Krytpos on X, Olympic opening, & Christians using coercion

X, Twitter, and the Value of Long-Form Threads

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. And today we have a guest we've had on before. We have Kruptas. This is your second time, I think, right? Kruptas on the podcast.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's good to be back, John. Thank you for the invitation.

Yeah, I appreciate it. And of course, Seeking the Hidden Thing is your blog if people wanna go subscribe. I think it's only Substack or is there a website?

It's, well, it's at Substack, but I did the thing. Somebody recommended that if you want to bypass Twitter's algorithms a little bit better to buy your own domain name, plus then the side effect is if Substack ever does get compromised, all of your material belongs to you because it's under your own domain name.

And you can then take the domain name and just move all your material over and just host it yourself on your own domain name. You don't benefit from Substack's algorithms, unfortunately, but at least then you are in possession of your mailing list and so forth that way, and you can rebuild, hopefully.

But yeah, and then I guess the other place people can find me is, in addition to seekingthehiddenthing .com, is on Twitter at at underscore Kruptos.

All right, and I enjoy your Twitter threads. I don't know, people ask me this too, so it's not necessarily unique to you, but how do you have the time to post all these threads and these profound, sometimes long threads about various subjects?

I don't really. Well, the thing is I'm self-employed, right? So I set my own schedule, and my business kind of ebbs and flows. So sometimes I have to apologize to my readers who are paid subscribers that, I didn't get a chance to post anything for two weeks because believe it or not, I've been working 14-hour days on things.

The nice thing about Twitter sometimes is it's, you can do it sort of in in-between spaces where I tend to be the kind of person when I'm working, I like to get buried in my work and tunnel vision, and I'm not the kind of person who tends to work nicely in 15 or 20-minute segments.

So if I stay productive, and there's always a lot of those 15 or 20-minute segments, is you blow through the timeline, and then something pops up and you tweet it out, or what happens is while I'm bouncing around in my truck, going from client to client, I think of stuff, and then as soon as I get 15 minutes to put it down, I just bang out a thread or a tweet, and off you go that way.

So that's some of how, and so a lot of it is just time management. So I have a lot of days between my regular job writing and Twitter where I'm up at six in the morning, and I don't stop until 10, 10 .30 at night, and I watch a half hour of TV with my wife, and then I'm off to bed.

Well, I think I have a similar schedule or routine, and Twitter, I was talking to my wife about this yesterday, Twitter is, or X, I guess they call it now, it's such a blessing in the sense that it is so easy to just post something.

It is the easiest thing in the world to get a message out there, and get it out there quickly to a lot of people.

Yeah, and especially if you're dialed into a network, and you have something important you need to say, you can expand those messages very, very fast.

Yeah, it's a great source for news now. I mean, you go to Twitter now before going to a news organization to find out what's happening, because the news is there first, and I've had a love-hate relationship with X, Twitter, for a while.

I deleted, I had one account that I had for, I don't know, two years, and I got up to, I think, about 12 ,000 subscribers, and I deleted it, and I was like, forget about this, and that was around the time they banned Trump, and all of that, and then, took me a few years, Elon Musk took over, I was like, okay, I'll try it, and I come back, slowly start to tweet a little bit, and I think I'm up to like seven, I don't know, .6 subscribers now, something like that, but slowly rebuilding it, and then yesterday, I was talking to my wife, and I just said, you know, I really do not like this platform in so many ways.

It's stressful sometimes. You have, because you can have big names going after you, and getting a lot of attention, and trying to shame you, and it can just be sometimes a time waster, but at the same time, there's these benefits.

I don't know what to do. Do I stick with it? Do I not? So, I try to manage it, but manage doesn't work.

Anyway.

I've used, because I was in ministry for a number of years, and so, I've experienced the sort of the big fish in the small pond thing, so within my own denomination being a prominent, you know, you've graduated from the seminary, you're in ministry, you sit on boards, you do all the usual stuff that you do when you're in ministry, right?

Yeah.

And then, for personal reasons, ducked out, like stepped away. I just needed, ministry's a tough gig, and I needed to step away, and I've been doing something else now for like 17, 18 years. I still preach occasionally, but I, you know, intentionally sort of took myself off of boards and sort of, you know, drifted back into obscurity, just sort of very Voltaire, you know, just tending my own garden kind of thing, right?

Again, that education flex we were talking about beforehand,.

Right?

But it's, I found Twitter to be a really good way to build networks out with people, with other smart people with ideas. And, you know, it was nice to kind of find that I'm good at this whole, I mean, I always kind of knew it, that I'm good at this whole thinking and ideas thing and analyzing stuff.

And, you know, for a guy in his late fifties to pick up Twitter and be good at it is still, because this is supposedly in theory, you know, a medium for the 20 year olds, right? And they seem to get all of the, you know, the irony and the memes and the whole bit, but there is a space for overly serious people in their fifties with good ideas to build a platform.

And I was surprised because I did address something very similar to you. I built my account up to about 4 ,500 followers, then nuked it and then came back and then did the, hey, I'm back thing. And you realize that like, oh, a lot of people have moved on now or just gone.

And so I picked up about a thousand followers in 24 hours. And then I'm up to, I'm on the cusp now of 15 ,000. My kids find it hilarious that, because they're dialed into Instagram and stuff, right? And, you know, my one daughter says, oh, I got to post an Instagram that got 500 views.

And I'm just like, oh, sweetie, I just, I almost don't have the heart to tell them about, you know, the million view tweets that.

Yeah.

I wonder about some of those though, because the interaction is minimal compared to the view count. And I don't know what to attribute that to. Is that just people strolling past? Is that bots? You know, but.

It's fairly consistent. Cause I have, you know, my business is very numbers dependent. So I want to know sort of your, you know, your pipeline type of stuff, right? So I have over time been paying attention a lot to my metrics.

And so what I'm generally shooting for is, so there's pre-Musk and post-Musk. Pre-Musk was a little bit more predictable in that way. Post-Musk is changed somewhat, but I generally try to evaluate a, a tweet is sort of average when it's getting one like for every hundred follows that you have.

And then you're trying to get a view count that's about, you know, a good tweet gets about half the views of you have followers. So if I've got 15 ,000 followers, a good tweet will get about seven and a half thousand views and about, you know, 145 to 150 likes, right?

And that's kind of the benchmark I use for like, was it a good tweet or wasn't a good, was it well-received or not well-received? So anything over that it's doing, you know, it's the numbers are good.

Anything under that, well, okay, that one flopped, right? And that's kind of how I evaluate it. And I think a lot of people that come back to me and say, that's a really helpful kind of metric just to look at.

It's also a good way to evaluate how controversial tweet is. So that one that got almost a million views, that was the trailer park mom tweet. And it got only a thousand likes, but it got like almost a thousand QTs and retweets and whatever, because everybody was talking about it, but it was controversial.

So people were going back and forth on it. A lot of people did. And, you know, my most popular tweet that got something like 8 ,000 likes had only about 500 ,000 views. So in that regard, it was much better received for a lot.

So there was a lot more people liking it than they were critiquing it and commenting on it and all of that kind of stuff. So just for your audience who are maybe new to Twitter or just that this whole Twitter seems like an alien sort of thing, and how do you understand it?

You know, it is, you can't actually bore down into it and wrap your head around the medium and understand it. The next thing to do is just figure out how to write good tweets. And that in itself is something that, that's not the easiest thing to teach people.

Yeah, yeah. You've really thought about this.

I have. That's kind of what I do, right? I analyze everything.

It's just like everything.

It's just sort of the curse of my brain.

Yeah, well, it's a blessing to others who get to reap the rewards from that.

Yeah, it's like, there's just nothing in life that I'm not around. Like, I will play cards. And, you know, we have a monthly card tournament, right? Where we play a card game, Euchre, and we get together with like 20 of us every month and have a Euchre tournament.

And I have a whole complete breakdown of my particular analysis of how to win at Euchre, which I do very frequently. So, but yeah.

Okay, well.

It's one of those things. So, anything can be analyzed and broken down. I'm a class traitor, by the way, a manager. I'm your typical, you know, break it down, analyze it, abstract it. I am the manager's manager who betrayed my own to tell you about managerialism.

The Olympic Opening Ceremony and Christian Reactions

To, yeah, look behind the curtain and see what's actually going on there. So, I wanted to show everyone on the screen this. This is an article that you wrote. This is the real reason we're actually talking.

Yeah.

It is this article from Seeking the Hidden Thing. It's called The Case for Coercive Christianity, which is a very provocative title.

Intentionally so.

Intentionally so, right. And the reason that you sent me this was because of a series of reactions to the French Olympics opening ceremony. And they're, just to bring everyone up to speed, most people, I think, know at this point that there were some fairly, you think that title is provocative.

Wait till you see the opening ceremony.

Don't go looking for it if you haven't seen it already.

Yeah.

You don't need to see that.

If you're not corrupted, then, you know, do not become corrupted by watching those videos. I was pretty surprised. I thought it was a parody at first, you know? And of course, there's a controversy now on whether there was a depiction of the Lord's Supper or was it some pagan feast that they were trying to portray.

But initially, a lot of Christians thought they were mocking the Lord's Supper with transgenders. And there's one guy with, literally a part of his genitalia was hanging out on television.

I unfortunately saw that.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that's the curse of X too, is if you're, you know, you can just all of a sudden see things. And so that was a long, you know, I don't want to analyze the whole thing, but there was that, there was another one with a bearded lady doing very provocative sexual type things.

There was Marie Antoinette holding her head as she's decapitated and burning down the palace.

Edward Hapsburg loved that one, right? One of the Hapsburg heirs. He was really appreciated for that.

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it was just disgusting. The whole thing was disgusting. It was an assault on the good, true, and beautiful. And Elon Musk came out with a tweet where he said something like, Christianity has become toothless, I think was what he said.

Something like that.

And this resonated with a lot of people. Because if you did this to Muslims or in a Muslim country, obviously this would be an uproar. And so France, a post-Christians, at least their elites are post-Christian secularist, at least in Paris.

And very sexually deviant. And they portrayed that to the world. And a bunch of Christians, and we won't name them by name in this particular episode unless you want to. I think I might have my special episode for that one.

But a bunch of Christians had different reactions, but some of them and some prominent voices seemed to think that there was a reaction that was wrong coming from. In other words, there was infighting and disagreement in the Christian world over what the proper response to something like this is.

With some saying only revival, only preaching the gospel can do anything to stop this. This is just going to be the society you live in. It's gonna look like this if people don't believe the gospel. And then others saying, no, gain power, use force, lay down the law, make sure that these people don't have a platform.

When they do things like this that are very evil, they should be punished for it. And there should be a disincentive. And so I think in one sense, the people who are on that side were proven right because actually the Olympics, their committee took it off of YouTube.

And that wasn't because there was a revival in France. That was because there was public pressure that said this is unacceptable.

Well, and they took it off so they could get the messaging right. It was funny because there was some article. Well, I don't know if it came back, but it was the festival of Dionysus stuff started emerging after they took it down.

And there were several articles before that where people in the left media were acknowledging, outrage over LGBTQ prediction, depiction of the Last Supper. And so many of the elites, they picked up on what was going on, saw it for what it was.

And you get a lot of criticism for that. They take it down. And then shortly after that, you begin to see elite messaging. Like, no, actually this was a Dionysus festival. And then, so they rallied around, got their messaging straight and came back out again.

So it's, you know, I, and then there is the critique that, well, it's rooted in the French tradition of, you know, the circus festivals that would come around the feasts and they would mock the priests and so forth.

And I'm like, yeah, but those, you know, my thought is, well, yeah, but those festivals, that was the common folk mocking the, you know, the rich and powerful who weren't living up to the standards of what the church and the crown should be.

These were not the crown then mocking the faith of the common man in that sense. So the power dynamics were entirely different in that regard. So there's a bunch of different, you know, there's some who tried to understand it.

Like, I don't think that, you know, you're maybe misjudging that or whatever. And so I think while I appreciate the attempt to say that maybe it isn't what you think, I think ultimately in that regard, that's not quite the right way to look at it.

I think, you know, this is who they are. They, you know, they want to deconstruct mock and disassemble the traditions that have been handed down to them. And they do it largely through sexual degeneration and deviancy.

And that's, you know, and they basically threw that into everybody, in everybody's face, thinking that they would be avant-garde and be thought so. But I think they're just so in their bubbles that they couldn't fathom the idea that when you put that out globally, there's going to be enough people at home and abroad that would be thoroughly offended by it.

And they offended everybody. Like they offended the old, like the old titled nobility. There was a picture of the King and Queen of Spain who have distant relatives to Marie Antoinette, who like the look on her face was like, she didn't quite cover her mouth with her hand, but it came pretty close.

And then of course, the Edward Hapsburg, the heir to the Hapsburg throne, or what was once the Hapsburg throne, if there was such a thing, still he tweeted out something very caustic, you know, and even my, like my 80 year old mother, I showed that to her, like both of, cause she hadn't heard the thing.

So I showed her after church on Sunday, right?

There we go, a coffee after church.

That's a great time to do it, yeah.

Yeah, that's a great time to do it. And my mother's like, she just like, okay, Edward, tell us how you feel. Yeah, and then my mom went off on it, which is good. Cause when like 80 year olds go off on something, it's always fun because they don't care anymore.

It's always fun. Well, it can be fun. Yeah, there's no filter and they don't care if you, they're like, we're already canceled.

I'm 80, I'm in my 80s, like what can you do to me at this point?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So, I mean, maybe before we get into the coercive thing, since I haven't looked into it deeply, but I was thinking about it this morning. What difference does it make if it's the festival to Dionysus or the Last Supper?

I mean, I guess there is somewhat of a difference if you're mocking directly our Lord and Da Vinci's portrayal of our Lord at the Last Supper. But I'm still like, it's so bad. No matter how you cut this, like it doesn't make it like, so it was totally fine because it was Dionysus.

I'm like, well, there's still a guy's genitalia hanging out, there's still, and this is supposedly in a country that's supposed to have some Christian influence. And it's not just you're taking pagan symbolism, or like we do that with our architecture in DC in the United States, in the Southern United States.

It's like you're taking the worst elements of paganism and then trying to put those in front of our face, the ones that conflict with Christianity. So I don't know. I mean, do you think it was a portrayal of the Last Supper?

Because I think that's what they were doing.

I think it was. Oh yeah, you can see the crown on the head or whatever. Okay, so if let's say, let's take them, if we were to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that, well, no, we weren't mocking Christianity.

We were celebrating the feast of Dionysus. And do you remember there was back quite a number of years, I think there was in Finland or Norway, one of the Nordic countries had like the Winter Olympics and they did a whole pagan revival.

Like they did a whole, like the Norse myths, Beowulf and all of these, and they reenacted all of the pagan myths and they just leaned into that, right? And you're thinking like, okay, this is an interesting, and they didn't mock Christianity or anything, but you're thinking in theory, these are all now, quote unquote, Christian nations, right?

But you could see that there was something in the winds where the elites were singing, like we're making a break from the old Christian side and we're going to do it very subtly by celebrating our pagan roots, you know?

So there was this, but it was done very well. And it wasn't in that way directly critical of Christianity. It's just, if you're in the know of how messaging works and subtle symbols, you're like, oh, I see what they're kind of doing here.

They're trying to push Christianity aside by re-embracing their pagan roots, right? So I think what they're trying, what they were trying to do to save themselves is to say that they were doing something similar, that what we're doing is celebrating the pagan roots of European society, and we're embracing the Feast of Dionysius as a celebration of the joy of pleasure and wine and all these kinds of things as a critique of, maybe it's just sort of the button-down nature of society or whatever, you know?

But so they try to basically take Christianity.

Right out of it.

But in the end, it really is just a, the Feast of Dionysius in that regard is just really a celebration of debauchery. And so whether you're doing a celebration of debauchery in direct thumb-your-nose at Christianity or you're just doing it for the sake of celebrating a feast of debauchery, you're still celebrating a feast of debauchery.

And that's, I think, kind of the core point.

They said, though, it was about the war and how anti-war messaging in the Feast of Dionysus.

Yeah, which is like, yeah, okay. Like, if that works for you, I suppose you can try to convince yourself of that.

Yeah, I was like very confused by that.

It's just the way it was laid out and the way that everybody, it wasn't just that they were all standing there. They were all leaning in certain ways. And when you put the two pictures next to each other, it's like, oh, I see it right.

Like, it's not like you have to work hard to like, well, maybe if we squint a little, I can see what they're doing. It just hits you right in the face.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, oh, I get what they're doing. You have a fat lesbian with a halo on her head and she's in a white robe and she's Jesus. And you're like going like, okay, really? And then all of the rest of them are sitting in ways that suggest, you know, sort of the groupings of the disciples, but not exactly the way that it was done.

So, but anyways, it's very obvious when you put the two pictures side by side.

These people who perform these things, you know, they schedule and choreograph. It really is choreographed. Cause I noticed the people behind the table there, they abruptly got into a position at one point.

So it wasn't just their natural body movements. They were supposed to be standing a certain way. And so this is thought through in advance. Oh yeah, it's intentional. Yeah, no one who looks at this is going to think like, oh wow, by accident, people might think this is the Last Supper depiction.

Like it should jump out at you right away that if you are trying to portray something else, man, this something else looks awfully similar to Da Vinci's portrayal of the Last Supper. Maybe we should reconsider because just a rational person would think that.

So they went ahead with messaging that best case scenario, if it wasn't the Last Supper, they knew that this would be associated with that strongly.

Oh yeah.

And it's just, it's the dimensions of it alone are suggestive. Like the elongated table and just the way the number of people spread out on the table. It's very hard to like, I just don't buy any other explanation.

It just doesn't seem plausible.

Yeah.

And so in that regard, you have to sort of, you know, as they say, you know, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck. And that's, and I think that's really the inescapable, and that's why they ended up having to take it down just because there was no real way for them to avoid.

It's out there now, but it just, it was bad all the way around.

I think, you know, when I saw the clips of it on X, the optics of it to me were, it hit me like, okay, this is the superiority of paganism to Christianity. That's the message they're trying to convey with Dionysius on this table, you know, and of course, and everything sexually deviant, but of course he only has a loincloth and he looks, there's a scariness to him because he's, it's sort of shocking.

He's blue paint and this bright red beard, and he's doing all these kinds of provocative things on this table. And then he is at the center of that table and right behind him is this lesbian, as you pointed out, who has a halo that's approaching divinity status.

I mean, it's, she's set apart from the rest of the crowd in a very

And trying to look angelic.

In a very strong way. And some of, I noticed online, some people were trying to say that this, they were looking at a portrayal of the Feast of Dionysius where someone at the table has a little faint halo perhaps behind them.

And they're saying, well, this is what that was trying to do. And I'm like, no, it wasn't.

No, it wasn't.

This was

Like, give your head a shake.

Yeah, you have a problem if you think that, but he's doing it right in front of her and he's at a higher elevation. He's very brazen, very bold, and just, I don't know. It seemed like the optics of it were like, I'm above this.

I'm greater than this.

And Oh yeah.

And then of course, in addition to that Christianity being a fake religion because all these, this depiction of the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples, they're all a bunch of perverts. They're all a bunch of degenerates essentially.

And really demystifying that whole event. So anyway, all that to say, it was terrible. And Christians reacted in these odd ways, in my opinion. And of course They do. You noticed some of the back and forth I was having with some people.

I think most notably Phil Johnson. He came into some of my threads and we were going back and forth. And it was, yeah, I was a little bit like, wow. It was insinuated that

Tell me how you feel, Phil.

Yeah, I just, I didn't really, I wasn't too concerned about, I guess, sharing the gospel. I didn't really think, I felt like the church and state should be mingled in some way and in an appropriate way.

I mean, there was all these insinuations being cast my way about, and none of them were fair. None of them represented my concern.

No, it's all basically like the heat of wreck. It's basically about winning the rhetorical game, right? Scoring a point, the kill shot.

Yeah, right, right. Yeah, it was just, I don't know, it was just silly. And this is the kind of discussions that make me want to reevaluate X, my participation. Cause I'm like, this is crazy, right guys?

You're seeing this, this is crazy.

Well, he's trying to kill shot.

He's trying to do a kill shot argument, largely in bad faith, cause he's not actually having a discussion with you, right? And that's, those are the kinds of things, it takes real discipline, as you say, especially when you get a big name coming after you, it takes real discipline just to step around those types.

I find it hard sometimes to step around those discussions and remain above them. But, you know, you get sucked into these bad faith discussions and you realize like, this is just killing me here. And there's no way out because no matter what I say, he's got a bad faith rhetorical kill to zing at me again.

And I never get my point in edgewise.

Yeah.

And I think, hopefully, I don't know if you, you probably didn't see every interaction, but I would try to maintain a decorum and respect.

Yeah, enough of it. I think you did okay, John.

Thanks.

Thanks for that. So, and people who are hearing this now for the first time are probably wondering, what are you, you're not talking about the Phil Johnson at Grace Tu. Unfortunately, I am.

You are, yes.

And yes, this is someone that I, you know, I consider to be a friend with on some level. I mean, we weren't close, but I don't know. I have his number. The last time, this is the second time we've had something like this.

And it usually, it surprised me last time, it surprised me this time. And I tried to reach out personally, but we, you know, it never culminated in a conversation. But I just, you know, over, left him a long voice message of like, look, I appreciate you so much.

I want you to point out if there's really something in my life, you know, that you're concerned about. And I try to take that approach because I want to be humble about this stuff. Maybe I'm missing something.

Maybe you have a point, but it just became so clear to me. And it wasn't obviously just him. Like there was, there was a number of Christians that were jumping on the whole people who, Christians who want to use some kind of power against this kind of debauchery are doing something evil.

Like, like we should be suspicious of them. There's something nefarious that they're doing that we should not identify, not with Christianity, but with something else, something pagan. And it's, it's Constantine.

It's, you know, it's, I don't know, the Puritans and Oliver Cromwell. I mean, these are some of the images that were being depicted about like these very tyrannical regimes that used to exist. And this is where Christians want to go back to this.

And there were some Christians were like, yeah, we do.

But it's, there's, there's, there is just, there's a lot of stuff that, you know, at work here, John, like, cause there's, there's a bunch of presuppositions that come out of the North American context where, and there's some that will not like to hear this, but the, the intermingling of liberal, libertarian ideas with Christianity, the influence of nominalism, the philosophy of nominalism in Christianity is at play, but it's also, there's, there's historical factors, you know, rooted in, in pietism, but also people's understanding of the nature of the church and what, you know, what, what is the church community, some theology has been lost, like the theology of, of the, the roles of prophet, priest, and king within the Christian community, and the understanding of, of the nature of, of the role of the church within the Christian community.

So, you know, to sort of frame the whole discussion, if you think of the people of God, so the community of believers, right? So that's a body. So the community of believers, you know, if you draw a circle there, there's many people who look at the church as being fully encompassing that circle of the body of believers.

So whatever the body of believers is about, the church fully encompasses the life of the believers. And that at heart really is a mistaken way of understanding the community of the believers. The, the community, the, the church as an institution, you could talk about the church as the people of God, but the church as an institution, sort of as a formal thing, exists as an institution within the community of believers that exists to serve the community of believers.

So let's take, for example, and a good way to illustrate this then is, let's say that it will take for granted, you know, I'll accept the premise just for the sake of argument, that we, that we need to do individual evangelism.

That's the only correct way to do it. But let's just say we're, we're wildly successful with this and we convert 95 of the population and they're all Christians. Okay, and we have a defined area, let's call it the United States.

And we've been wildly successful with our outreach efforts. 95 of the population have converted to Christ. We still have the issues of, we need roads built, we need trash picked up. We need to defend ourselves from invasion.

You know, those darn Canadians up North and the Mexicans down South, right? You know, we have, you know, and then the Russians are out there, you know. So we still have all of these issues. And even if let's say we were to Christianize everybody, we would still have a whole series of issues that really fall outside of the church that need to be dealt with.

And we still live in a sinful world. So there's still, even in a population that's 95 Christian, there are still going to be some people who fall into the grips of sin. They're going to do things that are destructive.

You're gonna have people that, you know, cheat on their taxes, that, you know, somebody is gonna get angry and enraged and they're going to kill somebody. Even if it's, you know, it's not intentional murder, there's going to be probably some cases of like spouse abuse.

You're gonna still have, you know, rape and all these other things that, all these sins, they exist in society. Until Christ returns, you're not gonna get rid of them. And there is a necessity for there to be an institution to grapple with all of this stuff, right?

And this, we would call this the kingly office. So now you have this body politic. So those that would say, well, you know, Christians have no business in politics. So you've been wildly successful in evangelism.

You're 95 of the population. Are you really trying to tell me that you need to turn over governance of your nation to the 5 that remain unbelievers because you as Christians can't be involved in government?

Right, and so, you know, and this is the kind of dilemmas that you put yourself into. So you have the institution of the church, and this is very old sort of classic theology of the institution of the crown and God institutes a crown.