NXR Podcast - THE INTERVIEW - Christian Patriotism, Mid Eva, & Voting For Trump with Backwoods Beliefs
Aired: 2024-07-08
Duration: 01:30:22


=== Wary of Bad Trajectories (12:15) ===

[00:00:00]  All right, welcome back to another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:00:02]  I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
[00:00:05]  And in this episode, I was privileged to welcome back to the show now, the second time, the co host of Backwoods Belief.
[00:00:12]  We've got Jeff and Ben.
[00:00:14]  We're going to be talking about patriotism, the fifth commandment, honoring our fathers.
[00:00:19]  We talk a little bit about abolitionism at the end of the video and some of the intramural debates back and forth between guys who would agree ultimately on being an abolitionist.
[00:00:31]  Disagree on some of the specific applications of that conviction, like voting in a presidential election.
[00:00:39]  This is a jam packed episode.
[00:00:41]  A lot of really, really just helpful, relevant topics and questions that the average Christian is thinking about.
[00:00:47]  Can I celebrate the 4th of July?
[00:00:50]  Why do people hate America?
[00:00:52]  Why is Western civilization under attack?
[00:00:54]  This war on whiteness, is it just a war on Christianity or those two distinct wars?
[00:01:00]  All of that we get into.
[00:01:01]  It's a jam packed episode for the blue collar, everyday Christian.
[00:01:07]  Political commentary, theological commentary.
[00:01:10]  It's a banger.
[00:01:11]  So buckle up and enjoy.
[00:01:14]  Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
[00:01:18]  This is Theology Applied.
[00:01:25]  All right, welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
[00:01:27]  I'm your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries.
[00:01:30]  In this episode, I am privileged to welcome back to the show one of my favorite podcasts that used to actually put out episodes, but it's been a couple months now.
[00:01:39]  They've gotten busy with Life because they're blue collar folks who are good churchmen and just good husbands, good fathers who are busy doing blue collar type things.
[00:01:50]  So they are on a hiatus with their own platform.
[00:01:53]  So I figured, you know, we might as well force them the podcast by having them here at Right Response.
[00:01:58]  So Jeff and Ben, welcome to the show.
[00:02:01]  Thank you, Joel.
[00:02:02]  Hey, thanks, Joel.
[00:02:03]  Glad to be here.
[00:02:04]  So, real quick, go ahead and plug your channel, assuming, you know, Lord willing, one day you'll hop back on there.
[00:02:11]  Yeah, so Backwoods Belief is a podcast that Jeff and I started, oh man, I don't remember how long ago, but a while back, just focused on sort of the basic backwoods Christian who isn't a part of a big city, isn't a part of a big platform, isn't a part of a big association, but is just a faithful Christian trying to make his way in the world in the United States.
[00:02:38]  And we've put out some episodes that I think have been helpful to people, and we have been lacks in our releasing of episodes recently, but I know we've both been pretty busy.
[00:02:50]  So it's been hard to find time to do it.
[00:02:52]  Nice.
[00:02:53]  Jeff, what would you say?
[00:02:54]  What do you feel like the vision of you and Ben's podcast, Backwoods Belief?
[00:03:00]  I think that Christianity thrives on the margins.
[00:03:03]  And we've been in a season where that vision has kind of been lost.
[00:03:08]  We've assumed that the way for Christianity to thrive was by making inroads with elites and, you know, in the Lord's providence and his blessing on our country, that did work for a while.
[00:03:19]  But for the ruins of Christendom to be rebuilt, it'll have to come from a vigorous margin that then returns to centers of cultural elites and power and whatnot and shows them a better way forward.
[00:03:33]  So we're just kind of owning that Christianity does really well out in the sticks and from the sticks has something to offer those in urban environments that assume that they are in the places where power is held.
[00:03:47]  Amen.
[00:03:47]  Yeah.
[00:03:48]  Yeah, it just depends where you are in history and what the Lord and His providence is doing.
[00:03:52]  And the conception of positive and neutral and negative world, I think, is helpful.
[00:03:56]  And we started off very much with a general positive view towards Christianity.
[00:04:03]  And then for a while, it was kind of like this neutral world where you didn't really gain much by being a Christian, but you didn't really get penalized for it either.
[00:04:13]  And really, for a while now, coming up on a decade, I would say probably 2015, a Burger Fell was kind of the nail in the coffin with officially being in a negative world.
[00:04:24]  And we're not saying that.
[00:04:27]  That the scenery of the United States towards Christianity is the most negative that it could be.
[00:04:36]  We're not claiming that at all, but we are saying that it has shifted to where officially, by being a biblical Orthodox Christian, you stand the promise of loss more than gain.
[00:04:48]  And that doesn't mean that there aren't faithful Christians losing more and more negative places and more hostile places.
[00:04:56]  It's not a persecution contest.
[00:04:59]  But you don't have to wait until your wife and children are beheaded to say that you're under attack and to try to do something about it.
[00:05:09]  And to say otherwise is just foolishness.
[00:05:12]  Mike Kosper, I think, didn't he say something recently about look at how bad it is in Nigeria?
[00:05:20]  But his point wasn't to have gratitude in the Lord.
[00:05:22]  His point was so let it happen here.
[00:05:25]  Stop it.
[00:05:25]  Stop defending.
[00:05:27]  Stop trying.
[00:05:28]  It's really bad in Nigeria.
[00:05:30]  And so you should do nothing until it gets that bad here.
[00:05:35]  Right.
[00:05:35]  Well, Kosper is a great example of the persecution fetish that's held by some of our elite evangelical leaders.
[00:05:44]  And I couldn't use that term more loosely, it's applied to Kosper and Christianity today.
[00:05:48]  But the thing about Kosper is he will constantly yield to whatever a pagan culture wants.
[00:05:57]  And so he actually won't ever face persecution.
[00:05:59]  He'll just be a court evangelical for whatever the spirit of the age demands.
[00:06:04]  And so it's easy for him to sit in isolation on an evangelical paycheck by people who don't understand they're paying a betrayer and say, well, you know, this isn't persecution.
[00:06:14]  Of course, Mike, you'll never experience it because there's nothing that you won't jettison that the world demands of you.
[00:06:19]  Yeah, it's really not so bad for you because you never will be.
[00:06:22]  You'll never be able to actually hold on to anything that matters.
[00:06:25]  Right.
[00:06:25]  Yeah.
[00:06:26]  I mean, he'll be in the White House wearing a dress with a leash around his neck if that's what they want from him.
[00:06:32]  That's a really good point.
[00:06:33]  All right.
[00:06:34]  So, we're going to hop into the topic here in just a second.
[00:06:37]  We're going to be discussing patriotism.
[00:06:39]  And, you know, should Christians be patriotic?
[00:06:42]  Is that a good thing, a positive thing?
[00:06:43]  And tying that to the fifth commandment and in light of Independence Day that just recently passed.
[00:06:49]  And so, we'll do that.
[00:06:50]  But, real quick, for some of our listeners, I think we might have done this last time we had you guys on.
[00:06:55]  But, Ben, you got to just, I feel like your claim to fame is Wary's Law.
[00:07:01]  Is it Wary's or Barry's?
[00:07:02]  It's a Wary's Law.
[00:07:03]  Wary's Law.
[00:07:03]  Yeah.
[00:07:04]  Right.
[00:07:05]  Not Joel Berry, but Wary.
[00:07:08]  So, what is Wary's Law?
[00:07:10]  Because it is, man, I mean, there's a lot of predictions that could be made, and you could be right, you could be wrong, but Wary's Law is batting a thousand.
[00:07:19]  It's pretty amazing.
[00:07:22]  Yeah.
[00:07:22]  So, I think it was at the beginning of this past year, I posted a tweet that basically said something along the lines of Any woman with a any conservative woman with a public platform is on a trajectory towards liberalism.
[00:07:41]  And then I have since done like a 45 minute video where I explain what I meant by that and why it's true.
[00:07:46]  But essentially, what I was arguing is that just by nature of the attempt to gain public favor, a public platform to engage in the public discourse in a particular way is in itself not a feminine thing.
[00:08:03]  And so, by virtue of doing that, no matter what you're saying, you could be saying extremely conservative things, but by virtue of engaging in that way, you are actually abandoning.
[00:08:13]  The nature that God created you for, the purpose that God created you for.
[00:08:17]  And so, you know, it's not an attack on, I hate that I even have to say things like this.
[00:08:23]  I really shouldn't, but it's not an attack on, you know, particular women like, oh, I hate these women or something like that.
[00:08:29]  It's pointing out if you engage in this way, you are already, by virtue of engaging in this way, putting yourself on a bad trajectory and it's going to end up in really bad place.
[00:08:40]  And, you know, as I've said to many of our friends, let's just wait a year and we'll.
[00:08:46]  You know, we'll see.
[00:08:46]  Right.
[00:08:47]  And they tell me about exceptions.
[00:08:48]  Exactly.
[00:08:48]  They'll say, but, you know, yeah, you might be generally right, but there are exceptions.
[00:08:52]  And then they'll name, you know, somebody like, that'll never happen with so and so.
[00:08:56]  You know, they're true, they're faithful, they're conservative.
[00:09:00]  And, yeah, you always respond by, let's wait a year.
[00:09:03]  And goodness gracious, it's disheartening, you know.
[00:09:08]  But you're right, because it really is an oxymoron.
[00:09:10]  You know, it's kind of like a jumbo shrimp.
[00:09:12]  You know, and what we're saying is not that a woman can't have conservative virtues and values, of course she can.
[00:09:18]  Of course, you can.
[00:09:20]  But it's like a fish out of water.
[00:09:23]  It's an oxymoron.
[00:09:24]  It's ironic and not in a good way that if a woman is conservative, one conservative aspect would be a biblical conservative view of gender roles.
[00:09:34]  And as we look at gender roles, according to the scripture, a woman has a quiet and gentle spirit.
[00:09:39]  So, not adoring herself with outward beauty, but an imperishable, that beauty will fade, right?
[00:09:46]  Beauty fades and charm is deceptive.
[00:09:49]  But a woman who fears the Lord is to be pleased.
[00:09:51]  And so, not this outward perishable beauty, but an imperishable beauty of the heart, which is pleasing in the sight of God, which is characterized by a gentle and quiet spirit.
[00:10:00]  And so, in public discourse, we're saying that in many ways, it's not even just the public square of this idea that we're letting the best idea win, where there's discourse between different philosophies and worldviews.
[00:10:18]  But social media, especially Twitter, Not necessarily every single platform.
[00:10:22]  Facebook is maybe a little bit more for the 65 year old grandma to see pictures of the grandkids.
[00:10:30]  There are different purposes, but Twitter, especially X, whatever, it's not really the public square.
[00:10:37]  There's guys who have said it's more so like the arena.
[00:10:41]  It's not to express ideas, but it's designed for a fight.
[00:10:48]  And so putting a woman in a context to fight.
[00:10:52]  Saying, I'm a conservative woman who holds to that women should be feminine, and I'm going to fight you until you agree with me.
[00:11:01]  It's just silly.
[00:11:04]  So it's like saying, Women are the weaker vessel, and I'm going to, if you don't agree with me, let's have a bench press competition.
[00:11:17]  Whoever wins gets to be right.
[00:11:20]  So a woman proving that she's weaker by outbenching men.
[00:11:24]  It's kind of what we did with the woke wars in like 2020, right?
[00:11:27]  You know, it's like, well, let's get, let's find a black guy and have him say, you know, the thing that, you know, the white guys are, you know, know is true, but we're afraid to say.
[00:11:37]  And so, you know, we've kind of done that with women.
[00:11:41]  And we're grateful for these women who have, you know, stood the test of time.
[00:11:44]  But really, I would say the last thing I'll say is, and you guys tell me if you disagree, but I think there are two outcomes.
[00:11:49]  One is that if there's a woman holding to, you know, this public voice and this, you know, and it's not just every now and then, but it's really a part of their MO.
[00:11:58]  It's what they do, it's their living, it's, you know, they're in the public discourse as a conservative voice, as a woman.
[00:12:07]  The two outcomes one is that it's an oxymoron and, And that inevitably they drift left and become more progressive.

=== Loving City Without Compromise (15:01) ===

[00:12:15]  The other outcome, though, is that they actually could trend right, in which case they won't continue to have a platform.
[00:12:25]  They'll become so conservative that you'd be like, What happened to so and so?
[00:12:28]  And it turns out so and so is just what happened is that she's with her kids at home.
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[00:14:46]  And that's the outcome we want.
[00:14:48]  I don't relish that my predictions have come true often.
[00:14:52]  Right, right.
[00:14:54]  Okay, well, um, Let's go ahead and hop into it.
[00:14:57]  You guys kind of frame it up for us.
[00:14:59]  What are we talking about?
[00:15:03]  Well, we wanted to talk about patriotism.
[00:15:05]  We're recording, I'm not sure what the release date is on this, but we're recording pretty close to the celebration of Independence Day.
[00:15:12]  That always raises lots of heat and sometimes not enough light in evangelical circles.
[00:15:18]  And so, pretty good time to give the right response to the need to honor our fathers appropriately without engaging in some kind of idolatry.
[00:15:30]  All right.
[00:15:32]  Well, start us off.
[00:15:34]  I mean, that frames it up, but what, you know, what's the problem?
[00:15:37]  What in evangelicalism as a whole, I'll pose it as a question.
[00:15:41]  Do you think that evangelicalism as a whole is friendly towards things like Independence Day and honoring our founders and our fathers and those, you know, are they patriotic or is that something that has disappeared?
[00:15:55]  Yeah, I think that one of the things that has happened in, I mean, the young, I'm sure we talked about this the last time we did a show together, the Young Restless Reform Movement. recognized a problem that existed, which was, you know, the Robert Jeffress kind of patriotism in church and wanted to steer away from that.
[00:16:20]  But what it ended up becoming, I think, is almost an anti American attitude.
[00:16:25]  And I mean, certainly that's true among the left wing, but even what we would think of as, excuse me, what we would think of as like right wing, you know, the young restless reform movement, sort of the new Calvinists.
[00:16:39]  they adopted a stance of hostility towards that kind of patriotism in the church.
[00:16:46]  And what that ended up being was a rejection of patriotism at all.
[00:16:50]  We're now even loving America is seen as like an unchristian, idolatrous sort of behavior.
[00:16:58]  And I think that's, we've gone off the deep end, like off the rails, because actually it's good to love your country.
[00:17:04]  It's good to be thankful to God for what your fathers have built.
[00:17:10]  To appreciate that and celebrate what was done in the past by your forefathers.
[00:17:14]  Which is so hypocritical because, I mean, how much, how often do we hear about how it's good to love your city, right?
[00:17:20]  You can, you know, in and for your city all day long and in and for the world, right?
[00:17:25]  You know, I'm a citizen of the world, kind of like a Bob Marley evangelicalism, you know, like, so I'm in and for the world because God so loved the world and that's true.
[00:17:35]  So I love all nations, all people, which is good and right and true.
[00:17:39]  And I'm in and for my city.
[00:17:41]  So it's like I'm locally.
[00:17:44]  There can be a local identity and a global identity, but there cannot be a national identity.
[00:17:51]  And well, that's not true, unless you're Jewish, you know, or really to be fair and not just pick on Israel, but like you can have a national identity so long as you're a part of any nation except for America, you know, or maybe to be a little more specific, any non Western nation.
[00:18:09]  Like you can, you know, you can have a national identity if you're a part of, You know, if you're a part of Israel or if you're a part of Palestine or if you're a part of Uganda or the Sudan or anywhere, Brazil, they can have a national identity, but Americans can't.
[00:18:23]  And in a larger scope, Europeans can't.
[00:18:26]  Do you think that's a fair assessment?
[00:18:28]  Yeah.
[00:18:29]  Yeah, I think that's it.
[00:18:30]  Absolutely.
[00:18:30]  I do.
[00:18:31]  And I mean, I'll confess that, like, I remember being a young man.
[00:18:35]  I think this name will ring a bell for people maybe who are watching.
[00:18:39]  Cassie Bernal, who was killed in the Columbine shootings.
[00:18:42]  Her dad kind of went on a, Speaking tour, and he came to my home church as a kid.
[00:18:47]  And so, service one on the Lord's Day was about Cassie and her, you know, her martyrdom, basically.
[00:18:55]  And then, service two that evening was in praise of the United States.
[00:19:00]  And I remember recoiling from it and finding it very distasteful.
[00:19:04]  So, it's not like I don't understand these dynamics from within.
[00:19:08]  I understand why the YRR kind of balked at some of that stuff.
[00:19:13]  But I also think you've hit on something there, Joel, that.
[00:19:16]  As multiculturalism became the trendy thing to embrace among coastal elites, well, lo and behold, institutional evangelicalism also became very uncomfortable with patriotism.
[00:19:34]  And it actually is now colonizing even local endeavors.
[00:19:38]  That's something backwoods belief really wants to be intentional about.
[00:19:40]  But you think about some of these projects where guys are intentionally forming local communities to cultivate Christian communities.
[00:19:48]  And now that's being seen as anathema and like a dangerous threat to society.
[00:19:52]  And so, even the option that was once there that, yeah, you could love your city.
[00:19:57]  Well, you could love your city as long as nobody there is intentionally trying to be Christian in organized fashion.
[00:20:05]  It's really becoming so.
[00:20:05]  You can love your city so long as your city hates Jesus.
[00:20:11]  You can't love a lovely city.
[00:20:14]  You can only love.
[00:20:15]  And there's something to be said for loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us.
[00:20:19]  But we do need proper theological categories.
[00:20:22]  But.
[00:20:22]  But still, the general principle is there.
[00:20:24]  Like we can love our enemies, but that was never, Jesus never said, you know, love your enemies and hate your friends.
[00:20:31]  Right?
[00:20:31]  Like, I mean, even the golden rule is to love your neighbor as you love yourself, which isn't a commandment, a moral obligation to work on self love, you know, and self care, but it's an assumption.
[00:20:42]  Jesus was assuming just a universal truth that everybody loves himself at some level.
[00:20:48]  Now, that might be misguided, misdirected, but even the person who, God forbid, commits suicide does it out of self love.
[00:20:54]  In fact, that's one of the most selfish decisions that you can make.
[00:20:57]  It's to forego all consideration for anybody but self.
[00:21:00]  And so it's, I'm so miserable and I'm in so much pain, but I love myself so much more than I love everyone else that I'm going to provide relief for myself at the cost of others.
[00:21:11]  And so my point is that Jesus is assuming in the golden rule, love your neighbor as you love yourself.
[00:21:16]  He's not saying you need to work on self love so that you can therefore love others.
[00:21:19]  No, he's saying you do love yourself, love yourself rightly in the right direction, the right ways, and then seek to love others.
[00:21:27]  In the way that you love yourself.
[00:21:28]  But that wasn't, it's not just a commandment to love your enemies only.
[00:21:34]  It's also, it's to also love your enemies with the assumption that you love yourself and you love your friends.
[00:21:42]  But now it's become, you can, like you said, Jeff, you can absolutely love your city so long as your city loves sodomites, so long as your city loves pagan idolatry.
[00:21:53]  But if your city, if you're trying to set up, for instance, a Christian city, You know, a Christian town like Ridge Runner than that town that only exists in theory before it even exists in practice.
[00:22:05]  That city, Christians should hate it before it even begins, which is just silly.
[00:22:11]  I think the suicide example is actually really appropriate because that's really what this is.
[00:22:16]  It's a kind of cultural suicide.
[00:22:20]  Like, Westerners are culturally suicidal.
[00:22:23]  They think that their culture doesn't have the right to exist, and so they're going to kill it by.
[00:22:32]  You know, various different means.
[00:22:35]  But, well, and that's the crux of the city thing.
[00:22:37]  Like, you can love your city as long as your city is constantly self consciously yielding to multiculturalism.
[00:22:43]  Right.
[00:22:44]  You know, at any point it has a distinct identity that's contrary to multiculturalism.
[00:22:48]  Well, now it's a threat to the public order.
[00:22:51]  And I mean, you mentioned Ridge Runner.
[00:22:53]  Clearly, the world has an immune system to this.
[00:22:57]  How many times has the New York Times gone after, um, Or some other kind of global news agency went after this smaller project, like you just said, that only exists in theory at this point.
[00:23:08]  But, you know, it immediately raises all the defense mechanisms and hackles that post war consensus has to bring to bear.
[00:23:17]  You know, you guys got me thinking with the multiculturalism.
[00:23:21]  You said, Jeff, that you can love your city insofar as your city is multicultural.
[00:23:27]  It's a multicultural metropolis.
[00:23:30]  And that part isn't said out loud, but that probably is instinctively, that's probably the reason behind why it is proper and permissible and even.
[00:23:40]  You know, even an obligation to love your city because cities, right?
[00:23:45]  Because it wasn't love your town.
[00:23:47]  And I think, you know, without trying to read into the phrase too much, and just for the record, you know, just the elephant in the room, we're talking about Tim Keller.
[00:23:53]  He would have been, you know, one of the leading guys with this.
[00:23:56]  And then beyond that, the Gospel Coalition, Acts 29 picked it up.
[00:24:01]  All the, I call them the Gospel Centered, Centered Gospel, Gospel Movement.
[00:24:04]  You know, so like all those guys, and we, for the record, we love Gospel Centrality and are actually Gospel Centered, which presupposes that if the Gospel's the center, there's actually something around it.
[00:24:16]  There's a difference between gospel centeredness, which is good, and then the gospel centered movement, which actually became gospel myoptic, gospel exclusivism at the point of antinomianism, a rejection of the law of God, anything that, you know.
[00:24:30]  So, anyways, all that being said, the gospel centered, you know, movement, TM, you know, gospel myopticism, those guys probably the reason why you heard in and for the city, love the city, and you never heard in and for the rural, you know, county, you know, or in and for the small towns.
[00:24:47]  Is, you know, in and for, you know, the country hillside is probably because the cities were the first places in America to embrace multiculturalism.
[00:24:57]  So, loving the city, there was a time, well, now, like the whole country is multicultural to a point that I think is unsustainable, but there was a time where the nation probably was more of a monoculture.
[00:25:12]  And that's why you shouldn't love the nation.
[00:25:14]  Whereas the city was, you know, Multicultural hub.
[00:25:19]  So you could love the city because loving the city was loving the world because the whole world had immigrated and moved to the city.
[00:25:26]  So you could love the city because loving the city was loving the world.
[00:25:29]  You couldn't love the nation because the nation would only be loving one part of the world and it happens to be the part that's oppressive and colonizing.
[00:25:39]  I mean, the closest you get to them saying it out loud is diversity is our greatest strength.
[00:25:44]  Right.
[00:25:46]  And it's funny, anybody who's visited a major metropolitan area.
[00:25:49]  Realizes that immigrants don't think this way.
[00:25:52]  We all know Chinatown.
[00:25:53]  We all know the way they, you know, these immigrants wanting to be around people that they understand organize themselves into little communities within the city.
[00:26:04]  But that, you know, the Westerner was supposed to say, Well, I love my city because look, I can go get Thai food and I can get Korean food.
[00:26:11]  We have the recipes, Jeff.
[00:26:12]  We have, you know, right.
[00:26:15]  But it was always founded on this idea that self dissolution as a people and as a culture was the.
[00:26:22]  You know, the right goal for Westerners.
[00:26:25]  You're right.
[00:26:27]  So we should love our nation, right?
[00:26:31]  Yeah, I mean, that's probably the thing we haven't said out loud.
[00:26:35]  Legitimate patriotism is an extension of the fifth commandment, right?
[00:26:39]  We've kind of referenced it, but we have received good things that are hard to come by in a fallen world from our forefathers.
[00:26:46]  We're supposed to honor not only our forefathers, but the good inheritance they've given us.
[00:26:51]  And so, patriotism, to whatever degree, It is good, and there is goodness in patriotism.
[00:26:56]  It's grounded in a command to honor your father and mother.
[00:27:01]  You think about the proverb, a righteous man leaves an inheritance for his children's children.
[00:27:07]  Well, that's what our forefathers did.
[00:27:09]  Right.
[00:27:10]  So they left, say what you want, died and bled for their children's children.

=== God's Blessing on Posterity (04:09) ===

[00:27:16]  Or I thought they did it for strangers.
[00:27:21]  Is it the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence that says that they're doing this for their progeny?
[00:27:25]  Yeah, for their posterity.
[00:27:26]  For us and our fathers.
[00:27:27]  For their posterity.
[00:27:28]  Yeah.
[00:27:32]  So, yeah, I mean, Our forefathers were righteous men in that way.
[00:27:36]  They left an inheritance to us that we have since squandered badly, which says something about us as well.
[00:27:43]  Well, that, you know, if you're going to critique our nation, I think about the resources of the continent that North America has.
[00:27:52]  You know, it could be that ingratitude is the fundamental sin of our nation, that we have been given such incredible resources and looked and said, well, those are to be despised.
[00:28:03]  You know, we want really good Thai food or whatever.
[00:28:08]  That's a really good point.
[00:28:09]  Yeah.
[00:28:10]  I mean, obviously, there's multiple reasons for the success of our nation.
[00:28:13]  Number one, the grace of God, just his providence and it being favorable according to his good pleasure.
[00:28:18]  That's what he determined, at least during this period of history.
[00:28:22]  And so, you know, God bless him.
[00:28:23]  God bless God.
[00:28:25]  Beyond that, the sovereign grace of God, it would be, I think, the distinctly, you know, Christian founding.
[00:28:31]  They could have been even more distinct.
[00:28:32]  I would have appreciated that, but it was clearly a Christian and clearly a Protestant.
[00:28:37]  Project.
[00:28:37]  And so I think obedience.
[00:28:39]  So it's God's sovereign grace, but then it's also a blessing that came in response to a particular obedience.
[00:28:46]  So I think the Christian founding of the nation.
[00:28:49]  But then, Jeff, you put your finger on another aspect.
[00:28:51]  I would say that the third biggest aspect.
[00:28:53]  So the grace of God, the obedience of our fathers.
[00:28:56]  But then, lastly, there is actually a strong geographic argument to be made that America, I mean, you look at the rest of the world and that America was.
[00:29:09]  Was really bound to succeed, unless it was just a completely wicked, you know, rebellious people that God immediately placed under his judgment.
[00:29:18]  Because with just half a brain, you know, and I think the founders had a lot more than just half a brain, but with half a brain, the rivers, the protection to the north, you've got snow.
[00:29:29]  To the south, you have, you know, with Mexico, it's not just like, oh, well, Mexico, you know, cartel and blah, blah, blah.
[00:29:36]  Yeah, they're not really a threat.
[00:29:37]  But let's say that Mexico was on its peak game.
[00:29:41]  Even with its peak game, Mexico is much smaller than the United States.
[00:29:48]  So beneath you, you don't have a continent that's larger or a country that's larger than your country to the south or even the same size, comparable.
[00:29:57]  But instead, you have this very narrow, much smaller country.
[00:30:01]  Above Canada is actually massive, but the conditions aren't sustainable to have a massive population.
[00:30:08]  And then on the west and the east, you have oceans.
[00:30:14]  You think of Just crossing a 15 mile waterway in Europe and some of the wars that took place in World War I and World War II.
[00:30:26]  And just this 15 mile wide waterway made it nearly impossible to invade another country, much less you throw the Atlantic Ocean into the mix.
[00:30:37]  And so there was protection and then all the riverways, the Mississippi, and being able, I think it's something like, I could be wrong on these numbers, but it's something around this.
[00:30:47]  This would be ballpark.
[00:30:48]  It's like 30 to 35,000 miles of navigable rivers in the whole world.
[00:30:57]  And 17,000 of those 30 to 35,000 worldwide are found in the United States.
[00:31:04]  So there's just all these incredible resources and blessings.
[00:31:10]  And we said, you know what?
[00:31:13]  Our fathers died for us to have them as their posterity, but we will give them away because at the end of the day, There's just nothing like Mexican food.

=== Hope Beyond Theological Lines (06:26) ===

[00:31:26]  You know, it's pretty.
[00:31:28]  There's an intrinsic self loathing that we've talked about this on our podcast.
[00:31:32]  It seems like so many of the groups I'm a part of have this self loathing, and it's displaced the appropriate gratitude.
[00:31:39]  You know, it is not wicked to receive an inheritance.
[00:31:42]  If it's righteous for a man to leave an inheritance, it's righteous for a man to gratefully receive one and steward.
[00:31:48]  But that's where we broke.
[00:31:49]  You know, there's a lot of criticism out there for the boomers about not wanting to leave anything for their children.
[00:31:55]  You know, as a post boomer generation, we've got to take stock of our constant signaling that we don't value anything you'll leave us.
[00:32:03]  And so, you know, there is guilt in refusing to leave an inheritance, but an ungrateful progeny that constantly tells their parents they hate them isn't exactly primed to receive an inheritance.
[00:32:14]  And that's who we are.
[00:32:16]  Well said.
[00:32:17]  Yeah.
[00:32:18]  So it was something I've said in the past, you know, 2019, I came into post millennial eschatology convictions that I really do believe.
[00:32:27]  Not necessarily in the short run, right?
[00:32:28]  Just like the stock market, there are dips along the way, but I thought that, you know, the overall trajectory was going to be up.
[00:32:35]  That Christ is king now, which post millennials are not the only ones who believe that, but with that, that Christ would usher in throughout human history in a gradual way.
[00:32:45]  He would usher in tangible physical elements of his kingdom through nations and in practical ways.
[00:32:53]  And so instead of just setting it all right at the end, we'd have this gradual, you know, the mustard seed growing into the mustard, you know, into a tree.
[00:33:00]  And so.
[00:33:02]  That's still my conviction.
[00:33:04]  I'm more convicted today than before.
[00:33:07]  But what's changed for me is recognizing that for a while there, when I was, you know, you become a Calvinist and, you know, and you have a cage stage.
[00:33:16]  And I think, you know, post millennialism might be a little bit similar.
[00:33:19]  So I think I had a bit of a cage stage where it's just like, how, you know, this is the only thing that works.
[00:33:25]  And then, you know, what changed for me was one, just seeing over the last four years that.
[00:33:32]  Post millennials can be insufferable.
[00:33:35]  And so that was a profound moment for me.
[00:33:38]  But then also seeing a lot of all millennials and even pre millennials, and not just historic, but even, you know, much to my astonishment, even some of the Dispy guys that I strongly disagree with, but seeing that, you know, go fight, win.
[00:33:52]  You know, they're like, hey, we'll be on the team.
[00:33:54]  And I was like, well, and then I'll take you.
[00:33:57]  You know, beggars can't be choosers.
[00:33:58]  I want to win, you know.
[00:33:59]  And so there's nothing more ironic than a post mill guy.
[00:34:03]  Who thinks we're going to win, sending away non post mill guys that would hurt your chances of winning?
[00:34:07]  That just seems ridiculous.
[00:34:09]  So, anyway, so all these guys saying, I think things can get better by the grace of God.
[00:34:16]  Not that He hasn't promised it, but they could if we would call upon His name and humble ourselves and repent of our sins.
[00:34:24]  Things could get better.
[00:34:25]  And so, all that being said, I realize now I don't want to be so specific and say you got to be post mill, but I do think, you guys tell me if this is fair.
[00:34:32]  I think there's two things that the evangelical has to embrace.
[00:34:36]  And I think you can do this as an Arminian or a Calvinist.
[00:34:39]  I think you don't have to be reformed.
[00:34:41]  I think you can do it as pre mill, all mill, post mill.
[00:34:44]  I think, you know, I think you could even do it as a dispensationalist, by golly.
[00:34:49]  And so here are the two things I think you have to have hope for the future and honor for our fathers.
[00:34:56]  Honor for our fathers, hope for the future.
[00:34:58]  And I think that evangelicals have been psyoped into thinking.
[00:35:01]  And I think part of it was dispensationalism.
[00:35:04]  And that's why I'm kind of hard on the theology, although there's some of the most precious people who hold to it.
[00:35:10]  But my point is I think dispensationalism was part of the psyop, but it's more than just that.
[00:35:15]  That ultimately, evangelicalism, I would say for at least the past four to seven decades in America specifically, has had the opposite when it comes to the past and when it comes to the future.
[00:35:27]  That they've had disdain for fathers and despair for the future.
[00:35:32]  Disdain for fathers and despair for the future.
[00:35:36]  And I think what we need, and again, C.A., I think you could have a lot of different theological convictions and still agree on these two things.
[00:35:44]  We're not going to have disdain for our fathers, we're going to have honor for our fathers.
[00:35:48]  And we're not going to have despair for the future.
[00:35:50]  We're going to have hope for the future.
[00:35:52]  And I think, any way you slice that theologically, I think, you know, there's a lot of different roads that can lead to Rome and where you can get behind those two positions.
[00:36:01]  And that seems to me to be the movement.
[00:36:05]  If you would ask me in 2020, I'd say it's a post millennial movement.
[00:36:08]  But, you know, but, but between COVID, it's like I'd like, I'd like to say it was all the reformed churches that stood their ground against tyranny, you know, and lockdowns and vax, man.
[00:36:17]  But it wasn't, man.
[00:36:18]  Calvary Chapel guys made us look dumb.
[00:36:21]  So, a bunch of Arminians had more spine than, partly because the Calvinist movement attracts that theology.
[00:36:29]  I think it's right, but it attracts pencil necks, it attracts bean counters, and bean counters don't have a lot of spine.
[00:36:38]  So, the Calvinists actually did, they had the theological framework to take the right action, but in terms of the actual men in that movement at the top in positions of leadership, they were some of the most spineless, feckless men.
[00:36:53]  You could possibly imagine.
[00:36:54]  So, not only did they not do better than other theological camps, they were some of the worst.
[00:37:00]  So, all that being said, I'm trying to put my ecumenical hat on.
[00:37:05]  And I think the movement that's growing, this new right or Christian nationalism, not everybody likes that.
[00:37:12]  Whether it's a mere Christendom or Christian nationalism or the dissident right or whatever you want to call it.
[00:37:19]  But what I've realized is it's more than just reformed, it has some charismatics in there.
[00:37:24]  God bless them.
[00:37:26]  I disagree on some things, but.
[00:37:29]  It's not just these clear cookie cutter theological lines of cessationism, versus, it's the charismatics are on the team, dispies are on the team, pre mill and all mill is on the team.
[00:37:41]  So then, what is the team?
[00:37:42]  And if I had to define it as simply as possible with two things the team is guys who don't hate our past and have hope for our future.
[00:37:51]  That's the team.

=== Two Kingdoms and Revival (17:06) ===

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[00:39:25]  The danger of centralized power is often represented by the word king.
[00:39:30]  As Americans, we hate the word king.
[00:39:33]  Civilian ownership of body armor is about helping people to have increased power to resist tyrants and criminals.
[00:39:41]  And so Armored Republic is about helping you to preserve your God-given rights to the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ because he is the King of Kings and he governs kings and he will judge them.
[00:39:54]  This is Armored Republic and in a republic there is no king but Christ.
[00:40:00]  We are free craftsmen and we are honored to be your armor spread of choice.
[00:40:18]  I think too, I agree with all of that.
[00:40:21]  But I think also another element is just the ability to think in political categories and not necessarily just theological categories.
[00:40:30]  I was just listening to Andrew and CJ on their podcast earlier today, and they were talking about this thing.
[00:40:36]  And man, they were so right.
[00:40:41]  There are a lot of positive things about the sort of 20th century theonomist crowd that they get a lot right.
[00:40:48]  Things that I see a struggle with is just an incapability or an unwillingness to think in political categories or in political terms.
[00:40:57]  Like what we're trying to accomplish for the nation is a political, like we're looking for a political answer to a problem, to a political problem.
[00:41:08]  So, yeah, you know, the worship as warfare thing is a good sentiment, but it doesn't actually accomplish political goals.
[00:41:16]  And it can't accomplish political goals because God didn't create.
[00:41:20]  The church, too, bear the sword.
[00:41:23]  The church has the keys of the kingdom.
[00:41:25]  The state has the sword.
[00:41:27]  And those two, while they talk to one another, they're never mixed with each other.
[00:41:33]  And so that's something that the two kingdoms guys, like the radical Westminster West two kingdoms guys, take that to an extreme.
[00:41:41]  But we do need to recognize there is a distinction between these two ways in which Christ rules, one being the kingdom, the keys of the kingdom in the church, and one being the civil powers that he has given authority.
[00:41:55]  And I think when we're talking about civil problems, we have to be thinking in political terms to an extent.
[00:42:01]  And an unwillingness to do that leads you to, like, I don't remember how to pronounce his last name, so I'm just going to butcher it.
[00:42:09]  Scott Enneel today, I think, tweeted about, you know, Stephen said in his talk, his one talk at the New Christendom Press Conference, he said, you know, we don't have any place that's our own besides America, talking about wasps.
[00:42:27]  And Scott posted it and was like, well, that's not true.
[00:42:30]  We have, you know, a heavenly kingdom.
[00:42:33]  Well, yeah, but that's clearly not what he's talking about.
[00:42:35]  He's talking about a political problem, which is where does this people live?
[00:42:40]  Where is their home on this earth?
[00:42:41]  I don't have any food or clothing.
[00:42:43]  We'll be there and well fed.
[00:42:45]  Yeah, right.
[00:42:45]  Be blessed and get off the bread of life.
[00:42:48]  Right.
[00:42:48]  Yeah, go.
[00:42:49]  Get out of here.
[00:42:51]  Yeah.
[00:42:52]  That's not a helpful answer to a problem that is not a spiritual, not entirely, I'll say, a spiritual problem.
[00:42:59]  Because obviously there are spiritual aspects to the problem of.
[00:43:02]  What's happening to the United States of America.
[00:43:04]  But largely, it's a political problem as well.
[00:43:06]  And you're not going to answer a political problem with a purely, you know, spiritual pie in the sky kind of answer.
[00:43:14]  Hopefully, that all makes sense.
[00:43:16]  Well, and we're even just bizarre as a generation to think that political categories have to be antithetical to theological categories.
[00:43:25]  That's not what the Reformed tradition thought.
[00:43:28]  It's not what our actual enemies think.
[00:43:31]  Materialists don't think that political goals can be separable from spiritual.
[00:43:35]  I mean, Who do the materialists hate?
[00:43:38]  They hate Christians and they want to see Christian influence driven from society.
[00:43:42]  You know, there's that famous example of Mark's collaborator who said, Who do you hate most?
[00:43:47]  And he said, Spurgeon.
[00:43:48]  These guys know.
[00:43:49]  You know, you talk to some of the Hindus online, they know Christianity is in their way.
[00:43:56]  But for some reason, we're the only people who tend to think that politics has to be pitted against theology.
[00:44:02]  And it's, I mean, we're just historically disconnected from any, not just Christian group.
[00:44:08]  Thinking that way, but basically every other ideology out there, they all know there's a spiritual component, even the ones who would deny spiritual reality.
[00:44:15]  Right.
[00:44:16]  No, that's a great point.
[00:44:17]  And what you were saying, Ben, about the, you know, the Reconstructionists.
[00:44:21]  So for the listener, if that's a new term, it's the Theonomy guys, the guys, you know, Theonomy being God's law.
[00:44:29]  And so some of the, so I would identify as a general equity Theonomist, but I would break on some issues from some of the OG Theonomist guys that were known as the Reconstructionists.
[00:44:41]  So that'd be, you know, guys like Rush Dooney or Greg Bonson or Gary North.
[00:44:46]  Those guys, to be fair to them, and you said this, Ben, they got a lot right.
[00:44:51]  And honestly, they also got separation of church and state right.
[00:44:54]  Now, they would have been more of an Abraham Kuyper, you know, a Kuyperian persuasion.
[00:44:59]  So they would have referred to that concept with like a framework of spheres rather than kingdoms.
[00:45:05]  And so instead of, you know, the sacred and the secular, a common kingdom, and that kind of being the church and state respectively, that's an oversimplification.
[00:45:14]  But, you know, state, civil kind of things are common.
[00:45:18]  Common things.
[00:45:19]  And to be fair to the reformed two kingdom, the classical two kingdom guy, not the retarded two kingdom, you know, Westminster, but the true two kingdom guy, a guy like Stephen Wolfe, he would say Christ is ruling now, even as an all millennial.
[00:45:32]  He would absolutely affirm that he's ruling now.
[00:45:35]  He's ruling here.
[00:45:36]  And he is ruling.
[00:45:38]  There are two kingdoms, and he's the king of both of them.
[00:45:40]  But he is ruling in different ways.
[00:45:42]  In these two kingdoms, he rules through different means.
[00:45:45]  He's king still of both of them, but he has different means of executing his kingly.
[00:45:52]  Rule in these two kingdoms.
[00:45:54]  The common one being, you know, state would be, you know, one of the big examples there, and the sacred one being the church.
[00:46:00]  And so, all that being said, the Reconstructionists, they had those categories too.
[00:46:04]  They would have called them spheres, you know, referred to them as spheres more than kingdoms necessarily.
[00:46:10]  But this is where I think they were wrong they were insistent, relentlessly insistent, that they recognize there's two spheres the church and gospel preaching, word and sacrament, and then there's, you know, the state.
[00:46:25]  And they recognize that the state, Has to legislate morality.
[00:46:29]  It has to bear the sword.
[00:46:30]  It needs laws.
[00:46:32]  There's voting.
[00:46:33]  They knew that and they talked about it all the time.
[00:46:36]  But here's the deal they thought that the only way that that could really get better is with a 50% majority plus one regenerate hearts.
[00:46:45]  So they thought that they did see a distinction between the, they would have said spheres instead of kingdoms, but the church and the state.
[00:46:53]  But they thought that the church's task, they didn't see these as two tasks.
[00:46:58]  To be simultaneously pursued.
[00:47:01]  They saw it as step one, step two, that the church had to complete its task first.
[00:47:06]  So God would have to send revival.
[00:47:09]  And then, if there was enough revival and out of that enough regeneration, then we could elect our way into righteous laws in the civil sphere.
[00:47:21]  And with that, a lot of them actually had kind of, you know, so step one, you can't do it both at the same time.
[00:47:28]  Pursuing word and sacrament with the church and also pursuing righteous laws with the state.
[00:47:33]  You can pursue them, and they did, to be fair to them.
[00:47:35]  They did pursue it, but they didn't think it would be ultimately successful until the church was substantially more successful in its role, God sending revival.
[00:47:45]  And they also thought that God would have to send revival through the church, and he would also have to kind of so, like, bringing up the church with regenerate hearts, gospel preaching, revival, that kind of stuff.
[00:47:58]  And simultaneously, he would have to bring down, but in a spiritual, Supernatural sense, bring down the state.
[00:48:04]  So, a lot of them were actually looking to.
[00:48:05]  You can read about this.
[00:48:07]  They put a lot of stock in Y2K.
[00:48:09]  You remember that?
[00:48:10]  They were really like, the only way this is going to happen is one revival through the church, more regenerate hearts.
[00:48:16]  We have to have a majority population of Christians.
[00:48:19]  You can't do it with a minority.
[00:48:21]  It must be a bottom up, grassroots restoration of the country.
[00:48:26]  So it's got to be bottom up.
[00:48:28]  It'll never be top down.
[00:48:29]  Whereas it's like, well, but less than 3% of the population was LGBT.
[00:48:34]  And in 40 years, they organized, they were vigilant, and they replaced the literal American flag with a rainbow.
[00:48:41]  In 40 years, they didn't have a majority.
[00:48:43]  They didn't wait for a majority.
[00:48:44]  And so.
[00:48:45]  Anyway, so they thought, you know, the church has to be successful in a supernatural sense.
[00:48:49]  God has to send revival.
[00:48:51]  And then also the state has to be supernaturally unsuccessful.
[00:48:55]  You need some kind of apocalypse scenario, like Y2K or whatever, and for the state to be disrupted.
[00:49:03]  But if the state is disrupted over here and Christians have been preaching faithfully over there, and you got 51% of the population being Christian, and they also happen to be, you know, as good Christians, they happen to be preppers.
[00:49:18]  You know, and homesteaders that then and only then will America change.
[00:49:22]  And we would just say so, so to be fair, they did have the distinction of church and state.
[00:49:28]  Um, but we would just say, no, that distinction of church that that's good.
[00:49:32]  Um, but but by God's grace, we could actually have a this is what's crazy.
[00:49:37]  We could have, and I know it sounds like blasphemy to some of the the Anabaptist type guys, but we could have a Christian nation in the political sphere, uh, long before we had a distinctly Christian revival.
[00:49:51]  In the church and spiritual sphere, we could actually have a Christian nation long before it could be 40 years after we officially had a Christian nation with Christian laws and adopting, for instance, the Apostles' Creed as a preamble to the Constitution.
[00:50:05]  You could have a Christian nation truly in terms of legislation and the judicial systems and all this kind of stuff.
[00:50:13]  A Christian nation 40 years before actually having half of the population being actual Christians in the true regenerate eternal sense.
[00:50:23]  It's like, well, where in the heck are you getting that from, Joel?
[00:50:26]  Well, history, Constantine, Alfred, you know, but then also the Bible, right?
[00:50:30]  Like it's not like Israel was like, you know what, we have preachers who've been preaching the gospel faithfully, and we've now achieved 51% of the population of Israel is now officially regenerate and loves the Lord.
[00:50:44]  And because of that, now we will see to it that we get a good king.
[00:50:47]  No, you have a bunch of idolaters.
[00:50:50]  Then Josiah comes in and says, you know what, I'm not going to wait for your hearts to change.
[00:50:55]  God will or will not do that as he sees fit according to his sovereignty.
[00:51:00]  But even if you're wicked internally at the level of the heart, externally, especially in public, the Molech sacrifice will stop immediately.
[00:51:14]  The high places will come down.
[00:51:16]  And that's, I think, the stuff that Stephen Wolfe talks about.
[00:51:20]  That's the stuff where mid Eva loses its mind.
[00:51:23]  Owen Strand cannot comprehend that concept.
[00:51:28]  He's like, cannot compute.
[00:51:30]  It just makes him crazy.
[00:51:32]  You think about like the king of Nineveh, Jonah shows up and he's like, all right, guys, we're all going to repent now.
[00:51:38]  And they did.
[00:51:39]  Like the nation did.
[00:51:41]  So you don't need, now, some might argue that's a national revival, but I think it was more of the king said, we're going to do this, so we're going to do it.
[00:51:49]  Well, and Ben, that's the thing.
[00:51:51]  There can be catastrophic revival or you catastrophic to use Tolkien's category.
[00:51:56]  There can be.
[00:51:57]  Absolutely can be.
[00:51:58]  But the thing that's been jettisoned is that the law teaches, the law restrains evil so good can flourish.
[00:52:05]  And it teaches people what is good.
[00:52:06]  You said, you know, the government can enforce morality.
[00:52:09]  That's all it can do.
[00:52:11]  It can only say this is good and that's bad.
[00:52:14]  So it's easy to look at our own country, right?
[00:52:16]  When there are blue laws for Sunday, Christianity does a little bit better because people have this sort of enforced honoring of the Lord's Day.
[00:52:27]  A burger fail comes in and it teaches people no, you know, sodomy is normal, it's completely acceptable.
[00:52:34]  And you have San Francisco's Pride Parade this year where people are performing oral sex in the street.
[00:52:39]  The law teaches.
[00:52:40]  And it's bizarre to me to watch evangelicals forget and even like have a visceral hostility towards the idea that one of the things God ordains the state to do through the sword is to teach people what is good.
[00:52:53]  And it actually does shape a people to be more virtuous, to have categories of virtue, or to be less virtuous and to repudiate virtue.
[00:53:03]  So, again, we're just such a weird people historically as evangelicals in this generation.
[00:53:08]  We're untethered.
[00:53:09]  Yeah, no Christian thought the way that.
[00:53:11]  Post war Western Christians think today.
[00:53:14]  But you're absolutely right, Jeff.
[00:53:16]  The role of the state is to reward the righteous, punish the evildoer, to bear the sword.
[00:53:22]  But that punishment is not only punishment, but a good, righteous civil magistrate also, what makes him good is he is accurately reflecting in his earthly legislation, in political terms, it's accurately reflecting God's eternal moral standards.
[00:53:40]  And so, insofar as he legislates righteously and then enforces that legislation with With righteous penalties, appropriate penalties for those who do evil.
[00:53:50]  He's not only restraining outward expressions of evil among the populace, but he is also instructing, not only restraining, but instructing and teaching.
[00:54:04]  And that's why I said that we could have a Christian nation in terms of our laws and these kinds of things 40 years before.
[00:54:14]  And I was being intentional in saying that because I don't think we would have a Christian nation indefinitely.
[00:54:20]  Without having a truly regenerate Christian populace, I think that the Christian nation, what it would inevitably produce is a regenerate people because what it would do is it would be a constant reminder.
[00:54:35]  You'd have two preachers.
[00:54:36]  You'd have the church preaching, but then you would have the Christian prince, and in our case, with an American system, like Christian princes, plural, many of them, and they too would be preaching rightly within their sphere, not administering the sacraments or, you know, or.
[00:54:53]  Preaching a sermon per se, but they would be preaching God's law.

=== Christian Princes in Their Sphere (06:23) ===

[00:54:59]  And what the law of God does is it functions as a mirror.
[00:55:02]  It reveals to us the holiness of God and by way of consequence, our sinfulness and our need for a savior.
[00:55:07]  So, like a righteous civil magistrate would be revealing to the general population that they're evil.
[00:55:13]  Even those who don't commit crimes, but have the desire inwardly to commit those crimes, and the only thing that restrains them is the threat of punishment, but they know in their hearts that they do want to break the law, that they do want to steal, they do.
[00:55:26]  And it would be constantly reinforcing righteous laws, would be reinforcing in their hearts and minds that they are not a righteous people, and therefore they need the perfect righteousness of Christ, which is received by grace through faith.
[00:55:38]  And many of them would go to church, they'd end up going to church.
[00:55:42]  And so it's just this is what God, we always ask, What could God do?
[00:55:49]  Well, God could send revival.
[00:55:52]  It just happens one day.
[00:55:53]  God could.
[00:55:55]  But I think a more helpful question.
[00:55:57]  Is not what can God do, but what has God done?
[00:56:01]  And historically, for the last 2,000 years and biblically, as you see with Israel for a millennia and a half, what God has done, if we were to actually, it's not just, well, every now and then.
[00:56:15]  No, the majority of the time, if we were to put statistics on it, percentages, it is far more common that you see biblically and historically top down revival than you see bottom up revival.
[00:56:33]  You we have far more examples certainly in the Old Testament of the Christian prince coming in when the people are actually far, their hearts are far from the Lord.
[00:56:44]  But the Christian prince comes in, and then the hearts of the people eventually catch up and follow.
[00:56:49]  You see that example actually far more than you see the people, um, coming to the Lord within their hearts and then you know, uh, uh, getting better rulers in the civil realm.
[00:57:02]  Well, you're getting at how unquestioning we are about the principles of democracy, we've just assumed that the The world is organized according to democratic principles.
[00:57:11]  And that's it, you know, this is kind of something I wanted to come back to that you laid out with your two principles of sort of having hope for the future and honor for your fathers.
[00:57:22]  You know, ultimately, what we're talking about with patriotism and even sort of civics is an assault on patriarchy.
[00:57:28]  You know, it ultimately comes down to father rule.
[00:57:33]  But we have assumed democratic principles.
[00:57:36]  And then just quickly contrast that with what you laid out there and sort of that historical sketch.
[00:57:40]  You know, and what you're proposing, what we saw for a time in America, we saw for a time in Britain, is that the sword of a just ruler is actually a plow.
[00:57:49]  It makes the soil tender for the planting of the gospel.
[00:57:55]  You know, and so we all sort of look forward to that day when the swords will be beaten into plowshares.
[00:58:00]  A just civic ruler helps do that, it makes the ground tender for the reception of the seed of the gospel.
[00:58:07]  But again, we just, because we've assumed democratic principles all the way up, We forget these things intentionally and we come to despise the thought of them in a way that is historically very aberrant.
[00:58:21]  That's good.
[00:58:23]  The sword functions also as a plow.
[00:58:26]  I will steal that, Jeff.
[00:58:30]  I was thinking of the example we used earlier of Constantine.
[00:58:36]  And I think this is a great example of what you're talking about, Joel.
[00:58:39]  Like when Constantine said, we're all Christians now, it's not as though everybody suddenly became regenerate.
[00:58:44]  Right.
[00:58:45]  We're not saying that.
[00:58:46]  That society developed into a society where many regenerate people came out of it because they were being discipled, because they were being catechized, because they were surrounded by a culture that was focused on Jesus Christ.
[00:58:58]  You couldn't avoid it.
[00:59:00]  And so, certainly, more people became Christian as a result of that than if they had remained a pagan nation, a pagan empire.
[00:59:06]  Like, that's certainly the case.
[00:59:09]  And, you know, I'm not being non reformed because I believe God uses means, and that was one of the means he used.
[00:59:15]  But, yeah, I mean, it's so obvious and so clear from history that that's what happens.
[00:59:21]  It's just abnormal that we think that that can't happen.
[00:59:26]  So then, why?
[00:59:27]  Let's get to the heart of it here.
[00:59:28]  And we'll admit that this would be speculation.
[00:59:31]  Speculation, I think, can be helpful as long as it's named for what it is.
[00:59:35]  And there's acknowledgement that this is not definitive.
[00:59:40]  But my question is this everything that we've just said seems so obvious.
[00:59:46]  So then, why in 2024, when they're chopping off.
[00:59:51]  The genitals of children.
[00:59:54]  Why would church leaders in 2024 publicly counter signal Christian culture?
[01:00:03]  Could you imagine?
[01:00:03]  Can you imagine being a Christian leader and counter signaling Christian culture in our current moment in history?
[01:00:15]  For me, it's like, couldn't it be me?
[01:00:18]  That's insane.
[01:00:19]  I mean, it's absolutely insane.
[01:00:21]  So imagine that.
[01:00:22]  And how fast the Overton window has moved.
[01:00:25]  Um, you know, from a burger fell and all these things, and so it's like you got BLM riots and burning down the country, you've got lockdowns with you know, with COVID, you've got um, you've got drag queen story hour, you've got the transgender madness with minors, and and then and then you're a Christian leader or even a Christian pastor, and and you have a platform that reaches thousands of people, and you think you know what time it is,
[01:00:54]  it's time to tell people incessantly that Christian culture.
[01:00:59]  Would actually be worse.
[01:01:03]  Walk me through that.
[01:01:04]  What has to happen to someone to think that?
[01:01:08]  I have a thought on that.
[01:01:09]  And that is Stephen Wolf tweeted out a while ago in a gynocracy, the categories of ethics are not good and evil, they are safe and scary.
[01:01:20]  And Christian nationalism is really scary.

=== Safetyism Is Scary (05:11) ===

[01:01:22]  Well, safetyism, man, that's such a perfect encapsulation.
[01:01:27]  And again, women are made with glorious category distinctions from men.
[01:01:32]  But society cannot inherently in a fallen world be safe.
[01:01:37]  There has to be antagonism.
[01:01:39]  There has to be agony and conflict.
[01:01:42]  And so once you do have sort of, I mean, I see this as a Southern Baptist.
[01:01:46]  We constantly cater to the feminine perspective.
[01:01:49]  And so once safety becomes the idol, safety becomes the God of the system, men, particularly men who are willing to acknowledge and oppose evil, that is a very unsafe occupation.
[01:02:06]  Dynamic, right?
[01:02:08]  It represents something that is unsafe.
[01:02:11]  But if safety is the high good, it can't ultimately work that way.
[01:02:15]  But there's this time where you feel like, well, anything that's dangerous, we can just tamp down.
[01:02:20]  And it only really works with Westerners because we have this Christian ethic.
[01:02:26]  Eastern societies don't value safety the way that we do.
[01:02:31]  And so they're happy to kind of fill that vacuum with, if not violence, at least aggression.
[01:02:38]  Which again feels very unsafe, but they're happy to take advantage of a playing field where opponents have been emasculated and taken off the field who would oppose them because they were told that aggression, ambition, and conflict are, well, that just can't be part of a civil society.
[01:02:56]  That's a really good point.
[01:02:57]  It makes me think of, it's a silly thought, but this is how I think.
[01:03:03]  It makes me think of Bruce Wayne and, you know, I like, You know, his parents, you know, and the infamous scene, you know, of them getting mugged outside of the theater, you know, and it's the mother, you know, who's just give him what he wants.
[01:03:19]  Just give, you know, the thief what he wants so that he'll leave us alone.
[01:03:22]  And that's kind of the sentiment you see, like, videos of elderly old women in France, you know, a few months back, you know, like just kowtowing to violent young men who hate their country and hate their heritage.
[01:03:39]  And, You know, when there were mobs and things like that in the street, you know, and you don't see, you know, the native French people rising up.
[01:03:52]  You see them bowing down.
[01:03:54]  And it's not because they think it's good, right?
[01:03:57]  They'll say that because of the same thing, C point A, right?
[01:04:00]  It would be unsafe to publicly say that you think this is bad.
[01:04:05]  But in their heart of hearts, they absolutely know that it's bad.
[01:04:09]  But they think that if they concede, it'll simply go away.
[01:04:12]  And so, the same way that statistically, it would be the woman who, if she's held at gunpoint, she would be the one who would be.
[01:04:23]  More likely to give the assailant what they want, thinking that if I just give them what they want, they'll go away.
[01:04:30]  And so that safety reflex that is uniquely feminine, it is in general more feminine than it is masculine.
[01:04:40]  So it's like just concede.
[01:04:43]  It's not even saying this is right, it's just saying to concede to this thing, which is actually wrong, is safe.
[01:04:51]  So concession is safe.
[01:04:53]  Um, not that it's right, but it's safe, and so then you know the question is just at that point, just who's in charge, you know?
[01:05:00]  So, if women are in charge, then you're going to see there's going to be constantly a push towards conceding.
[01:05:08]  And if men are in charge, you know, and the enemy's at the gates, and they say, You know, you've got to bring out your firstborn, and we're gonna mutilate their genitals, you know, and if you don't, then we're gonna do something even worse.
[01:05:23]  Well, if men are in charge, they say, Well, Okay, sounds like I'm going to have to kill you.
[01:05:31]  And if women are in charge, they say, well, sounds like our firstborn's going to lose their genitals.
[01:05:38]  That's just the difference between men and women.
[01:05:41]  Well, and that was the rhetorical play for the pro trans movement, right?
[01:05:47]  Would you rather your kid be mutilated or commit suicide?
[01:05:50]  Because you won't let them be their authentic self.
[01:05:52]  And who did that appeal to?
[01:05:53]  Right.
[01:05:54]  The feminine instinct is it'd be better to have the child mutilated.
[01:05:59]  Than to risk the danger of losing the life.
[01:06:04]  Again, these are corrupt aspects of what's uniquely glorious about a woman.
[01:06:09]  She is supposed to create a safe domain for her family, but it comes within the umbrella of a father who draws the kind of boundaries and guards them that that kind of safety for her family can exist in.
[01:06:22]  But once it's taken out of that context and becomes the guiding principle of society, it just yields the conflict to the people who are still willing to be violent.
[01:06:32]  Yeah, that's good.

=== Defining Christian Adjacent (12:31) ===

[01:06:34]  Yeah, that's it.
[01:06:34]  I mean, that's, I think that's it.
[01:06:36]  So you answered the question again.
[01:06:38]  Like I said, the disclaimer is this is speculation, but we're trying to answer a question that, you know, it's, we're not just being mean.
[01:06:45]  It's an important question.
[01:06:46]  Why is the church, our leaders in the church, saying things like Christian culture is bad?
[01:06:58]  I mean, that is just an asinine statement, you know, and so what, why, why would, you know, what, What's behind that?
[01:07:04]  And we're saying, well, maybe it's because these Christian leaders, even if they're men, they're beholden to women, that in an informal sense, and sadly it's becoming formal, but in an informal sense, women have been at the helm of evangelicalism for a while now.
[01:07:21]  Right?
[01:07:22]  Let me throw another possibility out there, which is we started this episode talking about patriotism and the sort of anti American attitude that a lot of the sort of young, restless reformed, our generation of guys has had.
[01:07:39]  And what if the disdain for a Christian nation is actually a disdain for Western culture?
[01:07:52]  And Western culture is Christian.
[01:07:55]  And these people are so against Western culture that they hate Christianity.
[01:08:03]  So some people might say I'm getting this backwards, that they hate Western culture because it is Christian.
[01:08:08]  And I'm saying what if they hate Christianity so much because they really hate European Western culture and have been taught that it is an oppressive, evil regime?
[01:08:18]  And so they need to reject any kind of culture that looks like that, which would be a Christian culture.
[01:08:24]  I'm just throwing this idea out here.
[01:08:26]  No, I agree.
[01:08:27]  I've said for a while now, as that conversation has been happening publicly with guys who I would consider to be friends, the guys who are not enemies by any stretch.
[01:08:39]  But there has been kind of an intramural debate in terms of.
[01:08:44]  Is it a war on Christianity and therefore a war on whiteness, a war on Western civilization?
[01:08:53]  Or is it what I would say is, and you're proposing the other way around.
[01:08:59]  My proposal is I just think there are two wars, and I think it's important.
[01:09:04]  I think it's a difference that matters.
[01:09:07]  I think there are two wars.
[01:09:08]  There really is a war on whiteness, on Europeans, and then there's a war on Christianity.
[01:09:14]  So I don't think it's just one circle, there's a war on Christianity.
[01:09:17]  And that happens to affect Westerners most because they come from a Christian heritage.
[01:09:22]  No, I think there's two wars there's a war on white people and there's a war on Christian people.
[01:09:27]  And it's not just one circle, it's a Venn diagram.
[01:09:29]  And there is, I admit, a ton of overlap there, but they are two distinct circles with, I'd say, probably a 90%, you know, 85, 90% overlap, but still some level of distinction.
[01:09:41]  The reason why I think here's just one case study.
[01:09:44]  This isn't the only reason, but just as an example for why that distinction matters.
[01:09:49]  Because you have to do something with the virtually universal hatred of Israel, the modern nation state of Israel.
[01:09:57]  And so, if it is just because they hate Christ, then you start getting the rhetoric of, like, well, it's because Israel has a whiff of Christ, right?
[01:10:05]  Because their Torah observance is, you know, it's.
[01:10:09]  So then you have to start carving out this position that Israel is Christian adjacent.
[01:10:13]  Yes, we recognize, you know, that there's no salvation apart from, you know, by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone.
[01:10:18]  So, we're not going to go so far.
[01:10:19]  We're not going to, you know, Be heretics, you know, and say that Israel, you know, can has a second path to salvation some other way besides Christ.
[01:10:27]  We're not, you know, we know better than that.
[01:10:28]  We're not doing that.
[01:10:29]  And praise God, you know, none of our friends are doing that.
[01:10:33]  But we will say that although they are not Christian, it's not just believer and unbeliever, light and darkness, of which there's no fellowship, but there actually is this third category there's light and light.
[01:10:44]  There's light, there's darkness, and then there's light adjacent.
[01:10:47]  There's Christian, there's unbeliever, and there's Christian adjacent.
[01:10:51]  And so, you know, Israel is receiving so much.
[01:10:54]  Hostility from so much of the world because, again, if you only have one war, if you don't have a war on whiteness and a war on Christianity, and it's a Venn diagram, and yes, there's a lot of overlap, but it is two distinct wars.
[01:11:07]  If you reject that paradigm, you say, no, it's just a war on Christianity, and that happens by way of consequence to predominantly affect white people because of their Christian heritage.
[01:11:17]  If you go that route, one of the reasons why I think this is a difference that matters is because then you have to, and there's other examples that be given, but Just using Israel as one example, you therefore have to rope Israel into the war on Israel, is the war on Christians.
[01:11:34]  Whereas I would say, no, Israel is not Christian adjacent.
[01:11:37]  In fact, out of every major world religion, we could find some sects and niche cults.
[01:11:43]  But in terms of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, every single major world religion outside of Christianity still has a fairly fond view of Jesus.
[01:11:56]  They deny his divinity, and therefore it is blasphemy, therefore it is heresy, and it will send you to hell.
[01:12:02]  But Muslims think Jesus was pretty good.
[01:12:05]  Buddhists think he was pretty good.
[01:12:06]  Hindus think he was pretty good.
[01:12:08]  Talmudic Judaism is uniquely hostile towards Jesus out of every major world religion.
[01:12:14]  And it's not even close.
[01:12:14]  So, not only are they not Christian adjacent, if anything, and I'm happy to just categorize them as a false major world religion that hates Jesus just like Islam and everything.
[01:12:25]  But if I was to be technical, not only would they not be Christian adjacent, they would be the farthest from Christians and then there's enemies of Christ.
[01:12:35]  And then over here, even more animosity towards Christ is Talmudic Judaism.
[01:12:42]  In a category all its own.
[01:12:43]  So, not only is it not Christian adjacent, it is.
[01:12:46]  So, I'm happy with just two categories, light and darkness.
[01:12:49]  But if we, you know, this idea of light, darkness, and light adjacent, well, if you want to go that route, then that kind of tempts me.
[01:12:55]  It's my personality to say, well, no, really, there's light, there's darkness, and then there's pitch black darkness, you know, and that would be Israel.
[01:13:05]  And so, all that being said, my point is just to say, I think that it does matter to say it's two distinct wars one on whiteness, one on Christianity.
[01:13:14]  And yes, a lot of overlap.
[01:13:16]  Because then what you can say is that the war on Israel, I would say the war on Israel, people's hostility towards Israel is not because Israel has a whiff of Christ and they lump them in the Christian category.
[01:13:26]  I think it's because they have a whiff of whiteness and they get lumped in the white category.
[01:13:30]  And the reason why they have a whiff of whiteness is not because of a lighter skin pigment.
[01:13:35]  That's not what I'm saying.
[01:13:36]  Not in terms of their physical, the way they look.
[01:13:41]  But what I'm saying is they get roped into.
[01:13:45]  The war on whiteness, because in their context in the Middle East, it's a Marxist paradigm, a neo Marxist paradigm of oppressors and oppressed.
[01:13:57]  So Palestine is good.
[01:14:00]  Why?
[01:14:00]  Because Palestine is Muslim and Israel's good because Israel's Christian ish.
[01:14:05]  No, Palestine's good because they're poor and weaker and have less stuff.
[01:14:12]  And Israel is bad because they're richer and have more bombs and more, you know, and.
[01:14:19]  It's because they are the white guy.
[01:14:22]  They're the white guy.
[01:14:23]  They're Western.
[01:14:24]  So I would say that Israel, if I pose it like this as a question, what do you think is more plausible?
[01:14:29]  Israel, Talmudic Judaism being Christian adjacent, or the nation state of Israel being Western adjacent?
[01:14:37]  Come on.
[01:14:39]  You guys think I'm crazy?
[01:14:40]  What do you think, Jeff?
[01:14:42]  Well, there's a credibility to it in the way that Asians are now kind of roped into the whiteness by the woke, and you're white adjacent, and you've had cultural success, and therefore you're kind of the Oppressor, also, and that paradigm makes sense of real world dynamics that we're watching play out.
[01:15:03]  And, you know, I think part of the reason that the narrative of like Christianity adjacent Israel is credible in some minds among evangelicals is that we have read the Old Testament, we've read the New Testament, we see the way that Paul honors his heritage, but we have not read, you know, the further developments that you're talking about, where like Jesus is in hell being boiled in filth because of his blasphemies.
[01:15:30]  We've not read post Second Temple Judaism.
[01:15:34]  And so it seems like, well, you know, we kind of want to be with Paul, not realizing where the tradition went.
[01:15:40]  That's a great point because people, the average evangelical thinks that Judaism is the Bible minus the New Testament.
[01:15:47]  So they think the problem, and they'll admit it's a problem, and it's a big enough problem to where you will go to hell.
[01:15:53]  There's no salvation apart from Christ.
[01:15:55]  And so they rightly recognize that.
[01:15:57]  But they think that the difference between Judaism and Christianity is that they have, that, that, that, That they're half of the Christian religion because they have half of the Bible.
[01:16:06]  They have the Old Testament and we have the New.
[01:16:09]  But what they don't realize is that our New Testament is not just that we have two parts of the Bible, right?
[01:16:13]  We're not Andy Stanley.
[01:16:14]  We're not, you know, unhitching.
[01:16:16]  We view the New Testament as, in many ways, it's the lens by which we read the Old Testament.
[01:16:24]  It doesn't replace it, it's not that there was the Old Testament and then the New Testament replaces it, right?
[01:16:28]  Like the Quran, you know, it's the more recent passages will directly contradict older passages and when in doubt.
[01:16:35]  When there's a contradiction, well, the new ones they override.
[01:16:38]  Well, that's not the Christian faith.
[01:16:39]  We believe that it's a seamless stream, you know, from Genesis to Revelation.
[01:16:43]  But what the New Testament does is it doesn't override the Old Testament, but it brings it to bear.
[01:16:48]  It reveals it.
[01:16:49]  There was one theologian who said the Old Testament is a richly furnished room, but dimly lit.
[01:16:55]  And the New Testament is the light that allows the illumination to appreciate it.
[01:17:00]  So, in that sense, my point is people, I wish evangelicals would begin to view Talmudic, modern Judaism.
[01:17:09]  It should be viewed, I think this is a helpful analogy, is it should be viewed very similar to Mormonism.
[01:17:15]  The Book of Mormon is not an addendum to the Bible, but it overrides, it's the lens through which the Bible is now read.
[01:17:24]  And what it does is it overrides the Bible.
[01:17:27]  That's what the Talmud does to the Torah.
[01:17:29]  So it's not, so Christians, it's not that, well, Judaism is just Christianity minus half.
[01:17:35]  We have old and new, and they just have old.
[01:17:37]  No, they have a New Testament.
[01:17:39]  Their New Testament is the Talmud.
[01:17:41]  So our New Testament, We read the Old Testament in light of the New.
[01:17:45]  They read the Old Testament, the Torah, in light of their New Testament, which is the Talmud.
[01:17:50]  What does that amount to?
[01:17:52]  It amounts to the Old Testament being completely perverted.
[01:17:55]  It amounts to.
[01:17:56]  So it's not that they only have the Old Testament.
[01:17:58]  They don't have the Old Testament.
[01:17:59]  They don't have anything because what they do have is not that we have the whole Bible, they have half.
[01:18:05]  The half that they do have is eradicated by their New Testament equivalency, which is the Talmud.
[01:18:12]  In the same way, it's the same way that the Book of Mormon works with the Bible.
[01:18:16]  So too, the Talmud works that way with the Torah.
[01:18:19]  And I think if that's really basic, but a lot of Christians haven't been taught that.
[01:18:23]  I didn't learn that until the last like three years.
[01:18:26]  I'm ashamed to say.
[01:18:27]  But that's super basic and a super defensible position that nobody's going to be able to say, no, actually, no, that's just true.
[01:18:36]  And when you figure that out, then I think it becomes much easier to recognize okay, Judaism is not like our second cousin.
[01:18:45]  This is like they're not on the team, and uh, and then what does that mean?
[01:18:49]  So, therefore, hate them.
[01:18:50]  No, therefore, um, we need like any other false doctrine, we need to preach Christ and Him crucified and pray that God would save them, you know.
[01:18:59]  But, but that this third category of Christian adjacent that that one that dog don't hunt.

=== Abolitionist Thoughts on Roe (11:16) ===

[01:19:05]  So, all right, well, any other thoughts about patriotism?
[01:19:09]  Or you know, that's we're a long ways from patriotism.
[01:19:13]  We got into Israel, but but the point is just to say that, like, you know, there's we were talking about honoring our fathers.
[01:19:20]  Honoring the, in our case, you know, as United States citizens, that being honoring, you know, the founding and honoring this Anglo Protestant tradition, honoring Western civilization, the great books, the classical tradition, these kinds of things.
[01:19:34]  And there's a war on that.
[01:19:36]  That's how we got there.
[01:19:38]  And that war is a war on Christianity, but I think it's also, I think there's two wars.
[01:19:43]  So, what do you guys think?
[01:19:45]  That's how we got there.
[01:19:45]  But any final thoughts on that?
[01:19:49]  Well, the one thing that we'd kind of talked about.
[01:19:51]  Preparing for the episode, is what do you do with celebrating holidays?
[01:19:55]  And if you do, if you see patriotism as a patriarchal endeavor, which I think you should, the question of what the church celebrates becomes pretty relevant.
[01:20:05]  And so, here again, enemies of the faith understand this.
[01:20:09]  That's why, you know, we've done an episode on how pride is becoming a new national identity.
[01:20:16]  Holidays mark out your identity in the same way that family traditions help mark out your family's identity, right?
[01:20:23]  So, like, There's an inner regulative principle for me that would balk at the idea of having sort of a patriotic, Robert Jefferson style Lord's Day service about the United States of America.
[01:20:35]  I think it's really good for a church to get together and celebrate Independence Day in the parking lot or a church member's house with hot dogs.
[01:20:44]  Something that I've been negligent within our own church, but I've tried to do is incomplete as it is, I think one of the things we should celebrate as a holiday is the fall of Roe.
[01:20:56]  And the overturning of a national black mark on our spiritual resume.
[01:21:01]  So, like, we want to celebrate those things.
[01:21:03]  I'm not going to do it on Lord's Day corporate worship, but I'm happy for our church family to do it.
[01:21:09]  It's sort of a voluntary act.
[01:21:11]  Probably wouldn't do that with Labor Day, you know?
[01:21:13]  Yeah.
[01:21:14]  And Jeff, I think too, sorry to interrupt you, but I think what you can do is you don't necessarily need to celebrate that as a religious thing.
[01:21:23]  You can do it as a civic thing.
[01:21:25]  I am an American with my fellow Americans celebrating the fall of an evil law.
[01:21:30]  Well, the one thing I want to do, though, is as a Christian, thank God for that.
[01:21:34]  Yeah.
[01:21:35]  So, like, as an American, thank God for that.
[01:21:37]  Right.
[01:21:37]  Both.
[01:21:37]  Right.
[01:21:38]  Like, I know that as an American, I should thank God for this because I'm a Christian and my Christianity is not separate from my civic life.
[01:21:45]  And so, you know, I don't want to pick too much of a fight here.
[01:21:49]  I don't think that we're in substantial disagreement.
[01:21:50]  But, like, as a Christian, I know that Roe is bad.
[01:21:54]  And as a Christian, I know that we need more than the fall of Roe.
[01:21:57]  But I also want to say thank you, God, as a gift to my people.
[01:22:01]  That you have given us this gift.
[01:22:03]  And I want to celebrate that.
[01:22:04]  And again, in a way that I'm not going to pay any attention to Labor Day as our church, but Independence Day, Roe, yeah, I'm going to celebrate those things as sort of marks of our family identity under the lordship of our Father.
[01:22:19]  That's good.
[01:22:20]  Ben, any thoughts?
[01:22:22]  No, I think I've got all of mine out.
[01:22:26]  Yeah, no, that's good.
[01:22:27]  If we have more time, the whole Roe thing just made me think of, dare I breach the topic?
[01:22:33]  But I, you know, just in terms of, You know, intermural debates and with friends that we love.
[01:22:41]  But man, it's just, that's a tough thing is, you know, being able to say that on one hand, there is a sense in which Roe is unjust and wrong.
[01:22:58]  And that it's not the state's issue.
[01:23:01]  It's abortion is murder and it should be outlawed at the federal level and then outlawed at the state level, not just, you know, Conceding it to the states.
[01:23:10]  But then, on the other hand, I'm with you, Jeff, that like I think we absolutely still should just celebrate in God's providence what he did in overturning Roe and adamantly working, you know, for more.
[01:23:25]  And then, when it comes to, you know, bills and things like that, that's a can of worms.
[01:23:29]  But like, I, but I, but I am of the persuasion that, you know, it should only be just bills, it should be equal protection.
[01:23:35]  The second victim narrative is from the depths of hell.
[01:23:39]  And so, Equal protection bills.
[01:23:42]  Abortion should be treated as a homicide, not just with the doctor, but also with the mother and the father if there's any coercion and he's involved.
[01:23:50]  All those things, yes and amen.
[01:23:51]  And I don't think you can present an unjust bill that says it's okay to murder on Wednesday, but not on Thursday.
[01:23:58]  But all that being said, I think you can be an abolitionist in terms of the abolitionist position for the goal of where we're heading.
[01:24:06]  You definitely should hold to that.
[01:24:08]  And even in terms of tactics when it comes to presenting and voting on bills.
[01:24:12]  I think you can do it there.
[01:24:14]  And even when it comes to primaries and things like that, like we will only support in terms of our primarying an abolitionist candidate for this position at all those levels.
[01:24:26]  But then it's like we're losing friendships over it.
[01:24:29]  So we agreed on 99.9999%.
[01:24:35]  But then to take it further and say, and to be an abolitionist, also, once you're done with the primaries in a general presidential election, you can only like.
[01:24:48]  That's where I'm just like, okay, man, I love you.
[01:24:52]  And I was with you.
[01:24:54]  I was with you.
[01:24:56]  You persuaded me.
[01:24:57]  I publicly repented of any kind of pro life ink, and I just got done buying the hat and the t shirt that says Proud Abolitionist.
[01:25:10]  And then I hear you say that if you celebrate Roe, you should step down from being an elder.
[01:25:17]  That's the only reason I brought this up because you're talking like, I mean, like what you just suggested, Jeff.
[01:25:22]  There are a couple guys who would say, like, you're disqualified from pastoral ministry for what you just said.
[01:25:27]  And that's where I'm like, man.
[01:25:29]  So we're going for the full two hours here today.
[01:25:31]  Well, just, I'm just like, when you get to that level of beautiful loserry, you know, where it's like I can do a triple axle into my face plant, then I'm just like, oh my gosh, man, you're on the team.
[01:25:42]  I love you.
[01:25:42]  You're a brother.
[01:25:43]  I love you.
[01:25:45]  But my wife and I, here it is.
[01:25:47]  So I think we should repeal the 19th Amendment.
[01:25:50]  You know what I'm going to be doing on November 3rd?
[01:25:52]  Me and my wife, noses unplugged, will be going down, voting for Donald J. Trump, and sleeping like babies.
[01:26:00]  And none of that being a contradiction to my convictions.
[01:26:04]  Yeah.
[01:26:04]  I mean, I know the guys you're talking about, and I love them the same way you do.
[01:26:08]  And I get, I mean, I've learned a lot in the last three or four years and considered myself an abolitionist.
[01:26:13]  But again, you got to go back to what we started with.
[01:26:17]  I think our primary sin may be ingratitude.
[01:26:20]  And so, you know, when we celebrate Roe, There has to be, excuse me.
[01:26:25]  Now, when you guys say celebrate the overturning, the overturning of Roe, the sentence that has to express your gratitude is, Thank you, Father, now more, please.
[01:26:37]  Yes.
[01:26:38]  Right.
[01:26:38]  That you want to honor gratitude and you also want to acknowledge that it's far from over.
[01:26:43]  And so I don't think that'll probably appease some of the people we have in mind here.
[01:26:48]  But as a guy who's thinking about how to be grateful and ambitious, aggressively ambitious, thank you, Father.
[01:26:56]  Please, more let this snowball, let this go further.
[01:26:59]  It's inadequate in and of itself.
[01:27:02]  But I still think there has to be a place for gratitude for the federal government, you know, no longer being an active or as active, I guess, you know, promoter of atrocity.
[01:27:14]  Amen.
[01:27:14]  Ben, were you going to say something?
[01:27:19]  Only that, hold on, I lost it.
[01:27:25]  I totally agree with what you guys are saying.
[01:27:28]  Also, one of the things I appreciate so much about my abolitionist friends, of which I'm not, and I've made that clear, but I'm not going to.
[01:27:35]  I don't want to attack them because they are my friends and I 100% agree with their goals.
[01:27:40]  But there are real problems with the pro life Inc.
[01:27:45]  Those guys are not our friends.
[01:27:47]  No, they're not.
[01:27:47]  In many cases.
[01:27:50]  All of the money involved, it's just bad news.
[01:27:52]  And so I'm totally with them on that kind of thing.
[01:27:56]  We need to do something different than pro life Inc. because they're making a lot of money off of an issue and they would like to continue to do that.
[01:28:03]  Right.
[01:28:04]  Pro life Inc.
[01:28:04]  That's all I have.
[01:28:05]  No, that's good.
[01:28:05]  Well said.
[01:28:06]  Pro Life Inc., it's important for the Christian to be aware that it's not just that they're not doing enough, it's far more sinister than that.
[01:28:14]  The last thing they want is for abortion to be abolished.
[01:28:19]  They don't want abortion to be done.
[01:28:22]  They need abortion.
[01:28:23]  They want abortion.
[01:28:24]  They never would verbalize it or say that publicly, but it's splitting the penny a million different ways.
[01:28:32]  But at the end of the day, what you are most committed to is not so much the splitting of the penny.
[01:28:38]  But what you're most committed to is that some of the penny remains because the penny remaining is what ensures that the dollar keeps coming into your pocket.
[01:28:48]  That's your bread and butter.
[01:28:49]  Yeah.
[01:28:50]  So Pro Life Inc., the abolitionists, even, and it's not all abolitionists, but even the more extreme type of abolitionists that would say that voting for Donald Trump is a sin or to celebrate in the parking lot with your church, the overturning of Roe is a sin.
[01:29:10]  Number one, I want to say that's not all abolitionists.
[01:29:13]  It is some.
[01:29:14]  And they're very vocal about it.
[01:29:15]  So, you know, it is some.
[01:29:17]  And I would have defended and said, nobody thinks that, but they made it impossible for me to defend.
[01:29:22]  I was like, no abolitionist would say that.
[01:29:24]  And then boom.
[01:29:26]  So, anyway, so there are some, much to my disappointment.
[01:29:29]  But even those, my point is, those guys are our friend.
[01:29:33]  Pro Life Inc., those guys are not our friends.
[01:29:35]  Right.
[01:29:36]  So, we want to be clear about which side of the aisle we're on here.
[01:29:40]  So.
[01:29:40]  All right.
[01:29:41]  You're here.
[01:29:41]  Well said.
[01:29:42]  Any final thoughts for today's episode?
[01:29:45]  I mean, I know it was all over the place, but I think it was great.
[01:29:48]  I think so.
[01:29:50]  I think people like it.
[01:29:51]  Who needs topics anyway?
[01:29:55]  I mean, honestly, the best podcasts are really just like minded guys who have a friendship talking, and you just happen to allow 5,000 other people to listen to the conversation.
[01:30:07]  So, any final thoughts, Jeff, Ben?
[01:30:10]  Just thanks for having me on the song, Joel.
[01:30:11]  Appreciate what you're doing.
[01:30:12]  Keep it up, man.
[01:30:13]  All right.
[01:30:13]  Listen to the backwoods belief if they ever come out with new episodes.
[01:30:16]  Yes, sir.
[01:30:17]  All right, cool.
[01:30:17]  Well, thank you guys.
[01:30:18]  God bless you.
[01:30:19]  And thank you to the listener for tuning in.