magistrate to summon synods and councils of the church and to be present at them and gives them a great deal of authority to determine what is decided is whether it's in accordance with the word of God.
In the American version, it says that the magistrate is to be a nursing father as Christian.
We all serve the church of our common Lord, and the magistrate is to be supportive of that.
So take the weaker one, which I think is in this case a better version, the weaker standard of the Reformation in the American 1789 version of the Westminster.
I subscribe to that.
And Scott Clark, on this topic, doesn't, right?
He's on the issue of church-state relations, on the issue of Christian nationalism or Christendom.
Scott Clark is simply a modern evangelical.
And in other areas, he's confessionally reformed.
But the Puritans, the Reformers, they had a tightly reasoned, worked-out theology of how the state and the church were supposed to interact.
And there are three basic ways you can structure this.
One is the, think of the medieval papacy, where the church is over the state.
Okay, the pope is in charge of all the countries.
That's the medieval papacy, church over state.
Then there's another position called the Erastian position, after a guy named Erastus in the Reformation era, who said the state is over the church.
Okay, that's the second arrangement.
The third arrangement, I think the best name for it would be Kuiperion, after Abraham Kuyper, where you have different spheres: the sphere of the state, the sphere of the church, the sphere of the family.
These are all governments.
Family government was created by God directly.
The government of the church was created by God directly.
The civil magistrate was created by God directly.
None of them get their authority to exist from the other two.
So they are independent institutions.
And they have areas where they touch and overlap and have to work at it, and they have to work out what they're going to do.
So I'm a Kuiperian, and I believe the American Westminster Confession is in essence Kuiperian.
It was written before Kuiper, but it was, in essence, that was the solution.
That is a reformed biblical Protestant evangelical pluralism.
It's not who's to say what truth is, pluralism.
Because as soon as you say, nobody knows what the truth is, come one, come all, that's not pluralism, that's anarchy.
And you've got people insisting that we are living in a time when, in the name of pluralism, they can chop babies up and sell the pieces.
Kuiperianism.
And I love it.
And this is fun getting to host like a proxy war between Doug Wilson and Scott Clark.
Yeah, a proxy.
Or a proxy discussion.
A proxy discussion.
A proxy irenic roundtable.
Oh, that's the best.
You guys will work this out when you're both in heaven.
It's going to be very true.
That's right.
Or when we're both in the cattle cars being held off to the camps.
We'll be there too.
Oh, I know.
You guys are going to be in the front car.
We'll be there first.
The first wave everywhere.
I don't know.
I don't know who they're going to come after first.
So basically, how elastic is pluralism?
How far can it go?
Right?
You're mutilating kids, right?
And so the states, Idaho, just our governor just signed a bill outlawing Surgeries and transsexual surgeries on kids and that sort of thing.
So very, very glad for Idaho.
That's wonderful.
And I think about 17 states have done this.
But it's controversial.
When we say, hey, man, don't chop the bait.
You know, mom, can I buy cigarettes?
No, you're five.
Mom, can I buy some seagrams?
No, you're five.
Can I borrow the car?
No, you're five.
Can I be a girl?
Can I get attention?
No, no, you're five.
Can I change my sex?
Oh, whatever you say, Johnny.
Yeah, whatever you say.
This is just, this is demented.
Can I buy Turok too?
It's a beer again.
Sorry.
No, you can't.
So the critiques of broader Christian nationalism in Christendom have abounded.
They've proliferated.
I've got a mild critique.
We've been talking about intense stuff.
One fear is that the church will become, you know, if the government takes it over, the government mucks up everything it touches.
And would you say that there's any danger that if the government in church are one and the same or that there's an established church, would you say there's any danger that the church will be like the DMV?
Yes.
Yeah, who wants to worship in a service run by the DMV?
Not me.
So not me.
No.
So thank you.
This is a great question.
There's a distinction between theocracy, which every society is.
What's the God of the system?
Mammon.
Okay.
Mammon.
Mammon or Allah in certain societies.
Allah is the God of the system.
In ours, it's Mammon.
It used to be the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now, a theocracy in that sense is not the same thing as an ecclesiocracy.
So an ecclesiocracy is where the church runs it.
That's what you have in Iran with the Ayatollahs with control.
I am death on ecclesiocracies.
I don't want an established church.
Because as you point out, I think that would be the kiss of death for that established church.
Well, and that's what Kuyper argues in a book he wrote called Our Program.
He is arguing that the government of the Netherlands, he was the prime minister of the Netherlands at one point.
He said the government of the Netherlands needs to be explicitly Christian and there needs to be no established church.
So establishing a church is not the same thing as having your civil compact recognize that Jesus rose from the dead.
So what I'm wanting, and this goes back to the Holy Trinity case in 1892, they didn't establish a Christian denomination.
They just said, look, America is a Christian nation.
Deal with it.
We're generically Christian.
We have all these Christian traditions.
We're a Christian people.
This is what we are.
And they did that without establishing any state church.
Now, there's one other thing that should be said, and that is when the First Amendment was adopted, where Congress shall make no law concerning the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Right now, we're in the middle of prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
That's the full court press.
But the only entity that can violate the First Amendment is Congress.
Congress shall make no law concerning the establishment of religion.
When they adopted the First Amendment, when the First Amendment was adopted, out of the 13 colonies, nine of the 13 colonies had a formal relationship with a Christian denomination.
So now, like, for example, and Connecticut's had a relationship with the Congregational church, which lasted down into the 1830s.
Now, I'm against state church at the state level.
I don't want to see that happen in Idaho because it'd be the kiss of death for whatever church that was.
But if they were to do that in Idaho, it wouldn't be unconstitutional because the men who framed the Constitution, they didn't make us church of the United States the way there's a church of Denmark or a Church of England.
They didn't do that because if you have a national bird, the bald eagle, it doesn't bring you into conflict with Maryland that has the Oriel as the state bird.
Or if you have a national flower and a state flower, it doesn't produce any conflicts.
But if you had the Anglican church in Virginia and the Congregational Church in Connecticut and you made the Episcopal Church the church of the United States, you're just asking for civil strife between the different states.
So the refusal to make a church of the United States was not neutral secularism.
What it was was peacekeeping between Christians.
We want to have our Christianity embedded in this federal system.
Now, I think at the state level, having a state-sponsored church at the state level is not a good idea, but it's not an unconstitutional idea.
I would prefer to have, if someone said, what do you want to do then?
Well, I'd like to have the Apostles' Creed included in the Constitution and just say, we affirm that Jesus rose from the dead and Christianity is woven into the texture of our customs, our laws.
It's the foundation of everything.
You can quote a Bible verse in a court decision without it being the end of the world.
But I don't want tax money to go to a particular church.
Especially the Lutherans.
Look what happened in Germany.
No, but it's interesting.
So maybe I'm dense.
I'm trying to think, we were talking about for a while the coexistence of the Reformed denomination with the Baptists and how they just would have to not coexist.
Like they would live in separate spaces.
Actually, that was a joke.
It's kind of a joke.
Well, no, it was a joke.
It wasn't kind of a joke.
No, but we're saying you are not actually advocating for the charismatics to be like sent to El Paso or something.
No.
Unless the Lord told them.
Oh, nice, good answer.
So basically, I think that any person who wants to, let's say you've got a Christian establishment, not an ecclesiocracy, but a generic recognition that we are a Christian people.
And let's say that that would mean that in a state where there were many Lutherans, let's say Wisconsin or somewhere, and someone wanted to plant a Southern Baptist church there, they'd be free to do so.
Right.
And the difficulty would be, and this is where people want to run ahead 500 years and push everything into the corners and say, well, what about a mosque?
That's what I was about to ask.
Okay.
What about a mosque?
And I would say, yes.
And this is me being president for a day, three days.
Yes, to a mosque, but no minarets.
Okay.
Okay.
In other words, the church bells occupy the public space.
And if someone says, oh, you mean you wouldn't let the Muslim call to prayer fill the public space?
Right.
But would Muslims be free to live in America and do, you know, yeah, they would.
Under American law.
Under American law.
Not under Sharia law.
Correct.
Right.
And that's the thing where I believe that Muslim rights are going to be protected more under Christian law than under Sharia law.
Okay.
So if you, now it used to be that I could say, well, under Sharia law, they in certain, depends on what ethnic group they're from, they practiced genital mutilation.
And that should be against the law.
But now we can't talk that way anymore because we're the ones practicing genital mutilation.
We're the ones doing it in service of a different God and for different reasons.
But we're doing that.
Christian law would ban it all.
Christian law would say, leave echoing Pink Floyd, leave those kids alone.
Leave those kids alone.
It's a good song.
The Serrated Edge.
Yeah, so I read the Serrated Edge.
I got a lot of criticism when I first started working here because I'm in ministry for using satire and for making fun of the church or for calling out different hypocrisies that we see.
Right now I'm associated with all this.
So one of my friends, his name's Eric Thanis, recommended the Serrated Edge, which I read and I very much liked.
I think it's a great treatise on how Christians can handle and what had Christian justification for your satire.
And so anyway, can you just speak to that just really briefly?
Because I think for us, it's really an important topic.
Yes, we're in the same line of work.
And I've had to feel this objection for 40 years or a long time anyway.
And when people come to me, let's say I've, and I don't do this all the time.
It's not like it's nonstop making fun of people or things.
When I'm preaching on Sunday, it comes up rarely.
But when I write, it comes up more frequently, depending on the topic.
And so people have pushed back for years.
And they come to me and they say, the first thing they'll say is what you're doing is not Christ-like.
Right.
Okay.
This is just not a Christ-like thing to do.
And I'd say, great, that's a substantive objection.
Let's have a Bible study.
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
How did Christ talk?
All right.
Matthew 23.
Matthew 23.
Go into you, scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites.
Who told you you anyway?
Christ unloads on them.
So Christ has uses biting humor, colorful expressions.
So you can't say that Christ was unchrist-like.
And then the thing is, well, yeah, they'll say, okay, that's biblical, but you're not Jesus, pal.
That's true.
But do you ever say that to people who are volunteering in soup kitchens?
Nice try.
You're not Jesus.
What do you think you are?
Yeah, Jesus exhibited love and compassion.
But you're not Jesus.
You don't try.
You don't even try.
Okay, now I acknowledge that when I use satire, there have been, shall we call it, some satire fails.
Oh.
Right.
You swing in a miss.
Or you hurt.
Oscar Wilde once said that a gentleman is someone who never insults someone else accidentally.
Yeah.
Right.
So sometimes you do something or you say something and all of a sudden there's a situation over here.
And you go, oh, I didn't mean, that's not what I was swinging at.
So their satire fails.
Why?
Well, because I'm not Jesus.
But that is no excuse or reason to not try.
Our goal is to become like Jesus.
And we're not going to get there perfectly or altogether.
But this is true.
Can love become toxic?
And can volunteering for the downtrodden, can that become sentimental and can problems develop there?
Yeah, you're not Jesus.
But that's no reason to quit.
That's a reason to give yourself back to the word.
One of the things that you were saying is that all of these types of communication and lifestyle are available to us because Christ, you know, Christ engaged in these types of communication.
So we're able to do that too.
We're Christians.
He did it.
We can do it as well.
And if people say he's the son of God and I say, okay, but Amos wasn't the son of God.
And the book of Amos is satire.
You've got multiple examples.
Elijah, multiple examples.
That was the one headline.
One of the one headlines that I got pitched that passed through.
It's, what is it?
Elijah criticized by Israel for unloving satire towards the prophets of Baal.
So good.
That's exactly right.
But so then when you say, okay, let's have a Bible study and you hammer it out.
Okay, okay, okay.
Maybe it's biblical.
Maybe you're so doctrinal and Bible man and everything.
But it's just counterproductive.
It's just counterproductive.
You're turning people off.
Well, in my experience, it's just the opposite.
Christians are so fed up with the mealy-mouthed approach to the faith that when someone articulates clearly, Paul says, if the bugle blows indistinctly, who's going to get ready for battle?
When you use satire, you're not only making your point clearly, but you're making your point in a way that indicates a willingness to fight.
One of our writers at the Bee wrote a premium article on exactly this topic, and then he wrote a follow-up.
It was called Should Christians Mock?
That's one of the great things you get at babylonbee.com slash plans.
Sign up for a subscription.
You get access to extra articles.
Joel Barry.
That was actually Jason.
Jason.
Jason Magutchijin.
Different Jason.
Oh, different Jason.
Well, one of the things that, so I mean, again, it's a ripe topic, but there are answers.
One of the things that I liked in the Serrated Edge book is when you said, yes, it's like you want to steel man your opponent out of charity, but also sometimes you can't steel man a straw man.
You didn't set up a straw man to knock down.
There's a straw man there and you blow on it and it just topples.
So you made the argument that if there is a straw man, it's fair game, correct?
Correct.
If the straw man, if you're not manufacturing a straw man to attack instead of their formidable case, that's a fallacy.
That's just bad manners, bad form, bad everything.
But it's not bad form to take what they've said and make it ridiculous by putting it in a format where everybody sees how ridiculous it is.
Either by understatement or exaggeration.
Well, people do it to us too.
The Onion just released an article about two days ago about the Bud Light thing with Dylan Mulvaney.
And it was essentially a straw man.
It was like, man has to drink something else before he beats his kids now.
And it's just like, this is a straw man.
That's not what we're saying.
That's not the reason why, you know, it's just kind of a caricature.
It's okay, but it was a caricature of everyone that's conservative that drinks Bud Light.
And we tend not to do that with our satire.
So we tend to steel man as much as we can, but sometimes you can't steel man a straw.
Right.
You can't.
Because that's not the criticism.
Right.
Well, so the serrated edge book, that's something we can all like pat each other on the back about.
Yeah, it's a good one.
There's other books you've written that have drawn ire.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
Doug Wilson says slavery is, and you're like, oh, bad.
But but, and you know, Doug Wilson says, but, and you, so why, why?
People of God, for a time, were prohibited from eating shellfish.
But your position holds that all of us at one time used to be shellfish.
There's another topic that's given you many gray hairs, perhaps rightfully so.
The federal vision question.
Whatever you do, don't apologize for the Bible.
This has been another edition of the Babylon Bee Podcast from the dedicated team of certified fake news journalists you can trust here at the Babylon Bee, reminding you to read C.S. Lewis.