Tim Keller's Third Way: Debunked

I'm your host, John Harris. I know it's a weekend. I hope it's a beautiful one for you. It is for me. Fall in New York is absolutely amazing. My wife and I and our little baby went to see, well, we were hoping to see a ghost walk last night, which is like a, it's not really ghost.

It's a old mansion where people dress up in colonial apparel and we didn't get tickets. So I went and I was like, that's a big bummer. It was like an hour away at this big mansion, but we had this amazing walk.

And as the sun was setting over the Hudson River, I just thought, man, it doesn't get better. This is the time of year for that. And so anyway, I just wanted to say that up front, start with a little positivity here, but the Lord's day of course is tomorrow.

And, you know, I think about this sometimes, a lot of preachers, they ascend the pulpit and the prep time, I mean, Saturday is like that prep day, right? Saturday is the day you're putting fine, you're fine tuning the sermon, you're getting ready.

And so many influences, I think, grasp at the attention of a preacher. And one of them, and this has been something I focused on for the last few years. And of course my guest today, Megan Basham, is also focused on this, is the influence of the evangelical industry, Big Eva, evangelical industrial complexes, I'll call them.

And they have certain messages they want pastors to proclaim. And I think many Christians have been the victims of some very poor messaging. One of those things is the third way messaging, the third way political messaging that I've talked about on this podcast before, that sees Christianity as this transcendent moral framework that supersedes the left-right dichotomy, that isn't really attached in any way to political conservatism, it judges political conservatism, it judges political liberalism.

And you can see why that would be appealing. And on the face of it, it sounds like a good thing, but this is actually, when applied, I think a disastrous thing for the church. And we're gonna talk about that today because it's become a new discussion, even though it's been a discussion for years, in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination.

Charlie Kirk had a way of approaching politics from a Christian moral framework. And someone else, Tim Keller, who is now the late Tim Keller, had another way of approaching this topic. And they were different.

And that's what we're gonna discuss, is the difference. And we're gonna do so by going through some clips from Gavin Ortlund, who is a Christian podcaster, who has talked about this in defense of third-way thinking.

We are gonna critique third-way thinking. So with that said, I want to introduce, once again, Megan Basham to the podcast. She is a journalist with The Daily Wire. You can check out her great book, New York Times bestselling book, "'Shepherds for Sale.".

She's also a wife and a mother. Welcome, Megan. Thank you for being here.

Hey, thanks for having me, John, on a gorgeous Saturday. So yeah, this is a nice afternoon to do this.

Yeah, is it? I mean, North Carolina is different. I did live there in Raleigh, at least a little farther north. I mean, are the leaves changing yet down there?

They are, actually, yeah. You know, I think it's because it gets cold at night, so they start to change, actually, right around now. And it's gorgeous. It's like 76 in the day, but just crisp enough at night.

So this is like my favorite time of year.

Yeah, if you go up to Asheville, I'm sure it's gotta be like just about peak. Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably. Anyway, yeah, cool. I'm glad you're enjoying it. This is such a crazy topic to me because I thought, in my mind, we've kind of been through this, right?

And I know you've talked about this before. So I guess my first question before we even get started is why do you think this is coming up again? Why is this a heated topic now of all times?

I mean, obviously, I think Charlie's death and the reaction to it has kind of thrown this third-way taxonomy into, I don't wanna say suspicion, but maybe discreditation would be a good way to describe it.

Suddenly, a lot of people are going, well, huh, I'm hearing all these young people saying that they're coming to Christ or they're feeling convicted or they're repenting. And I'm hearing it first person.

I'm going out to these TPUSA faith events. So these kids are lining up and they're telling me, hey, I was lukewarm and Charlie's model, his example, and then his death and the response to it has really brought me back to Christ.

Or it's made me wanna witness. It's made me wanna reach out to, one kid told me my brother who was caught in the sin of homosexuality and I was sort of maybe anesthetized how serious that was. And this just told me, I need to speak to him and I need to try to help, frankly, save him from the fires of hell eternally.

So I think all of that's going on and it's making people question, okay, Charlie Kirk was such an outspoken conservative. He was somebody who took unequivocal positions on so many of these issues that we deem political, but are really biblical issues, that I think it's cast a lot of questions on the third way model.

So at the same time, then you're having what you might call a scramble from more establishment figures to defend the third way model because it's been cast into the suspicion. So Gospel Coalition did an article, I think last week or maybe the week before with JD Greer defending the third way.

Gavin Ortland, as you just said, just did a podcast defending the third way. And on the flip side, you've had people like Allie Bestucky who's a pretty big podcaster out questioning it and saying, well, wait a minute, I don't know that I think your defenses are all that strong.

So I think that's what's going on right now.

Yeah, there does seem to be a lot of defensiveness. I am curious, since you're out there, I'm not at TPUSA events, at least across the country right now. What's the energy like? I mean, what are people telling you who have been doing this pre-Charlie Kirk's assassination?

Is there just like a lot of people coming out that weren't there before?

It is so hard to fully capture or overemphasize the energy that's out there right now. I just did in Louisville, Kentucky last week, an Ask Me Anything event for TPUSA Faith at the University of Louisville.

And I expected kind of what we used to see at those kinds of events, people coming out. And I prepared, you know, I'm like, all right, I'm ready to defend the cause of life. I'm ready to defend the created order on male and female and what marriage is.

And there were a lot of people there. There was, you know, a very long line of questioners and not one of them brought up anything that they really wanted to debate like that. There was like one combative question, but I think it was asked in good faith.

And it was actually on, okay, I want to believe the Bible. I want to come to the Lord, but what do we do? Right, I mean, this was like the only person in line. And he was like, but I struggle with God ordering the Israelites in the Old Testament to destroy all the Canaanites, for example.

He's like, help me understand that because that for me has been an obstacle to coming to the Lord. And that was like literally the only combative question. And it wasn't that combative. All the others were, how do we save more people?

How do I get more involved in my faith? What should I look for in a church? I mean, it was just totally different than what I think we experienced pre-Charlie's assassination.

Wow, so when the critics are, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief, you don't really have critics anymore. That's incredible. I'm really glad to hear that. Man, I'm kind of curious. I should have done this probably earlier.

I've just been so busy. I'm in a very secular area in New York, but I should probably find out. I think there's maybe an hour for me at TPUSA because I don't even know how they do these events. That's a discussion we could talk about off camera, I guess.

But my way of going to a college campus is just walking around and trying to talk to people. But when you have a crowd like that, so many people would get to hear what you're saying, even though you're having a conversation with one person.

I love that format. And anyway, would love to get involved with that in some way. So that's really great. Transitioning to the third way stuff, the third way thinking whereby, and I know we're gonna get into this in just a second, but there's more or less a moral equivalency rather drawn.

Gavin Ortlin says that that's not what's going on, but that's effectively what does happen. That positions Christianity as not really on a side, it seems like, of good and evil. And people, I think, are recognizing that there's actual evil, and the left seems to incarnate that.

That seems to be the issue in my mind. And so Christianity and political conservatism are somewhat coming together in, not that they've never been together, they've always been, I think, attached, but now it's like people are overtly understanding.

If you wanna be on the cosmic battle between good and evil, you can't be on the left at least. Like that doesn't seem like an option, right? So, all right, so I got the video queued up. I'm just gonna play some clips, let you respond.

This is from what, last week, I think, Gavin Ortlin put this out. And I've taken the major arguments and boiled them down. Here is Gavin Ortlin.

Take into account differences of calling and context. Tim Keller is a pastor in New York City, was a pastor and church planter. Charlie Kirk is more of a political and cultural and religious commentator doing debates on university campuses.

He talks about theology as well, but he's got a different calling. You know, it's like, if you're gonna compare these two people, it's like comparing, it's like saying, you know, Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, look at them both playing golf.

Wow, Tiger Woods is so much better.

Okay, so I don't know, I have a clip that we can play of Tim Keller, but what's your reaction to that? Because that's, I think, the first argument that he makes is that, look, you can't compare these two people, they're different.

Yeah, I don't think that analogy works. I mean, for one, the thing that he's saying that Keller and Charlie Kirk were both doing was the exact same kind of activity though, right? We're talking about a method of evangelizing.

And both Charlie talked about that and Tim Keller talked about that. So maybe they both had different roles, but the subject matter that they were addressing was the same. How do we reach lost people?

And Tim Keller argued that the way we do that is by not being identified with a political party or a political side. And obviously Charlie, particularly towards the end of his life, I mean, I think he was more political when he first started out, but as his ministry, and I'm not gonna hesitate to call it a ministry, continued, you know, in the last few years, we saw him become much more interested in matters of faith and being faithful to what scripture says on social issues that before he was a little fuzzy on.

I mean, there was a time when I think, you know, we saw TPUSA being accepting of, more accepting, I would say, of the log cabin Republican type of gay marriage, things like that. And politically they would say, yeah, we're still willing to be co-belligerents with people like that on various issues.

But at his faith events, he was suddenly becoming extremely clear about this is what scripture says, and this is why I believe it, and this is why I believe it's good for society. So, you know, I don't actually think they were doing different things.

You might almost, and I saw someone, I don't remember where I saw it, say it's more like they were two players on the same team. You would have to compare them to, I'm not a sports ball person. So I don't know, like a point guard and some other person on a basketball team, it's more like that.

Right, so you know Charlie Kirk, or you knew Charlie Kirk. I'm curious a little bit, because I did see that transition. Was that Rob McCoy? What happened in circa 2021, 22, where he became much more aggressive about, I mean, he even, I saw a clip the other day where he was even saying that because Ed Stetzer was the head of, what college was it?

You know what I'm talking about.

Billy Graham, Wheaton.

Oh, I don't know, no, it wasn't Wheaton, it was California.

Biola.

Yeah, Biola, that was it, sorry. I don't know why that skipped my mind, but Biola, that it wasn't even a Christian college. And I thought, oh my goodness, like he was

He's getting kind of deep in the weeds, right? Like he knows the players and the names, right?

Right, I mean, he's going full quote unquote discernment blogger there. And that's not the Charlie Kirk I remember from 2019 or 2020. So do you know what happened? I'm just curious.

Yeah, I mean, I don't, I didn't know him very well. You know, we, I went on his show a number of times, you know, we communicated a few times. I would see him in events and he was always very encouraging.

I could tell you that when my book came out, I didn't have the following that has kind of grown since then. And he immediately had me on the show when it was not that big of a book or a topic. And I think he helped make it a bigger topic and then immediately started inviting me to TPUSA faith events to speak.

So that was kind of when I got to know him. I didn't get to know him until maybe late 2023, 2024 when Shepherds for Sale came out. So he had already kind of made that transition to some degree by then.

But I do think, you know, I do know Rob McCoy very well. And I know Frank Turek, who also the Christian apologist who has mentored Charlie. I know Lucas Miles, head of TPUSA faith very well. And so, you know, hopefully I'm not speaking out of turn here.

And if I am, you know, I apologize guys. But what it seemed like to me was that the darkness of 2020 between COVID and the BLM riots and the rise of the extreme left taking hold of all of our cultural institutions.

We had seen the growth of it for years, but it was like, that was the period of time where we saw the full fruition of everything that that meant. And I think it seemed like he realized that debating politics is not the thing that is going to hold back this darkness.

It's not enough. It's not strong enough. It's gonna take a spiritual revival and it's going to take a standard of authority and truth that is greater than just here's what I believe politically. So I think that's what was going on.

So Bethel says the answer is that he married Erica who's much

That's probably a good, Bethel's a smart cookie. That's probably, yeah.

I will, and Diane backs that up. So I will just go with that. So we just talked about this statement. We've gotten a little away from Gavin. That's my problem. But he said that you can't compare these guys, Tim Keller and Charlie Kirk.

You gave a great answer. They're dealing with the same content. I just want to play this Keller clip. This is from 2021. Tim Keller, who is talking about political activists who are Christian on the right.

And so he's not preaching. He's not talking about ecclesiology. This is actually politics. And here's what Tim Keller, how he assesses them.

I would say for the last 20 years, the Christian right, though I usually would agree with their positions. I'm pro-life. You know, in other words, I did not, I still don't think that same-sex marriage is a good idea for the country or people.

So I would technically be in, you know, agreeing with them. But you know how they raise their money? For 20 years, they sent out letters talking about how you've got to send this money because the gay people are going to try to come and take your children away.

And because they're evil. And because, you know, Democrats and the left are going to destroy your religious liberty. They just said awful things and vilified people. It's one of the reasons why so many gay activists now just don't want to forgive evangelicals.

Because when they had a little more power in the 80s and 90s, that's how they raised their money. That's how they got people out. And weirdly enough, that's not the Christian way at all. The Christian way at all is, you know, the way up is down.

The way to rule is to serve. This is how Jesus did it. The way to get happy is to not think about your own happiness, but the happiness of others.

Tim Keller.

Okay, so maybe that's a good point to just comment there. Any thoughts?

I mean, yeah, one, again, I feel like, and you say this so often with Tim Keller, is that it's category confusion. You know, he is sort of slamming the conservative activists of the 80s for raising money on things that did turn out to be true.

They were coming for your children. They were trying to get access to the levers of education and culture in order to shape their minds. You know, obviously we've seen that with all of the LGBTQ materials in school libraries and that teachers are teaching now.

And, you know, we've seen it with Drag Queen Story Hour and all of these things. And so every opportunity they've gotten to get access to kids, they've pushed for that. And it was a political action. So, you know, you could do two things.

You could raise money back in the 80s and 90s to say, hey, we don't want this in our schools. We don't want this influence. We want to raise money to stop gay marriage from being enshrined in law. But at the same time, we could also love our gay neighbor, our gay relative.

We could tell them, I love you. I'm going to serve you. So it was total category confusion, what he was saying right there. And I really dislike dumping on the 80s moral majority. I think that there were a lot of really good, sincere people who were trying to do their best to be good citizens.

And I think we should actually be grateful for a lot of what they accomplished.

And not to quibble with this, but he did say past two decades in 2021. So he was actually talking about not just the 80s, but the 90s and the 2000s. This is something that carried through, and I don't know, he doesn't get specific, but people like, obviously Jerry Falwell, I guess that's 80s.

But beyond that, I'm trying to think of the big leaders in the 2000s.

James Dobson.

James Dobson, there you go. Yeah, I think that would be a good probably example there. So that was Tim Keller. And so we can say, I think, without any hesitation, that what Gavin Ortlund said there is not true.

That wasn't the third way. Keller didn't actually present it the way Gavin Ortlund does there. Keller thought he was speaking about conservative activism when he would say, this is the way of Jesus, and it conflicts with your political thinking and so forth.

All right, moving on here, Gavin's next claim.

For example, has always said, it is not about finding a middle ground. It is about nothing other than following the Bible, no matter what, even if the world sees you as an extremist. Christopher Walken wrote this excellent book, Biblical Critical Theory.

It's very clear that third wayism is not splitting the difference between the major political parties that are currently operating. Not only is that not the way forward, that's actually wandering from the faith.

Rather, the goal is nothing other than letting the Bible set the table. The Bible does not fit into the modern world. It will rearrange the furniture, so to speak. Trevin Wax makes this point very clearly that we should not stay above the fray.

We should not make it sound like there's moral equivalency between the two parties. There isn't. J .D. Greer, by the way, Griffin Gulledge is the one who drew my attention to that older article. All of these articles are years old.

So you'd hope that people would interact with this stuff. It's been out there forever. But a lot of the ways you hear third wayism represented, you're like, that's not a, you can tell they're not trying to put it in a way that a proponent of this could recognize.

But I was gonna say Griffin Gulledge is the one who drew my attention to that older article of Trevin's in a tweet. And I thought he made a great point about the danger of a warmed over and politically flavored homogenous unit principle.

If you don't know what that is, Google it. Great insight there. J .D. Greer has an article up at the Gospel Coalition and it's based on his new book where he talks about this and he's very clear. It is not that both sides are morally equivalent.

And he talks about the particular evils enshrined in the Democratic Party.

There's a kind of.

Okay.

I do have one question that I wanna let you go, Megan. Do you know how old these old ancient articles were? The oldest one? I don't know if you looked that up.

I'm curious.

I didn't.

I did not do my homework on that.

That's okay.

I did.

So here's the, if I could pull it up. So here's the old article from 2022.

Okay.

All right.

From Trevin Wax.

Ancient, yeah.

Ancient articles. So I'm pulling up stuff and maybe we'll talk about it in a minute from like 2011, 2019, 2020, 21. And he's appealing to, this is the old way to view it. And he's going back to 2022, which I just thought was kind of weird.

But what do you think about the clip you just heard?

Well, I'm glad you brought up and I wasn't planning on discussing this, but the timeline of how deep are we going? How far back are we going to look at this discussion of the third way and how it has now, and over a period of decades manifested itself because Tim Keller didn't just start arguing this in 21 or 2022.

I found an article that Bethel McGrew actually just popped up, shared with me from 1999, where he gave an interview with Christianity Today. And he was talking about how, you know, pastors don't necessarily have to preach these social issues that are biblical issues from the pulpit, that it is just something that a church member might absorb in the atmosphere.

And so he told this story of, you know, in 1999, of a woman coming to him and saying, well, you know, I've always been pro-choice, but, you know, just sort of sitting in the church, I haven't heard you talk about it, but I'm just starting to have funny feelings about abortion and that maybe it's not right.

And so, you know, the argument that Tim Keller was making then was that you don't necessarily have to preach specifically about abortion. You just preach principles of life and eventually they'll just start to get it.

So, you know, he was already kind, and that is kind of a part of Third Way. So that's one.

Was that Christian Powers, I think that says that?

Yes, I'm so glad you brought that up because then she wrote, she was in his church for a number of years and in her memoriam of him and the piece that she wrote, remembering him, that was very, you know, she said my complicated feelings on Tim Keller, clear she was conflicted.

She basically said, you know, I sat in that church for a number of years before I realized I was being asked to sign on to things that I didn't necessarily know that I agreed with, like the sanctity of human life or that marriage is only between one man and one woman.

And she said, I didn't ever hear that from the pulpit. I just started to get the sense in the small groups and the people I was with that, oh, they might believe this stuff. So she did not hear it from the pulpit.

So that's, you know, two examples of that. And, you know, on this definition of third way, they can say that's what it is. They can say it's being, it's not cutting in the middle. It's saying that we are something outside of politics that is above, that is aligning with the Bible.

So it's neither right nor left. But one, that's how it played out in real life. And we all have seen that. We have seen a lack of clarity on some of these very biblically clear issues. So, you know, that's one thing.

And then the other thing, you know, it's hard for me to hear people like J .D. Greer talk about not over-politicizing the church when I sit back and remember where these guys were just a couple of years ago, when it came to issues like Black Lives Matter or alleged racial injustice, or how we should handle things like shutting down our churches in the middle of a pandemic.

You know, so these were the moments where I went, where was the third way there? Because those are truly biblically debatable issues. You know, how much racial injustice is happening. We can discuss that, or what our immigration policy should be.

And at that point, they were not third way. So I think we've had enough time for people to sort of go, you may tell us that's what it is, but it's not how it plays out. And we can all see that.

Yeah, so often the rights issues were not given the same kind of treatment the left's issues are, where the left's issues like on racial quote-unquote justice or loving your neighbor in the COVID era is a gospel issue or a love of your neighbor issue.

It's not a political issue anymore. It's kind of taken out of that. And, you know, this is something that we've been dealing with for a long time. I wanted to point out though, a few just sources that I thought were interesting.

So Tim Keller, and you've probably read this Meg, in his book, The Reason for God. It was one of his first big books. And in the introduction, he talks about his attraction to the Frankfurt School and that kind of thing.

But before that, he says, younger Christians are the vanguard of some major new religious, social, and political arrangements that could make the older form of culture wars obsolete after they wrestle with doubts and objections to Christianity may come out on the other side with an Orthodox faith that doesn't fit the current categories of liberal Democrat or conservative Republican.

Many see both sides in the culture war, making individual freedom and personal happiness, the ultimate value rather than God and the common good. And then he goes on to critique liberals and conservatives that they have different kinds of individualism, that this is essentially a moral equivalency.

That's what it comes across as at least. And I'll play you a video in the moment where he says this in, I think it's 2019. So the book is from, I think it was first published in 2009. And years later, he's saying the same thing.

I'm gonna mention this in passing. And if you wanna respond, you can say this as well. I just feel like it is significant for the history of this. Karl Truman at the same time published a book called Republicrat.

And that's literally what it's called. And he says in the intro to that book that the reason he wrote the book is that the evangelical church is in danger of alienating a significant section of people, particularly young people, because they're too tight on their conservative party politics and Christian fidelity.

And he even specifically cites abortion as a wedge issue. We shouldn't be using it that way. And he, without going into the whole quote, he basically parrots the same exact thinking that Tim Keller does.

And the reason I wanted to mention this as well is because Keller and Truman at the same time are both saying this is a contextualization strategy. They're looking at the political landscape. They're saying the church has to somehow fit into this and the church is gonna do poorly.

They're not gonna attract people if we just hold on to the previous status quo, which was conservative political topics on moral issues. We can't do that as much. That's the whole motivation. I feel like I'm a broken record on this, but I keep saying, if you see this as an abstract universal political thing, third way ism, you're missing the entire point.

It was a very specific strategy designed to attract a specific group of people in a specific context. They're left-leaning blue city dwellers. Why this was rolled out. And you see in the initial phase of even building this from those two major thinkers that that is what they're thinking.

So I don't know if you have any reaction to that, but I wanted to just point that out from the ground floor. I don't think that's ever what this was about was just the biblical authority.

Yeah, and I haven't read that book. So let me preface this with that. And I consider Carl Truman a friend. I like him, but based on just the title, I probably wouldn't agree with much from that position.

And I think he would know that. I think Carl Truman probably knows me well enough to go, yeah, she wouldn't probably like that. And part of it is because, I don't know, maybe I'm just a simple-minded creature.

I don't like all of these strategies that are extra biblical for how do we reach these people. I don't know. I just kind of, there's a part of me that's like, just preach the word, lift up Christ, and he will draw who he wants.

And maybe we don't have to over-intellectualize this in the way that we do. And part of the reason I think that these strategies have been put into place, just as you said, is because there was a certain kind of people, as you just pointed out, that they were meant to draw.

And it is a culturally attractive and advantageous kind of person, because it looks good, right, to have young urban professionals, people who are the movers and shakers in cultural institutions in your churches.

It's a lot harder to have the broken, drug-addicted people living in trailers in rural Ohio. You know, that's not gonna get you covered in the New York Times, typically, when you're reaching out to those people and those people are filling your churches, because that's just not who they're interested in.

Those are sort of the lost and forgotten people. And so there's a part of me that feels like that is the reason for a strategy like that, and I don't like that. And then, you know, the other thing is that, again, I don't know what's in Truman's book, but when I would look at Keller, you would then see it manifest itself through these tortured analogies of abortion versus idolatry in law, and going, well, you know, and I, you know, the infamous tweet thread that he put out saying, the Bible tells us abortion is wrong, but it doesn't tell us how to fight abortion.

Like, you know, maybe new social entitlements would be the way to, you know, lower the abortion rate, not necessarily just adhere to thou shalt not murder.

Oh, that's good. You remembered that. I actually forgot about that, and now I'm remembering it. That was crazy.

And he said, you know, on the other hand, there was, we don't outlaw idolatry, and the Bible also tells us that we shouldn't worship idols, and I'm going, well, I don't know how you would legislate that.

How would you find out if someone's worshiping an idol? And to be fair, there's a part of me that goes, I don't know, publicly, I don't really like giant Hindu statues in the middle of Dallas, so we could talk about that maybe.

Your terms are acceptable.

Right, but one thing is taking another human being's life, and one isn't. So when you think about it that way, it sounds a little silly. And, you know, someone else who I like very much, but I remembered hearing the same sort of tortured analogy from him when I think he was trying to apply this third way kind of thing was John Piper, and I love John Piper.

I've learned from John Piper for years. I listened to his sermons, but I remember when he wrote that essay about electing Trump, he acknowledged, yes, abortion is murder, and we don't want more murder, but Donald Trump is very arrogant, and arrogance can also be a kind of murder.

And you just sit back, and there's a part of you that goes, you guys are trying to be too clever by half here.

Yeah, all of Trump's sins were in the Greek. I remember that.

Right, right.

Yeah, Hillary Clinton's were not. But yeah, you're too nice, Megan. I don't care what they say about you.

Thank you.

That's very sweet. I don't know why people don't know this about me.

Yeah, I don't know why some people. So I think there's one other element to this before we continue with Gavin, because I think this is a, and you kind of touched on it here, these tortured analogies, but his characterization of the right and the left.

So he would set up, it almost seemed like a straw man at times, like the right is this, and then his description would be, what are you talking about? That's not, if that is the right, that's certainly not anything mainstream.

And then he would take the most, sometimes charitable examples, or the middle of the way, kind of common thinking on the Democrat side. And you're like, how is this a fair equivalency? And if we're going to do third way, if we're going to do as they're trying to defend it, we're gonna take the Bible and we're gonna apply it, then wouldn't you want to have equal weights and balances here so that you're actually applying it into the correct situation rather than a, from a leftist frame, which is how Keller came across.

And I just, I pulled two examples of this real quick. One is from his 2019 book that he came out with on ministry. And I don't want to read the whole thing here, but he talks about blue evangelicalism and red evangelicalism.