Pastor Joel and Aaron Wren dissect Joe Biden's "fake unity," contrasting political surrender with biblical submission to Christ. They critique the church for lagging five years behind culture, adopting trends like Black Lives Matter without prophetic resistance to societal sins. Wren argues that true prophecy requires resisting public approval, while distinguishing patriotism from idolatrous ethno-superiority. Ultimately, the episode concludes that Biden's demand for unity on issues violating the Ten Commandments is impossible, as shared convictions are eroding alongside political diversity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Fake Unity in Politics00:01:56
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
Hi, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied with Right Response Ministries.
I'm Pastor Joel, the host of this podcast and show.
Today, I'm honored to have Aaron Wren as our guest.
He does a lot of different things, but one of the things that he's known for the most currently is he's the author and contributor for.
The Masculinist newsletter that also is kind of veering out to becoming a podcast.
And so I've listened to some of the episodes on the podcast.
I also saw him on Man Rampant with Doug Wilson, and he has a lot of great insight.
So I'm excited for him to be a guest on the show today.
And so the title of our show today is this Joe Biden's Fake Unity.
Joe Biden's Fake Unity.
We're going to talk about politics.
We're going to talk about how Christians should be thinking about politics and the theological implications for life.
For believers, followers of Jesus here in America today.
So, without further ado, Aaron Wren, will you introduce yourself to our guest?
Well, thanks for having me on.
As you said, I'm the publisher of The Masculinist, which started out as a monthly newsletter about men in the church.
I was really struck by the fact that while men have traditionally avoided the church, that the church skews female, that a lot of these secular figures like Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan, and on down the line to, you know, Pickup artists, or even the incel community.
There's all these online communities of men, all these men's gurus out there that are drawing hordes of men to them.
And I'm like, why is the church not doing that?
And so I really felt we needed to get in the game because I thought there were some things we weren't exactly getting right on that.
So it started off as a newsletter.
Aging Out of Big Churches00:15:33
That's still the core of what I do.
But I've been expanding.
Again, there's a website now, themasculinist.com.
So there's blogging there, there's podcasts.
I'm even doing like live video interviews now, sort of like we're doing a video interview at the moment.
So there's a lot going on as I'm trying to build out the platform.
Originally, it was sort of an underground, kind of like a little bit of an underground movement, because prior to starting in on this full time, kind of late last year, I'd been spending most of my career working on urban policy.
So I was a writer and researcher about cities and spent several years working at the Manhattan Institute in New York, which is a conservative think tank there.
Uh, and then before that, spent a long time in corporate consulting.
So, I've lived in Manhattan, but I also grew up in a small town of about 50 people.
So, I grew up on a country road in rural southern Indiana.
So, I've had quite an experience there.
But right now, my focus is on reaching men and helping men and the church to succeed and thrive in a 21st century that's increasingly hostile and certainly very different than what most of us have ever experienced before.
Yeah, there's a lot of challenges there.
I Real quick, you mentioned for 15 years you were a consultant with urban policy and just kind of an expert on cities.
And I remember there was one podcast on one of your episodes on the masculinist that I listened to that was just kind of a confirmation.
It was encouraging to me because, as you know, me and my team, we just recently moved from San Diego and a church that I planted.
I handed that over and we moved to the north side of Austin, Texas.
I wanted to get out of crazy California and I always have to.
Always have to clarify this because you know, people will be in the comment section and they'll be like, Does he know what Austin is?
Right?
I'm going to leave California, but we're in Williamson County.
So, not Travis County, is where Austin is.
And so, we're just enough away from Austin to where hopefully our police don't get defunded, but close enough to Austin to where there's opportunity for ministry and for evangelism, but also where we're close enough to the tech and the culture and the developments.
And we want to be able to benefit from that.
We also want to be able to influence and shape that.
But I remember listening to that episode where you were talking about cities.
And it just made me think about San Diego.
San Diego was rated, I think it was back in 2015, but there was a study that was done and said it was the number one worst city in America to build wealth.
In terms of obviously, there are not many, but a few cities with a higher cost of living, like San Francisco, Washington, D.C.
But San Diego topped the charts in terms of cost of living versus jobs and income being so low.
And so it was the hardest city in America to build wealth.
And being there for 11 years and pastoring the church, The turnover was immense.
And I remember you talking about just those transient communities that are constantly turning over.
And so it was very difficult to have long term friendship.
There was a core that stayed for that whole 11 years.
But really, the church, you know, I mean, we grew up to about 180 adult members, starting with nothing.
But the verdict was really still out.
I remember being encouraged and thinking, man, we're really doing it.
But then as I started to see a little bit more clearly, I realized that.
Part of the reason we were doing it is because we were a bunch of young singles.
And then, you know, towards the end, we were married, and then everyone was starting to have their first and second kid.
But we never really got to that stage, just that demographic as a church of having, you know, three, four kids, and now in our 40s, and kids are starting to go to school.
And are we going to send them to public school, or how are we going to, you know, so you're going to have to function on one income because mom's homeschooling, or you're going to have to pay an additional price for private education.
We, you know, the church is just now everybody who we left behind who took over the church, they're just now kind of getting to that demographic.
And I'm curious to see how many people actually are able to stay long term.
So that was part of it.
We wanted to get out of crazy California, but we also just my wife and I and our friends who came with us, we wanted to be able to be in a place where we could, um, well, where we could have friendships for 20 years instead of two to four.
And I remember listening to what you were saying on that episode, and it felt like kind of a confirmation that I. Did the right thing.
And yet at the same time, urban areas and cities need churches.
Can you speak to that a little bit?
Yeah, well, I did an entire podcast series I called Urban World, Urban Church that married kind of my urban, the urban side of my research with my experience in kind of that church world.
And you're very right that especially the big global cities like New York or a lot of the California cities, there are high transient populations there.
So they're really not healthy places to live in a lot of ways.
I mean, there may be good if you are young and single for a certain stage of your life, but the reality is, most people are going to essentially age out of those places.
And if you don't, if you stick around too long, you could really end up doing some damage to your life.
There's a ton of people in these churches in New York who are now in their 30s and 40s and single and no prospect of finding a husband or a wife.
And there's a lot of people who are very unhappy and a lot of pain there.
So, you can end up really doing damage to your life.
There's a whole genre of leaving New York essays that people wrote.
And the granddaddy of them all was Joan Didion's Goodbye to All That, which she wrote in the 60s when she was leaving New York for LA.
And she talks about that.
It's like you can go in, and one of her lines is it's like going in a revolving door and coming out eight years older on the other side and not even knowing what's happening.
And so that's true, I think, in a lot of these bigger cities.
Now, I live in Indianapolis, which there's 900,000 or so people in Indianapolis.
And it's a big difference, though.
It's mostly people who are pretty rooted here.
And you can have those kind of long term relationships.
But yeah, you look at these churches, these big global city churches, I think one of the things that characterizes them is a very high churn population.
And the people who stay long term are often people who are very wealthy or very affluent.
And so if you're not in that category, chances are you're not going to be hanging out with them.
You tend to hang out with people who are sort of more in your kind of socioeconomic level.
It's not that these are bad people.
But you're not going to be going skiing in Vail with them every weekend.
You're not going to all the same fundraisers with them.
And they're super busy people.
They've only got so many cycles in the day.
And they can only spend so much time on kind of younger, less high wattage people.
So I think it becomes very difficult to sustain long term relationships in the city, in these places.
And again, you have churches.
It's sort of like the consulting business.
I don't really like the consulting business in the sense that you sign a project and you do it.
And then you have no revenue again.
You have to sign a new project.
So, part of the challenge of a consulting business is not only do you have to grow your business, but you have to be replacing your business every single year.
Every single year, you essentially have to resell your whole book of business in a sense.
It's like that for some of these big churches.
Like if you go to Tim Keller's Redeemer New York City Church, I bet there's a very high percentage turnover there every year.
So, just to keep the church from shrinking, they have to be bringing a bunch of new people in the door.
A ton of people.
Now, of course, There are always new people moving into the city, and a lot of them are already Christian now, which, you know, that wasn't true, say, 30 years ago.
You know, there's a lot of young, kind of hip urban Christian types who want to live in a city.
They come there out of college.
So there is a sort of a natural inflow to draw from as well.
And I think that's kind of one of the things I would say is that's kind of the dirty little secret of most of these churches now is that they are essentially attracting people who are already Christians.
They're not as many people.
Uh, who are becoming converted to Christianity as there may have been, say, in the 1990s, uh, when some of these places were getting started.
So it's a lot of people, it's a place for people who are already Christian who move to the big city, which I don't think is bad necessarily.
But you know, I think you can, you know, maybe have some wrong ideas about how these churches function based on the place that you're from because you probably have longer term relationships, more rooted populations.
You know, et cetera, maybe more evangelistic outreach.
That's just less the case in a lot of these cities.
That's not all these churches, but that's a lot of them.
I completely agree.
And I think part of it depends on your local church and its theology as well as its ministry philosophy.
And so I think for me, you know, for the 11 years that I was there, I think I just was continuing to, you know, semper reformanda, you know, reformed and always reforming and continuing to grow in my doctrine and learning how to apply.
My theology in all of life, but also on the Lord's day when the saints gather together.
And so, with this evolution in theology and ministry philosophy, what I noticed was that the church, as it was becoming more theologically conservative, and as we were even on Sunday morning when we would gather together, as I was becoming more persuaded of a regulative principle of worship rather than a normative principle of worship, and so more traditional practices on Sunday morning that were just kind of less.
Less attractive to the average person.
So Sunday morning became a little bit more traditional, a little bit more conservative, both in the content, both I think John Owen would say, the matter and the manner, right?
The matter of our worship in terms of the doctrine, the tenets, the content, but also the manner, the method, and how we would do worship, and a little bit more of a liturgical style, more pastoral prayers, a prayer of confession, and a declaration of pardon, and maybe a creed that we would recite together.
And so as As a church, I would just say, as the church kind of grew up, it became a little bit less attractional.
And one of the challenges was exactly what you're saying, because there's such a large back door.
If that front door is not at least the same size as the back door, then you're constantly shrinking.
It's not sustainable.
And so we had a massive front door in the beginning because the service was just the way that we did things, it was just more palatable.
Our doctrine wasn't super offensive.
It wasn't, you know, it didn't really surprise people.
But as we came into more convictions, now COVID kind of helped us because everybody became family integrated in their convictions because, you know, because you couldn't do childcare and things like that.
But as that began, you know, as that changes and, you know, people want children's programs on Sunday.
And I'm a little bit more persuaded of, you know, I'm okay with a nursery perhaps or things like that.
But I want children to go to church.
Like if you ask me, you know, to just say in one sentence, what's your conviction for children on Sunday?
My conviction is that children should go to church.
And when we send them to another room where the Lord's Supper is not administered, where they're not hearing the preached word from their pastor, where they're not sitting with their parents and worship, then they're not going to church.
Where the parents are going to church and dropping their kids off at a Christian childcare center on the way and then picking them up after.
And so for me, I'm convicted that children should go to church and that a child, part of the reason I think kids fall away from the faith when they go to college is because, you know, if they're a part of a big mega church that's had a Sunday morning, It's Wednesday night or something like that.
It's totally different, but supplemental, I think, is great.
But when it's a substitute for Sunday morning and some things, it goes all the way up through high school.
So you're talking about an 18 year old who, for me, convictionally, has never been to church.
They're now 18 years old, they're a legal adult.
And then we send them to college and they're trying to find out how to go to church for the first time in their life.
And we wonder why they're not doing so well.
So, but things like that.
My point is in a smaller town, Or, even like you said, there are some large towns that aren't quite as transient, like Houston, Texas, right?
Because the cost of living is lower, there's lots of jobs.
And so, even though it's a large city, there's still more long term residents.
But in a place with that high churn rate, that high turnover, part of what I realized is I've only got, if the city is an average lifespan of its citizens, like three to four years, then I really only have three to four years to disciple people into the matter and the manner, the content and the method of our church.
And I realized that.
As I was growing in my convictions, three to four years just wasn't enough time to, like, if somebody showed up to San Diego and was looking for a church, and the person even is already a Christian, because we're getting plenty of people who are already followers of Jesus, but still they would visit our church on a Sunday.
And it's like if there's one thing that's new to them that maybe is a little bit of a turnoff, maybe they can get over that.
But if there's three or four things that they're like, I've never seen this before, there's no childcare.
And the pastor really, you know, he preaches pretty intensely his philosophy of the pulpit, you know.
And if there's a couple things like that, and then, you know, but maybe I could win them over time, but I've only got three or four years to do it.
So I realized I kind of had a choice to make.
If I wanted to keep to my convictions, I just realized I was going to need more time.
So, like Doug Wilson, controversial figure, we had him as a guest recently.
I'm a big fan of Doug Wilson, but a lot of people don't like him.
But one thing that you have to admit that he's done well is, I mean, he's taken over a town.
A small town, albeit, but I mean, he has taken over that town for Jesus.
And I think part of the success is that he's had 20, 30, 40 years with the residents of Moscow, Idaho, to try to win them over and to disciple them into the convictions of Christ Church, the church that he pastors there.
But if you're in that high turnover place, you kind of almost by default, it's like you're forced to have less convictions or at least less visible convictions that might turn people off.
In order to keep that front door large enough to keep up with the back door, would you agree with that?
Yeah, I think there's probably something to that.
I mean, I haven't had as much experience with what you're talking about, but I think you're absolutely right.
When you only have someone for a limited number of time, you know, a limited period of time, then, you know, you can't be thinking about, oh, I'm going someplace over the next five, 10 years or that kind of maturity path.
It's like, what's the impact I'm going to make in their life right now?
I think it does become, you know, a much more challenging.
Situation in a lot of these churches for people.
Yeah.
Wages vs Cost of Living00:08:59
So, real quick, you mentioned, well, you mentioned just as far as biblical masculinity as you were introing yourself and saying, I do this and I've done that.
And I kind of picked up on the whole urban policy and cities.
But then you also talked about men and what it's like to be a man in America in 2021.
And so I wanted to pick your brain on that for a moment.
One of the thoughts that I've had, and I think I heard you.
Speak about this on your podcast, or maybe it was Man Rampant with Doug Wilson.
I know you're a guest on that show.
But one of the difficulties is it seems like with the rise of feminism and women in the workplace, and all in the name of equality, it seems as though a lot of employers have realized that they could pay people half of the salary that they used to.
Like the idea, you know what I mean?
Like, because why is it your wife working?
And so the idea that you're applying for a job as a man, it's like, I want.
You know, we want to have a big family.
We want to have multiple kids.
We want to homeschool or something like that.
And so mom's going to stay home.
We can't do two incomes.
We, you know, we need to, our family needs to be provided for off of one income.
And it doesn't seem like there's a lot of businesses and a lot of places that think in terms of a fair wage for this job is going to be, you know, a one income household.
It just seems like, it seems like because of the rise of feminism and the fact that it's been normalized.
That both men and women should both be in the workplace working.
It seems like wages, in some sense, when you think of wages as it relates to the cost of living, that they've kind of gone down.
And so there's a lot of men that I've spoken with, young men who they feel they seem exasperated.
I think of, you know, like Jesus says, fathers do not exasperate your children, or fathers don't provoke your sons to wrath.
And I think there's a lot of men who they're just exasperated, they feel angry.
And I think part of it is because, you know, they look at their parents' generation and they look at what their dad was able to do and providing for their family and mom was able to stay at home.
And it feels as though it is just objectively more difficult.
Is that me as a young guy just making excuses?
Or would you say that from the last 30 years or so, if we think of like the 1990s or even 80s, and then we look at 2021, would you say that men are just more lazy and apathetic?
I know there are problems with men, there's sin that we need to repent of.
But would you say that maybe circumstantially, it actually is a more difficult world for a man to be?
The single income breadwinner for a home today?
Oh, sure.
It's undoubtedly the case.
I mean, you know, we have essentially a two tier economy today.
Whereas if you're part of the knowledge economy class of, say, the top 20% most educated, highly compensated workers, you're probably doing okay.
You're maybe even doing great.
But if you're someone who, say, doesn't have a college degree, which is, you know, well over half the population, I mean, like, you know, two thirds of the population, and that's not just, That's not just because we have a lot of old people who didn't go to college.
Even younger people, fewer than half of millennials are going to college and getting a degree.
Then you're in a situation where you're in a much more income constrained environment.
Because a lot of those old, well paid kind of blue collar jobs, let's say old union jobs in the Ford plant, those jobs don't exist anymore.
They may exist for the people who still have them because they got them a long time ago.
But even if you got a job, At the Ford plant today, you're on a two tier wage scale where younger workers are getting paid much, much, much less than the previous workers did.
A lot of the benefits like pensions are not there like they used to be.
So, yeah, so since the 70s, essentially, incomes, you know, real incomes, that is to say, adjusted for inflation in the country have kind of stagnated.
There's, you know, a lot of things started going wrong in 1970, and there's a lot of debates about why that may be.
But definitely, The idea that companies no longer have this idea of a family wage might be one of them.
Even the unions wanted to bargain for a family wage so that you could support a family on one income.
And now the unions are weaker, and we have corporations that are essentially committed to driving down labor costs.
In a lot of ways, you could consider yourself fortunate if you have a job that pays low wages rather than your job having been shipped off to India, Mexico, China.
Someplace like that.
I worked in the IT consulting industry, and the company I worked for went from less than 1,000 employees in India in 2000 to now I think they have over 200,000 employees in India.
And so you start looking at that, certainly, corporations today have, since the 80s, probably have become much more ruthless in driving down costs.
And it's complicated.
I don't want to say that it's too facile to say it's feminism's fault.
There's a lot of things going on there.
But it's certainly the case that it's a lot harder to support a family on one income today than it used to be.
There's an outfit called American Compass run by a guy named Orrin Cass, a former colleague of mine.
And they've published research on this.
I'm like, here's what one income in America will buy today versus what it used to buy back in the day.
And that has become something that they're trying to resurrect that sort of analysis.
Can you actually support a family on this income?
And in many cases, the answer is just flat out no.
On the other hand, I think we can complain about the world, but we also have to live in it.
And I think a lot, I mean, a lot of us today, we have become a very consumer driven society.
And we probably do spend way too much money, you know, in general.
I know I spend too much money.
I spend a lot less money than I used to.
And I have a wife who stays home with our son right now.
But if I hadn't made those painful reductions in my lifestyle and in my spending over the course of close to a decade, I would never have been able to do that.
So we just have to.
You know, our parents' generation, when they were raising kids, were not drinking Starbucks lattes.
I can tell you that.
They weren't drinking microbrew beers.
They weren't having, you know, the proverbial avocado toast.
We hardly ever went out to eat when I was a kid.
You know, when we were getting like, you know, my mom got whatever brand of soda was on sale that week.
That's what we got.
And so, you know, it wasn't like, you know, I had a great childhood, but it wasn't like when you think back about it, it's like, man, in the 1970s and 80s, when I was growing up, family life was much, spending in the homes were much more simple, much more primitive.
And I think we have to start thinking about how we take cost out of our lives because that's the other thing we can do.
Our incomes are probably not going to go up.
That's a hard thing to adjust.
But we can look at taking costs out because I do think we want to create margin, create margin for taking risks for ministry, create margin for having your wife stay home with the kids, create margin for lots of things.
And so I think that's where I would sort of be looking at it today.
Yeah, that's super helpful.
I think it is.
I think you're right.
I think it is more difficult.
I think it is.
Challenging on the income side of things, but you're right.
I think back to my childhood, and yeah, everything was Hill Country Fair from HEB.
Hill Country Fair was the generic brand.
I think it's still around.
I think my wife, now that we're in Texas, is she's excited about HEB and we're buying Hill Country Fair for our kids.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Our parents were just, they were frugal.
They were more frugal.
And they had to be.
They had to be.
Now, again, that's not to say, I mean, there were a lot of things that were cheaper back then.
There were a lot of things that were different, but I think we have become, we have definitely, there's a lot more.
Expensive things to buy today than there were back in the 80s.
In the 80s, you had three TV stations, you know, or four TV stations.
You were drinking Miller Butter Coors.
You know, you were drinking Maxwell House or Folgers.
Those were your choices.
You didn't have a lot of choices to spend a lot of money.
Now you had a lot of choices, you had a lot of opportunities to spend a lot of money.
You're right.
All right.
So shifting gears here, kind of into the political realm, you said something on one of the episodes of your podcast, The Masculinist Again, that I, I thought it was really, really insightful.
So, I've been a pastor in the Acts 29 network for a little while and been a part of that gospel center, gospel center, everything's gospel center, which I have grown to resent a little bit.
Gaining Clarity on Culture00:15:21
I absolutely believe that the gospel is the center.
The problem is, I think in a lot of gospel centrality churches, the gospel, it's not gospel centrality, it's gospel myopticism, it's gospel everything.
There's only the gospel.
Whereas for me, if we're saying gospel center, that implies If it's the center, there's something around it.
And I would argue that what's around the gospel is the law, that God loves his law just as much as he loves his gospel.
And we don't, it's not our obedience to the law that merits salvation.
We're saved by grace through faith in Christ, but that the law matters.
It reveals to us our sin, our need for a Savior.
And then for the Christian, upon salvation, upon conversion, we delight in the law of God.
It's a lamp unto our feet, it's that compass that shows us where we should go, not to earn God's favor, but this response of gratitude for the free favor we've received through faith in Jesus Christ.
And so, all that being said, in these gospel centered, gospel everything churches, and a lot of them being urban city churches, and it's all about, you know, In the city, in the city.
And you hear the phrase, you know, from Jeremiah in the city and for the city, right?
If the city prospers, you too will prosper.
Seek the welfare of the city.
Exactly.
In the city, for the city, love your city.
But then, but then when you hear guys talk about loving your country, all those kind of churches that are all about being in the city and loving the city, love New York.
Pretty suspicious, or we're just going to outright frown upon that.
It really seems like hypocritical, a disconnect.
And you picked up on that, and I thought it was really insightful.
So, could you speak to that, flesh that out, and tell us what you meant by that, and maybe some of the reasons why you think that's become a thing that not just in the culture, right?
We can expect that in the culture, but in churches, it's cool to love your city, but it's not cool to love your country.
What's up with that?
Yeah, you know, it's one of those things.
I just noticed it.
Actually, my wife was the one that first noticed it.
It's like, Man, they always seem to be telling you to love your country less and love your city more.
And I thought about that as like this idea of, you know, we're here, we're all about the city.
And yet at the same time, kind of nationalism or thinking about your country, like that's considered bad, it's parochial.
Don't you know that we're, you know, there's neither Jew nor Greek, there's nothing, there's no distinctions, we're all just one body of Christ and all that.
And, you know, you can go to some of these, you know, kind of new Calvinist websites like the Gospel Coalition and search on nationalism and see what they have to say.
You know, try to find them say anything about making an idol out of your city or, you know, identifying too much with your city.
And you just really can't find it.
And I think this is just, you know, it's never described why, you know, and again, there's like a lot of it.
It's like it's presented, but unless you kind of put two and two together, you don't necessarily think about it.
And that's what I have noticed the rhetoric of a lot of these pastors is like that.
They tell you things that sound great, like, oh, seek the welfare of the city, all this stuff.
And so everything individually sounds correct.
But there's a lot of things they're not saying.
All right.
So there's a lot of things they're not saying.
And like when you start putting these things together, you start saying, well, why is the city the place?
Why is the city the locus of identity and not the nation, for example?
And I think that's really interesting.
I mean, I think it's very obvious that the Bible is much friendlier to call them particularized loyalties than a lot of these churches seem to be.
And in fact, the one thing I think that the Bible is, Does not really advocate is loyalty to your city.
I mean, I don't think that's something that necessarily comes through in the Bible, you know, but I think about, for example, maybe some loyalty to Jerusalem because the temple is located, you know, like what it symbolizes.
But apart from that, yeah, it's, I mean, in the old level, not a city level, it's Israel.
It's not, it's Israel, it's your tribe, right?
You know, and I think about Paul, I think it's in Romans 9, where he talks about he would be willing to give up his own salvation for the sake of his people.
You know, the Jewish people.
And even though he was the apostle, he's like, man, my heart breaks because my people have rejected the gospel, even though I'm the apostle.
So he never made that offer to the whole planet, but he's like, for my people, I care about that.
So I don't think that there's this idea that you can't care about your own people, that you can't care about your own family.
Again, is it Titus or 1 Timothy?
I can never remember what it says.
He who does not provide for his own family has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
Do good to all men, but especially to the household of the faith.
You know, universal, kind of one universal community, but we have sort of particular communities that we have, you know, responsibilities to, I think is very biblical.
And again, oddly, the city is not one of them.
And I do think, you know, I see this like pretty much everything else in the church today, unfortunately, as a reflection of sort of the cultural kind of prejudices and biases of the people who are promoting it.
Because in essence, right, the, The elite classes of the city, the knowledge economy classes of the cities, view themselves as very, when they view themselves as very, at one level, they view themselves as very cosmopolitan and transcultural.
So they see themselves as very much having a lot in common with the similar class of people in London or Buenos Aires or Tokyo or wherever the place may be.
They view themselves as very, very cosmopolitan.
And yet at the same time, they view themselves as very, many of them, not all of them, but quite a few of them see themselves as very attached to their cities.
You know, I lived in Chicago for a long time, and you know, you would see on people's arms a Chicago flag tattooed.
I mean, the Chicago flag is everywhere.
People are so into being in Chicago, or they'll have like a Chicago star.
There's like a star style star on their flag here in Indianapolis.
And I actually helped launch this, I'm afraid.
Well, I'm not afraid.
It's a great thing.
We have a great city flag here.
So you go around the neighborhood where I live, I live in the center city of Indianapolis.
You will see much more likely to see a city of Indianapolis flag hanging off of a house than an American flag.
Or certainly than a state flag.
And so you have this situation where the people who live in these places are very cosmopolitan in outlook.
And to the extent that they have particularized loyalties, it's a loyalty to the city where they live.
Often in opposition to the state where they live.
I'm from Austin.
I'm a good blue city progressive Austin resident.
I'm not like those people out there.
And I think this attitude has been mapped directly onto the church.
I mean, that attitude effectively is the whole.
Deprioritize the nation, deprioritize your state, have this kind of cosmopolitan, transnational view of the family of God and have a parochialized attachment to the city.
It is directly secular.
I agree.
And I think that's been the downside of contextualization.
They always say you have to contextualize your ministry to where you are.
And I'm a believer in that.
I mean, as I say, if you want to go in the pizza business, you better know if you're in Chicago or New York.
Right.
Yeah.
And so you got to know what the genres are.
I'm a big believer in that, but you can take it too far and essentially go native.
Yeah.
You know, and it's like, you know, that's the danger of consultants, right?
If you have the same client for a long time, you go native in the client's culture and you lose your detachment and it comes from it.
And I think a lot of these people have over contextualized the cities around and have taken in a lot of these ideas.
And so, yeah, I did a whole, again, I did a whole podcast series on my little observations like that about the urban church.
Yeah, it was really insightful.
And the contextualization, I completely agree with you.
You can over contextualize where really you're being influenced more by the city than the city is being shaped and influenced by the church.
And I think, you know, with contextualization, the importance, the point in my assessment, as I look at just the New Testament, I look at Paul, I look at the book of Acts, it seems as though the point of contextualizing is to make the gospel message more clear, not more ambiguous.
It's not to make it more palatable, it's not to raise acceptability, it's to raise clarity.
And so it seems like what the Apostle Paul is often doing, you know, where he At Athens, you know, I see that you're a very religious people.
You've got, you know, this idol and this idol and this god and this god.
And I see there's one, you know, to the unknown god.
And I'm here to make him known.
And he's playing off of that, but it's not for palatability.
It's not an attractional method so much as it's a point of clarity.
And so I think when you come into a city or you come into any new people group, if it's, you know, shame and honor based, you know, and knowing that about the culture and being able to play off of those.
Shame and honor themes in the scripture and in the gospel.
But the point of that is not so that they'll like you necessarily.
The point of that is to be able, again, it's clarity.
It's so that they would understand the word of God because you're walking into a culture that already has virtues and it already has vices.
It already has things that are deemed as good and things that are deemed as bad.
And because we're all sinners, every single culture is going to be right about some of those things and they're going to be wrong about some of those things.
And wherever they're right, Then, yeah, that's common ground, right?
Because of God's common grace, there could be a culture of people who, plenty of people who are not Christian, and yet they still, there's something in the culture that they value that God values, simply because they're image bearers of the living God, made in his image, and they got something right.
And we can highlight that.
But the point of highlighting that is, again, it's not just to find common ground so they'll like us, but I think the point is to start with something that they understand so that we can gain understanding, so that we can gain clarity.
And I think a lot of young hipster pastors have.
Have used contextualization as a means of gaining the approval of the people that they're ministering to, rather than a means of gaining clarity with the gospel message so that the people they're ministering to will better understand.
And so I see the Apostle Paul contextualizing for the purpose of clarity, not for the purpose of the approval of man.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I think that's interesting.
You know, people love to quote that Mars Hill speech from Paul in Athens.
But I think it's interesting that Paul's Athens mission appears to have been a failure.
I mean, in contrast to many other places, we don't hear that he made a lot of converts or that he established a church there.
It would seem to be that he went into the intellectual centers.
He kind of tried this approach, it actually didn't work.
So that might be, you might want to pick a more successful one there.
Yeah, I do think there's, I like this idea of getting more clarity.
You know, more clarity to the gospel, but, you know, not trying to overly synchronize, you know, overly synchronize with the culture.
Yep.
Because I think without question, without question, the urban culture had more impact on the church than the church had on urban culture.
I mean, that's just unquestionable.
And you're not talking about Paul at this point.
You're talking about today.
I'm talking about today.
You know, but again, I don't know how much impact Paul had on the urban culture.
I mean, And this is where, you know, I think maybe we don't want to get us off track here, but Paul, like, does not, I don't see Paul as a cultural transformation mission as part of Paul's mission.
It doesn't come through to me in reading Paul.
I think he's very concerned about two things.
One is making converts, transferring people from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the sun.
And secondly, how establishing and the community life, talking about the community life within the church.
So much of what he talks about within the church, very few of his commands were deal with the world outside the church.
It's like in Corinth, it's like they're like this.
You don't be like this.
Here's how you're going to behave.
But isn't like, okay, you got to go out and like change the sexual practices of Corinth.
You know, so I'm not, I would say, this is where I differ from the Kellers and the Wilsons.
I'm not a transformationalist.
Okay.
So, see, and I am, I would be Kyperian.
And so I would push back then.
I would say, I think you're right.
But I think, you know, you're describing motive or goals of Paul.
You know, I mean, and both of us, of course, are ultimately assuming.
And you're saying, man, it seems like the goal was converts, it was disciples, and it was the church.
And whereas I would look at that and I would say, yeah, that I think is absolutely a goal that was in the mind of Paul.
But I would also see that as it's not just the goal, it's not just the end, but it is the means.
Because if you make enough converts and you make enough disciples and the church gets large enough, then just by default, the culture does begin to change.
So I think of an example would be Paul and his ministry.
I believe it was Ephesus.
Where everybody is getting together, they want to arrest Paul and get rid of him because he's had so much success.
And I believe Ephesus is where for three years, the Temple of Artemis.
Yeah, the Hall of Tyrrhenius, that he's got this block, and it seems like it was just like this hall that was used for thinkers and philosophers.
And he gets the cheapest, it seems like he gets the cheapest time slot where it's the hottest inside.
But for most biblical scholars and historians would say it was like a three hour slot from noon.
To 3 p.m. in the Hall Tyrrhenius.
And I think he's there for either a year and a half or three years, and he's teaching, just publicly teaching in the public square, if you will.
It's not a synagogue, it's not a church.
And he's doing that for a very long time.
And eventually, the result is that even the blacksmiths and silversmiths and people are getting together and they say, We're in danger of Artemis and the great God losing her.
Her reputation and our very trade is being threatened by extinction.
And so, basically, my point is Paul's message was so effective that people were buying significantly less idols to the point where the merchants, you know, and the people who that was their trade was working with silver and gold and different, you know, precious metals to make idols.
Prophetic Church Leadership00:04:39
They were losing their jobs and losing their livelihood because the city, the culture seemed like it was beginning to shift, beginning to change.
And they were, it was, He was so successful that they were upset about it, upset about it enough to.
Whereas I feel like if it's just the church, if it's just what we do in the church, then, well.
I mean, I say, I think if you convert the whole town, then obviously that's going to have an impact on it.
I just think, you know, it's an outworking.
It's an outworking of, I agree.
You know, the process of that.
It's not, you know, we're coming in here to transform the culture.
No, you're right.
Okay.
I think that's where I kind of feel like it's like we're going in here.
We're on a mission for culture transformation.
Right.
And, you know, I just think, and certainly in today's world, it just hasn't worked in these urban areas.
Their culture has not been transformed.
The culture of the church is what's been transformed.
Right.
And that's, I completely agree with that.
And it's frustrating to continue to hear people in the church talk about, you know, we're going against the grain.
We're countercultural, countercultural.
And they say we're countercultural as they hold their next big conference that solely focuses on whatever the culture was talking about five to 10 years before they started talking about it.
You know, like when I see a church conference and the title of the conference and the whole theme of the conference, Is verbatim the same thing that I find on my Amazon fire stick on the, you know, when I'm looking at the screen, you know, about Black Lives Mattering or stopping injustice, you know, or then I just, I'm struggling to understand how are you countercultural?
And if this was such a big deal, if this is such a big deal and there's inequality and injustice, then why wasn't the church talking about it before it was cool?
Why wasn't, you know what I mean?
Because, I mean, for, I think we have to stop kidding ourselves.
I think we just have to.
Call a spade a spade and just admit that, like, the church is not countercultural.
That sadly, the church is continually, in my experience, it seems as though the church is about five years behind the culture.
And all the church does that's distinct from the culture is if the culture hops on to, you know, if the culture labels anything as a virtue that's blatantly not a virtue according to scripture, then the church just sits that play out.
But anything that the culture deems as virtuous that the Bible could even get close to affirming as virtuous.
The church hops on that about five years after the culture has already begun the work.
Right.
And to say that that's leading culture, shaping culture, I think it, I don't know.
I think we need to repent and admit that we're just, we're not doing so hot.
Yeah.
I mean, you never see these, you never see these churches speak prophetically about, you know, about the sins of the city that they're in, you know, greed on walls.
And if they were like that, if they were speaking prophetically, they would probably get a lot more pushback because, I mean, even Jesus said, was there ever a prophet that your forefathers did not kill?
Prophets seemed, you know, typically one of the, Clear, you know, telltale signs of a prophet is that they're persecuted because they're a leader.
You could say it like that.
I mean, a prophet, obviously, in Old Testament times was, they're not, you know, I was going to say a thought leader.
Well, thought leader, thought leader.
And, well, a prophet in Old Testament times, they weren't a thought leader so much.
It was God's thoughts and they were simply speaking for God.
But in New Testament times, I mean, a prophet is somebody who, you know, I think a prophet is somebody who just simply has an open Bible and common sense.
And I think a, a, You know, like Frodo Baggins, he had an unusual resilience to the power of the ring.
I think a prophet in today's times has an unusual resilience to the power of the approval of man.
They seem to not care so much about what people think.
So they just have an open Bible, they have some common sense, and they don't really care what people think.
And there's your New Testament, you know, prophet, if you will.
And for those individuals, they're the actual thought leaders.
They're the people who are saying things when it's not okay to say it, you know, before it becomes mainstream, before it becomes accepted.
Prophets tend to be ridiculed.
Prophets are rarely praised or applauded.
And so I think whenever the church is being applauded, nine times out of 10, it's probably because the church is not being prophetic.
If the church was being prophetic, I think then the church would be more ridiculed, the church would be less liked.
Patriotism Without Blind Support00:15:40
And so, anyways, that being said, what is the difference?
Because going back to love your country, you know, and not just your city, what's the difference between nationalism and patriotism?
Because I think that's one of the hangups.
Because I've seen the Gospel Coalition write some articles about nationalism and how that's wrong.
But what is the actual distinction between nationalism and patriotism?
And why do you think Christians in this nation are trending away from being patriotic?
And why does that keep getting wrapped up into nationalism?
Yeah, I mean, I don't have precise definitions of any of these terms, and neither does anyone else.
It's just like nationalism is like a negative identifier today, and patriotism, I guess, for some is a positive identifier, although other people don't like.
Patriotism, either.
So, you know, the only thing I could say is like, you know, to them, like nationalism is just a bad thing.
Calling someone a nationalist is just like calling them, you know, a xenophobe or anything else.
It's just a general purpose epithet of negativity that they apply to something.
And seldom, and one of the things you find, you rarely find really crisp definitions of what these people are talking about.
You know, if you're going to, if you are, you know, if you are going to critique nationalism, Then I think you should define what you mean by that if you're going to critique it.
So I don't even spend time thinking about that stuff because I think getting down in the weeds of content on those sorts of things is just a little bit.
You're never going to convince these people by coming up with a better definition.
Oh, if you just understood the proper definition of nationalism or patriotism, you would think differently.
I mean, what they're saying is pure rhetoric.
And that's just what I think.
One of the most important things I would just.
Tell people is everything these people say is pure rhetoric.
The content is almost incidental to its rhetorical function.
And you can't, you can't, if you're trying to engage in a substantive debate, one of my rules with them is if you're engaging in substance, you've already lost.
If you're trying to get into some kind of a, you know, a logical, you know, dialectical, you know, debate with people, you're going to get crushed because that's not the level at which they're operating.
You know, you can do that.
Certainly not if you're in a position of, Call it cultural supremacy.
If you're in the incumbent position, then you can maybe, and you know, maybe you can do things a little differently.
But you know, if you're sort of in the challenger position, then you know, talking about facts is kind of a waste of time.
I hate to say it.
Not that facts aren't important, it's important to have it right, but you're never going to convince other people through a superior, you know, logical argument about PACs, which is sad.
But okay, well, then let me phrase the question like this so, terms aside and definitions aside, nationalism, patriotism, Let me ask this.
What level of love for one's country is too far?
At what point, for the Christian, speaking from a Christian worldview, at what point would it become actually idolatrous or sin?
Or what is too much love for one's country?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I mean, I really haven't thought about it.
I think it's less about love of one's own than it becomes hate for other people.
I mean, I think we certainly, if we cross the boundary line into hatred for other people, then that's sinful because that is a sin.
You know, I think when you become, you know, when it becomes, you know, a sort of, you know, ethno superiority to an extent, I think there's a, I think there's a, you know, kind of a hell, a kind of healthy view of superiority.
Like you always love your own kids and think your own kids are better than other people's kids.
Right.
And that's normal and natural.
So you could, you should mostly, I think, feel good about the place where you are.
Maybe, oh, our country's the best.
We're the greatest.
But like maybe it's like, oh, we should like rule over people.
Other people are terrible.
You know, you get into that sort of thing.
Yep.
You know, I think we have to start.
I do think we have to start with the recognition that there are very few, you know, kind of culture free individuals, right?
That we were all born into a community of flesh and blood people, you know, with, you know, sort of shared history, shared traditions, you know, shared language, shared culture.
And it is not wrong to identify yourself with that any more than it is wrong to identify yourself with the family that you were born into.
And it doesn't mean, you know, You know, my country, right or wrong, or something like that.
Because I think we could recognize, I look at the analogy to the family.
We can recognize that people in our family are sinful, that maybe they've done wrong to us or others.
And yet that doesn't stop us from still being in a family relationship with them.
You know, and I think this is one of the things that people try to undermine your love of country by essentially pointing out its flaws.
Well, don't you know that these people did this?
Don't you know this person here was bad, did these bad things?
I'm like, so what?
I mean, ultimately, this idea like, if the standard for caring about someone or something or having identity to them is that they were perfect and didn't have any sins and didn't do bad things, you know, we're not going to have anybody on there.
So I think they're always trying to, you know, and I think, you know, the reality is sort of the, you know, call them, you know, very patriotic.
This is probably an example of bad patriotism, you know, and it's really like the 80s Christianity I grew up in, you know, this America is the new Israel.
And like, we're God's chosen vessel, and like, America is this perfect nation.
It's like, I so I do think we've overly, we've overly lionized America as this, you know, perfect, unique, exceptional right country.
Whereas I think we can acknowledge the idea that like somehow acknowledging the flaws in America, acknowledging what's went wrong, somehow would keep you from not feeling an American, identifying with America and being America.
Well, I don't think that's so any more than our.
You know, defects in our family necessarily keep us from loving them or being in a relationship.
We just realize that's our family.
That's who we are.
Right.
And so I, you know, I think that we can be, we should be honest about the failures of the country, but that doesn't mean that we should say, oh, we're so horrible.
You know, and again, these things are never applied.
These things are never applied, you know, evenly across the board.
Right.
It's only applied to the United States.
It's only applied to like white people.
It's only applied to men.
It's like, it's, I mean, it's a joke.
Yep.
It really is.
Woke is a joke.
All right.
Well, let's go ahead and just round out the episode.
So, this is the final question.
This gets to the title that I said all the way at the beginning.
I apologize to the listeners who are like, hey, I clicked on this video to get to the Joe Biden unity thing.
So, here we go.
President Joe Biden, he continues to call for unity.
The nation needs to be united.
Let's all come together.
Let's all just get along.
You know, now that that divisive Donald Trump is out of here, you know, and I'm here, let's just bring back, you know, love and everybody love everybody.
But it feels disingenuous.
It doesn't feel like True unity, or what the Bible would define as unity.
So, I guess the question is what do you see as some of the distinctions between Biden's unity and God's unity?
Well, that's a good question.
God's unity, I don't know.
I do think that the New Testament, one of the key themes of the New Testament is unity within the church.
And I think that there's, you know, I think a lot of the talk about unity in the New Testament is specific to the church community, that there's this new kind of community.
That has been inaugurated.
And the way that we live within that community is to be different than the way that people have lived, I think, in the world.
We see Ephesians.
It's like three chapters of the gospel, three chapters of how we're supposed to live in response to that as a community, as a church.
I also think this idea, there is this idea that Christ is reconciling all things to himself, which I can't begin to explain.
Biden's unity is basically surrender to me.
You know, go along with me.
And I do think, and this is where I think, you know, I do think as Christians, we need to be careful because, you know, I have a very high view of authority.
And, you know, we are called to be into, you know, submission to the authorities.
Even, you know, you look at like 1 Peter, it's like even when they are evil authorities, right, in many respects.
And so, you know, I don't think, you know, again, it's, you know, It's a little, you know, it's not like, okay, we have to go along with Biden because he's the president.
You know, the Pharisees were the authorities.
Jesus didn't go along.
He recognized their authority, said they live in, they sit in Moses' seat, but he didn't act like they were like these great group of people either.
So I think we can, we get to respect, I do think we have to respect and honor authorities in a country, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to support what they're doing or all those things.
And additionally, within our Within our culture and our system of government, dissent and protests and things like that are certainly valid parts of what it means to be under the authority of the United States.
So there's an explicit legalized room for dissent.
But I do think we need to be careful not to overly reject the authorities that are there just because we don't like them.
So the reality is Joe Biden is the president.
That's right.
And so we need to honor the king, right?
In the sense that we're called to pay, give taxes to who taxes are due, et cetera.
But, you know, I certainly think, you know, Joe Biden, you know, just like all politicians, his call for unity is basically do what I want.
And, you know, I don't think we have to go along with that.
Yeah.
So let me pick up on that.
You said do what I want, you know, and earlier you said, you know, Biden's unity is surrender to me.
Surrender to me.
And I thought, and I think that's great because, so this is kind of, you know, as you were saying that, it just got me thinking.
But I think Biden's unity is, in many ways, ironically, I think it is similar to God's unity or Christ's unity because.
That's Christ's unity, surrender to me.
And I think, you know, like you said, like the unity in the church.
I kept thinking as you were talking, I kept thinking, like, the reason that we should, and we don't always have it because we're sinners and we fail, but the reason why there's at least the hope or the opportunity, the potential of unity within the church is because as Christians and followers of Jesus, we are all supposed to be surrendered to Christ and what he thinks, his virtues, his values, his priorities, his commandments.
And so the reason we even stand a chance at unity, it seems, is because Our commander in chief within the church, Jesus Christ, the head of the church, the way that he tries to gain unity, the way that he is gaining, he doesn't just try, but he is gaining unity in his body, his bride, is by forming more and more by his grace through sanctification, by the power of the Spirit, he is forming more and more of himself, his virtues, his values,
his righteousness within his body.
From the head is flowing all the blessings of God to the body of Christ, and we're becoming more like him.
We're because we are increasingly sharing in his virtues, his values, his thoughts, um, thinking God's thoughts after him, you know.
And I think like Biden wants that unity.
It's funny because I just haven't thought like this before, but just as you were talking, I think Biden's calling for that same type of unity think the way I think, have the same virtues as I have.
I think the problem is from a Christian perspective, I just don't know if we're supposed to have unity in a nation filled with Christians, but also pagans.
I keep thinking of scripturally, like, there is no fellowship.
What fellowship does light have with darkness?
So, as Christians, I think we can.
We can have like a unity.
I've heard some people say two types of biblical unity.
One is a unity of common care, and one is a unity of common conviction, right?
So there's that unity of common conviction that we have the same doctrine, the same tenets, the same, you know, that Ephesians 4 talks about that we have the unity of the faith.
But then there's also the unity of love, the unity of common care that, you know, that even those people who are less mature and have some wrong views, that we bear with those who are weaker in the faith and who get under our skin and mistreat us.
We're bearing with them.
We're long suffering.
We're patient.
We're loving.
And so, I think when it comes to the nation, it seems like we can aspire to have what you're saying, you know, honor the emperor, honor the king.
We can aspire to have that unity of common care.
But biblically, we can never have that unity of common conviction.
We're never going to agree with abortion.
We're never going to agree with, you know, well, I would hope that Christians would never agree with socialism.
That's my perspective, you know, because we would see these as things that are against the Ten Commandments it's murder and it's theft.
And just because it's civil theft doesn't mean it's not theft.
And so, Uh, these kind of things we cannot have unity of common conviction, unity of thought, um, but but we can still strive to have a unity of common care, a unity of love, um, bearing with one another, being patient, long suffering, those kinds of things.
Would you agree with that?
Yeah, well, I think if you look at the Bible, right, unity in the church is possible because of two things one, uh, in theory, everyone in the church has placed their highest allegiance to Christ, so everybody has the same thing, and secondly, there's the power of the Holy Spirit that's at work.
To make it possible.
And even then, even just in the New Testament, these apostolic planted churches, you know, by people who are, you know, better ministers than you or I will ever be, it was a constant struggle.
Unity, I mean, a lot of those letters were written, they still couldn't get it to work.
Right.
And so I think when you start looking at the difficulties of unity within the church, and, you know, I think it's almost impossible kind of outside of it.
Again, in Biden's unity, I don't think there's anything particularly nefarious to it.
That's what all politicians will say.
That's what Trump said when he got elected.
And, you know, Biden and his guys, they didn't unify around Trump.
You know, they declared themselves the resistance.
And so, you know, it's what every president's going to do.
You know, I don't put too much, you know, I don't put too much stock in that sort of political statements.
And you're right, we're not going to have, you know, you're not going to have unity.
And I think that actually, you know, shows that the more, you know, that is, you know, this common convictions and sort of things.
When you have a more diverse society, unity becomes progressively more difficult to achieve.
That's right.
Yeah, because there's less to unite around.
Yeah, you have less kind of, you know, less common cause.
But I use the term diversity in kind of the broadest sense, and that is just, you know, people of all sorts of different inclinations, ideas, et cetera.
You know, it's just going to be very hard to create unity around those things.
What to Unite Around00:03:09
Right.
You have different religions, you have cultures, you have different, you know, ethnicities, all these things in America.
And the sad thing, the ironic thing is, you know, with all those differences, there's not a whole lot for us to unite around in terms of commonality.
The one thing that we had.
That we could unite around was love for the country.
And now that one got taken away too.
So it's like, what do you, you know, what do I have to unite over with, you know, my Nigerian neighbor, you know, who is American?
They live in America, they're American citizen, but like culturally, we don't have a whole lot.
But typically, what we would have is they're here for a reason.
And nine times out of 10, the reason is because in some sense, they love America.
They view this as a wonderful place to be.
That's why I moved my family here.
And I could say, hey, I love America too.
But now you can't even say that anymore.
So there's just not a lot of items left to unite around.
We got to go.
We went a little long.
I apologize to you and to the listeners, but let's go ahead and conclude the episode.
So, this is the bonus question.
If you are listening and you're not yet one of our club members, we call them our responders.
I encourage you to go ahead and sign up.
We have bonus material from each of our episodes of Theology Applied.
We also have an entire other podcast called Lionheart.
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And so, this is our bonus question for our responders.
Aaron's going to stay on for just a little bit longer, our after hours episode.
So, the question is this Aaron, you had another one of your episodes.
You're like me.
Sometimes you just got to shamelessly use that clickbait title to get people to listen to the material.
But you titled it this, and you even confessed, I think, in the episode and admitted, all right, I did a little bit of the clickbait thing.
But the title was Why the Republican Party Hates Your Guts.
And so I just wanted to hear a little bit.
What is your assessment of the Republican Party today?
And what's your prediction for what the Republican Party is going to be in the next five years?
And more generally, what do you think the future of conservatism is in our nation?
So that's our question.
Let's go ahead and close out the episode.
Aaron, could you let our listeners know how they could keep up with you, be praying for you, and follow you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just go to themasculinist.com.
Everything will be there.
The thing I would love for you to do is sign up for the newsletter.
That's really the core of what I do.
And you can check out the podcast if you're into podcasts.
I got YouTube, it's all there.
Check it out.
But please get on the newsletter.
Great.
Thanks so much for coming on, Aaron.
Thank you.
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