NXR Podcast - THE LIVESTREAM - Are “Trad-Wives” Just A Sham?
Aired: 2025-02-22
Duration: 02:11:12


=== Why We Need Positive Reviews (03:06) ===

[00:00:00]  Leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.
[00:00:04]  I get it, it's annoying, everybody asks, but I'm going to tell you why.
[00:00:07]  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.
[00:00:16]  You and I both know that this ministry is willing to talk about things that most ministries aren't.
[00:00:21]  We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
[00:00:27]  If you've spent any time in Christian Twitter circles over the past few years, then you've probably come across the name.
[00:00:34]  Patriarchy Hannah.
[00:00:36]  With her bold advocacy for traditional femininity and biblical patriarchy and the trad wife lifestyle, she built a falling of nearly 30,000 people and positioned herself as a voice in the online push for Christian homemaking and submission.
[00:00:53]  She claimed to be a devoted wife, married to a contractor named Tony, and a mother to 14 children.
[00:01:01]  Her posts were filled with strong rebukes of modern feminism, encouragements for women to embrace submission. and even some sharp critiques for other Christian women in the public sphere.
[00:01:15]  But as of this past week, everything about Patriarchy Hannah has unraveled.
[00:01:20]  The account has been exposed as a fabrication, run not by a married mother of 14 children, but by a single childless woman named Jennifer, a 37-year-old from Arkansas.
[00:01:34]  A deep dive into public records, receipts, and past online activity revealed that her husband, Tony, doesn't exist.
[00:01:44]  Her family life was invented, and the house that she claimed her husband built was actually constructed by a completely unrelated developer.
[00:01:52]  Now, some are celebrating this revelation as proof that the entire online patriarchal movement is built on deception.
[00:02:00]  They argue that trad influencers are merely cosplayers, and that many who follow them are fetishes.
[00:02:08]  So, what does this all mean?
[00:02:10]  To be sure, Patriarchy Hannah deceived many, and it's worth noting that she has publicly apologized.
[00:02:16]  But this does not mean that the goals of patriarchy and the trad wife movement are illegitimate.
[00:02:23]  If anything, it shows that Christian women and Christian men, for that matter, are in vital need of real life discipleship.
[00:02:31]  The women, in their case, require discipleship in how to keep their homes, how to be lovers of children, and how to joyfully submit to their own husband.
[00:02:41]  This episode is brought to you by our premier sponsors, Armored Republic and Reese Fund, as well as our Patreon members.
[00:02:50]  And our faithful donors.
[00:02:52]  You can join our Patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries, or you can donate by going to right response ministries.com forward slash donate.

=== Clarifying Christian Patriarchy Goals (02:58) ===

[00:03:06]  As we have said before, sometimes you have to LARP before you can fly.
[00:03:12]  Rather than disparaging the LARPers, we should continue to extol godly femininity and all women who aspire to develop it.
[00:03:21]  Tune in now with special guest.
[00:03:24]  Eric Kahn, as we set the record straight and defend the lost virtue of patriarchy and Christian femininity.
[00:03:42]  That's it, boys.
[00:03:43]  Pack it up.
[00:03:44]  It's time to go home.
[00:03:46]  We're so over.
[00:03:47]  As far as I can tell from the interweb, a woman lied, therefore, feminism is true.
[00:03:54]  All the waves of it one, two, three, and four.
[00:03:56]  One, two, three, and four.
[00:03:57]  That's right.
[00:03:58]  One woman lied, feminism is true.
[00:04:00]  Pack it up.
[00:04:01]  Patriarchy, it's so over.
[00:04:03]  Today, we are joined by a special guest, my spirit animal, who, honestly, at this point, let's just be honest, I'm not even proud about this, but it is the sad reality that I must admit there was a time.
[00:04:15]  When people would say, you know, you, um, you know, you, if you're not careful, you're going to be just as, um, just as hated online as Eric Kahn.
[00:04:25]  And now people say, Who's Eric Kahn?
[00:04:29]  Eric, welcome to the show.
[00:04:30]  Thanks for coming.
[00:04:32]  Introduce yourself.
[00:04:32]  Awesome.
[00:04:32]  Thanks for having me.
[00:04:33]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:04:34]  Joel, I'm happy to pass that mandolin on to you, by the way, as most hated on the interwebs.
[00:04:39]  Congratulations and condolences.
[00:04:41]  Yeah, seriously.
[00:04:43]  Seriously.
[00:04:44]  Okay, so this is what we're going to do.
[00:04:45]  Uh, we have our very own Wesley Todd, we've got Michael Belch.
[00:04:49]  Myself and Eric Kahn is a special guest.
[00:04:51]  The reason we invited Eric, one, because he's a friend and we love him.
[00:04:54]  Two, because he's been, I think, a really consistent and steady, faithful voice on this subject of biblical patriarchy for quite a while, multiple years.
[00:05:05]  And I remember, you know, even, I don't know, when did you start?
[00:05:10]  Would you start a hard man podcast?
[00:05:12]  When did that start?
[00:05:14]  So it started in 2020, really kind of hitting that hard.
[00:05:17]  About April, I think, of 2020, COVID was kicking off.
[00:05:21]  That's when we started.
[00:05:23]  Cool.
[00:05:24]  Yeah, I just, I remember listening to it.
[00:05:25]  I was going to say about five years ago.
[00:05:26]  And so that checks.
[00:05:27]  I wanted to make sure I didn't say five years ago.
[00:05:30]  And you're like, I started it, you know, last week, you know.
[00:05:31]  But so that, yeah, the math checks out there.
[00:05:34]  And I remember being blessed by your content and learning a lot from it, your podcast, as well as It's Good to Be a Man.
[00:05:40]  I remember listening to that back in the day.
[00:05:42]  So we want to have Eric on because he speaks to this topic quite frequently, also because he's a friend, and also because you and I were both named recently.
[00:05:52]  In a podcast, and we're going to show some clips from that.
[00:05:55]  And we're going to do our best not to be bombastic and not to be unnecessarily, you know, we don't want to be mean spirited, partly because we want to be consistent with our view.

=== Contextualizing Social Justice Movements (12:10) ===

[00:06:05]  We believe in biblical patriarchy, we believe that's what the Bible espouses, gendered piety, whatever term you want to use.
[00:06:12]  And so, because of that, we don't want to unnecessarily pick fights with the fairer sex.
[00:06:19]  Now, that said, if the fairer sex chooses to pick a fight with us, We'll finish it.
[00:06:26]  No, I'm just kidding.
[00:06:28]  No, but if the fair sex chooses to pick a fight with us and their platform is significant enough within meaningful Christian circles, then there are times where it just simply merits clarification.
[00:06:39]  That's how I feel.
[00:06:40]  What do you think, Eric?
[00:06:42]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:06:43]  I mean, I've been told picking fights with women online is like kicking puppies on stage.
[00:06:49]  So we try to avoid that at all possible.
[00:06:52]  But yeah, I think, especially as we think pastorally, just for our ladies, We'll talk about Ali Beth Stuckey, I think, in a minute.
[00:07:00]  But we had people in our congregation asking about that in the patriarchy Hannah situation.
[00:07:05]  So I think in that case, it definitely warrants a response, hopefully, to be pastoral and encourage our ladies no, patriarchy is not dead.
[00:07:13]  No, the principles didn't fail just because somebody was grifting or LARPing in an unrighteous way.
[00:07:20]  Right.
[00:07:21]  Amen.
[00:07:21]  Yeah.
[00:07:22]  So we want to bring clarity to this primarily for women.
[00:07:26]  I feel like most of the guys don't really care.
[00:07:29]  Except for the bad faith listeners, like the guys who were already soft complimentarian and already didn't like patriarchy and are just looking for, they had a confirmation bias, and this is the confirmation.
[00:07:39]  They were just looking for low hanging fruit, a gotcha kind of moment.
[00:07:43]  So there's some of those guys.
[00:07:46]  But other than those guys, most of the men who are in patriarchal circles are like, so what?
[00:07:52]  Why is it a big deal?
[00:07:54]  But I think some of the women are genuinely hurt in part because I think some of them really did interact with patriarchy, Hannah, at some of them, lesser and more degrees, depending on the person.
[00:08:06]  But some of them really were following her page pretty intently and learning things from her.
[00:08:12]  Maybe even interacted with her some in private messages or whatever it might have been, or tuned into her podcast or tuned into a lot of the spaces that I didn't really, you know, I think I listened to one that Michael Foster was leading, but she was an administrator on that Twitter space.
[00:08:34]  And then there might have been one more, but I did notice, you know, because your phone, every time you open the X app, it alerts you, you know, these spaces are happening.
[00:08:43]  And I did notice, you know, she did a lot of spaces.
[00:08:45]  And so I think there were women who, you know, whether it was following her account on X or hopping in the spaces that were done on a semi regular basis pretty frequently.
[00:08:55]  Most of the ones that I saw, I was alerted because they were led by Michael Foster.
[00:08:58]  You know, he led at least a couple dozen with her.
[00:09:02]  And when I say with her, I don't mean like she was speaking all the time, but she was the administrator.
[00:09:07]  I guess I don't even know really how it works, but apparently, I don't know, there's such a thing as being good at hosting a space, and she was doing that for a lot of guys in our circle.
[00:09:17]  For those women who were, you know, in, you know, having those relational touch points, some of them were hurt.
[00:09:24]  And so I think it merits, as best we can, like some encouragement to those women, some clarifications of what biblical patriarchy is, and a path forward so that we can move on.
[00:09:38]  And that's kind of what we want to do.
[00:09:39]  So, Eric, if there's anything that you want to say, go ahead and say it.
[00:09:42]  If not, we'll go ahead and throw on the first clip from a recent podcast from Alibeth Stucky.
[00:09:49]  Yeah, I think just the one thing, kind of to contextualize everything, one of the things I've heard is, you know, Joel, you and Eric, you know, you platform this lady.
[00:09:58]  And just to be clear, I was invited to, I think it was billed as I talked to my husband, Tony, who we now know didn't exist.
[00:10:06]  I talked to him.
[00:10:07]  This is mainly for ladies who have questions about your ministry and patriarchy.
[00:10:12]  So I went on there and was just answering objections.
[00:10:15]  This is pretty standard fare, I think, for anybody who's in public space that you get requests to do podcasts.
[00:10:21]  And so we did that, interacted with some posts.
[00:10:25]  Most of the stuff I saw from her over the years was, you know, I thought decently solid.
[00:10:30]  And so that's kind of limited.
[00:10:32]  I definitely wouldn't say, like, oh, yeah, we platformed this person.
[00:10:37]  But yeah, that's kind of the extent of at least my involvement.
[00:10:42]  Right.
[00:10:43]  Yeah.
[00:10:43]  Same with me.
[00:10:43]  I went on one of her podcasts.
[00:10:45]  So same thing.
[00:10:45]  Neither Eric or I had Hannah Patriarchy on our platform, but you went on her podcast once.
[00:10:51]  I went on her podcast once.
[00:10:53]  And same thing.
[00:10:54]  I, you know, I specifically asked her, I remember it was probably close to two years ago at this point.
[00:11:00]  So it was after the clip went viral of me talking about a husband's authority in the home.
[00:11:04]  And what does that mean?
[00:11:05]  Is it merely hypothetical?
[00:11:06]  Is it just ethereal?
[00:11:07]  Or is it actual authority?
[00:11:10]  Are there practical implications?
[00:11:11]  And I use as an example that a husband has authority even over the spiritual diet of his wife and children, not just the children, but also his wife, that he actually has the authority to say, ah, you know what?
[00:11:22]  I don't want you to read that.
[00:11:23]  We can read that together at a later time.
[00:11:25]  Right now, I don't have time for it.
[00:11:27]  So in the meantime, let's go ahead and read something else.
[00:11:30]  And people are like, what?
[00:11:31]  You can't.
[00:11:32]  You can't say that.
[00:11:33]  And of course, the answer is yes, you can.
[00:11:35]  You absolutely can.
[00:11:37]  A husband has authority or he doesn't.
[00:11:39]  And I'm of the persuasion that he does.
[00:11:41]  Wives submit to your husbands in everything.
[00:11:44]  So it was after that, and complementarians lost their mind because they're like, wait a second, this guy actually believes male headship and he's not keeping in step with complementarianism, which is the facade of male headship, but doesn't actually follow through in practice whatsoever.
[00:12:02]  So the complementarians who are functionally egalitarians were very, very, very offended.
[00:12:07]  And so she asked me to come on her podcast.
[00:12:09]  And she even told me up front, I remember her saying, it's really small.
[00:12:12]  It's just basically a few women that listen.
[00:12:16]  And I don't know.
[00:12:16]  I don't know the metrics of her podcast.
[00:12:18]  I think that's probably true.
[00:12:20]  And so, anyway, so I was like, hey, do you want to do video?
[00:12:23]  And she was like, no, audio only.
[00:12:25]  That checks out now.
[00:12:26]  That makes sense.
[00:12:27]  And then right before we recorded, she gave me a link and I tuned in when the day came.
[00:12:32]  And I asked her specifically, I said, is your husband going to be a part of it?
[00:12:35]  Do you have his permission?
[00:12:36]  I asked those questions.
[00:12:37]  And she said, oh, yes, absolutely.
[00:12:39]  Before any of this is released, he's out working.
[00:12:42]  He's given me his permission.
[00:12:43]  I'm going to record it.
[00:12:44]  And before I release any of my podcasts, he always listens to the audio and goes over it first.
[00:12:50]  And I was like, great.
[00:12:51]  So, yeah.
[00:12:53]  And I'm sure it was probably something similar with you.
[00:12:55]  All right.
[00:12:55]  Are we ready to get into our first clip?
[00:12:59]  Yep.
[00:12:59]  Okay.
[00:12:59]  Here we go.
[00:13:00]  Nate.
[00:13:00]  I truly think that this is like intentional.
[00:13:03]  I think that she's trolling these people.
[00:13:05]  I mean, it's just so, so silly.
[00:13:08]  And I'm just like curious, did these, Men check with Hannah's husband before going on her podcast because these men have criticized me for having a platform.
[00:13:17]  Now, it's interesting because a lot of these men, like, you know, people like Joel Webbin, who have told me, you know, I shouldn't be on the front lines of the culture wars.
[00:13:30]  All right.
[00:13:31]  There's our first clip.
[00:13:33]  What do you think?
[00:13:35]  Man, this Joel Webbin, this Joel Webbin guy seems really terrible based on that.
[00:13:39]  I'm kind of amended at you.
[00:13:41]  Cool, okay.
[00:13:41]  She's about to name you two.
[00:13:44]  I know, I know, I know.
[00:13:45]  Uh, it is actually interesting though.
[00:13:47]  Obviously, we answered one of the objections, uh, already, but of course, you know, she was uh telling us that her husband was involved, Tony, who doesn't exist.
[00:13:58]  Uh, of course, we know that.
[00:13:59]  I do also think it's interesting though because there's this desire to portray all of the patriarchy camp, uh, as particularly LARPy in the past.
[00:14:08]  She's called it the red pill, manosphere, trad wife.
[00:14:12]  Kind of interesting because I've never associated with those labels.
[00:14:16]  If anything, I've generally criticized them.
[00:14:19]  But I think, you know, this, I think she's smart.
[00:14:21]  This is a smart play.
[00:14:23]  Associate an oppositional theological position with probably the easiest target, which would be, you know, somebody who just got caught lying as though that represents all of us in our camp, which of course it doesn't.
[00:14:37]  We're leaning back on the reformers and Calvin and Knox and Vermigli and Luther and stuff like that.
[00:14:43]  But that, of course, is not going to be the talking point here.
[00:14:46]  Yeah.
[00:14:47]  Right.
[00:14:47]  Well said.
[00:14:48]  I wanted to pick up too, Eric.
[00:14:49]  You're like, well, I never associated with the label, which is true.
[00:14:51]  I've followed you for years and you've never been like, I'm the red pill guy, I'm the trad guy.
[00:14:56]  But I think the reason that you don't, and I would think say this of all of us in the room, is movements like that, and that includes good ones like trad wife and all of those, they inherently take people that are very susceptible to wanting to be involved in something.
[00:15:09]  So imagine you don't have a great home life and you hear someone come along and they say, you know, the real problem in your life is, you know, you're not submitting to your husband, you're not dressing modestly, you're not taking care of things in the home.
[00:15:18]  If you're unhappy with the way your life is or unhappy with your marriage, Well, great news.
[00:15:21]  I have this wonderful pill, and there's a lot of people, whether that be the trad life movement.
[00:15:26]  I remember social justice, for instance.
[00:15:28]  I never posted the black square, but there were so many people that were like, This is the thing I'm going to attach to.
[00:15:33]  This is the thing I'm going to make to be my identity.
[00:15:35]  This is the thing I'm going to get to be invested in.
[00:15:37]  And there's a lot of people that they'll get in a movement and they'll go and they'll have steam for two years and then die off.
[00:15:42]  And then it'll be something new and they're on to something else and this and that and the other.
[00:15:46]  So you said there, I've never associated with it.
[00:15:47]  And I think that's a good instinct to have.
[00:15:49]  Everybody's posting a black square for social justice on Instagram.
[00:15:52]  Probably not the best time to do it.
[00:15:54]  Tons of people are dressing up, they're titching everything in the closet, replacing it with a line of dresses, starting the sourdough baking company.
[00:16:00]  Probably that six month time period is not the best time to be like, you know what?
[00:16:04]  I got to start mine too in my neighborhood.
[00:16:07]  The best type of movements, the best types of change, it's over years and they're habits that are kept up for life.
[00:16:12]  And that's just not conducive to something that's a flash in the pan, very exciting, has a lot of people that are really into it all of a sudden.
[00:16:18]  That doesn't create the ground, the soil for a good pattern of life that lasts.
[00:16:24]  Yeah, there's a lot of things, multiple elements that can be appealing.
[00:16:27]  One, like you already said, Wes, is just the desire for community, belonging, relationship.
[00:16:32]  Which is a good desire.
[00:16:33]  Right.
[00:16:34]  So a lot of people who get pulled into flash in the pan type movements, it really can be.
[00:16:41]  Simply that they're lonely.
[00:16:42]  That can be a big part of it, is just wanting friendship.
[00:16:46]  In addition to that, there's not just the desire for community, but also the desire to be seen as virtuous.
[00:16:51]  And so, whether it was social justice in the black square, it's like, look at me, I'm virtuous.
[00:16:58]  Or whether it's trad life.
[00:17:00]  So, if women are constantly flooding social media with pictures of themselves in bikinis and you're showing a picture with you and your children in a sundress, That's good.
[00:17:12]  And I would love for social media to be flooded with that instead.
[00:17:14]  That is objectively good.
[00:17:16]  But the desires, in terms of your incentives and motives, hidden motives of the heart, it could be to honor God.
[00:17:21]  It could also be simply to be viewed as being virtuous, morally superior to those who are scantily clad.
[00:17:28]  But a lot of that gets down to, again, I think the thing that I want to point out is those don't have any bearing over whether or not something is objectively moral and true.
[00:17:41]  That's what you're talking about is at the individual level what the incentives or hidden motives of their heart, inward motives might be for somebody hopping on board.
[00:17:50]  But the fact that a movement or a set of doctrinal principles or whatever it might be, or even an individual local church, that it might attract people for the wrong reasons, doesn't it's a fallacy to say that that definitively and objectively means that this church or this movement or this doctrinal belief system is somehow inherently flawed, that it's morally flawed because it attracted.

=== The Virtues of a Productive Household (07:18) ===

[00:18:16]  The wrong person.
[00:18:17]  That's just, that's guilt by association.
[00:18:23]  That's a fallacy.
[00:18:25]  And so that's the only thing that I would want to add to it.
[00:18:28]  Michael, do you have anything you want to say?
[00:18:29]  Well, I do.
[00:18:29]  I want to be upfront.
[00:18:32]  Almost a year ago, I didn't look back and see the exact date that we did it, but about a year ago, we did an episode and it was Which Way Western Woman?
[00:18:39]  And it was Witchcraft or Trad Wife.
[00:18:42]  Right.
[00:18:42]  And so, you know, in that episode, we were commending the virtues of the Trad Wife movement.
[00:18:47]  However, Eric, something I heard you say once a while ago, well, this is years ago.
[00:18:53]  You said that one of the problems in the 50s and 60s was that as the domestic duties became easier because of machinery and canned goods, things like that, one of the failures of men was that we did not figure out how to continue to involve our wives, women, in the process of.
[00:19:19]  The creation mandate of being fruitful, of subduing the earth.
[00:19:23]  And we kind of, in some ways, like modern society just left women kind of twiddling their thumbs.
[00:19:29]  So I'm curious, Eric, what you think.
[00:19:32]  You know, sourdough and sundresses is not enough, right?
[00:19:36]  But I think we would all say it's a step in the right direction.
[00:19:39]  But I'm curious if your perspective is still well, we need to be creative and thoughtful about how we encourage our wives and dads, their daughters, in knowing how to be keepers at home when the Roomba vacuum can, you know, can clean the floor for them, right?
[00:20:01]  So I'm just curious.
[00:20:03]  Yes, trad wife is a good impulse in the right direction, but it's not enough, obviously.
[00:20:08]  Yeah, I think really what it's, trad wife is like the tip of the iceberg.
[00:20:11]  But I think what women and men too who are interested in this sort of topic, I think what they're actually looking for is an old principle that we would have called in Christendom the productive household.
[00:20:22]  So when you read Proverbs 31, you see a woman who is working, she's busy with a number of activities that are associated with her household.
[00:20:29]  She's actually involved in some ways, usually at least in a tertiary way, with her husband's business.
[00:20:35]  Whether that's maybe doing some bookkeeping, your husband's a welder or something like that, and you're involved in it somehow.
[00:20:42]  The daughters would have been involved in those things too.
[00:20:45]  So I think really the 50s is kind of as Christendom falls apart and the productive household is gone, they still maintain a little bit of the moral virtue of the household.
[00:20:56]  But it's really more of what we think of today as like the nuclear family.
[00:21:00]  Yeah, leave it to Beaver.
[00:21:02]  There's a dad, there's a mom.
[00:21:04]  But it's already broken down a little bit at that point because dad's going off to a job by himself.
[00:21:09]  Mom just kind of stays at home, kids go to a public school.
[00:21:12]  It was definitely more wholesome than today, but it's still a denigration of what the biblical household, I think, pattern is supposed to be.
[00:21:21]  So, yeah, particularly having women see that the sourdough is just part of a bigger whole and a bigger vision for the productive household.
[00:21:30]  And I think one of the things that we've tried to do, you know, I said we weren't involved in the red pill manosphere or trad wife, whatever, but one of the things we definitely have done, and I think Joel's done this as well.
[00:21:41]  Is we've looked at those cultural trends and we've seen some of those hungers for the old productive household.
[00:21:46]  And we've said, sort of in the, you know, Paul going into the Areopagus and saying, yeah, actually, some of the things that you're talking about, it's the unknown God.
[00:21:54]  But let me tell you the real story here.
[00:21:56]  The reason we have so much father hunger in the land is actually because something has gone catastrophically wrong with society.
[00:22:04]  And so we want to correct some of those errors.
[00:22:06]  We do want to speak to the guys who are really hungry for, you know, Andrew Tate content, for example, without saying, yeah, I'm part of the red pill movement.
[00:22:15]  We're obviously going to critique Andrew Tate, but we're going to speak to that desire.
[00:22:19]  And I think you see that across society that people really are longing, and wives in particular, not just to be, you know, cute on the fainting couch, but to actually be involved in the work that her husband is doing and then bringing the children into that work as well.
[00:22:35]  Sourdough could be a part of it, but it's actually a much greater vision than just that.
[00:22:40]  Right.
[00:22:40]  Because it's getting at virtues underneath.
[00:22:42]  Like what are dresses getting at underneath?
[00:22:44]  Modesty.
[00:22:45]  And beauty, modesty without being frumpy, modesty with elegance, feminine beauty.
[00:22:52]  Right.
[00:22:52]  What is sourdough getting at underneath?
[00:22:53]  Provision, submission, warmth.
[00:22:56]  So, by all means, take the things underneath.
[00:22:58]  We talk about them all the time with masculinity.
[00:23:00]  What is working out getting underneath?
[00:23:04]  Longevity of life, stability, security, protection, right?
[00:23:08]  Discipline.
[00:23:09]  What about a guy who's being ambitious and trying to make more money so long as he's doing it ethically without neglecting his other duties?
[00:23:15]  Well, that's provision.
[00:23:17]  Like, this is the right direction.
[00:23:19]  So, these are things that we don't want to disparage.
[00:23:21]  These are things that we want to encourage.
[00:23:23]  And we want to encourage them and then come alongside them and start to provide some of the theological biblical underpinnings, like Eric was talking about, for them to say, This is right.
[00:23:33]  Let me tell you why.
[00:23:34]  This is good.
[00:23:35]  Let me tell you why, and show them the biblical reasoning and then also show them historically how this is how all the world has thought, even outside of Christian nations, even pagan nations have thought this way.
[00:23:47]  All the world has seen a difference between men and women and the function of women in society, and predominantly that being in the home.
[00:23:55]  This is.
[00:23:56]  Common knowledge for the vast majority of all of human history, and it's certainly true to the scriptures.
[00:24:01]  So, if we see something like that in the culture at large, yeah, trad wives and sourdough beat the hell out of OnlyFans, right?
[00:24:13]  So, when we're living in OnlyFans culture, and then you see even just the sparks of a potential sundress and sourdough movement, then yeah, we want to encourage that and say, That's great.
[00:24:30]  And then add some of the robust underpinnings, theological underpinnings for why.
[00:24:34]  But we don't want to disparage it and say, well, no, that's not really what femininity is because we're actually intimidated by wives who are staying home and wearing dresses and making sourdough because we actually secretly want to be able to protect our own wives and their 40 hour a week career or whatever outside of the home.
[00:24:53]  That's, to me, that does not sit well with me.
[00:24:59]  So, one more thing that I wanted to add with a clip.
[00:25:01]  Nathan, can you?
[00:25:02]  Play, not the next one, but could you go back and play the clip that you already did one last time?
[00:25:06]  I have one more point to make.
[00:25:10]  And gullible.
[00:25:11]  Hannah also hosted two of these people, Eric Kahn and Joel Webbin, on her podcast, Patriarchy Country.
[00:25:18]  I truly think this show, who is also a working mother.
[00:25:24]  And also a few years ago, Joel Webbin really, really wanted to be on my show, was asking and asking and asking to be on my show.
[00:25:33]  I did not want to do it.

=== Spiritual Strength Over Physical Might (13:47) ===

[00:25:35]  I just finished feeding him and he just like cuddles up on me like this.
[00:25:38]  How am I supposed to put him back?
[00:25:40]  That's all right.
[00:25:41]  Technical difficulties.
[00:25:43]  It happens to everyone, including Nathan.
[00:25:45]  So here we go.
[00:25:45]  So that was actually our second clip, but it's okay because it basically makes the same point as the first clip.
[00:25:50]  So we'll go ahead and just address both in one foul swoop.
[00:25:54]  But I wanted to say from the first clip, and the sentiment is there again in the second.
[00:26:00]  But, you know, Ali mentioned that, well, you know, people like Joel Webbin or Eric Kahn, they don't think that I should have a podcast.
[00:26:07]  They don't think that I should, and she specifically said, they don't think that I should be on the front lines of the culture war.
[00:26:12]  And so I just want to, I mean, I think I've said it in the last week, but might as well go ahead and for the record and say it again.
[00:26:19]  That is correct.
[00:26:21]  That's correct.
[00:26:21]  I do not want women on the front lines of battle.
[00:26:26]  No, I don't think that it's pleasing to the Lord.
[00:26:30]  There's a number of reasons for that, but I'll give at least one.
[00:26:33]  I've given it before, I'll give it again.
[00:26:36]  Men should be strong, and physical strength in a man's youth eventually.
[00:26:42]  Coupled with grace, gives way, as we've talked about before, gives way to spiritual strength as he gets older.
[00:26:48]  So, there's something in our youth at the physical level that God is saying, He's conveying to us through nature, by means of nature, saying, This is the general direction that I have and my will for you.
[00:27:02]  So, He makes men, typically in general, young men are physically strong.
[00:27:07]  And that says something about the spiritual telos of a man, strength.
[00:27:11]  So, that physical strength then gives way.
[00:27:14]  To gray hair, a crown, wisdom, spiritual strength, that he remains a protector.
[00:27:19]  He may not be able to bench the same amount, but he's actually an even stronger protector and provider for his people as he ages.
[00:27:28]  That physical strength gives way to spiritual strength.
[00:27:31]  So too with a woman.
[00:27:33]  God makes, in a general sense, women beautiful.
[00:27:37]  Now, that external beauty, the physical beauty that a woman possesses in her youth, eventually, the scripture says, and we see in our experience, that it eventually fades.
[00:27:47]  That beauty is fading, charm is deceptive, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
[00:27:51]  But that physical, that's God speaking through nature, that physical beauty that embodies women in their youth, is to give way to greater and greater degrees of spiritual beauty.
[00:28:05]  Now, speaking of the spiritual beauty, 1 Peter talks about this and explains exactly what that is.
[00:28:11]  It's not an external physical beauty that's perishable, but an imperishable beauty of the heart.
[00:28:16]  So, an internal and eternal.
[00:28:19]  It's imperishable.
[00:28:19]  So, it's internal and eternal beauty.
[00:28:22]  And then God defines this beauty that is precious in his sight with two predominant characteristics.
[00:28:29]  Number one, that it's quiet.
[00:28:32]  And number two, that it's gentle.
[00:28:34]  It's a quiet and gentle spirit.
[00:28:37]  And so the reason, this is just one reason.
[00:28:39]  There are a number of reasons.
[00:28:41]  There are practical reasons, psychological reasons, political reasons.
[00:28:44]  There are all kinds of reasons.
[00:28:45]  But this is one theological reason.
[00:28:47]  No, I don't want to see any woman.
[00:28:49]  It's nothing personal against Ali Beth Stucky, but I don't want to see any woman, and especially any Christian sister in the Lord.
[00:28:56]  On the front lines fighting a war.
[00:29:00]  Now, I understand that it's not a physical battle, but to be on the front lines of the culture war, it requires at least some degree.
[00:29:09]  It's not the only tool in your toolbox, but it will be used.
[00:29:13]  It is necessary.
[00:29:14]  You don't only use a hammer when you're building a house, but you can't build a house without a hammer.
[00:29:19]  You're going to have to use it at least some.
[00:29:22]  Well, here's a tool on the culture war because it is a war.
[00:29:26]  It is a right sentiment that we've.
[00:29:28]  We've called it, we haven't just called it the cultural project or the cultural cooking, cultural baking, you know, cultural nursing.
[00:29:37]  No, it's called the culture war.
[00:29:40]  And there's a reason for that label and the reason why it's stuck because it is really a war.
[00:29:45]  And when you're in war, even if it's not a physical battle, that cultural war, one of the tools like a hammer, it's not your only tool to be used all the time, even in the case of men, but it is necessary.
[00:29:55]  It will have to be used occasionally, is being polemical.
[00:29:59]  And the The mere fact of being polemical, to be polemical is to not be quiet and gentle.
[00:30:09]  You cannot be polemical and quiet and gentle at the same time, which, according to God's word, if we're going to trust that God's word is true, a quiet and gentle spirit are the two predominant defining characteristics of inward feminine beauty that is pleasing in the sight of God.
[00:30:28]  And so, a woman who is on the front lines fighting the culture war. Is going to be polemical, and Allie is at times.
[00:30:35]  She's being polemical in this video towards us.
[00:30:38]  She's you know being a little snarky, a little bit of sarcasm.
[00:30:42]  It's it's you know she's she's warring, she's it's a fight, she's fighting.
[00:30:47]  And and in being polemical, you cannot be gentle and quiet, which means that those are two of the premier characteristics of beauty, according to God's word, for women inward beauty.
[00:31:01]  Then you can't be beautiful.
[00:31:04]  In other words, if we send our Christian sisters in the Lord to the front lines of the culture war, then we are requiring of them, maybe not every second of every podcast or everything, but we are requiring by necessity that at least in some significant degree they will have to sacrifice their beauty in order to engage in that polemic.
[00:31:32]  You can't do both.
[00:31:33]  You can't be polemical and beautiful as a woman, feminine beauty, according to God's definition of what beauty is.
[00:31:42]  And we, given the choice between warring sisters in Christ or beautiful sisters in Christ, we want our sisters in Christ to be beautiful.
[00:31:52]  So, back to that first clip.
[00:31:54]  We won't play it again because we're having a little bit of challenges.
[00:31:58]  But that first clip, she said, you know, Joel doesn't think that I should be in the culture war.
[00:32:03]  That is correct.
[00:32:04]  That is correct.
[00:32:05]  And my opinion has not changed.
[00:32:07]  And that is because I don't think that the culture war is just that.
[00:32:12]  It's a war.
[00:32:13]  And war is for men.
[00:32:15]  But physically.
[00:32:16]  In the physical sense, when there's bullets, and in the spiritual sense.
[00:32:19]  The culture war is different than building culture.
[00:32:22]  That's right.
[00:32:23]  Women have been authors and painters and keepers of home, helping produce their household livelihood.
[00:32:33]  Building culture is different than what we're talking about with the culture war on the front lines, trying to beat back negative influences and sinful beliefs that are shaping how the culture builds itself.
[00:32:45]  Right.
[00:32:46]  Eric, what do you think?
[00:32:48]  Yeah, I think that you guys make some really good points.
[00:32:50]  I think the other is just practical, facing up to the practical things that are going on too.
[00:32:54]  So, having spent a lot of time in the media industry outside of a particularly reformed or Christian space, you've got to think about the cultural context and what a marketing guy is thinking through.
[00:33:06]  He's saying you got a pretty blonde lady and you've got an audience of women.
[00:33:10]  So, how do you market to them?
[00:33:12]  You get somebody to speak their language.
[00:33:14]  You feel like you need something like that.
[00:33:16]  That's really a big factor here.
[00:33:19]  The other one I would say, though, is when we're addressing principles, just like in the book of Acts, when you start telling the silversmiths and the magicians that what they're doing is not a good thing for them to be doing, well, what ends up happening is it causes an economic problem.
[00:33:36]  And so, I think for Ali and for other people, they're very successful.
[00:33:41]  And I think in the past, this is why you'll tend to hear quips from them like, you're jealous of my platform, yada, yada.
[00:33:48]  We're like, no, actually, it's a principled issue.
[00:33:51]  But you've got to be aware of that.
[00:33:53]  The other thing I think that's really, it's kind of just in the cultural water, particularly with mainstream evangelicalism for some time now, is you've had the Jen Wilkin effect, where we had this idea that the only way that you could serve women was to have a female version of a pastor.
[00:34:09]  And so we did that with women's ministries.
[00:34:11]  And so.
[00:34:12]  I actually view this as just an extension of the same thing, where it's like, well, men addressing political issues wasn't enough.
[00:34:19]  We need a female version of that in order to be effective.
[00:34:24]  And of course, again, on principle, we don't think that's the case.
[00:34:27]  I also think, going back to something that Wes said about movements, this is one of the particular reasons that we want to ground what we're saying, not in novel, innovative 1980s complementarian theology, but in the reformed tradition as a whole.
[00:34:43]  Right.
[00:34:43]  So 200 years and plus older.
[00:34:46]  And we say when you stack up something like Alibeth against all of that, if you go 200 years ago, they would be laughing that this conversation is even happening.
[00:34:56]  Right.
[00:34:56]  Yeah.
[00:34:57]  A little, just a bit on the war.
[00:34:58]  Maybe we'll hit our first commercial break.
[00:35:00]  But that's the positive side, the polemical, the attack, the aggression.
[00:35:04]  But on the negative side, I mean, I'm sure Joel and Eric get much more than I do.
[00:35:08]  But the messages, the insults, and everything that I receive, I would never want my wife to be on the receiving end.
[00:35:12]  They don't bother me whatsoever.
[00:35:14]  But anyone that has some level of a public platform and speaks strongly on the issues of today, they're going to be on the receiving end of hate, of vile, disgusting things that should never be hurled at a woman, most certainly, in regards to this.
[00:35:28]  And so by saying, no, I wouldn't want my wife doing a podcast on this, I wouldn't want her speaking, I wouldn't want her authoring related to these issues.
[00:35:35]  You're shielding her from being exposed to nastiness.
[00:35:38]  They have just no place being exposed to.
[00:35:40]  I love them.
[00:35:40]  I want you to sleep great at night.
[00:35:41]  And so we're not going to involve you in this culture war.
[00:35:44]  And I will happily take the heat because I can take a thousand or whatever it would be and not lose a wink.
[00:35:50]  But for you, out of love, I just know this is to protect you.
[00:35:54]  Amen.
[00:35:55]  Well said.
[00:35:55]  Yeah, sometimes people ask, like, how come we never see your family?
[00:36:00]  You know, like, how come your wife doesn't ever jump on a podcast with you or anything like that?
[00:36:06]  And the short answer is because I love my family.
[00:36:09]  Because I love my wife.
[00:36:11]  There's about 100,000 people that appreciate Joel Weber by the grace of God.
[00:36:16]  And there's 10 million that hate me.
[00:36:20]  They're a vocal 10 million, Joel.
[00:36:23]  They are.
[00:36:25]  And so my wife, Megan, she'll ask from time to time, so what are people mad at you for today?
[00:36:34]  What's the new thing?
[00:36:37]  And a lot of times I'll just say, well, nothing.
[00:36:42]  I mean, people are mad.
[00:36:44]  That's true.
[00:36:44]  I won't lie to her.
[00:36:46]  But nothing important.
[00:36:49]  I will catch her up maybe once every couple of weeks, maybe once a month, if there's something really significant that I think might actually come up in conversation with other women in the church that they might ask her about.
[00:37:08]  Or maybe her parents might have seen something online.
[00:37:13]  If I get picked up by some major, News station, and my email is getting flooded, you know, because some clip went viral, you know, or something like that.
[00:37:22]  And it's almost, you know, like close to being a national story.
[00:37:27]  So, like, you know, she could have an aunt or an uncle that hear, you know, about it.
[00:37:31]  Then something like that, I'll, you know, I'll clue her in and let her know what's going on so that she can be prepared, not caught off guard.
[00:37:38]  Like if she's going for a walk with her mom and her mom asks a question or a woman in the church.
[00:37:43]  But other than that, no, I don't sleep very great.
[00:37:48]  But my wife sleeps like a baby.
[00:37:50]  She's living her best life now.
[00:37:52]  She's got her five little babies living the dream and she's happy.
[00:37:56]  She has her friends in the church and good relationships with her family.
[00:38:00]  And she does make her sourdough and she wears beautiful dresses and she's healthy and she's happy and she's beautiful.
[00:38:08]  And no, I don't like why is your wife not podcasting with you?
[00:38:12]  Because I love her.
[00:38:13]  That's why I'm not bringing her into this world.
[00:38:16]  No, I'll go to war for her.
[00:38:19]  And that's why I'm doing it.
[00:38:20]  I'm doing it number one, for the glory of God.
[00:38:22]  Number two, for the good of his people, for the good of the church, Christians.
[00:38:25]  And number three, because I have a wife and children.
[00:38:29]  And as Stephen Wolfe would say, I don't have any fancy titles, although he literally does.
[00:38:35]  He has a doctrine and political philosophy.
[00:38:38]  I don't have any fancy titles, but I am a father and I want my children to live in a Christian nation.
[00:38:45]  That's why we do what we do for the glory of God, the good of his people, and for our children.
[00:38:50]  And our children's children.
[00:38:51]  We want them to live in a Christian nation.
[00:38:53]  So, no, I'm not going to bring my wife into battle with me podcasting in the same way that if I got enlisted because we went into World War III, you know, because.
[00:39:04]  For Ukraine.
[00:39:06]  It would be Israel, let's be honest.
[00:39:07]  But, you know, but if we, you know, if we get, you know, I get drafted, no, I'm not going to take my wife with me and my daughters with me into battle.
[00:39:16]  And I'm also not going to subject them to the internet to be hated by 10 million people.

=== Courage to Speak Truth in Love (05:30) ===

[00:39:22]  So.
[00:39:24]  Oh, one more thing.
[00:39:25]  So, since we did play the second clip, we might as well address it real quick and then we'll go to our first commercial break.
[00:39:29]  The only thing there that's worth addressing is that it's, you know, I've seen it online and Ali said it in that clip, but I've seen it online where people are like, well, you're hypocritical and I heard that you paid Ali to go on her show and this, that, and the other.
[00:39:44]  And I think there's two things worth noting.
[00:39:46]  Number one, the simplest thing that I can say is that by God's grace, I've actually changed.
[00:39:55]  And this is what I don't like a lot of times about older ministers.
[00:39:58]  Guys who are fathers in the faith and we appreciate them, we want to be as respectful as we can.
[00:40:02]  But one thing that really is disappointing and exasperating, I think, for spiritual sons when we see older men in the ministry who are, they don't just do this once or twice, but they're kind of like uniquely marked by it.
[00:40:15]  It's kind of like their MO, it's something that they're known for because they do it with such frequency.
[00:40:20]  One of the things that's often done is that guys will get caught in some kind of inconsistency.
[00:40:28]  And instead of an apology, there's a double down.
[00:40:33]  There's, well, I'm going to write this many extra blogs to Claire.
[00:40:38]  And it's not an apology, it's actually an indictment because at the end of it, what you're really communicating is, I need you to apologize for being so stupid that you misunderstood me.
[00:40:49]  So I'm not going to do that to you guys.
[00:40:51]  What I'll do instead is, it was early 2020, pretty quick after COVID happened in March.
[00:40:58]  I think it was April, May.
[00:41:00]  Something like that, maybe June.
[00:41:02]  So, about five years ago.
[00:41:04]  And I had just written a book called Am I Truly Saved on the Assurance of Salvation?
[00:41:09]  And we reached out to multiple Christian podcasts.
[00:41:12]  Just Thinking was one of them with Virgil Walker and Daryl Harrison.
[00:41:16]  So, we reached out to multiple Christian podcasts and asked them if we could do advertising with them to promote the book.
[00:41:24]  And Allie was one of the podcasts that we reached out to.
[00:41:27]  And I can't remember the price.
[00:41:28]  I think it was about $700 for one commercial, which I'm sure her price is a lot higher now.
[00:41:32]  She has a much larger platform.
[00:41:35]  And I'm not saying that she was gouging us.
[00:41:37]  I think that was a fair price.
[00:41:38]  So we paid $700 for one commercial for my book.
[00:41:42]  And then I followed up when they said yes to that, to promoting the book.
[00:41:46]  And we agreed on the price.
[00:41:47]  They sent the invoice and we paid it.
[00:41:48]  Then I followed up and said, hey, while we're at it, I'm pastoring in California.
[00:41:54]  COVID's kind of a big thing.
[00:41:55]  And we've taken a stand on that issue when a lot of other churches haven't.
[00:41:59]  And we took a stand early.
[00:42:02]  Would you be willing to have me on for a short segment to talk about that?
[00:42:05]  And she said, yes.
[00:42:07]  Now, she says she didn't want to.
[00:42:09]  I think that's probably true.
[00:42:10]  I don't think she's lying.
[00:42:11]  I bet behind the scenes she's like, not really interested.
[00:42:14]  But she made an exception and probably in part because we had just become customers by paying for an ad.
[00:42:21]  And to be frank, that was my strategy.
[00:42:23]  My strategy was I'm going to pay for the ad because I really do just want to promote the book.
[00:42:27]  And after having paid for an ad to promote the book, then I'll make a request.
[00:42:30]  Can I go on your show?
[00:42:32]  Because that's kind of a decent strategy because then the person feels a little bit beholden to you.
[00:42:37]  So, I think Allie's telling the truth.
[00:42:38]  I think I'm telling the truth.
[00:42:39]  I think that both of these things actually consistently meld with one another.
[00:42:44]  So, I think she didn't really want to do it, but we had just given her money to pay for an ad.
[00:42:49]  And so she decided, oh, what's the harm?
[00:42:52]  We'll throw them in on a 10 minute slot.
[00:42:53]  And that's what she did.
[00:42:55]  And I talked about COVID.
[00:42:57]  Now, later, as you'll see here in a moment, after our commercial break, we'll play another clip.
[00:43:01]  You know, she goes further and saying, well, it's not just that, but Joel, you know, celebrated Candace Owens when she played a clip from Joel's podcast on her show.
[00:43:13]  I don't know if I celebrated Candace Owens.
[00:43:15]  I can't remember how, maybe Allie didn't say it like that, but something along those lines.
[00:43:18]  But I did celebrate the clip from my show being played on Candace Owens' show.
[00:43:23]  Absolutely.
[00:43:24]  I hope she plays a few more.
[00:43:27]  And if she invited me to be on her show, I would say no in principle.
[00:43:31]  No, I would say yes.
[00:43:33]  If Laura Ingram said, hey, do you want to come on for a short segment with Fox News?
[00:43:37]  I would say yes.
[00:43:39]  Now, if Laura Ingram also asked me in private or in public on her show, what do you think I should do with my life to honor God?
[00:43:49]  I would say, quit your job and go home.
[00:43:53]  That's what I believe.
[00:43:55]  Those two things can be true.
[00:43:57]  That's not hypocrisy.
[00:43:59]  That is being shrewd and calculated and strategic.
[00:44:03]  I'm going to take whatever platform and opportunity I can to get out a message, not to make much of me, but to make much of Christ and get out a message that I believe is absolutely necessary and a message that I think has been suppressed in our country for decades, whether it's something when all the churches are folding like a cheap suit on COVID.
[00:44:26]  Yeah, I will take whatever opportunity I have to encourage pastors and Christians to be courageous as I possibly can, even if it means going on a female's podcast.
[00:44:36]  I did a podcast with Pearly Things, Pearl Davis.
[00:44:42]  I would do it again.
[00:44:43]  If I had the opportunity, I would do it again.
[00:44:45]  Why?
[00:44:46]  Because she has a large platform with a lot of followers, and I have a message that I want to get across.

=== Strategic Platform Building for God's Glory (07:28) ===

[00:44:53]  So, yeah, so I just don't see any conflict or inconsistency with that.
[00:44:58]  Now, all that said, though, I will, like I said, I don't want to just clarify.
[00:45:01]  I also do want to admit I've changed.
[00:45:04]  So in 2020, I did have different views than I had today.
[00:45:09]  I would have been more.
[00:45:10]  I started embracing biblical patriarchy at the end of 2018, taught on it in 2019, took four weeks to go through the first 15 verses of 1 Timothy chapter 2, lost about a third of the church that I was pastoring.
[00:45:27]  In those four weeks, we lost about a third of the church.
[00:45:30]  So it was 2018, 2019 that I really started to embrace more of a patriarchal view, but it was still softer and less robust and fleshed out as what I hold today.
[00:45:45]  So part of it was strategy, and then part of it was that I really have, by God's grace, evolved in my doctrine.
[00:45:54]  And the statement of, I've been the same for 30 years, brother, that's not the brag you think it is.
[00:46:04]  I think that there is something to be said for, you know, I've noticed people say, well, wouldn't it be great to come into these positions and not make major doctrinal changes, at least before becoming a pastor?
[00:46:14]  And I would say, yeah, that is absolutely ideal.
[00:46:18]  And in better times throughout church history, in better times of Christendom, that would have been the norm.
[00:46:24]  The ideal would have been the norm.
[00:46:26]  I think the reason it's not the norm today is not just because an individual is, you know, choosing to, you know, just sow his wild theological oak.
[00:46:37]  And be an edgelord.
[00:46:38]  I think the reason why you see guys like me and the Ogden guys, I think, are an example of this also, shifting in our theological convictions over time is because the church in America has been in complete disarray.
[00:46:54]  So you say, well, you should have gone to seminary and you should have even gone further and got a PhD and you should have waited.
[00:47:01]  And I don't know if I should have gone to seminary.
[00:47:04]  I don't know if I should have got a PhD.
[00:47:06]  I do think I should have waited before entering the ministry.
[00:47:09]  I'll admit that.
[00:47:11]  But my point is, That I don't think that would have fixed it.
[00:47:14]  And how do I know?
[00:47:15]  Because there's a bunch of guys with MDivs who suck.
[00:47:20]  That's how I know.
[00:47:21]  I know because I see those guys who did go to seminary and their theology on especially these kinds of subjects like biblical patriarchy is absolutely deplorable.
[00:47:35]  And my prayer for those guys is that they would be willing to humble themselves and change.
[00:47:40]  That's what it's like.
[00:47:42]  Well, I've never changed in 30.
[00:47:43]  What is repentance other than change?
[00:47:48]  That's what repentance is.
[00:47:49]  It's changing.
[00:47:51]  And so, yeah, I want to be a minister.
[00:47:54]  And beyond that, beyond just being a public voice or a pastor, I want to be a Christian.
[00:47:59]  And I want to be the kind of Christian that's going from glory to glory to glory, that's being further and further progressively conformed into the image of Christ day by day.
[00:48:09]  That I want to be able to say five years from now, the same way I can say today, I have better theology than I did five years ago.
[00:48:16]  I hope five years from now, That I can say that again.
[00:48:20]  I think that that's the goal.
[00:48:22]  I think that's the goal.
[00:48:23]  And I understand that you can give people theological whiplash by changing too quickly or changing on major issues.
[00:48:31]  But I just think that you have to realize, you know, the sons of Issachar, you have to realize what is a product of the individual person being just unstable and, you know, just kind of going back and forth too wishy washy.
[00:48:48]  What's a product of that, the individual person?
[00:48:51]  And then separating that from what is a product of just the larger lay of the land in Christendom as it pertains to today, there's no way to get the training back on the rails apart from ministers and pastors and Christians making major theological changes.
[00:49:14]  Like, we're in rough shape, guys.
[00:49:17]  If this was the mid 1800s, and you had a guy. Who was every five years making major theological changes, then yeah, I would be right there with you saying, What's up with that?
[00:49:28]  That's kind of weird.
[00:49:30]  But it's not the mid 1800s, right?
[00:49:33]  It's the year of our Lord, 2025, where for at least 70 years here in these United States, the church has been atrocious in much of its doctrine.
[00:49:44]  And the only way out of it is for people to build a plane in mid flight and admit, as they're learning, I was wrong.
[00:49:53]  I'm changing and now doing this.
[00:49:56]  So I think it's a component of two things with Allie and her show five years ago.
[00:50:01]  One, I've changed.
[00:50:03]  I was more wrong then, still wrong now, I'm sure, but more wrong then five years ago than I am today because I'm trying to change.
[00:50:11]  That's one.
[00:50:12]  I changed.
[00:50:13]  Number two, there is a difference in going on someone else's platform versus having them on yours.
[00:50:20]  There is something to be said for some degree of measured pragmatism and strategy.
[00:50:26]  Eric, do you have any thoughts about that before we go to our next commercial?
[00:50:31]  Yeah, I think particularly just the element of change.
[00:50:34]  You mentioned Ogden.
[00:50:35]  We've had some of that too.
[00:50:36]  I always think it's funny because people will dunk on Brian.
[00:50:39]  They find some picture from 15 years ago when Brian had a soul patch and maybe a little bit of a hipster look to him.
[00:50:48]  And they're like, oh, isn't this funny?
[00:50:50]  But I think I'm old enough to remember I kind of grew up in a time period before social media, before everything was online.
[00:50:56]  There is no Twitter from when I was nine years old because, well, Twitter didn't exist.
[00:51:01]  And now X.
[00:51:02]  So I think part of it is giving guys grace to say that, yeah, because of the times that we're living in, There's been a ton of change.
[00:51:10]  Think about Martin Luther and the Reformation, though.
[00:51:13]  So much change was happening then because it was a very dark period in the church.
[00:51:17]  And nobody today looks at Martin Luther and says, wow, you sure changed a lot.
[00:51:20]  That's a noggin against you.
[00:51:22]  No, in fact, we have conferences celebrating the things that he taught because it was bringing light back to the church.
[00:51:28]  And then I would say this, too there's a dynamic in which anytime you try to do the work of reform retrieval, this historical work, it's necessarily going to be a situation where people hate you, people are opposed to you, people take it personally.
[00:51:43]  And one thing I just continually go back to, even with Alibath, this really isn't a personal thing between, you know, say me and her or anyone else in our camp and her.
[00:51:53]  It's more of a principled issue, particularly when we think about our women.
[00:51:58]  And I don't want our women being reared in an environment spiritually where they feel like having an opinion on everything politically and being very loud about it is the only way that they can be a glory as a woman.
[00:52:11]  Instead, I want them, like you said, to feel at peace in the home.
[00:52:14]  My wife is much the same way.
[00:52:16]  She doesn't even usually ask me about Twitter.
[00:52:18]  She said, I know it's bad.

=== Peace at Home Through Biblical Roles (02:35) ===

[00:52:21]  I know they're probably coming after you.
[00:52:22]  Thank you for shielding me from that.
[00:52:24]  The home is peaceful because I don't have to know all of those things.
[00:52:29]  And so I think just for our ladies, if people can see the inside of the church and see what we're teaching and then what the fruits of that is, it's actually happy women, happy homes.
[00:52:42]  And as Michael mentioned, a rich culture building within the home.
[00:52:46]  That just emanates out of the walls into the church in really a joyful way.
[00:52:53]  Amen.
[00:52:53]  All right, let's go to a commercial break.
[00:52:55]  We'll be right back.
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[00:54:48]  Yeah, it's Mr. Zionism himself.
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[00:54:51]  Mr. Zionism.
[00:54:51]  Yeah, we're using all that Qatari money to build Christian nations.

=== Motives Behind Audience Growth Strategies (14:37) ===

[00:54:56]  Isn't that something?
[00:54:57]  There we go.
[00:54:58]  Yeah.
[00:54:58]  It's a.
[00:54:59]  It's a bold strategy for the Muslims, huh?
[00:55:01]  Let's see if it works out for them.
[00:55:04]  We're going to fund guys to build Christian nations to help Islam.
[00:55:08]  Okay, we'll see.
[00:55:10]  All right, so we're going to go ahead and just hop into it.
[00:55:12]  We want to play this last clip, Eric, and get your thoughts, get my thoughts, see if Wes and Michael have something that they want to add.
[00:55:19]  And then we're going to start dealing with the chat.
[00:55:21]  We've got a ton of questions.
[00:55:23]  And I assume that we have a ton of questions because they all want to hear from me.
[00:55:28]  No, I'm just kidding.
[00:55:29]  I think part of it's because you're here.
[00:55:31]  So, Eric, if you're willing.
[00:55:33]  Yeah.
[00:55:34]  Probably it's about four o'clock right now.
[00:55:36]  I think we can be done by five.
[00:55:37]  Can you give us another hour to do this clip and then do some questions?
[00:55:41]  Yeah, that's great.
[00:55:42]  Great.
[00:55:43]  Okay.
[00:55:44]  Nathan is going to play this, but it's already just the way that the tech works.
[00:55:47]  He's already into the clip a little bit.
[00:55:49]  So for the listener and the viewer, please, please forgive Nathan.
[00:55:53]  He's doing his very best and he does an awesome job.
[00:55:55]  He's going to play it and then he's going to have to immediately rewind it because it's going to kind of like start right in the middle.
[00:56:01]  He'll rewind it and then he'll let it go and we'll see the whole thing.
[00:56:04]  Here we go.
[00:56:04]  Khan also said that women should not be arguing with men on Twitter using insults like heretic without addressing the issues through proper channels like their husbands and their church.
[00:56:15]  Okay, what's funny is that I have never argued with any of these people on Twitter, but he and other men like him have repeatedly tried to goad me into a debate for attention.
[00:56:26]  They've picked fights with me, with other women, even though I've never given them the time of day.
[00:56:34]  And so they are extremely catty.
[00:56:37]  They pick lots of fights.
[00:56:38]  They get into lots of little arguments.
[00:56:41]  And at the same time, they will be like, no, we're on the front lines fighting the culture war.
[00:56:47]  And women shouldn't be on here.
[00:56:48]  Bro, it's a podcast.
[00:56:49]  Okay.
[00:56:50]  It's a podcast.
[00:56:52]  And one thing that women are really good at doing is talking.
[00:56:57]  So let me go first, Eric, and then I'll throw it to you.
[00:56:59]  So just to provide some history for the listener, a lot of our listeners may be aware of this, but for those who aren't, So that part, you know, I tried to defend Ali earlier and say, yeah, I think both of these things could be true.
[00:57:14]  Like, I didn't want to have him on the show, but also I did, you know, because they paid for an ad, which that does, the details do matter.
[00:57:21]  Like, if you want to give me a hard time because we paid Ali for an ad and I also asked if I could do a segment, that's fine.
[00:57:27]  But what you see online is people saying, well, he paid to go on the show.
[00:57:30]  Well, no, we didn't.
[00:57:31]  We paid for an ad.
[00:57:32]  I asked to go on the show.
[00:57:34]  She felt obligated by her own admission because we paid for the ad to oblige that request.
[00:57:41]  So, there, I wanted to defend her and say, yeah, I think that's probably true when she says, I didn't really want to have Joel, but I went ahead and did it anyways.
[00:57:47]  I think she's being truthful.
[00:57:48]  That last clip that we just watched is not truthful.
[00:57:51]  And you know what?
[00:57:53]  I'll say this again to try to steal man and give as much charity as possible.
[00:57:59]  Sometimes when we say things that aren't truthful, it can be nefarious, it can be malicious that we're intentionally being deceptive.
[00:58:05]  It also, it's not always our fallibility, it can also be our finitude, right?
[00:58:10]  It could be just the fact that we're creaturely and we don't have.
[00:58:13]  Steel trap, perfect memories all the time.
[00:58:16]  So, giving the benefit of the doubt, maybe she's not trying to be deceitful here, but maybe she just forgot.
[00:58:22]  But I remember because for me it was a bit of an ordeal.
[00:58:26]  And so it's more memorable.
[00:58:29]  But the way that this started, it started when Allie Beth quoted, she read verbatim for about five, six minutes or so, a portion of a transcript of my sermon on her show and then mocked it.
[00:58:46]  And then multiple women at the time, this was about two and a half years ago or so.
[00:58:50]  23, I think.
[00:58:51]  Yeah.
[00:58:52]  Yeah.
[00:58:53]  Two years ago, something like that.
[00:58:54]  Multiple women in our church, their husbands approached me because their wives were struggling with that.
[00:59:00]  Because their wives at the time, now at this point, I don't know if we really have anyone in our church who listens to Alibeth or definitely few.
[00:59:10]  And I don't say that as like a donk or anything.
[00:59:12]  It's just like the people who are big fans of Alibeth are probably not big fans of me.
[00:59:17]  It's just like we don't have as much overlap.
[00:59:19]  There was a time where we had more overlap and now not so much.
[00:59:24]  But when she read that transcript from my sermon and then proceeded to make fun of it and say why it was theologically wrong and why it was also just.
[00:59:33]  Stupid and dumb, that affected me at a pastoral level.
[00:59:38]  I had to do meetings with people and I had to explain things to people.
[00:59:44]  For me, I'm not just a podcaster.
[00:59:46]  Yes, I podcast, but I also am a pastor.
[00:59:49]  And so I'm shepherding people's souls.
[00:59:54]  And if you have women in your church who think very highly of Ali Bastaki because they had previously listened to her for years before even coming to our church and had gotten some of the polemical, you know, Boss babe, kind of catty, snarky stuff that's maybe not so good for their soul, but also, I'm not going to say that's all it is, also some things that are objectively, theologically true, and some good counsel along the way, and this and that and the other.
[01:00:21]  And so, they've benefited from her, they've been blessed by her, and they have a history of maybe they listened to her for two years, three years, four years, and then came to Covenant Bible Church.
[01:00:32]  And it was primarily the families that were new to our church.
[01:00:35]  And Eric, I'm going to let you because I think you guys have a similar experience.
[01:00:38]  So, you're talking about not just one, but A handful, multiple newer families to our church that have only been there maybe six months or a year at most that have been, you know, the wives have been fans of Ali Bastucci and have benefited from her.
[01:00:53]  And then, you know, they hear their pastor preach a sermon and they weren't bothered by it because they heard the whole context, the whole sermon.
[01:01:00]  They know me and they thought that's true.
[01:01:02]  That was good.
[01:01:03]  But then that, imagine that next week they're listening to their favorite Christian female podcaster and she is saying, now Ali didn't name me.
[01:01:13]  Which I appreciated.
[01:01:14]  I appreciated that.
[01:01:15]  But for me, it was a local pastoral challenge that was presented by this, not a public image challenge.
[01:01:21]  It wasn't for my podcast, it was for my pastoral ministry.
[01:01:25]  When she quoted word for word, five, six minutes straight of the manuscript from my sermon, all the women in my church, in public, people maybe didn't know, but the women in my church, they knew exactly whose sermon that was.
[01:01:40]  I heard that sermon last week.
[01:01:43]  I know who that is.
[01:01:44]  And She's saying, My pastor is silly and stupid.
[01:01:50]  And more importantly than that, theologically and biblically unfaithful and wrong.
[01:01:58]  Maybe I should be concerned.
[01:01:59]  You know, so that created, and that was the first occurrence.
[01:02:08]  So let the record be clear and be straight.
[01:02:13]  We were teaching guys like me, guys like Eric, guys like Brian, we were teaching the principles of biblical patriarchy, including not just that you should have, you know, not just complementarianism, that you, as long as you have, you know, male elders and only men preach on the Lord's Day, then women can do everything else, including being, you know, they don't have the title, they're not ordained, but they actually can be the shadow elders who actually tell their husbands what to do and really run the church.
[01:02:40]  And they can also preach in all these other contexts and blah, We're not complementarian.
[01:02:46]  We are patriarchal.
[01:02:47]  And so we've been teaching these principles of biblical patriarchy for the last few years.
[01:02:55]  And I don't know about you, Eric.
[01:02:57]  Maybe your story is different.
[01:02:59]  You can speak for yourself.
[01:02:59]  But for me, I had not, and I know this, I had not named Ali Bestaki once.
[01:03:06]  Not once.
[01:03:07]  As I was talking about what I see as a problem of women who are not elders, they're not preaching on the Lord's day, but they're still doing a lot of polemical, theological warring.
[01:03:19]  In the public sphere.
[01:03:22]  Just in a nutshell, in general, I don't want to see women in the public sphere.
[01:03:28]  You mean they shouldn't hold political office?
[01:03:30]  Correct.
[01:03:31]  You mean you don't want to see them podcasting?
[01:03:34]  Correct.
[01:03:35]  Well, but what about in the marketplace, you know, with nine to five careers?
[01:03:41]  Nope, not that either.
[01:03:42]  Like, I don't want to see women holding positions in the public square.
[01:03:48]  I don't.
[01:03:49]  Um, not just I don't want to see women in combat positions in the military, that's finally we've gotten there.
[01:03:55]  We finally gotten to the point as a culture where we can say, Yeah, female people, you know, female females in the secret service might be a bad idea.
[01:04:02]  I'm glad we've gotten there.
[01:04:03]  The president almost died, and we go, Well, maybe not now that the president has almost died because, yeah, now we can say that, yeah.
[01:04:10]  So I'm glad we can say that that's an improvement, praise God.
[01:04:13]  Um, but I want to go way further than that, way further than that.
[01:04:15]  So we were talking about those kinds of things, um, before, and I think that.
[01:04:22]  Allie must have heard something and it bothered her, but I had not named her.
[01:04:27]  But then she, and again, to be clear and be honest, she did not name me, but she did verbatim read a transcript, not just two sentences, a whole portion of one of my sermons out of context to where every single woman in my church knew that she was talking about me and I had to address it.
[01:04:47]  So when she says, you know, these guys are catty and they want to pick fights.
[01:04:55]  I just think it helps to remember the details of what actually happened.
[01:04:59]  Eric, do you have any thoughts?
[01:05:01]  Yeah, I think in particular, I want to give credit here.
[01:05:04]  I think it was Jeff Wright and Benda Wherry who I first heard this from.
[01:05:08]  But one of the problems I think when you put a woman in the polemical role, culture warring, something she's not designed to do, generally her fight mode is Mama Bear.
[01:05:18]  And you kind of see that sort of thing happening.
[01:05:22]  I would also say, in listening to the clip with Allie, what she had just said.
[01:05:27]  I think there's quite a bit of continued reading of motive and intent in there.
[01:05:34]  I keep hearing things like these guys are chasing clout and they're just jealous of my platform.
[01:05:39]  And I won't even respond to them.
[01:05:42]  Here I am above it all.
[01:05:43]  But that's actually going back to what you said about a year ago when this all kicked off.
[01:05:47]  I remember her citing from the sermon.
[01:05:50]  Of course, we all kind of knew what she was talking about, going after it pretty directly, word for word.
[01:05:55]  It quickly became a thing where people knew who it was about.
[01:05:58]  But also, what she was doing on our end, we were responding in general at the time, not specifically to her.
[01:06:04]  And like she would do a screenshot of one of my posts, try to cut off like half of my face, but you could clearly, anybody who knows, it was still me.
[01:06:15]  But her whole thing was like, well, I don't want to give these guys a bigger platform because they just want my platform, blah, blah, blah.
[01:06:22]  I think all of that is, look, it's fundamental misunderstanding, again, about the personal nature of the agon of ideas.
[01:06:29]  When we come into Twitter, Orrin McIntyre has said this, when we come into Twitter, it's like the Coliseum.
[01:06:34]  And now, people come here for blood.
[01:06:36]  It's a bit of a blood sport.
[01:06:38]  Not saying we all have to play that game identically, but it's an exchange of ideas.
[01:06:42]  So, if you come out in the marketplace of ideas, you exchange an idea, and then in bad faith try to dunk on people and then act like the victim, I mean, for a lot of people, that's probably not going to be a very good look.
[01:06:53]  I also think it's inherently dishonest.
[01:06:56]  And to the personal, I guess, the personal and the pastoral, the reason it became an issue for us is because we had people in the church.
[01:07:05]  Who were in the process of leaving because it's generally a woman running her household.
[01:07:12]  She's listening to Alibeth Stuckey.
[01:07:15]  She's wildly offended that we would ever disagree with anything that Alibeth said.
[01:07:20]  And then goes on listening to Alibeth as the conflict goes on and felt the same way.
[01:07:26]  It was like I would say I was disagreeing with Alibeth, and she would say you're attacking her.
[01:07:33]  And that's, again, that's a very feminine coded way to look at how conflicts work.
[01:07:39]  Women are generally peacemakers.
[01:07:40]  I do think it's funny.
[01:07:43]  Maybe it's a show of no bad blood, but I think like two weeks after that kicked off, Ali Best Dad, their publisher reached out on their book and said, Do you want to interview Ali Best Dad?
[01:07:54]  I was like, Sure, why not?
[01:07:55]  Like, you know, he's a nice guy.
[01:07:56]  We had a good conversation.
[01:07:58]  And, you know, I had mentioned it then and in our conversation, I've actually emailed the show, Relatable.
[01:08:08]  I said, Look, you know, if you want to talk offline, not trying to chase clout or whatever.
[01:08:13]  But would love a discussion with your husband or whatever, whoever you want me to talk to.
[01:08:18]  But yeah, would be more than happy to address it in a fair and equitable way.
[01:08:22]  But look, I think it comes back to this bottom line it's jeopardizing money and career.
[01:08:28]  And anytime you have that, understandably, you're going to have somewhat of a hostile response.
[01:08:35]  Right.
[01:08:35]  Well said.
[01:08:36]  Yeah.
[01:08:36]  Yeah.
[01:08:37]  I remember you asked me, Eric, I think it was about a year ago.
[01:08:39]  You said, we were talking, and you said, Joel, would you.
[01:08:43]  Would you be willing to talk to Allie about this as things were kind of a little bit, you know, some drama in the public sphere?
[01:08:51]  And I said, Eric, I would be more than happy to talk to her husband.
[01:08:55]  I would love to talk to her husband.
[01:08:57]  That sounds great.
[01:08:58]  Wes, Michael, do you guys have any thoughts?
[01:09:00]  I was just going to mention what Eric mentioned too about while some of the clips that we showed, I think she was fair.
[01:09:09]  She said, you know, when I interviewed Joel, I didn't actually disagree with him at the time.
[01:09:13]  Yeah, that's true.
[01:09:14]  But definitely that last one was.
[01:09:18]  Pushing into it, impugning motives, Wayne, and evaluating motives.
[01:09:23]  They're doing it for platform for clout, but Eric brought that up already, so I'll leave it there.
[01:09:27]  Okay, Wes?
[01:09:29]  I can't believe she gets a couch and I've got chairs.
[01:09:31]  We need a nice leather couch in the studio.

=== Honest Conversations About Clout and Influence (15:24) ===

[01:09:34]  Yeah, wow.
[01:09:35]  Someday.
[01:09:37]  That's it.
[01:09:37]  That's all.
[01:09:38]  That's all you got.
[01:09:38]  That's your question.
[01:09:40]  That's all you got.
[01:09:41]  That's all you got.
[01:09:42]  Yeah, he's chiming in for a couch.
[01:09:44]  I love that.
[01:09:44]  The other thing I would say, you know, you hear this from lots of social media people the clout chasing.
[01:09:51]  There's a level, I think, where we all have to be a little bit honest and say if you're on social media, if you have a media company, let's be real.
[01:09:59]  We're all trying to grow audiences, and it doesn't necessarily have to be nefarious.
[01:10:02]  We just believe that our message is important and we want to get the message out.
[01:10:06]  So if Ali said to me, Hey, I just think you're trying to grow your media company, I'd be like, Yeah, aren't you?
[01:10:11]  I mean, isn't that what anybody in this space is doing?
[01:10:13]  And so let's just be honest about that.
[01:10:16]  That's, I'm so glad.
[01:10:17]  That's the one thing that I wanted to bring up.
[01:10:19]  You're absolutely right.
[01:10:20]  You know, people say, Well, I think Joel's just platform building.
[01:10:23]  So everyone with a platform is platform building.
[01:10:26]  Yeah, that's what we're doing.
[01:10:27]  Like, you know, and a lot of times there's people who like, you know, really love like, you know, someone like John MacArthur who has a massive platform.
[01:10:33]  And, you know, I always tell them, I'll say, Look, here's the deal.
[01:10:38]  Somebody at some point in his ministry, John MacArthur's ministry, went to him and said, I think your preaching is really good.
[01:10:46]  I think it could benefit more than just the local church, a broader, wider audience.
[01:10:50]  I would like to record it with tapes or record it with video cameras.
[01:10:55]  And at some point, right, if John MacArthur did not want a platform, then he could have said no.
[01:11:01]  He would have said no.
[01:11:03]  At some point, at the end of the day, I'm not saying he's doing it himself, that he's showing up, you know, like three hours before the Sunday sermon and, you know, plugging in the cameras and all.
[01:11:11]  I'm not saying that he's doing it himself, but he still gave his consent.
[01:11:16]  Like somebody came to him and said, We think you have a gift and a message that would benefit a broader audience.
[01:11:23]  And we'd like to do this, X, Y, and Z.
[01:11:26]  And we need your permission.
[01:11:27]  And John MacArthur said, Yes, I give you permission to help me build my platform.
[01:11:34]  I want to build a platform.
[01:11:37]  And I'm not trying to pick on John MacArthur because there's nothing wrong with that.
[01:11:40]  The only reason I use the printing press with reprinting sermons in England.
[01:11:45]  Right?
[01:11:45]  It wasn't the sermon.
[01:11:47]  William Perkins didn't do that.
[01:11:48]  It was the publisher that pursued it.
[01:11:50]  And then William Perkins said, okay, let's go.
[01:11:51]  But he gave his consent.
[01:11:53]  He said, yes, I would like for that to happen.
[01:11:55]  Charles Spurgeon, like his, you know, the Monday paper would always include, you know, in London, his sermon, you know, from the London Tabernacle, you know, Metropolitan, you know, whatever.
[01:12:04]  And he gave his consent for that.
[01:12:06]  So everybody that you've heard of, other than if it's a flesh and blood relationship, like with your dad or with your local pastor or everybody else that you've heard of, but you've never met, you don't have a personal relationship, With you've heard of them because they made at some point along the way, they made a conscious decision to build a platform.
[01:12:26]  And that decision, in and of itself, is not there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
[01:12:31]  It's the same as it's back to the trad wife sourdough and sundresses.
[01:12:35]  Nothing wrong with sourdough and sundresses.
[01:12:36]  In fact, I can make the argument that that's actually even good.
[01:12:40]  There's actually, if anything, there is something inherent in that, and it's inherently positive, certainly in terms of comparatively.
[01:12:49]  To dress immodestly and just using Uber Eats or something for every meal for your children that's unhealthy and blah, blah, blah, and it's not natural.
[01:12:59]  So there's actually something, not only is it not inherently bad, it's actually inherently good.
[01:13:03]  It could also be still bad, even though it's on the surface, it's inherently good.
[01:13:08]  It could still be bad if there are inwardly bad motives, right?
[01:13:12]  I'm just trying to be seen, right?
[01:13:14]  The praise of men or whatever it is with the trad wife thing.
[01:13:17]  Same concept, that same concept, now apply it to platform building.
[01:13:22]  Sourdough is not inherently bad.
[01:13:24]  Platform building is not inherently bad.
[01:13:26]  The question is the motives.
[01:13:29]  And that's up to the individual, especially if it's a follower of Christ, for them to be able to say, as David did, search me, O God, if there's anything that's not upright, you know, like search my heart, purge from me any sinful motives, any sinful incentives, any Qatar money, you know, any of that, Lord, just purge it out, you know.
[01:13:53]  But that's ultimately up to each individual.
[01:13:56]  That's their responsibility before the Lord.
[01:13:58]  And they need, at a personal level, not the masses online, but flesh and blood relationships in their life to hold them accountable.
[01:14:06]  Their elders, their spouse, those people in their life to say, hey, I just want to make sure that at the end of the day, it's for the glory of God.
[01:14:15]  It's for the glory of God.
[01:14:17]  And checking, for lack of a better phrase, checking your heart, examining yourself.
[01:14:25]  Try me, Lord.
[01:14:26]  Search me, Lord.
[01:14:27]  Are my motives true?
[01:14:28]  But platform building.
[01:14:30]  Aside from there being bad motives, right?
[01:14:32]  All things being equal, just the act of trying to build a larger mechanism for getting a message out to more people, there is nothing inherently wrong about that.
[01:14:42]  In fact, that can be really good if the message that you're trying to communicate is something that's true and biblical and pleasing to the Lord.
[01:14:51]  So, this idea of like, well, I just feel like these guys are platform building.
[01:14:55]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:14:57]  And so are you.
[01:14:58]  So are you.
[01:14:59]  You are.
[01:15:01]  Everybody with a platform is platform building.
[01:15:04]  Okay.
[01:15:05]  Any other thoughts?
[01:15:06]  Go ahead.
[01:15:07]  Yeah.
[01:15:07]  I was just going to say some of it too is just I think people weighing the internal inconsistencies that many of us have, right?
[01:15:15]  You're at ShepCon, since you mentioned John MacArthur.
[01:15:17]  You're at Shepherd's Conference and you're there to see all your favorite preachers.
[01:15:21]  And then maybe there's somebody outside your camp you look at, maybe like us, and you go, man, this is crazy.
[01:15:26]  They host conferences and they want attention.
[01:15:28]  I can't believe them.
[01:15:29]  And then, you know, it's like John MacArthur has his face on a fresco can.
[01:15:32]  And I'm like, actually, I thought that was pretty cool.
[01:15:34]  I mean, it's kind of funny.
[01:15:36]  So I think a lot of it is that.
[01:15:37]  And then I also think, too, when you look at these worlds, this is kind of related to Patriarchy Hannah, which obviously Alec brings up.
[01:15:45]  But when you look at something like that in the G3 Shepcon world, Steve Lawson falls, and nobody says, man, I bet Reformed theology is just not even true.
[01:15:57]  Right.
[01:15:58]  Right.
[01:15:58]  Well, in the same way, it's like you have somebody who does something that's dumb, says sorry, and we all admit, like, that was a really dumb, that's bad.
[01:16:06]  Don't do that.
[01:16:08]  Mining is bad.
[01:16:08]  I think we can all agree on that one.
[01:16:11]  But the same camp, and I'm not saying everybody there, but like with Alibeth in particular, I think it's just a useful tool and a cudgel to say, you know, oh man, I can't believe it.
[01:16:23]  You've, you know, it's all, patriarchy is all wrong because of this one person who did a bad thing.
[01:16:30]  Is it, no, let's just be more consistent.
[01:16:32]  Obviously, there are people who fall.
[01:16:33]  That's unfortunate.
[01:16:34]  And we stand on timeless truths and we just keep going with that.
[01:16:39]  That's so well said.
[01:16:40]  Yes, you and I each.
[01:16:43]  One time, being assured that she had her husband's permission and that he was going to listen to the recording before it was published publicly, went on her podcast, Patriarchy Hannah, each of us, one time, an audio only podcast to be heard by, as far as we were both informed, a few dozen women, maybe 100, 200 max.
[01:17:13]  And then it comes out that Patriarchy Hannah lied.
[01:17:18]  She was living a lie.
[01:17:21]  And all the Calvinists, right?
[01:17:24]  We're not talking about the pagans.
[01:17:26]  Of course, they love it.
[01:17:28]  But the Calvinists, the reformed camp of evangelicalism, they come out and say here it is the smoking gun, inarguable, irrefutable evidence that patriarchy is false, that the whole thing is a false doctrine because the fruit is false.
[01:17:48]  Whereas, and again, We went on her audio only podcast once.
[01:17:55]  This same guy is criticizing, platformed Steve Lawson at every conference, at seminaries, publishing books, Ligonier cruises for a decade or more.
[01:18:10]  They were platforming him on the largest platforms and not once, but hundreds of times between the number of podcasts, the number of speaking engagements, and conferences, and seminaries, and cruises, and all these things for a decade at least.
[01:18:29]  Hundreds of times on massive platforms.
[01:18:33]  And he, in the very same way, let's be consistent here Steve Lawson, just like Patriarchy Hannah, was also living a lie.
[01:18:44]  Living a lie.
[01:18:46]  The only difference, to be fair, to Patriarchy Hannah is that she apologized quickly and publicly.
[01:18:53]  And for the record, I'll say this because I don't think it's private.
[01:18:58]  I don't think she would mind.
[01:19:00]  You and I, Eric, we don't have a relationship or a friendship with her.
[01:19:04]  One, because she's a woman.
[01:19:05]  I don't have female friends.
[01:19:07]  My wife has female friends, and by proxy, adjacent, I know those women who I'm friends with their husband and they're friends with my wife.
[01:19:15]  That's about it.
[01:19:16]  So we don't have relationships with women.
[01:19:18]  And so for that reason, and that reason alone, neither Eric nor I had any relationship with Patriarchy Hannah.
[01:19:25]  We went on her podcast one time.
[01:19:28]  I was in a space that she was hosting one or maybe two times.
[01:19:33]  By that metric, if that's a relationship, then Michael Foster was 10 times the friend of Patriarchy Hannah than Eric or myself.
[01:19:41]  Right?
[01:19:41]  So, and I, and I, just to be clear, I don't think Michael Foster did anything wrong.
[01:19:45]  But you just, if you're going to give me and Eric a hard time, let's, you just got to equal weights and measures.
[01:19:50]  If you're mad at me and Eric, then you should be done with Michael Foster if we're being consistent.
[01:19:55]  So, all that being said, here's the point we don't have a relationship with Patriarchy Hannah.
[01:20:00]  However, she messaged us, and I think it's appropriate to say this, I don't think she would mind.
[01:20:04]  This is one of the only private messages I've ever received from her.
[01:20:08]  And she messaged both of us together.
[01:20:09]  So it wasn't just her with me or her with you, but a message to both Eric and I.
[01:20:15]  And it was just, was it last night or two nights ago?
[01:20:18]  Two days ago, Eric?
[01:20:21]  I think it was on Wednesday.
[01:20:23]  Yeah.
[01:20:24]  And it was a, I would say, you correct me if I'm wrong, but a pretty profuse, heartfelt, I don't see her heart.
[01:20:32]  God alone sees a heart, but in terms of the words that she sent, profuse, heartfelt apology.
[01:20:38]  Because, and I think the reason, and here's the deal because the bad faith listeners will say, well, the fact that she sent you a personal, not just the public one that she posted, but a personal apology to you and Eric, that just confirms that you and Eric actually did platform her and you were probably best friends with her and talking to her on a day.
[01:20:54]  No, I think she reached out to me and Eric, not because we had any kind of engagement or relationship with her.
[01:21:00]  I think she reached out to me and Eric because she noticed and saw online that me and Eric are the main guys, the main object of criticism.
[01:21:10]  We're the main, nobody's upset with Michael Foster.
[01:21:14]  Because he's not quite as outspoken about these things as Eric and I am.
[01:21:18]  He was, but not recently.
[01:21:21]  And so Eric and I, we got a personal apology from Patriarchy Hannah, not because of a personal friendship or close vicinity, but because she noticed, and she said this in her apology I noticed that you guys are getting the brunt of criticism because of my failure, my sin.
[01:21:42]  And I'm so, so sorry.
[01:21:43]  And so I just want to say back to Steve Lawson.
[01:21:46]  The main difference, they both were living a lie.
[01:21:49]  The main difference is that one was platformed, legitimately platformed, on real, serious, large platforms, hundreds of times for a decade.
[01:21:59]  And when he fell, and it proved that he was pulling the wool over people's eyes and was deceiving people and living a lie for years and years, nobody said, Oh, time to pack it in.
[01:22:12]  Calvinism's not true.
[01:22:14]  Oh, time to pack it in.
[01:22:15]  The sovereignty of God, I guess it's just a farce.
[01:22:18]  Right?
[01:22:19]  And then some woman.
[01:22:21]  With a tiny, comparatively speaking, Steve Lawson versus Patriarch, a tiny platform who virtually no one platformed.
[01:22:30]  You and I wouldn't have had her on our show, but we went on her show as a courtesy one time each.
[01:22:36]  She comes out and everyone's like, here it is.
[01:22:39]  This is it.
[01:22:40]  It's over.
[01:22:42]  Irrefutable proof that patriarchy is a lie.
[01:22:46]  What does that tell you?
[01:22:47]  That doesn't really speak to the caliber of sin that she committed, although I think it was serious.
[01:22:52]  And it doesn't speak, the fact that she personally apologized to us doesn't speak about the vicinity of our relationship to her.
[01:22:58]  She just noticed that me and you, Eric, were getting the brunt of the criticism.
[01:23:02]  What it says, what it speaks to, I think, is it shows you what Christian message, particularly, is currently in our culture today under attack and needs to be spoken about courageously by men like Eric all the more.
[01:23:20]  Right?
[01:23:21]  There was a time where Calvinism, Calvinism was a little bit icky.
[01:23:26]  It was controversial.
[01:23:27]  It was a cutting edge.
[01:23:29]  Calvinism still upsets some people.
[01:23:30]  Don't get me wrong.
[01:23:31]  But let's be honest.
[01:23:33]  You want to be hated?
[01:23:36]  Talk about biblical patriarchy.
[01:23:39]  The reason why the double standard, and this is a double standard, Steve Lawson fails, Calvinism is still true.
[01:23:45]  Patriarchy Hannah turns out a woman lied and pack it up, boys.
[01:23:50]  You're done.
[01:23:50]  The patriarchy, we buried it six feet under.
[01:23:53]  Like, why?
[01:23:55]  What's such a stark difference?
[01:23:56]  Why?
[01:23:57]  Because one of those messages is generally accepted, even if not even agreed upon, it's generally accepted among evangelicals, namely Calvinism.
[01:24:07]  The other one is absolutely despised with vitriol.
[01:24:13]  Like, I mean, it is seriously hated, namely biblical roles of men and women.
[01:24:20]  And I think we would be remiss if that was not included in this episode.
[01:24:25]  Any further thoughts from you guys?
[01:24:27]  And then we'll go to some questions.
[01:24:28]  I'll have a commercial break maybe before the questions.
[01:24:31]  Eric, you got some thoughts?
[01:24:33]  Yeah, well, I think, you know, that's what you said is really true.
[01:24:36]  I think the other thing is you have to ask which theologies, you know, if it's complementarian, if it's biblical patriarchy, which one can be syncretized with the culture at large?
[01:24:48]  I think complementarianism, that's what it is.
[01:24:51]  People like it because you can syncretize it.
[01:24:53]  It doesn't disrupt your world quite as much.
[01:24:56]  You're like, well, my husband has a tiebreak vote.

=== The Danger of Growing Platforms (04:14) ===

[01:24:58]  Other than that, I can go out in the world and do pretty much whatever I want, wear whatever I want, et cetera.
[01:25:03]  And then I think with biblical patriarchy, it's just a cultural disruptor.
[01:25:07]  And anytime you have people who are disrupting the cultural zeitgeist, you're obviously going to have heat and attention and frustration from people.
[01:25:15]  And obviously, you want to make sure you're doing it on biblical principle and you want to do things righteously.
[01:25:20]  You want to make sure that you're not just getting a mob because you're saying dumb things.
[01:25:25]  But think about the number of times that Paul starts a riot.
[01:25:29]  And sometimes intentionally, he sees the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and he looks at them both and kind of the crowd forming.
[01:25:35]  And he's like, I'm actually here on account of the resurrection, ladies and gentlemen.
[01:25:39]  And everybody's in an uproar.
[01:25:41]  And so I think part of this is kind of twofold.
[01:25:44]  One, just for the people who are listening, to say that, yes, speaking up in any form on the hot button issues, if you're going to poke the idol in both eyes, there's usually going to be a strong response, and you should be prepared for that.
[01:25:59]  And then I think for the people, the other folks who are speaking to the truth on these issues, I just think I look at it and I say, okay, we're probably over the target.
[01:26:09]  And I know people don't like that.
[01:26:11]  We have to, with gentleness, continue to teach the true doctrines of scripture.
[01:26:16]  We believe that they can be defended from.
[01:26:18]  From the text of scripture, and so we're just going to keep pressing in.
[01:26:22]  Christ Himself said, You know, you're going to be persecuted, and we just got to square that in our own minds.
[01:26:29]  I think the real temptation actually is if your platform does grow and you start making ground, that's really where you run into danger because you have a lot of people who will come to you and they will say, Hey, if you could just tone that down a little bit, I could get you on this little bit higher platform show.
[01:26:45]  Um, and of course, you know, for my money, it's like, No, I think I'll just stick with the old truths and uh, you know, the old reformed faith.
[01:26:53]  You know, come what may, Joel.
[01:26:55]  Come what may.
[01:26:56]  Come what may.
[01:26:58]  All right.
[01:26:58]  Come what.
[01:26:59]  More like come what gay, am I right?
[01:27:01]  All right.
[01:27:01]  Okay.
[01:27:02]  Here's our final commercial break for the day.
[01:27:04]  All right.
[01:27:05]  The clock is running out.
[01:27:06]  You need to go and register now for our Christ is King How to Defeat Trash World Conference.
[01:27:12]  It's happening the year of our Lord 2025, April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
[01:27:17]  That's a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
[01:27:20]  And by God's grace, we're able to provide for you an all star lineup.
[01:27:24]  We've got Steve Dace, Calvin Robinson, Orrin McIntyre.
[01:27:28]  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.
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[01:27:52]  Again, that's Right Response Conference.com.
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=== Encouraging Obedience in Wives and Daughters (15:12) ===

[01:29:12]  All of Christ for all of life and all of finance for Christendom.
[01:29:19]  All right, we're back.
[01:29:20]  We're going to get into some of the questions.
[01:29:22]  Eric, thanks for sticking around.
[01:29:24]  We've got about half an hour.
[01:29:25]  We're going to do our best to be done by five.
[01:29:28]  Michael, why don't you lead us off?
[01:29:32]  Super chat from earlier in the episode.
[01:29:33]  Nate, if you can scroll up.
[01:29:34]  All the way at the top.
[01:29:35]  There we go.
[01:29:36]  This is from Ben Hufstetler.
[01:29:38]  Ben, very generous, incredible.
[01:29:39]  Thank you very much.
[01:29:40]  $99.
[01:29:41]  $99.
[01:29:41]  Men, you have to get in that industry.
[01:29:43]  That's wonderful.
[01:29:44]  Ben has been hitting us up with $100 super chats.
[01:29:46]  Yep.
[01:29:47]  Very kind.
[01:29:47]  Single handedly supporting this ministry.
[01:29:49]  That's right.
[01:29:49]  He says, thoughts on helping a wife and daughter that is coming out of new age and into full submission to her calling?
[01:29:57]  We have been transitioning for a few years now.
[01:30:00]  They are all in.
[01:30:01]  My wife is struggling with not overriding me in conversations.
[01:30:06]  My daughter is just generally much love.
[01:30:10]  Sounds like generally all in.
[01:30:12]  Yeah.
[01:30:13]  Sounds good.
[01:30:13]  Yeah.
[01:30:13]  Much love.
[01:30:14]  Thanks again, Ben.
[01:30:15]  Cool.
[01:30:16]  Thanks, Ben.
[01:30:17]  I think that progress matters, right?
[01:30:19]  Wes, you and I have had conversations about this.
[01:30:22]  Is there a sense where it should be expected?
[01:30:25]  Does Christ expect all of our obedience to be perfect?
[01:30:29]  Hebrews says, be holy and pursue sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.
[01:30:34]  There is a sense where we want to hold ourselves to that standard.
[01:30:37]  There's also the practical reality of sanctification.
[01:30:40]  And if your wife and your daughter are moving rapidly and consistently in that direction, I would not break that reed.
[01:30:48]  I would not diminish that obedience.
[01:30:52]  I think that it's appropriate if you see specific things that are strategic, as your role in your role as a husband, to say, there's been a lot of progress, but this is a specific issue.
[01:31:01]  Can we strategize?
[01:31:02]  Can we talk?
[01:31:02]  Can we pray about this?
[01:31:04]  Bring those up.
[01:31:05]  But if it's just a general, how do we move faster?
[01:31:09]  I don't know.
[01:31:09]  The reality is a lot of people are coming out of perspectives that were wrong.
[01:31:13]  And that does sometimes take a while to change.
[01:31:16]  So be strategic, be specific.
[01:31:19]  Get them around other women who are thinking the same way.
[01:31:24]  Go to a church that is preaching along those lines so that they're hearing it from the pulpit and they're around other women who are working in that direction and demonstrating that in their own lives.
[01:31:38]  And I would say, having seen situations where it doesn't go well, I would be very thankful to the Lord that He has inclined your wife and daughter's hearts in this direction and encourage them, challenge them when necessary to grow in that direction.
[01:31:52]  Well said.
[01:31:53]  Yeah, I think it's like what I was saying earlier.
[01:31:56]  You know, the reason why I've had to change is because the train is way off the rails.
[01:32:03]  It's the year of our Lord, 2025, and America and pretty much all of Christendom and the West and European countries have been fervently apostatizing against the Lord Jesus Christ for arguably 70 years, arguably 130 years, and arguably like 300 years, depending, you know, from where you start.
[01:32:22]  Like we have been, you know, We have been in quite a dip, quite a rebellion against the Lord.
[01:32:29]  And so the only way to right the ship is going to be some pretty significant about face, you know, full turnaround, deep repentance and change.
[01:32:40]  That said, I do think that you kind of get to choose as the husband.
[01:32:48]  You don't get to choose what God's word says, you don't get to choose what's sin and what's not, and whether repentance is necessary, but you do.
[01:32:56]  Just like a parent, right?
[01:32:57]  It's not exactly the same.
[01:32:58]  The authority of a husband over a wife is different than the authority over a child.
[01:33:04]  But, as my wife and I are parenting, one of the consistent conversations that comes up again and again is do we really want to make that a command?
[01:33:14]  We can.
[01:33:14]  We do have that God given authority.
[01:33:16]  We could make this command.
[01:33:17]  And just for the record, our kids, because people give grief about this because they're bad faith listeners and they assume the worst.
[01:33:23]  Our kids are little.
[01:33:24]  We have seven, five, Four, two, and zero.
[01:33:28]  Five kids, those are the ages.
[01:33:29]  So we're talking about little kids.
[01:33:31]  But as soon as you get home from school, you can do it instinctively without even thinking about it.
[01:33:35]  So you come out of the garage, you just park the van, you open the door.
[01:33:39]  We have a shoe cubby right there by the door to the garage where they come in.
[01:33:43]  And right there, as a parent, I have a choice.
[01:33:45]  I can say, all right, take off your shoes, go potty, get changed, and then we're going to do something.
[01:33:55]  I've just provided for, you know, not all five children, one of them, like I said, is zero.
[01:34:00]  She's an infant, she's a baby.
[01:34:01]  But for, you know, three or four of my children, the toddler, we sometimes might give a separate lower bar command.
[01:34:07]  But for at least three, maybe four of those five children, I've just set a bar.
[01:34:11]  And I've just placed them in a position.
[01:34:13]  It's not wrong for me to do it, but I do have a choice.
[01:34:15]  I place them in a position to where now I, as a parent, am going to have to follow through if they don't obey.
[01:34:19]  And I've just given to three or four kids like three different commands take off your shoes, go potty, change, get out of your school clothes.
[01:34:30]  And then we're going to do something as a family before dinner.
[01:34:32]  We're going to go for a walk or whatever.
[01:34:35]  So I need you to do it.
[01:34:35]  Go potty, take off your shoes, put them in the shoe cubby, and get changed.
[01:34:39]  And I've got a seven year old, a five year old, a four year old, and a two year old that I've just given three commands to.
[01:34:46]  So basically, what I decided is hey, welcome home from school.
[01:34:49]  And in about 90 seconds, I'm going to be spanking.
[01:34:54]  I was about to say, context the decision that was just made.
[01:34:57]  Because you've got about 100% chance with four kids, little kids at those ages, seven, five, four, and two, and three commands shoes off, get changed, go to the restroom.
[01:35:10]  You've got like 100% chance that at least one of the kids is not going to obey one of those commands.
[01:35:14]  Now, here's the other thing you actually don't have to give the command.
[01:35:18]  Now, you have to teach your children obedience.
[01:35:19]  You have to sometimes give commands, but you don't always.
[01:35:22]  You don't always.
[01:35:24]  So I have to decide.
[01:35:25]  My point is long way of saying I get to decide, as head of the home, I get to decide is this going to be a command?
[01:35:33]  Am I going to make this an ultimatum?
[01:35:36]  And husbands, you get to do that.
[01:35:38]  Obviously, it's not telling them to go to the bathroom, but you get to do that with your wives.
[01:35:43]  You get to decide.
[01:35:44]  So you, right?
[01:35:45]  The train is way off the rails.
[01:35:48]  In virtually every doctrine under the sun, especially gender piety, biblical roles of male and female, and their function in society and in the home and in the church.
[01:35:59]  We're way off the rails and been off the rails for decades.
[01:36:03]  You, by God's grace, are coming to biblical patriarchal convictions in the Word of God, and you're starting to see what's right.
[01:36:11]  Good.
[01:36:12]  Good on you.
[01:36:12]  Praise God.
[01:36:13]  Glory to God for giving you that revelation.
[01:36:15]  But now you have the prerogative.
[01:36:17]  You have.
[01:36:19]  The luxury of how fast are you going to make that change with your wife?
[01:36:26]  How often?
[01:36:27]  Yes, you do have real authority as a husband in your home.
[01:36:29]  You do.
[01:36:30]  How often are you going to exercise it?
[01:36:34]  What things are you going to like?
[01:36:36]  Really?
[01:36:37]  That thing?
[01:36:38]  Yes, it is your authority.
[01:36:40]  It is your authority.
[01:36:41]  You actually do have the authority to say, sweetheart, I'd like for you to wear a red dress.
[01:36:47]  Much to the chagrin of all the complimentarians, you do have that authority.
[01:36:51]  But here's the deal.
[01:36:52]  You're talking about a woman that you love as Christ loved the church, your wife, that you're wanting to bring into glory with you as a co heir in grace, who has been shaped by 70 years of radical God hating feminism.
[01:37:09]  It's in her bones.
[01:37:11]  And you have a choice of how gently you're going to bring her along, whether or not you want constant friction and war in your home, or whether or not you want some moments of enjoyment.
[01:37:24]  And slowly bringing her along and realizing that, you know what, feminism is such a cancer.
[01:37:31]  This cancer might not get removed all in one generation.
[01:37:36]  This might be generations.
[01:37:37]  It might be my wife repents some over the next 40 years.
[01:37:41]  My daughter, because of that, my daughter, she becomes the next feminine beauty.
[01:37:47]  And then my granddaughter, like, can you have the humility?
[01:37:51]  And I'm not talking, that's a separate category from, well, did you compromise in the word of God?
[01:37:55]  Like, if you're going to be patriarchal, then you need to be, you know, issuing commit.
[01:37:57]  Like, no, no, you do have authority.
[01:37:59]  You have that authority.
[01:38:01]  That's what I don't like about the complementarians, is because they basically say that headship is just like this spiritual, ethereal, it doesn't mean anything.
[01:38:08]  It practically means nothing.
[01:38:10]  It means I get the tie breaking vote that might come up three times over the course of a 50 year marriage.
[01:38:14]  I don't like that.
[01:38:16]  I think a husband has real authority.
[01:38:17]  That said, I have never said, and a husband should exercise that real authority on anything and everything, you know, 40 times a day.
[01:38:25]  That's never been my position.
[01:38:27]  And if your wife is a raging feminist, and 99 out of 100 times, she probably is, because we've been off the rails, not picking on her, but just our whole society, men and women alike, have been.
[01:38:43]  Rebelling with every fiber in our being against the Lord God Almighty on this issue for 70 years and arguably longer.
[01:38:52]  Decades.
[01:38:53]  So, because of that, your wife probably is a feminist.
[01:38:56]  The question is not if she's a feminist, it's just how much of a feminist is she?
[01:38:59]  Some of you guys are married to a woman who's a little bit of a feminist, and some of you guys are married to one that's a lot of it a feminist.
[01:39:05]  And if you just came in, husband, to patriarchal convictions six months ago, two years ago, three years ago, and your wife has been bred by her father, And her mother, and they were bred and trained by their fathers and mothers, like for generations to be boss babes.
[01:39:25]  You do have to, you want your wife to go to heaven, so you do have to wash her with the word.
[01:39:29]  You do have to disciple her, but you get to choose how many times in a day you're going to have war in your home rather than peace.
[01:39:37]  There is no verse in the Bible that says you do have the authority.
[01:39:40]  The Bible says that, but the Bible does not say you have to execute and use that authority on every single issue.
[01:39:47]  40 times a day.
[01:39:48]  That is actually up to you.
[01:39:50]  That's your prerogative.
[01:39:52]  And so that's how I would answer the question, Ben.
[01:39:54]  Thank you again so much for the generosity.
[01:39:55]  But that's what I would say man, just lots and lots and lots of grace.
[01:40:02]  Because at the end of the day, I have counseled marriages.
[01:40:06]  I know marriages where the guy came into biblical patriarchal views and he's right and it's true and he's being honorable.
[01:40:16]  But he drew a hard line in the sand right away.
[01:40:20]  And you can do that.
[01:40:21]  And sometimes God, in His mercy, does a miracle in that woman's heart.
[01:40:25]  And she comes into those convictions too.
[01:40:26]  And both husband and wife are pinned together and it's glorious.
[01:40:30]  And sometimes that doesn't happen.
[01:40:33]  And your home becomes a battlefield every second.
[01:40:37]  You walk through the door and it's war, war.
[01:40:40]  It's no one's talking.
[01:40:42]  The children have just this constant sense of unrest and instability and worry.
[01:40:50]  You got to be true to the word of God.
[01:40:52]  You don't have to exercise every command all the time.
[01:40:55]  I don't have to tell my kids every time we come home three commands.
[01:41:00]  Actually, if I'm more thoughtful, and my wife and I, we've had this conversation, like we've gotten to the point where there's some days where it's like the kids are already falling apart, they're having a hard day.
[01:41:07]  We're going to deal gently with the bruised reeds.
[01:41:13]  And so we actually, we're going to get home and we're just not going to give the command because we know if we give it, they're probably going to disobey.
[01:41:19]  And we know that it's our job.
[01:41:21]  To remove disobedience from their heart.
[01:41:23]  Rebellion is bound up in the heart of the child, and there's a way to remove it.
[01:41:26]  The Bible gives.
[01:41:27]  And it's not just preaching the gospel, it turns out, if you read the Bible.
[01:41:31]  There's another way to remove it also.
[01:41:32]  So we've got to do some of that, but we don't have to do it all the time.
[01:41:35]  We also need to have moments of peace and joy and happiness.
[01:41:38]  And one of the ways that we can have that in our home is by pursuing Jesus and loving Him.
[01:41:42]  And also, one of the ways you can have peace in your home is by having just moments where you're not constantly training.
[01:41:51]  I could give the command, I would be justified to do so.
[01:41:55]  But you don't, it's just like the military, Wes.
[01:41:58]  It's like, yeah, like the drill sergeant could say, and another mile, and another mile, and another mile.
[01:42:04]  And he would have the authority to do so.
[01:42:06]  Right.
[01:42:07]  And the platoon really does need to get whipped into shape.
[01:42:10]  But there is a fine line of like, you want to train them, but you'd like them to still be alive at the end of it, right?
[01:42:16]  The best leader doesn't break, he shapes.
[01:42:19]  Right.
[01:42:19]  Like that's an actual good leader that says, you've got to get to this destination.
[01:42:22]  And I can't do it in three months, but give me a year and I could.
[01:42:25]  And he actually gets them there.
[01:42:27]  It's not just, yes, sir, two out of 100 finally met the fitness standard.
[01:42:31]  Right.
[01:42:31]  It's, I got the majority along with me and they love me for it.
[01:42:35]  That's a good leader.
[01:42:36]  Amen.
[01:42:36]  Eric, what are your thoughts on the question just how to bring your wife?
[01:42:40]  Along, she's struggling with patriarchy, yeah.
[01:42:43]  I think, particularly in the instance where uh somebody's coming out of new age, you know, coming into uh patriarchy at all, yeah.
[01:42:52]  My first thought is exactly what Michael said you know, you're talking about a bruised reed and a smoldering wick, and you're thinking about okay, how can I?
[01:43:01]  You think about that, you see no flame, but there's smoke coming off of it, so there's got to be something going on here.
[01:43:06]  Uh, but in that situation, the Lord is gracious, He's merciful, you're going to do everything you can to encourage whatever growth you do see.
[01:43:14]  I think being gentle in the way that you lead is a really good thing, encouragement.
[01:43:18]  The only other thing I'd add to the discussion is it really is something that you ideally are not the only voice in their lives, particularly what we've seen in community here.
[01:43:29]  If you could be in context where you just see modeled other versions of biblical femininity, that has an appeal and an allure to it where you'll find wives who are new to our community saying things like that we didn't even necessarily tell them.
[01:43:45]  That woman, you know, she carries herself well.
[01:43:47]  She's so respectful to her husband.
[01:43:49]  I want to grow into that.
[01:43:50]  We're creatures who imitate.
[01:43:52]  That's how God designed us.
[01:43:54]  So I think also having, you know, wise companions for them, role models to look up to, can be a really good piece of advice.
[01:44:02]  Yeah.
[01:44:02]  Nice.
[01:44:03]  Probably apply that right to Vlad's question as well.
[01:44:05]  Vlad's a great brother, and he asked the question.
[01:44:07]  I think it really is closely related to your answer.
[01:44:09]  What are some practical methods to help a wife be more comfortable in submitting in all things and becoming less uncomfortable with the true amount of control?
[01:44:16]  A husband has.
[01:44:17]  So, very much so in that vein, but basically saying there could be a level where, like, a wife's coming into it and she's like, holy cow, he has a lot of authority.

=== Authority Versus Prudence in Marriage (03:56) ===

[01:44:25]  Like, there really isn't, aside from the extremes, go kill your neighbor, which no one in the right mind would ever order.
[01:44:31]  But aside from the extremes, like, he has close to, not truly, only God has true and ultimate final authority, but he's got a lot of authority.
[01:44:39]  And that's scary.
[01:44:41]  So, to apply to that, patience, grace, and then demonstrating.
[01:44:44]  So, authority versus prudence.
[01:44:46]  You can have the authority, but it may not be prudent to do something.
[01:44:49]  Demonstrating as much as possible over time, when I do exercise this, which is my right and does have to be obeyed, I temper it with prudence every time.
[01:44:58]  I'm not coming off half cocked.
[01:44:59]  Go, I don't even know.
[01:45:03]  Go, whatever it would be.
[01:45:05]  You're not saying silly things, saying, I have the authority, I'm saying this, and it ties directly.
[01:45:09]  Your wife comes home from the store and she forgot an ingredient.
[01:45:12]  Go back to the store right now.
[01:45:14]  Submission to that is a lot scarier.
[01:45:17]  You do have that authority.
[01:45:18]  You could say it, and you could say it kindly.
[01:45:20]  But you don't have to.
[01:45:21]  Yep.
[01:45:21]  Exactly.
[01:45:21]  You don't have to.
[01:45:22]  Just say it, we'll get it next time.
[01:45:23]  And then, but the point being comfortable with wait, I know I'm not going to come home, be ordered to go back to the store 45 minutes away, or go clean the chicken coop three times a day.
[01:45:32]  No, that authority is only coming in place when it's for the good.
[01:45:34]  Hey, that kid really needs a spanking and it's for love and it's for kindness, or this isn't modest and it's actually unloving to you and others around.
[01:45:41]  I can see that that's being exercised with prudence.
[01:45:44]  I think that's the way you help grow in comfort.
[01:45:46]  Well said.
[01:45:47]  Good.
[01:45:47]  Good.
[01:45:47]  All right.
[01:45:48]  We have a lot of super chats.
[01:45:49]  So, gentlemen.
[01:45:51]  Real quick, the only thing I was going to add on that, though, is just it's just important to understand, like whether you call it sphere sovereignty or whether you call it, you know, the classical two kingdoms, however you want to frame it, whatever theological framework, it is important to understand that in the home, The husband has a the husband slash father, um, the measure of authority that he has, biblically speaking, what the Bible says, right?
[01:46:13]  Um, God's the only one who has you know inherent authority, all human authority is vested authority, it's an extension of God, God gives it to them, and so it's not limitless, not in the true sense.
[01:46:24]  But a husband slash father is the closest in terms of human authority figures, it's the closest to limitless authority.
[01:46:35]  If you command your wife to do something God forbids.
[01:46:38]  That's outside of your authority.
[01:46:40]  Or if you forbid her from doing something that God commands, that's outside of your authority.
[01:46:46]  Apart from that, as husbandslash father, that human position, office, head of household, has more authority than any other human office in all of the created cosmos.
[01:47:04]  An emperor, I mean, even kings, it's like, well, we don't want to have a monarchy, that would be tyranny.
[01:47:10]  And it's like we have a deep state regime that has cameras everywhere and monitors all of your data and knows exactly what, like, no accountability.
[01:47:17]  Yeah, dude, kings back in the day, they had no clue what the peasants way over there on the farm, like, they had a ton of freedom.
[01:47:23]  People had actually a lot of freedom.
[01:47:27]  My point is to say, even in what you would deem as a more tyrannical form of civil government, that king, even if we did have a monarchy, that king still would not, under God, and even if he tried to, He would not be able to pull it off.
[01:47:42]  So, in terms of what God's word gives, affords to him, and in terms of his own human attempts, even if he's trying to be a tyrant, he still does not have as much authority as the head of household.
[01:47:52]  Head of household has a ton of authority, but you, because you have that authority, you get to choose how frequently you're going to execute it and what you're going to do, you know, what are going to be the deal breakers and when are you going to actually draw a line in the sand?
[01:48:08]  Are you going to make a fight about everything?
[01:48:09]  Because you actually have the authority to choose not to.
[01:48:12]  Okay, let's go.
[01:48:14]  We got some more super chats.
[01:48:15]  Good.
[01:48:15]  Down a little, yep.
[01:48:18]  Granddad Farms, he gives us $5.
[01:48:20]  Thanks, Granddad Farms.

=== Choosing Wisdom Over Usurped Power (16:04) ===

[01:48:21]  We really appreciate it.
[01:48:22]  He says, GA, good afternoon, gentlemen.
[01:48:25]  And Eric.
[01:48:25]  GA, and happy Friday.
[01:48:27]  Happy Friday.
[01:48:27]  Okay.
[01:48:28]  And then we've got Nobody Special.
[01:48:30]  He says, Is Theonomy a trap for unsuccessful men?
[01:48:34]  Eric, what do you think?
[01:48:36]  Is Theonomy a trap?
[01:48:37]  That's a super chat from Nobody Special.
[01:48:39]  Thank you, Nobody Special.
[01:48:40]  Is Theonomy a trap for unsuccessful men?
[01:48:44]  Wow.
[01:48:44]  That has a.
[01:48:46]  Seems like a lot of baggage attached to it.
[01:48:48]  I don't know what the whole context of that question is, but uh, I would say no, not necessarily.
[01:48:53]  Uh, I've known lots of uh, lots of good guys in that camp.
[01:48:57]  Uh, Joel, Joel Webbin, kind of depending on very successful man.
[01:49:03]  No, it would be my short answer.
[01:49:06]  It could be, yeah, okay, there you go.
[01:49:09]  Nobody special.
[01:49:10]  That's you know what, you give a hundred dollar super chat and you get a 45 minute answer.
[01:49:14]  No, that's not true.
[01:49:19]  Yeah, I don't really have anything to add to that.
[01:49:20]  I don't know exactly what you're getting at, but we appreciate the support and I agree with Eric.
[01:49:26]  Okay, let's see.
[01:49:27]  Daniel Bartos.
[01:49:28]  Oh, wow.
[01:49:29]  $50 super chat.
[01:49:30]  Thank you so much for the generosity.
[01:49:31]  We really appreciate it.
[01:49:32]  He says, This is well overdue and not nearly enough for what you men have done for my spiritual growth and my desires for a greater understanding of God's holy word, the truth.
[01:49:44]  Stand strong and courageous in the spirit of the Lord.
[01:49:47]  God bless.
[01:49:47]  Thank you, Daniel.
[01:49:48]  We really appreciate that.
[01:49:50]  Michael here at the bottom, he says, Could you do a podcast on how you do discipline?
[01:49:57]  That's a great question.
[01:49:59]  I've addressed it some in the past.
[01:50:01]  It is.
[01:50:02]  It's difficult because that's one of those topics.
[01:50:04]  It's not just hashtag based, you know, or controversial, and you'll get grief.
[01:50:08]  But we live in a world that hates children.
[01:50:11]  I mean, hates them.
[01:50:14]  And I'm not just being hyperbolic.
[01:50:15]  I would back that up with scripture.
[01:50:16]  You know, spare the rod, spoil the child.
[01:50:19]  People always say that's not in the Bible.
[01:50:20]  You're right.
[01:50:21]  The Bible says way worse than spoil.
[01:50:23]  It doesn't say spare the rod, spoil the child.
[01:50:25]  It says that he who spares a rod hates his son.
[01:50:29]  That if you don't discipline, you actually hate the child.
[01:50:32]  And gentle parenting.
[01:50:34]  Is not biblical.
[01:50:35]  The Bible tells us how to discipline.
[01:50:37]  Now, it doesn't mean that that's the exhaustive, exclusive form of discipline.
[01:50:41]  You can't ever discipline in any other way.
[01:50:44]  But that is a part of discipline, especially in the little years, the earlier years of life.
[01:50:49]  So, in the younger years of life, spanking is a non negotiable Christian part of discipline.
[01:50:57]  But because we live in a world that hates children, the moment that our world that hates God and therefore hates his image as they see it in children, the moment they see someone loving children, Because to discipline a child is love.
[01:51:09]  Per Hebrews chapter 12, God disciplines his sons, those that he loves.
[01:51:13]  The moment that our child hating world sees a parent loving children, they will try to take those children away.
[01:51:21]  They will.
[01:51:22]  They will actually try to take your kids.
[01:51:24]  So this isn't just, oh, I'll get in trouble on X. You know, I'm in trouble on X every day of the week, every day of the week, no matter what.
[01:51:31]  It's not about that.
[01:51:33]  But this is one where people will actually, they really will try to ruin your life, legally take your kids.
[01:51:40]  The whole nine yards.
[01:51:41]  So, to answer the question, it just happened a couple months ago.
[01:51:43]  Someone talked about disciplining his son.
[01:51:45]  CPS was there and everything.
[01:51:47]  It was a big deal.
[01:51:49]  We're not talking just about people in America.
[01:51:50]  We're not talking about.
[01:51:51]  Not in England or in Germany.
[01:51:53]  Right.
[01:51:53]  No, here in the United States, in Ohio.
[01:51:55]  Here in America.
[01:51:55]  Yep.
[01:51:56]  Yep.
[01:51:56]  So, to answer the question, yes, I'm willing to go there, but that's one that we would probably have to take our time to think through and think through the wording of it, not the biblical principles.
[01:52:10]  Yeah, we know the principles, but how to be clear enough to where it's helpful to you guys.
[01:52:15]  Because if we're so vague, then it's not even helpful.
[01:52:18]  So we'd have to find a way to be clear enough to be helpful, but also careful enough to not have our children taken from us.
[01:52:26]  Because we live in a world that hates kids.
[01:52:28]  That said, there are some signs of life, some signs of hope on the horizon, whether it's JD Vance or Elon Musk or Trump's grandkids, just having kids in some of those public spaces and not just hiding them away.
[01:52:42]  The kids are always somewhere else.
[01:52:44]  That is encouraging.
[01:52:45]  So I think there's hope on the horizon that we might have a more child friendly culture.
[01:52:50]  In the future, but that's an uphill battle.
[01:52:52]  And right now, it's pretty dangerous.
[01:52:55]  Okay.
[01:52:56]  One more super chat.
[01:52:57]  Modern waggy?
[01:52:58]  Modern waggy.
[01:52:59]  It's like a wage kind of someone that's just like, yeah.
[01:53:03]  I see.
[01:53:04]  $10 from Modern waggy.
[01:53:05]  Thank you so much.
[01:53:05]  Wes, you want to read it?
[01:53:06]  Sure.
[01:53:07]  Question from him.
[01:53:08]  He says, What do you say to complementariansslash people who do not take the scripture literally?
[01:53:13]  Great description.
[01:53:14]  It says, Wives can have careers if they also take care of the home to keep fitting with Titus 2 5.
[01:53:20]  I don't agree.
[01:53:21]  So the question being, What do you say to those people?
[01:53:23]  They're like, I'm complementarian.
[01:53:25]  I'm this, that, or the other.
[01:53:26]  And as far as Titus 2 5 goes, women to be keepers at home.
[01:53:29]  Well, as long as she keeps the home, completes that category, checks the box, well, she can also have a career as well.
[01:53:36]  I'd love to hear from Eric, but we've talked about this before.
[01:53:40]  It's not possible to run a home with any number of children well and then have any semblance of a career.
[01:53:47]  I could not do my career and watch my kids.
[01:53:50]  And I have two kids, three and one.
[01:53:52]  I just couldn't do it.
[01:53:54]  I know of no situation that does not involve childcare for 40 hours a week, maybe sending all of them to school.
[01:54:01]  So this would be maybe you're done having young children.
[01:54:03]  Sending all of them to school, which is a different category and maybe a different conversation.
[01:54:07]  But I just know of nobody 20 to 40, two, three, four kids, any wife that's doing a great job in the home, loving her husband, watching her children, that would have any reasonable bandwidth for any type of meaningful job, aside from something like she does nurse one night a week overnight.
[01:54:25]  There are some arrangements where financially it makes sense, with the time it makes sense.
[01:54:30]  It's not a high commitment.
[01:54:32]  Hey, I make $400 a week to do eight hours.
[01:54:35]  You know, on a Wednesday night to make some great money for our family.
[01:54:39]  But as far as nine to five, as far as four days a week, there's nothing that you're doing for one that's more valuable than your children.
[01:54:46]  And there's nothing you're doing that you're not split in two directions, neither passing the kids off to someone else or ultimately just not really doing a good job at whatever day job you would have.
[01:54:56]  Eric, well said, Wes.
[01:54:57]  Eric, what do you think?
[01:54:59]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:54:59]  I think it's a very simple principle that none of us, as far as I'm aware, are capable of being in two places at one time.
[01:55:07]  And so when you think about that, You're like, okay, well, yeah, as Wes said, like, unless you farm out 90% of the job to other people, you're not physically capable of doing that.
[01:55:18]  I think the other operative word there is career.
[01:55:20]  Obviously, a woman can work, meaning that she can serve her household, she can help her husband in the productive economy of the home, all those things.
[01:55:29]  But yeah, not physically actually possible to do two separate things and actually be fully involved in the full role of motherhood.
[01:55:38]  Good.
[01:55:39]  Well said.
[01:55:39]  Yeah.
[01:55:39]  So much of it, I think, is wanting your wife's labor.
[01:55:43]  To be attached to you as her head.
[01:55:49]  It's every wife works, but it's what we want to see is we want to see wives working for her man rather than the man.
[01:56:01]  We want to see, in other words, and part of it honestly is like believing in the truth and the power of God's word, but then also believing in the, you know, he who finds a wife finds a good thing, believing in the wife that the Lord sovereignly in his mercy.
[01:56:17]  Gave you as a blessing, as a gift to you, and believing that you employing her will actually benefit your household more than farming her out to be employed by someone else.
[01:56:28]  That her gifts and her strengths and her ability and her labor and all these different things under your headship and your direction could actually be more productive and more profitable than farming her out to some other man who has not made vows to her, who is not in covenant with her, who has not promised to love her as Christ would love the church.
[01:56:50]  Seeing her as yours.
[01:56:52]  She belongs to you and having her work with you.
[01:56:56]  Like the Proverbs 31 woman is a working woman.
[01:56:59]  It's all attached to the home, but there are things outside of the home.
[01:57:02]  She's doing it from the home, but like she's doing land acquisition.
[01:57:06]  You know, she sees a field and purchases it, but she's doing it, number one, with whose money?
[01:57:11]  Her husband's money.
[01:57:12]  So it's the husband's estate, it's his resources, his money that she's using, and it's underneath his discretion.
[01:57:20]  And she's still doing the legwork and probably looking into the fields and comparing and blah, blah, blah.
[01:57:26]  But she's doing all this, whether it's real estate or whether it's, I don't know, some side business on Etsy or whatever.
[01:57:33]  But it's all, it's under, in terms of like if it was a LLC, it would be underneath her husband's name as the LLC.
[01:57:42]  It was like, you know, it would be, you know, Eric Kahn Incorporated, you know, Joel Webbin Incorporated, Michael Belch Incorporated, Wesley Todd.
[01:57:50]  It's under that entity, under that entity and that supervision, an extension, an arm extending from that.
[01:57:58]  Core unit that she's being productive and developing, and all those things.
[01:58:02]  So, wives can work.
[01:58:03]  The question is how, where, and attached to who.
[01:58:08]  That's very different than just sending the wife out of the home to report to someone else.
[01:58:13]  And the last thing I'll say on that that I always find ironic is guys who say, well, husbands don't have that kind of authority, and a man can't tell his wife, you know.
[01:58:23]  But then they're perfectly fine with women working outside of the home where they go and typically work for a man.
[01:58:30]  And the authority that they're perfectly comfortable with him having is all the way down to the exact time that they show up, how many breaks they're allowed to have, when they can take those breaks, what wardrobe they have to wear, down to the shoes and socks.
[01:58:47]  I mean, every corporate employer, like we're fine.
[01:58:51]  Here's the deal the world just hates husbands.
[01:58:55]  We just have to be honest about that.
[01:58:56]  And let's be further honest conservative pastors.
[01:59:00]  Conservative in quotation marks for the listener here.
[01:59:04]  Conservative pastors hate husbands.
[01:59:07]  They don't have any problem.
[01:59:09]  They don't have any problem with a corporate employer saying, here's your dress code, here's your schedule.
[01:59:20]  Nope, you can't go on vacation without first running it by me, and I might tell you no.
[01:59:27]  All those kinds of things.
[01:59:28]  And that's one of the biggest things.
[01:59:29]  I can't remember who it was that I was talking to.
[01:59:32]  I can't remember who it was, but it was really insightful.
[01:59:36]  But just talking about one of the problems with the wife working, it's not just that the work is out of the home rather than attached to the home.
[01:59:42]  That's one principle.
[01:59:43]  But then the other is if she's working for someone else, then the house is divided.
[01:59:49]  You have just made a decision as a husband to usurp your own authority.
[01:59:54]  Because think about that.
[01:59:55]  So you're the head of the home, you're the head of your wife.
[01:59:58]  And now you are asking your wife to go ask another man if your family can go on vacation.
[02:00:05]  Think about that for a second.
[02:00:06]  Process that.
[02:00:07]  You, head of the home, who are called by Christ to be willing to lay your life down for your wife and are daily washing her in the words, and she's been given the command to submit to you in everything.
[02:00:19]  And yet you have to ask your wife to go ask another man before your family makes decisions.
[02:00:28]  And all these conservative, complimentary pastors are fine with that, they're fine with another man.
[02:00:34]  Who has not made vows to her, who will not give his life for her, who does not love her, having that kind of executive authority over precise details of, you can't go on a break right now.
[02:00:47]  They're fine with that woman working outside of the home for Amazon that will say, I'm sorry, you can't go to the bathroom.
[02:00:53]  Right.
[02:00:54]  Right.
[02:00:54]  So they're going to get mad at me with a video about a husband's authority and talking about my young children when my young, not my wife, but my young children when they need to go to the bathroom.
[02:01:05]  And the example that I was giving was again, my children, three years old, four years old, five years old, it's bedtime.
[02:01:11]  Hey, go potty before bed.
[02:01:14]  I was saying a father does have that authority.
[02:01:16]  And so they're going to make a clip like that go viral, like Ali Bestucky, who was the first person to make that transcript.
[02:01:22]  That's what it was about, go viral, and started this whole feud.
[02:01:26]  They're going to freak out about that.
[02:01:28]  Meanwhile, they're going to say that it's perfectly permissible for a man at Amazon Incorporated to tell not children who are five years old, but a full grown woman who is not their wife, who they've not made vows to, when she can go to the bathroom.
[02:01:46]  So just admit you're hypocrites.
[02:01:49]  You're hypocrites.
[02:01:50]  And at the end of the day, you hate husbands and you love feminism.
[02:01:55]  And you're compromised.
[02:01:59]  Eric, any thoughts?
[02:02:01]  I don't know, Joel.
[02:02:02]  That was a lot of fire breathing truth right there.
[02:02:06]  Yeah, I do actually think it's a lot of the same thing just hypocrisy with that situation, the amount of authority given outside the home.
[02:02:15]  I think it's also interesting, too, when you get to the complementarian camp, they're also willing to let wives go into environments that are hostile, including law enforcement.
[02:02:26]  It's not safe.
[02:02:27]  So, physical harm becomes involved in those things.
[02:02:31]  And yeah, again, just the woman can actually be safeguarded and thriving in a home environment where a husband who loves her is making those decisions rather than a corporate boss who more than likely sees her as a disposable line item on a budget.
[02:02:47]  Amen.
[02:02:48]  Michael West, any thoughts?
[02:02:50]  Nope.
[02:02:50]  It's good.
[02:02:52]  Nope.
[02:02:52]  It's good.
[02:02:53]  Okay.
[02:02:54]  Last one Cameron Stevenson.
[02:02:55]  He said, Joel, did I hear correctly that Brian Sylvain won't be making it to the Conference this year due to his wife expecting their child around a baby coming around that time.
[02:03:06]  No, that is not the case.
[02:03:08]  I was actually in Ogden, as Eric can testify, just a few weeks ago.
[02:03:12]  And I told Lexi to her face, right?
[02:03:15]  Because I just talked about other men having a thought.
[02:03:17]  I said, I'm so sorry to hear that Brian won't be there for the birth of your next child because he will be at the conference.
[02:03:23]  This is baby number seven at this point.
[02:03:25]  It's baby number seven.
[02:03:27]  At that point, it's like, I'm sorry.
[02:03:28]  It's your seventh kid.
[02:03:30]  No, yeah, he is going to miss out.
[02:03:33]  Brian gave me a hard time because he told me, like, people are like, there must be something going on that they're not being honest about, that Ogden, you know, is upset with Joel about something.
[02:03:42]  Because, you know, Brian pulling out of the conference because I was in trouble for something.
[02:03:46]  It's like, it's because Joel's in trouble.
[02:03:48]  I'm always in trouble.
[02:03:49]  I'm always in trouble.
[02:03:50]  But they're like, Joel's in trouble.
[02:03:51]  And so Brian's backing out.
[02:03:52]  And they're like, if it was really a baby, they would have known way in advance.
[02:03:55]  Well, here's the truth.
[02:03:56]  I did know way in advance.
[02:03:57]  Brian told me months and months and months and months ago.
[02:04:01]  And I just, in my heart of hearts, I considered it.
[02:04:04]  I thought about it and I just said, No, I don't believe it.
[02:04:07]  I don't believe it.
[02:04:08]  I just don't believe it's happening.
[02:04:09]  And I left his picture on the conference promo and I just kept running the image with Brian right there smiling with his little handlebar mustache for like four months after he had told me.
[02:04:21]  And at a certain point, like he was like, All right, Joel, I'm just going to post on X because you refused to announce it.

=== Supporting the New Christendom Movement (06:46) ===

[02:04:25]  I'm just going to say, I'm going to have to announce it for you that I am not coming to the conference.
[02:04:29]  So that's how that shook out.
[02:04:30]  Well, that's called denial.
[02:04:32]  That was denial.
[02:04:33]  I just couldn't believe it.
[02:04:34]  It hurt.
[02:04:34]  It just hurt too much to acknowledge it.
[02:04:37]  This is the end of the episode.
[02:04:38]  Eric, thanks so much for coming on the show.
[02:04:40]  Any final thoughts for our listeners?
[02:04:43]  Oh, wow.
[02:04:43]  Yeah.
[02:04:44]  I would just say I encourage people to continue pressing in on these issues.
[02:04:49]  Don't be discouraged when you see either failures or criticism.
[02:04:53]  But, you know, there are a lot of good people doing a lot of good work.
[02:04:57]  And, point I always leave people with if you can be a part of a community, whether that's Georgetown, Texas, Ogden, Utah, anywhere else, You can be a part of a community where people are thriving.
[02:05:07]  These sorts of things don't quite impact you as much.
[02:05:11]  You realize our people are great.
[02:05:12]  We continue to grow.
[02:05:13]  And that's an outside distraction.
[02:05:15]  Just keep doing the good work and Christ will bless that.
[02:05:18]  So just to encourage people with that.
[02:05:21]  Amen.
[02:05:22]  So our conference is happening April 3rd, 4th, and 5th.
[02:05:25]  We'd love for you guys to come.
[02:05:26]  Crisis King, How to Defeat Trash World.
[02:05:28]  Eric will be there.
[02:05:29]  Dan Burkholder will be there.
[02:05:31]  The Vikings.
[02:05:31]  Brian Savay will be there.
[02:05:32]  Brian Savay will be there.
[02:05:33]  He doesn't know that.
[02:05:34]  Lexi doesn't know that, but I know that.
[02:05:36]  He'll be there.
[02:05:37]  And Ben Garrett will be there.
[02:05:38]  And then a host of a bunch of other people will be there.
[02:05:41]  But then also, just a few months after that, two months after that, in June, Eric, real quick, do you want to plug your conference?
[02:05:48]  Yeah, absolutely.
[02:05:49]  June 12th through 14th, Ogden, Utah.
[02:05:51]  We have a host of wonderful speakers, including.
[02:05:54]  Our very own Joel Webbin.
[02:05:56]  And I say our very own because I feel like you kind of belong to us a little bit, Joel.
[02:05:59]  So that's fair.
[02:06:00]  That's fair.
[02:06:02]  Brian Webbin.
[02:06:02]  For better or for worse.
[02:06:04]  Yeah, that's right.
[02:06:05]  For better or worse.
[02:06:06]  We own all of it.
[02:06:08]  Yeah, Joel will be there.
[02:06:09]  Brian Sauvay, myself, Dan Burkholder.
[02:06:12]  We've got Stephen Wolf, Andrew Isker.
[02:06:14]  So it's going to be a really good time.
[02:06:15]  We're going to be talking about recovering the spirit of American greatness.
[02:06:19]  It's time to get back to the Christian Protestant vision for America that built this country.
[02:06:24]  No more hiding under the longhouse.
[02:06:26]  As it were, and we'll do some networking.
[02:06:30]  There's even going to be some games, some, I think, rock throwing, Scottish style games.
[02:06:35]  And no, I'm not joking.
[02:06:37]  So, Joel, you'll be participating in that.
[02:06:40]  No, I'm sure he will be.
[02:06:41]  Yes.
[02:06:42]  Your failures will be broadcast for the world to see.
[02:06:45]  So, I'm just saying you better get in shape.
[02:06:47]  I can't do it.
[02:06:48]  I will be there and I will be spectating.
[02:06:51]  I'm not going to allow Ogden to just video record me to publicly mock me for the next one.
[02:06:56]  All right, Michael, you're in.
[02:06:57]  Yeah, there you go.
[02:06:59]  Somebody better step up.
[02:07:00]  No, I'll be there.
[02:07:01]  I'm planning to.
[02:07:02]  Nice.
[02:07:02]  And that's what are the dates?
[02:07:04]  June what?
[02:07:05]  Yeah, June 12th through 14th.
[02:07:07]  You can find more information at newchristenimpress.com slash 2025.
[02:07:11]  Great.
[02:07:11]  Newchristenimpress.com slash 2025.
[02:07:14]  All right.
[02:07:15]  That's it for the show.
[02:07:17]  That ends, wraps up the week for us.
[02:07:18]  Thank you guys so much for listening and all of your prayers, all of your support, all of your encouragement.
[02:07:24]  We really appreciate it.
[02:07:25]  We got a lot of great support and encouragement for the episode that we did this last Wednesday.
[02:07:30]  Just a couple days ago, on genetics and race and all these kinds of things, wading into those very controversial waters.
[02:07:37]  But the church does need to be able to address these things biblically from the book of special revelation and natural revelation, the way that God has constructed the world, what God has written to us in his word.
[02:07:48]  And we need to do it courageously because people have real questions and we need real answers.
[02:07:54]  And a lot of you guys, obviously, people were upset about it, but a lot of people privately emailed me or messaged me.
[02:08:00]  Message me as well.
[02:08:01]  Yeah, message Wes, thanking us for being willing to answer some questions that people have had for a long time that nobody's been willing to answer.
[02:08:11]  So, thank you for your encouragement.
[02:08:14]  It's hard, it does take a toll.
[02:08:16]  We enjoy what we do, we're happy and honored to do it.
[02:08:20]  But as you guys see publicly, we get a lot of heat, a lot of heat.
[02:08:26]  And so, you guys, those of you who are able to support the ministry financially, Goes a long way.
[02:08:32]  Those of you who are willing to reach out and thank us or encourage us goes a long way.
[02:08:38]  Those of you who are able to come to the conference and show your support.
[02:08:42]  A lot of people, sadly, Christians, a lot of Christians are rooting for it to fail.
[02:08:46]  They do not want us to have a thousand people at New Christendom Conference or Right Response Conference.
[02:08:51]  And you guys being willing to do that encourages us, it benefits you, and it also helps to show our Christian brothers and sisters that we love.
[02:09:02]  That no, this is what the Word of God says.
[02:09:04]  This is not new, it's not flashy, it's not novel.
[02:09:07]  This is a return to the old ways, the old past.
[02:09:10]  This is what our Christian forefathers believed, this is what the Bible teaches.
[02:09:15]  We are not the anomaly.
[02:09:17]  The 20th century in Western civilization, in Christendom, that's the anomaly.
[02:09:23]  And so we look like the anomaly because everybody has been derailed.
[02:09:28]  But we're actually getting back to the common denominator, the constant.
[02:09:33]  And when you guys support things like New Christendom, you support Right Response, you come to the conference in person, even though it's a sacrifice, it's hard.
[02:09:43]  But, you know, to take off work, it costs money to travel.
[02:09:47]  But when you physically show up to our conferences, That makes our Christian brothers and sisters who disagree with us over these things, it forces them to have to reconsider.
[02:10:00]  And that matters.
[02:10:02]  When something starts to get enough traction, people hate it, but eventually they have to reckon with it.
[02:10:08]  They have to consider it.
[02:10:10]  And it's not that we're just trying to rub it in with people who disagree.
[02:10:14]  No, we want to win and we want them to eventually change teams.
[02:10:19]  And one of the ways that we do it. Is if it's just us podcasting, you know, throwing out podcasts into the wind and hosting podcasts, you know, conferences with 50 people, there's nothing wrong with that.
[02:10:30]  But if that's all it is, then they're never going to give us the time of day.
[02:10:35]  It's my point is, it's not even so much us.
[02:10:37]  It's not Eric.
[02:10:38]  It's not New Christendom.
[02:10:39]  It's not me.
[02:10:40]  It's not Right Response.
[02:10:41]  It's you, the listener.
[02:10:43]  It's you guys, all of you guys coming, you know, and contributing online in the conversation on X and coming and liking our posts and.
[02:10:53]  Listening to our podcast and showing up to our conference and listening to Brian Sauvay's music.
[02:10:58]  It's you guys that are making things like biblical patriarchy, the Bible's teaching on biblical roles of men and women, come back and into the center forefront to where the rest of the Christian church has to deal with it.
[02:11:11]  You guys are making that happen.