The Battle over Christian Culture

The Promise and Limits of 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'd 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 and it's obvious.

Why Cultural Christianity Still Matters

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 Wolf 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 Wolf 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 any there, 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 save 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. 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. It crafts even some of the laws. Some places still have blue laws. And I think that's somewhat of a blessing.

I think we do with a little more of that. 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? 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.

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 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 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, or the Lutherans. 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 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.

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. 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 goat 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, I don't know what explains all this.

But these are tactics I see from the left. The left tends to muddy the waters. 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, there's some, 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 this is, 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.

I don't know about the money, but these guys are the guys that resisted that, that are somehow now implementing some of these same smears. Some people going after Steven for alleged racism and stuff. It's just, I feel like I'm reliving something that I saw a few years ago.

The Smears Against Stephen Wolfe and the Logic of Gatekeeping

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, and it's, I don't know if it, I don't know what the reaction is online, but after I read it, I was like thinking, this is not going to satisfy anyone.

So that's probably what's happening right now. But you know, 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, but what he said, that's a possibility.

And so I'm, 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.

There's differences, but there's universal application of the moral standards of Israel. Not all the laws, the ceremonial or some of the civic laws that were unique to Jewish identity, but the other laws, yeah.

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, red 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.

There's some of these statements are so goofy. I'm just going to skip over them, to be honest with you. 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, or 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 the two, 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 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 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 an 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, 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'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 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. Graciate 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, but 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 going to mock you a little bit. This isn't, I'm going to disagree with you in a humorous way. This is, you're an evil person. 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. They're not going to use that term. That's what the left is going to 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 was 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, 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 going to rally to it. Especially, but everyone is in Christianity. And the gatekeeping will not work.

I got news for you. If you guys, if you guys with these big platforms want to 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.

You know, 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 want to conserve? Do you want to conserve 1990? Do you want to 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. I used to remember there was a great America. Yeah, the Cold War era maybe. That was pretty great. 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 going to call it? Is it stay tuned or we're going to 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.