Bonus Episode: Empathy, Sin, and Al Mohler Comes for SWAJ
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Music playing.
Welcome to our bonus episode, Straight White American Jesus.
Great to be with you today.
This is going to be fun.
We're going to have fun today.
It's going to be enjoyable, Dan.
Who are you?
What are you doing?
You sound like the parent on the car trip.
We're going to have a good time.
Everybody clear on that?
We're going to have fun.
I'm fine.
I'm Dan Miller.
I'm a professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I'm glad to be here and have some fun, Brad.
You and I crossed paths or kind of or strange whatever at Oxford.
And after you left, there was a guy who arrived named Tim.
And Tim, if you're listening, shout out to Tim.
But Tim was a great friend of mine and he's one of the funniest people I've ever met.
But he would always do this.
We'd have like a grad school event or we'd have like our friend group together and something would go wrong.
Some drama or somebody broke up with someone and there'd be people upset with each other.
I don't know.
You know, somebody gets drunk and acts like a jerk and whatever.
And Tim would always do this imitation of the dad, and he'd be like, he would just look at everyone and be like, everybody's having a good time.
Everybody's having a good time.
And he would just sort of impose that on us, and it was hilarious.
Threaten to turn the car around, like they've ever come up.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. All right.
So, special episode.
We want to do two things today.
One of them is to talk about Al Mohler and his
Teaching that empathy is bad.
This, of course, goes with the three episodes I did on the sin of empathy.
So I wanted to bring Dan into this because Dan has a particular history with Al Mohler.
And some of you don't know this, but Al Mohler attacked our show in 2020 or 21. I have to look.
Let me look this up.
He was unhappy with us about some things.
It was March of 2021, Dan.
We're kind of at the anniversary, just past the anniversary.
Yeah. Yeah, this is our molar month.
Yeah. And he was actually upset with me because I had said some things about purity culture in the New York Times, and he didn't like it.
So we did a response episode.
I can try to put that in the show notes.
But anyway, so time to revisit our friend Al Mohler.
Who is Al Mohler, Dan?
Some people are listening.
They're like, who is this guy?
Why are you talking about him?
And as usual, we're going to do something serious.
We're going to tear down Al Mohler.
We're going to destroy his understanding of empathy.
We are going to completely obliterate his weak theological reasoning.
And then we're going to have a story from me about trying to date people after purity culture and evangelicalism that Dan's never heard.
And I guarantee you, none of you are going to be able to know what's the ending of this story.
It is unpredictable to say.
Dan, first, before the fun, ridiculous Brad dating people story, give us the who is Al Mohler.
Yeah, so Al Mohler is the president of...
The technical title is The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
So the Southern Baptist Convention has a number of educational institutions, seminaries that train people for ministry.
He's the longtime pastor of Southern Seminary, and he goes all the way back to in the 80s and 90s, the Southern Baptist Convention was sort of taken over by the ultra-conservatives in the denomination,
and he is one of that kind of old guard.
Sort of set up shop at Southern and has made it into, in his head, this kind of, you know, think tank of the, you know, the conservative religious, you know, mind ever since.
And so he weighs in a lot on politics and culture and different things like this.
We've talked about him in the past.
Something I'll talk about as we go into this is he's...
He's really sort of slippery theologically.
He likes to say that he's not, but he does the thing that I think conservative theologians have to do when they want to be big cultural players, but they're actually not.
But yeah, that's him.
And the reason I don't like him, people ask me this, because I've really detested Al Mohler as a person since the 90s when I was an undergraduate.
And the reason is that there was this story, and I even looked it up to make sure that I wasn't misremembering it or whatever, but it's from October in 1997 when...
So a long ways back, that's how long Mueller's been there.
He's been at Southern Seminary for a long time.
The then president of the Southern Baptist Seminary was speaking at chapel at Southern Seminary.
Sorry, the Southern Baptist Convention speaking at Southern Seminary.
And he made a comment and he congratulated Al Mueller for fighting the liberals and bringing conservative theologians in and whatever.
And he made this comment about how...
Under the old regime, he would not have been invited to speak.
His name was Tom Eliff, and he was a conservative and so forth.
And this librarian, a reference librarian at Southern Seminary, who'd been there for 35 years, 10 months out from retirement, wrote a letter to the president of the SBC, a personal letter, and just said, I don't think that that statement's accurate,
and I've been here for 35 years, and, like, here are all the Southern Baptist presidents who've been invited to come and speak, and he was fired.
He was fired by Al Mohler.
Tom Eliff never said it, but he cried to Al Mohler and said, this guy said this, and it was mean, and Al Mohler fired him.
And Al Mohler, aside from the theology stuff, just has this long history of character assassination and the most inhumane kinds of actions like this.
Like, you didn't just, like...
Tell the guy, sorry, you're going to go work in the archives for the next 10 months until you retire and not see sunlight again, or like, whatever.
No, he just fired him.
And then do that thing that organizations always do when they fire somebody and say, well, it's a personnel matter for reasons of confidentiality.
We can't discuss it.
So, I mean, that's Al Mohler, because he talks about character in this New Yorker piece we're going to look at today.
He's big on character, unless it's Al Mohler talking about character.
So, Al Mohler's never met me, I don't think.
I don't think I've ever met him.
I don't desire to.
But my animosity toward this man, for a number of reasons, including his theology, goes back a long, long, long ways.
But he's somebody I've just always viewed as inhumane and basically cruel.
And he fits the current MAGA regime of, you know, cruelty in the name of piety.
So Al Mohler is the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, in essence, and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the country.
And he, this summer, as we've chronicled on this show, he was on a panel with Doug Wilson, the provocateur from Moscow, Idaho.
So he legitimized Wilson in a moment that, for those of us who study these things, saw as a kind of watershed.
Because 30 years ago, Wilson was seen as completely outre, beyond the pale.
And now here's Al Mohler shaking his hand with him on stage.
So Al Mohler's a big deal.
You may not know who he is.
And if you don't know who he is and you don't care about the Southern Baptist Convention, surely you should care about people thinking that empathy is a sin and a bad thing, which is what Al Mohler is doing, as I've talked about on the show on three successive Mondays going back to March.
So, Dan, I'll let you jump in on this New Yorker article because I know you're chomping at the bit.
But, you know, he says things here like that empathy is an artificial virtue and he wants to lean into authentic virtues.
He talks.
All right, go ahead.
I'm going to stop.
You and Al have a personal history, so I want you to just take the first crack.
Yeah, I just want to know.
I know you've been talking about empathy, and I just want to know from him what the authentic virtues are, where those are supposed to come from.
He does what Al Mohler does, the straw person argument and whatever, and he's like, empathy means that you can never say no.
You can never say no to what somebody thinks or believes.
It's just a bunch of nonsense, this notion that that's what empathy means.
And he doesn't really clarify for me very well in this article what these authentic virtues are supposed to be, how they stand in contrast to empathy.
It's just a statement.
It's another thing that he does in this article, and he does it generally.
He does that thing that a-hole academics do, where he tries to act like he's like, are you following me?
I'm about to get complicated here, so I hope you can follow me.
He kind of does that thing, and it's just a mask for the fact that he's not actually saying anything.
Didn't tell you what these authentic virtues are, or exactly why empathy would be bad, except for this weird notion that if you put yourself in somebody else's shoes, you can't possibly say no.
I feel like you and I spend a lot of time empathizing with, that is, trying to understand the thought forms, the emotions, the understanding of people we vehemently disagree with.
That's what started this podcast.
Is that we felt like we had a vision or an understanding of sort of Christian nationalism, the religious framework this comes out of, that we could sort of inhabit that space.
We disagree with it.
Empathy is not the same as sympathy.
To feel what somebody else feels in the same way, it's just Al Mohler trying to sound sophisticated, and it's just not.
And it's a completely false sort of premise that if you can put yourself in a position of understanding why somebody thinks what they think or how they feel what they feel, that you somehow can't also render a judgment on that.
It's just silly.
Thank you.
When Al Mohler says, can you follow me?
It's like when you go on like a walk that is, you know, like you ever, you ever go on a walk with like six-year-olds and nine-year-olds and, and, you know, it's like you're walking two miles on a trail that is not paved, but definitely wide.
And there's a little hill, but you know, it's fine.
And, and as you're walking with the kids.
You pass, like, somebody or they pass you coming the other way with, like, the full-on, like, you know, they've got the water strapped to their back, they've got hiking poles and a hat, and, you know, they look at you like they've got their armor on, and you're just like, you know, they look at you like they're super serious,
and you're like, hey, bro, it's like a two-mile walk, and these six-year-olds out here who just got done with kindergarten are doing it.
So when Al Mohler's like, follow me, it's like he's dressed for that hike, like, that way, and you're like, hey, man.
We know what you're saying.
This is not, you know, we're good.
This is not that hard.
So here's some quotes that people might take.
And this all goes into that broader movement on the American right at the moment to say that empathy is a bad thing.
This is the next, this is a kind of discursive move that's being made by Elon Musk and the technocrats.
It's being made by Joe Rigney, Ali Beth Stuckey, and now Al Mohler.
And Al Mohler is asked, What is your broader concern with empathy right now?
And he responds, the broader concern is that it's an artificial virtue and I want to lean into authentic virtues.
And it's like, all right, you just made those categories up.
And you just said one is real, one is false.
And I like, it's like somebody was like, why don't you like, you know, why don't you like this thing?
And it's like, well, it's not a real thing.
I like real things.
And you're like, oh, yeah, okay, good.
But okay, but the thing, okay, you got to explain that.
I want to lean into authentic virtues, and I think it is used politically in ways that are very destructive and manipulative.
That's the real answer, Al Mohler, is you think empathy is destructive and manipulative for what?
So then he says, he says what you were referencing, Dan.
He says, empathy means never having to say no, because the whole impulse of empathy is feeling with people as they feel.
It's a therapeutic category rather than a moral category.
I'm a Christian.
This is the voice that I have to read this in.
I'm a Christian.
I believe in moral categories.
I believe in the importance of sympathy and even more in the responsibility of compassion.
But that takes action.
And it's based in truth, Dan.
It's not based on validating anyone's self-perceived situation, nor identifying with their own read of the situation as valid.
So, Al Mohler, Karen or Darren or whatever you want to be, like...
This is so short-sighted, and it just is such a sophist approach.
You are a sophist.
This is fallacious, faux-intellectual argumentation that's meant to be hiding a different agenda.
The whole impulse of empathy is a feeling with people, and thus it's not a moral category, and it means never saying no.
I guess if you're an eight-year-old who doesn't have the ability to have a complex approach to morality and personal relationships, If it's just choosing between empathy and everything else, then I guess it means never saying no or something else.
But I don't know.
Us adults don't approach interpersonal relationships or morality that way.
So here's something.
When he says, and I know I'm like, all right, we're a couple professors, so I'll be pedantic to the pedantic Al Mohler.
When he says the whole impulse of empathy is feeling with people, the literal meaning of the word sympathy is to feel with.
That's what sympathy...
He's like, I want to be sympathetic, not empathetic.
I don't want to drag us all the way down the rabbit hole of sympathy versus empathy.
But he literally defines the wrong term.
He literally takes a word and looks up the dictionary definition of a different word and sticks it on there and says, oh, this is what it is.
That's point number one.
Point number two, you just mentioned adults and people in the real world.
I was having a conversation with somebody recently.
And we were talking about raising kids and discipline, and it was like a teenage thing, and like, you know, we're navigating this whole, we have teenagers, how do we do this?
And we were talking about, like, a kid makes a bad decision, does something they shouldn't do, and taking the time to hear them and listen to them and understand them and communicate to them that you understand, like, why they did what they did and all this other stuff, so it's not just you crashing down on them.
And then explaining to them why it is they're going to have to have the consequences they have for those bad decisions that they made.
It's like an empathetic model that lots and lots of parents, I think, try to use so that they're not just viewed by their kids as arbitrary and authoritarian and whatever else.
That's empathy in action.
Concrete action.
Al Mohler takes concrete action.
Doesn't mean never saying no.
Doesn't mean always just, quote, feeling with people in a way that can't be questioned and so forth.
It's just...
Al Mohler's also one of those people that, like, if you go to, like, wiki pages and bios of the word, like, world-renowned or one of the leading theological voices of our time, that kind of stuff comes out.
He's not.
Outside of the evangelical world, he is not.
He's not that person.
Within that world, he is.
And within that echo chamber, he resonates this kind of authority to people.
And you've talked about this with other thinkers.
When they come out of that chamber and say these things, and you're like, what?
What are you talking about?
And this is just one of those spots.
I agree.
And I think Moeller is...
Yeah, I think he's a sophist.
I think he has made his career on appearing to be a complex, important thinker who really isn't.
Let me go through some more of this article here.
So he says...
The interviewer says that there's concerns...
About cruelty toward immigrants.
Do you feel that at all?
Does that concern you?
This comes right after everything we just quoted about empathy.
It would concern me.
It would.
In the subjunctive, Dan.
That is not what I am seeing.
And I've been in parts of the country where this is of daily concern.
What? What is of daily concern?
Immigration? I mean, Fox News has made this concern in Kansas or in the Dakotas where there are very few immigrants, much less undocumented immigrants, and yet, whatever.
Okay. What I do see is that there are very clear concerns reflected in public support for the president, sending gang members back to their home country and things like that.
In the view of millions of Americans, it's a lack of compassion for fellow citizens that has led to relatively insane and irresponsible open borders.
There's two points to make here.
What I do see is that there are very clear concerns reflected in public support for the president.
Al Mohler, that doesn't mean that those concerns are not...
Or expressed in cruel ways.
Even if cruelty isn't the origin of those thoughts, they can be expressed or carried out in cruel and inhumane ways.
Like, the White House is literally putting out on social media, like, hype videos of people being cuffed and tied and gagged and put out of the country.
It's like deportation porn.
Okay? So that's a point to make.
Then he does the thing that I talked about with Joe Rigney and Ali Bestucki, which is an either-or view of all of this.
In the view of millions of Americans, it's a lack of compassion for fellow citizens that has led to relatively insane and irresponsible open borders.
He uses the word compassion, but he's really saying, when you empathize, you have to choose who to empathize with.
And I choose to empathize with the citizens.
Who think that it's irresponsible for open border blah blah blah.
It's either or.
If you have empathy for the undocumented immigrant, you cannot have compassion for anyone else.
If you have empathy for the migrant, you hurt the citizen.
That is either or thinking.
That is not empathy is destructive.
That is you as a moral thinker needing to break everything down into preschool versions of right and wrong.
Either you or me.
You either help me or hurt me.
If you help them, you hurt me.
If you take from this, you have to add to that.
That is how you're viewing this.
And so he completely avoids the question.
He's completely unwilling to admit of any cruelty shown to anyone when it comes to immigration.
And then he says, but the real cruelty is really the citizens who are being hurt by people coming to this country legally for asylum.
Dan, keep going.
What else do you want to hit in this article?
Well, I've got a bigger overarching thing that I want to think about.
Briefly before that, the next thing in the article, the next question is about, we don't actually know that they're all gang members and whatever.
One of the points I made in a roundup, the last one or the one before, but this vision of the difference between saying, we have to make sure that innocent people aren't punished.
Which means that, yeah, there may be some bad actors in the world who maybe don't get what they deserve because we're erring on the side of not punishing innocent people.
Versus the view that says, well, you know, if a few innocent people get swept up, we don't care because it's so important to try to punish wrongdoers.
And that's part of Mueller's shtick in this, too.
He's just very dismissive of the whole thing.
There's actually no due process or anything else here.
We have no idea if these people are gang members or not.
And we now know that the courts have ordered that...
Somebody needs to be brought back who was not a gang member and so forth and all of these kinds of things.
And Mueller is just deaf to that because his God is deaf to that.
Mueller's God is not a God of compassion or anything else.
That's one thing.
But I want to back up a bit because you hit on something that I think is really important, the either-or thinking.
And this has been Mueller's stock and trade forever.
As an evangelical, there's biblical truth.
It's always appealing to the Bible.
It is either or.
Morality is either or.
You are either godly or you are fallen.
You are sinful or you are fallen.
You are Christian or you are not Christian.
But one of the things he's pressed on in this article is his own changing views.
And the interviewer's like, in 2016, you said that you couldn't support, and I looked this up, and Mueller has talked about this, you said that you couldn't support Donald Trump or you would have to apologize to Bill Clinton because of the criticisms you made of him.
And then in 2020, Mueller backs off of that and supports Trump.
And here in this article, he's sort of moved even further from that.
And he's pressed on this.
And he says over and over and over that he hasn't changed.
He's like, there's a straight line.
I've moved in a straight line.
I've gone this similar direction.
And one of the things that strikes me about this article and the either-or thinking is that it's very convenient for Mueller when he's appealing to the either-or thinking.
When it's somebody else...
Oh, they're making a false choice.
They're choosing this dark path.
We've just got one or the other.
But when it's Mueller and you're like, well, you said this about Trump in 2016, and then you said this other thing in 2020, and now by 2024, 2025, you're saying something different.
Explain that to me.
And here's what Mueller says.
He says, you know, I've moved in a straight line and all of this.
And here's the thing that I was thinking about is why can't he just say, I changed my mind.
I was wrong in 2016.
I was wrong in 2020.
In 2020, he says, when they asked him about this, you know, in 2016, or not, didn't ask him, he was saying this, he said, this is what he said in 2020, so the second election that Trump runs for.
He says, I still believe in the necessity of character for public office, but I've had to think more deeply about how character is evaluated in a historic context.
So here it's not either or.
It's not you're either a person of good character or you're not.
It's we've got to look at context and history and time and all these other things to determine whether or not you're a good person.
And that creeps in.
And when I look at this, I zoom out.
If somebody's looking at this, why can't this dude just say, I think I was wrong in 2016?
Or my views have changed.
2016 was a while back, and I've continued to study and learn, and my views have changed.
And here's what I think, and I want to see what you think about this.
And it veers from empathy a bit, but I think it hovers over all of this.
It's because of that claim about the Bible.
And everybody who listens to my stuff knows we talk about the Bible all the time because that's what this high-control religious context does.
Remember, Mohler is one of those people who believes, number one, that the Bible is inerrant.
It has no error.
It cannot be wrong.
He's also one of those who will appeal to what he calls, you know, the clear word of God, that the Bible is clear because it's God's communication and God wants us to know it's clear what God demands.
But he also believes and has built his entire career on being the person who speaks for God.
That's his entire shtick.
It has always been his shtick, is that he is the one who tells us what God thinks.
So he can't be wrong.
Mueller can't say I'm wrong because that runs the risk that, oh, maybe this divine revelation, you say that you're peddling to us, maybe it's not so clear.
Or, I don't know, maybe you read the Bible like a lot of other people do, and you kind of pick and choose which parts seem to resonate you within a given moment.
I don't remember you talking about immigration this way in 2016, Al Mueller.
I don't know what Bible verse you're going to pick up and throw at me to try to tell me all about modern nation-states and modern borders and modern immigration policy, because those are all concepts that didn't exist when the Bible was written.
I don't know how you're going to do that.
So he goes through these gymnastics of trying to talk about his views, changing and having to think more deeply, but it's all in a straight line.
I've really been saying the same thing all along, even though I haven't been saying the same thing all along, but it really has been, and it's this gaslighting response.
And I've talked to people about this kind of distance.
Why can't they just say, like, I changed my mind?
Or I'm wrong?
And I think, theologically, that's the reason he can't.
His entire career is built on not being wrong.
Why? Because he's the one that tells us what the unchanging, infallible word of God is.
Doctrine can't change, God doesn't change, and so forth.
But Al Mohler has changed.
The reason he did this is not because he had to think more deeply about how you evaluate character.
It's because he found himself on the outside looking in.
He came out in opposition to Trump.
All the evangelicals got on board with Trump, and he found himself being irrelevant, and so what did he do?
He circled back around to support for Trump, and then you get that kind of echo-chambery thing where he does that, and a lot of regular people who think Al Mohler's really smart, he gives an authoritative nod to it.
It's that whole thing, all while he tells us about moral absolutes.
And all these things, while his own views have changed and shifted for the last eight years.
And it's really absurd to look at.
And again, I think when these people have to come out of that echo chamber and talk to anybody in the real world, anybody reading this is like, if they went back and looked at the kind of things he said in 2016 and 2020, they're like, dude, you're saying different stuff.
Just be a grown-up and be like, I think I was wrong then.
Or here's what I think now.
Or be a real grown-up and say, Like, they were all leaving me behind.
Nobody would play with me anymore if I held that position.
Didn't want to be Russell Moore.
Yeah, you'll be Russell Moore.
You'll be on the outside looking in.
So I found ways to try to circle back around and do this.
And I'm going to do things like, are you still following me?
This is complicated.
And, you know, it's not.
So that's a thing that stands out to me of the gymnastics that he goes through to gaslight everybody and tell us that he's saying the same stuff he was saying in 2016 and 2020 or that there's a straight line and it's just not the case.
It'd be like you and I saying, yeah.
We used to be in the evangelical world, now we do it.
But there's a straight line.
It's like, no, I've got some real breaks and some curves and some jagged, dotted lines that I don't know how to connect.
And, you know, that's what being in the world is.
But Mueller can't just acknowledge that because he positions himself as the authority who speaks for God.
And that's why you get the incoherence of this.
But it shows you the danger of that kind of hermeneutic of the Bible.
Yeah, absolutely.
It shows you the danger because the men who do it, and they're all men, The divine, you know, the divine likeness, they become the voice.
And if they are the voice of God, well, then they're the arbiters of what God says, period.
And, you know, they can't change.
They can't be wrong.
They can't be an error.
So you have to be this kind of leader who's in the Al Mohler vein, often authoritarian, often a character assassin, often threatened by any dissent, often threatened by the old professor about to retire who dares to speak up.
I'm going to give you one more than what we can move on unless you want to hit anything else.
The interviewer talks about the conditions that some of the folks being deported to El Salvador have undergone.
The barber who is gay, crying, asking for his mother, being slapped, being chained.
It's cruel.
I mean, it's just cruel.
It's hard to read.
It's hard to think about.
It's awful.
And the interviewer says the president and his administration were reveling in this.
They were, like, joyous about it.
Here's Mohler's response.
I think you ought to have a concern about the mistreatment of anyone.
Look. Okay, so that's one.
But then the follow-up to this is, I take a very Augustinian view of state power.
You know Augustine, the church father.
And the interviewer's like, I've heard of him.
And then Mohler says, this is the main Western theological tradition in Christianity.
Am I making sense?
And it's like, brother, yes, you're making sense.
You just said Augustine and then said he's the Western theological tradition.
In the main.
This is...
You did not just read Latin or, like, translate Sanskrit, dude.
Come on.
You're not...
This is...
Jesus. Here's Mueller.
An Augustinian view of government says that the government coercion is never pretty.
It is necessary, but it's never pretty.
When government acts in a coercive manner, it always leads to some form of pain.
You know, Dan, I am so tired.
Of these guys referring to anybody but Jesus when it comes to justifying their position on the mistreatment of folks in El Salvador in prisons, the lack of empathy for the woman who is pregnant and considering ending that pregnancy,
the person who's having body dysphoria, when you ask them about their response and their biblical basis, their ethical basis, it's always like a reference.
To either Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, the same books of the Bible that are like, if you need slaves, go buy children.
I mean, you can find that in Leviticus.
Or it's a reference to like, well, I'm Al Mohler, an Augustinian.
Heard of him?
Have you lost me, son?
I said I'm an Augustinian.
You still with me?
Okay. Next step.
Government. Is always coercive.
So it's never pretty.
So I, the theologian, am telling you that my response to human cruelty, as the kind just described to me, is necessary because I'm an Augustinian.
Nothing about Jesus.
Nothing about the kingdom of God.
Nothing about caring for the lost sheep, seeking out the one.
None of that.
It's simply, I'm an Augustinian.
Or nothing about, like, maybe Guston was wrong.
Like, there's that.
There have always been people who thought that.
He's not the only voice in the Christian tradition.
Augustine's writing on the state was all about defending the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire is sort of breaking up around him.
He doesn't want Christians to be blamed, so his whole argument is to try to show the compatibility between Christianity and imperialism.
That's his whole entire theological project that Moeller is citing here.
So, yeah, you could, as you're saying, if we want more authentic Christian sources, how about the Jesus guy that supposedly, Al Moeller, This is all about.
You could also just say, yeah, I think Augustine was wrong.
He's a dude.
He was smart and stuff, but he thought a lot of weird things about sex and had all kinds of stuff about body dysphoria.
His own issues about enfleshment and embodiment and whatever else.
Yeah, that's our dude.
It is for Mueller.
That's the kind of academic swing in the club to just try to make people think that you've got something there.
It's just not.
If you're sitting there talking to Alamo, you're like, oh yeah, I disagree with Augustine, though.
I think he's got a bad understanding of the state.
You take an Augustinian view, it doesn't mean Augustine is foolproof, right?
And again, my brother in Christ, how about we quote Christ?
Or maybe we quote St. Paul.
I would take St. Paul in this case.
I would even take like 3rd John.
The least canonical of the New Testament.
You know, like, Book of Hebrews.
Paul didn't write Hebrews, but give it to me anyway, my homie.
Like, Hebrews 13. You know, like, entertaining angels.
You want to do any of that?
Nah. All right.
All right, Dan.
Should we move on?
Do you want to take any more swings?
I'm good.
Al, Ralbert, our Albert Moeller.
Ralbert can go his own way now.
I always call him Ralbert.
When I'm in Southern Baptist circles, and sometimes people get all kind of weird.
Yeah. It's not nice to make fun of people's names, but you were just reading his initials, so it's not...
Yeah, I was just reading his name.
It's Robert.
Okay. All right.
All right, y'all.
If you're a subscriber, we're going to go into our next fun thing, which is me reading you a story about trying to date after evangelicalism.
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