July 19, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| I have a concern about critical theory. | ||
| Everything that's happening right now, I believe is a Trojan horse. | ||
| I believe that James Lindsay, and how he described it as a Trojan horse, he's exactly right on. | ||
| It's coming into our churches. | ||
| Dude, the division that it's causing right now is insane, because like you said, it's another gospel, it's another religion. | ||
| It's like, because once again, they have their own epistemology. | ||
| So the way that they discover truth is from a positional standpoint. | ||
|
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So, so how do I respond to that? | |
| Quick reminder, everybody, to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that pesky notification bell. | ||
| And joining me today is an author and a teaching pastor, Nathan Finocchio. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey, it's good to be here, Dave. | ||
| I'm glad to have you, sir, because as you probably know, I do some talking to people of faith, people that are skeptics, people that are somewhere in between, and I always find these to be sort of the most interesting conversations that I have. | ||
| So before we do anything about what you're doing now, tell me a little bit about your journey to faith. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm the son of a preacher man. | ||
| My dad has been in the ministry as long as I can remember. | ||
| And I've sort of just fallen into it, to be quite honest. | ||
| I tried to kind of, not necessarily run the other way, but do something else. | ||
| And sort of just caught up to me, you know, it's like, you know, so just kind of, this is what I do now, because it's just kind of what I know, but I do, I do, you know, have a, I've always had a kind of strong faith in God. | ||
| I just never saw myself as the ministerial type because, you know, like people of faith, I guess spiritual leaders, they kind of have a type. | ||
| In my opinion, they're kind of square, and they stay home on Friday nights and play Scrabble with Grandma. | ||
| And that's just not what I want to do with my life, you know? | ||
| Hey, don't knock Scrabble, man. | ||
| Everybody loves Scrabble. | ||
| Look, I take that back, okay? | ||
| Scrabble is great. | ||
| And Grandma's wonderful. | ||
| Well, to your point though, you kind of, it's like, well, wait a minute, look at this guy. | ||
| He doesn't really look like a pastor. | ||
| And then on the other hand, you look like sort of a modern Jesus. | ||
| So you're, you're sort of doing a little everything over there. | ||
| Um, it's, you know, it's a work in progress. | ||
| Did you, on the way, you said you did a little something before going into this, even though you came from a family of faith. | ||
| Was the faith part always there, or did you mean that you deviated from that, too? | ||
| Or did you just mean that sort of career-wise, or something else? | ||
| I just meant that sort of career-wise, yeah. | ||
| I was doing music for about eight years, and so yeah, it's kind of doing that, and things just didn't work out the way I kind of wanted them to work out, and I sort of went back to Went back to the family farm, so to speak, and so I've just kind of been doing ministry now for the last, gosh, I don't know, last six years. | ||
| So if somebody said to you, sort of, lay out what your belief system is, what would that be, kind of, broadly speaking? | ||
| Yeah, so I'm a confessional Christian. | ||
| That's what I'd say. | ||
| In the kind of the brand of Christianity that I'm, or the stream that I flow in, it's more of a Pentecostal Christianity. | ||
| You know, so we're the ones that, I mean, I've never handled a snake before, but that's kind of what Pentecostals are known for. | ||
| You know, tambourine destroying Pentecostals. | ||
| We're the ones that when you go to our churches on the weekend, it's kind of like a rock concert. | ||
| So we've got lasers and, you know, we kind of attract a younger crowd. | ||
| But our idea, basically, is that we have a historic, orthodox, confessional Christian doctrine. | ||
| So we believe that the stuff that the church has always believed, and we confess and we profess that, but we wrap it up in sort of a modern, in a modern vibe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you get a lot of pushback on that sort of, I've seen this in a few different versions where there's, you know, the sort of belief that you just have to have the belief and the, the orthodoxy and the conservative look at religion. | ||
| And then you bring in music, you bring in lasers, you bring in bands and all sorts of other stuff. | ||
| And people, a certain set of people will think that that will kind of erode the original message. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think that that's utter and total Ridiculousness. | ||
| Basically, I mean, look at Vatican III and kind of what the Catholic Church has done. | ||
| Like, is having services in English somehow diminish the Catholic Church's, you know, their message? | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| So that's essentially what we're doing. | ||
| Whereas for them, progress is translating the Mass from Latin to English. | ||
| For us, we're doing exactly that. | ||
| We're translating the message. | ||
| But like, The currency, I think, of our generation is music and the arts. | ||
| And so that's kind of how we communicated that language. | ||
| Right, so sort of speaking of music and the arts, what kind of put you on my radar is that Justin Bieber is a member of the church. | ||
| I don't want you to get into any specifics about anyone that goes to the church, but what do you sense is happening with people of his age? | ||
| related to belief. | ||
| There does seem to be something going on. | ||
| Kanye's running these services now, and as you just said, it's sort of related to music and culture and something else. | ||
| It's not what we think of when we just think of the traditional religious perspective. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| I think that people, and you mentioned Justin and Kanye, as far as I know, they had church upbringings. | ||
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So there's a lot of people come up in the church. | |
| I know Justin for a fact did. | ||
| I went to, I spoke at his home church in Canada. | ||
| I'm actually Canadian. | ||
| I grew up 45 minutes from where he grew up. | ||
| So I know, like, I mean Elvis for crying out loud, you know, came up in the churches. | ||
| It's not uncommon in the American story that people in the arts come up in church and then they kind of leave the small town and they go do big musical things. | ||
| So, but in terms of a return, I mean, we saw it even in Elvis's career. | ||
| The only album they'd ever won a Grammy for was for his gospel record. | ||
| So there's something, I think, intrinsic to Americana and the church and music. | ||
| So it's a pretty common theme. | ||
| Why millennials and Gen Zers are reconnecting with the church or connecting for the first time to faith? | ||
| Large in part due to the failure, perhaps, of secularism. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| And there's questions, I think, that it's attempted to answer that it hasn't answered. | ||
| And that's why you'll even see guys like Sam Harris, who have become spiritual, not in any sort of orthodox sense, but an awareness that maybe there is something out there that we connect to in soul and spirit, etc. | ||
| So I think we have something to offer people that is reasonable and that is also experiential. | ||
| So one of the things that I've been talking about on the show a lot lately is that I think a lot of the problems we're having is that we seem to be reaching the end of secularism, which I think is sort of what you're alluding to, that when you get to the end of pure secularism with nothing else outside of itself, That everything's on the table again, and we don't know if men are men and women are women, and we're debating, destroying our past in the name of some utopian future, and the rest of it. | ||
| Do you see that as just like the natural kind of outgrowth of what a purely secular society is? | ||
| Yeah, I think, gosh, without getting into a huge history lesson, what I would call, I think there's two types There's two types of people in our churches right now. | ||
| There's what we might call leftists. | ||
| A secularist might be a better term. | ||
| And then we have, for lack of a better term, a conservative, which I can't stand the term, but just using generalizations. | ||
| And what I think has happened as a society is that we have an epistemological crisis. | ||
| That's kind of what happened, what has happened. | ||
| Because secularism is the idea essentially that Material is the only thing that you can touch, and we should all live together in our material society, and let's forget about things that are non-material, like spirituality, because those things will just divide us. | ||
| It kind of works out at first, but then it begins to hammer down everybody into just material, and people aren't just material, and the world isn't just material. | ||
| There's a lot more to it than that. | ||
| We have this epistemology that's kind of developed from secularism and that epistemology is essentially like when you, um, when we got rid of a traditional authority, which, you know, traditional authorities like Kings and you know, that the priests and church and not that they weren't, you know, commit, like doing bad things and that there were, there were, there was reason for them to, for us to be suspicious of it. | ||
| And so we did away with it. | ||
| It's sort of like now that we have no traditional authority, the self has become the locus of everything. | ||
| We're the locus of interpretation. | ||
| And so there's a great deal of pressure on people to know everything. | ||
| That's why in our culture, you have to self-authenticate, you have to self-help, you need to build up the self, and you need to be the best version of yourself, because nobody out here is going to help you, and you can't trust anybody. | ||
| And so what happens is that experience now becomes Like, it becomes the highest metric in a world where there's no authorities that can be trusted. | ||
| And so in the church, we have people that are coming in and it's all about experience. | ||
| And so that's, I think, where, you know, to borrow from James Lindsay, that's where a positional epistemology becomes so massive. | ||
| And we're dealing with it with churches right now. | ||
| So it's like, you know, people love the idea of Jesus, but the scriptures, So Christians, we appeal to an external authority. | ||
| We believe things about reality that are just kind of incompatible with most kids that are coming in. | ||
| Kids that are coming in are going, reality is my experience. | ||
| But Christianity is going, reality is what God says in the scriptures. | ||
| And so that's, it's kind of, it's, and it's very similar to, um, that's why I think that Christianity will save Western civilization because we might be the last ones who believe in science, which would be hilarious. | ||
| Um, you know, so, but just the idea that we believe that. | ||
| That truth exists externally. | ||
| Like imagine that, that religious fanatics believe that truth exists externally, Dave, right? | ||
| We believe in. | ||
| What we might call phenomenological transcendence. | ||
| The idea that, like, a tree isn't... You can't just call a tree whatever you want to call a tree. | ||
| You know, a tree is real, and if you want to go ahead and drive your car into that tree, you will experience phenomenological transcendence. | ||
| You will experience that. | ||
| But rather, why don't you live your life like there are things that exist outside of you? | ||
| And for us, the way that we appeal to Christians, and we try to, you know, kind of try to convert them to Christianity, because Christianity is this thing that's like, It's reasonable. | ||
| We believe that truth is external. | ||
| It's not all about you and your experiences. | ||
| It's also about some things that, you know, that God has said in his word. | ||
| And so morality isn't just kind of whatever you want it to be or however you want to paint it. | ||
| It's, you know, God who created you. | ||
| He has some opinions. | ||
| He's God. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| And so you need to, you know, does that make sense? | ||
| So it's an epistemological war that the church is in. | ||
| Yeah, you gave me about five roads there that we could shoot off of, so I'm gonna try to come around to all of them or get them into something. | ||
| Let's do it all. | ||
| I'll see if I can do it. | ||
| But first, you mentioned James Lindsay, who I've had on the show, of course, who wrote the book with Peter Boghossian about how to have important conversations. | ||
| One of the things that I'm sort of amazed by, by the sort of James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, Michael Shermer, the more, I would say, left-leaning, largely atheist crew, Is that many of them are suddenly going, you know, all those religious people we were screaming about, they're not so bad. | ||
| And they're appearing on stage with religious people. | ||
| They're, you know, I don't know if you know, but just about six or eight months ago, I was on stage in front of 14,000 students at Liberty University with Jerry Falwell Jr. | ||
| right next to me. | ||
| And it was just absolutely incredible. | ||
| And sure, we have some differences. | ||
| We have some theological differences. | ||
| We have some You know, spiritual differences and political differences, but nobody cared. | ||
| Everybody was thrilled. | ||
| It was wonderful. | ||
| But I'm curious what you think about that, the fact that some of the sort of main drivers of secularism are suddenly looking at you guys, basically, and going, huh, you're a lot nicer than that other crew over there. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Yeah, I don't think it's just modern intersectionalism that we're strange bedfellows. | ||
| I think that we have a very similar epistemology, and that's why we actually argue. | ||
| Dave, you can't argue with people that you don't have the same epistemology with. | ||
| We have the same epistemology as atheists. | ||
| We do have demands of literature, and we come at things believing that there are external forces. | ||
| The difference being that an atheist would believe in a strictly material universe. | ||
| But material is super important to Christians as well. | ||
| And the idea that truth lives externally, it's really important to us as well. | ||
| So I think that, yeah, we find ourselves on the same aisle with respect to our epistemology. | ||
| And you know this about, I mean, Christians aren't perfect. | ||
| And, you know, we've slain our thousands and we've made some massive mistakes and One of my favorite quotes of a Christian theologian is St. | ||
| Augustine, who said that the church is a whore, but she's my mother. | ||
| We're aware, Dave, of the things that have happened in history that are stupid. | ||
| There's a lot of people who have used the scripture to do some really stupid things. | ||
| But yet we find ourselves now You know, debating with people who we have the same epistemology. | ||
| I can't have a conversation with you if you can't define reality the way that I define reality. | ||
| And so to me, once again, it's an epistemological factor. | ||
| Do you sense young people that are showing up now, sure the lights and the music is something | ||
| and you're explaining sort of the end of secularism so they feel that there's a hole there, | ||
| but do you sense just like in the last couple of years maybe because of the culture war, | ||
| because of social... | ||
| that the hole that they have seems to be way bigger, that it's maybe not just spiritual, | ||
| but it's also very community-based. | ||
| We got all of these tools and apps, and we thought it was gonna make us more connected, | ||
| and in many ways, social media made us anti-social, and now people are trying to find community | ||
| in oddly more traditional ways, whether there's lasers or not. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I remember there was a book written in the '90s by a guy named Putnam, and the title was "Bowling Alone," | ||
| and it sort of was a sociological book just looking at the erosion of community in America, | ||
| beginning with the bowling leagues, and how bowling leagues were like, | ||
| they replaced church for my grandfather's generation, and now, yeah, that's gone. | ||
| So there's definitely. | ||
| There's definitely a sociological factor. | ||
| I think that, to be quite honest with you, the sociological factor may very well be one of the biggest factors in the church. | ||
| We understand the value of community. | ||
| We believe, theologically, that we're not made to be alone. | ||
| There was one thing in the garden that was wrong. | ||
| A lot of people think that, you know, in that Genesis story, that God creates this garden and it's perfect, it's paradise. | ||
| Well, it's not. | ||
| It was optimal for living. | ||
| And the one thing that was wrong was that Adam was alone. | ||
| And so he creates Eve, and so we're created for one another, and we need one another desperately. | ||
| So that's definitely a tenet of our faith. | ||
| And there's definitely a sociological it factor to church. | ||
| And yeah, there's a giant hole. | ||
| I also believe that there's this book written by a Pulitzer Prize winner. | ||
| I think his name is Ernest Becker, and the title of it was The Denial of Death. | ||
| And he was in his book, he's an atheist and he sort of is looking at secularism and kind of what it's done in modernity. | ||
| And he believes that like with the death of God, society sort of was just like, okay, well now I, because I need somebody to validate my reality, to validate my existence, to see me because we need to be seen as human beings. | ||
| And that's why we need relationship. | ||
| And so, He believed that the first option, that modern stride, was the love option. | ||
| And that's why everybody talks about having the one, finding the one. | ||
| 300 years ago, love wasn't the reason why you got married. | ||
| But now, we put all this emphasis, and that's why we have apocalyptic hookup culture in New York, because we're all trying to find God, and for somebody to validate You're living. | ||
| So to me, that's what the church does. | ||
| Are you saying God's not on Tinder? | ||
| Is that what you're telling me? | ||
| Oh, he's definitely on Tinder. | ||
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He's definitely searching for people. | |
| He's going after the, he's left the 99 and going after the one. | ||
| So I think that, I think that, What you said is absolutely right in a roundabout way. | ||
| I think that, you know, we're looking for love. | ||
| We're looking for romance. | ||
| And I think we've, you know, in a strange way, we do find it in community. | ||
| We find that validation that we need. | ||
| But in a more spiritual sense, Dave, yeah, we find it in God. | ||
| And that's what I believe, and that's what we teach. | ||
| We teach that God's the one who sees you. | ||
| He's the one who goes after you. | ||
| You're not the one who's been going after Him, but He's been the one that's been pursuing you, because He knows you. | ||
| He knows how to get to you, and He loves you. | ||
| And so when people sort of, when that settles them, there's a lot of things in their life that change, and being a part of a community is definitely one of them. | ||
| Yeah, so before you mentioned the sort of lefty versus conservative demographics that you're dealing with in the church, so as we've watched this culture war just like explode all over the place, I know that all sorts of churches, temples, Virtually every organization, secular or not, is dealing with some sort of internal split over how to deal with everything that's happening these days, literally from coronavirus to Black Lives Matter and everything in between. | ||
| What version of that are you seeing these days? | ||
| Yeah, there's definitely a political Part of everything. | ||
| I mean, dude, this is insane. | ||
| Like, it's insane. | ||
| I keep on telling my friends this. | ||
| I'm sure that all your friends are just going, what is happening in 2020? | ||
| You know, there's a conversation in the church right now, politically, about the threshold of religious liberty versus, you know, government needing to keep tabs and A lid on coronavirus. | ||
| And so we're kind of, I guess, exploring that threshold. | ||
| You know, you got people who... That absolutely falls along ideological lines, right? | ||
| So there seems like there's two types of Americans. | ||
| There's ones that want to... They have a huge trust in the government. | ||
| My wife is one of them. | ||
| My wife is an Australian. | ||
| I'm a Canadian. | ||
| But my wife is like, she trusts the government. | ||
| She's just like, they are, you know, they love us. | ||
| And I want to be, she told me last night, she's like, I want to be nannied. | ||
| I'm like, my God, moment. | ||
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unidentified
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Have you read history? | |
| Good luck with all of that. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| So there you got my wife, Jasmine, and then you got me and I'm like the most distrusting, you know, person of government because yeah, you know, like, Who are these angels? | ||
| You know, like the old argument. | ||
| Who are these angels that are going to make all these right decisions for us? | ||
| So that's a huge conversation of the church. | ||
| And that alone, Dave, was tearing us apart. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So you've got pastors calling up pastors and people calling up people in the faith community just being like, you need to trust the government! | ||
| Authorities from God! | ||
| And then now you have, of course, George Floyd's death, which was horrific and tragic. | ||
| Um, and, uh, you have Black Lives Matter, um, the organization, um, that's kind of, uh, occupied some space in wake of the George Floyd killing and then Ahmaud Arbery. | ||
| Um, because it, it looks, um, it looks from social media that young black men are being hunted down and killed. | ||
| Um, so. | ||
| So yeah, you have this major space and this is another thing that's kind of dividing us right now. | ||
| It's just like the narrative to believe and what we ought to do about it. | ||
| And regardless of if you believe the narrative or not, you know, Christians are called to mourn with those who mourn and weep with those who weep. | ||
| So finding that threshold of going, okay, I might not agree with the political narrative, but I'm called to stand alongside You know, people who are in my life that regardless of whether or not, whether or not I believe that they are, their emotions are rooted in any kind of reality. | ||
| And I'm arguing from a, you know, if you're a conservative, you know, like I have, I have a responsibility towards them to love them. | ||
| You know, like my wife is, is terrified of airplanes. | ||
| Um, it's not rooted in anything logical at all. | ||
| Um, but I'm the one that's stuck pulling the bag and comforting her and getting her Xanax when we're on a flight. | ||
| You know, so there's an element of that, if you're a conservative, that you have a responsibility towards the people that you're in community with, and you're living life with, and, you know, quoting stats at my wife doesn't help her flight anxiety, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So finding that threshold is the mess right now. | ||
| Yeah, how worried are you though that letting in this sort of different, what I would call a religious belief system, social justice, that once it enters the institution, enters the church, that in many ways it will just It will rot from the inside all of the good things that you've been talking about. | ||
| I mean, this is what we've sort of seen happen to every secular institution. | ||
| It's happening to the New York Times. | ||
| It's happening to the Washington Post. | ||
| It's happening to Harvard and Princeton and all of our liberal institutions. | ||
| So I'm sort of fascinated where, with this idea that it could be entering, you know, sort of conservative or religious institutions and that they may not even have the correct defense mechanisms to purge it or keep it at bay. | ||
| That's exactly what's happening. | ||
| So it's not necessarily... So for me, I've tried to dance this line. | ||
| We're like, you know, the idea of Black Lives Matter. | ||
| It's like, it's an idea. | ||
| It's a saying. | ||
| I've sort of divorced it from the organization. | ||
| They don't like that, but I've divorced it from the organization because, you know, yeah, black lives do matter. | ||
| And so if there are instances of where, you know, there's police brutality that Doesn't seem to fit, you know, the rest of it. | ||
| I mean, you know, as we examine the data, that's one of the big ones. | ||
| We know that, you know, the Harvard Rollins, his paper, and we know, like, the study that was done. | ||
| Heather McDonald obviously lays this all out, but one of the things that I have a giant question mark over is the police brutality part. | ||
| I don't know if we're nailing that, you know, well. | ||
| And so, let's say that you're like me, where you're going, Okay, the shooting part, you know, there's no racial bias that's been detected by three major studies. | ||
| But police brutality, do you have a question on that? | ||
| Like, why are 30% of blacks being, you know, accused of resisting arrest? | ||
| Are they resisting arrest? | ||
| Is that what's happening? | ||
| Or the police, you know, being antagonistic towards them or whatever. | ||
| So let's just say, for example, that there is some antagonism that needs to be dialed back. | ||
| Um, so I stand with my brother who feels he's, he's terrified. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And he's, he's like, Nate, you know, like, I just feel like black doesn't matter. | ||
| Okay, man, black lives matter. | ||
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Okay. | |
| I'm with you. | ||
| Black lives. | ||
| Like, I'll say that now the organization, they believe in the denuclearization of the family, which is doing nobody a service, particularly the black community in America. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, um, so, so for me, obviously I have, some fatter theological concerns to fry, but I'm walking this line where I'm in community with my black brothers and sisters. | ||
| And so for me, once again, I have a concern about critical theory. | ||
| Everything that's happening right now, I believe is a Trojan horse. | ||
| I believe that James Lindsay, and how he described it as the Trojan Horses, he's exactly right on. | ||
| It's coming into our churches. | ||
| Dude, the division that it's causing right now is insane, because like you said, it's another gospel, it's another religion. | ||
| It's like, because once again, they have their own epistemology. | ||
| So the way that they discover truth is from a positional standpoint. | ||
|
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So how do I respond to that? | |
| It's almost an impossible dance, but I have to show rational Compassion, not empathy. | ||
| Because empathy, as we've seen in the last 10-15 years in psychology, is dangerous and your biases come into empathy. | ||
| I have to have what's called rational compassion. | ||
| So I have to reasonably move through the data, move through the things that are happening, using my Christian worldview and framework and my epistemology. | ||
| And then as I'm checking these movements and going, okay, these are their demands, right? | ||
| Everything has a demand. | ||
| We demand that, you know, that you overhaul, you know, as James says, you know, you can't tear down the master's house with the master's tools. | ||
| So we have to completely change how we structure, not just the way we structure our church organization, but we also demand that, like, the way that you go about finding truth changes as well. | ||
| And so at that point, Um, for me, I'm not going to fight peripherals. | ||
| Like in any good argument, you always argue first principles. | ||
| You don't argue peripherals. | ||
| And so for me, when it comes to the black lives matter movement, when it comes to the things that are happening on the streets and the protests, et cetera, I'm not going to, there are some things I think that are peripheral and as conservatives, we get a little bit sidetracked by. | ||
| And so to me, the critical theory thing, and this is why I think James Lindsay, um, Is just so on the money right now is because it's the you don't go after the fruit. | ||
| You go after the root. | ||
| And to me, critical theory is the root of this giant problem. | ||
| It's the reason why the political narrative has been spun the way it is. | ||
| And so to me, that's that's what I'm going after while holding the hand of people that are hurting. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's almost an impossible place to put yourself because you're trying to hold something, you're trying to be open, you're trying to retain ideas and also not put people down. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| What do you make of this idea? | ||
| So you hit on that critical theory, whatever you, cultural Marxism, whatever you want to call this thing, that it's religious in nature. | ||
| One of the facets that I'm constantly amazed by is there's no forgiveness in this thing that basically if you're white or you're cisgendered or you're christian or whatever you're privileged and thus bad and that really you just have to pay penance your whole life you have to live on your knees your whole life where most religions have some level of forgiveness right you can actually atone for your sins and hopefully be a better person on the other side this thing doesn't have that this thing has oh | ||
| Well, live like a slave forever, in effect. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| So, in critical theory, you're sort of guilty, you know, before proven innocent. | ||
| So everybody's guilty. | ||
| And as James Lindsay, you know, has observed in his findings, all of the critical theorists believe, essentially, that if you will, even, you know, for example, if I want to be Somebody accused me of problematic allyship yesterday. | ||
| But that's the whole point. | ||
| The whole point is that I can never be truly an ally. | ||
| My allyship is always going to be problematic. | ||
| So there's no end to it. | ||
| like, so there's no, there's no, there's no end to it. | ||
| It just continues to be what it is. | ||
| So, yeah, they, they, they don't forgive because there's nothing to forgive | ||
| because I'm stuck in, I'm stuck in the oppressor group. | ||
| If I'm stuck in the oppressor group and there's no escaping it, there can be no forgiveness if there's no repentance, right? | ||
| Like, isn't that how it works? | ||
| So that I'm just perpetually a sinner and I'm just going to continue to perpetuate the oppressor group and there's nothing that I can do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's why, of course, cancel culture is actually the logical conclusion of critical theory. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's the logical conclusion that to be consistent, logically, they have to be consistent in their cancel culture because they have to get rid of the oppressor class. | ||
| I hate to tell you, I think it's beheadings is the logical conclusion. | ||
| Cancel culture is just a stop on the way, but we can sort of leave that. | ||
| Just for you personally dealing with this, the idea that everything's become political, and in many ways I think people used to go to have religious experiences regardless of the religion, they would go there to escape politics. | ||
| That religion sort of offered them that separation from the real world To think of something timeless, something like that. | ||
| To see it all seep in, just for you as a leader of a community, how's that been on you? | ||
| Yeah, so one of the things that I do in my role is I travel to a number of churches. | ||
| I'm not the lead pastor in a community, but I go to all of the different communities and I speak at a number of churches. | ||
| What is it, what is it like? | ||
| Well, yeah, people are, people don't, church is supposed to be a place where they, like, hear about the love of God for them and they hear about the sacrifice, you know, and they remember the Lord's passion, etc. | ||
| And so it's kind of become, in some circles, in some churches, the gospel has totally become about current events. | ||
| And I think that that's definitely problematic. | ||
| You know, it definitely become problematic where in Christianity we teach essentially that everybody's a priest. | ||
| In fact, the Protestant Reformation happened because one of Martin Luther's 95 problems of the Catholic Church was that you had to have a priest to connect with God. | ||
| And the New Testament is replete with scriptures about the priesthood of the believer. | ||
| And so what this necessarily means for Protestants like me is that every believer is supposedly coming to church to be a priest. | ||
| It's what you literally do is you come to what a priest do, they minister to the Lord and they minister to others. | ||
| But like when you come to church and it's a lesson on critical theory, you know, and there's like, there's no escape. | ||
| I think that people aren't able to do their job as a Christian. | ||
| I think that it's really tough to glorify God and to worship God when it's like you're in a perpetual classroom and there's just doubt and there's confusion. | ||
| And I think that one of the biggest frustrations for me is that I don't think that a lot of church leaders have their pulse on this epistemological issue. | ||
| So it's just, it's washing. | ||
| Pastors are good people and they love people. | ||
| And so from that good place of going, I love people, they're probably going, we need to talk about this because this is a real, this is where the rubber hits the road. | ||
| But problematically, if you're not, you don't have your pulse on culture and understanding the undercurrents epistemologically, you know, you're creating a lot of confusion for people. | ||
| So that's absolutely what's happening. | ||
| Do you think certain religious denominations and certain sects within religions are just better at keeping some of this stuff at bay? | ||
| So it seems to me, it's not perfect, but something like orthodox Jews, let's say, have really kept this at bay in a way that conservative or reformed Jews haven't been able to. | ||
| Or evangelicals, I think, have done a pretty good job at keeping it at bay. | ||
| Do you think that there are like certain strengths and weaknesses from a Protestant perspective or another denomination perspective that makes certain worldviews a little more able to stand up to these things? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So it's a focus on their purpose. | ||
| Like why do Orthodox Jews exist, right? | ||
| Like they know why. | ||
| And I mean, look right down sometimes to the way that they dress. | ||
| Like they're in this world, but they're not of this world, sort of as Jesus said. | ||
| And so I think that they do a really great job, you know, of like focusing on their community and focusing on the reasons why they exist. | ||
| So there is definitely a balance to be struck. | ||
| Well, see, when I look at Jesus, and once again, this is an epistemological issue, but when I look at Jesus, I don't look at somebody who is necessarily engaged in the politics of his day. | ||
| I think that, you know, Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world. | ||
| And so he had a little bit of a, I'm in the world, but I'm not of it. | ||
| Um, does that mean that we don't engage in issues of justice? | ||
| No, it doesn't mean that we don't. | ||
| I think that marching with Martin Luther King was the right thing to do, um, during the civil rights. | ||
| And, and, um, you know, I think that defeating Hitler was probably a good thing to do. | ||
| Um, you know, like, so there's, there's, I think that the church doesn't run from things, but it's sifting through the things that we should engage in, how we should engage, and the threshold of that. | ||
| And it's a conversation that we're having right now. | ||
| And yeah, evangelicals probably have done a really great job because evangelicals are a bit more heady. | ||
| Pentecostals are probably a bit more, we lean a bit more experiential. | ||
| And so I'm a, Um, that's, you know, I wish that Pentecostals, you know, were a bit more like evangelicals and, uh, in that they, they sifted, they had their, you know, like Albert Muller, you know, he, he's the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. | ||
| And he set out, he sent out a letter on critical theory to all of the pastors and going, Hey guys, this is what's happening. | ||
| Like, but Pentecostalism is a bit of the wild, wild West and Christianity. | ||
| Um, I don't know if you knew this, but we've only been around for 120 years. | ||
| And we, uh, there's 750 million of us and we're the fastest growing version of Christianity in the world. | ||
| Like we're going to eclipse, we're going to eclipse Catholicism in 50 years. | ||
| Um, so, uh, so our brand of Christianity in terms of filling stadiums and people singing our songs and all this stuff, it's a, it's, it's a big place and it's like, it is the battleground for Christian expression. | ||
| And that finding that threshold of where politics are, what Christianity is going to look like, et cetera. | ||
| So Pentecostals don't, we don't have, um, we don't have like a grand Pumbaa, like an Albert Moller or like a Jerry Fowler or whatever, who kind of dictates to us or will tell us, Hey guys, this is what's coming. | ||
| We're, we're very, very much independent. | ||
| So because of that, because the nature of that, and because we're so experiential and because we're so kind of up on the culture, It's a mess right now. | ||
| Nobody knows what to believe but we know that people are hurting and so we're going to run towards people because we're experiential and people are having these experiences so we're going to love them but the rational part of our compassion seems to be a bit missing and we're unawares to what is really inside this Trojan horse. | ||
| Yeah, well that's exactly why I wanted to have this conversation because I just see this happening across the board and I'm fascinated when I see it in communities that I'm not necessarily part of. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| So when you see things like, you're in California too, our wonderful progressive governor Gavin Newsom basically telling people that they can't sing in church because that can spread You know, COVID, and then, you know, our mayor here in L.A., Garcetti, is out there with no mask on, kneeling in front of protesters, and then also tells us we can't have Fourth of July celebrations, or, you know, we gotta stay in our house. | ||
| All of these just crazed, conflicting messages, do you think that also is just a driver for religion? | ||
| Like, it seems like they're specifically attacking religion at some level, right? | ||
| You see de Blasio locking up playgrounds for Orthodox Jews to kids to go to, but then he's out there in the streets with protesters that there seems to be like an actual assault on religion. | ||
| And then at the same time, it's like everything they send us is mixed messages. | ||
| So it's like, ah, maybe that's a little paranoid. | ||
| Yeah, no, I think that you're right. | ||
| And to be honest with you, I feel like it's been open season on Jews for some time now. | ||
| And I think that that falls along a particular political aisle, whether we care to admit it or not. | ||
| With respect to Christians and houses of worship, yeah, Americans believe in peaceful assembly, and the right to assemble, and freedom of religion. | ||
| And so there's, once again, Exploring that threshold of who you can tell to gather. | ||
| For example, a popular pastor down here in California, Jensen Franklin, made a statement about this on his social media three days ago. | ||
| And all hell broke loose in Pentecostal Christendom. | ||
| And Jensen was just like, hey, I feel like this is a bit arbitrary. | ||
| They're telling churches that we can't, and, but Jensen marched with protesters. | ||
| And he goes, look, I marched. | ||
| So I, you know, I was there. | ||
| And what I'm saying though, is I think it's arbitrary to allow people to protest and not allow people to sing in church. | ||
| And it's just, it's like a powder keg. | ||
| That seems rational to me. | ||
| That seems sensible. | ||
| But you're saying not everyone operates in sync. | ||
| People screaming, right? | ||
| Like, so like, if you can scream in a mask right beside somebody, Um, or you can sing in a mask, you know, people are going, it's about droplets. | ||
| Yeah, a hundred percent, but that's what people, people are screaming. | ||
| So it's like, um, so I just think that like the concern about COVID-19 in some ways is like a little bit, it's missed. | ||
|
unidentified
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I have so many friends who've had COVID-19, right? | |
| Like you have a 98.8% chance of surviving this thing if you're under the age of 40. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So like, but it's all, it all seems to be young people. | ||
| Young progressives who are, you know, screaming at Jensen. | ||
| Young Christian progressives going, you know, how dare you bring the protesters into this? | ||
| I'm not, I marched, but don't you see this is a bit arbitrary? | ||
| And then he said, you know, make sure that you vote your faith this fall. | ||
| And that was the straw that broke the camel's back. | ||
| So it's just like, you know, are you telling us to vote now? | ||
| And who to vote for? | ||
| I don't know, dude, it's a mess. | ||
| But I think that, once again, I think it doesn't fall along necessarily faith lines, but it would fall along ideological lines in terms of what type of government do you want? | ||
| Do you want a government that is overreaching? | ||
| Or do you want a government who is going to just allow churches and allow people to do what they want to do? | ||
| I mean, as far as I know, Dave, Hasn't it been that every single high court has ruled that these governors' overreach of churches has been unconstitutional? | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| I don't know if it's every single one, but I've seen several of them, yeah. | ||
| Look, we have a Fourth Amendment. | ||
| We have the right to assemble. | ||
| So the idea that Newsom's saying you can't do it in church, but you can do it on the streets, it's simply not constitutional. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think that this type of stuff will galvanize But once again, in Pentecostalism, you know, our epistemology has already kind of been experiential and positional. | ||
| Our church definitely is split right down the line in terms of how people will vote, how people see, like my wife. | ||
| My wife wants to be nannied. | ||
| God bless her. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| You see that we have some serious, you know, I'm married to her. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So like we have some serious, we have some fat fish to fry. | ||
| All right, then I only got one more for you because we've talked about sort of the strife and everything that's got us here and everything else, but as a man of faith in a crazy time that we're in, give me something hopeful, if you got it. | ||
| What, you know, sort of an outlook that gets us past this, and how do we get to something that will start feeling a little more, maybe, well, maybe feeling isn't the right word, that will create a reality that will be a little more in line with some of the things that we've talked about here. | ||
| That are the good things. | ||
| So I think that there are only, us Christians believe that Jesus is going to come back and he is going to rule and reign on the earth forever. | ||
| That's what we believe. | ||
| So until that happens, I think that there's going to continue to be chaos. | ||
| Now, God has given us, we believe in this doctrine called common grace, where we believe that God has given men faculty and reason And I believe that one of the ways that we can limit the effects of the Fall, and the effects of sin, and the effects of brokenness, is by limiting government. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Like, what is the hope for things to maybe get better? | ||
| Ultimately, the return of Christ and the Gospel. | ||
| You know, that God will heal the world. | ||
| And when He heals the world, then He becomes President. | ||
| There's no more elections. | ||
| His government will be so good that it will be cause for praise eternally. | ||
| Until that happens, I think that limiting people's ability is probably our greatest hope. | ||
| So, yeah, I don't think that the scriptures necessarily paint some sort of utopia and, you know, let's bring the kingdom down to earth right now before Jesus comes back. | ||
| And the scriptures aren't redemptive necessarily that way. | ||
| In terms of things are gonna get better. | ||
| Things probably will get worse. | ||
| Just knowing humanity. | ||
| Humanity needs a savior. | ||
| The world is broken. | ||
| And I think that we can all agree about that. | ||
| But I don't think the fix is more people. | ||
| The fix is Jesus Christ. | ||
| He always has been. | ||
| And I think that when he comes back and he's king, we'll be okay. | ||
| And I think that's actually great hope. | ||
| Like, here's some hope. | ||
| Put your hope in Jesus. | ||
| Put your hope in somebody whose rulership in his kingdom will be good for everybody. | ||
| So that's my two thoughts. | ||
| All right, you took us out on some hope. | ||
| Now, in good conscience, I can't send people to Twitter after a conversation like this. | ||
| Where can people go to find out a little bit more about you and what you do? | ||
| They can go to my Instagram, Nathan Finocchio. | ||
| And, or Nathan, my website, NathanFanopio.ca, because I am a Canadian, and, you know, they can hate on me, and if they have any issues, if they have any problems with this program, just send an email to DaveRubin at gmail.com. | ||
| I don't have that gmail, so yes, they can send it there. | ||
| Alright, Nathan, it's been a pleasure talking to you, and hopefully when all this stuff clears up, we'll be able to do this in person sometime. | ||
| It was a pleasure, Dave. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about spirituality instead of nonstop yelling, check out our spirituality playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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