The Carl Trueman Interview

Welcome to another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast. I'm Sean DeMars, there we go, with my guest

Carl Truman, who just got through preaching a fantastic message here at the

Quorum Deo Pastors Conference. He's fried, but you know what? He's a machine. He's ready to keep going. Isn't that right, brother?

Just about, yes. Will you open us in prayer? Sure. Yeah. Oh, Lord God and loving

Heavenly Father, we praise you for you are a great God. You're a loving God and you're a gracious God. We thank you for the grace you've shown towards us in your son, the

Lord Jesus Christ. And we pray now that as we spend some time together and discuss serious issues, you would guide us into all truth for we pray this in Jesus name.

Amen. Amen or amen or amen. My temptation in this interview is to talk about Rise and Triumph stuff,

Brave New World stuff. I feel like you've kind of, I mean, obviously the relevance of those books and those ideas is going to continue, but I feel like that's what you preached about here.

That's what you've been talking about nonstop for the last few years. I am more interested in your next book.

I think it's going to be your next book on Critical Theory. Is that right? That's correct. Yes. It's coming out from Broadman and Hallman in October.

So yeah. What was the inspiration behind that book and what is that book going to look like? What need is it going to address?

Yeah, good question. The inspiration actually came from Broadman and Hallman. In the aftermath of all of the...

Sorry, is that B &H? B &H. Yeah. In the aftermath of all of the explosions of 2020, 2021 and Critical Race Theory particularly becoming a hot topic,

Broadman and Hallman, B &H, approached me and asked if I would write a book that they could use for undergraduates and seminary students that would be a guide to the basic principles and elements of what we call

Critical Theory. And I said I would do so as long as I could by and large avoid

Critical Race Theory. For the reason that I actually think that the basic principles that guide

Critical Theory were established pretty early on in the history of the way of thinking among a group of predominantly

German Jewish thinkers in the 1930s and 1940s known as the Frankfurt School.

So the book really deals with the origins of Critical Theory in Marx, in the

Marxists of the 1920s, and then particularly in the thought of the Frankfurt School, people like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse.

So the book is an attempt to get at where Critical Theory comes from and what it articulates.

And I think later developments of Critical Theory, such as Critical Race Theory, are essentially applications of or consonant with principles articulated in earlier

Critical Theory. So the Frankfurt School comes along and Freudian psychology,

Marxist sociology, a little bit of Nietzschean stuff in there. It kind of makes this beast with seven backs of a philosophy.

And then it's reified later, and then it's applied variously. So you have Critical Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Critical Fat Theory.

So are you going to do more of the history, like this is where it came from, not so much the application and reification of it later?

To an extent. I start with Karl Marx and I look at some of the key elements in Marx are established really in a number of manuscripts, unpublished in his lifetime, that he wrote during the 1840s, where he's very much drawing upon the philosophy of Georg Hegel, a famous German idealist philosopher of the early 19th century.

And this early Hegelian Marx is very interested, we might say, in questions of what we would now call self -consciousness, how people think, which was very much drawn from Hegel.

And his thinking is picked up in the 1920s. There's a group of Marxist thinkers who are puzzled by a number of oddities within the history of, particularly the socialist

Marxist movement. The two big ones are that the revolution happens in Russia, and Marx expected that the revolution would happen in a country with a highly developed working class.

And Russia is a peasant society, so something's going on which is a bit odd. Second thing is the thing that doesn't happen, and that's that Marxism would have expected revolution to happen in a place like Germany.

Germany's a highly developed industrialized society at that point. It does not have a strong tradition of democratic institutions.

It's only existed for around about 50 years as a nation. And it's just lost a catastrophic war.

So all of the conditions are in place for a Marxist takeover. But strange to tell, the attempted

Marxist revolution of 1918 is crushed. Its leaders are executed.

And by the time we hit the 1920s, we're seeing the emergence of powerful nationalist groups within Germany.

As a response. As a response. The draw for a lot of their support on the working class.

And so there are a number of Marxist thinkers who are asking the question, why is it that working class, who have every vested interest in being

Marxists, are effectively, we would say today, voting against their own best interests?

Why are they joining these right -wing nationalist parties? Gramsci, the Italian philosopher, is wondering that.

In the Italian context, you have a similar thing where you have the rise of fascism under Benito Mussolini.

So Gramsci is, yeah, he's wrestling with the same thing. For prison, he's like, why isn't the revolution happening? Yeah, yeah. And in the book,

I look particularly at the writings of two figures, a man called George Lukács, who's a

Hungarian thinker. Got kicked out of Hungary, didn't he? He wrote in Vienna.

He lived in Austria for a time. He was later part of the Hungarian communist regime.

He has a very interesting and somewhat unpleasant history. I mean, he's got blood on his hands, George Lukács.

But he emerges in the 1920s as a significant Marxist intellectual. And the other guy is a guy called

Karl Korsch. And the two of them are interested in, if you like, drawing on Hegel as a way of trying to probe why is it the working class is becoming, in their view, reactionary and right -wing?

So like going before Marx, going to the source, Marx was drawing heavily from Hegel.

Is it like, okay, Marx's predictions didn't work out. Let's go to the fountainhead to try to figure out what went wrong.

Well, again, another interesting thing is that a number of these manuscripts that people like Korsch and Lukács' thinking seems to connect with were not available at the time they were writing.

So Korsch and Lukács are sort of reinventing the Marx of the 1840s without knowing that that's what they're doing.

What they're doing is going back to Hegel and thinking Hegel gives us a logic of history and a way of thinking about how self -consciousness is formed that's useful.

And is that, forgive me, you're a scholar, I'm an idiot. Is that the dialectic? Is that where that comes in?

The dialectic is really Hegel's view of history, that history is a process whereby things change.

And that's picked up by Marx. Now where Hegel thinks things change is really in the realm of ideas. It's ideas that drive things.

Marx thinks it's material conditions. A lot of students when I teach this stuff have difficulty grasping the idea of the dialectic.

But if you think about it in terms of a friendship, the first day you meet a friend, you make a friend, the relationship is not the same as it is 20 years down the line when you're still friends with that person.

What's happened in the meantime is as you've got to know your friend more, the friendship has changed, perhaps it's deepened.

And they've changed too. So to understand the friendship, you've got to look at the process of change that takes place where the two parties change each other.

Marx's view of history is a dialectical one whereby you have classes, the working class and the middle class in relation to each other, in antagonistic relation to each other.

And as the history develops, as history goes on, each class is transformed by its relationship with the other until something explodes.

That's the metamorphosis, right? Synthesis, antithesis, and then it comes down into the new.

Well, it's thesis, antithesis and then synthesis. That's the sort of the popular way that it's looked at.

So you could think about history where let's say you have a society where they're trying to figure out how to govern themselves.

And you have, initially they come up with the idea of everybody does what's right in their own eyes, at least a total chaos.

So there's a reaction to that. And the reaction is the emergence of a strong man, a dictator who imposes his will on everyone.

But that brings with it its problems too. So ultimately you end up with democracy where the needs of the masses and the needs of the individual are balanced against each other.

That would be a kind of dialectical view of history. Okay. And how does Freud factor into this,

Freudian psychology? Freud comes in really in the 1930s because the big question, particularly with the emergence of Adolf Hitler, big question in Germany is why do the working classes follow

Hitler? And rather to simplify the answer of members of the Frankfurt School is this.

Freud taught us that the basic dynamic of growing up is coming to terms with our father.

We have to learn, our survival depends upon us loving our father and fearing our father.

And there's a problem then when we leave home, because we're constantly looking for the father figure to guide us.

Well, what's Hitler? Hitler is the father figure. And so it's somewhat naive, but the idea is the working classes are susceptible to Nazism because they tend to have strong patriarchal hierarchical families that leave them disposed towards looking for the dad to lead them, not just in the domestic sphere, but to lead them on the national stage as well.

Okay. So you have all that happening at the people at the

Frankfurt School are Jewish. They flee to the United States. Some of them, like Marcuse, get jobs at Ivy League universities.

Yeah. And for the American government as well. I mean, I'm from, I live in Decatur, which is next to Huntsville, Alabama, where we have the von

Braun rocket center, you know? So yeah. So it comes over and these guys immediately get planted in the

American higher education system. Take us from there. Yeah. Well, the big year really is 1968, which is a year of widespread student protests, both in the

United States of America and on what, as a British person, I would say continental Europe as in Europe that isn't

Britain. And a central part of the student rebellions is the sexual revolution that we have there.

You know, this idea of free love as a revolutionary activity. Now you might say, well, how does that connect to the

Frankfurt School? Well, one of the things that, to go back to the answer about Hitler and Freud, one of the things that the

Frankfurt School pick up on is the idea that the sexual codes that society uses to organize itself serve the interests of those in power.

Right. So the idea is that, you know, monogamy, fidelity. The family unit.

The family unit. These things are not necessary for civilization, so much as necessary for capitalist civilization.

So what you get in the 1930s is somebody like Wilhelm Reich, or a little bit later in the 1950s,

Herbert Marcuse, arguing that the path to revolution is, we might put it this way, sexual transgression.

That engaging in sexual activity that does not conform to bourgeois norms is revolutionary.

The critique, if you like, of sexual morality in the 20th century fulfills the same role that Marx thought the critique of religion would fulfill in the 19th century.

Marx, in his notes on Hegel's philosophy of right, makes the comment, famously, religion is the opium of the people.

It's part of a bigger section, but this section culminates with him saying, you know, criticism of religion is foundational to revolution.

That we need to critique religion. We need to take away that which keeps the people in place.

Well, in the 20th century, focus shifts to sexual matters. If we're going to smash the patriarchal family that breeds little fascists, we have to smash the sexual morality that undergirds that family.

Well, Reich and Marcuse are making these arguments in the 30s and then in the 50s.

It's easier to do it in the 60s though, because what Reich does not have at his disposal in the 30s, of course, is the pill or antibiotics.

You know, you can proclaim sexual revolution in the 30s, but you're going to get all kinds of nasty diseases.

You're going to get a lot of women pregnant. You're going to get beaten up by her dad or her brothers. You're going to end up in a lot of trouble.

There's a technological move that takes place in the early 60s that means people can then believe they can actually smash the old bourgeois sexual codes and get away with it.

So 68 becomes this year of student rebellion with a significant focus upon sexual codes as a target for transgression.

Yeah. Real quick, and I said we weren't going to do Rise and Triumph stuff. All this stuff is really...

It all connects to Rise and Triumph. It's all interwoven. But you have a little section in there where you say you're considering writing a book about technology and the modern self.

Are you going to do that? Maybe at some point. I mean,

I've just finished a critical theory book and I'm just finishing a book on desecration and technology features in that.

But certainly, if I don't write that book, somebody more competent than me should write it because technology powerfully shapes how we think and imagine the world.

And you know, Marx, for all the crap that we give him, and rightly so in many ways, was no fool.

And some of his predictions were prescient. I mean, the idea that the advancement of certain technologies would allow the androgynisation of society was spot on.

It's exactly what we see today. Yeah. I mean, Marx, he makes that comment in the Communist Manifesto that the more automation advances in the industrial workplace, the more he actually says the work of women will supersede that of men.

Now, he's not thinking there of the technology that has enabled and empowered transgenderism, for example.

But he couldn't have thought of that. He's thinking of, well, where once blacksmiths had to be big burly guys because you've got to wield up a big sledge hammer on the anvil.

Once you press a button and it drives the hammer down from the machine, a woman could do it.

But he's on a continuum, I think, with the transgender thing. He's making the point that so much of the way we think about the relationships between men and women connects, first of all, to the workplace, and then also to our bodies.

And what we're moving into now is a stage where technology is overcoming not just the physical strength limits of our bodies, but what

I would say the way we imagine the biological telos or end of our bodies is.

As in Abigail Favale's definition of woman, a woman is somebody whose body is normatively tailored towards gestation.

That's a teleological answer. Well, if you can believe that you can transplant a womb into a man's body and that he can conceive, that teleological answer disappears at that point.

That's right. Although I'm sure you would agree with Al Mohler when he says ontology always trumps autonomy.

Oh yeah, yeah. I think nature always bites back and it tends to bite back in rather ferocious ways.

Technology is allowing us, oddly, in terms of the human body, to think that we can beat nature.

At the very same time that many of the people who are arguing for that are also arguing relative to the environment that actually we can't treat the environment in any way we want because it's creating climate change, etc, etc.

I've never been able to quite tie together in my mind the sort of radical thought that sees the environment as having a shape and an authority we must respect, while the human body is nothing but a lump of clay that we can mold to our technological wills.

I think it's just dissonance. Yeah, yeah. So okay, back to critical theory. This isn't the only way.

There's no such thing as a monocausal explanation, but one of the main ways that critical theory proper makes its way to the is through the university system.

One of the things that conservatives, let's use that in the best sense of the term.

There's a fence in the field. We're not going to tear it down until we know why it was put there in the first place. Conservatives have been accused of being hyper suspicious, conspiracy theorists.

You think that there's this grand orchestrated plan to march through the institutions of power and culture, but we know that that was actually a part of the right?

And as it went into the university system, it really spread from there everywhere else to the media, to the boardroom, so on and so forth.

So can you kind of walk us through that? Well, I mean, that's a history that I don't know all of the details of, but certainly the ideological vision is set forth by Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci, the

Italian Marxist you've mentioned, who sees the key to revolution is not waiting for the working class to rise up and overthrow the middle class.

The key to revolution is transforming the culture, grabbing hold of the institutions of power.

And I think what you see in say America today is the dominance in the mainstream academic field of the generation that grew up in the shadow of 1968.

In other words, the young radicals of 1968 have produced children who now populate the institutions of power in this country.

And, you know, things like the humanities have been locked up now for radical theoretical approaches for a generation.

It's really, you know, we see, you know, you'll get something of this. It's a book from the, it must be the late 80s or early 90s.

I can't remember the date, but Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom there puts his finger on the transformation of the humanities at that point in American higher education.

Now, is there some grand conspiracy operated by, you know, some

Bond villain in a yacht in the Mediterranean? I don't think so. I think what you do have is an increasingly politicized education creates increasingly politicized students who, when they come to maturity, get tenured positions at universities and intensify the process.

Yeah. The way that I had a debate on woke stuff with Rebecca McLaughlin for the classical coalition.

We couldn't even agree on what wokeness meant. So that's another thing. But I said it like this and you correct me.

What's happening in the classrooms of higher education moves into the boardrooms, moves into the control rooms, moves even into the

Sunday school rooms. Is that fair to say? Is that too linear? I think there is a trickle down. I would say it's a little more complicated that on the grounds, and I alluded to this in the talk

I gave a few months ago when I said, you know, one of the reasons why critical theory resonates, at least in its popular form with a lot of people, is it actually connects to some of the basic intuitions of modern individualism.

Particularly in America, we tend to think that limits, external constraints, these things inhibit our freedom.

So we are naturally sympathetic towards anything that seems to push against the limits or regards them as oppressive.

So critical theory oddly resonates with very untheoretical but intuitive understandings of human nature that we have today.

But certainly there's a trickle down effect. And I think you see that on Twitter.

I mean, one of the funniest things when I wrote a piece about critical race theory for First Things some years ago, some of the funniest responses,

I remember one from an African -American Baptist pastor, I think, saying, Truman, by tying critical theory back to the

Frankfurt School, is trying to make it the result of privileged white men, or something like that.

Well, the obvious answer is actually the Frankfurt School, whatever else they were, they weren't privileged white men.

They were Jews in Germany in the 1930s. I think they know a lot more about marginalisation than the average

African -American Baptist pastor in the United States of America does today, in that their lives really were on the line, not from random racists in the street, but from the very top echelons of government.

So... So how does post -modernism... I'm sure you've read James Lindsay and Helen Clark Rose's work.

They say, okay, you have critical theory proper, but then it kind of merges and has a baby with post -modernism.

Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, well, in some ways, one could say that modern critical theory has actually two roots.

One of the roots we've talked about is the Marxist roots from the 1930s, but a very important strand of critical theory emerges from France in the era after the

Second World War. A guy called Michel Foucault, another man called

Jacques Derrida. These are very significant figures for... Really, what a guy like Michel Foucault is doing is dismantling the notion of categories.

He's asking the question. He's asking a very Nietzschean question in some ways. Not, what does this category mean?

What does the category of man mean? He's going to ask the question, who benefits from the category of man being understood and used in the way it does?

Which is interesting because that is a very Marxist way of thinking about things. The post -modernists were influenced by Marx, but then they went a weird epistemological route with it and then came back.

Yeah. Well, the difference between somebody like Foucault and Marxists is that Foucault doesn't really believe...

Foucault would be as critical of Marxism. True. In fact, in his inaugural lecture at the, I think it was the

College de France around 1970, when he's giving his inaugural lecture as a professor, he identifies

Hegel and Hegel's progeny as the enemy. These are the people we have to overcome because these are the people, and Marxists would fit into this category.

These are the people who want to build all -embracing systems. What Foucault is interested in really is destabilizing all systems.

Show him a system, he's going to destabilize it. But he's still looking through that lens of power, right?

Conflict theory. What he shares in common with the critical theorists is, we might put it this way from a

Christian perspective, a very cynical way of looking at the world where everything comes down to manipulation and power.

Now, for your Marxist, for many Marxists, there's hope, there's light at the end of the tunnel. There's a utopia.

Yeah. If we can just dismantle everything, utopia will emerge in its place. We can't tell you exactly what it looks like because we don't have a view from nowhere to say we're trapped in the world we're in.

But we have confidence that if we smash everything to pieces, utopia will emerge. Foucault is a much more pessimistic thinker.

And I think for Foucault, if you smash everything to pieces, yes, something new will emerge, and you've got to smash that to pieces as well.

Just never ending. Yeah. I mean, I think if you were to say to Foucault, you keep claiming that claims to truth are manipulative power moves.

Well, is that not a claim to truth? And is that not there for itself, a manipulative power move? I think he'd shrug his shoulders and say, sure, sure.

It wouldn't be like a gotcha question. He'd be like, no, yeah, we're all doing that. Yeah. We're all engaged in it. Yeah. Okay.

So Pluckrose and Lindsay, they talk about the reification of these theories.

What on earth does that mean? Well, reification is interesting enough. It's actually a Marxist category. It's George Lukács who talks about reification.

And reification is really a way of talking about something that doesn't exist as if it does exist, and then it becoming a kind of powerful way of thinking about reality.

We could take... Like the category of race. Yeah. Or we could take a more neutral category.

Think about it. Often, we'll talk about the economy. We'll say the demands of the economy mean that we've got to fire a bunch of people.

We've got to hire a bunch of people. We've got to raise prices. We've got to drop prices. Well, you could ask, well, what do you mean when you talk about the economy?

You can't take me into Charlotte and point and say, that's the economy.

You can't slice it and put it in a test tube and boil it and analyze it. The economy is actually a term we use to gather together a whole heap of human interactions and relationships.

But what Lukács would say is when we start to use the economy as if it has an existence of its own, an interesting thing takes place.

Human beings become less important. They become, we might say, cogs in the machine, because the machine of the economy that doesn't really exist, does exist in the imagination.

I think what Pluckrose and Lindsay are getting at when they say these theories become reified is that, strange to tell, these theories that are designed to, in some ways, dismantle totalitarian ideologies become totalitarian themselves.

Such that you could imagine being with a critical theorist and debating with a critical theorist.

Any evidence you provide that their theory is wrong simply becomes more evidence of how deeply brainwashed you are by the culture you come from.

White fragility. You say you have white fragility. I say I don't. And then you say, well, that's proof that you have it. Yeah. Or you could say, look at Brown v.

Board of Education. Derek Bell's essay on Brown v. Board of Education, which most of us would say, tilt things, doesn't solve the race problem in America, but it's an advance.

It's an improvement. Derek Bell would say, no, no. It's a response to pressure from foreign countries.

And it's really a cover for allowing everything to continue just as it actually was.

Which is why I think you're so wise to constantly refer to this worldview as a hermeneutic of suspicion.

Yeah. Yeah. Is it unfair of me to call it a worldview? Is that... I mean, it has questions and answers about every ultimate thing.

I think it is. Ultimately, it is not a tool. I mean, I've heard, you know, critical theory is a good tool.

Well, critical theory can only be a tool if, for a purist critical theorist, they'd say you're no longer doing critical theory.

Because... What do you mean? Well, a real critical theorist is going to say it's comprehensive. Right. You can't simply use it as a tool in a toolkit.

You can't... Because, for example, critical theory actually shapes what you think evidence is and how you think about it.

So you can't pick it up now. And this is one of my big problems with the way that a lot of Christians have bought into critical race theory.

It's not that racism isn't real. It's not that race isn't a problem. It's not that racism isn't sin and we have to address it.

But the problem with buying into critical race theory is you buy into a theory that doesn't allow you then,

I think, to resist the blandishments of queer theory. And that's why if you go to somewhere like Black Lives Matter website and look at their vision statement, you find, well, we're not just talking about race here.

We're talking about... The Western concept of the nuclear family. Yeah. We're talking about queerism. We're talking about transgenderism.

Well, to the uninitiated, that's kind of confusing. To anybody who's read any critical theory, it makes perfect sense because they are all designed to dismantle the categories of contemporary bourgeois existence.

I forget who it is, but they have the illustration of the cordyceps mushroom. It goes into a host and then sort of takes over and does its own thing with the host.

And critical theorists self -consciously say that's what they're doing. We want to go into this branch and take it over with critical theory and make it our own.

So mathematics is no longer about mathematics. Now it's about the sociology of math and the history of oppression and how is math being used for power dynamics and all the above.

Yeah. I mean, an interesting game to play is when you see a Christian making a statement about race using the language of critical race theory is to switch out the category of race, for example, the category of sex, men and women, and then ask them, so how does the argument you've applied to race not apply to sex slash gender?

How can you use this argument as a Christian here relative to race and expect to localize the theory to that specific issue?

Theory is going to travel and it's going to travel across boundaries that you set up that simply can't resist the journey.

The concern that I have with that is that more and more when you try to do that, they'll say, no, it makes sense with sex too.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where I think, you know, Nietzsche's Madman in the famous passage in the Gay Science, when

Nietzsche's Madman comes in and proclaims the death of God and we have killed him and this changes everything and everybody laughs at him.

And then Nietzsche's Madman says, I've come too early. The light takes time to come from the stars.

And I think, yeah, you buy into this stuff now, you're going to find that it generates unexpected poisonous fruit a year, five years, 10 years from now.

And that's why, you know, I suspect that those who buy into, those who think to use

Douglas Murray's kind of analogy that, you know, the theoretical train is going to stop at the station before it crashes into the, in the boundaries of every category mistaken.

The theoretical train, it runs and it doesn't stop. You show it a category, it will demolish it.

Okay. So it's interesting you brought up Douglas Murray. I'm thinking about him, Tom Holland. I mean, to bring the bar down a little bit,

Joe Rogan. I'm thinking about these figures who maybe 20 years ago would have been pretty happy with the trajectory of progressivism, but now they're starting to see the light from the stars is arriving.

They don't like what it's producing and they're starting to pull back, but they're doing so in a way where they don't really know on what basis or really where to go next.

They're just kind of terrified by the telos of the journey that we're on now. Now, Tom Holland, his whole answer is, well,

Christianity seems to work well with the world we live in. So let's just go with that. I'll be a cultural Christian. Douglas Murray, not so much, but he knows that this is bad.

He doesn't know what to do anyway. Where do you think we're going? What's next?

It's hard to know because on one level, queer theory allowed to run amok is going to destroy everything.

It just is a permanent state of what the Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce calls total revolution.

It's just continual overthrow of everything, which would make society as a whole unsustainable.

What's interesting when you look at societies from the past, do they collapse or do they pull back from the brink?

Well, they can do either, but you don't know which they're going to do until they do one or the other. So it's hard to tell in advance what's going to happen.

I do think that the weakness of the positions of those who deny a kind of sacred order is that, for example, if you were to say, well,

Christianity seems to work, at that point, I'm going to put on a critical theorist hat and say, what do you mean by it seems to work?

What you mean is it delivers results that you personally like. And that's not the same as saying it's true.

That's just a power game. And I think if you deny the reality of truth, then you're going to end up with chaos.

And that's why I struggle with thinkers who seem to say, you know, I'm going to be a

Christian because Christianity is a way of stopping the madness. I want to say, no, you should be a

Christian because it's true. It will stop the madness, but that's not why you should believe it. Yeah. I don't even know if I would agree with that second thing.

Will it stop the madness? Can you elaborate on that? Well, it gives you grounds for arguing against the madness.

Okay. Yeah, that's right. But of course it doesn't always, even in the Bible, the advent of Christianity does not always lead to peace and harmony.

When you think about Jesus with the demoniac of the Gadarenes, cast the demons out of the man in the graveyard and the man's in his right mind, but the pigs have all run into the lake and drowned.

The local economy has been tanked. That's why they don't want Jesus hanging around anymore. You've ruined, okay, you got rid of the crazy guy who's lowering house properties because he's shouting all night long.

But on the other hand, you've tanked the local economy. So there is a sense in which, you know, if you read the

Bible, well, we can certainly hope that the sacred order of the Bible provides us with principles as individuals for ordering our lives, but it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to see a sweetness and light in society around us.

Aren't you excited about theonomy? No, I'm not excited. I don't think about theonomy from one day to the next. I think first of all, it's a bit of a pipe dream.

You know, if you're talking about theonomy, generally it's a Protestant movement. There's a Catholic equivalent in integralism.

But, you know, we don't even have a reliable Protestant member of the

Supreme Court. I don't think we're taking over the country for Jesus anytime soon.

Not yet. Not yet. Okay. Post -millennialism reminds me of communism.

It's like, we're going to get there one day and when we do, you're going to see. What interests me about the real

Christian nationalism, rather than the boogeyman that is used by the left a lot, is that I'm seeing some real

Christian nationalist voices emerging among Baptists. Oh brother, as a Reformed Baptist, it's driving me crazy.

It's really strange because I'm thinking the history of Christian nations is generally one where Baptists are put in prison or worse.

You know, when you're talking about Christian nationalism, I say, okay, let's go with the

Simon Rutherford line where the Presbyterians run everything and everybody else is put in prison. Well, it just doesn't even make sense with a

Baptist hermeneutic or a Baptist biblical theology, the discontinuity in the covenants that we see. I think there's a reason why

Presbyterians look at Calvin's Geneva and go, oh, we want that. Yeah. It makes more sense given

Presbyterian history. I'm not a theanist myself, but I can see that amidst all of the great retrieval of the last decade of the classical theology that underpins

Reformed theology, you can see that the retrieval might also lead to a recovery of the vision of church and state that held in the 16th and 17th centuries among Presbyterians.

So I can see it has historical roots. Well, sociologically, it makes sense why it's happening right now, why even

Baptists are buying in. Drag queen story hour, America's losing its grip, right?

And so you got people going, okay, whatever this is, we hate it, we don't want it. And what's interesting is the people who most want to be biblical, there's two poles.

We hate this thing that's happening in the culture and whether they're doing it consciously or not, we need a theological justification to fight back against that so we don't lose.

And theonomy offers that. It offers, I would say in many ways, simple answers to complicated questions.

Yeah, that's so good. And it's a movement of reaction. And it's not that I don't sympathize with, as you put it, many of the concerns.

I mean, it's one of the sad things about the death of civic Christianity. And I know there are some people who say, isn't it good that civic

Christianity has died? And I know what they mean. I think that they're saying, isn't it good that it's becoming more obvious what true

Christianity is? And I, yeah, I see that. But I also feel that civic Christianity comes with, the loss of civic

Christianity comes with a cost. And that is, it actually makes society more dangerous for kids.

When civic Christianity holds, you don't worry about walking down M street in DC during June and being confronted with gay pornography in shop windows.

You don't. And I think that's a good thing. So the loss of civic Christianity is not a good thing on that front.

And I can understand why, you know, Christians become angry. I can certainly understand, if you like, the psychology that lies behind.

And as I say, it's interesting that Catholicism has a parallel movement, integralism, which again is calling for really for, you know, wouldn't it be great if America became a

Catholic country? Not so great for us Protestants and the Jews and the

Muslims and the Hindus, I suspect, but. But it is interesting, isn't it? That they're all sort of gaining steam at the same time.

The Brad Littlejohns, the Doug Wilsons, the Catholic integralists. It's because there's this thing culturally that's happening and there's a theological mirror response.

Yeah. I mean, I think I would not put Brad in the theonomy category. No, but I would put him in a heavy,

I don't know what you would call it, but heavily. Deep concern for culture, I think, and the impact of Christianity on it.

I would put him in whatever camp is the photo negative of the liberal version of we need to rebuild the city.

Okay. You know, like it's, it's, it's, it's a conservative version of that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. So we don't know exactly what's going to happen.

You're not omniscient, no prognostications from you, but you are plugged in, you know, you're a theologian, you're a historian, you deal with a lot of young people.

You're at conferences like these, which we're going to come back to in a minute. What do you think is the big theological issue that we're going to have to deal with that's, that's not identity stuff over the next 50 years?

Well, I, you know, it may not be speak for the identity stuff, but I think anthropology, the question of what it means to be a human being is the big one in a society at the moment.

And I think the church needs to think long and hard about that. C .S. Lewis is the abolition of man, those lectures he gave in 1943.

Yeah, read it. It's one of those books. I've said this numerous times. It's more true today than it was when he wrote it.

He couldn't possibly have known how relevant that book was going to be. So I think anthropology, that's going to be the big issue.

I'm actually optimistic on one or two points. I do think that the, there is evidence emerging that the trans issue is going to be pushed back just yet.

I mean, we're recording this, but just yesterday, on the day we're recording yesterday, Britain's National Health Service announced that it was no longer going to be giving puberty blockers to kids.

You know, we're in the odd situation now where Europe is moving in a more conservative direction than, certainly than Canada.

Canada has often been a liberal outlier or a liberal vanguard, but even the United States. And there was an article published this week in New York Magazine, trying to justify really gender treatment for kids.

And to me, I said to a friend just yesterday, that article is actually a sign of weakness.

They're having to say these things because they're feeling the pushback. So I think that we will see some good developments on the trans front.

I think it will transform LGBTQ activism because we're also seeing support dropping for LGBTQ rights.

And I think the reason for that is the T. The L, the G, and the B have tied themselves.

You pushed too far. Yeah. So I think we will see a major rift within the LGBTQ movement when a lot of LGB people decide they've got to cut themselves away from an alliance.

I mean, I think we're already seeing that, right? Yeah. Who's the author of Harry Potter? J .K.

Rowling. Yeah. I mean, she's been fighting that battle for two years. Yeah. You're seeing it in feminism. In Britain, the

LGB alliance, which is... But she's a lesbian though, I think too. No, no. She's not a lesbian.

She's married. Yeah. No, she's a feminist. She just strikes me as a lesbian. I'm just kidding. Go ahead.

No, she's a feminist. And I praise God for her because she has the financial wherewithal to take the stand she's taking.

Uncancellable. Yeah. The public school teacher, they can't do that without losing everything.

So I think, you know, Christians everywhere should pray that more J .K. Rowling's emerge to make a public stand.

So we are at the Coram Deo conference. You were one of the plenary speakers, which means important in Latin.

And I knew a little bit of... Full session. And now, listen, you have written extensively against sort of celebrity culture and evangelicalism, which

I very much appreciate. But here you are, the celebrity on stage, people were clapping. Actually, I don't think they clapped, which is good.

How do you navigate that? Because you're right to critique that. On the other hand, the Lord has given you a good measure of influence.

Well, I think there are a couple of issues there. One, there is a sense in which...

My big writings against celebrity culture are, I am deeply concerned that some people live their

Christian lives through conferences. I think it's actually less of a problem now than it was 10, 15 years ago, when that was the era of big, mega

Christian conferences. That's sort of past. I have a deep concern, and this doesn't just refer to conferences, but anyone who has any sort of public presence online, that people come to look to the people they don't know as their pastor, rather than the people they do know.

So I would say in some ways, I'm very happy to speak at a conference of pastors like this, happy to speak at churches.

One of the things I try to be careful about is when people ask me questions that really they need to speak to their pastor about, is to say, well, look,

I really think you need to chat to your pastor. Your pastor is the one who loves and cares for you and knows you. So that's a big part of it.

The other side... On that note real quick, Colin Hansen has a great little metaphor for, in the same way that people go into doctor's offices already having

Googled their symptoms, and they're basically diagnosis shopping. People go into Sunday morning service looking for their pastor to say what

John Piper said, or what Douglas Wilson has said. And if they're not affirmed, if they don't get the diagnosis, spiritually speaking, that they want, they're not content.

And brother, when I heard that, I said, that is exactly what we're dealing with. That's a problem. It was actually

Mark Dever. I asked Mark Dever some years ago, how do you handle it? The emails you get from people saying, my son's just come out, or this, that, and the other.

How do I handle that? He said, well, he said, other than giving very general guidance, as in read this book, or look at this article,

I always say to people, go back to your own pastor and ask them because they know all of the complexities of the situation.

And the other aspect of celebrity culture, I think, that has always worried me is when the people on the stage start to believe their own publicity.

And that's a vulnerability for everybody, I think. Not just for the people of big comedy, it'd be a vulnerability for the pastor.

That's where I think friends, and particularly wives are critical in not believing the propaganda of their husbands and that.

So I think being very aware and being grounded in the local church is very, very important.

Hey man, I loved the fact that you ended Rise and Triumph with that section on the local church.

It was fantastic. Yeah. And I, you know, as I said in my talk this morning, you know, the church is the answer. Sometimes it may be hard to see exactly how, but we know from the

Bible, the church is the answer. And we know that the people who are most important and influential in our lives are not the

TikTok influencers, or shouldn't be the TikTok influencers, but should be the people we sit next to in the pew, the people we go out for lunch with, the people that come in and out of our homes.

Yes. Amen, brother. Years ago, I don't know how many years ago you wrote the article, maybe you can tell me,

What Can Miserable Christians Say? Oh yeah, yeah. How long ago was that? 20 years? 15? Maybe nearly 20 years ago.

It's a long time ago. And it's an article I wrote in 35, 40 minutes when

I was really annoyed by something I'd read. And I think I've had more - That's when you write your best. I am so frustrated.

I think I've had more kind letters and emails as a result of that one thing than any of the books

I've ever read. It seemed to strike a real chord, the idea that when we think about Christian worship, we need to make sure that there are things in our worship services that the woman who's just had a miscarriage or the person who's just lost their wife or their loved one of some kind, that they can sing with integrity with the congregation.

And I make the argument in it actually that the Psalms really allow us to do that because there are

Psalms that express some of the most powerful of human emotions. I was having a,

I thought about this question. I had a list of questions. This wasn't on it for the interview. And I was having a really rough pastoral morning.

I got, you know, punches and bunches. I got like three things in three hours. Any one of them I could have handled if I just got a little bit more space between them.

But I was having a really rough morning and I put on the hymn, I Asked the Lord That I Might Grow, which

Luke Hill just modernized and made it a little more congregationally friendly, I think. And I mean,

I thought about the article. I thought this song is the perfect song for me to sing while I'm extremely discouraged.

It strengthened me. It reminded me of the gospel. It gave me hope. And it felt tonally appropriate for my depression.

It didn't feel like it was trying to sort of whip me up into an emotional frenzy to get me out of it. It was like, no, lament, you know, and it was so rich.

Yeah. And lamentation, you know, so many Christians today, I think it's part of the culture we live in. We feel that, you know, being depressed is somehow a sign that we failed as Christians.

And I want to say, no, you know, sometimes being depressed and it's a natural part of life.

We don't expect the woman who's miscarried to just turn up to church, smiling and singing,

Jesus wants me for a sunbeam. It's why I don't like, you know, celebrations of life.

And I understand the good motivation that often lies behind them. I mean, that people, you know, want to give thanks for the loved one.

But I would say, you know, if a life is worth celebrating, then the death has to be worth mourning.

If it was a great life. Weep for those who weep. Rejoice for those. If you're going to do one, make sure you do both.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's interesting. And nobody's raised that article in my presence for a year or two now, but that's given me over the years, a consistent amount of positive mail.

Mark still has all of his interns read it. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny when I visited Capitol Hill, maybe 10 years ago now,

I visited the restroom and as I was leaving the restroom, I looked in the bin and there was a printout of that article in the bin.

So delighted he gave it to the interns, but one of them threw it straight in the bin. They probably read it three or four times.

I hope so. Now, do you remember our dinner in DC? It's okay if you don't, you're a busy man.

We had dinner in DC. I do not remember that. Mark took us, he had an hour before and he rushed us to the steakhouse.

That was a crazy hour because we went and it took us a long time to get the restaurant.

And then the waiter wasn't super quick. And then we had to wolf down a steak.

And Mark was weaving in and out of DC traffic. That was insane. I do remember. I'd forgotten you were there.

A bunch of guys. Yeah, it was a group of guys. And I weaseled my way into that one because I'd read Rise and Triumph and then

Strange New World had just come out. And I was sitting in a staff meeting and Mark was like, oh, you know,

Carl's going to be here tonight and we're going to take Ben Lacy and some Anglican guy. And I leaned over and I said,

Mark, please let me come to this dinner. I just, please. I just want to sit and listen to Carl because I've read so many of your books.

I mean, Rise and Triumph is kind of the thing that's shot you up into, uh, I don't know. Made me a celebrity.

There you go. I didn't want to say it. I didn't want to say it. But I mean, I remember reading Republicrat years ago.

I got a lot of hate mail from that one. I'm sure you did. I mean, at the time I was reading, I was like, this guy's kind of an idiot.

But I mean, you've written so many helpful books, brother. And, and, uh, I haven't even gotten a chance to pick up your most recent one.

What's it called? Um, well, actually it's, it's a revision, uh, a moderate revision of the creedal imperative crisis of confidence.

If you read the creedal imperative, you've got the core. It's a sort of update of that to include expressive individualist stuff.

So it's a kind of, I'm adding to it. Okay. The argument for creedal creeds also applies to, it's also useful when we're thinking about how to combat expressive individualism in the church.

In the two or three years that since you've written rise and triumph, what would you add to it?

If you could just go back and add another five or 10 pages? I think, uh, certainly the rise and triumph,

I'd want a section on technology, strange new world. I did a bit more with technology. The big thing

I would want to add is I would want to add on transhumanism. I taught,

I treated transgenderism as a species, well, as a political thing connected to the

LGB. Absolutely it is. But I think philosophically it's actually a form of transhumanism.

So I'd want to add a section on transhumanism. I have a book recommendation for you when we get done with this.

Okay. Sounds good. Have you read much Hartman Rosa? Yes. Resonance and, uh, social acceleration.

Okay. So I've read the smaller version. Oh, yeah. Uh, the unchangeability of the world.

It's a great book. Absolutely. Fantastic. Yeah. But regarding technology, uh, which I'm not sure

I fully understood, uh, what was the first book you said? Uh, um, social acceleration.

Yeah. I'm not, I see. I don't even remember the name. I'm not totally understood it, but this idea that technology comes disrupt society.

You have plenty of time to get used to the new society as the technology has shaped it. But then another technology comes, you go through that cycle.

But recently in modernism, his whole thesis is like modernism is like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And, uh, culture is advancing at such a rapid pace that we're not having time to settle into.

Yeah. You think the printing press, 15th century invention leads to the reformation, not to reduce the reformation, the printing press, but no printing press, no reformation.

Uh, and really it leads then to, you know, you could say from the invention of the printing press to Europe stabilizing around the printing press, probably 200 years involving bloody wars of religion.

Uh, well, we're getting a printing press invented every 12 to 18 months.

You know, that's a little exaggeration, but you could say, you know, the, the advent of the cell phone, then the smartphone.

Well, we went from the Wright brothers airplane, I think in like 1910s to space travel in the sixties.

And then it's just been nonstop since then. Now, do you buy into Ross Douthat's theory of the decadent society and, you know, technological decline?

Are we about to have to wrap up? Okay. Nevermind. Don't answer that. I've got rapid fire questions for you here.

And brother, thank you so much for even giving us a small amount of time. Uh, first of all, uh, was the government involved in 9 -11?

That's my friend, Todd Pruitt. He's conspiracy theory adjacent. Yes. Nice.

Okay. Uh, tea or coffee? Your British show. Yeah, there you go. Uh, just leaves and water.

All right. Um, do you watch TV? Yes. What's your favorite TV show? Um, Father Ted.

British Irish comedy from the nineties. Wow. Okay. If you could only take these books, uh, books from one author,

I'll give you some categories on a desert Island with you for the rest of your life. We're going to have more desert

Island book questions. So don't worry. Uh, but Dever, Piper Keller, Sproul, John McArthur, let's say

Sinclair Ferguson and Kevin de Young. You could only take one set of books. Who would you take? Uh, probably

Kevin de Young. Yeah. I have to say that I'm sitting in his church, but that's probably truthful. Yeah. Uh, you're the critical theory expert.

Tim Keller has gone to be with the Lord. I said he wasn't woke at the TGC debate. Got a lot of flack for that.

Was I right or wrong? Is Tim, was Tim Keller woke? I think you were right. He's not woke. Thank you. I think he was naive.

So I would say naive at some points as we all are, but I would say, no, Tim Keller's not. I use the

Pelagianism, Arminianism spectrum. Like you can be influenced by something, but not wholly given over to it.

In fact, I wrote an article, uh, you know, entitled, I was asked to write it. It might've been by the gospel coalition.

It might've been by modern reformation. Is Tim Keller a cultural Marxist? And I gave the answer. No, no. I essentially said,

I don't agree with Tim Keller on a whole heap of stuff, but it's, it's ridiculous to call him a cultural Marxist.

You hear that internet? Interesting enough. Christianity today quoted that article in their obituary of Tim Keller.

I was the only critic they quoted. They quoted that article. Yeah. And the whole point was

I was actually being nice about it. Yeah. And they managed to make it sound as if I was some sort of critic.

Hey, I'm really sorry that happened to you. Favorite fiction author. Oh, it's a tough one, but I think, um, uh, oh, it's hard, but a books

I've read recently, I think I should've got to say Dostoyevsky. Okay.

If you could only take the complete works of Tolkien or the complete works of Lewis onto a desert

Island, which one do you choose? Tolkien. Man, Luke, you are really racking these up.

Luke is a huge Tolkien guy. Okay. Mountains or beach? Mountains. Champagne or wine?

Wine. Uh, Android or iPhone? Android on the basis.

It's cheaper. Macaroni salad or potato salad. Not over keen on either.

I've probably got to go potato if I had to go either way. Night in or night out. Oh, I'm an introvert night in every time.

Okay. Concert or football. And when I say football, I mean the free kind, like the American kind.

Oh, concert. Okay. But you're a soccer guy. No, I'm a rugby guy. Okay. All right.

Morning person or night owl? If it's work morning, if it's relaxing, it's evening.

Okay. That's a good answer. I like to get up early and right. Yeah. To get it out the way. Yes. And then the rest of the day

I slowly wind down. Yeah. Okay. This is such an American question, so bear with me, but Burger King or McDonald's?

Oh, I avoid fast food, like the plague. I love burgers, but I like decent burgers. Okay. Oh, I don't know what would be a more

English question. Fish and chips or curry? Curry. Okay. There we go.

Mexican or Italian? Italian. Though I love them both, but I've got to go Italian. You know, I'm talking about the races, not the food, right?

Burgers or barbecue? Burgers. Do we really go to the moon? Yes. Chinese takeout or sushi?

Chinese takeout. Cold or hot? Depends. Oh, you mean weather or?

Yeah. Um, probably more of a cold person on the whole. Yeah, you're from England. Uh, this is going to be a ridiculous question for you.

Rock or rap? Okay. Rock. Okay. Classical or jazz?

Probably classical, but I love them both. Okay. You can only take one systematic theology with you onto a desert island.

Um, well, James Eglinton would disagree and say this isn't a systematic theology, but I would say Bavinck's dogmatics.

Yeah. Why would he say that? Cause it's a dogmatic style rather than a systematic style. I'm pretty sure if you, if it was strictly systematics and I probably got to go for Louis Burkhoff.

Okay. All right. What hymn do you want to be sung at your funeral? Um, a mighty fortress.

Ooh. And, but you got to have like guys, we got to do it like, like get after it. Right. Cause it's meant to be sung with gusto.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Does a straw have one hole or two? Uh, well the ones

I typically use have one, but I don't know if that's normative or just my limited experience.

You'd be surprised how controversial this question is. Okay. Yeah. Well, okay. That's it.

Uh, brother, let me pray and then we'll sign off. Thanks very much. Lord. Thank you so much for our brother,

Carl. Thank you for first and foremost, calling him to yourself, saving him by the blood of your son,

Jesus Christ, and keeping him by the power of your Holy spirit that has sealed him for the day of redemption.

Lord, we pray that you will protect him and lead him and guide him in all of his endeavors.

May his testimony be that of both faithfulness and fruitfulness to the glory of your name.

We know that as a man plans his steps, you are guiding them. You're leading us along your own perfect path.

So as our brother continues to teach in the university system, as he continues to write books, as he continues to serve as an elder in his local church,

Lord, we pray that you will guide him in every way. Give him an abundance of wisdom, an abundance of fruit of the spirit.

We ask all of this with great hope and expectation, knowing that you delight to answer prayers like this and the affirmative in the name of Jesus.