Breakdown of the G3 & Christian Nationalism Controversy

Conversations That Matter

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00:01

We are live on the Conversations That Matter podcast for a wonderful evening.

00:06

I hope it's wonderful where you are. It's actually raining where I am, but we have some guests with us who they seem to be having a good evening.

00:14

Stephen Wolf is with us, who is the author of the case for Christian nationalism. And Stephen, you're enjoying a nice evening.

00:22

I see you're outside smoking a pipe. And then we have Nate Fisher with us, who is the

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CEO of Newfounding and the founder of American Reformer. And Nate and I actually have gone back quite a few years.

00:36

We've been friends for a long time. We have Josh Abattoy with us, who's the executive director for American Reformer.

00:43

And then William Wolfe looks like he just joined. William, welcome. William, I didn't get the chance to ask you since you just joined how you wanted to be introduced.

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So I'll let you introduce yourself. That was great. William Wolfe's my name. Glad to be here.

00:58

Okay, William Wolfe is here. All right. Well, let's start here. I think we wanna get into some specifics, but we wanna start with the why.

01:06

Why are we having this discussion? And from my point of view, there's three main things. The first one is that I think, especially for Nate and Stephen, I wanna give you guys an opportunity to respond to some of the insinuations that have been made by people who are associated with G3 against you guys.

01:24

And then I think the second thing is, we need to clarify the issues so that people understand what is the disagreement over?

01:32

There's still a lot of confusion over this. To be honest with you, I might even have a little confusion over this. So hopefully we can clarify things as we talk.

01:40

And I think Nate has some thoughts on how to handle moving forward social media disagreements like this, because this is a new dynamic that we are not used to.

01:51

And as Christians, we need to think through how do we treat people respectfully, but also hold our positions in high esteem and the

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God that we worship and his moral laws, we understand in a high esteem on social media. So with that,

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I just wanna open it up to any of you guys. I mean, does that sound good? Is that why you're here? Do you wanna add anything to that?

02:17

All right, we're all in agreement. That's a good way to start the podcast. Well, what

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I'd like to do then, if possible, is start sequentially and go through this. Because I think most people understand things better when you start at the beginning and you go through piece by piece.

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And so I wanna start at the, this is a slide show that I prepared just with some representative things that have been said.

02:40

It's not everything, you couldn't capture everything because this has been months. But I would say in April, there were some insinuations and I don't know if you wanna call them attacks.

02:52

I think Josh Bice was sensitive to calling these attacks, but there were insinuations that the people who were on the

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Christian nationalist side wanted a Protestant Pope or believed in integralism. Or Stephen specifically was not doing biblical exegesis so his ideas could not have been biblical.

03:13

That there was a racial component which was very wrong and unbiblical and all of this.

03:18

So I put a few representatives there. I don't know if you guys wanna focus on any of these or add to them.

03:23

But I mean, where would you see this whole debate starting or on what issue,

03:30

I suppose? John, could I set a historical marker even just a little bit further back?

03:38

Sure, your audio is a little staticky, but yeah, go for it. Okay, well, is that, can you hear me all right or no?

03:45

Yeah, I can still hear you, I can make it out. Well, look, I mean, I just, I mean, it's very interesting if we bring this conversation back to December of 21,

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November. I just got on Twitter in October and I'm writing a paper on Christian nationalism.

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And nobody knew I was back then really. And I put a definition out there in early December, late

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November, and the definition was very positively responded to even by some people in the

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G3 orbit. I don't have to read the definition, I'm happy if you want me to. And so it's very interesting if you go back even further to see how things have changed since then, because I would argue

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I haven't changed at all from that original definition by and large. So it goes back even further and something happens.

04:31

Yeah, and that's maybe one of the things we should explore. Any of you guys want to weigh in on this?

04:39

Where you think this, where this stems from, why this attack started in April?

04:44

Because it was odd to me that it wasn't just one person. It was like, it almost seemed coordinated. It was a bunch of people at the same time.

04:52

Many of them associated with G3. And whether you want to use the word attack or just insinuating or casting shade on or whatever, that mean, it all seemed to happen around the same time in April.

05:05

Yeah, well, I mean, from my own part, yeah, I didn't even know who any of these guys were until they started,

05:11

I guess, attacking me or attacking Christian nationalism. So, and I've been attacked from so many different people that it's hard for me to know when and what happened.

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But yeah, I mean, they weren't even really on my radar. I guess I maybe had heard of G3, but it wasn't really until,

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I don't know. It seemed like the guy, basically our friends started to respond to them.

05:38

That's when I took notice. I guess it was in April, I don't know. It seems like these criticisms come in waves from different groups and it moves from one to the other.

05:48

So, but yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the motivation was. Yeah, Nate, did you have something?

05:55

I was gonna say, that was my perspective. I mean, I'm also maybe a little bit of an outsider to this world. I'm a Presbyterian.

06:00

I wasn't sort of deeply familiar with G3's background. And it really seemed strange to me.

06:07

Like it seemed like just sustained ongoing sort of waves of Twitter, let's call it aggressive to hostile messages, whether they're directly attacks or at least sort of challenges.

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They're pretty aggressive challenges. And a lot of them were questions, but they were sort of leading questions.

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And it was strange to me where it came from. It clearly seemed motivated by something. I mean, maybe they, my guess is they saw

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Christian nationalism gaining traction and decided it was a threat. I don't necessarily assume that coordination is a bad thing, but yeah.

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I think that just a lot of, I bet they were just asked questions probably from their listeners and readers.

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And they said, hey, what do you think about this? And I think that's happening across denominations in the country, either in the reformed or reformed kind of adjacent world.

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And I think it just came to a point where they thought they had to deal with it.

07:09

So I think that's probably the, maybe there was some things going on in the background, but I think it was just that there's a lot of young people or just people in general who are interested in this.

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I've said before that we're in a time when people are looking for answers and not that, not the kind of the old, boring, you know, worthless conservative lines that the neutral world sort of rhetoric.

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And I think people are open to other things, open to other ideas. And here we show up with quoting older guys, you know, the venerable dead, and it seems to violate the social dogma of the last few decades.

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And so I think they tried to engage it or they have tried to engage these ideas.

08:00

Yeah, and I'm obligated to say this because Angel, I think this is Angel Garcia, if I'm not mistaken, but for $5, he says, the reason it seems coordinated is because Michael O 'Fallon gives them their talking points.

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So I don't know if any of us want to confirm or deny that, but that's a theory, I guess, that is floating out there.

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And I've seen other people on Twitter say the same thing, but I mean, I don't really care where it comes from. I mean, it's just what we have to deal with,

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I suppose. Yeah, I won't touch on that, but I do think there was some unified messaging across various different accounts,

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John, and you highlighted some of this, but they were questions, but they weren't entirely good faith questions.

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They were sort of leading. So there was a question that, for instance, asked how many

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Christian nationalists would like to be following a Protestant Pope under the banner of Christian nationalism, or how many would be happy with integralism?

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Like, these are not questions that if you read Stephen's book, or if you read some of the stuff about Christian nationalism on American Reformer, you read

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William's stuff, you wouldn't really pick those concepts up in any of that writing. Like, it's kind of argumentatively, and I would say unfairly framed from the start, which is probably why it caused so much heat from the start.

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I'm not sure it was necessarily anybody on this call, but certainly a lot of people immediately recognized those questions as being sort of unfairly or argumentatively framed from the very beginning.

09:34

Yeah, and I have some of them on the screen. I mean, I'm not gonna read all, but you have the integralism, the question about a

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Protestant Pope, but you also have things like, you have Nathaniel Jolly implying that Christian nationalism usurps the role of the gospel and replaces it with legally imposed moralism and political activism.

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You have Virgil Walker saying that building your own brand is difficult.

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When you're trying to grow followers, it's easier to leverage the previous success of others. And he's talking about some people,

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I know William was part of this, who put a statement together on Christian nationalism. So there's a lot of things like this.

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I actually had to really narrow it down because there were so many, but this is where I think it started.

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And I think it's important to point that out, that it wasn't, at least from my point of view, trying to watch this whole thing,

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I didn't see Christian nationalists start attacking G3 out of nowhere or saying that they were terrible or anything like that.

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It seemed to, it was a few weeks of that kind of thing that I just showed you on the screen that took place before there was really much of a response.

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And I think I was with you, Josh, with your dad as well. We were in Kentucky when this all started.

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And I remember we were talking about it a little bit and it was very much, well, maybe there's confusion. Maybe we, and I think

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I emailed Scott and Neil right then and said, hey, would you come on a podcast or can we talk about this? Because I think you and I both thought, well, maybe this is just a misunderstanding and we can work it out.

11:07

And we're so downstream from that now, which is sad to me. I think, I mean, they're not gonna like this comment, but I think one of the problems is that they simply had never actually dealt with the arguments from magisterial

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Protestantism or classical Protestantism, whatever you want to call it. And they had a, they, yeah, they had the sense, they had a sort of Baptist narrative.

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I mean, apologies to the Baptist here. I'm not trying to, but there is this like, this typical Baptist narrative where like the, you know, the

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Presbyterians or Congregationalists or Anglicans were forcing the faith upon them and violating rights of conscience and all that.

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They had this sort of narrative. And so that when they read or see screenshots of my book, they think, okay, this is like, you know,

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Baptist drowning 2 .0 or something like that. And so instead of initially taking the time to understand the arguments historically, and also in my book and others, they just kind of went from what that, that sort of Baptist narrative,

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I think hoping that it would capture the attention of fellow Baptists who are, have been kind of socialized into that narrative.

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Yeah. And I think it, I think what they realized eventually that they couldn't just do that.

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And so they had to kind of regroup. So it does seem that there was at some point they had to kind of figure out, okay, what the arguments are.

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I'm still not entirely sure they grasped them, but there was,

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I think, initially this, hey, we could just, you know, Baptist drowning 2 .0

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sort of narrative against Greek nationalism. Good point. John, is my audio any better? I took the headphones off.

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Yes, yes, it is much better. Yes. Wow, the AirPod Pro is no good, but just speaking out loud is great. How's that for technology?

13:01

Look, I'm not gonna get into naming names, but I think there's no doubt there was a coordinated effort, right? Because again, you know,

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I'd publicly, you know, posted and been engaging on Christian nationalism for months when, you know, when

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I had no followers, no platform whatsoever. And so the continued effort to push for Christian nationalism is not, you know, a platform building exercise for me.

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It's because I came to a belief that this is actually the right system to consider for our present moment.

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But I think that there was a coordinated effort to try to sort of label Christian nationalism as wokeism from the right, and really try to paint it into the box of integralism, which is really funny to me as well, because I had also in my time in seminary written another paper denouncing integralism and all its work, all its works.

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You know, I denounced the Anabaptists as well, and I proposed, you know, something else in between, which is sort of akin to Christian nationalism.

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So I think that as Christian nationalism was gaining steam on the right, and particularly percolating into congregations and working class individuals and constituents of various ministries and churches, then sort of a bat signal went out that sort of said, how can we get on top of this?

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How can we counter this? How can we label this in such a way as to, you know, paint it into a box?

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And it's unfortunate because that's when it seems that the sort of good faith disagreement, or even honestly, the interest in it from this crowd went away.

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Yeah. And I think for Nate and myself, and maybe Josh, you know, we're just kind of painted, and we're friends with you guys.

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So we're kind of just in the same, lumped into the same group, because I don't know, Nate, Josh, you guys haven't, as far as I know, taken that label upon yourselves, have you?

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Yeah, I didn't think so. Never. I've certainly been sympathetic to aspects of their aims.

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American Reformers has been associated, it's published pro -Christian nationalist pieces, but I've always been clear that I'm not,

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I'm not settled on various aspects of that, both including the prudence of the label, and even convinced of every aspect of the program.

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I'm not unconvinced of it. And what I noticed was interesting is I, there were a lot of demands that I denounce or repudiate things.

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And it's kind of like, my view is not settled on this, and you're demanding that I denounce it.

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That's, I'm not gonna do that. But it was interesting. Even being open to it, really exploring it.

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I mean, my position is, I'm not an expert on a lot of this stuff. I came from more of a business background.

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I learn a lot from these discussions. I learn a lot from every American Reformer article I read. I'm figuring out a big part of my mission with starting

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American Reformer was, I wanna see some good discussions about what a Christian vision could look like.

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Discussions and debates. And we've published anti -Christian nationalist pieces as well.

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And it's a debate, it's a discussion that needs to be had.

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And it seems to me that even being open to discussion of these issues was something that was apparently beyond the pale for them and demanded denunciation.

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Yeah, it's interesting. I had retweeted a Nathaniel Jolly tweet, who's associated with G3, at least he's written for them, from January, where he said there's good people on both sides of this debate.

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And it's a discussion that needs to be had, just like you just said, Nate. And something changed. Obviously something changed big time since then.

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And it hasn't really been all that long. I did wanna show everyone just a few representative tweets.

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This continued, and I would say the temperature got higher in the discussion through May and June and July.

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And the accusations and insinuations, I should say more so, about Christian nationalism,

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Christian nationalists, were perhaps more serious, or at least more damning in our current secular framing regarding racism accusations, or kinism,

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I should say, I think that was the term used. And starting to question even,

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I have a tweet right here from Josh Bice. This was, I think, from last week where he was questioning Joel Askell's commitment to the

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G3's ministry to local churches. Like Joel Askell doesn't really care about ministries that help local churches or something.

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And stuff like that just started to pour in. And this is where I think it became more difficult, in my opinion, to have a discussion about these things.

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Because whatever window of opportunity was present to maybe do a public discussion was gone when you start demonizing the other side too heavy.

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I don't know if, maybe this is getting into maybe your thing, Nate, about handling these disputes online.

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But that's the challenge that I see now, is there's been such a demonization, it's hard.

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And I think we're still willing to, I'd love, I wish they were on this call with us. I mean, that's, I've invited

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Josh. I've tried to get, and Virgil and Scott, but they're not that interested. And this is what they're saying online.

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So any thoughts on that? Yeah, getting to my point about the nature of these social media things.

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I think one common response we've seen is, and I think it's not an unreasonable question, is, well, why do you have to engage?

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Why can't you just let it slide, be the bigger man, whatever?

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And I think that's often the right move in a debate. But I think social media creates this interesting dynamic that doesn't leave that an option.

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It leaves that an option after one or two, often. If there's one or two sort of jabs, you can just ignore them.

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But when there's a sustained volley, especially a sustained volley by fairly high follower count accounts, that it kind of leaves a couple of options.

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One is it just brands something. If it's unresponded to, it brands something. You've seen this in a lot of political cases.

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You've seen a lot of times one candidate will launch a lot of negative things and the other one won't respond and they just don't recover from that.

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And it's just the nature of reality is you do need to respond. Now, there's a lot of different ways you can respond, but if it's gonna be sustained, it will have an impact on how people perceive things, especially if it's coming from people they see as good

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Christians. And then secondly, the other nature of social media is people will respond. There will be a response.

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There's a lot of people on our side. There's a lot of energy on our side. And by our side, I'm using that not just Christian Nationalists itself, but sort of broadly people are open to these discussions.

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There's a lot of energy there and people will respond. And so there is going to be engagement on social media.

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And if they want a fight, they will get a fight. And again,

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I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that we're called to vigorously make the case for what we do.

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So then the question is simply, are we gonna be involved in that or not? And since obviously a lot of the questions ultimately go to things where we're seen as, for whatever reason, we're seen as leaders, even if I haven't accepted the label, in the case of I had recently sort of brought into it personally, then it makes sense for us to get in there and talk about it.

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And it's kind of like people are wondering, well, what are we going to say? And I think coming in and actually responding with the questions that I have in mind are helpful.

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But the main point that I wanted to make was it's not, in social media, just staying out is not an option when something's sustained.

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There's a group of people and some will respond. Yeah, and that's a new challenge in a way.

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I think that's hard for people who haven't been on social media and some who still aren't to understand.

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And some of the folks in this audience aren't really, they're not on Twitter. They don't have time for those kinds of things.

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And so I think that's helpful to explain the nature of this. You can paint a movement in very dark tones if you want.

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And if they don't respond, then that label does stick. I mean, my first response was largely, let's have a conversation.

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Let's jump, this is a complicated issue. There's a lot of content here.

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There's been a lot of discussions. There's been a lot of discussions going on for a long time between a lot of, and among a lot of the people involved.

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And there's really many aspects of it too. There's sort of the political philosophy angle. There's the, how do we respond to the current regime angle?

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There's the, what's the vision we're ultimately aiming for? And those are really three, those are really different questions.

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And I think there was a lot of conflation of those. And the simplest way to address that is often gonna be to jump on a longer form discussion like this, where we can really, we can hash it out.

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We can, at the very least, clarify if there was an area of misunderstanding. And so my first instinct was just off of that, just offer a conversation.

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And you did that actually publicly. I have the screenshot right here where you asked Josh if he would come on a recorded

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Twitter space with you after he attacked you. And I have Josh Abattoy, you did the same thing,

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Josh, invited them to a public discussion. I know Steven, you said,

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I think you've done this a number of times. Hey, have me on your podcast or I'll discuss it with you.

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And then I put some private messages from myself to Scott O 'Neill in April and then a recent one to Josh Bice.

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I wouldn't show their end of it, but these are the messages I sent them in response to some, the second was in response to a message that Pastor Bice sent me.

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But in every single case, there was an unwillingness. I'm unfortunately sad to say on their part to make something like that happen.

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And I mean, I could get into details, but I don't know if that's necessary for me to do that. I know it's not just us though.

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AD Robles was supposed to join us for this call. I know that he had some personal conversations.

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They did not go well. William, I don't know if you wanted to share. I think you were involved in some behind the scenes trying to get a public discussion going or some kind of offering an olive branch in some way.

23:57

Yeah, well, I wanted to make a comment about the framing here more generally and like how to facilitate conversations because if somebody enters the public arena with like loaded and frankly misrepresentative questions towards people, it's almost signaling there's no desire to have a conversation.

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And so then we try to respond asking for a conversation, but we have to sort of realize that's essentially trying to climb like a steel wall.

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There's no handhold there because if you're gonna lead with saying, how many Christian nationalists want a

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Protestant Pope or Christian nationalism is ethnocentric in a scary negative way.

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And then people like us go behind the scenes and we say, no, no, no, it's not that. Like, can we have a conversation, clarify that.

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It's almost as if we know that's not going to happen. And unfortunately that's sort of what's played out here.

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I mean, look, there's a certain degree to which nobody owes anybody a public conversation, no doubt about that.

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But I do think that there is a degree of manliness and courage to if you're going to engage ideas that people are associated with or then people themselves and present them in a certain way that then you have the willingness to engage them in a conversation to hash those things out.

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And I just don't know if that's materialized at any point yet here. Yeah, I think you're unfortunately right about that.

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And there's been resistance to the discussion online. I think this is where the rope kind of broke and snapped.

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Like Josh Bice was, he told Joel Askell basically, I'm done talking with you or others who engage in childish unbiblical behavior while hiding behind masks, which everyone

25:43

I think has known Joel Askell's Twitter handle. But Scott O 'Neill also made a whole paragraph, a whole post about how he's not going to have public conversations with individuals who have been unwilling to be respectful in private, have acted belligerently in private, have proven in public settings to be manipulative and deceptive or have a martyr complex.

26:08

And there's more examples of this kind of thing. I know for me, that was Josh's objection to me personally, having a conversation was that I had, he said misrepresented

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G3 and I messaged him back and I gave him basically, here's what

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I said. And I think it's provable. I'm not trying to malign or anything. I'm just, explain to me how this is a misrepresentation or slander and nothing.

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He hasn't engaged at all in any of that. And so I just, there's really nothing left for me to do.

26:42

And I think maybe we're all in that same boat that we've made every effort and we've just had the door kind of slammed in our face.

26:48

I mean, that's how I feel. I don't know if I'm speaking for all of us on that. Yeah, I'll just say that like for my part,

26:57

I guess I've been in general kind of like ambivalent about the whole thing. I mean, obviously have engaged them and I've tried to, for the most part, provide my little short arguments and replies to what they, and they usually ignore it.

27:14

I mean, it was one of the interesting things that I'll essentially ratio them. I'll get dozens more likes than they would on something and they don't actually engage it.

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And it's kind of frustrating. And now you just come to realize that they have a certain audience.

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Our ideas, or at least my ideas are the sort of ideas that you can, you don't actually have to show that they're demonstrate that they're wrong or an error.

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You just have to say that they're scary. That's what it comes down to. You can quote me and say that's scary.

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And that's probably generally speaking enough for their audience. And I think that for many years that sort of audience has been kind of socialized into that kind of rhetoric.

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And so like from my perspective, I don't expect to be able to convince these guys of my position.

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So I've just tried to kind of plug away at their arguments the best I can on Twitter so that other people can see it and hopefully be convinced by it.

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But ultimately I don't have, I think that it's, I mean, this also comes back to some private conversations

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I had with Owen Strain, or I have his last name, where I just came to the conclusion that there's no way to dislodge at least him from using the worst form of rhetoric against me no matter what

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I say. I don't know if that's true for the rest of the G3 guys. And so I just have to come to accept it and just plug away.

28:57

I mean, I think that if we just have the better arguments, we have the better historical support, people are gonna see it.

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And then the right people are going to come to our positions or at least my position.

29:11

So I think that's the best thing we can do. You guys in your worlds might have a more, might be kind of in that world more than I am.

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So there might be different tactics you take. But for me, it's just if they say something that I think is wrong,

29:26

I'm just gonna provide it as best I can, a short argument against it. Well, I'd like to give you,

29:32

Steven, and then Nate opportunities to specifically respond to some of the claims that have been made.

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I flashed a few of them on the screen, Steven, about from Owen Strain basically saying that you're, or implying,

29:47

I should say, that there's this kinest problem that I guess you have.

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And I, or at least someone has it. I'm assuming it's you.

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I'll jump in and I'll just say that's the most troubling thing, one of the most troubling things to me.

30:03

Like I even don't even mind the direct attacks at me as much, but a lot of these, especially coming from Owen are sort of general subtweets where there's not a named person.

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And they're often pretty, they're often like pretty vile insinuations. They're ranging from sort of just negative people have done horrible, they've been nasty in private or whatever to all the way to much worse things.

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It's kind of like, I don't even know who they're referring to. I'm about as in the game as most people here and I don't know who they're referring to.

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And it clearly gives a sort of impression, it's designed to, or it certainly has the effect of in a sense sort of making accusations that are insinuated against everyone in the movement.

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And I think that's just a really, and then refusing to name names when asked.

30:58

Let me read one of them and then, Nate, you can go on. I just wanna give people an example because I have a few of them up here.

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There were so many with Owen, but he says, if your pastor has been radicalized and now preaches paranoia and a false gospel of ethnocentric nationalism, you need to pray, ask to speak with him and graciously raise major concerns.

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It may be time to find a new church home because the pulpit is no place for fear mongers. Now, something like that motivates real people on the ground who listened to Owen, who go to G3 to then interrogate their pastors, which

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I have no problem with applying a biblical standard to what's preached in the pulpit.

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But I think as you said, Nate, this is what

31:41

Russell Moore did. This is a vague, there's this very scary big group of people out there who are preaching this horrible false gospel.

31:50

I mean, I'll send people to hell, I guess. And - Well, I mean, this is what I'm talking about. So if I were to respond to Owen and be like, dude, if you just read what

31:59

I talk about ethnicity, you'll see that it's not kinist as kinism has been understood for many years, but particularly in the last 15 years as it kind of grew in popularity in certain

32:13

Facebook groups back, some of you guys may be aware of some of that history on Facebook.

32:20

So there was like an actual group of people who claim kinism. It was a particular thing.

32:27

And the way I present ethnicity is opposed to that form of kinism.

32:35

But does it really matter to him that I could point that out and show that that's not, that I don't affirm that?

32:44

I think it'd be pointless to try to convince him otherwise, even if it directly, despite the fact that like in one of my chapters,

32:52

I say that intermarriage connect is good in creating a more like solid, more solidarity amongst a culture.

33:03

It doesn't matter that that's in there. It doesn't matter that my book says nothing about interracial marriage or interethnic marriage.

33:10

It doesn't matter that I define ethnicity more along cultural lines than I do genetic lines.

33:16

It doesn't matter. So when he says ethnocentrism, he's tapping into a sense that ethnicity is a entirely genetic thing.

33:29

And so then people should align around common genetics, even though if you read the chapter,

33:35

I don't argue for that, argue against that explicitly. But again, it doesn't matter. So that's like the frustrating thing is

33:41

I can't have, you can't have a rational conversation with him or these people generally, because they want to use certain terminology understood to their audience and then use it against not only me, but then broadly to anyone who claims

33:58

Christian nationalism or anyone kind of in the Protestant right, you know, and yeah, and that's what

34:05

I think, I mean, that's what Owen is doing. Like he says ethnocentric nationalism. So yeah, in my book, I do think ethnicity matters, but I define ethnicity not according to a genetic, you know, as if you could do the genetic tests and say who's in and out.

34:20

I define it according to a common culture and a connection to people in place that is not linked.

34:29

I explicitly say that we're not, like a nation is not a family of sort of cousins by genetic line, but you know, again, it doesn't matter.

34:40

Like they'll just keep using the term, but not take into account how

34:45

I present it. And it's an easy way, it's unprincipled, it's irresponsible rhetoric given what

34:55

I've said, but it is effective. So if they want to win, like if they want to use powerful rhetoric to win, they could certainly take advantage of that.

35:06

They could take sections of my book where I say, yeah, like I think the Magistro reformers were right that in principle, you can, the civil power can suppress gross heresy.

35:18

I think Calvin was right about that. I think all the reformers were basically right about that. I think everyone is right about that for a few hundred years and they can screenshot that and say, look, he

35:28

Wolf wants to throw you Baptists in prison. That's despite the fact that in dozens of places,

35:33

I say, I'm not interested in that, that I want the Baptists on my side. It doesn't matter because they can screenshot the section that says, oh, you affirm that civil power may use its power to suppress heresy and that's enough.

35:48

And then they dream up visions of being drowned. So it's, but they can use that rhetoric because it's scary.

35:55

Like someone else mentioned before. And so that's the frustrating thing that if you, that once like you claim to be a principled kind of interlocutor, but then you don't actually deal with the very substance of the argument and the way

36:10

I define my own terms. I think you and I both know Steven from our shared experience that the

36:16

Lutherans are the only denomination that we have to worry about if they get in control, persecuting us.

36:21

Yeah, exactly the case, yeah. I wanted to show that when you were talking,

36:28

Steven, I pulled this tweet up from Virgil Walker. He's responding to Tom Buck and there's a guy named Corey Mahler, speaking of the

36:33

Lutherans, who says interracial marriage is tantamount to murder. And Tom Buck had asked, you know, if there were

36:40

Christian nationalist proponents who had publicly denounced this, tagged William Wolfe, tagged

36:45

Joel Webben, A .D. Robles. And Virgil Walker responded, I could care less if they denounce it.

36:51

I'm not surprised that Steven Wolfe follows this guy. So it's like, it doesn't really matter what you say.

36:57

I think as you just said, Steven, and there's Virgil Walker confirming exactly what you just said. It does not matter what you say.

37:03

He could care less. Yeah, I mean, one of the things they don't realize is that there were people who were like traditional kinists who have been kind of convinced out of that by me.

37:13

So I'm not gonna like wear that as a badge of honor, but that's kind of the irony here is that I'm supposed to unfollow, repudiate these guys, which

37:22

I don't actually do. I don't, you know, I haven't, I don't actively repudiate people on Twitter.

37:29

That's just not something I do anyway. Yeah, yeah.

37:35

Again, it's like that I follow him, I must therefore agree with everything Mahler says.

37:40

I mean, I absolutely don't agree with him on those things. I think he takes this traditional kinist type absolutist perspective on these things.

37:50

And I don't think that it's actually historically accurate, biblically accurate. But at the same time,

37:57

I don't spend my days kind of like doing this performative repudiation that you're somehow supposed to do.

38:06

I know people do it, it's fine, but I just don't do that. Yeah, I do wanna get to Nate and some of the objections to his association with Charles Hayward.

38:14

But William, did you have something? Yeah, I just wanna make a point about, cause I saw that tweet from Tom and the

38:20

Cory Mahler incident and just wanna make a couple principal points about engagement here, right?

38:26

And that's one, I think, first of all, this entire thing has been an act of gatekeeping in many ways, right?

38:32

But when you are the gatekeepers, then you get to sort of exercise rhetoric and deploy strategies that those that you're trying to keep outside don't quite get as much purchase with.

38:43

And one of those is not picking, right? Trying to take somebody who claims a similar label that other people claim and hold them up as the end all be all example when that's not a good example.

38:56

And so actually, look, Tom, I know Tom Bucks some and he's a dear brother. And I think that his effort there was a genuine effort to help the

39:04

Christian nationalists out, but it just plays into this whole rhetorical strategy where I don't, never followed

39:11

Cory, I don't pay attention to the guy. And now all of a sudden, I'm publicly supposed to denounce this rotten nut picked out of the barrel as sort of representative of the

39:21

Christian nationalist movement, which as much as I don't like to do that, I actually did do it in that case because I was giving

39:27

Tom benefit of the doubt and I think I was right to do so. But in general, that's how this strategy has been deployed.

39:33

Now, if you are outside of the gate and you try to employ the nut picking rhetorical strategy or logical fallacy, you don't quite get as much purchase on it because they're safely ensconced within the gate, they have their positions in institutions.

39:48

And so it creates kind of an asymmetrical engagement and the anti -Christian nationalists have definitely tried to use that.

39:55

And I think I just want people to be aware of that and that's what's going on. I do need before we move on from Steven, I had two messages along these lines.

40:04

Wolf never, I'm assuming it's Steven Wolf, not William. Wolf never appeals to scripture to argue his positions.

40:11

This is one of the big arguments against you, Steven. And it's, I think the reason is because, especially with G3's audience, and I did come from kind of the

40:20

MacArthurite world. So if you want to call it that, but institutions associated with John MacArthur's ministry.

40:27

And there is very much this deep respect for exegetical preaching, for Bible study, for understanding things in the original languages.

40:35

So you know exactly what scripture is saying. And there is a biblicism of sorts.

40:40

And sometimes I've seen it go into a blank slate biblicism where it's probably not helpful. You don't have the historical guardrails as much, but I don't think that's

40:48

MacArthur necessarily. It works though. It works on that audience when you tell them that guy's not quoting the

40:54

Bible. Like that's a scary thing. So would you just address that? Yeah, I mean, first of all, when people say that, well, which premise is false?

41:04

And where's the invalid reasoning? So, I mean,

41:09

I assume that even biblicists believe in reason and logic. And they agree that if two premises are both true and they relate to one another such that they produce a valid conclusion, that you ought to also affirm that conclusion.

41:26

And so if you read my book, and you see no scripture, and yet you agree with the premises and you think the logic is valid, then what's your problem?

41:34

So I think that's what people don't realize. Like, well, you didn't appeal to scripture.

41:41

Like, well, what do you disagree with? A lot of my premises, like so when you're addressing an audience, specific audience, you're trying to use assumptions that you think your audience already affirmed.

41:55

And then you show that those assumptions lead to other conclusions. And so if I'm talking to a biblically -based or like a reformed audience who affirms this or that, then

42:07

I can work from that to make other conclusions. And that's what my book did. So if you're wondering where's the scripture,

42:14

I would say, where's the false premise? Where's the bad reasoning? The other thing too is it's political theory.

42:22

So I'm doing politics. And I assume the reformed theological system.

42:27

I mean, I assume everyone affirms some kind of theological system that ought to be coherent and robust and systematic.

42:33

I affirm one that I think is historical and the majority sort of system of the reformed faith.

42:41

But not everything is assumed. And I make a lot of arguments from it. So I think that, and really this is, a lot of older works do a lot of this sort of reasoning.

42:57

I mean, a lot of theologians, like you read something like Lex Rex, a lot of the sections are not scripture. It's just him reasoning from premises to conclusions and other parts of scripture.

43:08

I do stay in the book that I hope that someone would write like a prove what

43:13

I'm trying to, prove the same conclusions from scripture. And so, like I say, this is just kind of the beginning of discussion of Christian nationalism.

43:24

So I think that is, it's actually, I think it's a very bad reply. It's a very populist kind of reply. I think it relies on a lot of kind of, let me just say kind of ignorance of how historically theologians and political theorists have and Christian jurists and Christian political theorists have approached these questions.

43:46

And I, again, I mean, yeah, you can reason from premises to conclusions and that's what

43:53

I do. So I know that's not gonna satisfy a lot of people. I think it's partly because a lot of people, a lot of Christians were not kind of classically trained or they weren't, they thought that everything that you conclude has to follow from a kind of series of Bible verses or proof texts, or at best, some kind of exegetical method.

44:15

When, if you pick up like Turton's Institutes of the Lincoln Theology, like his three volumes, he does exegesis, but a lot of his writing is really just clarifying the issue, clarifying the question, and then working through that question logically and rationally to have a coherent, solid conclusion.

44:35

So I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how else to.

44:43

Yeah, to go from it's, he doesn't quote Bible verses to therefore it's unbiblical is the thing that I've seen from,

44:50

I don't know if G3 accounts have specifically said that, but I've definitely seen tweets and stuff to that effect.

44:55

And it's, at the very least, trying to cast shade on what you're doing as if it must not be biblical somehow.

45:02

So I appreciate that. I think, yeah, and again, I think that is actually one of the worst objections, but it is also the most popular.

45:10

Yeah. So I have to deal with it, but you know. Well, I think, Nate, you need a turn at this because Josh Bice did go after you.

45:20

I would say it was kind of hard in a way. I mean, really, he was going after Charles Hayward pretty hard, but the intention was to connect

45:31

Charles Hayward to Christian nationalism, to you. So I don't have all of the stuff he said against Hayward up here, but I do have like just two representative tweets where he says that there's this ideology in a manifesto that Charles Hayward wrote that's in this nationalist framework, which is basically very scary.

45:53

And the reason he's bringing it up, he says, is because Nate Fisher is a proponent of Christian nationalism and connected to Hayward as a leader of one of the lodges in this group.

46:01

So I, and then one more, I guess. He's asking

46:06

Jeff Wright on Twitter, do you find it concerning that a man who reads the praise and praises Lenin and pens a manifesto with language about violence, about his ideology foundationalism, who calls the commitment to Christian beliefs in his ninth pillar while himself being

46:22

Eastern Orthodox is a concern. So that's all about Charles Hayward. Nate, what do you have to say about this?

46:30

You're associated with a secret society with Charles Hayward, who's, I guess, a bad guy. Yeah, well,

46:35

I'll start with the secret society. And I think the entire framing, the entire framing of this was just, it was just wrong.

46:43

And there was no attempt, there was no attempt to ask, like Josh could have pinged me, and he could have said, hey, what's this

46:53

Sacker thing? What's the deal with Hayward? And I would have told him, but instead he launches into this

47:00

Twitter threat against it. And first off, it's, so Charles is a director of it.

47:06

I'm a director of it. And I'm a director at the national level too. There's a number of directors.

47:14

It's a very decentralized group. It's basically a group that was started with the sense that fraternity is breaking down.

47:23

Like men traditionally would get together. They would talk about politics. They would talk about problems in their community, needs of their community.

47:32

And that was something that was really expunged. It may was expunged by the left.

47:38

The left intentionally destroyed that. And that was a real loss and that men need that type of opportunity.

47:44

And so the Society for American Civic Renewal, it's exactly what its name says. It's a society, we get together, we seek civic renewal.

47:53

It's Christian. The membership must be Trinitarian Christians. And that's a pretty broad requirement.

47:59

And there's a pretty broad range of people, even in the leadership, ranging from people who would be more evangelical to Catholic, to Orthodox.

48:11

And it's sort of this big tent thing where men get together and they like at the local, and they're very decentralized.

48:18

So the local chapters or lodges will have like a meeting and maybe 15 guys get together and a speaker comes in and talks about something politically.

48:30

Sometimes it's a political candidate or whatever, and then we learn and sometimes we just hang out. And it's not really, there's no sort of great secrecy associated with it.

48:40

There's a little degree of confidentiality because there's guys there who are at companies where even being associated with a group that is all men would be seen as suspicious.

48:53

And exactly the kind of suspicions that Josh is fanning here where they're gonna try to insinuate all sorts of nefarious things, which is the kind of thing the left has been doing against any sort of male group for a long time.

49:06

They do that against the church. They assume there's all sorts of abuse and horrible things that come out of churches that believe in all male leadership.

49:15

And it's absurd, but it's what our society does. And I think Josh is playing directly into that.

49:22

And there's a reason that men who are raising families wanna be prudent about what they share with a hostile world.

49:31

So beyond that, it's pretty open in terms of we do that, we get together like that.

49:40

It's very decentralized. There's no central leadership. Certainly it's not Charles Haywood controls it and he uses it to implement his ideas as much as I think

49:50

Charles has a lot of thoughtful ideas and he's a very thoughtful person about these things. There's none of that central control.

49:56

So I think that's an example of just a straight up launch of volley rather than pick up the phone and ask something that could have been easily clarified.

50:05

I had Charles Haywood on my podcast this morning. It hasn't been released yet, but I interviewed him and we talked a little bit about foundationalism.

50:13

I'm not really scared by it, but what do you think makes people like Josh scared of foundationalism?

50:21

What is it? And I guess, yeah, just what makes people scared of it? Yeah, let me hop in on that one.

50:28

I mean, so what Bice says is that foundationalism calls for violence or at least references violence.

50:38

Well, I mean, as we all know, anytime there's any sort of political change or regime change, violence occurs.

50:45

And that's all that Haywood sort of means when he even talks about or references violence anywhere is the fact that if you're going to have a constitutional change, there will be violence.

50:55

Guess what? At our founding, there was a revolution and there was violence. When you're under tyrannical conditions, there's a right.

51:04

Some of the tradition would even say that there's a duty to revolt. That necessarily involves violence.

51:12

So yeah, I mean, I think that scares people. And I think part of what scares people and what Haywood says is pointing out the fragility of where our political situation is right now.

51:23

He's a student of history. He reads a lot of books. I mean, he doesn't work anymore.

51:29

He reads great books from history and writes book reviews about them on his blog. It's fantastic. A lot of interesting stuff on there.

51:36

But the thing that he notices, I think any student of history has to notice, which is just that there's repeatable patterns and that you can kind of tell when a political situation is getting tense, when a prior order is starting to get fragile and lose its grip on a society, there's tension.

51:54

He points that out and he's realistic and clear -eyed about it. And I think that scares some people.

51:59

But frankly, as Christian men, I think all of us here, many of us are fathers or husbands.

52:06

We have a political vocation. We need to be able to look at that kind of stuff with clear eyes and actually think about what that means for our future or our kids' future.

52:15

I'll add one thing. It's not some fantastic leap to imagine political violence in this country.

52:22

And I think Charles's point that he makes time and time and time again, if you read his stuff, is the left initiates political violence over and over and over and over again.

52:30

And anytime they get power, they initiate it. And if they see any challenge to that power, even if it's a purely democratic challenge to that power, they respond with violence.

52:39

And all you have to do is think back to the summer of 2020 and realize that this is not some far -fetched idea that they have rioted, they have committed acts of violence, and they will do it again.

52:58

And you look at history and you realize a lot of the times that stuff escalates. So I think that's a big thing. And he's very, very clear in his

53:04

Tucker interview. He's very clear about that and about how it's a prediction. Absolutely, it's not something that you should wish for, but it's something that responsible people have to be ready for.

53:16

So I think there's a lot of these attempts. I mean, Haywood's a very provocative thinker. He's someone who's willing to, he's willing to coolly assess a situation in light of a lot of, sort of a wide range of historical analogs.

53:31

And there's, what's interesting is I have not, I mean,

53:36

I have not, it's not like I've adopted foundationalism as some manifesto for what I'm doing.

53:42

I read it, I found it interesting. I certainly would say a lot of the things in there remain,

53:49

I have certainly not committed to them. Some I may have disagreed with, but there's this idea that I'm, you're not even allowed to discuss the idea, this sort of, it must be anathematized.

54:04

You must totally, you must denounce and distance yourself from this person. I think you see this very commonly among liberals where anything that is outside of the

54:12

Overton window, it really is sort of a view of the world that was settled on in the 1960s and 1970s.

54:21

There was a set of norms that really were not, that they were a long ways away from the American founders. As Josh just pointed out, the

54:27

American founders were, they loved a lot of these discussions. They were very active about a lot of these discussions. And then sort of throughout a lot of the country, there were a lot of norms.

54:37

And what you have with liberals is there was a new set of norms that were adopted in the 60s and 70s.

54:44

And similar to that, you have this sort of adoption of the idea that if you question those or you challenge those, if you really, if you threaten to go backward in the progressive vision, there's nothing worse than going backward in history.

55:00

If you would even sort of suggest going backward, that is beyond the pale and it must be denounced and you must distance yourself from people who do that.

55:09

And that's, I'm not gonna do that. I don't think that's, I don't think we as Christians should do that. I think as Christians, at the very least, we should consider what other

55:20

Christian societies have and the very thoughtful Christian leaders have believed.

55:25

And we should at least entertain those ideas. Yeah, even if they come from like James Lindsay, right?

55:31

Maybe. One final, I'm a member of this scary society as well.

55:37

And I first became aware of Charles's manifesto, I think three weeks ago when somebody first tweeted about it.

55:45

So, you know, like it's, you know, but I read it and I was like, what's the fuss about?

55:51

It's basically, you know, he read a lot of old books. It's classical political philosophy.

55:57

It's Polybius and Aristotle. It's all the stuff that our founders read before they wrote the constitution. He calls for a mixed regime like our constitution had.

56:06

If people wanna do a deep dive, Tymon Klein and I did a podcast on the American Reformer podcast, where we read his manifesto and talked about how, you know, similar it was actually to a lot of the assumptions that our founders had.

56:20

But we had a good time with that. Anyways, it's sort of an odd controversy to me.

56:26

Yeah. Yeah, me too. I thought it was kind of out of left field and seemed desperate. And I was just surprised that the president of G3 Ministries would be trying to create that connection and vilify

56:38

Nate. There are a couple of questions, but I know William, I think you had something you wanted to say real quick, right?

56:45

Yeah, I mean, Nate got to it, but I wanna kind of put it in just like a pithy statement, which is that assessing potential political outcomes or even dealing with the realities on the ground is not at all equivalent to like expressing a preference or a desire for those things to happen.

57:06

When you prognosticate about the future as you watch how events are unfolding in real time, and you suggest that we might reach a point where X happens and maybe

57:15

X is political violence in America, that's not the same thing at all. And quite frankly, it's just sort of a real sloppy argument to say it is that somebody is advocating for violence, right?

57:28

So reading the political situation and future prognostication is not equivalent to advocating for something.

57:36

That's just an important point that everybody should recognize. Second is that the vast majority of political violence that is and has been occurring in the

57:43

United States, and make no mistake, it is occurring, is being perpetrated by leftists. On the DHS website from July 21, 2020, just wanna read this line, they say up top, for the past 50 plus days, as of the evening of Monday, July 20th, 2020, violent anarchists targeted the

58:03

Hatfield Federal Courthouse and federal law enforcement officers in Portland. So of course we're familiar with the widespread riots, but there's essentially a localized insurrection in Portland, political violence against the federal courthouse, an autonomous zone that was created that cost people lives as the sovereign state of Portland, so to speak, ceded authority to these violent political anarchists.

58:27

And so to pretend like it's not happening in America right now, as it is, which is essentially to be putting your head in the sand like an ostrich.

58:34

And then the third point I wanted to make on this is that it's very interesting. I can understand to a certain degree why those on the

58:40

Christian right maybe get sort of concerned when there's talk of violence because as Christians, right, we're not the ones attacking the courthouse.

58:50

But the reality is these same voices have been so quiet about so much of the political violence that's been perpetrated by the

58:55

American regime overseas. I mean, what do you think it is that we did in Iraq for 20 years?

59:01

What are we doing in Libya? Like, what are we doing even in Ukraine right now? We are perpetrating and funding and helping political violence unfold.

59:11

And so it's very interesting, again, to see the cherry picking of sort of the pearl clutching when it comes to conversations about political violence vis -a -vis the political system in America and who it comes from.

59:23

Yeah, I think those are very good points. There are a few audience questions, and I just wanna say anyone who's live streaming right now, if you have a question, get it in now because we're landing the plane.

59:32

We've been going almost an hour here and we didn't really wanna go too much over an hour. I wanna just, there was one last question

59:40

I had that I wanted to pull up. And just broad question, but ask each of you guys, what do you think the root disagreement here is?

59:48

Now, I understand the more cynical side of us might say like, or maybe not us, but I know other people have voiced to me that they don't think this is really about Christian nationalism at all.

59:58

This is a turf war and that kind of thing. But there does seem to be some kind of a disagreement, at least some of the people associated with G3 think that they have with some of us.

01:00:10

And this is a tweet from Owen that I thought might have, Owen Strawn, that maybe clarifies.

01:00:16

He said, in political terms, though mocked, I stand for religious liberty, not suppression of heretics, democracy, not a dictatorship, free speech, not speech codes, the constitution, much as its authority has been weakened in a multi -ethnic state, not a mono -ethnic one.

01:00:31

And of course, this gets very broad support. It's funny to me though, because Josh Bice said that he wouldn't talk to people,

01:00:39

I guess, I think it was Josh Bice. I showed it, the screenshot earlier, who had a martyr complex.

01:00:45

And so, and Owen Strawn starts this whole tweet, though mocked, this is what I stand for.

01:00:50

And these are things I would say universally, most Christians would say, like if you say, hey, do you believe in religious liberty?

01:00:57

They'd say, well, yeah, right? So, I mean, I'm wondering, like, is this what,

01:01:04

I don't wanna get in their heads, because I don't know if Owen Strawn, does he actually think that that's the disagreement? I'm assuming he does.

01:01:11

But, when we look at a list like this, and this is being promoted as this is the thing, this is the gate or the barrier between us.

01:01:19

I mean, do you see anything that you're just really strongly against here, that this really just runs counter to what you believe and you would argue against it?

01:01:27

Or is this generally kind of what we all believe? Or, I mean, it's kind of vague, but I just wanna give you guys all a shot at that.

01:01:35

Anything you take issue with in this, maybe Steven should go first. He's the scariest.

01:01:42

Yeah, I mean, I take issue with the fact that it's passive aggressive, that it's a typical tweet, it's

01:01:49

Big Eva 2 .0, which means that it's, you know, like the old

01:01:55

Big Eva sort of rhetoric is that you say something that on its face is, on the surface is something most or everyone affirms, but then it implies that your opponents or enemies don't affirm those things.

01:02:14

And that's why people like that. That's what get likes on social media with this sort of passive aggressive rhetoric.

01:02:20

And I've written about this a lot in the past when I was criticizing Russell Moore. So, I mean, it's like, again, it's just like Big Eva 2 .0

01:02:28

kind of rhetoric. I think like separating democracy versus dictatorship is a very modern approach to politics.

01:02:36

And frankly, I think it's kind of embarrassing for someone to affirm that sort of binary approach to politics given the one, not only the classical or just the political tradition of Western political thought, but also just Christian political thought, which always affirmed the legitimacy of multiple or different types of regimes.

01:02:57

But yeah, I mean, in terms of religious liberty, again, it's one of those passive aggressive attacks where he's essentially affirming war in court, religious liberty, which means essentially religious chaos, which means the left will ultimately take over as they did.

01:03:19

Whereas I think in American history before the founding, at the founding, after the founding, there was an affirmation of religious liberty, but it was understood that religious liberty would only function and exist well under a

01:03:37

Christian or an American context under Protestant framework or a Protestant foundation.

01:03:43

And that's why there was so much interest in maintaining the sort of Protestant dominance in the

01:03:49

United States, because there was a thinking that, like I said, Protestantism is the foundation of religious liberty, theologically, conceptually, philosophically, and just culturally.

01:04:01

So yeah, I don't know what else is on the list, the multi -ethnic thing. I mean,

01:04:07

I guess that's an attack on me. I'm a paleoconservative and a paleoconservative traditionally has affirmed that it is good to have a regional ties to a place with the people that have lived on that place for generations.

01:04:27

I think it's pretty much indisputable that you have a connection to this country because each of us has probably a story of a grandfather or a father or a great -grandfather who was a part of, say,

01:04:39

World War II. And each of us could probably give a story, maybe not an exciting

01:04:45

Medal of Honor sort of story, but nevertheless, my grandfather was in Honolulu during World War II.

01:04:51

My other grandfather volunteered, but he was medically disqualified. We all have those stories that connects us to this country.

01:04:59

So I think that there certainly is a generational component to your attachment to a place that cannot be shrugged off.

01:05:09

Now, I certainly think there could be a multi -ethnic populace under a state,

01:05:17

I won't deny that, but there is something good about having a connection a generational connection to a place.

01:05:27

And that's what I tried to argue in the book. Again, when he says ethnic, he's appealing to probably more genetic sort of -

01:05:35

A different definition. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot to talk about there.

01:05:40

This is one of the problems. It's like you go through that list and each one of those things, you can talk in depth, like democracy versus dictatorship.

01:05:48

Okay, you accept the post -World War political, the new political science framing that sets everything in a binary.

01:05:53

Okay, why don't we talk about the other regime types or mixed regime or something like that?

01:05:59

So - Yeah, yeah. You don't have to go over all of it right now, but - But I know we want to wrap it up, but yeah,

01:06:06

I'll just say that. Yeah, I mean, any of you guys want to weigh in on this at all? I got to jump in on this one.

01:06:12

Go for it. I think that what he has in mind, like Steven already says, is post -1960 definitions of these terms.

01:06:20

And he makes that somewhat clear with his little parentheticals, but just to rattle them off, like religious liberty.

01:06:26

We had a religious liberty of a kind at our founding, but it was very different than what it is today. We had states that had establishments.

01:06:33

We had blasphemy laws on the books. We had blue laws. We were self -confidently a Christian country, broadly speaking.

01:06:40

We were tolerant for the most part relative to most other countries of minority religions.

01:06:47

But if that's what he means by religious liberty, great. But I have a sense that he means something much more like 1960s.

01:06:53

Okay, democracy. Read the founders. Most of the founders were actually, they had a very dim view of what they called pure democracy.

01:07:01

They thought that was mob rule. They thought that what they were founding was a constitutional republic, which incorporated elements of monarchy and aristocracy, and they blended those elements together to make the government more stable.

01:07:16

They were very skeptical of the rule by the mob. And by the way, they also thought that you could have a democracy that wasn't tyranny.

01:07:24

You could have 51 % that decided to be a tyrant over the 49%. Maybe that's happening today.

01:07:32

Free speech. So at our founding, people were free to speak their mind about political issues and criticize their government.

01:07:40

People were not free to blaspheme or to speak, generally speaking, there were restrictions on profanity or pornography or things like that.

01:07:51

That's free speech, and I'm all for that if that's what Owen means. But again, I don't know. I mean, he might very well mean free speech the way it's defined in the later half of the 20th century, which means everybody has a constitutional right to make pornography.

01:08:06

The constitution, absolutely in favor of that. I don't know if we, I don't know how we get back to the constitution.

01:08:14

I would love to get back to it. I think we're under a different constitution And then finally, the multi -ethnic state.

01:08:21

Just, I would say, substitute cultural for the word ethnic in his statement there. He wants a multicultural state rather than a monocultural state.

01:08:30

At our founding, one of the most important predicates that had to be laid down in the Federalist Papers was John Jay's Federalist Two, where he argued that the people of the

01:08:38

United States had enough of a shared culture that they could be in one nation together. Most people throughout time have thought it was important to share a culture, a language, traditions in order to have a political life together.

01:08:51

I don't know if Owen's rejecting that or not, but it's unclear from what he says here. All right, well,

01:08:57

I, just because of time, unless you have something really quick, I'd like to move on to just a few of the questions the audience is bringing in.

01:09:06

So I'll open it up real quick as I pull up those questions. Yeah, I've got something quick on that.

01:09:12

I was at an event in DC at the Hungarian Embassy, and I think this is really important to point out that you could potentially have a multiethnic state.

01:09:22

There's nothing wrong with that at all, but you can't have a multicultural state. But what we have in America right now is unmitigated multiculturalism, which is an acid that destroys all sort of cohesive, you know, cohesive ties for stable civil society.

01:09:43

You know, in some senses, when I see that tweet from Owen, I wanna say yes and amen. I agree that I don't want any of those things that you don't want, so we're on the same side.

01:09:51

But then the fundamental question is, as Josh alluded to, well, how do we get back to the things that we want if we could agree on those things?

01:09:57

And as I think of Christian nationalism, it really is an effort to get back to the right understanding of all those positive things that Owen listed, and it's a path back.

01:10:07

We had it, we lost it, and we need to restore it. How do we do that? Let me give you some,

01:10:14

Nate, I'm sorry, you didn't weigh in. Did you wanna say anything real quick? I think Josh said it. I think in many ways, they don't wanna venture far outside of sort of post -1960s, post -1970s framework.

01:10:28

They like basically advancing Christianity within that framework. And I think the other one is institutions, right?

01:10:37

I mean, I think there's been a consistent theme we didn't touch on, but I would say they are very individualistic with the faith.

01:10:44

They're very skeptical or negative toward any sort of Christian institution, and there's been a lot of Twitter based on that.

01:10:50

And fundamentally, I think where I'm probably most focused, as I said,

01:10:55

I'm ambivalent about the Christian nationalism, or I certainly am not convinced on that, but I'm 100 % convinced that we need to be building

01:11:04

Christian institutions, institutions oriented toward a Christian vision. And that I think is a real area of disagreement.

01:11:12

Yeah. All right, some questions from the audience. So here's one for 1999.

01:11:18

Is it inherently better to marry your own race? So the word race is used, not ethnicity, not culture, but so I'm assuming that there's a genetic component that Ian Franklin is bringing into this.

01:11:30

I mean, I think Steven already kind of talked about this, but I don't know if any of you guys wanna answer that question.

01:11:39

Is it better or worse? Does it matter? I'll pick on someone if we have to.

01:11:51

Well, William, you wanna take a crack at that? Or Josh, Josh, you haven't said much lately, have you? You've probably talked the least in this whole thing.

01:11:58

I just rattled off, I just destroyed Owen, but okay, fine, I'll take a go at that. I don't think it's inherently better or worse, but I think it's more common and that's fine.

01:12:09

That's not a problem. It's not something that we need to worry about. Okay, here's another one.

01:12:15

This is for Steven for 999. What is the difference between what

01:12:23

Douglas Wilson and mere Christendom and your, so I guess the question is, do you disagree with Doug Wilson, your

01:12:29

Christian nationalism and his mere Christendom? Yeah, I mean,

01:12:35

I disagree with some of his arguments in there. I think his argument about free speech, his argument against blasphemy laws,

01:12:41

I think those are all wrongheaded. I think they're just all faulty arguments. I think he also comes from a post -millennial perspective and a certain one that I would say is it wants to start with revivalism as the, so there has to be a wide revival before,

01:13:02

I don't want to misrepresent his arguments, but I think he seems to suggest that we can't do much until there's a widespread revival spiritually.

01:13:14

And my argument is that each authority, so a civil authority and I think societies in general as a sort of authority can, ought to exercise its power within it with prudence, according to principles.

01:13:31

And that includes ordering the people to a

01:13:37

Christian life and eternal life. So even though of course, it's an essential element that there would be, the gospel would flourish in this community,

01:13:46

I don't think we have to wait on a revival for there to be assertive

01:13:52

Christian politics that orders the people properly. Now that's not to say it's forced, but it is to say that if the conditions are appropriate, then you can begin to act with prudence to that end.

01:14:08

So I think that's our, he and I would disagree on that, I think. So I would take like, so like Calvin in his, he dedicates the institutes to the

01:14:22

King of France and he doesn't call, he doesn't say, hey, let's wait till there's true religion flourishes and then you can act and be a

01:14:30

Christian King. He said, no, you're a Christian King, you ought to be one now. And he's not,

01:14:37

Calvin's not denying that there ought to be preachers preaching the gospel at every corner of the kingdom, but that as a

01:14:45

King, he has the authority and obligation to act with his power to that end.

01:14:52

So I think that would be the disagreement. There might be other things as well. But again, so I'm not misunderstood, of course.

01:14:59

It has to be within the realm of prudence and the possibility. Politics is the art of the possible, is that the right quote, so?

01:15:07

Yeah, I'll leave it at that. Well, there are other questions that are very good, but I think we need to land a plane. We've gone 15 minutes over an hour now and I just wanna give all of you guys a chance to maybe make a short final word.

01:15:20

If there's something you forgot that you wanted to say or just if you wanna cap this. And I think maybe in particular, people who are listening to this, how can they, what should they take away from our discussion?

01:15:32

So I'll go last, but anyone who wants to jump in there, go for it. So I'll start and I'll say,

01:15:39

I would love to, I'm looking to build alliances at every point.

01:15:48

I'm not, I'm open to discussion. I'm open to debate. I'm open to challenge.

01:15:54

And ultimately I think we share a tremendous amount. A lot of the objections from the

01:16:00

G3 leaders are about things that I might consider theoretically worth considering.

01:16:08

When it comes to what practically we're trying to do, especially in the private sector, which is where really all of us are focused largely, it's private and religious sphere.

01:16:21

I think there's a tremendous amount of agreement and I want to be working together with everyone who shares those views.

01:16:29

I think that we need to cooperate. And I think we all know that there's serious problems here and we all generally, certainly the vast majority of Christians, especially vast majority of conservative

01:16:45

Christians are in agreement on a lot of the things that need to happen and we should be working together.

01:16:55

Yeah, good, good word. I would say that we all need space to be having discussions about politics right now and we need to be reconsidering some assumptions that we've had.

01:17:09

We've had, frankly, a very comfortable run in some ways as Christians, but the atmosphere is changing.

01:17:16

We're having to consider questions that we haven't had to think about in a very long time. American Reformer is dedicated to being a forum for those kinds of debates.

01:17:27

So again, we're not the Christian nationalist journal, but we're very interested in running good stuff on Christian nationalism and people who want to thoughtfully disagree with it are welcome to come there as well.

01:17:39

It has to be people who make arguments, not people who come and say, these ideas are scary or whatever, but we need to have a debate.

01:17:49

And like I said at the beginning, if you've got a political vocation, you really have a duty to be thinking about our political situation.

01:17:57

Hopefully pastors can be helping that process, but at a minimum, I would hope that they don't, folks at good faithful organizations at least don't criticize faithful Christians who are wanting to think through these issues right now.

01:18:12

Maybe it's not every pastor's specialty and that's okay. They don't need to be the expert on this particular issue, but they need to understand that politics is intruding on their flock and their flock needs to think through these issues now.

01:18:27

Very good. And I totally agree. William. Yeah, I would like to close by encouraging

01:18:33

Baptists who support a constitutional Republic and religious liberty, but recognize that they need to reject the myth of neutrality to be willing to consider that there are perhaps some pre -liberal commitments, either explicitly

01:18:48

Christian out of scripture or natural law arguments that are necessary to uphold a free society.

01:18:54

And those are rapidly disintegrating in our country. Craig Carter said, somebody has to say no to the radical secularists who wanna tear everything down.

01:19:04

Well, who's gonna say no? I would say Christian nationalists need to say no. And as we see even increased reports of the mass immigration that's flooding across our border and everything else that's happening.

01:19:15

Today, two elderly 70 -year -old pro -life women were charged in federal court or they were sentenced to be charged in federal court for their pro -life activities.

01:19:26

We're at a civilizational crossroads and Baptists have to decide whether we're gonna do political theology by slogans or by tradition and scripture.

01:19:37

And this is something that previous Baptists have understood at the end of Carl F .H.

01:19:42

Henry, arguably one of the most prominent political cultural critics of the 20th century in Baptist life at the end of his six volume work,

01:19:52

God, Revelation and Authority, he says this and I'll close with this. He says, if modern culture is to escape the oblivion that has engulfed the earlier civilizations of man, the recovery of the will of the self -revealed

01:20:05

God in the realm of justice and law is crucially imperative. Either we return to the

01:20:11

God of the Bible or we perish in the pit of lawlessness, which that's just a long way to say it's

01:20:18

Christ or chaos. And that's what's facing us today. Yeah, good, good word. Stephen. Yeah, I would just say that I think we probably would all agree with this, that one of the things we wanna see and what

01:20:31

I wanna see as an American Christian nationalist is to see the return of an assertive

01:20:40

Protestantism at this point, I don't think just Protestantism, but an assertive Christianity that affirms this place as ours and is willing to say that and act for that end to secure it.

01:21:00

I think that is, in fact, the most American position you can take given our history as I've tried to show elsewhere that for most of our history, it was the belief that we're a

01:21:15

Christian country and we ought to remain a Christian country. And there was a confidence in trying to secure that.

01:21:25

Yeah, trying to secure that. So I think that's, but at the same time, do that in a very

01:21:32

American way given our traditions. So that's what I'm all about.

01:21:39

And so, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Well, I appreciate each one of you. And I just wanna say,

01:21:45

I commend you for your patience in all of this. We've watched this over the course of months play out.

01:21:51

And I think some of you have demonstrated an incredible amount of patience with some of the things that you've been called by, not just and on accounts or anything, but actually people with institutional authority and Christianity, or at least the insinuations that have been made against you.

01:22:07

I just would appeal to anyone from G3 who's watching this, who is maybe part of some of the screenshots and the public discussion on Twitter that's taken place to just pursue the things that make for peace.

01:22:20

I think all of these brothers, including myself, that's what we desire. And I don't think we have stopped desiring that.

01:22:26

However, we do recognize that there has been a shift that after a certain amount of time of this continued attempts to have public discussions that are profitable and even maybe private discussions that are profitable and having that not be reciprocated, it's going to have an effect.

01:22:47

And that effect is going to be a divide. And I think that divide is already forming and it's a shame.

01:22:53

It's a shame, I think, to the kingdom of Christ, but there is no vitriol on any of our ends.

01:22:59

And we're firm in what we believe. We're going to defend it. I think each of the panelists here have demonstrated that and given their commitment to that.

01:23:09

And my, I guess, charge for everyone who's listening to this is just to think for yourself, not to follow someone just because they're a part of a ministry that you followed for a long time or because they have a letters by their name or they preach well, even, or speak well, but really think through what the truth is.

01:23:30

What does the Bible say? As Martin Luther said, scripture in plain reason, what actually comports with what is truly true?

01:23:37

And I think once you start thinking about that, applying truth to the situation that we live in, you'll come to your own conclusions on it.

01:23:44

And it might take some work, but that is what we're called to do. That's what the Bereans were commended for. So I appreciate those of you in the audience.

01:23:52

I know many of you are thinkers. You do think through these things. That's why you're listening to this. Thank you for listening. We appreciate it.

01:23:58

And any questions you can go to, well, you can go to my website, johnharrispodcast .com.

01:24:05

Nate, Josh, American Reformer, is that the best way to get ahold of you guys? Americanreformer .org.

01:24:12

We're on Twitter, amreformer. Amreformer on Twitter. And William, Twitter, I'm assuming.

01:24:20

Is that where people can get ahold of you? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. Okay, just find him.

01:24:27

Just find him on Twitter. All right. And Steven's on Twitter as well. Well, with that, guys, good night to everyone.