The Battle over Christian Culture

Hey, everyone, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am your host, John Harris, traveling right now on the road.

I'm in Tennessee visiting family. I was in Kentucky yesterday checking out the Ridge Runner community properties.

They're amazing, by the way, as far as the beauty, the fishing, the hunting, the farming. They are out in the middle of nowhere, though.

You've heard me talk about this before, RidgeRunnerUSA .com. I had Josh Abatoy from Ridge Runner talk about the great sort and how people are moving from blue areas to red areas.

This is a red area in Kentucky. I think it's going to take some homesteader types to really get this started, but encouraging time with Josh yesterday.

I'll share some of those pictures soon. It's cheap land. I think they might be on the precipice of something here because if you were in Raleigh 20 years ago, you would have said you'd wanted to invest in land.

If you were in Dallas 30 years ago, you would have wanted to invest in land. If you were in Knoxville 10 years ago, you would have wanted to invest in land.

Maybe the area outside of Berksville eventually will become that. I don't know.

I saw some new builds going in, but if it's going to happen, they're on the cusp of it right now. Positive stuff.

I wanted to see the properties that I'm talking about on the podcast because guess what? It's not worth it to have a sponsor if it's just going to benefit me.

I want to provide for you services and goods that will benefit you and give you leads that will help you.

For some of you, especially if you're working remotely, they have fiber -optic high -speed internet out in these rural areas now.

That might be the place. If you have a San Francisco salary, you can go live like a king in Kentucky. Not that that's the point of life, but living with a high -trust environment with like -minded people, that's attractive.

To be able to do it financially is certainly a positive in these economically hard times. RidgeRunnerUSA .com.

Check it out. I'll be talking more about it in the coming days. I wanted to weigh in on this issue of,

I'm going to call it pluralism versus Christianity in the public square. Different people are using different terms.

Some are saying we're just for the Constitution. They're against freedom of conscience and the

Constitution guarantees that. Some are trying to frame it like we're just orthodox believers who care about the gospel and these

Christian nationalists don't. There's all those sorts of ways. I think this has been under the surface for a while. The debate we're seeing in front of us right now, in Christianity, it's an in -house debate, but I think that this debate is really over principle pluralism, if you want to call it that, but just pluralism is what

I'm calling it, versus Christianity in the public square. There's so much to say.

I don't have enough time to say everything I want to say, but let me start here. I'm frustrated and I wanted to say,

I understand those of you who are frustrated because there's a lot of energy that's being sucked away from the fight that we're in because we're in a situation where everywhere you look,

Christianity is under assault. It's obvious. The very social fabric that we have is being unraveled right before our eyes.

I saw LinkedIn was yesterday, now has a filter where if you don't want white people, you can make sure that you turn on that filter for your job.

Down the road from me, just recently, they put in this mural. It's an apple country and yet it's a mural glorifying homosexuality.

This stuff is happening everywhere we look. The news cycles are so short, you can't even keep up with all of it. Our heads are spinning and yet we're going to take time to really fight against Christian nationalism apparently because that is one of the priorities.

That is, I think, not resonating with people. We understand that's ridiculous. Even if you were concerned about it, it doesn't even measure in the top 20 concerns that you have.

Right now, I think most of us feel this way, especially young men. We see the kind of lives that we're going to be living as we want to raise young families, as we want to be able to provide for a legacy.

We're looking around and we're saying, okay, what do we do? We see the deck is stacked against us.

We see that it's closing in and what are we going to do about this?

Well, it takes some creativity, takes some innovation. We're going to have to think outside the box. Thank goodness there's some people doing that.

Thank goodness Stephen Wolfe came around and wrote a book. I haven't taken the label Christian nationalist. There's even some things

I quibble about in the book, but guess what? In general, I'm thankful to Stephen. Doug Wilson just wrote a book that I haven't read yet.

It's sitting on my desk called Mere Christendom. And I'm looking forward to, as I get a chance, seeing what he's saying.

But my only point in bringing him up is to say he's someone who's trying to craft a positive vision.

I'm trying to craft a positive vision in the book that I'm writing right now. All of our visions are probably going to be a little different, but we're trying to meet a challenge.

And it's a challenge we all know is out there, right? Okay. Hopefully we're all on the same page now. Because of that,

I think most of us are confused by the attacks against Christian nationalism, quote unquote, and Stephen Wolfe in particular, because we look at him, even if we disagree, as some kind of an ally, that we can be in a big tent, we have the same forces to fight, we're on the same page, let's band together, right?

I'm not, at least I don't take the label theonomist. I think there's some things, that's for another episode, that I quibble with.

Though some people who call themselves general equity theonomists, I end up agreeing with most of what they say. So I don't know exactly where, and I've read all this,

I've read Greg Bonds, and I've read the stuff on it. But I'm just using this as one example.

I'm not necessarily in that camp. Guess what though? I can work with theonomists. I can work with them, why not?

They have the same basic enemy. And one of the things I want you to think about as we go through this is,

God is a God of order. The devil comes to seek, kill, or destroy. When you see misrepresentations, attributing false motives, low blows, the vitriol that we've seen on Twitter over the last week.

When you see that kind of stuff, and it's causing confusion, ask yourself this, is this from God?

When Christians are at each other's throats, is that from God? And from where I sit, it's not the quote -unquote

Christian nationalists, or the people in favor of cultural Christianity, or Christianity in the public square that have started this level of vitriol.

It was an attack on them, from people who seem to be more in favor of a secularism of some kind.

And it's very discouraging to see this. It's frustrating. But I think even if the debate itself is not as important,

I mean, compared to the other things we should be concerned about, the division is. The division that's happening before our eyes will affect ministries, where you go to conferences, where you give your money, all of that stuff is going to be affected by this.

And so we need to talk about it. And I'm going to try to bring as much clarity to this as I possibly can, without going through all the tweets, without going through,

I'm not going to drag you through the mud. I want to just give you some categories to help you think through this.

That's my goal. And I think it'll help you. It'll maybe give you more of an assurance in your own beliefs.

And I think on the other side of this, hopefully you'll be somewhat encouraged. And that's my goal.

So yeah, some of this might sound discouraging at first, but I really want to encourage you. I want to build up to something here. So I see opportunity.

There is a desperation in the fight against Stephen Wolfe right now. The pattern has been, over the last week,

Stephen Wolfe says something that's 100 % true, and it is used to just smear him all over the place.

And I know because I've talked to young men, that people are, young men in particular, feel like they can't sometimes even talk to their pastors about what they're really feeling.

The rage they might have about how they've been treated at their jobs or how, all the things that we've seen, the war on Christianity, but it's also a war on, you know, men and white people and Americans and it just, that whole thing has discouraged people and they want answers.

They want to do something about it. And some of them feel like they can't even say truth. They can't even say basic facts.

They can't even admit or vocalize that there's, the deck is stacked against them, that they've been wronged in some way.

Like there's no one to take their, their, their plight. I mean, they go to like Donald Trump. That's, that's, you want to know why

Donald Trump gets the popularity he gets is because he'll say that kind of stuff. He'll just, he'll say that, that stuff that gets him in trouble.

And Stephen does the same thing. Stephen says stuff, it's true, and then everyone loses their mind. That's my read on it.

Because if we were going to operate in a way that I think sought to give the

Christian benefit of the doubt and accurately read, we wouldn't be doing this with what Stephen said.

And for those who don't know, Stephen, there's really two main things that Stephen said, and I think there's a few different tweets, but one of them has to do with him saying that white evangelicals are a bulwark or the lone bull, whatever he said, lone bulwark against moral insanity because of their voting pattern.

And then the other one was regarding cultural Christianity and how all you need is a minority, a strong -willed minority to enforce

Christian laws. And these statements have made people lose their minds, both of them.

So I don't know if it's like Trump derangement syndrome, Stephen Wolf derangement syndrome, but like there's something to this.

And I don't see the vitriol coming from Stephen. I don't see at least Stephen being the one to instigate this.

This is the kind of thing though, when you see people like Stephen being treated this way, someone who's young, who's bright, who has creativity and is trying to craft something to help all

Christians, and he's shut down from, and they try to gatekeep him out. That is the reason that I think a lot of young men are going places like Eastern Orthodoxy, where they think it's more stable, where they think it's not reinventing itself every 10 years.

It's not losing its mind over politically incorrect things. And there's an attraction there.

And I think that's not right. Obviously, I argue against that, but I do think it's understandable.

And young men are discouraged, and they're discouraged when they see this kind of attitude. And I want to point out some things.

This attack on cultural Christianity more broadly, Stephen Wolf in particular, is something that I've noticed the people who are attacking it happen to benefit from.

Most of them live in areas like Iowa, like Georgia, like North Carolina, like Texas.

The people attacking Christian nationalism the hardest tend to be in areas that, or they've spent most of their life in areas that are in the

Bible Belt. That's an odd thing if you think about it. And some of those, there are people outside the

Bible Belt who may feel similarly, but I wonder how much experience they've had. Some might have, but I wonder how much experience most of them at least have had going between the two regions.

I have a lot of that. I grew up in New York primarily, but I would go down south almost every year to Mississippi for family reunions.

And guess what? One of the big differences was Christianity, and it was ingrained in everything. My wife and I were in commenting as we were driving down to Tennessee that we just traded in the billboards and the smut for crosses and Jesus saves signs.

I mean, it's ingrained. The hierarchy's ingrained. Yes sir, yes ma 'am. Pastors are respected in the community.

Foul language is not heard as much. I mean, there's all kinds of things. And it doesn't mean the

South is perfect, the South is the best, the Bible Belt is the best, the Midwest is. No, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that at all.

I'm saying every society is imperfect. Every society has sin. Every society has problems. There's not one.

Just like people aren't perfect. But guess what? The South and to some extent the

Midwest, they've been able to retain something that in other regions has not been retained.

They've been able to retain a Christianity as a default setting in the culture. It doesn't mean everyone's a Christian. It just means that they still have a respect for it, and it crafts even some of the laws.

Some places still have blue laws. And I think that's somewhat of a blessing. Like, I think we do with a little more of that, right?

Am I weird for that? Am I against the gospel? Am I all the things that are being said about Christian nationalists because I think cultural

Christianity is great? I don't have the assumption that it's going to save you. Why does the assumption have to be it must lead directly to salvation or else we don't need to throw it out?

I mean, cultural Christianity supports the first and the third use of the law, convicting of sin.

Paul said he wouldn't know sin without the law. That was a schoolmaster to bring him to repentance. So cultural

Christianity lets you know that there's a standard and you're violating it. The other thing is it prevents society from going to the levels of depravity it would normally go to had it its way.

So people who are bad don't do bad things because of consequences. Those consequences come from cultural

Christianity in the regions I'm talking about. And so this is an important thing.

It doesn't fulfill the Great Commission. It's not meant to be. It's not Christians being salt and light to their neighbors because there's a

Christian law or something. What it does, though, is it reinforces the moral code.

So people, let's say in the South, I know this because I have a lot of relatives in Mississippi who some of them might think they're

Christians who aren't and some of them are Christians. But if you, in either case, bring up a sinful thing, they will at least admit that's sinful.

They know that there's a standard out there. In New York, good luck. Good luck trying to even convince people that their moral behavior is somehow sinful.

They don't think. They're self -justified. You know why? Because they live outside of cultural Christianity. So do not tell me that cultural

Christianity is not positive or not important. Of course it is. That's like saying, you know, we can't have a

Christian family or a Christian business or Christian anything unless 100 % of everyone is saved and we should never enforce

Christian laws because we might violate freedom of conscience or something. That's the level at which we're thinking here and no one would take that to the family.

Of course, when you have a mom and dad who are Christians or go to church, operate in a

Christian way, as soon as they have a baby, that baby's not a Christian yet. Even for the Presbyterians, right?

And Orthodox Presbyterians don't believe that anyway. But like, or the Lutherans, you know, you haven't baptized the baby yet.

That baby's not a Christian. And does that mean the family's all of a sudden, there's an identity crisis? They're not a

Christian family anymore? No, of course not. We know what we mean when we talk about a Christian family.

This is challenging our intelligence to even have this discussion, but we need to. So I want to just give you my bio.

I grew up making the contrast and I saw something very superior. Not everything was superior, but I saw something very superior about cultural

Christianity. Now, the thing that's not superior is sometimes, you know, you get the impression that maybe you are a

Christian because you live in this culture or something, and that's what makes you a Christian. And so, yeah, bad theology, of course, that stuff is unavoidable in this world, but that's not the issue when it comes to cultural

Christianity. The issue is an ethical one. Should the mores of society, should the laws of society be shaped by Christianity?

That's the only question. And the answer is yes. Any Christian should say yes. Some are not. Some are not though, and they're attacking people who do.

Christian nationalism, I think, became the term that was a young man's rallying point for this, for cultural

Christianity. Young men who knew, Christian men, who knew the deck was stacked against them, wanted to return to a cultural

Christianity, and they're finding in this term, Christian nationalism, a rallying point.

And if you can destroy the rallying point, you can destroy the movement. We've seen the left do this over and over with destroying symbols and terms and changing definitions and smearing and misrepresenting and attributing false motives.

And we're seeing the same play happen against Christian nationalists right now. Instead of encouraging these young men, instead of trying to bring them into your side to help them understand, instead of having good faith discussions publicly, what's happened is it's been ready, shoot, fire.

Let's throw bombs online. And I've seen guys from G3 doing this kind of thing and other ministries that have platforms.

Guys that I didn't expect it from. Guys, some of them I had some respect for, and now I'm wondering what is going on.

It's a tactic. It seems like a gatekeeping tactic to shut these guys out when we should be kind of on the same team going for a lot of the same goals.

And we should be trying to have some sort of a unity against the tidal wave of secularism and depravity that's coming against us.

That's what I think. But that's not how some of these men have chosen to go. And, you know, there's probably like an anti -Christian national statement in the works or something.

I mean, I don't know what explains all this. But these are tactics I see from the left. The left tends to muddy the waters, right?

Josh Bice has been muddying the waters for a week and a half at least, if not longer. You guys must believe, some of you must believe that we should have a

Protestant pope or, you know, it's integralism. It's integralism, which is a Roman. I've read a lot about integralism now.

Roman Catholic social teaching. It's not integralism. There might be some parallels, but it's not. We'll talk about that more in another episode.

It's, you know, you're going to, I guess, implying you're going to jail people or, you know, you're going to violate freedom of conscience somehow, and that's going to lead to tyranny.

And all this stuff that, like, you're not getting it from Stephen Wolf's book. Like, where is this coming from?

But it's just, it's throwing these things out there and projecting motives, like Christian nationalists are after power.

Really? Because they'd be ingratiating themselves, I would think, to the people who are attacking them right now, because they're the ones that have platforms.

Stephen Wolf is the biggest name you can come up with. Maybe Andrew Torba. Like, we don't have big names.

The American Reformer guys. I mean, Nate Fisher, Josh Abattoy.

Is it Jeff Wright? Who are we talking about here? A .D. Robles? Joel Webben? These aren't people with big, big ministries or organizations.

But yet, some people are implying that they're after power, and they aggressively are, you know, trying to seize it.

And one of the ways that this is done, the left does this too, is I've heard some people get really annoyed, really annoyed at anon accounts.

I was listening, I think it was last week, to a James White podcast where he was getting really annoyed at a certain, like, anonymous account who was going after him.

And that can be annoying. It really can. But one of the things we have to be careful of is, that doesn't mean the movement or the identifiable figures who are trying to support a

Christian culture are somehow represented by these anons. Or, I mean, every side is going to have anons and anonymous accounts using pseudonyms.

And so that's just unavoidable. And some of them might not behave right. But we can't just use that as the example.

When I try to use examples on this podcast, I'm not going to... There's a reason I don't go and talk about the anonymous accounts who have said things about me or said things about this issue.

I want to try to point you to the leaders. Here's what the leaders are saying. Here's what people that have a platform are saying. And let's rightly represent them, right?

So it's odd for me to see what's going on right now. When the waters are getting muddied, motives are being projected, and there's an attempt to gatekeep by painting those without a platform as if they're representative of the movement or something.

It's very odd. It's what I saw the social justice guys doing. And now I'm seeing it with people who didn't go quite woke, at least mostly.

I think we're all a little woke. But we're all kind of a little woke after 2020. But these guys are the guys that resisted that.

That are somehow now just implementing some of these same smears. And some people are going after Stephen for alleged racism and stuff.

It's just, I feel like I'm reliving something that I saw a few years ago.

So there's been some... Let me just tell you some of the things that I thought were crazy that I've seen over the last week. I'm not going to give you the names of everyone behind some of these things.

But these are some of the statements that were made from bigger name accounts, we'll say. Scott O 'Neill is one of them.

And by the way, I should say this before I even read some of these. I reached out to Scott O 'Neill from G3 Ministries, Vice President of G3, and asked him if he'd be on the show with me and William Wolfe.

Because William Wolfe is a Baptist and takes the term Christian nationalism for himself. Scott is obviously opposed.

And let's have a good faith discussion. And Scott's response was possibly after he publishes and clarifies.

And so he published an article today, which I read. I don't know what the reaction is online.

But after I read it, I was thinking, this is not going to satisfy anyone. So that's probably what's happening right now.

But he wasn't comfortable coming on the show yet. I'm being pretty transparent here. I don't usually do this with email correspondents.

But he said that's a possibility. And so please pray for that. I'm hoping for that, that we could have a good, respectful discussion, an adult and a mature discussion.

But some of the things that he said have just not been helpful. Sarcastically asking if Biden's recent statement that our nation's children are all our children is

Christian nationalism. What? Implying that if you attempt to enforce more than the second table of the law, you're disobeying

God and creating a nominal Christianity that hinders the Great Commission. That's a serious charge. You know, and on that point,

Israel's laws were obviously beyond the second table of the law. We're told in Isaiah, there's supposed to be a light to the nations.

Queen of Sheba came, right, to copy the pattern of Israel. Not being a covenant community in every way, not, there's differences, but there's universal application of the moral standards of Israel.

Not all the laws, the ceremonial, some of the civic laws that were unique to Jewish identity, but the other laws, yeah.

I mean, this is, I don't know, to me, this is what all Christians, whether you're a theonomist or not, would readily agree to,

I would think. But now it seems like it's being implied, if you believe that, that you're somehow challenging the gospel.

To attempt to consider a nation as a

Christian to a degree that all its citizens are pressed to abide by Christian laws would have negative consequences, like outlawing false teaching, wanting a

Christian prince to enforce God's law. So this is kind of like, we're going to get totalitarianism, guys. This is terrible.

We can't do this. And I just want to put that on the shelf for a moment and just say this. I want to argue against this, but it's so unimportant to me.

The reason is, guys, how close are we to getting totalitarianism of a Christian variety in this country?

Like, you know, a Christian nationalist who's going to be the dictator and force, supposedly, even though I can't find this in the writings that I, the prominent writings on Christian nationals, and they're supposedly going to violate freedom of conscience and, you know, round up all the, you know, the

Baptists, if they're Presbyterian or something, and put them in prison. How close are we to that?

Yeah, right. We're not even, it's not even a thought. It's just not even a thought. I think pagans would laugh at this kind of a discussion because it's like, we have to be able, we have to craft a vision, but we have to be able to get this off the floor.

This is not, even if you disagree with Christian nationalism or Christian culture or whatever, we're not, you can't ring the bell and say it's a danger.

You know, we're at alert when we're this far. We're so far from that.

That's my pragmatic side, I guess. I'm just like, why? Why? Like there's 10 things that I can think about that are more important than this.

But anyway, that's, some people find this important. I don't know.

Some of these statements are so goofy. I'm just going to skip over them to be honest with you because it's just not worth it. I don't want to drag you through everything.

Stephen's statement about white evangelicals being a bulwark against moral degeneracy.

We've talked about that already a little bit, but I wanted to just mention too, you know, Thomas Kidd writing for the

Gospel Coalition made a very similar point. Tim Keller talks about white evangelicals voting.

Chocolate Knox, who criticized Stephen's statement, quotes John Knox in his own way and says, give me the black church or I die.

James White, I've listened to James White. I used to listen to James White, I guess, for a long time. He would talk about the theological weaknesses of the black church.

And he'd say that, the black church. And now it's like, I don't know if it's because Stephen Wolf is the

Christian nationalist guy, but it's like he says these obvious things on a social political level that now are like creating such a backlash.

And, you know, it's interesting to me just because ethnic categories in scripture, including terms like Gentiles that include various ethnic categories that share something in common are frequently used.

You can't even read the Bible without that. And now we're supposed to, because of the unity in Christ we have, which we do, on a spiritual level, we're supposed to just kind of assume,

I guess, that like anyone who would bring up a distinction, socially speaking or politically speaking, between groups of people like white people or white evangelicals in this case is somehow, and the insinuation is they're being racially insensitive, which of course kills your reputation in this particular context of society.

So you need to be very careful before you start slinging that around, but it's being slung around without any care against Stephen.

It just, it boggles my mind. But is it because of the Christian nationalism thing? Is it because we're in the middle of this debate?

And this is just, you know, people were retweeting it saying, people with platforms saying, this just shows what

Christian nationalism is really about. And it's like, no, no, it doesn't.

And the spin you're putting on it is just off -putting. It's so cringy and cheesy, to be honest.

The other statement Stephen made was, you don't need to wait for a revival to Christianize the institutions when a strong -willed and resolute minority is enough.

And he's absolutely right. Think of the British empire. They would go into areas, they were a strong -willed and resolute minority, and they would

Christianize in some ways the cultures there. You have in India, the Muslims and the Hindus were able to live in peace until the

British moved out, and then a million Muslims died trying to flee the Hindus. This is just the story of the

British empire. It's the story of America too, though. I would say for most of American history, if not all of it, you'd never had a majority that were

Christians, true born -again believers. You had people who took

Christianity seriously, but actually born -again believers, not many. And yet, by the time the constitution was ratified, nine of the 13 states had official state religions.

Nine of 13. That's quite a bit. And just state churches. Some of the people who are combating this saying, well, we're for the constitution, therefore we have to be against Christian nationalism or cultural

Christianity because we're for freedom of conscience. They're forgetting that that was a arrangement made for a federal republic, not as a template to be copied by local and state municipalities.

It wasn't at the time. And even in the constitution, the importing the

British common law that they all would have assumed, the oath of office taken upon the Bible, which the first one was by George Washington, is an admission of a system of rewards and punishments that there's an accountability beyond the highest office in the land that means you're serving

God. I don't know, I'm just frustrated because it's so ingrained in our society,

Christianity. And yet, for much of it, I'm sure there wasn't a majority who were actually born -again

Christians. Now, what explains some of this attack? I think some are jumping on the bandwagon against Stephen.

I think some are probably doing a gatekeeping technique. I read a book years ago about Jews in concentration camps and how the ones who were given charge of work details by the

Nazis would treat the Jews under them worse than the Nazis would in some cases, which is weird.

It made me mad. I'm like, why would you side with the Nazis against your own people? And the reason is, is because, well, you wanted the better food.

You wanted the better, you know, you're still treated like an animal, but at least you got more privileges. And I wonder, that's an extreme example, but I'm wondering if a dynamic like that is working out because I saw this with the woke stuff, ingratiate ourselves to leftists.

And if we do that, then we'll be closer to the power and they'll leave us alone. Well, proverbial blood of the lamb on our doorpost and the angel of death, the woke angel of death will pass over.

I'm wondering if something similar is happening now, that there's going to be a backlash against Christian nationalism. And so let's separate ourselves.

Let's condemn it. Let's gatekeep against it. Let's disassociate in any way we possibly can.

So that's another motive, I think, that might be at play with some. How many of these guys critiquing cultural

Christianity are just cushioned by it? They live in areas that they just, there's ignorance there. There's ignorance there.

They don't know what they're criticizing. That's part of it, possibly, to some extent. And the net result of all of this is the breakdown of trust.

Like, for example, Canon Press even got involved in this to some extent when they,

Stephen Wolfe's own publisher started mocking Stephen, essentially, posting things against Stephen.

Who wants to publish with Canon Press now? This is how they treat their author. That's one of the things that I think, and that's just one example of many, but that's one of the things that I think people aren't taking into account.

There's trust that's being broken when we treat other brothers and sisters in these ways. I think we can be able to take jokes.

I think we can be able to laugh with each other. Some banter is even healthy.

But this isn't that. That's not what we're seeing against Stephen. This isn't healthy banter. This isn't good faith.

This isn't, I love you, but I'm gonna mock you a little bit. This isn't, I'm gonna disagree with you in a humorous way.

This is, you're an evil person. And some of the people involved in this might not even think that's what they're doing, but that's what they're playing into.

That's exactly what they're playing into. You're an evil person. You're basically a

Christofascist. Well, they're not gonna use that term. That's what the left is gonna use in the media, though. And they're giving the left everything they need to do that.

You're basically, you're an authoritarian. You want to subjugate all of us because you're power hungry.

And you're racist. And I mean, this is the accusation. This is what's the narrative being formed by all these things that are being said against someone like Stephen.

And all of it is to maintain some kind of a secularism. That's the curious thing to me.

All of this is in defense of what? The status quo. Some kind of secular, well, what's the vision?

What's the positive vision? People need one. And if Christian nationalism is the only one out there, guess what?

Young men are gonna rally to it, especially. But everyone is in Christianity. And the gatekeeping will not work.

I got news for you. If you guys with these big platforms wanna keep those big platforms and want people to be interested in what you have to say, you don't do it by dividing like this, by smearing, by breaking trust, by low blows, by ready, shoot, aim.

You don't. You do it by having actual reasoned adult conversations and debates if necessary.

But you try to win people to your side. And if you have no positive vision, you have no side to win them to.

Now, I think of what

I've grown up with and what my parents have grown up with and my grandparents. Christianity fading with each generation, but always having some kind of a moral compass.

Even when I was young, when I was a kid, what Bill Clinton did was wrong. Why? Because we have a culture that was informed by Christianity.

Now it's not. Now we see what even the Republican presidential nominee does is not a big deal, right?

The moral degeneracy is just off the charts. And this is what we've...

And so what do you wanna conserve? Do you wanna conserve 1990? Do you wanna conserve 1950? Should we go back to 1850?

Should we go back to... So no, there was slavery back then. Where is it that you want to... What's the vision?

What's the positive vision? And I think

Trump had a bit of a positive vision with the whole make America great again. People kind of knew what he meant by that.

They knew it used to be great in my lifetime even. Like I used to remember there was a great America. Yeah, the

Cold War era maybe. Like that was pretty great. Like we were doing stuff. We were united. We were better people.

And man, we don't seem great anymore. He crafted a positive vision. You have to craft a positive vision.

Even if it's general, you have to have one. What are the G3 guys? What's their positive vision?

That's an honest question. What is it? What are you gonna call it? Is it stay tuned?

We're gonna come up with something but we have to somehow destroy cultural

Christianity and Christian nationalism before we do that. I don't know. I'm hoping, I'm really hoping that one of those guys,

Scott in particular would be willing to come on the program and answer some of these questions. But that's the problem that they face.

And they will be irrelevant if they don't have anything. And I'm not saying just about G3. This is a number of the people who got involved in this pile on against Stephen.

Come up with something that's a positive vision. That's what I'm trying to do. That's why I'm writing the book I'm writing now. I'm trying to come up with what do we do?

How should we then live now? And it's not enough to just say, well, the constitution. What does that mean?

What does that mean to people? In a post -constitutional world without a moral and religious people in general, what does that mean?

How do you do that? Do we do a localist approach? Is this a top -down totalitarian thing?

What do we do? What they're really defending, I think, the people piling on against Stephen is a version of pluralism.

And I grew up with it and you grew up with it. My grandparents grew up with it to some extent.

It's more post -World War II, I would say. But we were no longer a

Christian culture, but we were definitely operating in such a way that we were benefiting from the inertia of being

Christian at one time. And we thought we could do that. We even started phrasing things

Judeo -Christian, right? Instead of just Christian. And then even more general, people of faith.

And so the lines kept getting more blurry and more broad. And now it's just family values,

I guess. Sanity is now the rallying point. This is not workable.

If you want to call it principle pluralism, call it that. The people who are advocating for that principle pluralism like to call it constitutionalism or some of them will say liberalism.

I don't care what term you use, whatever that is. That was a temporary state of affairs.

And it always was. It was a transition. We, all of us who have lived and our parents and even our grandparents,

I think, lived through a transition that was taking place. And we didn't know it was taking place when we were in it, maybe. But that transition was from Christianity to paganism.

And in between was this liberalism. This liberalism that gave us the illusion that we could have order, peace, justice without Jesus Christ as the authority, as the king.

That we didn't need Jesus as the authority or the king because we all had morality somehow, whatever that means.

The only reason it seemed to work for so long is because all of us were so influenced by Christianity.

We kept that Christ's morality as the standard in general for a long time.

And there was a majority of Christians or people who at least claimed some form of Christianity, whether they were or weren't.

But there was a shift in our thinking. There was a shift in the way that we viewed the operations of government and society at large.

We figured that we didn't actually need Christ as Lord. You didn't need the Bible as an authority.

And that stuff was unnecessary. You just need good people. You just need, well, what produces virtue?

The founders knew, it was religion. Religion secured and produced virtue. And then virtue is necessary for a constitutional republic.

If you wanna say you're for a constitutional republic but you're not willing to support the things that make for virtue in the public sphere, then how in the world do you maintain it?

See, I don't think people are thinking very deeply about this. And I don't have time to share everything I'd like to but I really think that the long view of history will help people here.

And knowing what happened before us, knowing what came before us, knowing a little bit of even just American history would help us.

It's so ingrained in our country's history, Christianity, so ingrained, that it's just, it's unbelievable to me.

I think even if you went back 100 years and you said, hey, there's gonna be prominent, supposedly conservative

Christians in 100 years who are gonna be arguing against having a Christian nation, people would have looked at you like you had three heads.

Even non -Christians would have been like, what are you talking about? Because it was just obvious. People, I don't wanna deal with all the objections now.

It doesn't, we've gone long enough. But let me give you some, just some encouraging words, right?

I said I would end this on a positive note. Do not be discouraged. God is a God of order and his order is not foiled by the disorder around us.

He even has a plan for that. If you were in Gideon's army, you would have thought, oh my goodness, God's dividing our army up, we're gonna lose.

And yet they were stronger with fewer. I don't know what God's doing now. If he's winnowing, if he's exposing, if he's, whatever it is,

I think that yes, the devil, even if the devil's at work, God is still above that working out his plans and the devil's gonna lose.

And it's, we are gonna have King Jesus. No matter what your eschatological stripe, we are at some point.

And we just have to be faithful where we're at. And so I see tremendous opportunity because leaders in the church, quote unquote, and it's really the big

Eva and little Eva now, it's little, there's a split in little Eva, as I've called it. They are losing credibility at a really fast rate.

And I'm not excited about that. I don't wanna see any of that. I love, I love these people. I love the people who are criticizing

Stephen Wolf even on harsh terms. That's why it saddens me so much. This was, this has been hard for me to even think about making this video.

But when the truth is exposed, when it's revealed, it creates the need for new blood, for new leaders to fill that vacuum, that leadership vacuum.

And I think, I believe that there are leaders out there. I think that you don't know a lot of their names yet.

I've been encouraged with what I've seen with Joel Webben recently. Joel has Right Response Ministries. There you go, there's the plug.

He, I don't agree with him on everything theologically, but yet Joel, he's an honest guy.

He's for the people. He wants to help people. He is, he wants

Christianity to influence the public sphere. He's got, he's trying to craft a positive vision here. He's really for that.

He's actually, there's a book coming out. I'll have him on the show when it comes out on specifically moving from blue states to red states as a way to conserve and to promote

Christianity. And like, this is a guy that's actually doing the work that is necessary. And guess what's happening to his platform?

It's exploding. He's just a pastor. It's exploding though, because the Baptists who are busy attacking

Stephen Wolfe aren't bothering to do those things. They may think they are, but they're not crafting the positive vision that's actually gonna attract believers who are interested in really fighting this battle that we're really in.

So I see that as an encouraging thing. I see like, like he came out of nowhere. No, no one's like, like,

I can speak for myself here. Like, I'm not accountable to people outside my church.

Like, like in a, I'm accountable to you as, as listeners, but like people in these big ministries or whatever,

I don't have to listen to them. I don't have to take, like, there's, there's no loyalty that I have to have in order to, to, to have this platform at all.

And that is a good thing. To decentralize the voices that you're listening to, the podcasts that you're listening to is a really, really good thing.

And let me plug for you one, okay? Let me plug in a podcast for you. If you want to listen to a good, just Christian ministry podcast, it's different than this one, but why don't you go check out

The Rap Report. Andrew Rapaport, great guy, doing great work, discipling people in podcasting.

He's got a few shows, but one of them is called The Rap Report. And, you know, he's, he's a regular guy.

He's a pastor, but he's a regular guy. Down to earth, approachable, humble. I think that there's gonna be a lot more guys like that ascending.

Now there's, we're always gonna have people that aren't, right? I'm not saying that we're gonna have fakers and posers and stuff, but, and people who are, you know, ill -suited for that.

But, but I think that we're, people are starting to see, they do not want a manufactured image.

They want authenticity. Younger people in particular. And that's why people like Andrew, I think are gonna benefit from what's happening right now.

As some places, some ministries lose some credibility, it doesn't mean that all those people are gone.

No, the kingdom of God keeps going. That's the encouraging part. It just keeps going. And it's gonna use the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

I wondered why this podcast has gotten any traction sometimes. I'm like, how did this happen? Why, why is this podcast even around?

I'm on my cell phone talking to you. God uses the weak things to shame the strong.

Yeah, that's it. That's what it is. That makes sense. And guess what? If I believe, the more I believe that, and I'm not saying

I'm exempt from pride, gotta constantly be kept in check from that. But the more that I believe that, the more it keeps me humble.

And I do, you know, I just remembered this. I should probably say, I need to retract something. In a spirit of humility here,

I said something wrong a few weeks ago about Rosaria Butterfield. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I did get an email about it.

And something along the lines of, I said that she taught her children,

I guess, to support the language of the roles in like a lesbian relationship, that she wanted her children to make sure that they knew which one was the daddy and the mommy or something like that.

And it never happened. I was referring to something in her book. And I was, I think I was speculating in my statement, but I was,

I said, I think I remember her saying, and then that's what I said. When in reality, what she had said in her book was, it was something much more mild than that.

It was like, she wanted them to use the proper titles, but not to reinforce the roles, you know, gender roles, the fake gender roles that they were assigned to themselves.

It was like, who's mom and who's mommy, that kind of thing. So, and I'm sure she doesn't even agree with that anymore,

I'm sure. But anyway, in the spirit of humility, I just want to say, I get things wrong sometimes.

And you can even take what I say with a grain of salt and look it up yourself. Look at the sources. That's my encouragement.

If this analysis helps you, praise God, if it helps you categorize things. This one's been more general and hopefully it's helped.

But here's the positivity. We got to be positive about what we love. Negativity about innovations to attack those things.

So, you love your family, you love your church, you love your life, you love, you know, the things that you're called to love, love those things.

And be negative about the innovative ways that people attack them. The family substitutes, the degrading the symbols of your people, degrading the moral fabric of your community, degrading the power of your church.

Stand against all the evil, all the nonsense, you know what it is. You see it out there. We can't fall into the trap of conservative plans to build a utopia because we'll never have a utopia.

We just have to love the things that we're called to love. And we must order our affections. Family is the most irreducible unit, not the city.

Loving the city is the big thing now. Love the city. Well, yeah, okay, love the city. But you know what? Your family is more important.

And loving the individual. That's what the libertarians, you know, it's all about individual, this and that. The family is the most basic building block of society.

And it's where you learn to be a good citizen first. It's where you learn to be responsible. It is where you are in closest proximity to others.

And that's where you fulfill the commandment to love your neighbors, yourself, mostly. You got to resist the temptation to form identities and by extension loyalties, according to temporal relationships that are less fundamental.

And this is the problem with fascism and communism and libertarianism. You know, the state becomes the nation.

Oh, that's wrong. No, the state is not the nation. The state is not the family. The state is not, you can do all these romantic paintings about, you know, the

Nazis did this. The state, but it was statism. That's not where your affection lies. You love your family, okay?

The state can be a means to that somehow, to protecting your family and so forth. But it's the same problem with communism.

It's universal love without distinction. Libertarianism, love of oneself. But, you know, putting number one first.

And I know some libertarians will get upset at me. And I know not all libertarians believe it that way. I'm giving broad categories here.

I think I did a critique of libertarianism in a video from a few years ago, if I'm not mistaken, if people want to look at my views on that.

I don't have time to expand on it now. The change that we're looking for to stop drag queen story hour and all the nonsense we see won't come from the center.

Most movements start with a motivated minority. I remember when gay marriage was, no one agreed on it.

Everyone was against it. And guess where it is now? That's an evil movement. The right as a whole isn't motivated as a whole because they're unwilling to sacrifice.

The left tends to be more willing to sacrifice. We have to be more willing to sacrifice as Christians.

So I think that there's men who are more bold, who are going to do the work that has been left undone, that are rising up.

And I'm encouraged by that. And that doesn't mean I hate anyone, everyone who piled on against Steven, just so don't misunderstand me here.

I think though, it might be a necessary thing for the growth and maturity to expose and show kind of where people are at and how serious they actually see the issues we're facing and what time they think it is.

I think that there's tremendous opportunity and it's going to be hard.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's going to be hard watching relationships break, watching the church fragmented, watching people, just false teachings even emerge,

I'm sure in the coming years and so forth. That's all going to be hard. But I think in the midst of that,

God is winnowing and forming a group of just strong, special forces really, like really strong young guys and families and I'm excited about that.

And I do see that. And I think you're going to see it more on the local level. Lots more to say, but I hope that was helpful for you.

Encouraging, don't lose hope. Don't lose heart. Keep going. Don't let the Twitter nonsense get you down.

There's a God who's bigger than all of that and he's got a purpose for it. He's got a purpose for you and he puts you here for such a time as this.