Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation
Jon Ward's life is divided in half: two decades inside the evangelical Christian bubble and two decades outside of it.
In Testimony, Ward tells the engaging story of his upbringing in, and eventual break from, an influential evangelical church in the 1980s and 1990s. Ward sheds light on the evangelical movement's troubling political and cultural dimensions, tracing the ways in which the Jesus People movement was seduced by materialism and other factors to become politically captive rather than prophetic.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
As always, my name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and today joined by just an amazing guest with a really long and impressive resume with a brand new book out, and that is John Ward.
So John, thanks for joining me.
Hey Brad, thank you for having me.
Really enjoyed your podcast and of course I think I've been pretty vocal in my praise for the Matthew Taylor project you guys did.
I'm happy to be here.
Thank you.
Yeah, no, we were so glad to see your piece on that and to see your kind words.
Let me tell folks about your book.
It's called Testimony Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation.
And let me just make sure that folks know who you are.
So John is the Chief National Correspondent at Yahoo News.
He's covered American politicians and culture for two decades, including as a White House correspondent, traveling aboard Air Force One, and as a national affairs correspondent, writing about two presidential campaigns.
Previously, he's the author of Camelot's End, Kennedy versus Carter, and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party, and hosts the Long Game podcast.
Your book really is a memoir.
As I got into your book, I thought to myself, this is a memoir in every sense of the term.
In some ways, it was refreshingly simple in that sense.
You were telling your story told through your eyes.
One of the things that hit me about this, John, is that for me, as somebody who left evangelicalism, I did so by moving.
I went from California to the UK, and I've been everywhere since then.
Paris and Egypt, Tennessee and New York.
I've lived in those places.
You grew up right near D.C.
in Maryland.
Your parents converted to what's known as the Jesus People Movement, and I know obviously you've gone far and wide to do your journalistic work, but your life has really kind of stayed in that region for its entirety.
So if we begin at home, talk to me about your parents and their conversion.
How did they become Christian people?
Yeah.
It's funny what you point out.
I am Jimmy Stewart.
I like it.
I like it.
It's a wonderful life.
I, I, I have for a long time wanted to live somewhere else.
And, uh, you know, I'm thinking of Jimmy Stewart in that furniture store or where he gets his suitcase and he goes, I want a big one.
And, uh, you know, he's got, I want a big one cause I want room for all the All the stickers from all the places I'm gonna go.
And yeah, I have traveled for work, but we still talk about...
Living somewhere else.
It'll happen at some point, but.
You know, it's like when you have curly hair and you like, and you want straight hair.
Cause like I've lived so many places that I, like I've lived in DC and I was just there and I can get around the district.
I used to live in various neighborhoods.
I have my haunts I go back to.
And I have that in like dozens of places, but I don't have a place that honestly, at this point has been home for like more than a decade.
I kind of want that now.
I kind of want to just be there.
Whereas you're thinking, Hey, be nice to, to do something else.
So anyway.
Well, when the kids are in the coming years.
It'll happen.
But your parents convert.
One of the things about the book that really I think is worth digging into is they're Jesus people and the conversion is fresh.
And I think that's important because I think it's important that you're like a preacher's kid, you're a church kid, but it's not with like, you're not a fourth generation Yeah, no, that's interesting.
great granddaddy who was a Presbyterian minister.
There's a sense of your dad having this fresh conversion that I think instills an energy into your family's faith that is really worth trying to bring off the page, if you don't mind.
Yeah.
No, that's interesting.
My grandfather, who I write about, my dad's dad was a college football star.
He was a two-time consensus All-American at the University of Maryland in the early 50s when they had top-ranked teams.
They won the national championship one year.
His father was a detective in New Jersey, Irish Catholic.
So yes, the whole idea of being a preacher was something my dad started.
And he wasn't My dad wasn't really a preacher in his pastoral ministry.
He was more of a pastoral care guy slash political activist.
I mean, he was leading anti-abortion rallies or protests outside of clinics.
So, It's just really, really important to understand, I think, the deadness of the religion that my parents were reacting against.
Perceived deadness.
I think there was probably things that were legitimate that they were reacting against.
Things that they were probably just missing too, but their experience of Catholicism on my dad's part and my Episcopalism on my mom's side, they got nothing out of it and they felt like it was rote religion.
And I see that actually in a lot of people in my parents' generation still to this day.
I'm thinking of one relative who I'll bring up, I'll just mention Lent.
And they're still sort of an allergic reaction to it because it smacks of Catholicism to them.
And of course, a lot of people in my generation, our generation, I think are gravitating Back or towards more historic sources of faith and liturgy and the Christian calendar, all of these things that I think give us a little more stability and rootedness.
But at the time, all of that stuff was really dead to my parents.
And it was the early 70s, My dad had a pretty bad experience where he was invited to leave the Air Force Academy.
He explained to me that he wasn't kicked out, but I don't think he had an option to stay either.
He hitchhikes home and he meets a friend in Iowa.
And we actually just had a conversation about this recently after he read the first draft of the book, where he said he was describing to me what it was like to go into a church service in, I think, Ames, Iowa.
And he just talked about how he had never heard anybody talk about how God loved him in a personal way and how God wanted to know him personally and have a relationship with him.
And it was really quite a beautiful moment to hear him express that.
It was still very fresh in his mind and in his heart.
And that changed his life, and so what then really became, I think, formative for my parents was my dad comes back, and there's all these people his same age who are having similar experiences to different degrees, and they start a church, or they actually started a Bible study.
And it just explodes in growth, and there's people, all kinds of people coming, most of them young.
And there was a sense of something new and exciting happening and they were incorporating more contemporary forms of music.
There were young guys getting up and Giving sermons that were dynamic and interesting and funny and provocative.
And Keith Green is going around the country, this musician, and playing pretty decent music and also just laying into audiences with this no BS kind of religion.
I still like Keith Green.
I kind of like his attitude.
I mean, he's kind of like an angry prophet at times.
And so then in the late 70s, they started church and then into the 80s, they become more established.
But that period in the 70s, And I say in the book, if you really want to feel or get a sense of what that time was like, go find some of the music.
You'll see some of the raw passion that I think was being expressed.
And that's why when I saw the Asbury revival, it kind of reminded me of some of this.
Well, and I think you and I are of similar age, and I grew up in Southern California where there was a lot of Jesus people, a lot of Jesus movement folks, and I think it's hard to explain to people now that we've lived through the Trump presidency, we lived through a time when evangelicals are really outliers in many ways politically.
They have coalitions with certain Catholic communities and so on, but for a lot of folks, when they hear evangelical now, they think Trumpist, they think MAGA.
Yeah.
And it's really hard to go back a generation and a half and say, in the 70s, if you grew up in an Irish Catholic house where, you know, perhaps the mass was like in Latin or half Latin, like it was in my wife's hometown.
Religion felt, as you say, dead.
So to come home from the Vietnam War, And to enter spaces where there was like great guitar music and singing and people who were doing something that felt grassroots and alive.
That's something that really drew in your parents' generation.
And you mentioned the music.
You have this line in there where you talk about how Keith Green is this world-class musician.
And he made your community feel legitimate because he could compete with any, you know, and you talk about how the legend grew, you know, Keith Green supposedly was the best guitarist in the world and Jimi Hendrix and whoever it is air clapped.
And these people are like, Oh, Keith Green, the best guitarist in the world.
I had that too growing up as a Christian, and there's a sense of counter-cultural Christianity there.
We're different, but we can keep up with the other guys.
Can you talk about that?
What was it like in your very small and insular community wanting to say, no, we're just as good at music or anything else because we want to show the world that what we have in Christ is something worth sharing.
And I don't know, when I read those pages, it hit me 'cause those were experiences I had too. - Yeah, and before I get to that, I think it's worth just talking about the fact that there's not a lot of, one of the things that I think is unfortunate is that there's not a lot of retrospective analysis on the part of evangelicals to think about the historical factors one of the things that I think is unfortunate is that there's not a retrospective analysis on the part of evangelicals to think about the historical factors that created that hunger.
I just think it'd be so healthy for people in my parents' generation to do a historical analysis of all the things that were creating the late 60s, the zeitgeist of the late 60s and the early 70s.
Not because it cancels out their experience, but because I think it augments and expands the understanding of what's happening.
Yeah.
And to your point about the stultifying nature of Irish Catholicism at times, I have never read a book that helped me understand that better than Fintan O'Toole's We Don't Know Ourselves, which is a, I believe it's called the, I believe the subtitle is A Modern History of Ireland.
And he talks about the way that the Irish The Catholic Church has really had a tight grip on a lot of Irish life.
And I went to a memorial service for my dad's uncle within the last year or two in Princeton, New Jersey.
And it was like going back to a mass from when my dad was growing up.
And I think I turned to him and said, I understand now what you were reacting to.
Yeah.
My mega church growing up was like half post-Catholic because that generation was so hungry to like get in there and live religion rather than have what they grew up with.
Yeah.
Sorry, what was the question you wanted me to respond to?
Well, I was just interested in, here's where I'm really going with this.
In 2023, a lot of people feel like white Christian nationalists, many evangelicals included, want to just take over the world.
Like Sean Foyt said this week, we want the lawmakers to be Christian.
There was a spirit in the 70s and 80s and 90s of, we're not going to take over the world because we're counter-cultural.
We're different.
So we're not going to overcome and conquer Jimi Hendrix or whatever politician.
We're going to just be set apart.
And, and it's fun to be that.
I don't know, John, if you ever felt this, but it felt cool as a 16 year old to be like, yeah, I'm not out here to like overcome the world or conquer it.
I'm out here to be this rebel.
Like it was a nice way to put on the rebel mantle.
Cause I'm not a, I'm not part of you guys.
I'm over here doing my thing with Keith Green and contemporary Christian music.
And we're different.
We have a whole way of swimming upstream and it's cool.
I, I don't know if people understand that feeling now because the 2020s have been so marked by a will to power.
And I just don't know that sense of being a kind of cultural outsider has any play in Christian America right now.
Right.
Yeah.
I don't know that I ever felt the way you described.
I always felt alienated and uncool, but also alienated from the church, but our churches Umbrella group was called People of Destiny for a while.
So that was definitely expressing a sense of sort of a messianic sense of like, we really not only have a lot of the answers, but we're on the move, we're making an impact.
And that's not too unusual for, for Christians or people of faith to feel like God has a purpose for my life.
But it was on another level, I would say, just like this people of destiny.
And that, and I think a lot of that came from guys like Larry Tomczak, Lou Angle, Cheyenne, who, those guys, Chey and Lou, who are now pretty prominent in the New Apostolic Reformation, they left I think in the mid 80s and went to California, but that was their vibe.
They were very much like big, bold, in your face, you know, not angry.
I don't think they were really that angry.
They were just like, they wanted a dramatic faith that could move mountains.
And that was the sense I got from them.
But I, to me, like I was writing about that sense of us making up those stories or being too quick to believe the stories.
About how great Phil Keagy and Keith Green were.
Because we, for me, that was expressing the sense of we're in this subculture, we keep to ourselves, we're cut off from a lot of cultural exchange and interaction.
And so we have to have these stories to help us feel like we're keeping up.
So yeah, I would say.
Your question that was about, you know, is there a sense of Being a cultural outsider now.
I don't really know.
I mean, I don't, I don't know how, like, I don't know how young people in turning point USA feel about in relation to that.
Like, I think they want to, I think the young people in turning point USA are like, yeah, we're going to, we're going to take over the United States.
Whereas like when I was their age, I was like, yeah, I'm a, I'm swimming up the current and it, the ethos feels different.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's interesting.
I mean, there, there was a lot of like.
Communication to us to swim against the culture.
Exactly.
But I don't don't you think a lot of people like turning point young people would say, well, they're doing that too, because they're they're against.
all of the liberal agendas that they fight against?
I think they would say, we may be swimming up the culture now, but once we're victorious, everyone else would be swimming up against us.
I think for me, I always just expected I would be swimming upstream until Jesus came back.
Like I was gonna be just, yeah, the world will never get me.
I'm gonna walk up to you at lunchtime at high school and try to witness to you.
You're going to think I'm weird.
All right.
Sounds good to me.
I'm going to stand outside the movie theater.
See if you'll accept Jesus.
You'll think I'm weird.
Whatever.
That was my approach.
And when I see the TPUSA folks, they're like 19.
I'm like, y'all just want to take over the world.
This is like domination time.
This is like will to power time.
Your book is one of those books where you, just by existing in what you describe as a small insular community, come into contact with all these people who become really powerful players over the decades.
So you have an intimate kind of view of Lew Angle in the early days of ministry.
There's a lot of people that will recognize that name from the New Apostolic Reformation series.
I'm wondering what that looked like early on, the sense of charisma, the sense of the power of the Holy Spirit.
How did those things look to you as somebody who was, as you say, inside the community, but always felt like an outsider within it?
Well, I think when you're a young kid, you get away with If you and you're in church you get a pass for a while until about middle school when they start when they start really like bringing the pressure and I have to say like I think when I was about 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 I wasn't necessarily a rebellious kid or a bad kid because I'm an old I'm the oldest of seven and
Not all that much of a wild child at all, but I do remember, like, cutting up in Sunday school and kind of making fun of it and just goofing off.
And then in middle school, the same thing.
I would have my go-to Bible verse if I got called on for, what's your Bible verse?
Proverbs 27, 17, as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
And I think what's really interesting about That middle school and high school period is that you can, you can be standoffish towards it or kind of not that interested.
But if that is where your family's taking you, it's where all your relationships are.
Two things still happen.
One, your view of the world is still shaped in an incredibly dominant way by the way that that congregation thinks.
And two, you do still have experiences at like youth retreats or the occasional church service that are like high spiritual highs, high intensity moments.
And there's a lot of, or there were for us a lot, there was a lot of pressure.
We didn't, I don't know that we talked a lot about hell.
It'd be really interesting to like do archival research on how much that was discussed, but it was very much In the atmosphere, just this fear of sin because of... I think it's just because even if you don't emphasize it, if it's the clear teaching, it's still terrifying.
Yeah.
And so even into high school, like I, I was in high school, actually, I was even less interested in a lot of religion.
And, and then it was in college that the church really started hiring people to try to get those of us in college to, to, to buy in more.
You really, it's an interesting story.
Cause I kept waiting for, I kind of expected the, I'm going to grow up in this.
And then in college, before I even picked up the book, I thought, In college, becomes a journalism major, sets him on the track and there he goes.
And your college years are actually way more complicated than that, because I kept waiting for the moment when you got that exposure to the world outside of your insular community, and you're going to have like your rumspringa and just sort of like go for it.
You played college baseball, like junior college baseball.
You went to the University of Maryland.
And those were places I thought, all right, these are the chapters I'm going to get the, met this professor, that professor, this one.
Was a communist for a while, like got crazy radical.
And then I eventually made peace with my parents and my church.
It was not like that.
Can you talk about those years as ones of like expansion into a world you never knew, but also holding onto what had become at that point a pretty sincere faith?
Yeah.
And, and I will say, I think I've always valued moderation and not overreacting or overcorrecting.
So yeah, I've never, I've never really.
I've done that and I don't know if that's good or bad, but that's what it is.
Yeah, in college, I did those two years of community college and then I transferred to Maryland and it was at that point that I went to a church service at a retreat and had a moment of just feeling like I had heard the gospel talked about in a way that I had never Fully comprehended, not just intellectually, but spiritually.
That was a sermon preached by CJ Mahaney, who was the pastor, the head pastor there.
And so I kind of just made a very radical change in my life.
There had been some things leading up to that, nothing too dramatic.
You know, things.
And so I cut off relationships and just went for it and was quickly brought into discipleship groups, started to be seen as somebody who could be a leader, was talked about as a potential leader in the church.
And at the same time, I'm going to the University of Maryland.
I am going to literature classes where the world is opening up a bit and my Shakespeare professor Has had one of the biggest impacts on me and my life, I think, simply by encouraging me, you know?
And, uh...
Praising my writing.
That was such a wild phenomenon.
And I don't even really know why.
Maybe I didn't have a lot of interaction with people who were encouraging like that.
I'm not really sure.
But he was passionate about his subject matter.
Just a wonderful, wonderful guy.
And other professors introduced me to the New Yorker.
So I was beginning to see a way In which I could praise the world, praise creation.
And I think in that sense, worship through some of my more natural talents, rather than this sort of awkward, fitting way, forced way that didn't at all feel like it was meant to be.
A lot of the religion that I grew up with in the church, Felt forced and I was beginning to see a way I think of existing which I think that's I'm trying to describe what I was beginning to see then and where I'm still trying to get now.
It's a way of being in the world that is in sync with with creation and with the rhythms of the way that the creator has made it and made us to be and And discovering that sense of wonder in learning and writing in college, I think was one of the first steps on that path.
Well, and I guess this leads us to your career in journalism, which there's some great stories in there about how you got started in that and some pretty incredible just recounting of the almost miraculous way you got taken into journalism.
But I'm wondering if you can talk about journalism along the lines that you mentioned of loving yourself into the world.
Because for me, the world, when I was 19, Was supposedly this scary, awful, terrible place that if I allowed myself to walk onto a public college campus, I'd be inundated with sin and licentiousness by just walking on the campus.
And if I went into the secular world, God knows what I would see.
And so I was always so afraid of it.
And I think for me, academia ended up being this place where I met people who were different than me.
I was exposed to ideas that were different than mine.
And I started to kind of think, oh, These people aren't the devil.
They don't hate me or, you know, they're not just awful.
And I'm learning a lot and I'm actually enjoying talking to them.
Maybe there's a way that I can see the world as something that is full of wonder rather than just full of tragedy and disobedience.
How did journalism perhaps play that kind of role for you?
Similar.
I mean, I think the religion I was raised on was very dominated by fear, and the way I think of faith now is more along the lines of wonder, as you just said, and adventure.
I was just listening to Scott McKnight, who has a book out about the Book of Revelation, talk about this on Caleb Mason's podcast, and he was listing off the ways that the dispensationalist paradigm
Influenced a lot of evangelicalism through fear and he listed off like four or five fears and it just drove home how fear-based a lot of it was then and how it, I think that's at the heart of, I think that's at the heart of what happened politically over the past several years is fear and then isolation leading to a lack of discernment and a vulnerability to manipulation.
And so I think journalism helped me in a lot of the same ways you described by just taking me out of the realm of the unknown into the realm of the known.
That's pretty simple, right?
But our worst fears are often about the things that we have heard about from others, but which we haven't actually encountered.
And it's when we Step into, I believe this guy Luke Norsworthy, this pastor in Texas, wrote a book about this, about how the way to disarm your fear is to step towards it.
I just, I pray, I pray for more of that in evangelicalism.
We're going to run out of time here.
I want to touch on the process of leaving because I think your book is one in which, again, you really give us a firsthand account of the complexities of what it means to have your faith and your life transformed, especially when you grew up so saturated in the culture like you did.
It's not a short story.
It's not a linear story.
It's really one of Bouncing back and forth between worlds, one of doubt, one of feeling like you have commitments here, but you also have interests there.
Would you mind just talking about that?
And I think one of the things you mentioned to me before we started recording was the word patience and why that's important to you.
Yeah, it's important to me because I wouldn't have experienced the growth that I have As I see it.
I'm sure there are other people who see it as regression, right?
But the growth that I've experienced wouldn't have been possible if not for people who showed patience towards me in conversation and in relationship.
Because as you said, it takes a long time to grow.
I struggle with how to talk about this because at times, The words are coming out of my mouth and it sounds like to me that I'm saying, we have to be patient with people who are religiously conservative until they become like us.
And I don't, I hope I don't think that, maybe I do, maybe I'm unconsciously expressing it.
I certainly don't want to believe that or say that.
Sure, I disagree with people who are religiously conservative, but What I know I believe in my core is that we have to be patient with each other in disagreement.
And what I know for sure too is that for me, it's taken a very long time to unpack all of the things that were deposited in me that I was not conscious of.
That's maybe the point is that All of us have a lot of beliefs and views and opinions that are not the product of a rigorous study.
They're the product of these deposits that are made in us by the environment outside of us and the people and the events.
And I think the work of living well, one of the tasks is to examine your life and understand those deposits.
And you can discard them.
You can hold on to them.
But I think it's important to excavate.
Well, and I think that the account you give gives us a clue into the process that it takes for folks who grew up in this to actually get to a place where they have a sense of self and a sense of awareness in the world where they know where they're at.
That's what I took a lot from your story, especially you as a young adult coming into this place as a journalist.
Somebody who was getting his bearings in a world that was expanding and was no longer nearly as small and narrow.
And somebody for whom, you know, a care for family and care for those in your life who had shaped you was always going to make that story complicated.
Now, I think for me, and this is the lessons I've learned, is that there's not everybody can stay in relationship with that religiously conservative, like if that's a person who the religiously conservative person wants Dead or wants to erase, then it's really hard for them to be patient because it's like, hey, I'm trying to to exist as a queer person or as a trans person or a black person.
You know, I think it's different in every case, but but I think what your your story was really good at reminding me is of.
This can be really excruciating.
And if you would have looked at my last year of ministry, you would have just thought on the outside, there's Brad, as religiously conservative as ever.
And internally, I was a mess.
I mean, I would get to church an hour early on Sundays as the pastor to read like Chuck Palahniuk novels, which is like so, that's so embarrassing.
Come on.
Sorry, Chuck Palahniuk, if you're listening.
But it is very embarrassing that that's the way I was rebelling.
And I would, like, hide them under my, like, seat cushion in the car because I didn't want the other pastors to see me reading that.
But that was just, like, one symbol of how it's just, like, searching for something else in the world.
But you would have never known that.
And I feel like that's what I kind of took away from some of those years where you're wrestling with that as a young journalist, a young man trying to figure out how you relate to everything, including your family and your faith.
I mean, one of the things that I do know our church was pretty good at saying was, you know, it's up to us to plant the seeds, it's up to God to grow the plant.
And that applies in this situation too.
If you're somebody who really wants to persuade someone you know to think differently, just recognize you may not, you probably will not ever get the, if they come to agree with you, It'll probably take a long time and they'll probably never give you credit.
And I think it's just, that's part of, like, that's a healthy challenge for us because it helps us remove the ego from the equation.
Well, I guess one of the things that we can finish on here is, here's a question that may not, I'm wondering, I don't know how this is going to hit you, but Academics and journalists, but especially journalists in my mind, are always inside and outside at the same time.
The best journalists I know are really good at being right in the middle of everything that's happening, but they're never there like everyone else.
So I'm just wondering if your life as a journalist is a way to be like, well, haven't really changed the way I fit into the rooms I go into.
I just get to like exercise, uh, you know, a different set of muscles and, uh, feel good about it rather than awkward about it.
Yeah.
But wow, that is a really insightful statement and question because I felt for a long time, like there must be something wrong with me because I would just, Week in and week out in church, and I'm probably thinking back to those times when I was most invested in church, those two last years of college and then a couple years after that.
It was like a weekly experience.
I don't know if there was ever a Sunday that wasn't like this, where my brain would just be going non-stop during the sermon, analyzing, critiquing, probing, and I would sometimes try to talk to people about this.
And the response I usually got was, why are you so critical?
Why are you so negative?
A lot of the same things that I've heard about this book now from people who are still in that world.
And it's just because that's the way I am.
And I have had to, some of that pushback was good.
It helped me to moderate or modulate it a little bit, but I think, I think One of the things maybe, not maybe, definitely people in church maybe don't appreciate is that there's different types of people and there's different roles.
And I'm not going to sit here and say everybody should be like me, but I think people have a hard time who want to keep things more on the positive side with people like me who are all, we're just constitutionally alert and aware of things that could be better.
And we're analytical and we're critical.
And yes, that can definitely go too far, but we need that skill set as well.
Yeah.
I still find it hard to be in any room.
Like if there's a convention or something, I go there and I'm like, I'm going to listen.
And then I just, I'm looking at everyone in the crowd.
I usually go stand in the back.
I like writing notes and that's all the stuff that gets you in trouble at church.
Because if you're doing that at church, everyone's like, why aren't you paying attention?
Why aren't you like engaged?
Why aren't you just listening to the sermon?
All that stuff.
So anyway, thanks for your time.
Thanks for just a little bit of a window into you and your life and your story.
There's of course just tons and tons more in the book.
What's the best way to link up with you as you kind of move ahead here with the book appearing in the world?
Sure.
It's a weird thing.
We used to just say, Hey, find me on Twitter.
And now.
Yeah.
Kind of weird, but my book website, which has information on both my books, is johnwardwrites.org.
That's J-O-N-W-A-R-D-W-R-I-T-E-S dot org.
And there's links there to my Twitter and to my sub stack.
And that's probably the best place for people to go.
We did not, friends, get into the Joshua Harris sections of the book, so I'll just leave that as a nice teaser.
I'm actually going on Josh's podcast.
Are you?
Probably a week from now, yeah.
Okay.
You can listen to it there, or you can read the pages, but there's a little bit of Forrest Gump about your story here, because you're like, somehow I'm just reading pages, and then you're like, All the luminaries from the various eras of evangelicalism are like showing up and you're not seeking them out.
They're just appearing in your life.
It's crazy.
You know what else is funny?
We have acquaintances who are like pretty close to Sean Foyt.
So there's another one.
There it is.
It doesn't stop.
Yeah, Sean making his own waves in the last week here.
Anyway, as always friends, find us at Straight White JC, find me at Bradley Onishi, find all of our info on our link tree, and you can see events coming up.
You can see our PayPal, our Patreon, all that business.
But for now I'll say thanks for being here.
We'll be back later this week with It's in the Code and the weekly roundup.
