Stephen Wolf and Pastor Joel Webbin argue that Western decadence stems from a "will to die" driven by guilt, which Christian nationalism must counter through assertive dominion. They contend that female leadership fosters untethered empathy and soft-on-crime policies, while men require firm authority to enforce natural law against cultural violations like mass immigration and transgender rights. The discussion critiques modern altruism for ignoring security issues and social media's "Marvelification of reality," urging believers to reject passivity and actively order society toward eternal good before the book launches on November 1st. [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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Welcome to Theology Applied00:04:27
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Thanks.
All right.
Welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
I am your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
I'm excited about this episode because we have in this episode Stephen Wolf.
Stephen Wolf is the author of just a Just very mild, meek book.
This book is probably what you would want to buy for a Christmas gift for your family members to go right along with Dane Ortland, Gentle and Lowly.
It's really in the same vein as that book.
You know, it's the case for Christian nationalism.
Obviously, I'm being facetious.
This book, what I've read so far, I just got an advanced reader copy a couple days ago from recording this episode, but by the time we launch it, I think the book should be public.
November 1st is when it's airing.
And what I've read so far is fantastic.
He's not pulling any punches.
Stephen is.
He's not just talking about the theory or the idea of Christian nationalism in some abstract, ivory tower, intellectual sense, but he's actually down to earth and saying, No, we could do this, guys.
If we just had the resolve to trust the Lord and read his word and be obedient in all of life, if we just had the will to honor God and love him and love our fellow man, we could do this whole Christian nationalism thing.
We could have a nation that honors God and it would be a nation that's prosperous, a nation that's blessed.
One of the things we talk about in the interview is that sadly, it seems as though at this current juncture that America simply has a will to die.
We've just lost the will to live.
Whether it's in our altruism or whatever it might be, the West in general, European countries, it's almost like the Western civilization just is suicidal out of guilt, out of apathy, out of empathy, all these different misguided feelings.
We just seem to have lost the will to live, and that's what Stephen's trying to address is no, guys, let's rally the troops.
Um, we should live, and that's not selfish.
There is a way to do what is good for our nation that pleases the Lord and is good for all people by starting in our affections, in our love, right here at home.
So, tune into this episode, it's a real treat.
Oh, hi, I didn't see you there.
Thanks for sticking around.
I've got an important announcement to make that's the Theonomy and Post Millennialism Conference 2023.
May 5th, 6th, and 7th, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Theonomy and Postmillennialism.
We've got the speakers that we've already had lined up.
That's Dr. James White, Dr. Joseph Boot, Dr. Gary DeMar, non doctor Pastor Joel Webbin.
But we also have a bonus speaker, and that is Dale Partridge from Real Christianity.
Perhaps you've heard of him.
If not, you should start listening to his podcast.
It's fantastic.
Dale Partridge is going to be joining our team.
We're going to have live panels on Friday night and Saturday night where you'll be able to write in questions and get them answered.
We're also going to have a catered barbecue, Texas style barbecue meal on Friday that's a part of your registration fee.
All that is covered.
So you need to get that.
This is how you do it.
Go and register right now at rightresponseconference.com.
Again, that's rightresponseconference.com.
God bless.
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
All right.
Welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied.
I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
And in this episode, I'm very privileged to have joining me Stephen Wolf.
Stephen Wolf, thank you for joining us on the show.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
All right.
Well, we're going to go ahead and dive in.
So, for those of you who've been living underneath a rock, you may not be aware, but for everybody else, you've probably seen this in the Twitterverse.
This is Stephen's brand new book that's going to be coming out to the public on November 1st.
Is that right, Stephen?
Yes.
So, I've got one of the advanced reader copies.
Canon Plus was kind enough to send me one, or I guess just Canon, Canon Plus being the app, but sent me a copy.
And so, I'm starting to dive into it.
Obeying Unjust Laws00:15:37
And I wanted to just talk about this conversation of Christian nationalism.
So I'll start with this.
What inspired you to write?
What made you think, hey, we need a book about Christian nationalism?
Yeah, I mean, it was a term of derision.
I mean, it actually was used in the 19th century a little bit in the civil rights era.
It's been used by kind of black Christians, mainly heretical ones, but it was used also in the UK.
It was used by some Chinese Christians.
But recently, yeah, it was a term of derision.
But I think our conservative impulse is to be accused of something and then instantly say, I'm not that.
So we go through a kind of series of these disclaimers and disavowals and all that.
But once we started being accused of Christian nationalism, the more I thought about it, was it, well, this is precisely actually what I am.
I am a Christian, love my nation, and I'm nationalist.
So, what does it mean to bring all those together?
And so, that was my.
As you know, I initially started thinking about this more and more, and I realized, you know what, actually, what Christians need today, in particular in the West, is we need a sort of Christian nationalist approach because nationalism tends to emphasize national will.
That's kind of historically, just in the 19th century and another thing, it just had this emphasis on the kind of national will, kind of a will to live.
And it seems to me that the.
The West is in a position where it's kind of has a will to die.
Westerners have this sort of self hating, self loathing malaise that it leads them to want to kind of implode and commit national suicide.
So, this I think the nationalism is a principled response to both our heritage as Protestants, but also it's good for the moment.
And that moment is to kind of reinvigorate, revitalize.
Our will to live and not just will to live in a, you know, to have just have food and shelter, but a will to actually order our lives and our society towards the highest things.
So eternal good.
And that's so that's why that's what inspired me.
And that's why I think the book, even though there's a lot in there that's old, I think it's kind of unique in the approach.
Yeah, great.
I like the way that Wilson put it on one of his.
Blogs, but just basically saying we kind of have six choices you know, three categories and then two subcategories underneath each of the main three headers.
That you know, we can be tribalist, we can be nationalist, we can be globalist, and we don't want to be globalist because, for one, just biblically, the Bible speaks of distinct nations, the nations are Christ's inheritance.
The Bible emphasizes sovereign nations and distinctions between them.
And then tribalism may sound good, localism is a good thing.
We should care about our county, you know, and the place that God is.
Put us most immediately in working out from that.
But that doesn't really work as a form of government.
Tribes are just, you know, you exist and maybe it's peaceful for six months and then you get taken over by another tribe.
And so it just doesn't seem to work.
And so that leaves us with this nationalism piece.
And then the question is really do we want to be a pagan?
Do we want pagan nationalism, secular humanistic nationalism, or Christian?
So the six categories mean secular tribalism versus Christian tribalism, secular globalism, Christian globalism, and then secular nationalism versus Christian nationalism.
It seems like as a nation, we've been heading towards certainly secularism for quite a while now, but then more recently, kind of secular globalism.
And that doesn't seem like it's panning out well.
And so it seems like a return to.
A focus on nations, individual, sovereign, distinct nations, and patriotism and those kinds of things.
And then looking to God as the question is by what standard?
How do nations function?
And is it just the will of the people?
Is Demas God?
Or is there a theos, a God above the state?
And so, yeah, Christian nationalism is not the term that necessarily we would have chosen for ourselves.
It is a pejorative.
But Puritan.
Was a pejorative of sorts, you know, and there's been many times when faithful Christians over the centuries throughout church history have been labeled something by the opposition, but it worked.
And they worked with the term because it actually had biblical merit.
And so I think that's what you and many other guys are doing.
And so, any thoughts on that before I move on into some more questions?
Well, I, you know, I would just say that I'm not just taking the term because as a way to troll.
You know, the uh, I'm not saying implied this, but I actually think it's a good term for our moment, and so in a way, I'm like grateful for the people who came up with it thinking that it was going to be as a pejorative, it's going to beat down these Christians and call them Christian nationalists.
I mean, in a way, I'm thankful because I think it's just a it is the right term for the moment, and I mean, I think it's the right term for all moments, but I think in particular, this one, the things that are emphasized in nationalism, uh, particularly that sense of drive, that will, that's saying we are going to seek and.
After our good, we're going to act, we're going to have resolve.
That is what is kind of inherent to the emphasis of the term nationalism.
And to say it's Christian nationalism is to say that we're not only going to be concerned about our mash and our temporal life, but also for our eternal life as well.
And so we're going to order ourselves to that.
So I think it's just a good term.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Amen.
All right.
So one of the quotes that you highlighted, I believe, this was in.
Chapter, I believe chapter six, it says, What Laws Can and Cannot Do Civil Law.
The very first citation that you have is The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, 1647.
I just want to read that and then let you comment on it.
I just thought it was profound and really helpful.
It says, For when the authority is of God, and that in a way of the ordinance, Romans 13, 1, and when the administration of it is according to deductions and rules gathered from the word of God and the clear light of nature in civil nations,
surely there is no human law that tendeth to the common good according to those principles, but what is immediately a law of God, and that in way of an ordinance which all are to submit unto, and that for conscience sake.
Romans 13 5.
What are your thoughts on that?
It seems like that kind of set the tone for this chapter, and you worked from that quote.
I mean, it's essentially a summary of standard.
Reformed, I mean, it's also Thomist.
I mean, it's just a Christian, it's a classical Christian conception of the law, which just kind of shows you that even the Puritans had the same kind of conception of law as just Christians broadly did.
But yeah, that basically summarizes that chapter.
You know, usually you will kind of want a pithy quote in the front.
I thought, well, you know what?
I'll just throw in one of these hard to read 17th century quotes.
That's a long one.
But yeah, I mean, that is, it's saying that civil law is something that binds our conscience to action because.
Because it's rooted in the law of God or the natural law, the moral law of God.
And so this means that a magistrate who says, do this or don't do that, he can only say that.
He can only actually command you that.
And you're compelled to obey only if that command is derived from God's law.
And in this sense, a just law is an ordinance of God.
It's essentially God telling you to do something.
Though it's mediated through the determination of a civil magistrate.
And you would say with that that all human authority is delegated authority.
There's no such thing as inherent human authority.
It's all vested from God, whether it be familiar.
Yeah, so none of us have a natural power to command our fellow man to do something.
So, yeah, we can't.
I guess I suppose we command him not to commit some moral offense against us.
But we can't say, hey, you got to do this, you got to drive on the side of the road, you got to whatever.
We don't have that power inherently.
That has to be something God, in a sense, grants someone to then serve as a sort of mediator of civil law.
So this mediator, which has been called a magistrate or a prince or whatever, you can call them just a civil government or legislative authority, can legislate law that says do this and do that, but only because it's derived from God.
Himself.
So, in this sense, it's like a just body of law is in a way divine law.
Even though we wanted separate categories, but it's something, yeah, on that basis we ought to do it in obedience to God.
Amen.
I wish that a lot of pastors had that understanding two and a half years ago when COVID hit.
And I think so many misuses when it comes to Romans chapter 13.
A lot of people would read Romans chapter 13 Would you have no fear of the one who rules over you?
Do what he says, but that's not what the text says.
It says, do what is good.
And the question I think that that begs for the Christian is good according to who?
Good as defined by what?
Is it do what is good simply meaning do what this individual human civil authority says, or is it do something that is transcendently good?
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Well, I mean, you ought to do what a civil authority says, but with this understanding, The power that they have to command truly is a power that they can only command actually what is good for you.
Right.
And what this means then is that if there's a command that is just, then it's in a sort of mediated ordinance of God and you have to do it.
And then in that sense, they're actually acting as God's deputy in a way.
Exactly.
But the moment they command what is unjust, they no longer serve as God's deputy.
Deputy, but as just a man commanding you.
Because again, the power that's invested with these people is only for good.
If it's for evil, then they're actually not commanding with that power itself.
And this is why you can, with good principle, disobey an unjust civil command or civil law, because it's really no law at all.
And that's because law is the creation of legitimate power, and power is only for good.
So, yeah, if it's an unjust law, you're not disobeying the magistrate, you're disobeying a man who's telling you to do something unjust.
That's a really important distinction.
There is a sense in which.
Like Christ says, that someone takes your tunic or someone has you go for a mile.
There is a sense in which an unjust law, you could obey it for some other reason.
And part of his command about obeying a sort of injustice.
But then there's a very complicated history with that.
I'd recommend reading Calvin on it or Augustine.
So you're not actually bound to do whatever is unjust based upon those verses, but it could be a prudential way to demonstrate maybe.
Maybe your faith or for whatever reason.
But according to actual principles of law and power, an unjust law is no law at all and therefore does not bind your conscience to action.
Yeah, you wrote on page 249 unjust laws are not laws, properly speaking, and so they do not bind the conscience to obedience.
And I would say yes and amen.
It reminds me of John Knox that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.
And I think you're right in terms of the category of prudence.
When a law is unjust according to God's Higher universal law, then we're not required, we're not obligated morally to obey it.
But there may be times that we may choose within our conscience to obey something that doesn't directly, it's a commandment that doesn't forbid what God commands or command what God forbids.
It's still not just because, but it's something that we could actually acquiesce to without sinning against God's law.
And we may choose at certain times within prudence that, you know, which fights we're actually, you know, which hills we're going to die on, which fights we're going to fight.
I personally feel like you can make a fairly strong argument from the scripture that any taxation that rivals the tithe, so 10% or higher, which we're way past that point, is unjust.
But then the question is do we want to counsel every single Christian to pursue tax evasion?
And I would say no, I don't think that's probably the fight that we need to fight.
I think there are other battles that we should prioritize.
And so, anyways, I thought that that was a really good point of just saying that unjust laws are not actually.
Laws.
And so it's not that you're disobeying the civil magistrate as he functions as God's deacon, God's servant.
You're just disobeying a rogue individual man who is, yeah, at that moment, he's gone rogue.
He's operating outside of the authority that God's vested within him.
Any more thoughts on that?
Well, so in the military, the state empowers officers with the ability to command anything that is like.
Moral, ethical, yeah, moral, legal, ethical is what they say.
And so that means that if you're a soldier and your commanding officer says do this and it's moral, legal, and ethical, then go do it.
That's what you have to do.
And they have the power to do that and you have the duty to obey.
But if the officer commands something that is not legal or it's unethical, it's immoral, well, then he's exceeded his power.
And in fact, as you as a soldier, you are obligated not to obey.
That officer, because for those reasons.
And in disobeying him, you're disobeying him not as he is an officer, but just as he is a guy telling you to do something unjust.
So you're not, I mean, he is like, in that moment, he has the appearance of officership, but he's actually commanding you just as a man to do what's unjust.
So it's the same kind of thing.
And yeah, it's the same type of thing for you in relation to civil magistrates.
Grace and Natural Law00:15:42
Right.
And your disobedience to that individual really is flowing out of your obedience to a higher authority.
So, you know, so that if you have.
You know, a lieutenant who's given you, you know, a certain set of orders that are objectively immoral, your disobedience to that lieutenant is actually reflective of your commitment and obedience to the authority above him.
That the moment they find out what this guy is doing, they're going to thank you for it.
So, you know, within Romans 13 and, you know, submission to the civil magistrate and these kinds of things, part of that, you have to understand that in light of God and his transcendent authority, but you also have to understand that within.
The nation that you live in, and within the parameters of your civil magistrate and how it functions.
And we have multiple levels of civil authorities in our nation, and our highest authority in our nation, civil authority, is not a human official by design, but rather a document.
And there are times where you may be resisting the tyranny of one individual, lower level individual, and it's not just disobedience, but your disobedience with that person is actually reflective of your obedience towards.
A higher authority.
So the Christian is never acting in rebellion.
The Christian is always supposed to be acting in submission to true God given authority and able to discern between good and evil and when certain human authorities are out of line.
Yeah, would you agree with that?
Yeah, yeah, I think it's all right.
Yeah.
It's all right.
It's not great, but we'll take it.
All right, so let me ask you another question.
So you talked to.
Already, just so far in our conversation about natural law, and I just want to pick your brain on that.
When you're talking about Christian nationalism and natural law and these kinds of things, if we're talking about moral law being the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, do you see natural law as distinct?
Do you see that as simply the second table of the Decalogue?
Or do you see that as all Ten Commandments falling within the parameters of natural law?
How would you define natural law?
Because different guys have, we use that phrase a lot, natural law, but there are different ideas of what natural law is.
Yeah, well, I mean, if anyone's saying that the natural law only kind of is the second table, then that is an extremely novel position.
In fact, I don't know anyone who's ever said that.
And if someone's saying it now, then they are quite the innovator.
So no one's ever said that.
Calvin didn't say it, Aquinas didn't say it, no one.
I mean, so it'd be bizarre.
And to say that, it would be pretty weird because the first table simply acknowledges what's owed to God.
And so it would be, in fact, it would kind of approach a sort of Roman Catholic position in a way.
But I mean, we don't have to go there.
But it was just the idea of natural law is that you have these duties to God and to fellow man, and those duties are summarized and scripturated as the Decalogue.
And the first table is the first because it's not only the most obviously your duty to God is first, but also that your duty to man flows from your duties to God.
So, there's a sort of logical progression.
The first commandment, essentially in a positive sense, says worship only through God.
And it flows from there that you ought to honor your father and mother and not murder, which positively means support the life of the well being of those around you.
So, I mean, there's just, yeah.
And so the natural law can be defined as the rule or standard by which man.
Will achieve his natural end.
And that natural end is his happiness.
So obedience to God leads to happiness, or you could say it is happiness.
And man's natural end is a sense of more than earthly, it's heavenly as well.
So obedience to God in the natural law would, in a way, point to, I mean, this can get really technical theology, but in a way, what's embedded in the natural law is this sort of higher life, this sense of.
That earth is not, was never meant to be your only place, but you're actually meant for something higher.
And the natural law, in a way, of obeying it was going to be the way to achieve that life that's originally for Adam.
But I mean, I think just generally speaking, it's a standard by which man achieves his end.
So, which, yeah.
Okay.
If that makes any sense.
Yeah, no, that makes sense.
So, you know, like what I always, Teach as a local pastor with my congregation, you know, just in our liturgy, we have a reading of God's law where we read Exodus chapter 20, all 10 commandments, and, you know, we have a corporate confession of sin and an assurance of pardon and a confession of faith.
And one of the things I always say is I'm teaching on the law of God because we want to preach both law and gospel.
And one of my concerns is that much of the church, I think, today is antinomian, at least in the technical sense of a rejection of the third use of God's law.
If there is any preaching of God's law, it's in the gospel centered, centered, gospel, gospel centered tribe that's.
You know, where it's just, it's only the first use of the law.
Here's God's commands.
Here's the imperative.
Here's how you failed.
Thank God for Jesus.
He fulfilled it.
And don't you love Jesus?
And so, yeah, I do love Jesus.
And the law, it is, the law functions in its first use.
It drives us the law.
No man will be saved by works as done unto the law, but the law does reveal the holiness of God, the sinfulness of man, and the need for a Savior.
And it drives us to Christ who can save.
But the law also functions as a light unto our feet.
And David delighted in the law of God.
It was.
Something that he loved and it leads towards blessing.
And I think there's so much of a fear and maybe an overreaction to the prosperity gospel and what we might deem as legalism and these kinds of things that we.
I think there's a lot of Christians, what I'm getting at is I think there's a lot of Christians that don't even want to mention the law of God, the first or the second table, in its third use as a light unto our feet, as a way to live, not a way to salvation, to earn salvation, but a way from salvation in gratitude for the free grace that we have through faith in Jesus Christ.
And so I think that.
Right now, the case that you're making and the case that other guys are making, there seems to be kind of this rising movement of sorts, and I think there's a lot that's going to need to get ironed out.
But I guess what I'm saying is to make a case that states, that nations at the civil level should be lawful according to God's law, natural law, moral law.
I'm coming off of the past few years as a local pastor, and I don't even think churches are convinced of that.
Not that states should be that way, but that churches should even preach the law of God in its third use as a light unto our path.
Have you experienced that?
I feel like the culture, the church culture, and then just the culture at large is very afraid of legalism, very antinomian, very lawless.
And in addition to that, I think very, not just the antinomian piece, but that, you know, just, I don't know.
What are your thoughts on that?
Well, I mean, yeah, I think that we have failed to distinguish nature and grace.
And we've allowed grace to essentially destroy nature, to kind of invade that.
That natural, I think, I think we have, I think man has a natural drive for a sort of dominion, to be assertive in the world.
And I think we've allowed grace to make us very passive.
I think there's also some feminization in the church going on with this as well.
But there is a sense in which the gospel has become a means for us to have kind of this like sort of cognitive well being or psychological well being while just being, you know, fat on the couch watching Marvel movies.
So instead of actually being the gospel being something that restores us to activity, to doing things, to organizing, just to activity generally, to be assertive and dominion oriented, we've allowed it to be the opposite through grace kind of destroying nature.
And so I think that when we understand the gospel, I mean, we can separate justification and sanctification.
Justification is a sort of like your, in a way, your title to eternal life.
So, the merit of Christ, you can kind of claim for yourself a title to eternal life.
But sanctification involves, is a sort of restoration.
So, Adam was given these gifts, and these gifts empowered him to exercise, be a very active person, to exercise dominion in the world under God.
Okay, so that means, as I argued in one chapter, is that basically it means that there'd be nations, they would spread and have distinct nations and all that.
But the point I'm getting here is that he was empowered to.
With sets of gifts, with the completeness of his gifts to achieve that end.
Because, of course, that was part of the covenantal conditions, was him do that.
So he had to have the power to do it.
In the fall, Adam lost not all his gifts.
He didn't lose the ability to kind of reason according to principles and he didn't lose the strive to have some kind of society and community.
He did lose his ability to achieve heavenly good.
He adopted vicious habits.
And so he's unable to fully.
Seek dominion under God, though he still had a drive, obviously, because you see men have done virtuous things in ways.
But in the actual restoration, in sanctification, we might call it definitive sanctification, we've gone from a sort of total depravity to a total sanctification, by which I do not mean that we've become perfected in every practical way, but that we've been re equipped in a way.
We've been re equipped with the sort of things Adam had, which includes this desire for heavenly life, but also the ability.
The gifts pertaining to his work in dominion under God.
And so these were natural, and in a way, they're supernaturally kind of grafted in, but they're the same in substance.
They're the same sort of things that Adam had to achieve his end.
So I think part of sanctification, part of kind of working out your salvation in the sanctifying, in the sanctification sense, is having this natural drive to complete the sort of things Adam would have done, though not to achieve eternal life.
But as a matter of just being a fully human being.
So that is achieving what you ought to have done as a natural human being, not so much as like a being of grace.
It's not a command of grace to exercise dominion.
It's a restoration of grace that you can naturally do it.
And so I think that what's antinomian to my sense is not just that we don't have kind of civil law, it doesn't reflect natural law, but that we don't have that spirit, meaning like the spirit for action that we should have given our sanctification in Christ.
And that should.
Give us this active, activity oriented, dominion oriented life with others to kind of realize on earth these institutions and communities that are under God.
So, what does this mean practically?
This means that there ought to be Christian schools, there ought to be Christian governments, there ought to be Christian magistrates, Christian civil societies, and that sort of thing.
So, that's kind of how I go from.
Yeah, that's why I think the importance of sanctification and also just natural law.
We are natural beings and we have natural drives and we ought to order those properly, which means activity in the world to place the things of the world under God.
Yeah.
So we talked a little bit about what is your reason for writing the book?
Why did you write it?
Let me ask you now not why did you write the book, but what are you hoping the book will do?
Yeah, I mean, I mentioned this earlier.
I think I hope several things.
One, I hope that for the individual men, I wrote the book.
I mean, if someone reads it, they'd probably know this.
I wrote the book for men in mind.
It's not a self help book, it's more of an exhortation, I guess.
And that would be to realize that your masculinity, the things of power that drive to, To exercise dominion is actually true and good and not destroyed.
It's natural and it's not destroyed by nature.
So that's one thing, just on the individual level.
But on the broader level, it's about realizing that you're a people and you have a place.
And if you're Christian, you want that to be a Christian place.
And in order for that to happen, it's not a matter of reading the times, you know, they're reading the signs.
And talking about eschatology all the time and saying like that post mill, and like people used to do that online.
You know, it's not, it's about no, you have to do it.
Like, you, like, you know, you people have to do it.
It's not just like bringing about stuff into existence in reality to make Christian institutions, public institutions.
It's not just simply, it's not simply divine providence.
It's you actually acting in the world to do it.
It's like a synergistic thing.
It's not monergistic.
It's just, it's just like sanctification is something you have to like, you have to act.
You have a piece in this.
The same is true when you do political theology.
Like, if you're post millennial, I know not all post millennials think this way, but there can be this tendency of thinking, oh, that, you know, it's prophesied, it'll come.
Like, I believe this will come.
No, but if it does, you've got to do it.
So that's part of the thing is no, like, we have to have the will for it to happen.
It's not going to, if we don't will it into existence, it's not going to happen because it's necessary for man to actually act for it to happen.
So that's kind of what I, That's why I emphasize the will throughout the book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's great.
In the epilogue, let's talk about that for a moment.
One of your portions in the epilogue talks about being ruled by women, which I completely agree with you.
I've said this on my show before, so I don't know, so that you're not nervous, I'll show my hand ahead of time and let you know where I'm at.
But I've mentioned multiple times on our podcast that I think a few things have caused more suffering than women's suffrage.
So I think that men should vote.
And so that's my position with that.
Women Ruling Society00:13:12
I don't think that there's any problem with that.
But I do think that it's extraordinary that we really do live in a society where even just the implicit.
Laws, right?
The cultural laws that aren't even civil laws, but just cultural guidelines and directives are all feminine.
So, anytime a man tries to take initiative and tries to actually carry out what God has called him to, taking dominion in his various arenas of life and the responsibilities that God has given to him, as a husband, as a father, in his vocation, in his local church, in his local town, maybe he runs for city council, these kinds of things.
A lot of times men just get blasted for being misogynist or being this is toxic masculinity.
This is aggressive.
And then we have any book within Christianity that sells really well and that people, oh, this was so good.
It always focuses on Jesus, meek and mild, gentle and lowly.
It's the most feminine qualities that you could.
Imagine and those, I'm not saying those are objectively feminine qualities.
Jesus is meek and mild, and Jesus was and is a man.
But that's not the only that that's that's not the whole of Jesus and his attributes and who he is.
And so, anyways, can you can you talk a little bit why did you include that in the epilogue and what are you trying to get across to the reader?
Yeah, so I mean, I when I wrote this book, it's not just like an academic exercise, it's not just trying to be precise for my fellow academics or you know, whatever highbrow thinkers.
I actually want it to happen.
And I mean, people might be surprised when they read the kind of epilogue, what's in there.
But what's in there is just, again, it's mainly written for men and it's saying, what's going to prevent us from being Christian nationalists?
What's to bring in a Christian nation that follows kind of principles of Christian nationalism?
And I think one of it is going to be I don't think it could happen when women are generally kind of in charge and rule things.
And that's because women tend not to, they tend to have, they have, they're very empathetic.
They tend to be more inclusive, and men tend to be more exclusive.
And they tend to, yeah.
So there's these different traits that you see between sexes.
And in order to have a Christian nation where blasphemy is punished by someone who seems well meaning and nice and smiles big, You're going to have to have a guy who says, no, you're going to jail.
I mean, or whatever it is, you're fine.
I mean, because, yeah, I'm all for blasphemy laws, by the way.
If you're going to suppress atheism, I mean, there might be some very nice guy who has a big smile, loves atheism.
Like, no, atheism is crushed.
It's not going to be tolerated.
You have to have this kind of firm hand where it says, you just say, no, we're not going to do this.
And, uh, and what I mean, there's just study after study coming out today about women dominated fields in academia where that the sort of traits you see coming out of those departments are the exact opposite of that of sort of assertive, um, uh, saying kind of saying no to these things that are going to be damaging.
And I, so I think that there's, uh, what I call kind of a gynocracy, um, which is a term that I didn't make up.
It's been around.
But one of the things that you see is this because of empathy within gynocracies, you have this very strong egalitarian appeal, like following a very egalitarian principle.
And what happens then within these groups is everything becomes very institutionalized, very proceduralized.
A lot of times, the men who are very assertive and agonistic, who want to actually compete with one another, kind of are suppressed, and everything has to be extremely cooperative and equality driven.
And in the end, you don't actually have the naturally superior people arise to the top.
And the benefit of like a masculine leadership, to my mind, is that men can compete aggressively with one another, and they can debate and they can fight each other.
They, in a way, can self sort into hierarchies through this activity.
So, like on the playground, I mean, growing up, you can see in the playground, different guys tended to kind of lead the pack.
And sometimes there was conflict, but eventually everyone kind of sorted out where they were in this hierarchy and everyone figured out what they did well and how they relate to everyone else.
And everyone in general was kind of fine with that, with some problems at times.
But with the gynocratic system, That sort of thing cannot happen.
So, you get a lot of mediocrity and it suppresses a lot of those kind of masculine virtues that can really inspire greatness.
So, that's one thing.
But I think, just broadly speaking, if you have very kind of feminine led institutions, you can't have Christian nationalism because you're going to have a sort of empathy run amok.
You're going to have untethered empathy.
And I think, I mean, I'm bashing women here a lot, but I'm just saying that.
Women are essential to dominion.
They're essential to the work we have in this world.
But the excesses of empathy can actually destroy societies.
Yeah, I can create these contradictions.
So, who supports homosexuality the most tends to be women.
Who supports transgender kids, transitioning all that insanity tends to be women.
Who supports the.
Often, like criminals on the streets and want lower crime sentences, more prosecutorial discretion tends to be women.
And who is this?
Well, I mean, one of the most reliable voting blocks for Democrats is actually college educated white women.
And so you see these kind of like these, I call them gynocratic contradictions, where like an untethered empathy, when it becomes realized in policy, can actually literally destroy, not.
Not only destroys societies, but it comes back and harms women as well.
I mean, just see that in sports, women can train their entire teenage, their young lives to compete in some sport, and then they're beat by this mediocre guy who claims to be a girl.
So, anyway, I mean, that's what I was trying to get at.
But the main point, I've talked a lot about this, I'm going to get in trouble for it all.
The main point is that we're not going to see a Christian nationalism happen because women are not able to.
As easily as kind of stomach the exclusivist posture you need towards people in society.
Yeah.
The Old Testament, I think it may be Isaiah, it might have been Ezekiel, but talks about the civil magistrate, like the state, the government, and speaks of it in animalistic terms as bears or like with claws, sharp claws.
And, you know, and that goes right along with, you know, Romans 13, like he bears the sword.
And, you know, and these are masculine things.
He bears the sword, you know, or a bear or things like that.
And I, you know, I think of like Kintanji Brown Jackson, you know, Supreme Court, and, you know, some of the things that as she was going through, you know, getting grilled and those kinds of things, you guys are bringing up.
You're soft on crime, and particularly, you know, cases of, you know, where they're pedophilia, you know, and I think, you know, the instinct is, you know, Well, man, you know, like even with Putin, when things like that were just starting out with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you know, like one woman, I forget her name, but wrote a poem like, If only I Were Your Mom, you know.
And I think like women think in those terms.
So it's like, here's a pedophile, you know, who's being tried in court.
And the woman, if she happens to be the judge, is thinking, Gosh, I, you know, how can this poor guy, you know, he's messed up?
He just needs help.
Whereas men think, This guy should be hung publicly.
He's a what?
He's a pedophile?
Like, no, we're not thinking in sympathetic terms.
And so there's just different roles for men and women in the ways that God has designed us.
But when you're thinking of at home caring for three year olds, you don't want bears doing that.
You want nurturing.
So, anyway, so I completely agree with you.
And I think that there was one study that said, If women weren't able to vote, I think that we wouldn't have one Democrat president for the last 50 years.
That, you know, if only men were voting.
And you even see within marriage, like statistically, when women do get married, there's a higher likelihood that they begin voting more conservatively after entering into marriage and having children, and I'm sure some influence from their husbands.
And so I just thought that that was a bold thing for you to add, but it's somebody we need to talk about.
I think that's part of the issue.
And it's not just with the state and it's not just with the culture, but I think there's so much feminization of the church to where there's a reason why the church doesn't appeal to men.
And I think it's because we've said in many ways that church isn't for men.
And the sad thing is, nothing is for men anymore.
All of society is for women.
And I think that that's one of the reasons why there's soft on crime policies that are driven by women, but there's also just exasperated men.
I think that's why Jordan Peterson has launched into the stratosphere because.
He had the audacity just to say, you know, that we need a place for men, you know, and that resonates, you know, with many people.
So, what do you mean?
Yeah, I'll just say there's, yeah, I mean, what you see is like in academia, you see that women tend to be more kind of social justice oriented, less dispassionate within the academic field.
I mean, this is just an aggregate.
This is not, of course, there are exceptions and all that.
And so what you get is this push towards more egalitarian policies, more egalitarian activism.
And And this leads to essentially the smothering of the people who are naturally going to rise to the top and are not going to be able to do that because they're beat down, because they agonistically and with competition pursue that.
And you're going to get people who have a propensity for criminality, they're just going to kind of run free.
So you have this egalitarian principle.
Uh, that is kind of governs their thought, and it actually governs our thought now, it has for a long time.
It just leads to a society that will smother essentially pathologizes masculinity, you know.
So, it's you have to wonder what men are for in a society that is dominated by kind of a very strict, egalitarian governing principle, yeah.
Um, what do you think it is?
So, you said like we've lost it's you said something like this, so I'm paraphrasing, but that we've lost the will to live, right?
It's like, um I don't know if you ever read The Fate of Empires, Grubb, something.
It's just a collection of like two essays and talks about, you know, he tracks like how empires on average tend to live about a quarter of a millennia, you know, through 250 years, give or take.
And they enter into, you know, their later stages enter into decadence and then, you know, there's a lethargy and laziness, you know, apathy that comes.
Immigration and National Identity00:08:20
But then also, it's not just that, but there's also a mixture that begins to happen.
Like they.
It's like they fought to take over the world and they finally did.
And they become so strong that really there's no.
They've neutralized all outer threats.
And so they usually implode from within.
And it's usually because of apathy, laziness, empathy is a big thing.
And so, like, starting to, you know, where positions of leadership in society become a charity rather than merit.
But then also in mixture, in terms of, you know, everybody wants to be a part of the empire.
Everybody wants to, you know, there's a lot of times prosperity and opportunity, these kinds of things.
And.
Over time, you know, there's all of a sudden a bunch of people who are living in this particular place that don't really identify with the place, who don't, it's not really their home.
And so, you know, another thing that I've heard you say on this topic is saying that, you know, like we need to figure out who we are as America.
And it's not just that we need to deal with illegal immigration, which we most certainly do immediately.
That's a huge problem.
I mean, you can argue that it's a full scale invasion that's happening.
With our nation, but then even with legal immigration, that needs to be mitigated drastically, at least for a time, for us to let the dust settle and have this corporate national identity.
And there has to be history, right?
A shared history with each other to be able to say, yeah, our grandparents worked together or fought in this war together, and not just, you know, you arrived 15 minutes ago.
There's always going to be some level of immigration, people who arrived 15 minutes ago, but if you start talking about a significant portion of the population of a nation is people who just arrived, then that nation is in serious trouble.
And so I guess my question is what is it that Americans have just, it really does seem like a Like slitting your wrist in the bathtub or something, like a will, a death wish, like a will to die.
Like, do you think?
I feel like some of it is laziness and decadence, but I think some of it also is just guilt.
Like, winners feel guilty for winning.
Or what do you think it is that America is just, because I mean, we're really like trying to lose?
Yeah, I think the West generally is in a sense tired, has lacked, has lost self confidence, is self loathing.
Self hating, and to a, I mean, that's all pathological, but to kind of this intense, like, perverse degree, where, I mean, you see this in a way is more in Europe, where they'll take in so called refugees, and those refugees will begin to practice their culture as they came from, which violates various Western norms.
But then they don't do anything about it.
So the country blames them, they blame themselves for, so the Germans will blame themselves for the problems in the immigrant community.
And they'll say, well, you know, it's just learn to live with it, is kind of the common phrase they hear in all the European countries now.
You just got to learn to live with the new normal.
And it's this, I mean, if a bunch of people came into your community and then all of a sudden sexual assault sprang up, I mean, you saw this, this is, I'm not, there's not some conspiracy.
This is, Documented in places like Sweden and Germany and all throughout Europe, the spike of sexual assaults.
If people did that in your community and you had kind of a will to live, you'd kick them all out.
Right.
But, and I mean, just like the millions of migrants that came into Europe a few years ago in 2016, 2017, whatever that was, they kept talking that the media would show pictures of families, but the vast majority were fighting aged young men.
Who came across.
And this was, again, documented many times.
But they kept telling themselves, essentially lying to themselves, that it's a bunch of families coming across the border.
Like, no, it's actually 20 something year old men who could be fighting for their country back home.
And so they fled to come here and take advantage and exploit the system and all that.
But we have this extremely.
The West tends to be very altruistic, especially the Anglo.
The Anglo tradition is very altruistic, and so we tend to think that you know, those immigrants they were legitimate refugees, they're all of them, 100% down to every single one.
And uh, they're not coming here to exploit our system, they're coming here to be Frenchmen, German, and Dutch, and that's why they're coming here.
They want to be one of us.
Well, no, I mean, that's why uh, the suburbs of Paris are full of people who've never uh, assembled into becoming French and they resist becoming French because why would they?
I mean, they're not French, uh, they you know.
So, just these lies from these altruistic principles that we flow from.
I think in America, there's a lot of people who do come here to be Americans.
And I believe that very seriously.
So I think there is some difference here.
And I think many people go to England for that to become British.
But I think there's the majority, at least in continental Europe, I don't think that was the case.
But in the United States, we tend to have a more like geographic, this universalistic notion that we just live in geographic space.
And where it's a, any human could come here and be here, and that's enough.
Like, you're within the borders, you're American.
Like, so there is a sense in which we just, the United States is a geographic space for like everyone, all humans.
And so, and I mean, this, it's a very complicated discussion.
I'm not trying to make it simplistic, but because of like, what is, you know, what is America, or what does it mean to be American?
It's very complicated.
But I think that's our universalistic, very humanistic mindset that this, This space is just for everyone.
So, anyway, anyone can come here.
And my problem with that is that, okay, it's a very diverse country, but like you mentioned, we have to live life in generations here with others.
You have to, like, I bring up this idea of your grandfather, you mentioned in wars, like, so big national events and national struggles that tends to bring people together.
There's the, if your grandfather went to the same high school, and that may not just, or your grandfather, Father worked at this shop, and my grandfather already came in.
We would go into that shop, and there'd be stories.
Oh, wasn't that fun?
You know, there would just be this sense of community based in generations.
But if you have people continuously coming in, just millions of people always coming in, they don't have like this sort of collective communal memory in this place.
And it's like constantly restarting it.
Like if we just stopped, I mean, just theoretically say we stopped everyone from coming in, and all we have is the people here right now.
It would take several generations before we could all, I think, come together as a people.
Not only through intermarriage, it doesn't have to be intermarriage.
We have shared experience in this place together.
That's why I oppose immigration for America.
It's hard for America.
We're never going to become an actual nation given our current level diversity if we keep.
Importing from mass immigration.
It's just not going to happen.
So it's, yeah.
Yep.
Social Media Flags00:05:03
No, I agree.
I think, yeah.
So I think there's guilt, there's apathy, there's empathy, you know, that's a twisted sense of thinking like we're, you know, this, you know, being overly altruistic and, oh, we're helping, you know, and this is what it means to be, you know, compassionate, all these kinds of things.
And I think, you know, the last thought that I kind of had as you were talking was, I wonder if social media, you know, just the rise with, Technology, those kinds of things, has anything to do with because there's such a vested interest for individuals today to for their lives and their achievements and their interests and all these different things to simply be optics and not necessarily tangible, not necessarily real.
To just to have, you know, like everything you do is to broadcast out to as many people, you know, wanting so much approval from.
From the masses.
And I wonder, just like as the world has gotten smaller through various technologies and these kinds of things, that, you know, we're caring more about, you know, what America looks like on the world stage.
Does the UN like us?
Do other nations think we're nice enough?
You know, like, whereas, you know, like when your whole focus is oriented in who's physically in front of you, you know, it's just like your whole life, right?
You don't know, you don't have 30,000 fans, you know, or a million.
Your whole life is, I know about 50 people.
You know, by name that are in my life, and I've got my wife and I've got my children, I've got my job and I have my church, and uh, and so yeah, so I'm gonna do what benefits them, um, because they're the only approval that I'm looking for.
I'm not looking for the approval of someone in Ukraine, you know, like by having you know, the supporting them with this flag, you know, in my bio on my social media page.
Do I so I guess my question is there's altruism, but do you think altruism has kind of ramped up on steroids because of social media to the The point where we just care more about appearances and global approval than actual tangible growth and productivity and benefit?
I mean, yeah, I think that a lot of the social media presence is sort of kind of framing an identity.
It's usually in opposition.
I mean, I tend to think when I see the Ukraine flag in the bio, I usually think that they really just mean they.
Don't like me.
That it's really not, it's less support for Ukraine and more that they just don't like conservatives or right wing people.
It's actually a flag for them to signal their support for crushing us.
That's how I interpret the flag.
And I think that's probably right, given the sort of people who have the flag and what they say.
Yeah, I think that there is this, they can't, people have their, I call this like the marvelification of reality.
I think this is actually my.
Co host from podcast, but Thomas says this, but it's like a marvelification of reality where the media captures you with who's the baddie.
It's like the two minute hate from Orwell's 1984, where they present in front of you who's the bad guy today.
And then you have heroes along with it.
You have Captain Ukraine and you have Zelensky, and you have these guys are like the heroes, the ones with the capes and fighting the bad guys, and you have the evil one, Putin.
And so that's why you had all like when this was happening, and you still see this like Marvel characters in these scenarios, in these situations.
It's like this where we're instead of watching like a Marvel movie, we're watching the news, but it's the same kind of thing.
And it's portrayed as like reality to us when it's really just feeding our more consumption, consume, consume, consume, consume.
And it, but it frames who we think is bad and good.
And that's like our entire reality.
So that we, the people are able to get out there.
Because they, again, they're just fat on the couch and want to watch Marvel movies, they want to get out that aggression.
And so that aggression is channeled through the marvelous location of, through the news media of who's good and who's bad.
And then Twitter and social media feeds into this as well.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think there certainly is this, it's appearances, but I mean, but it's more, I think it's psychological.
I think we're just so unable to do anything realistic or tangible.
And meaningful in this world that we can just try to get brought into this fantasy reality of good and bad and hate and love and hate.
That makes a lot of sense.
Boiling Point of Division00:02:35
Okay.
Well, do you have any final thoughts for our listeners that you'd like to leave us with?
I mean, the only other question I have in the back of my mind is from a little bit of talking with you with some other guys, like minded, offline, and then.
Watching you already doing some interviews, talking about the book, and then a little bit of the book that I've read so far.
I've only had it for a couple days at the time that we're recording right now.
But I, man, I just don't understand why Christians would not be for the case that you're making.
It's, I mean, it's a, this is a historic, this isn't even like a radical, you know, it's just not that extreme.
It's just, it's a confessional, you know, reformed Protestant case for.
It's Christianity and just its natural outworkings in all of our various spheres of life.
And yet, it seems like it's not like you're just going to have a bunch of purple haired, you know, liberal progressive people not liking it, but like there are apparently, allegedly, conservative Christians, you know, who are also not really a fan.
What do you think that is?
What do you think the outcome of it?
Do you think that the church can.
Rally behind something like this that we could be Christian nationalists, or are we just going to splinter?
I feel like, I guess what I'm trying to say is I feel like over the last two and a half years, in the providence of God, in His mercy, the veil has been lifted to where, you know, American Christianity just was slowly heating up like the frog in this boiling pot of water.
And it's like the enemy got too arrogant and turned up the temperature all of a sudden, real quick.
It's like, oh, we were almost to boiling point.
Let's just go ahead and knock it the rest of the way.
And the temperature rose quickly, and the frog finally, you know, felt it and jumped out of the pot.
And it's like you have half of the evangelical church that, like, that finally is awake and realize that CRT and intersectionality and wokeness and civil tyranny and transing kids in schools and all the like, this is a bad idea.
We're not doing this.
Um, but so it's like we had half of us, and we were, and it really felt like for a couple of years, like we have a team here.
And now it feels like the team's getting really narrow because we agreed on the problem, but I'm quickly finding that, um, Even within the Christian conservative world, we don't agree on the solution.
Guys who I would have thought even just six months ago, like that guy for sure, he'll be on the team, and they're not.
Passive Moral Witness00:05:06
What do you think is going to happen?
Well, I don't know.
I hope I convince a lot of people.
I think one thing that's going to happen is they're going to try to use the kind of social justice cards to attack Christian nationalism.
So I made the choice to talk about gynocracy in the book.
And so they're going to say that I'm misogynist.
And that's going to be what they're going to try to divide women from this.
Of course, many women will not.
They'll actually agree with what I say, but given the state of the world, it'll probably be fewer than will be offended.
There's going to be racial stuff.
They're going to try to divide along that.
It's kind of a divide and conquer.
That's going to happen.
But I think that the main thing that people don't like, the way they'll resist, Is we've been trained in passivity.
We've been trained to be passive with regard to Christian political action.
And this has been going on for a long, long time.
I think that it's, it's, it's, I don't know when it started, but the example of it would be the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King.
So I'm not going to bash anything related to any of that or him.
But his, his movement and the civil rights movement was, was largely kind of this passive thing.
Of course, it was active there in the streets and all that.
But it wasn't, it was more like it was passive in the sense that it was a, a sort of performance to get like white sympathy.
So then, you know, people would see the hoses and the dogs barking and all that.
They'd have sympathy and they'd say no more, and then segregation's ended.
So that was a passive in the sense that you're appealing, you're not achieving it yourself.
You're actually doing something to then get other people to do something for you in a way.
Okay.
Christians kind of have that same mindset that if we have good moral witness, if we show ourselves to be passive and submissive.
And kind and winsome, all these things is meant to try to passively perform in front of now secular overlords to kind of get what we want.
The idea is we can't achieve anything by our own self assertion, by bringing it about by our own action.
It has to be passive.
This is like David French's basic political theology, which is an incoherent mess, doesn't make any sense, but that's basically what it is it's passivity.
Passive performance to get the other people to like you to let you kind of have your little space in the world.
That's what it's all about.
And I don't know how, I mean, it's frustrating because it's like, yeah, well, you're Presbyterian.
Do you even know your own tradition?
I mean, you're here, you know, so even Baptist, anyone, any Protestant, like, do you even know your own heritage?
Like, that's not this passive thing, is not, you know, there's an element of that, but it's active.
So the point here is that Christian nationalism, Christian.
Yeah, the Christian nationalism is saying you should be assertive and active so that you, in your own will and action, bring about what you want.
Bring about what ought to be in existence.
Not passively, not perform, not this, oh, please, overlords, give us what we want.
No, it's we say this is what we ought to do and we act and achieve it.
And I'm just hoping that people will see that.
I'm hoping men in particular will see that they should do things and not.
Concern themselves with the school marms who want to look down upon that and say, No, you can't violate the rules.
That's not inclusive enough.
No, you should assert yourself and say, Yeah, no, you're not going to blaspheme God anymore.
It's done.
You're done.
I mean, that's sort of thing we should have that assertion and do it, enact it, and it's just.
So, anyway, that's what I would hope to see in the world.
Yeah, I agree.
All right, well, Where can people get it?
Let me hold up the book again so everybody can see it.
It's coming out November 1st, The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe.
And I believe that it'll be available through Canon, but then also Amazon.
Is that right?
Yeah, I mean, you can pre order it now.
Yeah.
And eventually Canon will have it available.
Yeah, I don't know what the timetable on that is.
And will they have like a hard copy?
Will it be on the Canon Plus app in terms of like an audible format?
So I understand that someone is reading it now, and so it should be on the Canon Plus app.
I don't know about hardcover.
I think that is, that might happen, but they wanted to get it out now and had paperback.
Okay, great.
All right.
So here it is once more The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolf.
Pre-Order the New Book00:00:54
Thanks so much for coming on the show, Stephen.
I appreciate it.
And last thing, where can people follow you online?
I think you said you had a podcast that people can tune into.
Yeah.
I mean, with Thomas Acord and I, we do a podcast called Ours Politica.
Ours Politica.
Okay.
So we've been doing that for a couple of years.
So you can find us there.
All right.
Yep.
That's when the name of your podcast is Ours Politica, then you know that you've been working on a doctorate.
That's his idea.
Okay, we'll blame it on you.
Okay, cool.
Well, thanks again, Stephen.
I really appreciate you coming on the show.
God bless.
Thanks so much for listening.
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