John Moody: The Tom Bomadil of Christianity

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a guest today, John Moody, who has, well, let's just say his hands in a lot of different pots.

He's a homesteader. He is a graduate from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, so he's a theological background, but he's also an expert on elderberries and getting raided by the government.

And he has a food buying co -op. And we're gonna talk about cancel -free

Christianity, how to, when the government challenges you, how to deal with that, how to deal with some of the challenges we don't think of as much today, like nutrition and self -sufficiency.

I talk a lot about that. And so I'm grateful to have John Moody on the podcast. Thanks for joining me, John. Thank you so much for having me.

We've talked a little bit, I know, over the last few weeks, but you've come highly recommended from those who attended the

County Before Country Conference last year. And I'll just tell you this.

You've probably heard it already. The thing I kept hearing from friends of mine, I even had someone in my church attend, is that you're the

Tom Bombadil of evangelicalism. And so after like five or so recommendations,

I said, oh, sure, sure, I'll listen to the speech. And so I listened to your talk and I thought, wow, this is really incredible stuff that I don't hear about ever.

I didn't know about the government raiding farms and raiding you specifically.

And there's a certain amount of bravery, I think you probably have from being in that environment that we need right now for the other fights that we're undergoing.

So anyway, I appreciate you being brave enough to talk about it. Is there anything else you wanna, before we get into these topics, just send people websites, places that they can go to find out more about you?

I do the Rogue Food Conference with my friend, Joel Salatin. It's one of the only conferences where we teach people how to fight.

The theme of the conference is creative circumvention, non -compliance and how to fight.

And so we have, it's been such a blessing to do that, to really,

I always pick on what I call con ink. I did that, I think in both of my CBC talks because conservative ink gives the appearance of resistance without the substance.

And so one reason I was excited when Michael approached me about County Before Country or when Joel approached me about doing

Rogue Food is we wanted to give the substance of what resistance actually is, not just pseudo -intellectual resistance to the spirit of the age.

So Rogue Food is great. And then I have my personal website, johnwmoody .com,

but I don't really have anything there. Well, and I failed to mention, I think

I follow you on social media and see a lot of jujitsu pictures, right? You're into that as well. So fighting physically, as well as with the government in a political way.

Me and my kids primary judo and we cross train jujitsu. Oh, wow.

Okay, well, all right. So that is helpful when you're being raided by the government now.

I'm sure you haven't used any of that, but this is something that I see with a lot of young guys who are just starting out and they feel like the deck's already stacked against them before they're even out of the gate.

They just, they might be in debt already from the education expenses. They wanna get married, but what do you do when you have $30 ,000, $80 ,000 in debt and you're offering yourself,

I can protect you. And it's not the most appealing thing. And so there's young guys rebelling against this, trying to find alternative ways of starting out their lives, self -sufficient ways.

They don't wanna be reliant on these systems that are currently in existence that really are the result of modernity, that some things that our grandparents never would have conceived of.

And you're living that, you're showing a template for this. And so I would be curious to hear you just talk about your story a little bit and advice for young guys starting out who wanna be self -sufficient, who wanna think local and act local, who want to be forces to preserve, not just Christianity, but Christianity as well, and healthy living practices in their community.

Yeah, so short intro, the Lord saved me my sophomore year of college.

So I grew up in a nominally Catholic household and that's a whole story of its own, my childhood into adulthood.

Lord saved me my sophomore year of college. By my senior year, my local association of churches felt that I was called to ministry.

So they sent me to Kentucky to go to seminary. And so I got to seminary and it was really weird because all these people knew, like they're like, oh, like it's

Dr. Fuller, it's Dr. Nettles. I'm like, I don't know any of these people. Like, cause

I didn't grow up in Christian evangelical circles, let alone

Baptist circles. So I was just there to learn. I'm just taking classes cause

I'm like, I really want to know the Bible. I really want to understand the world. And while I was in seminary, one of my professors suggested, he goes, instead of reading a little bit of everybody, choose three authors to really be shaped by, deeply.

So learn three people very, very well, rather than learning 300 people very poorly.

And so one of the people I chose was Schaefer. And at the same time

I'm going through seminary, I became deathly sick. I got down to like 120 pounds on a six foot two frame.

So if you can imagine, I'd turn sideways, I'd just - That's insane, yeah. And so I go to a doctor and I'm talking to a doctor.

He sends me in for testing. He comes back. He's like, oh, this is what you have. These are the drugs we can give you for this.

And I remember looking at this doctor and I say to him, I go, I go, well, what do these drugs do to my body?

And he didn't know. So he has to pull out the drug insert and cartoon style looking at this, 0 .1

sans serif font drug insert, trying to figure out what it does. And he goes, oh, he goes, it shuts off your body's ability to produce hydrochloric acid.

And I look at the doctor and I go, I go, what happens though when you make my body stop doing something that it was designed to do?

And the doctor stops and he's quiet for a long stretch of time for a doctor to be quiet.

And he looks at me. He goes, nobody has ever asked me a question like this.

He goes, and I've honestly, in all my years of medical training, never thought about it this way.

I've never thought about design, how the human body is supposed to work by design and then how that impacts how

I treat disease conditions and problems in my patients. And that was like a giant light bulb for me that the systems that I, as a

Christian, were interacting with were not built upon any sort of biblical rational foundation.

These systems are basically like voodoo at this point. Considerations of design, just all sorts of things.

So that along with my exposure to Schaefer, who Schaefer wrote,

Pollution and the Death of Man, he had a very deep ecological naturalist streak in his theology, along with things like beauty and other stuff.

I walked out of the doctor's office and I began to go down a rabbit hole in terms of like food, nutrition, farming, economic, just like so many different issues.

And about a year later, I had completely healed, not just the condition

I'd seen the doctor for, but like I had seasonal allergies so bad that Benadryl sent me free stock options.

As like a patronage dividend at the end of the year. Wow. You know, so like I had enough antibiotics as a child to qualify as my own

CAFO animal operation. And so, you know,

I'm like 24 at the time of all this. And after about a year or so, like I live on a farm in the

Ohio River Valley. I have no allergies. I haven't had a dental cavity in 20 some years.

I haven't needed antibiotics in two decades. My kids who've totaled 60 some years on the planet now, we've never had a broken bone.

We've never needed antibiotics. And so there's this, you know, conservative

Christians, we like to talk about design in the theoretical and then ignore it in the practical.

Well, what would that actually mean for how I feed my family, for how I live my life, for how I use technology?

And I've always chafed against that kind of disconnect between the intellectual side of conservatism, especially

Christianity, and then the practical side. So I healed all of these health conditions and I did it because we, you know, we had to get food from different places because the kind of food

I could get at the grocery store, I realized was the kind of food that was actually making me sick.

And so that led to my wife and I starting the Food Buying Club in 2006, where I was just like,

I don't have time to go to seven different farmer's markets and four different places to get food.

So I'm going to build something that simplifies this problem for me. Yeah, I mean,

I'm curious to know what you think the root issue was with your health. So, I mean, is it just, there's so much terrible stuff in our food and you started eating better and that really just made a huge difference?

Well, what we've, you know, the first thing I tell people, and this annoys people, especially conservatives, but most of what you call food is not food.

It's just, you know, you should not think of it as food. It's ironic to me, because if I pulled a tire off of my car and I chopped it up and set it on a plate in front of you, you would never eat it, but you'll go to a clown head and order food out of a clown head.

And if you look at the ingredient list on that food, there's a lot of the same ingredients that are in tires, but you'll eat that.

Because it tastes better. And yeah, well, and so I don't think most conservatives have any sort of objective standard for what actually qualifies as food and what doesn't, other than, you know, well, what our culture says.

And I'm like, well, our culture really isn't, you know, our culture can't even call gender right anymore, let alone other things.

So while you're taking your cues from, there's a study that just came out, that by 2030 to 2035, 50 % of American children will be obese.

Obese is not overweight, just so your listeners really capture this. Obese is not overweight.

Obese is when you have a whole extra you that you are carrying around basically.

And that's what they're looking at in terms of youth in America. 50%, they're saying round to 2035 is gonna be obese.

And I'm just like, you know, it - Well, we wanna have an army. I mean, there's implications beyond just health of the individuals, there's health of a country when you get to that point.

I mean, farmers have known forever obesity and the ability to reproduce, to have offspring are antithetical, you know, like with your cows, with your pigs, with any animal carrying excess weight suppresses reproductive capacity and it makes less healthy offspring.

So it's, you know, it's a domino effect of destruction and you have conservatives decrying the culture of death while feeding it to their children and destroying their children's long -term health and ability to produce more image bearers.

And I'm just like, come on guys. So don't go to McDonald's is what you're saying. You know,

I'm curious. All right, so I don't know if you wanted to share more about your story because you have so much more to share with the raids and everything else, but you decided to eat better and now you're to the point you've changed, fundamentally changed

I'm sure a lot of the habits that you had before, not just with what you're eating, but just how you're living in general.

And this is something that I know a lot of young people are curious about. They want to reject what you just talked about, 50 % obesity, they wanna reject that and they wanna go to the gym, right?

And so I can see young guys taking these small steps, right, I'm gonna get ripped or whatever,

I'm gonna get jacked, I'm gonna go to the gym. I'm gonna start drinking some raw milk.

Raw milk nationalism is even a book, right? And what kinds of things like that do you think are helpful or you found beneficial that would be good for people starting out or everyone really?

Yeah, so for my wife and I, the thing I always tell people is like, when we started dating and then got married, we were as standard

American as you can possibly imagine. I was the breakfast cereal eating, cartoon watching, video game playing kid of the nineties, like that stereotypical, you wake up on Saturday morning, you eat sugary breakfast cereal, you watch cartoons, you play video games, like that was me to a

T. So when we began to kind of retool our approach to the world,

I'm like, we have no skills really, we were, I wouldn't say we were like super poor, but there is a number of years in our early marriage where at least on paper, we made 25, $30 ,000.

So it's not like we had gabs of money. And so I always tell people like the easiest way to crack this nut is we would choose two things every week to change in our household.

So one week it would be like learning to make our own cleaners. The next week it would be learning to cook a whole chicken.

The next week it would be learning to use, actual flour to make baked goods.

And then eventually we bought a, so I just tell people it's, you didn't end up where you are overnight.

So don't expect to be somewhere very different when you wake up tomorrow. So I just tried to be very strategic as a husband.

I was like, I know kind of where, I know the general direction I wanna go, but I don't know the exact destination, but I need to start plotting a course and I need the course to be sustainable for our family.

And that's just kind of how we began to do it. So that's practical, that you can incrementally change certain things about yourself and your lifestyle there.

I mean, what's the most beneficial change that you made, you think? What's the thing that you would say helped your health more than anything else?

Well, it was changing what we viewed as food and where food comes from. So like, we eat hamburgers, but we get the beef from a local farmer where the cows are like raised on things

God designed cows to eat. You know, so it's, our diet in some ways doesn't look that different than a lot of other people's diets.

It's like, we eat hamburgers, we eat French fries, but they're cooked in tallow or lard instead of being cooked in seed vegetables, oils.

You know, we eat smoothies, but the milk comes from pastured cows and it's raw milk yogurt we make.

Do you ever go to a restaurant or is that just not something you do anymore? We do on occasion. I mean, there's, almost every major city now has some good quality restaurants to eat at.

So, you know, so we eat out, no, probably a dozen times a year maybe.

So it's definitely not something we do all the time, but it's something we do regularly, but we choose a better quality restaurant that gets food from actual farmers.

And that made a huge difference, just getting food from farmers instead of, well,

I mean, I guess farmers have to raise beef or maybe is that agribusiness? You're making a distinction between farmers and agribusiness.

Yeah, you know, so take meat in America. You have four major categories of meat and protein.

You know, you have beef, pork, chicken, eggs, and dairy. In each of those categories, roughly 85 to 90 % of that category is controlled by four companies.

So I call this, when you go into a grocery store, it's the illusion of choice.

So you go into a Kroger, you go into an Aldi's, you go into a Costco, you go into a

Walmart, and you're like, there's 200 different brands of beef products, let's say, maybe even 400 brands of beef products.

But those 400 brands are just the different brands of only four companies.

Okay, so, and these companies, these four companies are not raising their, their beef's quality is not that great, was what you're saying.

They're feeding them bad stuff and - Yeah, well, what, you know, like in beef, the cows come from places like where I live.

And, you know, this goes back to also like thoughts on like, how do you actually love your neighbor? So if you want to understand the economic and generational heartbreak of rural

America, go to an auction house where cattle and other animals are sold at auction, and sit with the people who've lived in these communities for generations, and talk with them on an auction

Saturday. And if your heart doesn't break, I don't know what to do for you.

Because I did that years ago, where I, one of my older neighbors, guy like in his seventies, invited me to go to the auction house with him.

And, you know, how does an auction work? What makes an auction an auction?

Well, you sell to the highest bidder, right? So you have to have a lot of buyers.

Yeah. And hopefully not a ton of sellers. Right. The Irvington cattle auction, it'll have two, 300 farms come to the auction to sell cows.

Guess how many buyers come? How many? One? One. Because these four big companies don't want to compete against each other.

So I'll send my buyer to the Irvington auction, and you send your buyer to the

Upton auction, and we won't be bidding against each other, because there'll be no one to bid against us. Wow.

And so these big companies buy all these cattle, and then they take them out to the Midwest, and they raise them in feedlots, you know, for six to eight months, feeding them things cows should not be fed, and then they butcher them.

And so it impoverishes rural America. It destroys the nutritional quality of this food.

And then consumers are paying $20 for a steak that one of my neighbors got 60 cents, you know, on the pound on.

Wow. Yeah, I didn't realize it was quite that bad with your auction story there.

I know rural America has been pretty decimated. What I'm wondering is because, probably because of the story you just shared is a result of this, people are not living on farms anymore, or rural areas as much, even the people that move out to rural areas, as I've seen where I live, are people from the city who can tell a story, they can telecommute now.

So they're just sitting with their wifi. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me exactly, but I guess it's supposed to maybe, they get away from crime, so it makes a certain amount of sense.

But how does someone who is in these positions, likely listening to this podcast right now, go about living their life?

Because you were able to start a farm, and you have a food co -op, and you're living healthy.

And I don't know if everyone has that option, or do you think that everyone does? Everyone should just do what you're doing. I mean, what's your advice there?

Well, everybody has the option of changing where they spend their money.

So this is something I've said at County Before Country. I've never understood conservatives being completely unwilling to defund their enemies.

You know, we're like, you can't even get them to cancel Netflix. When Netflix is parading around little girls.

Oh, right, yeah, yeah. No, that's so true, that's so true.

I mean, I have a lot of friends who still subscribe to Netflix, and I'm like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, for my own family, it was a challenge to get rid of Amazon Prime, because it was just like, it's so convenient though, but we can get our stuff in a day.

And it's like, well, yeah, but they're also terrible. Well, and it's just what kills me, is it's just like, you know, talk is, complaining is cheap.

And I'm like, you have options. You can, you know, when I was in seminary, that's when boycotting

Disney at times was still a thing. I remember that, yeah. And I remember those certain people quietly just being like, well,

I'm taking my family to Disney. Even like some professors. I wouldn't ask you to name names, yeah.

No, I'm not gonna name names there. And I was just amazed. I'm just like,

I'm like, I heard you preach a sermon on being willing to do whatever it takes for Christ, and you can't even cancel

Netflix. Yeah. You won't stop shopping at Kroger, who supports, you know, every

Kroger I go into, the employees are wearing big transgender flags, and, you know, they're prioritizing not hiring white males, except for in the worst.

You know, the thing that's always killed me as somebody who did not grow up in evangelicalism is basically the limp -wristedness of all the men

I deal with, where, you know, they'll complain in front of their kids, they'll whine about the state of the country, and they won't even cancel

Netflix. They won't change any practical things about their life that'll actually make a difference, and that'll stymie and hurt their enemies.

You know, I gotta watch Monday Night Football. Yeah, sort of a suburban consumerist mindset,

I guess, that culturally, there's cultural factors, I guess you could say, that undercut the convictions that we hold, and that's a big problem.

I do see some hope right now, though. I do see, like I said, especially younger people who are more serious about their faith, who are starting to question these things and say, you know,

I know I've been raised this way, but is all of this actually good for me?

Is this good for my family? And so someone who, you know, doesn't own a farm and wants good nutrition choices, if they're not gonna go to Kroger, where do they go then?

What are just some practical things that they can do? Because, I mean, I don't know if every community has a local farm market.

I know that I have some smaller, like I have apple orchards in my area, so there are some smaller farm markets.

I also have a family. I grew up with a huge garden, and we had chickens and stuff, so I'm a little bit different, but I don't know of a big co -op.

There was when I was in Lynchburg, but there isn't here where I live, and so the options are kind of limited, and I don't know, you would probably know more than me to what extent those options are available for people.

I mean, in most of the country, it's not hard to find brothers and sisters in Christ farming to get good quality food from.

You know, it's not convenient, but it's not an insurmountable challenge for the vast majority of people to change where they spend some of their money.

Including their food dollars. You know, there's websites like Eat Wild, resources like the

Westin A. Price Foundation that can help you hunt down sources in your area, you know, but to give you an idea how easy it is, you know, this past year,

I traveled probably like 24 ,000 miles. I had a conference in Florida, conference in Virginia, and when

I travel in less than an hour of work, I can find farms.

You know, we went all the way to Florida to put on Rogue Food, and a bunch of the food for Rogue Food came from farms right there in Florida.

Only took me an hour to find farms to get food from for the event, and to feed my family while they're down there.

These are good brothers and sisters in Christ who were supporting them directly. So it's really not that difficult.

You know, it just means you need to spend less time getting in fruitless fights on Twitter, and more time caring about how your family uses the resources

God has given you. Well, if everyone did it, then we would restore some of these communities that you're talking about that have been so decimated, perhaps, because there would be more demand for farming and for people to be able to get food and people would just be more into it.

And I can't see that being a bad thing. Well, I mean, politically, conservatives complain that cities are liberalized.

You know, so we have hundreds of years of sociological political research that shows one of the strongest factors for somebody's support of big government, for somebody's embrace of liberalism, is population density, aka big modern cities.

But then conservatives spend all their money in ways that continues that consolidation.

So you have conservative commentators who are just like, we need to stop the liberalizing of America and stop large cities from dominating our politics.

But then their economics ensure that that will never happen because their economics are all pro big business and pro trade and getting goods from wherever is cheapest.

And I'm just like, guys, you're killing me. Like your practice undermines your goals.

You know, this is like, I meet Christian families, like, well, we want our kids to be healthy. We want them to have a lot of kids.

I was like, well, then you should spend more money on food, not less. You know, politically, we want a nation with a limited government.

And I mean, you know, go back, read the Greco -Romans, read Thomas Jefferson. There is no nation that has a limited government that does not have a strong independent populace.

So only support big businesses though, which destroy any hope of it.

And I'm just like, come on guys, like we know these things. These things aren't even that hard to figure out.

Yeah, no, that's a fair point. And man, it's convicting even me because I'm sure there's ways,

I've done some of the things like canceled my prime and we, I think in general, my wife and I do tend to eat healthier.

I hunt, you know, but there's probably so much more we could be doing. I mean, just yesterday,

I went to the local grocery store to get some food and I, you know,

I walk in, so maybe I'm making myself guilty here, but I walk in and there's like a little rainbow flag on the door and it kills me.

We still shop at Costco some, you know, there's,

I don't want to get, you know, I always want to encourage people, you know, we live in a fallen world.

Like you eat meat sacrifice to idols. You can't make everything perfect, but there's a lot of things people can do.

There's a lot of low hanging and middle hanging fruit that conservative Christians could go after that would make significant differences in their households and in their communities.

But it's not flashy. It's not glamorous. It's really, you know, kind of mundane stuff.

Yeah. Well, let me ask you this. So you are able to make these wise choices.

These wise choices though, come at a cost. They're expensive. The food's, I would think, more expensive to go find a farmer, maybe

I'm wrong on this, than to go to your grocery store. Is that not true or?

No, I mean, you know, most, so the first thing I'll just say here is you're going to have to make a choice for your listeners with kids.

Do you want to pay lots of medical bills or do you want to pay more for food?

Again, our kids have racked up almost 60 years. We've never had a broken bone. We've never had to use antibiotics.

You know, that's a substantial savings we have had.

Yeah, we'll wait till they get COVID. I'm just kidding. No, we've already had, we actually just had Rona in a couple of weeks, so we're still, still getting on the other side of that bioengineered nastiness.

Yeah. You know, so the one story I always tell in this regard is, you know, you have a car.

Imagine I walked up to you and I'm like, hey, John, I can save you like 50 % on your gasoline for your car.

I like hold up a bottle. I'm like, dude, I'll save you. Would you ever do that?

Well, 50 % on the gas. I mean, I would take 50%, sure. Well, at the risk of destroying your car?

Well, no, no, no, not, I wouldn't hurt my car to do it. Yeah. So you'd be like, well, how do I know this is, like most people would never skimp on gasoline for their car.

Right. But they're like, man, who has the cheapest food for my body? What's easier to repair?

That's true. Again, this is one of those things that never made sense to me. I'm like, when things go wrong with your body, it's very hard to repair them.

And it's insanely expensive. And it has repercussions. You know, so I know people where it's just like, you know, historically speaking, for most of human history and most of the world, people spent 25 to 50 % of their income on food.

This is the historical average for like a thousand years across the entire world.

25 to 50 % on food. Wow. Modern Americans spend eight.

Hmm. That's quite different. So that is, that is significantly different actually.

So, I mean, we're, wow. 8%. Now, I think some would say that that's actually a good thing because, hey, look at the, all the innovation and technology and just the advancements we've made because we don't have to spend so much money.

We can now go and spend it on our hobbies or, you know, spend it on our

Netflix account. Yeah. So that now you're one of the 40 % of people in America who are obese and on antidepressants.

Yeah. Because your diet is horrible and all that money you saved, you allocated to things that are also horrible that are also horrible now.

Yeah. Okay. So you make a compelling argument here. So maybe the thing to do now would be to talk a little bit about bravery because when you start making these choices and you start trying to devote more of your time and money to living healthy, stewarding your body well, steward your families well, you're going to run up.

I mean, you run up against resistance from the actual government, but some people, it might just be, you know, their friends don't understand and make fun of them or something.

I don't know. But that spectrum of resistance that you will find, how do you deal with that?

I just don't care. So that was a short answer. I mean, like, you know, cause people always ask me, they're like, how do you become uncancellable?

And the first thing is you really just have to not care. So if someone calls you a racist, you don't care.

You just don't care. You just don't care. Yeah. It's just like somebody, you know, years ago

I got selected to go on what was called the Mets trip. This was a trip that six seminaries got to send students on and Southern was one of the seminaries and the other five seminaries were all liberal seminaries.

So it's three of us students from Southern traveling for a month across, you know,

Turkey, Greece, Israel, all of these biblical archeological places, historical places.

And you're with like people from Princeton and Emory, all of these far left, crazy, radical seminaries.

And man, I just like the whole trip, people like, you're so, you're a bigot. I'm like,

I don't care. You're a misogynist, I'm like, I don't care. I mean, I just don't, like, why do we care so much about the opinions of people who are by and large failures or hate

God and his ways? I'm just like, why do you, why? You know, it's just, it's, again, this is one of those things that somebody who didn't grow up in Christian culture, you know,

I read the Bible and the Bible is just like the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the

Holy one is understanding. And, you know, and like the Psalms are just full of, you know, encouraging you, just fear

God. Don't worry about anybody else. Don't worry about anything else. Just fear the Lord.

So I'm like, that's just what I need to do. And then I meet all these Christians and they're just like, people are gonna think I'm weird. People, I'm like,

I'm like, you, you. Yeah, that's so true. Like, you believe God became a baby and died on a cross for you.

And you're gonna be upset that, you know, you won't eat like crap. You know, people are gonna make fun of me if I don't eat crappy food.

I'm like, you all are so effeminate. You are so weak. So the first thing

I tell people is just learn not to care. Like, like I just,

I've, you know, it's just like, people like me, people don't like me. People think

I'm crazy. People think I'm wise. I don't ever think about any of that. I just wake up and I'm like, what, how am

I faithful today? What is the Lord set before me today? Where can

I do good to others and good for his kingdom? And that's just what

I do. And I let the chips fall. You know, it's like with the Twitter controversy from a month or so ago involving

ACORN, at the end of the day, I just didn't really, I didn't care what people were going to think about what

I did. My only question was, what does the Bible require here?

Yeah, for those who aren't aware, briefly, you basically just came out and said, look, we need to, there was an individual,

Thomas Accord, who was being accused and doxxed and all these things. And you just said, we gotta do biblically what the

Bible says we should do here and not what you're doing. And that's basically what you're talking about is people would,

I'm sure they came to you and said, what about your reputation? What are you doing with your credibility here?

What are people gonna think when, if this guy's guilty, you're gonna look bad. And you just, you're saying,

I don't care about that. Well, I had people like men who really loved me, been friends with for decades, who sent me messages.

They're like, hey man, they're like, don't risk your credibility here. And I'm just like, but I don't care.

Yeah, there's an assumption that there's a certain level of credibility we have, like a pot, right?

And we can dish it out. We have to be wise in where we invest it or something. And if we do it wrong, then we'll lose all of it.

And there's no, it's very hard to gain back. And these little trivial things, that's the amazing thing to me is we can lose it so easily today because we're in a minefield.

Every step we take is the potential to lose our credibility with someone. So it's like,

I think what you're saying is probably why some people think you're wise and popular because you just don't care about those things.

And most people are obsessed with that. And I think that's maybe the most beneficial thing you can share with us is how to get over or how to just not have that obsession, to not care what people think.

Even when the government's coming in and threatening your very existence, like your farm, financially, your family, that's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people.

Oh, yeah, that is. So the second thing, so in 2011, our buying club was raided by the

Kentucky State Health Department. As I was sharing with you earlier though, we now know that this was orchestrated by the federal government.

So the USDA, the FDA, at behest of these corporations, the control beef and other segments of the economy,

I've only been threatened with harm three times in my adult life where like somebody has credibly threatened to harm me, like physically harm me.

And all three of them have been from corporate government actors over food.

Wow. Yeah, it's pretty crazy to think about. That they care that much about this issue, that's crazy.

Yeah, in a behind closed door meeting in Frankfort, Kentucky, the people who control the

Kentucky dairy industry threatened me and two friends with physical harm if we continued to push against their control.

Sounds like mob stuff. Oh, it's crazy. I laughed when they threatened us when they got up at the table and started wagging their fingers at us.

And we're like, hey, like we're gonna do very bad things to you all if you don't stop what you're doing. I just like cracked up.

Cause he's like, I'm like, dude, like you're an overweight middle -aged man who runs a dying business.

I'm like, you're a joke to me. But so we were raided in 2011.

And at the time, I guess my wife was probably pregnant with Noah would be my guess.

And we had two small children who were six and under. So Noah might've been actually born at this point.

We might've been, we had a gaggle of small kids, the Kentucky health department at the behest of the

FDA and USDA raid our little buying club. And they serve us cease and desist and quarantine orders.

And they put these big sheets of paper down that say, if you violate this, you face no less than this many years in jail and no less than this much of financial fines, all the good stuff.

And that is other than when the Lord saved me my sophomore year of college, there are a few moments in my life

I remember as well as that weekend and that event, because it's easy to talk about fighting.

It's easy to talk about taking risks. And again, this is one of my biggest critiques of conservatism.

You know, the Presbyterians will pick fights with the Baptists, you know, and say like, all you

Baptists are why we have trannies. You know, and what really annoys me about it, again, it's the appearance of risk and fighting without the substance.

It's basically like posturing, you know, because it's easy for me to pick a fight with you because you're a

Christian. And you - Yeah, we've been fighting. Yeah. You know, infighting is riskless.

It's a way we posture and peacock and, you know, try and move up the pecking order within the church, but there's no real risk to that for the most part.

It's really effeminate in my view. It's why it drives me nuts, the constant online fighting over baptism.

And, you know, I'm just like, come on guys, fight somebody who actually is a risk for you to fight with.

Go protest at an abortion clinic, go show up and preach the gospel at queer story hour at your library.

Like do something meaningful for a change. So the, you know, they rate us and I have a decision to make now.

You know, I have small kids who, you know, I have a wife who might be pregnant.

I have multiple small children. And what do I do with this cease and desist in quarantine order?

And two things really drove me. The first is when I looked at my kids, you know, this is something that's always weighed in my mind with my kids,

I am always going to be imperfect. I want my kids to know that I'm an imperfect person saved by God's grace.

But whether or not I'm a hypocrite, that's a choice I make. And I'm not willing to complain about the abuse of powerful people, the run amok nature of government.

And then when I finally have a chance to do something about it, not be willing to take that opportunity.

So when I looked at my kids, because a lot of people were like, well, dude, you could have went to jail for like a couple years of your kid's childhood.

And I go, yeah, I go, but it would have been worse for my kids for me not to go to jail or not to fight because I was afraid of going to jail.

Like of these two things, which one was going to be worse for their souls?

If I had played chicken little and I talked a big game and then when a fight actually came along,

I tucked my tail and ran. Right. So there is that aspect of it.

And then there's also just, I forget who the quote is by, it's often put with like a person in armor, but like eventually somebody has to fight.

So what man leaves the fight for his children to fight?

And one reason I'm very critical of boomers, you know, evangelical, political, conservative and whatnot, because that's by and large what they've done to us and to our children.

Francis Schaeffer in the 1970s, when he came to America, he lambasted churches and Christians.

And he said, why haven't you stopped paying taxes? Why haven't you, why have you in no meaningful way stood up to the culture of death and run amok government in your day and age?

This was the seventies. Imagine if American Christians in the seventies had heeded

Schaeffer's call to meaningful risk -taking to nip in the bud the culture of death before now it's metastasized into a cancer that's completely overran the

West. And so I've always just been of the viewpoint that if somebody has to fight, if somebody has to suffer, if somebody has to take a risk, then that is my duty.

And if I try and punt that to my children, when they rise up and they condemn me,

I will deserve their condemnation. So this is what drives me nuts about all the boomers and stuff is they deserve the scorn they're receiving.

Just cause I'm sure we have a number of baby boomers. My parents are baby boomers listening to this podcast is to fine tune it.

Are you saying that there's a general tendency in baby boomers to trust the systems they grew up with and to go along with that instead of challenging them?

Is that what you're saying? Yeah, as Schaefer in his trilogy, I think it was, in the seventies, he warned that the greatest danger to the church in the

West was affluence and social acceptability.

And that he warned in the seventies that what he saw was gonna happen in America that those generations of people were so enamored with financial prosperity and social acceptance that they weren't going to fight or stop any of the evils.

So Reagan, who is a conservative icon, if you try and criticize

Reagan, a lot of conservatives will lose their minds. He is who gave us no default divorce.

Right. Right. I mean, he put the nail in the coffin of sexual morality in America by, and of course he was a serial adulterer himself.

He was divorced and remarried, I believe. So it's, so just by and large, there's a couple generations that ran before us who had opportunities to rebuild the walls, to stem the flood.

And now, when we look at, go look up a map of the number of transgender clinics that now exist in America.

There's a direct thread that runs from no fault divorce. You know, like these are all part of that philosophical thing.

And by and large, these older generations, instead of fighting against these unbiblical philosophies, they ran roughshod right along with them and kept a window dressing of Christianity.

Yeah, they accommodated. And yeah, so you know what you're saying sounds like the flip side, not the flip side is not the right term.

What you're saying sounds like, I don't know how to say this, similar to what people who were influenced by David Platt's radical, that kind of thing, that pre -social justice thing that I remember in seminary.

I don't know if we were, I don't think we were concurrent. I think you were in seminary before me. So I'm talking like 2011, 12, like in there.

I was 2000 to 2005. Yeah, so, okay. So David Platt's book hadn't come out yet when you were there, but there was this kind of blowback against boomers in a way.

That was because they're a bunch of materialistic, racist, obsessed with the

American dream. Just, they're just terrible people.

The reason the world's poor is because we have so much and it's sort of a Marxist spin on it, right?

And that the thing to do is to be radical, to get out to, instead of what you're saying, which is to move to rural areas or to be self -sufficient, it was to move to the inner city urban areas, right?

And to live with those people. And that was the most holy thing you could do. Of course, David Platt didn't really do that to my knowledge.

Well, none of them do that. None of them, yeah. It's like all the liberals saying they're going to move to Canada. Trump got them. They never, yeah, they never do.

So he has a nice home in the suburbs and has a nice church in the suburbs. And that's what he's always, that's what he's known.

But the premise was though, that that's what we're going to do. And I think there's like three people who did it, but everyone else was kind of like, used it as just kind of a wedge to make fun of or dishonor the older generation.

And I reacted against that. I thought, well, we're supposed to honor father and mother. And they're the, in most of the cases, they're paying your bills to be here at seminary.

And now you're developing disdain for them. For like half the people who believed in, and I'm not knocking covenantal theology here, but I think half the people who believed in like post -millennialism or amillennialism were doing so because their parents were pre -mill.

It was like literally just a, you know what I'm saying? Like they hadn't read the Bible and come to these conviction. It was just like, well, that's not what my parents believe.

So I'm going to reject it. And there are many. And so I'm going to be Calvinist, right? There's these sort of settle, anyway,

I'm on my own tangent here now. What you're saying is though, is different than that because your critique isn't the

Marxist critique. Your critique is not that they did, you know, too much to be successful and to make a good life for their family.

You're saying that it's actually the opposite of that, that they did not protect their family.

They did not do enough and they didn't preserve the good things that they had.

And that's like totally 180 from, you know, the critique that the people who like David Platt stuff were saying.

So anyway, I just thought I'd point that out. I don't know if that's ever occurred to you, but it is interesting to me.

And I think some of this does ring true that there were generations, I'm sure the baby boomers can look at the greatest generation and say, hey, you guys kind of messed it up in the way you raised us, the way you gave us everything we wanted.

And that wasn't good for us. And, you know. Well, you know, or like, again, you know,

I love my dad dearly and he knows I love him dearly, but I've just said to him on occasion, you know, my dad was like a mega

Trump person. And I just said to him once, I'm like, dad, I'm like, government expanding into areas beyond both the

Bible and constitution has been going on for 50 years. Well, really longer, you know, we could have a discussion of especially, you know,

FDR, New Deal, how that just - I go back to Lincoln, but okay. Yeah, I would totally agree with you.

You know, so, and for you all of a sudden to one day and wake up and finally start chafing against this, it's hard to take seriously.

Like, why didn't you fight this in the 80s? When they impose zoning and planning on, you know, like, it's, you know, it's the frog in the pot problem where we're the ones who feel the heat of this situation.

You know, like for young guys like us, you know, when my dad and his brothers were starting businesses, there is no registration to start a business.

There were no special taxes. You know, my dad and his brothers one day decided to start a construction company.

So they went and started a construction company and they made a bunch of money. So I'm like, dad, do you understand?

Like in Kentucky, when we started our elderberry business, not only did

I have to pay a fee just to have a business in Kentucky, but then because that's a food business,

I had to apply for another permit and fee. And, you know, like -

Yeah. You know, it's - I live in New York, so I don't have a lot of sympathy for you, but it's like every, you have to, before you take a breath, you have to get a permit.

It's like every single thing that you want to do. Yeah. And it's not like they're cheap and it's not like they actually,

I mean, for some of them, they'll send out a surveyor for construction, but for a lot of them, it's a rubber stamp.

Yeah. You know, anyway, I feel the same way that medical expenses is another one.

You know, when my parents were growing up, they had certain things a doctor could do.

I'll take out your tonsils. I'll do this or that. And there was a fee associated with it. And now it's like so complicated with insurance companies.

And of course the government has its hand in that. That, yeah, I've wondered the same thing.

I'm like, well, you know, what happened? How did we get from that to this? And you get like, did you, did you guys as a generation do anything?

Did you try to fight this? Like what happened? Well, and again, as Schaefer warned, they by and large supported it because their worldview was not one of preserving liberty and opportunity and biblical order.

Their worldview was driven by preserving affluence and social acceptability.

And, oh, like, you know, like imagine being the person who opposed seatbelt laws.

Now I think you should wear a seatbelt. That's my dad. You know, it's prudent, but by and large, you know, most people wouldn't publicly oppose street belt, seatbelt laws because it would make you look bad to others.

Well, don't you care about, and because people wonder why such a large percentage of Americans went along with COVID, you know, the insane

COVID restrictions, but it's that same, that same, you know,

I need to be socially acceptable. I need to do what is safe for others.

Like that's all, go back and read Schaefer's stuff on this. He's so prescient for accurately predicting what the last 50 years of America was gonna look like in terms of both moral decay and radical government expansion.

You know, he's like, here's how you can stop this now, guys. You really need to stop this now.

And now we're, you know, 40 years later and I'm just like, e -gads. It's such a harder thing to deal with.

Yeah, no, there's no doubt about it. I think the analogy you gave the frog, boiling is absolutely perfect.

I remember once, funny illustration, maybe to close the show out with, but I was in a national park and it was, there was nothing to hit, right?

Like it was, I think it was Craters of the Moon National Park in Idaho. I don't know if you've ever been there, but there's a whole lot of nothing. Okay. And there's no cars.

And my dad wasn't wearing a seatbelt because we would, you know, stop every so often, get out of the car, look at the view, read the sign.

And I remember as, I don't remember how old I was, but I just remember, like, I had a problem with it. I was like, dad,

Roman's 13. You know, the law says you have to buckle up. And this was maybe a stage

I was going through, but I just really wanted everything to be orderly, to conform, to do everything perfectly right.

And I remember he just, I don't even think he gave me like a very nuanced answer on why he wasn't wearing a seatbelt at that time, but it was basically boiled down to just like, be quiet.

And just like, let me just stop. I'm going to do this. I'm not, there's no problem here.

I'm not harming anyone. And I didn't grow up with this. And I've been in several incidences, and this isn't to get off on seatbelts, because I do wear my seatbelt most of the time, just so people know.

I do think it's primarily safety, but I've been in some car incidents, one in particular where my car went off a cliff and I had to jump out.

And I, the seatbelt, I remember thinking, because I had to unbuckle my seatbelt. And I remember just thinking like, man, that took like a second, but the seconds matter.

And I can see scenarios where it's safer for me to take off the seatbelt.

If I'm in danger of like, I might have to jump out really soon. I don't want a seatbelt on. So anyway, that's a roundabout way of just saying like, we have to think prudently about these things and realize that, you know, it is what

I was missing at the time, that the government doesn't actually have that authority. That's not really their lane to be regulating that.

But it's just assumed now that the government has this role of keeping us all safe. And I think one of the things you're doing that's so beneficial is you are thinking through some of these issues more deeply and you're applying the principles that you learn.

And you have a firm conviction of where the government's role is, how far they can go and no farther.

And if you've suffered the consequences, you're fine with it. And that's where we all need to be,

I think, is thinking through these issues and not just going along with the status quo, because some of the things we believe now weren't believed for thousands of years.

No one believed them until five seconds ago, right? So anyway, that's my little shtick at the end, but I'll give you the last word and any encouragement.

Go ahead. Are you a Tolkien fan? Yeah, well, I bought my wife for her birthday or for Christmas, the

Lord of the Rings in concert thing. So yeah, I mean, I guess I could, I have to say somewhat.

Most people won't go to a concert for the soundtrack. So yeah. Yeah. So who's the villain of the

Lord of the Rings books? Sauron. Sauron. But you know why Sauron becomes a villain?

I haven't watched Rings of Power. Don't watch Ring of Power. No, don't. I'm trying to remember now.

He was corrupted. I know he didn't start out that way, right? But he had a lust and a greed and - Well, but not quite.

He was corrupted because he saw the potential of Middle -earth and he felt that giving all of these people, giving all the

Valar and the Maiar and the elves and the humans, letting them all make their own decisions led to disorder.

It was too disorderly. And that's what Morgeth used to corrupt him.

It was his good, he wanted to see Middle -earth orderly and beautiful.

And he wanted to see Middle -earth reach its potential, which is what made him the ultimate tyrant.

You know, C .S. Lewis's warning that the worst tyranny is the tyranny exercised by somebody who actually thinks they're doing you good.

They actually think it's in your best interest. So Sauron was the ultimate story embodiment of literally somebody who will destroy the world in order to make you safe and give you your best life now.

Well, I can't, I'm gonna botch the quote, but it was one of the founders. I think it was Jefferson who was, you see,

I should know this, but that you could either have liberty or you could have safety.

You can't have both, right? And - If you trade liberty for safety, you do not deserve.

You have it better than me, yes. So. Yeah. So anyway, I appreciate picking your brain here and I think it'll encourage people.

Again, I don't remember the website you quoted or you gave us earlier, but where can people go to find you?

I mean, I'm on Facebook and I'm on Gab and then Rogue Food is the website for the conference

Joel and I put on. So if you've never been to Polyface Farm, so Joel is a

Christian farmer who the King of England, future

King of England, flew him over to England for tea in the afternoon and then flew him back.

What? Yeah, I mean, you wanna talk about embodying, you know, in Proverbs, you see a man skilled in his work, he will stand before Kings, he will not stand in front of -

Wow. Joel was flown by the future King of England to England to have tea with the future

King. And so we're doing Rogue at Polyface in May this year.

So if you wanna see just like what an impact a young multi -generational

Christian family can have by being faithful in an area of dominion and economics and stuff, come check out

Polyface Farm. Yeah, would love to. Thank you so much for just everything and hey,

God bless you and looking forward to hearing good things in the future. Great, thank you for having me brother. So Lord bless you and your family.