Trail Talk: Beware of Ideology

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Hey guys, welcome to the conversations that matter podcast, it's trail talk edition today and it is stunning.

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This is what September and October look like in New York and New England, summertime temperatures during the day, but it's crisp, it's cool, especially at night.

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It's dry, not like that sticky summer stuff. And look at this, you already have some leaves starting to change their color just a little bit.

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If you ever get a chance, if you don't live in this area and you're offered, I don't know, someone invites you to come stay with them, do it, especially in October.

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It's just a great time. Which reminds me, we have a men's retreat coming up and you will definitely get to see this kind of weather.

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I shouldn't say definitely because it might, you never know, rain can always come, but you will most likely get to see this kind of weather at the end of September at the

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Adirondacks where it's a little cooler. Just go to fundamentalsconference .com and unfortunately it's only for men, but we have a great time.

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So, anyway, the subject I have for today's podcast is kind of a stream of consciousness.

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I'm not working off of any notes or I don't have anything prepared to say, but there's some observations

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I have and some encouragement I have because I'm a little bit perturbed, shall we say, by some of the things that I'm noticing online.

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And any of us can fall into this kind of thing. I'm going to talk about, really,

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I guess, ideology. I know I talk about that a lot, but it's subtle, it's tempting, it's subversive.

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We don't know sometimes that we're in it. And the root, I think, of ideology often, if not in every case,

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I guess, is a pride or an ignorance following someone who's got a pride. There's a great arrogance to it.

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And I'll explain that as we get into this a little. But there's a principle in scripture that says we should not pretend to know more than we do know about something.

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We should not have confidence that we are sure about something when we don't have any reason for that confidence.

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Proverbs put it this way. Whoever gives an answer before he hears, it is a folly and a shame to him.

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It's not just a shame because you're embarrassed when you're proven wrong. It's a shame because you're actually making out like you're an expert on something.

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You're treating yourself as an expert on something when you're not an expert on something. And it will hurt you.

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Not just in the eyes of others, but in real life. It will hurt you. You will make bad decisions.

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You will do things that harm yourself and others because you're working off of bad information and your arrogance is blinding you because you can't see the full picture.

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And maybe you have a kernel of truth. Maybe you have access and you've understood rightly some things that are true, but you don't have the full picture.

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So it's important whenever thinking through important matters to really take your time and come to clear convictions on things.

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And don't feel the need to spout off or be sure about things that you simply don't have the bandwidth, time, or energy to be sure about.

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There are so many examples of this. And I understand today with social media, especially we have what some would call, not my term, but some would call the democratization of opinion and knowledge.

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And this has blessings and curses. I've talked about the blessings before. You wouldn't be listening to the show if you did not have an internet connection and access to this podcast, right?

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And you probably found out about it on social media or someone told you about it.

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YouTube, somewhere like that. Algorithms might've told you, although they haven't been favoring me in the last few years on YouTube, but you have access to the information that I'm giving you.

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And I think that's a good thing. And I think there's many wonderful podcasts, but there is something tempting about the internet and social media.

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There is a false sense we get as humans. We can get in thinking that we have access to all knowledge that we almost have a godlike status.

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We have Google, we have now chat, GBT, and these other AI programs, and those things can be helpful tools, but they do not give us access to wisdom or all knowledge.

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There's always going to be things missing. There's always going to be people with their thumb on the scales. There's always going to be things that go beyond our bandwidth that we can't possibly understand everything about.

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Wisdom in the scripture is, if you think of like Proverbs, right?

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You'll notice this. It is learning from your experience, the experience of others, and natural revelation.

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What God has placed in this world. And of course, obviously, what he has said in his word clearly.

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So you're looking at these various things, you're tying them together, and you're coming up with patterns. You're noticing how human nature behaves under certain sets of circumstances, and you're adjusting your own behavior based on those things.

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Someone who is wise, when they get older, they have so many sets of experiences, whether it's things they've read or things they've lived through, or things they've watched other people go through, whether successes or trials, that they become sage -like.

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At least they should. They should be more wise. It's unfortunate when you find old fools who are stuck in some ideology, or they just decided not to learn from those things, not to apply prudence, and they end up old fools that are people who are worse off than they were maybe when they were young, because they keep going down the wrong path.

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But if you go down the right path, and you listen to lady wisdom, then you will be a sage.

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And I think you'll also demonstrate a maturity when you navigate controversial subjects, because you have a bigger view.

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You know that the world doesn't begin or end with you, or your time on earth. You know things change, and they can change quickly.

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Even if it's not going your way now, you know that God has a plan. There's providence. There's a certain joy,

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I think, that you can exhibit. And it's not a total passivity.

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It's not like, well, I can't change anything, so I'm not going to be mad. It's more of,

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I can only change what I have the authority and ability to change. I can't go beyond that.

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And that's what we all want to be. We all want to shoot for that. Sadly, what

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I've noticed with social media is, because of some of the blessings, like anyone can access any elite, for example, on X, like someone who's an elite who you never would have been able to talk to, there would have been so many barriers, you can go directly to them and say, hey,

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I want to hold you accountable for something, or I want to ask you a question. And sometimes they'll respond. Sometimes you'll get a crowd of people behind them saying, yeah, we want to know too.

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And it can apply pressure in ways that pressure didn't used to be applied. Because of those blessings, there's also, though, on the flip side, curses that come with that.

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You can be someone who doesn't know what you're talking about at all, which is a lot of people on social media, and you can be very opinionated and very sure of yourself.

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And if there is anything people right now want, it is to hold on to those who are sure of themselves, like a life raft.

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We're all drifting around a lot of the paradigms that we thought made sense of the world, don't seem to make sense of the world.

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We don't have categories for some of the evil and dysfunction we're seeing, and we're looking for them.

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And people are latching on to some very odd things, in my opinion. And I don't want to pick on too many specifics.

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I could probably make a podcast for three hours just going through what I think are ideological pitfalls that you can fall into.

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But there, I'll give you a few examples. I think reducing everything down to whether or not someone is of a certain racial makeup.

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And if they're of a certain racial makeup, then you know they're bad. And if they're not, then they're good.

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I'm not talking about proverbial truths that certain people groups seem to be characterized by this activity or this, even if it's harmful, this harmful activity.

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I'm saying that this is a paradigm that you use to make sense of everything in life without exception.

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And you don't notice other... Like, I just had an exchange with someone this morning that I could very clearly see.

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They want to blame a certain ethnic group for all the troubles of the world, and they're not very clearly seeing how other groups or other peoples have participated in the very troubles that they're complaining about.

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Not just participated, but engineered. And, but when you buy into ideology, it becomes very binary, and you take things that are more complicated, that have more moving parts, and you dismiss the things that don't fit your paradigm.

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And there may be a little kernel of truth somewhere, but you elevate that into the key to all knowledge.

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And so everything passes through these simple precepts. And everything has a tag on it.

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A tag that either says that it's good or it's bad. There's really no gray area, based upon answers to very simple questions.

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And this is... There obviously are things that are true moral binaries. It doesn't mean that there aren't.

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But not everything in life fits into one or two or even three binaries. It's not like you can look at a situation...

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For example, I'm just going to pick something from the news. You can't look at a situation like what's happening in Ohio right now with some town...

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I think it's one town, but probably more than that. I think there's a town in Ohio, a town in Georgia, but they're overrun with these

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Haitian immigrants. You can't look at that and say, well, I have this paradigm that says certain eschatologies are bad, right?

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And others are good. Mostly dispensationalism and post -millennialism are viewed almost ideologically by some people.

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And I'm going to blame that eschatology because I know it's bad. Well, can you find some connection of eschatology to these problems?

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Maybe you can try, but there's obviously other things going on. But ideology reduces everything.

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It flattens everything. It cartoonizes everything. And there's a lot of ideology, and it's very, very tempting for a rootless people.

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If you do not have a tradition to tap into that gives you a sense of the world around you and stability and a place of belonging.

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And I'm talking about, most importantly, your Christianity and Christian tradition.

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But I'm also talking about, beyond that, a healthy sense of family, a healthy sense of place and people.

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If you don't have these legends, these things that most children are brought up with, or they should be, they're probably not most anymore, but they at one time were, then you are very destabilized and you are ripe for an ideology.

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I've seen this. Someone comes to you. You can't make sense of the world.

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You know you've been harmed or treated poorly, and now you're in a state of shock.

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A lot of people were in that in 2020, right? They had to leave jobs. They had to leave places they lived in and move.

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There's just so many things, and then they're processing what just happened, and they don't have words or categories for it. They just know it was bad.

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And they do want something to blame. They do want to understand. And if someone comes to you with some kind of an ism and says, well, it's all because of this, it's all because of post -millennialists, or it's all because of dispensationalists, or it's all because of a certain ethnic group, or it's all because people, whatever.

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It's because they didn't, I don't know,

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I'm trying to think of other explanations that people use for 2020 stuff. We didn't adopt some policy years ago that we should have, and everything roots back to this one policy.

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There's a lot of moving parts in 2020. There was a lot of complicated things that happened. If you lived in Portland and you had to escape to Texas, there were probably a number of factors that caused the situation to be dismal where you were.

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And to reduce it all to one thing, or one or two things, and things that probably you shouldn't even attribute to that fully is,

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I think, a symptom of ideology. You can recognize it when you know about an issue. If you've studied an issue, if you understand, if you've applied wisdom principles, and then you go out there and you watch someone making these very overly simplistic binary presentations of what they think the problem is, you recognize it very quickly.

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Like, okay, this person, they're trying to grapple with something, and if they move beyond just asking questions, they're just making statements.

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Like, it's attributed, the problem is attributed to this one thing. You can tell that it's an ideological issue that they have.

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And on social media, I've noticed this gets increasingly arrogant. People who, it is obvious, it's so obvious.

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Like, last week with the whole, I guess it was last week, with the whole Tucker Carlson interview with this

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Martyr Maid guy, it was obvious to me, like 80, 90 % probably of the people forming opinions about this, they haven't read enough of World War II history to even understand fully the argument that Martyr Maid was bringing.

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But I think what happens is with these, you know, I said before, it's like a life raft.

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People are looking for those who have confidence. There are people out there who have confidence, sometimes ignorantly so.

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And they just want to latch on. And whether it's like a post -war consensus type of, like,

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Hitler, you know, evil as evil can be, and Winston Churchill, pure as the driven snow, and that just makes, we're going to start there without assumption before we even approach anything.

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And we haven't read it, but we just know that's kind of what we've inherited. You know, if it's that, or if it's the, you know, the flip side,

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I saw some people saying that this was somehow attributed to a fascination or an enthusiasm for the

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Third Reich. And you just basically flip the paradigm. Like, now,

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Hitler's the good guy. He's pure as the driven snow. Winston Churchill's the bad guy. Like, in both cases, there was a whole lot of ideology going on, but a lot of people commenting did not seem to understand the basic geopolitical situation.

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And I would just encourage people, if you don't, it's fine to say you don't know. I'm not an expert, by the way, on those things.

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But I actually, I had the benefit with that situation that at least I had read a lot of secondary sources on World War II.

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At least, you know, I had already, I had to create my own college -level

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World War II curriculum to teach. So I had that ready, I guess, if I ever get in a position of, I probably won't ever be in academia, but if I want to teach

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World War II. I mean, I'm not an expert on World War II, but I know a little bit about it. And I had read Pat Buchanan's book.

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So I already knew where Martyr Made was coming from. He later on attributed some of what he said to the same narrative that Pat Buchanan was bringing.

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And I knew that that narrative did not mean, regardless of Martyr Made's views,

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I don't know where he stands on other issues or other, you know, even World War II type things.

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But I knew that what he basically said on Tucker did not mean necessarily that he was some kind of Nazi enthusiast or neo -Nazi.

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He didn't say Hitler was the good guy. I knew that he didn't, that what he said did not render that conclusion.

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A lot of people jump to that conclusion because of ideology. It's true.

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That's just one situation. These situations though, I think because of the way social media works now, their cycles are so short.

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It'll be a day or two or three, and then we're on to arguing about something else and nothing is resolved. So you have people forming their opinions, but they haven't read the sources.

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They haven't actually tried to educate themselves on these things. They haven't learned from experience. They're going off of what someone with confidence says, and they like that personality or it fits some kind of a very simplistic paradigm that they've adopted.

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And so they're going to just believe it. And one of the things I hope that I offer, this is my hope on this podcast.

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I hope I offer you a stimulating challenge to think through issues rationally, logically, from the word of God, by good and necessary consequence.

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I hope that when we talk about the facts of a situation, in most cases,

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I'm at least able to give you, here are some primary sources. Here's some hard facts. This is what

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I'm working off of. This is the paradigm that I'm creating to make sense of all the available information, you know, that kind of thing.

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That's what I'm hoping. That's what I'm shooting for. And if I can't sufficiently do that, then

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I'll definitely let you know. And I'll say, you know, I have limits on this.

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And I've had to say that on a number of topics already. You know, eschatology being one of them.

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Yeah, I took a course in eschatology when I was in seminary. And yeah, you know, I've read some books on this and I've had to think through this.

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I've had to write position papers and all that kind of thing. But at the end of the day, I know

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I have a limitation and a lack of interest that I probably, I should be more interested, right?

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Because the Bible talks about this, but it's never been an interesting thing to me. And I, even as a kid, when there was, you know, all these movies and books about revelation,

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I just never, never got into that. I couldn't, I don't know. But I know

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I have a limitation there. So I don't talk about it. I just don't delve into those waters.

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Maybe someday I will. Maybe someday I'll really delve into those waters, right? And I'll give you, here's what I think.

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Here's all the references. Here's why I think this is important. But I'm not there. So when a controversy comes up about a topic like that, you're not going to find me weighing in.

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Unless I think I have something valuable to say that'll be helpful to you, that'll help you form your opinions in a wise, educated manner.

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True education. Not just spouting off Team Red or Team Blue. Not ideology.

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Not just personality -driven stuff. I really hope that there's more substance to it.

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Or else I wouldn't do the podcast. And there's a whole lot of opinion makers out there right now who I don't think are thinking that way.

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Praise God that there are people who are. But there are people who are changing.

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It's not wrong to change your views. But when you're constantly in flux, when you're changing your positions constantly, sometimes mid -podcast, right?

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When you haven't settled on some very fundamental things in your own view of the world, and you're figuring it out, then all you can really do is ask questions.

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And there's good podcasts where people ask questions, they have experts on, and hey, I'm going to expose. I think Tucker does actually a good job at this.

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When he doesn't know something, he has an expert on that might know about a topic, and he wants to just ask questions about it.

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But that's really all you can do at that point. You shouldn't act so confident about your new position that you've just found five minutes ago.

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Be careful of that. Because you may not have considered everything. We naturally need time to develop our ideas, to marinate in them, to mull them over.

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Take your time. Meditate. On things. When you're considering something new, really think about it.

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And consider whether you want to go public with your new convictions. I think that when someone becomes a

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Christian, there's a reason that they're not supposed to be put in a position of teaching authority in the church.

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And it's because of this kind of thing. There's a vacillation. You can be pushed to and fro by every wind of doctrine if you're not very rooted.

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And so make sure that you are rooted. And how would you know? Well, you can obviously assess yourself.

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But I think that having wise people in your life, if you have that available to you, especially spiritual leadership, they can help assess some of that for you.

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And this is the whole point of deacons and elders, and reaching a point of maturity and virtue, really.

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Virtue is a big part of this, before they can actually serve in their positions. We don't have that kind of vetting on social media.

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Anyone can pick up a, excuse me, a camera like this and start talking.

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Anyone, which, like I said, is a blessing, but it's also a curse. Because you don't always know who's on the other end of that camera, who's actually talking to you.

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What their life is like. Are they a virtuous person? Are they someone who pursues wisdom?

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Are they someone who's worth listening to? Who's thought through these things? And they can sound very confident.

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That sells today. When so many people are not rooted, are immature, are unstable, come from dysfunctional backgrounds, that is such an attractive thing to find people that are very, very sure of themselves.

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And it's not hard to always come up with a narrative either, of a few facts or something that will support a position that you hold.

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But most things, most situations, most conflicts, most figures, really every human figure is complicated in some ways.

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And if you're going to make honest assessments, you're going to have to wade through sometimes a lot more information than...

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And if you make confident assumptions, you're gonna have to wade through a lot more information than generally we like to, or we have bandwidth to.

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So, this is my plea that, you know, if you don't know something, if you're unsure about something, don't spout off on social media.

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Just be quiet. Just sit back and learn. That's when you have an opportunity to learn, to weigh things.

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When there's a matter that concerns you, that comes up, and maybe there's things you haven't thought through before.

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Maybe there are factors in life and categories that you didn't have on your radar, and now they're on your radar and you want to figure out.

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What is the post -war consensus, right? What does that mean? Go read, go study the issue.

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Don't just even listen to my podcast. I would encourage... If you have the bandwidth, don't just listen to this podcast.

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I'm going to try to bring you everything I can that I think is helpful, but there's a lot of information out there. And listen to both sides.

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Practice the Socratic method, and put yourself in the shoes of someone who might disagree with the person that you're listening to, and the person that you're attracted to, and really just think through it.

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And then go public. And then try to be an opinion shaper if you think that the

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Lord has put you in that role. This is a very hard thing, brothers and sisters. It really is. I realize that the principle of do not let many of you become teachers applies to the church, but I think that that is a principle that applies well beyond the church into so many other areas.

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Let not many of you become teachers, because teachers will incur what? A stricter judgment.

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You're held accountable because you actually do have power. You do have an effect with what you say. And when you lead astray a little one, it's better that you were drowned in the depths of the sea with a millstone around your neck.

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Your words have power. They really do. And you need to be careful how you use those.

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You want to use them to edify. You want to use them according to the need of the moment.

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There's sometimes good things you can say, but it's not the right moment for it. You want to make sure that you apply them properly.

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You don't want to be taking a sledgehammer, right, when you only need a screwdriver. So you need to admonish the unruly.

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You need to encourage the fainthearted. You need to help the weak and exercise patience in every category.

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There's very few people who are able to do this at the scale in which we are now requiring or asking people to do this kind of thing online.

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You have so many diverse groups of people listening to you in so many different walks of life. In various situations.

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And there's so many pieces of information coming at you about a million miles an hour. And you can't be an expert on all of them.

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You simply can't. You can learn wisdom principles. And then on the things you don't know, you can ask questions and try to come up with the best questions, the most relevant questions.

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I'm doing this this Friday. I'm having an author who's written about the Crusades who comes highly recommended to me by people that I believe are wise.

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And the reason I'm having him on isn't because I can't talk about the Crusades. I can talk about them.

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I took a course. I took actually a college course. This was an undergrad. But I did a course on Islam and the

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Middle East. And of course, we had to study the Crusades a little bit. And so I've read a few books on it.

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But I am in no way an expert on the Crusades. And I realized when there was a controversy two weeks ago about the

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Crusades and whether it was good or bad. I don't have time. There are so many. I got a triage. And that is not...

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The needs of the moment did not require me to say, you know what? I'm going to just take some time and really understand the

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Crusades. I've done that on other conflicts. I did that on the Russian -Ukraine conflict. I remember I dropped everything and I just read for days.

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And I still am not an expert. But I was able to get enough of the relevant facts to understand in basic terms what was happening in that situation and why our government in the

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United States was not giving us an accurate picture. They were withholding or ignoring certain things that they should not have been.

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So that was a very... I don't regret it. I'm glad that I did it. And now I have convictions on it. But I don't have time to do that.

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The Crusades were over what? A three, four hundred year period? Something like that. And there were,

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I think, six of them. It's a complicated thing. So I'm going to have an expert on. But someone who'd also comes recommended to me who's actually studied the issue out.

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And I'm going to ask questions. And there's a lot of things, probably most things in life. That's how we're going to pursue them.

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And if you're in a position of needing to figure that out, maybe you run a

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Christian school and you need to figure out curriculum or maybe this issue is, I don't know why it would, but it's dividing your church and you need to figure out a way to navigate that.

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Then yeah, maybe you need to go and do some more reading. But for most of us, guess what? That's probably not going to be a huge, huge issue in our lives.

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And there's probably other more important things. And so probably better to just let that controversy pass us by.

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I'm not being specific to anyone out there, obviously, because there's people who can very, in a qualified way, comment on these things.

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But we have to just be careful. We don't, none of us have the key to knowledge, the key to understanding everything.

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We know the process. God's given us a process by which to acquire knowledge and to understand things.

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He's given us the capability of finding wisdom, listening to Lady Wisdom and drawing conclusions.

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He's given us His word. He's given us anthropology. He's given us everything that we need to, the tools we need to approach these things.

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But that doesn't mean we all have the bandwidth to do all of it. And so don't fall into an ideology that makes sense of every situation, that uses simple precepts to make every situation in life, every controversy, every figure, every event either good or bad in some kind of very simplistic binary.

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Just be very wary of those things and don't fall into them.

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They can be very tempting because it's a shortcut too. And you don't have to do a lot of thinking once you buy into an ideology because it's all cut and dry.

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There are things that are cut and dry, but not everything. And the temptation of ideology,

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I think, is to make everything cut and dry, just about, you know, or most things in reality.

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And we just gotta fight that. We gotta fight that impulse more than ever.

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Like I said, it's a rootless people that I think tend to buy into ideology. And many of us are rootless now.

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So if you know you also come from a dysfunctional background or you feel that sense of rootlessness of you're trying to gain stability, you're trying to stand on your feet and you want something solid, know that you're probably more susceptible to this kind of thing and just be aware of it.

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That's all. Keep doing what you know you should be doing and practice principles of wisdom.

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Gain experience, gain understanding. Obviously, know the word of God well so that you can apply the principles in there to the various situations you come across.

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And be humble and learn and listen. And when you are sure about something, when you know something is right or wrong, because there's, let's face it, when it comes to a lot of basic moral things that are being challenged now, we do have firm convictions, we should.

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And, you know, it's, you don't have to know a lot to know that it's wrong for a woman to say that she is a man, right?

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Or that it's okay to kill a baby. There's things that are very, very, there's a low bar for entry into commenting on, it's not like the complicated, you know, six crusades and were they good or bad or what did they accomplish?

33:18

Like this is, these are very basic moral things. When it comes to stuff like that and it comes to stuff, even if it's complicated, you've gained a conviction on and you're in a position to be an opinion shaper and to change policy, change the way someone looks, then you be confident, be as confident as you possibly can be.

33:37

And don't let go, don't abandon your position because a popular opinion or something else hold to the truth.

33:45

But if you are not sure of yourself, if you haven't done the necessary study for a particular topic, don't go out there.

33:56

Don't trot out there and try to be an expert, whether to gain new followers or I don't know, just because you wanna assert yourself and maybe if you say it louder and more frequently, you'll feel more confident, whatever it is, just don't do it.

34:13

It's not wise and it's a folly and a shame. And you might find that you're not just hurting your own reputation, but you might actually hurt yourself and you might hurt others.

34:24

So that's my admonition, depending on who you are or my encouragement.

34:30

And I hope that that was helpful in some way, maybe gave you some food for thought. All right,