Donald Trump vs. Russell Moore: Populism and Ideology

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast for a crisp and beautiful morning here.

Spring starts to turn into summer. I wanted to share with you some quick thoughts before the live stream later today.

I'll let you know about that actually first. The live stream is at 2 p .m. if you can make it, and this is on the 11th of May, 2023,

Year of Our Lord. So if you're listening after this has taken place, you can't participate. You to this before that particular live stream,

I would just encourage you, if you have questions about Christianity and government and what the

Christian's role is and whether or not the government should be self -aware of Christianity and acknowledge

Christianity and govern in a Christian way and all the various conversations that have been going on about cultural

Christianity and Christian political engagement, I would encourage you come by at 2 p .m. Eastern Time today.

If you're in the live chat, just ask me whatever question you want. I'll try to pitch as many as I can to Jon Eidsmo, who's our guest.

If you're a patron, of course, you can participate live if you wish. Jon Eidsmo has been in this arena for a long time.

He was in the military. Now he's with the Foundation for Moral Law, which is a think tank slash,

I guess, legal firm. He, I understand, has some theological training. Actually, Judd Saul is the one that said, you got to get

Jon Eidsmo on to talk about this stuff. We're doing it. We're doing it. One other thing before I get into some of the thoughts that I wanted to share with you about Russell Moore and Donald Trump.

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Anyway, where do we start? That is a hard decision. I figured probably one of the best places to start would be what

Donald Trump said last night, and then we'll get Russell Moore's reaction to it. Here's what

Donald Trump said last night. Do you want Ukraine to win this war? I don't think in terms of winning and losing.

I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people and breaking them up. I don't think in terms of winning and losing.

Mr. President, can I just follow up on that, because that's a really important statement that you just made there. Can you say if you want Ukraine or Russia to win this war?

I want everybody to stop dying. They're dying. Russians and Ukrainians.

I want them to stop dying. And I'll have that done. I'll have that done in 24 hours.

I'll have it done. You need the power of the presidency to do it. But you won't say that you want Ukraine to win. You know what

I'll say? I'll say this. I want Europe to put up more money because they're in for 20 billion. We're in for 170.

And they should equalize. They have plenty of money. They should equalize. I got with NATO when

I sat down, I got them to put up hundreds of billions of dollars. Okay, well, that was one of the clips that I want to talk about today.

Before we get to that particular clip, though, I want to show you what Russell Moore had to say about this whole entire debacle.

He said glorifying people who violently attacked our capital, calling a capital officer a thug.

What a moral disgrace this is. So Russell Moore, and David French retweeted that, I think. And who knows who else today is going to do that?

Russell Moore has made his intentions known that that's the reason that this whole thing was a shamble.

And of course, I don't feel that way about it. I actually was pleasantly surprised by how Donald Trump behaved.

He was more measured, calm, cool, collected. He seemed very reasonable to me.

And maybe the moderator, quote unquote, set him up for that. But he was making some very,

I think, reasonable assessments about a number of issues. And he didn't fall into the traps that they set for him.

In fact, he turned it around, which I think is a good lesson for Christians to learn. And I'm not saying they have to go to Donald Trump to learn that lesson.

I think the perfect example is Jesus Christ, who never fell into the Pharisees' traps and would always turn it around on them, it seemed.

So that's your model. But in a political arena, we're not used to Republicans behaving this way.

Trump has been the exception, that he's willing to say things that will get him in trouble with the elite class.

And he doesn't care, it seems, what the consequences of those things are for him. He'll say them anyway.

And I know many of you, you're very skeptical of this.

And I understand why, that Trump is, he's just out for himself.

I see that too. I think you can say he's willing to make some of these sacrifices in part, because he knows some of these sacrifices are going to probably benefit him.

So he doesn't have maybe anything to prove to the elites, which is a good thing. And we all like that.

But perhaps ingratiating himself to the common man, quote unquote, is worth it to him.

And he thinks that's going to be a bigger boost to his own agenda and ego and all of the rest of it.

So I see all that look. And I have to say that there's a few people in the comments yesterday when

I posted about this and an observation I had, which I'm going to share with you in a moment, were immediately just dismissive of it.

Like, why are you buying into the two party system? Trump's about Trump. Like, I understand all that.

It's irrelevant to the point though I'm trying to make here. And that's what I want you to see, whether you vote for Trump or not, irrelevant to the point made here.

And I don't know who I'm voting for yet. It's a little premature. I don't know what it's going to look like. I don't know what third party candidates are going to be out there or what kind of traction they're going to be able to get or any of that.

So we're premature on this whole, who are you going to vote for and all that. It looks like it's probably going to be

Trump getting the Republican nomination, but anything could happen. So that being said, this is not meant to endorse a political candidate or persuade you that you got to go for Donald Trump, but there's an observation here.

I think as Christians, we need to think deep about these things as much as we can and finding the fundamental disagreement or the dividing line between CNN and Donald Trump voters, finding out what the core root issues in the divide, because it's a really, it's a stark divide that we have.

It's deep. Finding those core dividing lines, I think is important because we'll misdiagnose if we don't.

And if we misdiagnose, we come up with the wrong solutions to things. And you have people, well,

I'm not going to get into all the nonsense, but there's a lot of nonsense right now. And one of the things that's a big dividing line came out in the clip that I just played for you.

So here's what I wanted to share with you. This is an observation that I made last night, and I'm going to read it for you now.

I said this, I said, the most revealing part of tonight's CNN town hall was when Trump refused to say what side he wanted to win, the war between Ukraine and Russia.

Instead, he said he wanted people to stop dying. This isn't getting as much play as some of his zingers, but nothing came up that was more revealing about his philosophy versus the philosophy of most politicians.

Trump cares about condition. CNN cares about status. Trump, and I think most Americans with him, want people's conditions to be improved.

CNN and most elites care about being technically correct, regardless of the cost to human life. A status that ensures the correct outcome is more important than the human suffering it takes to achieve it.

This is the fundamental divide between populists and ideologues, or those who care more about people versus those who care more about ideas.

And there's already been reactions like, well, you're saying it's good that he's on principle. That's not what I'm saying here.

And that's part of the reason I wanted to make this video to clarify that for you. So you know exactly what

I'm talking about here. So we're going to get into this in a moment with the

Russell Moore article by way of a contrast here. But I want you to think about the reason that politicians, statesmen, magistrates, people running for the position of magistrate, what the reason they have for their office.

Why do they even exist? Why are they put there? You say to punish evil, right?

Punish evil, promote good. For who? For what?

In what context? For the betterment of who? It's obviously for the people they serve.

That goes without saying. It should go without saying. They do what they do because of people under their jurisdiction who need to be protected from bad guys, who need a good example set before them.

I'm not saying Trump's a good example, but they need a good example set before them. So promoting good is part of this.

And if we lose sight of that, of the fact that there's people that actually matter in this, tangible people who exist in the real world, who have real jobs and real families and real lives, then we are going to miss the entire point of why civil magistrates exist in the first place.

And I submit to you that that is actually one of the fundamental dividing lines between populists, if you want to use that term, and on the other side, elitists today.

And you could use different terms if you want. I didn't want to use conservative and liberal because I think it's actually a little bit different than that.

You could use those terms. But the more populist, and I'm going back to a definition of populism or conception of it that Clyde Wilson in his famous essay on populism in the 1970s gave it, where he talks about populism as this phenomenon from the right, not from the left, which a lot of academics say it's a left -wing thing because European leftists are populist or something.

But he made the point in America that's not true. It's a right -wing phenomenon. And it's actually when people mobilize, and we've probably seen this a number of times in our own lifetimes, people mobilize in mass against some kind of innovation being forced down their throats from the left, some new progressive innovation that is going to bring us into a state of euphoria, utopia, and all kinds of good things.

And we know that that's not true, that it's going to affect our families tangibly in the real world.

It's going to shape our own lives. And so you have movements like the moral majority. You have movements like the

Tea Party movement. And I would say Trump's election is also in that similar vein, movements that just rise up when the conditions are in a certain way, set against them in a certain way.

And all of a sudden, people who weren't even that politically involved, they're becoming involved, and they're becoming involved on the right side.

I mean, right isn't a political right. So that's what I'm talking about when

I'm talking about populism, these kinds of movements. And those movements are, every time that I can think of, populist movements are very concerned about the plight of real ordinary people, tangible people that exist in the real world, and the effects that some innovative policies that someone who probably went to college but doesn't have a lot of real world experience came up with.

And these theories, which is what they are, propositions, theories, abstract concepts, when they get pushed on people, they react.

And they say, look, that may work in your lab, in your mind or something, but here in the real world, that's going to cost me a lot of money, or that's going to kill our children.

That's going to create a culture we don't want to live in. It's going to have negative effects. All right, so that's a little bit on populism real quick.

Now, what I wanted to say about this particular scenario that you see playing out here is that we have been conditioned for centuries now, really, decades at the very least, to believe that people ought to be sacrificed to certain ideas, principles, concepts.

And you can see this in spreading democracy around the world and how important that is, and really that the death counts don't seem to matter to some people as much when it's for the noble cause of something like that.

But what's the noble cause? Well, the noble cause really isn't about tangible people, it's about spreading an idea.

You can see that even, I'm going back even to the 1860s, some of the reasoning used to justify the death of 600 ,000 people in a bloody civil war versus compensating and integrating the slaves who lived in the

United States at that time. That actually shows a little bit of this thinking that you have a noble cause, no one's arguing that it's not noble to want to end slavery, but at what cost?

That becomes a factor. What kinds of destruction, what kinds of devastation happen in the pursuit of this that may be avoided if another way was chosen?

And in questions like that, you're not even allowed to ask anymore about history. You're just not even allowed.

As soon as you ask them, well, and this is the way the left always responds. And now, unfortunately, people supposedly on the right are saying it, but they're really on the left, guys.

They start saying, where's your patriotism or where's your concern? You must be a bad person.

You want slavery? You don't want democracy? You want totalitarian regimes?

And it's like, no, no, no one wants those things. But the principles being applied to these situations are totally different.

You have on one side, people are sacrificed for the sake of these ideas.

Or if you want to say principles, you can say principles, make it as noble as you want, but people are sacrificed to those things.

And on the other side, you have those things actually are supposed to work for the benefit of tangible, actual people.

So in one scheme, man is sacrificed to these abstractions.

In the other scheme, in the other way of thinking, these abstractions serve man.

Trump's in that second way of thinking, which I think is the way that most people thought for, well, not everyone, obviously, but I think it's more of a modern innovation for people to think in these abstract terms.

It's at a time when there's mass communication, where you can talk about loving the entire world, but you don't actually have to love anyone in it.

Loving all the people of the world, but I don't like my neighbor. I don't like my family. That's the world that we live in now, where loving people means an allegiance to some abstraction, where being committed to diversity means that you are committed to some kind of a principle of diversity.

It doesn't mean you actually know diverse people. It doesn't mean that you're going and hanging out with people of different ethnicities or cultures from you.

And I was trying to think, you know, I'd be curious if people have comments on this in the, write them please on the video.

Because I was thinking biblically, I'm like, I'm sure there's many good examples of this. The only one that kept coming to mind for me though was

Jephthah's daughter, and how Jephthah made a promise that he would kill the first thing that came out of his house, and then his daughter comes out and he decides that he has to be held to his word.

And it's like, maybe you made a dumb promise, right? Maybe you should just say, look, that was not a good thing.

That was not a good idea. I mean, it's a good idea to want to sacrifice to the

Lord something, right? So that was a good idea. But he didn't think of the possibility that maybe a human being might walk out that door.

And it's a human that he might see. So if it's a human that he's seeing, he's going to, you know, swear to his own hurt and not change.

Well, that's what the righteous man does. I would say, yeah, in most circumstances, that's what the righteous man does.

As a general principle, that is exactly what you're supposed to do as a righteous man. You swear to your own hurt. Doesn't necessarily mean the hurts of others.

And it doesn't necessarily mean you can't confess and say, I made a dumb promise, and I know this breaks trust. I'm going to have to build it back up, but please forgive me.

And so that's an example that came to my mind from the Bible. What other examples can you think of along these lines? I'm just curious.

But, you know, the rules, the law of God even is meant to, it reflects the character and nature of God, but is it intended for man's betterment?

And I think people lose sight of this sometimes. It's intended for man's, to help man.

And I'm saying the universal principles that are applied to laws, that are the light to the nations, that are supposed to be applied across the board.

The reason the Queen of Bath of, now why am I blanking on this?

The Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon was because she was impressed to see the way that Solomon handled himself and the principles he applied in running his kingdom.

That is, that's important. That's important for us to think through.

Why are good laws good? What purpose do they serve? And in this situation with the

Ukraine war that's taking place, Trump was very wise, I think, in this particular setting to say, look, the condition is what matters here.

People are dying. You are so concerned about what side is right and making sure I get the right answer on this because people think

Ukraine's the right one. And if we can make Trump look bad, if he says that they're both equal or neither side is right or something, and Trump's like, look, that's, you're missing the main point here.

The main point is people are dying. People are dying and we need to stop that. And I think actually when you hear it articulated, the way

Trump articulates it, he does it actually fairly well. People resonate to it. They start to see, oh yeah, that is the big deal.

People are dying. That is the main thing. It's not which side you technically get correct in a situation that doesn't cost you much personally.

Now, of course, it's costing the taxpayer quite a bit, but it doesn't, personally, it doesn't really, you don't risk anything by saying, you know,

I want Ukraine to be the current, the side that wins. And then you never do anything about it. And you don't have to worry about those people who are actually taking shells into their homes.

So I think this was correct. And if you're going to negotiate, of course, you can't be on the record saying things like I want

Zelensky to win. And then you have to go to the negotiating table with Putin. Like that, that makes no sense. And CNN is just,

I don't understand why the moderator decided to do that. Other than they thought that this would be egg in Donald Trump's face.

And clearly it's not. They're in an insular bubble where the only thing that matters is whether you technically get the answer correct. So I wanted to point that out.

I think it's worth thinking through. That's one of the things I think you want to see in a statesman is that they care about whether, and in this case,

I know there's egos in the way and all the rest, but you want to make sure that they care about, whether it's

Trump or someone else, the people that they actually have to govern. And I would say that it applies to the people whose decisions in other countries are going to be affected by them.

So something, food for thought, something to think about. Now, real quick, I want to go through this article.

This is from Russell Moore. And I think that this illustrates a little bit, maybe we won't go through the whole thing, but on Tucker Carlson and the fear of being replaced.

Christians who seek the wrong kingdom will dread the wrong apocalypse. And he says, I only get an hour a week,

Tucker gets five. Oh man, does he have a paywall? The version I saw did not have a paywall. Okay, well,

I guess we're going to only read the first three paragraphs. I've heard a sentiment along these lines countless times from evangelical pastors, although they sometimes replace

Tucker with Laura or Sean or another Fox News cable host. After his firing by the network,

Tucker Carlson no longer has five hours a week, but his legacy ought to tell us just how much the church has secularized.

So the church certainly has, but is that really because of Tucker Carlson? That's who Russell Moore wants to blame.

I would submit it's because of Russell Moore. It's the people in the church. Tucker's not in, but anyway, but his legacy ought to tell us just how much the church has secularized.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the kind of replacement theory embraced by so many Christians, originating on the white nationalist fringes.

The great replacement theory holds that globalist elites are seeking to replace white Americans with black and brown immigrants from around the world at the 2017

Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. For example, the alt -right crowd chanted, you will not replace us,

Jews will not replace us. Now, let me comment on this briefly while I look to see if I can find one, a version of this that doesn't have the paywall.

I'm actually kind of surprised that, I don't know how I avoided the paywall before, but what he's talking about here is the idea that the

United States is being subverted in some way by populations that aren't

American coming in. You think that's happening right now? You bet it's happening, and it's happening a lot.

And so what he's saying is that this is something that exists on the white nationalist fringes.

This is something that is unique to people who would be not in keeping with Christian values.

So it's a guilt by association argument that he's already starting to wield form here.

Two years ago, he says David Froome argued that there actually is a great replacement happening, but not one popularized by Carlson and others.

Froome said the most politically important replacement in the United States is the replacement of conservative Christians by their liberal and secular children and grandchildren.

Froome's arguments, I mean, look, it's not either or. Both could be happening at the same time, right? Froome's arguments should come with lots of caveats and qualifications.

Like for those who say that demographic change will increase, minority populations would lead to a permanent progressive majority in the

United States. Some naively assume that secularization trends will mean the end of religion, especially of conservative

Christianity. For all sorts of reasons, this is not the case. But Froome is correct that one of the most seismic generational changes over the last 20 years is the rise of the nuns, referring to those with no religious affiliation.

He says that one reason American Christians are in a state of denial about these realities is that many are sorting themselves into the wrong us.

Every blood and soil form of fear -based identity politics thrives on defining us in terms of visceral categories like race, tribe, or nationality.

Those are visceral categories now, I'll have you know. I guess in Revelation, when every tribe, tongue, nation, people, they're all around the throne of God, I guess, you know, that's what's going to happen.

He's going to chide them all for—I mean, the Holy Spirit inspired John to write those words.

Are those visceral categories? Those categories are bad. Those are visceral categories. The only category that matters is whether,

I guess, you're a Christian or not. And it's like, spiritually speaking, that's true. But I'll tell you what, if you're an

English speaker, I'm going to be able to communicate with you over someone who's not English because I don't know any other language.

Well, I study Greek and Hebrew, but I'm not going to say that I know those languages either. I know enough to get by on Lagos.

All right, well, the problem for Christians is that the gospel contradicts this theology at its very root. Okay, this is where I'm like, where's

Russell Moore's gospel, really? Categorizing people by that means you don't have the gospel.

If Christianity for you is white and American, then it is not only out of step with the Bible. It is also precisely the kind of religion that almost every chapter of the

New Testament explicitly repudiates as carnal and pagan. Well, okay, clearly there are traditions within Christianity that have been molded by certain regions.

That's why you have Anglo -Protestantism, and that Anglo -Protestantism has certain features, like traditional hymns that many of us sing on Sundays that have traditional music and Scottish snaps in them, which you don't hear in other languages.

I mean, come on, come on. There's obviously traditions in the temporal world in which the

Church inhabits, the Church being part of that and helping to nurture and hopefully disciple people who are in this temporal world.

But yeah, if we're talking about the universal Church, of course those distinctions don't exist as far as barriers for entry.

This isn't hard stuff, but Russell Moore is just conflating things where he doesn't need to conflate them.

Anyway, the Gospel situates us in a whole new story, one based on the promise of God made to Abraham. If the

Church is just another way for humans to protect their gene pools, then Jesus was a fraud. See, who's saying this?

Who is saying this? If the blood and soil nationalists are correct about what defines success and the crowds are right to call out a leader like Barabbas instead of Jesus, this is just dribble.

It's just a tirade. There's no rationale behind any of this. But Jesus and his apostles gave us an entirely different vision of how we and us are ultimately defined.

You hear progressives often say it's the we and the us, those divisions.

We got to get rid of divisions, which of course, as soon as you do that, you're making a division. You're saying there's those people who believe in we and us, and then there's us, who we don't believe in we and us.

Well, that's also a division. That's a binary. And Russell Moore is doing that here. He's saying there's those Christians who are believing in these categories, these cultural categories, and then there's people like me, who we don't think those things are important.

Well, that's still a binary, and you're still dividing the body of Christ, aren't you? You're saying that there's Christians who are this way, and then there's

Christians who don't believe that way. And it's all self -refuting, because the whole premise is that the only category that's significant is

Christians and non -Christians, but he's creating another category. There's Christians who think wrongly, and then there's

Christians who think rightly, like him. Once we lose that biblical sense of wellness overall, any threats to the places where we do catch rare glimpses of it is considered an ultimate threat, capable of destroying us completely.

If we have misplaced hopes, we will have misplaced fears. That sense of paralyzing fear can also fuel a loss of the next generation.

He's implying we're losing children to progressive stuff because of our fears.

Our fears are driving this. The implicit but faulty logic is that we teach a generation to fear many things.

They will at least fear the things they ought to. But it doesn't work that way. My generation was taught that rock music included hidden, backward, mass satanic messages.

This did not lead us to become more discerning about cultural narratives. Now, he is right about this to some extent. When we found out this wasn't true, it was only taught to us to wonder what other of our elders' fears were imagined or fabricated.

People say this about teaching kids that Santa Claus exists. Well, what are they going to say when they get older and they find out he doesn't?

For those parents who are listening and their kids just heard that, I don't apologize, actually, but I am respectful in normal circumstances.

For the sake of this podcast, this is a perfect example, so I have to say it. It's a valid argument.

It's a valid argument, I think. Nothing against Santa Claus. I used to sit on Santa Claus' lap and stuff, but I knew he wasn't real when

I was a kid. I think there's some truth to this. The thing is, if there really is a

Santa Claus, and there is a historical one, but let's say and there's not, then should we believe in Santa Claus?

Well, yeah. The whole issue is whether it's true or not. The issue here is whether this great replacement stuff, is it true or not?

I don't know of all the theories about it that are swirling around there, but it seems obvious that we have millions of people crossing our border.

It's impacting our towns. I just talked in the last episode about how the county just under me is giving instructions to people from New York City to come up.

They'll get meals and laundry and all the rest. This is happening in real time, and it's affecting our communities deeply in bad ways.

We can't handle it financially. We can't handle it culturally. It's just the rate at which it's happening that assimilation can't take place.

What do you do about that? If you go back to the laws of Israel, they talked about these things.

They talked about aliens and strangers and the rest and the way to treat them and what laws applied and the borders were around cities.

If Jesus is right that our ultimate belonging comes not by our flesh and through spirit, then none of us can consider our present or potential future siblings in Christ scary or unclean.

Table television hosts come and go, but there will always be people who try to make us find our identity in the wrong place and our enemies in the wrong people.

He goes on. He says church will go into the future, even in America, and will probably be led by the very people we are told to fear now.

This is just drivel, but this is red meat for the Christianity Today audience and I would say the

Washington establishment who wants to consider themselves to be respectful Christians who are willing to go around along with the agendas, the globalist agendas.

That's the show. The contrast, I guess, is that you look at someone like Trump and he's willing to sacrifice real tangible people in the real world to what's the idea here?

Some kind of version of inclusion, some kind of theory or idea that we ought to get rid of these categories.

This is all happening in an abstract sense in one's mind, but then when it's applied to the real world, it has a devastating effect.

We don't talk about those effects. We deny them because it doesn't fit the theory. That's the point.

That's what ideologues do. If it doesn't fit the theory, it's not even part of reality. They don't even consider it.

That's ideological thinking. The consequences to people for enacting these principles of open borders and behind that the quality that's supposed to be produced through that, they don't care what kind of people are sacrificed.

The people who are sacrificed ought to be protected by the very magistrates who have control over these decisions. That's the difference between Donald Trump and Russell Moore.

If you want to know why there are so many Christians who are willing to vote for Donald Trump and willing to and they won't read

Russell Moore, it's because in part because of this. It's because of this ideological thinking versus real tangible on the ground nuts and bolts how it will affect my family thinking, populist thinking, if you want to call it that, but call it whatever you want.

All right. Well, hopefully that helped people understand some of this better. God bless. Don't forget the live stream later today, two o 'clock