How Do I Become Cancel-Proof? | An Interview with C.R. Wiley

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The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject

Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of Almighty God is hanging over our heads.

They will hear His words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed and they will perish.

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Welcome to Bible Bash, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.

We're your hosts, Harrison Kerrig and Pastor Tim Mullett, and today we seek to answer the age -old question, How do

I become cancel -proof? Now, in order to answer this question, we'll be joined by author, writer, public speaker, and academic board member,

C .R. Wiley. He's been happily married for over 30 years, has three grown children, and lives in the state of Washington.

He's written for Touchstone Magazine, Modern Reformation, Sacred Architecture, The Imaginative Conservative, Front Porch Republic, National Review Online, and First Things, among others.

His most recent book is In the House of Tom Bombadil. He's also the author of The Household and the

War for the Cosmos, published by Canon Press in 2019. He's a board member for the

Academy of Philosophy and Letters, as well as New St. Andrews College. So, Chris, we want to start off by saying welcome to the show, welcome to Bible Bash, and thanks for coming on.

Yeah, well, I'm honored to be with you guys. Thanks for asking. Yeah, I know that, personally, I've listened to the podcast over the years and been edified and blessed by that, and so we're excited to have you on and have a chance to talk about cancel culture.

Great, well, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for listening. Yes, sir. Well, maybe you could start out with just giving us a definition of cancel culture and maybe tell us why you think it's a problem.

Well, I mean, cancel culture basically is an environment, kind of a social environment in which, because of kind of the,

I guess, the cultural moment that we find ourselves in, you can find yourself essentially cut off in a variety of ways because of something you may have said that you may have said by accident or, you know, because you really intended to say it, but because of the kind of strictures regarding speech and kind of the high sensitivity that we see in lots of places, you could find yourself without a job, you could find yourself kind of without a platform any longer.

If you've kind of, you know, had a platform on one of the social media sites or even, you know, out of a job at your church, that kind of thing.

So I guess that's what I mean by cancel culture. I'm not the person who coined the term.

Maybe people who've, you know, been working with the term more would fill it out in ways that I have not thought of, but that's usually, you know, what comes to mind, at least for me, when

I hear about cancel culture. Sure. So maybe you could distinguish it from something like church discipline or something along those lines.

Yeah, well, there's no process. It's just kangaroo court and you're just suddenly cut off without any even ability to defend yourself in many cases.

So I have a friend who was just recently canceled at Gordon College, North Shore of Boston.

Great guy. We've known each other for over 30 years, and he made the mistake of actually,

I guess, promoting biblical sexual ethics at a Christian college and found himself, after his first address, disinvited.

So he was supposed to be there for a week. The first address led to his disinvitation, and it was just simply one of these, you know, things that kind of came up from below, you know, just a bunch of people who took offense at some things that he said and made the administration there uncomfortable enough for them to say, thanks, but no thanks, you can go now.

Wow. So predominantly in terms of trying to distinguish it from other, you know, biblical maybe forms of cancellation or something along those lines, you would primarily ground the distinction there between the two in terms of some sort of due process or some sort of not bowing down to the court of public pressure, that kind of thing.

Yeah, it's the difference between the mob and the court. Now, court, you can be condemned in a court and you can be disciplined, but also with regard to the church courts anyway, the purpose is restoration, whereas, you know, public cancel culture, it's obliteration.

It's just, they just want you to go away and never come back, have nothing to do anymore in the spheres that they, you know, sort of cast you out of.

So part of the reason then why it would be a problem would be that it has no redemptive purpose behind it.

It just is an exercise in raw punishment, justice, punishment or destruction, where you're just trying to essentially destroy a person.

Yeah, and then when we were talking about standards of justice and, you know, what are we referring to?

So I made a, you know, an observation about what occurred at Gordon College.

So Gordon College is a school that is self -consciously and identifies itself as a

Christian institution, an evangelical college in the Christian college coalition.

And as far as I can tell the, you know, the standards of the school in terms of biblical sexual ethics have been unaltered.

So there's nothing that Marvin said, and my friend's name is

Marvin Daniels, nothing that Marvin said that would be out of keeping with those standards, yet he found himself disinvited.

Wow. Fundamentally council culture is imposing upon us an alien standard, essentially a standard that's coming from the outside as to just keeping the pagans happy, something along those lines.

Yeah, I think that that's correct. I mean, there's a kind of interest in, well, you often hear this apologized for in terms of, you know, tone.

We don't want people to, you know, have their feelings heard or think that we're speaking strictly from some kind of vitriolic and narrow minded outlook.

So, you know, that's usually the way, at least within Christian circles or maybe in even academic circles that are self,

I guess, you know, self -proclaimed, you know, bastions of liberal thought or liberal kind of standards.

And then little is done in terms of actually trying to explore the basis of the accusations, whether they're founded or they're justified or not.

There have been just a lot of examples, a lot of, you know, situations that we could point to and say, this was just sort of a lynch mob, virtual lynch mob.

And people were punished for things that they should not have been punished for.

They weren't even wrong. Just a lot of people took offense. And so consequently, we've got a situation in which the offense is giving offense.

That's the offense. It's not whether or not, you know, what was said was right or wrong. There really are situations in which giving an offense is the right thing to do.

It does seem like we're living in a time right now where essentially right and wrong are determined by how people emotionally respond to that information.

More, you know, over and against just typically what we would understand right and wrong to be defined as to their correlation to reality, essentially.

And so now, yep. Yeah, that's right. Now, before we started the show,

Chris, you mentioned that you were excited to talk about this topic because it's something that you think about a lot yourself.

And so I guess I would just ask you, you know, what, what caused you to really think so much about cancel culture to begin with?

Well, I suppose it's because I could see it coming, you know, years ago.

I lived, you know, in Cambridge, Massachusetts for about a decade right between Harvard and MIT.

And I was I spent some time at Harvard. And so I was involved in it or I was kind of sort of situated in a milieu in which many of the

I guess many of the trends that we see that have come to fruition and have spread throughout popular culture and I could not just academia, but, you know, entertainment and beyond.

I could see them in an early embryonic stage. And I didn't take a lot of work to extrapolate the kind of imagine where things would go.

I did. I did think that much of the evangelical world was vulnerable to kind of what we now call wokeism.

And I consequently began to structure my own life to become cancel proof.

And so I'm far enough along in that now that I'm fairly cancel proof.

And so I'm happy to talk about how I went about that. But that's the reason why because I could see it coming.

And I felt like, you know, the first place to begin in terms of thinking this out is how do

I as an individual who at that time had, you know, small children. How do

I, you know, sort of set myself up so that I'm not going to, well, find myself in a situation where I'm not able to take care of my family the way

I'd like. So what kind of, you know, being someone who has a, has a pretty big platform overall,

I'm sure you get a lot of people who are, you know, pretty angry about some of the things you say.

I remember, I don't, I don't remember when I saw the video, but I watched your, your,

I guess, I guess the lecture you gave. I think it was, you know, when, when the same night,

Doug Wilson gave his I think sexual by design speech the same night.

Well, actually they were different. Oh, were they different? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But same hostility.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so I'm sure you, I'm sure you face stuff like that pretty often.

So, you know, do you, so could you just kind of, you know, spell out one of those experiences where you you've had people kind of coming in after you for some of the things that you believe in and that you've, you've said before?

Sure. I mean, I've, I've written things that have gone viral and I've gotten hate mail from around the world.

So, so, you know, I could say that I'm, I'm infamous in the minds of some people.

Notorious Sierra Wally. That's right. That's right. I try to, I try to help.

I try to convince people that I'm a really nice guy, but you know, some people just don't want to accept that. But yeah.

So, you know, I've had those kinds of, those kinds of experiences. In fact, you know, my, it was interesting that my, my years in Cambridge were very helpful in this regard.

I was in an environment where initially just kind of give you a little bit of background. I mean, I was involved in what could be described as a kind of earlier woke ism.

It was mostly oriented toward kind of economic issues and things related to ethnic relationships between groups and, and race relations and so forth.

So I was, I was kind of on the cool side of the table at once. One time, you know, people I traveled the country and spoke about all those kinds of things.

My friend, Marvin Daniels that I just told you about, it was canceled at Gordon college is, is black. And we actually were involved in urban ministry for about a decade together.

So, and he's from, you know, New York city and worked in some of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago.

I mean, so when it comes to, you know, his pedigree and my background, we've had plenty of,

I guess, exposure and I should focus more on myself, plenty of exposure to the out there.

So the mindsets that we're dealing with here, when

I went to Harvard initially, there was a kind of a fun story behind that. And it has to do with what we're talking about.

So I had a friend who was the chairman of the Republican city committee for the city of Cambridge.

He actually went on to work in the Bush and Obama administrations and trade. But at that time he was there in Cambridge and he got a, he got a call from Harvey Cox.

That name probably doesn't mean anything to you, but he was a big deal back in the sixties and seventies, kind of debt, the God theology, stuff like that.

He wrote a book called secular city that sold like 2 million copies. Anyway, he was a big deal at Harvard divinity, kind of public intellectual, you know, got into New York times and the

Atlantic all the time anyway. So he's having, he has this class on kind of evangelicalism for students that, you know,

Harvard divinity to kind of like, you know, learn about those strange creatures, you know, yeah.

Conservative Christians. And so he called my friend David Trumbull and David said, well,

I'm a, I'm an Anglican. I don't fit the, the, you know, the bill, but I, I know some guys. And so he called me.

And so I went into this classroom environment where, you know, there was, there were three of us and there were 30 of them.

And we, and we just kind of had it out for like an hour and a half. It was just like complete kind of free for all kind of Barbara and Harvey Cox was overseeing it kind of like the referee.

He's a cool guy. He's still alive. But afterward, he actually asked me, he said, Hey, I'd like you to come to Harvard divinity.

And so that's how I ended up there. He became my sponsor, but every, every class was like this.

So, you know, the situation I faced at, at, you know, university of Idaho, they were really junior league.

I mean, they were like the junior varsity of the liberal world. I mean, they were, they were actually kind of laughable in terms of just, they had, they had really had nothing that,

And they're done that got the t -shirt. Well, yeah. I mean, I, I've, I've got, I fought their big brother, you know?

So it was, it was kind of amusing for me. I was kind of, I wasn't just enjoying the experience and I, and I had plenty of police protection.

Yeah. I didn't have any death threats. Do you get it? Well, you know, one of the things this, this kind of gets back to camp, you know, how do you become counsel proof?

I really do think that there are certain ways that you can like make yourself more vulnerable and you can kind of work at trying to make sure that those, those means by which people can get at you are removed or at least hard to find.

And so I used to get more than I do now. And it's because I've kind of systematically figured out, okay, these are the things that I can do to make sure that I don't get, you know, you know, sort of hate mail in the middle of the night, wake me up at two in the morning, that kind of thing.

Fair enough. Well, one of the questions I wanted to get to before we maybe dive right into the, the method that you're withholding from us, but you know,

I think there is a sense in which there's obviously nothing new under the sun and maybe that applies to counsel culture to some degree.

I mean, in some sense I think counsel culture might be as old as Cain with his rock.

Yeah. As far as that's concerned. Yeah. The apostle Paul had a lot of cancellation issues. He did.

Yeah. I mean, same with trials. I mean, there's plenty of, I think historical examples of this kind of phenomenon, but you know, what do you make of the current trend towards counsel culture and how do you distinguish it from historical manifestations?

It seems like there there's something a little bit different going on today than maybe before, but maybe that reflects a historical naivety on my part, but what do you think?

No, I do think, you know, technology plays a big role. Things can happen really fast and because everything is kind of funneled through the internet.

Now there are these choke points with regard to even your financial, you know, means to make a living or to even conduct business.

So, you know, businesses can be deplatformed, that happens, debanked, you know, that kind of stuff.

So I think that that technological aspect of the situation does distinguish it.

It also gives it a more, I guess, sanitary sort of character. So like when the apostle

Paul was canceled, they actually had to pick up stones, get their hands dirty, and try to harm him physically, you know, and that can do something to your conscience.

You might feel a little bad when you see some blood, that kind of thing. Whereas this is kind of a bloodless depersonalized kind of...

Even anonymous at times, right? Yeah, virtual experience and anonymous. So I guess we figured out a way to do this humanely.

You know, nobody's dying in the street. You just cut off their means of livelihood and let them try to figure out how to take care of themselves after that.

Out of sight, out of mind? Yeah, yeah, something like that. Well, how would you rate it, you know, as a historical problem as it relates to that?

I mean, in terms of... There are some things that distinguish it, the technology aspect of it.

I think, you know, the fact that there's so many people now who can basically have access to that information, too.

The ease of spread of information. Yeah, I think those things are certainly unique to our time.

I do think that, you know, we shouldn't overstate the problem in the sense that, you know,

Christians in the Soviet Union had it a lot harder than we have it. And so there's not much basis for comparison in terms of hardship.

You know, I'm not consented to gulag, you know. But in terms of, you know, being sort of aware that at any moment something could be thrown at you, that I do think is kind of new.

You know, for example, here I am speaking to you on a computer. I've got my cell phone or my smartphone.

So the means of kind of access to me and my means of access to kind of this larger world, instantaneous, you know, speed of light, that's different.

Isn't it sort of weird that, I mean, you know, you could have said something 15, 20 years ago and it could be resurrected today through technology in a way that they wouldn't have that same kind of access to information in different times in history.

Yeah, yeah. To be able to do that. I've had it happen to me. I've had it happen to me. And I've been in situations where people are bringing up stuff from years ago, and I'm like, what did

I say? I've said a lot of things, you know. Can you give me a little context here?

Where'd you find this? You know, that kind of thing. And, you know, and so anyway, yeah, that's very true.

So I guess the follow up would be, you know, how did we get here to where we are at this point where essentially you say one thing that someone doesn't like and you're at a place where, you know, you lose your job, you lose your livelihood, go bankrupt, get sued.

How do we get here? What are some of the factors that have led to this kind of moment for us? Well, I think there have been trends in, you know, political life and also academic sort of thought that have coalesced with the technology that we now possess.

So these things have kind of come together in such a way to create a kind of perfect storm for this. So, you know, if we think about kind of the leftward, the kind of strong egalitarian kind of undercurrent that we see in the modern world that has kind of spread throughout society and kind of leveled many things, including our ability to make legitimate distinctions between just, you know, even biological realities like men and women are different.

This stuff, you know, it goes back a long way, at least to the French Revolution.

But I think that there are antecedents even to that. And it's been kind of working its way through the

West for some time now. So, you know, things like what we saw in the 1960s with, you know, a lot of what occurred with the rise of the new left, people who've been influenced by the

Frankfurt School, people who've been influenced more recently by developments and, you know, sort of literary interpretation with Foucault and Derrida and so forth.

All of this stuff is kind of working its way out to kind of the ground level.

I mean, I remember back in the 90s, I would talk about intellectual sort of trends and how

I thought they would be eventually sort of felt in just, you know, popular culture and in just everyday work environments.

And people just thought I was nuts. People thought that I was overstating the case or I was, you know, an alarmist or something like that.

And I'm afraid that I was right. Everything that I said was gonna happen has happened.

And so I can go back and look at stuff that I was writing in my journal back in like 1995, and I can say, yep, yep, yep, all those things happened.

So partly you're mentioning critical theory and then postmodernism, the absence of any kind of objective notion of truth.

And then, so you mix those two things together and then kind of the egalitarian impulse, you're putting that in there as well.

Right, correct. Combine that with the technology and, you know, we're in a situation where feelings matter more than facts, essentially.

Yeah, certainly. You know, many people live very kind of cosseted, buffered lives, you know, because they don't actually have to deal directly with the physical world.

I think that's another thing to kind of consider in all this, there are certain professions that are much more kind of susceptible to the woke -ism that we see around us than others.

As far as I guess - Like math is not, math and science aren't, but then when you're in the realm of literature, is that what you mean?

Well, you do see there, but math and science are starting to feel the pressure now in the way that no one anticipated they would.

There are a lot of crazy things going on in those environments that a lot of people that I -

Math is racist and two plus two equals five kind of stuff. Yeah, almost that bad. And, but I was thinking more just in terms of, you know, guys who work with their hands, they either can do the job or they can't.

You know, as I'm driving down the street and I'm looking at all the guys who are working on like a lot of the large construction projects, you know, in very liberal places like Portland and Seattle, they're all guys.

You know, they're all guys. Isn't that amazing how that works, that feminism doesn't want to advocate for equality on the construction jobs, but only in the

CEO kind of jobs? Well, actually they try, but they fail. You see, this is like the story that no one wants to kind of get into.

There have been, there has been a push for at least 30 years, because I can remember it, to get girls into the trades.

And they just simply wash out because it's too physically demanding. And the work has got to be done.

This is not about making you feel good. In fact, one of the things that you see in sort of, I have a background in the trades and I've been a contractor.

One of the things you see is you got to make money and you are in a competitive environment. And if you're not fast enough or competent enough, we just can't wait around for you, you know?

So why don't you just go hold a sign on the side of the road that says, you know, stop and drive slow.

And that's where you see a lot of the ladies end up, is doing that kind of stuff.

If they have any kind of, you know, direct experience with the trades. Or sometimes you'll get some, say, you know, home improvement company that's founded by a bunch of lesbians.

And they, unless they've got like this strong community of lesbians and feminists who keep them busy, they're out of business before you know it.

It's a tough way to make a living. And there's a lot of physically demanding aspects to it.

You know, just picking up a worm drive saw is too much for most people outside of the trades.

Yeah, that kind of reminds me of, you know, when I first got out of seminary, I did an appliance delivery job for a little bit.

And, you know, we were working from, you know, four in the morning to seven at night and delivering 600 pound refrigerators and all that kind of stuff.

But there are some ladies who worked that job with us, but, you know, they largely, you know, as a guy in that kind of job, you know, if you had a lady that was, you're supposed to help you, you knew that you were doing, you're taking that refrigerator in there by yourself, essentially.

Well, and often what they'll have is, there are kind of these awkward moments where the weakness of the gentle sex or the fair sex is unavoidable.

We can't pretend that this is not true. This refrigerator is on a landing two flights up and it needs to go up three more.

Either get out of the way, gal, or, you know, help. And if you can't help, then why did you ask for this job?

Right. That kind of stuff. Yeah. A big part of cancel culture is obviously the idea that whenever the mob, you know, the general group of people don't agree with something, they typically just want to take whatever dissenting voices are there and just totally remove them by whatever means are available to them.

And certainly for Christians, there's plenty of views and takes in the world that I think any person who reads their

Bible and believes that it's true and wants to commit their lives to following what

God has said is righteous, there's plenty of things that the world believes that we would look at and say, hey,

I really wish that this idea would go away. I really wish that anyone who's pushing for abortion would just totally stop, you know, advocating for it.

And so there's a sense in which I'm sure there are plenty of Christians who might be tempted to say, man,

I really want to cancel this person who keeps pushing for homosexuality, who keeps pushing for abortion, you know, whatever it is.

So, Chris, do you think that there's ever an appropriate time for the

Christian to partake themselves in cancel culture when it comes to talking about unbiblical views?

Yeah, I think there is. I mean, what we were referring to earlier as church discipline, when civil law has been informed by Scripture, then the civil authorities find themselves in situations where they're enforcing a set of laws that has some kind of Christian input in their development.

So in a situation like that, Christians who are, you know, thinking as Christians and involved in sort of the political and legal process and doing so self -consciously as Christians are looking to secure the public good, enforce justice, these things.

It's not necessarily about whether or not something that was said hurt your feelings.

Like, for example, just a few moments ago, I said some things about the differences between men and women that some people today would find deeply offensive.

But that doesn't matter. They're just real. And I'm not going to pretend that they're not. Now, they might try to craft laws to make it illegal for me to say things like that.

And, you know, they would have some kind of philosophical and kind of political outlook that's informing their approach to matters relating to law and justice and so forth.

And so they're pursuing that vision. I simply disagree, and I would argue that their understanding of justice is incorrect and that, you know, an understanding of justice that's informed by the natural law and by Scripture is what we ought to be looking to if we want to order society in ways

I described. In other words, securing the public good and securing justice.

But I guess that gets at what you're saying here, Harrison, and that is

I think sometimes there's an assumption that people have that if there are matters that I believe to be true because I'm a

Christian, that means I can't call for their recognition in the public square. And there's kind of a self -censorship that sometimes goes on because it seems like we're just kind of foisting our views on other people.

The Christian faith is not based on our personal predilections or desires.

The Christian faith is based on objective realities. And so because those realities are simply true, the

Christian faith should be presented as public truth. And so my argument would be that if we don't present the

Christian faith as public truth, then in some sense we're implying that it's not true for you.

It's just true for me. So it's not about whether we're going to impose a certain morality on our country.

It's what morality are we going to impose essentially? Yeah, not whether or not, but which.

That's the thing that I think is absolutely right. So there's no neutral ground to kind of retreat to where we all can play it safe and be nice.

I think that we need to be civil with the people that we disagree with, but I don't think that,

I think that the days of self -censorship are over. And I think we just need to get used to a future for the foreseeable future in which we need to, we're called to present our convictions as public truth.

You said that obviously one thing we do need to do is we need to be civil in our disagreement and our pushing for righteousness in our nation.

I'm assuming when you say that, you mean that we shouldn't be, I guess, essentially going after individuals who would disagree with us in the same way that it seems like the cancel culture mob typically does today, right?

Yeah, I think that Peter is pretty clear. Be prepared to make a defense for the hope that lies within you, but do so with respect.

And the reason why we do it with respect is because of our convictions that human beings are made in the image of God.

So it's not just that we're trying to be nice or we're trying to win friends and influence people in a kind of Dale Carnegie way.

We're not being manipulative. It's just simply we're recognizing some facts, some realities. And one of those realities is that the people that we disagree with are made in the image of God.

And we need to, even as we disagree with them strongly and argue vigorously, recognize those realities and limit ourselves in terms of what we resort to.

Okay. One more question before we get to the title question, Chris. The right essentially believes that cancel culture is largely a problem of the left, and then the left will in turn look at the right and essentially say, you know, you guys are being hypocrites.

You cancel just as much as we do. Where would you fall on that kind of argument?

Well, I think we got at it a little bit already, and that is if we have standards, then they're going to be applied.

And then the question just has to do with are we going about it in a just way?

Are we due process? Yeah, that kind of stuff. And are the things that we're trying to enforce things that ought to be enforced?

So I do think that there is a kind of range of matters in which we just kind of have to accept that, you know, short of the parousia, we kind of have to live with people who disagree with us on a range of things.

And then the question is, you know, what goes in those categories, you know, or that sort of area in which we're unlikely to get any kind of useful set of standards applied?

So an example would be, say, prohibition. So I'm sitting here enjoying a beer right now as I'm talking with you guys, but there are a lot of Christians out there who think that that's a problem.

And there's a range of opinions about the status of alcohol, even in the church.

So, you know, that would be something I would categorize as a matter that we're going to have to have generous, you know, sort of generous regard for the people who disagree with us about.

Sure. So would you say, then, that cancellation that the left is engaging in is largely based on just the standard of, you know, hurt feelings, essentially, than what the right should be based on as more matters of, you know, objective truth with some sort of tolerance for disagreements at those levels?

Yeah, I think on the left, what we're seeing today can be described the way you just described,

Tim. But I also think that there's a pretty significant difference between groups of people in our society about the nature of language and how it's used.

So if a person has come under the influence of, say, you know, critical theory, then language is just another tool or weapon to kind of get your way in the world.

It's not necessarily a means by which we convey the truth or sort of reflect reality.

It's just sort of an extension of a particular group's interests. So if a person maybe feels like, you know, something that you've said is in some way harming their interest, you know, then those things should not ever be permitted to be said.

Whereas a more, I think, traditional understanding of language is that language has a capacity to express realities that are true and not just simply the interests of any particular group.

Sure. Well, we've been kind of beating around the bush with this, you know, cancel proof.

You've spent years, you know, crafting your life in a way that you've sort of protected yourself from all of the death threats, so now you actually get less of them.

So it seems like whatever you're doing is working in some capacity. So could you go ahead and explain to us what you meant earlier when you were talking about, hey,

I've crafted my life, I've sort of, you know, set up my life in this specific way that has allowed me to become cancel proof?

Yeah, I think that what I've done could be described as bringing sort of the things that I need to control closer to me, in other words, so that I can have greater,

I guess, autonomy and agency. So, for example, when

I had a sense that I was going to find myself kind of outside the mainstream when it came to certain convictions that I had,

I realized that I needed to have a greater measure of control over my income and my wealth, particularly since I had, you know, small children to provide for.

My wife was, you know, a mom who was homeschooling the kids, and so I got involved in investment real estate, and over the years,

I built a portfolio that allowed me to have this kind of set of assets that kind of ensured my livelihood in case my other means of livelihood suddenly evaporated.

So that was a pretty important thing. Later on, when

I got into kind of the world of publishing for a wide range of publications and was sort of exposed in those ways,

I made sure that I had a set of alliances or connections with publications that were sympathetic to kind of the core concerns

I have. So let's say, you know, the things that I write for, say, Canon Press or for Touchstone Magazine were published in the

New York Times. I'd probably lose my job at the New York Times, you know? So, you know, that's a thing.

Now, those publications that I write for, they don't have the kind of the, obviously, the reach or the status of the

New York Times, but they are places where, you know, the things that I want to write about are the things they want to publish.

A third area in which I've gotten, you know, a greater degree of control is making certain that when

I'm serving an institution, including the church I serve, I'm working with people who have a high degree of conflict tolerance.

They're not conflict avoidance people, but they're people who are actually capable of dealing with, you know, sort of hostile parties.

So the church I serve right now is definitely that way, and it had a lot to do with why I'm here.

I've served other churches that have great people, but they weren't people who were capable of dealing with that kind of negative.

So let me give you an example. So when I was on Cape Cod, I pastored a church on Cape Cod back in the days when there was just a lot of talk about, you know, gay marriage.

This is before the, you know, Supreme Court decision, you know, a few years back.

So this was still a matter of live, you know, controversy and debate.

And I wrote a letter to the Cape Cod Times defending traditional marriage and calling into question the legitimacy of something, you know, like gay marriage.

And it led to a hate mail campaign that went on for a month at the Cape Cod Times.

Every day there were letters attacking me in the Cape Cod Times.

And I remember going to my church board and saying, you know, are you guys ready for what this could mean?

Are you ready for maybe a picket line outside church on Sunday morning? And I could see their eyes pop wide open.

They were scared to death. I said, you know, I get it. You know, you guys, you know, your idea of making a risky decision is maybe moving to a new house.

And, you know, you're just not, it's just sort of this kind of thing is just so far beyond the realm of your ability to imagine or sort of reconcile yourself to that.

It's just unrealistic for me to accept or to believe that you could kind of step up to that. So I think that if you're, particularly if you're a pastor, you need to be, you know, situated in a leadership environment in which conflict is not sort of like the ultimate problem or the thing that needs to be avoided at all costs.

You need to have a measure of comfort with it. And so that was important for me as well.

I didn't want to find myself someday, you know, defending myself to my own session or my own board.

Would you say, go ahead, Harrison. Well, I was just going to ask, I'm assuming that means if you need to situate yourself in a sort of environment where you're surrounded by brothers and sisters who are capable of facing, you know, the negative feedback that you're inevitably going to get for believing that the

Bible is true, then there's a sense in which you certainly would personally need to be that way as well, right?

Yeah, that's right. I think you need to have a, and this is one of the things that Aaron Wren was addressing here recently.

Are you guys familiar with Aaron and his work? I am. Yeah. So Aaron, he wrote something that appeared at First Things here about a month ago, published on the website.

It had to do with the fact that we now live in a world, which he refers to as negative world, in which conflict is inevitable.

It's just inevitable. No matter what you do, there's going to be conflict if you are a leader in the church.

So just get used to it. And we need to start vetting candidates for the ministry on mental toughness.

Can you take the pressure? You know, think about the Apostle Paul. The dude was mentally tough and physically tough.

You know, you don't take that kind of physical punishment and be as a wimp.

Right. So this is a guy who could take it. It doesn't mean you go out looking for it, but it's just reality.

You are going to face it. And so we need to start vetting candidates for the ministry not on their likability, which just seems to me what we do.

Well, it's all dynamic personality, that kind of stuff. And it seems like we don't have, we don't want the kind of resume that Paul has.

Like we don't want that kind of, I mean, beaten and shipwrecked. I mean, man, like you've, I mean. We don't want this guy as our pastor.

He's a troublemaker. He got people mad at him, you know. That's right. I do think that in certain church environments, it really is the unforgivable sin to kind of precipitate conflict.

In other words, not just simply to be the person who is receiving a pushback, but actually doing the pushing.

You know, that's grounds. And I think some church environments were defrocking. Well, there is this strong and powerful unspoken agreement in churches today that essentially

I won't talk about your sin if you don't talk about mine. And that's kind of a part of it. Now, would you,

I had a question. So you mentioned in terms of part of the counsel proof strategy is to essentially arrange your affairs financially in such a way that you're not, that you have some kind of security.

And so you're thinking primarily in terms of, you know, some of the things that the Proverbs are saying at that point.

And then surround yourself with like -minded ministry leaders who have fortitude and toughness and ability to handle conflict.

Would that mean then you would discourage individuals from doing, to use one of those trendy words, church revitalization?

Meaning going into a church that's in trouble and trying to revitalize it? Yeah, going into a church that's an absolute mess theologically and trying to turn the ship.

Well, I think that that's probably the place where we need, you know, the tough -minded most, you know, that's where you're likely to find the need to maybe confront some situations.

Now, when it comes to healing, you know, it's not like you keep the volume turned up all the time.

There are certain situations where I think, you know, wisdom and discretion say, okay, I need to provide a little bit of space for grace right now.

And that's where some, you know, kind of on -the -ground savvy is important. But I think in all of this, probably, you know,

I've dealt with some very practical kinds of matters and sort of strategies. But I think the most important thing is a kind of mindset and really a kind of confidence in God's care that allows you to cancel yourself first.

So I think that's really where you have to begin. So the first step to becoming cancel -proof is to cancel yourself.

What I mean by that is that every person has, you know, aspires to maybe develop in leadership and maybe acquire greater,

I guess, status or maybe enjoy a wider sphere of ministry, that kind of stuff.

And so a lot of times you'll have guys who have kind of career aspirations who say, well,

I can't go there, I can't talk about that, because there's this sort of nagging sort of fear in the back of the mind that this may limit my prospects down the road, right?

So I'm just going to try to manage this so that, you know, I can kind of get out of this alive.

But I think really what you need to do is just say, okay, I don't need the cool table.

I don't need the other job. I'm just going to accept the fact that I may be the most unpopular person in the room wherever I go for the rest of my life.

And I'm canceling myself right now. I'm just canceling myself. And there's a kind of freedom that can follow when you do that.

Now, of course, you know, this ought to be accompanied by a strong conviction that, you know, you're called to do this and that God is, you know, going to care for you throughout all of this, even if it means, you know, living under a bridge in a cardboard box, that kind of thing.

But I really do think you kind of have to think through these things, sort of worst case scenarios, and say, okay, I can live with that.

Is that it? So with the idea of canceling yourself, is that essentially the idea of ridding yourself from the fear of man?

Yeah, I think that's a way to put it. Now, the fear of man, what we mean by that, it's not just that I'm afraid to make this guy unhappy.

It can mean I'm afraid of what this may cost me with that group of people over there if they decide that I'm persona non grata now.

Not caring about the 11th commandment? Yeah, right. I think that, you know, I wrote something years ago entitled how to be a happy pariah or cheerful pariah.

And I think that's the thing that you should strive for. What I mean by pariah is sort of like a person who's, you know, not maybe welcome in certain settings because of the associations that are made.

So, you know, you're like, ah, here comes that guy. He always brings up that issue, you know, whatever.

Always has something bad to say about me. Yeah, he's just as always bringing up stuff about,

I don't know, revoice or something, you know, some kind of sexual whatever or, you know, and, you know, if you can just say, okay,

I can accept this pariah status and not revel in it or like get some kind of strange pleasure from it, but just enjoy the sort of the adventure of being a minister of the gospel, you know, and just kind of passing through all of this.

I mean, you know, think about great pariahs in the past. Athanasius, Christostom, the

Apostle Paul. There are some pretty significant pariahs in the past who were often, you know, unwelcome.

As part of that, you know, developing that kind of mindset, then just having a commitment to the truth that supersedes basically everything else, a commitment to speak what's right and what's accurate.

Yeah, I think that's right. There needs to be a measure of humility in so far as, you know, none of us are the final word on anything.

You know, there's always the potential that maybe there is some sort of dimension to the truth that we are not, you know, informed about.

But so long as there's that sense of, okay, I'm a vessel, I'm doing the best

I can, and I may not be able to say everything that needs to be said, but this particular thing is definitely right no matter what anybody says, and I'm going to stick to that, then that's what

I'm getting at. Sure. Sure. Now, what would be the difference between this kind of mindset that you're encouraging individuals to strive towards and just being kind of pugnacious or, you know, basically just developing, you know, developing a martyr complex or something along those lines where you just go into a situation, like an example of, you know, maybe you go into a

Muslim country, into the public square, and just get ready to be beheaded kind of thing.

Would that, how would that relate? Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that I'm hearing you say there,

Tim, that I think kind of moves in different directions. So like a martyr complex, you know, what can, you know, be going on underneath the surface in a situation like that is some really bad theology.

Sure. And also kind of a failure to recognize that there may be other alternatives to pursue, you know, in your desire to promote the truth.

Now, you may find yourself in the square someday, and you may find yourself in one of those either -or situations where it's, you know, either deny

Christ or die. And in those situations, then you die. Sure. But I think that's one thing.

But then with regard to sort of like kind of a personality that kind of delights in -

Being provocative or - Yeah, giving offense. Or maybe it's trying to build some kind of following, and the way to do that is just by saying crazy things all the time, you know, and sort of getting the thrill of a lot of people kind of jumping on your bandwagon and cheering you on.

You know, I think that, you know, pride can be a real pitfall for those folks.

And then the question is, what are you trying to build? You know, are you trying to just build your ego? Is this some kind of strange, you know, sort of project that doesn't really have any real, you know, relationship to the truth?

In other words, are you using the truth just simply to feed your ego needs, or are you actually out to promote the truth?

And I think that's an important thing to consider when we talk about what we're saying here.

So there's kind of two different things there that came to mind with the comments you made.

Well, maybe I could just take it in a total random direction, but maybe you could tell us what, you know,

Trump did wrong. Oh, yeah. I mean, he certainly, you know, made himself into a cancel -proof kind of person in a certain sense.

But then, you know, how would, you know, the way that he went about, I mean, certainly whatever you say about him, he had a certain measure of courage and it was significantly contagious, it seems to me.

But then there, you know, how would you distinguish just the Christian version of that, if there is such a thing?

Well, I think that with Trump, you had a person, and, you know, I didn't spend a tremendous amount of time analyzing that guy.

There were things about him that I found sort of refreshing, like a lot of people, you know, kind of refreshing, the refreshment that you feel when you can say, well, finally, somebody said it in public, you know, that kind of thing.

And then, you know, the responses that people, you know, engaged in.

My personal conviction is, I thought about him a little bit, is that he was fairly artful in a way, in a constructive way, in the sense that he would distract you with some provocative statement.

And then while you were completely flipping out over that, he's doing something over here that you're not watching.

So he got a lot of things done because he was a real artist when it came to that. So I also think that because he had a kind of reputation for being brash, he didn't need to prove anything on the battlefield, so to speak.

So, you know, when we look back upon his presidencies, I think the first president in a long time that didn't get us into some war.

That's something that I think is lost in a lot of people, because it seemed like Twitter was just a war zone all the time.

But it's one thing to say something that people don't like to hear. It's another thing to blow up cities. And so he seemed to work really hard at trying to keep us out of actual bloody conflicts.

But getting, I think, to the heart of what you're saying is what drove Trump? Well, I'm sure a lot of it's Trump and his ego, ego needs and that kind of stuff.

I also kind of detected a kind of a pleasure that he derived from irritating his adversaries.

And I think that some of that goes back a long way to his days in New York and certain communities that he was kind of blackballed and kept out of because of his kind of gruff queen's kind of manner and approach to things.

Anyway, those are some speculation. Now, how does this relate to people in the church? I think there are some people who are tempted in different ways.

You know, I've criticized people who were, you know, tempted to cowardice in the name of, you know, some kind of misunderstanding of what the piece of the church means.

So they're avoiding conflict all the time. But I think that there's a problem on the other end of the spectrum where a person can just find the thrill of the kind of the pugnacious, you know, sort of struggle in the public square to be almost intoxicating and it's a source of pleasure.

And if that's the case, then, you know, you're not keeping things in proper perspective.

You're doing something that doesn't serve the interests of the gospel. Talking about those in the church who are typically more wary of getting themselves into any kind of conflict or negative pushback for things, it seems like a big problem in the evangelical church right now is this idea that we need to be, you know, like you hear the

SBC, for example, their big mantra over the last few years has been, the world is watching, right?

And you hear words like winsome being thrown around all the time where we need to try to win the world over for Christ.

And so it seems like you end up because of these kinds of ideas are the result of people who typically view any sort of, you know, negative press or pushback from the unbelieving world.

They view that as a really bad thing and maybe almost even unfaithful to Christ when we experience those things.

And so how do you think that that issue has come about and become so popular in the evangelical church?

I think it has something to do with a kind of marketing strategy that was adopted in the name of evangelism.

So with the rise of the church growth movement in the late 70s and mid 80s and how that kind of led to the seeker -sensitive phenomenon in the 90s, what we ended up creating is this ethos in which we're trying to create a public image that can be readily kind of, well, seen as benign.

You know, these are all just really good people over there and that kind of thing. And they don't do anything that makes anybody uncomfortable.

I think that that is not in keeping with what we see in the

New Testament. It seems like in the New Testament what we have is the message leads and that message is good news, but it also has some rather demanding implications for those who hear it.

Obviously, it means that there's a call to repentance.

It means that there's some appropriate response in faith, giving ourselves in faith to God because he's given his son to us as a sacrifice for our sins.

All of that can be deeply offensive. And then to say

Jesus is Lord was a political statement. It wasn't just he's Lord in my heart or something like that.

He's Lord in fact, and Caesar is not. And so that challenged people and offended them.

And so I think that what we need is to recover our apostolic confidence.

What I mean by apostolic confidence is that we know something the world doesn't know. And it's not just simply as the case.

So let's take a look at the rise of the New Left in the early 70s and how it's successfully kind of marched through the institutions.

Let me tell you something. They didn't give one thought to being winsome. They cared about winning.

There's a huge difference. They did the things they needed to do to win. And if they hurt your feelings along the way, too bad for you.

That's something that I think that I'm not advocating a complete sort of embrace of everything

Saul Alinsky said or anything crazy like that. They had a plan at least, right? They had a plan, and the message was the thing that led.

Not whether or not people liked what they heard. Isn't that what's so funny about it is that the

Left is on a mission, and then even our soft evangelical leaders, it seems like there's an asymmetrical standard in how these things are being applied.

And so when it comes to any kind of push with the Left, the Left is obviously treated with kid gloves, and then you punch right, and that's the way it works.

Yeah. And what kind of friends do we have in the evangelical elite? They do.

They do it all the time. And so what I think is, first of all, we should not get our hopes up about those folks at all.

And we need to just simply say, okay, we're going to need to take care of some of these matters on our own without your help and just push forward.

And I've been in environments many times, many times, where someone who was, say, kind of a spokesperson for the new

Left, kind of what we might call woke or whatever, didn't give one thought to my feelings, put the finger in my face, accused me of wrong, and gave me no quarter at all, not even a means by which

I was supposed to redeem myself. If you defend yourself, it's just evidence against you, right? Yeah, pretty much.

I was just supposed to stop existing. That's it. So if that's the way the game is played, well, we don't play by all those rules, but I think we need to sort of find a way to accept that we're not going to win those people over with these philosophies of winsomeness.

They're not working. I mean, at least we should be able to say that. They're not working. Yeah. Yeah, pragmatism isn't going to win the day over,

I guess, huh? Yeah. All right, well, I guess maybe we'll just ask a few more questions.

I know you have to go. I'll just ask one more. Maybe Harrison will get one more, and then we'll thank you for your time.

Yeah, Tim, glad to do it. Yes, sir. Well, I know with – so essentially what you have in mainstream,

I guess, reform evangelicalism, you have a lot of individuals who are pushing the winsome, nuanced, gentle Jesus, that sort of thing at every point.

And then I think with the guys who are basically aware of how this game works, there's this realization that there's a lot of hard words that are to be found in Scripture.

So John the Baptist or Jesus, you brood of vipers who warned you to flee from the wrath to come. I mean, essentially you have

Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, making a polemic against the Pharisees at different points in his ministries.

You have the lawyer who comes up to him and says, hey, if you're saying these harsh words to the

Pharisees, that also implicates us. And then that doesn't deter him. He goes right into the lawyers too.

And so there's some place, it seems, in the Bible for this war mentality where you are waging war.

We're not battling according to the flesh, but everything else. And so there's that kind of thing. And I think

I hear – when I hear the – essentially the guys who are up on the game in the circles that I would say you run in and I listen to, there might be a kind of dismissal to the notion of gentleness at all or meekness at all or winsomeness at all.

Is there any way to harmonize those two kinds of passages, the kind of passage with 2

Timothy 2 .24, Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, able to teach patiently, enduring evil with the brood of vipers who warned you to flee from the wrath to come.

How do we do both at the same time? Well, the old -time preachers would talk about afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.

I think that's a good way to kind of think about this. And I think that sometimes we look at people that we might think of as kind of bombastic or kind of a little too,

I guess, prone to pugilism. And we only see them in the clip.

We don't see the rest of their lives. We don't, we're not aware of what else is going on. I know some of these guys and I know that in many other facets of their lives, there is kind of humble and meek as you could possibly want.

And so, you know, how does it get out? You know that they're that way?

Well, they don't have PR departments that spend all their time following around and trying to make them look good. They just kind of, you know, we only see them in the crisis moment or the conflict moment.

And I guess, you know, when you're in the battle, it doesn't look very pretty, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right.

You know, when you walk into a situation, you may find yourself sympathetic to the wrong party, just because you've kind of walked in at a particular moment where that's the person who seems to be getting beaten up.

You just missed the earlier, you know, sort of episode where the guy pulled out a gun. Right, right.

And was trying to kill that other guy. Well, isn't that what's funny about it too, that with a lot of those kind of situations that you're describing,

I think, and you're talking about people who are sheltered from the harsh realities of the world in certain ways, that there are certain situations you might find yourself in, like that kind of situation, that it's never going to look pretty to restrain an adult man with man strength who doesn't want to be restrained, that kind of thing.

Right, right. So I think that we need to be, I guess, prudent in the judgments that we make about a particular situation.

But, you know, I think to the heart of what you're asking, Tim, I think the audience to whom we are, you know, to perform our ministry is, you know, the

Christ who's seated at the right hand. He's the one that we should be most conscious of with regard to the conduct of our lives.

There are going to be plenty of, you know, there are going to be plenty of times in our lives where we're misunderstood.

Sure. And it doesn't matter how much we work to try to make ourselves look good, it's just not going to look good in the eyes of some people.

Go ahead and continue. No, well, I think you know where I was going on. You know, keeping our eyes focused on the one to whom we're accountable.

So would you say just rejecting kind of a one -size -fits -all approach to every encounter would be part of what you're saying then in terms of afflicting the – how did you put that?

Afflicting the comfortable? Yeah, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

Yeah. And sometimes – well,

I think I've said what I intended to say concerning how that may look to outsiders or to people who are not familiar with the situation on the ground and have seen it, you know, over a span of time.

Okay. Well, I guess the last question that we'll ask you in closing is, you know, a lot of the people that listen to our podcast, they're going to be the kind of people who are holding a very unpopular worldview in today's day and age.

So yourself being someone who has faced a lot of, you know, negative pushback all the way up to death threats, what would you say as an encouragement to the person who feels like, hey,

I've got all of these things. I'm looking at the Bible. I'm reading what it says. I totally –

I trust that God is not lying to me. I trust that when he says something is good, he means it's good.

No matter what the world says. But then the problem is everyone I know around me, they don't agree.

And normally they're very vocal about their disagreement with me in a way that I don't always feel like I can necessarily be as vocal in my disagreement as they are.

So what would you say as an encouragement to that kind of person who's facing a lot of opposition because of their belief in what

God has revealed to us? I think the thing that I turn to is that reality always wins.

So, you know, we live in a world that is ordered the way it is because of the creator and that creator governs it in an ongoing basis.

And when God argues, it's not just a verbal exchange.

When God argues, things happen. In other words, there's judgment and things are shaken that can be shaken and things that can't be shaken remain.

So we may – you know, we're at a particular point in history where we see a lot of things that are concerning, but they really don't have a future.

Even if we were just to kind of think about them dispassionately and just pondered how can these things possibly carry forward over the generations, how can these things generally or even be reconciled to any kind of healthy development of a culture?

They can't be. So, you know, when we think about the noneness with regard to marriage or sexual ethics and that kind of thing in our society, we're in a situation where there's no way we can actually reconcile the nuttiness that we see around us with the kind of health that I think we know is required in order for our culture to move forward in a good way.

So what I'm getting at is that the consequences of the actions that people are engaged in and also just the fact that God is sovereign and is overseeing the course of human history, there will be correctives.

So we can warn and we can pray, but we don't necessarily need to think that it's all up to us to make everything change, you know, in a way that we think it should change or are convinced it has to change.

Sometimes we kind of just kind of watch and wait and things occur that people can't argue with.

They're just realities. So let me give you an example. We live in a world where fewer women are having children.

Give it 20 years. You know, if you go around today and ask a lot of these gals why they are, you know, living the way that they're living, you'll find a range of justifications, everything from, you know,

I want to reduce my carbon footprint to, you know, we need fewer white people in the world or something like that.

And that's what they say today. But when they're all alone and they're pushing 50 and the prospects for having children are completely gone and, you know, they're just maybe not even in a realistic situation to even adopt children.

And if they even were to adopt children, they would be in for a big surprise in terms of how difficult it can be to raise an adopted child.

I think you'll find that a lot of these gals have some pretty significant regrets. And we might,

I think, be well served to think about how are we going to minister 20 years from now to all these disillusioned and bitter women.

Rather than spend all of our time today thinking about how can we tell them, oh, it's okay, you don't need to get married.

You know, maybe we need to think about where this all leads. We need a longer timeline. Yeah. I think something

Doug frequently says, and I don't know exactly the way he says it, but something along the lines of crazy never works long term.

Yeah. Right. I think that's right. But it does make you want to go hug your wife and your kids thinking about some of those things and just be moved to more compassion for those who are caught up in these kind of delusions for sure.

Because, I mean, it is a bleak future that they don't understand.

Yeah. And oftentimes there are other kinds of painful episodes in their lives that contributed to the embrace that they've made with some of this craziness.

So I'm with you. I mean, my kids are grown. I've got a couple of granddaughters now. My wife and I have a great marriage.

All of our kids are believers. I'm in a very good spot. You know, I'm living the dream, you could say.

So it's not like I'm mad at anybody because they've kept something from me. I'm more just kind of, like, exasperated that, you know, people can't see just how good it is when you do things the right way.

Sure. Well, Chris, you've answered all our questions. We're really thankful that you've come on.

It's been great talking to you. Tell us, where can people go to find more of you?

Well, I mean, I've got a website, crwiley .com, and go there. I don't spend a lot of time there.

It's just basically a bulletin board. Say, I just published a book, and every once in a while, I put up some interview that, you know,

I was involved in. But then there's the Theology Podcast, which comes out every week.

We've got about 10 ,000 listeners worldwide. This just blows our mind. So we did a show on Ukraine and Russia here recently.

And so just, you know, because the podcasting software allows us to kind of explore where our listeners are,

I discovered that we do have listeners in Russia in three different cities and in Ukraine in four different cities.

Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's pretty wild that that's the case. But, you know, you see it there.

And then, of course, there are the books. And if you ever find yourself here in the Pacific Northwest, come by and say hello.

I'm at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Vancouver. Yeah, I wish we would have interviewed you on Tom Bombadil, too.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was a fun book to do. All right. Well, Chris, we wanted to thank you again for coming on the show.

We really appreciate it a lot. And we want to thank also our listeners out there for taking the time to listen to our conversation.

And hopefully it's been helpful for you guys. And we look forward to seeing you on the next one. This has been another episode of Bible Bashed.

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Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.