A Conversation with a Dispensational Christian Nationalist

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You all are having a wonderful Christmas season.

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I know I am, although the snow did melt. We had a bunch of snow yesterday and now I'm looking outside and I see hardly any.

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So hopefully we'll get some more before Christmas time. But we have a special episode for you today.

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And I've had a number of people over probably the last year reach out to me and tell me, hey, you gotta get this guy,

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Chris LeDuc on your podcast. And not Chris LeDuc, the country singer.

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Some of you, probably 10 of you knew who I was talking about there, but Chris LeDuc, the pastor, who has been involved with,

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I struggle to figure out which term I wanna use, but we're just gonna say Christian nationalism. I know we've talked about it on the podcast.

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I know it's a hot button term for some of you, but this is a twist, right? Because Pastor Chris LeDuc is actually a dispensationalist and he is a graduate of the

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Master's Seminary in Sun Valley, California, where John MacArthur is the president. And despite that, he actually is not afraid to say, hey,

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I'm a Christian nationalist. I'm for that kind of stuff. And he has a YouTube series called How Should We Then Think or a channel called

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How Should We Then Think where he talks about this. And I'll say last, before we introduce him, that he was also referenced, although not by name, in the documentary about Grace Community Church and their stand on COVID.

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And when they reversed course and decided to open up the church, he was instrumental in influencing some of the leadership in that.

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So without further ado, thank you for coming on the podcast, Pastor Chris LeDuc. We appreciate it.

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Hey, John, good to talk with you. I've listened to you for a bunch of years, so it's fun to sit and be able to have an exchange.

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Likewise. Well, I'm admiring your office as I was beforehand and you have a great wall of books there with some great heroes of the faith over them.

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And I was thinking about some of the, Christmastime maybe does this, but some of the rich heritage that we have as Christians.

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We have such a rich heritage going back to millennium with amazing thinkers.

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And so often it seems that we, and I speak we in a very figurative sense there here, but we want to reinvent the wheel, right?

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There's guys who have actually thought through some of the issues that we're facing, but we want to go back to,

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I don't know what you even call it, like a blank slate kind of Biblicist. I'm gonna just sit in my room, figure out from the Bible, which

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I admire Bible study, of course, and so forth. But some of the debates that we're having now seem to be very similar to debates that have happened in the past, especially during the

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Reformation when there was a question about the extent to which the church and the state should interact with one another and have authority and that kind of thing.

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And I know this is some of what you've dealt with. And so I want to talk to you about that. I want to talk to you also about maybe,

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I don't know if you have a unique spin on the civil magistrate because of your dispensationalism.

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I know we were talking about this a little beforehand, that some folks reduce everything down to eschatology, which I don't think

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I go with, but I'd love to get your thought on that because I keep hearing that dispensationalists cannot be

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Christian nationalists. So why don't we start here? What made you decide that you wanted to tackle this subject and what made you interested in the extent to which the magistrate and the ecclesiastical branch interact and have authority and that kind of thing?

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Yeah, yeah. That's a good question. Well, in one sense, I've always been kind of interested in that topic, coming to faith later in life, being somewhat of a rebel as a kid, you finally come to Christ and now, at least for me,

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I was very serious about my submission to Christ. And obedience, that opened a lot of questions.

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And just over my years of study, when you combine a good anthropology, man, not good, a good anthropology with a little bit of understanding of even our own government, and all the different things, horrible things our government has done, whether it's the

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CIA or whoever, there's a healthy distrust. And then the question is, but I still need to be in submission.

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And so what does that look like? But COVID is really obviously what kind of brought this to the front for everybody.

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And when I left Grace Community Church and the seminary, got sent out with Grace Advance, was pastoring at Grace Advance Church in Oregon, we had the same doctrinal statement as Grace Church did.

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And there's a section in there that talks about how the local church is an autonomous entity, free from interference by any other sphere.

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And so, I always believed that. And this is where even definitions get important. One of the big ways language, imprecise language has been really harmful is talking about using the word church to refer to Christians in general.

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Because in Martin Lloyd -Jones talks about this in that kind of now infamous Romans 13 commentary, that introduces the old model.

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The church has certain roles, and then individual Christians have certain roles. And since we talk about, well, it's not the job of the church to engage culture.

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Okay, fine, whatever. How about the job of individual Christians to engage culture, right?

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But so many people use that term church to encompass both the institution, the organized body and the individuals.

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So, and the roles are different, right? I, as an individual, I don't baptize people, you know, those types of things.

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I don't serve the sacraments as an individual outside of the church. So, you know, when

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March, 2020 came around, I already was under the understanding of the church. When we assemble, we are an autonomous entity, right?

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We're under the Lordship of Christ. We're not under another sphere. And I quickly found myself in the minority position when we stayed open.

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And some of it was just prepped from even, I think, you know, Paul Washer, watching HeartCry Missionary Society.

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They were sending out updates from Wuhan all the way back in 2009 or 2019.

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And so our men's group, we'd already looked at some of the pictures they were sending out and saying, you know, we see what these guys are in hazmat suits, passing out tracks, doing what they're supposed to do.

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And so we talked to, hey, if it comes here, we're just, you know, the cost might be high, but we're gonna do what we're supposed to do. And so when everybody shuts down and we stay open, then

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I find that, you know, even my sending church, who I share a doctrinal statement with, tells me

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I'm wrong. And I know Romans 13 doesn't say anything about Caesar having authority over the local church.

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It's at that point that I'm realizing, all right, we got a big problem here because nobody seems to know

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Protestant, you know, political theory. Very few people can address Romans 13 out of a commentary that's more than 50 years old.

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So that, and I realized, listen, you know, it was almost easier to say, I know what

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Romans 13 doesn't teach, than I know what it does teach. I know it doesn't teach

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Caesar has authority over the local church. And so that was really what triggered it for me was 2020.

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And then seeing how much resistance there was to staying open. And I don't know if that helps a little bit.

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Yeah, well, it sounds like you had a view, a solid view about how to navigate that particular scenario before it happened.

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So you're telling me though, you actually were forced into it at the beginning of it. And that's when you figured out where these lines were.

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But before that, I mean, had you, I was expecting you to say something like, well, you know,

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I was interested in politics and decided to go to the ministry route or something like that. But it sounds like, no, you actually were studying and reading and in reaction to something that, and that's what spurred you to land at the conclusions you did.

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Yeah, I'm trying to, I'm just trying to ask the question of, you know, what does it look like to express the Lordship of Christ wherever I go, whatever sphere

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I enter into. And so even, you know, as I think about as a local church elder, you know, using pastor elders synonymously,

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I'm here at the local church. Caesar says, shut down. Christ has said, feed my sheep. And I'm thinking,

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I don't have, I have not been delegated the authority to turn away members in good standing from assembling and partaking of the ordinances.

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Christ hasn't delegated that authority to me, right? So if all these civil magistrates want to be tyrants,

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I'm not gonna be a tyrant. And so that really, you know, directed me to study, okay, how really does divinely delegated authority work in spheres with its limitations and teleology and all that?

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And so, yeah, I just forced my hand to where, listen, I'm not gonna turn you away. You know,

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I asked her, what do we guys wanna do at our church? And what do you mean what we wanna do? We're gonna do what we're supposed to do.

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We're gonna keep gathering and you know, you're gonna keep teaching, amen. So the guys who have reached out to me separately,

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I think without knowing it and said, hey, you gotta have this guy on, are very excited about the fact that they,

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I think they feel the privilege, the ability.

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They don't feel like hampered by dispensationalism. And they think that you're an example of this, that you've given them the go ahead, that they can believe in Christian nations.

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And we haven't even gotten into that yet, but you know, we've just talked about the

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COVID issue, but they can navigate that. And they don't have to be told that because they're a dispensationalist, they can't be involved in politics.

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That seems to be it to me. It's like, we can be involved as Christians despite our eschatology.

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Maybe talk about that for a moment because I do hear a lot of people, but it's, and I told you beforehand, it's not so much the

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Amal crowd, but there's a certain, it's only a certain strain in my mind, of Boesmael who tend to be very influenced by reconstruction, theonomy kind of stuff.

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And they will say, that's the bane issue. That's the problem is that Christians are affected by dispensationalism.

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And if we didn't have this, then we could really do some good. And I know

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I said beforehand, we started recording that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson, all these guys, founding fathers of the religious right, and even their, the people who've taken over from them, their descendants, as it were, like Matt Staver and who else did

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I mention? The various Christian groups that are out there, they seem to also be in that same line.

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They're dispensational as well, or they cater to that crowd. And they're the ones that, they're the game in town, in my mind.

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I don't see a lot of Boesmael guys channeling those efforts into actual political endeavors.

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It's very few. So I know that's a long way of framing this and setting it up, but you as someone who is a dispensationalist by conviction, how do you justify your, what you just described as your political position and what do you think about that whole argument?

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Yeah, I mean, one of the first things, and you and I talked a little bit about this, is let's just be consistent. If we're gonna make arguments, take them to their inescapable conclusions.

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And so one of the things I even like to say is, listen, if you wanna compare eschatologies and if we wanna blame the current state of affairs on current eschatologies, let's go look at Europe.

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You really wanna go there? Dispensationalism wasn't where the

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Reformation happened, right, and how are they doing? So let's not go there. You know, with dispensationalism, there's a lot of presuppositions that are brought into the political theology, right?

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So, as I said, I like to start the argument with talking about premillennial complementarianism.

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Tell me how premillennial complementarianism is different from all male or post -male complementarianism.

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And it's not, because complementarianism is a view about how delegated authority is supposed to be exercised in a particular sphere.

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It's not influenced by eschatology. So when we talk about delegated authority within the civil sphere, which is this kind of Christian nationalism debate, eschatology doesn't matter, because we're asking the question, how has

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God delegated authority to be exercised and for what purpose in a particular sphere? And we've just moved from the sphere of the church or the sphere of the family over to the political sphere.

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And so, but if you start with this idea that it's a post -male project, something like that, then the other point

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I like to make is who's written the most famous book on Christian nationalism? The card -carrying all -male, right?

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So, and you keep seeing Stephen Wolfe get lumped in with the post -males by the guys that don't seem to, maybe they're -

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He thinks that's funny, but. Yeah, and I wonder, it's like, okay, I want to assume the best and assume you guys don't know any better, and you loop them in with the post -males, but if you don't know any better, you probably ought not to be talking about this.

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But there's all these presuppositions that get brought in. So here's a contentious one, the sojourner identity of the church.

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And here's what's really funny, at least for dispensationalists, I think this is terribly inconsistent.

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So you go to Peter, Peter talks about how we're sojourners, and aliens, exiles.

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Well, Peter's the apostle to the Jews. He's writing to the

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Jews of the Diaspora. I mean, he literally says that. You were trained in languages. Peter's writing to Jews who are literally still in the exile under the curses of the

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Mosaic Covenant. They are kicked out of the land. They are dispersed from the land. And so he's writing to Jews who literally are of the exile.

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They're sojourners. They're not in their land. That's not me. The church is not in exile, right?

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I have not been kicked out of my land, but dispensationalists often do bring in that sojourner ideology.

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And here's what's really funky. You go back to Calvin. Calvin was very clear that those, first Peter, second

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Peter, it's written to the Jews. He's addressing the Jews. And that's the view throughout most of church history.

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And so you'd think if anybody would get it right, it'd be the dispensationalists. So we who say, listen, yeah, Revelation 21 says in the future in the eternal state, there's nations and there's kings.

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It's pretty clear. We also see a future nation of Israel. So yeah, they are the

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Diaspora. They are the exiles, the sojourners. That's not the church. Dispensationalists ought to get that right as those who were looking for that kind of regathering that God will do post -conversion of the

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Jews. So there's a lot of these ideas that come in, like the abrogation of the cultural mandate, right?

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If you think that the kingdom mandate, cultural mandate, dominion mandate, whatever you wanna call it, if you think that that's been abrogated and no longer in play, then, well, then

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I don't have any obligation to engage culture, right? But if you,

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I think consistently the scripture indicates it is still in play and there's dispensationalists that do believe and teach that that mandate is still in play.

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One of my professors, Mike Glock, would teach that. It's in the MacArthur -Mayhew systematic theology textbook that it's still in play,

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Psalm 8. David points out that we're supposed to have dominion and it's not yet completely fulfilled.

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It won't be fulfilled until Christ comes. But as dispensationalists, if we bring wrong ideas in, you know, even, okay, well, we lose down here as my pastor

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MacArthur is so famously saying. When?

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When do we lose down here exactly? I agree there's a coming antichrist. You know, there's a coming one world system.

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But where was the turning point? Have things gone only downhill since the

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Ascension? Was 1776, was that a low mark post Ascension or was that maybe a high mark?

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And so, yeah, okay, yeah, we lose down here, but so what? What does that have to do with what

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I'm supposed to do right now? What does it have to do with faithfulness? What has God called me to do right now?

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So anyway, kind of a long ramble, but I don't know if that's helpful. No, no, it is. You pointed out a few things.

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One is that the eschatology debate may be cloaking some other actual disagreements.

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I think that's a good way to frame it, that there are disagreements within Christianity, right?

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Surprise, surprise. But to attribute them to this particular disagreement may not be accurate.

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Not everything functions, this is the way I look at it. Like some of the guys, and I don't see all mills like this, but there's some rabidly post mill guys, not all post mills, and there's some rabidly pre mill and some dispensational guys, not all of them are like this, who will use their eschatology system like an ideology.

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In other words, like everything, it's like the cage stage Calvinists, like everything relates to it.

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They think they found the key that unlocks every door and this will just revolutionize every matter.

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And it doesn't, it's one area of theology and has one specific purpose.

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And they all actually agree on very fundamental things. So Christ is coming back, there's gonna be a new heaven and new earth.

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It's really their particular flavors of how we get there. So yeah, those things can, if you get to the point of just escapism, that's really the problem that can affect you.

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If you get to the point of, this is somehow, and I have heard guys articulate this, that this is part of the gospel for us to take over every institution.

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And you can get into some dicey heretical waters there very easily and compromise what the gospel is.

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And so there's problems, but like the systems themselves, the eschatologies themselves aren't really the, necessarily the problems, even if they have tendencies attached to them.

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That's how at least I see it. So it sounds like you see it very similar to that. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it because we're just trying to answer the question, what is the

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Lordship of Christ? The expression of the Lordship of Christ? What's it supposed to look like in this sphere?

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Now, if, I'll say this gently, if you need the crutch of thinking you're gonna win to be faithful, then fine, go for it.

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Take the post -mill position and you're gonna triumph here and now. If you need that to be faithful, then fine.

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I don't need that. In one sense, everything I do, whether it's as a father, as a husband, as a churchman, as a pastor, whatever, as a citizen,

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I just wanna be faithful and I'll leave the results to God. I don't need to be encouraged by, I'm gonna have this particular result here and now.

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Yeah, well, I guess even in that scheme, you're gonna win down here eventually.

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You're just training for coming back and ruling anyway, right? That's kind of the... So, I've told guys this, that when

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I was in seminary and I went to, I did one semester at master's and then I actually transferred eventually to Southeastern and that's where I completed my

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MDiv. And part of that was eschatology related. I actually wanted to explore other eschatologies and they seem to have a wide breadth of eschatologies represented there.

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It didn't really help me straighten anything out, I'll be honest. I think I might've made a mistake, but if that was my only motivation there.

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But I ended up in this class and in theology class and half the semester was eschatology and half was ecclesiology.

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And I remember the professor, Hammett was his name. He said, raise your hand for every different flavor of eschatology.

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And at the time I was going to, I had come from a John MacArthur type of dispensational church.

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And so, I was kind of by default. I'm like, well, I mean, that's what I believe. So, I raised my hand.

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There was only me and one other guy in the classroom. And we were also the most ardent creationists in the class. I was surprised at that.

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There's all these other like theistic evolutionists and so forth. So, the Postmill crowd was much bigger than we were.

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The Amill crowd was much bigger. And I thought, what explains this? Because the Southern Baptists, before that, if you went 10 years back, they would have been primarily dispensational.

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The Southern Baptists were known to be more dispensational. And there was a change that was happening.

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And I know in my own church history study, sorry, I'm waxing long about this. But if you go back to the social gospel time, those guys were all

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Postmill. It's pretty much. I mean, maybe there's some exceptions and some Amill guys and stuff.

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But anyway, I've tried to point this out to guys and say, look, if you think that's the key, if you think like, hey, if conservatives are just, if Christian conservatives were just Postmill, that would solve everything.

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You got to understand this eschatology also has been used to further liberalism. And where I was, which was a very social justice leaning seminary, they were all rejecting dispensationalism.

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And sometimes they would articulate it in such a way that that was the thing keeping the church back from social justice.

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So, and it's almost like two sides of the same, like one's arguing for a more right -wing approach.

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One's arguing for a more left -wing approach, but they're both saying that the key is in their eschatology. And so I just never really bought that.

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I was like, okay, it can't be that. It's gotta be something else that's causing this. So here's the question

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I have for you, I guess, at the end of that. What do you think is the determining thing? And this would, if there is a thing, maybe it's more than one thing.

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And this goes for a relationship of church and state, as we saw in COVID. This goes for even now the arguments over whether or not you can have a government that self -identifies as Christian or reinforces

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Christian laws, a cultural Christianity debate. What makes someone line up more on the right on those things and say, no, we have, the government can't do this to the true church.

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And yes, the government should be advocating Christianity. If it's not eschatology, what is it?

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Yeah, I mean, that's, so I did a 40 part sermon series on God and government and I'm slowly working that into a book.

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And one of the most difficult things is that there's so many threads that have to be woven together.

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So if your anthropology gets thrown off, you're gonna mess things up.

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If your understanding of divinely delegated authority and the limits gets messed up, you're gonna end up with error.

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So you're trying to make a 25 sided design, 25 sided stop sign.

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And if you get one side off, you're gonna throw off every other side. And so, and that's even where looking at guys that are fringe on whether it's post mill, all mill, pre mill, whatever, just argue the actual theology, rather than the fringe guy.

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I can find fringe guys to blame all kinds of stuff on. But yeah, so if you get anthropology wrong, if you, and that's what we saw in 2020.

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The mantra was, they're just looking out for our best interests. Anybody with a biblical anthropology was saying, why would you believe that?

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You know, and what we found out eventually was that no, they weren't looking out for our best interests. I mean, it was totalitarianism, you know, like crazy.

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So the logic I've used, John, is, and I did some of this in the series

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I'm doing, the biblical basics of political theology. You know, whenever God creates spheres, so sphere of self, you start there, sphere of family.

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And remember, I'm a long winded preacher, so you can interrupt at any time. You're good. When God creates a sphere, you know, there's a structure to the sphere.

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So you think of the family as the simplest one. It's got a structure, husband and wife, right? Not two dudes, not two women.

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The husband is the head of the wife. It's got a teleology, it's got a purpose, it's got a direction.

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And so there's a structure, there is a purpose, and tied into that's also a definition.

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Well, as soon as the fall is introduced, man goes sideways and every sphere gets corrupted in its purpose, in its definition, in its structure.

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And so you think in our country, if, there's so many threads here.

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Okay, let me argue it from this angle. You think about our Declaration of Independence, all men are created.

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So now we're Christian worldview. They're created by their creator, they're given certain inalienable rights.

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Okay, you know, I would argue that if you can't affirm that, you're not even American, right? The basis of being an

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American is the idea that there is a creator and he has given inalienable rights and it's the job of the government to secure those rights.

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And so, you know, I've argued God by virtue of his person is he alone has rights and he has the right to be obeyed, to be worshiped, to be loved.

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And that creates in us obligations. We have obligations to obey, to worship, to love.

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Now, since I have an obligation to obey God and to worship God and to love God, therefore I have the right to do that.

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No other sphere can come along and take away those rights. Now I can forfeit them and forfeit my life, but I have the right to life.

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I have the obligation to represent God by virtue of being made in the image of God, I have the obligation to represent him and I have the obligation to worship him and therefore

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I have the right to do those things. But as soon as the fall is introduced, you're gonna have corrupted teleology, corrupted definitions and we're seeing that with, you know, all the trans stuff, corrupted definition of what it means to be human, transhumanism even.

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Well, think about the civil government. So I've got corrupted individual spheres entering into the civil government.

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And if God's intention in the civil government was, and this introduces another rabbit trail, there's those who are gonna argue that civil government is a, you know, a post fall institution.

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That's a problem because in the eternal state, Revelation 21, the New Jerusalem comes down, there are kings and there are nations and the kings are bringing the glory of the nations into the

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New Jerusalem. So in glory, we still have distinct nations and we still have kings.

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So we still have civil authority post glory, which means it's gonna be really hard to argue that nations and civil authority, civil government are a result of the fall.

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If they're a result of the fall, why are they not reversed in glory? And what's really interesting is you think about marriage, apparently is gonna be dissolved post glory, right?

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They're not given or received in marriage and yet we're gonna have kings and nations. So if God's given the civil magistrate, the sword in this era post fall for punishing evil, well, if man's corrupted, then he's gonna corrupt the sphere of civil government.

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And if education, think about the role of education. So I'm kind of dancing, this is my,

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I'm illustrating my point of having to thread all this together. So we have the right to education because we have the obligation of education.

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So parents, education is a familial obligation. Parents are obligated to teach their children two things, spiritual matters, right?

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Worship of God, who he is, who I am, and then horizontal matters, right? How to interact with this creation, how to be faithful in representing

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God to the created sphere, being a profitable member of society. And so the family is obligated to teach that to their children, therefore they have the right to teach that to their children.

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But if the family is made up of corrupted individual spheres, they're no longer gonna use education for that purpose.

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They're gonna teach a wrong view of God, they're gonna teach a wrong view of self, they're gonna teach a wrong view of what you're supposed to do with this creation.

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And then what happens is those corrupted spheres of family continue to corrupt the individuals they're raising even more.

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Those individuals then get into the civil government. And the civil government then is gonna be tied together with the education system such that now what happens is the family creates these corrupted spheres that don't properly recognize

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God's authority. Those individuals go into the government. Now the government doesn't recognize God's authority, right, they become statist.

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And so then the schools that are created become statist. Statism is the idea that essentially there's no higher authority than God.

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Basically the state defines rights, it grants rights, it can suspend and even retract rights because they're not accountable to God.

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So these spheres of self that are corrupted go into the civil government, they don't recognize God's authority, and then they're gonna co -opt the schools and control what the schools teach in a self -perpetuating way.

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And so before you know it, you wake up and it's the year 2020, and everybody in America is a statist.

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And so, and that's the view that, hey, the civil government says shut down your church, you shut down your church because the state has essentially ultimate authority.

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And then the Christians say, well, you know what, we'll carve out one little section where Caesar doesn't have authority. He doesn't have authority in the teaching of the word and the doing of ordinances.

30:39

But other than that, he can tell you whether you open or close and all those types of things. So that's a really long way of answering your question.

30:47

But if you get education, the purpose of education wrong, if you get your anthropology wrong, you get your divinely delegated authority wrong, there's death by a thousand cuts here.

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Go to mudheadmama .com today. Now, back to the podcast. I see, so it's not just one thing in your mind that -

32:04

Yes, a short way to put it. Yeah, there's a number of things. And understanding your man, his role, you used a spheral authority there, his relationship to God and God's expectation then will channel you into a, a correct posture in your political theology.

32:27

Now, I guess where I wanna take this next is we already briefly touched on the whole, the government cannot, according to Romans 13 at least, they cannot use their delegated authority to stop true worship from taking place because the church is a separate institution with separate responsibilities and they have a right because there's a responsibility to worship.

32:51

I was, there's a few things I wanna talk to you about, but one of them is I was, I actually sent one of your messages to someone who

32:58

I was having a conversation with on Messenger, who is very adamant that the problem with these quote unquote

33:10

Christian nationalist types is that they confuse the church's mission with their own political philosophy and we should never do that.

33:20

And so Christians, and this is where maybe the conflation takes place, but Christians should not be looking to the government for salvation.

33:30

They should, they should only take their efforts and put them into the institutional church.

33:37

Anything else is idolatry of some kind. That's really what I was picking up from him. And I couldn't really reason him out of this, because I said, well, look, you got

33:44

Christian bookstores, you got Christian music, you got Christian conferences, you got, I got, I'm in a Christian family. My daughter's not saved yet in the sense that she's not put her faith in Jesus Christ, even though she is part of a

33:55

Christian family. And we would say in a sense, she's a Christian, not in a, you know, not Presbyterian, but she's a member of a family that operates on Christian morality and Christian traditions and these kinds of things.

34:07

So in that sense, she's culturally, she would be a Christian, even though, yeah, she is not a

34:12

Christian in a theological sense. And we desperately want her to be, she's only six months old though. So, you know, anyway, that being said, no one has a problem calling my family a

34:21

Christian family. No one has a problem calling a church a Christian church, even though there's wheat among the tares. So why is it a problem for the government?

34:30

Because that's really what we're talking about, to be self aware that they are

34:36

Christian, whether on the local level or whatever level you want to take. Why would it be a problem, let's say, in the middle of Oklahoma, where 99 % of the population is

34:45

Christian and there's Christians making up all the political roles and they want Christian morality and they don't want evolution taught in their school or whatever the issue is.

34:55

They want to put up a Christmas tree. Why is it a problem to say we got a Christian government? I don't understand the hang up on that, but there's a huge hang up on that.

35:04

And so maybe address that a little bit and work in where you think maybe this is going awry according to anthropology or what some of these threads that you were trying to connect here.

35:14

Yeah, yeah, I mean, you made good points about Christian schools, Christian movie producers, studios, things of that nature.

35:24

We've traditionally not had a problem attaching that label Christian to things that operate under biblical principles.

35:33

One of the issues is that public education has been incredibly, incredibly revisionistic.

35:42

Our, you think about the First Amendment. When the First Amendment was ratified, we had states that had state churches and religious tests for office in blasphemy laws.

35:54

Matter of fact, if you just Google Harvard Law Review First Amendment blasphemy, it'll pull up a

36:00

Harvard Law article where they talk about, yeah, blasphemy laws were in place all the way until about 1950.

36:06

It was never viewed as incompatible with the First Amendment, only on the federal level. But I think it's just, we've not had to think about these matters.

36:16

We've had, if we say it this way, we've had a generally benevolent government for the most part up until 2020.

36:24

And that's why everybody was caught by surprise and they checked their anthropology at the door and just said, oh yeah, they have our best interests at heart but there's just a lot of shallow thinking all the way around because we haven't had to focus here.

36:37

So, you know, nations are gonna be religious. They just are because people are by nature religious, right?

36:45

We all have a worldview. And even again, you know, thinking politically, the Supreme Court has ruled that, you know, atheism, agnosticism, those are religious views for First Amendment purposes.

36:58

So we all have this religious worldview. The government is gonna have a religious worldview. They're gonna point us to a highest good.

37:05

They're gonna point us to, you know, what we're supposed to do. Is there a higher authority? Is there not a higher authority?

37:11

Those are all spiritual claims, right? Where do our rights come from? How do we define good? How do we define man?

37:17

Those are all ultimately spiritual claims. You know, they're not scientifically testable claims.

37:23

And so the government will have inescapably a religious worldview. We have a, whether it's pluralistic, you know, polytheistic, communistic, you know, atheistic, naturalistic, materialistic, whatever, every government has a worldview.

37:39

The argument is that if they're gonna have a worldview and they will, they ought to then have a Christian worldview and that's the foundation even of this country.

37:47

There's a creator who, you know, gave rights to his creation and it's the job of government to protect those rights.

37:54

So it's just the inescapable fact that nations are religious. Now, and maybe if I were to ground that in scripture a little bit, and here's where, you know,

38:02

I chide my fellow dispensationalists a little bit. You know, we like to talk about how we champion a literal grammatical historical hermeneutic.

38:09

Okay, well, let's go to Psalm 2. When David wrote Psalm 2, the kings, they were essentially, you know, they were the mediators of divine blessing upon their nations.

38:22

That's just Old Testament worldview, right? And so in Psalm 2, when David writes that, whatever the king's religion was, was the religion of the nation.

38:32

It's just the way that it worked. So when Psalm 2 says for the kings to kiss the son, acknowledge the son publicly, worship him, serve him, obey him, judges of the earth, worship him, serve him, obey him, trust him.

38:47

What would that look like politically for the nation? Let's just be consistent here. In David's day, that Psalm would have meant that the king would have declared

38:56

Yahweh to be the one true God, and the judges would have judged according to Yahweh's revelation to the degree that they had it.

39:04

And so this is just how it's always been. Nations are religious, it's inescapable, man's religious, and therefore, you know, we ought to just be honest and point to the true religion.

39:17

Now, and this is, here's another faulty idea that gets imported in, and it was a

39:22

Canadian, actually. I think it's, what is his name? Klaus Van Dam, probably, it's

39:27

Van Dam, can't remember his first name. He's a retired seminary professor, had wrote a article on principled pluralism, and he made some really interesting points about Israel.

39:37

You know what I'm talking about? I don't know, I don't think I've read him, but I know about principled pluralism, so I think probably some other guys got it from him.

39:47

Okay, yeah, and there's some good and there's some bad there. You know, just like, I mean, I would be a neo -Calvinist in the

39:53

Bovink flavor, you know, not the Tim Keller flavor. So, but, you know, he makes the point that think about Israel as a nation.

40:04

You didn't have to convert to Yahwehism to join the nation of Israel, or let me say it, to reside within that territory.

40:12

Now, you couldn't participate in the festivals. You could be charged interest in a way that others couldn't.

40:20

So there were certain laws, most of the laws, you got equal treatment with the Israelites, but in some laws, you didn't get equal treatment.

40:27

So you could enter in, you could live there, right? You could be a sojourner, but you weren't required to worship

40:35

Yahweh, and if you didn't, you know, actually become a proselyte, then you couldn't engage in the public worship.

40:42

However, you weren't forced to worship. Nevertheless, you also couldn't publicly, you know, evangelize for your apostate religion, for your idolatry, right, so if you wanna worship

40:54

Baal, that's fine, but it's not gonna be public, and you're not gonna evangelize for it. And that's a really interesting paradigm, because it demonstrates that you could come and live in that land, and you're prohibited from blaspheming

41:07

Yahweh, you're prohibited from praising Baal, but you're not forced to worship

41:13

Yahweh. And there's a lot of people today who think that if the government says, you know, this gets into, you know, first table issues, civil magistrate enforcing the first table, there's a lot of people who think just shallowly that if the government enacts blasphemy laws, you can't blaspheme

41:33

Yahweh, you're forcing them to worship Yahweh. No, those aren't the same thing.

41:38

We can say, hey, because, well, think about it, we already have blasphemy laws in our country, so there's things you cannot say, so all countries have blasphemy laws, there's a protected class, and so, you know, nations are gonna have blasphemy laws, but that's not forcing people to worship.

41:55

Now totalitarian nations do force people to worship, where we were moving over the last four years to where you will affirm certain truths, or you will be punished, you will affirm this ideology, but, you know, if our government says, listen, you cannot practice that religion publicly, that doesn't mean you can't practice it privately, it doesn't mean that you have to, you know, forced conversions.

42:18

So, I mean, this is maybe a dumb analogy, but we just had snow, so I'm thinking about it, like there's some roads that don't get plowed immediately, right, you can't travel them in a snowstorm, and there's certain roads you can, they're plowed immediately, and so,

42:32

I mean, I think of it this way, like the government, with the communal funds that's given to them, they can plow, the road, you know, figuratively speaking, the road to worship

42:41

Christ, the road to true religion, that needs to be well -maintained and plowed, and people can travel on that road, but the roads that go to these other religions should not be ever maintained, or encouraged, or anything, they should just remain roads that should not be traveled down, at least state expenditure should not be spent on trying to allow people, or, you know, privilege, and this is where the whole issue with Satan monuments and things come in, and giving invocations from the temple of Satan instead of a

43:13

Christian church, which is happening now, which is crazy, but it's, I mean, I just saw that in Cookville, Tennessee of all places, because I have some friends who live near there, are, they have this whole

43:23

Christmas controversy over, I think it's a local coven or something wants to, yeah, well, what in the world, what in the world, this is the middle, and I was just there, it's

43:31

Bible Belt territory, but, you know, the armies of darkness, the forces of darkness see an opportunity, and that's the logic they'll use, it's like, this is just about religious liberty, this is just, you have yours,

43:41

I should have mine, right, it's equal, and I think it was Jay Sekulow years ago said, well, you know, the

43:47

Satanists, they don't show up, so it's not a problem, and now it's a problem, so what now? You know, what are you gonna say now?

43:54

Unless you have some kind of a default, like we, this is who we are as an identity, we are, we're

44:02

Christian, or we don't do the Satanist thing, like you're not going to be able to argue against it, because there's no neutrality, really,

44:10

I mean, fundamentally speaking, it sounds great to, but it only works in a society that's already monolithic in some way, that has a default religion, and then, you know, you can say neutrality all day long, because the

44:21

Satanists won't show up, but once they show up, then what do you do with neutrality? Well, and we're inconsistent in that, because think about it, our country historically has not allowed

44:31

Mormon marriage, polygamy, you know, we're not gonna hopefully allow, you know,

44:38

Muslim child brides, but that's their religious observance, so we already have, every nation has religious restrictions on what's tolerated or what's not, you know, and the reality is, as we, as Christians, you know, as you teach that the job of the church is not to get involved in politics,

44:56

I say yes and amen, it's the job of the Christian to get involved in politics, not the church, but as Christians retreat, you know who's not gonna retreat?

45:06

Everybody else, and that's what you see, actually, so, you know, we talked briefly about the cultural mandate,

45:11

I like to emphasize the cultural mandate, I was trained under, you know, Mike Block calls it the kingdom mandate, because of that language there of ruling and subduing, others call it the dominion mandate,

45:23

I like to focus on the cultural mandate that God gives man, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, the reason

45:30

I like the cultural mandate language is because fill, I am convinced, includes not just people, we tend to read it that way, but here's what happens, the next time you find that Hebrew word for fill, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, the next time you find that Hebrew word is in Genesis 6, when the earth is filled, and it's not filled with people, it says it's filled with violence, and so the idea there is not just filling it with people, but you're filling it with culture, and that is part of what it means to be in the image of God, by design, we are culture makers, we create culture, and then culture helps shape us, and you see that in Genesis 4, this is where it's so important to go back to these early chapters of Genesis, and I love answers in Genesis, and great ministry, but I think there's been an overemphasis on some of the scientific stuff, and a little bit of loss of some of the theological implications, but Cain's line, by design, not because they're worshiping

46:32

God, they carry out the cultural mandate, Cain and his son, they begin urbanization, you're at, they build a city, and then you get to Lamech, and Lamech has his sons, they invent the wind instruments, they invent the stringed instruments, they're doing specialized husbandry, they're creating metal instruments, so within seven generations, the cultural mandate is fully engaged, and by the time you get to Lamech's song in Genesis 4, he's writing the first gangster rap song, or he's writing a song about killing somebody, and some of the, there's some speculations there that Lamech's introduced, and then his sons are introduced, and their accomplishments, and then it returns to Lamech's song, and there's some speculation that maybe he's using one of his son's instruments to write this song, that's why

47:24

Genesis sets it in poetic form in your Bible, and then maybe he was using one of his son's metal instruments to carry out that murder, so the fallen line, you got two lines of people, there's the redeemed line, and there's the sons of Satan, as Jesus would say, or as John would say, there's the sons of the devil, and there's the sons of God, the sons of the devil are actively involved in doing the cultural mandate, because it's what comes naturally to them, by virtue of being in the image of God, so they're going into every sphere they can, and they're carrying out the cultural mandate to the glory of their spiritual father, by nature, they're corrupting every sphere they enter into, and that's what we're supposed to be doing as Christians, but we're supposed to be engaging the culture, and creating spheres, and creating systems for the glory of our spiritual father, but to the degree that we back away from that, nature abhors a vacuum, and so the godless are gonna fill that vacuum, and they're gonna further corrupt, and further corrupt, and so the way

48:27

I've argued it, is that the great commission comes along, and subsumes the cultural mandate, so as an unbeliever, you were building out this world for your own glory, and you were doing it, as Ephesians says, according to the prince of the power of the air, who's at work in the sons of disobedience, so every unbeliever is building out this world for his own glory, he's animated, and influenced by the prince of the power of the air, and so he's carrying out that mandate to the glory of his spiritual father, well, when the great commission comes, it comes along, we're regenerated, we're converted, and now we, in many ways, continue doing the same thing we've always been doing, but now we're doing it to the glory of our father, so now we're building godly, god -honoring businesses, and families, and social clubs, and religious institutions, and educational institutions, and political institutions, and that's what we're supposed to be doing, because, again, that's what we naturally do by divine design, and to the degree that we're intentional about it, or unintentional about it, is the degree to which we're successful in representing

49:37

God, or unsuccessful in representing God, and it's a degree that we retreat from culture, and retreat from building, it's just gonna be filled in by the sons of the devil, and that's what we've really seen,

49:51

I think, over the last 50 years, so, anyway, there you go, there's another long, long answer. No, it's good, good stuff.

49:57

I wanna ask you, especially with the dispensational belief, what do you think about the phrase Judeo -Christian? Yeah. Any thoughts on that?

50:06

Well, I actually think so. Usually used to justify, or just to imply that there's some kind of a league between Jews and Christians, and that our government,

50:17

I think it's a tip of the hat to the Old Testament, but it's also an invitation for Jewish people to kind of operate on an equal footing to Christians in the civil sphere.

50:31

Yeah, I mean, obviously, that's a contentious issue right now, right? A little bit, that's why I asked you.

50:37

No, and I'm more than happy to address it. I mean, I've addressed it on Facebook a lot, actually. I'm pinging on there all the time.

50:44

I think this is an area where dispensationalists have been weak. So, okay, so dispensationalists,

50:52

I believe that in the future, according to Deuteronomy 30, Moses tells Israel, hey, you're gonna disobey, you're gonna be scattered.

51:01

While you're scattered, Deuteronomy 31 through six lays out the terms and conditions and then the inevitability of the conditions being met.

51:08

Essentially, when you're scattered and you turn to the Lord your God with all your heart, then he will regather you back into the land.

51:14

So that tells us they are now scattered, they're now under the Mosaic Covenant curses.

51:20

The Mosaic Covenant is obviously abrogated, it's gone, it's been replaced, it's obsolete. Hebrews makes that clear.

51:26

You know, we have a new covenant, we have a new priesthood. But nevertheless, the promise of regathering isn't tied to the

51:34

Mosaic Covenant. The promise of regathering is tied to the Abrahamic Covenant. So in the future, ethnic

51:41

Israel will be regenerated and then they will be gathered back into the land as a regenerated people.

51:47

I mean, that's all throughout the Old Testament. And I don't wanna pick a fight with my covenantal brothers and so I'll just say that it's so clear and all the

51:58

Old Testament saints understood that's what God was promising them. And so was God intentionally misleading them that he was gonna regather them into the land when they converted?

52:08

Anyway. Okay, so what dispensation ought to be able to say is that modern

52:15

Judaism, I don't care whether it's rabbinic Judaism, orthodox Judaism, ultra orthodox

52:20

Judaism, reform Judaism, none of those are Old Testament Judaism, right?

52:26

Old Testament Judaism ended with the Babylonian captivity. That brought us to Second Temple Judaism.

52:32

And what we see today is not Second Temple Judaism, right? It's basically, you know, rabbinic

52:38

Judaism. So we should be able as dispensationalists to say, yeah, whatever Judaism you see today, that's not biblical

52:44

Judaism, right? There's no temples, there's no sacrifices, there's no priests. That is not the

52:50

Judaism of Paul. It's not the Judaism of John the Baptist or Jesus or any of the prophets.

52:56

This is a totally different Judaism. You know, so we should be clear there. Also, I don't think dispensationalists should have a problem saying that they're still, the ethnic

53:11

Jews are still under the curses of the Mosaic covenant. They're still scattered. They've never been regathered.

53:16

Ezra nine, Nehemiah nine, both make that clear in their prayers that they're still subservient even though a remnant had returned.

53:25

So they're still experiencing those curses. They are judicially hardened according to Isaiah six.

53:31

And then Paul in Romans makes it clear they're still judicially hardened. They're still the same, you know, with a few

53:38

Messianic Jewish exceptions. They're still the same Christ haters, you know, that murdered him, you know, 2000 years ago.

53:48

And Jesus said that Jerusalem would be trampled by the Gentiles, you know, until the end.

53:54

And so God kicked them out. Jesus said, Jerusalem's gonna be trampled. God said he would gather them back after they corporately turned to him.

54:05

Therefore, what you see as the modern nation of Israel back in the land, isn't the biblical nation of Israel because the biblical nation of Israel that God has promised for the future is a regenerate national

54:20

Israel that they're first converted again, Deuteronomy 31 through six or a bunch of other texts.

54:27

They're converted and then they're gathered back into the land and they're trusting Yahweh, right?

54:32

In the Judaism of today, they don't trust Yahweh. They are explicitly anti -Trinitarian, right?

54:38

They worship a different God. They don't worship the same God as we do. They've rejected God's own self -revelation.

54:46

So modern Judaism is not biblical Judaism. Modern nation state of Israel, I would argue as a,

54:54

I call myself a rabid dispensationalist, modern ethnic

54:59

Jews do not have a right to the land of Canaan right now. Their right has been revoked due to their covenant disobedience and that right will be restored according to the

55:12

Abrahamic covenant when they turn back to the Lord. So dispensationalists should be able to say the modern nation state of Israel, it's not the biblical

55:21

Israel, you know, they're totally apostate. They don't even have a theological right to the land.

55:30

However, if they've been given a treaty or some sort of land grant that grants them that land as happens in every other nation, you know, you conquer or whatever happens and you own that land, yeah, now you have a geopolitical right to autonomy and to self -protection, self -preservation.

55:48

So they have those kind of nation state rights as a legitimate nation, but that's not because they have a theological right to the land right now.

55:59

And not only that, not only that, you know, Genesis 49 makes it clear. There's, I think, 13 last days prophecies.

56:07

Let me plug the Legacy Standard Bible. It's the only Bible that translate that Hebrew phrase consistently every time.

56:13

I think there's 13 of them. You pull out the Hebrew Bible and look it up. There's 13 of them. And Genesis 49 makes it clear all 12 tribes will be around in the last days.

56:22

That's part of the regathering. And there's enough scattered Jews. Let me say it this way.

56:29

You gotta have all 12 tribes for the end, but there's enough scattered

56:34

Jews that those who are in Israel right now, who are engaged in, even though they've been kicked out of the land, their regathering is an act of high -handed rebellion because they're not supposed to be there.

56:45

They don't have a theological claim to the land right now. They should not expect divine protection because,

56:52

I mean, you know, again, as a dispensationalist in the future, Israel's gonna get purged even further, according to the

56:58

Old Testament. And so they shouldn't expect divine protection either. There's enough

57:04

Jews scattered still that that current nation, I'm not saying it should, it should not, that current nation should not be wiped out, but God could allow that to happen.

57:14

And you still have enough ethnic Jews from the 12 tribes to be regathered in the future, just as God has promised

57:19

He'll do. So I think dispensationalists, another long answer here, dispensationalists haven't done the job we should of delineating, you know, what's true and what's not.

57:31

And so then you get everybody looking at us like, oh yeah, you guys support the modern nation state of Israel because you think they have a right to the land and they worship the same

57:37

God as us. No. So -

57:43

There may be, I've been assuming the majority probably do believe that, that there's, and I don't know.

57:49

I mean, that's why I said the phrase Judeo -Christian because that seems to cut across even denominational lines and even some eschatological lines when it becomes a matter of practical politics.

58:00

And I guess because of the number of, and the representation of Jewish people in the government, there is a concerted effort to include and use the

58:11

Israel issue also to try to widen the Republican base if possible.

58:16

Because there's right now, obviously a weakness on the side of the Democrats with the pro -Palestinian contingent.

58:22

So, hey, a lot of, I mean, I'll just say it like it is because this is how it is.

58:28

There's a lot of rich Jewish people out there with money to give to the Republicans and they're in powerful positions as lawyers and politicians and the rest.

58:37

And so I think that's where the pressure comes from to try to not maintain, not just a friendship, but give a privileged status to Jewish people.

58:47

And the phrase Judeo -Christian, I think has somewhat become representative of that, that using that phrase is, and this is an innovative thing.

58:54

This is a newer thing. George Washington never said Judeo -Christian, right? So anyway, if we had more time, we could talk more about it.

59:02

I had one last question I wanted to ask you about identity because I think this plays into the whole debate over Christian nations.

59:09

And it's not the Christian part, it's the nation's part. And I know we only have a few minutes here, but I was on a podcast recently, the

59:16

Wrath and Grace podcast with a guy named Nathan Anderson. And we were talking about this

59:22

Antioch Declaration. I don't know if you've seen that. It's not relevant for the purposes of this, but he was trying to make the point.

59:30

And I've heard this point made by a number of post -multimony guys before in their version of, I guess, what they see as Christian nationalism, that the identity of a nation comes solely from, some will say primarily from, but I get the impression more of them think it's solely from, exclusively from the covenant.

59:50

So they look at the covenant of Israel and how God, you could be part of the covenant community if you bowed the knee to Yahweh.

59:58

Now, I've tried to point out there was a lot of limitations on this and there was, you didn't automatically get integrated into every level of civil society.

01:00:06

You didn't get land permanently, 70 years or year of Jubilee, rather it reverts.

01:00:12

And there's laws like perpetual slavery for the foreigner, but not for the, there's all kinds of things.

01:00:17

But anyway, what they'll say is that it was all based on the covenant. That's the entire basis for your national identity.

01:00:28

And I've seen what I think is a debate between oftentimes it gets framed like natural law versus theonomy or, but it seems to me though, there are people, and I would put myself in this camp that think the family

01:00:41

I'm born into, I don't know if you believe this, but I think families are the kernel seed, the basis for nations.

01:00:47

So the family I'm born into or adopted into as the case may be, I'm born into a family, but the family that I'm in, like,

01:00:54

I don't really, I don't have a choice. I never signed an agreement. You know what I mean? Like I never, they never said,

01:01:00

John, you need to give us some assent here and come into the covenant of our family. Or look,

01:01:05

I was just born into it. It's a natural relationship that has obligations attached to it and privileges.

01:01:11

And it's a blessing. It's wonderful. I think God set it up. I think scripture assumes this, but I think there's something similar going on with nations that nations are also the extension of this kind of a relationship and they work in their own best interests.

01:01:25

And when you're born into a nation, you're not born into, you also have obligations that you didn't consent to.

01:01:33

And so it's not like later in life, there's a covenant to find out if you're really part of this family necessarily, even though families do have certain habits and beliefs and music and all kinds of art, right?

01:01:46

A culture, as you just explained. So anyway, I'm setting it up for you to,

01:01:52

I guess, take a swing at it either direction you want. I mean, do you think that our national identity is based in covenant or do you think it's based in nature or if it's not either of those, where does it come from?

01:02:07

Yeah, this is part of the difficulty is you've probably got three or four different arguments all in play at once here.

01:02:16

One of the arguments being made is can nations make a covenant with God other than Israel?

01:02:22

And whichever case you wanna argue, well, just show me scripture, right? I've seen a lot of arguments.

01:02:28

Oh no, you can't have a covenant unless you're Israel. Okay, well, show me that from scripture.

01:02:34

Not saying, I'm not opposed to making a nation making covenants with God. God always deals federally with nations.

01:02:45

I did several messages on that. What the leader of a nation does, and that's how it works.

01:02:52

Like, I talked to my kids, what the father does in the home, the kids suffer or prosper.

01:02:58

If our president declares war, it's gonna impact all of us. So God's always, and God deals that way too.

01:03:10

So biblically, we're trying to do a diachronic study, right, of nationhood. Tower of Babel, post -dispersion, nations were ethnic people groups, right?

01:03:24

And this is, okay, so you got a ton of people that can't differentiate between ethnicity and what's the other word?

01:03:31

Making fun of those. Race, there you go. And this is an important one.

01:03:37

People need to be able to differentiate between ethnicity and race. You can have two people of the same race with different ethnicities.

01:03:46

And you can have two people of the, it works both ways. So, and even our founders, and you can find this in the

01:03:55

Federalist Letters, they all agreed, hey, we are a nation with one language, one religion, one set of customs and cultures.

01:04:05

That's how the country was founded. If you don't like that, that's fine. If you wanna argue for something different, that's fine.

01:04:12

You'll have to prove that it works. I'll show you that it doesn't. Look around. But going back to Genesis, yeah, you were born into that nation.

01:04:24

It was according to your lineage. And then you could get up and move. You could change nations if you wanted to, in theory.

01:04:34

But there's this concentric circles of obligation, right? To love my neighbor as myself, and I can't love everybody.

01:04:40

And so I, even you see this in the New Testament, let us do good to all men, especially to the household of God.

01:04:49

So the question of, is a nation, because you're born there, you're a citizen, or is it because you've affirmed a covenant?

01:05:00

I think that by virtue of being born there, you're obligated.

01:05:06

You've been given obligations to those people. If those people and their customs are at enmity with God, then your obligation to God supersedes those obligations, of course.

01:05:21

Now, if an individual, so and this is how I would argue for our own country,

01:05:28

I have great difficulty in somebody being an American citizen who would reject the

01:05:36

Declaration of Independence. If you don't believe that men are created by a creator and given inalienable rights, and it's the job of the government to protect those rights, how are we gonna have a civil society together?

01:05:53

We're gonna fundamentally disagree about why I'm here, where I'm going, what is good, who is man, the purpose of government.

01:06:02

So can I love you and care for you? Yeah, I can do all those things. I mean, you can't even have a local church, a small local church without a shared language.

01:06:13

How in the world are you gonna have a state or a nation if you are fundamentally opposed?

01:06:20

And so if the nation has a constitution or a covenant or whatever, and you come to age and you realize,

01:06:25

I disagree with this. Well, then in some ways, you're gonna be an enemy of the people, right?

01:06:33

You're gonna be an enemy of that nation. So I don't know. I know that doesn't really answer your question all that well, but you could even restate it based on what

01:06:41

I've said and pin me down. I wanna know what you said, what you think about that. That's a big debate right now.

01:06:47

And yeah, I have my firm positions on it that I'm writing down and actually

01:06:53

I've written the chapter on it. It's coming out in my next book. But I think there's some overlap in what you're saying and what

01:07:00

I've come to the conclusion on. And I do not root identity fundamentally, national identity in a ability to assent to some kind of a covenant.

01:07:12

I do think that is a natural thing. I think in a family, it's a natural thing too. It's easier to understand on that level,

01:07:18

I suppose, because we haven't seen, we are seeing a big attacks on the family, but I think we've had attacks on the broader, broadly speaking, the nation for longer.

01:07:29

And we've, in America at least, we've really drunk deep from this proposition nation idea that nations really don't even exist.

01:07:36

They're just these abstractions and you assent to them. And so at a family level,

01:07:43

I think you can, there is room, you can, so if you have like a wayward child, you can look at that child, like the prodigal son, right?

01:07:53

And say, he's actually still a member of the family. He has the rights of a member of the family. And those privileges were given to him at the point of birth because he bears the last name and that kind of thing.

01:08:06

Now you can embarrass, you can throw off those privileges, but you reject them.

01:08:13

And then I think that does put you into a kind of like a situation where it's the father's grace in that story.

01:08:23

Then the ability to accept back the son that allows him back into the fold. So I do think there is a way that you can reject your family and become an enemy of your family by attacking them essentially, attacking them at their root.

01:08:35

So I understand what you're saying about like when you have a body politic that is bound together and in part they're bound together by the fact that they've endured certain struggles, one of them being the

01:08:48

American revolution. And in that struggle, one of the core principles, and this is where the

01:08:55

Proposition Nation guys would wanna capitalize. So you just said principle. Well, I'm saying that there's our shared assumptions about life that nations have to hold in common.

01:09:04

It's not just about politics. It's also about what kind of music are we gonna use for our 4th of July parade, right?

01:09:11

Like things like that, even it might sound trite and simple, but those things actually do come together for people to share a community together.

01:09:18

What language? Think about a work ethic, right? If you go to a country where they don't, they take siestas in the middle of the day.

01:09:24

It's gonna be a problem in New York where I live, for sure you're gonna be fired pretty quick. So yeah, there are these shared assumptions.

01:09:31

Oftentimes you don't really examine them because you're just born with them. And so that said,

01:09:37

I think that, yeah, like you don't, you can forfeit those privileges, but at the root you're gonna be messed up.

01:09:44

Your identity, you're still going to have this piece of you that you take with you that is, you're part of the

01:09:51

United States. Like if I moved to Canada right now or any other country, and of course

01:09:56

I think that the United States is actually more of an empire than a nation, but I'm a little bit of a mutt myself in a way.

01:10:03

You were saying you moved around a lot and I think it's part of our problem. I moved around too a little bit. I was born in California, raised in New York, but I got family in the

01:10:10

Midwest and the South. What do you do with that? And so culturally speaking,

01:10:15

I'm probably more Californian than anything else, even though I was raised in New York because of my parents and we did things a little differently.

01:10:20

I knew we were different, but if I went to Canada or someplace very different today and I said, I reject the

01:10:26

United States, I reject my California upbringing or whatever, I'm going to have a problem because I'm gonna be taking that with me.

01:10:35

There's gonna be a part of me I cannot change. It has been, it's set in stone. I was born into it. It's just,

01:10:42

I'm gonna like ranch dressing on pizza. I'm sorry, it's a California thing, but there's gonna be certain things that you just can't shake me of them.

01:10:51

And so I think it's more organic than anything. And that's where it gets confusing. It's not like a rigid thing that you can just say, you can, as a matter of public policy, you have to create rigid laws.

01:11:02

But I think what, even in public policy, you're trying to reflect what actually is intrinsically there in reality.

01:11:10

And what's there is something organic. You know it when you see it. I know a Southerner when I see a Southerner. I knew you were a

01:11:16

Southerner, even though for some reason I thought you're from Canada. I don't know why I thought that. Someone must, I don't know.

01:11:21

But the way you spoke. It's the French last name. That must be it. Yeah, right. So that could be a

01:11:27

New Orleans, right? Sure. Yeah, I don't know if that's where your family traces to, but you moved around, but you were in the

01:11:35

South. So you developed kind of a Southern twang in your accent. And I picked that up right away. Like, are you a

01:11:40

Southerner, right? Like, if I came up with the 10 points of what it means to be a Southerner, if you fell short of two of them, are you still a

01:11:46

Southerner, right? Those are the kind of stupid debates in my mind that happen where it's like, no, it's something that like, it's something ingrained.

01:11:54

It's something you know when you see. It's something that you can, it's hard for me to get a quantified list at an expansive, exhaustive list of what it means to be a

01:12:03

Southerner. But I do know it when I see it. And if you got to talking on a front porch with someone and you're joking and laughing, it would be more obvious, right?

01:12:12

Like, so like that's the kind of thing I think we're talking about when we talk about families and nations.

01:12:18

It's when you're at church, you're watching these kids, you know whose parents they belong to, not just because of how they look, it's because of how they act, because of a number of factors you're probably feeling more than seeing.

01:12:29

Sounds somewhat sentimental, I suppose. But anyway, I think that it is more rooted in these kind of like patterns of life, traditions, development over time.

01:12:42

Obviously, ancestry has something to play in this. But so that's my position.

01:12:50

Obviously, I'm giving my position and not yours now, but I think the side of the more theonomic postmill side that wants to say that it's just a covenant and that's it.

01:13:00

Like it only reduces down to a covenant. I just don't think they're taking into account all the other beautiful things

01:13:07

God has put there to make people different. And so that's where I come down on it. But go ahead.

01:13:12

I think you're right. I'd agree with you there. Yeah. I think one thing that needs to be pointed out, and this is, you know,

01:13:19

Rusty Reno helped with this. I'm certain you read his book, you know, in the post -war consensus.

01:13:26

Yes, yes. You know, what we're experiencing in our country is a lot like what the

01:13:32

Assyrians did, the Assyrian Empire. And so one of their, you might call it geniuses, the way they kept their conquered people conquered, this is where we get the

01:13:42

Samaritans, right? So you go in, you conquer a people group. You take, you know, 75 % of them out of that land, and then you bring in, you backfill that 75 % with people from eight other conquered nations.

01:13:55

You destroy any homogeneity that there was there. And that's what the Samaritans are, right?

01:14:01

They call them halflings. That's absolutely true, yeah. And so that's what's happening in this country. You're diversifying, you're watering down, you know, anything that binds people together, these cultures, you know, and so essentially it's a, you know,

01:14:16

Assyrian Empire 2 .0, and that gets into, you know, obviously borders and all that, and so.

01:14:23

No, that's an example I used actually in my book was the Assyrians. It's not a good thing in scripture, so.

01:14:29

Right. Unfortunately, I have to run because I have another podcast thing coming up, but it was good to talk to you about this, and I'm really glad that we had the opportunity.

01:14:39

If people want to check out more on your work, they can go to where? Yeah, on YouTube, How Shall We Then Think is my

01:14:49

YouTube page, and there's a few different playlists on there. Dispy Primer on Christian nationalism and biblical basics of political theology, but yeah.

01:15:00

All right, well, with that, Chris LaDuke, we appreciate your time, and God bless. Have a