The American Churchman: Advice for the New Christian Right

Welcome to the American Churchmen podcast. Once again, we are a podcast that aims at encouraging men to fulfill their God-given responsibilities and conquer in the realms that God has given them in this world for Christ.

So I appreciate everyone being with me as always. My co-host Matthew Pearson is with us tonight. And we also have a special guest. We have Pastor Danny Steinmeier on the podcast. You might know Pastor Steinmeier from seeing him on Conversations That Matter, or he's been featured on the TruthScript website.

He's one of the board members. He's written some articles. So welcome, Pastor Steinmeier.

It's good to have you.

Yeah, thanks for having me, guys.

So we have a lot to talk about today. We're gonna jump into it here. Welcome, by the way, everyone who came from Conversations That Matter. I just ended the podcast a few minutes ago, and I can tell people are already filling up.

So as promised, we are gonna talk about what I said we would talk about, the new Christian rights. But before we get there, we wanna talk about the attributes of God and here to lead us off with that, Matthew, what do we got today?

Excellent. Well, thank you, John, as always, for throwing this whole little program together. But yes, I do know that we have a lot to talk about. So this one may be a little bit shorter, maybe not. I'm not sure.

It depends on where we go with this. But as always, for the most part, I either use Bob Inker Moeller today. I just, I threw something together using Moeller. So guys, you should be reading Richard Moeller, but if you don't feel like reading him on the divine attributes, you can come get my watered down version here.

But today we will be discussing God's attribute of wisdom, or we could call it divine wisdom. So just to start us off, I'm gonna be reading just three verses from Romans chapter 16. So it'll be Romans 16, verses 25 through 27, where the apostle Paul writes, "'Now to him who is able to strengthen you "'according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, "'according to the revelation of the mystery "'that was kept secret for long ages, "'but has now been disclosed "'and through the prophetic writings "'has been made known to all nations, "'according to the command of the eternal God, "'to bring about the obedience of faith, "'to the only wise God be glory forevermore "'through Jesus Christ, amen.'".

Now that was a lot of verses, but the key thing I wanted us to notice there is in verse 27, where it says, "'To the only wise God be glory forever.'". So as I stated, we will be talking a little bit about divine wisdom.

So essentially, and again, as I stated, this is a lot of, this is pulled from Richard Muller, great resource on many things. But according to Muller, the way that he talks about God's wisdom is he basically says that God's wisdom can be defined as the correspondence of God's thought with the highest good of all things.

So I'm gonna say it again. God's wisdom can be defined as the correspondence of God's thought with the highest good of all things. So there's two sorts of little things that we see there. We see this idea of God's thought or God's knowledge of things, but also you see the highest good of all things.

So there's a correspondence between knowledge and some particular end in mind, the highest end, the highest good, God. Because God is himself the highest good towards which all things tend, his wisdom can thus be defined as this correspondence of God's thought with his essence as it is considered the highest good.

Because when we speak about the divine attributes, all that is in God is God, something I've said many times and will continue to say. Basically, his wisdom is this knowledge which orders towards himself, his own essence.

So when we speak about divine wisdom, as I just stated, there's like a statement of knowledge there. And this talk of knowledge, if you're a consistent American churchman, listener or watcher, you may think, hey, we just covered in the divine attributes, we just talked about omniscience, God's immediate knowledge of all things.

And that's because even though God's wisdom can be distinguished from his omniscience, both of these attributes, they still concern his knowledge. So God's knowledge according to omniscience can be thought of as a more theoretical knowledge.

It simply is an immediate knowledge of all things that God possesses. While his knowledge according to wisdom can be conceived of as more of a practical knowledge because it is inherently ordered towards something.

And something that I sort of thought of when I was looking into this briefly is that wisdom itself as an attribute is inherently teleological. That's from the word telos, which is end. It is inherently ordered towards something.

So because this, and the reason why we can say that wisdom is practical is because this wisdom itself is defined according to his end, namely that end being participation in God. Wisdom is us. And when we just think of wisdom in general, like apart from God being wisdom itself, when we just think of wisdom in general, wisdom would just be a knowledge of first principles and the conclusions which may be drawn from them.

Thus the wisdom of God would be, as was stated earlier, the correspondence of this knowledge of God according to his essence. So that was a lot of big things that I said, but I'd say that the big thing that I want us to take away when thinking about the wisdom of God is that this is an ordered knowledge.

This is a knowledge which is ordered towards, it corresponds with the highest good. Now, what is the highest good? The highest good is God. So when we think of someone who is wise, who is able to be wise and know things, knowledge is not wisdom.

You can have the smartest person in the world. You can have someone who just nerds out on theology or any other subject, but they're stupid. They don't actually live a virtuous life. They don't know how to behave well.

They're not even pious or truly loving God. So wisdom would be using this knowledge and ordering it to the highest good. So God as wisdom would essentially be his knowledge in correspondence with his own essence as a highest good.

So that's how we would speak of God's wisdom.

Good, Pastor Steinmeier, you have anything to say regarding any of that?

I think there's something good there that you said towards the end that it's not the one-to-one with knowledge. Certainly it's hard to be wise without knowledge. So sometimes knowledge and wisdom can sometimes be used interchangeably.

But the point that you're making there is that of course you can have a lot of knowledge, but if you deny God, you're a fool, right? That's what the scripture speaks of it. And so if you're not really corresponding to the way in which God has ordered the world, you might know a lot of things, but it's out of order and it doesn't have the proper end.

And so you are truly a fool because you're outside of God's wisdom, the starting place of knowing him and of understanding and acknowledging him in all things. So I think that's an interesting part. That's very true.

Very smart people can be very foolish and unwise.

Yes.

I was curious about someone who does something that's, so like wise on a basic level, like they, not just smart, but they, well, maybe this, you would categorize this as smart. I don't know, but I'm thinking of someone who has like practical life advice for marriage or how to navigate, you know, the coming of age or something like that.

And sometimes older men who aren't Christians will say some seemingly wise things that might just be part of the nature that God's given us and experience that they've had. So how does, like, where do we put that?

How do we categorize that?

Yeah, I would say that people that are unregenerate can have true wisdom. I mean, many in the Christian faith have taken from people who were themselves not Christian. Think of like appropriate, think of classical appropriations of Plato or Aristotle, or even if we want to talk about presuppositionalism, think about their interactions with Immanuel Kant and wrestling through his philosophical implications in order to build a system of presuppositional thought.

Throughout the history of the church, people have always wrestled with the wisdom of those who are not in Christ. And so there's a sense in which there are certain things which are a good, and insofar as they're good and you're ordered towards that good, there's a participation in God, yet it is not a participation which is ordered, which is actually like good in the sight of God in that it's seen as something which is righteous and which is thus seen as fruitful for their salvation.

But, you know, you think of this instance of like someone who's not a Christian who saves a woman from like a building that's on fire. We can say that what he did was good in the eyes of God, his action was not good in that it doesn't orient him towards eternal life, but it is still a earthly good that God sees as good, it's simply not a good which is sufficient to be pleasing in the eyes of the Lord.

That's kind of how I would think about it.

Would you say it's oriented towards God's design then in a temporal world? So like if someone who's an engineer figures out a really efficient way to organize a parking lot, like he's working in God's, with God's tools, mathematics, he's acknowledging the order God has put into the world and then he's doing something that's good for people.

Like we would all say, oh, it's great that we have a parking lot and a mall or a store that doesn't cave in, like I wouldn't wanna go in there if it did. So, you know, is that wisdom, but it's not, it like terminates though at the level of, I guess, the temporal world so that if it was a Christian, hopefully engineer doing that, they would then be able to also worship God in doing this.

It's natural wisdom. It wouldn't be a supernatural wisdom, which would God would look at and be pleased with. That's what I would say. And that's why we need the Holy Spirit to regenerate us so that all that we do is to the glory of God.

Well, in the ultimate sense, I think is where you kind of get to that element of the fool. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? You can have a success with knowledge in God's world that he's made.

So insofar as you are able to function and order your life in the way in which things truly are, genuine science and for instance, and just remember too, Solomon and his wisdom, what did his wisdom actually look like?

It was knowledge of plants and animals and humanity and what a mother's desire and heart is for her child to know if I suggest we split the baby, I'll figure out who the real mom is, right? That was the whole point.

So he understood humanity and understood femininity and motherhood in those types of things. But he also had a sense of who God is, right? Understanding and writing the Proverbs. So the person that makes that parking lot, John, they are able to be successful and apply knowledge to the real world that God has made.

But in so far as he doesn't know God, ultimately he is a fool in the ultimate sense in that the end of things is simply a parking lot and the damnation of his soul.

Well, he probably thinks that the math arrived by chance or something crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

But insofar as he functions in the world that God has made in common grace and different things like that, that you have things that demonstrate the wisdom of God actually in a world that's broken and fallen, where he restrains and provides even knowledge in ways that to even fools.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Bill, this has been good. I haven't thought of wisdom in those terms, Matthew, but I think that's a good way to frame it. And the phrase comes to mind, you hear it all the time, it's often abused, but all truth is God's truth.

But I mean, that actually is true. Like all truth is God's truth. So many times when people say that though, they're talking about something false and they're trying to attribute it. They're saying, yeah, this false thing, all truth is God's truth.

Muslims and Christians worship the same God. All truth is God's truth.

Yeah, we can turn to psychology. All truth is God's truth.

That's usually the play.

Yeah.

All right, well, having said that, I don't see any questions in the chat about that particular section. We can move on to the article and let me see if I can pull it up. I actually think I have it here, but did you both read it?

I know you read it, Pastor Steinmeier. Did you read it, Matthew?

I did, yes, I read it.

Okay, all right. So it's on the TrueScript website. I think it's actually the featured article right now,.

But I'll put it up here. So here we go.

It says six cautions for the new Christian right. And so I wrote this. I'm not gonna read the whole thing to you. People can go to the website if they wanna read it, but I basically started out by saying, I am in largely, not even largely, I'm in agreement with, you know, broadly speaking with the new Christian right.

I guess I would see myself as part of it. There are these areas that I think we should pay attention to. And I give six of them, though. Do not repay evil for evil. Do not center your life around new Christian right leaders.

Honor the gray-headed. Beware of ideology. Let scripture guide you and avoid ecumenicism. Or, yeah, I guess I should have put ecumenicalism. I don't know if that's

No, ecumenism's a real word.

That works.

I know it is, but it, well, okay. So someone actually, they corrected me and said that I used the wrong word there, but I don't know. We're gonna go with it since the editors thought it was fine. So maybe we start with that.

But maybe we start before the first point here, just on these three paragraphs, where I describe what the new Christian right is and affirm my general positivity towards them. I'd like to hear, if possible, from you, Pastor Steinmeier, first, since you read this.

What, like, what did you think of that? Did you agree with my definition of the new Christian right that, like, this is a broad movement of, well, I should probably, maybe on this one I should read what I actually wrote.

So I said, the new Christian right is primarily composed of younger American Protestants interested in overcoming liberal ideology or restoring Christian order to their lives, churches, and society. The movement is broad in that it encompasses different flavors and visions for how life ought to be arranged.

It includes general equity theonomists, paleo-conservatives, self-described Christian nationalists, traditional Baptists, and others. And then I basically say they're not fascists, even though they keep being called that.

So did you agree with that definition or would you add anything to that?

Yeah, I do agree with it.

I think that's a good definition.

I like one of my,.

I've got some of these young guys in my church as well, and we had a little back and forth. One of them suggested the new movement of Christians reclaiming the old right. It doesn't roll off the tongue, the new Christian right.

Yeah, that catches. Everyone's gonna remember that.

No, but the idea of it's, I think we have to be careful of the new part, just typically, because I think the big idea of the new Christian right is the discovery of old paths. And that's actually been a huge element of my own ministry.

I've said this from the very beginning, because as you know, John, we're a church plant, we're about six years old, and, but we've not been wanting to invent anything new. We've been wanting to be, I've been saying, you know, walking old paths.

And so that's really what we wanna be about. It's really trying to return to conservative ideas, but it's not just the conservatism that is conserving the last 10 years, but it's actually trying to go backwards further and understand a little bit more of where the last 10 years have failed us in conservatism and to really look back further.

And I think you've really described it really well of looking back to older writings, some things that were trying to win the last era, the postmodern era and other political fights that some of them lost.

Guys like Pat Buchanan, former presidential candidate and things like that. So, but I thought it was well said and well defined and it is broad. And I think that's one of the challenges and it hasn't landed in some regards.

So, but overall I thought it was good.

Yeah, there's a lot of guys that wanna pigeonhole it into something.

Right.

And I was actually just critiquing a Kevin DeYoung speech at a conference last weekend where he quotes Stephen Wolfe and then proceeds to argue for something that Stephen Wolfe himself repudiates. And he broad brushes this whole movement.

And these younger guys, they want to use the church, he said, for the purpose of Christianizing the country or the state. And so the church becomes a means to an end and that's what everyone's doing, which Stephen Wolfe himself doesn't even agree with.

And I just thought, well, there might be some guys that do think that, but it's a broad movement. You can't just pick one or two guys or even reach back into, well, this seems like it's reconstruction from the seventies.

I'm just gonna pick that and say that that's what this is.

It's not.

And that makes it hard to define. I looked at the paper when I was writing it and I thought, what do I even put here? And I think that captures it. That is what it is, but it's in the process of defining itself, even as we speak.

Different figures are coming to new conclusions or not old conclusions, but they're newly coming to them and their platforms are getting bigger. And so it's changing the movement as we speak. So Matthew, did you have any thoughts about any of that being the Zoomer who, I don't even know where you would put yourself.

In all of that.

Like where I'd label myself among people on the new Christian right?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the millennials hated labels. Zoomers hate labels.

I mean, I don't really care much about them. I'm not opposed to it, but I guess, I mean, given my political theology and where I would just align on the political spectrum, what my ideology is, I only said that to annoy you.

No, I guess I would be on the new Christian right, sure. I mean, yeah, you gave a good description of it in that first paragraph. A lot of those people definitely are a part of the movement. And yeah, I really like what the one young fella at Pastor Steinmeier's church, how he defined it as kind of like, I don't remember the exact words, but it's almost like an appropriation, like a re-appropriation of the old right.

Because at the end of the day, that's mostly what it is. Because where we are now, it's like the default is this sort of like a very wimpy conservatism that doesn't actually seek to conserve like anything like traditional moral values or what historically the United States was.

I mean, even like the progressives, like historically in the United States, like I'm thinking like 19th, 20th century progressives, even they are far more conservative than conservatives nowadays. So I think that's mainly what it is.

And because of that, we would call it new, like as new Christian right, because it's like, it's a re-appropriation. It's like a revivification of that, which is in our history. It's not like we're coming up with these things out of nowhere.

There are certain elements of which are, I guess you could say are reactionary, like based off the circumstances we're in, but it's all just old principles. It's, you know how there's old time religion?

This is just old time political thinking. It sort of is something like that. But no, I thought that your opening paragraph was succinct to the point and accurate.

Yeah, okay, cool. Well, let's get to the first point then. It says, or I wrote that we should not repay evil for evil. And you know, there's a lot of hurt feelings and there's a lot of mistrust and I don't, I guess disagreement too.

I mean, it's a whole soup of different things, but I've seen legacy ministries and I'll be blunt. None of you guys have to say what I'm about to say unless you want to, but I think that frankly, Doug Wilson, James White, those two especially recently have been kind of unfair to some of the guys in Ogden, to Joel Webben.

I know some of my listeners probably don't want to hear that, but as I've looked at, to the best of my ability, I've looked at the back and forth and I've talked to some of these guys behind the scenes.

I just, I think that it's, there's been a lot of mistrust zone that in my opinion was unnecessary. I don't want to see those things, but there's an attempt to stamp out, I think the new Christian rights.

And I don't think it's just represented by Stephen Wolfe or just represented by Ogden or Joel Webben or American reformer. I think it's probably in flux and there's going to be names that will be more prominent, perhaps we've never heard of, that will come into being even in the next year or two.

But it's, there is a, if you want, I guess I'll call it gatekeeping. There is this attempt to kind of gatekeep these guys. So I don't know if you, you don't have to agree with me, but I'm curious, especially Pastor Steinmeier, what you think of some of this.

We've talked about some of this and it's not something I like talking about necessarily, but people do want direction on it and they're confused. And so I think they need some wisdom right now to talk about the attribute of God we were just referencing.

Well, you stole my thunder on this. I mean, I appreciate that you named those names and that's actually what I, exactly what I would say. Doug Wilson and James White, this is part of the disappointment is that these would be leaders that you would hope to be, and in some ways have been on the right wing of conservative evangelicalism.

They have been, as even Doug's system and explanation, I thought the Ogden guys did a fantastic job, even just demonstrating the self-own that Doug has had here with his three, one, two, three, and four system, where now Doug is acting like a three, punching right against the fours and acting as that gatekeeper.

And I think it's lacking in real self-awareness of he is doing to his disciples, those people who have benefited from him, who have learned from him, what those who he benefited from and learned from as well, it did to him, the embargo.

All the ways that Canon Press, for instance, is not part of the publishing groups accepted at respectable conferences and so forth. And now he's one that's now laying down embargoes. If you do this, you're not welcome here.

If Moscow's closed to you, I'm withdrawing from your stage and you won't be invited to my stage. And you're exactly right. It's an effort to stamp out this, all because, well, not because you guys necessarily are the problem, but you are now the problem because you're not policing Anons in comment sections, as opposed to, guys, get over the comment section, maybe don't even read them.

And you're chasing ghosts, but now you're gonna lay this at the feet. And by the way, this is what people accused Doug of for a long time.

You know, hey, Doug, maybe you might be okay, you might mean things,.

But your rhetoric is radicalizing these other guys. And he wouldn't own that. And now he's gonna punish these guys for quote unquote, not owning the people that they are, the Anons that are taking their side or whatever else.

I look, I think there's probably some imperfection. I think you acknowledge that some lack of wisdom from some of those younger guys and some of the guys on the new right, but the way that, and James White, I think has been horrible in this entire thing.

And I think just at the moment, look, there's a vibe shift. Wokeness is dying. Companies are canceling DEI and stuff like that. Trump is coming in. There's a new, even interest in God, in religion. I think post-modernism having died and given way to woke-ism.

Woke-ism now being bankrupt and being shown to be fraudulent. Woke-ism is very sure of itself, but it's sure of things that aren't so. And that's been made clear. Now what's happening is there's an opportunity for truth.

There's an opportunity for foundations and people are hungry for the Lord and for foundations. And I think the evangelicals, the reformed evangelicals are poised to gag away an opportunity because they're gonna fight each other and gatekeep those who are actually, I think, ready to lead us in the best way of older conservatism.

So before we get to you, Matthew, I gotta ask you this, and I'm gonna set it up with this comment that just came in from Cam Beck. Danny, that is not an accurate representation of Doug Wilson's position.

He never said he wouldn't talk with them, just that there are certain partnerships that are closed off from them as long as they entertain certain ideologies. And so I guess the question that I have in conglomeration with that is, aren't there movements or people that you do want to gatekeep?

Every movement has to actually have a gate somewhere. And obviously to the left, conservative organizations, especially supposed conservative organizations have let that gate open so wide they get infiltrated.

I don't buy, this is a whole nother discussion I don't wanna get into. I do not buy that neo-Nazi ideologue types are to the right of the new Christian right or anything like that. I just have to put that out there just because I don't think, that's the framing that some of the Anons online will give that like, we're being gate kept out.

I do think there is a place for some of that with prudence. It's not gatekeeping the right though. It's gatekeeping out ideologies that can scuttle your movement. Would you agree with that? And if so, where are the boundaries?

Maybe approach that comment about Doug Wilson that he's just trying to preserve the movement that he has.

Well, so if I said that he wouldn't talk to them, that was maybe a mistake if that's what I said. He certainly has indicated, I think it's been demonstrated, Moscow is closed to Joel Webben if he does certain things.

And also he's removed himself from their conferences and so forth. He is essentially cutting ties with those guys and there really is a separation going on. When it comes to the concept of gatekeeping, of course, you're trying to keep out those influences that are unorthodox.

But what we have is really, again, a group of people who are learning and growing and asking questions and questioning narratives that we've been given for a long period of time. And I remember some of these when I was growing up as well.

I mean, I am old enough, I just turned 45. So I do remember Pat Buchanan. I remember reading his book, Death of the West, 20 years ago or whatever it was. Those are some things that these guys are discovering or recognizing we weren't taught.

And I don't think that's the same thing as gatekeeping. Look, you're gonna try to gatekeep this supposed anti-Semitism that's on the right. And I don't think that that's... I think there may be legitimacy if you got the receipts.

And I don't think we're bringing receipts. I think we're chasing ghosts. And the Anon movement is what they're upset about. And these guys are getting the albatross hung around their neck for owning it.

Yeah, yeah.

One of the recent examples was I saw Doug Wilson cut ties with Ogden, with the church there, Eric Kahn and Brian Sauve and some of those guys. And the ultimate, I guess, straw that broke the camel's back according to him was this video they shared, this white boy summer Christmas montage.

It was a silly little thing. I didn't share it. Would I share it? Probably not. But it had a scene in it. See, this even gets in the weeds trying to explain it because it's so... But it had a scene from a slasher movie, actually, which apparently had a Jewish director.

But the scene was, according to Doug Wilson, anti-Semitic because the scene that came before it had someone murdered who was Jewish with a, I guess, some Jewish symbol. I forget what it was. It might've been a

Yeah.

It was a menorah. Okay, there you go. Anyway

Well, Doug shared the clip, okay?

That wasn't

Yeah, oh, man. Not a clip it's edifying for anyone to see.

Well, so that's sort of the... It's good for the goose, but it's not good for the gander, apparently, unfortunately, in Doug Wilson's paradigm right now. Because he's played that game with his own sometimes pushing the envelope with language and other, the middle finger controversy and stuff like that.

And when people would share it around, or I forget his analogy, serving up something on a cracker or whatever. And the idea, well, now you just shared it around. And so now you're the guilty one. These guys didn't share the clip that included the killing of the

It was just Santa Claus walking down the street.

It was the clip immediately after that, that apparently was in that video. I haven't seen the other video. I saw the one that Doug shared. Doug is the one that actually promoted the viewing of that abhorrent scene.

Well, the point is though, that the interpretation he had was not the interpretation any of these guys who shared this montage had. And whether it was unwise or not to share this montage and whether or not the source of it was someone you should be sharing, okay, that's a discussion you can have.

And I can see merit to someone saying it's unwise or whatever, you shouldn't do it as a pastor. I don't know. But to make that exhibit A, we're breaking fellowship. And it's because of antisemitism. And it wasn't even that.

That wasn't in any of these guys' minds. I think that's where there's a lot of head scratching. And then to come back to the point of the article, that's where there's an opportunity to repay evil for evil here.

To say, we got treated this way and now we're gonna treat you bad. We're gonna say nasty things about you. And maybe to bring you in here, Matthew, a little bit, I mean, you're plugged into the social media discourse on some of these things.

Some of the people listening probably don't even know what we're talking about right now, or at least they haven't seen stuff on X. I mean, have you seen what I've seen with some people, especially, it's more Anons, I would say, or Anons, however you say that, doing it.

But there is sort of like a nasty, kind of vengeful, like, you did this to us now, we're gonna say nasty things to you. We're gonna use a lot of profanity and stuff. I've noticed that at times.

Yeah, no, I've definitely seen similar things to that. I mean, when you get in an Anon account, you can kind of just say whatever you want, like I've had an Anon account before. And so I know how that sort of thing is.

But at the same time, you do have to think where a lot of these people are coming from. We talk about empathy, having empathy for the oppressed. Why not have empathy for the Anon here, okay? Put yourself in their shoes.

They're starting to discover all these new things. They're starting to question all these interesting narratives. They were really big Doug Wilson fans. And then as a matter of fact, you know who Doug Wilson put them on?

They watched that one man rampant interview. Oh, this guy named E. Michael Jones. Yeah, let's look up E. Michael Jones. And then they pull up his book list and they see, oh, the Jewish revolutionary spirit.

Oh, the Holocaust narrative. Oh, the Catholic church and the Jews. Like, you know, you see, so all of a sudden they love Doug Wilson. They see this video of him with E. Michael Jones. They look up his books, they start reading.

They start getting super excited because now they discovered that Jews are the bad guys. And they finally go to Doug and they're like,.

Doug, I figured it out.

And then, you know, I can kind of understand why there is some of that nasty behavior out there, honestly. And I do think that there's a bit of, you know, like kind of what Pastor Steinmeier was saying, you know, it sort of is like, I feel like Doug would have canceled Doug from three to seven years ago.

Like, you know, just based off how things are going. But of course there is a sense in which there is a time for righteous anger. There is even a time for language, which is harsh. But in doing those sorts of things, you do have to do so with the heart, which is ordered to, I mean, when we were talking about wisdom, with wisdom and prudence, a heart that's ordered towards the highest good, thinking, is this unjust anger?

Is this pleasing to God? Or is this just me like spark, like, you know, like crashing out because I'm just angry in general. So a lot of this thing, these things need to be done with prayer. And of course there are some people that they may like be investigating more like, I don't know, spicy topics they may feel, and they're scared to like, you know, talk about it with people because they don't want those people to turn on them because there've been a lot of people that have been put under church discipline for exploring certain like topics or whatever.

But it is good to find a older godly mentor in your life who you can discuss these sorts of things with, who you can work through issues with, who can disagree with you on something without threatening to cancel you or something like that.

And I think that at the end of the day, sometimes the anger does come from not having someone in your life, because I personally have been blessed being able to think through certain topics, knowing that I have someone who I can go to discuss it with who is older than me, wiser than me, and who I can trust wouldn't like destroy my life.