Krytpos on X, Olympic opening, & Christians using coercion

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00:02

So today we have a guest we've had on before, we have

00:21

Kruptas. This is your second time, I think, right, Kruptas on the podcast. Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's good to be back,

00:27

John. Thank you for the invitation. Yeah, I appreciate it. And of course, Seeking the Hidden Thing is your blog if people want to go subscribe.

00:35

I think it's only Substack or is there a website? Well, it's at Substack, but I did the thing.

00:43

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.

01:03

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.

01:10

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.

01:18

And you can rebuild hopefully. So but yeah, and then I guess the other place people can find me is in addition to Seeking the

01:26

Hidden Thing dot com is on Twitter at at underscore Kruptos. All right, and I enjoy your

01:32

Twitter threads. I don't know. People ask me this, too, so it's not necessarily unique to you.

01:39

But how do you have the time to post all these threads and these profound, sometimes long threads about various subjects?

01:48

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.

01:57

So sometimes I have to apologize to my readers who are paid subscribers that, you know, I didn't get a chance to pay to post anything for two weeks because believe it or not,

02:05

I've been, you know, working 14 hour days, things. And the nice thing about Twitter sometimes is it's you can do it sort of in between spaces where I tend to be the kind of person when

02:18

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.

02:26

So if I stay productive and there's always a lot of those 15 or 20 minute segments is, you know, you blow through the timeline and then something pops up and you tweet it out.

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Or what happens is while I'm bouncing around in my truck going from client to client, I think of stuff.

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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.

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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, you know,

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I'm up at six in the morning and I don't stop until 10, 1030 at night and I watch a half hour of TV with my wife and then

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I'm off to bed. Well, you know, I think I have a similar schedule or routine and Twitter.

03:13

I saw 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.

03:23

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

03:39

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.

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And I've had a love hate relationship with X Twitter for a while.

03:53

I deleted I had one account that I had for, I don't know, two years. And I got up to,

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I think, about twelve thousand subscribers and I deleted it. And I was like, forget about this. And that was around the time they banned

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Trump and all of that. And then took me a few years. Elon Musk took over. I was like,

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OK, I'll try it. And I come back, slowly start to tweet a little bit. And I think

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I'm up to like seven, I don't know, point six subscribers now, something like that, but slowly rebuilding it.

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And 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.

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It's it's stressful sometimes you have because you could have big names going after you and getting a lot of attention and trying to shame you.

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And and it can just be sometimes a time waster.

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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 manage it, but manage.

04:52

Well, and anyway, I've I've used like because I'm I was in ministry for a number of years.

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And so I've experienced the sort of the big fish in the small pond thing. So within my own denomination being, you know, 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.

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Right. Yeah. And then for personal reasons, ducked out, like stepped away. I just needed it.

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Ministry is a tough gig and I needed to step away. And I've been doing something else now for like 17, 18 years.

05:24

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.

05:36

You know, just tending my own garden kind of thing. Right. Again, that education flex we were talking about beforehand.

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Right. But it's I I have

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I found Twitter to be a really good way to to build networks out with people, with other smart people, with ideas.

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And, you know, it was nice to kind of find that I'm good at this whole

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I mean, I was 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 50s 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.

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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 50s with good ideas to build a platform.

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I'm surprised because I did something very similar to you. I built my account up to about forty five hundred followers, then nuked it and then came back and then did the hey,

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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

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I'm up to I'm on the cusp now of fifteen thousand. My kids find it hilarious that because they're dialed into Instagram and stuff.

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Right. And, you know, my one daughter says, I got to post an Instagram that that got five hundred views.

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

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Yeah, I wonder about some of those, though, because the interaction is some is minimal compared to the view count.

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And I don't know what to attribute that to. Is that just people scrolling past that bots? You know, but it's it's it's fairly consistent because I have, you know, my business is very numbers dependent.

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So I want to know sort of your you know, your pipeline type of stuff. Right. So I have over time been very paying attention a lot to to my metrics.

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And so what I'm generally shooting for is it so that there's pre

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Musk and post Musk pre Musk was a little bit more predictable in that way. Post Musk is is changed somewhat.

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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.

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And then you're trying to get a view count that's about, you know, a good tweet gets about half of the views of you have followers.

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So if I've got 15000 followers, a good tweet will get about seven and a half thousand views and about, you know, one hundred and forty five to one hundred and fifty likes.

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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?

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So anything over that it's doing, you know, it's the numbers are good. Anything under that. Well, OK, that one flopped.

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Right. And that's kind of how I evaluate it. And I think a lot of people that come back to me said, you know, that was that's a really helpful kind of metric just to look at.

08:46

It's also a good way to evaluate. How controversial tweet is, so that one that got almost a million views, what that was the the trailer park mom tweet, and it got only a thousand likes, but it got like almost a thousand

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QTs and retweets and whatever because everybody was talking about it. But it was controversial.

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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 eight thousand views, eight thousand likes had only about five hundred thousand views.

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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.

09:34

So just for your audience who are maybe new to Twitter or just that this whole Twitter seems like an alien sort of thing.

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And how do you understand it? You know, it is you can't you can't actually bore down into it and and wrap your head around the medium and understand it.

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The next thing to do is just figure out how to write good tweets. And that's that in itself is something that that's not the easiest thing to teach people.

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Yeah, yeah. You've really thought about this. I have. That's kind of what I do. Right. I analyze.

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Yeah, like everything. It's just sort of the curse of my brain. Yeah, it's a blessing to others who get to reap the rewards from that.

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There's just nothing in life that I'm not around. Like I 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.

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And I have a whole complete breakdown of my particular analysis of of how to win at euchre, which

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I do very frequently. So but yeah, OK, well, it's one of those things. So anything can be analyzed and broken down.

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I'm I'm a class traitor, by the way, a manager. I'm your typical, you know, break it down, analyze it, abstract it.

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I am the manager's manager who betrayed my own to tell you about managerialism.

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To look behind the curtain and see what's actually going on there. So I wanted to show everyone on the screen this.

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This is an article that you wrote. This is the real reason we're actually talking. Yeah, is that this article from Seeking the

11:11

Hidden Thing, it's called The Case for Coercive Christianity, which is a very provocative title.

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Intentionally so. Intentionally so. Right. And the reason that you sent me this was because of a series of reactions to the

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French Olympics opening ceremony. And they're just to bring everyone up to speed.

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Most people, I think, know at this point that there were some fairly. You think that title is provocative.

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Wait till you see the opening ceremony. There's some Google looking for it. If you haven't seen it, yeah, you don't need to see that.

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If you're not corrupted, then do not become corrupted by watching those videos. I was pretty surprised.

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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

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Lord's Supper or was it some pagan feast that they were trying to portray?

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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.

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I saw. I unfortunately saw that. Yeah. And you know, and that's the curse of X, too, is if you're, you know, you can just all of a sudden see things.

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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.

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

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

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So, I mean, it was just disgusting. The whole thing was disgusting. It was an assault on the good, true and beautiful.

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And Elon Musk came out with a tweet where he said something like Christianity has become toothless,

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I think is what he said. Something like that. And this resonated with a lot of people, because if you did this to Muslims or in a

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Muslim country, obviously this would be an uproar. And so France, a post -Christian, at least their elites are post -Christian secularist, at least in Paris, and very sexually deviant.

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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.

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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 seem to think that it that there was a reaction that was wrong coming from.

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In other words, there is 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.

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This is just going to be the society you live in. It's going to look like this if people don't believe the gospel.

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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.

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And so I think in one sense, the people who are on that side were proven right because actually the

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Olympics, their committee took it off of YouTube. And that wasn't because there was a revival in France.

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That was because there was public pressure that said this is unacceptable. So. Well, and they took it off so they could get the messaging right.

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It was funny because there was some article. Well, it's I don't know if it came back, but it was the the festival of Dionysus stuff started emerging after they took it down.

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And there were several articles before that where people in the left media were acknowledging, you know, outrage over, you know,

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LGBTQ prediction from, you know, depiction of the of the

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Last Supper. And so the many of the elites, they picked up on what was going on, saw it for what it was.

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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

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Dionysus festival, you know. And then, you know, so they they they rallied around, got their messaging straight and came back out again.

15:52

So it's, you know, I. And then there there is the critique that, well, it's rooted in the

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French tradition of, you know, the the the circus festivals that would come around the feasts and they would mock the the priests and so forth.

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And I'm like, yeah, but those you know, my my thought is, well, yeah, but those festivals, that was the 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.

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These were not the crown then mocking the faith of the common man in that sense.

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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.

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Like, I don't think, you know, you're maybe misjudging that or whatever. And so I think while I appreciate the the the attempt to say that maybe it isn't what you think,

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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.

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They, you know, they want to deconstruct, mock and disassemble the traditions that have been handed down to them.

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And and they do it largely through sexual degeneration and deviancy.

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And that's, you know, and they they basically threw that into everybody in everybody's face, thinking that they would be avant garde and be thought so.

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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.

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And they offended everybody, like they offended the old, like the the old titled nobility.

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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.

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And then, of course, the Edward Habsburg, the heir to the Habsburg throne or what was once the

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Habsburg throne, if there was such a thing still, he he tweeted out something very caustic, you know, and even my like my 80 year old mother,

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I showed that to her, like both because she hadn't heard the thing. So I showed her after church on Sunday.

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Right. There we go. I get coffee after church time to do it. Yeah, that's a great time to do it. And my mother's like she just looks like,

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OK, Edward, tell us how you feel. Yeah. And then my mom went off on it, which is good, because when like 80 year olds go off on something, it's always fun because they they don't care anymore.

18:26

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.

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I mean, it's like you can't do anything. 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.

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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

18:57

Lord and Da Vinci's portrayal of our Lord at the Last Supper. But I still like it's so bad, like no matter how you cut this, like it doesn't make it like so it's totally fine because it was

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Dionysus. I'm like, well, there's still a guy's genitalia hanging out. And this is supposedly in a country that's supposed to have some

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Christian influence. And it's not just you're taking pagan symbolism or like we do that with our architecture in D .C.,

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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.

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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.

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Oh, yeah. You can see the crown on the head or whatever. OK, so the 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

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Christianity. We were celebrating the Feast of Dionysus. And do you remember there was back quite a number of years,

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I think there was in Finland or Norway, one of the Nordic countries had like the Winter Olympics and they did a whole pagan, like they did a whole like the

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Norse myths, Beowulf and all of these, you know, like and they reenacted all of the pagan myths and they just leaned into that.

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Right. And you're thinking like, OK, this is an interesting and they didn't mock Christianity or anything, but you're thinking.

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In theory, these are all now, you know, quote unquote Christian nations.

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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

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Christian side and we're going to do it very subtly by celebrating our pagan roots, you know, so and so there was this and but it was it was done very well.

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And it wasn't, you know, in that way directly critical of Christianity. It's just if you're in the the know of how messaging works and subtle symbols, you're like, oh,

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I see what they're kind of doing here. They're they're trying to push Christianity aside by re -embracing their pagan roots.

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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, you know,

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European society. And we're embracing, you know, the Feast of Dionysus as a celebration of, you know, the joy of, you know, pleasure and wine and all these kind of things as a critique of, you know, maybe it's just sort of the buttoned down nature of society or whatever, you know, but they so they try to basically, you know, take

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Christianity right out of it. And but in the end, it really is just a celebration, the

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Feast of Dionysus in that regard is just really a celebration of debauchery. And so whether you're doing a celebration of debauchery in direct, you know, 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.

22:11

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

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Feast of Dionysus. Which is like, yeah, OK, like if that works for you,

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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 you had the way that everybody it wasn't just that they were all standing there, they were all leaning in certain ways.

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And when you put the two pictures like next to each other, it's like, oh, I see it right.

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Like it was it's not like you have to work hard to like, well, maybe if we squint a little,

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I can see what they're doing. It just hits you right in the face. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I get what they're doing.

22:56

You have a fat lesbian with a with a halo on her head and she's in a white robe and she's

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Jesus. And you're like going like, OK, really? And then all of the rest of them are sitting in ways that suggest, you know, sort of the groupings of the of the of the disciples, but not exactly the way that it was done.

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So but yeah, anyways, it's it was very obvious when you put the two pictures side by side, these people who perform these things, you know, they schedule and choreograph.

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It really is choreographed because I noticed that the people behind the table there, they abruptly got into a position at one point.

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So it wasn't just their natural body movements. They were yes, they were supposed to be standing a certain way.

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And so this is this is thought through in advance. 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

23:59

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

24:11

Last Supper. Maybe we should reconsider because that like just a rational person would think that.

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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 strong.

24:28

Oh, yeah. And it's just it's it's the the the dimensions of it alone are suggestive, like the the elongated table and just the the way the number of people spread out on the table.

24:40

It's it's very hard to like I just don't buy any other explanation. It just doesn't seem plausible.

24:49

Yeah. And so in that regard, you have to sort of, you know, as they say, you know, if it if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

24:57

And that's and I think that's really the inescapable. And that's why they they ended up having to take it down, just because there was no real way for them to avoid.

25:07

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,

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OK, this is the superiority of paganism to Christianity. That's the message they're trying to convey with Dionysus on this table, you know, and of course, and everything sexually deviant.

25:30

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.

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He's blue paint and this bright red beard. And yes, and he's doing all these kind of provocative things on this table.

25:44

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.

25:56

I mean, it's oh, yeah, set apart from the rest of the crowd in a very trying to look angelic in a very strong way.

26:03

And some of I noticed online some people were trying to say that this they were looking at a portrayal of the

26:09

Feast of Dionysus, where someone at the table has a little faint halo, perhaps behind them.

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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 your head.

26:21

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.

26:29

He's very brazen, very bold. And just I don't know, it seemed like the optics of it were like,

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I'm above this. I'm greater than this. And oh, yeah. And then, of course, in addition to that,

26:44

Christianity being a fake religion, because all these this depiction of the

26:50

Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples, they're all a bunch of perverts. They're all a bunch of degenerates, essentially.

26:58

And really demystifying that whole event.

27:04

So anyway, all that to say it was terrible. And Christians reacted in these odd ways, in my opinion.

27:10

And of course, you noticed some of the back and forth I was having with some people. I think most notably Phil Johnson.

27:15

He came into some of my threads and we were going back and forth. And it was yeah,

27:21

I was a little bit like, wow. You know, it was insinuated that. Tell me how you feel,

27:27

Phil. Yeah, I just I didn't really I wasn't too concerned about, I guess, sharing the gospel.

27:33

I didn't really think I felt like the church and state should be mingled in some way and the in an inappropriate way.

27:41

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

27:47

None of them represented my concern. And it's all basically like the heat of wreckage.

27:53

But it's basically about winning the rhetorical game. Right. Scoring a point. The kill shot. Yeah, right.

28:00

Right. Yeah, it was just I don't know. It's silly. And this is the kind of discussions that I make me want to reevaluate my participation because I'm like, this is crazy.

28:09

Right, guys, you're seeing this. This is crazy. But he's trying to kill shot. He's trying to do a kill shot argument largely in bad faith because he's not actually having a discussion with you.

28:17

Right. And that's those are the kind of things it takes real discipline, as you say, especially when you get a big name coming after you.

28:25

It takes real discipline just to to step around those. I find it hard sometimes to step around those discussions and remain above them.

28:35

But, you know, you get sucked into these bad faith discussions and you realize like this is just killing me here.

28:40

And there's no way out because no matter what I say, he's got a bad faith rhetorical kill to to to zing at me again.

28:49

And I never get my point in edgewise. Yeah. And I think hopefully I don't know if you didn't probably didn't see every interaction, but I would try to maintain a decorum and respect.

28:58

And I do enough of it. I think you did. OK, Jim, thanks. Thanks for that. So people who are hearing this now for the first time are probably wondering, what do you say?

29:07

You're not talking about the Phil Johnson at Grace to you. And fortunately, I am. And I and yes, this is someone that I, you know,

29:14

I consider to be a friend with on some level. I mean, we weren't close, but I don't know.

29:21

I have this number. The last time this is the second time we've had something like this. And and it usually it surprised me last time.

29:30

It surprised me this time. And I sort of is happening. I tried to reach out personally, but we never culminated in a conversation.

29:38

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.

29:47

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.

29:53

But it just became so clear to me. And it wasn't obviously just him. Like there was no there was a number of Christians that were jumping on the whole people who

30:05

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.

30:14

There's something nefarious that they're doing that we should not identify, not with Christianity, but with something else, something pagan.

30:23

And it's Constantine. It's, you know, it's the

30:28

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.

30:38

And this is where Christians want to go back to this. And there are some Christians are 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,

30:50

John, because 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 intermingling of liberal libertarian ideas with Christianity, the influence of nominalism, the philosophy of nominalism and Christianity is at play.

31:13

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?

31:30

Some theology has been lost, like the theology of the roles of prophet, priest and king within the

31:38

Christian community and the understanding of of the the nature of the role of the church within the

31:46

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.

31:54

So the community of believers, 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.

32:08

So whatever the body of believers is about, the church fully encompasses the life of the believers.

32:15

And that at heart really is a mistaken way of understanding the community, the believers, the community, the church as an institution.

32:24

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.

32:40

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,

32:47

I'll accept the premise just for the sake of argument that we that we need to do individual evangelism.

32:54

That's the only correct way to do it. But let's just say we're wildly successful with this and we convert 95 percent of the population and they're all

33:04

Christians. OK, and we have a defined area, let's call it the United States, and we've been wildly successful with our outreach efforts.

33:13

Ninety five percent of the population have converted to Christ. We still have the issues of we need roads built, we need trash picked up.

33:25

We need to defend ourselves from invasion. You know, those darn Canadians up north and the

33:31

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.

33:38

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.

33:48

And we still live in a sinful world. So there's still even in a population that's 95 percent

33:54

Christian, there are still going to be some people who fall into the grips of sin.

34:00

They're going to do things that are destructive. You're going to have people that, you know, cheat on their taxes, that, you know, somebody's going to get angry and a rage and they're going to kill somebody.

34:12

Even if it's, you know, it's not intentional murder, there's going to be probably some cases of like spouse abuse.

34:19

You're going to still have, you know, rape and all these other things that all these sins that exist in society until Christ returns, you're not going to get rid of them.

34:29

And there is a necessity for there to be an institution to grapple with all of this stuff.

34:37

Right. And this, we would call this the kingly office. So now you have this body politic.

34:43

So those that would say, well, you know, Christians have no business in politics. So you've been wildly successful in evangelism.

34:49

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

35:03

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.

35:10

And this is this is very old sort of classic theology of the institution of the crown and God institutes of God.

35:16

Now, whether this crown is a modern democratic institution, it's an old monarchical or even if it's a dictator, the

35:26

Christian teaching is that God puts our leaders in place, that nobody rises into leadership unless God wants them to as allowed them to be there.

35:36

And they are ultimately responsible to God. Even in a society where we think of popular sovereignty, our leaders are responsible to God for how they lead.

35:44

And they're given this authority by God to do these certain things, to pick up the trash, fix the roads, but also to defend the people from invasion and to punish evildoers.

35:57

So there is a sense of civil punishment that has to be done for the good of society. Some of these crimes have to be punished.

36:04

And so there's these two roles in society. And then we have a third role, which is the prophetic role, which is really the prophet is there to call the church leaders and the civil leaders to account when they become corrupt.

36:20

And that's kind of the prophetic role is sort of exists outside of the power structures. But in the medieval world where this kind of worked out imperfectly in practice, those two institutions of church and crown work together to foster a broadly

36:38

Christian society. Now, they were powers. So they butted heads with each other. They became corrupted.

36:45

And this is the danger in a sinful world. The critics of politics are correct that politics does corrupt you.

36:53

And that's the danger of, you might say, the calling into politics of being given the crown by God is that the necessities, the exigencies of political rule will corrupt you.

37:08

Because the political rule runs by its own kind of set of rules.

37:13

And in some ways, they're very Machiavellian. So take, for example, just in the realm of state secrets, for example, you cannot be completely open with the enemies of this

37:26

Christian nation that we've been theorizing about. So you have to keep secrets. And those secrets have to be kept not just from your enemies, but you have to keep them from your own people, because if you don't, they'll get out to the enemies.

37:40

So there's a sense of that you're politically on one level, just to protect your own people, you're forced to lie to them.

37:47

Right? And that's one of those basic types of things is that you can't be completely open with your own people about everything.

37:53

Because if you do so, you make yourself vulnerable to bad actors from outside the people who would use that against you to destroy you.

38:01

Right? So there's all, and then, but there's all kinds of other things. In a sinful world, you're also faced with many hard choices.

38:07

And it's not always between doing what is right and what is wrong. But politics demands that sometimes you're faced with a choice between the greater evil and the lesser evil.

38:19

So, you know, the classic example of this, you know, would you lie to the Nazis to protect the

38:25

Jews during World War II? Right? Well, lying technically is a sin. Right? So you have a choice.

38:31

So I can sin in one way, which is lying, or I can sin in another way, which is handing a person unjustly over to be murdered on the other hand.

38:40

And so I'm going to choose the lesser evil, but I'm going to acknowledge what it is that I'm doing. And I'm just going to say, you know, and then just basically stand on the grace of God that I'm caught in this dynamic of a sinful world.

38:51

And civil leaders have to make these choices all the time in many ways. Now, sometimes religious leaders have to do the same thing, but the church can focus largely on the preaching of the word, the administration of the sacraments, and, you know, the discipling of the people.

39:05

They have the luxury to do that. But the political world has to deal with, you know, also, you know, justice, restraining powers, dealing with the corrupt.

39:17

And yes, sometimes in a Christian society, sometimes those corrupt people would happen to be, you know, men and women who claim to be church going

39:25

Christians, and they have corrupted themselves and need to be held to account in a civic way. So that's,

39:30

I think, in a sense, for your audience, a sort of larger, you know, more historic

39:36

Christian understanding of how, you know, the civil and the church work together in a

39:43

Christian society. Now, when you're in a minoritarian society, you're in perhaps a different position, but many of the time, and this is,

39:52

I think, where the arguments come today is, so what should Christians do when you're not a majoritarian society?

40:00

So we need to sort of stay out of politics because it's corrupting. We need to, you know, just focus on evangelism, on individual evangelism, one -on -one.

40:11

And while I think these people are well -meaning because they do understand that politics is corrupting, and they do want to convert the lost, they're working from a set of presuppositions about how the world works that I believe are faulty, and not just faulty, but in a sense, dangerous and undermine—well, not dangerous, but they undermine a proper understanding of the gospel.

40:35

And they also then, because of that, undermine the evangelistic enterprise because it misunderstands the nature of, in a sense, how the expansion of the gospel works and has worked in practice in that regard.

40:50

So I think that's really kind of where we get at it today is this, you know, how do we grapple with being a minoritarian group in a society that's majoritarian and pagan that largely hates us and spits on us as Christians?

41:03

You know, and they would argue that, well, you have to resist this urge to want to, you know, sort of storm the Bastille and punish your enemies.

41:10

You need to just focus on converting the lost, and that will be sufficient to us and leave justice to God. And I think that's kind of the fairest way of explaining sort of our opponents and how they think about it.

41:23

But at the same time, I would argue that that is—and I know that you agree that this is—and that's why I wrote the piece, you know,

41:29

The Case for Coercive Christianity, is that I think it's ultimately a mistaken understanding of the world and how things work and how we as Christians are supposed to interact in a world where we're a minority.

41:41

Yeah, I've used the word ecclesiocentric to describe some of these tendencies, where you can see even in some of the exchanges that I had on Saturday, one of them in particular is sticking out in my mind, where the first part of the tweet in response to me was talking about Christians broadly,

42:01

I think was the first part, and then the second part was talking about the institution of the church. And the way that this individual went between the two of them so easily was an indication to me that when

42:16

I am talking about what Christians should do, or when you are talking about what Christians should do in wielding political power or using public pressure against evil, some of them seem to be hearing—this is my assumption at least, because—and

42:31

I've had other interactions similar to this—they think it's the church you're talking about, that the institution of the church itself must then wield the sword and start getting involved in these things.

42:42

Of course, neither of us are saying that at all. Absolutely not. Right. It would be a betrayal of their role of the church if they did that.

42:50

Right. Or they think that we are suggesting that churches should be meting out civil punishments, which neither of us are saying that either.

43:01

And it seems like it's hard for some people in evangelicalism in the

43:07

United States to break out of thinking in their one -dimensional way to thinking in a three -dimensional way where Christians operate with different roles.

43:20

And I remember—I have so many stories on this, but one of the stories I remember, there's a guy named

43:25

Jesse Johnson. He was also in that sort of graced community church,

43:31

John MacArthur's church orbit. And I have the utmost respect for John MacArthur, but I went to that seminary, for Master's Seminary, for a semester, and I was there for a summer.

43:40

And I think it was the summer I was there. There was a—this was like 2010 or 11. There was a big, big

43:47

Bible study. It was a college career. And Jesse Johnson gave a lecture on—I think it was the

43:56

Christian operating in civil society, but New Testament versus Old Testament, right?

44:03

So it's amazing I remember this because I forget so many things, but this stuck out in my mind from years ago.

44:09

And it's like the—I probably wouldn't even know who Jesse Johnson was, except for this one thing stuck out in my mind.

44:15

He was a pastor, I think at the time of evangelism there. And he makes the case—I think it's because I was thinking about going back to law school or going to law school.

44:26

I have a sort of a complicated educational journey, but I was really conflicted about law school, seminary, and so I'm sitting there.

44:37

I don't remember if I was coming off a semester. I think I was about to enter seminary. So anyway, he's saying in the

44:45

Old Testament, the way that it worked was Israel was the locus of God's authority and power, and it was the demonstration that his wisdom was correct.

44:55

And that's why the Queen of Sheba came under Solomon's reign. And they were supposed to be a light to the nations, as Isaiah says.

45:02

But that's all gone now because now the community faith is the church, and the church isn't supposed to sit there and wait for the world to come to them to showcase

45:12

God's wisdom. The church is supposed to go out and proclaim the gospel via the Great Commission.

45:18

And so that's who we are, right? And so this, of course, there was implications to this that political involvement, religious rights stuff, they're slopping back into this

45:29

Old Testament paradigm. That's dead, old, part of the old covenant. This shouldn't be what we're doing. So I walked up to him afterward because I was considering political involvement.

45:38

I was really interested in these things. And of course, now that I have a daughter, I'm even more interested in some ways.

45:44

I want her to live in a world that's not super crazy. So I asked him, what do you think about, he had made a statement, something along the lines of there's really nothing significant or important about being in political office.

46:01

And I'm paraphrasing here, but it's no more significant than being a janitor. It's just a job.

46:06

And if that's the job that God gives you, that enables you to then be a witness, to share the gospel, and it pays for your family's needs.

46:14

And that's it. And so I asked him about this and I said, are you serious? It seems to me there is something more important and bigger about politics.

46:24

I didn't say, are you serious? I was actually at that point, I was willing to absorb what he was saying because I was a young skull full of mush as Rush Limbaugh used to say.

46:32

And I was like, this is my leader. This is one of the leaders of spiritual authority telling me this.

46:37

Maybe I'm all wrong, right? So I came with that posture and he said, yes, if getting involved in politics, it's a job.

46:46

If you get a job doing that, it's no different than getting a job as a janitor somewhere. It just pays the bills and enables you a platform to share the gospel.

46:57

And then he says this, he goes, well, actually, I said, what if you do something like at the time

47:03

Roe v. Wade wasn't overturned? So what if you end Roe v. Wade? What if you do something incredibly just?

47:08

And he goes, well, there are certain situations where it is more important, like William Wilberforce and ending the slave trade.

47:16

That was definitely a work of God. William Wilberforce was basically channeling it.

47:22

He was doing something extra and ordinary, but those are special circumstances that you can't do that all the time.

47:28

Yeah. And I'm like, I was so confused as a young man and it took me years to work through this whole thing.

47:36

And now I look back and I don't have resentment. I don't think I hope not in my heart, but I do.

47:43

I think of all the other people that I was in seminary with. I heard a guy once say at a conference.

47:51

Again, was at the Shepherds Conference. He went up to Nate Busenitz and I talked to Nate Busenitz about the speech he was giving.

47:57

It was something like, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? I think it was or Jerusalem have to do with Athens rather.

48:02

And he went up to him. I remember afterward and he said, because of you and your ministry, I do not vote any longer.

48:11

And, you know, this is something I had brought up to him beforehand. He's a professor at the Master Seminary. And I said, look, whatever you say in your speech at Shepherds Conference, please just be aware.

48:20

There are people out there that are justifying political non -involvement. And he was like, well, you know, that's

48:26

I'm not trying to say that. Right. And I'm like, this is what this is what's happening. And literally, right.

48:32

You know how people you say something and people hear what they want to hear. Like how this works. Right. Yeah. Because I think the official position and I'm not trying to pick on them.

48:39

This is just my experience because that's where I went. You know, so this is my experience dealing with this. I see this in other institutions.

48:45

I've seen this at Southeastern. I've seen this at Liberty to lesser extents. Sure. But I've seen this. Mentality where like the idea seems to be the church is the witness, the church, you know, the gates of hell won't prevail.

48:57

And whatever happens to the church is important. And whatever happens outside the church, not as important.

49:02

Al Mohler once said, I remember the whatever happens in the Southern Baptist Convention is more important than what happens in the

49:08

United States. And it's like your country, your society, your particular flavor of even

49:14

Christianity and those traditions and that theology and those songs and that architecture and those hymn books and those pews that can all be cast asunder in favor of this global Christianity that's going to prevail.

49:26

And the church, that's what the church is, the universal church. And so don't be concerned about all these other things, these particular things in your context.

49:35

And the political fight represents those particular things. And so you're just not it.

49:41

So the impression is given like, yeah, you can be involved in politics as a moral witness. Somehow it's kind of vague as to why.

49:47

But somehow you're supposed to stave off evil. I think Scott and Annie all had said something like, you know,

49:55

I don't want an explicitly Christian government, but I want to keep the pagans from having their explicitly pagan government.

50:00

So that's why Christians should be involved, you know, is to like somehow embrace this neutrality.

50:06

And yeah. And this, I think, is yeah. And this, I think, is part of the problem. So there's, you know, what you've been talking about, you know, really effectively kills the idea of Christian vocation, that you can sanctify the work that you do as a particular calling from God.

50:27

But the other thing is, I think there's a mistaken sort of understanding that outside of the religious sphere of the church, you have this almost kind of dead, like spiritually dead, secular, neutral space that is just sort of empty of content.

50:48

And so we as Christians go out from the church. And what we're trying to do is to convert people and bring them from this sort of dead space into the

51:00

Christian space. But that space outside of the Christian space will always remain somehow dead and neutral.

51:08

And the best thing you can do is to maybe have that neutral space be somehow not your enemy. But for the most part, it's sort of dead and lifeless.

51:16

And there really isn't anything out there. And it's only within the

51:23

Christian, the walls of the Christian church that you find sacred space. And it is really a, as you mentioned, it's a collapsing of all of the

51:33

Christian categories and everything now, everything Christian happens within the realm of the church, which is, you know, in many ways, it's a, it's a, it's a, even in the, in the

51:46

Old Testament, everything didn't happen within the temple. You still had the king and the priests and they were separate institutions.

51:56

It's, and I think partly in the American context, and I raised this, I'm trying to remember, I talked about it on a different podcast, but part of the problem,

52:06

I think, in the history of America is that during the colonizing, the building of the colonies, a lot of people came over to the new world to practice their religious faith the way that they want.

52:22

So this is Christian faith. So Puritans and other groups came specifically to practice the faith in the way that they wanted to practice.

52:29

So they were setting up a complete society that would allow them to practice their faith in the way that they wanted to practice.

52:36

As history kind of moves forward, you have this broadly Christian society with various Christian sects.

52:44

And in many ways, what they did is they took their, the political consciousness of the community and they outsourced it to the

52:54

American government, assuming in a broadly Christian society. And that was kind of, I think, the sort of the unwritten assumption under everything in your founding documents.

53:04

You know, you're here to think that it's basically what we're setting up as a government for religious people.

53:10

And it really only functions in that regard. I forget the exact quote now. But there's that very clear intention that whatever's happening in the

53:18

American government is being built on a substrate of a Christian society. And it's up to the role of the people in the churches to maintain that religious character.

53:27

But what they're going to do then is outsource all of the governing institutions to this sort of neutral entity that will exist between all of us church groups so we don't engage in the kind of conflict that they had in Europe.

53:41

And that, in some sense, works fine in a broadly

53:47

Christian society. But internally, mentally, what you've done is you've outsourced a key aspect of the

53:54

Christian community to a third party. And then over time, as that third party entity, this public space, becomes increasingly less

54:04

Christian, more hostile to the Christian faith. Now what you've done is you've given all of your governing institution the sense of the political consciousness of a people of God.

54:15

This version of prophet, priest, and king. So you've maintained the priestly function in the church, but you outsourced the kingly function to the

54:27

American government, assuming that it would be shaped by the character of the Christian society within which it operates.

54:34

But unfortunately, over time, now you have these two separate interests. And now Christians have to grapple with this idea that this governing institution that was supposed to manage a

54:45

Christian society is now hostile to us as church. And we don't, you know, as a lot of Christians just don't know how to be politically conscious in a way that has real integrity and respects all the dangers of the political and so forth.

55:01

Because you're now dealing with a hostile entity, and they can't understand that, you know, the proper function of it, how it works, you know, the whole notion.

55:09

Because I come from, you know, the neo -Calvinist reform tradition of Kuiper, of, you know, sphere sovereignty, that God is king over everything, right?

55:18

And he's king over the government. So there's all of these things that, I think, just because of the way that the

55:24

American context played out historically, that it sort of plays into the hands of that kind of extreme

55:31

Anabaptist position that, you know, basically looks at government as evil, and that Christians should have nothing to do with it, right?

55:37

And you say, at best, it's just a place to pay the bills for the family. And if you happen to be able to do something good of it, woo, that's great.

55:43

But really, it's just not a place for Christians, you know, and for you to think of it as Christian ministry, which

55:49

I think largely is mistaken. I don't know if you want to maybe get into some of like, you know, work from the beginning.

55:56

Yeah, well, yeah, work the article. We're only an hour in. Why would we start working at the article now?

56:01

I mean, we're... Because it's a sensitive, yeah, because it's a sensitive topic. And there's a lot here, John. I'm joking.

56:07

I'm joking. Sorry. Well, I know, and for your audience, this is why, because there's a lot here. So this is the article, and let's get into the points that you're making.

56:15

And I'm sorry that we've spent so much time setting this up. Well, I think it's good, though. We lay the groundwork for it.

56:21

So the idea is, now that we've kind of set it up, we're a minority. Christians are a minoritarian group in a society that...

56:30

And even if we're a large majority, like in America, you know, where I live in Canada, we're like 5 % to 7%.

56:35

We're much more like Europe in that regard, like a real minority. But in the States, where I studied and lived for a number of years, it's a significant majority, like 35 % of the population are regular churchgoers.

56:47

You know, so that's a solid majority that needs to be respected from a political perspective.

56:54

So what do we do with it? So let's begin at the beginning with this notion of nominalism.

57:00

And so we're going to get into philosophy here. But much of modern life is built on this idea that there is no underlying metaphysical connection between human beings.

57:16

So that each person is an isolated monad. And when you see, like,

57:21

I'm separate from you and you're separate from me, and there's nothing unseen that connects the two of us.

57:28

And much of science is built on this. Much of the technological society is built on this.

57:36

And that when we see objects out there in nature, the scientific way of thinking, nominalist way of thinking is, and we see a connection between things, that connection exists in our mind, but it doesn't necessarily exist out there in nature.

57:51

So our mind is categorizing things, making them into groups because they're like things.

57:57

But the connections that we're seeing are a connection in our mind and not in the world. And the older way of thinking of the world said that, no, those connections are actually real.

58:10

That there is an underlying, you know, metaphysical created order that binds all of creation together at a basic level.

58:21

Now, there's a fancy word, being, is at its most basic level. Everything is bound together in what you call a great pyramid or chain of being.

58:29

And we're all united in it. And so at the subject, everything has existence.

58:34

It's all bound together in this great chain of being. Now, this is important to understand, in a sense, because for theological reasons, because thin inserts into the world with Adam, right?

58:49

Well, what happens with Adam? Now, in a nominalist world, Adam remains a discrete entity with no connection to anyone or anything else.

58:59

And it would have to be that just in the way that we think of conversion, Adam would have to go out and corrupt everybody one by one.

59:06

And they would all have to be absorbed. But Christian theology argues that, no, the moment that Adam sins, being itself is corrupted.

59:17

So the thing that binds the whole universe. So you think to yourself, well, what if there was another group of people on a planet, you know, on the other end of the universe, and Adam sins, would they be tainted by sin?

59:28

Yes, they would be tainted by sin because being itself has been tainted, right? Not that there's people that exist on the other side of the universe, but just for the sake of argument.

59:37

So what happens, because Adam sins, all of us have sinned because we're all connected into this great chain of being.

59:43

So when we're born, we're born corrupted by sin because of Adam's sin.

59:50

And all of being is changed. Now, Augustine's argument is that evil itself doesn't have any existence of its own.

59:57

There's not these two entities, evil and good, and they exist eternally. What Augustine argues, and this is the

01:00:03

Christian understanding, is that only being has existence, and evil only appears to have existence because evil is a corruption of what is good.

01:00:15

And that's kind of your basic line. So we have this world where we're corrupted beings, we're all corrupted.

01:00:21

Then you get into sort of the converse, right? That in Christ's salvation, so in man, and this is,

01:00:30

I believe it's, I'm just drawing a blank, it's in Romans, sorry. Through Adam, all are corrupted, but in Christ then, through Christ's death, all are saved.

01:00:38

And this is where Gregory of Nazianzus and Athanasius are, what is not assumed is redeemed.

01:00:46

So Christ assumes our whole human nature, and he redeems not just a human person, but he redeems human nature itself.

01:00:55

So that thing that binds us all together in Christ has been redeemed.

01:01:01

So now how is this redemption then revealed in our lives? How do we participate in that cleansing of being?

01:01:09

Well, we do that through faith and through the work of the Holy Spirit reveals it in our lives. Now also, this is where those who would argue for universalism, that's the sort of the seed where they come to for like, you know, everybody's going to be saved because of what

01:01:22

Christ did. So that's sort of, you know, and it's not a terrible case. It's just, I think, ultimately wrong.

01:01:29

Not everybody's going to be saved because there's testimony elsewhere in Scripture that says that isn't going to happen. But that's kind of the mechanism that it happens, that it happens through this chain of being.

01:01:39

So this then brings us into things like political community and community.

01:01:45

So for example, then, if you sin, we talk about, you know, what happens in the privacy of my own bedroom is nobody's business.

01:01:55

Well, it is somebody's business because if you sin in the privacy of your own bedroom, because you're connected to other people through that chain of being, the sins you do in the privacy of your own home corrupt the whole of your community.

01:02:09

So for example, a good example of this, if you as a husband are looking at pornography on the internet, it's not just corrupting you, but it's corrupting your marriage, it's corrupting your wife, it's corrupting your children and it's corrupting your neighbors.

01:02:23

And so it's one of these things where, you know, bedroom sins really do matter because they then corrupt the whole of society through this chain of being.

01:02:36

Now, in the working out of the Christian faith, this is all kinds of gets tangled together. So there's those passages in Corinthians where Paul is talking about, you know, a believing spouse, unbelieving spouse, what do you do, you know, husband and wife, you know, do you leave your husband because they're an unbeliever or do you stay with them?

01:02:55

And Paul makes the case, and this is part because the gospel flows out through this chain of being, through the work of the spirit, it's expansive, it pours out over us and it begins to encompass those who are around us.

01:03:11

And so what Paul says is that you, by being a faithful believer, you sanctify your husband and thus sanctify your children.

01:03:21

Now, the word he uses there is that they're made holy. Now, that's also the same word that's used for a believer.

01:03:29

Now, is Paul saying that your unbelieving husband is a believer? No, he's not. Is he saying that your children are automatically believers?

01:03:38

No, they're not. But they are separate from the world. They're now brought into a different state.

01:03:43

They're no longer just a random person out there. They have been brought into the sphere, the influence, the outworking of Christ's grace and what he did on the cross through the work of the spirit as it flows out from you, but also through this chain of being that they are affected.

01:03:59

And this is for those that baptize infants. This is why we baptize infants because we're declaring a formal seal and sign on our children that you belong to God, that you are in a special, sacred relationship with the

01:04:12

Lord that you can no longer escape from. You are marked by God. And so this is the thing.

01:04:17

So now, if you take it then out of the specific family context, a real good case can be made, and I think this is the correct way to look at it, that let's say you're a small business owner and you really emphasize in your business

01:04:31

Christian principles of doing things and you institute this in every practice and how you do it, how you conduct sales, how you treat customers, the care with which you take to build your products, and you emphasize how we treat each other as employees and you emphasize this

01:04:49

Christian character of your business, a case could be made that the same thing that happens between husband and wife is happening between you and your employees, that you are sanctifying the business space within which you operate, that your employees are becoming sanctified by your outworking as a boss.

01:05:11

And now, are they believers? No, but they're being made by you as a boss to act in a way that's

01:05:18

Christian -like. And they're being brought into the sphere of the outworking of the

01:05:24

Holy Spirit in your life, and so they're being touched by God, touched by grace, touched by the Spirit, but they're also being connected into that chain of being with Christ that then cleanses and sanctifies being, and so they're finding their actions being cleansed and sanctified and being made holy in what they do.

01:05:44

And so we can take that then and transport that into the political. And so then let's say that you are a

01:05:51

Christian king, and you then say, we are going to conduct ourselves as a people in a manner that's

01:05:58

Christian. Just like you did with the Christian business, you insist on Christian practices from top to bottom in your society, in the way that governance works, in the way that people treat each other in the streets.

01:06:10

And your work as a king has a sanctifying effect on the people. Now, when you look then also at how people's opinions and so forth change in society, when you begin to examine this quote -unquote scientifically, what you discover is that opinion doesn't bubble from the bottom up.

01:06:30

It really comes down from the top down. So those people in our society who are the tastemakers, the leaders, those who are beneath them in society tend to want to emulate their betters.

01:06:44

And this is why Paul says very clearly in one of the Gospels, do like what I do. He's just imitate me, be an imitator.

01:06:50

If you want to know what it means to live the life of Christ, imitate me, do what I'm doing, and you will be a faithful disciple of Christ.

01:06:58

And so in the same way, tastemakers in our society, if those tastemakers are devout and faithful Christians, the people on the street who look up to those tastemakers will themselves, whether they believe or don't believe, will begin acting in ways that are in harmony with the elite tastemakers.

01:07:19

And in many ways, more so than that even, when you look at differences in personality, ability, intelligence, and so forth, those generally who tend to be at the upper end of discipline, intelligence, and so forth, a lot of these folks can make moral choices on their own and reason through it, make it, have the discipline to follow their own moral code.

01:07:42

So sometimes when they break from things and say, listen, I'm not going to live like the dominant Christian society.

01:07:47

I'm going to go my own way, and I'm going to think, and I can be a good person and do that, and reason it out, they may actually have the capacity to do that themselves.

01:07:55

But the person who is down the scale socially from them, who's maybe not quite as smart, maybe not quite as disciplined, they can't make those same calculations themselves.

01:08:05

But now they're looking to this tastemaker and says, well, if this guy lives this way, I can live this way too. Now, for the tastemaker, it's fine.

01:08:11

He can live a good life, make a good income, and basically, you know, he's probably going to go to hell, but for his visible life, it looks fine.

01:08:18

But for that person who's down the scale socially, who's now imitating him, it's disastrous for their life.

01:08:24

Their life falls apart. They, you know, they fall into poverty, and so forth and so on.

01:08:30

It spins out of control. So what you realize as you look into this and you bore into sort of the research is that the people who are down the scale socially, what they need from their betters is a very clear moral framework that's then imposed upon them, that the standards are set.

01:08:50

They maybe don't even always understand them, but they do like the people who are above them. They imitate them because they want to be thought of well by the people who are above them in society, and so they imitate them.

01:09:01

Now, if that means you go to church, you pray, you do all the rest of these things, they do it. Now, do they understand their faith at the same level as the guy from the seminary?

01:09:08

No, they don't. But they basically, they become Christian, and they probably go through all the motions of they get baptized, they do everything, they pray at meals, they do all these things.

01:09:18

Some ways, maybe they do it more prayerfully or more authentically and genuinely because they aren't, they're not the kind of people to question everything in their head.

01:09:27

They just do what people tell them to do, and so if their leaders are telling them that they need to be Christian, then they become

01:09:33

Christian, and they just do it and live it out, and that's kind of the way it works. And so this idea that everybody is a free, autonomous person that has to be respected in their will and their decision, and so we have to approach them one by one and convince them and so forth.

01:09:48

You try to do that, there's a lot of people for whom you can get them in the room, and you can convince them that Christ is the right way to follow, and then they leave and go back to doing exactly what they were doing before.

01:10:00

Why? Because the tastemakers, their bettors in society, are living very differently, and all the other messaging in society, now they may come back to you again, and they say, hey,

01:10:11

I told you about the gospel, I told you what to do, why didn't you do it? And they have no answer for you, because they're not the kind of people who are capable of sustaining that kind of moral behavior alone just from being convinced one by one.

01:10:25

They need a sort of a hierarchical structure where their leaders are, in a sense, are saying, this is how you behave, this is how you believe.

01:10:33

And throughout the history of Christianity, for the most part, the way that Europe was Christianized is they didn't do it from the bottom up.

01:10:40

They evangelized the king, and when the king of the greater tribe was converted, the people were

01:10:48

Christian. They were building churches, and they were going to church, and that's the way it worked. And so this idea that we have to convince people one by one by one really just sort of works.

01:11:01

And then now if we're living in like a mass society with propaganda and messaging with propaganda, propaganda doesn't work on that level.

01:11:08

Nobody tries to convince anybody one by one because it doesn't work. So you're trying to convince people one by one, and meanwhile, your secular government through the media, through the news, through the

01:11:20

HR department of things, a constant propaganda storm, they're mass inculcating people into a liberal, debauched, left -wing lifestyle.

01:11:30

That's the constant messaging they get in propaganda. And here you are out trying to convince people to do it one by one by one, and you wonder why you make no traction or whatever, because you're working against the grain of not only just how things work in an older sort of hierarchical society, but you're also going against the grain of how things work in a mass propagandistic society.

01:11:49

So that's, I think, the broader case there, John. And so the idea of why do you want to take office in this society is so that the idea is that if we can become the elite tastemakers in society, the amount of good that we can do in that regard is far more significant than if we try to convert people one by one by one.

01:12:13

Now you say, well, is that coercive? In some way, yeah, I guess it is. But this is how society has worked forever.

01:12:22

And so you can either try to run against society because of an ideology of free will and libertarianism, or you can just kind of embrace sort of,

01:12:32

I think, a biblical vision for how this works, but also just basically being wise and seeing the way that God ordered creation, that God put in place kings and leaders for this precise reason to be good examples for the people.

01:12:46

And this is why when the prophets are criticizing, they don't often criticize the general public.

01:12:52

They're criticizing the kings, the leaders, and the priests because they're the ones that are letting down the people. And that's really, they're the ones that get the brunt of God's rage when things are going badly.

01:13:03

So anyways, I think that's the big explanation. I mean, you're talking about elite theory here. And I think that in many churches, especially from the tradition that I come from, that I come out of, the tastemakers that are upright and moral and actually set a good example only exist within the church.

01:13:26

That's the only safe place that you can find a tastemaker. So you end up having a celebrity, they call it celebrity

01:13:33

Christianity or Christian celebrities. I mean, it goes along with the big

01:13:39

Eva and the whole industry. There's an image. Oftentimes you don't really know this person, just like people listening to this podcast don't know you and they don't know me personally.

01:13:47

They're hearing some of what we're saying and they know us in that sense, but they don't know what I'm going to be doing the rest of the day.

01:13:53

I don't know what you're going to be doing the rest of the day or how we live our lives in general. And so anyway, all that to say, like when you make your tastemakers exclusively within the church, they become pastors or other

01:14:08

Christian leaders, speakers, seminary presidents, circuit conference speakers, and authors.

01:14:15

And you don't know everything about what they do with the rest of their lives, maybe even how they vote, what they think about social issues, but you do know what they say at these outlets.

01:14:26

So if it's in my tradition, it's mostly expository preaching, right? With a little maybe asides that you'll hear at a sermon about some political thing where it applies, maybe once in a blue moon, but it's mainly just going through the text.

01:14:41

And I've known a lot of people, Kruptos, who come from that tradition, who end up thinking that the world is so evil and I mean, the world's evil, it's legitimately true, but they think that outside this ecclesiastical bubble, in fact, it's not just ecclesiastical it's their ecclesiastical bubble, that there is much gnashing of teeth and don't go out there.

01:15:06

Don't, you know, these opinion makers who shape other things in the world, that should be of no consequence, that should be irrelevant.

01:15:13

And they craft their lives around these opinion makers in their tradition, their church tradition. And so it ends up being like, you know, they become very ideological.

01:15:23

Everything should be about, you know, to take one example, you know, maybe expository preaching, that's it.

01:15:28

That's the only thing you should really be listening to, Christian music, perhaps, it narrows your world quite a bit.

01:15:36

And so the solution to all the debauchery out there is, I'm just like, I saw people saying this about the

01:15:41

Olympics, and maybe some of them in a fair, you know, boycotting kind of way where they want to exert pressure.

01:15:47

But there's also this like, I won't watch the Olympics, that's the world. Like, my tastemakers are only in the church.

01:15:54

I'm not going to allow myself to go out there and have another tastemaker dictate to me.

01:16:00

I'm not going to be influenced by that. But of course, we have to live in the world, right? We have bosses, we have, we're going to inevitably have people over us who make decisions.

01:16:08

So this is a dynamic that I see playing out. And that's why part of the reason

01:16:14

I think that there's this tendency to just say, no matter what the problem is, keep evangelizing. And it's not just because like, there is this idea that yes, it's the power of God to salvation.

01:16:24

And once someone's saved, they're going to make different decisions, which I think there's a truth to that.

01:16:30

Although how many Christians do we know that make very poor political decisions? I know a lot, but I get that.

01:16:37

But there's also this sense of you're bringing them into this community where they're only going to now be influenced by church tastemakers, not those in the world.

01:16:46

So you have to get them out of this domain where they're reading tabloids and they're seeing television and commercials and they're listening to what politicians have to say and they're going to the movie theater, get them out of that and get them into your exclusive group, which is very narrow.

01:17:04

And then they're going to be in lockstep with us. And that's the only solution to this. There's no solution outside of the ecclesia, the church.

01:17:13

But the thing, go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, it's. It's you're right, because there is this sense that the only option for the church is persecution, right, that we basically circle the wagons, we live within our little bubble.

01:17:33

And if they're going to persecute us, they're going to persecute us. And we just simply endure that. And we have to endure that.

01:17:39

And I suppose there is a certain value to that. But as we talked about earlier, you have to prepare for the idea that you could be successful in these evangelistic enterprises.

01:17:53

And so it behooves you to think about the fact that, well, if this was 100 percent Christian society, how would we what what would it mean for us now to have to take on these civic functions?

01:18:05

Because somebody's going to have to do it. So but there is also, you know, and in a negative society, it may the balance, you know, these folks are right.

01:18:16

The balance may tip towards the public realm becomes so hostile that it's just a place where, you know, as a

01:18:25

Christian, you're more or less handing your life over to try to get into the system and influence.

01:18:31

And you maybe can keep it very, very secret. You can maybe live in balance of two worlds and maybe you can have some influence.

01:18:36

But maybe they are correct. And it is so hostile. That's a that's a situation where that I'm open to.

01:18:43

But we have to also consider it. And we should not then still we have to remember that even within the

01:18:49

Christian community, that in those situations, the role of prophet, priest and king still remains.

01:18:55

So the example then is we have to understand that martyrdom, the desire to.

01:19:04

So we tend we tend to think of society as being founded on discussion that it's discussion and talking about love, whereas all societies in a sinful world are founded on violence.

01:19:18

OK, so you you have a choice. Now, we have to understand that the choice for martyrdom is not a choice of peace and nonviolence, but martyrdom is a choice of.

01:19:37

Martial attack in a sense of violence that wasn't taken. So in a sense that martyrdom is itself a martial choice.

01:19:45

It's it's in a sense a military choice. I'm just choosing not to take up arms against you.

01:19:51

But that is in itself it's a kingly decision. It's a military choice. And so but it's a it's a sense a personal choice.

01:19:59

So as a community of believers, the church itself as an institution.

01:20:06

OK, because all societies are founded on violence, the church, if our community is coterminous with the with the church and the church encompasses the whole thing and the church says as an institution, we cannot fight back.

01:20:21

Our people have to understand that that in and of itself is a political decision, that the church has become a political organization at that moment.

01:20:34

The moment that somebody in like a church officialdom says to you, it's improper for you to fight back.

01:20:41

You must martyr yourself and allow yourself to be martyred as soon as that choice is being made for you by somebody else.

01:20:48

That is in itself a political decision. And the church has taken on the role of the king.

01:20:54

So if you have this separate thing is, you know, this kingly role, the choice might be for you personally that I choose not to take up arms.

01:21:03

I'm willing to accept the consequences of not taking up arms, which means martyrdom, that the regime or whatever, the hostile regime is going to, you know, put me to the sword, throw me to the lions and so forth.

01:21:16

But there might be a group within the church community who feel that kingly calling in a sense,

01:21:23

I see what the regime is doing to my people, and I believe the

01:21:29

Lord has called me in this sinful world not to stand by it. We are going to take up arms and defend our people.

01:21:35

And they can do that outside of the institutions of the church itself and to take on that kingly role, to take on then that political role and say, we are going to defend our people.

01:21:48

Now, if some of our people still choose to martyr themselves, that choice is up to them. But we believe we are called by God to take up arms and defend our people.

01:21:56

Yes, we're going to have to take life. We recognize that this is a sinful world. This is not what God planned in creation.

01:22:02

But for the protection of our people, we believe that God has called us to protect our people by the sword.

01:22:09

And that, in a sense, that decision is a kingly decision. And I think once you realize that there's a lot of times in our churches now where they're calling us to do things, they're impressing upon us like our church leaders, our pastors or whatever, are hinting at, are making choices, are saying that things are out of bound for us.

01:22:29

And the choices that they're thrusting upon us are distinctly political choices. So what's happening is, is that whether they realize it or not, our priests are taking on the roles of the magistrate themselves and taking on a political role by forbidding you from entering the political.

01:22:47

Does that make sense? It does. It does. Yeah. And I think, so this, uh,

01:22:53

I think grooves with the point that I'm making that if the goal is to just evangelize, if that's the only tool in your arsenal to get people to join the community so that they will then make these pastors or Christian celebrities, their tastemakers, and they'll govern their lives that way.

01:23:11

Then if evangelism, let's say doesn't produce converts, uh, you're kind of up a river as far as like, it's not a solution to the dilemma you're in when you have the darkness closing in around you as far as like, and I'm not, people are going to probably go ahead.

01:23:27

Yeah. You're right. It doesn't solve the problem. Yeah. Yeah. People are going to clip that and say, I'm against evangelism or something, which is, you know, nothing can be further from the truth.

01:23:33

Like I, but I think the fact that you would knee jerk to that is probably an indication. You should probably do a little self -examination that it's, that, um, it's, you're trying to get a tool to do something that the tool wasn't really intended to do.

01:23:48

That's my point. Yeah. There are, there are effects that evangelism has when someone's converted and they start to understand what the word of God teaches, but the, what naturally should happen in a discipleship situation is that person will eventually understand the role that the

01:24:06

Christians have in society and they'll exercise that role. I mean, that's a properly functioning, but, but that's downstream.

01:24:13

And, uh, and, and so I acknowledge that I, I totally think, but that it's not the only tool in our arsenal and it's not, um, and then just admiring people who

01:24:23

Christian industries say are admirable, whether it's Christian, you know, like, uh, what's that film equivalent they have, uh, trying to think there's like a

01:24:34

Christian app where it's like Christian films and they're all pretty low budget. But, you know, some people that's all they watch, right.

01:24:40

Or, uh, you know, they, they get themselves in this kind of, uh, ghetto where, um, like that becomes the only thing that will solve the problem is we just must immerse ourselves here, but there's no other tools on the table to meeting this challenge.

01:24:54

It's just a, a mechanism for eventually being defeated.

01:25:00

That's what it is because as the darkness keeps pushing, pushing, pushing, you're just holding up in the shire saying, we just need to try to get more elves and, and, and we need to convert the, uh, uh, you know, the

01:25:13

Arikai and the, uh, you know, the, the trolls and things and get them to come in here in the shire.

01:25:18

And if they could just live like us shire folks, like everything would be fine. That's your only tool. It's like, no, you have an army marching towards you.

01:25:25

What are you going to do about this? It's you can't just keep gardening in the shire and hoping that it'll go away.

01:25:32

And yeah, they're going to be winsome enough to convince them to join you in the shire. Cause they're not interested in that.

01:25:38

You know what I mean? Well, and, and the thing is, if you, as an individual shire member, you know, in, in, as you stand before God, think to yourself, the, the, the thing that God wants me to do is to stand boldly and not raise a sword in violence against the regime to make that statement of non -violence, um, as a testimony against the violence of the enemy.

01:26:02

Um, good. That's, that's, that's a very noble thing and you can do that. But when your political leaders or your church leaders who are, you know, effectively in charge of this community, cause they're now, you know, and they say, we are not going to get involved in politics.

01:26:22

That in itself is a political decision. And they are making that when your church leaders say, we should not be involved in politics.

01:26:31

You have to understand that your church leaders have made a political claim and are even in making that negation are involved politically.

01:26:42

And so there is no way to escape it in the regard, and we're not talking about the individual.

01:26:48

We're talking about, you know, your leaders and your leaderships and you're at the institutional level.

01:26:53

When somebody argues as a community on behalf of the community or for the sake of the community, we as a community should not be involved in politics.

01:27:02

That is a political declaration. Um, and they're basically saying we as a community need to martyr ourselves.

01:27:10

They are making a decision for you that is not a political decision for you to saying that the correct

01:27:19

Christian political decision is not to defend ourselves as a people or nation. And they're making a very, they're taking on the role of the political and the church is becoming political and they're no longer doing the things of, um, of preaching the word and the administration of sacraments.

01:27:33

They've taken on that role of the king unto themselves and saying and making that sort of kingly declaration.

01:27:39

And that's, and, and your, our people have to understand sort of the dynamics of what is happening is that our churches have already politicized themselves by standing down and they've already taken on the role of king and they've already collapsed the role of king like church and state into singular roles.

01:28:00

And, and because we've, the, the, the church has become coterminous with the, the, the, with the entirety of the

01:28:07

Christian community in many people's minds, our leaders are invariably taking on the role of, of priest and king together.

01:28:14

And they do so by making a declaration of, um, nonpolitical involvements, which is itself a political decision.

01:28:22

Yeah. And so that's kind of, I think, you know, in sort of, once you understand kind of what's going on, that a political decision has been made and it's made for you already.

01:28:31

And your leaders are already politicians and politically involved, and they're already taking on the role and combining the role of priest and king together two roles that probably should be separate.

01:28:41

Um, and, and, and rightly so. And, you know, from a practical perspective, and I think a lot of people should start looking at it this way, like, cause we, we tend to in mass society, think of things at the very top level, everything is federal and nation and so forth.

01:28:55

Right. But there's still a lot of us who live in communities where we might not be a hundred percent

01:29:01

Christian, but we're 65 or 70 % of the community are still church going folks.

01:29:06

Now there might be four or five different churches. We're not all going to the same church, but we know basically in our small community, our little

01:29:13

County, um, that we're still like 70, 80 % Christian. And we, everybody's going to church on Sunday.

01:29:19

There's some places where all the stores closed down on Sunday. Well, you have an opportunity in these environments then to exercise, um, the kingship of Christ political dominion in your community to run your town or your township in a way is that is distinctly

01:29:37

Christian and to emphasize Christian values. And, but the thing is, is that once you do so, and this is something that Calvin notes in the institutes is that there is an obligation for what he calls the lower magistrate.

01:29:50

So let's say you're the mayor of the town, right? And you, you're in a town that's majoritarian Christian and, um, the upper, like the higher magistrates are imposing.

01:30:01

So they want to impose, say they want to put an abortion clinic in your town, or they want to have, they're demanding you have a gay pride day or whatever.

01:30:08

And your people say, no, we don't do that here, right? Calvin argues that if the, the higher magistrate is threatening the people that are under the care of the lower magistrate, that lower magistrate has an obligation from God to defend his people from the higher magistrate to take up arms if necessary against the higher magistrate.

01:30:31

And Calvin's very clear in the institutes that the lower magistrate, even if he gets wiped out, he had, again, has that kingly obligation to stand up for his people and to do what is right.

01:30:41

Even if the higher magistrate says, I'm going to crush you if you try to stand up to me. And I think a lot of us, we have lost these teachings in a sense, but there's a lot of little localities that can function in a perfectly

01:30:53

Christian manner that you can do Christian politics in your own Christian community and be very intentionally

01:30:58

Christian about it. That we are going to have a Christian community. We're going to have no abortion clinics here. We're going to have no gay pride place.

01:31:04

We're going to take control of our schools. We're going to ignore state dictates on how school, on what's taught in our schools.

01:31:11

And we are going to run a Christian society in this county because we're 85 % of the people. And if the 25 % don't like it, you know what

01:31:18

I mean? That's too bad for them. This is a Christian county. Yeah. Boom. Yeah. Now they might be able to, they might be able to wield those 25 % now in our society, they can wield a tremendous impact because they can use the greater magistrates to rage lawfare against you and all these kinds of things.

01:31:36

They might pull state subsidies and everything. But these, I think if you frame that, and that's specifically

01:31:41

Calvin really, because he talks about, you know, God raising up people to take out like rebels to take out unjust leaders.

01:31:50

Right. And he says, you really don't want to claim that for yourselves because that act of taking down a king is in itself an evil act.

01:31:57

But God can raise up evil men to punish other evil men. Right. But, you know, so this calling to rebel against God is something that God does.

01:32:05

And you may want to be very, very careful if you take that mantle onto yourself. But the one specific instance where Calvin does specifically say that there is a justice and a rightness about taking up violence as a

01:32:21

Christian in society is the lesser magistrate protecting his people from the unjust encroachments of the greater magistrate, which is,

01:32:30

I think this is when we talk for a lot of us talk about parallelism. This is the kind of thing we're talking about, either founding new communities which have that kingly function or recognizing that we have a majoritarian

01:32:44

Christian county or like area already. Why don't we do something with this, which we're not doing right now in most cases.

01:32:50

Let's have a little Christian fiefdom right here in our own little thing. And let's do things in a Christian manner.

01:32:57

Why not? Yeah, you don't even and then we can stand up against the greater magistrate and protect ourselves.

01:33:02

You don't even necessarily need a majority. If there's a minority that is willing and active, yeah, vocal, active, you know, willing to do these things.

01:33:15

And, you know, in the face of those who are not. I'm willing to resist the rewards and the punishments of the regime.

01:33:22

So there, there is, there's, there's all probably going to be a certain cost to that. You might lose, maybe some industries won't set up in your, in your town, but maybe some will because, you know, they like the idea of operating in a

01:33:33

Christian environment. Right, right. These types of things. So there are all kinds of possibilities. I think that because our churches are making political decisions of non -involvement that we are allowing our society at a, at a dizzying pace to be consumed by a godless regime.

01:33:52

Yeah. And even in the political sphere, when you have Christians acting supposedly for the

01:34:00

Christian good in those spheres, for the most part, what I've noticed throughout, you know, the nineties and two thousands up until recently is it's a lot of branding

01:34:11

Christian. So it's like, we're going to be Christians, which in this applies, not just to politics, but to business and to other areas, to pure flicks, you know, it's like, we're

01:34:23

Christian, let's wear that on our sleeve. And what that means is we're very nice people.

01:34:28

We're very winsome. Our lifestyle is worthy of emulating because look how great the dynamics are between the husband and wife and the kids.

01:34:37

There's a cheesiness about it because there is no sense of coercion.

01:34:43

There's nothing negative in that, right? You turn on Christian radio and it's today's positive sound. There's a, it's a cheesy branding, especially when you put that in politics or business, it's like, we're a

01:34:53

Christian business. Well, I hope you're nice. Like, I hope that does translate into some joy and treating other people nice, but there's also going to be an element where you should be, especially if you're bearing the sword, you should be crushing those who would make your society compromised, who would attack, you know, make war on your society in some way using evil methods.

01:35:15

What we saw at the Olympic opening ceremony, it shouldn't be a question. This should be crushed. This should be stopped. This should be illegal.

01:35:21

This should be punished if it happens. Like that's also an element. And I have not seen that element play itself out much in the political realm.

01:35:31

I'm not saying it's not there at all, but when Christians get involved, it's generally this cheesy kind of like smile on their face.

01:35:38

I just, you know, basically wanting a liberal neutrality of some kind, and I'm going to be winsome in my

01:35:44

Christian witness. And so we want to get some things done. There are some objectives we have, but you know, these objectives aren't meant to stop the parade or crash the party that you guys are having over there.

01:35:55

This is the danger too. And so there are those that recognize the danger of politics and things, but one of the dangers that we have is that we, we embrace the material, like the philosophical materialism of much of the world around us, that Christianity becomes another sort of self -help guide.

01:36:15

So, you know, the church helps me to live a good life. You know, so I get, I get a really good life plan from following, you know,

01:36:23

God, you know, the, that just drives me nuts. This whole thing, God's guide or, you know, his rules for living in the scriptures, you know, and you're like, you know, it's not a policy manual, folks.

01:36:35

And it's not, it's not a guidebook for living the good life. And that's sort of, people still want to hold on to that sort of, you know, they want the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

01:36:45

And, you know, Jesus is going to be my co -pilot as I pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of, you know, as a, and so there is that,

01:36:53

I think. But there's also the danger on the political perspective that we try to turn the gospel into a set of policy prescriptions only, or that it's a political program.

01:37:03

And we, and as you say, we turn the gospel into just another ideology. We empty it of, of its core purpose.

01:37:11

And so we have to always remind ourselves that even though political action is justified, even though, yes, if you embrace

01:37:21

Christ, your life will be better. It may not be the materialist good life that the world sells you, but it will be a good life.

01:37:31

We have to remember that fundamentally that the gospel is about overcoming the alienation between God and man.

01:37:37

So the real, the point of the Christian faith is that you bring people, not just into communion with each other or give them a good way of living, but that we are actively discipling them and drawing them closer to the presence of God in their lives.

01:37:52

And so, and this is really why you need these two institutions, right? Because you need the church out there, within the

01:37:59

Christian community, discipling people, reminding them that, you know, this is really about, you know, prayer, worship, pursuing

01:38:08

God, having the presence of God in your life, being in the sanctuary of the

01:38:13

Lord all the time, throughout the entirety of your life. I'll just be, you know, as, you know, walking in the cool of the garden with the

01:38:20

Lord and just, and that's kind of the life that you live. But while recognizing that then this communion with God is not some sort of airy fairy thing that you can actually spell out with words the kind of effects that it should be having in your life.

01:38:43

And the things that you should be doing. But then if you go into, on a social level, society level, that you can then say that these are some of the things that if people are communing with God and being reunited with God, these are some of the downstream effects that that should have in our life.

01:39:04

And we can institute these in some, we can formalize them, shall we say, in laws and maybe even policy prescriptions and so forth.

01:39:14

But at its heart, Christianity is not just another ideology because at its heart, it is about communing, bringing people into the real communion with God.

01:39:24

And there's many who are growing churches and forgetting that. And there's many who want to do politics and forget that.

01:39:31

You know, as long as the church is full and busy, it's fine. And if they're in the door, that's great. And I think as long as we've got policy prescriptions that match up with the scriptures, then it's great.

01:39:40

But in the process of it, if we lose that fundamentally Christianity is about overcoming the alienation with God through grace in Christ, then the whole project is for waste.

01:39:50

Like there's no point in growing churches and there's no point in political action. And so this is the, that's that, you know, in a sense, the prophet is there to remind us constantly and both halves of that this is really what we're all about.

01:40:04

And it's not about growing churches. And it's not about asserting political dominion. It's about people drawing close to God and allowing their actions to flow out of that intimacy that they have with God.

01:40:17

Yeah. Well, you know, in closing, I was thinking about this as you were talking about the, how everything's connected in some way or how not everything's connected, but how when someone is a

01:40:29

Christian and that influence is exerted, there is this benefit that people have downstream from that.

01:40:36

And I was thinking about my wife and I, we lived in Virginia for three years and we were very close to the

01:40:44

Blue Ridge Mountains and we'd like to go up there. And I don't know if you've ever been down there. It's very pretty. It is beautiful.

01:40:50

And, and, you know, the Blue Ridge Parkway was right there. So we would go up there and where I live now in New York, where my wife grew up is very close to the

01:41:00

Catskill Mountains, right? And, you know, both of these ranges have similar features in some ways.

01:41:07

I mean, I could drop you in the middle of one of these locations and probably ask you, which one are you in?

01:41:12

And unless you know the area really well, you wouldn't know, probably, you know, you'd have to know something about the flora and fauna and rock formation, but they're similar in some ways.

01:41:21

Now there's this interesting thing, and I, you know, this might sound somewhat mystical to some of the people that are listening, but we, for years, my wife and I have talked about the

01:41:32

Catskill Mountains as if they're haunted or enchanted. There's some kind of like, and it's dark.

01:41:38

There's a dark kind of hauntedness to them. And you could obviously go back in literature and look at things like, you know,

01:41:46

Rip Van Winkle, the legend of Rip Van Winkle takes place in the Catskills, right? And, you know, there's, there's things that you can pull,

01:41:53

I guess, from literature that also seem to indicate this. But I think today, as I go through a town, like, you know,

01:42:01

New Paltz, New York, or Woodstock, New York, there's an incredible weight in those places.

01:42:07

There's a darkness. And I can't tell, it's just felt. I just know it's there. It's the, it's in the people.

01:42:13

It's in, and it's felt in the region. I can just feel it as I'm driving through these places.

01:42:19

They're oppressed. There's an oppression. There's a darkness. And a residual spiritual.

01:42:27

Oh, I totally agree with you, John. I'm with you there. Homes, places, you know, you go into a house and you're, you're kind of looking like something just feels off.

01:42:36

And then you, you know, hey, let's go downstairs. We'll play some video games or watch it, you know? And you're like, oh, there's like horror movies all in the bookshelf.

01:42:43

And you're like, okay, I can place the, the, you know, there's, there's a, there's a residual effect.

01:42:48

Like there's just something that they're, you know, instantiating in the house. One of our parsonages that, that we were in the, the, one of the bedrooms that we turned it into a nursery, painted it all up nicely.

01:43:03

And this is, it was scary because this was a parsonage, but this room, we changed the carpet.

01:43:08

We changed everything. It had a smell in there. And my infant son would wake up in the middle of the night, like looking scared, right?

01:43:17

And so finally we just stopped using it. But you think to yourself, like, this is a parsonage and something dark happened in this room.

01:43:26

And there was a residual spiritual presence in this room, whether it's like a demonic entity is there haunting the place, or it's just the leftover residue that's just sort of in the physical space.

01:43:40

Oh, I think so too. And then you get this in nations and communities and peoples that they take on the spiritual character of the people.

01:43:47

And so if you can then, if you can then as a

01:43:52

Christian community, in a sense, lighten your community and lift that burden, think of the benefit for everybody outside of the church.

01:44:00

Like, why wouldn't you do that? Yeah. Well, I was going to say, like, even in the old Testament, and also this parallels some of the ancient

01:44:09

European traditions and religions that venerate trees or ashtroth poles. What did you do when you went in there?

01:44:16

You chopped them down. You chopped them down. And there's this understanding that there is this residual effect that the people who lived here desecrated this land, that this needs to, and it's mystical in some way.

01:44:30

Like, I can't tell you exactly what that is or how it's done. I'm just telling you, when you're in the

01:44:36

Blue Ridge Mountains, it could be just as sunny as when you're in the Catskills. The same level of light could be present.

01:44:42

And I feel so much less burdened. I feel like there's just brightness and warmth and happiness and stability.

01:44:52

And it could be the same day in the Catskills. And I know that it's not those things.

01:44:57

I can't put my finger on it, but I know that it has something to do with Virginia in that region is very Christian.

01:45:03

So there you go. And the thing is, is that we're talking about, and this is why these metaphysical realities, in a sense, the fabric of creation, the chain of being, but then also created elements like angels, demons, all of these things are in this interplay.

01:45:22

And they then absorb and take on the character of the people.

01:45:27

So, and this is one of the reasons why the devil wants to desecrate things. And this is like, I guess it's like full circle back to the

01:45:35

Olympic ceremony. This is exactly why they do it, because they're desecrating the space.

01:45:43

And this is why they want to build, like say with the renewal or the reconstruction of Notre Dame, why they want to put in modernist facades on Notre Dame, because they want to desecrate the space and claim it for something other than the

01:46:01

Christian faith. And it's being done intentionally. It's a very similar dynamic to what you're talking about between the

01:46:07

Blue Ridge and the Catskills. And these things are very real. And in this case, it's very intentional.

01:46:14

They're desecrating the things that have gone before them. They're burning down the altars.

01:46:21

I always talk about the Josiah option. And even though he was, the

01:46:28

Lord said that, in spite of all of his efforts, that the people of Israel are going to be still under judgment.

01:46:36

Josiah went through and he cleansed the land in a way that no other king cleansed the land. Murdered priests, desecrated altars, scattered the bones on shrines and did all of that because it was the right thing to do as a king.

01:46:51

Yes. Well, Kruptos, this is one of the longest podcasts I've ever recorded. So it's been an engaging discussion, and I think it'll help people out.

01:47:01

If people want to find out more about your work, where can they go? They can go to seekingthehiddenthing .com.

01:47:09

That's my substack. And then they can also find me on Twitter at underscore

01:47:15

Kruptos. Perfect, perfect. Reach out to Kruptos if you have questions. And if you disagree with anything we said on this podcast, it is his fault.

01:47:24

So... Yeah, there you go. Go at me on Twitter and see how that works out for you. Yeah, there you go.

01:47:30

There you go. There you go. Drop the gauntlet down, right? Yeah. Use coercion and force against Kruptos and public shaming, which is also part of that,

01:47:39

I suppose, on Twitter. All right. Well, God bless Kruptos. Have a good day. All right. Take care. You too. All right.

01:47:49

So, Josh, where are we right now? We're standing about in the midpoint of Black's Hollow. So we've walked in,

01:47:56

I guess, about a quarter mile from where we parked, a third of a mile. But as you can see, we can barely see the cars past those trees down there.

01:48:04

This is what they call a holler around here, hollow. It's a valley between these ridgetops.

01:48:12

So, you know, again, you're standing here and you own to both ridgetops. And as you can see, there's lots of good building sites along this valley, both down this way and then further up the valley, running for another half mile in that direction.

01:48:27

Yeah. I noticed there's a creek over here. You have some bigger hardwoods that are along the creek, they're very beautiful.

01:48:35

And this would be the land if you wanted to plant a garden or something, this is where you would do it, right? Yeah. The soil down here, this is bottomland soil.

01:48:44

It's good soil for gardening, you know, some crops. Certainly you could fence it and run livestock in here.

01:48:52

But yeah, this is, it's all the runoff coming down from the hills and it kind of stays down here and it gets really good fertile soil.