Dr. Wolf and the host dissect the "Christian Prince" concept, arguing that while God grants magistrates authority to suppress atheism and blasphemy as socially destructive, this power must be checked by a people-created constitutional system. They critique modern Christians for inconsistently tolerating atheists while ostracizing repentant racists, urging instead that pressure target transgender activists and gender-affirming care providers. The discussion defines a Christian nation where public architecture favors Christianity without persecuting private minorities, yet restricts non-Christian public displays, ultimately framing true resistance as crushing internal acceptance of liberal social dogma regarding abortion and gender identity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Divine Power and Civil Magistrate00:09:31
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Okay, this is episode eight, and myself and Dr. Wolf are going to be talking a little bit more about the Christian Prince.
We began that conversation in the previous episode, episode seven.
So if you haven't watched that, go back and check it out.
We're going to continue the conversation about the Christian Prince, and particularly, we're going to talk about the powers that are afforded to him.
And you've already prepped me that you think that in terms of permissibility and what's possible, that he could have a very great deal of power.
And then we're going to seek to.
Give some qualifiers and disclaimers within a constitutional government that we have here in America, and then also how that relates to religious liberty.
Yeah, so I think that the power in the abstract that God grants a Christian prince or a civil magistrate is very broad, vast, and actually not absolute.
There's some things that they cannot do, but it is very, in principle, it can be very wide and broad.
And this is where people criticized me because it sounded like I was saying he could be like a tyrant and he could be an absolute ruler.
And I got criticism recently.
Someone said, Well, what about like you have a birthday party and there's some of the girls' friends are not nice?
Can the civil magistrate show up and say, You cannot do that?
That's bad.
And make a law against girls being unkind or something during the birthday party or something weird like that.
And I was like, I guess in principle he could do that.
But there are other authorities that can do that as well.
So I just think, in principle, the power that God grants is a power of God to order outward affairs in ways that we would not like or think appropriate.
But I think people have to understand that when we form a political society, we have to make decisions on the political system.
Like, so when our framers got together, they used all the experience of Western civilization, the various constitutions of the past.
And said, actually, what's best for us, and given the political experience of the ages, we should divide this power into three different branches.
We should divide it into legislative, executive, and judicial.
And we're going to make them separate branches and we're going to give them different qualifications and functions and we're going to limit them so that all of that power of civil government is now limited, directed, it's curtailed for our people.
And so when I say that the prince has all this power, what I mean is that in principle he does, a lot of things are permissible.
But that doesn't mean they're all appropriate.
And that power should fall under the political system by the people.
The people create the political system themselves, whether it's aristocracy, a mixed regime, a monarchy, a democracy, whatever it is.
And that power, because they consent to it and because it's in a way originates from them, the design of it, then they should be the ones that then the politicians or the statesmen or the civil rulers should then abide by that.
As a, they have a sort of fiduciary power.
They have a power that is granted to them in a way by the people, and then they have to operate within the system that is created.
So, this is one of the criticisms I got from my friend Glenn Moots, who's a professor up in Michigan, a good friend.
And he said, You know, you talk about the Christian prince, but why didn't you talk about constitutionalism?
It's true that in the past, a lot of the reformers and like earlier reformers, they granted a lot of power to the civil magistrate, but haven't you considered You know, Montesquieu's work.
He's the French guy, I forgot a few episodes back.
That's the French legal theorist.
It's Montesquieu.
Or what about James Madison, Thomas Jefferson?
These guys all acknowledge that there's tremendous power in the abstract, but actually it's got to be curtailed for the good of the people.
So, why don't you think of that?
So, I would just say when we need to think, yes, in principle, there's a lot of power, but we as a people, we still have a decision to make on how that power is going to be directed for the good of our society.
And that's our decision.
Like, one of my general emphases within this whole Christian Nationals project is to say that we, the people, have the power.
To order ourselves as we see fit for our good.
And that includes the political system as well.
So, yeah, that's it.
I guess that's great.
Religious liberty?
Religious liberty.
So, that's it.
Yeah.
This is, again, a criticism.
I think what we have to.
So, from the very beginning of the Reformation, one of the basic Protestant doctrines was that civil law cannot strike at the heart.
The civil sword cannot.
Say, you have a bad belief, and therefore I'm going to beat that out of you.
I'm going to cudgel it.
I'm just going to beat out that belief.
So, from the beginning, it was that Christ is Lord of the conscience.
So, every time a Baptist or a modern two kingdom guy says that, you know, Christ is the Lord of the conscience, you're actually affirming the very thing Calvin affirmed, Luther affirmed, everyone affirmed this.
No, I've never read a single person in the history of Protestantism who rejected that proposition.
What they understood is that that is an inward reality.
And the moment something is outwardly expressed, the moment you say God does not exist, or the moment you blaspheme Christ, that becomes an outward expression of something.
And as outward, then that's something that the civil magistrate can say, no, you're not going to allow that anymore.
Atheism will be crushed.
Atheism will be crushed.
Right.
So if somebody is an atheist in their heart and privately in their home, that's one thing.
But in a Christian society, if you have a teacher who's shaping young hearts and young minds, And in his curriculum and teaching, he's telling children that there is no God.
That's different than just a personal belief.
He's publicly expressing that and indoctrinating and teaching children.
And it would be perfectly within the confines of a Christian prince in a Christian nation to be able to come in and say, no, you can't do that.
I can't make you love God, believe in God, or any of these things at a personal, private level, but I absolutely can.
Direct and thwart your public teaching on the matter and to inflict some manner of penalties in order to curb that kind of outward behavior is permissible.
Yeah, and that is a fundamental classical liberal doctrine.
It's funny to see people say, I'm a classical liberal.
I just got in a debate with a guy at the Evangelical Philosophical Society who was representing the classical liberal position.
You know, we should crush atheism.
He's like, well, I'm a classical liberal.
But John Locke, the father of classical liberalism, said that explicitly, very famously, that anyone who denies the being of a God should not be tolerated.
So the great, you know, the great Enlightenment advocate of religious liberty said, there are some things that are destructive of society, and atheism is one of those.
And that's repeated over and over and over.
All the founders believed that atheism was destructive of society.
And really, blasphemy laws were on the books until.
The mid 20th century until they were deemed unconstitutional.
So that is a fundamental classical liberal doctrine.
Why is that?
Well, because atheists, one, I would argue that atheism corrupts the soul.
And so it leads to destructive beliefs, which statistically is true.
So if you ask atheists what they believe in terms of social policy, you know, LGBT stuff, all that other stuff, trans and kids, they are the majority of them, actually, the super majority of them would affirm all those things.
So atheism is actually very, very destructive.
And you'll point out a few guys like, you know, James Lindsay, this and that, but James Lindsay's pro gay.
Like, there's a reason, like, they say he's a conservative.
Like, no, he's not.
He's actually just a modern liberal.
And it doesn't even have to be by law that these things, I think law would be appropriate for atheists, but also just by social opprobrium.
Like, it's, it would be frowned upon.
And it is actually, generally speaking, it's not good for a politician in most places to say, I'm an atheist.
Social Opprobrium for Atheists00:16:04
They will not get voted on.
So, there is actually in our society still that.
Precedence matters.
Like, do I think Joe Biden is a Christian?
No.
Do I even think he's a decent Catholic?
No.
But it is worth noting that we have not had one president of the United States that did not, at least outwardly in terms of profession, claim to be a Christian.
Or at the very least a theist, like a personal.
But I don't want to, like, that's a precedent that we have that I don't want to see lost.
Like, would I prefer that it would actually be true as a matter of the heart in addition to just merely word?
Of course.
But if I had to choose between it not being true at all, both by word and by heart, I'd rather at least be present in their word, even if it's not true in their heart.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, this is the thing Christians lose their minds over the idea of crushing the atheist.
But Christians are very willing to crush people for naughty beliefs.
If someone is a racist, they deem this guy a racist.
Christians will join hands, join arms, or whatever with the atheists and destroy that guy.
They'll team up with the most progressive people you could possibly imagine on the left who are transing children and supporting gay pride parades.
And they'll immediately team up with them to make sure that that racist man, even if he has a profession of faith and even if he's repentant, even if he acknowledges that he did wrong, they may not have the power to enact some kind of law in order to.
Put him in jail or to fine him.
But in terms of cultural power, social power, they will make sure that he loses his job.
They'll follow him to the next job, make sure that he can't maintain employment.
And in a sense, it's even harsher than prison.
They effectively, in terms of their actions and what they're willing to do, the Christian will go to a repentant racist who is a brother in Christ and say, I will not relent until your kids starve.
Yeah.
I hate you.
And that's not an exaggeration.
No.
We know from personal experience.
I'm describing something actually right now.
And so the point is that they are willing, they are perfectly willing to use the nuclear option on those sorts of people.
Yep.
And yet, when I say, and by the way, those are the sorts of people who probably vote the same way you do, Christian, right?
So you probably agree with this person on 95%.
Percent of things, right?
In politics, who you vote for, all these things, and yet that one position is enough for you to join with the left to utterly obliterate the guy.
Um, an atheist, however, uh, has the most sinful position you can have, which is deny God.
Like breaking the first commandment is the most, you know, is the worst sin you commit.
And by virtue of breaking the first, there should immediately be a lack of trust that he's going to keep any of the other commandments.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, yeah.
Once you lose the first, you lose the second.
And that's, again, that's just demonstrated through social science that atheists have the most atrocious social political positions.
And yet, we don't do anything with those guys.
We'll join forces with, like, a James Lindsay to attack fellow Christians, as we've seen recently.
Even at Christian conferences.
Like, oh, yeah, sharing a stage and giving him, you know, opportunity.
Yeah.
And it's so my point then is that, well, one, there's an inconsistency there.
You say, oh, Christians should, you know, we're not of the world.
Like, we're not of the world.
We shouldn't use the world's power.
We shouldn't, you know, we should be pilgrims and we should be strangers and sojourners and all that.
I just don't believe them.
I don't.
I maybe there's obviously some cognitive dissonance, or at least they just don't realize.
That they are just as swept up in these things as everyone else, and they use in ways, um, given my experiences, the church people in the church are worse.
The people in the church who have been, um, accused of racism are hounded not by the atheists, not by the non Christians, the Muslim, any like they're they're hounded by people who claim Christ, um, they're followed by people who claim Christ, so people are willing to do these things.
Devote their life to tracking, like what church does he go to and this and that, and where has he moved to now?
And let's do that.
They're willing to do that, but they're not willing to do it for people who are socially destructive in their totality of their beliefs.
So, my appeal then is to say, okay, fine.
If you're not going to let up against the racist, why not do it against people who are actually socially destructive?
Why do we treat the racist worse than we do the transgender activist?
I mean, let alone the doctors that are trans in kids, that's horrible, throw them in jail.
And I think most people be okay with that, maybe.
But why not also the transgender activist?
Isn't that more socially destructive than some dude with an anonymous account?
But we're not willing to do that.
We're willing to winsomely engage and write books where we grant that we haven't been friendly and nice and that we just want you to come to Christ.
Why not do that against the guys who your own tradition of classical liberalism said are actually bad and demonstrably?
Bad in their beliefs.
So, anyway, let's do that.
Join me.
Join me in doing that and shifting our social ire against the enemies of civilization.
Anyway, let's crush atheism.
That's great.
Okay, so a little bit more maybe on religious liberty or any other thoughts?
Yeah, yeah.
So, right.
I mean, we're going back to again, so when you punish someone for an outward belief, You're not doing that so that you can reform their hearts.
That might be an indirect result, you know, something like that.
Because the law is a tutor, but if God uses it in that way, praise be to God.
But that's not, you're not, the Christian prince is not saying, I'm doing this solely for the sake of conversion or a change of heart.
No, you're doing this because his outward, if that inward belief is manifest deliberately, Outwardly, it affects others.
Right.
So, yeah, your sufficient reason should not be for them reforming internally.
Yeah, that would be a good consequence.
And yeah, but yeah, like you said, the point is that you are creating, you're trying to create conditions outwardly that conduce to what is good.
And if someone is put forward in a position that is destructive of society, then that should come under, unless there's reasons not to, that should come under some kind of social or civil penalty.
Right.
So the way that I've said it is, you know, like people will be like, well, what about, you know, the First Amendment, you know, and freedom of religion and, you know, I'll always say the same thing that you always say.
Well, what's the first word or the first thing?
Congress.
And so I don't think that we should ever have, and I don't think within, in terms of permissibility, maybe elsewhere, but within this, our nation of America, I don't think that at the federal level that we should have a national church.
I think it is permissible, although probably not a great idea, but you could have state churches.
But then more broadly than that, it's like, Well, with Christian nationalism, are you going to round up all the Muslims?
Are you going to round up all the Jews?
The Baptists, right?
And the answer is no.
Again, it's all about outward and particularly public expressions.
So a Christian nation, by necessity, would not require, it doesn't require and it doesn't even permit the thought police.
It's not like a minority report trying to stop a crime on a hunch before it even takes place.
That's not what's going on.
So, you're not rounding up Muslims.
But the conversation where it actually lies is I think there's a sliding scale, a spectrum within what's permissible from not allowing a mosque all the way up to we're allowing a mosque, but no public prayer sirens, calls to prayer.
And then, even further up the line, you could say, like, okay, well, if this particular town happens to be predominantly Muslim and they vote for whatever at a local level, maybe it's permissible.
And I would say it's not, but maybe it's permissible.
But at a national level, there will be no Muslim parades.
Our parades, you know, like we will have Christmas parades.
We will not have whatever.
And so, but that's what we're saying.
We're not talking about a sweet, you know, Muslim family that lives next door that's been neighborly and kind and good citizens that obey the laws.
And then all of a sudden you see a SWAT team, you know, go into their house and dragging them out.
You know, like that's not what.
Nobody, I don't know anyone advocating for that.
But what we are saying is there's a preference at minimum, even before cracking down in terms of penalties.
The first thing to establish is not penalties, but preference given to public expressions of Christianity.
Yes.
Right?
Yeah.
And it's important to emphasize that in having civil laws with regard to like false religion, you're not doing it for its own sake.
Like, it's not as if this is a command that if you don't suppress all false religion, every instance of it, then therefore you're disobeying God.
That is not what I'm saying.
It's not, that's false, let's suppress it.
It's, is the nature of that conducive or does it harm a Christian people in a Christian society?
Right.
And if it does, then it still may not be appropriate to go after it for various circumstances, but it could in principle be.
Um, something you go after, uh, yeah.
So, for, yeah, like you said, if there's a, like we talked about before, if there's like 3% of the population or a minority of the population that is not Christian, then you could very well just leave them alone.
Right.
Now, would you allow, if they're wealthy in some way, to build a gigantic religious thing with a gaudy display and all those colors and gold and everything?
Like that 90 foot statue, and I think it was in Houston, Texas.
Yeah.
None of that would be allowed because our architecture is.
Public art.
It's one of the few, there's also statues, but there's, yeah, it's one of the few public arts.
And public art shapes the people.
And it should shape the people.
And having your largest building being the church, or if you want it to be the, say, or like some sort of capital building, whatever it is, preferably it would be that there would be a large church.
That would indicate that these people, because it's visible, that indicates what this place is.
Right.
You go to an Italian village in Italy and you'll see a, You'll generally speaking see a large Roman Catholic church that dominates the scenery.
That's why, even that's and that signals everyone this is a Christian people, a Christian town, exactly.
And the people inside, people outside.
That's not to say you deny the synagogues or the mosques, um, it's just that within the laws of public architecture, that one is a prominent, that is the central, and that that identifies what this place is because of the place as a whole is Christian rather than.
And that's that's for me why, you know, as somebody in my eschatology who's post millennial.
Like, I believe, um, you know, we're not going to have a temple nor will we have a mosque, um, in the long game in Jerusalem.
But, um, Jerusalem actually does matter, I think the history matters and geography matters.
Um, but it belongs to Christians, and one day I think we'll have a giant Christian cathedral not a mosque, not a temple.
Neither the Jew nor the Muslim will ultimately win, but Christ has won.
And of the increase of his government, there shall be no end, and his victory will be further and further manifest in temporal and earthly ways throughout this gospel age and eventually.
Jerusalem.
And that's why I don't want to be overly harsh on the Crusaders, for instance.
I don't think there are plenty of things that I would disagree with, but the general sentiment of this piece of land matters and it belongs to Christ and it should visibly convey that, that it belongs to Christ.
That was, in a general sense, a good oriented sentiment.
That's true.
And one of my favorite of the Crusaders, Richard the Lionheart, he.
You know, it's really interesting.
I wish that America, Americans, politicians would understand this today and dispensational pastors for that matter.
But he was one of the first crusaders who gave it up.
By that point, they had established, I think it was like four or maybe it was seven different castles, strongholds, fortresses in Jerusalem to the point where, with certain innovations, the crossbow was significant.
They were able to defend the area from all, you know, the Invading Muslims and things like that.
But the problem was geographically, the way that it was centered, it wasn't enough to just defend Jerusalem as an outpost with Christians.
But in order for it to be viable, you had to have a corridor stretching all the way from the sea all the way to Jerusalem for trade and to resource.
And so they didn't just have to defend Jerusalem, but they had to defend like a strait.
And that was indefensible.
And Richard the Lionheart, from a strategic perspective, Standpoint, not necessarily theological, but strategically, he concluded.
I can't quote him exactly, but he basically was one of the first kind of Christian princes within the Crusades.
And this is, I forget, maybe the seventh or something.
This is well underway, centuries into the project.
But he was one of the first guys who famously said, It can't be done, at least not now.
And I think about that even in the mind of God, if I can speculate.
Even geographically, the way that God has constructed the earth and Jerusalem, the center of the world in some ways.
I really think that the world being Christianized, part of the problem with the dispensationalists is they don't believe the world will be Christianized.
And so they kind of want to just make this thing that ultimately is negative happen in Jerusalem because it'll just usher back the return of Christ and that'll be a net positive.
But for me, I think the whole world will, the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge and the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.
But in terms of timing and chronological order, I don't think you start there.
I think that's the end game.
I think little by little, the corners of the earth, as it were, Being Christianized, and we work our way to the center.
And the Crusaders, in some sense, one of their gaping failures is that they tried to start with the center and work out.
And I don't think that it's a coincidence that in God's providence, you have this little piece of land that really does matter to Christian history, not Jewish history, but Christian history.
Risks of Sectarian Persecution00:08:29
But it also is smack dab like an island in a sea of false religion.
And I think it will be one, but it'll be one last.
I think in our time, we should talk about Baptists.
Okay.
Well, two things.
First thing is like, well, don't you want to, like, so you want a confessional state?
You want all Presbyterianism and around, like, everything is Presbyterian or whatever.
And that's not, that's not at all what I have in mind.
The great thing about Protestantism is you could, like, you know, like I said before, we can affirm each other's mutual faith and be Protestants at the same time.
It's not, we're not united by being in part of a global institution like in Roman Catholicism.
So we can, we can affirm each other's mutual faith.
And as we'll talk about, I think in the last episode, How this was a product of Protestant experience, and that this is why Baptists today should not be afraid of Stephen Wolfe or any of the Christian nationalists.
Many of the Christian, they are Baptists like yourself and others.
And there's also like so many of you that I don't think the 2% of us as Presbyterians will be able to dominate in any sort of political sense.
And so they should just get over that.
And also that we are Americans who recognize that there was a sort of progress in Protestant.
Understanding themselves that led to us not killing each other.
So, all of that is unbounded.
It's a pan Protestant, not pan Presbyterian.
And because it's Protestant, the way I word it is it would be creedal by nature, not confessional.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, so I think, like you said in another episode, the Baptists should kind of get over themselves.
The victim mentality, this almost like dream of being thrown in jail by the Anglicans or something.
Fear and fantasy, somehow simultaneously.
They should get over that.
Afraid of being a victim and also secretly hoping because the greatest thing that could ever happen is to be drowned by a Presbyterian.
Yeah.
But no one is out to do that.
Right.
And, you know, that would be.
You've tried.
Yeah.
I don't know how to convince the guy of anything.
But, yeah, that's, I mean, friends with you, friends with William Wolfe, Baptist.
And so it's like, just, it's just not the case.
And if they read the book, they'd know that's not the case.
So.
But yeah, so in terms of like fellow Christians, you can even have an established church in a state like they did in the early days of the American Republic and have quasi establishments and also have religious liberty at the same time where you can worship however you want.
And so that's perfectly within the bounds of permissibility and prudence.
And I would say that even if you're a magisterial Protestant, that doesn't mean you're around rounding up heretics or Baptists and like that.
The principles are, I think, now developed over time such that that's unnecessary.
And I think American experience proves that.
So, yeah, so the Baptists should not be afraid.
And yeah, I'm not looking for like a confessional state.
There's also the argument of, I guess, lastly, that, well, the moment you start persecuting some group or the moment you start saying we're Christian and not Muslim, well, that just opens up the principle.
So now the Muslims take over and it becomes a Muslim state and this and that.
And there is precedent for something like that happening between warring sects of Christianity.
Of course, it happened a lot in the 16th, 17th centuries.
So there is truth to that.
But that's also true for everything we do when we legislate.
Right.
Like that's just a, that is a, in a way, it's like, in itself, it's a trivial point.
Because if you throw people in jail, it's possible that you throw an innocent guy in jail.
Right.
You know, so there's always going to be the case that something that you try to suppress, it can be used in a bad way.
If you.
If you say, for example, that cursing is not speech, and you say that actually you saying, you know, F you in a crowd is not protected speech, well, someone could go, I guess, use that and say, well, it's wrong to say Christ is Lord.
I mean, you can see how the same principle, the moment you suppress one thing, some other guy is going to use that.
But that's just true for everything.
And so in this case, I think there is a strong history.
Of Protestant experience, that we can we don't have to just jump back into you know Geneva in the 1550s, we can jump back into the you know the 19th century America where we had broad religious liberty with robust religiosity, a lot of theological discussion, and a lot of downsides to that, too.
We got Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian science came out of that as well.
Um, that's the downside of a kind of an open, tolerant uh society, and yet there was high religiosity that is even reflected.
In our society to this day, we are still a highly religious society in terms of the Christian West.
Right.
We're more religious in terms of church attendance than most places.
And when you think of it in the macro, like, wouldn't that be such an improvement if one of our biggest concerns was winning out in the hearts and minds and through persuasion against Mormons instead of what we currently have, trying to win through persuasion, the hearts and minds of.
People, whether or not it's appropriate to chop the genitals off of a child.
Yeah.
Like, you're all the point is, like, you're always going to all politics is identity politics.
You're always going to have groups, they're always going to disagree with one another.
People are going to be vying for power.
People want to win.
And so, the question is just how broad are you going to have it?
Are you going to have your nation so broad to where the opposing side is murdering babies and chopping off, you know, the genitals of children?
That's is it going to be so broad to where that's your chief opponent?
Or is it going to be still broad and still allowing for a great degree of liberty, still charity and liberty and kindness, but narrow enough to where now my chief opponents are guys who are saying you can have more than one wife and that Joseph Smith is a prophet and that we have an extra book in addition to the Bible?
Those are problems.
I'm not saying it's not a problem, but if those are the bookends and that's as bad as we've got, how would that not be an improvement for where we are today?
Like, that's one of the biggest arguments that I like.
I try to, you know, I almost just want to grab people by the collar and shake and say, What's wrong with you?
Like, well, they might, what if seven Baptist ministers were drowned?
Well, but what about 70 million babies murdered?
Like, what world do you live in?
I would love, like, you must be the happiest, go luckiest, you know, blissfully unaware person alive.
Like, what world are you living in to where the things that we're proposing are somehow.
Worse than the current state.
I don't get it.
Yeah.
I mean, it's been normalized.
All those things seem.
It's why the guys would align with the atheists to attack their fellow Christians for being, you know, woke right.
Because in their heart of hearts, they think a guy who might be racist, whatever that is, is objectively worse than a guy who is killing babies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can have a winsome discussion with someone who is.
Who is pro abortion.
Yep.
But you cannot have a winsome discussion with, you know, even us because we don't affirm their understanding of religious liberty.
Right.
So we're outside.
So every society has these norms.
And I would just say that, like, you have to be self critical.
You have to think through why are these set of things the sort of things I will align with these other guys you disagree with?
I will have winsome discussions with these guys against this other crowd.
Why is that?
Right.
And let's reorient that a bit.
Because one is socially.
Mocking Liberal Contestation00:08:25
Permissible and the other one is not.
And so much of that just has to do with the range of discourse given in the present time.
Right now, we can say that, like, oh, we're making all of our decisions objectively based off of what we perceive as virtue as Christians, but that's just not true.
I mean, that's easily proven to be false.
That's not what it is.
It's not the immutable law word of God that's setting the discourse.
It is the culture and what the culture at large perceives as being permissible and acceptable speech at that time.
And Christians are just.
Obliging that we're just without even putting up a fight, just saying yes, sir.
Uh, whereas no, we should set the parameters, we should make it um, it should be unthinkable, uh, that someone would actually make an argument for transgenderism.
They should be mocked and ridiculed and laughed at.
Um, and there's so much that you can do even without a Christian prince, even without laws.
Uh, there's so much you can do culturally.
Um, and that's why, like, yeah, there's a certain you know, there's a line where it becomes.
Actually, objectively immoral and unchristian and inappropriate.
But in terms of the principle, that's why things like memes are really powerful.
It's a powerful way of pushing the discourse to where people like all the guys right now, you've seen all the announcements after the Trump victory of I'm leaving X and I'm going to Threads.
And then what's the other one?
Blue Sky.
Blue Sky.
I saw one meme.
It's a little grotesque, but I think that this falls into the realm of appropriateness.
And it illustrates exactly what I'm saying in terms of motivating through mockery.
And it showed, you know, in a public bathroom, it showed two guys, you know, and there's like seven urinals and they're as far away from each other as possible.
And it says X, you know, one guy here, one guy there.
And then the next one, it shows, you know, all these urinals and they're right next to each other and it says threads.
And then the next one, it shows them facing each other and urinating on each other and it said blue sky, you know.
And like that's like, I understand that it's a little crass for sure.
I'm not saying it's not crass, but no, but yeah, mock those people.
Mock them.
You're an embarrassment.
You're a joke.
I want you to know you're an embarrassment and you're a joke.
You literally virtue signaling on X your departure from the platform to go into by deliberately an echo chamber where you can just have your thoughts regurgitated back to you by people who already agree.
And the reason you're doing that is because you actually can't stand the test of cross examination and scrutiny with those who actually disagree with you.
Yes, you are a joke.
And I want you to feel like a joke, not because I hate you, but because hopefully.
You could be shamed into better behavior.
I think it's more than that, too.
The people going to Blue Sky are going into a left wing cesspool.
They are more comfortable.
So, guys are on the center right, like X is too right wing.
Like, well, I'm going to go to where I want to go, where I'm more comfortable, which just happens to be all the lefty guys.
That's right.
These same people, I've seen Joel Berry say this and others, where it's like, as Christians, we attack both the left and we attack the right.
Of course, they don't attack liberalism for some reason.
Somehow, liberalism is like this neutral thing you don't actually attack.
It's just that's the norm, and you don't.
Because they think that they literally think it's synonymous with Christianity.
With Christianity, yeah.
The timeless politics of Jesus is synonymous with liberalism.
It's not even that they don't.
Exactly.
And it's so convenient.
It's not that they don't, that they reserve their attacks because they think it's neutral.
They reserve their attacks because they think it's good.
It's not just neutral, they think it's right, that it is synonymous with the New Testament.
But even this is the thing that even.
Even in the way, and even in the way they attack the left, like I said this kind of before, is like the, it's really, it's very superficial to say, oh, I attack both left and right.
This is actually what like Tim Keller would do.
He's like, you know, I, you know, third way I, I, I criticize the left and the right.
It's the way that they go about attacking each side.
So they will go on blue skies to have a discussion with people they disagree with in the winsome manner.
And, you know, they do it with, you know, gentle and, you know, what is it called?
Humble and what is it called?
Gentle and lowly.
Yeah, they'll be gentle and lowly trademark in Blue Skies, but then they interact and they find some guy saying something they consider too right wing.
And what do they do?
They mock those people.
They'll be on fire.
Yeah.
Not just mockery.
Yeah, they mock and they condemn.
But they'll use the very strong.
It's not just that they'll mock, because I just advocated for mocking.
You know, like that's fine.
May the best meme win.
Well, they won't actually engage the ideas.
But they won't engage the ideas and they'll outright just condemn.
Yeah.
It's not, I disagree with you or I think that this is wrong.
And here's the reason.
It's literally on the one hand, it's, Oh, I think that you're a good person and I love you and I disagree with you, but I love you and I think that you know that you have dignity and blah blah.
And then over here, it's immediately amazing.
Like you look at a thread and it's not like down the line, you know, 14 different tweets back and forth.
It's the very first comment is you're unregenerate.
Yeah.
You're a false teacher.
You should step down from the pulpit.
You're not a Christian.
Like immediately, not mocking, condemning outside of being a Christian.
Yeah, it's moral denunciation.
That's the rhetoric.
And then the other side is the winsome engagement.
But then because they do both, they can claim, oh, we attack both the left and the right.
But not the same way.
Yeah, it's not the same way.
That's how Tim Keller did it the entire time.
And yeah, it's all fake.
It's all fake.
And really, what they're doing is they are like they say that, you know, like Christians should not be of the world, but they are the most of the world.
Like if you find yourself where you disagree with the social dogma, but you engage it in a way very different than someone who also disagrees from a different angle of the social dogma, then you just denounce them, but then you engage winsomely, then.
You're actually of the world.
You're actually.
And they would say, we're not of the world because look at all these Democrats that disagree with us.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, but in Gospel of God, we get off it from the left and the right.
Yeah.
But it's like, no, no, no.
So you're saying you're not of the world because the Democrats disagree with you.
Well, according to the last election, that's less than half of the country.
But who does agree with you?
He's literally.
So I'm not of the world.
And yet, conveniently, the majority of citizens agree with me.
The majority.
You know, like the majority voted for Trump.
And I would be the first to say, I'm grateful for Trump, but I would admit, Yeah, I think part of the reason why he won is because the dude's a little bit worldly.
He's a little bit of the world.
I mean, he is, think about it, from all the way from the apprentice to, you know, like, I mean, he is a product of the American culture, the world.
Like, that's so, so I would say I'm grateful for Trump.
I think that he's certainly an improvement from what we've had in the past.
I think providentially, God will use him.
He had my vote, you know, all those kinds of things.
But I would never say that he's, he's, what I like about Trump is that he's so distinct from the world.
No, he is the world.
Yeah.
And in the same way, so is the Babylon B.
It is the world.
Yeah.
So, so that, you know, that's fine.
You can, you can hold that position, but just say we're in the world and we look just like the world, you know.
But if you really want to say we're otherworldly and you really want to actually maintain the defense that, you know, we're, we're the remnant, we're, you know, the minority and, and, and we're fighting on all sides, you know, it's, it's me and 13 other dudes versus everybody, you know, Athanasius, you know, Contra Munim, well, then look at the dissident right.
Yeah.
We could actually claim that.
So, any final thoughts for this episode?
Yeah, I was just going to say about those guys, they are, like you said before, that they think that the current political order, which is a form of modern liberalism, is the timeless politics of Jesus.
Yes.
And within that liberal order, if you are left liberal who's pro abortion, pro gay, atheist, all those things, then you fit.
Resisting Modern Liberalism00:03:21
And so you fit in that, even though you disagree with them, they fit.
Fit in within this world of liberal contestation.
They fit the form.
Yeah, they fit within the, yeah.
But if you're dissident right, you tend to be anti liberal or have an older conception of liberalism that's long gone.
And so that's why you're out.
That's why they can condemn you.
Right.
But at the same time, they'll say that, well, we're not, you know, we're not of the world.
But actually, you're deeply embedded and committed in heart and mind with the current consensus.
To the current consensus.
Yeah.
And so, what we, I mean, so apart from them, they're all boring, but the guys watching this, that doesn't mean like the current liberal order is bad.
I think it's bad.
I think it's wrong fundamentally, foundationally.
But it means that I think that we are, like, if you are, like, if you're a self reflective person with the willingness to resist internally your socialization, like, if you are, I'm not anymore, You're not anymore.
All our friends are like desensitized to the social dogma.
But it's a process.
So, everyone watching this has to then say, like I said this before, what are the habits that's leading me to engage people differently?
What are the habits that make me uncomfortable with this idea, even though you think it's true?
But these ideas, I think they're false, but I'm still going to engage when somebody thinks all this is permissible.
I treat it as if it's permissible.
That is, I'd say, socially engineered into us to think that way.
And it takes a strong personal will.
That when that crops up, you reflect on that and then you crush that.
And then eventually, over time, you have to do this with wisdom.
So don't go crazy and lose your job.
But you eventually will become desensitized to the social dogma and you can actually think well, think clearly.
And it's very freeing.
Like it means you're actually freed from ideas that are really on their face stupid, that you know are false deep down, like in the deep subconscious, you know it's stupid and false.
But at the surface, You tend to, the surface of consciousness, you have a habit that wants to flee from the truth.
Right.
And you become free.
Don't flee from the truth.
Like crush that habit, think rightly, be prudent and wise, but also be free and affirm what you know is true deep down.
And you become free, kind of like the freedom and the carefreeness of a child.
For instance, like a particular child who was able to say in a crowded space, the emperor has no clothes.
You know, like that's that kind of freedom to just be able to look on the face of things.
And to be able to say out loud that which is obviously true.
Um, every you know, the older ones are the ones who are the most programmed and actually find it you know, they're the ones who find it the most difficult to do something so simple, uh, that a child actually has an advantage.
So, uh, thank you guys for tuning in.
I hope you found this episode helpful.
Uh, this was episode eight.
We have two more episodes left in this series.
Childlike Freedom to Speak Truth00:00:38
Episode nine, we're going to discuss uh, American history.
How does Christian nationalism fit with the American?
Project.
Right, because Christian nationalism.
Time and Con would be mad that I said project, so I'll take that back.
The American heritage.
Yeah, heritage.
There you go.
But that just right there assumes what that implies, I should say, is you've never advocated that Christian nationalism is a one size fits all and that every nation, if they all adopted it, would be the same.
No.
Christian nationalism in America takes America's history into account.