Three Reformed Evangelical Ministries on Christian Political Involvement

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host, John Harris. It is a beautiful day where I am, and I hope you are enjoying a beautiful day where you are.

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It's basically spring where I am, and for New York, this is really rare, because usually

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April is when we get these 60, 65 degree days, and we're getting into March. It seems like it's going to be warm in the 50s, 60s for the next 10 days, and it's just a dot.

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Watch, we're going to get a blizzard, but we got flowers coming up, it's great. I was planning on doing other podcasts this week, and I didn't get a chance to, partially because you don't realize necessarily until it happens how much work it is when your car gets hit, and not just my wife's car, but my truck as well, and dealing with repairs, replacing vehicles.

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We borrowed a vehicle from someone who lives an hour and a half away, and getting that, and returning it, and just all the things that go with this, it's just a lot.

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This week, it's overtaken me to some extent, but I think we're in the homestretch, thankfully, and I just appreciate everyone's support and prayers.

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There were two podcasts that were released this week that I was a part of, it just wasn't on this channel or this feed, if you're listening.

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I would just encourage you, go to my social media profiles, whether that's on Gab, or Facebook, or X, or I don't know,

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I got a few others as well. If you're following me on social media, then I did post on Monday an interview

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I did on another podcast, which it was interesting, it was on Courage, and I shared things that I've never thought to share, really, publicly.

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It's good, when you have a good interviewer, they can pull things out of you that you wouldn't normally share. You can check that out.

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Then on Tuesday, I did release TrueScript Tuesday, and you should all be subscribed to TrueScript Tuesday, whether that is on iTunes, you can go to TrueScript Live, or whether that is on YouTube, just type in TrueScript Tuesday, it'll come up.

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I know, I sometimes do the TrueScript Tuesdays, other times, other people do, I know my brother's done it before, and good things happening, by the way, with TrueScript.

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I can't go into all the details now, but you can find out more on TrueScript Tuesday. All that to say, it's late in the week, but I do have a few podcasts,

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I'm going to try to do another one, if I can, tomorrow as well, and I'll maybe release that next week. There's just been a lot going on, not just in my personal life, but out there, there are things to talk about.

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Of course, today, we're going to talk about something that, you're no stranger to it, let's say, if you listen to this podcast, because I've talked about Christians and the church, and we should keep those separate,

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Christians' responsibilities, the many hats they wear, and then the church as an institution, and the way that Christians and the church interact in the political realm, in the public realm, and how they ought to interact.

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I think for me, personally, and this is just John Harris giving his unvarnished opinion here, but I think that we've been off for a long time.

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What I mean by we, most Christian organizations, at least the ones that I've been familiar with, I've been frustrated with most

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Christian organizations since going back to when I was, I think the first presidential election,

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I was able to vote in. I was probably McCain, if I'm not mistaken, I think. Maybe was it the one before that, either way.

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My earliest political memories of when I was old enough to vote and stuff, I was frustrated with Christian ministries.

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I realize a little bit more now why that is. I didn't understand a lot.

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I didn't understand why it seemed like so many Christian ministries that at least I was familiar with seemed to be somewhat, they would discourage

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Christian political participation. You could say maybe there was some overreaction to the religious right of previous decades and that kind of thing.

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But just overall in the more evangelical reformed world, which is kind of like the world that I was most familiar with, there just wasn't a good public theology on this stuff.

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And so I thought in 2020, perhaps that would cause a lot of reevaluation.

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And sadly, I don't think it did. I think there's a little bit and I can point to a few little things, but I don't know that they were actually lasting.

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And so we're still getting these bad takes from Christian organizations about how we shouldn't put our hope in the political world, political realm, and we ought not to idolize politics.

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And we should just be very suspicious of Christians who are too rah -rah in that regard.

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And it's like we don't do this really, maybe TGC does, but most of us don't do this in other categories.

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We don't say that about your responsibilities at home or your responsibilities on the job or your responsibilities to your church.

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We we tend to only say it when it comes to one thing, and that's the political realm. Just just like we tend to think it's fine to have

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Christian publishing companies and Christian families and Christian businesses and Christian conferences, but not

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Christian nations. It's the same kind of thing. There is this like this brick wall you hit.

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And I've been noticing that it's being that evangelical leaders have hit this wall for decades, at least during my lifetime.

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Now, what I want to show you today, because it is an election year, is three more reformed -ish evangelical outlets and some of the direction that they are giving on Christian political participation.

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And the reason I think it's important to cover this kind of thing again is, number one, like I said, it's an election year. We are all considering what to do, not just with our vote, but with our time and with our money.

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Are we going to volunteer for a campaign? I mean, how involved do we get? Do we get involved in local elections? Do we run for office?

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Do we donate to a campaign? What political party should we put more stock in? And there's a million questions, right?

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And so it'd be good, I think, to have some direction on this. The other thing is, though, as a matter of just the context in which we live,

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I think it's important to note something. And that is that it seems to me, this is, like I said,

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John Harris's unvarnished opinion, that the disparity between the people in the pews and our leaders in evangelical institutions has grown exponentially since 2020.

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Public trust is down. And it may not be for the baby boomers and maybe Gen X as much, but for the millennials and especially

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Gen Z Christians, there is hardly any public trust. I'm just saying that that's with my finger on the pulse of it.

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That's what I'm sensing. And in some senses, people just don't care. Like, for example,

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I have to give you all a caveat and a disclaimer, because one of the speeches that I'm going to play clips from is a session.

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It's the title of a session that was given at the Shepherds Conference on Christian Nationalism. But because I did not have the video from Shepherds Conference, there was the same speech, apparently, maybe with a few alterations, was given like a month before, at least allegedly.

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That's what I was told. And I talked to people who were at the speech. And so I got the take from people who were there, but no one recorded it.

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And let me just tell you, for people that I know who would have always been listening to these things, recording these things so they could comment on them, to see the lack of interest is a seed change.

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It's a it's different. I don't know exactly what's going on, but I think

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Christians in the pews less they care less and less and less about what their pastors and especially what their evangelical leaders in these institutions like publishing companies and conference circuits and all that, what they have to say about the political.

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That's not good. It's not good for anyone, really, because we do need, in my opinion. We do need good leaders and leaders that can comment on important things, and the political is becoming more and more important.

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It's getting into our lives in ways that 10 years ago we could not have foreseen. If you're a regular

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Joe and you're looking at your family, you're looking at their future. You really just want to know that your leaders in the spiritual realm know what you're going through.

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They don't even have to give perfect advice. I think if they just know and recognize what you're going through and like credibility is built.

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But I don't think people feel that way in general on a wide, broad scale here. So so so I want to perhaps critique some of the things we're going to look at nine marks and something they put out recently, we're going to look at the gospel coalition.

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And then, of course, with my disclaimer, because I don't know exactly what was said at Shepard's conference in this session, but I have a session that's supposedly a carbon copy.

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Close, maybe not carbon copy, but it's close, it's the same message. I want

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I do want to kind of look at these things and maybe critique them, and if there's something a good point, maybe bring that out. But but but I think behind all of this for me is

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I want to point out if any of these guys listen, because I know some of them do listen to this podcast,

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I want them to kind of like maybe reevaluate. And, you know,

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I do have some hope that maybe some will think through things and this might help that process.

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I hope the other thing is for you in the pews, you know, I know some of you need to know that there is someone out there.

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There are voices out there that do recognize what you're going through and and recognize that in an election year, this is an important time for you to make some crucial decisions.

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And these aren't to be downplayed. So I'm here. I'm in your corner. I'm in I'm with you.

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I'm I'm just like you in that way. I have I have the same feelings. And so so that's really,

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I guess, where I'm coming from. That's my heart in this. And obviously, I want to glorify God with with everything that I'm going to say.

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So, you know, I want this to be edifying. I want it to be able to be something that can build you up and help you.

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But also, I'm going to say some hard things, perhaps calling out people, maybe even people you like, or at least maybe not calling them out, but at least recognizing some of the things that they're saying are harmful.

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And I'm going to I'm going to call those things out. So that's where we're headed with this particular podcast.

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More could be said, but this is going to be a long one. And so if you are on YouTube, there are chapters.

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You can go to the specific chapter if you want to look at just, hey, I just want to see what John said about nine marks. You can go there if you're on iTunes, go to the info section and you'll see the little timestamps.

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This this will be a mega edition. So with that said, one sponsor of this podcast that I want to just play for you a one minute video advertisement of their product for is

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And this is the shortest one of all. This is like a two and a half minute clip of Mark Dever.

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It's a roundtable discussion or a panel discussion, and he's asked a question about politics.

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Here's what he has to say. Mark, you mentioned in your passage, you talked a little bit about government, but then you also talked about the propensity of pastors now, given governmental stances on things, to have a kind of doom and gloom perspective on life that you've warned against.

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So how do you hold that balance of, yes, government is opposing Christians. You're really feeling these things on your jobs, at your schools.

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Those are real. And yet Jesus is real and alive and wins without the kind of triumphalistic, you know, none of this really matters.

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No, these things really matter and they really hurt. And yet we need that fear. An image

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I use again and again when I'm talking about Christianity is that it is the most realistic. It's the most two -eyed religion.

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Every other religion has one eye open and one eye closed. They either see things as basically good or basically bad.

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Christianity alone has the power of accurate, three -dimensional, like there's Romans 13 and there's

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Revelation 13. There's the sword being from the Lord and the beastly sword, the beastly use of it.

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And some people only see the negative, you know, and some people only see the positive. And neither of those things are accurate.

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And the Bible is mature and adult and gives us both. So it's just, you know, reality is our home ground.

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There's nothing for us to fear. So what we want to move into is listen carefully to what people are saying.

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Admit the truth of as much of it as we can, but then supply what's lacking. And I think in various ones of our churches, depending on what our settings are like, different things could be lacking.

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There may be some churches that are way too pessimistic. They just think nothing can ever get worse.

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I'm sorry, nothing could ever get better. Things always and only get worse. Well, man, medical history alone in the last century doesn't agree with that.

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And there's so many ways in which things have gotten better. On the other hand, some people think that things only get better, you know, or we can take the culture and transform the city.

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Well, that's going to be a short path to liberalism and unbelief. I mean, that's just not going to work in a fallen world. So that doesn't mean you can never make anything better.

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But so we've always got sort of both sides of the cultural mandate in a fallen world expecting the second coming to apply to our people.

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And as shepherds, we need to know what our sheep, the Lord's sheep that we care for particularly need.

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Okay, well, as far as practical advice during an election year, not much there, if anything, other than you need to look at your congregation, assess their needs, whether they're being too triumphalistic and thinking

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Jesus is just going to, I guess, come back and rule the world or or there may be being too negative and thinking that there's no hope.

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And that's his only advice. And I just think this is honestly terrible because the question he's asked is, how do you hold together the anti -Christian things you see coming from the government and then

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Jesus also winning? And he says, well, neither attitude is accurate. And I'm thinking, no, both are accurate.

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They're both true. We do have anti -Christian stuff coming from the government. That's totally valid.

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That's totally true. That needs to be affirmed. It needs to be recognized. It needs to be dealt with. It needs to be challenged in any avenue that we have where we have the ability to challenge it.

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And then knowing that Jesus does win really no matter what your eschatological stripe is,

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Jesus wins in the end. And he's creating a tension that doesn't need to be there.

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These things actually flow together perfectly. Yes, right now, things may look bad in some ways, but we know in the end we win.

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We are going to be judged by God. We should fear God rather than men. And on that basis, make our decisions even in the realm of politics.

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And so he gives these two examples. One is that things can be getting better. And he gives medical history, medical technology and the increase in it as his example.

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And I'll grant you, OK, there's been some medical advances since 2020. It seems like medical care has gone way down in the

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United States, at least. But there's been some medical advances. Good. Great. But he's asked a question about government.

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So my tendency is to think, OK, despite the government or unrelated to the government, we've had some medical advances.

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It's kind of off topic here. And then his negative view, his negative example of things going poorly is unhypothetical.

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It's that Christians could take over the culture and that would lead to unbelief. Now, if there's anything that would,

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I'll ask you to put it this way, what Mark Devere just said, would it encourage

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Christian political action or discourage Christian political action? And I think the obvious answer is discourage.

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You know, the encouragement is that, hey, I guess in some other realms, not having to do with government, some good things happen.

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But when it comes to the government, if Christians, they try to take over the culture and take over the government, then, you know, really bad things happen.

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It just leads to more unbelief. You get the opposite of what you're intending to have happen. And I'm not saying that you can't have because people are people.

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You're going to have negative circumstances even when people with good intentions sometimes get involved in power.

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That's the story of human history. But to to make it seem like when the

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Christians get in power, I mean, that that just leads to some unbelief. That's not a good thing. Talk about pouring some cold water on the fires of maybe some younger folks that might have wanted to do something.

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They're not going to want to do something if they have respect for Mark Devere, because that's what they're hearing. And so I think just an awful take during the election year and for pastors to hear this and to think,

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OK, that's my job now is to just assess whether the congregation is too positive or negative and realize there's a tension there.

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And then because of that, we need some kind of a balance. How about both? How about Christ is coming and leap for joy and have joy in that?

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And then also realize we're in a spot here with our families. We're in a real spot and we need to do whatever we can to fight that.

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And and then not trying to discourage fighting it because you're going to somehow cause more unbelief.

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Where do you even see that in scripture as as a moral principle or an instruction given that, hey, don't get too involved in this kind of public stuff?

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Because, you know, I can just imagine in the Old Testament, especially like, yeah, you know, if all the children of Israel, if they they follow the law and stuff,

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I mean, hey, bad things can happen. It can lead to unbelief. I mean, unbelief is good. Unbelief can be there, whether that happens or not.

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If anything, if the government, as he referenced Romans 13, is a sword to promote good behavior and to condemn evil, then actually scripture points in the opposite direction.

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When Christians, when when good moral choices are being made, it actually promotes good and condemns evil.

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So terrible take, in my opinion, by Mark Dever. And I say that, you know, not wanting to give any disrespect to some of the things he's written on ecclesiology, for example.

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But maybe it's time to stick to the ecclesiology. All right. Well, I think the next one now we can do the

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Gospel Coalition or we can do the. Jesse Johnson presentation that is supposed to be the same presentation he gave basically at the

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Shepherds Conference. I think this the Jesse Johnson one is going to be longer. So I'm going to start with that and then we'll do the

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TGC one, which will be at the end. So here is Jesse Johnson. This was from like a month ago or so.

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And it's at a church in California. But this is he says at the beginning, this is a presentation that he gave at Shepherds Conference.

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And it's it's got a title that I guess was was also it's the same speech, essentially.

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So if someone if someone wants to correct me on that and say, no, just Jesse Johnson's speech was different than that.

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The one at Shepherds Conference this year, I will I will look at that because I know he gave two presentations.

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I know there was one last year. There was one this year. So I'm assuming this is the one from from this year. But, you know, either way,

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I think it's important to go over this stuff. And I realize most of you don't know who Jesse Johnson is. He's not a he's not a name, a recognizable name.

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But he has been a platform at the Shepherds Conference for a number of years and and giving sessions and so forth.

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Not not the main sessions, but like breakouts. And in this year, he gave another one on Christian nationalism.

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And, you know, it's funny, I had forgotten about this, but I was looking up. I was trying to find it. Anyone record it?

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There was a I remembered it was several years ago that I guess he had also given a presentation on evangelism or something.

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And there was this big controversy. It might have been 10 years ago now because he condemned way the master, more or less, or at least

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I don't know, maybe condemn is too strong a word. But he he opposed way of the master, you know, the

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Ray Comfort, Kirk Cameron evangelism curriculum. And I remember John MacArthur had to write a letter affirming Ray Comfort after that.

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It was this whole thing. So so anyway, I I don't. I don't know enough about what he's assigned to speak on.

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But but he often it seems like at least talks about other things happening, things that are going on in evangelicalism more broadly and other ministries and other movements of these kinds of things.

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And in order to do that, you and I do that, obviously, all the time. You have to be super careful because what you want to do is you want to make sure you totally understand in the best possible light.

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According to the terms of the authors or the movement leaders, what their meaning is, what their intention is, and you need to be able to explain it to them in such a way that it mirrors the way they would explain their beliefs themselves.

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And I do often see it's not just Jesse Johnson, but I do often see a sloppiness where people want to critique other movements, churches, figures, books, and they just it's obvious they haven't done the homework.

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And that that has been, I think, with Stephen Wolfe, especially that has been super eye opening for me to see so many ministries want to critique what he has to say.

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And there's some things I think that you can actually critique, I think, actually, to give you a positive example of that,

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I think I don't know if I necessarily agree with all of his reasoning. But I think David Morrill from Protestia has done a better job critiquing

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Stephen than all of the major ministries like Kevin Young's review was terrible, right?

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Like, there's people that you just think they should know better. And they're just sloppy. And why? I don't know. I don't know the full reason for that.

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I got a similar impression with this, though. It's just kind of sloppy. And I'll point out maybe some of the areas in which

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I think it's sloppy. But here it is. I think I have a clip that's a little longer. It's like 14 minutes, 16 minutes.

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So it might take us about half an hour to get through it. But it's coveting Caesar's throne, the case against Christian nationalism,

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Jesse Johnson, the Al Mohler kind of Christian nationalism you're talking about. Like, it's not the, yeah, there's such a thing as nations and ours as a

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Christian influence. Inside of the Christian world, the definition of Christian nationalism becomes more distinct.

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And so there's some positive and negative definitions. Let me borrow the definition from Paul Miller.

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He wrote a book called The Religion of American Greatness. And I have many problems with the book. I think there's a lot that's good in the book.

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But I have many problems with it as well. So me using this definition is not me embracing the whole book. I actually do know

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Paul. And he's a really cool guy. And he drives a big Harley. And I coach his son in soccer. And I have a great relationship with him.

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So anything I say critical about it, it's not personal. But I do have some issues with his book.

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But I like his definition of Christian nationalism just because it is descriptive here. The belief that there's something identifiable as an

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American nation distinct from other nations, that American nationhood is and should remain defined by Christianity or Christian cultural norms, and that the

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American people and their government should actively work to defend, sustain, and cultivate

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Americans' Christian culture, heritage, and values. So you can see it's a very long definition.

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Too long for a dictionary. That would not pass the editor in a dictionary. But there's a lot of words doing a lot of work in there.

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For example, and their government is snuck in there. And the government is given an active role, should actively work to defend, is a defensive posture, which is normally working is active and defensive is more passive.

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But Americans' Christian culture, heritage, and values. That's his definition. He writes in his book that the national argument boils down to an assertion that ideology cannot survive if disconnected from the non -ideological components of culture.

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What he means by that is that if America, that Christian nationalism is the belief that if American government loses its distinctly

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Christian flavor, that our nation will cease to exist as a nation is his argument.

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He will argue against that. He goes on to critique Christian nationalism. Now, I want to just say this briefly about Paul Miller, because I have read his book and took notes on it.

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And actually, I wrote an article that was contrasting Paul Miller or showing what

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Paul Miller's root issue was with quote unquote Christian nationalism and kind of contrasting it with Stephen Wolf's version.

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And I think I sent it to American Reformer, and they were flooded with so much stuff about Stephen Wolf's book.

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They didn't publish it. But I'm going to include it, I think, in the next book that's hopefully coming out soon, this late spring.

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Well, it wouldn't be coming out late spring, but I'm finishing it hopefully late spring. So with that being said,

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I'm just saying, I've read Miller. Miller's book is terrible. Miller's book is terrible.

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Why he quotes Miller. It's, you know,

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Miller is so, like, he defends drag queen story hour. He slanders Jerry Falwell. His history is shoddy.

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He's, he thinks nationalism is just Jim Crow on a global scale. I mean, it's just reading everything in the worst possible light.

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And at the root of all of it is he likes pluralism, multiculturalism, and the proposition nation.

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And he doesn't like Christians asserting themselves as Christians in the public sphere, because they should really just be about the common good and human flourishing.

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And that's, that's the quote, unquote, standard, which we all know, isn't actually enough of a, like, that's not a standard.

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That's a cop out. So I'm glad Jesse Johnson has some problems with the book.

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I'd be kind of curious to know what problems he has and why he's even, like, looking to Miller as this great authority on the subject.

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When, when Miller's whole entire purpose is to not just destroy what some would narrowly define as Christian nationalism, attaching it to Stephen Wolfe or Andrew Torba, but he would, he would really go against Christian political action that is inspired by and for the sake of Christians.

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So Christians asserting themselves as Christians in the public realm, not something that Paul Miller is going to be in favor of.

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He's arguing against that. So, so he's, I would put him more in like the CNN, MSNBC camp of like people against Christian nationalism.

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So that's just kind of like an F FYI. That's who Paul Miller is. That's who Jesse Johnson is quoting here authoritatively and saying like, this is, this is what

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Christian nationalism is. And this is the, the, I guess the problematic kind of Christian nationalism.

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I critique tonight is targeted at this form, not the Al Mohler form. So Al Mohler says he's a

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Christian nationalist to whatever may his tribe increased. I kind of don't care, but I do care more about this.

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And I want to kind of give you guys a way to defend yourself against this kind of Christian nationalism.

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While we're at it, I would just like to point this out too, because Johnson's making the claim that Mohler, Al Mohler has like,

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I guess the good kind of Christian nationalism. So he's trying to make a separation, you know, you got Al Mohler, he's, you got to kind of account for that, especially since you have people like Mohler who are respected still in some of these circles saying he's a

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Christian nationalist. Well, what's makes him okay? And others not well, he's quote, he says Al Mohler is okay, but then there's this other kind of nefarious kind that Paul Miller critiques.

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Here's the thing though. If you look at what Paul Miller says about Al Mohler on, on X or Twitter at the time it's not, it's, it doesn't seem like he, he thinks of it that way.

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So Paul Miller on January 6th, you know, Al Mohler said, what we are seeing in Washington now is the refutation of our

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American commitment, a form of unleashed anarchy, which is the enemy of ordered liberty. And president Trump is responsible now for unleashing mayhem.

30:13

Pray that God will rescue, rescue us. I think he meant to say from this. And then Paul Miller says this rings hollow unless it's accompanied by a recognition of and repentance for how we got here.

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Trump's defenders like Moeller defended, justified, and explained Trump till now, but draw the line at rioting.

30:30

Maybe the road that led to the riots needs reexamination. To put it another way, you, if you argue as Moeller did that Christians should vote for Trump with full knowledge of Trump's character and record, then you own the consequences.

30:41

Pleading ignorance. I didn't know he didn't cite a riot rings hollow because we warned this would happen.

30:47

Um, and then Danny Slavich, uh, suggested in 2022, I would love to see

30:52

Al Moeller interview and discuss debate Christian nationalism with Paul Miller on thinking in public. And Paul Miller says,

30:58

I'm game, Dr. Moeller. And then Samuel Perry, who's also kind of Paul Miller, Samuel Perry, like the same in my mind.

31:04

And he says, would also love to see this. So he's willing to debate Moeller on his version of Christian nationalism.

31:10

Um, and, and there's, there's another tweet here too, that, uh, you know, Al Moeller says, what is

31:17

Christian nationalism? And what is the danger? Understanding the different roles of the church and nation and God's plan. And Paul Miller says, love it.

31:22

How Moeller just asserts that nationalism is fringe without going into any history or scholarship that says otherwise.

31:28

And so I'm just bringing this up to say, I don't think Paul Miller, when, when Paul Miller's talking about Christian nationalism,

31:35

Al Moeller is included in that. Al Moeller is not the good kind of Christian nationalism to Paul Miller.

31:40

And this goes back to something that I've said repeatedly. I think the most recent was like two weeks ago when you had that MSNBC commentator saying

31:47

Christian nationalists just believe our rights are given by God. And I made the point that I'm making it again, that the

31:54

Christian ministries who try to make a separation and say, well, Christian nationalists, like the bad kind, or just Christian nationalists are in this narrow little group over here.

32:05

And we're not that, so don't come after us. That's not who we are. It, the strategy is, it's not going to work.

32:13

It's a losing strategy. It's the same strategy that was employed by social justice activists in evangelicalism in the really 2014, all the way to 2020, where they were saying like, hey, evangelicals are racists, evangelicals are, are bad.

32:31

They have this bad problem with this, but not us. Right. It was always this like attempt to make this separation.

32:37

And I think if we, if you look at it, this is just a tactic thing, but if you look at the battlefield, you look at the strength and the influence that the mainstream media has,

32:47

Hollywood, the political realm, education system, and they're all lined up against Christians, all

32:53

Christians who would ever dare assert any kind that even resembles a

32:58

Christian morality. That's why they're even against Trump. Who's not, for all intents and purposes, doesn't, he doesn't give evidence that he is a

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Bible believing Christian. Right. They'll, they'll even lie against him. If you know, just, just anything that smells like there's a

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Christian element to it, they attack it and they attack it just as hard. And in the same way, there's no escaping it.

33:17

There's no, like, I just think that the resources, whatever limited resources we have should be really focused on them.

33:24

Not, not obsessing over them, but like fighting them, undermining them inspiring people to fight against them in, in the political sense.

33:36

And that's, you know, we're, we're spending our resources with, with going after people like Stephen Wolfe.

33:45

And even to some extent, like I'm sitting here spending my time, right. And I think it's worth it, obviously, or I wouldn't do it, but trying to kind of like explain and sort of demystify or not demystify, but like,

33:59

I, I'm attempting to show you why perhaps you shouldn't listen to all the advice from the, the big evangelical industries that have traditionally been trusted.

34:15

Like, I don't really, like, I would prefer not to have to spend time doing this, but these are the kinds of things that do sometimes influence people in evangelicalism.

34:25

Maybe not as much as they used to, I'm wondering now, but, but I know that there's still an influence there. And like,

34:31

I want to inspire you, Hey, I understand that's what you're hearing. I understand that's the big concern this year, but really the concern should be what's actually happening, what you're seeing with your own two eyes in your own communities.

34:45

And I'm talking about the sexual anarchy stuff that your kids are having to deal with. Maybe you're having to deal with it.

34:50

I'm talking about the flood of migrants coming across the border. You know, were there any sessions at any of these conferences where they're talking about that issue?

34:58

You know, biblically opening up the Bible and saying, here's what the Bible says about this. Here's the situation we're in.

35:04

Here's some practical things to think about. That's not a church service. That's a conference, right? So you can talk about those things for Christians.

35:10

You know, is that's not what's being talked about. It's like sessions on Christian nationalism. So I just want to tell you, Hey, it's okay to talk about those other things.

35:17

And those are the things actually that you should be focused on. Those are the important things. Those are the things that are threatening the way of life that you cherish and a way of life that has been so great and a blessing that the

35:28

Lord's given us that we should steward well. So that's just sort of a side tangent here, but I think it's a point that needs to be made more and more and more.

35:38

All right, let's keep going with Jesse Johnson. My concerns with Stephen Wolfe's approach to Christian nationalism, which again is taking off in the church at large, is fourfold.

35:47

I have four critiques of his approach to Christian nationalism. So you're taking notes. You could write these down to get the substance of what

35:54

I'm talking about tonight. My first objection with Wolfe's former Christian nationalism is it idealizes the past.

36:01

It idealizes the past. Wolfe argues that the goal of Christian nationalism is to recover a

36:07

Christian heritage in a nation. It's this idea that the United States used to have this Christian past and that we have since lost and that it is the church's calling.

36:18

The Christian is calling individually and the church is calling corporately to regain that sense of Christian identity.

36:25

Now, there were two things that you heard there. The first is that there's a Christian past that needs to be somehow recovered in Stephen Wolfe's scheme of Christian nationalism.

36:37

And you're going to hear Jesse Johnson in a moment argue against that, that we didn't really have the Christian past that quote unquote

36:42

Christian nationalist thinks we think we have. And then the second thing is that Stephen Wolfe argues that the church corporately should be advocating in the political realm to make

36:55

Christian society and Christian government come back, that this is not. So hear what

37:01

I'm saying. Hear what he's saying. Not just Christians as individuals, but the church as an institution.

37:06

Now, I want to point something out to you, and I almost hate to do this, but I just don't even I don't see another way around it.

37:12

If you go to Stephen's book, all right, and this is early on in the book, chapter two, there's a section that says the church and the people of God.

37:20

And Stephen goes into great detail about what he means by history. He tries to define himself. And he says that we should distinguish between the visible church and the people of God.

37:31

The distinction here is subtle, but important. Both refer to the same people. But people of God refers to Christians as restored humans, not only to their common profession of faith in Christ for heavenly life, but also to their earthly life in Christ.

37:44

The visible church, in my use of the term, refers only to the spiritual, heavenward aspect of those who profess

37:51

Christ. It refers to the sharing in and common pursuit of the highest good. But the people of God refers to restored men in their completeness, pursuing not merely the highest good, but the complete good.

38:02

The people of God are like what Adam's race would have been, only they are under the final Adam, Jesus Christ.

38:07

They remain human and by grace are fully human, having been sanctified and having received the divine image. They constitute a restored humanity on earth.

38:14

And then he quotes Calvin. He goes, here's why this is important. He says this, this distinction helps us avoid the claim that the church that Christ founded, which is one church, both visible and invisible, has in and from itself a worldly mission and focus.

38:48

In other words, what he's saying is that the church as an institution isn't what he's talking about.

38:56

He's talking about the people of God. And you hear Jesse Johnson here, just, I don't know what, how else to,

39:04

I mean, if there's a better word than the people of God, it's the people of God. or whatever, or more accurate, let me know in the comments.

39:09

I don't know how else to see it. It's inaccurate. It's sloppy. That's what it is.

39:14

It's sloppy. He's claiming Stephen Wolfe thinks the church corporately is supposed to be being part of this mission to restore

39:25

Christianity to its rightful place in the government and in society. Stephen talks about this.

39:31

And if you just read his book, you know that that's not what he's talking about. But if you go back to who's a

39:40

Christian in the early 1960s, it's writing like Martin Lloyd -Jones. You know, what did he say about the

39:45

American culture of the fifties and sixties? Oh, he hated it. He thought it was entertainment driven, materialistic.

39:52

He couldn't believe how many so -called Christians would go to the theater on Saturday nights and they were defiling the

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Lord's day on Sunday morning. You're reading his writing on that time period.

40:03

And it's not like, oh, that's a Christian nation. You know, Spurgeon said of the American culture in his lifetime, quote, he called it, quote, shameful and abominable.

40:14

And he said that if God didn't punish the United States with a bloody war, then the

40:20

God of the Bible doesn't exist. That's a paraphrase of Spurgeon's argument about how awful the American culture was.

40:26

In a different work, he called America's culture, quote, abhorrent and blood thirsty. Now, what's interesting to me is that Spurgeon never excused

40:35

England's role in the slave trade. In fact, he said, quote, slavery would not have been in the U .S. had it not been carried there from Manchester and Liverpool.

40:42

Spurgeon identified slavery as wrong and England's role in it as wrong. Of course he did. But he also recognized that the

40:49

United States had a distinct embrace of it that poisoned our culture. And he thought it was worthy of God's judgment.

40:55

Now, it's interesting to me, he chooses two guys from Britain to critique the United States.

41:00

Maybe that's on purpose. I don't know. I mean, it's not like Martin Louis Jones was the only guy writing in the 1950s and 60s.

41:08

You had many evangelicals writing about, especially during the Cold War era, the need for America to assert itself in a

41:18

Christian way that, broadly speaking, has a contrast to the Soviet Union. But, you know, what this strikes me as is kind of like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

41:30

And, you know, you can go to any time period. There's no time period in human history that you can go to and say that's happened yet, at least, except for the

41:40

Garden of Eden pre -fall that you can say, you know, everything is just perfect here. There's no

41:46

Christian nation you can go to. And by that, I'm meaning it in the way that most people mean it and have throughout history, a nation in which

41:55

Christianity sets the tone for the law, for the social mores and the traditions.

42:01

The holidays are Christian. There's a Christian basic moral framework that's understood by even those who aren't

42:06

Christians. The church is at least an institution in society and an important one.

42:13

You know, those kinds of things. You can't go to any of the countries and nations that have been Christian and then look at them and say, you know what?

42:21

This snapshot right here, you know, 1692 in this country, this is the place because they're all going to have their imperfections, just like every family you call

42:31

Christian families, Christian families. And then you could say, well, hey, like, you know, one of the kids in this family of, you know, five kids, one of them's not saved or two of them or three of them.

42:40

And and maybe they're too young. And look at the problem. There's dishes in the sink and there's laziness.

42:47

And, hey, the parents just watched something they probably shouldn't have watched on television. And is that a

42:52

Christian family? I mean, you could do this all day. Right. And by the time you're done, nothing is really

42:59

Christian. You know, is, you know, maybe you could make the argument that individuals who have put their trust in Christ are the only things that are

43:06

Christian and nothing else really is. And even then you have to look at them cross eyed because they still sin in this life.

43:12

Right. So that's what I think is going on. It's very similar to what you hear when

43:17

Donald Trump's campaign slogan make America great again is critiqued because the left loves to say, when was

43:23

America ever great? And no matter what year you pick, they're going to choose something that they think was bad during that year to say

43:30

America couldn't have been great at that point. And I think this is just it's a lot of smoke, honestly, because the truth, the reality is that obviously no nation is perfect.

43:43

And we know we just have a general understanding that there are Hindu nations, there are

43:48

Muslim nations, there are Buddhist nations, there are secular, humanist, atheistic nations. There's all these different kinds of and we don't mean that everyone in the country is that or everyone is perfectly living that out or that the government, you know, that they don't have things that are inconsistent with those belief systems within them.

44:07

What we mean by that is that in general, they the source of authority, moral authority is that particular religion and that it influences society in very important and fundamental ways.

44:21

And you're going to have to have a system like that, a faith.

44:27

There has to be at the bottom level some kind of a faith system, a God, a place to justify moral law or else you don't have a society anyway.

44:36

So there's going to be something it's going to be a Christian society or it's going to be a pagan society. And we're in the transition.

44:42

And, you know, I could even say that he wants to bring up I still don't understand why he uses two British guys. Exactly. Maybe he has a rhyme or reason for that.

44:49

But Martin Lowe joins in Spurgeon said the same thing about England, right? Spurgeon, if you look at like Spurgeon sermons where he uses the phrase

44:57

Christian nation, oftentimes he's being sarcastic or he's critiquing England that, hey, we're a Christian nation, but you guys aren't acting like Christians.

45:06

And the homes aren't Christian anymore. And he's looking at a rot that's taking place, a progression away from Christianity in the homes and in the personal lives of people while still living in a

45:16

Christian nation. I can't find anywhere that he denied that England is a Christian nation, just that there's hypocrisy that we're not living up to it.

45:25

And it's almost a joke now that we're living in these terrible ways in England and we call ourselves a

45:32

Christian nation. There's some hypocrisy there. And guess what? There's probably levels of hypocrisy in many

45:37

Christian homes as well, however small they are. And so Martin Lowe and Jones, Charles Spurgeon in their sermons, they're preaching.

45:46

The context is going to be nine out of 10 times, if not more. They're preaching to. Congregations are preaching to their flocks on a

45:54

Sunday morning or Sunday evening service or maybe a Wednesday night, and they are focused on the personal holiness in the lives of the people in their flock, as they should be.

46:04

And so when they talk about when they bring up these things, they're not saying them to like say, well, it can't be a

46:11

Christian nation then if it's got this flaw here, they might they'll point out the hypocrisy and they might do it in a very prophetic way and in a strong way.

46:20

But it's not my point is that Jesse Johnson is not getting he's he's not addressing the main problem here or the main issue here.

46:29

Stephen's I think actually Stephen would probably be positive towards a Martin Lowe Jones and a

46:34

Charles Spurgeon and what they're saying and saying, hey, wake up, get your act together. And he would join them in that. And he's not a pastor.

46:41

He's a political philosopher, but he's saying something a little different than that. He's saying that the nation should conceive of itself as a

46:48

Christian nation and let Christian standards set the tone legally, socially.

46:55

That's what he's saying. He's not saying that everyone's going to be a Christian or everyone's going to perfectly work out Christianity or the government's going to do everything one hundred percent right in every circumstance.

47:03

He's saying this is the bedrock we should be going back to. And I don't I actually think it's very probable.

47:11

And I don't want to say this for certain because I haven't read everything of Martin Lowe Jones Jones or Spurgeon, but it's it's fairly probable in my head just what

47:19

I do know about them, that they would probably actually get along with Stephen more that I don't think they would be opposing him or saying something that's totally contradiction, contradicting him here.

47:30

You can go back to our country's founding, even was our country intentionally and deliberately founded as a

47:37

Christian nation. Not really. I mean, there was debates in the founding about the role of religion in public society, about the role of the government and church separation.

47:47

Certainly, they viewed a closer relationship between the government and the church than we have now. But it wasn't out of this idea that we would be founded in some sense as anything that they would identify as a

47:57

Christian nation. I mean, you go to the Constitution and the Constitution has the religious test clause in it that you can't have somebody's religion or religious position as a requisite for holding a federal office.

48:09

That's not the kind of thing you would put in the Constitution if you're arguing for a Christian nation. OK, so there's two things going on here.

48:19

One, two questions that should be asked, I suppose. One is, is America a nation or a federal republic?

48:26

And some might say it's both. I think of a nation, though, properly conceived is going to have a group of people that share certain things in common.

48:41

And I think there were founders who thought that because there was a default kind of Anglo Protestantism in all the colonies,

48:50

George Washington writes about this in his farewell address, that they share religion, they share a common heritage, they share common law, they share a common language.

49:01

So maybe on that basis, you can say it's a nation. But I would quibble with that, perhaps.

49:08

I think it's and certainly today I'd quibble with that. It's an empire at this point. But you had a federal system in place.

49:15

And this is often, I think, not acknowledged or talked about or the implications of it are not thought through as deeply as perhaps they should be.

49:25

Because at this time, this is the second question that should be asked. Was America Christian on the local and state level?

49:35

And the answer is yes. Every single colony, whether the ones that still had royal charters or the ones that had constitutions, every single one had a

49:45

Christian. There's like maybe two like Pennsylvania. And I'm trying to think, you know, maybe

49:50

I can't remember the other one. There's like two states that had more general references to God.

49:57

Even those, though, if you read them, they're talking about the Christian God. Right. And in many of the states, you still had religious tests for office that required you to believe things like the

50:07

Trinity or the divinity of Christ or the inspiration of the scriptures. That was at the time of the founding of the country that he's talking about at the time of the adoption of the

50:16

Constitution. And then you have even on the national level, the general level, a system of chaplains, the requirement that Supreme Court justices need to acknowledge

50:28

God, that in Northwest Ordinance, you know, religion needs to be in the public schools. These things were just assumed, you know, and you did not have any other religions that had any influence other than Christian ones,

50:41

Christian denominations. So, yeah, there's a small minorities, very small group of Jewish people who are kind of a tolerated minority, but no one had influence except Christians.

50:50

This is what a lot of people get wrong, too, about the Jeffersons and Adams or not

50:57

Adams, sorry, Madison, their their religious toleration bill. It's in a context of where, broadly speaking,

51:06

Christian, it's the same year Jefferson implements a Sabbath law. Right. Which, you know,

51:11

I think probably guys like Jesse Johnson would be against that kind of thing. That's a institution of religion.

51:17

But, you know, the people who are the most liberal in these ways still believed that the freedom of conscience was to worship

51:24

God, not multiple gods, not Satan, not there. There was a general Christian understanding.

51:30

So you might be able to say something like there was tolerance for a multitude of different denominations that were

51:38

Christian. And, you know, and depending on what state you were in, there might be more or less tolerance.

51:43

But there was an allowance for that on the national level or on the if you want to call it the general level, which

51:49

I'm trying to get in my speech more, the general level. Yes, sure. But to claim, though, that, yeah, just America wasn't a

51:56

Christian nation or from the founders weren't, they didn't think of it that way. Yeah, sure they did.

52:01

They just didn't want an ecclesiastical situation where those things were emerged like they had in England, where you had an official state church and they had just I mean, history, the historical context should matter in this.

52:17

They just broke away from England. So this is one of the things that they're avoiding. And there's nothing that says the states can't have that.

52:23

But on the general level, no, we're not going to have that kind of ecclesiastical control. But yeah, there's a general

52:29

Christian flavor here. And we're implementing and passing laws and things that are certainly pro

52:35

Christian. Again, though, that's still not even the institution of it's not like a certain church they're favoring.

52:42

So it's I don't know, like it's just frustrating for me because it's like it's a little more complicated.

52:48

And I think when someone says knowing all of the intricacies of it says, yeah, we were a Christian nation.

52:53

I know exactly what they mean. And I think so does so do most people. And we can recognize that, especially within the last 50 years, 60 years, we've totally gotten away from that.

53:04

Like we're now implementing paganism that we're in the beginning stages of that. So to say we're going to we want to go back to a

53:10

Christian nation. Like it's not there's something concrete about it. We're not saying that it's going everything's going to be perfect.

53:18

We're not saying that, you know, that we're not looking at the situation and trying to say that other minority groups are necessarily going to be kicked out of the country because they're not

53:34

Christians. It's that I've given the example before, but we're going to have Christian invocations right with civic ceremonies.

53:42

We're going to have, you know, in God, we trust not in gods, not in whatever you want.

53:48

It's in God we trust. We're going to have the Christmas tree and the manger nativity scene.

53:55

And we don't want other stuff there. Like if you want to live here, you can live here. But you're not, you know, if you're a Muslim, you're not getting a call to prayer.

54:02

You're going to hear church bells. That's because that's where you're living, right? That's sort of that's the idea behind it, that Christianity sets the social standard.

54:11

So and I think most people know what that means. But let's just keep going because I don't want to get too derailed here.

54:17

I'm probably already getting too derailed and worked up a little. Here we go. Second addition, a difficulty of Christian nationalism is that it impossibilizes the future.

54:27

What's that you say? I mean, it impossibilizes the present. So what's the argument here is that through democracy, we need to reclaim our country as a

54:34

Christian nation. And that's a pretty good definition of Christian nationalism. I think that if only the church would get their act together, we could go back to being a

54:41

Christian nation. Again, not the church as an institution is sloppy wording here. Christians, the people of God, if you want to use

54:49

Wolf's term, it's just be careful because it lends itself to a misreading. But it really is a numbers game.

54:56

And Christianity is a narrow path. It's a narrow path. So if it comes down to just as simple as if more people voted, you're not going to you're not going to win.

55:05

And I noticed that this is from Canon Press. I mentioned earlier, Moscow, Idaho, you know, a lot of that's all in on the

55:11

Christian nationalism front, but they can't they can't take over the city council in Moscow, Idaho. Now, I want to say something about this.

55:18

I actually think that's a good point. That's a good point that Jesse Johnson brings up here.

55:23

Now, I don't think it relates to Stephen as a political philosopher and what Stephen's doing. But to say that, hey, we have an insurmountable kind of this is hard stuff.

55:32

We may not be as successful, but now we're in the realm of practicality.

55:37

We're talking about prudent, prudential judgments and what is possible and what's not. We're not in the realm of what ought to be what's the direction or the course that we should set.

55:48

So what he's saying, I think, is 100 percent true. Yeah. And I thought that before, too. Like if if you know, Moscow, Idaho is often brought up as like that's the place that's doing it right or something.

55:58

And I'm thinking, I mean, if they can't take over their city council, then or, you know, even get people elected on the local level, then that's kind of like that's kind of your first step.

56:11

Right. So you can look at like Dusty Devers. Right. And I've had him on the podcast. He's someone that claims the mantle of Christian nationalism, and he's a state rep in Oklahoma.

56:20

And of course, other even bigger people with more influence, like Marjorie Taylor Greene. And I think

56:26

Lauren Boebert, both of them females. Interestingly, I think they have both claimed the mantle of Christian nationalism.

56:33

I don't know if they understand all the ins and outs of what Stephen is saying, but they certainly want hey, we need what we want to be

56:39

Christian in our political direction. And so, yeah,

56:46

I mean, I don't think it's impossible no matter where you go. Moscow, Idaho is a liberal college town.

56:51

Right. So it's a tough spot to be able to I mean, I would assume that even if you're just a conservative trying to get elected, it's pretty tough in a place like Moscow, Idaho.

57:03

I don't know. I don't know anything about like who's in power there. I just know that the mayor is on the left and I know that it's a college town.

57:13

So I know the college town near me. I don't I can't see any church there unless it gets really big being able to overcome the numbers game.

57:22

So it is a numbers game in a sense. And I think that's that's a practical thing as a good point. Just he's bringing up as a practical thing. But it doesn't mean you don't like put down your sword.

57:30

So we're not going to fight anymore for the right thing. That's a practical thing. And we could say that like if you're in California right now and you're stuck, you have to live there, you know, or maybe you want to live there, whatever.

57:42

And you're in Los Angeles, like the chances of you even getting a Republican elected is pretty slim. Does that mean you just like vacate the field and don't?

57:50

Well, I mean, maybe you need to look at other strategies. I know the last election, there was a guy who was fairly conservative who ran under the

57:59

Democrat ticket, who is trying to primary the Democrat as, hey, let's try this outside the box strategy.

58:04

You know, maybe you got to think of things like that to try to exert some influence. But I just don't see where that like you can't go from that to where you shouldn't even try because like it's in certain regions, it's too hard.

58:19

Hey, if you're in like the middle of Kentucky, you probably have a pretty good chance of it's all

58:25

Republicans anyway. Like, why don't you get a guy in who's, you know, Christian and even more to the right and wanting to bring in more

58:37

Christian laws and Christian influence? Like, why not? You have the ability there, right? So I think it's more of a prudential thing than anything else.

58:44

But I think it's a point worth looking at. Third objection to this is that it institutionalizes the church.

58:54

It makes the church a subsidiary of government. He argues very clearly that in his view of Christian nationalism, the government should have the ability to rebuke slothful ministers.

59:05

Like, if your pastor's being lazy in that study, straight to jail or maybe just a fine.

59:10

I don't know. Maybe a fine, a rebuke, you know. The church should have authority over statements of faith to keep heresy from being taught and then propagated in the church.

59:21

And he has other examples as well. But that makes the church subsidiary to government. It goes radically against the kind of political theology that's often been taught and practiced by evangelicals and Baptists throughout the post -Reformation worlds.

59:36

Now, for me, this critique you just heard is probably the most potent and relatable critique that Jesse Johnson offers, because I think even living through 2020, we kind of feel this like a mistrust of the government.

59:51

And so the idea that there would be any kind of government oversight in certain spiritual matters makes us super uneasy.

01:00:02

Part of that's our history. Part of that's the recent past and what we've just lived through.

01:00:08

I think it's important to note a few things here, though. There's a whole argument that Stephen unravels, and I can't do the whole thing right now, but he has a whole chapter on the

01:00:17

Christian prince. And his point is that, and I should say he relies on Turretin and Calvin and all these

01:00:24

Reformation guys who are then trying to distill the teachings of scripture. And he believes that the magistrate, and he calls him the

01:00:33

Christian prince. And so I should also note before I say this, that a lot of people think this is just an authoritarian, fascistic type figure.

01:00:42

And Stephen's made it very plain, I know, especially since then in interviews and stuff, and that he's not taught.

01:00:49

In fact, I was at an event where he talked about George Washington as being a Christian prince. So the Christian prince is not necessarily this super authoritarian figure.

01:00:59

The Christian prince is the person with the authority, with the sword, who God has, who's directly accountable to God and not the church, but to God directly for what he does.

01:01:10

And he argues this at length. I think he does a good job. But that Christian prince, and this is the term used in a lot of the

01:01:18

Protestant writings, has the power of procurement and disposition of sacred things, not the administration.

01:01:26

Now, what does that mean? It means that you have today, your church, if you have a public building, let's say a church building, has to meet certain safety requirements.

01:01:36

There's certain things in emergency situations that your church is expected to do.

01:01:44

And so there is this power, even we acknowledge today, that the civil realm has, and is it in spiritual matters?

01:01:55

It's not in the spiritual matters as such. It is, though, around and about them in a way.

01:02:01

There is a certain regulation that they have that might limit or expand your ability to, in certain situations, perform these spiritual things.

01:02:13

Now, he makes it clear, too, in the book that there is this barrier that, for example, the

01:02:19

Christian prince can be excommunicated by the church. There is a spiritual power the church has, and he has no power to do those kinds of things.

01:02:30

So there are divisions there. But the specific example that Jesse Johnson brings up, slothful ministers and oversight, overstatements of faith, he does mention slothful or lazy is the word he uses, lazy ministers, that they can be corrected by the

01:02:49

Christian prince if they're not doing their job. And the Christian prince has the ability to call councils and punish arch heretics.

01:02:58

And so that's what he must mean by the oversight, overstatements of faith, because he doesn't really talk about statements of faith like you would think of in a

01:03:04

Baptist church. He's talking about calling councils where you have major schisms and so forth.

01:03:11

So we're going back in a way to a medieval era. And I think this was the critique.

01:03:17

I don't remember if it was Mark David Hall or Kevin DeYoung. I forget. But one of them had brought this out about like, hey, this is just a medieval era.

01:03:23

We're not going back to that. And so this is irrelevant. But you got to remember, this is a work of political philosophy.

01:03:30

OK, so we're in the abstract. And to make that concrete and to look at how would that work in our society today is another matter.

01:03:39

And Stephen, actually, it's funny enough, I was looking back through some of my notes on his book. And he talks about basically the civil government responding to major threats.

01:03:52

That's what he's talking. He's not saying that your local church pastor is a little lazy, doesn't study enough. I mean, that's where Jesse Johnson's mocking him.

01:04:00

He's talking about like major threats to the faith. And I'm trying to look for the exact quote.

01:04:06

I can't find it now. There was a quote I know where he talks about basically the American kind of tradition of valuing individual freedom and stuff.

01:04:17

And he says he wants that. And in fact, he even says that his version of Christian nationalism, this is compatible with the

01:04:25

First Amendment to the Constitution. So it's it's a little more complicated. It's a little more heady.

01:04:31

It takes a little more work to kind of get through exactly what he's saying. But he he is not saying that the church and this is

01:04:39

Jesse Johnson's conclusion, which is wrong, that the the church as an institution is just subservient now to the state.

01:04:48

And that's the end of the sentence, basically. It's not that it's that the church as an earthly institution.

01:04:56

And in that capacity has to abide by rules that are laid down by the

01:05:02

Christian prince, by the state, by the civil realm. We actually already do this in a like I gave a few examples.

01:05:10

We have some ways in which we do this. That does not mean and he makes it clear that it doesn't mean that there are spiritual things that the government gets a say in.

01:05:22

So, you know, the government can't come in to your church and start saying we're going to take over the administration of the sacraments or the the what's the word that we

01:05:31

Baptists like to use the ordinances. We like that better than the sacraments. That's not something that the state can do.

01:05:38

So there are there are these limitations. But but yes, he does give a role to the

01:05:44

Christian magistrate, the Christian prince that I think many would be uncomfortable with. And we're thinking Joe Biden in our heads and he's leaving it in this sort of theoretical realm where that could mean your mayor, that could mean your governor.

01:05:57

It could mean it could mean local leaders responding to those things. And, you know, maybe in that great national threat, it would be the person at the top of that or something.

01:06:07

But before all this, behind all this is this kind of this desire that the national will of Christians is kind of like personified by this

01:06:19

Christian prince. So you have someone who has character, who has I mean, that's kind of like an assumption here that he's also making.

01:06:26

So you see examples of this from even some post -Reformation times.

01:06:32

You see examples of this. Stephen even talks about in the same chapter in the Christian prince. And I'm not here to explain everything

01:06:37

Stephen Wolfe says, but I got to say this one last thing. He does talk about the Roman Catholic Church and how they were very rigid and how the

01:06:44

Protestant tradition is not that way, that there is a toleration that Protestants have.

01:06:51

And I remember I was just reading a book, Pierre Verret. Now, he doesn't mention Pierre Verret, but Pierre Verret even talks about like under certain conditions that, you know, not to in certain towns and regions, he formed somewhat of an alliance with Roman Catholics over certain things or a cobelligerency at the very least.

01:07:13

And so there was I know that there are Protestants who had broader kind of understandings of what was acceptable and what wasn't.

01:07:23

But yeah, I mean, Stephen Wolfe would probably I don't I haven't asked him about Cervetus specifically being the poster child for Calvinists and they're, you know, taking care of heretics.

01:07:33

But, you know, would Stephen look at a Cervetus situation and say, actually, that problem Cervetus needed to be punished?

01:07:40

He may have. I don't know. And that maybe that's a disagreement that some in the audience have. What I would say, though, is if you read his book and you take the chapter seriously, you're going to have to bring your

01:07:49

A game and you're going to have to really work through it. And it's not I think Jesse Johnson has this kind of dismissive, like cavalier attitude that just sort of comes through that it's it's just not it doesn't seem like to actually represent the serious nature that that under which

01:08:10

Stephen is writing these things. So but I would say that's the most potent and probably maybe the only potent, in my opinion, thing that he has to say about this.

01:08:19

Let's finish this up and then we need to get to the nine mark stuff because we're going this like I said, it's going to be a long one, but we're going pretty long already.

01:08:26

So here we go. This form of Christian nationalism idolizes ethnicity.

01:08:33

Ben, I want to be careful with my words here because he's he is pretty careful to not bring race into the discussion.

01:08:39

He objects to the idea that this that anything he says is racist, of course, and he would agree with me that there is only one race, that race is a biological fiction.

01:08:49

There really is no biological defensible concept of race.

01:08:55

The Bible uses the word ethnos for ethnicity, which speaks of different cultures and languages and what we refer to as ethnic identity.

01:09:04

So he is talking about that. Nevertheless, he he makes

01:09:09

I would say he makes an idol out of race. He gets very weird when he talks about interracial marriages or interethnic marriages.

01:09:16

He even develops another category for like you would say that homosexual marriage is not a true marriage at all because it's not marriage.

01:09:23

And then there's marriages that aren't wise. Of course, the people aren't aren't compatible and there's marriages where everybody's a good fit.

01:09:29

And he kind of seems to argue that that an interracial marriage would fit in that middle category like it's still technically a marriage, which wouldn't be wise.

01:09:38

All of this is viewing is a wrong view of our past. As I mentioned, the United States was not designed.

01:09:43

It wasn't founded with one ethnic identity. It was founded with people from, you know, immigrants from from the

01:09:49

Netherlands, immigrants from France and from Spain and from England. And as the U .S.

01:09:55

expanded, it intentionally adopted even more of that. You get to Hawaii and you take out Hawaii, which has its, you know, incorporate that into our country, which has its own ethnic identity.

01:10:04

And, you know, he would argue that Hawaii has one ethnic identity, which shows that it's truly its own nation. But it ain't anymore.

01:10:10

Like it's there's a star on the flag and everything for it. Like it's part of us now. Is it not rightly part of us?

01:10:18

How do you even navigate those kind of complexities? The argument gets very weird, very fast.

01:10:23

You just have to understand that God has called believers to go into all the world, preaching the gospel, making disciples, not putting their own nation before the love of other nations.

01:10:33

Now, I recognize in a nationalistic concept in politics, you want a government that is defending its own people first.

01:10:40

Absolutely. But you recognize that Christians, at the very least, have competing tensions in that you're supposed to be demonstrating love to even your enemies, even your enemies of other nations.

01:10:52

And that doesn't mean there should be no such thing as borders. The nations can't prioritize their own interests.

01:10:57

Of course they can. But you recognize at the very least there's a Christian tension in all of that.

01:11:04

For me, I. OK, there's man, that's kind of a mess.

01:11:11

And let me let me try to be quick if I can. But he said Stephen would agree there's only one race.

01:11:17

I don't actually know that Stephen would agree with that. So I don't know where he's getting that Stephen would agree with him on that. I don't I don't think

01:11:23

Stephen I don't know what he means by that makes an idol out of race, though.

01:11:28

So that's the weird thing is like Stephen would agree with me there's only one race and then he makes an idol out of race. So that means Stephen's making an idol about out of everyone.

01:11:36

So clearly he's now using the same word race, which he just said there's only one. Stephen would agree with him on that.

01:11:41

Now he's turning around and he's using it like there's multiple races and Stephen makes an idol out of particular ones.

01:11:47

So it's just super messy. Like you're using Jesse Johnson's using like different understandings of words.

01:11:53

And he's he's defining them differently from sentence to sentence. And then he goes, he talks about interracial marriages that Stephen would think they aren't wise.

01:12:05

I don't know if he's getting this from Twitter stuff. That's what I assume. I don't know that he's getting there is like a little section in the book where Stephen actually has there's a footnote where he talks about he's not against interracial marriage and stuff.

01:12:17

But he thinks like the border needs to be sealed because we we need time to basically form an ethnogenesis with the people who are here.

01:12:26

We can't really we can't sustain what's happening, which I would agree with them on. But there's that tweet from him that I bring it up when people bring up, you know,

01:12:36

Stephen's got this problem with race or ethnicity or whatever, where it's from, I think, 2019, maybe 2018 originally, but it was

01:12:43

Clarence Thomas with his with his wife and Clarence Thomas is black, his wife is white.

01:12:49

And Stephen says, this is a good and fitting marriage. Stephen's not putting Clarence Thomas's marriage in the category of unwise.

01:12:57

Now, he may be saying on a broad national level, you lose your nation if there's a certain level, if it's too high of a level of different people coming in and you're merging with them, you lose something in that.

01:13:12

But that's much different. That's a sociological thing that's much different than saying on an individual level.

01:13:18

And people often conflate these. And that's a sloppy thing. Again, I think Jesse Johnson, I don't know how else to say it.

01:13:23

It seems like he's just being sloppy. The U .S. was not founded as an ethnic as one ethnic identity, he says.

01:13:31

And because we had different people from Europe here. The thing is, though, at the time, you read the book

01:13:36

Albion Seed, right, by David Haggett Fisher. Yeah, you had these little bitty pockets of minorities here, just like you did in places like Great Britain at the time.

01:13:45

And other European countries had the same thing. Like there was little pockets here and there. You had Jewish people, you had people who were there from other countries in small numbers.

01:13:55

But basically speaking, it's dominated by, the default setting is it's

01:14:01

English in England, right? So in the United States, it's broader in the sense that you have people from different parts of England.

01:14:09

And then you have also people settling from Scotland eventually, well, actually even in the 1700s.

01:14:15

This is before the Constitution. You have them settling in the Appalachia and that kind of thing. But these people were very similar.

01:14:23

That was George Washington's point in his farewell address. You're similar, you have the same religion, you have the same language, you have the same traditions, same law.

01:14:33

So there was enough similarity there to kind of form an ethnogenesis. At least that's what some people thought.

01:14:41

Now, you can look at the war that happened not long afterward and say, hey, maybe they actually were kind of different.

01:14:48

These people from different regions in England settling in different areas, maybe there was enough difference there that you could even look at it today and say, hey, the

01:14:57

South is different than the Northeast, different than the Mid. I tend to think we have an empire. It's composed of a number of different nations.

01:15:03

And especially out West, you have actual, literally, you're driving through Arizona, you have the Navajo Nation. In the

01:15:08

United States of America, it's the Navajo Nation, right? So I think we already have this situation.

01:15:14

And so then this theory would be applied to individual nations. And he's not talking about empires necessarily.

01:15:22

It'd be interesting if he wrote a book on that. But that gets into the Hawaii thing, like, hey, it's just how do you apply

01:15:28

Stephen's thing to Hawaii? And today, Hawaii, though, is mostly populated by,

01:15:35

I think, the people who are natives there who can trace back before colonization. They're in small numbers.

01:15:42

But sure, yeah, I mean, Hawaii, I don't think there's any doubt in my mind, and I don't think there would be in Stephen's mind, that Hawaii had a distinct language and they were distinct people.

01:15:51

And so it was colonized, like, literally, it was colonized. And the character of it has changed since then.

01:15:58

So today, Hawaii, and I have been to Hawaii, I could see,

01:16:03

I think it's in a transition. But for me, like, I think that there are differences, but there are also many things that are very similar to the

01:16:13

United States. And again, it's the empire thing. It really is. I was in Puerto Rico not long ago, actually.

01:16:21

And it's the same thing there. It's a territory of the

01:16:27

United States. There's so many things that are similar, these transitions, but it's also very distinct in many ways.

01:16:33

And if Puerto Rico wanted to be its own thing, I think they voted for it a few times, they wanted to be under their own, strictly their own, not just their local government, but totally severed ties with the

01:16:43

United States. It would make sense. I could see that happening. They have enough of a difference, but it also serves them to be part of the empire.

01:16:51

And so you have to look at the United States like the Roman Empire in a way, or like the Soviet Union with the satellite states. If there's any critique

01:17:00

I would make of Stephen's book, and there are like two things I can think of that I wasn't at least too hot on, but one of them is the cover, because it does give the impression like America itself is a nation.

01:17:15

This is talking about, yes, it's for America, but it's also, I think, it's for regions and localities.

01:17:23

This stuff might not all be, in a federal system, if that's what we still have, it may not be as practical.

01:17:33

It may not be practical to conceive of this entire huge continent with all its territories as one nation.

01:17:39

That doesn't actually make sense to me. So I'm interjecting my own thoughts here. I don't know exactly what

01:17:45

Stephen would say about all of this, but I do think Stephen does think in terms of intergenerational, or I should say like multiple generations living on the same land, sharing experiences with the people near you.

01:17:58

And I think in the case of Hawaii before colonization, certainly, certainly they were, and they're in a transition period.

01:18:05

And now they have their immigration. That's maybe a warning sign to the United States. You let enough people come in, it does change the character of the land you live in.

01:18:12

I don't see this as a big problem for Stephen or anything, but then it gets to, this is the worst thing to me of that whole clip.

01:18:20

Then he gets into that there's this great tension that Christians have. This is where I'm like, huh?

01:18:27

There's great tension because we have the Great Commission and we're supposed to favor, I guess, Christians more than our own nation.

01:18:34

And then this also translates into the border situation. We have this great tension with what do we do about the border?

01:18:40

I have no tension, guys. I don't know about you. I don't see the tension there.

01:18:46

I think it's perfectly reasonable and perfectly possible to say, I want people to become saved around the world here at home.

01:18:56

I also want the border sealed. And I also want the, it's like saying, hey, we want to favor other people who aren't saved, who we could preach the gospel to over our families.

01:19:07

That makes no sense. And so there's this tension between loving your family and loving people you don't know who need the gospel.

01:19:14

Makes no sense. Makes no sense. It's the order of Morris. I mean, there is a proximity we have and responsibility we have and commands we have, actually, to our family that we don't have towards a stranger.

01:19:30

It doesn't mean we don't love the stranger. I love my wife. I also, in a certain sense, I guess I could say, I love all females.

01:19:37

I'm supposed to love everyone, right? So I love all females and males, right? I love them all, but I have a special love for a particular female, my wife.

01:19:45

So this is just goofy to me. I don't understand this. This is like, who would even, other than maybe some

01:19:53

Anabaptist traditions, feel this way about their own people? I really don't know.

01:19:58

But head scratcher on that one. I mean, if I'm being totally honest with you,

01:20:04

I vote in every election and I do so mostly because I know it would be a huge stumbling block to people if I didn't.

01:20:12

Like, if I told people in the congregation, you know what? I actually don't vote. In DC, no less.

01:20:17

Yeah. So, I mean, I also, beyond that, I realize there is a stewardship issue that I don't know.

01:20:24

I mean, it's not for me about the vote winning or losing an election as much as God has given me a role in a democratic society, however small.

01:20:32

So it's my way of participating in society. But I often wonder, like, there are people that are so wrapped up in it that I feel like for some of their sanctification, it'd actually be better if they didn't.

01:20:44

I use a Costco analogy. Have you heard me use that? All right. Let's stop there for a second.

01:20:51

So to me, this clip is the most concerning of all. So he votes to,

01:20:57

I guess, participate in society. It's his way of participating in society.

01:21:03

I don't even, I don't know what to say. Like, I go to the store,

01:21:09

I buy groceries. It's my way of participating in society because that's a duty, I guess, to participate.

01:21:15

Why is that a duty? Why is that something we should do? Why should Christians participate? I would like to know the answer to that one. It's, I mean,

01:21:24

I think I know why, but there's something like way bigger here, like the purpose behind voting in the first place to elect good leaders.

01:21:33

Leaders you think would do a good job and have a similar vision to the one that you have.

01:21:40

He votes so that people aren't offended. That's the first thing he said. So people aren't, it would make people stumble if they knew he didn't vote and so forth.

01:21:47

I mean, what a terrible reason to vote. How about vote because you actually believe in the future for your children and you want to steward the place you live into the best of your ability before God.

01:21:56

That's the reason to vote. We have this unique privilege of living in a country where we have a say.

01:22:06

Some places you don't have a say as much, but in many regions, you still have a say. And it means that you are, it's not just the people in elected office who are bearing the sword, you are selecting indirectly those, well, actually directly those who will bear the sword in a sense that you have some latitude and authority over this.

01:22:38

And if you don't use it, someone else obviously does. And the less Christians participate, the more people who aren't

01:22:44

Christians will have a greater say in the direction that your society goes politically.

01:22:51

And that does affect all kinds of other things. So why should you vote? I think it's pretty simple.

01:22:58

You vote because you want to have the best possible person in office to carry out the closest you can to what

01:23:10

God has said is good so that you have a Romans 13 minister who bears the sword for good and to also prevent people from coming into office who have very horrible moral visions that will punish people who are good and reward evildoers.

01:23:28

You're trying to prevent. It's a preventative measure too. And maybe that's all it is now in some elections. But that's awful that he would, and some people shouldn't even participate.

01:23:39

Wow. I mean, I just wouldn't say that about so many other things we do in life. Would you?

01:23:44

I mean, would you say if it's a responsibility, he seems to indicate that there's a responsibility we have to participate in society.

01:23:51

I don't know where he gets this, but he seems to see there's something, some participation there, some responsibility.

01:23:57

Would you say this about other responsibilities? Would you say this about, you're just too wrapped up.

01:24:03

You're idolizing the church. You're here too often, right? Don't use your spiritual gifts so much, or don't use them at all really would be a proper comparison.

01:24:13

Don't use your spiritual gifts. Don't be a father. You love being a father too much.

01:24:18

How about just get your priorities straight and keep doing the responsibilities that you have. Use your spiritual gifts.

01:24:25

Be a father, be a parent, do what you need to do. Go to work and get your heart straight about the level of priority it should be.

01:24:33

Don't just stop doing it. Don't just abandon a responsibility, but that's what you would have to think.

01:24:39

I don't know how we just wouldn't say this about anything else. It's just weird to me. All right. I hope this is the last.

01:24:44

I think this is the last thing. Okay. So all right. Pretend Costco gets away, get sort of all the free samples because of COVID or whatever.

01:24:54

Pretend. And all right. Then they bring it back, and they say only two samples per person or whatever.

01:25:01

And they've got a sign up that does it. And then people are all ignoring the law and just feeding, feeding, going there for lunch and everything and pigging out.

01:25:10

And so you have like the Christian nationalists that would say like the church needs to take over Costco and bring the law down because what is good for society is good for the church and good for Costco.

01:25:22

And so the church and Costco should be merged to regulate the samples. This is an argument from the absurd to the concrete.

01:25:28

So walk with me here. And you have like the natural law people. They're like, you know, you can make an appeal to people like, hey, it's actually not best for society if you eat all that you can at Costco because then they'll take away the free samples, and they won't be there for us next week.

01:25:43

That's kind of the natural law argument. And, you know, neither of those are right, you know.

01:25:51

So the prophetic voice is the ability for somebody to come in and say, no, this is wrong. And you employees do your job.

01:25:59

The sign is on the wall. Do your job. And you honor the sign. Not that you should be a jerk at Costco because who honestly cares?

01:26:05

But this is where you go from the absurd. This is where if you go the absurd to the concrete, you know. The Christian nationalist approach is kind of the seeing a cohesion of the church and government.

01:26:16

And the natural law approach is saying, like, listen, you can argue against gay marriage or drag shows and libraries because it's not good for human flourishing.

01:26:24

Like you shouldn't be doing transition surgeries on fourth graders because it's ultimately not what is good for society, and they might have mental issues later on in life, like that kind of argument.

01:26:33

But the prophetic voice is the ability to say, like, this is an abomination to the Lord. The Lord says this is sinful and wrong, and he will judge you.

01:26:41

First Thessalonians 4, he will judge the sexually immoral. He knows what's happening. He will judge them. So that's the voice that church should have in society.

01:26:47

It's not about a political end or political agenda as much as it is about calling out what is wrong.

01:26:53

And I mean, John the Baptist got his head cut off, and it wasn't for making a Christian nationalist argument because he's talking to Herod, you know, literally named

01:27:03

Herod. And he's also not making a natural argument. He's not appealing to him like, listen, for the flourishing of human society, it's not right to have your brother's wife.

01:27:13

No, it's like what you're doing, God says is wrong, and he will judge you. Okay, a few things here.

01:27:23

I think he's actually right in a sense about the role of the church as an institution. As an institution, sure, the church's job is to lay down the morality of God, proclaim the judgment that God has proclaimed as well.

01:27:40

So you're preaching the word and to administer the gospel. It's a institution of grace.

01:27:48

So yeah, his Costco analogy is a little weird, but sure, okay, everyone's abusing the free samples at Costco, and the church is saying,

01:27:56

God has made a law, and you're violating the law, you're stealing, whatever.

01:28:02

Okay, I can go with him on that. The problem I see with this is that there's a few problems, actually, but the main one is that he mischaracterizes the

01:28:11

Christian nationalists. He says the Christian nationalists want the church to take over Costco. No, maybe there's some goofy, you know, fringy, whatever.

01:28:20

I mean, it's not even unique to Christian nationalists. You could find a church somewhere where people are maybe saying that. I don't know where that would be.

01:28:27

But in the main movement, if you want to call it that, of conservative

01:28:33

Christians who are now being labeled Christian nationalists, they would say, no, we want Christian leaders.

01:28:40

As Christians, we want to elect people who share our concerns, our values, our agenda.

01:28:47

So they're not saying the church as an institution takes over Costco. They're saying that we elect people.

01:28:55

The management at Costco is terrible, and we need new management. Let's elect. Let's get some new managers in there.

01:29:02

And this is the difference. The church is proclaiming the power that God has already established and the power that God will reveal in a more real form, a more concrete form on Judgment Day.

01:29:21

The power, though, of the state is to they actually wield power in the temporal realm right then.

01:29:28

Not that God can't do that, but that's not the role of the church as an institution. That is the role of the state, though.

01:29:35

And so Christian nationalists are saying this is a mess. Costco is a mess. We need power to come in. They've already seen the sign.

01:29:42

They're disregarding the sign. Great that the church, you know, people are bringing a moral witness to this and saying, hey, you're condemned.

01:29:48

But we need to correct this crazy situation in the here and now. We need someone powerful to come in and put a stop to it.

01:29:55

Force. That's what Christian nationalists are doing. So there's power in this temporal, earthly power, but there's power in it.

01:30:03

And so, yeah, I guess that's the main thing. The other thing, the natural law versus Christian law kind of thing.

01:30:12

Yeah, I mean, there's people who want to say who want to broaden natural law. It's this thing that we can just observe, and that's all it is and stuff.

01:30:19

I do think, and if you can go back, I did a podcast with Jared Lavelle not long ago where we talked about this natural rights, natural law.

01:30:28

And originally, natural law was conceived as something totally in lockstep with what

01:30:36

Scripture taught. Like, in other words, it's not if Scripture teaches against it, it's not natural law.

01:30:42

So there wasn't a conflict there. It's not until you have enlightenment, rationalism and natural rights talk that you start getting this sort of separation to where people today like libertarians want to say natural law sometimes and throw out the

01:30:56

Bible or something. But those things were in step with each other originally. And I think we should still conceive of them that way.

01:31:03

In other words, nature's law, what God has established in nature by design is not out of step with what he has revealed in Scripture.

01:31:13

Natural revelation, special revelation, these things, hand and glove, they work together.

01:31:19

And so that's more of a side thing. But the main thing with all of that is that that's not what

01:31:25

Christian nationalists are trying to do at all. And it's just, I don't know what the excuse is for this sloppy of a handling of it.

01:31:34

There's this part of me that's really hoping the Shepherds Conference presentation wasn't this bad. Maybe it was,

01:31:39

I don't know. But this is the same title. And if this was given at the

01:31:44

Shepherds Conference, I just don't know what to say. It's just not, it's embarrassing, to be quite frank.

01:31:50

It's just kind of an embarrassing take. All right, with me offending everyone in the

01:31:56

Shepherds Conference orbit, not intentionally, by the way, I think probably most of the sessions were great,

01:32:03

I'm sure. But this is election year, and I would be not doing what you expect me to do if I just ignored that because I really like John MacArthur and I really like Shepherds and stuff.

01:32:17

So I needed to include that. Now, the last one is the Gospel Coalition, which, of course, on this podcast, we have no problem talking about the

01:32:24

Gospel Coalition and pointing out some of the problems. So here's the Gospel Coalition's take.

01:32:29

This is called, What Does It Mean to be a Christian Nationalist? And boy, was this one of the most,

01:32:35

I just felt like I wasted my time after listening to this, which is why I've cut it down to only a few minutes, because most of it is fluff.

01:32:42

Most of it is raising questions, not answering them, fluff, people who aren't even talking about, it's like they haven't done the reading and they just put them at a table and said, have a discussion.

01:32:53

Honestly, it's an odd discussion. I feel like I could get three random people from my church, have them sit down in a room and say, let's talk about Christian nationalism.

01:33:00

We could have a way better, more helpful discussion. And I'm not saying that to mock,

01:33:06

I'm being serious. I really do think it was that bad. But here's the relevant portions that have to do with Christian nationalism.

01:33:15

You have the rise of sort of social conservatives in the Republican Party, the rise of the influence of evangelicalism in politics.

01:33:25

Carter is elected and one of the major magazines does the Year of the Evangelical and all this kind of stuff.

01:33:30

Within that movement, the Reconstruction movement, the Theonomy movement is sort of part of that right -wing wave that's growing up, wanting to influence the culture with Christian virtues, ideals, principles, laws, et cetera.

01:33:48

Today, the Christian nationalism group, I really think, represents a sense of the loss of influence in culture.

01:33:57

It represents a tiny, tiny, politically uninfluential group.

01:34:04

I mean, what governor, senator, congressman is out there advocating for anything like Christian nationalism or who would be open to that?

01:34:13

You remember when the laws were being debated in Uganda regarding LGBTQIA rights, even the most conservative members of the

01:34:25

U .S. Congress would not touch it at all. And so, what we're seeing now is a discussion about Christian nationalism that has, there's no possibility of any real public effect on it in terms of public policy, government, et cetera.

01:34:41

Who are the people that are advocating for it that are actually involved in government? And that, to me,

01:34:47

I think that means that with at least some people that will utilize the label, they're more concerned with building a subculture within the church that...

01:35:03

Let me stop there for a minute because he's going on to make another point, and I want to say something about this. Lincoln Duncan drives me nuts.

01:35:14

I kind of like Jesse Johnson, his personality. I feel like we could get a, maybe he,

01:35:19

I don't know if he feels this way, but I feel like we could have a fun conversation or something. Lincoln Duncan is one of the few people in, quote unquote,

01:35:27

Big Eva, I would have a hard time not losing it. I'd have to just pray that the Lord would help sanctify me.

01:35:34

There's something about him. I just want to remind you all, this is the guy who said that he gets really excited and was shaking his hands and stuff on stage.

01:35:43

I wish I had the clip right here, where that we were getting all of these migrants coming across who were

01:35:51

Roman Catholic, and that that was going to possibly save the

01:35:57

United States from its descent into secularism. That, you know,

01:36:02

Christians need to kind of get on board with the mass immigration thing, because that's going to save America from the secularists.

01:36:09

This is the same Lincoln Duncan who at the Shepherd's Q &A from, what was it, five, six years ago, told

01:36:16

John MacArthur he basically needed to get woke on race so his kids wouldn't get woke on LGBT.

01:36:22

How are these strategies working out for you, Lincoln Duncan? This is the same guy that said, we got to take down the

01:36:28

Mississippi state flag. Because it's part of our Christian witness. Is Mississippi more

01:36:34

Christian? Is the United States more Christian from the immigration? Are the grandkids in that generation, are they more

01:36:40

Christian because you went a little woke on race? There is no reason to believe anything this man says about social stuff, in my opinion, because he's wrong every time

01:36:51

I've heard him. His strategies are terrible. And now we're to the point that he's like, well, you know what?

01:36:58

It's a foregone conclusion, I guess. We're just not really Christian anymore. No one takes being Christian in politics seriously, except that he forgot about Marjorie Taylor Greene, he forgot about Lauren Bovart, who both have embraced that label, as far as I understand.

01:37:11

He didn't mention Dusty Devers, who embraces that label. And what about all the people who don't embrace that label, but are labeled

01:37:16

Christian nationalists by the media, because they want to bring some semblance of Christianity wherever they can?

01:37:22

What about them? Do we bring reinforcements? Do we encourage them? Do we vote for them? Do we encourage our young to try to do something in their local communities?

01:37:31

Or do we just discourage them out of the gate and say, you know what? Not even the most conservative members cared about Uganda's law, so you shouldn't even really be concerned with this

01:37:42

Christian nationalist thing. It's just not going to work. It's not even serious.

01:37:47

Jesse Johnson kind of said something similar. It's just not serious. This isn't viable. This can't happen.

01:37:53

And it's just years of listening to this guy saying, here's what we got to do. You got to do this woke stuff with me, this liberal kind of stuff with me, because that's what's going to somehow preserve our

01:38:04

Christian witness, and it's going to save the United States, its Christian foundations and whatever.

01:38:10

And now to hear him be like, well, throw in the towel. It's so frustrating and aggravating. I can't even tell you.

01:38:15

Maybe this is the part of the podcast where my... Maybe this is my unsanctified self, but I actually do believe this is righteous indignation too.

01:38:22

This is wrong. People like this shouldn't be leading. And it just disgusts me. It just disgusts me.

01:38:28

All right. Now that you know how I... Tell me how you really feel about Lincoln Duncan. Well, he advocates for certain ideals and excludes other people that don't advocate for those ideals rather than actually influencing the way we operate as a commonwealth, as a nation, as a republic.

01:38:46

Did you catch that? He said that the purpose, the whole Christian nationalist movement is about excluding certain

01:38:53

Christians from, I guess, the cool kids club, the insiders. So it's not about actually doing anything serious in the political realm.

01:39:00

It's about drawing lines in the church, which honestly puts it in the worst possible light, because you're looking at it now as just a divisive movement coming into the church.

01:39:12

And that's how pastors are going to target it. If you're part of that Christian nationalist thing, which, according to the media, that just means you believe rights come from God, you're part of a divisive movement.

01:39:24

Sick stuff. Sick stuff. I didn't say any of that about Jesse Johnson or Mark Dever, if you notice.

01:39:32

The fire's for Duncan on this one, guys. Just the way it is. Christ's kingdom advances by its servants dying.

01:39:41

The kingdoms of this world advance by killing or threatening to kill the power of the sword, the opponent.

01:39:47

So the question is, how are opponents and opposition opposing views dealt with?

01:39:53

And for us, we seek to persuade. We seek to exemplify godliness.

01:39:59

We seek to pray for people, be willing to lay down our lives. The government uses the sword. It's what it's designed to do.

01:40:05

So I'm uncomfortable with the marrying of those two together. Okay. So there's a good question that's actually asked after this, kind of.

01:40:12

But this is Andy Davis. Actually, I was a member of Andy Davis' church for like one semester, and it's in Durham.

01:40:18

And it kind of saddens me to see him on the Gospel Coalition panel. I'm not going to lie. More I could say about that.

01:40:24

It's just, I don't know. I don't want to. But it just saddens me that he's still part of this Gospel Coalition stuff.

01:40:31

But there he is saying that he doesn't like the wedding or the bringing together of church and state because there's this,

01:40:42

I guess, element of force and power and advancing the kingdom of God in ways that we're not supposed to.

01:40:48

The we there is key. The we as Christians. We as Christians are supposed to advance the kingdom of God through not the sword, but through persuasion and the word of God and witnessing and that kind of thing.

01:41:07

So he's saying that once we wed that with the state, what you get is a trying to advance the kingdom through the sword, kind of like Islam, right?

01:41:19

So here's the follow up question, which I think is actually pretty good. It doesn't help me much if I'm a Christian who's running for office or who's on the school board or who's on the city council.

01:41:26

So I think that's where the question gets interesting to me is there's a lot of people in our churches that can keep those two worlds relatively separate, but there are many who can't.

01:41:32

And so that's where it becomes interesting is what taking that a step further,

01:41:38

Andy, what would you say to someone who does have a responsibility to instantiate public policy in some way?

01:41:44

Or I could say, or vote. It's all of us. It's not just those in the public realm because of the way that we don't have a king that's just making decrees.

01:41:54

We have a participation in this. So what do we do in an election year, right?

01:41:59

You could say that, I mean, this is a great argument for not voting at all. You could frame it that way if you wanted to.

01:42:06

So this is a great, great question. It's a challenge. I mean, we have a church member that's gone on to a circuit

01:42:14

Supreme Court track. He's heading perhaps toward very high level, maybe even Supreme Court ultimately has a desire to do that.

01:42:21

And he's going to be rendering verdicts on cases based out of his Christian convictions. But he also knows that the surrounding culture doesn't support that.

01:42:28

So it's challenging. That's the salt and light aspect. And so you argue, you defend, you put your views forward, but we're going to get, we're seeing increasingly outvoted.

01:42:39

And the thing that's hard with the LGBT. Now think about this. This guy, I don't know who he is, but he's going to be in the civil realm.

01:42:46

He's going to be wielding the sword, at least partially. That's going to be his role. He's part of the magisterium, right?

01:42:53

So suddenly now it's challenging. It's okay, but he's falling back on, we're supposed to reason with people.

01:42:59

We're supposed to argue like, this is not a well thought out public theology at all.

01:43:06

In my opinion, this is a, not like seeing that you have a role for the government in Romans 13 and seeing that you have a role for the church and then not knowing what to do with either one.

01:43:21

If you have a Christian who like, this is the thing, like Christians wear multiple hats.

01:43:27

We're not just in the church. We also have families and businesses and we have roles in civil society.

01:43:34

So because of that, it's perfectly fine. There's no challenge in it.

01:43:39

It's not challenging in like, in the sense of like, what do we do as Christians? I don't know. It's challenging because we have these competing things.

01:43:45

There's a tension, like Jesse Johnson said about the border and about our love for, there's no tension. There's no challenge.

01:43:51

Not like the way they're saying it. It's actually pretty simple. You just follow God's law. You apply it to the best.

01:43:56

That might be the challenge is applying it, but the challenge isn't knowing whether or not you're supposed to use the sword.

01:44:02

And I'm taking this position that uses the sword. And I know I'm not really called to do that because I'm supposed to not use the sword as a

01:44:08

Christian. No, you are, you are. If you're in the government, you are. And if you're, so this is, this tension, this, like, we need this balance.

01:44:19

We need this, we have this challenge in front of us. That's the thing that has driven me nuts for decades about the reformed evangelical world is they don't have a developed public theology on these things.

01:44:30

They, it's like, they haven't thought through them super deeply and they fall back into sort of this Anabaptist.

01:44:36

I don't know what else to call it, but this sort of view of like, there's the church and the church is only here looking in on the world.

01:44:43

I actually brought this up last podcast, talking about John MacArthur a bit. And I talked about his fundamentalism and some people, by the way, had some questions about that.

01:44:51

And I'll just say briefly, like, I think, yeah, fundamental, we're actually having a fundamentals conference, getting back to the fundamentals in October.

01:44:59

I am totally in favor of theological fundamentalism, but there was a weird culture that kind of developed around it over the course of decades that had this weird separatism and legalism and rigidity and everything was kind of black and white.

01:45:12

And I said, you know, when John MacArthur says things like Jerry Falwell was using the kingdom of darkness to advance

01:45:19

Christianity. That's I said, I think that's like the fundamentalism. That's like the black and white. Like there's no neutrality with politics.

01:45:25

It can't just be used by either side necessarily. Like it is bad in and of itself. Like there's a label assigned to everything and this is bad.

01:45:34

And so MacArthur is kind of inconsistent with this. So are most people, because you can't live in the world completely with this.

01:45:40

But like, but he said that. So that's my conclusion. It's not just his eschatology. It's probably more, you know, it's more of that.

01:45:48

But he had the same thing kind of going on, that there's this like, there's this tension.

01:45:55

And I look at it, you know, discussions like this as well with Andy Davis, First Baptist Durham, he's kind of bringing the same kind of like there's this tension, this like, we don't really know.

01:46:08

It just takes a lot of wisdom because like we don't, it's like if only there was a guide, if only there was a book or something, right?

01:46:14

If only there was a guide to show us how to interact in the political, public, social realm and as Christians.

01:46:22

Well, there is. It's like we just have to make the distinctions that it makes. It gives the government the sword, right?

01:46:28

Individual Christians can participate in that. You can be a good soldier even in, you know, for Rome. We have a whole

01:46:35

Old Testament that talks a lot about government. And yeah, you know, don't think that you're advancing, like the way that Jesus's kingdom advances is through a spiritual power.

01:46:45

In other words, you can do all the political things you want and you're not guaranteed that people get saved. But that gets back to Stephen Wolf's point about that's why it's the government can create these conditions, but it cannot, it cannot save people.

01:47:01

It doesn't have that ministry. So there's these separate spheres and those spheres have different responsibilities, but Christians can inhabit both of them.

01:47:10

And it's not like you just have the church, like I said, out here, this sort of Anabaptist view that I see with a lot of these guys.

01:47:16

And it's so separate, like the, you know, here's earthly existence in the temporal world. There's also a sense in which the church is actually here.

01:47:24

It's part of culture. It affects culture itself too. It's unavoidable.

01:47:29

You walk into a church, you walk into like, you know, a church like Grace Community Church in California. It's like walking into the 1950s a little bit, like people are wearing, you know, suits and the music is from, a lot of it's from that era and the instrumentation and just the style.

01:47:46

And so there's a certain culture, sort of fundamentalist culture from that era.

01:47:53

You walk into, you know, an old Anglican church, you might feel like you're in the medieval times and a lot of like, or a

01:48:00

Lutheran church and a lot of the liturgy and everything, it's because in a certain way, the church, the visible church is also part of a culture.

01:48:13

And we have a hard time with that. The Anabaptists were the ones who make it so separate. And I think we need to get back to kind of like our, our

01:48:20

Protestant roots, the mainstream Protestant roots, which are that, yes, the church, there's a, there's an invisible church.

01:48:26

There's also a visible church. All right. We're going like almost two hours here.

01:48:32

So I got to lay on this plane guys. I think we got like one or two more. Aspect and other things is it's, it seems to be militarized almost.

01:48:39

And, you know, you lose your job if you don't sign up with these things. And that's the challenge. Think about our

01:48:45

Christian view of how we relate to the civil magistrate. Think about Christian liberty. And then think about how do we do this in a pluralistic society?

01:48:53

Because a lot of the material that we look back to from our heroes is written from a time when it was not a pluralistic society.

01:49:01

There was an established church. And that's a different dynamic for how you tell a

01:49:07

Christian how to engage. You were talking about China. I had the same thought in the early 1990s.

01:49:12

I'm teaching in Jackson. I had these guys that are very influenced by Christian reconstructionism.

01:49:18

They're, you know, they're quoting Greg Bonson that every Christian must personally advocate for the application of the civil laws of Moses to the nation state.

01:49:26

And I'm thinking, I'm looking out in my class and I'm seeing a Chinese student. And I'm going, okay, even if he wanted to do that, how does he do that?

01:49:35

You know, and so it's good to realize that Christians around the world are in very, very different political situations.

01:49:42

And they've got different calculations to make in those different political situations. Prudential. So I would just say that doesn't mean that you don't, like, this is, again, the perfect being the enemy of the good.

01:49:56

All right, you can't do everything. You're in San Francisco, right? You're not in Alabama, rural

01:50:01

Alabama. You're in San Francisco. How do you do this there? Well, there's a lot of prerequisites that have to happen before you get to that point.

01:50:08

It doesn't mean, though, that you shouldn't want to get to that point or you shouldn't be open to God using you to get to that point.

01:50:15

But it just means that, yeah, you may like your involvement may be more like you may not be able to accomplish all the things that you would like to accomplish.

01:50:24

It may mean you only serve one term. It may mean you don't get elected. It may mean most of your time is going to be spent doing more basic things like evangelizing and trying to make sure that there's a base to support a

01:50:37

Christian candidate and that kind of thing. It may be the case, but that doesn't change like what like the goal, like what should be people should be striving for.

01:50:47

And that's the point. So you could certainly teach a Chinese student that this is I this is the ideal to shoot for doesn't mean you're always going to hit it.

01:50:57

And I would submit that even in the best Christian, quote, unquote, society, this side of heaven, you will never hit completely the ideal.

01:51:05

And there's going to be particulars, though, in different regions that make that, as he said, he's right about this, that do make you have to make different calculations.

01:51:14

But it doesn't mean you stop teaching or you just ignore that. You know, it's like, again,

01:51:19

I keep using the family analogy because I think it fits like family, nation, you know, nations kind of arise from families.

01:51:28

You have a family and, you know, you don't say that. Well, you know, this family, this is family is a mess and you got saved late in life and your wife's not

01:51:37

Christian. Let's say if you're a husband and your kids aren't Christian. So, you know, why even teach about family life and what the

01:51:43

Bible has? Like, what is that? You should know what God has to say. Yeah, you're probably not going to hit it, but you should know what

01:51:50

God has to say about it. All right, last clip. Decision making that has to be a part of democracy, right?

01:51:57

Because so much of how we govern is it's in a context of compromise.

01:52:03

You have to figure out, can I get, can I coalesce around a particular program to get enough votes to win a vote?

01:52:10

You have to win in democracy in order to be able to govern. And that means that people are, they can throw rocks.

01:52:17

How could you have compromised with that? Could you have made alliances with them? You're a compromising, liver -lilied coward.

01:52:24

But if you don't construct coalitions in a democracy, you can't govern. So it's messier in a democracy,

01:52:32

I think. In some ways, it's cleaner when you're dealing with an evil dictator. But when we're the government, you have to build coalitions to operate in that democracy.

01:52:43

Yeah, I mean, obviously, right? I don't know that there's anything earth -shattering in that, but that's not against Christian participation in government.

01:52:58

It just means that in some situations, you have to have co -belligerence. I'm fine being a co -belligerent with Roman Catholics on pro -life, let's say, if they're actually going to push for that, or anti -abortion.

01:53:09

If they're going to push for that, I'm fine being like, hey, we'll vote the same way. If we can share certain resources, that's fine.

01:53:16

That's not the church sharing resources. That's me as a Christian and maybe Christian organizations or organizations for Christians to belong to sharing some resources.

01:53:24

We don't endorse, keep those doctrinal lines, but that you're not blending or you're not making those doctrinal lines, erasing them just by being co -belligerent.

01:53:37

So yeah, of course. And I don't think anyone's against that. But it's brought up as like, this would be against Christian nationalism or something.

01:53:44

Well, yeah. Ultimately, the goal is to not have that, but you have to be prudent where you're at.

01:53:51

And if where you're at is, we got several steps before you can have Stephen Wolf's conception of the

01:53:58

Christian prince or whatever. Then you got to just see, this is where I live.

01:54:04

I'm in step B, and I'm not at step C yet. And so these aren't arguments against it.

01:54:11

That's kind of my thing. It's just, there aren't arguments against it. And that's it. That's the

01:54:16

Gospel Coalition. That's with a caveat at a, with the special caveat,

01:54:25

Shepherd's Conference, assuming that was kind of the same presentation. And then of course, Nine Marks Ministries.

01:54:31

Want to share with you, if I can pull it up here, just in closing, where I'm going to be.

01:54:39

See here. I think I have the technology. I think we can bring this up.

01:54:49

So yes. Yeah, not that. This, speaking engagement.

01:54:56

So I just want to let everyone know, I will be in Boise, Idaho, April 27th through 28th for the Stand Firm Conference. And May 4th through 5th,

01:55:02

I'll be in St. Croix, Wisconsin, St. Croix Falls, Be Not Conformed Conference. And then the retreat registration for the men's retreat,

01:55:09

September 27th through 29th in Speculator, New York, Camp of the Woods is open. The Fundamentals Conference.

01:55:14

You can actually go to fundamentalsconference .com. That's fundamentalsconference .com. And we might add another speaker to this.

01:55:23

But we got Dr. Richard Vargas, who's the head of the IFCA. And then I'll be there.

01:55:28

AD will be there. My dad will be there. But we have a few pictures and you can register.

01:55:34

It's for single occupancy for the weekend. And this is all your meals included. They're very, it's a very nice facility, in my opinion.

01:55:42

$310. That's if you just want to be alone. For double occupancy, $255. And if you are willing to share with three or four, two or three other people, $220.

01:55:52

So the price kind of is tiered that way. In the past, I've just kind of tried to give you the cheapest price.

01:55:58

And this time, I've just, I've given the availability. If you want to pay more and you want to be alone, you have that ability.

01:56:04

So check it out. We have a great time and looking forward to seeing you there.

01:56:09

If you're a guy and you want to come. And if you're not sure if you're a guy, then you might want not like the conference.

01:56:18

I'm not sure. But maybe you actually need to come more if you're not sure about it. Anyway, that's the podcast today.

01:56:24

Hopefully that was helpful for some of you in thinking through these issues a little bit. You're going to hear this stuff during this election year,

01:56:30

I think ramped up even more. And just remember that God is sovereign. That's true.

01:56:36

He chooses the leaders, but he's also given you a unique role. You live in the United States. You have this unique ability to participate in choosing your candidates.

01:56:46

And not only that, but participating in campaigns and giving your money and all kinds of things running for office.

01:56:52

If you want to run for office, I mean, these are amazing things, amazing blessings we have. And so just keep those things in mind that as a

01:56:58

Christian, you can really bring stuff to the table that other people who aren't Christians, I mean, they're not going to bring.

01:57:04

Don't expect that the rulers are going to be good. If Christians just abandon that particular realm.

01:57:10

So that's my encouragement to you. And God's going to do what he's going to do.

01:57:16

But there have been times in history when people thought all was lost. And then all of a sudden things really turned around.

01:57:23

And I always bring up the defeats of the Ottoman Empire in the siege of Vienna and how people felt like this was it for Europe.

01:57:34

Islam was going to conquer Europe. And then last minute, General Sobyetsin comes with his winged Hussars and turns the tide of the battle.

01:57:43

And there's been many times like that in history where surprising things have happened. And so, hey, don't give up hope.

01:57:49

Don't give up faith. Our faith is ultimately in the Lord and the eternal things.

01:57:54

But he also guides us in the path that we have in this life. And we should fear no evil.

01:58:00

So that's my little pep talk. All right. God bless. And since that was so long, maybe we'll wait till next week to have more podcasts.