Bonus Ep. 1: That Time God Wanted Dan to Get Arrested
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Welcome to a special episode of the Three White American Jesus, Hanging with Dan and Brett.
There used to be a show called Hanging with Mr. Cooper.
This is Hanging with Dan and Brad.
I don't know, Dan?
I'm already into the dad jokes.
I don't know if you want to, like, call this... What did you want to call it?
Cargo Shorts and Minivan Book Day?
Or... Anyway.
So.
Hello, Dan.
How are you?
I'm good.
I guess it'd be like Cargo Shorts and Corollas or something for me.
Like, gotta get that... Yeah.
...kind of in there.
Yeah, we're fine.
Looser even than normal and, you know, our first ever little thing, so cheers.
Yeah, Dan's drinking a beer.
I just want to point out it is later where I am than where you are, so I feel like that's kind of important.
I'm drinking a seltzer.
I quit drinking alcohol during the pandemic.
I felt like the pandemic was going to push me either to drink like five drinks a night because of the pandemic or to not drink at all, and I chose the second one.
I haven't started breaking anything yet.
We're going to be a little looser on our special episode here.
A little more meandering, I would say.
Doesn't mean we're going to be aimless.
See, you can see the nice picture I'm painting there.
We're not going to be aimless.
We are going somewhere.
But we're going to meander a little bit.
We're going to take our time.
First of all, thank you all for listening.
Thank you for being subscribers.
Thanks for hanging out with us.
Hope you're into the Discord.
Hope you're drinking a beer like Dan is.
Or a peach seltzer water like me.
And, you know, just Cannot say how thankful I am for this sweetie.
Really, really am.
Dan, let's start with God's Will.
So I'm going to turn it over to you.
Tell us about God's Will and getting arrested.
Yeah, so this is like one of my, I don't know, like religion Americana stories.
I used to share this story with folks in the UK and they were like, What?
Like, what are you talking about?
That's a real story.
So, to set the stage, I'm like, you know, thinning, shaved head, whatever.
But when I was in college, I also had a shaved head.
But back then, I was this big kind of burly guy.
I was Mr.
Super evangelical Christian guy, but Brad, I think this will make sense to you.
I know that to some of our listeners, it will make sense.
Others will be like, I don't understand the world you're talking about.
But within the kind of evangelical subculture, I was like the badass Christian guy.
So like I was the guy who was like super Christian.
But I could bench press like 300 pounds and like I wore combat boots and had a shaved head and a tattoo and like earrings and like that was that was a thing so I mean you're laughing but like you get this and that Christian like you had the Ned Flanders and then you had like me who was like the look you can be Christian and cool and like I only listen to Christian music but it was all like Christian hardcore and thrash metal and stuff and I would go to like
Concerts and like do like mosh pits and get my nose bloodied and like right so it's like that kind of Whenever and I was I was a pretty I was a much more imposing figure than my sort of Teletubby middle-aged self So anyway, all of that's that's relevant because I went home for the weekend one time in college I think I was like a junior in college And setting the stage again, small town Arkansas.
So I graduated high school from this little town of like 3,500 people in rural Arkansas.
I'm not kidding.
Our mascot was the Hillbillies.
That was the name of our mascot.
Okay.
So just real quick, First of all, I was using the bad mic there for a minute.
So friends, if the audio quality just got better, we're meandering.
We're looser.
And you might have noticed.
All right.
I have not had any beer, but I was using the wrong mic.
All right.
Dan, so I just want to get this straight.
You go home from your Christian college to your High school your high school mascot is the hillbillies, but I want to know what you're wearing Like so we already know that you're like what six one you can bench pass 350 pounds You are the hey, I am a hard hard hardcore Christian.
I'm gonna go to Southern Baptist Seminary guy I have unflinching moral Christian morals, but I am like Hard.
I'm like a straight edge, hardcore guy.
You can be cool.
You can be Christian and you can be cool.
It was that kind of Christian counterculture, parallel culture.
But like, what are you wearing at this football game?
Like, paint us the picture of like a 20 year old dad.
I'm wearing combat boots and like...
It's true.
Pair of jeans.
I have a wallet with a chain.
And this, this part's, this part's even more embarrassing on one side.
On the other side, I have a Bible with a chain.
So I would carry this like, yeah.
And I'm wearing like, it's like, I don't know, maybe October, November.
So it's cool ish.
So I'm wearing like, you know, uh, I think I was wearing, like, a fleece or a... probably a flannel shirt, like I am now, or, you know, something like that.
The shaved head, the whole, like, whatever.
I would wear durags then, and stuff, and, you know, whatever.
So, that's me.
That's what I'm dressed as.
So, I go to this game.
Again, 3,500 people, little town.
The mascot is the hillbillies.
The pastor of my church is the mascot.
He would run up and down the sidelines with a shotgun that he would fire when the team scored and stuff.
This is all relevant.
It's all relevant to the story.
It's all setting the stage.
I promise I'm going to get to God's will.
What part of Arkansas is this?
It's northwest Arkansas.
You're going to get to Memphis in like an hour from here.
No?
Yeah, or a couple.
It's closer to Oklahoma.
It's about 30 minutes from the Oklahoma border.
If anybody's familiar on I-40, you cross the border, you're at Fort Smith, and then you get to Little Ozark.
Oh, Northwest, not Northeast, sorry.
Yeah, Northwest.
Yeah, going to Oklahoma, not going to Tennessee.
All right, got it.
So, yeah, so I'm there, and my brothers are playing in this game, and it's a big game.
Whoever wins is going to go to the playoffs, and who doesn't win is like, their season's done.
High school football game, whatever, and it's not going well for my brother's team.
Bad officiating and stuff, the crowd is murderous, you know, whatever.
And it becomes clear that they're gonna lose, and they do, and so like the last couple minutes, I'm there with my mom, like I'm home for the weekend, I'm visiting, I'm hanging out with my mom.
I'm like, I'm gonna go wait in the parking lot so I can like kind of beat the crowd, whatever.
So I go to the parking lot, this is all relevant, And it's the parking lot with, like, the herringbone parking spaces, right?
So, like, the cars face each other at kind of an angle.
And I'm out there standing there, and I'm standing at an empty parking space with my back to the stadium, and I'm just waiting, and like, the lights turn on behind me, so the car, like, kind of facing the lane.
And this is where I'm a stupid 20, 21-year-old.
I should have just, like, not done this.
But I turn around, and this vehicle, like, right across from me is, like, it's got its lights on, it's running.
And in my head, I'm like, this person, instead of backing out like they're supposed to and driving around, they're going to come through this spot that I'm standing in, and that annoys me, so I'm going to stand here.
And sure enough, they drive right up next to me, like literally like the van brushes up against me.
And all of a sudden the van stops and it opens up and it's all the officials from the game.
It's like their van, right?
And they're out and they form this circle around me and they're like poking me in the chest.
The guy's like, you just keyed my van.
I was like, what are you talking about?
I didn't key your van.
He's like, you keyed my van.
I saw you key my van.
I'm like, I didn't, I didn't do anything to your van.
You just like hit me standing here in your parking lot.
I didn't do anything.
So one of them runs off to go get a cop.
He's going to get the police and report me for keying his van.
And I should have just left.
I was parked like three blocks away.
I should have just gone to my car, but I didn't do anything.
So I'm like, I'm going to stand here in the righteousness of my whatever.
So here comes this Ozark cop, and I don't fit the stereotype of the rural Arkansas Ned Flanders Christian guy.
So he comes up, he's like, what's going on?
They're like, you keyed my van.
I'm like, I didn't do anything.
He's like, do you know it's illegal to threaten high school athletic officials?
I was like, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't threaten anybody.
I'm just like, I'm, I'm standing in this parking lot.
He's like, it's against the law to even intimidate.
I'm like, I, I'm just me standing in a park.
That's all I'm doing.
He goes, put your hands on the vehicle.
I was like, what?
So I put your hands on the vehicle.
I'm like, not to tell me why.
He's like, you're under arrest.
That's why.
I'm like, all right.
So like hands on the vehicle.
He handcuffs me.
I'm standing there.
The officials are still like yelling at me and stuff and whatever.
But by now, Brad, the game's over and fans are starting to come out.
So this is like embarrassing.
This is going on.
I'm like, huh?
Good evangelical me.
I'm like, I'm going to ruin my witness.
People are going to think I'm bad.
They're going to think I did something, but instead I'm in this little town.
Like everybody knows me.
I'm the little preacher kid.
I preach sermons at the local churches.
This is me.
So after a while, my mom shows up.
She's like crying and stuff.
Cause I'm like arrested and like, I'm not a minor.
So there's nothing she can do.
And she's crying about it.
But after a while, Here comes my pastor, the pastor of my church, dressed as the hillbilly, and he's talking to the cop.
Well, he has a gun.
I'm getting scared now.
He has a gun.
He's caught all of that.
He's talking to the cop, trying to figure out what's going on.
And my brothers are there.
They've come out, half the football team, some of whom I played with, the young guys on the team.
I had been on the team when I was a senior, and they were freshmen and that kind of thing.
So they're out there.
So this whole crowd is like, There.
I'm, like, handcuffed.
The cop is kind of figuring out that, like, maybe I didn't do anything.
He runs my license.
There's nothing there.
The guy I used to work for in my high school job is like, did anybody check the van and see if there are scratches on it?
And, you know, it's a minivan.
It's a family minivan.
It's all kind of beat to hell.
Whatever.
So this is going on, it's been like an hour, and I'm still out there, I'm still handcuffed, and now the youth pastor from the church shows up, okay?
Small town Americana church thing, so the youth pastor would drive a vanload of youth group kids to the game every week.
So there's like 15 youth group kids Who are there and the youth pastor there who'd been my youth pastor and he's like, I'm not leaving until we get this straightened out.
But see Brad, this is where it kicks in because people start praying for my deliverance.
So the youth group forms a circle around me and they're like holding hands and some of them are crying and stuff and they're praying.
They're like all praying like out loud for my deliverance and stuff.
And this cop is there like wondering what in the world is like he's gotten himself into.
They start singing Kumbaya.
I'm not even kidding.
They sit down.
It's like a protest.
They sit down and they're singing Kumbaya for my deliverance.
The football coach comes out, and he's just swearing a blue streak at this cop, actively threatening this cop that he knows where he lives and stuff, and I'm a good kid, and all this stuff.
This goes on for an hour and a half.
Eventually, I was charged with criminal mischief in the second degree, which was later dropped.
I didn't do anything.
I did not key the vehicle.
But here's the thing.
People start talking to me about how this is God's will.
God's will for my life was to be there in that moment, to be a witness to persecution.
I'm now a persecuted Christian.
I am persecuted for my appearance.
I am a witness for Christ and the injustice of it all, and so on and so forth.
So this is just one story where the takeaway for the Christians is not Hey, kid, you're like 20.
Like, maybe just move.
Just let the van drive by.
Like, just do that.
Or, these officials have had a really bad game.
They're feeling pretty freaked out because they've had fans yelling at them for two hours, and they think that they threw the game, and like, whatever, and they just want to get out of there, go to their families, whatever.
Nope.
This was God's will.
This is what God had you there to do.
All of that to say it's this ridiculous story.
It illustrates for me so much about religion in America.
The kumbaya part, people are like, that couldn't have happened.
I'm like, no, it happened.
So this was on a Friday night.
That's when high school football is.
So I'm still in town on Sunday.
So I go to church.
I've got people coming up and congratulating me for being such a warrior for Christ and following God's will and being where God wanted me to be and all of this.
And at the time, man, this all makes sense to me.
This resonates with me.
I was like, it was a rough night.
I thought it was going to be bad.
It was God's plan.
God wanted me there to do what?
To like stand in a parking lot and like, Have Detective Kirksey, that was the cop who arrested me, have him like hassle me for a while or what?
So I'll let you do what you want with that.
It's a silly example.
We can look at real examples.
I got another example about the 2000 election, but like that's on a really popular level and everyday lived Christian experience level.
That's the kind of thing where oftentimes no matter what happens, whatever it is, it was God's will.
Yeah.
It's a ridiculous story.
I think the takeaway, if we want to have a serious point here, is like- There's only one?
Well, I have a lot of more things I want to say here.
First thing is, If the kids pray, so everyone's in a circle, they're praying, kumbaya, the youth pastor, the senior pastor, everyone's there.
It's God's will that they let you go.
So they prayed and it had an effect.
Why else would you pray?
And you got let go and you didn't go to jail and you didn't, whatever.
Great.
If you do go to jail, that's God's will.
And you're an even more witness for Christ, right?
And I guess, you know, I see a lot of memes like this.
I think it's a point that a lot of people understand intuitively, but it's basically one of those situations where a lot of conservative Christians want to say, if something good happens, it's God's will.
And everything bad that happens is the fault of human beings.
And so I think that's one.
You know, like with Mike Johnson, he really got put on the hot seat because he had to go on the on the record saying, yes, that was God's will, I guess, that Joe Biden became president.
And then he's got to go answer all these questions from people.
All over the country, like, why would God's will be that Joe Biden is president?
You know, this is, in their minds, he's stealing the country.
In their minds, Donald Trump lost the, uh, you know, had, had the presidency stolen from him, blah, blah, blah.
But it also just shows the incoherency of this kind of thinking.
And I think you and I are the kinds of people, at least, at least I was in college, who was like, you know, I'm going to use my college years to work out some questions I have about theology.
One is like God and time, you know, is, God and time.
God created everything, but he knew everything beforehand.
He lets us have free will, but we kind of don't.
I remember being a college freshman, sophomore, just being so into the question of God and time.
But there's also the question of God's sovereignty, which is not unrelated, which is, does God have control of everything or does he not?
If he doesn't, does it mean he's less of a God?
These are all the, if you're listening, you know, some of you know, these are the gateway drugs to like open theology, process theology.
I mean, these are the gateway drugs to like that, that's that fringe stuff on that's right on the fringes of evangelicalism.
And sometimes you get like the theology professor who's allowed to teach it, but.
It's not it's not going to lead you back to like orthodox evangelicalism.
So there's this line that Nietzsche has where he says that Christianity sort of sowed the seeds of its own undoing by saying that you should seek the truth.
And for intellectual types like us, that can be true when you start really plumbing down into like, OK, so how do we square this?
Because, like, for those who don't know, like, here's how it works to the high school kid, to the young adult, whatever, trying to figure these things out, that a typical piece of that is, yes, God is sovereign.
Nothing happens that God doesn't want to have happen.
Immediate, like, obvious, clear question is, like, wait a minute, what about, like, sin?
What about human sinfulness and bad things?
Did God want that to happen?
What about the Holocaust?
What about, I mean... Yeah, the whatabouts and it's called, you know, arguments of so-called theodicy, free will, and determinism, and on and on and on.
So the real knee-jerk reaction, the simple reaction to that is to say, well, God doesn't cause everything that happens.
He could.
He's God.
If he wanted to dictate everything, he could.
But he foreknows everything that'll happen.
He has foreknowledge.
The problem with this is that on all of these theologies, God is what we could call a most perfect being, which means he has perfect knowledge, which means he can't be wrong about stuff.
So if he knows that something's going to happen, if he foresees it, it has to happen that way because he can't have been mistaken, which then brings you back to, okay, so I did what I did and I felt that I acted freely and so on and so forth, but if God knew from the foundation of the world that I was going to do that, could it really be that way?
Brings up God in time.
That's a kind of a different thing.
But like here with these kids, so like you talk about prayer.
So does prayer do anything or not?
Yeah, that, yeah.
Do we pray because God tells us to pray?
If we pray and then God does what we were praying for, does it really mean that God responded to us and did it?
Did God change God's mind?
Did God, yeah.
Or was it just God's will that we pray because you're supposed to do that?
Or was God always going to do it in the same way?
It's a test like, you know, with Abraham and Isaac and he's just testing your faithfulness and you pass the test.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It's those kind of things.
And you're right about the gateway drug thing.
What moved me into theology and seminary, I did a paper about all the passages in the Hebrew Bible.
There's one particular verb where it says that God changes his mind or repents or regrets things.
And I was like, yep, okay, yep, all that foreknowledge stuff, gone, doesn't work, whatever.
But all that to say that we move it up into, it's funny, it's youth group kids, they're praying, they're happy because they did something faithful and I was delivered and it was God's will or whatever.
Talk about Mike Johnson.
Or years later in the 2000 election, I think I've talked about this before too, in this closeted way, I voted for Gore and not Bush and was very out of step with like evangelicals.
And I'm in this evangelical seminary when the Supreme Court closed down the recounts in Florida and basically handed the election to Bush and so forth.
I went in and there's another prayer circle, me in the prayer circles.
It's a circle of like seminary students this time.
And they're all praying, they're thanking God for making sure that his will was done, and George W. Bush was elected, and so forth.
And I didn't, like, argue with that, because I was this kind of claw.
I wasn't going to tell anybody I had voted for a Democrat, but I wasn't going to, like, join the prayer circle.
And I'm getting some coffee nearby, someone said, do you want to join?
It's like, yeah, I got to get ready for class.
And they're like, yeah, but God's will, we got to really, you know, praise the sovereignty of God and that his will was done.
And I said, Isn't God's will always done?
Of course.
I'm like, so the last eight years of Clinton have been God's will too.
And then like, there's no answer to that or God always wins.
It's like, well, yeah, but it was God's will so that we'd see how bad things are and vote for Bush or, you know, whatever.
It just becomes completely incoherent.
No, I agree.
I mean, these are the kinds of questions that lead to deconstruction.
They lead people to like, you know, because the center doesn't hold.
You know, the more you pick, the more you pick, the more you realize it does not hold together.
Let me give you one on this that sticks out.
So I, like you, was all in on pro-life abortion.
No, abortion is murder.
And I've talked about this on the show.
And I remember discussing this with a friend later on in life who had also been in this same space, and he actually taught high school at a Christian high school.
Kind of when he got to the place of doubt and deconstruction, you know, being a smart aleck like you just were in the prayer circle at seminary and that kind of stuff.
And he had kids coming up to him asking him, I think, to give money or do something for a pro-life cause.
His response, and I think this almost got him fired from the Christian school he taught, was, look, if a child is born, are they born into original sin?
And the answer is yes.
So if a child is born, the very first breath they take Evangelical theology, I mean, especially Calvinist theology, but just broad evangelical theology is like, they're sinful.
Like my baby daughter, when she was born four months ago, after her first breath, condemned to hell for sin because she's a fallen being.
Okay.
So the dude goes on and he's like, so, you know, you guys want to stop abortion, but Where do aborted babies go?
Because they don't have a choice.
And I think that from what I understand, if you don't have a choice and you are not sinful and you never actually enter the world in flesh, you go to heaven because you didn't have a choice whether or not to accept Christ.
So you're good.
And they were like, yeah, that sounds right.
And he was like, so shouldn't we want everyone to be aborted?
And it's pretty slick.
And especially with high school kids, it's like, that's just going to blow them.
Their brain is going to blow up.
But we talked just a minute ago about the incoherency.
For me, what that story brings up is the nihilism.
Because one of the things that I—here's the kick I got on, Dan.
My last years in evangelicalism, the kick I got on was like, you know, it seems like all we care about is like Jesus being born Christmas Day and then Jesus dying.
It could have been executed as an infant.
Done.
It seems like his life meant nothing.
And I was, I got on this huge, I mean, if you'd known me then, I was, I'm always an annoying person, but I was super annoying in terms of like, I was reading every Christological piece of theology I could find that affirmed the life of Christ as a good thing.
Like, hey, Jesus was in the world.
Jesus had a body.
Jesus was like wandering in this thing we call flesh, like us.
Why don't we like learn from that?
You know, I was very, I mean, that led me into reading like, Episcopalians and Catholics and mystics, others who had like... The Eastern Orthodox.
Oh man, I considered, you know, many of my friends, I mean, you know, you have your friend.
I got about a dozen friends who are still Orthodox and they converted from Evangelicalism as a result of this way of thinking.
What's the point?
Part of me just felt like, I think we're kinda nihilistic because we just are into death.
It's just, everyone's sinful, everyone needs to repent, there's no beauty, there's no wonder, there's no Jesus life was beautiful, Jesus life was wondrous, it's just death, death, death, death.
And to me that abortion high school story, it really uncovers that in like a 30 second vignette.
Like if it's better for no babies to be born, so all the babies go to heaven, why be born at all?
And you know, you can go on a long theological sojourn of like, whatever, God creation and fallenness, you can do it.
You can, you can, your friend Wayne Grudem could sit here if he was here and do a five hour retort to that.
But there is, there is in there a sense of like, it almost seems like not being born is better.
What kind of fucking theology is that?
What kind of theology tells you it's better if you were never born?
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