Wimpy, Weak and Woke: John Cooper Joins us to Talk About His New Book

Well, greetings, everybody. Welcome to The Dividing Line. My name's James White. We're back in the big studio. We haven't been in here for so long that Rich has no idea how anything works anymore. So his blood pressure is is peaking right now.

He would not be able to buy any life insurance right now from anybody if they if they did that life insurance test thing they do. So we're just going to hope everything goes together. We as everybody, no one cares about me being here.

But we are joined today by a world famous author, commentator, cultural critic. He does some music on the side. And soon, soon, I hope, and I believe to be wearing at minimally some really nice cardigan sweaters.

And eventually, with time, I think I can get him up to the Coogee level. It's going to take some work. It really, really will. But we are joined today by my dear friend, John Cooper. Some of you may have, you know, heard some songs he's written or something like that.

I don't know. But obviously, the big thing these days, John, is you've you've decided to become a big time author. And I just want to point something out. There's a couple things as we get started. First of all, first of all, I know I'm too small on the screen to see this.

But this I have an age test for you. Ready? I'm ready, bud. Okay. All right. There's an age test. I am wearing a t shirt that says specifically, first annual WKRP Turkey Drop 1978. Do you have any idea what the t shirt is about?

The only thing that crosses my mind is WKRP in Cincinnati.

Okay, you're halfway there. You're halfway there. But what is their absolutely most famous skit ever was the Thanksgiving Turkey Drop. If you haven't seen it. See, this is this is amazing. I mentioned this to Summer and to Eric at Jenny's birthday party this past weekend.

And they were clueless. They had never even heard of it. And at least you know, the theme song to WKRP, but you've not seen.

The Turkey Drop? Well, I'm a little bit older than Summer. I'm just not ancient like you.

So, I don't quite remember the episode. Okay, Rich just took offense to that because he's older than I am. So, but okay, when we're done here, you're gonna go watch... You're gonna go put Turkey... All you got to do is put Turkey Drop into YouTube.

It'll be the first thing that comes.

Up. Every time I talk to you, you just do nothing but give me homework. Yesterday, you told me I had to go study the diet of something which... Spire. ...of Spire. And, you know, I told you I knew all about the P90X diet, but I didn't know about the diet of Spire.

I'm tired of the homework,.

Man. I'm tired of it. Okay, all right. But here's the next thing. When you and I first hooked up in 2020, you hadn't written any books. That's true. When we talked about anything, it was, I'm just a rocker.

And now, we hook up, and two and a half years later, you're on your second book. How many footnotes in this beast? It's a lot. 648. 648 footnote book. And you're hanging with people like Joe Boot and me and all sorts of theological weirdos like us.

Does Cory blame me for a lot of this or just what's actually going on there? You know what I think happened? I think it.

Probably was because about two months ago, I think, or was that just one month ago, we got to come to your 40-year celebration for AOM. And I got to sit in your office. And I was sitting in the office, and I don't want to be too mystical, but I felt a spirit come upon me.

And I can only say, I think it's the spirit of the Coogee. The spirit of the Coogee came upon me. I felt it. And now, I think I'm almost ready to wear ugly sweaters. Don't go there. Resist it. Don't go there.

Resist it. Look, look, look. Okay, they are not ugly sweaters. They are wearable art. Okay. And that was the third thing I was going to say. Would you stop it? We're supposed to be professionals here.

Come on. Yeah, we didn't even start. Rich couldn't even get the logo to work. When you can't get your own logo working, you're pretty much out of the professional range. But the third thing I was going to do is I did want to sincerely thank you and Cory for coming here.

In fact, it was right through the wall right over there is where we were. Coming to our 40th anniversary celebration, that was a huge surprise. Josh and Summer arranged that. Josh went and grabbed you guys.

And I was totally and completely shocked and surprised and amazed. And it was really, really wonderful of you to do that. I'm not sure who then dragged you into having to talk. Um, someday you're going to get to come to Apologia Church and do nothing.

No talking, no singing, no performing. Just sit there and be blessed. That'll be a whole lot of fun someday. But I'm not sure. But I just wanted to thank you and Cory for making that effort because I know your guys's schedule is absolutely insane.

And that was just another trip through TSA. Uh, you know, uh, and you know, you guys don't fly all that much. You do a lot of driving. So do you have all the neat, cool TSA stuff or, or do you have to just love it through with all the.

Rest of us? Well, let's see. No, we, we, we don't, let's say we typically drive, but we do fly still a lot. I mean, probably 20 or 30 times a year. Um, and we do have a lot of things worked out. So it's just, it's just part of the gig.

If you're going to be in a band, you kind of got to get, you got to fly planes, trains, and automobiles. We've done all of those things, but it was, uh, we had a great time coming. I was really thrilled when, when summer and Josh hit me and said, Hey, um, do you think you guys can make it?

And I honestly was like, everything's booked. I'm not sure we're going to see what the schedule is. I couldn't believe it actually worked out. And we were on a fly date. We had flown to California and played at a metal festival.

Um, and, uh, with, uh, with a bunch of bands like tool and Limp Bizkit. And I told Corey, I said, I bet we're the only, we're the only artists ever that went from a playing with tool to going to a J Dr. James White thing, but it was really fun.

It was a, an honor to be there. And so, as you know, I'm just blessed with, uh, your friendship and blessed with the mentoring that you've done for me, taking my phone calls, sent me good stuff to study, uh, better, better things than WKRPs Turkey roast or whatever you're talking about now, but, uh, I appreciate it.

Look, it's going to become your favorite thing from 1978 when you see it. So, uh,.

That means it's gotta be better than battle star Galactica, which was loosely based on Mormonism.

The Mormon Roots of Battlestar Galactica and the Diet of Spire

Oh, no, it wasn't loosely based on Mormonism. Let me tell you something, buddy. Uh, I think I've told you this, but every writer was a returned Mormon missionary. And I actually fired up a couple of the first episodes recently while I was writing indoors.

And I was stunned at how Mormon it was. I mean, the language, the terminology, it was astonishing, but yeah, uh, look, Battlestar Galactica wasn't meant to be funny. I mean, Starbuck tried to be funny, but really normally wasn't all that funny.

Um, but yeah, you look as soon as we're done, ask Corey, if she knows it, first of all, all right, I will. And then look it up and you're going to love it. And you're going to go, man, I don't know how I missed that.

See, James has shown me something else to look at in life, but anyway, it's all that stuff, uh, aside by the way, the diet of spire. If you know that the diet of spire is where the term Protestant came from.

And that it wasn't that we were protesting Roman Catholicism. It was that the minority was protesting the majority's removal of their religious liberty rights. Then, you know, a whole lot more than pretty much everybody back on October 31st, who was posting the stuff with Martin Luther banging something on the Wittenberg door, which really didn't happen either.

Uh, so see, I'm doing everything I can to make sure that when you get to book like number 20, you're going to have to like dedicate one of them to me or something because I, I, I, I pointed you in the right direction.

All right. It's a deal. Speaking of books. Uh, okay. So I don't remember it was, uh, I don't remember exactly when it was that, uh, you started sending me various versions of a particular chapter. I think it was sort of the heart of the book, the main, the main chapter.

Cause I remember you were making changes in like a red or pink colored font type thing. Um, and we went through a lot of changes because unlike the first book, which was more, I would sort of call it more of an evangelistic book.

Um, you know, something you want to give unbelievers, uh, you know, sort of general worldview topics leading to a gospel presentation type of a situation. That's not what you're doing here. And you had to make a lot of decisions and you'll remember my, you know, my repetitive statement was, well, who exactly do you want to communicate to who, who, who exactly are you going for here?

That's, that's going to determine whether you do some of the things you're wanting to do or are concerned about doing, or worried that might distract. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff going on and it all comes back to who's your audience.

So did you sort of scratch and itch with the first book and then all the Cooper stuff webcasts you've been doing, dealing with stuff internally to the church created the next itch, uh, which is, man, there's some really bad stuff coming into the church.

I need to address this. Is that sort of.

Why Wimpy, Weak and Woke Targets Church Drift and Utopianism

How you'd see it going on? Yeah, I think that's probably definitely in the mix for sure. Uh, and you are right. The first book was, was more of a basic kind of worldview situation. I do think it was good for people who don't know Christ also found that it was good for a lot of people who have been in church maybe even for years, but never really fully understood what the basics of the faith, you know, really is.

And there's a lot of those kinds of people. Um, and I can relate to that certain things going on. How, how could I have missed that this whole time I've been in church? And, but since then, as the problems in the world are getting crazier and as I'm seeing, um, you know, as I began my relationship with you and you are sending me, Hey, have you heard of these people or these people?

And I started getting online, finding out the players, finding out who's saying what the shocking things that evangelical leaders are saying, some of our big leaders or the institutional regime, church people are so shocking that, that I just had this naivety, you know, this naivety that was just dying.

And, uh, I just felt like somebody needs to say this in a way that, that the ordinary people can understand ordinary moms and dads that don't have time to sit around, you know, uh, reading every book ever, but they're just going, how is this happening at my church?

Why is my, why is my church starting to say A, B, or C, or why is my kid coming home with a material telling my kids that, that they could be boys or girls or neither or both, or it could change every day.

Their gender could be fluid. Why are these things happening? Why are there drag queens showing up at the public library with little kids and all of these questions. And now most recently, why is, uh, why are our college kids in America cheering on Hamas as Hamas is as brutally doing some of the most just demonic things I've ever seen on video.

Okay. Um, raping people, butchering babies, putting babies in, in, in ovens and cooking them. Why are people in America cheering that on? And I'm sure you've seen the same statistics as me. I think it's Americans age 18 to 24, 51 of them support what Hamas did.

They say it was justified. Why is that happening? And I thought all of these things are under a rubric to me of utopianism and it's seeped into the church. And one of the things you'll be interested in that I don't know if I've said on any podcast, cause most people won't really care, but as I kept digging into it, I began discovering some of it is seeped into the church.

Certainly not a surprise under, uh, progressive Christianity or just liberal Christianity, but other times it seeped into the church and some of our reformed friends because of what I call in a, a faux post-millennialism.

It's, it's a post-millennial view of the kingdom going into the world and, um, making the wrong things, right. Bringing kingdom justice, but their ideas of kingdom justice are not biblically based. They're, they're really no different than secular humanism, but they, they, they've misunderstood what the gospel of the kingdom is.

As I started understanding that, I said, Oh, this is in our own camp. This is the post-millennial reform people in some cases, really preaching some of this really evil stuff. And so I just felt like maybe I could lay it out.

In a way that the ordinary lay person could understand. Well, I'll be honest, a couple of things. Um, I don't know if you've seen this because this only, I only started seeing this last night briefly.

And I saw a little bit more this morning, uh, this, um, TikTok videos of people reading Osama bin Laden's letter to America and all, and all these people going, wow, we were wrong to have gone after Osama bin Laden and just stuff like this, where you're, you're realizing that the, the young generation has been sold a bill of goods.

They've been given a worldview that's utterly untenable. It can't last. It can't, it can't lead to human flourishing, but they've embraced it via emotionalism. And it's frightening. It truly, truly is frightening because, you know, they will, they will be the ones determining who's in office if they're not already within a very short period of time.

And that that's going to change everything. But the other thing is, you know, you mentioned, I, I remember more than once in our conversations over the past couple of years that you would ask a question like, but, but how can fill in the blank famous reform person, um, say such and such a thing.

And there was a part of me that was, that was almost hesitant to have to, to have to fill you in basically. Um, and say, well, um, yeah, you may have been really blessed by this person in this area or that area, but here's how this works.

And, um, I had to explain to you going to Fuller Theological Seminary and being their token fundamentalist and having to deal with the progressive perspective in my seminary education and figuring out years and years later, yeah, that was purposeful.

The Lord had had an intention in that that's become very important in my apologetic ministry to be able to understand where these folks are coming from. But at the same time, it's, you're not the first person that I've had to say, yeah, well, there's a lot of views out there that you sort of wonder exactly how someone did, did buy into it.

And it's, it's hard to keep the balance of being able to go, yeah, but I was, I was blessed by them over in this area. Yeah. And you still can be, the Lord can use them in that way, but you have to be discerning.

You have to recognize when there's other, other stuff coming into play. And so that was definitely a thought in the back of my mind, even on that first long phone call that we had. Remember, I was driving down from Flagstaff when we first talked, that big, long one there.

And, and it's just sort of like, yeah, sadly you have to learn to be blessed by the things that are blessable and then take the rest of it and go, yeah, not so much on that one. We need to, you know, try to bring some correction there, bring some light to this area, things like that.

And that's really, that's really tough because that's not something you do based on emotions. That's something you do based upon a commitment to objective truth. And that's not a popular position to be holding today.

It's certainly not a popular position in your industry. So let's talk for a minute about the fact that, well, what have I said to you over and over again, as you were writing the book? It's my, my line, whenever you'd share something with me, my line would be, well, your manager's gonna love this one.

I mean, yeah, that's right. You know, I said it more than once. It's like, you know, is this person on blood pressure meds? Just, you know, are they reading this too? Because you know, you're having to say things that put you outside of the comfort zone of your industry.

I mean, let's just be honest. You really, you really, really are. And so far you're such a big juggernaut that you're, you're surviving it. You do such a good job in presenting it that I think a lot of people are a little hesitant to take you on directly, but there are lots of people on the sidelines that are lobbing hand grenades your direction.

Why, why take the risk?

Yeah, you said that, you said it to me a whole bunch of times. You say, what does your manager think about this? I mean, you know, it's just such crazy times. I mean, the truth is that I truly wish we could rewind the clock and make, make everything like it was in 2008 and 2007.

That would be really great. I mean, that was an enjoyable time of life. But we really are coming to, it's like, it's like the lies of pluralism and the lies of, of, of like, I would almost call it like globalization almost, you know, or multiculturalism or tolerance, or I don't know what you want to call it.

All of those lies are, we're basically have the fruit of it now. Eventually people are going to follow their worldview down the path. And at some point it's, we can't keep saying peace, peace, when there is no peace.

And I think that that's what happened with me. I got to the point when I just said, okay, wait a minute. All right. At the point in which we have, whether it's Christian musicians, Christian worship leaders, or whether it's Christian pastors like, you know, Joshua Harris and, and people like that, and maybe even more currently what we see happening with people like Andy Stanley and stuff, at the point in which we have all of these people saying such unorthodox things, or even just flat out leaving the faith and just, you know, setting fire to the church when they leave or setting fire to the gospel when they leave, we cannot sit silent with these things.

In fact, it's why James, I've actually got a physical book here to show people what it looks like. Here's what it looked like. So the cover is a little bit alarmist. People say it's burning. Well, I actually don't think it's that alarmist.

Once you have 51 of a generation cheering on Hamas and beginning to say, you know what, maybe bin Laden had a point. Maybe America is the bad ones. You know, it's like, once you do that, you realize we really are at the demise of a nation.

And so you got to ask yourself some questions like, what is it that you guys, you people cheering on the destruction of America, what would you like to replace it with? What do you think is going to be better than that?

And what we're seeing in the Christian music world now is just like, hey, if we don't stand against this now, this apostasy in Christian music, there will be no such thing as Christian music. And in fact, you probably could make an argument, to what degree is it even Christian music anymore anyway?

I mean, it's not like it used to be. I mean, I don't want to make it sound like the good old days were perfect. You've always had compromise in every institution, but you used to at least know that if you were going to a Christian bookstore, people were at least going to do their best to pretend that we were all singing about something we believed in.

And now there's no pretense. And the truth is, is that most Christians don't even really super care either. I mean, I've spent the last two weeks being rebuked by people, by Christians, because I said something about drag queens coming to the double awards, people that call themselves Christians coming in drag.

And you spend two weeks getting rebuked by people about it, and you just go, my Lord, Jesus come quickly. So anyway, I am not pessimistic about the end, meaning I trust God's providence. I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit through the church.

I believe in the power of the gospel to change lives, but we have a job to do, and the church has got to wake up.

Postmillennialism, Objective Truth, and the Need for Discernment

You know, you mentioned being rebuked for the past couple of weeks over a situation that I've shared with you long before you and I ever hooked up. You sent me a picture a couple weeks ago. You all were watching one of my debates on the bus driving somewhere.

I forget where it was. I think you said, this is how rock stars take the day off or something like that. And it was watching a debate that I had done. Well, years ago, I was contacted by a Christian artist group that was doing the exact same thing, and it was Cateman's Call, and I was contacted by Derek Webb.

And so we had contact. It's not that once the wheels fell off, he ever contacted me. He didn't. I wish he had. I don't know what I necessarily could have done for him before everything fell apart. But there have been those times, and obviously, I couldn't say much to what happened at the Dove Awards, but you certainly could, because didn't you guys win something as well?

Yes, we were not there, but yes, we did.

Yeah, okay. So, I mean, you can say something. You've got standing. They could care less what in the world I have to say. But yeah, that's a tough situation. The other thing that most people don't know, and this surprised me, is that you were a postie before I was.

All right. Right. In fact, you said once that if I listened to the earliest albums that Skillet did, that I would be able to see post-millennial themes in the songs. And the way you put it once was, but I don't really write them anymore, because no one understood what I was talking about.

You know, there's a level of truth to that. But yeah, you go back to some of those earliest, when you were a blonde, baby-faced kid, basically, there was post-millennial themes in a lot of the earlier albums.

And so, you were there before I was. And so, you're coming at this, not from where most people are coming at this, and that is a dispensational pre-millennial background that's sort of determining how you're going to look at world events.

You're coming to this book, and you're seeing a utopianism, and there is a utopianism in the WEF, WHO, globalist, secular idea that if we just establish these secular standards, that all is going to be well.

You're going to own nothing and be happy about it. La, la, la stuff. You're coming to that stuff, and you know what it means to have a positive hope for the future. But you have to differentiate that in light of sin, redemption, the reality of life in this world from the utopianism of the secular perspective, which ignores all that, ignores sin, ignores redemption, ignores the law.

So, how do you communicate to your audience? Because at one point, we had a discussion. I remember I was in the RV. That doesn't tell me much, but I remember I was in the RV. And you said some long lines of you were, I think you had put in a discussion or a definition of some of the millennial views, and then you were going to take it out.

You remember that? Yes, I do. Yes, that's right. What did you end up doing along those lines? Because how do you make the distinction between what you call the faux utopianism or faux post-millennialism and a biblical perspective with an audience that doesn't necessarily know what any of those background issues are?

Explaining Faux Post-Millennialism and the Utopian Project

Yeah, so here's kind of how I did it. Maybe I'm going to rewind a little bit, if that's all right, and give people a little bit of understanding about why I'm writing this utopia thing. I started thinking, okay, there's been some really great Christian books on certain issues.

For instance, I loved Fault Lines by Vodie Bauckham. It was fantastic. I loved Carl Truman's book. It's called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, I believe is what it's called. I loved Live Not by Lies by Rod Dreher.

There's a lot of great books focused on different things. My friend John Harris from Conversations That Matter podcast wrote Social Justice Goes to Church. That was really great on the social justice movement.

I was saying, what do all of these things have in common? What they all have in common is that they are trying to reach utopia, a perfected society of equity. You have the racial equity. You have the Marxism, the sort of economic equity.

You have the neo-Marxist, which breaks everybody up into gender, sex, race. You have all of that kind of equity. You have the communist America is the biggest oppressors on the planet Earth. You have all of these things.

Then, of course, you have the sexual revolution, the sexual utopia people. All of this is about creating this utopia. What I wanted to do for people is rather than just go off on these ideas, I wanted to give people what the original writers said.

The reason is because probably like a lot of people watching your show, in the last three years, I've had dozens of conversations with Christian people, Christian people who I consider brothers and sisters in Christ, and we are butting heads.

We're butting heads on BLM. We're butting heads on COVID, on whether churches should be locked down. These are people that were mad at Pastor MacArthur for opening up his church. These are people that would have hated Apologia, for sure.

We're butting heads on literally everything, but they're Christians and we're brothers, and I'm trying to make it work. I will say something negative about fill in the blank, critical race theory. 20, 30 times somebody said, John, you don't even know what critical race theory is.

That's just a right-wing talking point. They don't teach that in school. It's only a legal theory. Every time I've had that conversation, I want to rip my hair out because I do know what critical race theory is.

In fact, it sounds like my opponent doesn't know what it is. They're just repeating a left-wing talking point, which says that I'm just giving a right-wing talking point. So what I did in the book, as I said, there's nearly 650 footnotes from all the original folks, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Freud, Nietzsche, critical theorists, Marcuse, into the postmodern era, Foucault, Derrida, and all these people since with critical whiteness studies, so that the Christian can see the words and realize how much these people hated God.

They don't even pretend to not hate God. They are passionately vocal about hating God. And so that is the utopian aspect. What I don't dig about the faux post-millennial, that's what I call it, the faux post-millennial aspect, and by the way, I don't talk about eschatology a lot.

I'm not a theologian. I could never go into a debate and win if it came to that. And I would never divide over eschatology. The one thing I really want to do is encourage Christians, whatever your eschatology is, is in your life to live victoriously.

So you might not believe in the quote-unquote victorious church on earth, but certainly, certainly you agree that Christ has been victorious over the power of sin in our lives. And you have the power through the Holy Spirit to put that thing to death.

And that is what so drew me to post-millennialism, actually, was realizing, oh, you mean I don't have to live in sin as a Christian? Of course, I'm going to keep sinning, but I'm talking about patterns of sin and addiction and this and the other.

You mean through the power of the Spirit, I can overcome those things because of the work of Christ on the cross? That blew me away. And so the thing I don't like about faux post-millennialism is that they typically are very morally confused.

And I realize I'm making a generalization, but these people are morally, it's almost like they think everybody's going to get saved. And because everybody's going to get saved or be nice to each other, then everything's just going to miraculously happen.

And people are no longer going to commit sins against their neighbors. Well, that's just utopianism. God gave us a law for a reason so that we can understand who He is. And so the law is a schoolteacher, the Bible says.

So from the law, I understand what is wrong and what is right. And part of glorifying God, in my understanding, in the post-millennial eschatological dominion worldview, is that we glorify God by using His moral law to institute our civil law.

And that is how we bless the world. That's how we know what is actually righteous. What I see in the faux post-millennial camp is they are basically just taking on these secular philosophies of the world, like critical race theory or reparations and this and saying, see, that's what the kingdom of God would do because they're helping the poor.

But they look just like the secular utopians. They're never at odds with the secular utopians. How often have you seen a Christian post-mill, somebody like Eric Mason or somebody like that? I don't actually know his eschatology, but he talks about this gospel of the kingdom a lot.

How many times have any of those people ever stood up for the unborn, ever? How many of those people have ever stood against radical gender theory? How many of them have stood against the mutilation of teenagers because of this, the gender theory madness that we are seeing?

How many of them have stood up against Palestine, this Hamas and not Palestine, but Hamas and these evil things? They never stand up for any of those justice issues because those justice issues are considered to be quote-unquote conservative or whatever they are.

They only stand up for justice when the neo-Marxists have told them they are supposed to, and I think that's a very telling.

Thing. Well, remember that Eric Mason has called for an ecumenical church council to declare me a heretic. So then there's that. So I don't think he's done that for you yet, but the book might get you there.

We'll see if we can get you condemned as a heretic by some ecumenical council just for the fun of it while we're at it. By the way, I've come up with a new term for you while I was listening to you talking.

It's a whole lot easier to say on webcasts instead of faux post-millennialism. Just call it faux-po. Faux-po. Faux-po. I like that. That'll get you through interviews a lot faster. So this idea of a utopia, I'm not sure that people on our side have been clear enough in warning about this.

I don't know if you remember there was a video that came out about two years ago. Did you see this? It's like built in a desert. It's this city. We're talking about 15-minute cities and stuff like that, which is also known as the concentration camp.

But 15-minute cities and this city that you can cram all these people into, and it's so easy and all the rest of the stuff. And I'm sitting here going, all of this ignores the fact that you're cramming these people into a tiny little space and you're not changing their hearts.

And we're watching the crime that is taking place around the world, but especially in Western cultures right now, because we have abandoned the moral constraints that had, even when the explicit beliefs had sort of gone by the wayside, there was still the tradition that sort of held things together.

That's falling apart now. And you try to cram everybody into these utopian spaces and it's going to result in incredible degradation. This is not how humanity flourishes because, you know, whether you use the term or not, what you were just talking about regarding God's law is called theonomy.

And there are people that freak out when you even use that term, but obviously we're sitting in a situation today where the world is, because of its, the encroachment of secularism and its worldview. The only way you can come up with this is right.

And this is wrong is you start by manipulating people's emotions. You start by doing what we've done with the indoctrination system, not the education system. It's not education, the indoctrination system and removing from people the capacity to do serious critical thought.

And then you try to get them to go some direction that grants power to these people, but then to get to utopia, you eventually have to use tyranny. You have to use power to force people to do what you want them to do.

There's no basis for liberty. There's no basis for freedom. There's no basis for any kind of human flourishing in those situations. And of course, what we've been saying all along was, if mankind wants to flourish, we need to flourish in the light of God's truth because we are God's creatures.

But secularism says we're just a bunch of bags of fizzing chemicals. And the only way to get all the bags of fizzing chemicals to fizz the same way is through the use of tyrannical power. And so we see that going.

We have a communist dictator guilty of genocidal murder of the Uyghurs, imprisoning of Christians all across his land in the United States right now, being treated like a king. And so many of the young generation is like, oh, isn't it wonderful what they do over there?

And we're just left going, well, you know, when you take over a system that forced everybody to go for eight hours a day to be indoctrinated, I guess this is what you end up getting on the other side.

And so you raise the statement, and that's the question here. All right, let's say the wheels fall off. Let's say there's a period of real darkness heading the world's direction. This is not sustainable.

Secularism cannot cause human flourishing in this world. So somebody has to be saying, this is how you rebuild when all of this comes crashing down. So it seems to me that some of the tensions that I, you know, I don't get the feeling you're a super huge, you know, like really check it frequently social media guy, but because you do Cooper stuff, you've got to be on there enough to see some of the trends that are happening.

But it seems to me that part of the argument going on amongst Christians is between those who want to try to go back and rescue what we thought we had and those who recognize it's too late for that, we have to be looking forward to building something new.