The Obscene Treatment of Stephen Wolfe - Part 1

Opening Remarks and Transition to Christian Nationalism

All right everybody, welcome back to the channel. God bless you, hope you're well. We're gonna take a little break from the Jen Wilkins stuff, but I gotta say, I'm really quite enjoying it. You know, most of the time when I do Gospel Coalition content, I basically get sick of it right away.

I can't take it for very long. But you know, I power through because you guys enjoy it and you get value out of it, so I do it for you guys, as simple as that. But I can't say I enjoy it all the time.

But the Jen Wilkins stuff, I haven't gotten sick of it yet. I mean, obviously I can only take it in small doses, but I've quite enjoyed it and I don't really know why that is. Maybe because the feedback has been so positive.

By the way, thank you for all the feedback. I can see that it's helpful to you, so that's great. So maybe it's the feedback, but I think it's also because Jen makes it so easy. You know, she's really promoting some really obvious feminism, not as hidden as a lot of the Gospel Coalition, not as sneaky as a lot of the Gospel Coalition is, and she says a lot of outlandish things.

So maybe that's why I like it. It's just a lot of fun. But in any case, we're gonna take a step back and we're gonna talk a little bit about Christian nationalism, just a little bit, because a lot of you also asked of me to do some of that.

The Civil Magistrate and the First Table of the Law

So here's a YouTube comment that I thought was interesting. Basically the commenter says he's not sick of the Christian nationalism stuff, and every time Christian nationalism comes up on Twitter, Christians and non-Christians—I think he's thinking of probably the G3 people—and non-Christians say that Christian nationalists want to force people to believe in Christ, to profess Christ's name.

And the reason that they give for that is because we talk about the civil magistrate enforcing the first table of the law, or at least having some role. I mean, depending on the Christian nationalist you talk to, you could get different versions of this.

But at least there's some role for the magistrate in the first table of the law. And so that's what they say is the reason that Christian nationalists want to force someone to believe in Christ. I think Andy Woodward also used the—this is so stupid.

I mean, Andy, come on, you're smarter than this, dude. You're smarter than this. He uses Stephen Wolf's tweet where he says atheism will be crushed under Christian nationalism. 100%. It will be. It will be.

Atheism will come to an end. It's as simple as that. That's a really stupid reason to think we're trying to force you to believe in Christ. How could that even work? I mean, how could you force someone's conscience to trust in the Lord or profess Christ?

Like, you couldn't do that. I mean, I guess you could force them to say they profess Christ, but it wouldn't actually be a profession of Christ. Whatever. I mean, that's a side issue. So I guess the YouTube—by the way, great comment here.

Good question. The question is, what do we mean by the civil magistrate has a role in the first table of the law? And I really don't think this is that complicated. I mean, obviously, some people are going to have different opinions on how far that should go and things like that, but this is something that, you know, they did in New England in the time of the Puritans, you know, Sabbath laws and things like that.

These are things that are—in many places, they're still on the books right now, and it doesn't force anyone to believe in Christ, but what it does do is privilege the worship of Christ on Sunday. And so the idea that you should not be able to just go to the bar and get blitzed or go to the grocery store and buy alcohol or go to just any store for frivolous reasons at all—like, things that are not necessary should be closed on Sundays.

I think that it's completely appropriate for a Christian magistrate to enforce that by law, to say, no, there's no frivolous stuff open on Sunday. And the idea is not to profess Christ—it's not to force the shop owners to profess Christ—but the idea is to privilege and encourage your people to honor Christ as Lord on Sunday and to make it as easy as possible for people to set aside Sunday for the worship of God.

Look, if you're an emergency room doctor or things like that, we all understand that there are some things that are essential services. We understand that, right? The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

This is something that the Lord taught very clearly, right? But if you're just a vendor at the NFL stadium on Sunday, that is completely frivolous. And so we don't want people to have those kinds of jobs where all of a sudden they can't gather with the saints on Sunday when they want to, right?

And of course you might say to yourself, well, anyone who has a job like that probably doesn't want to gather with the saints. Okay, fine! But we want to encourage as many people to set aside Sunday as a day to honor the Lord as possible.

Does that mean that everyone is forced to go to church and worship Christ? No, it does not. But it does mean that everyone is going to set aside time on Sunday because Christ is Lord whether you think he is or not.

Whether you think he's up there or not, he is Lord and he has dedicated Sunday as his day. It's the Lord's day. I don't care if you're an atheist, a Hindu, a Jew, whatever, the Lord's day is Sunday and we are all going to set aside time to rest.

Now you do what you got to do, we're going to do what we have to do. It's as simple as that. And this is the thing, this is how it worked in Israel too. Like this is not something that you really need a lot of hypothetical examples, right?

Because here's the thing on the Sabbath in Israel, which was Saturday, no work was to be done but they did not force you to worship Yahweh. If you were there, you were sojourning in the land, yeah, you couldn't work either.

You have to respect the fact that we are dedicating this day to the Lord. You're a sojourner, you don't make the rules. We do. But you didn't have to worship Yahweh. Nobody's forced, nobody's got a gun to your head to say you're worshiping Yahweh but you are going to respect our rules because this is our country.

It's stuff like that. It's stuff like that. I think that you could think of different kinds of ways, different kinds of Sabbath laws. I think some states could do things more extremely than others and I think that would be totally fine.

I mean, again, we still have that situation in some places. When I used to live in New York, for example, they didn't sell alcohol in the grocery stores on Sunday in the 2000s. I don't know if it's still the case there but when I was there, they didn't.

It was against the law. Why was that? It's a Sabbath law. That's a Sabbath law, my friend. And so it's that kind of stuff. So the civil magistrate would privilege the worship of God and they would not do the same for Muslims or Hindus.

We don't close the stores on Friday because Muslims want to have a day to worship whatever. I mean, if they want to close their stores, they could do whatever the heck they want to do and they do, by the way.

In New York, there are things that close early on certain days. I don't remember if it's Friday or Saturday. I just don't know enough about the religion. But that happens in New York, right? They do whatever they want to do but the government has nothing to do with it.

See, that's the thing. They privilege the worship of Christ. They make it as easy as to encourage your citizenry to worship the Lord. And companies that refuse to comply, they would be punished for that.

It's as simple as that. I also think things like, for example, we're not forcing you to worship Christ but if you don't worship Christ, you can't be in leadership. We should absolutely have a requirement to worship and serve Christ in order to lead the country.

That should be a requirement. Because if you don't worship and serve Christ, then you don't even know what your job is if you're a leader in the country. If you're a governor or a legislator, if you don't honor Christ as Lord, then you don't know that you're serving Lord.

Therefore, you don't even know what your job is. Because the civil governing authority, according to scripture, is a revenger of God. And if you don't even acknowledge God, then you don't even know what your job is.

So how can you do your job? See, it's stuff like that. And obviously, I could say a lot more about that. And obviously, people are going to have differences and how far they go, what kind of blasphemy laws, things like that.

But that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about forcing people to worship Yahweh, but you are going to respect Yahweh's rule and his reign. You are going to do that in our Christian country.

Hope that's helpful, guys. Hope that's helpful. And again, people are going to make it seem like that's crazy, that's insane, that's totalitarian, that's a dictatorship. All you have to do is know just a tiny bit about history to know that the people that say that that's insane, they're lying to you.

Like, I got to be honest with you. I forget who it was. It might have been O 'Fallon or it might have been his little atheist crony. But they said something about how if blasphemy laws are enacted, the United States will cease to be the United States.

And it's like, then I guess the United States has never been the United States because when it started, there were blasphemy laws. I mean, that's an insane take. It's an insane take. That being said, I want to also talk about this Twitter thread from Steven Wolf.

Steven Wolfe on Classical Protestant Political Thought

And I think that this is, you should take this seriously, even if you don't like Steven, even if you think that some of what he says is a little suspicious or whatever, take this thread seriously. You know, if you don't hear anything else from Steven, hear this.

This is important, I think. Here's what he says. He says, it's clear at this point that the G3 guys and allies do not know classical Protestant political thought. And of course, their audience doesn't know it.

So they can either do the right thing and learn it, present it fairly and critique it on its own terms. Or they can continue to strawman and distort and rely on the ignorance of their audience to score points.

There are ways to move the conversation forward. And that involves getting acquainted with what most educated Protestants once understood. I'm going to stop there for a moment. When I read Steven's book, and Steven, if you listen to this, this is not a criticism of you.

When I read Steven's book, I found it hard to get through. I'll be honest, I found it hard to get through. And that's because of the way that I read and the way that I learn. Steven went to great lengths to cite things.

It's just extensive citations. It's hard reading. It's not the kind of reading that I would write. Like, in other words, you read my Social Justice Pharisees book, there really aren't that many citations.

It's very simple. It's very plain. I'm not giving you any deep, like, I haven't done, like, deep research. These are, like, kind of obscure things that I'm kind of retrieving and pulling back from. It wasn't like that.

It's just very simple ideas, right? And that's the kind of reading that I like to do or that I'm good at. But these kinds of things where he's just, it's really deep, right? And if you want to read these citations, you're going to go on this long trail of finding and rediscovering, really, a lot of Protestant thinkers that you know their names, but you didn't really know all this stuff, right?

He's retrieving a lot of this stuff from the past and from people that this was just all obvious to them. Well, it's no longer obvious. And now we're getting people that, you know, claim to be Protestants, claim to love a lot of these names, but actually don't really know what they thought about this.

And so now they're calling it heresy and dangerous and evil and stuff like that. It's like, these are your heroes. These are your guys that think this. I'm not saying anything new. I'm retrieving this stuff.

And it's very interesting. And so I found the book hard to get through. And I wonder, you know, to a certain degree, and again, Stephen, this is not a criticism. I know why you did that, because you knew the lines of attack that people would use against you.

And so this is kind of like, look, if you're going to call me a neo-Nazi racist son of a gun, you're going to be calling all these Protestants from our past the same thing. You know what I mean? It's almost like, you know, you're going to have to reject it all, your entire history, if you're going to reject what I say.

I get what you're doing, Stephen. I'm just saying it was hard for me. And I wonder if a lot of these guys, it was hard for them too, because it certainly does not seem like, yeah, they've thought about this.

I'm not going to say they haven't thought about it, but the way they're presenting their arguments, it's like they thought about it with a millimeter of depth. They haven't really thought through the implications of what the giants in the faith that they claim to revere thought, said, assumed, all that kind of stuff.

They thought about it for about a millimeter of depth. And so it's okay. Like, this is the thing. This is the thing that I think is important to understand. If you want to reject all the Protestants from the Reformation, you know, you want to reject all the Puritans and all this kind of, if you want to go ahead and reject it, but just be honest about that.

Be honest with what you're doing. You've got a whole new take. You know what I mean? You're just rejecting this classical Protestant tradition in toto. That's what you're doing. You think they're all heretics, they're all neo-Nazis, they're all whatever, racist, you know, whatever.

Anyway, let's continue with what Stephen has to say. He says, most critics of Christian nationalism rely on the normalization of secularism in the post -1960s era. Their argument boils down to, wow, oh wow.

My mind is not impressed by your wow, oh wow. What he's saying here is that a lot of the critiques, they hear this does not compute with the orthodoxy established by liberalism and secularism in the 1960s, and because of that, it must be racist, it must be evil, it must be bigoted, it must be all these things.

But the thing is, like, okay, if that's what you're doing, at least recognize that's what you're doing. Your position is not historical. Your position is not what Christians believed for millennia. It's new.

It's a new thing. You think that the secular liberalists got it liberalist. That's a made-up term. That's a term made up by Sargon of Akkad, liberalist. Your secularist, liberalist friends, they got it right for the first time.

They got it right. They got Christianity right. It's really that stupid. It's really that stupid. Anyway, let's continue. He says, I could spend my days providing these people all the distinctions that educated people once knew, but I found it to be completely pointless, except maybe for a few observers.

Simplistic characterizations sell, but ultimately, they ultimately stem a deep cynicism, that an issue made complex by distinctions is an attempt to conceal a simpler and sinister plot. Here's the thing, Stephen.

I think Stephen did try to provide a lot of these distinctions in the book, which is why it's hard to read for a guy like me, right? Because it's very nuanced. It's very careful. It's very meticulous, you could say.

But again, he's so right because what people have done, and I've literally had a conversation with one of the G3 guys, and what he said was that Stephen Wolf is essentially an evil genius, and that he's very careful to make the appropriate distinctions because what he wants, this is what he told me, he said, what he wants is plausible deniability.

He wants to be a Nazi racist son of a gun, but he wants to make it plausible that he's not. So what he did was he made very careful distinctions. He's a genius. That's what this man told me. And what do you do with a mind like that?

It's like, well, look, Stephen, he said this, he said that. He goes, no, no, no, no, but what he's doing is he's trying to hide the fact that he's a racist Nazi son of a, you know what? What do you do with a mind like that?

There's so much cynicism there. There's really nothing to be done at that point. I don't know if Stephen's had these conversations too. I'm sure he's seen the criticism that led him to this characterization.

But Stephen, let me say this. I've had the conversations with people, and I said the same thing I just said here. You know, I found his book hard to read because he was so meticulous about this. He was so careful to nuance and whatever, you know, in a good way, nuance I know is kind of a dirty word on our channel, but in a good way, he nuanced things.

I found it hard to read. And he goes, yeah, yeah, but don't you see? That's a smart guy. That's what he wants to have. He wants to, you know, get you to sneakily become a Nazi with him. How is that supposed to work?

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. The cynicism is just so palpable. He continues. He says, you know, maybe I do think that a national church is permissible by principle, but at the same time, I don't think it would be suitable or appropriate for the American political arrangement.

You know, maybe I do believe that a magistrate can, in principle, suppress false religion via law, but also that it's often counterproductive and unsuitable to American sensibilities and political tradition.

I could go on and on. This is exactly right. This is exactly right, because often in Stephen's work, he will say stuff like this, right? Well, this is actually permissible, like a national church. There's really nothing in scripture that would prevent that from being a thing.

There's nothing in scripture that would prevent the magistrate from suppressing false religion. There's nothing. You can't go to God's law and say, oh, yeah, this is totally against the law. You know, this is against God.

God would hate that. You can't do that. But at the same time, he says, America is such a, in some ways, a jacked up country that it wouldn't work. It was civil magistrate for a day. If I was the ruler, the emperor of the United States for a day, I wouldn't, it would not be prudent for me to make every single change that I think needs to happen with the snap of a finger.

I got the sign of a pen. Like, there would be prudence to take into consideration. I liken this to the Doug Wilson thing. I use this example all the time, because I think that there's such a good principle here.

At one point in his career as a pastor, Doug Wilson became convinced that to use grape juice for communion was a sin. Okay, now forget that, forget that whether you disagree or agree. Just hear me out here.

He was at a church, and he came to the decision based on his study, his research, you know, all that, that using grape juice for communion was a sin, that you had to use wine. And the next Sunday, after he came to that decision, they used grape juice for communion.

And he prayed to God. He prayed privately to himself. He said, God, Lord, Jesus, you know, every bit of righteousness I have is because of you. Please forgive me for this sin I'm about to do. That sounds, it's a weird prayer, right?

It's a weird prayer. And you might not agree with it. But to him, what he was thinking was, it would not be prudent for me to just cause, just to lob a grenade into my church, where it was going to offend people without taking some time to figure out the best way forward.

The best way forward so that I could teach my flock that wine is necessary for communion, not grape juice, not, you know, but wine. Because that's what the Lord told us to do. He said, there's a matter of prudence here as well.

There's a matter of prudence here as well. But they don't allow Stephen to make these distinctions. They say, oh, see, no, he wants to establish a national church, and then he wants to beat all the Hindus and kill them if they don't worship Christ.

Like, that's not what he said, but that's what they make him say that. Oh, but A .D., you don't understand that. That's exactly, he's a smart guy. He's an evil genius. That's what he wants you to think.

He just said that because that's what he wants you to think. What do you do with people like that? What do you do with people like that? There's not much to be done. He says, I could go on and on, but the cynical minds of these critics resort to either one, simplifying everything into some sinister plot, or two, comparing my ideas to scary 20th century political movements.

It's rhetorical garbage, but it sells. It does sell for now. And this is where the encouragement lies. I think lots of people see the absolute garbage that G3 has been selling on the topic of Christian nationalism for the last few months.

A lot of people still trust G3 in general, but on the issue of Christian nationalism, they have lost so much respect. It is incalculable and they don't see it yet. They don't see it yet, but they have, they have, I don't know if I want to say they've delivered themselves a death blow because I think they could still recover.

They have done so much damage to themselves and they're going to have bravado. I will stand for the truth no matter what, but they have inflicted on themselves so many unforced errors. I am done trying to stop them.

I am not going to try to stop people who've decided that I'm their mortal enemy from making more mistakes. Keep it up G3, keep it up. You're selling garbage to your people and people will only eat garbage for so long.

It's as simple as that. It's as simple as that because they're going to eventually read Stephen Wolf's book because they're going to see how so many of us are like, I just don't understand. I don't understand why they're saying this about Stephen when his book says this.

They're going to see that enough times, they're just going to read it for themselves. And when they read it for themselves, they're going to see what you have done. They're going to see what you've done to Stephen.

This is completely preposterous how you could treat a brother in this way. You could treat a brother in this way. I wouldn't even treat a freaking enemy like this. Where you don't allow him to actually speak for himself.

Every word that he says is just a sinister plot to get everyone to say, Heil Hitler. You guys are sick in the head at this point. It's unbelievable how sick you guys are. I don't know what it is. You started believing your own press, thinking you're better than you are, thinking you're smarter than you are.

You've got the, your egos are just out of control right now, but keep it up. Keep it up because the more people see what you've been up to, the less they're going to accept what you're saying on this.

It's just simple as that because every day that passes, I think it can't get any stupider. It can't get any more immature. It can't get any worse. They can't soil themselves worse today than they did yesterday.

And every day you managed to figure out another freaking way to do it. You guys are sick, sick, the way you've treated Steven. If I'm being honest, I hope you found this video helpful. God bless.