Appeal to Kevin DeYoung - We Can Work Together - Part 1

All right everybody, welcome back to the channel. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. I definitely did.

We are back to the content today. I put up a poll on Twitter to see if you wanted me to read this article by Kevin DeYoung, Reverend Kevin DeYoung, I should say.

And overwhelmingly you said yes, so we're going to talk about it. We're going to read the article and I'll start and stop like I normally do.

One thing I will say is I saw a lot of people on Twitter, you know, responding to this and almost everybody started the same way.

They said, hey, you know, I really like and respect Kevin DeYoung, you know, but here's what I have to say and stuff like that.

And normally when people say that kind of stuff, you know, I really don't, I don't like it that much.

I used to do that myself on my channel all the time. But usually it sounds like people are just kind of hedging before they blast someone into kingdom come.

But with Kevin DeYoung, Reverend Kevin DeYoung, I should say, I actually understand why people are saying this.

I feel the same way about Reverend Kevin DeYoung because Reverend Kevin DeYoung is actually an effective minister, in my opinion.

He's definitely not perfect. He's definitely not my cup of tea in every area, but he is not one of these guys that doesn't fight back.

He actually does. He actually does in a very particular way. I remember talking to my brother about some issues going on in the

PCA. And Reverend Kevin DeYoung, you know, gave a speech at the assembly that was very effective.

And we need people like that pushing back, you know, he's got a particular style that will reach a particular audience.

And we need that. We can't say that we don't, you know, like I always say, you know, we've got

Ezra's, we've got Nehemiah's, and we need each other, man, we need each other. And Kevin DeYoung, Reverend Kevin DeYoung, he's a man of the cloth, just like Ezra.

But yeah, so anyway, I understand why people were kind of heaping praise upon him in general.

So I started the same way because I feel the same way about Reverend Kevin DeYoung. Now he is deeply troubled, as you might say.

He is deeply troubled about the Moscow mood, culture war, and Doug Wilson.

That's what this article is all about. Doug Wilson and the Moscow mood. We're going to get into it, guys.

We're going to talk about what I think is going on here, why this is happening, why I think that some of these guys like Kevin DeYoung, they really don't know what to be concerned about in the grand scheme of things, because I saw a lot of people pointing this out.

And I felt the same way when I read this, when I saw this article, rather. I didn't read it at the time.

But I felt the same way. It's like, you think Doug's bad? You have no idea what is coming.

Oh, man. Anyway, so let's get into it. I'm sure we'll talk more about that in just a moment.

So here is what the good reverend says. Quote, each of the great world civilizations,

Christopher Dawson wrote in his classic work from 1940s on religion and the rise of Western culture, has been faced with the problem of reconciling the aggressive ethos of warrior with the moral ideals of a universal religion.

But none, and that's still the quote. But in none of them has the tension been so vital and intense as in medieval

Christendom. And nowhere have the results been more important for the history of culture, end quote. At the heart of Dawson's provocative thesis is the insistence that Western European culture was the coming together of two cultures, two social traditions and two spiritual worlds.

The cultural formation of Europe combined, quote, the war society of the barbarian kingdom with its cult of heroism and aggression, end quote, leavened by the, quote, peaceful society of the

Christian church with its ideals of asceticism and renunciation of its high theological culture, end quote.

Arguably, the Crusades expressed the best and worst of this synthesis. There were times when the fusion of warrior heroism and Christian virtue produced something noble and exemplary during the centuries long effort to reclaim the

Holy Land. And there were times when the fusion failed and produced something ugly and lamentable.

But even the failures teach us about the aspirational ideals of Christendom. We cannot understand the rise of Western culture without the religious unity imposed by the

Christian church in the Middle Ages. And likewise, we cannot understand the flourishing of Christendom unless we understand that it grew up out of the soil of warrior kings and barbarian kingdoms.

Dawson's thesis, though concerned with the rise of Western culture in the Middle Ages, is instructive for our own age.

For many of us, it looks as if Western culture has been overrun, whether by Muslim immigration in Europe, critical theory in our universities, sexual degradation in our popular culture, violence in our streets, or plain old anti -Western vitriol in the hearts of many

Westerners who have no idea how much more miserable the world would be if their deluded wishes came true.

If this is the world we live in, or even something generally headed in this fearful direction, the question we in the Christian West are wrestling with, or should be wrestling with, is what to do now.

So that's how the article starts. And I can't help but thinking as I read this article, you know, he's using, of course, medieval

Christianity as sort of his example of this fusion between like a sort of a barbarian kingdom with heroism and aggression, and then you fuse it with this universal religion, sort of the

Christian theology and stuff like that. And he's kind of saying, you know, he's kind of saying this is, you know, this is, you know, it can lead to good things, it can lead to bad things.

And he's using this as sort of his example to get us started. When I read this, I couldn't help but think that, you know, the true examples of this, you don't have to go to, you know, to more recent history, you can actually just look at the

Bible itself. Because the Bible itself, you know, in the

Old Testament, you know, there are one of the things that kids really like about the Old Testament in particular, and quite frankly,

I really like as well, is that you see stories of heroism, you see stories of war and warriors, and some of the best people in the

Bible, they're like these warriors, right? And yet they're operating right alongside, you know, the men of the cloth, the people that are more concerned with the law of God and things like that.

I don't mean more concerned, but that's like their job. Their job is the law of God. And you see them working together, and they're working for the

Lord, both of them. And again, I always bring up Ezra and Nehemiah, this is my favorite example of this. You got the man of the cloth,

Ezra, and he's, you know, he's reading the law, and he's talking about the law, and he's praying, he's tearing his clothes, he's pulling out his beard, his hair, all this kind of stuff.

And, you know, he's very pious in that way. And then you see Nehemiah, who is, he's a warrior, you know, he's a hero.

He's a governor, he's a leader, like he gets, he starts taking action and stuff like that. And they're working together, and the

Bible, you know, can hold all of this together. So we see this fusion of which, you know,

Reverend Kevin DeYoung is talking about. We see it in the pages of the Bible itself, even

King David, for example. And there's just so many stories like this that we can look to, to say, you know, this is something that should be part and parcel of Christianity.

And so, you know, I'm not saying that I don't like that Kevin DeYoung used, you know, medieval

Christian kingdoms as the example. He's totally open to do that.

I think that's totally fine. But I don't want anyone to have the impression that this was something new.

You know what I mean? This is something different. There was something new under the sun at the time. There really wasn't.

And we read the Bible, we see Ezra commended, we see Nehemiah set up as an example of this as a hero.

And we should work together. We kind of need both of those sides of it. We need the warriors, we need the leaders, and we need, we need men of the cloth.

There's, you know, there are some people online that I, that I know of that, that do seem to have sort of an anti men of the cloth perspective.

And, you know, there's not a lot of them, but there are some, you know, they don't go to church or they do go to church, but they don't respect any of their pastors and stuff like that.

And that's not no bueno, no bueno. You know what I mean? We definitely need people whose job it is to study the law of God, to study the word of God, I should say, and to do theology.

You know what I mean? That is valuable. It's worthwhile. Not everybody has to do that. But a lot of us, some of us do, and we need, we need each other as simple as that.

All right, let's continue. The appeal of the Moscow mood, which brings me to the reason you are likely reading this article in the first place, and that is the name, quote,

Doug Wilson in the title. So what do you think about Doug is a question I've been asked many times during my years in pastoral ministry.

I'd say that questioners have been pretty evenly split between I'm asking because I really like him.

And I'm asking because I hope you don't like him. And I'm asking because I'm not sure what to think.

Even now, I'd rather not be writing this piece because one, it takes a lot of time to I'm not looking to get into a long drawn out debate with Wilson or his followers.

And three, I know a lot of good Christians who have been helped by Wilson and by the people and institutions in his orbit.

I'm answering the question now in hopes that I might help those who appreciate some of what Wilson has to say, but also feel like something isn't quite right.

By any measure, one has to marvel at the literary, digital and institutional output that has come out of Moscow, Idaho in the past several decades.

While some internet cranks are wannabes trying to make a name for themselves by trying to tear down what others have built up,

Wilson is to be commended for establishing an ecosystem of churches, schools, media offerings and publishing venue ventures.

For a scholarly and fair assessment of what Wilson has tried to do in Moscow, I recommend Crawford Griffin's excellent book.

Who cares? Wilson also deserves credit for being unafraid to take unpopular positions.

True, he often seems to enjoy stating his opinion, unpopular opinion in the most unpopular ways, more on that later.

But no one is going to accuse Wilson of being a spineless even jellyfish. He offers the world and the church an angular, muscular, forthright

Christianity in an age of compromise and defection. On top of that, Wilson has a family that loves him and loves

Christ. These are no small things, by the way. This is my comment. These are no small things, by the way. And I'm glad that he's commending

Doug for these things. He continues, moreover, Wilson understands that opposition to Christ, his word, his gospel and his lordship is not to be taken lightly.

Many Christians are witnessing the disintegration of our western world and the Christian consensus that used to hold sway.

And they are thinking to themselves, this is terrible. I can't believe this is happening to the

Christians with these concerns. And I count myself among them. Doug Wilson says, yes, it really is bad.

And let's do something about it. Amen. That is what he's saying. I'm convinced, he says, the appeal of Moscow is visceral more than intellectual.

That's not meant to be a knock on the smart people in Moscow or attracted to Moscow. It is to say, however, that people are not mainly moving to Idaho because they now understand

Revelation 20 in a different way, or because they did a deep word study on ta ethne in the

Great Commission, or even because of a well -thought -out political philosophy of Christian nationalism.

Those things matter to Wilson and his followers, but I believe postmillennialism and Christian nationalism are lagging indicators, not leading indicators.

That is, people come to those particular intellectual convictions because they were first attracted to the cultural aesthetic and the political posture that Wilson so skillfully embodies.

In short, people are moving to Moscow, whether literally or spiritually, because of a mood. It's a mood that says we are not giving up and we are not giving in.

We can do better than negotiate the terms of our surrender. The infidels have taken over our

Christian laws, our Christian heritage, and our Christian lands, and we are coming to take them back.

I could not have said it better myself. I could not. It is a very, very good point.

And, you know, when I saw the fact that Kevin DeYoung had written this article, and I saw some of the pushback from some of my friends about the article,

I hadn't read it yet at that point, but I could deduce sort of what the thrust of the article was.

And when I deduced what the thrust of the article was, what I came up with independently is that Christians can do better than a neatly, politely managed decline.

American Christians can do much better than just sort of managing the decline so it's not quite as intense, not quite as bad, maybe smoothing out some of the edges, but you're still in decline.

We could do a lot better than that. And people are figuring that out. Not that many people know that yet, but the people that are making serious moves.

It's as simple as that. It's as simple as that, and that is a very good thing. So basically what he says that Doug Wilson's kind of message is, we can do better than negotiate the terms of our surrender.

That's exactly the point. Not only can we do better, but we must do better, we will do better, and we can do a whole lot better.

That's huge. And don't be deterred by what Kevin DeYoung says here, because I think he's right, and I don't think this is a bad thing.

People want post -millennialism to be true before they go to the scripture and they realize it actually is true.

They want it first, and then they realize that it's actually true. This is true of almost every belief that anyone has.

You have to want it to be true. It has to be attractive in order for you to sign on.

It really does. If you think about the gospel even, when I first kind of came to terms with the fact that the kingdom of God was real and that the gospel was true, before that had to happen, before that happened,

I wanted it to be true. You know what I mean? Before I accepted that the gospel was real,

I had to see it as beautiful. You know what I mean? I know that the rented atheist would say, oh, you see, it's just a wish.

But that's not really how it is. I saw it as beautiful first, and then

I was like, man, I want that. I want that. And then I came to realize that it was, in fact, true.

This is how human beings work. People want to be like people that have attractive lives.

You know what I mean? People want that. It's part of what the

Bible even says. Always be ready to give a defense for people who ask for the hope that's within you.

I'm misquoting that. The hope that's within you, right? They see something in you that they don't see out there, and they ask you.

That's expected. It's like, man, like, you've got four kids?

Yeah, man, I got four kids. And you're like, you're not annoyed by them? No, I'm not annoyed by them.

Oh, man, what about the whole ball and chain? I mean, well, never let you go out, you know, she's not a ball and chain.

I love my wife. You don't complain about your family life at work. What's the deal with that?

They might not even ever ask you, but they know there's something different.

This happened to me all the time when I was in New York after I had become a believer.

They weren't asking me about the gospel per se, but when they had a problem, when they had an issue, when they had a deep sort of existential kind of emotional thing happen to them, they wouldn't go to the guy who was at the bar every night with a different girl to ask him about what to do about their life or their situation or their difficulty.

They would come to me. And so it's like, yes, the aesthetic absolutely matters.

The posture matters. The mood matters. I 100 % agree.

People are initially attracted to Doug Wilson because he's so jolly and so seemingly unafraid and strong with a family that is something that people would want for themselves.

And then they hear the teaching and then they, you know, it's not like, you know, Kevin Young is saying that we're not, you know, being

Bereans about this, like, oh, you know, he's just a cool guy. So like, who cares what he teaches? We're just going to believe it all.

No, no, no, no, no. We're talking about Christians here. We give

Doug a hearing because of how he carries himself. This is life.

Nothing to complain about, nothing to be ashamed of. You get a hearing based on how you carry yourself, the skill of your work, the skill of your life.

You get hearings because of that. People will take you more seriously because of that. This is common sense.

Who are you going to ask for parenting advice? Someone who's got four kids that are well -adjusted and well -behaved or someone who doesn't have any kids, but they have a degree.

Who are you going to ask parenting advice from? I mean, this is common sense. I'm convinced the appeal of Moscow is more visceral than intellectual.

I think this is true. And then we're all Bereans about this, and we hear what he has to say, and we're kind of checking, you know, to see what's in the scriptures, what's said, and we read resources.

We look at Calvin because we all love Calvin, of course. And we look at some of the reformers and things like that, and we realize, you know, hey, a lot of this is really good stuff.

This is really good stuff. And we might have mild disagreements here and there with Doug Wilson, but we continue to give him a hearing.

We continue to be attracted to the aesthetic. Then we do the deep word study on ethne.

You know what I mean? Like, we don't leave it there, right? Of course, we don't leave it there.

We hear him out on ethne, and then we do the study for ourselves. But the initial aesthetic sort of visceral attraction, oh, 100 % it is there.

It is there, and it has been lacking so much in so many of our

Christian lives. It has been lacking. You go to the standard church, and you see lots of old people, which is totally fine.

Nothing wrong with old people. I love old people. I see lots of women. The men that do go, they're kind of sitting there quiet.

They're not really singing. And we know just viscerally that something is not quite right.

Because when I read the Scriptures, it's the story of a lot of men, and they've got zeal for the

Lord, and they're doing things, and they're building things, and they've got confidence, they've got faith.

We're not seeing that here. So we're thirsty for it. So we're thirsty for it.

And one thing men are really good at, you know, I think in general, is smelling, you know what?

Smelling it from a mile away. We know when someone's faking it. We do.

And we've smelled that smell entirely too much for entirely too long.

And then we see Doug, and we're like, I don't smell that smell anymore. Give him a hearing. Let me hear him out.

That's true, man. There's nothing to be ashamed of here. I think this is definitely true. And this is the thing that I want to say, and we're gonna have to break this into a few different parts, you know, because he's gonna talk about where the mood misfires.

That's like the real criticism part. We're gonna save that for next video. But one thing

I will say is that Doug is a very easy rallying point for kind of typical

Big Eva, which Kevin DeYoung is definitely part of it, but he's not like so many of them that are essentially subversive.

Kevin DeYoung is part of Gospel Coalition. Gospel Coalition in general, if you write for Gospel Coalition, I assume you are subversive at this point.

You're subversive. I don't count Kevin DeYoung as a subversive. I think he's trying,

I think Kevin DeYoung, if I had to guess, would be working behind the scenes to try to change things for the better.

Maybe he's not, who knows, right? Because you don't see any of it publicly, at least yet. So I mean,

I could be really, you know, kind of kind with him. And I've seen some of his kind of work behind the scenes in the past in other areas.

And so maybe he's doing the same thing here. But here's the thing. So for the Big Eva standard type,

Doug Wilson is a very easy rallying point. It's a very easy person to attack. It's a very nobody's gonna get too mad at you.

Yeah, sure. You'll get some people on the internet that'll defend Doug to the death and all that kind of stuff. And that's totally fine.

But you won't lose any credibility. You won't lose any influence by attacking Doug Wilson.

And so that's what they do. And I think Doug Wilson is that he's that's his role in a lot of this.

You know what I mean? That's his role. He's the tank. We talked about World of Warcraft a few weeks ago. He's a tank.

He's supposed to be drawing enemy fire. And he's doing it. He's doing it. But what these guys don't realize is that Doug is just the beginning.

He's just the beginning. And he's not even close to the most intense person out there that you should be worried about.

I mean, Doug is providing cover fire. But there's an army of Andrew Iskers out there that are pushing this way further, way further, way more stout, way more right, way more aggressive, a much more troubling definition of ethne.

You know what I mean? And that's that's that's the that's the point of that's that's where the

Overton window is being pushed. And that's what you really should be worried about. But but it's not as easy to get.

They're playing the ignore game with Andrew Isker for the most part. That's what they used to do with Doug Wilson.

But the thing is, they can't anymore. They can't. I saw Chris Bolt say, you know, the way to kind of end the

Moscow mood is to ignore Doug or or beat him like do better than him. And I saw someone respond to Chris and said, well, you know, to be honest, you know,

Chris Bolt, they they tried that with Doug. They tried to ignore him. That's what they used to do. And that's true.

They used to ignore. Didn't work. It didn't work. And now they're at the point where they can't ignore.

So they're attacking. They're they're doing what they they're very troubled. You know, they're trying to they're trying to win over their female of both genders audience.

I'm very troubled about this. This is a very the mood is misfiring. That's not going to work either.

Meanwhile, the guys you are ignoring that are really pushing the envelope and I think in a good direction, they're getting the ignore treatment.

You didn't learn your lesson yet. And so here you go. And this is the thing about guys like Isker that I just love.

That he goes further than Doug on certain things. But he still loves

Doug. You see, we're not we're not eating our own from from from from behind. Like, you know, we're pushing the envelope more and more.

Right. But we're not like destroying the people over here. You know what I mean? That are also pushing the envelope. Right. Big Eva doesn't get this.

They don't understand this. And I don't think they ever will. They'll never understand it.

And so, you know, this is this is to be expected. It's this is really it's really humorous to me because they're going to attack

Doug and they're going to continue to attack Doug. And oh, he believes in spanking. Can you believe that? He believes in spanking.

And and it's like you're going to you're going to appeal to certain women, you know, typically the more liberal women.

And you're going to appeal to effeminate men, you know, doing this for the most part.

But the guys that are actually building that are actually willing to sort of not only stick their neck out there and say the things that need to be said, but also do the things that need to be done.

They don't care what you say anymore, Reverend Kevin DeYoung. It's a fact.

It's a fact. Every day that passes, less of them care what guys like you have to say.

And I'm not trying to say that you're the worst example of this. You are not. I still respect you and I still care what you have to say because I can see what you're doing.

You're trying to be the Ezra to our Nehemiah. You're trying to be the Ezra to our Nehemiah. And unlike you,

I know that we need Ezra's. You get hearings in spaces that a guy like me could never get, could never get.

And that's good. That's good. And I appreciate what you do. And I think that we can work together.

What I ask of you, Reverend Kevin DeYoung, is to recognize that guys like me,

I'm not saying me, but guys like me can get a hearing in spaces that you, no matter how hard you tried, never could.

And that's good. That's a good thing. And you should embrace that instead of attacking it.

You should embrace that. If you and I ended up in prison together one day, there's a good chance that I would have more sway and influence and an ability to communicate with the other prisoners than you.

It's as simple as that. And I'm not saying that reflects poorly on you. That's not your role.

You're an academic. You're a man of the cloth. That is good. Ezra was good.

I named my son Ezra because I think Ezra is good. You are good.

I'm just asking you to just for one moment think how much

Ezra needed Nehemiah. When he prayed to God, what are we going to do?

God, the people are intermarrying. They're liberalizing.

They're doing all these things and things are going real bad. God, help me. Help me figure this out with this people.

Just consider for one moment, God answered that prayer by sending a brute, by sending a guy who was not afraid to scrap, beat those people, make them swear an oath, pulled out their beards or their hair.

Which one was it? One of them pulled out their beard. The other one pulled out their hair. I forget. As you pray,

Kevin DeYoung, and you're asking for repentance, you're asking for more justice, for Christians to not lose their influence.

Just consider for one moment, is God answering the prayer?

Is God answering the prayer by increasing the Moscow mood? I'm not saying just Doug in Moscow.

I'm saying just that mood that you're talking about. Maybe he's answering your prayer by finally having men that can talk to other men, who can influence other men, other kingdom builders, people who take action, people who are not afraid to confront the school board and tell them that they're disgusting pedophiles for showing their children.

You get it. Just consider for one moment, man. Anyway, I love you,

Kevin DeYoung. I do. I do, man. I love you. I got love for you, man. You're not like the rest of them.

In fact, I think I've called you out before, not in a mean way, but maybe just come out of her. You don't need

Gospel Coalition anymore. Maybe we can just let the liberals have that because basically they already do.

And quite frankly, none of us really care about gospel. I haven't thought about Gospel Coalition in months and months and months.

And every time I do, I just laugh at them. That's the future, man.

That's the future. We need guys like you, man. We do. And so I'm calling you out again, man.

You don't need to do what Big Eva typically does. You don't. You can work with us.

And it doesn't mean you have to get your hands dirty because that's the thing. I think it's good that Ezra didn't get his hands dirty. You know what

I mean? That's good. I think that's fine. That's not who he was. Nehemiah sure did. He got his hands dirty.

Nobody's saying, Kevin, that you have to do things the way Doug does. One thing that would be nice, though, is he can recognize that we're on the same team, number one, and that not everyone has to do it the way you do it either.

Someone, eventually, sometime, has to get their hands dirty. See, that's the meme, too. I keep saying it's the end, but I'm going to say one more thing.

I saw somebody say about how the meme is that Christian nationalists are like young guys, just young, crazy guys that just live in their parents' basement and all this kind of stuff.

It's just not the case, man. It's not the case. Forty -one years old, got four sons, got a wife, started two businesses on the board of various non -profits in the course of my life.

I haven't run for political office yet, but maybe that'll change one day. Maybe that'll change one day. We're the ones doing the stuff out here.

We do have to engage a lot of this stuff head on, and we're going to do it in the ways that we're suited to do it.

I'm not going to say I'm as capable or competent as a Nehemiah. I'm not going to say that, but between Ezra and Nehemiah, I'm more on that track, you know what

I mean? It would be nice for you to recognize that we're on the same team, and not everyone has to be a man of the cloth like you, an

Ezra, a personality like you, people who talk like you, speak like you, who reach the same people you reach.

Maybe it's a good thing when someone's a little bit more gruff and doesn't take any of that off anyone.