Wes Todd and Nathan defend JD Vance's "prioritizing your own people" as a consistent application of Thomas Aquinas's ordo amoris, arguing finite resources necessitate triaging love toward family and nation before global charity. They critique Tucker Carlson's interview with Piers Morgan regarding Western sovereignty loss and condemn modern liberalism for neglecting households while preaching universal aid. The hosts promote the April 3rd–5th "Christ is King" conference, asserting that America's current demographic and moral crises require an "America First" approach, including cutting unrepentant children from wills to preserve wealth for godly offspring. Ultimately, they conclude that rejecting inverted globalist values is essential for restoring Christian prosperity and national strength. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Triggering The Algorithm00:09:32
Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
I get it.
It's annoying.
Everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
When you give us a positive review, what that does is it triggers the algorithm so that our podcast shows up on more people's news feeds.
You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
Last week, Vice President Vance made a simple statement Prioritizing your own people is a Christian idea.
The backlash was immediate.
Christian leaders and politicians pushed back, arguing that national interest should never take precedence over broader humanitarian concerns.
But that argument ignores both history and reality.
For centuries, theologians from Augustine to Aquinas, from Calvin to the Reformers, have taught that love must be rightly.
Ordered.
A father feeds his children before his neighbors.
A nation looks after its own people before extending charity elsewhere.
This isn't a rejection of others, it's the foundation of a healthy society.
The truth is, America is not doing well.
Real wages are stagnant, families are struggling, and national identity is unraveling.
A country that refuses to prioritize its own people is not acting morally, it's committing national suicide.
This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members and our faithful donors.
You can join our Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash Right Response Ministries, or you can make a donation by going to Right Response Ministries.com forward slash donate.
Vice President Vance is right.
The Ordo Amoris, the proper ordering of our loves, Teaches that a nation has a duty to its own people first and always.
Anything less is a betrayal, and it certainly is not Christian.
Tune in now.
All right, welcome.
Welcome back.
Here we are.
I'm feeling a little bit generous today.
I'm also just feeling just amped.
I'm probably going to just black out probably halfway through the episode and just muscle memory, just going crazy.
I think this is going to be a great episode.
I'm really stoked about it.
But I want to start with this because I'm feeling amped, because I'm feeling excited.
We've got a little bit over 700 people currently who are registered for our conference Christ is King, How to Defeat Trash World.
All right, the conference is happening April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
That's Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
We want to have at least 1,000 people.
We still got a couple months left.
I think we're going to hit it, but I'm going to make sure that we hit it today because I'm feeling generous.
All right.
So, this is what you got to do.
Libs need not apply, and you won't be able to because if you're a lib, you won't be able to spell what I'm about to say.
Here's the promo.
This is just Nathan's not even ready for it.
Nathan, you're going to have to do this.
Ordo amoris.
But we're going to do this one word.
One word.
This is the promo.
All caps.
Ordo amoris.
Nathan, he's going to put it in the chat right now.
Here it comes.
Just so you can get the spelling, the libs, I guess you'll be able to sneak past here.
O R D O A M O R I S. One more time for those who are listening only.
O R D O A M O R I S. Order a Morris, but we're making it one word.
That's the promo.
If you put this in, we're going to go all the way back, deepest discount, all the way back to the early bird pricing $130.
Okay, but you've got to register ASAP.
This is going to be like a 24 hour thing.
We're going to take it down tomorrow.
So you've got today.
Maybe if you just happen in the providence of God to find this video early tomorrow morning, you watch it and you just zoom over to rightresponseconference.com and type in the promo.
It may still be operating, but this is not going to last long, probably less than 24 hours.
Again, Ordo Amoris as one word, all caps.
There's your promo code.
And again, for the link to be able to register, go to rightresponse, not ministries.
Right response conference.com.
Right response conference.com.
Again, this is Christ is King, How to Defeat Trash World Conference.
We've got Andrew Isker, Steve Dace, Orrin McIntyre, Calvin Robinson, Stephen Wolf, Dusty Devers, John Harris, Dan Burkholder, Ben Garrett, Eric Kahn, AD Robles.
Who else do we have?
I feel like there's probably some more that I'm missing.
I know.
Anybody else that you can see?
Calvin Robinson?
It's like 50.
Yep.
It's like 15 people.
I was reading chat while you were talking about that.
Did I say Steve Dace?
That's all right.
You said Steve Dace?
I said Steve Dace.
I said Dan Burkhorn, Ben Garrett.
Let's see.
I feel like there's one.
Oh, CJ Engel.
There's one.
Almost forgot him.
Super smart guy.
Makes me feel dumb all the time.
You just, what you do with guys like CJ is you just retweet them without even considering what they said.
Just believe.
Just believe that.
New CJ just dropped.
Retweet.
CJ's great.
Retweet.
We'll talk on the phone from time to time.
And they're doing really good.
You guys should tune in, by the way, just to give them a plug.
They do great work and they're faithful.
They love the Lord.
They have their fingers on the pulse of what God is providentially doing in our culture and politics.
And they have done the reading, they've done the homework.
Andrew Isker and CJ Engel co host a podcast called Contra Mundum Against the World from Athanasius.
Contra Mundum.
And they have upped their game with their tech.
Now, granted, so I tuned in because I wanted to check it out because they're doing video.
Now they're in the same place.
They're not having to do Zoom and piping in.
So they're in the same place.
They've got a set going, they've got a little bit better equipment.
And so I tuned in.
I was like, all right, I'm rooting for you guys.
And it was the worst audio I've ever heard in my life.
And about 10 minutes in, like they're fumbling around.
Wait a second.
Let's fix this mic.
All right.
Well, you know what?
They have good content.
They'll always have good content.
One day, by the grace of God, they might also have some good tech and quality, but the content is fantastic.
So listen to those guys.
And if you want to meet them in person, here's the thing about the conference.
We're going to have seven main sessions and three panels.
One of them is going to be a formal debate.
Here's the name I forgot David Reese.
So one of them is going to be a formal debate between David Reese and Stephen Wolf on natural law versus theonomy.
And our very own Wesley Todd, he's going to be moderating.
That debate.
And then the two other panels are just going to be kind of like a royal rumble with like seven guys on each of the panels and talking about Christian nationalism, talking about, I don't know, all sorts of things American, Protestant, you know, taking back the country for God and how to get rid of the trash world and the regime and all these kinds of things.
We're going to talk about why conservatives always lose, that you win by winning, actually, it turns out.
All these kinds of things will be discussed at this conference.
But the biggest thing, more than the content, is getting to meet each other.
And part of the reason why we are probably not going to be very profitable, if at all, with this conference.
And I knew that from the very beginning.
I was like, hey, we could have a conference with like four guys.
And that's great because there's not a lot of overhead.
But I basically thought, no, I think I want to pay basically all of my friends.
To come because I want to see them and I want everybody else to see.
I want this to be an event that it's not just a think tank session and with plenary lectures and things like that, but it is a relational networking.
This is going to be the event, I think, of 2025 that people are going to be saying, Yeah, I was there when Oren said this, or I was there when Calvin and Stephen were duking it out about reformed theology, or I was there when Stephen and Reese were talking about theonomy and debating natural law.
Uh, and I got to meet these guys, you know, on the side and those guys over there.
And I, you know, took pictures with Contra Mundum and I got to, um, to get uh, Orrin McIntyre to sign my you know, total state copy.
And, um, you guys are going to want to be there if you miss it.
I really think you're going to regret it.
So, we're trying to make it, um, as feasible as conceivably possible for you to come.
And one of the ways that I'm doing that is, um, at random, like today, uh, giving a deep discount.
I would honestly, I would do even cheaper if it wasn't, um, I think it's unethical and a slap in the face to everybody who was actually didn't procrastinate and signed up for the early bird.
So, to come in two months before the conference, like six months after the early bird pricing, and to say, we're going to give you an even better deal than those guys who were proactive and registered right away.
I can't do that.
But what I can do is I can take it all the way back to the early bird pricing.
Deep Discounts For You00:03:24
So, $130, Ordo Amoris, all caps, one word, use that as your promo code.
And again, go to rightresponseconference.com.
Okay.
You got to go.
Got to go.
Michael, take us away.
All right.
We are excited for today.
And with the speed that the news is moving these days, it is hard to keep up.
I'll tell you that.
I heard someone say, man, what a year it's been last week.
So it's totally true.
What is Trump in office now?
Three, four years almost?
Three weeks.
Almost at the end of his term.
Oh, no.
We are talking about the clip with Vice President JD Vance and the response to it where he just dropped the idea of the Order of Amaris.
And it's really interesting because this idea of the Ordo Amaris touches on so many of the trash world ideas that we are seeking to reject and defeat.
And the idea of what is the proper place of a nation, of a people, what is the proper place of a family, what is the proper role of a church, what is the proper role of Christians within a society, and how do we keep these things straight.
And in some ways, if you get the Ordo Amaris wrong, which is properly ordered loves, it's like following a recipe in the wrong order.
Right, like throw it in the oven, then pull it out, then mix in the flour, you know, put it back in for another 15 minutes, cut it.
Now, add the milk.
It just is all things that have to happen, but when they happen in the wrong order or to the wrong degree, it throws an entire system into chaos.
And so, what we want to do is we want to start a lot of you all have probably seen some of these clips already, but just to give the context, we want to start with the original video that Vice President Vance had that.
The interview that he had that kind of ignited the firestorm.
And then we're actually going to jump to, we'll make a couple comments on that, and then we'll jump to a video between Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan.
So, Nate, if you've got that video with Vice President Vance, let's go ahead and roll it.
But there's this old school, and I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way, that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country.
And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.
A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.
They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders.
That is no way to run a society.
And I think the profound difference that Donald Trump brings to the leadership of this country is the simple concept America first.
It doesn't mean you hate anybody else, it means that you have leadership.
And President Trump has been very clear about this that puts the interests of American citizens first.
In the same way that the British prime minister should care about Brits and the French should care about the French.
We have an American president who cares primarily about Americans, and that's a very welcome change.
What is President Xi doing?
What is Vladimir Putin doing?
He's looking after the Chinese.
Putin is looking after the Russians.
They're entitled to do that.
Thank God we now have an American president who's looking after the citizens of his own country.
So notice in there, at no point did JD Vance say, We need to nuke the rest of the world.
Right.
Right.
In fact, he even said the last one that he mentioned was, And then you exert care as you can for the rest of the world.
Right.
But it's all about order.
Seeking God As A Child00:06:11
Ordo Amoris.
Well, here's the thing JD is a massive racist.
Everybody knows this.
He married an Indian wife as a cover up.
He wears eyeliner.
Yeah, we know what he's doing.
When he says, you know, Ordo Amoris, America first, what he means is that we should hate everybody else.
That's right.
And obviously, I'm being sarcastic.
That's, you know, I preached on it this last Sunday, and believe it or not, I don't exegete, you know, Twitter posts.
I really, it was, it just, every now and then, the providence of God is quite delicious.
You might say.
And so our text happened to be we're working through the gospel according to Matthew.
We're going through the Sermon on the Mount.
We're in Matthew chapter 7.
It was verses 7 through 11 where Jesus talks about seek and you will find, ask, it will be given to you, knock, the door will be open.
And then he makes an argument from the lesser to the greater.
And so he deals with familial fathers, earthly fathers.
And he says, Which of you, if your son asks for some bread, he's hungry, would give him a rock, a stone?
Or if he asks for a fish, To eat, would give him a scorpion or a serpent.
And then he says this, and it's just classic, you know, based Jesus.
He says, If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your own children, how much more your Father in heaven?
Meaning that if you ask God, and if you're a Christian, right?
So through the ministry of adoption, the work of the Holy Spirit, you're the branches that now have union with the vine, who is Christ, by the doctrine of regeneration, the Spirit of God in sovereign election, causing you to be born again.
And to become a new creature in Christ Jesus with a new heart, no longer the heart of stone, but that's now been removed and replaced with a heart of flesh that's softened and malleable, receptive to the things of God.
You have spiritual eyes to see spiritual things, spiritual ears to hear the word of Christ, to not just listen without understanding, but to truly hear the words of Christ.
My sheep, they know my voice.
If God has done this for you, He's adopted you.
You have the Spirit of God dwelling within you.
1 Corinthians chapter 6.
Body's a temple of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit which now dwells within you confirms and affirms your adoption as a beloved Son of the triune God.
The Spirit cries out, Abba, Father.
If you are a child of God, in short, if you're a child of God, God is now your Father, and as your Father, if earthly fathers who are sinners and fallen and evil, if they by nature, even albeit fallen nature, Because of sin and the curse in Genesis chapter 3.
If even earthly fathers, even unregenerate, unbelieving, non Christian earthly fathers, fallen in their nature by sin, if a vestige of that nature in God's original design, even though it's been tarnished, a mere vestige, if that still remains intact, that evil, sinful earthly fathers still cannot help but desire to want to give bread and fish, food, clothing, shelter, provision.
To their own posterity, their own physical offspring, then how much more, that's the argument from the lesser to the greater, how much more God, who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, if He is your spiritual heavenly Father, will He not give good gifts to you?
And so I preached this on Sunday, and I preached, you know, on the one hand, you should probably be a Calvinist.
I know not all of our listeners agree, but I talked about that from the standpoint of I don't believe that this is an Arminian verse that says, you know, unbelievers need to find Jesus.
When did you find Jesus?
Hey, I found Jesus.
Well, I, you know, Jesus was completely ignoring me, but luckily, you know, I took the first step and I was vigilant and diligent and I went and I sought after him.
And so, you know, if you seek him enough, you know, then you'll find him.
And that finding, you know, referencing conversion, salvation initially for the first time, I don't think that's what it's talking about.
I don't think this is talking about salvation.
You're an unbeliever and you seek for God.
And if you seek him while in a state of unbelief, you choose to override that by your own strength and your own ability and seek him, regardless of the fact that you're currently unregenerate.
That you'll find him and you will merit the reward will be your eternal salvation.
I don't think that's what it's being said because, well, you know, we interpret scripture by scripture.
Romans chapter 3 says, no one seeks for God.
That God's anthropology, not just theology, who is God, but who is man?
Who is mankind?
God's anthropology from the Bible in Romans 3 says, no one seeks for God.
No one does good.
Their throats are like open graves.
They lie in wait for blood.
The Bible's picture, God's perspective of fallen humanity, apart from grace, apart from salvation, is pretty bleak.
And so the Bible says no one seeks for God.
So it's talking about someone who God has already sought after.
There is one true seeker, and the one true seeker in all the universe is God Himself.
I believe it was Spurgeon who said that God is the bloodhound of heaven and he seeks down, earnestly seeks for the souls of men.
And so, if God first seeks you, 1 John 4 19, we love because he first loved us.
So, if God has first salvifically sought after you and by the Holy Spirit caused you to come alive spiritually and to be adopted as his beloved son, well, now, now God is your father.
And now, because God first sought after you, you can now seek after him.
And because you're now a child of God, God is no longer your enemy, you're no longer a child of his wrath.
But you're a beloved adopted child, now you're capable of seeking, and there's a promise that when you seek, you will find.
When you knock, the door will be opened.
When you ask, you will receive.
Why?
Because God is a father, He knows how fathers work.
He baked it into the creation, the created order that He established.
When fathers have their own offspring, ask them for good things.
Fathers, even evil fathers, answer the call and want to provide for their children.
Protecting Your Life And Freedom00:10:49
Notice.
The argument that Jesus makes about our Heavenly Father and that He will grant the request of His children.
He doesn't say, well, you can trust your Heavenly Father to answer your prayers because people, even though you're evil, regularly give everything they have to foreigners and strangers on the other side of the planet that they've never met.
That's not the argument He makes.
But I do know some people who think like that.
The heat map meme, the complete, like, Where's your strongest allegiance?
Where's your greatest devotion?
You know, the smelt fish, endangered fish, rocks, trees, and random people in the Sudan that I've never met before.
Well, that's not a father.
That's not the heavenly father.
That's not earthly fathers.
That's called a lib.
Don't be a lib.
Don't be a liberal.
It's unnatural.
It's unbiblical.
It's unchristian.
JD Vance is exactly right.
And everybody who's losing their mind right now saying, well, this isn't Christian.
When they say this isn't Christian, what they mean is this isn't Christian after Christianity had been tweaked and perverted, corrupted, and warped since about the 1940s over the last 80 years and perverted to where now Christianity is just a thin veneer covering the post liberal order where I'm just a citizen of the world, bro.
I'm just a citizen of the world and everybody's my brother and everybody's my sister.
But that's not the world that God created and that's not what's in view when Jesus is teaching about this in Matthew chapter 7.
Yeah.
Do you want to make any comments about the Tucker video before we, or the Vance video before I transition into the Tucker?
All I would say is there's kind of this idea that the elites live up in their ivory towers and you can't really influence them.
There's no way I could prove it, nor would he ever probably admit it.
But a lot of this rhetoric we've heard, especially from Vance, I mean, he's younger, he's very late 30s.
It's really old now.
He's in his late 30s.
He's online.
He follows guys like Charles Haywood.
It's very likely he's getting some of that, maybe probably not necessarily from us, but guys that are in the dissident right, like Arn McIntyre, Charles Haywood.
So, there's this whole idea like, well, there's the elites and they just do their thing.
You can influence the elites.
And the way Vance is talking there is probably in some part, maybe not all of it, right?
He is Catholic.
He may have heard this organically, but certainly in some part could literally be you on X, on social media, sourcing, posting quotes.
Hey, this is what Christians have believed.
You did that.
We did that.
And that's meaningful.
That is meaningful.
Yeah.
So, we're drawing a connection between the comments about the Ordo Moris and the post war consensus.
And some of you might wonder, well, what is the connection there?
Well, the connection is.
If this is the natural state that a nation ought to provide for and prefer its own people, and that people of a nation ought to prefer their own people in the same way that a father ought to provide for his own family, and a family ought to love itself, each other, more than other families, if this is a natural state, how have we gotten to the point where this is almost the exact opposite of what we're doing now in the West?
I mean, it's not just the US, right?
A few weeks ago, we did the episode on the.
Gangs that are roaming about England, right?
It's happening in England.
It's happening all over Europe.
So, how did we get to the point where what is natural and seemingly obvious has been completely inverted?
Well, there's a really interesting interview that happened recently between Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan.
Piers Morgan, thank you.
Where Piers Morgan basically says, Oh, I'm totally free.
The results of World War II left me as an Englishman and my nation exactly as it should be.
And it's amazing the cognitive dissonance that he has, where he thinks things are as they should be.
We won the war and things are going swimmingly because we won the war.
And so the connection is the post war consensus and the results.
I was just listening to an interview today before we go to that clip where the U.S. aid, which is the U.S. Agency for International Development, and agencies like it that preceded it.
Have intentionally sought to meddle with global politics such that no nation could ever be strong on its own and create another third world war.
This has been a project basically since the war.
We've said it before.
We'll say it again.
But there are people who are trying to keep nations from preferring themselves, strong nations from preferring themselves, so that they can't get quote unquote too strong.
And the interview with Tucker and Piers Morgan, I think, illustrates that perfectly.
So, Nate, let's go ahead and roll that interview.
Roll that beautiful bean.
You're avoiding answering my question.
Which is why do we have so many guns?
No, no.
Because we're free.
No, no.
Didn't answer that question.
Because we're free.
Because no one can tell us.
We can't defend ourselves.
We all used to have guns, too.
And then you guys, after the Second World War, which was like a liberation war, and you won, you lost all your freedom.
And now you can't even express your political opinions, so they put you in jail.
So, like, how did you win?
How did you win?
Is that what victory looks like?
You lose all your rights, your economy gets destroyed, you just become bankers, and all of a sudden, oh, I won.
We won because I'm not conducting this interview in German, which I wouldn't be.
So it's linguistic.
I'd rather not speak German and be goose stepping around my yard in England.
Yes.
Goose stepping?
Yeah.
But you are goose stepping.
People are arrested for praying.
We literally won our freedom from people.
Where's your freedom?
Where's your freedom?
You can get arrested.
I'm as free as you could possibly want a human being to be.
You can't defend yourself.
You can't control who comes into your country.
And you can't criticize government policies or you get arrested.
So, how are you free?
You're a slave, aren't you?
No.
Really?
How free are you?
We have cultural problems in our country and societal problems.
And you can't just look at Facebook right now and say, I don't want any more immigrants in my country.
They're making it worse.
You could say that.
What you couldn't say, because a lot of these stories, I have to say, in America, have been spun completely disingenuously.
There's one case, for example, I see everyone trying to send me as an example of Britain's gone mad, Elon Musk has done it.
There's a guy who got seven years in prison.
Actually, what he was doing, this guy, was he was orchestrating and directing rioting on hotels containing asylum seekers because he had an incorrect belief that someone who had stabbed three young girls to death and All right.
The quote that just, I just, is so rich.
I'm as free as you could ever want anyone to be.
Well, that is exactly the point.
That is as free as the post war consensus wants you to be, which is not actually free.
That concept of freedom, I just have to say, it's so truncated.
Like when our founding fathers talked about freedom and liberty, they actually had freedom and liberty freedom to worship God in the way that you intended to be in a denomination and wasn't ruled over by the state, freedom to start a business, freedom to have a home, and all of that.
What a truncation of freedom to I can smoke weed, I can watch HBO Max.
And like, I don't know, like, order DoorDash, like, literally the liberal, like, I'm free.
Let's, I mean, the major tenet of liberal freedom is I can be gay.
Right.
I can be free.
Freedom to sexual perversion.
Right.
That's like, and that's what people think of.
They, you know, they think, you know, well, at least I can be gay.
You know, yeah, okay, but one, that's not good for you.
That's not the kind of liberty that the founding fathers gave their lives for.
When they were talking about liberty, they weren't talking about liberty for butt sex.
They were talking about actual liberty liberty to worship God according to your conscience and to the word of God without tyranny.
They were talking about the freedom to be able to protect your life.
To give an inheritance to your children's children, to build wealth, to self defense, to start a business, to generate wealth, to do this, to do that.
Real freedom, real freedom.
Not the freedom of the pod man, right?
The bug man.
Well, I'm free.
I'm free to watch Netflix, you know, or I'm free.
That you know, there's a ton of people you know in the matrix that thought they were free.
I'm free to do this, I'm free to do that.
You're a battery, like you're a battery for the elite, you're a tax farm, you're right.
Um, you're just fueling people above you, and you're just you've been placated, you've been you know, you're docile because um, because they have given you a form of freedom, but but it's only freedom um, to um, to appease your basest, um, most based appetites.
That's but that's not real.
Freedom.
And notice, like, the only example he can give, like, Tucker gives three examples of the ways in which they're not free.
You're not free to criticize your government without the jeopardy of being arrested and them taking legal action against you.
You're not free to determine who comes into your country.
And, you know, so you're not free to police your own borders and defend, you know, your heritage and your people.
And you're not free at the individual level to self defense, you know, in terms of gun rights and these kinds of things.
And Piers Morgan, you know, he counters this by, Tucker says, here's three ways you're not free.
And all three ways of those that he cites are backed up and legitimate.
Piers Morgan gives only one example in the positive of, well, we are free.
And the only example that he can even think of is, well, at least we're not speaking German.
To be fair, he gave two.
He's also not having to goose step in his yard.
So he's not speaking German and he's not having to goose step at noon every Monday.
But I think, you know, Tucker did a good job and say, but you are goose stepping.
So you're just, you're goose stepping in English.
Yeah.
Right.
And that's the sad thing is that I think we've been so brainwashed in so many ways.
We would rather be slaves that speak English than people who are free and speak German.
Now, I like English.
I don't, you know, I'm not.
Great language.
It's a great language.
I'm not German.
But I'd rather be speaking German and free than speaking English and a slave.
And it's so ridiculous.
Hitler had no ambitions to take over the world.
It was a reunification of the German people.
There was no idea of, like, I'm going to go to England and we're just going to march people down and force them.
Like, that's just ahistorical.
It's stupid and it's a silly example.
Yeah.
I think one thing to point out about the history or the freedom question is, and again, I just feel like some of these things we've said, but Wes, I agree with what you're saying, but it's even more than that because they, the founders and the Puritans, those who came over from England, they applied biblical passages such as, it is for freedom that you have been set free.
Loving The World In Action00:15:47
And they saw the freedom that Christ gives his people needing to have a physical, tangible outworking, which would be, we ought to be able to live.
In the way that is governed by our Christian virtue.
And so, even going to the idea of the Ordo Amoris, one of the problems is many people spiritualize this to such a high degree that they say, well, it doesn't apply.
You can't make judgment calls about immigration based on the Ordo Amoris.
Or you can't work this out into should a nation prefer its own people or its neighbor or the country that's far, far away from it.
And I just want to say, like, Christianity has always understood that spiritual truths, we have been set free from sin.
And then they said, okay, we've been set free for freedom.
What does that look like in the tangible, practical way?
Well, we have to be able to live it.
We have to be able to worship the way we want to, but also we have to be able to be governed by just laws.
We have to be in a position where a man can work and keep the return on his labor, provide for his family, where if he is slothful, his family will suffer.
And if he is disciplined and hardworking, his family will prosper.
I mean, the spiritual reality always, this is the point, always has.
Pushed itself into practical applications.
And the Order of Mars is the same way.
Yep.
Well said.
All right, let's take a break here and go to our first commercial.
And when we come back, we'll be talking about whether this is, in fact, a Christian stance, what JD Vance said.
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All right, we are back.
So, needless to say, as I'm sure all of you have seen, Vice President Vance's comment sparked Applauds, they sparked outrage, they sparked all sorts of people coming out of the woodworks and saying, This is not Christian.
I had to laugh at William Wolfe, who said, I am a Christian, I went to seminary, this is definitely Christian.
people flashing all their credentials.
So the question really is, at the end of the day, at least for this podcast, apart from whether or not it's good political maneuvering and practice, which I think it is, the question for us is, is this actually a Christian position?
Is what Vice President Vance said a Christian position?
So I want to play a couple of, not play, show a couple of screenshots from X where people weighed in on this.
So let's go to the first one.
At the top of the screen, you're going to see a post from Edward Feaser, who is a professor of philosophy.
He's a scholastic Catholic.
And he said this he said, the vice president has St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and indeed the entire mainstream Christian and natural law traditions on his side.
His critics have, on their side, woolly liberal bromides and foot stomping, which I thought was pretty great.
That's good.
Now, we're going to go through some of the source material here, but he is saying, as a professor of scholasticism and Christian history, Absolutely, this is the lion's share of the Christian testimony throughout history, both natural law tradition and biblical studies tradition.
That's it.
He is entirely in the camp of the established tradition.
There was a follow up post there, Nate, if you'll show that again, from one Anthony Esselin, whom I don't know as much.
It said, it's also to be found in Lewis's Abolition of Man, which, Wes, is one of your favorite books.
Every chance I can plug it, I do.
Yep.
Where he says the Tao, which is the natural order, embraces moral requirements regarding particular duties of charity close to home and love of family, along with requirements of a more general benevolence.
Lewis and Tolkien are with Vance here solidly.
So, high praise there for what Vice President Vance is saying and what he is claiming.
One last one that I wanted to show just because it illustrates the duplicity.
On the liberal and progressive side, both the Christian liberal side and the secular liberal side.
So let's show the one from Malo's Toast here, Nate.
The left is perfectly fine applying the principle of order moris and natural relations when it comes to things like COVID.
So he says, Get the vax or your grandma dies.
In other words, we have to shut down the entire society because your grandma, who is close to you, might die.
Shut down that elementary school on the other side of the city.
Doesn't matter that they're, you know, Going to miss a whole year of education, your immediate family, your natural obligation and duty to your grandmother matters more than some distant elementary school.
And then he says, now you should love illegal immigrants more than your grandma.
And then he says, typical Marxist maneuvering to latch onto whatever they can leech, whatever they can to leech the most power, like parasites on civilization that they are.
I think that's a perfect illustration of exactly what happens.
The order of Morris, love the people close to you, your grandma, your mom, whatever it is.
Great.
We should definitely prefer our own in that situation.
Now that we're dealing with international immigration questions, no, Don't prefer your own.
That would be a terrible idea.
That would be immoral.
That would be wrong.
And it really shows, I think, the duplicity going on and the way that a lot of this is just power plays and attempts to gain influence and really to get influence over the system by any appeal to emotion that they can.
There's a great, they're like Soyjack memes or whatever.
But there's one where it's a guy and he says, Jesus said to be compassionate or something.
It's like a quote from him.
And it follows up, like, well, no, I'm not a Christian at all.
And I actually have contempt for all of your beliefs, but maybe if I say this, you'll do what I want.
So I'm going to use a Bible verse on you about love or mercy or compassion.
This would never work on me.
I'm not a Christian.
Right.
It wouldn't work on me.
I actually hate your religion.
But if I use this, I just might be able to get you to do what I want.
That's right.
Yeah.
No, that's, I mean, that is how many non Christians function.
They're always throwing in your face what they think the Bible says, but they don't actually know.
Right.
Because they're throwing in your face what the normie Christians have told them is in the Bible.
That's true.
Yeah.
We do disciple the culture.
Yeah.
That's true.
That's a good point.
Yep.
Yeah.
Let's get to.
Well, you have some more from X, I think.
No, but I definitely.
No, we're going to jump into the quotes.
Yeah.
Yep.
Okay.
Because we want to chronicle what part of what we want to do in this episode is show you from major thinkers throughout church history, theologians, how this is not a novel position at all.
It is the lion's share dominant position throughout all of church history.
The aberration is the last, you know, 70, 80 years.
Yeah.
We are.
The ones who are standing outside of this clear witness of church history.
It's we like people all the time, you know, all you have to do is pan out.
That's all you have to do.
Because a lot of times people will think, well, that can't be true because, you know, it goes against the way everyone thinks today.
And it's like, yeah, but the way everyone thinks today goes against the way everyone always thought since the beginning of the world.
Right.
Like we're the weird ones, we're the ones who are out of order.
All right, I want to give two caveats before we jump into this.
Number one is we do have to understand the time that we live in.
And part of what has made this an issue that needs to be reconsidered is globalism.
A thousand years ago, even the entire nation of England would not have known about some natural disaster in Sierra Leone or Indonesia or something like that, right?
So they wouldn't have even had a compulsion or an ability to know about some sort of suffering on the other side of the world.
That they might need to have some sort of Christian response to.
So that's one thing we do have to acknowledge.
We live in a time where the global headlines are bringing things to people's eyes almost instantaneously.
And so there is an appeal for your empathy at all times that you have to be careful of because it's easy to feel empathy when you see these images from the other side of the world.
And I think part of what the media does is they put that in front of you as an emotional manipulation.
Right.
Which is not to say we ought not have compassion on all, like a general disposition of goodwill.
That used to be the Christian position.
Goodwill, men of goodwill.
Right.
However, that is just something we have to be aware of in the global time that we live in.
And that good, real quick, that goodwill is universal.
This is one of the quotes that I used from my sermon yesterday, but from Aquinas.
He says this On this respect, we love all men equally out of charity.
So he's speaking of not necessarily our behaviors or our tangible physical actions, but our general disposition, our Our goodwill, our feeling towards humanity as a whole, it should be a general disposition of charity, not animus, not malice, but charity.
So we love all men equally in terms of a general disposition, feeling of charity towards all men because we wish them all one same generic good.
And to put a little bit more of a fine point on that, we would go further and say that that one same generic good that we wish for all men universally, globally, Is the highest good, the eternal good, which is namely their justification, the salvation of their souls.
Aquinas continues, namely, everlasting happiness, which is salvation, everlasting happiness, eternal joy, peace, which is only found in Christ.
Secondly, love is said to be greater through its action, being more intense.
And in this way, we ought not to love all equally.
To sum that up, in short, I wrote the following this is in my sermon notes.
I said, in short, Aquinas taught that we must love all universally.
But practically, we must love all unequally.
I'll say that again Aquinas taught that we must love all universally.
But practically, in terms of not just word or theory, but deed and practice, practically, we must love all unequally.
So when it comes to the actions of love, we must triage.
Yep.
Right?
So actions of love, meaning making tangible physical provision.
We don't take our paycheck.
Every two weeks or every month, and say, Well, there's 8.3 billion people in the world, and so I'm going to take my paycheck and divide it by 8.3 billion people, and everyone's going to get a fraction of a penny every two weeks when I get paid.
If you do that, that actually does zero good for mankind because it's so insignificant by the time it's distilled and trickled down.
And not only does it do zero good for people on the other side of the world that you've never even met, it also Most significantly, it does zero good for your own people, especially your family, your children.
You do that, and you have just effectively starved your own wife and children.
And according to scripture, the apostle Paul says, He doesn't say, if you won't make equal, tangible, physical provision for every single person alive on the planet at any given time, then you're not a good person, or you're not a Christian, or you've denied the faith.
Paul never says that.
What Paul does, inspired by the Holy Spirit in Holy Scripture, what he does say.
Is that any man who does not provide for his own, the members of his own household, his own family?
He says that that man is actually, and he doesn't say that man is equivalent to an unbeliever.
No, he says that man is worse than an infidel.
Worse.
He's actually worse than an unbeliever, and he is denied the faith.
So, disposition, general disposition, that is your feeling towards mankind, your general feeling towards mankind should be universal love.
I love all people.
I am rooting for Uganda.
I'm rooting for Russia.
I'm rooting for China.
I'm rooting for Canada.
I'm rooting for Mexico.
I hope that all people, by God's grace, thrive in this life.
And I hope that all of them, by God's grace, in accordance with His will, would attain good, temporal, earthly good, but most importantly, the highest good, the eternal good, their everlasting happiness, that is, their salvation in Jesus Christ.
That is a universal love.
In terms of our disposition, but there must be a hierarchy of loves, that is to say, unequal loves, in terms of not our general disposition, but our particular practice.
In a particular practice, in terms of not theory, theoretical love, or words of love, thoughts of love, thoughts and prayers, but over here, in terms of word, not love in word, but now love in deed.
When it comes to our actions, we are not only permissible.
It is actually a sin to do otherwise.
We must give in terms of a triage of priority.
We must give our greatest efforts, the majority, lion's share of our actions, the majority of our striving, our time, our work, all these things towards loving in practice, loving indeed those who are closest to us, and then rippling out.
So we are going to love our family in terms of practice the most.
We are going to love the world in terms of our general disposition.
A position, a general position of charity towards all mankind.
Prioritizing Those Closest To Us00:12:44
Yeah.
I remember how this played out very young.
I grew up in a Baptist church with a huge missions emphasis, which that was kind of the, you know, what was in the air at the time.
And there is a good love, I think, for the unsaved.
But I remember I'd like to try to pray at night and I would start praying maybe for people that are unsaved.
And then I would go up to the national level.
I'd be like, well, shoot, like, if I prayed for X, Y, and Z country that we know this missionary from, well, I can now think of three other countries that I need to pray for.
And how much time should I spend?
Praying for them, or you would pray for something local, and then you think of your neighbor.
Well, he's unsaved, and that's a bigger need than this family member who's sick, or my brother and sister.
And I remember being almost paralyzing because it's like I could sit here and pray for hours and hours and hours and hours, and I wouldn't name everyone that was unsaved.
I wouldn't name every country that had individuals in it that needed conversion.
Whereas in the past week, my kids have been sick, and I prayed more for their colds to get better than for the salvation of my neighbor's kids.
Well, in the eternal sense, what is of more value, like being healed from a cold or eternal salvation?
You, of course, know the answer, but they're my kids.
That were sick.
And that lion's share, that majority of the prayer lavished on them without guilt for, man, I prayed for them with a cold, but really my neighbor needs to be saved.
And really a lot of people in Georgetown need to be saved.
And Texas and politics and the United States and mission.
You don't need to do all that.
Don't be paralyzed and don't teach your kids to do that either.
Pray for that which is closest.
Well said.
So even in prayers, because again, that is still love in practice because you're actually doing so.
Prayer is, we believe that prayer is real, that it works, that the prayers of the righteous avail of much.
And so, but that is still, that's not just a general disposition.
That's, I'm devoting effort, time, thought.
I'm doing something.
Prayer is an action.
I'm taking action.
So when it comes to our actions, it's not just because, well, you don't love everybody equally when it comes to love in the realm of practice because you're fallen, because you're sinful, and that's why you don't love it.
No, you can't love everyone equally because not of your fallenness, but because of your finitude, because you're a creature.
You're creaturely.
God is the creator, the only creator who is to be ever, forever praised.
Amen.
We are creatures.
That means to us is given one mind, limited resources, 24 hours in a day, 80 years, give or take of a life.
We're very limited in our resources.
So it's not like, well, I'm going to love some people in terms of, again, love in action, love in practice.
I'm going to love some people more than others because.
Because I'm content to be unfair, because I'm a sinner and I'm fallen.
No, it's because I'm content to be a creature, because I'm finite.
God made me and bound me by the creaturely restrictions that are upon all of us.
We're not omniscient, we're not omnibenevolent, we're not omnipotent, we're not God.
And in fact, I would argue that the only way to love equally, truly, not just in general disposition of charity, but in the realm of practice, deed, the only way to love all people equally is to love no one at all.
And I think that that's precisely what the liberal does.
And I'll just say it.
I think the liberal is being consistent when the liberal says, Well, I love people on the other side of the planet just as much as I love our nation, just as much as I love my family.
And I would say, Yeah, I think he's being honest.
You're the liberal who has cut off your parents because they voted for Trump and you won't even see them for Thanksgiving.
You're the liberal who has opted out of having children and chosen, self-elected, to be a single cat lady for the rest of your life.
You are the liberal who is a lousy neighbor who just keeps to themselves and doesn't really consider themselves.
Who hates having your kids around.
Yep, who hates having kids around.
And it seems that with moms who are more liberal, they see their kids as an inconvenience as a general rule.
So it is possible, to be fair, to add this caveat, it is possible, not just in the realm of general disposition, charity towards all mankind, but over here in the realm of tangible, physical, practical love.
It is possible to love everyone on the planet.
Practically, physically, equally.
But the only way to attain that is to love no one at all.
And I believe that liberals, in large part, have attained it.
It's impressive.
They actually not love nation, town, family.
It's like Aragorn, right?
On Lord of the Rings.
It's like, you know, the hobbits are asking him, you know, they see the ring race for the first time and they're like, what are they?
And he says, they were men once.
So too is a liberal.
Like, what is a liberal?
They were men once.
But no longer.
And Aquinas, you know, he makes that argument, and Calvin makes that argument, you know, that to neglect your own household is, you know, makes you, as the Apostle Paul says, worse than the infidel, worse than unbeliever.
It makes you a monster.
It makes you, in a very real sense, it is to lose your own humanity.
It makes you less than human.
The type of person who is so seared in heart and mind and conscience that they have no regard for their own.
Family, their own posterity, their own kinsmen, according to the flesh, that they have no preference for their own people, for their own country, for their own citizens, and that they're content to just love the world at the cost.
And even in their love for the world, it's just virtue signaling.
It's not really love in practice or in deed, but this thin veneer, this facade of loving the world in word, merely word, with no deed at all, and to do that at the expense of loving their own.
In any tangible way whatsoever, that kind of person is less than a person.
They are a monster.
They have lost their own humanity.
In a very real sense, they've forfeited their soul.
All right, well, let's go ahead and look at some of the quotes.
And the second caveat you guys already actually mentioned that I was going to say, which is that it is true that our spiritual relationship to the church, even the church universal, is a more ultimate relationship.
Right, that is an eternal relationship, and so you'll hear sometimes where some of these theologians they greatly highlight the duty that we have to our own church uh, not you, not even your local church, but to the church universal.
And you'll hear that in some of the quotes.
But the key to keep in mind here is ultimate versus the duties that God has given you.
And one of the ways they resolved this was they said, actually, loving God comes first, and God has given you your obligations to your family and to your nation.
And so, some of them grouped the reason they would say you ought to love your family.
More is because in God's providence, that's who He gave you.
And so, loving your family is actually accomplishing your first duty, which is to love God, because He is the one who providentially gave you your spouse, your children, your town, your nation.
And so, it's very interesting.
They were able to put some of the natural loves as primary because it falls under the first commandment, even more so than falling under the second commandment, which I thought was pretty interesting.
Okay, here are some of the quotes.
So, guys, what we'll do is I'll read through here.
If there was something that stuck out and you want to make a short comment on it, Then we will.
If not, our goal is here to document what has been said.
Okay.
So this first one is from Augustine, Sermon 344.
He says, To those set alight by this love, which is the love that a Christian has for God, or rather, that they may be more set alight, this is what he says, who is Christ.
Whoever loves father or mother above me is not worthy of me.
And whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
Matthew 10, 37 through 38.
He did not abolish love of parents, wife, or children.
But put them in their right order.
He didn't say whoever loves, but whoever loves above me.
And here it is where we cannot abolish the natural order.
Simply stated, the natural order starts with love for God first.
I would just comment on that.
That man, that verse when it's misapplied is just profoundly irritating because one of the things in there is whoever does not hate wife.
If that truly means hating your wife, then God is schizophrenic because the command to husbands is to love your wife.
So, unless you are profoundly.
That's why you love the church.
Right.
Intensely.
Your physical wife should be loved.
And then Jesus says, whoever does not hate his wife.
So, either God, like, it is profoundly stupid to think that what is being said there is that the natural family and the natural order is put aside, that it's just relegated to be flat compared to, to be replaced by love for Jesus.
They're not replaced by, but rather it's a comparison.
As, like, Augustine points out, he's not saying.
Don't love them at all, but saying loving in comparison in the right order.
So, yes, Jesus does say, Who is my father and mother?
He talks of his spiritual family, not to replace.
Jesus says to John at the foot of the cross, Take care of my physical mother.
So, that relationship has not been replaced, but the Christian has been added to, as Peter would say, a holy nation, a holy people, a spiritual family, adopted sons and daughters, not destroying the other, but complementing together and love for God, ranking above that natural family.
That's all that's being done there.
But that's not the order of Morris West.
When Jesus says to John, Behold your mother, what he's actually saying is that John is standing in as one of the apostles, a foundation of what would be the Christian church.
And he's saying that the church has a mother, and that mother is Mary.
Right?
So you could have some Vatican II insights right there.
You could have that view and be wrong.
Nate, cut the feed.
Yeah, and be wrong.
Or you could say, No, this is Jesus, the God man.
And even as he's carrying the weight of, Of the sin of the world and enduring the white hot wrath of God for sin, even in that moment in his humanity, he still has temporal concerns for the well being, the physical well being of his earthly mother.
Because Jesus is modeling for us who God is, but also who man is.
When grace perfects nature, this is Jesus is God, certainly no less, but he is also the God man.
He is perfectly God, fully God, but also perfect.
Man, he's showing us perfect humanity and perfect humanity, right?
Greater love has no one than this that a man would lay down his life for his friends.
And yet, even in his sacrifice of laying down his life in love for his friends, that's one picture of perfect humanity, the perfect man.
But even in that, he doesn't even do that at the expense of foregoing his earthly natural obligations to his household, in this case, being his mother.
So he's going to model for us perfect humanity in sacrificial love, laying down his life, while simultaneously also making sure that he doesn't abdicate his.
Um, earthly moral responsibilities as a human man with a widowed mother who has physical, tangible needs, and so he's making sure that those will be taken care of in his absence while he then gives his life, um, out of love for his friends.
Um, see, it's it's Vatican II, um, actually, you know, with just even that one example, wrecks, yeah, uh, the auto amoris by making it some metaphorical statement about how you know the church is birthed by its mother, you know, and its mother is Mary.
In their attempt to be Mary pilled, they actually give way to, you know, they set the theological groundwork by taking away one of the premier examples from Christ himself of the Ordo Amoris.
And so they actually set the theological groundwork by getting rid of that example.
They actually set the groundwork for gay globalism.
In other words, modern Roman Catholics faking gay, 100%.
Catholics.
Back in the medieval ages, like ancient Catholicism, lowercase c, before Trent, before Vatican I, I would argue, and certainly Vatican II, guys like Aquinas, guys like Athanasius.
Correcting Perverted Doctrines00:12:30
That's our heritage.
Those are our guys.
And would we have some theological disagreement?
Yes, of course we would.
I have theological disagreements with virtually everyone.
So that's just part of being a Protestant.
But that's our heritage.
Because if not, But then, honestly, then we got to quit picking on the Jehovah's Witness and say, well, you guys think, you know, there's the first century church and they were faithful, and then all faithful witness of Christianity completely vanished from the earth for 1800 years until Joseph Smith.
Like, Reformed Protestants, let's just be honest and admit, we can do the very same thing.
We just, you know, beat our chest and pride ourselves in the fact that, unlike Jehovah's Witnesses, we only had 1400 years of a complete absence of a faithful Christian witness, you know, until Joseph Smith came.
No, for us, it wasn't, you know, in the 1800s or 1700s, whatever.
But for us, It was the 1500s and it wasn't Joseph Smith, it was Luther.
But it's the same thing.
The Pentecostals can do it with Azusa Street, right?
So 1906, you know, the spirits finally poured back out, you know.
So 1800 years, right?
There's first century church, then there's Azusa Street, you know, Pentecostals, right?
You know, your Jehovah's Witnesses, you know, it's like it was first century church and then there's Joseph Smith, your Reformed guys, you know, first century church and then there's Luther.
No, we love the holy Catholic Church.
Universal church, the faith once and for all passed down to the saints with a faithful remnant, sometimes thriving, sometimes by the grace of God, merely surviving, but always present in every century, in every generation.
The crusaders, those are my guys.
Based.
Duke Godfrey, that's my guy.
King Alfred, that's my guy.
Roman Catholics in the last couple hundred years, not my guys.
That's the aboriginal.
They're the aboriginal.
They're the ones who chose to break off of the constant faithful stream that God providentially.
We're continuing in that stream.
They broke off.
And my prayer, and I've said this before and I'll say it again it's like, because for reformed guys, it's like, well, if you're not hosting a conference where you, you know, kind of like, you know how people will reenact the Civil War, they'll dress up in costumes, you know, and you'll have many of those.
Right.
And that's good fun.
I don't think there's anything wrong with it.
But, you know, you dress up as southerners, you know, and then you have the Northern aggression, you know, and you have the two sides, you're reenacting.
That's kind of what reformed guys have been doing forever, is just reenacting, kind of LARPing, reenacting the Reformation.
And the reality is, you know, for a lot of reformed guys, it's like the only thing that they want to talk about is how Roman Catholics are wrong.
And believe me, I believe that Roman Catholics are wrong.
But my prayer, my hope, and I would even go so far as to say my prediction is I don't think that Roman Catholicism will ultimately be destroyed.
I think that by God's grace, eventually, and it may take centuries, but eventually, I think that Rome will not be destroyed and be removed, but that it will repent.
That they would undo Trent and undo Vatican I and Vatican II.
There would still be differences in theology, just like there are differences between Baptists and Presbyterians and Anglicans and Episcopalians, but that they would come back to the true vine and say, Yeah, we got off track there for about 500 years.
We should have held a council, we should have given a hearing.
Luther was right, we were wrong.
Sorry about that.
I want to see that side of the church reformed.
And not merely removed.
Speaking of guys who love the Catholic Church, let's read another quote from John Calvin.
There you go.
Yeah, last thing I want to say when you're reading Westminster Confession, when you're reading 1689, Second London Baptist Confession, when you're reading John Calvin, when you're reading these guys, keep in mind here's the thing the sons of Issachar, they knew the times.
Guys, it is not the 1500s, it's not the 1600s, it's not the 1700s.
It is the year of our Lord 2025.
And in the year of our Lord 2025, if you think Roman Catholics are your biggest, greatest threat, Then you need to wake the hell up.
You don't know what time it is.
I understand that, yes, I understand there is a sense in which the gospel of Christ is always under threat and the gospel is central.
But when the reformers are talking about the Pope being an antichrist, in their time period, it wasn't just because the Pope had perverted doctrine, it was the Pope who was commissioning people to run them down and take from them their own physical lives.
He was not just a theological threat, he was a physical threat.
He's the one who would commission the physical danger of their children, of their wives, of their lands, of their homes.
When I think of, okay, who is that type of enemy today?
It's not just, oh, well, that guy, he holds the Trent and he's anathematized the gospel.
Yeah, that is a doctrinal problem, a huge doctrinal problem.
But transing kids and aborting babies and exporting.
Globalism and our sacred democracy to the whole world, and giving billions of our tax dollars, treating American citizens as a tax farm, and importing the third world to our doorstep so that we have to deal with people who have no desire to ever assimilate, to ever truly be Americans.
Who's doing that?
The kinds of actions that come from our political elites, some of them are Catholic and some of them are not.
But those kinds of actions have much more similarity.
I think with the types of physical threats that Luther was enduring, that Calvin was enduring.
The corruption, too, of the priesthood when Luther visits Rome as he's going through this tortured process of his conscience.
I mean, just drunkenness, they're reciting the Mass as fast as possible so they can take payment to get as many of them out.
It was a type of like debaucherous living, too, that you just don't see in Catholic priests visibly.
Now, we obviously there's scandals within the church, but like visibly, it was an orgy of drunkenness and abuse and immorality, too, that they were seeing in the Catholic Church protesting against that just isn't the same today.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
So here's this from Calvin.
So this second quote there, Nathan.
He says, to begin, he says, There is no tie of relationship more sacred than spiritual relationship.
And so if you pause there, you'll think, aha, Calvin agrees with the globalists, or at least the Christians who say we have a greater duty than Christians in Ethiopia.
However, he goes on and he clarifies.
He says, Although these words seem to imply that Christ has no regard to the ties of blood, yet we know that in reality, he paid the strictest attention to human order and discharged his lawful duties towards his relatives, which is what we talked about earlier.
But he, Christ, points out that in comparison of spiritual relationship, no regard or very little is due to the relationship of the flesh.
That's in comparison to the spiritual relationship.
Let us therefore attend to this comparison, so as to perform all that nature can justly claim.
You hear that?
We are to perform every duty that nature can claim on us, can justly claim, and at the same time, not to be too strongly attached to flesh and blood.
Again, as Christ bestows on the disciples of his gospel, The inestimable honor of being reckoned as his brethren, we must be held guilty of the basest ingratitude if we do not disregard all the desires of the flesh and direct every effort towards this object.
So, really, just a beautiful setting side by side the duty that the Christian has, the great love and worship, the fact that we have been called not just no longer enemies of God, Sons and co heirs and brethren of Christ is an incredible thing.
And Calvin's saying we ought to be eternally grateful for that and to direct all of our efforts to that.
But he says part of doing that is we fulfill every obligation that the natural system can justly lay upon us.
Because God set it up.
That's correct.
That's 100% right.
It's his system.
God set it up.
It's his system.
And sorry, just for the record, when we object to what's going on in the US, we don't object just because we're Americans and we love America.
That's true.
But this is a perversion of the natural order when it happens in England and in France and in Germany, anywhere, right?
Like God set this system up.
If there was a country on the other side of the world that existed to be a tax farm for us, right, and their citizens were being exploited, their own borders were unprotected, their own military was slowly whittling away and becoming deficient with, you know, trans infantry and all these kinds of things.
And yet, meanwhile, a sizable portion of their labor and their earnings, their wages, was being siphoned away from their people.
And given to us, I would hope that we would have the honesty and the character to object and say, that's wrong.
That's wrong.
When any country, its political elites treat its citizens that they're responsible for stewarding and loving and nurturing as a civil father, when they treat their own people as merely batteries, back to the Matrix illustration, as a tax farm for some other people, then that's wrong.
And it's sad.
Like, I mean, we do this on a global scale, whether it be Ukraine or whether, you know, there's lots of countries you could fill in the blank.
But we've done this for 150 years.
Right.
Well, we do this a lot with Israel, a lot.
And with Israel, part of the problem is not just our wicked, corrupt political elites, but part of it is our theology has made us vulnerable and sitting ducks to be exploited because our country is still predominantly Christian.
Have we apostatized in many ways, rebelled, and turned away?
Of course.
We're not saying that this is our brightest moment in Christendom, in the history of these United States, but there still is this Christian foundation and origin and history and a general Christian disposition.
There's still a lot of people in America, a sizable portion, that would at least profess to be Christian.
And it's on that basis, not despite us being Christian, but because we're Christian and because of some hijacked, perverted doctrines that have been labeled as Christian.
That we actually volunteer to be a tax farm for Israel because we think, well, those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed.
And our own politicians I mean, you look at the numbers of the amount of US politicians who have dual citizenship with these United States and Israel, and it's like, whoa, what's going on?
And it's like, why are we doing this?
Why are we preferring someone else more than ourselves?
It's fine to be charitable.
And it's fine for nations to have political alliances.
And if it makes sense at a practical political level for us to say that the modern state of Israel should be our political ally because we need someone that we can trust in the Middle East because we're worried that there might be the development of nuclear weapons with Iran or this or that to be able to be on the ground with a close geographic proximity to observe and report back with impending threats, that's fine.
But that's not what we're doing.
We care.
I mean, I remember when Bibi not that long ago came and he's talking about October 7th, and he's literally in front of our Congress, he's insulting American tragedies.
He's like, You think 9 11 was bad?
Well, October 7th is like 20 9 11s.
And I understand the argument he's making.
He's saying, If you look at the size of our population and the number of people who are affected by it, and you look at that as a percentage, because our nation is smaller than your nation, then it's like 20 9 11s.
Well, I understand.
And so it sounds like you should do something about it.
You.
Should do something about it.
Christians Preferring Their Own00:07:25
There's the only person, John Fetterman, Senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, wears like shorts at the inauguration, put the suit on when the real boss came into town.
Yeah, that was the only like speech.
Oh, yeah, the dude's wearing sweatpants.
Yeah, I had to get to the dry cleaners for this one.
Right.
If it's the president of the United States, Trump's walking in the room, sweatpants.
No, but when the sweatpants is dressing up, shorts really, right?
Short.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jim shorts.
But when the true leader of the free world walks into the room, right?
Like, have you seen the meme where it shows every state, you know, it's an electoral, you know, College, you know, election every state is the same color, and it's like sweeps, you know, 400 something, you know, whatever electoral votes, and it shows the winner, and it's Bibby, you know, and he's like, Yeah, the winner of every American election.
So, anyways, every country should prefer its own people, its own natural citizens.
And we do that.
We, and I think part of it with the order of morals, the last thing I'll say real quick is I think most people get it when it comes to family, because even like your liberal theologians, you know, like, you know, they've kind of come out of the woodwork with Vance and saying, Well, yeah, sure, you love your family.
You know, but so they can't even deny that.
They'll be like, yes, no one's saying that you can't love your wife and kids.
You know, yes, you should learn to love your own children more than everybody else's children.
But where they lose their minds is for them, it's kind of not triage.
It's not multiple, you know, different ripples going out, multiple categories.
It's just two.
It's your family, and then immediately it's everyone else.
In between your family and 8.3 billion people, there's no categories in between.
And I'm like, how?
So, like, yes, you prefer, you know, the five people or whatever in your family.
You know, my family is seven people.
You prefer those seven people.
Outside of those seven people, everyone else is the same, right?
And that's just not what scripture teaches.
And that's certainly not what the church has held.
It's duplicitous to counter signal.
Like you'll see guys, and they'll acknowledge, of course, you have responsibility to family, but they'll counter signal the order amoris, and you try to get under it.
Like, well, why are we doing this?
Like, why do you not like this idea of ordering?
And Stephen Wolfe said it well.
Like, everyone who's counter signaling it, if you force them to rank, it's because white men are at the bottom.
Like, it's really got down to it.
They just, they disdain their American, if you're an American or European, or European white heritage.
And they would, I mean, literally, Muslim refugees from Somalia would rank higher on.
I would give them clothing and I would give them food and I would give them money and I would give them support.
And when the Order of Morris is laid out and you're forced to say family, community, town, nation, people, oh, wow, what's this down here at the bottom?
Oh, your countrymen.
Right.
But the only reason they're countering it is they're countering it for Americans because they want us to neglect our countrymen.
Wes is so right.
I don't want us to skip over that real quick.
I am utterly convinced.
That all these guys who are counter signaling, you know, JD Vance and bemoaning how, you know, how terrible this is and this isn't really Christian, all of them are completely fine with following the order of morals in any other country.
Right.
Because in any other country, if that other country holds to the order of morals and they have this triage of affections, this rightly ordered loves with categories and prioritizing as like a pond, a rock hitting, you know, a pond rippling out, if they care for their immediate.
Family, and then beyond that, you know, their province or state, and then beyond that, their countrymen, you know, citizens, and then beyond that, neighboring countries that they have, you know, more relation to and more relationship with, and those, and then beyond that, the world as a whole.
These liberal guys are fine with that.
They're actually fine with the order of Morris.
They're fine if Uganda they practice it, they're fine with it.
They're fine with Uganda practicing the order of Morris, they're fine with any Muslim country, you know, here in the US, a Korean church that's for Korean people that speak Korean.
They probably love it.
Oh, so beautiful.
The gospel.
They're fine with it.
Yeah.
Joel Berry loves the Order of Morris when it comes to Israel.
You know, you know, like, so anybody, whether it's Jews or Muslims or anybody else, the reason they don't want us to practice the Order of Morris is because America is still, I don't know for how much longer, but currently it is still a majority white nation.
Right.
So if America practices the Order of Morris for citizens of these United States, legal citizens of these United States, it would mean giving an in group preference.
To white people.
And we can't have that.
I really think that's what it comes down to.
And I don't even think it's just Christians, right?
Because they'll say, no, the war isn't against white people.
It's just against Christians.
Well, I think there is a war on Christianity.
Don't get me wrong.
I think there's been a war on Christianity since Genesis chapter 3.
So I'm not saying it's a war on white people as a substitute to war.
I think there are two wars, though.
I do strongly disagree with the guys who try to conflate them and say, well, it just looks like a war on white people because the most Christian nations are Western nations, and Western European nations in America are predominantly white.
And so it looks like a war on white people, but really it's just a war on Christianity.
I disagree.
I do not think that there's a massive push against in group preferences and loving your own in the order of Morris when it comes to Argentina or when it comes to Ethiopia or when it comes to.
Like there are other.
Guatemala is 95% Christian.
Right.
We're not at war with Guatemala and natural affections.
The world, the regime, our elites, Western elites, they're actually fine with other Christian nations doing what's best for them to where they get ahead.
And because they're other.
Christian nation, they are Christian nations, it would mean Christians getting ahead by preferring their nation, their own, their own people.
And because those nations are predominantly Christian, it would mean the flourishing and betterment of Christians.
And they're fine with it because they're not white Christians.
And it took me a while.
I mean, I remember it was probably about a year and a half ago.
And I'm sitting here, I'm just trying to be honest with you.
So I know I'm indicting myself by saying, like, what?
This dude just realized a year and a half ago?
What an idiot.
Yeah, I'll own that.
Because I believed all these other guys that I looked up to, and they were like, Joel, it's not about white people.
It's just, they just hate Christianity.
No, it's about white people.
It really is.
The world hates Christ, and therefore it does hate Christians.
But they also hate white people.
It's both.
And those are two distinct hatreds, two distinct wars.
It's not one.
You should not conflate it into one.
You'll miss what's going on, and you'll come to some really wrong conclusions if you just say, there is no.
There's no global bias, you know, animus against white people.
It's just against Christians, and a lot of Christians happen to be white.
That's just, that's not true.
Maybe that was true, you know, hundreds of years ago.
But these days, there's more Christians in Africa than there are in the West.
There's more Christians in South America than there are in the West.
There's arguably more Christians, certainly on the rise, soon to be more Christians in Asia than in the West.
But everybody's fine with Asia loving Asia, with Africans loving Africans, with people in South America, Brazilians or Argentinians or whatever, loving their own.
They don't want Westerners to love their own.
And it's not because we're Christian.
It's because we're white.
Taking Dominion Over Finances00:02:11
All right, let's go to a commercial break, real quick.
We'll come right back.
All right, the clock is running out.
You need to go and register now for our Christ is King How to Defeat Trash World Conference.
It's happening the year of our Lord 2025, April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
That's a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
And by God's grace, we're able to provide for you an all star lineup.
We've got Steve Dace, Calvin Robinson, Orrin McIntyre.
Dr. Stephen Wolf, Eric Kahn, David Reese, Andrew Isker, John Harris, Ady Robles, Dan Burkholder, Dusty Devers, Ben Garrett, CJ Engel, and yours truly, Pastor Joel Webbin.
Come on out, join us April 3rd, 4th, and 5th, 2025, Thursday through a Saturday.
Go to Right Response Conference.com to register today.
Again, that's Right Response Conference.com.
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Building Our Community Together00:07:00
All right, guys, some of you are just now tuning in.
We've got over a thousand people who are listening to us live.
You may have missed at the very beginning, I led with this.
I said I'm feeling particularly amped and generous today.
And we have a little over 700 people who are currently registered for our conference.
And we want to make sure that we have at least a thousand people.
The content is going to be amazing.
It's seven main sessions, it's three different panels.
We're going to have debates, we're going to have all the stuff.
You guys just saw the commercial.
We've got Steve Dace, we've got Orrin McIntyre, Stephen Wolfe.
We've got all these guys, 15 people, Dusty Devers, the Ogden guys.
It's going to be phenomenal.
And it's not just about the content.
The thing that I made, the argument I was making at the beginning of the episode when I was plugging the conference is I think it's going to be historic.
People are going to be like, I can't believe I missed it.
And everybody who's there will be pointing back to it, I think for a few years, because We're living in a providential moment right now where there's, it's like there really is, you know, which way, Western man?
Like there's a fork in the road.
Are we going to double down on just the post liberal order and give it a thin, you know, hashtag based, you know, Christian veneer, but we're really just perfectly in lockstep with the way that the world has thought for the last 80 years that's completely contrary to the way that the world thought for the last 6,000 years?
Or are we going to truly go back and uncover?
What's old and tried and true?
Are we going to get back to real Christian doctrine?
Are we going to be able to be like the little kid who points to the emperor and has the balls to say, I can see your balls?
Who has the courage to say, the emperor has no clothes?
Are we going to be able to do that?
And this conference, that is what we're doing.
And you guys know we have gotten the world's saddest violin.
I'm not saying that you should pity us, but we've gotten a ton of hate.
For this conference, a ton of hate.
I mean, like Calvin Robinson, like I understand there are doctrinal differences.
I like him.
You know, I don't know what to tell you.
I like him.
But, you know, there are legitimate doctrinal differences between the two of us.
But he was slated to speak at Clear Truth Media.
Right.
And nobody even knew.
Like, not a word was said.
Like, I can't believe that, you know, Clear Truth Media is going to, you know, platform Calvin Robinson after what he said about Mary, you know, and praying to Mary and blah, blah, blah.
Nobody went after Clear Truth Media for, you know, like before they dropped him without any pressure whatsoever, you know, but before they dropped him without being pressured, when he was still slated to speak, like nobody was going after them.
They were going after us.
They're not going after us because they're concerned about Calvin Robinson.
They're going after us because our conference is going to teach you things, things that you're not allowed to say, things that virtually every Christian believed for thousands of years.
But have been incredibly suppressed for the last 80, give or take, years.
And I'm telling you, if you miss it, you're going to regret it.
And it's not just about the content, it's about the people.
There's a particular type of person who is going to come to the Christ is King conference April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
And those people, they're growing, I'm encouraged, but are still exceedingly rare currently.
And it's one thing to have your co belligerence on X, but it's another to actually meet up and get to meet these people and shake their hand, flesh and blood, make relationships, exchange phone numbers.
I think that friendships.
More than anything, I think just friendships are going to come out of this conference.
Friendships that I believe, by the grace of God, many of them will last years, some of them even a lifetime.
And so, because, like I said, I'm feeling amped and particularly generous on this Monday afternoon, we wanted to give, we wanted to go all the way back to the early bird rate.
In fact, I would make it even cheaper if I could, but I think it's disrespectful to those who registered right away and were proactive.
So I can't go any lower than that.
But the early bird pricing was $130.
And so that's what we're going to do.
But we're going to leave it up for about 24 hours.
You've got today, Uh, maybe you might if you wake up early, have a little bit of time tomorrow morning, and that's it.
So, right now, for $130 all the way back to the early bird pricing, if you want to register for this conference, Christ is King, How to Defeat Trash World, April 3rd, 4th, and 5th, the year of our Lord 2025, then go to Right Response Conference, not ministries, rightresponseconference.com.
Promo code is Ordo Amoris, all caps, and make it one word.
I'm aware that it is not one word, but we're going to make it one word.
Ordo Amoris.
One word, no space, all caps.
Ordo Amoris, all caps, one word in the promo code.
Again, writeresponseconference.com.
And you will get the early bird pricing, but you must register now.
And I know everybody says now, I mean literally now.
This conference is going to be unique.
There are other guys that we partner with.
All the guys who are coming to this conference are guys that we partner with, guys who have the same kind of view that we do.
But we're paying a lot of money and we're happy to do it.
But we're paying a lot of money to have all those guys in the same room at the same time because we want it to be not just a place for content and teaching.
We want it to be a like the premier paleo conservative, new dissident right, new Christian right, whatever you want to call what the Lord is doing right now.
The Lord is doing something.
We wanted to make this conference the one stop shop place where you can meet everybody.
Where you can meet, yeah, you get to meet the Ogden guys and you get to meet Isker, but you also get to meet Orrin McIntyre.
Right, you also get to see Dusty Devers and John Harris and AD Robles and David Reese and all the guys in one place at one time.
And more important than us, you get to meet each other and actually real flesh and blood, shake each other's hands, look each other in the eye, make those connections, make those friendships.
But you got to register now.
Someone asked, Are women welcome at the conference?
What would be the benefit for them?
You're welcome.
Tons of women come, they bring their children.
It's a great family time.
There's food, there's Interacting, there's friendships being made.
So, yeah, make it a family thing.
There's a family that comes every year that we met at the first Right Response Conference, and my wife and her still keep up.
We just met them, we happen to have lunch with them.
From conferences.
And they come to our house for Sunday dinner every year when they come to the conference now.
That's cool.
And they stay in touch over the year.
Like, it's been great.
Maintaining Family Connections00:05:19
Right.
Yeah.
Wives are welcome to come, children are welcome to come.
Single women are welcome to come.
Single women are welcome to come.
It's a great place to find a husband.
You will find a room filled with.
Hundreds of men who are godly, and many of the women.
The ratio won't be 50 50 quite yet.
It will not be 50 50.
The women will have much better chances than the men.
The men, you know, it'll be kind of like a lot of competition.
It'll be like a, you know, probably a 10 to 1 ratio.
But the last thing I was going to say for women, just the conference, you're more than welcome.
And it will be helpful information for everyone.
Everyone.
But there will be nothing women specific.
Specific, right.
Like we're not going to be teaching about things that are particular to women.
We're going to be teaching about things that are particular to women.
Um, America, political philosophy, um, theology applied, and how to take our country back for Christ.
That's that's what it's going to be, and I think that that's pertinent for all people, women and children included.
But, um, no, there will be no, uh, there will be no, no Alibeth breakout, no, um, no, no, nothing particular to women.
Okay, Michael, we want to close with one last quote from Thomas Aquinas, and this is a long quote, and I really appreciate this quote for a couple of reasons.
One is that by the end, he admits there are Is just some of the nature of this question requires a lot of wisdom.
And part of what we have to realize, Joel, you said it earlier the times that you live in.
And the wise man knows the time that he lives in and what to do.
And so there are principles here that are not equally applied.
Like before the show started, I talked about how we all get this intuitively on a personal level.
If you have a father, you should say, well, his priority should be his family.
Yeah.
But the night before his big board meeting pitch, you know, or some big, huge presentation that he's doing at work, He might stay at work until 10 or 11 that night, getting ready for that, because that is a critical thing in his career for the sake of his company and also for the sake of his family.
And so he might say to his kids, Guys, I know we play board games normally on Monday nights, but tonight I'm going to cancel.
Could you make the argument that in that moment his job is more important to his family?
Well, yes, you always do what's most important to you, but that's just the time.
Like you say, this is an exception because this is an incredibly important thing.
And the quote by Aquinas here kind of actually gets into the fact that it requires wisdom to know the time that you live in to know how to apply these principles properly.
So, this is a long quote.
I'm probably not going to stop really.
This is something that you guys could pause if you go back to later and really think through this.
There's a lot, a lot in this quote.
So, here it is.
He starts off by quoting Aquinas.
So, this is from, or Augustine.
It's from Aquinas, but he says, Augustine says, since one cannot do good to all, we ought to consider those chiefly who, by reason of place, time, or other circumstances, by kind of chance or providence, I would add, are more closely united to us.
Now, the order of nature is such that every natural agent pours forth its activity first and most of all on the things which are the nearest to it.
But the bestowal of benefits is an act of charity towards others.
Therefore, we ought to be the most beneficent towards those who are the most closely connected to us.
He goes on.
Now, one man's connection with another may be measured in reference to the various matters.
In which men are engaged together.
And here he says there are natural bonds that require different duties.
He says, thus, the intercourse or the interrelation, the communion of kinsmen is in natural matters, that of fellow citizens is in civic matters.
In civic matters, that of the faithful is in spiritual matters.
So the kinsman has natural relations, the faithful, the Christians have spiritual relations, and so forth.
And various benefits should be conferred in various ways according to these various connections, because we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which, speaking simply, he is most closely connected to us.
And yet this may vary according to the various requirements of time, place, or matter in hand, because in certain cases one ought, for instance, to succor, which is to give aid to a stranger, In extreme necessity rather than one's own father, if he, the father, is not in such urgent need.
And then he closes with this, and this I think is just helpful.
He says, For it must be understood that other things being equal, all things being equal, one ought to succor, to give aid, to those, to succor those rather who are most closely connected with us.
And if of two one be more closely connected and the other in greater want, It is not possible to decide by any general rule which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection.
And the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man.
And I just appreciate that.
Succoring Those Most Closely Connected00:09:08
And really what we're seeing in our time is people who are not able to exert good, godly judgment.
What is the situation that we live in?
We don't live in a time where America is strong, loves itself, promoting the true religion, and where our people are thriving both in their Christian faith and in their natural lives.
That's not what we live in.
Right.
And so to pretend otherwise and say, well, we've got to be looking outward now is completely missing the point.
Right.
Yeah.
If America, you have to, again, sons of Hizekai, you got to know the times.
If right now, if America was at the top of its game, right, and the majority of our nation was faithfully, not just professing, but faithfully Christian, and we weren't overrun by DEI and transgenderism and all these things, and And with no protection, I mean, these things are changing now, but even now, they're slow.
What Trump is doing, I'm incredibly grateful for.
But with these numbers and even projected increases over the course of his administration, you're looking at two, three, maybe four million that are deported.
Try 50.
That's what we need.
About 50 million have to go back.
And so we're not even close.
The point is, praise God that we've had some positive developments.
I'm not going to sit here and be a nothing ever happens, bro.
I believe that God is a miraculous God and things happen.
God moves.
He does things.
Praise God.
But we need to admit that, yeah, so things are happening.
But the things that are happening are small and they've been happening for two weeks.
Before that, though, America has been at its lowest point.
Full scale invasion of our southern border, tax at the highest rates you could possibly imagine.
The average person cannot buy a home.
People are foregoing marriage partly.
Because of being degenerate in terms of their morals and ethics and abandoning Christ and Christian virtues, but also in part because they don't have any confidence that they could actually take a wife and provide for children.
So, that we've we are in a terrible situation.
So, right now, to say, hey, look out, look, look up and look out, you know, look, look over to the other side of the planet, look at sub Saharan Africans, you know, and look at, um, you know, South Americans and, um, no, no, right?
Come, come back and talk to me in 50 years and we'll see how things are going.
Uh, for now, what we need to do is, um, Deport 50 million people from the country, cancel all foreign aid.
And real quick, when I say all, right, it's like Ron Swanson.
He's like, give me all the eggs you have.
And, you know, the waiter starts to walk away.
He's like, yes, sir.
He's like, wait, stop.
He's like, I'm concerned that what you heard me say is bring me a lot of eggs.
But what I said was bring me all the eggs you have.
Right.
And so even Trump, God bless him.
I'm grateful for him.
But he's canceled all foreign aid.
But it's really more like a lot of eggs instead of all the eggs you have.
Because in this case, all foreign aid, of course, Takes exemption to Israel and Egypt, strangely enough.
And Egypt.
No, like we need to deport 50 million people.
We need to lock down our borders.
We need to cancel all foreign aid.
That includes Bibi.
And we need to make motherhood great again.
We need to make houses affordable for our own citizens again.
We need to either abolish entirely, that would be my choice, abolishing.
The Department of Education.
We need to get our food to where it's not poisonous.
There's a lot of things to work on.
So, right now, it's simply just not the time.
And I appreciate Aquinas saying there's degrees of relation, right?
You can have a brother and a cousin.
One's closer.
There's also degrees of need.
So, the cousin might be dying and the brother might be hurt.
So, the cousin is further a degree away in terms of relation, but higher.
Closer degree of urgent need.
In that instance.
In that instance.
And so, in that instance, and I appreciate the way Aquinas put it, he said, and so therefore, because the need is greater, you go with the greater need.
No, he leaves it open and says, and therefore, it requires prudence.
Because I think that's what it's been for Americans we've just got relation, closeness of relation, has never even factored into the equation.
It's only been degree of need.
And so, Americans, historically, because we've been prosperous, well, everybody.
And generous.
And generous, everybody seems to have more need than us.
So we've always preferred someone else.
And we've done it to our detriment, to where now America, I mean, that's why you have a slogan that rings true with so many people make America great again.
Meaning what?
Currently, it's not that great.
America first, because we've not been first.
Right.
Yeah.
Let me take that principle and apply it to one of the questions someone practically asked us.
Let's get into these questions then.
So if you could go to the questions, Nate, someone asked, What kind of obligations do I have to my cousins?
I have a lot of them, no birth control, they're all Catholic.
Praise God.
I think we do have an obligation to cousins.
They're the closest family that would be outside of your siblings.
And that relationship, so I have cousins and they're Christians, they don't live near me.
But I can imagine a scenario where, say, my cousin said, I need $1,000 to help make rent.
I leave the phone call, I hang up, I'm about to turn it over.
And the newest member from our church, I see that he also is $1,000 short on rent.
This is maybe a person I don't know very well.
It's not like we've been friends for years.
I think you could go either way on that.
You two could correct me if I'm wrong, but you have family, blood relation.
Hey, I need some help.
You could even say they're in the body of Christ, but they're not near you.
They're not part of your church.
And then someone you're bound to by faith, by Christ.
I actually think you could.
And not merely because it's not just like, oh, in a Christian Uganda, you know, or a Christian Nigerian prince, as you know, in your local church.
Right.
So, exactly.
So, it's not just the spiritual bind of brother in Christ, but also he is, he's not just a Christian.
There's lots of Christians, but this happens to be one of the few Christians.
Who I'm actually in a local covenant community with.
Because that person also has siblings, father, mother, grandparents, cousins that could potentially help them.
And Paul, even in Timothy, he's kind of saying, like, the first line for widows, it's not the church.
It's her own.
It could even be a daughter.
That's crazy.
Paul literally, so in 1 Timothy 5, he says, like, does she not have any family, right?
So her husband's died, but does she have any sons, or uncle, or brother, or this?
And then he even gets down to a daughter, and you're talking about the first century world.
And he's saying, even if he has a daughter and she happens for whatever, because her husband is rich or whatever, that she can meet the needs, then she should.
And he says, so that the church might not be burdened.
The first line of defense when it comes to Tangible physical needs is not the church, certainly not the state, it is the family.
And so, like all the time, like when you know, pastorally, we have benevolence, right?
So, that's part of our budget.
Um, is we have this many thousands of dollars that are set aside for members of our church, not visitors, but those who are in covenant with us, members of our church, who have a tangible physical need.
But the first question that we always ask as elders and deacons, as we're you know, somebody comes with a need and we're you know, and we're um, ascertaining whether or not that's a need that the church should meet, the first question that we are always going to ask is, Do you have any family?
Yep, they can help you.
Have you reached out to your parents?
Do you have a brother?
Do you have a sister?
Do you have an uncle?
And not just because we as a church don't want to pay, but because that's literally what the Bible teaches, right?
It's what the Bible teaches.
And there are, so I have uncles that I would, for example, help out.
And then I have an uncle who's made a lot of bad choices in life and I would not help out.
So you're weighing the reasons.
What is it for?
Is it for rent?
Is it for, you know, we don't really know what he's going to use it for.
There is no formula, no ranking, no, well, if it's a third cousin and the need is above, You have to be wise, you have to be prudent, and that's how you actually go about deciding I'm gonna love this person at the expense, not even at the expense, but I'm gonna choose to prioritize this person, this individual more.
Right.
Yeah.
And part of this is why I am so grieved at the loss of Christendom and specifically Christian culture, because some of these assumptions and the way of thinking actually kind of get baked into your worldview and your perspective.
And people don't always know why they make the decision they make.
But a lot of times, when you've been discipled well and immersed in the Word of God and natural principles, all of those things, it becomes somewhat clear.
Like, yeah, we should do this.
Why?
I'm not really sure.
It's just how we are as a people.
And there's value in that.
There's great value in that.
Right.
Do us a favor.
We're going to take one or two more questions and we've got to wrap it up.
Subscribe And Stay Updated00:02:19
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Balancing Parental Responsibilities00:15:50
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Yeah.
All right, let's hit a couple more questions.
Let's see.
Here we go.
Okay.
William Betzelberger.
Betzelberger.
Maybe.
He says, How do I rightly order where I live?
I live in Oklahoma, where we are more free to build and live to the betterment of our children.
But both my wife's and my family are in Michigan and want us to move back.
That's a tough one.
That is a tough one.
What do you guys think?
When I was younger, I was much more of the move to a church.
I mean, I did it, but.
I look back and realize I should have cared more about roots and family than I did.
You're just not thinking in those categories when you don't have kids and you're in your 20s.
Then you have kids and you see the relationship to their grandparents and you live half a nation away and you realize that's not insignificant.
So have you lived in like Oklahoma for like eight months?
You work a remote job, you would have something, you went back to Michigan, you could totally afford it.
Is that the scenario?
A good church?
Like you haven't found a good church in Oklahoma, there is a church you could go back to.
Or is Where they live in Michigan, a town of 2,000 people, there's no good church, there's no good work to do, you have a flourishing job in Oklahoma.
Those are the things that I would weigh.
Like all else being equal, what's the church situation?
What is the job situation you have to work?
And then if all else is equal, you could do both.
You could be in a good church, you could be in a good place.
I do think family wins out.
Like those freedoms, it's not insignificant the difference between Michigan and Oklahoma.
But if all else being equal, because like small towns, You won't feel it the same way.
Like here in Georgetown, we don't feel the same way you would in Austin.
You don't see the same amount of pride flags.
You don't have the same defunding of police.
So, all else being equal, I know one's a blue state, one's a red state.
I do think family breaks the tie.
But again, there are factors to say, but I wouldn't be able to really afford to live.
Or it would be much tighter than you could say, no, we're going to stay here.
And what we're going to do is work towards mom and dad moving towards us.
Right.
Exactly.
That's what I was going to say in that scenario.
So, you have red state, blue state, but it's not just like, all right, so I'm going to pick a better state.
You know, on the one hand, I have a red state.
On the other hand, I have mom and dad.
I have family.
So, state versus family.
Well, then that, you know, if you frame it like that, it sounds like, well, you got to go with family.
But I think the better framing is to acknowledge no, it's family versus family.
Because by living in Oklahoma, you're going to have a much better life for your kids.
And your kids are a part of your family.
In fact, your kids, in terms of the order of morals and our natural affections and our order of loves and these kinds of things, as a parent, as a father and a mother, you have a higher obligation under God, a moral obligation to your children than you do your mother and father.
And I'm not making light of that.
You have a high obligation to mother and father, to honor father and mother.
It's not just a command for younger children while living underneath their father's roof.
But I believe that the child, in the childhood years, living underneath your father's roof, you're called to obey your father and mother.
But I believe that even the grown child who has left and began his own household, for this reason, a man should leave his father and mother and cling fast to his wife.
So, taking a wife, starting a family, starting your own household, you're now an adult, you're no longer called to implicitly obey your mother and father, but you are called for life, your whole life, to honor your father and mother.
So, you have a high calling, a high obligation to your mother and father, but you have even that much higher to your children and to your wife.
So, it's wife first.
Then children, then parents.
And so don't think of it as, you know, it's Oklahoma versus mom and dad.
No, it's in that scenario, it's children versus mom and dad.
It's like, well, but if we move to Michigan for mom and dad, of course we're taking the children with us.
Yeah, you're taking the children to Michigan.
Right.
And that has to be considered.
And I'm not saying that, and therefore it's a clear no.
I'm not saying there's no scenario.
Right.
But that is politically, economically, and culturally.
In all three of those levels, that is a worse life for your children.
Now, what are some of the pros?
Those are the cons.
Pros, the children get grandma and grandpa.
That's a better life.
That's not nothing.
That's not nothing.
Yeah.
We moved to Texas in large part for grandma and grandpa, both sides.
My wife was born and raised in California, but her parents, they saw the writing on the wall all the way back in 2013 and they left.
And they moved to Texas.
And I was born and raised in Texas.
So for me, it was coming back home to my parents.
And so we have two sets of grandma and grandpa, and it's incredible.
It's incredible.
But back to the final thing you said, just real briefly, I think this is some good pastoral counsel, and I've given it to a lot of people.
Here's the reality practically and financially, economically.
In most scenarios, not every scenario, I understand if mom and dad, right, let's say you're in your 40s or 50s, and mom and dad are bedridden, they're towards the end of their life, they have certain medical problems, there's insurance to be considered, and who's their primary doctor.
And they've been with them for a decade and a half, and they need this, need that for this surgery with this physician who's only in this state.
I get that.
But put that aside, unless there's extenuating circumstances like that, and there may be, but if there's not, if your parents are in their 50s or 60s and they're reasonably healthy, not perfectly healthy, but reasonably healthy, it is 10 times easier for grandma and grandpa to move than for you.
Grandma and grandpa are at the stage of life where their children have left.
They don't have to work.
They're empty nesters.
They don't have to factor in school, education.
They don't have to.
And for them, like, so my parents, like I said, I was born and raised in Texas, but we moved to Georgetown because that's where my wife's parents were.
And my parents were still a few hours away.
And they moved here too.
So they're in Georgetown also.
But the reason why they moved, and they didn't just sit there and arrogantly demand, well, why are you moving there?
And you need to move over four hours over here to us.
They recognize no, it's much more easy.
It's much easier for us to move than you.
You have a wife and five kids, and you're in the beginning stages of your vocation and career and trying to save money and buying your first home.
And like we've had a mortgage, we have a home, we have equity, we have 20, 30, you know, 35 years of work experience and can transition with jobs or even, you know, go ahead and pull the trigger early and part way, not maybe entirely, but a hybrid of.
Partial retirement where now I'm going to work as a consultant, you know, and I'm going to do remote.
The 55 year old, the 60, 65 year old has those kinds of options like, well, our house is almost paid off.
We've got, you know, $300,000 of equity.
I could, you know, with my work, my company, I've been there for 20 years and I could probably work half time remotely and they would keep me as a consultant.
I could start tapping early with my retirement and pick up, you know, some things over here.
Like they, The guy in his 30s with five kids who's trying to be obedient to the Lord and fruitful and multiply, but he's a millennial.
And by the time he entered into manhood, the world, economically speaking, was destroyed and the rug was ripped out from underneath his feet.
To put that expectation on him is just not fair.
It's just not fair.
So, a lot of times it's like, so not only is it like you moving to Michigan and that's a blue state, it's a worse state than Oklahoma, it's also way harder for you to move than mom and dad.
And if mom and dad can't because they're 85, And they can't get out of bed, and their physician happens to be admitted.
I get that.
But if it's not that, and it's mom and dad won't, even though culturally, politically, and economically, at every single level, it would be easier for them than it would be for you, then I know it's hard to hear, but mom and dad are forsaking you.
You're not forsaking them.
There's a difference in responsibility, too.
I'm the firstborn.
I view it as my unique responsibility among my siblings to make sure my parents are taken care of the way my wife, who's the thirdborn woman, I don't feel that same responsibility through her, and nor does she to care for her parents because there are other siblings.
She has a firstborn, her brother is firstborn.
So I feel that for my parents and specifically would apply that.
But if you're like the fifth, sixth son or daughter, you do have a different relationship to who's going to take care of mom and dad.
Oh, big brother's got it, big sister already has it, and you maybe have a freedom.
Or if you're the firstborn, you do maybe actually do it.
Hey, no, I actually have to go back.
They are aging and I need to take care of them and see them into the afterlife.
The only thing I would add on to this is part of the.
Calculus also is, am I putting my offspring in a situation where just the next generation is going to have to flee, possibly?
Right.
Literally was thinking that.
One of the things for us in Texas, and we don't know the future, we don't know what's going to happen, but our plan, our goal, Lord willing, this would be a place that our children and our grandchildren would not have to flee from so that they are not faced with the same decision that people in our time are having to make.
And that being the case.
I'm thinking that if they do have to flee from here, then they would have had to.
Flee from anywhere.
In that case, the whole ship's going down.
You're off to El Salvador where it's just a flourishing Bitcoin economy.
The last thing I was going to say with that is I know that some people feel like, well, it's hypocritical for me to leave, but then me not to want my children to leave.
They'll see that we left and then they're going to leave.
Well, that's just your parenting.
You have to explain as age is appropriate why you left, what your goals are, what family are, what roots are.
And if necessary, you do need to show what it means to care for your parents as they age.
But the principle is not, we're going to leave, they're going to leave.
The principle is establishing roots with a community in a place that's safe and prosperous for families to grow.
And if you're instructing your children in those biblical values, I mean, you know, people still will move.
It's not like we're all just going to be locked into the same town for the rest of, you know, 700 years.
But the likelihood, I think, is they'll catch the principle.
The principle is near family, near a church for a long time, roots, connections, influence locally.
Right.
Last one Ben Wooding.
Says, how do you reconcile the order of morals with the inheritance or lack thereof, the rights of the wayward, disobedient Christian child?
Rush Dooney actually has some really good things on this, but he argues, I think, persuasively, and I think it is the biblical position, that the wayward, disobedient child who is unrepentant, you don't make this decision flippantly or overnight, but the wayward child who years have gone by and they remain disobedient and unrepentant should be cut out of the will.
That they should not receive an inheritance.
And that would be for not because of personal offense or they disagree with you or, you know, my oldest.
They got drunk one time.
You know, what?
They got drunk one time.
Right.
Right.
But it would be in a Christian perspective, it would be as Christian parents, it would be one of our sons or one of our daughters denied the faith.
Right.
And is no longer professing Christ, no longer a member in a Bible preaching church, has denied the Christian faith.
We have pleaded with them and pursued them to no avail.
We have been patient and long suffering.
It's been three years, you know what?
But they still, they're not a Christian.
They have abandoned Christ.
And in that case, they should be cut out of the will because what we want is in being fruitful and multiply, we want to promote godly offspring.
And so, what you want to do is you want the wealth that you, by God's grace, have generated and accrued over a lifetime.
You want that to go to your faithful, godly offspring and not to be wasted on those who have renounced Christ.
And you're still applying the Ordo Amoris because you're still praying for them more than any other unbeliever that isn't saved.
And it actually is not loving to give someone $250,000 if they're a drunkard and a drug user.
So, still to that person, there's still a supreme amount of love, prayer and service, care, pleading.
And then in love, you're withholding because you would destroy yourself with this.
So, you're still applying it and simply saying, I can't give you this portion because you, by your actions, Have forfeited the right to it.
And if something happened, God forbid they got hit by a truck and they're in the hospital and life support and they can't afford it.
That's, of course, we're talking about an inheritance.
That's different than a need.
Giving an inheritance is different than meeting an urgent, practical, physical need.
So there's still your child.
So, yes, you're praying for them, pleading with them, you're paying for airfare to go and visit them, even though they don't probably want to be visited, but just, could I please take you out to dinner, you know, and I'll fly halfway across the country just for.
An hour and a half, you know, just to see you and remind you that I love you and talk to you about Jesus and, you know, those kinds of things.
And if you were, you know, that's the person, you know, that grown son or daughter would be the person that they can't make rent.
Okay, I'm going to help you.
I'm going to, but that's different than meeting a tangible urgent need versus giving them an equal inheritance to their siblings who have been faithful to Christ and faithful to you.
Yeah.
That's, it's unfair to, it's wrong.
It's disrespectful.
A slap in the face to your other children who have actually honored their father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise that it would go well with them.
But you're literally, in a sense, you're denying God's word.
So you've taught your children, hopefully, as a Christian parent, their whole lives growing up when they were just little and still in diapers that honor thy father and mother, that things may go well with you and you live a long life on the earth.
And then you're teaching them now that they're grown, actually, you could dishonor father and mother and things will go equally well with you financially.
Right.
Keep all the benefits.
Yep.
Because we have four kids, three of them love the Lord and have honored their father and mother and honored Christ.
And one of them has spit in their mother and father's face and spit in Christ's face.
But they're going to get the same degree of blessing as you.
So, in that sense, you're actually undermining God's word and setting a bad example for your faithful children.
There's also the sense in the Old Testament where a lot of the degeneracy, you're talking about someone just abandoning the faith, but to get to Take it a step further.
Limits Of Corporal Punishment00:02:36
A lot of the degeneracy that we see people engage in now would have been capital offenses in the Old Testament.
Right.
And so there's a sense where if your children willfully go down some of those roads under God's system, they actually are more lost to you than they are now.
Like the prescription is they are executed.
And this is where the old school theonomists, not so much the modern ones, but the old school reconstructionists like Bonson and like Rush Duny, especially, I think he was the gold standard.
Um, this is where uh they thrived, and I 100% agree with them.
I think they were like Rushden, he talks about um, you know, whether it's uh, you know, um, what do you call it, not not flogging, but you know, beating, yeah, right, corporal punishment, corporal punishment, yeah, exactly.
Like, so we're not going to throw a guy in jail, right?
Where when you put a guy in jail, you're actually punishing everybody else, right?
You're saying, uh, this guy committed a crime, so now all of you are punished by virtue of your tax dollars.
You all now have to give him three meals a day, room and board, you know, and a little bit of exercise time.
And also, we'd like to teach them some arts and crafts and basket weaving on Saturdays.
And you, all of you who did not commit a crime, are going to pay for it.
So you don't do that.
And also, that doesn't rehabilitate.
You're basically saying, we're going to take this guy for the next 20 years, we're going to put him with the worst people in all of society.
They can all influence each other.
And that's it, just doesn't work.
But biblical punishment is there's corporal punishment for lower infractions, and then there's restitution, financial restitution for theft and things like that.
Where you make the person whole, the person that you ripped off.
And then for everything else that's severe, a severe crime, if it's not something where the restitution could be made, you kill somebody's daughter, you can't bring their daughter back.
There is no restitution, not in this life.
Only God can make that whole in the life to come.
But in this life, the deed is done.
So in those cases where it's not just theft of material possessions, but things like murder, There's no restitution, and it's not, it's too severe to treat it as corporal punishment because corporal punishment, the goal is rehabilitation to bring that person back as a functioning member of society.
But at that point, the person has forfeited their own life.
And so you're absolutely right, Michael, that many of the cases, and Rush Jenny makes that argument, but many of the cases of the type of person, it's not just a child that messed up or a child who has a bad season for a season is rebellious, you know, or no, the type of child that should be cut out of your will.
Restitution Only In The Life To Come00:00:15
Is the type of child that if we were a biblical society wouldn't currently be in your will because they'd be dead.
Their will would actually go into play.
That's right.
Because they would be dead.
So, all right.
Thank you guys for tuning in.
And Lord willing, we will see you again on Wednesday.