Weekly Roundup: SCOTUS and McConnell Surrender to Trump
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Brad and Dan begin by demonstrating how Mitch McConnell, who is stepping down from Senate leadership because of his party's extremism, created that extremism by poking holes in democracy. His work is coming to fruition in SCOTUS' decision to hear the Trump immunity appeal - and thus almost guarantee he won't be prosecuted before the election.
In the second segment the hosts trace the fallout of the Alabama IVF decision, showing how it is the work of 6 decades of organizing to end reproductive rights, a sign of the Catholicization of sexual politics in America, and an example of bad natural theology.
In the final segment, they take on a new essay at the National Review titled "A Case for a Theocentric Right."
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
An election year that will change our lives forever.
We are committed to safeguarding our democracy from religious nationalisms and extremisms, and we need your help to do it.
For a few bucks a month, you can become a premium Straight White American Jesus subscriber and help us keep doing this work of educating in order to activate.
If you subscribe, you'll get ad-free listening, access to our 500 episode archive, a premium episode every month, Check it out now in the show notes or go to www.axismoondi.supercast.com.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus Podcast.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today with my beleaguered, tired, fatigued co-host.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I had the pleasure of jury duty this week and didn't get selected, but it just kind of threw my whole week off.
I'm glad to be here in a moment of regularity.
Best way not to get chosen for jury duty is just to wear that shirt that just says, straight white American Jesus, you know?
That just, if you wear that shirt, a lot of times you won't, or maybe you will get picked.
I don't know, knowing this country.
All right.
And it has been a week, friends.
I'll just say, I've had two sick kids.
Dan's got kids who are frustrating he and his partner by doing very typical teenage and other stuff.
So I think we're both tired.
And I think what's going to happen is we're going to tee off here, Dan.
That's my prediction.
If I know us, I know that tired Dan and Brad are more punchy and less forgiving.
So we will see what happens on this episode.
I'm going to start by talking about Mitch McConnell and the fact that the Supreme Court will be hearing the Trump case about immunity after all.
I'm going to then go and talk, I think, in detail about some of the fallout from the IVF decision in Alabama across the country and the ways that it's shaping debates about reproductive rights and Christian nationalist approaches to it.
And then we'll finish with a critique of a piece that appeared at the National Review, the National Review supposedly as The kind of vanguard of the intellectual.
There's a piece there this week called The Case for a Theocentric.
And Dan and I have some thoughts, as you might have predicted, and we're going to provide some of those thoughts as we go.
All right, Dan, we learned this week that Mitch McConnell is going to step down from Senate leadership, and we don't know that he's retiring.
His term does not end until 2026, but it basically seems like McConnell's saying, I can now see that Trump will be the nominee and I don't want to be the Senate leader for another Trump term or another Trump candidacy even.
So I'm going to sort of bow out now or in a few months and go to a different role.
I just want to ask you real quick, Dan, before I go into some details of this, did this just garner utter sympathy for Mitch McConnell?
Did you lay awake last night thinking, you know, that poor man, his legacy is just going to be tarnished by this bully named Donald Trump?
And it's just really sad that McConnell has to go out this way.
And I just hope he's okay.
I mean, maybe you sent him a card or an email.
I don't know.
How did you feel about it?
You nailed it.
I mean, I had like a tear, a single tear just ran down for Mitch McConnell.
No, in some ways, like Mitch McConnell's like, if everybody else is like a fish in this discussion, he's like the whale, like the giant figure.
But we've talked about this how many times?
The GOP candidates who decide they're not going to run, they're going to retire from Congress, and then they become critics of Trump or they decry how divided things are.
Or John McCain moaning and groaning and crying about how his GOP had gone away after he's the one who sort of in many ways mainstreamed all of this with Sarah Palin.
We talked about this on the show when there were some reflections on his political career and life in politics.
I'm like, no, it's just more of the same thing like, oh, gee, McConnell, who like, cue it up.
We talk about it again.
The GOP taps into the populist, nationalist, radical voices and so forth, thinks it can harness it.
And then he couldn't, as it turns out.
So now he'll leave and play the victim and kind of cry about how, you know, things aren't going to happen.
And the Supreme Court that he built is like now helping Trump not go to trial, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So, yeah, no, no, no real tears in this quarter on this stuff.
So let's just say it clear, because some of you are like, hey, there's a lot of news this week, guys.
Why Mitch McConnell getting the first run here?
And here's what I would argue.
We learned this week that the Supreme Court will hear Trump's immunity case, and that will not be until April.
Now, many observers, many people who are legal experts, who are lawyers, Who know the ins and outs of how these things work, have basically said, this all but means that Trump will not stand trial before the election when it comes to the case about immunity, the case about J6 and all the crimes related to that.
So what that means, Dan, is that we are where we thought we were with Merrick Garland dragging his feet for years.
Finally appointing Jack Smith and then what?
We're running right up against the deadline and surprise surprise a Supreme Court that is stacked with Federalist Society picks has decided to take up the case even though the lower court that sent it to them had such an airtight case that many legal experts said there's no reason for the Supreme Court to even take this up because it's such a bad case.
It's a weak claim.
It's like, you know, Dan, if you make a weak claim, if I say, you know, I think that, you know, as a public school teacher, I should be able to carry a broadsword and threaten my students with it.
I can't believe I got fired.
I'm appealing to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court's like, we're not going to listen to that.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
Well, that's kind of where the Trump immunity claim is, even despite the fact that he used to be president and so on.
Well, it's going to say so.
Maybe I shouldn't do this.
Why don't I tell a Dan story?
Another Dan story.
I don't think I've told this story, but in fifth grade, I was out at recess.
I promise this is going somewhere.
And I kicked a ball and I went up on the roof of our school.
We had this one-story, flat-roof school.
You're supposed to go tell the janitors that there's a ball on the roof, but it takes forever.
So I climbed on the roof during recess to get the ball.
Nice.
And it's like a magic land up there.
There are balls and frisbees and I'm like throwing it.
And I was like a celebrity.
There are kids like down like, how far can you throw it?
You know, whatever.
So I do all this stuff.
So we go in.
So the net, I was fine.
Here's the problem.
Next recess, I decide to try to, you know, to capture the lightning again.
I get it back up on the roof.
But this, this, so like this is a terrible, I'm like 10 and I'm climbing on the roof of the school and like whatever.
So go back from recess and the teacher's like in the hallway.
She's like, Dan, please come here for a minute.
Need to talk to you.
And so I come out in the hallway.
She's like, is there anything you want to tell me?
I'm like, nope.
Like, you know, we all know you don't take the bait on that.
She's like, anything about maybe climbing on the roof at school?
And this was my response.
This is going to tell everybody everything you need to know about me.
I said, there's no rule that says you can't climb on the school roof at recess.
So, which is true.
There was no stated rule that said, so, did it work for me?
Did it convince them?
Was the teacher like, oh, you're right, there's not.
Let's just go have a seat.
No, I got sent to the principal's office and they called my parents, like, whatever.
That's Trump.
That's this argument that's like, well, it doesn't say that you don't have absolute immunity.
And you're like, that is the most ridiculous claim.
It's like the fifth grader being like, oh, it's fine that I was on the roof because it doesn't spell it out in the rules that you're not supposed to do that.
It's that, and this is what they decided that they need to hear.
And I guess while I'm on it, to be more serious, Is it possible that the Supreme Court is going to settle this, that they want to speak strongly?
Is it possible, maybe probable, that a majority is going to be really clear and say there is no... Yeah, fine, cool, they'll settle it once for all, but they could have done that.
And they don't have to move... I don't know why courts have to move at this glacial pace.
They don't.
Nothing else in society does.
The court sure moved faster in 2000 to stop the recount.
They've moved faster in other times.
It could go a lot quicker than this.
So, you know, there can be positive reasons for this.
There can be positive outcomes of it.
But as you say, everybody, including the Supreme Court justices, know that this basically guarantees that this is not going to go to trial before the election.
And it's a ridiculous case.
In my, you know, non-legal expert fifth grade roof logic argument.
So what does this have to do with Mitch McConnell?
Well, here, if y'all give me a few minutes, I'm going to take you through how Mitch McConnell engineered the scenario we are in now, such that Mitch McConnell is now retiring saying things, you know, I can, I can feel the pulse of my, my party and it's time for me to go.
And it's like, bro, you created this entire thing.
It's like you invited, here, I'll give you an example from your fifth grade.
It's like you invited everybody over for a party to your buddy's house whose parents were not in town.
You spread the word.
You got everyone to bring alcohol even though they're underage.
You looked around and you were like, well there's like 75 teenagers here getting crazy.
The cops are surely coming.
People's parents are gonna...
We're all going to get in trouble.
Time for me to go.
I'm going to just bounce because I don't like where this is going.
It's gotten a little out of hand.
Except the party's at your house.
Yeah.
That's Mitch McConnell.
He's like, oh yeah, nobody will notice it was me who called the party, except that it's his house that the cops are coming to.
So, let's start here.
This is a piece at Political Magazine just from the other day, and the person quoted here is Jeffrey Kaba's service from the Niskanen Center.
He says this, When McConnell first ran for political office, he presented himself as a Republican in the moderate model, a pragmatist whose interest in building a big tent party found expression in pro-civil rights, pro-labor, and even pro-choice stances.
But McConnell didn't merely shift rightward once he reached the Senate in 1985.
Man's been in the Senate since 1985, Dan.
He's been the leader for almost two decades.
His determination to put party and his own power over country undermined the Senate's bipartisanship and institutional effectiveness.
Which fed the partisanship and polarization that ultimately destroyed the GOP as a responsible, governing-minded party.
Okay, this part is really important to our story today.
He put power over bipartisanship and institutional effectiveness.
The goal was not for the Senate and the Congress as a whole to help people, to pass laws that were smart, to do things that would improve the lives of Americans, to balance the budget.
The goal was power.
Just stay right there with me.
That's your goal.
So Dan, you quote this so many times in the show, but when asked, what is your goal?
When it came to 2008, 9, 10, what did McConnell say?
The goal is to, excuse me, this was back in 2008.
Yeah, 2008-2010.
Sorry, I'm getting my, I'm a little worked up.
What's the statement?
The goal is to make sure Obama doesn't have a second term.
And you've outlined this so many times in the show that that is a preventionist party.
That is not a party that wants to help people flourish.
It's a preventionist no party.
It's the party of no.
Okay.
I'm going to do this quickly.
We all know then that Antonin Scalia dies in 2016.
Dan, I used to live in DC at this time.
I was in a coffee shop like three blocks from the Capitol.
I'm not kidding.
I was like in there writing an article and I'm like doing work and this guy, there's a TV and this guy's going up to order an espresso.
And he looks up and I look up at the same time and it's like CNN and it just says, Scalia dead.
And it's one of those moments you're like, oh my goodness, that's a big day here, especially for this town.
I'm in Washington, D.C.
Like I'm like three.
Like I could if I wanted to see the Supreme Court, if I stood at the right place on the street where this coffee shop is.
And this guy who's like a Republican operative puts his hand on his head, like his forehead, and he just he's like paying no attention to anything else.
He's like, no, no, no.
And he just runs from the cafe like he didn't order.
He didn't wait for his coffee.
And it was like it was D.C.
Nobody even looked up.
Everyone just knew this guy's got to go run and do something because Scalia's dead.
What does McConnell say?
We cannot appoint Merrick Garland in an election year, even though there are 264 days until the election.
Dan, it was preventionist.
It was, was that in his right to do according to the rules?
Yes.
But what was it about, friends?
Let's go back to our theme for today.
It was about putting power over institutional effectiveness, power over democratic flourishing.
He then does everything he can to stack the court.
So not only does he wait out the Merrick Garland nomination and make sure that Gorsuch gets put in, we then have the appointment of Kavanaugh.
But even further, we get to Coney Barrett, who replaces Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and she was put in like days before the election, like Americans had already voted, Dan.
So, once again, is that hypocritical?
Yes.
But does McConnell care?
No.
It's about power.
It is not about democratic flourishing.
It is not about faith in our institutions.
It's not about doing right by Americans and what they need.
Nope.
It's about power.
He oversees, is present for, is part of impeachment number one of Trump, does nothing to rally Republicans to vote for it.
But I don't even want to focus on the first impeachment.
I want to focus on the second impeachment.
In the second impeachment, he said things that were like Donald Trump is absolutely to blame for what happened here.
He talked about the ways that Trump was the one who instigated January 6th.
He stood on the floor of the Senate and said he is the guy that did this.
He even told reporters that he was glad that J6 or something like it had happened because it was finally going to be the end of Trump.
That the guy who McConnell couldn't stand had finally shot himself in the foot.
And guess what?
Did McConnell vote for impeachment the second time?
No.
Did he get his caucus to do that in the Senate?
No.
Mitch McConnell had a chance at that time to impeach Trump and for his party once and for all to say, you're not our guy anymore.
You're not our guy anymore.
They didn't.
So now where are we, Dan?
I just want to add, right?
That was also where the logic came out that they don't need to impeach him because this is an issue for the courts.
The courts will figure it out, right?
This is a legal issue.
And we know that, of course, what Trump's team has tried to argue, which is right at the heart of this, is that he needed to have been impeached for it to be an issue that the courts can take up.
So, like, just sort of another layer to the McConnell obstruction that you're talking about.
So, let me give you one more example of power overflourishing, and then I'm going to tell you why the impeachment and all of that leads us to where we are today, okay?
This is from Jim Manley, who was a legislative and public affairs consultant, worked on the Hill for a long time, worked in the Senate for like over two decades and so on and so on, was affiliated with Harry Reid.
He says, a few months after Obama was sworn in, in 2008, one of the first pieces of legislation that Harry Reid took to the Senate floor was, and this was left over from a Republican-led Congress, was to authorize a number of national parks.
New national parks.
Non-controversial.
Yet, Manley says, in an indication of things to come, it took us three weeks to pass the bill because Republicans, led by McConnell, tried to kill it with the filibuster.
As the new Republican leader, Senator McConnell made it very clear he intended to put raw political power over the good of the country and to do all he could, in his own words, to make Barack Obama a one-term president.
And the way that he did that was using the filibuster to grind the Senate to a halt.
Use of the filibuster exploded under McConnell and over the next eight years, all but the most routine pieces of legislation were subject to a Republican filibuster.
Dan, when McConnell talks about the Trumpian ethos of his party these days, just remember this is the guy that was like, we're not voting for the national parks because the Democrats are in power and we don't want them to be able to pass anything.
Doesn't matter what it is.
It doesn't matter how good, useful, wise, helpful, beneficial it is.
We are not doing it because it's them.
Politics is about raw power, nothing else.
That leads me back to the final point I'll make and then I'll throw it to you and we can move on, is that we are now at a place where McConnell said after the second impeachment, after J6, this is for the courts.
Where Trump is claiming, what's the claim?
What's the immunity claim?
He can't be held accountable unless he is, everybody say it with me, impeached.
So McConnell, this is for the courts, I'm not gonna vote to impeach him even though I'm standing here today telling you that he's the one that instigated J6.
Trump now claiming, you cannot, you cannot prosecute me unless it's impeachment and conviction by the Senate.
Now that claim will not be heard in our Supreme Court, the Supreme Court that was strategically curated by Mitch McConnell in an obstructionist, hypocritical, craven way, filled with Federalist Society appointees, blessed by Leonard Leo, the Christian nationalist par excellence.
That court will not hear the case about immunity until April, meaning That January 6, the very event we're talking about in terms of second impeachment, in terms of the breakup of the peaceful transfer of power, will not be legislated until Trump is perhaps president again.
Dan, I'll just say it.
We say it a lot on this show.
But if you want to trace how democracy from within erodes, it's men like Mitch McConnell who kick out a leg here, a brace there, a structure over there, and then they think they can hold it together when they need to, when all of a sudden they've unleashed Trump on the party and this 82-year-old man who's been in the Senate since John Calhoun was there Is now like, I'm tired and I need to go away.
And the rest of you can live through the potential hellscape of Trump 2.0 using the Insurrection Act on U.S.
citizens, implementing Project 2025, putting 50,000 federal workers on a schedule that they can be fired whenever he feels like it, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Good riddance, Mitch McConnell.
You have done us no favors.
Just a quick point, you bring up the notion of the national parks legislation.
Fast forward to now, and you had bipartisan legislation that was tanked by whom?
By Trump saying not to support it, so they undercut their own.
They got the playbook from Mitch McConnell.
Well, and this was support for Ukraine.
Why are we not supporting Ukraine?
Yeah, exactly.
So recent bipartisan legislation, what does it mean?
Another thing I've said a lot is that Trump was a symptom, not the cause of this.
The patterns were already there.
They were set by people like, among others, Mitch McConnell.
But, okay, we'll go to break.
Just let me say this real quick.
McConnell thinks of himself as, like, the rational architect.
I'm gonna pull the strings.
I'm the puppet master.
But you only have so much energy.
You only have so much drive as that kind of persona.
You know who just never stops?
Who never ever gives up until they're dead?
A malignant narcissist.
Because a malignant narcissist doesn't wake up one day and is like, oh, let's, you know, let's do something that makes sense.
The malignant narcissist wakes up and says, what do I get?
How am I going to get it?
Who am I going to go through for me?
And that person will always outlast you.
Until they're gone.
So Mitch McConnell is like, yeah, I'm done.
I can't believe what I'm seeing in my party.
And it's like, dude, you did everything to create this.
Like when we get to April and the Supreme Court hears this, when we get to November and there's an election, Don't forget everybody who it was that really helped to shape the scenario we are in right now.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back, talk about IVF, reproductive rights, and natural law.
Just a cheery Friday.
This is what you want on a Friday afternoon, Dan.
It's just, I'm going to get a popsicle and just, you know what I'm saying?
Flag down the ice cream man.
Just, you know, have a good time.
All right.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, tell me more about Mike Johnson, natural law, IVF, and the rest.
Yeah, so really just living in Alabama and IVF and natural law, and we'll come back to that with some other things as well.
So I want to start with sort of an opening question.
I don't know if, or a reflection, I don't know if this is an experience everybody has had.
It's an experience I've had, and I want people to think about it.
And the question is, and you can think about it too, have you ever had like a moment where you realized that you didn't believe something that you thought you believed?
Like you sincerely thought it was a value you held, Something you believe, and then you're confronted with something, or some event takes place, and you realize that you don't.
It's like you didn't believe what you thought you believed.
For me, one example, when I was a pastor, I can remember the moment in a conversation with somebody where I realized, I absolutely do not believe that God created two humans named Adam and Eve.
I just really don't believe that.
That's a myth.
It does various kinds of theological work.
It's not a real thing.
That didn't happen.
And I remember being sort of shocked at myself.
It's like there was another me in there being like, what are you talking about?
Of course you believe that.
And like, I realized that I didn't.
I want everybody to hold on to that thought because this is like one of the things that I think we see on display this week, or we should see on display this week.
And I think a lot of what we see is people trying to evade that experience.
So just to remind everybody where we are, the Alabama Supreme Court made a ruling that fertilized frozen embryos for IVF counted as children because of an amendment in the Alabama Constitution That says, quote, it's the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the right of unborn children, including the right to life.
And so embryos for unborn children, they said that they were covered under a law because of that constitutional piece.
And IVF clinics in Alabama stopped services to put things on hold.
And this has thrown everybody, mostly on the right, I mean, people on the left and Democrats and And others who are not anti-abortion activists, you know, oppose this, obviously.
But people on the right have sort of, it's like kicking a hornet's nest this week to watch everything that's going on.
So you have had GOP figures and conservatives trying to find ways to preserve IVF because it's hugely popular.
Some of them say that they support it.
Can't get into their hearts and minds and know if they actually support it or if it's just that they know that it's a potential political killer to come out being opposed to this.
But they have tried to ensure that they can preserve IVF and the insistence that life starts at conception.
That somehow or another, as soon as you have a fertilized ovum, you have a human person.
So you've had a flurry of activity about this, including in Alabama.
They've got legislation going forward to try to do an end around with this.
You've had proposals for federal legislation about this and so forth.
So where are we at with that?
So here I'm going to put my, I'm going to be a little philosophical today.
Here's what I would say.
I would say, number one, if you believe that life or personhood, is maybe even the better term here, begins at conception, if you really believe that, And if you understand what IVF entails, which is, among other things, you have fertilized embryos that are not implanted into a uterus.
Okay?
If you understand those two things...
And you really believe that life begins at conception.
IVF is morally or religiously unethical.
It's really straightforward.
And that's people that act shocked about this.
I remember talking about this in like ethics classes as an undergrad.
You can read any evangelical ethics textbook that you want and there will be a section on reproductive technologies and a lot of them are very critical of IVF and so forth.
So here's the thing.
If you say or you claim Life begins at conception, and then you hear that this rules out IVF, and your first reaction would be like, well, that can't be right.
Like, IVF's really important.
Guess what?
You don't actually believe That life begins at conception.
You don't.
You might have believed until that moment that you believed it, but that feeling of disconnect is where you're sort of called upon to sort of think and be like, oh my gosh, I need to rethink this.
This leads to consequences that I didn't plan on.
This is your moment of reassessment.
And that's what we're not seeing.
I bring this up, I teach an ethics class from time to time.
I know you teach similar courses or it comes up in other things.
This is the kind of thing you do, you sort of throw out a claim, Let's see where people are at.
Whether you say, okay, and then you come up with a hypothetical, well, what if it meant this?
Or what if it led to this?
And somebody's like, well, that seems kind of crazy or absurd or doesn't make sense.
And you're like, okay, well, maybe we need to reassess our position then.
We need to add some nuance.
That's where we're at.
That's where we should be.
This is the experience that people should be having.
And it's the experience for the most part they're not.
So I want to just run through what we've seen and what we could see.
You've had weird arguments, selective views, just sort of weak theology of all these Christians who are sort of in favor of IVF but want to still square this circle about, you know, life beginning at conception.
You've had weird natural law arguments.
You had Lindsey Graham, maybe not the best theologian among us, saying something about, well, nobody's ever been born in a freezer.
Like, some sort of piece of logic there that, oh, well, if you're not born into, like, I don't know, if you're not in a uterus, it doesn't count, but it's still life, and so forth.
This is what we call natural law, the notion that there's something unnatural about this, and so there we go.
You've had these inconsistent kinds of things.
The Catholic Church, by contrast, has always been really consistent on this.
I don't agree with what's called natural law theory.
I don't agree with the anti-abortion arguments.
I don't agree with Catholic moral teaching on this.
But the Catholics have always said the purpose of sex is procreation.
That's the only valid purpose.
It's its natural purpose.
Anything that interferes with the natural outcome of that is morally impermissible.
That's quote-unquote artificial birth control.
Some are even opposed to like I disagree with all of that, but at least it's consistent.
You've got all these people on the religious right now trying to find ways to bring these things together, and they just don't.
them out of a body and fertilizing it in an artificial context is itself unnatural and therefore immoral.
I disagree with all of that, but at least it's consistent.
You've got all these people on the religious right now trying to find ways to bring these things together, and they just don't.
That's been one response.
Another one is just the political bills coming due for conservative politicians.
You have politicians who for decades have used the language of life begins at conception, and I think a lot of them have used it because it mobilizes, it fires people up.
When Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, you could rally people behind that, and you could do it with the safety that Abortion was never going to go away.
You could say that all the time, and you were never going to have to deal with the consequences of that.
You were never going to have to deal with the fact that, again, you were courting radical elements of the anti-abortion movement.
Well, guess what?
Roe v. Wade went away.
We are seeing the logical outcomes of this, and now you're seeing politicians having to pay the bills.
For these things that they've said and done, and we're not seeing where that is.
And we're starting to see a potential fracturing of some of those coalitions of radical anti-abortion activists and politicians who need to stay in office, who've said this for years, but now realize that they've already got a problem with suburban women.
They already have a problem with African-American women.
They already have problems because of overturning Roe v. Wade.
And now it's just adding to that.
You've also had just what I would call a kind of morality of convenience.
This was something that I found sort of interesting this week.
So one of the arguments is that this wouldn't invalidate IVF, you just can't destroy the embryos that are fertilized.
So they would have to be stored indefinitely.
Well, here's what I came across.
I didn't know this till this week.
So apparently in Louisiana, this is already law, has been since the 80s.
And so there was this interview with Dr. John Stormont, a reproductive endocrinologist in Lafayette, Louisiana.
And basically, he was like, this really hasn't been that much of a problem for us.
You know why, Brad?
Because what they do, because in Louisiana, you are not allowed to destroy fertilized embryos.
They send them to other states to be stored where they can be destroyed.
So they're like, our hands are morally clean.
We believe that it's life.
Honest, we do.
But if you send it to, like, I don't know, Arkansas or somewhere and they destroy the embryos, that's OK.
That's what you find.
You also, I think, see Brought into clear view the radical aims of the anti-abortion movement, that this is not in any way moderate.
This is not about women's health.
This is not about anything positive.
This is just sort of very, very destructive.
So you see all these things.
What you don't see, or what I haven't seen much of, is a lot of people saying, wow, turns out it's really complicated to talk about when life might start.
And we could have real discussions about how that all works.
We're going to have to rethink this rhetoric we've had.
Instead, what we see are impossible, you know, impossible to reconcile political movements with bad theology and bad morality.
We see the actual aims of the anti-abortion movement laid bare.
All of that is what we see this week, together with lots of really, really, really sort of ham-fisted attempts to argue about what is natural and what's not.
I could just rant and rave all day.
I will not.
I will throw it over to you for your thoughts.
All right.
So, I think what I want to talk about is, as always, you know, you are really the one on the show who's inclined and very strong with social theory and I think mixing that with kind of more philosophical approaches to things.
I'm always inclined toward history.
So, one of the things I wanted to make sure we got on the air today was this.
One of the reasons, Dan, for the incoherency you're pointing to.
Is that in the 1960s, abortion was not the issue for conservative Protestants that it is today.
Now, don't get me wrong.
There were conservative Protestants who were opposed to abortion.
This is not a like unilateral, they were all for it and didn't even think about it.
It's not.
Gil Frank, who's a great scholar, has done good work on this, pointing out that there were lively debates about abortion.
In the 1940s, 50s, 60s, among conservative Protestants, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists.
Great.
OK, that's great.
Here's the thing, though.
Dan, you have pointed out on this show that prominent theologians like Norman Geisler, in the early editions of their Christian Ethics books, saw abortion as an issue that was permissible in cases such as incest, right, or rape.
The Southern Baptist Convention, so many various conservative denominational institutions articulated a theology that said abortion should be permitted in some cases.
What that means, okay, so you're like, there's a lot of history there, more to come on that.
What that means is that life does not begin at conception if, right, you're allowed to do some sort of abortion at 10 weeks, 18 weeks, whatever, and if it's because you're doing it as a result of, you know, incest or rape, etc.
What you're saying is, is abortion is not ideal and we don't like it and we think it should not happen in any case, any time, but it doesn't mean that it's always not okay because life doesn't begin again.
What happens over time is exactly what you said.
In order to mobilize Protestants to vote, you get this idea that life begins at conception.
Now, as you pointed out, Dan, This is a long-held Catholic idea.
Catholic moral teaching, Catholic sexual ethics for since, I'll just call it 1869.
Has basically held that abortion is wrong in all cases and that life begins at conception, at the fertilization of the egg.
Now, what Megan Goodwin has argued, shout out to Dr. Megan Goodwin, Abusing Religion is her book, and she argues that what you've seen since the development of the religious right in the early 70s And you're like, what does that mean?
What it means is that in order to find ways to articulate their position on abortion and reproductive rights, Protestants who are like Baptists and Methodists and non-denominational have had to take up the line
So you never would get an Alabama Supreme Court led by Tom Parker, who is a Seven Mountains Mandate Protestant, saying that an embryo is a person without the Catholicization of our kind of public square when it comes to sexual ethics.
Now, the consequences of that are that the Catholics Right?
Who have thought this through and have positions that you and I thoroughly disagree with, Dan, have a position that's like, yep, exactly right.
We've been saying it for years.
We don't think that you should use contraception in any way.
We actually think if you use natural family planning and try to use the calendar to have sex at a time of the month where you won't become pregnant, you're still doing things God doesn't want.
You should just have sex for reproduction.
Every time you have sex, it should be reproductive.
And all of you listening should be able to kind of glean why there's such a heteronormative theology there.
You can't get reproduction if you are in anything but a heterosexual setting.
So sex is for reproduction, you shouldn't try to stop it in any way, and therefore birth control, therefore IUDs, therefore anything of that ilk is not okay, and an embryo is a person.
What we are going to see, now that Roe has fallen and Alabama has come to this, are Protestants scrambling to find a coherent position and looking more and more to those Catholic conservative social teachings on sex.
We're going to have the further Catholicization Of the discussions about reproduction, about gender.
And I'm not lumping all Catholics in there.
There's some of you listening, they're like, I'm a progressive Catholic, I'm a liberal Catholic, I don't agree with my church on this, and I hear you and I see you.
I'm not lumping you all together.
I'm not trying to say that this is uniform.
But the Catholic Church has had this teaching and its proponents in the public square have argued that, yes, contraception And life begins at conception are our positions.
Now, what does that mean, Dan?
And I'll stop here.
It means that when people are like, hey, a Trump 2.0 presidency means they're going to come for your birth control.
They're going to come for your IUD.
It means they're going to come, right, for anything along those lines.
They're going to go for a national abortion ban.
The answer is yes, because you're seeing the resources they have to push forward in a post-Roe world, an even more hardcore version of this.
They need it to mobilize.
They need it for another goal.
You can't just be like, hey guys, we did it.
Roe's gone.
No more Roe v. Wade.
Let's get ice cream.
Victory party.
Go take a nap.
When we wake up, what's next?
I don't know.
Should we take a pickleball?
I don't.
Well, let's get a new hobby.
They're not going to do that.
They need to scare you and push you further to get your vote.
So they're going to keep at it.
And the way to keep at it is embryos are people.
No more birth control.
Sex should be between a man and a woman.
And if it isn't, it's illicit.
It's pornographic.
It's unnatural to go back to your word, Dan.
And so we should persecute that.
We should prosecute that.
Maybe let's go back to sodomy laws.
Maybe let's call any non-heterosexual folks holding hands in public.
Just a quick point about that historical piece is that all of this, these appeals to nature and what is natural and the notion that what is natural tells us something about what God wants and so forth.
That's part of what we mean when people talk about natural law theory, if that is like a term that people are like, I don't know what that is.
That's always been really central to Catholicism.
What's sort of weird about all this historically is Protestantism actually rejected that.
It was really, really critical.
You go back and look at the Reformers and Reformation theology, a distinctive feature of the Protestant intellectual traditions was a rejection of natural law theology.
And that's part of one of the reasons why the positions that are coming out are so incoherent.
They're not good at this, number one.
And number two, when you try to take a piece of a system, and again, I'm with you, I don't buy into natural law theory at all.
I don't buy into Catholic social teaching on lots of stuff.
Um, for that reason, but it's, it's systematic.
It hinges together.
The pieces are all mutually reinforcing.
It's this kind of complex thought system.
It's really hard to pull a piece from that and be like, we're just going to use this.
We're going to pull this little piece out because you pull it out of all of its context.
And that's what we see, which is why it makes no sense to have like a Lindsey Graham being like, well, people aren't born in a freezer.
So that somehow like changes it.
It's, it's part of why.
The Protestants who are talking about this, the evangelicals, are not putting forward positions that they don't pass any smell test of like, that doesn't even make sense.
And that's part of why, to give more of that sort of historical background, this is a line of reasoning they had rejected until, as you note, as Goodwin notes, you've had this appropriation of Catholic moral teaching in a way that doesn't make sense.
Last point I'll just make is I think this was also at the basis of the Hobby Lobby opposition to having to provide contraception.
That always struck me as an interesting position because that would not have been a traditionally Protestant moral opposition to providing what?
To providing birth control.
Not to providing abortion access, not to funding abortions, but to providing birth control.
That was, I think, a sort of sign of things to come of exactly the direction that you're talking about.
Let's take a break.
We're going to come back.
We're going to talk about a piece at the National Review called The Case for a Theocentric Right, but it's going to give us a chance, I think, to talk one more time about natural theology.
Because what I want to do, Dan, is I want everybody to walk away from today knowing why natural theology can be so, so dangerous and so, so hurtful to people.
So, we'll be back in a second and we'll unpack that.
All right, Dan, before we start tearing apart this piece at the National Review, let's just hover on natural theology for a minute, and let's just make sure everybody gets it.
Like, this is the end of class.
I want to make sure everyone, like, understands what we did today.
Here's what natural theology says.
It says that we as human beings can glean, using our kind of reason and our rationality and what God has shown us, about the way that God created the world in a natural way.
Now we can also understand that design that God has for the world in terms of its prelapsarian state.
That means before original sin came in.
So natural theology is basically like, hey humans, let's live the way God designed us to live.
Let's live according to how this thing was designed.
Like I have a two and a half year old, Dan, who is really into cleaning.
This is all going to sound very strange.
Just give me 30 seconds.
So like for Christmas, she wanted cleaning tools.
So we gave her this little set of cleaning tools, which I know everyone listening is like the least feminist thing you could ever do, dickhead.
And I know that, but she wanted, I'm not trying to teach my little girl to clean.
I don't, that's not my intention, but she just would not stop talking about cleaning tools.
So we gave her like a broom and a mop.
Okay.
That lasted like six months.
And now she's really into using that mop as like a sword to try to fight me.
Okay.
And I have to explain, which is all right.
Some of you are now cheering.
You're like, good.
The little girl wants to get swords.
And now we're talking.
I have to try to tell her like, hey, I don't think the mop we got you was designed as a sword.
Let's not use it for that.
That's what natural theologians want to tell you.
They want to say that I know how things were designed.
Let's use them how God designed them.
Now, here's why that can be so dangerous and you jump in here.
They are the ones that are going to decide what's natural.
They're the ones that are going to decide the design, and then they're going to tell you how to live into that.
So if you don't live into the design they have determined comes from God, then you're in trouble because you're not doing the design plan that God made you for, and you're out of bounds.
I mean, give us an example.
Tell me what you want to expand on that, and then we'll go to the National Review.
Yeah, so everything you said is right.
And there's another piece of natural law arguments, or what are called teleological arguments, or arguments from design.
And the fancy philosophical way is that they're also what are called a posteriori arguments, that if you look at what nature is, and its patterns and rhythms and so forth, it tells us stuff about God.
So you've always had this tension, in my view, between this kind of dogmatic speculation of what that nature was before the fall, quote unquote, and arguments that it still is in place and so forth.
And here's how I'm always interested in how we use theology.
And so this kind of goes to your point of the way that it actually works is you'll encounter people, and I'm in this kind of like, I don't know, taking on evangelical apologetic mode.
People have been listening to, it's in the code, you know this.
is one of the ways that it happens, and this is going to come through, I think, in the piece that we're going to talk about, is to say, hey, we Christians, we're the reasonable ones.
We're not saying anything crazy.
We're not trying to just force weird speculative metaphysics on you.
We're just looking at the way the world is.
If you just look at the natural way of things, if you look at how things work, Things like God and creation and redemption, those are all just natural outcomes of that.
They make sense.
It's thoroughly reasonable.
It's thoroughly rational.
And you'll get this kind of apologetic move that's often made to try to make those of us who don't accept those, we're the ones who are sort of crazy or putting forward our own agenda because we're arguing for what's— Or we're deviant, we're demented, we're destroying ourselves with unnatural body deformations.
Yeah, exactly.
It's that kind of thing, or unnatural desires of a man for another man, or whatever.
So it puts itself forward as this model of reasonableness.
So I'll give a little history.
This time it's sort of like, well, where does that come from?
In the Christian tradition, it really comes from Aristotle.
And Aristotle, just for people who might not off the top of their head remember Aristotle's time, that's the 300s BCE.
So like 23, 2400 years ago.
And Aristotle did.
He looked at nature and he developed a philosophy that in his time was really kind of amazing because he was like, let's take a look at the world around us and draw philosophical lessons from that.
Cool.
A lot of stuff happens.
Things go on.
Eventually, that way of doing things comes into the Christian tradition, primarily through Thomas Aquinas.
Thomas Aquinas is the 1200s CE, and so he picks that up.
So, if you want to know what—okay, so we're talking about natural law.
Brad, you're saying they get to decide what nature is.
Well, where are they deciding that?
They're deciding that from, like, the 1200s.
Right?
And from before that, a view that was already over a millennium old, right?
So here's how it actually works.
They'll tell you, we're just looking at nature.
We're just looking at how things are.
We're just looking at the nature of things.
But what they actually do is they start it with a worldview that is, you know, 800 years ago at its most recent.
You sort of canonize that.
You lock that in.
You make that your official theology.
And then what you do is you use that to judge any other claims that are made about nature now.
And so when they appeal to nature and say, hey, we're just looking at nature.
We're just talking about what is natural.
Here's the trick.
Humans have still been looking at nature for the last 800 years.
We've gotten really good at it.
We've investigated a lot, and there is no aspect of nature that really fits an Aristotelian worldview the way that Aristotle thought nature worked, or the way that Aquinas did.
Whether you're talking about cosmology, or the earth sciences, or geology, or you're talking about biology, or chemistry, or physics, or psychology, or physiology, or anything else, it's different.
So here's what'll happen.
You'll get the The quote-unquote natural law theorist who says, you know what?
I think same-sex marriage is bad because same-sex attraction is unnatural.
And so they're talking to Brad.
Brad says, wait, hold on.
We've actually been looking at the animal kingdom a lot, and it turns out that humans aren't the only ones that experience same-sex attraction.
And it turns out that there are animals that do have sexual relations that can't physically procreate.
So it's not unnatural.
And there's a sizable chunk of the human population that experiences this.
Doesn't make them weird or anything.
So, I mean, like, if you're talking about nature, like, it looks like, you know, some stuff about same-sex attraction and things like that.
It's...
Seems like it's natural.
So like, if you're going to talk about natural law, maybe we need to revise what we think.
And then they'll be like, nope, because now we got our Trump card that we're talking about what nature should have been before humans screwed it up and departed from God and so forth.
And it turns out that the natural law theorists, nature's kind of, it's a lie.
They say that they're drawing on nature.
They're not.
They're drawing on their conception of what counts as nature.
And then in my view, there's this kind of bait and switch Where they appeal to nature so they can try to tell you that it's not really them doing it, but they're the ones who defined what that was in the first place.
That's a lot, but that's my big takeaway of why I'm just not a natural law theorist.
Well, but it's, and here's why it's dangerous, is because you have a group of people that are going to decide what is natural, and then they're going to tell you, if you're queer, they're going to tell you that if you use birth control, they're going to tell you, and you all think I'm lying, but I'm not, that if you want to be in an interracial marriage, I mean, go back to the early 20th century.
What are the arguments against interracial relationships and marriage and reproduction?
Not natural.
People are drawn to their natural kind, right?
And you just, yep, it's eugenics and racism and everything else.
And where do you think the eugenics get, like, y'all read my book, James Dobson.
Who did James Dobson learn from?
Who was his mentor?
A eugenicist named Paul Popenoe.
Like, shout out Audrey Claire Farley and Sarah Mosner, who've done so much work here.
Where did James Dobson get his idea of the natural nuclear family?
One man, one woman, a patriarchal dad.
He got it from a eugenicist.
Do you see why this is so dangerous, potentially?
I just want to say two things if you want to talk to me, Natural Law Theorists, about same-sex attraction.
Have you seen Magic Mike, the first one?
I mean, come on, Dan.
Hey, that's number one.
All right?
I don't think I have to say more.
Number two, I don't know even know why I said that.
It's Friday.
I'm so tired.
All my credibility is gone as an intellectual, but shout out Magic Mike, number one.
Okay.
Number two, you want to see unnatural, Google Thomas Aquinas' haircut.
That's unnatural.
That's dogmatics in the front, depravity in the back.
Okay?
That's what I call that haircut.
So stick that in your a posteriori.
All right.
I'm on a roll.
It's over.
I apologize to everyone.
It's over.
It's over.
We're going to go back to programming.
Natural theology is really dangerous for those reasons, but when you have people in power, whether it's in a church setting or a government setting, and they can appeal to nature and then tell you that you're unnatural, That starts to sound like a real wide avenue for telling queer people, trans people, interracial marriage folks, so on and so on and so on.
You're out of line and we're going to punish you for it.
Now let's go to the case for a theocentric right, National Review.
We've got like five minutes because you and I got on a roll.
But there's a lot of natural theology in this piece, Dan.
So this is the case for a godly conservatism at the National Review.
He lists your point.
He says that transcendence and natural law are the foundations for basically society.
You have to have those two things.
It's a direct quote.
Yep.
Like he says, conservatism is based on a natural order of things and the natural order of things comes from God.
Therefore, we should, I mean, everything we just talked about, it's alive and well on the National Review website today, this week.
Here's what he says.
If our existence is due to divine forces outside of ourselves, autonomy is not humanity's greatest political need.
You know what he just said?
You know what word he did not use?
He used autonomy.
You know what word he didn't use there?
It was a word choice.
He went to the thesaurus.
Synonym for freedom.
Anyone?
Hey, anyone?
Synonym for freedom.
Autonomy.
Okay, yeah, I'm going to use that one.
So he could have said, freedom is not humanity's political need.
Man, this is sounding very anti-American to me, Dan.
Very un-American.
Because I thought freedom was what we're here for.
I'd go back to it.
Instead, here's what you need.
Here's what he's telling you.
I'm so worked up now.
You're all going to have to bear with me.
You don't need freedom.
You don't need to be able to choose how your body operates, what you can do and do not with your body.
You know what you need?
And I'm quoting now, self-ordering and political ordering around the divine.
You know what you need, person?
More than freedom and self, uh, uh, uh, choosing of who you are and what you'll do?
You need political ording around the divine.
Man.
Dan, that sounds like medieval Europe.
That sounds like a monarchic king sent from God telling you that you don't need freedom, you need me to tell you what you need.
I'm also just going to point out, right, talk about the word choice, that he describes as a theocentric vision instead of a theocratic vision.
That's what it is.
The logic of this is theocracy, explicitly put forward as the conservative vision for America.
All right, give me one more quote from the piece and I'll let you run with a couple of yours.
He says, a little later, Christianity provides the social order with someone like the non-Christian political theorist Vaclav Havel longed for but could not find, a cosmic anchoring, the notion of an ultimate foundation that orders existence and that political orders cannot supply on their own.
This is where they try to make it sound like they're the reasonable ones.
They're the natural ones.
And they want you to feel like, yeah, that makes sense.
You need you need a foundation.
And I guess you just it's got to be an ultimate one and a transcendent one.
Otherwise.
And here's what I'm saying.
Nope.
We can be people who live in a community who have said we have a constitution based on this.
Hey, everybody, we're going to share power.
I'm standing up on a crate now looking at people standing in my village.
There's 100 of us.
And I'm saying, hey, everybody, Let's agree to share power.
Let's agree that our principles will be freedom and liberty and equality.
And if you have beliefs about the divine or the transcendent, you're free to do that.
Go ahead and go for it.
But we don't all agree on that.
So why don't you, all of us, share power?
We'll vote on who gets the rule.
We'll try to persuade each other to do things the best way.
And that's how it'll go.
We have a provisional Government and values that are doing our best for flourishing.
Because you know why?
You know why?
Here's one of the reasons from the American Revolution.
The wars in Europe convinced us that when you try to give a cosmic anchor to your politics, it just becomes my cosmic anchor versus yours and millions of people die.
Go look up the wars of religion if you need a Wikipedia page to read tonight before bed.
And I'm going to give you one more thing, Dan, because I'm a weird little guy and we all know that.
Do you know who Václav Havel is, y'all?
Y'all done this?
Do y'all know Václav Havel?
This is a dude.
Y'all should know Václav Havel, because this is a dude.
Václav Havel was an anti-communist agitator in Czechoslovakia.
This is a man who did everything he could to get rid of a totalitarian regime as a non-Christian.
As a non-believer, he fought for what?
Freedom.
He fought for autonomy, for independence.
You know what happened to Václav Havel?
He helped get rid of the communists from Czechoslovakia and became president of Czechoslovakia.
And you know what?
Guess what happened?
Czechoslovakia went away because the people of Slovakia and the people of the Czech Republic were like, we should really govern ourselves.
And everyone did.
Then he became president of the Czech Republic for another 10 years.
Happened to be an amazing playwright.
Happened to be the hero of Czech democratic freedom.
Bro, you wrote Václav Havel in this piece thinking it was a flex.
This is not a flex, homie.
You gotta do your reading.
This is an atheist who led people to democratic freedom.
Go read the novels of Ivan Klima.
Have y'all not done this?
Go read about The Velvet Revolution.
It's amazing things.
I don't know what y'all are doing watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey.
Just read this stuff before bed.
It'll change your life.
Alright, I'm done, Dan.
It's all falling apart.
I'm just saying, don't fucking flex with Václav Havel unless you know about Václav Havel, because you just did everything to undermine your argument trying to sound like a smart dude who's mentioning some political theorist you know nothing about.
Yeah, so just real quick, I know we got to wrap this up.
Today I was, because this is what we do, you read these novels before bed.
I had like half an hour before class, so I read some Hume, some David Hume.
It's what you do, a little 18th century philosophy.
Why?
I was reminded, you know, obviously he's some of the most trenchant critiques of natural law theology ever put forward are by him.
But one of the things that Hume is really famous for, not in natural law, but in other things, is saying that is does not imply ought.
In other words, one of the things he said is, we can describe what reality is like, but that doesn't necessarily tell us what it's supposed to be like.
It's why it's hard to figure out what we should do in ethics and things like that.
Why do I highlight that?
I'm going to stick with that same paragraph when it talks about him longing for, quote, cosmic anchoring.
Let's imagine it's true that everybody wants cosmic anchoring.
They wish they had an absolute, sure foundation that could never be put into question.
Let's imagine that that's true.
I don't know that it is.
I don't think it has to be.
But let's imagine that it is.
Does that mean that that anchoring exists?
No.
Does it mean or does it get you to like everything that the Christian theists want you to believe about God and what God's order is?
No, it doesn't take you there.
It's just, it's another example that I think often gets smuggled in to natural law theories like this.
And again, this piece is positioned as some natural law reasoning of a kind of wish fulfillment, right?
We all want cosmic anchoring assurance, so there must be some cosmic being that can provide that for us and put a political order in place and make sure that we all do what we're supposed to do and take all that responsibility away from us.
It just doesn't follow.
It doesn't work.
There's no reason to.
And I bring it up because when you run into somebody who wants to say, well, hey, we all want assurance, Probably true.
Therefore, what follows from that?
Well, knowing what follows from that, maybe what follows from that is we have to learn how to make our way in a world where we just don't have that kind of assurance, and we've got to do the best we can.
So we come up with political systems where we say, you know what?
Let's try to counterbalance each other so that nothing gets too crazy and we can all be okay.
Maybe that's what we do.
The cost of assurance is violence because anybody who doesn't fall in line with the assured vision you have is going to get violently persecuted because they won't agree with you.
The cost of uncertainty is vulnerability, but it might just be what we have to live with as humans.
I don't know.
All right, Dan.
I'm still thinking about Vaclav Havel, but what's your reason for hope?
So I keep doing this and I'm really not just trying to revel in like chaos, but all watching what's going on with the GOP and the right about all this IVF stuff and everything.
If I'm looking for like, I am not happy that people are losing access to IVF in places like Alabama.
I think that that's bad.
But if there's a silver lining to this, if there's value to this, I just continue to be into the unmasking of what is really going on, of the agendas that are really at work, of the consequences that will really follow from the policies and the laws and the positions that people on the right and on the religious right and the Christian nationalists want.
So I don't know if hope's the right word, but I find maybe, I don't know, some solace Yeah, hope in the unmasking of this.
This is what it really is.
This is where it's heading.
It's not conspiracism to say that these are the kinds of things that people want.
So that's sort of where I'm living as I try to maybe find positive things in the chaos this week.
So mine is a little bit sentimental, but I just want to say my reason for hope is our community here with this podcast.
Our Discord community has really turned into a great place where people ask questions.
They provide each other answers.
They build community.
They share their experiences in high control religions or other places.
They share resources.
I don't know.
When I wake up in the morning, Um, it's one of the places that I'm, I'm excited to visit, you know, when I get online just to sort of see what people are saying, what they're asking, what they're doing.
It's really cool.
And I just want to say thanks to everybody who's part of that.
If you're a subscriber and you haven't joined us in there, get in.
And if you haven't subscribed yet, um, you know, it's just, it's just a really neat place, uh, for people to kind of talk, to discuss, to share resources, to encourage each other.
There's a lot of memes going back and forth, uh, all that kind of stuff.
So.
All right, y'all.
As always, we'll be back next week.
I have some great interviews lined up.
I interviewed Bryn Tannehill.
I interviewed David Nywert.
We have some special episodes coming out.
Our premium episode will come out in the next few days.
Dan and I answered a ton of AMA questions.
We talked about worldviews and why Theo bros try to convince people that everybody's religious, even when you're not.
It was a whole deal.
Other than that, we'll just say thanks for being here.
You can subscribe in the show notes, a couple bucks a month and support us and get access to all of the premium content and the 500 episode archive and so on and so on.
Thanks to y'all.
Have a good weekend.
We'll catch you next time.
Thanks, Brad.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
As a reminder, you can help us keep doing this pro-democracy work by becoming a paid subscriber.
Get ad-free listening, access to the 500-episode archive, a premium episode, and more.
