Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Pastrix critiques conservative Christianity while embracing radical inclusivity—her Denver church hosts LGBTQ+ transition ceremonies, yet she struggles to accept even liberal non-LGBTQ+ attendees. Andrew Clavin mocks her policy ignorance (e.g., dismissing capitalism’s role in cutting global poverty by 80% since 1970) and blames left-wing media for distorting conservative messages, like Hillary Clinton’s "dreamers" empathy overshadowing worker harm. The episode argues that conservatives fail to frame policies as compassionate, leaving progressives like Bolz-Weber trapped in performative virtue signaling. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it's been almost a week since the first Democrat debate, and it's time to sift through the smoking wreckage of what was once the American intellectual landscape and determine the winner, namely Hillary Clinton, and the loser, namely that process of evolution designed by a loving God to lift us from the soulless single-cell animality of half-life in the primordial bogs to a station of nobility higher even than the angels, a process which the debate catastrophically reversed.
Hillary Clinton scored her triumph by outthinking Bernie Sanders, who had traveled forward in time from the 1930s in hopes of saving the Soviet Union from collapse.
Unfortunately, due to an apparent glitch in his magic phone booth, Sanders arrived too late to resurrect the USSR and has been forced to leave that to Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama.
Sanders proposed $18 trillion worth of government giveaways, which he said would be funded by taxing America's 536 billionaires, who possess, all told, about $2,500 billion, which would fund about one-seventh of the proposals.
Under the Sanders Plan, also known as Stalinomics, billionaires and millionaires would be prevented from taking their wealth out of the country by a wall, which would be built on the border as soon as Bernie can figure out how to build one that still allows Mexico to flood our nation with impoverished refugees looking for jobs from billionaires and millionaires who would now have no money to hire them with.
Then Sanders said he would kill and arrest a lot of people and finally the nation would collapse when Ronald Reagan was elected in America.
When informed all this had already happened in Russia, Sanders pulled off his mask to reveal he was really Paul Krugman and sank cackling back into hell.
So Mrs. Clinton won that exchange.
Hillary also defeated former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chaffee when it turned out that prancing around the stage singing, I'll never grow up, not me, is not really all that charming once you're past 60.
And then there was former Maryland Governor Jim Webb, after he pointed out that all countries need borders to survive, that those who call for gun control are usually protected by bodyguards with guns, that people whose political opinions differ from yours are not your enemies, and that he himself had risked his life fighting for his country in Vietnam, Webb realized he had wandered into the wrong party's debate.
Finally, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley repeatedly called for 100% clean energy by 2050, and also thought it would be cool if we all wore sparkly unitards by then and had those robotic dogs from the Jetsons.
As for Hillary herself, she said that Barack Obama has done a wonderful job as president and that if she's elected, she will fix our disastrous economy, improve disintegrating racial relations, and bring order to the bloody chaos in the Middle East by continuing the policies of the last seven years.
This was hailed by the media as a masterpiece of that traditional Democrat rhetorical device, sometimes called making no sense.
Democrats everywhere celebrated Mrs. Clinton's victory by unanimously begging Joe Biden to enter the race.
Why The Internet Is Worth It00:05:10
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clayton Show.
All right, we're back.
We were gone for a couple days there.
We're still building our fantastic set.
You know, we haven't finished the candy cane castle and the runway for the Air Force to land after it does its flybys.
And so we're still here broadcasting from a container in the recycling center in Fresno, California.
But so we didn't get a chance to talk about the debates, and I actually have something to say that I haven't heard anybody else say.
So I'm going to back around.
I'll come back around to the debate and have a little something to say about it anyway.
What I really want to talk about is I read this really, really fascinating book, just an absolutely uplifting and inspiring book, and I've been struggling with how to talk about it because it's written by this left-wing feminist who hates us.
She hates Republicans, hates conservatives, and it's called Pastrix, Pastrix, the Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint.
And it's by Nadia Boltz-Weber, who is this kind of rad, foul-mouthed, tattooed Lutheran pastor in Denver.
And it's not really fair to say she hates us because unlike a lot of left-wing Christians, she actually is a Christian.
She actually believes in the gospel.
A lot of left-wingers kind of preach their own conscience instead of the gospel.
But she actually believes what she reads, so she knows she has to love us, so she works to forgive serial killers and terrorists and Republicans, basically.
That's her list of people that she has to struggle to love.
We are among the people that she has to work very hard to love.
So, first of all, you might ask yourself, why am I reading this book?
Why am I reading something like this by someone like this?
And the reason is, as much as I love the internet, I love the internet.
I was on this cruise about a month ago, the National Review cruise, and I was on a panel with Naomi Schaefer-Riley, who's just a wonderful person.
She's a writer for the New York Post and sometimes for the Wall Street Journal.
She's married to Jason Riley, who is at the Manhattan Institute, where I work too sometimes at the Manhattan Institute.
And she's just a great person, and we were on this panel together, and we got in this kind of argument, a debate, about the nature of the internet.
And I love the internet.
And Naomi is a mom.
I don't know how many kids she has.
One of her kids was on the cruise, just this absolutely angelicly beautiful little girl.
And so Naomi sees the internet as this dark forest of danger where her children are wandering through.
And at any minute, a pornographer is going to come and spirit them away.
My experience of the internet, I'm old enough not only to remember what the world was like before the internet, but I actually wrote entire novels before the internet was invented.
To research a novel before the internet was invented was an experience like nothing that actually exists today anymore.
I mean, I write thriller novels, and so I would kind of want to know what kind of gun would a hitman use.
To do this, you had to go, I was in New York, I would go to the New York Public Library, and you would open a wooden box, and in this wooden box, there would be little cards, little index cards, where somebody with a typewriter had, in 1957, had typed the name of this book.
And the most recent book they would have would be this book like Hitmen of 1932.
So you would find out what some guy was using in Chicago in 1932.
And you would go into this room and you would laboriously copy the information off these cards with a pencil.
And then a 600-year-old man would come into this, literally, you think I'm exaggerating, but he was literally born 600 years before.
And he had come in.
He was like a friend of Dante's, and he would come in and he would take this card and slowly walk away.
And then you would sit there.
You would sit in this room and you would sit and like spiders would spin webs on your face and you'd be grateful.
You'd be like, thank you, spider, for spinning a web because it was something to watch, because you had no iPad, because there was no internet, you know.
And after, who knows, days and days and days, this 600-year-old man would come slowly back and tell you the book had been stolen in 1957 and could he help you with anything else?
My feeling is, if your child has to be destroyed by pornography in order for me to have the internet, it's a small price to pay.
It's something, look, you know, everything costs something.
If it's your children, that's the way it is.
Why did I start talking about this?
Oh, yeah, okay.
I remember now.
I started talking, because as much as I love the internet, the weird thing about the internet is here is all the information on earth packed into this little computer.
And it somehow just keeps turning you back on things that you've already seen and already believe.
There are even apps that do this.
I have an app on my iPad called Zeit or Zeit and it records somehow in some magical way what I'm reading, what I like to read, and it gives me more of what I like.
So it feeds back to me more of what I'm already reading.
And it actually had, this has actually happened.
I'm not making this up, where I have opened Zeit, and the lead article is by me.
Why Ted Cruz Loves NPR00:15:00
So I'm not only reading stuff like me, I'm reading me.
You know, I'm getting my own opinions back at me.
And that's not what I want.
I mean, I want to hear from other people's opinions.
So I go on sites like Real Clear Politics, where it'll give you, it opens with a list of op-eds, and it'll give you the best op-ed on the right by Charles Krauthammer or Thomas Sowell, and the best op-eds on the left by Jack the Ripper and Bozo the Clown.
And you can just compare and you can see things.
So this is why I read this book, Pastrix, the Cranky, Beautiful Faith with Sinner and Saint, by this woman, Naddie Boltz-Weber, who hates us.
And the story of this book is she grows up in this very, very conservative Christian church where they're so incredibly sexist.
I mean, you know, I'm a sexist.
I'm considered a sexist because I love women as they actually are instead of as we're supposed to pretend they are, so that makes me a sexist.
But this church was really over the line.
I mean, they really didn't let women speak virtually.
They were so sexist and so conservative that they were almost as bad as a liberal enlightened Muslim mosque.
I mean, that's how bad they were.
And she couldn't stand it.
She was an oddball.
She was a little bit radical and wanted to get out in the world.
And so as a teenager, she leaves the church and she hates the church.
And she leaves Jesus.
And of course, Bob Dylan was right.
You've got to serve somebody.
And so she winds up serving alcohol and drugs and sleeping, waking up in bed with guys that she doesn't even know.
Here's a brief clip.
We have a brief soundbite of her talking somewhere and just describing this period of her life.
It didn't take long for things to get really bad.
I was an alcoholic by the time I was probably 18 years old.
So I also had this idea, I'm not sure where I got it, but because I didn't belong anywhere and I didn't fit, no one wanted my flavor, I had this idea that I was going to be dead by the time I was 30.
And I had this enormous capacity for destruction, both of myself and of other people.
For instance, when all my peers were in college, like at age 19, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment with eight people and some junkie was tattooing me in his living room.
So different choices, right?
They were making the choice to go to college.
I was making the choice to basically kill myself slowly.
So, all right, so she leaves the church and she's killing herself slowly.
Jesus won't give up on her because Jesus is stubborn because he's a Jew.
And so, I mean, there's the old expression, the Jews won't take yes for an answer, but Jews won't take no for an answer either.
They won't take anything for an answer.
And so Jesus keeps coming after her, and he does exactly to her what he did to me, which is he draws her in.
He leaves a kind of breadcrumb trail of love.
And she meets this nice guy.
First, she gets off the booth.
And she finds the higher power through a 12-step program.
She meets this really nice guy who happens to be in seminary.
He starts bringing her back to a more liberal Lutheran church.
She starts to think, gee, I would like to be a pastor too.
And she goes into seminary.
And she starts a church called House in Denver called House for All Sinners and Saints, which hilariously she nicknames half-ass, House for All Sinners and Saints.
And it's a church, as she says, for my people.
It's all gay people and transgender people, and people change their sex, and they have ceremonies to celebrate this.
And I have to say, this is the one point on which she and I are in complete agreement.
I know, you know, I work with kids, troubled kids sometimes.
I know there are kids who are being kicked out of their churches for whatever their sexuality is and whatever their attitudes are.
And I don't believe in that at all.
I mean, I believe only the Pharisees tell Jesus who sits at his table.
Only the Pharisees can tell him who he's supposed to sit with.
And they're always telling him, don't sit with that guy.
He's a sinner and don't sit with this girl.
You know, she's having, she's a prostitute and all this.
And he's always telling him to blow it out their ear and he's always doing it.
And whenever I point this out, I've pointed this out repeatedly on conservative blogs.
There's always a conservative who writes in and says yes, but then he says, go and sin no more.
But see, that's his superpower, okay?
That's not your superpower.
I mean, my wife left town for a couple of days, and it took me 45 minutes to find my socks this morning, so that I'm not forgiving anybody's sins or telling anybody to go and sin no more.
I just invite people to the table.
So I agree with her about this.
That's the last thing I agree with her about.
She really, she not only has a hard time accepting us, although there's a very moving chapter in the book where one of her very far right-wing enemies approaches her at a meeting and they become friends.
And it's very moving because she is trying.
She even has a hard time accepting when liberals who aren't tattooed and transgender show up at her church.
As the church becomes popular, they show up and they look like her parents, her mom and dad.
And even though they're liberal, she has a hard time accepting that.
And so I'm listening to this book, and I did find it inspiring.
I found her faith and her, that story is always inspiring when God pulls you up out of your own stupidity and self-destruction.
I started to ask myself, well, why does this person hate us?
Why is it hard for, I think that I want everything for my country in a way that she wants.
There are probably areas where we have stern disagreements.
I'm sure there are.
But why is it that she doesn't like, that she has such a hard time accepting me?
I mean, I find it very moving that she is in the body of Christ trying desperately to like me, and I'm in the body of Christ trying desperately to like her, you know, and so what's stopping us from coming together?
And there are two sentences in this book.
I didn't write them down, but there are two sentences, and I know I'm getting them pretty accurately, that seem to me to give everything away and bring me back to this debate.
One sentence made an offhanded remark she makes about something totally different.
She says, I don't know anything about sports and politics.
So forget about the sports for a minute.
She doesn't know anything about politics.
She doesn't know what policies do what.
She doesn't know what the reaction of one thing is over another.
She doesn't know when people are arguing policy, what they're arguing necessarily about, or why one policy might be better than another.
And the other thing she says is, actually, I'm not sure she says this in the, yes, she does.
She says it in the book.
She says, I get my news online and from NPR.
And she says, my people, these outcasts that she's pulled in, my people get their news online and NPR.
We already talked about being online.
Online just gives you your own opinions back at yourself.
And NPR is a socialist organization.
And it drives me crazy that NPR is socialist because NPR talks about all the things I'm interested in.
Talk about music and books and theater and movies.
It's the only place you can't go on conservative broadcasting and find discussions about that book.
About those things, you can only find them on NPR where you have to take this kind of force-fed socialism so that you walk away from NPR.
This kind of cloud of unknowing.
It's like a friend of mine who loves to go to France.
He's a conservative, but every time he comes back from France, you have to pull him back into capitalism.
You know, it's like, oh, yes, we should all be socialists.
And you go, no, no, no, that's France.
Oh, yes.
Now I remember, and his accent comes back and everything.
She doesn't know.
So what is it?
Like, she doesn't know that it's our ideas that help the poor.
Okay, here's some stuff I wrote.
Since 1970, since 1970, people don't know this.
World poverty has dropped 80%.
People always think poverty is getting worse.
It's getting so much better around the world.
And the reason it has dropped is because of the spread of property rights and free trade and capitalism.
It's not the NGOs, the foreign aid people dropping rice on these people.
It's because they have started their own businesses and have improved their governments and have gotten property rights in imitation of us, in imitation of us.
When I was in Africa, I said to a tour guide, I was looking at the intense poverty, and I said, what can we do to help?
And he said, stop sending us money.
This is our policies that help the poor.
Nadia Boltzweber doesn't know that.
She doesn't know that black neighborhoods are destroyed by the people who black people vote for.
She doesn't know that Detroit is Detroit because of the Democrats.
There hasn't been a Republican even passing through Detroit for 150 years.
Baltimore is the same.
You know, they had that show, The Wire, and it was all, every now and again they blame the evil Republicans.
There were no Republicans in the wire.
Everybody in the wire is a Democrat because those policies destroy black lives.
Talking about Naomi Schaefer-Riley and her husband Jason, Jason, this is what Jason writes about.
You can go on City Journal, the Manhattan Institute magazine, and read Jason Riley, and he'll tell you what the devastation Obama's policies are working on the poor.
Peace, let's talk about peace.
Since 2010, the number of people killed in wars, and this is not only under Obama's stewardship of our foreign policy, it's because of Obama's stewardship of our foreign policy.
The number of people killed in war has gone up four times since 2010.
The number of people killed by terrorism has gone up six times, okay?
Nadia Boltzweiber doesn't know.
She doesn't know this.
So why doesn't she know?
She doesn't know that our policies do what she wants to do, what she thinks the Democrats are doing.
So this brings me back to the debate.
Now, I do everything in my power to avoid watching these debates because I just feel that I only have so many brain cells, and if too many of them die, I won't be able to do my job.
But I did watch this debate.
And I just picked, and I did this at random virtually, okay?
I picked two clips, one of Hillary Clinton at the debate, obviously winner by a landslide because everybody else at the debate was insane, except for Webb, who was really a Republican.
And then I picked one of Ted Cruz.
And I picked Ted Cruz because I really like Ted Cruz.
So if it sounds like I'm criticizing him, I'm criticizing him from the point of view of the fact that I would be thrilled if Ted Cruz got the nomination if he were the president.
So just show the Hillary one first, okay?
Just listen carefully to what she says.
They're both talking about immigration.
I came to Las Vegas in, I think, May, early May, met with a group of dreamers.
I wish everybody in America could meet with these young people to hear their stories, to know their incredible talent, their determination.
And that's why I would go further than even the executive orders that President Obama has signed when I'm president.
Okay, so she met with the DREAMers, the DREAMers of the illegal immigrants, and she met with them.
They're wonderful people.
And that's why she would violate the Constitution even more profoundly than Obama has, although it's almost hard to imagine how you would do that.
But she would, and she would give amnesty to as many of them as possible.
Let's listen to what Ted Cruz says.
That there are far too many in the Washington cartel that support amnesty.
President Obama's talked about fundamentally transforming this country.
There's 7 billion people across the face of the globe, many of whom want to come to this country.
If they come legally, great.
But if they come illegally and they get amnesty, that is how we fundamentally change this country.
Okay, so we're asking the question, why doesn't Nadia Bolsweber know that our policies do what she wants them to do?
And of course, the first thing that comes to every conservative's mind is the media.
Nobody hates the media more than I do.
I think the media, the left-wing mainstream news media, is almost at this point a criminal organization.
I mean, it's basically just a front for the Democrat Party.
I wrote a novel about journalism called True Crime, and I put on the front of it a quote from the great screenwriter, Ben Heck, one of the absolute classic screenwriters and a former newspaper man.
I think he wrote his Girl Friday, the front page, basically.
This is a quote from a very funny movie he wrote called Nothing Sacred that reflects my feeling about journalism, and I put this on the front of my novel, True Crime.
He says, I'll tell you briefly what I think about newspaper men.
The hand of God, reaching down into the mire, couldn't elevate one of them to the depths of degradation.
It couldn't elevate, couldn't draw one of these guys up to the depths of degradation.
That, to me, describes our journalists perfectly.
So I'm not saying we're not right.
We are right.
We have every right to be angry, and we are misrepresented, and we're lied about, and we're wrong-footed by the press.
But if you listen to what those two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, did, just think for a minute about your first job interview.
Okay, what did you know about your first job interview?
You knew that they were not going to listen to anything after you walked into the room and spoke one sentence.
People do not listen to you after you say that first sentence.
If you walk into your first job interview and say, hey, dude, it's good to be here.
Hey, you're done.
You're done.
It doesn't matter if you then say, yeah, I went to Yale and I invented a nuclear reactor that you can put in your pocket.
It doesn't matter.
You're finished.
People listen to the first sentence.
The first thing that Hillary Clinton says is, I met with these dreamers and they are so hardworking and so dedicated.
And I just want to help them.
And then she goes ahead to propose a policy that would destroy the lower class in this country, that would take jobs away from Americans, the American poor.
And when they tell you these guys are doing jobs the American poor won't do, they're lying to you.
Obama has put more people on the welfare rolls than have been on since Carter, I believe.
And these guys would kill so many of these people.
This is the mistake Mitt Romney made.
So many of these people, they don't want to be there.
So many of them would kill for the lowest job that would give them some human dignity.
Hillary Clinton, after talking about how wonderful these people are, then proposes a policy that would just absolutely devastate America's poor.
Ted Cruz starts out and says the Washington cartel is supporting this policy that's trying to transform America.
That's all anybody hears.
That's all anybody hears.
Then what he proposes is a humane, helpful way of getting our broken immigration policy back on track because all countries need borders.
That's what defines a country.
That's how a country lives.
He's proposing sensible, honest things, on top of which, Ted Cruz is a man of integrity who will do what he says he's going to do and be fairly transparent.
And Hillary Clinton is a liar and a crook.
I mean, she's virtually a gangster at this point.
And yet, and yet, all anybody hears are those first words.
She's for people, and he's against the policy.
She is loving and accepting, and he's angry.
Horror of Faith00:05:33
And people say to me, oh, well, it's righteous anger.
My feeling is, you know, try righteousness without the anger and see how that works out for you, okay?
Because that's all people hear.
When people came out of the booth after voting for Barack Obama for a second term, they all said the same thing.
The poll showed they all agreed with Mitt Romney, and they all thought Barack Obama cared about them.
And how anybody could think Barack Obama cares about anybody but himself, I don't know, but it's the way they speak.
It's those first words.
And that was my impression sitting there watching the debate.
I thought, these people are nuts, but every time they start a sentence, every time they start a thought, it begins with the people and how good they feel about them.
And that's all people like Nadia Boltzweber are hearing, and that's why they hate us.
I think that's why they hate us.
And I think it would be useful for us to think about the way we speak, the way we sell our ideas, because they work.
They help people.
They help the poor.
They bring about peace.
They do all the things that these people want and that the Democrats can't do, but we don't sell them the way they need to be sold.
That was my reaction to the debate.
Stuff I like.
This is my stuff I like programming.
This is Halloween stuff I like.
I've been doing ghost stories.
I have to reiterate that when I say ghost stories, I'm talking about a very subtle form of fiction.
I'm talking about something because Jonathan A, our cameraman, has been reading some of the things.
I keep saying, I like subtle scares.
I don't like horror.
I don't like bloodshed.
I like things that just send a shudder up your spine.
So JA goes home and he reads some of the stuff and comes back and says, this stuff is kind of subtle.
You know, it's like, so even the people filming this aren't listening to a word I say.
So I'm talking about this.
What I like are things that just unnerve you a little bit.
And sometimes they don't unnerve you for a couple of days.
I've seen, I've read ghost stories where only two days later I thought like, hmm, now I'm scared, all of a sudden.
Now, this is a movie that I really like.
And it's called The Exorcism of Emily Rose.
And it gets very low ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the reason I bring it up.
It's directed by a guy named Scott Derrickson, who also made a very creepy picture called Sinister, which is much more in the horror line.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose has some horror in it, but it's really more of a spook story.
This movie came out, and it was sold as a horror movie.
And it had this huge opening weekend in which it made triple its expenses back.
So it was a big hit.
And then it trailed off because the kids went and saw it and said, hey, this is intelligent and it has conversation in it.
I don't want to watch this.
The thing is, in the guise of a horror movie, guys of an exorcism movie, this is a trial drama about faith.
It's a story of a priest who tries to exorcise a girl.
She dies.
It's based on a true story very loosely.
She dies, and so he is put on trial.
Did he kill her?
Is he responsible for her death?
Because he didn't get her medical treatment.
He only got her religious treatment.
So here's a scene.
It stars Laura Linney, who I'm head over heels in love with because she reminds me so much of my wife, Laura Linney.
Tom Wilkinson, Campbell Scott, and Jennifer Carpenter, who's the sister on Dexter and now has a new show called Limitless.
Anyway, in this scene, Laura Linney plays this very cynical lawyer and she goes into, she's defending the priest and she has no faith whatsoever.
And she goes in and she tells the priest that she was walking along, kind of thinking about whether it's possible there could be demons in the world when she stumbles on a locket just lying on the street that has her exact initials.
It has her monogram on it.
Three letters.
So here's just this brief scene from Exorcism of Emily Rose.
For a walk just to clear my head, and I was thinking about what you said to me.
Thinking, what if demons really do exist?
And wondering what that would mean if I believed that.
Because God knows I have my own demons.
And I saw something lying on the summit walk.
With the initials ECB engraved on it.
My middle name is Christine.
Aaron, Christine, Bruner.
And of all the people walking by that day, I found that locket.
What are the chances of that?
I don't know.
Maybe it was a sign.
Or maybe it was just some incredible coincidence, but it made me feel like no matter what mistakes I've made in the past, at that moment, I was exactly where I was meant to be.
Like I was on the right path.
All right, so that's the kind of thing that's going on in the picture.
It's an actual movie about faith told as a ghost story.
And I found it absolutely riveting.
I've watched it twice, which I don't often do, and I just found it really interesting, really different, and kind of spooky.
So that's Halloween stuff I like.
The exorcism at Emily Rose by Scott Derrickson, who is in fact a Christian and has been making some really, really interesting horror films from that point of view, including Sinister and This.
And that's all I have to say.
We will be back again tomorrow, and we will keep working on this set, and eventually it's going to be just a pleasure palace of delights until now.