The Boniface Option

We are live now on the Conversations That Matter podcast. Hope everyone's doing well on this beautiful Monday morning, at least it is where I am.

Andrew, is it beautiful where you are? Absolutely gorgeous, yeah. Your mug says

Minnesota, or it looks like Minnesota. Yeah, that's right, it says you betcha. So yeah, it's beautiful here.

It's one of the handful of beautiful days we have here. It's about to be frigid cold in like a month, so.

Yeah, are you in like northern Minnesota, or? No, I'm in southern Minnesota. It's extreme northern

Iowa, really, and cornfields everywhere, but it is, it gets cold quick, and so we're enjoying it.

You know, I'll maybe go golfing later today. When I'm in the Midwest, it's like the weather can change so quick, so drastically, that's what

I've noticed. Like you can have like a warm day, and the next day it's snowing, and so, anyway. For real, yeah.

So I should probably mention for those who are, I have a shirt on. It says, all you can see is vegetarian, so I should probably just clarify to everyone.

It says, it's actually an anti -vegetarian shirt, but. They're vegetarian. They're vegetarian, so you don't have to be.

So anyway, we have Andrew Iskar on the podcast today to talk about his latest book,

The Boniface Option, and of course, you were, I think the first book you published was the book with Torba, or Andrew Torba on Christian nationalism, right?

That's correct, yep. This is your second book? This is my second. My first one, that's just me. So it's kind of my second, kind of my first.

So you are a Christian nationalist. You are the person that everyone's mad at, that they wanna. Yeah, I guess so.

I guess I am. Yeah, yeah, here I am. You started this whole thing, because that was before Stephen's book that you published that book.

Yeah, I mean, Stephen, I think, I mean, he had his in development for a very long time, because it's a huge book. Ours, we worked on quickly, because we knew,

I mean, it was the 2022 election year, and that topic was becoming a big one.

I mean, they were attacking all sorts of different candidates, like where Torba lives in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano was running for governor, and they'd say, he's a

Christian nationalist, because he would have like a flag lapel pin, and he would say very basic Christian statements, why

I believe in Jesus, and I believe America was a Christian nation, and that's good. And they're like, ah, he's horrible.

This is a theocrat trying to take over the country. And so you had all of these, this whole cast of characters, like Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead, and all of these clowns, academics, who were attacking, writing all these books, attacking it.

And so we saw this going on, and we said, well, I believe this stuff.

I believe that America was a Christian nation, was founded by Christians, and that was good, and it's good if we go back to that.

And so we need to write in defense of it, stand up for what we believe in. And so we put the book together.

We wrote it very quickly. That was the first book we'd ever done. And of course we were attacked, because we didn't understand all the nuances of typesetting and all of those things.

And so, but we got it out, and really just tried to reinforce very basic Christian understanding of politics, of what it means to be a

Christian, and engage in politics, and have laws influenced by the

Bible, and by Christian teaching. And it was funny, because it's not like you read it, and the book itself was not very, it's like Stephen's book.

It's not actually all that controversial. Stephen's book was just a 400 -page exposition of Protestant political theory that has existed for hundreds of years.

And ours was really defense of Christian America, and not controversial in any real sense, but people still attacked it and hated it and went crazy.

And so, and it did well. And I think it did well, because we captured that particular moment when the battle lines were kind of being set.

And you still see that now a year later, people still don't exactly know what to make of it.

They think, I mean, you have some people like, oh, this is just a flash in the pan. This is like the emergent church, and it's gonna go away.

And I'm like, well, Christian America has existed for 400 years.

It's not going away. It's much smaller, and it's almost a remnant now, but it's not gonna just die out, this idea, this thinking.

And so, yeah, some of the stuff we wanted to do, because you would have the kind of like the Michael Flynn version of Christian nationalism, where, or the

Mike Lindell one, where you have these guys that aren't, they aren't very theologically adept.

Like they don't know very serious Christian doctrine. It's kind of a mishmash of boomer evangelicalism, charismatic kind of stuff.

And then there is this really weird thing. Like you have Flynn like a month or two ago saying, we need to put down the

Bible and pick up the constitution or something like that. And it's like, what? Oh, no, man, that's not what we need to do.

So you have that side of it, where it's not very sophisticated. It's just, we like Jesus, and we like America.

And it isn't that well thought out. But then you have other guys like us, and certainly like Steven and many others who are thinking through the more deeper, intellectual aspects of what these things really mean.

And so that has a lot more staying power, I think, than just kind of this flash in the pan thing that they think it is.

So yeah, that's what we are. We are unabashed. And it's like,

I don't really want a label. I don't really want to have this label of Christian nationalist, because it's not a label

I have always carried. But in the back of my head, it's what I believed for my entire life as a

Christian. And so that's one of the things too. It's like, why do you take a name that your enemies made?

And I'm like, well, that's pretty common throughout Christian history. Even like Protestant is a name that like Martin Luther and John Calvin didn't come up with the name

Protestant. That's a name their enemies gave them. Same thing with like Puritans, right? That was a slur that was used against them.

So I don't have any problem with saying, yeah, okay, yeah, we are Christian nationalists. Sure, great, cool. So yeah, and so we're kind of in the crosshairs with it a little bit, but my main goal and Torba's main goal was just to defend decent, regular

Christian people that don't wanna see their nation burned up and want it to be a faithful Christian place again.

Yeah, and you are a pastor, just so people understand where this is all coming from as we dive into your new book.

So you're writing for, I would assume people in your, or people like people in your congregation.

So Christians who are well -meaning and want the basics of what you just described, a

Christian understanding, honoring Christian values, that kind of thing. But maybe they don't know exactly in the confusion of the media circus where to turn, how to think through it.

And so you're providing some resources for them as a pastor, is that correct? Yeah, absolutely.

Because I mean, there really was nothing. All you have is the media constantly saying, this is wrong and bad and evil, and you're probably racist and you're probably really bad people.

And what we wanted was, because we would go on Amazon, you type in Christian nationalism on Amazon before August of 2022.

And it would just be all these books and things that would say how bad these people are and how they're evil and how they hate democracy and they're subverting our democracy and so forth.

And it's like, well, I want people to, who are normal and regular, decent

Christian folks to not be beat over the head constantly and be able to stand up for themselves and say, no,

I believe this and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. And so it's a really defense of our people to be able to say, no, there's nothing wrong with you at all.

This is normal. This is stuff that everybody, I mean, even like a hundred years ago,

I mean, you have these like proclamations that FDR of all people would make that say, well, during World War II, that America is a

Christian nation. We should pray for the military as they're out at war and like this long thing.

And it's like, that was FDR saying that. I mean, the guy's like, all but a communist. And so now what was normal and just universal across the board in America is being treated as this very fringe, very radical, crazy out there thing.

And it's not. I want people to, you know, one of my influences, one of the guys that influenced me a lot, man that I studied under,

Pastor Doug Wilson, one of the things he constantly says is assuming the center, right?

Just assuming the center. And really what that means is, no, we're the normal ones. We're not crazy.

All of you are. You're the radicals. You're the insane people. We are the normal ones.

And teaching people and giving people resources to be able to assume the center like that. Just say, no, this is normal.

This is fine. You guys are the crazy one. So let me ask you this.

I know we haven't even gotten into your new book yet, which obviously that's the title of this podcast. And that's what

I wanna do. But I can't really help myself. I'm supposed to, I'm going, we'll see what happens.

I'm planning on calling G3 Ministries later today and seeing if I can have a conversation with Josh Bice.

We'll see how that goes. About, really there's two things I think that I wanna try to see if I can just navigate with him.

And that one is, is there any way? We might be, it might be too late of an hour, but is there any way that we can figure out like have a listening session or just like actually talk to each other?

And in other words, people who criticize Christian nationalists who are Christians, and then people who take the label

Christian nationalists. So that's one of the things. And then the other thing is to try to figure out why he thinks that I've spread lies and slander about him or whatever.

And I don't see it. I don't know what he's referring to exactly. So I wanna address those things with him.

And I've told people in the last two weeks that I'm gonna give a little bit more of the inside baseball that because people are really curious, why is there this disagreement between people that we respect?

And we thought they were on the same team. They were both, we thought against social justice. And then you have, there's a whole bunch of evangelicals.

Josh is just one of them, but there's a whole bunch of them that are freaking out in my opinion, or at least their rhetoric looks like they're freaking out in the same way the media does using the same thing, saying that this is going to eliminate civil liberties.

And I mean, even mocking, do you want a Protestant Pope even suggesting that kind of thing?

I mean, there's been so many things said, trying to make Michael Flynn or King George, or not

King George, sorry. I'm blinking on the name of the King of England. Help me out here.

Charles. Charles, thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm still in a revolutionary war mindset. That's right.

Making King Charles the face of Christian nationalism. Like there's been these things that are, most of them

I think we see and we, you're laughing, we laugh. That's silly, that's not. But they really, they're serious and sincere when they say these things.

They're serious, yeah. And they do see racism under the hood. They do see all these things the media also sees. And I don't see it.

I don't, I've read your book. I've read Stephen's book. In fact, one of the local pastors who happens to be a conservative

Episcopalian, if you can believe it. Very well versed on at least like church tradition.

He'd read Stephen's book and he said, I don't understand why this is controversial. This is pretty much just like what Christians have said for hundreds of years.

But now it is. So I would just curious if you could like address that. Just say like, why do you think, we know what the media is up to.

The media has always been up to the same thing. Why do you think though that there's prominent Christian ministries taking such shots?

Gospel Coalition, G3 Ministries. I don't know, the list goes on. They're trying to discredit it in the same ways in many instances the media does.

Why is there that, you know, you think there's that lack of communication, that lack of trying to understand and that just kind of like that lashing out.

That's what it seems like to me. And then do you think there's any merit to charges of like, well,

Christian nationals are going to get rid of free speech. They're going to erode civil liberties.

They're going to restrict immigration to the point or now I guess Owen Strand is suggesting that there's kinism is lurking in the background here.

So I know it's supposed to be about your new book, but I'd really, that's what is on people's minds.

They play into each other. And I talk about some of this stuff in the new book too. So it's okay.

But what I think is, you know, what drives a lot of this is that we, you know, since 2015, well, even backing up there, like in America, since the second world war, there has been, you know, sort of a political and cultural consensus in particular after, you know, the civil rights revolution in the 1950s and 60s, there's been a cultural consensus of, this is what everybody thinks and anything outside of this, you know, to quote like Tom Woods, the three by five card of allowable opinion, anything outside of that is dangerous and bad and very scary.

So you can't go there. And so all of the things that everybody believes from 1945 onward is, you know, both liberals and conservatives, they all believe that liberal democracy, egalitarian liberal democracy is sacrosanct, right?

That it's inviolable, that we can't have any criticisms of it. We can't say that here's some problems with this system.

And so all of the aspects of it, right? That I think is part of it, where,

I mean, if you think like I do, like, I don't know if you've, maybe you have on your show talked about Christopher Caldwell's book,

Age of Entitlement, where it really gets into just how radical a departure from the constitutional

Republican norms that we had, that really it was a new constitution that was created in the 1960s over civil rights, where you don't get gay marriage, you don't get trans stuff, all the insanity that we have today without that being codified into law in the 1960s, because it's all based around civil rights law that these things are happening.

And so he backs up and says, well, this is the new constitution that supersedes the existing one.

And so I think a lot of it is that where now after 2015 and 2016, after Trump comes onto the scene and it shook things up so much that people began to seriously reevaluate the entire project of what we have had, this globalist system, and ask some very uncomfortable questions, at least uncomfortable for people in the mainstream of what if we don't have infinity immigration anymore?

What if we have a nation that actually pursues the interests of its people and what's good for them and not what's good for ginormous corporations?

What would that look like? And so genuine right -wing thought has made its way onto the scene, like the type of thinking that you'd only find with guys among the paleo -conservatives in the 90s, like Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried.

That has now entered, it's not in the mainstream yet, but it's much further away from the fringe and much closer to the mainstream than anybody's comfortable with.

And so I think they're very threatened by that. And some of it plays into also, and I bring this up in the new book,

I think Aaron Wren's three -world paradigm is so crucial, so important to understand not just things going on in evangelicalism, but really things going on in the culture in general.

And so any listeners that aren't familiar with that, I can explain it. It is, you have positive world, neutral world, and negative world.

And positive world was the time period in American society where people viewed

Christians positively. If you're going to apply for a job and they knew, okay, you go to church every

Sunday, you're a faithful Christian, that's a good guy. I like that guy. I wanna hire him to work.

I'm gonna trust, I'll have a positive view of him. I'll be willing to grant him a lot more trust than I would for other people, things like that, where just the view of Christianity was generally very, very positive.

And that lasted until the 90s. Well, just one illustration of that. Someone showed me a document the other day that I thought blew me away in New York City.

And it was from the 1930s or something. It was required, I guess certain people required it, that you had to get a recommendation from your pastor.

Your pastor had to literally sign on a lease if you were going to rent an apartment or something.

You needed someone vouching for you who had a man of the cloth, as they say.

So that was New York City. That's insane to think about. Yeah, I know,

I know. Not that long ago. No, less than a hundred years ago. And so that really kind of withered away in the 1990s.

And so by the 1990s, within Wren's paradigm, you entered something called neutral world where the positive view of Christians wasn't there.

It was more, it was an intellectual curiosity. It was like, oh, you're a Christian. That's cool.

I like to collect stamps. It's treated like you're a member of the Lions Club or the

Rotary. Like it's neither good nor bad, right? It's just a thing that you do.

And so that really lasted from the early to mid 90s until about 2015,

I think is really the Obergefell is really the clear jumping off point. And that's where guys like Tim Keller and a lot of the modern evangelicalism really made their hay.

I mean, or even Rick Warren, all the megachurch church growth stuff made its hay during neutral world where the culture isn't necessarily actively hostile.

Although in a few places in larger cities, maybe it was. It was more or less ambivalent.

And within that kind of cultural paradigm, that's how they understood everything. And that's where like winsomeness and all of that kind of stuff came in.

Cause it's like, well, they don't view us negatively. So if we show how winsome and good and respectable and decent and kind people we are, that's what's gonna be the thing that wins them to us.

And to be fair to those people that largely worked.

I mean, there's a reason why Tim Keller had massive success in Manhattan because that was appealing to that segment of the population.

And now after Obergefell, we are in negative world where the culture actively takes a dislike to Christians and views them negatively.

Like if you are an evangelical Christian, you're some kind of weird religious freak. I mean, you see this on like a television show, like The Office, they had the evangelical

Christian character, Angela, and she's this nasty vindictive woman and nobody likes her.

And she's really petty. And she's the evangelical Christian in the show.

That's kind of how they look at us, at least early in negative world. Now it's like, you are the devil, you're evil.

You are a hater, you're a bigot, you are the scum of the earth now, if you're a

Christian. And so a lot of evangelicalism, big evangelicals is not adapted to that at all.

They're still in the neutral world paradigm. And even the guys who are a little bit more to the right than the

Kellers and so forth, your G3 type of guys, like they still are living in neutral world.

They still really think that the globalist liberal project, it works.

And it's, if not morally neutral, it's a positive moral good. Democracy is great and pluralism is great.

And we can live in that world. I mean, some of it is theological too. I mean, if you have this,

I mean, it sort of fits in with a Baptist view of politics, where you wanna have pluralism because creeping around the corner are these guys who are going to drown

Baptists if we let them get power. And so that's like baked into the cake for them.

But some of it too is just cultural, that they are terrified of something that overturns the apple cart, that is outside the realm of allowable opinion, outside the

Overton window. And it's very scary to them. So I think, so in terms of, right, why are they, like you say, freaking out?

I think they are too. The rhetoric is just so over the top, oh, and straying especially, just totally over the top.

Why are they doing that? I think it's two things. It's one, the guys like me or Steven Wolf and others are gaining an audience, like people in YouTube, people are listening to what we have to say.

And it's like that conservative Episcopalian pastor, they read the stuff that Steven writes or I write, and they're like,

I don't get what the fuss is about. This is pretty reasonable, right? These arguments are sound, they make sense.

These are not wackos, they're saying things that I agree with.

And that I think is what terrifies them because our arguments are good and sound and they comport with reality, they comport with the actual situation as it exists today.

Because people see the whole globalist system is fracturing. And regardless of whatever happens with Trump and whatever,

I mean, 2024 is going to be, it's gonna make 2020 look like nothing. It's gonna make it look like the halcyon days of lore.

I think it's gonna be the most insane year we've lived through. So that's my prediction right now. I mean, I think my predictions are probably better than James Lindsay's who thought we were gonna have a trans

George Floyd this summer, or now he's just always wrong.

He's kind of like the Bill Crystal of predictions online.

He does fit into what you're talking about with these evangelicals and these media types who are freaking out.

Like there's this level 10 threat and it's not really a level 10 threat. It's not what they think it is necessarily.

So they overblow it, overplay it, and put themselves in the position of opposing it, which

I suppose should gain them some credibility or some accolades or something.

Well, I think some of that too though. Oh yeah, sorry. I think some of that too though is they, like wokeness is petering out.

Like people, like you could see it with the target stuff and the Bud Light stuff and everything like that, that they're having to dial it back because of the reaction from the populace to these things.

And so that threat is coming, even with the presidential campaign, like that's DeSantis' big, big issue where he really made his name for himself and that's kind of over.

And so you see him on the debate stage and he's got really nothing else to really distinguish himself from all the other also -rans running for president.

And so I think that stuff's petering out. So what do they do? They have to find some other threat. They have to find, okay, now it's the far right that is the scary one.

And in a lot of ways, in one sense, they're right because there hasn't been like genuine right -ism in America since before the

First World War or Second World War. Like the old conservative, the old right was the last instance of it.

And after World War II, the neocons basically won.

They basically took over conservatism, their view of foreign policy, their view of really everything, and just pushed down the old right.

Like National Review purged all the paleocons in the 90s, the guys that I mentioned, and now it's come back.

Right now, like, I mean, the podcasts that I do with CJ Engel are, I think, still our most watched episode, and it's still a very small podcast, our most watched episode, even more than when we had you on, it was a very popular episode, was with Paul Gottfried, this 80 -year -old guy, right?

And everyone's like, oh, I can't wait to hear what he has to say. And so he's having kind of a renaissance in his old age.

Everybody wants to have Paul Gottfried on because it's coming back, because people see that stuff is falling apart completely, that there are no answers, that you're not gonna get an answer from typical standard conservatism about the real problems that we face, and people want the truth.

And so it's growing, it's getting a lot bigger. And so they see this threat, they see this threat to their ministries because people are starting to wake up to what is actually occurring, what is actually going on in the world that we live in.

We can get into this with my book because that's really what I focus on is just how insane our world is currently today.

It's just a total fiction. I mean, I try not to overuse the matrix analogy, but it's like that.

I mean, it's a fantasy world that people live in that's manufactured and people have to break out of that.

So anyway, I cut you off and I went on a long tangent. No, no, no, it's all good. It's great.

We've been going almost half an hour. It's funny, we haven't even gotten to your new book really. I know, I know. Which I wanna do,

I wanna pivot and start talking about that. But yeah, the only thing I was gonna say is like, if you take the long view of this, it seems like there's, the left is, they're egalitarians.

And so they want to flatten everything, make everything equal, they idolize that.

Their whole diversity push is part of that to try to de -platform, de -center who they view as those white people who have too much power, white men specifically.

And if you take the long view though, this egalitarian impulse has been around for hundreds of years.

It's the idea that the real problem between us is that we have these different religions governing different regions.

And so we have religious wars. So if we just have a kind of a more pluralistic or to put the best, in the best case scenario in the

United States, which I think did it probably the best was a religious liberty of kinds where states can determine the boundaries of what religion, what religious activity is acceptable.

But on the national level, there's no test for office except I guess you do have to place your hand.

I mean, it doesn't say on a Bible, but that would have been the understanding. The common law tradition was you did have to put your hand on a

Bible and say, so it was still designed for Christians but it was kind of a broadly Christian setting.

And of course, over time that's been eroded to the point that now it's just blatant religious anarchy.

You're not allowed to even prefer in a town hall. You can't open with prayer hardly without getting a lawsuit now from the

ACLU or something. But then after World War II, I think there was this understanding that developed that, well, it's not just religion, right?

Religion was a problem. We had these disagreements and fought, but now it's the fact that we are different ethnically or racially and those racial differences, if those are channeled into some kind of a nationalist fervor or that you care too much about your people in place in a given area, then that'll create a war.

And so to dilute that and to make sure that that threat never comes back, we need mass immigration.

We need, I think that's probably part of, and I'm not against just so people know, because I get these weird accusations of kinism come in, but I'm certainly not against interracial marriages, but I do think there is this weird push on the left that that's, and then that explains it, why they want it so bad.

You look at a McDonald's commercial I saw the other day and every family, you had a black wife with a white husband with an

Asian kid. And it's like, I don't even know, where are they getting this from?

Maybe there's one family in my state that might sort of approximate that through adoption or something, but it's just, but that's their ideal, right?

That's what they wanna strive for. And I think it's because since World War II, it's like that won't produce conflict.

We won't fight each other over these differences if we are all like kind of in this melting pot, there's this blender.

And so anyway, like you're saying that paleoconservatism, the old right,

I was actually just reading an article from a national review from the fifties.

That was, I think it was Russell Kirk, but he was critiquing classical liberalism pretty hard. And so some of those conservatives they could see, and I think that is conservatism, like even though it's not really an ism, the posture, the tradition, et cetera, has been to resist innovations and to try to maintain stability and social trust and identity and realizing things that threaten those always produce negative consequences.

So they stood opposed to the Nazis. They stood opposed to the communists. They stood opposed also though, to the classical liberals.

And so, but the classical liberals won the day. And that's what you're saying with the, I guess, neoconservatives.

And then you fast forward to where we are now. It's just that that's all taken for granted.

Like, and there's like a rewriting of history that like America has always been this classical liberal place.

And what I see in the Christian nationals, and this is my opinion, is that it's a, I think it's exactly what you're saying.

It's a comeback of the paleoconservatism. And it's also, there may be in certain instances, some like theonomy and other stuff like mixed in there.

But I think primarily, especially if you look at Stephen's book, this is a paleoconservatism that specifically arose from a

Protestant political tradition. And it's been forgotten. And the people who claim to carry those doctrines in the realm of theology, and they're good on soteriology, and they're good on these other theological issues, they don't, they're not good on this.

They're not good on public theology. And they don't go back and, I mean, they might mine for quotes in the 1689 or something.

They try to find something that they can use to justify some kind of a neutrality, but that's not, but they have to mine.

They're not reading it correctly, right? And so they're committed to this, like post -World

War II consensus. And so anyway, I know I'm not going on my own rant that I've gone on for a while. But -

But you're right, you're right. I mean, all of it, yeah. I mean, it's interesting that you like what you said.

The tell really is the commitment to the post -war consensus on politics and culture, the post -war globalist liberal democracy consensus.

Because like we had Nate Fisher on Contramundum last week, and he brought up a really good point that you have all of these guys, whether it's

G3 or the late Tim Keller, or you have the

Escudito people, like we're scary. Yes, we are, very scary.

Yeah, I've just heard some of that. One wants to be president, that's good. No, absolutely not.

I don't want to face 700 years in prison. But no, you have all of these guys from very disparate traditions that are in conflict with each other.

I mean, you even have like Brian Mattson and Andrew Sandlin, who are,

I guess, you know, theonomists or Bonsonites, you know, that all of them are in agreement on Christian nationalism is bad and we can't have a

Christian nation. They're all in agreement that the post -war consensus is good and that it's inviolable, we cannot move away from it.

And they'll all cobble together rationales from their disparate traditions to arrive at the same conclusion.

So you'll have R. Scott Clarke and Andrew Sandlin that are like doing the predator handshake.

Yeah, let's go to fight Christian nationalism or to fight, or even if we don't use that phrase, to fight the way

Christians believed about politics a hundred years ago, all Christians everywhere, basically. And it's crazy to me, but it makes sense because that's the fundamental commitment, right?

That's overarching over all their traditions and all the major, major, very significant differences that they have in their political theology always comes back to, we can't move away from this, what we've had for the last 50 years.

Last question before your book. So this will be the determining factor as to whether you're scary or not. Do you think there should be any blasphemy laws of any kind?

Absolutely. I mean, it's not whether we're rich. Yeah, very scary. Right now,

I mean, right now we have guys who are going to prison because they burn rubber on a rainbow flag, right?

Like we have blasphemy laws in America. You're always going to have them. And I mean,

I saw in, was it France or Great Britain that they're bringing back blasphemy laws against the prophet

Muhammad and Allah. You can't blaspheme him, right? And so you're always going to have these and there's certain things that a polity cannot allow.

Right, you cannot, I mean, and it doesn't mean that you're not allowed to have a genuine, sincere opinion on religion where you don't believe in God, right?

I mean, you could be an atheist without blaspheming Jesus, right? You can't, I mean, there's a distinction between sincere unbelief and provocative statements where you are attacking

Christ, you're attacking the church, you're doing like the, what is it? Where they put the crucifix in a jar of urine, things like that.

No, like any, I mean, you look back to throughout all of Christian history. I mean, even if you had a

Baptist state, right? That was run by John Bunyan, right? Would they allow Piss Christ?

Sorry for this is a family show, but that's the title of the piece. Would they allow that in their country?

Of course they wouldn't. Well, we had blasphemy laws on the books at the founding of the country, and they just over time, and they were regional and state.

They weren't on the national level as far as I know, but over time, those have been eroded. We also had anti -pornography laws up until even, as late as the 70s and 80s, you could be arrested and go to jail if you had a picture of a naked woman in certain

Southern states. So this stuff is all been familiar. It's not anti, the people who think that's against the constitution or something, because it's against some notion of free speech, they're misreading,

I think, that they're imposing upon the constitution a newer understanding. Yes, it's post -civil rights revolution understanding of the constitution.

Like that's what, I mean, you look at like the James Lindsays and those people who are like, oh, the constitution, the constitution. It's like, originally, man, the constitution only let white men vote.

So which constitution are you talking about? Like, we got to respect the founders and everything. It's like, well, the constitution they wrote is not one that you agree with.

So like, you know, which constitution? And obviously they mean the constitution after 1960 or after 1945, right?

That's what they mean. And so like, yeah, you go back, I mean, there are obvious, clear historical antecedents in American history where yeah, they had blasphemy laws, they had anti -pornography laws.

And that was, I mean, that's one of the things where it's like, was America a

Christian nation? Well, I mean, that's an indicator, right? That we were. And so, yeah, like,

I mean, that's scary. But I mean, we're so far away from even like conceptualizing something like that.

That's where I'm like, I'm hesitant to answer the question for that reason. Cause it's like, look, like we -

We got like 10 other things we have to do. Yeah, I mean, a million other things before we get there. Like, I would just like to not have these globalist wars that kill a million people and expend a trillion dollars.

Like I would like to, you know, like maybe take care of that first. I'd like to stop murdering, you know, a million babies a year, things like that.

And then we can get to that point. So we're so far afield when we get to that point. But I think it's good to raise that question because it breaks the conceptual framework that people have that this post -war consensus is sacrosanct and we can't shake that up.

Because when people talk about the constitution, when you have like the, you know, the boomer cons, you know, the TPUSA types talk about, oh, the constitution, actually, you know,

Charlie Kirk's been a lot better lately, but - He's improving, I've noticed that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's really, it's something.

But when they talk about, oh, the constitution, the constitution, we love the constitution. They're talking about the 1960s constitution.

They're not talking about the constitution before FDR, for sure. So that's,

I mean, that's stuff that you have to break into and just force people outside the three by five card at thinking about things, you know?

Certainly not pre -Lincoln. Yeah. Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, it seems like it's like the

Lincolnite, you could call it the Lincolnite revolution. I coined that. So if anyone uses that, they have to pay me now. But you could call it that.

You could say that. And then, you know, sort of like a, there was like a reprieve, sort of. And then when the progressive era came in and then we had the civil rights constitutional understanding you have kind of like two, they fit very well together.

And so the paleocons want to go pre -Lincoln really with their understanding. They want more of an original understanding of it.

But let's get into your book because - Yeah, yeah, we're 41 minutes in and let's go. We've been talking, the entire podcast hasn't been about your book, but it's been interesting.

Hopefully people have enjoyed this. So the Boniface option. Tell me about the book. Who is St. Boniface? What are you, what's the novel idea or the,

I guess the strategy that you're recommending? Yeah, well, I'll correct the, at least the pronunciation

I use and most Boniface. Okay, well, there you go. Yeah, yeah, there we go. So right off the bat, the

Boniface option. It is, so, I mean, I wrote the book -

Is it Augustine or Augustine? Oh, that's, see, that one is like, we're gonna arm wrestle over that one.

But I think, well, it depends. The town in Florida is St. Augustine. It's hot, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but I mean, I'm sure you probably hear me on podcasts. I'll say Augustine one time and Augustine another.

So, you know, don't listen to me. But anyway, yeah, as far as the book goes, you know,

I wrote the book, I wrote an article, I think 2017 after Rod Dreher's book came out about, you know, the

Benedict option. I thought it was a pretty good book, but after finishing it, I thought, is that all there is?

You know, just retreat to intentional community, intentional Christian community and wait out the storm?

Is that all we have left for us? Because there's a lot more going on than just that.

We have bigger issues occurring. And I looked at, excuse me,

I looked at it, because I mean, it's really the first salvo back within the

Christian world, reacting to negative world, you know, going back to Ren's negative world. That was really the first big one was

Dreher's book. And I'm like, that's not enough. There's gotta be a lot more here that we have to dig into and get into.

And so I was kind of disappointed in it, even though I generally liked it.

And so what I wrote is that we, that's all retreating. And of course, in like terms of tactics and strategy in like a military sense, retreating is something you have to do sometimes, right?

You have to retreat in order to live, to fight another day. And so the people that were like, oh, it's just retreat is just terrible.

Like, I don't know. I think there's some wisdom there, but there has to be more. There has to be going on offense, right?

There has to be, all right, we're in the cloister hidden away, but that's not how

Christendom was won in the first place. I mean, that's kind of the paradigm that he sets is like, well, the monasteries that were built up, that's what preserved

Western civilization and allowed Christendom to flourish. And I'm like, yeah, on one hand, but then you also had men like St.

Boniface. And I get into the story in the early part of the book where St. Boniface was a

Benedictine monk, right? He had taken the Benedict option. He was a Benedictine monk in England and he was very, very skilled, very, very well thought of, very brilliant man and was going to be made the abbot of his monastery, right?

The head of his monastery and have a very comfortable sinecure, right?

There in England. And he rejected it. He said, no, I need to go to my people.

He was a Saxon in England and all of these people that he's descended from in Germany are all still pagans.

And he had a heart for his people and he wanted to go there and bring

Christ to them. He wanted to advance the borders of Christendom. And so he went and one of the first things that he did was he went to the sacred shrine in what's now

Giesmar, Germany. And there was this huge oak tree that was the oak of Thor, hundreds of years old.

And this is where they did all of their pagan sacrifices and everything. And he shows up one day and tells them,

I'm gonna touch your tree. And not only am I gonna touch it, and they believe that if you touch the tree, Thor is gonna send a lightning bolt from the heavens and strike you dead.

And it's like, oh, these silly superstitious pagan people. No, I actually believe that. I believe that Thor is a demon that has some power and they worshiped him.

And it probably really did happen. And so he was like, I'm gonna not only touch it, I'm gonna cut this thing down this time tomorrow.

So word goes out through all the villages and everything that here's this Christian who's gonna get fried tomorrow.

Come watch, let's watch this, this will be great. And so hundreds of people show up the next day to see him get zapped.

And he takes his ax and as far as the legend goes, takes one swing and a wind comes out of heaven and knocks the tree over.

And everybody there that witnessed it that day confessed Christ and was baptized.

And there the evangelization of Germany began. I mean, I'm German and it's meaningful to me because, and I'm actually my paternal ancestry comes from that region of Germany.

And so it's very, very deep meaning for me personally. And it's this heroic story.

I mean, later in his life, he was martyred by Frisians. And I mean, that's my actual ancestry is

East Frisia. And it's like, wow, this is, he bled and died to bring

Christ to my people. And so this is powerful, powerful stuff.

And I'm like, and I'm thinking about this and I'm looking around the landscape of American Christianity today, as I'm thinking about this story of reading

Dreer's book in like 2017, I'm thinking, we don't have people like that. We don't have any men like that at all that are just willing to go die or willing to suffer at least for the sake of Jesus Christ.

And if anything, that's what we need, right? We need to build men like that.

We need to become men like St. Boniface. We need to become men that we had in earlier periods of Christendom.

I mean, men like, I mean, you read the stories of the Reformation, you read like the biography of John Knox and here's this man who's taken into slavery and is working as a galley slave rowing.

I mean, just like, he's gonna die doing this. And the Catholics make him kiss a, you know, they're like, you have to go kiss this picture of Mary.

And it comes to him and he throws the thing out of the boat, right? And he could get beaten to death or whipped to death or whatever.

And he doesn't care, right? He's taking a stand for what he believes in. And I mean, all the men that were burned at the stake and I mean,

Latimer and Ridley, like all of these stories. And it's like, we don't have anybody like that today.

We're not like those men, but we need to be. And the moment has come, right? The moment has come where there is going to be real consequences for believing in Jesus in this insane world that we live in.

And so the book is about that. I mean, the first half of the book is showing just how absolutely insane the world is that we live in.

I call it, you know, trash world. It's an internet lingo. You know, it's trash world that we live in. And people,

I mean, especially, you know, your typical evangelical pastor who's, you know, a well -meaning guy, he loves his people.

He wants to minister to them and disciple them, lead them to Jesus and all of that.

And they're totally oblivious to how insane the world is. They'll hear about the trans stuff and things like that.

And they'll think it's this oddity. Like, oh yeah, it's really bad out there. But they don't think any deeper about it than that.

They don't think about how all of the insanity has been manufactured. All of it has been socially engineered to produce the kind of society that we have today, right?

People have intentionally built this world to be the way that it is in order to dechristianize it, right, in order to strip away the

Christian heritage that people had, the Christian culture that just pervaded everything. I mean, when we talk about some of the

Christian nationalism stuff and nominal Christianity, and you'll have, you know, like the G3 type guys who are like, oh yeah, cultural

Christianity is bad and it's good that it's gone. Or, you know, Russell Moore talking about how

Mayberry leads to hell just as surely as Gomorrah. And it's just, it's so stupid. It's so dumb.

I mean, when you think about it, because most people, I mean, most people in older days who were

Christians, you know, people who were Christians 100 years ago, they're Christians because all of the cultural,

I mean, not only this, but all the cultural superstructure around them pushes it into them by osmosis.

Everybody around them is a Christian and you don't even have to think about it. Like culture, that's just how culture works is it's all the unstated stuff, right?

The way the culture works is it's the things that everybody implicitly agrees upon without even thinking, right?

Without even, you know, because a lot of people think you just have to backfill every bit of Christian doctrine in order to be a

Christian, right? You have to think through every kind of theology, every single thing. And most people aren't built for that.

Most, I mean, not everybody is able to, you know, to read Calvin's Institutes and read

Francis Turretin and read all of the great theological works and work through their theology that way.

They just have a simple faith in Jesus where they're gonna trust their leaders to lead them.

That's how things work. And so anyway, like having a culture where the unstated agreement is that we're

Christians, this is a Christian place is good. It's very good. And what we have instead is a manufactured, socially engineered anti -Christian place.

And it isn't just your religious expressions and things like that and things that you see on TV and all of that.

It's the way that we live our life. It's not only anti -Christian, but it's anti -creational.

And the obvious case is the trans stuff where if you can attack the created order, right?

To the extent that we don't know what a man and a woman is anymore and strip that away.

We don't know what a household is. We don't know what a father is. We've taken all of those things away and just stripped people down to mere individuals.

That's an attack on God's creation. And it's an attack on God's creation because they want to take away

Christian life from people and any aspect of it in the world that people live in.

And so some of it is just coming to grips with that, understanding that, right? Once you wrap your head around those things, and really it's they wanna make you this globalist, individualist consumer, right?

Where all your life is, is you work and you consume stuff.

You consume Disney and Marvel and Star Wars and NFL football and all of these accoutrements that are around you.

And that's what you live for, right? You live to watch the Minnesota Vikings play. And that's your whole purpose in life is to consume these things.

Like, oh man, I can't wait until the next episode of the Mandalorian. And like, that's your whole life. That's what you live for.

And then you die, right? And that's where they want people because people like that are very, very easy to rule.

People that don't have a people, they don't have a place, they don't have any connection to the past. Like that's why they strip away history and make it so that,

I mean, you talk to people and they don't know any history before World War II, right? That's like the cutting off point is everything after World War II is real history.

Everything before that is just bad and bigoted and evil and everybody's bad and all of that.

And so they want you cut off from those things. They want you to be totally deracinated and just these individuals that are malleable and moldable so they can rule you easily.

And so when you talk about what they're scared of, what they're threatened by, is they're threatened by a

Christian people who are Christian all the way down to their bones that have a connection to the millennia of Christian tradition and Christian history and say, that's who

I am. That's what my people are. And then, right, you can't manipulate them.

You can't mold them. You can't shape them in this way anymore because they're standing outside of this project that you have.

And that's a huge threat. If your heart is with Jesus and everything that he's done and built and in our culture within Christendom for 2000 years, it's hard to make a person just this globalist slave.

It's very difficult. And so the book is about breaking people free from that, from trash world, and then building them up, right?

Doing the things you must do in your own personal life to be a threat to this whole system.

And it isn't, I mean, it's simple things. It's, I mean, I have a chapter on just, like they want you to be fat and weak and nearly dead.

And so just being in good physical condition is, and lifting weights and eating well is a huge thumbing of your nose at this system, right?

And because it's completely outside, like the whole diet, the whole superstructure of it is like just eat as much as you want, eat lots of carbs and keep drinking your big gulps.

And because they want everyone to look like the people in Wall -E. Do you think there is like someone, like a

Soros figure, World Economic Forum, kind of like a Klaus Schwab figure who really wants that?

Or do you think that this is more like just kind of like natural, not natural,

I don't wanna say that, like developments over time that it's, there's a benefit that a bigger government has when you are incapable of taking care of yourself.

And so it's not like a, it's not like someone's gonna sign on the dotted line. I want my citizens to be fat and like unable to take care of themselves, but it is like, it's not going to be discouraged.

And it is, there are gonna be mechanisms in place for encouraging it just because it doesn't, it does not threaten the state.

And if anything, it gives more power to the state. Cause I mean, I guess that's how I see it. I don't know that there's like looming in the shadows, some guy who wants everyone to be like, you know.

Yeah, I don't, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think, I mean, you can get like in these very conspiratorial mindsets.

And it's not to say that there isn't, like the World Economic Forum is not real and that these figures are not pushing certain things.

But a lot of it is just aligned with the kind of incentives that we have in this kind of globalist, fake capitalist system.

It's not really a free market system, but it's built to favor giant corporations.

And so like in the system we have now, like healthcare, the healthcare industry is like almost a fifth of American GDP.

So out of every dollar that of goods and services that are produced in America, like 17 or 18 cents is healthcare.

Is insurance, is doctors, is pharmaceuticals, that kind of thing. And so there's an incentive there where it's like if there's this cash cow where they kind of want you, they don't want you to be healthy because there's a lot of money in you being not healthy.

So there's this built -in incentive there that drives these things. So it's just incentive structure.

And same thing with like food. If they can produce this corporate food system where they produce a lot of food, way more than we ever need to eat, but it's also not very sating, right?

So it's also like, there's a reason why like every kind of processed food is full of corn and soy oil and things like this, because one, we produce a lot of it and we've designed a system to be able to, like where I live, right?

I go outside my door and I look and I see corn and soybeans everywhere. We manufacture a lot of that and that kind of food, it doesn't fill you up.

It makes you're still hungry after you eat it. Like you go to McDonald's and you've dropped 50 bucks on McDonald's food and two hours later you're hungry again, right?

Like that is also, I think by design, because it's like if you make food where you're still hungry afterward, then you're gonna spend more money on food.

And so I think that's somewhat part of it is like it's manufactured for profits, right?

To keep the big line going up. And so I think a lot of it is that.

So the incentive structure is aligned also with kind of the insidious political things where they all kind of fit together.

I mean, it's like, I don't know if you're familiar with like mold bug, but I mean, he talks about like, conspiracies are not just a handful of people sitting in a dark room, plotting evil stuff.

I mean, not that those people don't exist, but it's really just this decentralized conspiracy theory.

I mean, just look at, we're on YouTube, so I have to be careful of how I phrase this.

I'll have to use coded language, but two, three years ago, you see it firsthand where it's not like every single doctor in America is in on the plot with Fauci, right?

But the incentive structure is aligned for them to do whatever they say, right? And it's aligned for everybody to get a certain thing put in their arm, right?

That's a lot of it is it isn't like there's this, I mean, there is a plot, but it's decentralized, right?

Everybody knows their role in it and what they're supposed to do, and they go along with it, right?

That's how it works. There's not any central figure pulling the strings. It's aligned with profit motive.

It's aligned with certain political and cultural aspects that are unstated.

I mean, all of that kind of stuff. I mean, when I talk about trash world and being socially engineered and they want this, it's along those lines.

It's not so linear and so easy to like pin on, well, if we just get rid of George Soros, then we're good.

It's the entire superstructure of the whole regime and all of it, right? That's the boomer commentality, right?

Like that's what people typically, when they use that term, they're saying, like, it's not the system, that's the problem.

It's the people running it. And if we just got rid of them, then - Looks like Mike Pence at the debate last week, you know?

I don't know if you watched it, but he gets in with Vivek and he's like, Vivek's like, why are you doing all this

Reaganite, you know, mourning in America stuff? It is bad out there. What are you talking about? He's like, no, Mike Pence is like, no, we just need a government as good as its people.

Yeah, it's these platitudes that just, yeah, Mike Pence is so out of touch. It's unbelievable.

He's been like that though for years. So, you know, what do you think of this? Cause like, I don't, like Christians who take offense at you somehow thinking like you're doing this new novel thing.

They don't, I don't see them like reaching back to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson saying, and Francis Schaeffer too,

I suppose you could say, but say those guys were really off the rails. Like those guys got us here.

Like they're not villains. And I'm wondering if part of the reason for that, in fact,

I've actually, I should say this, I've even seen people try to use like Francis Schaeffer against you guys, which to me is kind of unusual in a way.

Cause I think Schaeffer would have been more on board probably with what you guys are trying to do.

It really, it's solely based on the fact that Schaeffer was worried about totalitarianism. And they think that you're trying to promote totalitarians all based on that.

It's like, that's the whole justification for them calling you a bunch of Hegelians and like all the rest.

Like it's that you want totalitarianism. You want what George Soros and the world economic forum want, but you just want a cross on the front of it and not, right?

So there's this Christian veneer. And so I wonder though, whether part of this problem has to do with like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were trying to maintain something that was in danger of being lost.

And it was being lost during their generation. And they wanted to like say that there's this moral majority out there who actually agrees with us and we're not gonna let that happen.

So it was kind of a defensive maneuver. You could say the only aggressive stance they took was probably on abortion.

Like we're going to overturn that. But that was something in such recent memory that it was trying to get back to something that everyone knew about.

And it wasn't like a weird thing. Today though, 40 years later, you guys are basically saying you're not like doing a defensive position as much of like, we need to maintain what we have.

It's more of, we need to actually aggressively take ground back that's been lost.

And so that's going to include sacrifices and it's gonna be a rough ride.

Like we're gonna have to think outside the box. We're probably gonna have to have like funds set up to help people who are canceled in this process.

Like it's going to be, it's war basically. And we don't have the high ground anymore. We have to charge.

And so I'm wondering if that's the main like distinction. There probably are others, but if that's like the thing that they're reacting to, like Christians, that's just not the way that I think many of us were told on a personal level,

Christians should ever act, right? We only can play defense. We can't really go and we're not the type to go punch the bully in the nose.

Like that's not a Christian thing to do really. We want to win that bully to Christ kind of thing, right? You know what

I mean? Like there is this, and we've had this confusion, I think in us for years of like the ordinary, sitting in the pew

Christian thinks, well, yeah, we should be Christian, but also at the same time, we can't be aggressive about it. And here's these scary people who want to be aggressive and that must be totalitarian.

So do you think that's the difference between you guys and what the eighties, what happened in the eighties?

Yeah, I mean, I think the eighties is, I think your read on it is right. That they saw that Christian America was being eroded and eaten away and wanted to defend it, wanted to fight that process.

And obviously you look at it like they failed, right? They did not accomplish what they set out to.

And I think part of it is they did not, I mean, we have the benefit of 30 or 40 years of hindsight that really what they needed to fight was the civil rights revolution, because ultimately what that did was erode

Christianity. I think, I mean, it's a culturally revolutionary act that took place and they didn't wage a counter revolution.

They were just trying to hold ground, maintain ground rather than aggressively attack the enemy that was destroying them.

And today it's different where we could just say it that this was bad, it's destroyed us.

And things we have to change, we can't do the same thing that we've been doing for 40 years. We have to take a different strategy if we want to preserve the country that was given to us.

And so, yeah, I mean, it's funny, like you bring up like being aggressive. Like this is, the book is kind of a handbook of aggressive

Christianity, if anything, my book. And I - You kind of called it that.

It's funny. The handbook of aggressive Christianity. Yeah, yeah, that'd be another -

The Boniface option is better. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it. But it is, like this

Sunday, I preached on 2 Samuel chapter 20. And that is, that's the chapter where you don't, unless you're like really deep into the story and the narrative of what's going on with King David.

Like David is old and weak and really impotent because of his sin and the consequences of his sin.

And you have this really wicked nephew of his named Joab who basically just takes over, right?

He kills the guy that David replaces him with as head of the army, just kills him right in front of everybody and goes and puts down a rebellion.

And at the end of the chapter, right? It doesn't look like David's in charge. We're told that Joab is the commander of the army and that's it.

And the narrative picks up again in 1 Kings where David has to tell Solomon, right?

Make Solomon his heir and say, you got to take care of Joab. Or that's the first order of business. And so really the point of that chapter is if you have good men, right?

Faithful men who are weak, you are going and they become weak and impotent.

You're not gonna have no men leading. You're gonna have wicked men. And what

Israel needed was David like he was before his sin. They needed a David that was aggressive that would stand up to a nine foot tall giant and say, you can't say that about my

God. I'm going, let me kill him. Let me kill this giant. And you see it in Jesus.

And I'm like, you read the gospels. I mean, you're told your whole life because of kind of a neutral world

Christianity that Jesus was so sweet and kind and very winsome and very nice and gentle and patient.

And he was very much like Mr. Rogers. You know, here comes, I'm taking my cardigan off and I'm untying my shoes and oh, here's the trolley.

And like, that's the picture people have of Jesus. But you like actually read the gospels, right? You actually sit down and read them and you see a man who is bold.

I mean, the boldest man in world history, right? He confronts his enemies.

He verbally attacks them and does not mince words at all. He calls them a brood of vipers and snakes and whitewashed tombs and all of that.

And he utters woes against them. I mean, you get to like Matthew, the end of the gospel of Matthew, he goes into the heart of the temple, right?

At Passover when there's thousands of people there witnessing everything and he attacks the priest.

He calls this place a den of robbers and he utters these woes and says, woe to you, woe to you, woe to you.

And he knows what he is saying is going to cost him his life, right?

That's what Jesus was like. That's the real Jesus was aggressive as all get out.

And that's the Jesus that we need to see today and emulate and be like.

Not weak and wimpy and impotent and allowing Joabs to do everything, but rather aggressive, right?

To confront things that are wrong, to attack, to challenge them. And it might, there'll be losses.

You might be martyred or you might be virtually martyred. I mean, in our day, I mean, not that actual martyrdom is off the table, but we see this, like people will be canceled.

You're not allowed to espouse basic Christian opinions. I mean, you have this thing in Ohio where this

Congressman attacks this pro -life leader for saying there's no hope outside of Jesus Christ.

And he's like, that is the most bigoted and anti -Semitic thing I've ever. And of course he is forced to apologize, but not, then he gets her, essentially gets her fired.

Not a real apology, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I apologize for that. By the way, you're out of a job. And like, that's what's going to happen to people who have any even like modicum of boldness with their

Christian faith is you are going to be attacked. You're going to, there's going to be a cost for being faithful and being bold, but you have to do it.

We have to, we absolutely have to in order to, in order to preserve our families, preserve our nation, all of this.

So that's what we have to, God has to do in us is see how insane the world is and be willing to just say what is true and be bold about it and not mince words and say what we think and let the chips fall where they may because people are not going to like you.

Like you have to, like that, I mean, that's part of the neutral world ethos, I think, is just get everybody to like you, right?

If they, if you're just nice and friendly, like maybe they'll disagree with you about some stuff, but like, they're going to know that you're a really good person and that you're really nice, right?

No, they're not going to, they're going to hate you. Like you need to be, you need to come to grips with the fact that people are going to hate you and they're going to hate you because of what you believe.

And you have to be okay with that, right? You have to be, you know, I mean, I get this sometimes where people will be like critical of me.

They'll be like, well, I don't like any of the, you know, or so -and -so says things better than you do.

Or like, I get more Bible teaching from this other guy than you. And I'm like, well, why would

I want you to like what I have to say? Someone like, like, I don't want, I don't care about your opinion.

I don't want, you know, like that's, but that's what people think. It's like, oh, if I say, I don't like you, that's going to be a dagger to your heart and hurt you and make you feel bad.

Yeah, that is, you bring up something that is very weird. That's something. I don't care about your opinion.

Yeah, Josh Bice, when he emailed me back, you know, this was in back in May.

That's one of the things he said that I thought was interesting was like, I've received basically negative messages about you from other people.

And I'm like. Okay. Like, yeah, right? Like another day in my life.

Like, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's just such a weird, especially for a Christian, especially for a Christian who follows a man who obviously -

What do you when all men think well of you? Yeah, like, I mean,

I could see if there's, if there's people who are godly and they're objecting to something you're saying, maybe pause and think through am

I, but using it as like almost like a tactic to,

I don't know, like that should be the goal is to not have that. I don't even know exactly what's behind that, but there is something there that really bothered me because it's not just him.

That's one example. This is like pervasive that it's just really bad when other people think negatively of you.

And so, I mean, the way that I've, because they often justify it with like things like, yeah, but there's a qualification for an elder that you must be thought of kind of like well by the people that you're around outside the church.

But I think the whole point of that is more like the people who actually see you outside of this performative environment where you are, because it's easy for a pastor to just kind of be quote unquote godly or act that way with a stage presence.

I've seen that many times, but the people who actually like your neighbors, the people in your regular course of life, like they know you have a good character.

You're not gonna swindle them. You're not going to, you're a good worker if you had a secular job. Like that's what that's talking about.

It doesn't mean that they all just, you know, have the butterflies for you or like, you know, they don't disagree with your

Christianity or, you know, don't think you're a bigot somehow. So anyway, that's my rant.

Yeah, I know. I know people use that to be like, see, that's the elder qualification is being winsome.

And it's like, no, I mean, it's, I mean, we're in a time where, yeah, or like not a brawler, you know, is part of it.

And it's like, well, yeah, that's true. Like you shouldn't be someone that's like looking for a fight always and just constantly on the war path.

And, you know, I tell people like all the time, I'm like, I actually don't want to fight.

I don't want conflict, right? I will avoid it. I will avoid it like the plague if I can.

Like, I'm not looking to fight these people. And usually it's, I only, you know, fight or argue if I'm being attacked.

Like I don't initiate it, right? I don't go out of my way to like, you know, attack different people, except for maybe like David French or Russell Moore.

But like other people, I don't, like, I'm not looking to get into a spat with, you know,

Jake Bedore or Alistair Roberts or any of the Davenant people. You know, I'm not looking to like, oh,

I can't wait to wake up tomorrow and tweet a banger about these guys. Like, no, I'm not,

I don't care about that. I don't want to fight. I want to encourage my people in the way that they should go more than anything else.

That's what I'm about. I want, like the fight is that, is building up my people and backing them up, right?

Having, you know, doing the things that I do so that they don't feel alone, right?

Cause that's a big thing is all of these people are coming to grips with how insidious and destructive and evil and disgusting trash world is.

And they see it all around them all day long. And there's this overwhelming feeling of that you're alone.

You're the only one that thinks something is wrong. And I don't want people to, I don't want our people to feel that way.

I want them to know, like, no, you're right. Everything else, everybody else is nuts. You're the one that's sane and keep doing what you're doing, right?

That's what I want to do, you know? Yeah. Well, we should probably land the plane. We've been going about an hour and 16 minutes.

We've been going for a few hours here, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We could just, I'm sure there's tons to talk about, but no, that sounds like a great message.

And I really, you know, wish you success. I shouldn't say wish. I pray that you have success with your book and with just the message that it conveys.

And that, you know, I really hope that people take this to heart. This is the thing that I've also been, it's funny.

I think many of us are seeing the same problem and it's whether you want to call it Christian nationalism or masculine

Christianity, or like, you don't even have a label. You just like, I don't really, I just want to go back to like old, like conservatism.

I don't want to let them take that word. That's my word. Like, I know, you know? Yeah, yeah. But, but whatever you want to think of it, like there is this need for a aggression of a masculine aggression that seems to be nowhere.

It seemed like, like even in Hollywood this summer, you know, who were the three biggest action movies were who?

It was like Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise. And I forget the name of the guy who plays in that, that movie about child trafficking, but he's also kind of older.

Jim Caviezel. Yeah, Jim Caviezel. So you have - They're all over 50. Yeah, they're all over 50.

And then who do you have that's young? That's a young, you have Ken, you have Ken in the Barbie movie, right? He's in his forties, you know?

Yeah, even, wow, even he, okay. So, but still like there, like there aren't any, even in Hollywood, you don't see positive examples of even pagans being masculine.

Like it's, that's dying out. That's like the older generation of Hollywood. So it's just like, it's just rich and it needs to, like that is the main need of the moment.

So anyway, congratulations on, it's hard to complete a book. Congratulations on doing that.

And people can get it where? Right now on Amazon is the place to get it.

I know a lot of people hate Amazon. I'm not particularly fond of Amazon either, but it's the most efficient and easiest way to get it out there and keep it out in the public eye.

So yeah, if you go to bonifaceoption .com, they'll take you right to the link to get the book. And yeah, please, please pick it up and read it, share it with people.

I know a lot of people have, I've been, and I'm so blown away that people really like it.

Because you write something and anybody that, even if you write blog posts and things like that, you're like, is anybody gonna read this?

Is it gonna be, are they gonna like what I'm writing or is it gonna have any impact at all?

And so you just, you kind of don't, you just, you do it and you hope for the best. And the messages

I've received from so many people are like, I've followed what you've done for years and I had high expectations for the book.

And it blew away all my expectations. And that like means a lot. I mean, it really, really does.

When people that said, I really, I had high hopes for the book and you exceeded all of them.

You know, that's really saying something. So, I mean, you read it. I think a lot of people really get a lot out of it.

And I mean, I wrote it for our kind of people, for people like your audience that need support and encouragement and to be built up.

And I also wrote it for the kind of Christians who have never thought about any of this stuff to kind of like, you know, wake them up, give them a sort of red pill moment and see that all things are bad.

And I even wrote it also for the kind of guys who are in middle

America, who are not really church going guys, who are not, maybe not even, they would say they believe in God or believe in Jesus, but they, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, the kind of people that like, they hear Oliver Anthony's song and like, yeah, that's great. It's for that, those type of folks that,

I mean, their experience in church has been what we've been talking about, where it's just this really wimpy, very consumeristic religious expression, where it's just, you know, it's just entertainment and it's kind of more or less meaningless.

And they've never seen any kind of aggressive, masculine Christianity that's like, that's what

I want. I mean, you see like Oliver Anthony reads Psalm 37 and people are like, yeah, let's go.

You know, like, it's like, I want people like that, you know, people that they hear that and they're like, yes, right.

They just read it in a precatory Psalm and they're like, yes. I want them to read that, you know?

It's crazy. I want them to read the book and think, oh, there's a kind of Christianity out there that speaks to me.

You know, that's what I'm trying to produce and bring people to because it's lacking.

It doesn't really exist, but it can still. And the kind of Christian faith that built the world that we love is just a little bit of an ember right there, but I want it to turn back into a roaring fire.

Yeah. Living in the new world with an old soul. Andrew Isker on the

Conversations That Matter podcast. You can check out the book on Amazon, the