127. Interview with Ben Zeisloft (Postmillennialism and Journalism)

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So that would include something like how you cover the news of the day, and it doesn't necessarily have to be pure Bible verses.

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The assumption is that it's under the Lordship of Christ. Even if you don't see that kind of thing in the paper, it's all of Christ for all of life.

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So that's what we're striving for. Yes. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf.

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This is episode 127, my interview with Ben Zeisloft, Postmillennialism and Journalism.

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Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm so excited for this interview today.

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And welcome back to interview week where we're doing some great interviews that are closing out our series on Postmillennialism.

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So thank you for coming back. Ben Zeisloft is a reporter. He's a journalist.

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And in our day, that's kind of a dirty word, you know, fake news and the big industrial media complex and all of that.

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Well, Ben's not like that. Ben is a devoted Christian. He's a husband. He's a

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Postmillennialist. And he's going to teach us today how your Postmillennial reformed

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Christianity can actually intersect with a field like journalism. So enjoy the interview, and we'll see you again next time on the podcast.

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Well, hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast for a special episode today where we're in a series called

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A Practical Postmillennialism. And I've been working to try to show how the whole

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Bible is the story of Postmillennialism, how Jesus is going to have victory, how that promise begins in the book of Genesis, and it works itself out through the entire

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Bible. And not only is that a theological concept that I've been developing, it is a practical truth that works itself out in our lives.

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If you believe that Christ has the victory, it's going to change the way that you live. And I want to, in this series, talk to people who live in different sectors than I do.

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I'm in ministry, but I want to talk to people who are homemakers. I want to talk to people who are in the medical field and music and journalism.

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And to that end, I'm very blessed today to welcome our special guest. His name is Ben Zeiselhoft.

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I didn't say that right. My tongue messed up. No, you got it. Oh, good. Good, good. I was like,

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I don't think I said that right. Ben Zeiselhoft, who I met, what is it, about a year and a half ago or a year ago or something like that?

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I think so, yeah. Yeah, so Ben is in journalism. He's an up -and -coming reporter. I met him when he was at the

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Daily Wire, and he was reporting on an event that I got myself involved with.

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We threw a pastor story hour here in New England, where instead of telling people that there's innumerable genders and having fat men in dresses shake their, you know, what's for children and adults to watch, we just told them the

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Bible and told them that God made male and female to the glory of God, and he made it good. And people went crazy, and they canceled our event.

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We had to attorney up, and then it became a national story. And Ben was part of the reason that it actually got out and more people heard about it.

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So Ben, thank you for being here. This is our second time doing this, the first time our tech failed or my tech failed, but brother, thank you for being here.

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Absolutely, great to be here. Yeah, well, tell us a little bit about you. Absolutely. So as you mentioned, I'm Ben Zeisloft.

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I'm the editor of the Republic Sentinel. We are a conservative news and commentary outlet owned and operated by Christians.

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Before this, I was at the Daily Wire, as you mentioned. Let's see, so I was an intern for a summer when

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I was in college, then it was part -time for a year, and then it was full -time for a year before I moved over to the

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Sentinel. And before that, I was at Campus Reform, which is a news outlet more for college students, up and coming conservative journalists who are still in college to learn how to write and report on the news.

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And of course, the liberal college campuses have no shortage of stories to talk about, as well as The Spectator.

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So I have about four years total of experience, part -time and full -time in the conservative journalism world.

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That's awesome, man. I want to get into journalism because, as we were talking about before we even came on, it is a really murky area of American life, and there's so much misinformation.

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That's where Donald Trump came along and called it fake news, and it stuck. It stuck for a reason, because we all understand, man, there's a lot of stuff that's just not true that's coming out of the media industrial complex or whatever you want to call it.

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So you're in that world, which is a blessing that we have Christians there. So I want to talk about that.

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But let's come at it from post -millennialism. Let's talk about your background as a

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Christian. How did you come to Christ, and how did you end up coming to this view of post -millennialism?

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What is it? What was influential for you? Absolutely, yeah. So I grew up in a Christian home, evangelical home.

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My parents are both believers. We went to church every single Sunday. Went to one of the largest churches in the area. So that came with benefits and drawbacks, one of them being that sometimes the fullness of the gospel wasn't preached in terms of repentance, the wrath of God, that sort of thing.

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So I didn't really hear the full gospel in that sort of way and really be encouraged to dig into the word until I went to college.

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So I think it was when I was around 19, because I was in a Bible study that was led by older students, and I was really impressed with their knowledge of the scriptures.

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We would ask a question, and one guy in particular, but pretty much all the older students in that college fellowship will be, well, let's go to first -peaker two and answer that question.

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I'm like, I had no concept of somebody about my age being able to have that kind of recall and knowledge of scripture.

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So that got me into the Bible. I read James for the first time. I read John next. And I think around John 6, when

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Jesus is saying that, whoever believes in me, I'll never cast out. If there was any one moment that was regenerated,

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I would say it was probably that. It's possible that it happened earlier in my life, but that's when I remember holding on to the promise of the gospel and believing that promise that Jesus will raise me on the last day, not because of anything

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I've done, but because I believe in him and what he has done. So that's how I became a Christian. And of course, that next year after I was converted, as has come with many,

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I grew like a weed. I was devouring any theological content that would throw at me. So I was going to the church that we're still members at actually, when

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I was first saved. So that happens to be a reformed church. So got exposure to the Puritans, to also modern day preachers like Jeff Durbin, R .C.

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Sproul. So just devouring their content. And pretty quickly, the church

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I grew up in happened to be dispensational. I didn't really know what that meant, but I had read the Left Behind series when

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I was in middle school. And there were some of those cultural factors and assumptions that just come from a dispensational background.

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But in just reading the scripture, reading First Thessalonians, reading Daniel, I sort of started to see how the whole secret rapture mindset doesn't quite match up.

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So that was a pretty easy transition in terms of a theological paradigm shift away from the default dispensationalism we see.

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But then I also saw in all scripture, this intense optimism of Christ making the world and then of remaking the world through the gospel.

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So that provides for, at the beginning of the Bible is where mankind in right relationship with his creator, told to take dominion of all the earth.

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And then in the church age, where we currently are, we're moving back toward that original design, it's even better, where the whole earth will be dominionized to the

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Lord of Christ, and the people of the earth will worship him and adore him as they were meant to do.

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In some ways, you have probably an advantage that you didn't grow up as deeply in the dispensational movement.

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Being in a megachurch or a big church like that, they tend to not say anything with a lot of depth because you're a mile wide, inch deep.

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So in some ways, that's good. And it gave you, it seems at least to me, it gave you the clarity to be able to read the

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Bible for what it's actually saying and to not have the malaise of depression superimposed upon the text, but for you to see us, pretty optimistic story.

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Jesus wins. The whole world can be filled with the knowledge of God as the water covers the seas. You didn't miss those passages like so many have.

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So that's incredible. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. Yeah. I think getting into the word, the

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Bible itself is the best apologetic for what we're talking about, where this grounding for being optimistic about what

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Christ is doing, where he's going to actually win and he's not going to come in at the last second and defeat all his enemies.

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And of course there is a final day of judgment. He will return physically at the second coming, but there is an intense amount of victory that I believe the church will see until that day happens.

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I think that's obvious that has happened for the past 2000 years. If you look at all the nations that have been the knee to Christ, and that's only continuing, it's really only in the

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West where that's not happening at the moment in history. I pray that reverses itself, but every other place in the world is seeing an exploding church and millions of people coming to Christ.

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I think it's also easy if you look throughout history, the optimism or pessimism of eschatology tends to fluctuate with what's going on in the world at the time and that time and place.

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So I think because we're on it, unfortunately, because of our unfaithfulness, our apostasy, a decline of Christianity in the

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Western world doesn't mean that blends itself to a pessimistic eschatology.

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It's almost like some people are waiting for more things to get worse and using that to say, see, Jesus is going to come back next

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Thursday. But I don't think that's the case throughout time and history. – Right. Yeah, we're always trying to immunitize the eschaton when what

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I see in scripture is a slow and steady build where we're, even in like revivalistic

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American Christianity, where we're like, we need revival to happen right away and we need

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God to just downpour. And I remember when I was in seminary, a pastor and theologian who was teaching my class, he told me, he said, you don't want a torrential downpour, because torrential downpours only happen when it's been dry for so long that it comes sort of as a last -ditch effort and washes away the topsoil.

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And it's not good for the land. It's not good for the vegetation. What you want is a slow and steady rhythmic rain.

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And I was just like, oh, that's so good. Like, that's what we want. We want to see Christian culture built slowly because you think about trees.

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You go to Home Depot and you look at these bent, what is it, candy cane -shaped trees that grow in five years.

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They shoot up really quickly and they're all sorts of soft and cracked. And no, you want an oak tree that grows over a hundred years that's straight and true and strong.

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We want to see the kingdom built that way, not in a microwave way. Certainly, yeah. I'm looking at my patio right now and some of our plants are rather wilted because we get a huge downpour of rain last night.

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It lasts for like 30 minutes, but then everything's just wet, right? And it's been dry for a few weeks too.

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So it's perfect that you mentioned that as an analogy. But yeah, you want that steady growth. And I see that in my own

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Christian life where following Christ for the past five years or so intentionally, I look at a certain day and it may be a better day or a worse day, but I look at the course of the past five years and I see that, yes,

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God has done a work on my life and he's continuing to do that. And it's not always obvious. It's not always evident in the moments.

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Sometimes there's mountaintop experiences and that's great. Sometimes it's like, I read the Bible this morning and I prayed and it wasn't that incredible per se.

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I learned something, but it wasn't explosive. But that's really okay. It's really, I think, the consistency over time.

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Every older believer I've ever talked to is just read your Bible and pray and God will do a work in you. Amen. That's good.

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And I love that you've been captivated by that because that is exactly what post -millennialism teaches.

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And it's not this pie in the sky that only theologians need to sit around in ivory tower rooms and opine about the end times.

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It's a really practical doctrine and actually it helps us live out everything that we do in our vocation and everything.

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So how'd you get into journalism? Let's now take this and intersect it with post -millennialism.

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Absolutely. Yeah. So when I was in college, I think it was my sophomore year, was the COVID year. So most of my college experience was unfortunately interrupted by COVID.

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But so I'd worked for a startup in Pittsburgh, my hometown, the year before between freshman and sophomore year.

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So I was applying to venture capital and more startup internships in between my sophomore and junior year that summer.

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And all those doors shut because of the lockdowns and the economy was terrible. And really the only door that was open for an internship that year was with The Spectator.

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So a summer fellowship in DC. So I ended up moving to DC for the summer and lived through the summer of 2020 in DC of all places.

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It was absolutely crazy. I witnessed I was on a run or something and I saw them trying to establish an autonomous zone outside the

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White House and that got shut down real quick. It was crazy. So that was my first exposure to the journalism world.

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And I really liked it. I've always liked to write. I've always enjoyed keeping up with politics and the news.

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But at that point, moving forward, I decided to stay in that realm. And I studied business and economics for most of the time.

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I still do write about topics related to business economics and really have actually carved out a niche with corporate wokeness and DEI and that sort of stuff too over the past few years.

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So that's sort of how I got involved in this realm. That's awesome. So obviously you brought your

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Christianity with you. These things aren't happening independent of one another. There's an overlap where now

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I'm not just a journalist, I'm a Christian journalist. I'm a journalist who believes that my work matters, that anything that I do for Christ is not in vain.

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And whatever I do, whether it's eat or drink, it's for the glory of Christ. So therefore, everything I do as a journalist is for Jesus.

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Tell me a little bit about that. How have you thought through bringing your post -mill optimism and your

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Christian faith into your journalism? Is that something that was natural or did you have to think about it or how'd that come about?

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Yeah, yeah. So I think the first realization I had was that nobody's neutral. So that was, if you're around reform theology and oppositional apologetics for long enough, you'll realize that that's definitely the case.

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Or even what we call neutral, like ABC or AP or Axios, any kind of news outlet that feigns neutrality, they're never actually neutral.

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They're following the democratic agenda. It's been funny to watch over the past few weeks them all turn on Biden in unison, but that's because it's intentional.

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There's movements within the democratic party to actually do that. So it doesn't matter if you're a conservative

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Republican or a progressive Democrat or something in between, you're going to bring your worldview and your biases into your reporting.

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And I think actually, historically, American journalists have recognized that. So that's why you have a lot of newspapers across the country that are still called like the

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Missouri Democrat or like the Arizona Republic, because there actually were news outlets that said we were the Republican news outlet in this state.

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And if you're a Republican, you should subscribe to us and read us. And then maybe you subscribe to that and like one or two others, and then maybe one democratic outlet to just to get the other perspective.

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And that's, of course, before Twitter and social media. But what really happened was post -war on, there's this,

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I guess, consensus mindset of we're all on the same team. We need to pursue this reporting journalism that's completely free of bias.

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And I just don't think that exists. So I think you're seeing that bifurcation happen again, where you have conservative outlets and you have democratic outlets and they offer different perspectives.

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And sometimes it's like you're in different countries reading the two. But what we try to do at The Sentinel is to tell the truth.

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So we're not going to lie to our audience and just promote false narratives or whatever, because there are some of those on the right.

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But we're going to tell the truth and we're going to present topics of interest to our audience that is largely conservative.

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And we're going to do it as Christians, meaning not necessarily that every single article has a Bible verse in it or is merely to preach the gospel, but it's

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Christian in the sense that it's excellent, that it's true, that the grammar is perfect as best as we can handle it.

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There's always errors that slip through. But it's a good reading experience.

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It sounds good in your inner ear as you read it to yourself. Great pictures on the screen, ads that aren't degenerate.

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We block a lot of ads that... So no drugs getting sold, no sexually explicit stuff.

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Hopefully, you'll never see that on our site because we do filter those ads out. So it's not necessarily just...

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A Christian news outlet doesn't necessarily just preach the gospel every single turn and not every single article has to be about the

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Bible, but it does have to be excellent. I think of the quote from Martin Luther where he talks about the Christian shoemaker, where the

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Christian shoemaker doesn't etch little crosses onto all of his shoes. The Christian shoemaker is the best shoemaker in the town where his craft is the most excellent, his shoes last the longest.

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You don't need to put on this veneer of Christianity to make things Christian. It's Christian because it's imitating God who is a creator, who is a hard worker, who delights in excellence.

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So that's what we try to do at The Sentinel. Yeah. A couple of things that you mentioned there. I just heard...

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I was watching the RNC coverage two days ago. I was watching it last night too. But two days ago, one of the

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Fox anchors said that the Milwaukee papers, there were two of them. One was for the

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Whig party and one was for the Democrats. And they did end up merging together. And because they couldn't maintain neutrality, they ended up going left.

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He didn't say that. That was the implication I got out of it was that they tried neutrality and it basically just led to the death of the conservative part of that paper.

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So certainly it's fascinating that you mentioned that because I just saw that and I thought that was an interesting feature there in Milwaukee.

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Another thing that you mentioned there is how do we do things excellently? I remember as a kid watching the

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Super Bowl ads, like the Budweiser frogs. I don't know if you've... That might be further back than you remember.

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But there was these frogs and they would say Budweiser. And then Christians came along and they're like, well, that's inappropriate.

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So they made t -shirts with frogs on lily pads that said God's wiser. And it was this really cheesy sort of...

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It's like what vegans do when they boil carrots and call them hot dogs. It's not good.

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And you shouldn't do that. It's like you violated something sacred. That's not what you're talking about where we're just mimicking and parroting what the world is doing.

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You're talking about true, us leading culture and us establishing what excellence is.

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Absolutely. It's so funny that you mentioned, so on both points, both the drift to the left and the mimicking of what's already out there in the world.

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I think it was yesterday or two days ago, Russell Moore unveiled the new cover of Christianity today. They have a new cover design and somebody realized that it looks exactly like the

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New Yorker and Harpers Ferry and all these elite liberal news outlets. So they're trying to appeal to an audience that has already...

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Something that's already been done, literally just parroting another outlet's design and appealing to a leftward audience because they themselves are drifting left under this false pretense of neutrality.

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So it's perfect that you mentioned that because literally we're seeing it happen in Christian institutions all the time.

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And yeah, I think about a year ago, when I first joined the Sentinel, I wrote an op -ed articulating our approach to journalism.

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I'll have to find it again. But I used the example of God's not dead, which is sort of like what you're saying, where you put this

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Christian veneer over what's supposed to be an entertaining movie, but really it's just propaganda. And of course, it's good propaganda because it's promoting the gospel and faith in Christ, but it's not doing it in a compelling way.

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So I compared that to Lord of the Rings, where it has a lot of Christian themes, or even like the Chronicles of Narnia, where it's just packed with Christian themes and meaning, but you really legitimately enjoy reading it.

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And the rest of the culture recognizes this is objectively good art. And you don't have to just be preachy and make it into a

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TED talk or a sermon about the gospel in the process. So again, we're trying to do that too, where you can come to our site and see excellent coverage of the election, of the economy, business, immigration, healthcare, whatever the case may be.

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But it's hopefully better than all the conservative outlets and even some of the liberal ones. That's at least what we're striving to be.

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And it's not necessarily that you're going to see embedded verse references and proof texts in every single paragraph, but it's just excellent reporting that sees the world through the light of God's truth and tries to reflect that accurately.

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– Right. And some might hear what you and I are talking about here and say, why wouldn't you have a

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Bible verse in it? Are you ashamed of the words of Christ? Jesus said, you're ashamed of my words and then

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I'll be ashamed of you. That's not what you're saying. But I want to be very clear to point this out. What most

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Christians have been infected with is actually an old heresy called Gnosticism, where we view everything has to be under the realm of sacred ipso facto or else it can't be

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Christian. You're painting a different vision, which is a more biblical, robust Genesis 1 kind of vision.

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Help me unpack that, brother. – That's a great way to put it. Yeah. So it's the cultural mandate where we're supposed to take dominion of all the earth, fill it and subdue it to the glory of God and fill the earth with his worship.

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And then after the fall, the repurposed cultural mandate is the great commission. But it's not just preaching the gospel.

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It's not just evangelism. It's not just baptism. But Jesus says, teaching all that I've commanded you. So it's

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Christian discipleship. It's doing all things to the glory of God. Like you said earlier, whether we eat or drink, whatever we do, do it to the glory of God.

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So that would include something like how you cover the news of the day. And it doesn't necessarily have to be pure Bible verses.

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The assumption is that it's under the Lordship of Christ. Even if you don't see that kind of thing in the paper, it's all of Christ for all of life.

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So that's what we're striving for. Yes. – So what you're really saying is that when you read your

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Bible in the morning before you go to work, and maybe work for you is working from home, I would say probably writing and all that, but that's just as much a sacred act of worship to the

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Lord as you researching a piece and doing it with excellence and making sure that you've reported accurately and that your grammar and your introductory adverbial clauses are perfectly well -written.

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That's just as much an act of worship as your time in the Word in the morning. –

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Absolutely. Yes. So when I close my Bible in the morning and get it from my desk and move it over to the other desk to work,

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I don't stop being a Christian. I'm still a Christian. I think actually the more prevalent mindset in our days is what you already described, where once you do close that Bible, you stop being a

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Christian. Then you just go about your day. And then on Wednesday night Bible study or Sunday morning church or your next quiet time in the morning, then you resume your

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Christianity. Then you hit pause again when it's over. Whereas I think what the historic Christian view, the biblical

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Christian vision of our life is, is this all of Christ for all of life, where yes, worship is the central component of it, whether it's individual, family, corporate, but then like a spokes of a wheel, it branches out into all of the areas of life.

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So how you manage your family finances, how you work and provide for your family, physical activity, working out, all that stuff falls under the

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Lordship of Christ and it's in obedience to his word and it's in conformity to his word. But it doesn't necessarily have to have, it is almost like a truncated view to say that it has to have the

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Bible in it somewhere in order for it to be Christian, but it can be informed by the Bible and still be Christian. Chris Exactly.

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Yeah. You brought up Lord of the Rings, which is, it's my favorite story, just well -written, impeccably put together.

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And I tell people, J .R .R. Tolkien didn't just write a book, he invented a world and he invented languages and he invented a history of the people.

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So when you come to Lord of the Rings and you're impressed by the story, that's the tip of the iceberg.

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Those groups of people, the elves and the dwarves and the orcs, all of them have a backstory that goes thousands of years into the past.

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He created a world with a mythology around it so that he could write stories into it.

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And I think about just what kind of a person you have to be to do that.

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You have to be dedicated and you have to be just exacting.

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You have to be committed. You have to have a long -term view. For probably 30 years of that man's life, he didn't accomplish a whole lot that we would consider of merit.

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It was all scribblings on notepads that was preparing him for the work that he would do in writing that series.

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So I'm a huge Lord of the Rings nerd. I love that. But that's what you're saying, is bringing all of that Christian character that you have, the fruits of the

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Spirit, the gifts that God has given you, bring it in to bear in your vocation as an act of service to the

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Lord. Absolutely, yeah. We have to remember that Jesus was a carpenter for 30 years before he started his earthly ministry.

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He was only in formal, full -time ministry for about three years, three and a half years before his crucifixion.

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But he spent most of the time in his adolescence, his early adulthood, working under his father and learning the trade of being a carpenter.

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And so he glorified all elements of human life from the womb to natural death.

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But included in that is work. And we can look at that as men and really as all human beings and say, yes, work is good.

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Our Savior, when he took on human flesh, he thought it was worthwhile to make really great tables and pillars and things of that nature.

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And even looking at it from the standpoint of creation, where like we were saying, God worked, God continues to work in upholding the universe by the word of his power.

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So being imitators of God as beloved children involves working. That's why work is not a product of the fall, work preceded the fall, and it's going to follow even into the eternal state.

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It would be a pretty pointless existence if you do zero work at all times. You're just completely unproductive, hanging out at the beach, going fishing all the time.

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But if you're working and there's challenges to overcome and things to accomplish, what is human life without that sort of stuff?

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We're made to do that because we're made in the image of our God. Right. And it's so important what you're saying, because there's two lies that I think are propagating right now.

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And it's infected many in the church. The one lie is that what John Piper hit on in his seashell sermon.

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You can look that up. It's fantastic. That my life, everything I'm doing is about saving for a moment where I do nothing and I just enjoy gluttonously the things that I've collected for myself, which is false and that's wrong.

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The other aspect is that I live for the stuff, that I live for the work, that I'm not trying to escape it one day through retirement.

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I'm trying to maximize it and enjoy it for its own sake. And that's equally wrong.

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So help me understand or us understand, not the seashells and not the workaholism for the sake of work, but what is the right way to view our work as a

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Christian? Right. So yeah, that's a great point. So I hope to save money and to be able to have some form of retirement where I can maybe transition into semi -retirement and work part -time, but also be more involved with my grandkids and church and things of that nature.

28:13

So it's not even just that the concept of retirement is bad. It's just that how we think of retirement is terrible, where like you're saying, it's gluttonous, it's consumption for its own sake.

28:21

You don't leave anything to your children. You go on 14 cruises and 12 vacations to Europe and consume it all.

28:28

But yeah, as a younger man being in the workforce, the latter is also a temptation where just being really obsessed with work and not being able to compartmentalize it, where for me, if it's a really eventful day in the news or something,

28:41

I sometimes have a hard time putting it away and focusing on being with my wife and having dinner with her and that sort of thing.

28:47

But yeah, I think the way that we view work is a component to serve other things. So obviously providing for family, offering a tithe to church, that sort of thing, being generous to others, as well as the work itself being important.

29:02

And like you said, the service to the Lord. But work is not all we do. Work is a core function of our lives.

29:09

But there is a time to put that away. There is a time to go to sleep, to go to worship on the Lord's day, to rest, to be with family.

29:16

So it's one crucial point. So much of the Christian life is this, where things have their place and putting the right emphasis and level of energy and priority into it is what we have to learn and discern how to do.

29:27

Yeah, as Christians, in some ways, I felt like that being a

29:33

Christian has felt like being mediocre at everything. That's the sort of general just,

29:40

I don't know, ethos that I felt in the church. Nobody says it out loud, but it's kind of like that. If I go to work,

29:46

I don't need to strive to do a really good job at work because that could make me prideful and pride's a sin.

29:53

And I don't need to have a nice vehicle to ride in that's safe because, well,

29:58

I'm an aesthetic and I should basically ride around in my terrible car for the sake of virtue.

30:05

And I don't want to leave anything to my children because money is the root of all evil. And we kind of have this sort of mediocrity that pervades in so many areas.

30:15

And what you're saying, and I think it's true, is that we actually need to be excellent in every area of life.

30:20

We need to be excellent in the way that we sleep and care for our bodies. We need to be excellent in the way that we eat.

30:26

We need to be excellent in the way that we take care of our physical temple that God has given us. We need to be excellent in the way we work our bodies so that we're outworking the pagans and producing greater product for the good of God and the glory of his name.

30:41

Everything we do, we don't have off time as Christians. We're to be on, as it were, all the time.

30:49

Absolutely, yeah. So when I was first saved, I was sitting in finance class, daydreaming about quitting and going to seminary.

30:55

There was a season in my life where I thought I needed to do that because being a pastor is really the best thing you can do with your life. And you're not a full

31:02

Christian unless you're in full -time ministry, an expert in theology. And I think I realized several months later, a year later, that that's not the case.

31:10

And then now that I'm in the workforce and I see the kind of thing that a Christian businessman, for example, can do with his money that he earns by doing hard work and doing excellent work and satisfying his customers, it just has all these amazing ripple effects.

31:23

So us being involved in the actual life of our economy, our nation, and the rest, it has direct effects on the

31:30

Kingdom of God. And like you said, it itself is worship of God.

31:36

So I think for a long time, we've thought, I'm an engineer, I'm an electrician, or I'm working at this factory so that I can put 10 % in the offering plate and fund foreign missions or something.

31:48

And that has a really negative effect of hollowing out your soul and thinking that you're just this second -class citizen in the

31:54

Kingdom of God, where I think God says, no, if you work to, I believe it's Colossians 4, if you work with excellence for your employer, whether they're

32:03

Christian or not, you do it as to the Lord. So maintaining and reclaiming that mindset is really important for us.

32:10

And I think we're seeing a lot of young guys starting to do that. Yeah, I've been really encouraged with,

32:15

I don't know what the most recent generation that's come of age is, is it Gen Z, the 18 -year -olds and 20 -year -olds and stuff.

32:23

But I've been really encouraged with how they're moving more conservative and they're moving more in line with some of these things.

32:30

Because the thing I want to tell people is I'm a pastor, but I'm not a first -class citizen in a world of second -class and third -class.

32:41

I play a role in the building of Jesus' Kingdom, where I'm helping to disciple and teach and preach and administer the sacraments and those things.

32:52

And those are critically important, but it's also critically important in how you are a mom or how you are an electrician or a plumber or a banker or a candlestick maker or whatever else.

33:06

All of these things are aspects of building the Kingdom. I think about Europe and the great cathedrals that they built.

33:15

They built those because of thousands of different people who were striving to be excellent in their field, who now were taking dominion of regions, who had wealth and resources to build these things.

33:28

Now these are great edifices of Christendom that are rotting because we've pulled out of the world and we've become mediocre in so many things.

33:37

Now the church is having to meet in 10 buildings and elementary schools because we're broke.

33:43

We're broke because we've lost the vision for how to extend the Kingdom. Absolutely. There's stories of men who spent their entire lives working on a single colonnade or hallway in one of these cathedrals.

33:56

They would basically bring their deathbed into that room and they would die there. That's how much they loved their work and saw their work as essential to their lives.

34:04

But we've lost that mindset. I think a perfect example is the Republican Party. As we're speaking, the Republican Party just gutted their entire platform of every pro -life, pro -marriage priority.

34:14

And it's because Christians are disengaged in politics. There's all these anecdotes I've been hearing about different Christian guys who want to come in and recruit in their churches to do a ballot initiative or something.

34:26

And the pastors say, no, nobody's interested in doing it. It's hard to get people involved. And we're seeing the fruit of it now where complete

34:33

Christian disengagement from the life of our nation, the life of our economy leads to the pagans being in charge of those things.

34:39

And then everything just gets terrible. Where if you look at Generation 2 in the past, even the moral majority, they by no means were perfect, but they at least got the

34:48

Republican Party to represent their interests on the life issue, on marriage. And now that's completely been jettisoned and we're just Democrats lite.

34:56

We have even pagan prayers at the RNC convention. And it's just because Christians don't really mind.

35:02

They're going to vote exactly the way they were going to, no matter what, anyway. And it's a whole separate conversation.

35:09

It's a good one. Yeah. We can recognize that it's the fault of Christians as to where our country is, especially given the fact that this country was

35:17

Christian. And then the past few generations have completely just rejected any meaningful version of Christianity.

35:22

Right. Right. It's such a good point, brother. And it is parallel to what we're talking about. I told the church this past Sunday in somewhat of a little rant that I went on, but I said that the reason that politics are so un -Christian is because we don't have any

35:40

Christians who are going there and building there and working there. And why is that? Why have we believed that the

35:46

God who owns every square inch of the cosmos, why do we believe that He wouldn't want us to go and make those places

35:53

Christian? When He told us to go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations, I think He means all sectors as well.

36:01

This is why it's parallel. I'm so thankful for guys like you because we could look at the media, industrial complex, and say, it's too corrupt.

36:11

The Washington Post, the New York Times, they've got a monopoly, CNN, MSNBC, even

36:17

Fox, which is just compromised in so many ways. But we look at all of these different things.

36:23

How can we have a voice? What could we possibly do? We just need to focus on Jesus, focus on our private

36:29

Christian faith, and then we just lose the entire institution of the media.

36:35

Wes, what you're doing is so much better. You're running towards it and trying to reclaim it for Christ.

36:41

Yeah, absolutely. So Christians throughout history have pioneered with schools and hospitals and building institutions that we just take for granted now, but were really innovations that Christians brought to mankind.

36:53

I'm thinking of an anecdote of a guy who goes to our church was telling me that they had a drag queen show at Penn Presbyterian Hospital a few weeks ago.

37:03

Listen to the name, Penn Presbyterian. Every hospital in this city has

37:09

Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist or Lutheran or even Catholic, something like that in the name because they were started by those sorts of Christians and they were reflecting

37:18

Christian values. And if you see where medicine is heading, where it's just facilitating just the most evil, atrocious practices, whether it's abortion, transgenderism, even going into transhumanism, how do we just artificially preserve life?

37:32

Euthanasia, assisted suicide, it's just getting terrible because there's nobody who's being salt and light. They're just groping in the darkness, doing what is right in their own eyes, and nobody is there to correct them because Christians are disengaged.

37:44

So it's true in every domain of life, whether you're a journalist, whether you're in medicine, whether you're in education, whether you're in the business world, it's critically important to have

37:52

Christians being salt and light and being the leaven that works its way through the whole lump. And it's not merely just, this is certainly part of it, it's not merely evangelizing your coworkers.

38:03

That's the other thing I think you hear from a lot of big Eva types where it's important that you work out there because you need to do evangelism.

38:10

And of course you should do that and you should, by word and by deed, you should reflect Christian values and the beauty of what it looks like to follow the

38:17

Lord in your work, but also the work itself does matter. And being a positive influence in those domains does matter, and doing it unto the glory of God, instead of building the

38:26

Tower of Babel, building the Kingdom of Christ. It's both, right? It's sacred and secular, or it's my spiritual and my physical.

38:35

I mean, it's both because God is a God of both. If you're a chef, for instance, and you make an incredible meal, you're going to get opportunities to say why you did it.

38:48

Did I do it for the glory of itself? Did I do it just because I want to make a big name for myself or do

38:54

I want to make a name for Christ? So I made that meal for my love of Jesus. Or if you're a basketball player, we see that if you're excellent, you'll get a platform and you'll get an opportunity to share why you've done something.

39:07

That's what the Bible says, let them see your good works so that they may glorify your Father who is in heaven, because you're going to get a platform to be able to tell them the hope that you have in Christ, which is what 1

39:16

Peter says. So we do everything. We work and we give everything we've got, not for the good of the job and not for the good of our name.

39:26

We do all of this because we realize that we're building His name, His Kingdom, and we'll get a platform to be able to share it.

39:33

Absolutely. I'm thinking of a proverb that says, do you see a man who is skilled at his work, he will stand before kings.

39:39

And it's objectively true that if you're great at what you do, you'll rise through the ranks, not even necessarily for your own glory, but just because objectively people can recognize this is a man who is good at what he does and he needs to be recognized and elevated.

39:54

And like you're saying, that's where the opportunities come for, why are you such a good carpenter? Whatever the case may be.

40:00

And you can say, well, it's because I follow a God who is excellent at all that He does. I strive to emulate

40:05

Him because I've been adopted into His family. And He is my Father, and I do work like my Father does.

40:12

So yeah, that's a mindset that we have to reclaim. Amen. All right. So I'm thinking of your work right now.

40:18

So you're doing journalism and you're doing it to the glory of Christ. Give me just a highlight reel of how do you do that in a way that will set you apart from others, that will actually make you the world's best journalist because you have

40:32

Jesus? Right. So we discussed the striving for excellence part, but now that you say that,

40:38

I'm thinking also of having a characteristic Christian boldness and trying to cultivate that and covering stories that not even the conservatives want to cover.

40:47

So especially with the corruption, the pro -life movement that's been, in addition to business economics, that's a primary emphasis of mine, is trying to show the

40:57

American people that in many states, the groups that are stopping abortion from being abolished are actually the pro -life groups and they're not representing your interests well.

41:05

And that is maybe a lot of enemies in the conservative journalism world, where a lot of people do not like me because I try to say,

41:11

Hey, you wrote this article that just accepted whether Susan B. Anthony List told you without question, and it's wrong.

41:17

And they see you as hateful or something like that. But I just, I'm interested in the truth.

41:23

And the truth is that it's the pro -choice movement that's keeping abortion legal, but it's also the pro -life movement in many cases.

41:29

And it's not every pro -life group, but I'm trying to expose some of that too, with my reporting, even writing a book about it, detailing some of the instances of that actually happening in many states that should be able to abolish abortion, like Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana is a great example.

41:45

So bringing those sorts of things to bear on the public, and that's something that I wouldn't be doing unless it were a

41:51

Christian and I were really committed to the abolition of abortion. So if you don't fear

41:56

God and you're just good to keep your job at a big conservative media outlet, then what's going to actually lead you to cover that sort of story that's going to make you really unpopular, that's going to get you nasty phone calls from your editor.

42:09

But I've been blessed with the opportunity and a free platform to do that at the Sentinel. And so I'm taking advantage of it to the glory of God.

42:17

That's such a good point. The courage that it takes to actually be a truth teller. We look at the 10 commandments, have no other gods before me.

42:24

So fear is a God that you are striving not to have before the living God, not trying to hang on to your status and keep your friends or whatever.

42:34

You're just telling the truth, which is incredible. So I very much appreciate that.

42:40

So along with excellence, there's courage, there's telling the truth, there's exposing darkness.

42:46

As a Christian, you're trying to do that. I think many people might actually be surprised. As we speak,

42:52

I'm trying to get Russell Hunter, who's a great abolitionist, trying to get him on the show to talk about this.

42:58

But many will be surprised that the pro -life movement is getting in the way of abolishing abortion.

43:06

Many will be surprised at that. Yeah, certainly. And people will look no further than what happened earlier this week, last week with the

43:14

Republican platform, where the Republicans gutted pretty much every single pro -life priority. And then you had a lot of the big pro -life groups come out and give statements saying, thank you for doing this.

43:24

This is so pro -life. And just ignoring the fact that all their interests were just gutted. So really unfortunate what's happened is a lot of those groups have been absorbed into the

43:33

Republican swamp establishment. So they don't represent your interests to the Republicans, they represent the

43:38

Republican interest to you. It convinces you that you need to vote no matter what for Republicans, even if they completely betray your priorities.

43:45

So I'm trying to expose some of that with my work, absolutely. Yeah. Even the idea of equal weights and measure, which has been really important for me thinking through this.

43:55

Most of the pro -life establishment can't find a single reason why any woman would ever be held accountable for a decision that she makes to murder her child.

44:04

They'll call it murder, but they'll say that she is somehow fundamentally different under the law, that it can't ever be the fact that she did this for wicked reasons.

44:15

And we know for a fact that that is true, that there are, I get that there's some women who are ignorant, but there are some women, most women, maybe even who know what they're doing and they still do it anyway.

44:27

Absolutely. Yeah. And that was the main hang up in Louisiana where they had a bill to abolish abortion in advance to the house floor for a vote, the

44:35

Louisiana state house. And it was every single, well, not every single, but I think it was over 70 pro -life organizations came out with a letter saying this would criminalize women.

44:44

So therefore you should vote this down. And the Republican lawmakers knew not to get on their bad side. So they just followed orders is basically how that went down.

44:51

It was disgusting. It was supposed to pass before the pro -life groups actually came out and did that. Actually Speaker Mike Johnson was a huge component in that.

44:58

So we actually got to break some news about him and his text messages to pastors and lawmakers in that state telling them to step down from that bill.

45:07

Oh, it's not the time for it yet. But that was actually after we knew that Roe was going to be overturned.

45:13

So what is the excuse at this point? In theory, the states can make their own abortion laws. Now they probably shouldn't have been submitting to Roe in the first place.

45:21

They should have been righteously defying that statute, but now they can, there's zero excuse for not just ending abortion, saying abortion is now illegal.

45:29

We're protecting babies the same way we protect born people. And if you kill a baby, you're going to face penalties. And a lot of that is because of the whole second victim narrative where I've ministered at abortion mills here in Philadelphia and the women know what they're doing.

45:43

They may have excuses. They may say, oh, it's just a clump of cells. But if you say, you know, that's not what you're actually here to do.

45:50

They'll be like, yeah. They'll admit and they'll say, they'll use the word baby. They'll call it murder. And they'll basically admit, yeah, this is because I don't want the responsibility of having a child right now.

46:03

So I think it's hard for Christians who actually engage on these issues to understand why something like that is happening, which is why it's so important for,

46:10

I think, journalists. But what I'm striving to do in exposing that and making sure that people know that there's that disconnect.

46:16

Yeah. And also, too, like the law restrains evil. It's what it's supposed to do. So if there was equal punishment under the law,

46:24

I think it would go a long way to actually abolishing abortion because people would have to either, they would either have to reckon with what's going on that, gosh, that is what

46:35

I'm doing. Or they would be persuaded against the consequences of, hey, if you murder someone, then there's capital punishment for that.

46:44

So you exposing that and bringing that to light is a part of actually raising awareness, which is what journalism was supposed to do all along.

46:53

Absolutely. Yeah. And there's actually interesting historical accounts of there was a huge under, I guess, underground abortion industry in the city of New York at the turn of the century.

47:03

It was actually Christian journalists who did expose that and they infiltrated the abortion mills and they saw how it was basically this luxury experience where you got to go murder your baby and it was this swanky room.

47:14

And that triggered this effect of cracking down on making sure that babies are protected across the country because it was illegal, but people were flouting that law and doing it and basically authorities turning a blind eye.

47:27

But by Christians who happened to be also journalists exposing the atrocities of that happening, public sentiment was turned so that they couldn't keep doing that.

47:36

And I tell people that it's just like actual murder where I was just on the issue of the second victim narrative where it's not that murder has gone down to zero because murder happens to be illegal, but if murder were not illegal, we'd have a lot more murder where people would be way more willing to kill their enemies to have a problem with it instead of facing the prospect of a long time in prison, life in prison.

48:00

And I think it should be the death penalty. I think if we had capital punishment as the Bible describes, we would have a lot less murder than we even do.

48:07

I'm just saying, apply all those same penalties and teach the people through the law that the preborn baby is just as valuable as the born person with those righteous penalties.

48:17

Amen. As you were talking, it made me think to myself that every job, if you don't have

48:25

Christ, you will end up doing it poorly or you will end up doing it in unrighteous ways.

48:30

And I know that self -evident, but think about it. The job of the journalist is to expose things so that we can repent as a society or so that we can even expose good things that are happening so that we can celebrate that and cheer that on.

48:44

It's like we did with you a couple of years ago, right? Right, exactly. You put a spotlight on something that needed to be talked about and to the glory of God, we got the word out, right?

48:54

Look at the mainstream media who doesn't have Christ. They're spotlighting things that are evil instead of spotlighting things that are true and good and beautiful, and they're covering up things that are evil instead of exposing them.

49:08

So it's the exact opposite of actually what you're trying to do, and you're only doing that because you have

49:14

Christ. Right, right. I'm serving my father and they're serving theirs. Oh, man. Oh, yeah.

49:20

That's good. That's right. That's what it comes down to. Yeah. If you are, like Jesus says in John 8, if you are of your father, the devil, you're going to lie and you're going to murder like he's done from the beginning, and you're going to be finding yourself building

49:33

Babel instead of building the kingdom of Christ. Yeah. Let me ask you this. Let's say there's people who are listening to us talk about this and they're like,

49:43

I want to get involved in journalism. I love to write. I love grammar. I want to expose things and I want to shine a light on things that are true, good, and beautiful.

49:53

How do I get involved? Help us understand that because I think people might want to know. Certainly. Yeah. So some of the best advice

49:59

I ever received in pursuing journalism was not necessarily to study journalism, but to pursue a subject matter that will be useful to report on.

50:09

So whether it's economics, healthcare, have some kind of expertise you can bring to the table so you know what's going on in a certain domain and then develop the writing skills alongside that.

50:19

So for me, like I said, I love to write. I've been writing since I was a little kid. That was kind of my impulse was reading and writing.

50:25

And my parents encouraged that and did a great job with that. So just repetition and practice and learning the distinctive writing style of reporting news in addition to studying a certain domain that is useful and people will actually read it.

50:41

And it doesn't just have to be like these academic subjects. It can be sports. It could be art. It could be culinary, whatever the case may be.

50:48

If you're excellent in one of those domains and you know what you're talking about, then it's just the writing and then everything else falls into place.

50:54

Yeah. Once that's sort of started, then who do you reach out to? Do you reach out to organizations like Sentinel or how do you even get your foot into the door?

51:05

Yeah. So there's a lot of internships for college students who are pursuing journalism, whether it's local news.

51:11

I did one with intercollegiate studies Institute. So a large conservative nonprofit that was trying to develop conservative journalists.

51:19

So folks can certainly search out those opportunities and they're out there for sure. So Ben, obviously what you're talking about applies to everything.

51:27

It doesn't just apply to journalism. It applies to everything. You said a couple of times in the episode, all of Christ for all of life.

51:33

We're talking about a kind of excellence, a kind of courage, a kind of righteousness, a kind of commitment, a kind of work that will literally transform the world, a kind of motherhood that will inculcate brand new

51:48

Christians and will raise them up to be faithful, dynamic workers in the world.

51:54

We're talking about a healthcare system that will actually eliminate diseases instead of being focused on building big, big businesses and patting the pockets of fat cats in the boardrooms.

52:06

We're talking about entrepreneurs. We're talking about a kind of all pervasive vision that will bring the glory of Christ to this world.

52:15

That's not just on Sundays, but it's on every day. Is that right? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

52:21

Living as a Christian is the normal thing to do in a sense because God made this world, it's his world, it works according to his parameters.

52:28

So when people who are submitted to his son and obeying his law go out and do likewise in the world, everything just gets better.

52:36

The good that the beautiful is promoted and humans are blessed and society advances instead of sinking back into paganism in the dark ages.

52:47

So yeah, when you have the all of Christ or all of life mindset, and it's this robust Christianity, everything does get better and it's obeying

52:54

Christ and all he commanded. Absolutely. It's so funny. I was talking with Toby Sumter a couple months ago, and he said that his view of post -millennialism is the doctrine of the

53:04

Holy Spirit applied to culture. The doctrine of the sanctification applied to culture because we get that as you and I, as men, as we submit ourselves to the

53:15

Lordship of Christ, we're going to become better men. What we don't as Christians end up thinking is that as many men and many women and many children do that same work, won't culture get better to the degree that more and more

53:29

Christians become more sanctified? Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I've heard an interesting argument about national judgment where when a critical mass of people in a population sets themselves against God and provokes his righteous judgment, that's when you get something like national judgment.

53:46

Well, quite possible the argument works in reverse too. When people are submitted to Christ in a critical mass, people are doing that and more and more people are doing that.

53:54

That's where you see more and more blessing come out. So whether it's men, women, children, wherever the case may be, when life is oriented around the

54:01

Lordship of Christ, everything just gets better because he's blessing it actively and he loves his people. He does reward obedience.

54:09

He rewards those who seek him. There is a sense in which that's true. It's not prosperity gospel to say that's what they're toward us.

54:14

Oh, it's prosperity gospel. But it's common sense that if you live with the grain of the world that God made, things just tend to work out.

54:21

That's what the whole book of Proverbs is about. I've been applying that to every single sphere of life, whether it's relationships and sex, whether it's finances, whether it's work.

54:30

Wisdom literature in the Bible tells us that if you obey God, he does reward that.

54:35

Normatively, he does reward that and there's suffering and stuff that comes in. But even that for the believer is sanctifying and it's good for you and it causes you to let go of idols.

54:45

So we need to reclaim that idea of encouraging Christian life, not only in private, but in public and in all spheres of human existence.

54:55

Amen, brother. Amen. Well, as we wrap up, I want to encourage our listeners to take what you've learned today and apply it.

55:03

Whatever field you're in, if you're in journalism, nursing, if you're in government, if you're not and you want to be, go after those things.

55:10

Bring Christ into every sphere. Ben, it's been wonderful hearing this because I think you've invigorated something for us that we need to pay attention to.

55:19

So I'm really thankful for that, brother. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yeah. And as far as the Sentinel goes, if you don't know about the

55:28

Sentinel, go to their website, add them to your homepage or to your favorites or whatever. Start reading news articles from that.

55:34

You will see a difference in the way they report the news as opposed to other organizations. Absolutely.

55:41

Thank you so much. Yeah. God bless you, Ben. And hopefully we will catch up with you another time, brother. Sounds good.

55:47

Thank you. All right. Bye -bye. Thank you so much for watching another episode of the podcast.

55:52

We had some technical difficulties in this show. My technology was not working. So thank you to Ben for being patient.

56:00

Thank you for watching. Thank you to the Lord that we got this good content out there for you to watch and for you to observe.

56:07

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56:15

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56:21

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56:30

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