News Roundup: Trump's GOP, Two Roads to Compromise, and Thriving in Division

That matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We are forging a bold Christian vision for America. And we are gonna talk about the election results last night. We're gonna talk about ecumenicism and why it threatens Orthodox theology within Christianity and a number of other news items.

So I'm really happy to be here. Happy that you are listening as well. I wanna let you know that I will be in Vancouver, Washington, which is right near Portland, Oregon, on, is it Oregon or Oregon? No one can tell me, but it's June 12th through 13th, the Church Militant Conference.

And you can go to mastersbiblechurch .churchcenter .com or you can just go to my webpage, johnharrismedia .com, speaking engagements, and you'll find right there where I'm gonna be. So looking forward to seeing you there.

And what they've asked me to talk about is co-belligerency, unity, political organization, how should Christians think about this? I've talked about this in the past. I think there's a lot more that needs to be said about this, especially as things progress or digress or develop, which is it, right?

There's good things happening. There's also very bad things happening. And Christians having discernment to navigate those things is in short supply. So we do need to talk about it. We do need Christians to produce good materials on what it looks like to be politically active and where the boundaries are.

So that's what I'm gonna be talking about. Well, to start off the podcast today, I figured I would share with you something I forgot to share in the last podcast. And that is there was this controversy, and I'm not directly involved, but I did get text message over it.

It's regarding Canon Press. Canon Press, which is a publication company, it's a, they publish books and materials. They have an app. And this is, I wanna say connected with, that's probably the best way to put it, Doug Wilson and Christchurch in Moscow, Idaho.

I think they are separate, but they are connected. Anyway, the controversy involves Kevin DeYoung. Kevin DeYoung had a number of books that Canon Plus, their app, they were able to receive. I don't know if they purchased rights to it or whatever, they probably did, but they got rights to this.

And they ended up putting it out there, advertising that Kevin DeYoung is in their panoply of people to listen to. And then Kevin DeYoung found out, and he was not happy about it. And so his company, or the company he published with, decided to pull the books.

So those were audio books. Crossway was the company that originally published them. And so now they are no longer there. Now, the reason I'm bringing this up is because Canon Plus just recently published my book, my last book, Against the Waves, the audio book version of it.

So if you have the Canon app, you can listen to it. And so people were curious as to whether or not they had asked my permission to do this, and yes, they did. And I decided to do it because I thought I don't really care where it's sold.

And this is gonna get into some of the things we're gonna talk about later regarding partnering with others and where are the lines. But let me give you my idea on this first. If Amazon is selling it as a book merchant, if Barnes and Noble's selling it, if online secular companies are selling my book, and they're going to get a little bit of the profit, sometimes more than a little bit.

Amazon gets a pretty big cut, actually. Is that a sin, first of all? And no, it's not. It's not a sin to, well, why would it be a sin? Well, I guess you could make the case, aren't you enriching these companies that also sell bad things and have bad policies in certain areas?

That's a prudence issue. And there are circumstances in which I do think it could be a sin, especially if your conscience condemns you, but it could be so unwise and it could be so flagrant that you are obviously enriching a company when the cost-benefit analysis does not make sense.

It is not something that actually is contributing to the greater good. You're not getting your message out there, but it's enriching this bad company. There are circumstances like that. But in this case, I think prudence would dictate that someone who is searching on some of the biggest marketplaces on earth for books and finds your book and you have a good message in that book and you want that message to get out, it is wise to let those companies market your book.

I don't think most people have a problem with that. Canon Plus is different in one way. They are Christian overtly and a certain flavor of Christianity. They have certain theology that they believe in, some of which I don't even agree with, but they market themselves as Christian.

That's their entire identity. It's not like Amazon, which is more secular and you could say maybe neutralist, but is any company really neutral? That's a question too. I don't know that that's even the case.

I don't think any company is purely neutral, but you could say they're more neutral. They sell all kinds of things. You can get things on all kinds of different subjects from amazon .com. So when Canon Plus asked me, I didn't even have a problem with it, sure.

If it's being sold in all these other places, certainly Canon Plus can sell my book. And I would be fine with other, I even thought this, if the Mormons came to me and said, can we sell your book? I would probably say yes.

Is that an endorsement of Mormonism? No, I'm not sharing a stage with them in any kind of an affirming way. I'm not legitimizing them. Now, you could talk about the optics of it, right? This is, again, this is a prudence thing.

Like if the optics were such that they're using the book to promote themselves and I'm like a bigger name that they need to grasp to prove themselves or something, then yes, that would be very unwise and it might even be, you could say sinful or wrong.

Again, this is a circumstantial thing in certain ways and it's a wisdom issue. But the mere fact of letting a market, letting a business sell your book is not a sin in and of itself. And I think the people at Canon Plus could use to hear my book.

So just like the people at Amazon. So I have no problem with it. And I do think for someone like Kevin DeYoung to be really against having Canon Plus market his stuff, but okay with other book distributors.

I mean, even CBD, right? CBD is so broad. I mean, like what kinds of things are they marketing? Terribly heretical things at times, I'm sure. So I see this as selective and not a conviction that I share with Kevin DeYoung.

So I figured I would give you my thought on that. I don't think this is a partnership that is compromised. This isn't partnering with evil in a way that's going to compromise me or compromise the people listening or compromise people who would get the message that I'm letting this company sell this book.

It is a business transaction, a business decision first and foremost. So I'm willing to hear any pushback on that kind of thing. But these are my principles going into it. And this is going to play into what we talk about later when it comes to conference stages and the impression you give.

Because the bottom line is, the end result is I don't think you're giving the impression that you endorse a particular company just because you let them sell your book. That message is your message. And they're merely gaining a percentage off of what you've done for work that they're doing in getting your message out.

It's your message that's the one going out in that kind of an arrangement. So if Jesus is at the synagogue and he's preaching to the people at the synagogue, is that an endorsement of the synagogue and the Pharisees teaching?

No, he's using the venue to get his own message out. There is a way you can do that. There's also a compromised way in which you are unfortunately giving the impression that you endorse what's going on in a place that's compromised.

And so if you do it wisely, I think you can do it. All right, well, that was the first message. I just needed to get that out of the way because that was something from the last news roundup I failed to cover.

Emmett Kellogg asked, didn't DeYoung and Wilson have somewhat of a falling out previously? Was it personal?

They did.

DeYoung wrote an article about the Moscow mood and didn't like it. So I didn't have a great opinion of Kevin DeYoung before, a lot less now. It really shows how not conservative he is.

Yeah, maybe.

I don't really know exactly what it shows. I think he probably has a number of issues with Doug Wilson, Moscow, and Canon Plus, but I think you're gonna be consistent. And I can respect someone who wants to be consistent and say, you know what?

I'm gonna be the only one to put this out there. I really just don't want anyone getting monetary reward for selling my material. But if you're gonna do that, make sure it's not on these other platforms as well that are compromised.

It's weirdness, says AD Robles, that makes the Dorian principle ring true. Oh, you know, I haven't heard about that principle in a long time. Thank you for reminding me, AD. This is such a mess. Business decisions, fracturing into Christian, or fragmenting, I think is probably what he meant to say, into Christian teaching.

Couldn't agree more. Oh, this is off topic. We'll get to this later. If you are for Trump's puppet and not for Massey, you are a low IQ individual. I feel like that's coming from the Trump playbook. It calls someone that.

Was Trump, I don't know that he has a copyright on it, but he does seem like the first one in my political memory to start calling people low IQ individuals. That's like a Trump trademark. So don't use his catchphrase.

Sorry for my spell checker issue. That's fine. Yeah, look, I have problems with spell check all the time. It's a proof that you don't use AI, really, is what it is. It is a shibboleth today that you are a real person that actually does real things.

Now, and the unfortunate part is people are gonna start telling AI, make little grammatical mistakes to prove that this isn't written by AI. And now then we'll never know. But at this point in the process, recently someone looked at something I wrote and they caught a grammatical mistake.

And it's like, well, at least you didn't use AI. And the sad part of it is I wrote the whole thing, which is what I always do. But I did ask AI to spell check. I usually ask AI spell check, grammar check, and what was the other thing?

Punctuation. Now, I don't always do that, but I have found that helpful in proofreading just because you might miss like there, there, there, which there did you use? But in this case, actually AI missed it.

AI is not perfect. And while I don't condone using AI to produce material, to do your thinking for you when you're publishing, especially sermons at all, I do think that you can use it to check your grammar.

But if you don't do it, even for grammar, you are in fact a real person and it lends to your credibility. Matthew says, just followed pastor in Grand Rapids, Michigan here. Keep crushing it, bro. Well, thank you, Matthew.

That's very kind of you to say. All right, well, let's keep going on the podcast here. We are gonna talk about Francis Chan. There's some talk about that already. Yes, I know he's in the thumbnail. We gotta talk about Francis Chan.

He's actually next on the list. So here we go. Good old Francis joins pastor James E. Ward Jr. in a documentary that they may be one, calling the church back to unity. Pastor James E. Ward believes the growing political, theological and cultural fractures inside the church reveal something deeper than denominational disagreement.

A spiritual crisis that can only be healed through repentance and surrender to God. The cultural issues of our day, the sociopolitical issues of our day have infected the church. Now, I want you to hear that.

I wanna emphasize that. Listen to what he's saying. The sociopolitical issues are the problem. So there's these fault lines forming. They're over sociopolitical things. Now, what kinds of things would those be?

I mean, go back to 2020. We had disagreements over BLM, Me Too, the COVID shot. Today, disagreements over foreign policy, especially as it regards Israel and the Middle Eastern foreign policy. Disagreements over immigration.

Disagreements over these new, the latest thing, the hot topic now is these AI centers that are going into various communities. And even some places, the government is using imminent domain to evict people to make way for the AI data center that's coming in.

These are all fractures.

And you're going to see more and more social and political fractures over more and more minute things. And it's gonna fracture people more and more. So those conditions are real. I affirm what this pastor is saying, but he says, look, this has infected the church though, which has then affected the church's ability to be salt and light.

So look, this is the major thesis. This is the problem. The church can't be salt and light. Can't do the church's mission. You can't go make disciples. You can't make your communities better because you're fracturing.

You're not united. Imagine if we could all unite. Imagine we could take all our resources from across Christendom, and we can put it into one big pot. Don't worry, I'll control the pot. I'll tell you where to invest.

And you take all those resources. And then we could go have the biggest rally, the biggest churches, the most beautiful buildings, the most, you fill in the blank. And we can actually get something done, right?

There is somewhat of a assumption behind this that the more cooperation, whether that's financial or energy and effort, the greater produce, the greater harvest you're going to reap. There are limits to this, I think.

I mean, this is the, if it's gone afoul, this is the reason the Seeker Sensitive Movement was the way it is and why it's not doing so well now, because they thought, if we just blur some of these theological distinctions, these lines, if we keep it really simple, if we just make it as broad as possible, we can get the most people in the church building.

We can get the biggest crowd. And then you just end up, though, compromising yourself. I'm much more in favor of, and I think this is much more biblically consistent to say, there are denominational lines, there are differences.

And there are secondary issues in which you can participate in things like evangelism efforts, publication, endeavors, et cetera. I can be a co-host with someone like a Matthew Pearson. We are different.

He's a PCA member. I'm an independent Bible church member. We can cooperate because on 99 of things, well, 90%, whatever, it's high, we agree. And because we agree, we are able to have unity. And the main unity, though, isn't even in our agreement over secondary theological matters.

It's over the primary doctrines of our faith. We agree that Jesus is the son of God. He is God in human flesh. He's the savior of the world. We believe in the hypostatic union, the trinity, the authority of the word of God, including its inspiration, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, by grace through faith.

So a tremendous amount of unity there, but I'm not gonna be going to the same church most likely. It's possible, but if I have an option to go to a church that practices what I believe when it comes to ecclesiology and baptism and these other matters, I'm gonna go there.

And he's gonna go to a church that practices those convictions he has. But we're gonna still have tremendous unity. And even we can have a shared unity in para-church ministries. But if we don't get the person of Jesus right, if we're worshiping different Jesuses as the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses do, if we don't understand the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, then, and when it comes to scripture, some, like if we have different canons of scripture, we are going to have different authorities, right?

I mean, this is one of the root reasons that while there can be a social cooperation with Roman Catholics who have extra books in their Bible, or even religious Jews who deny the New Testament's authority, but have the Old Testament.

Work with me here, guys. I know there's gonna be fact checkers on both those, both those statements who come out and say, actually, in the general, in the main, you know what I'm saying is true here. We can't have spiritual unity.

That's the problem. We have different doctrine because it's based off of, in part, these different authorities. So you see the point. If you have a different gospel, certainly you can't have spiritual unity.

You're compromised at that point, but you can still cooperate in political endeavors and other things. So there are, there is a spectrum on this particular topic, and there are lines. Now, the question about this particular piece that Francis Chan is doing is, what lines does he have a problem with?

If you're saying, look, the Presbyterian church down the street doesn't want to do evangelism with us. I agree. Why can't we get together? We have the same gospel, do evangelism. But if you're saying the Roman Catholic church isn't doing evangelism with us, why can't we take down the walls?

Then look, you're in the wrong neighborhood. The Roman Catholic church has a different gospel than the gospel, the Protestants, and I believe the historic Christians believed in. It is not by grace through faith alone.

So for my Catholic listeners, I'm not going to go into details in this podcast, but this is a conviction of Protestants, if they're actually true Protestants, and this is not something that we're willing to compromise on.

If we are, we lose our Protestant identity. And I think the reverse goes for Catholics as well. Despite Vatican II, you still have the Council of Trent. You still have to say that people with Protestant beliefs in this area are anathema.

Okay, there might be some confusion in the Catholic church, but that confusion alone means you can't cooperate in these endeavors. So what is this documentary that they may be one do? Well, it says, look, we got to stop fracturing over these political things because we have a Christian unity.

What does it say?

The film explores Christian unity through documentary interviews, historic reenactments that reflect Catholic and Protestant leaders alike. So that's what it is, guys. We're going to get the Catholics together.

We're going to get the Protestants together. Everyone come together and get rid of your convictions on these matters, these distinctions, and even your social views. Some of which I think actually root back into theological views that are important.

Like, you know, the church shouldn't meet. COVID, the reaction to that, not a good thing. Church should meet Jesus, establish the church with the intention that they would come together. So that's actual unity.

And if you're the one that's bringing the disunity, if you start saying liquor stores can be open, but not churches, we've been through this on the podcast. But that's a social political view, but it roots back into a theological matter.

The film features theological reflections from pastor and ministry leaders. It includes deep, pivotal moments in church history. Pentecost, the Azusa Street Revival. Now that's an interesting one, because the Azusa Street Revival is the birth of Pentecostalism.

And in the Azusa Street Revival, you have a number of different forces that come together, and it goes in all kinds of different directions, most notably into Catholic circles. That's why you have charismatic Catholics.

So this was a unity, but it was a unity that led to, I think, compromise eventually. Doesn't mean everyone associated with that was compromised on the gospel. I think it's a wrong view of the Holy Spirit, but I don't think that everyone who's charismatic is obviously compromised on the gospel.

I can have great fellowship with my charismatic brothers and sisters, including people like Juan Oriesco, but that movement did make this Holy Spirit, quote unquote, experience the main barometer by which you knew someone was a Christian.

And then it downplayed these other distinctions. So it doesn't, you know, Catholics, Protestants, yeah, they disagree on justification by grace through faith alone, impute and infuse righteousness. They disagree on the nature of the canon.

They disagree on papal authority and mariology. They disagree on purgatory. I mean, these are all very important things. They disagree on all these things, but I don't know, he had the sign of the Holy Spirit.

He's doing the speaking in tongues thing. I think he's okay, right? That's what happened. These more secondary and more really tertiary, secondary matters, they became elevated to such a point they replaced the primary matters.

That's always a danger. That's always a threat to orthodoxy. So they want to use that as, hey, that's the good positive example of what this unity should look like. I don't really need to know much more, but that's where the documentary is going.

Here's another write-up on it. This is from Word on Fire, which I believe is a charismatic publication. And they reveal that it starts, the whole documentary with the story of an Italian nun named St. Elena Guerra.

Who was canonized by Pope Francis in 2024. And she had a deep devotion to the Holy Spirit. Toward the end of the 19th century, she wrote a series of letters to Pope Leo, entreating him to promote a renewal of the church and the power of the Holy Spirit.

This Leo did enthusiastically. He penned an encyclical on the Holy Spirit in which established a novena to the spirit between the Feast of the Ascension and the Pentecost. All right, so it goes to the Yezusa Street Revival.

From there, this is a Catholic-Protestant joint effort. And Francis Chan is involved in it. And it's not a huge surprise. Francis Chan has been involved with Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics and some of the IHOP people, more word of faith type, charismatic Pentecostal folks.

And I've gone up and down in the way I view, I was gonna say Pope Francis. He's not the Pope, but Francis Chan. At one time, maybe he was becoming the Protestant Pope. I mean, he was really popular in whenever his book, Crazy Love came out, so early 2000s.

And he had some good things to say in the book. It was very simple, but I think it did help some people. But since that time, I've just been kind of up and down in my evaluation of him because he's doing this weird thing over here and giving the impression that, hey, these are brothers in Christ here.

These Franciscan monks, man, they know the Holy Spirit. And then he'll say something that's better. So I'm just gonna conclude this man is so confusing at best. That's best case scenario. You can't follow him.

You can't follow someone. It's like Peter, and that's best case scenario in Galatians. If he's not clear on the gospel, if he's not clear where the boundaries are on this, then it's an association thing.

Why are you sitting over here, Peter, with the people who are saying you gotta be circumcised? Why are you giving the impression they're okay? Again, this is a fellowship. This is a connection. This is a impression one is giving that these people are just fine and not having clear boundaries about what the true gospel is.

And that's Francis Chan to me. Not a guy I could follow. Not a guy I'm interested in. I'm not saying he doesn't do good things here or there, but this is a man who, if he's not a heretic, if he's on these matters, then he's at least muddy on them.

And no endorsement coming from me on that. And I would avoid a film like this. Don't promote it. Don't bring it into your church. If people do try to bring it in, you better nip it in the bud and say, look, we have convictions.

We have theology. It doesn't mean we can't cooperate with Catholics on pro-life. It means that we have to be clear that there's no spiritual unity, though, with people who do not believe the primary doctrines that we believe, especially on the nature of Christ's work and salvation.

We're not doing a mass every Sunday to, and I'm trying to think how to phrase it in a way that Catholics would find palatable. Because Protestants do this thing where they say, well, you're re-sacrificing Christ every Sunday.

You're worshiping saints. And Catholics will come back and say, we're venerating saints. And they don't like to frame it in such a way that it's a re-sacrifice. I'm trying to remember the word they use, but it's essentially a memorial to the sacrifice.

But effectively, what they're doing, and I'm obviously a Protestant saying this, though, is they're saying that the blood of Christ does have to be spilled in an actual transubstantiation in a way that is physically the body and blood of Christ every day, whereas Protestants say, look, it's once for all finished.

There was one sacrifice. It's done. That's kind of a big deal. It's kind of a big deal to say things that definitely sound like worship to people like Mary, whether you call it veneration or not, there's only one person that we should worship, and that's God.

These are issues, guys, that, again, you can't say like, oh, we're just gonna come together. If you're really gonna come together, why not be at the same church? What's the problem there? What kind of togetherness are you looking for?

It's a togetherness where they wanna say the gospel doesn't really matter as much as this Holy Spirit experience that you can see manifested in obvious external ways, and I'm not gonna say members of the Catholic Church that they're just not necessarily Christians.

I think there are members in that church who are trusting in Christ. They don't follow all the things the Catholic Church says. They don't necessarily agree with all the doctrine, and I think there are true believers.

That's a different thing, though, than saying Roman Catholic doctrine get to pass, all right? So hopefully that's clear, and we'll keep going. Let me, you know what? Yeah, let's keep going, and then I'll take a few more questions, because along these lines, I wanna talk about another conference.

Now, I kind of have to talk about this. I've received questions about it, namely because last year at an earlier iteration of this particular conference, I was a panelist. So this is a completely different conference than the one that existed last year.

Here, I'll show you the full screen. This is Christ as King, America after Trump. Kind of interesting, America after Trump, and Trump's still got two years, over two years left, but let's see if I can, it doesn't, Dale Partridge, Harrison Smith, Calvin Robinson, Alex Stein, J .P. Sears, Joel Webben, James Fishback, Joshua Hames, okay.

These are the speakers this year, and I don't think any of these speakers are the same as the speakers that were there last year, except for Calvin Robinson and Joel Webben, which is fascinating. It definitely shows you that there is a very particular direction that presumably Joel Webben has decided to take his, I don't know if he still calls it a ministry, his platform, and it's a different cast of characters.

Now, you have to ask yourself, what's the difference? I think we all know, but I will pose the question as we discuss it before answering it myself in the way that I think it should be answered. Now, I wanna say something briefly.

Last year, when the Christ is King conference happened, I had said yes to going to the conference a year before that time, so it was, if memory serves me correctly, spring of 2024, when I had first heard about it and replied and said, sure, I'll go.

When it got closer, I did have a conversation about it. I was nervous about the direction that I saw, especially Joel going in. And I said, look, I said, let my yes be yes, I'm gonna go. And I don't think there's anything innately wrong with going to a conference, even if there's potential compromise, even if there's problems, even if it's a bad look or whatever, whatever the issue is, I don't think there's a problem unless you give a pass to that problem.

So I decided that if there were issues, I was there. And during whatever time I had to say something, I would talk about them, which if you look at the panel that I did, that's exactly what I did. And that's exactly what Steve Dace did, who was sitting right next to me.

We basically both shared our concerns with the very movement that was forming around us, the very room we were in. And we were polite, but we were also direct. And I'm trying to remember what I even said.

I think I said, well, I know one thing I did was I mentioned Christ. I mentioned Jesus. I said his name probably four or five times. I talked about the gospel, making sure that that's front and center, making sure we don't lose that.

That was one of the concerns that I had. I didn't wanna lose the orthodoxy. The other concern I think I had was I wanted to make sure that people weren't just grabbing shallow identities from the internet, but instead were rooting themselves into actual, tangible, God-produced natural identities that he's given us.

So like, you're a dad, you're a father, you're a church member, you're a member of a community, there's a local area. What happened underneath your feet? What happened in your family's history? What kinds of things are part of your story?

Where do you fit as a link in a chain of the story that God's making, spiritually, physically, nationally, whatever? Like, make sure that you know those things. For me, this has been just, I think something I've inherited, I've assumed.

And it's been now maybe three years or four that I've started to really notice that, wow, that's not the norm for everyone, especially in the online world. There's a lot of people that have fractured, broken, dysfunctional backgrounds, identities, they're looking for something to belong to.

And it's easy to find your chat group, your tribe, your thing, it's a little bit like, I think I said this in the last podcast, it's like music, right? Remember when, in the early 2000s, guys started saying, I'm a hipster and I'm gonna do the non-corporate music thing.

I like this band over here. And like, they had a whole identity based off of it. And you're like, dude, you grew up in a totally different area. Like, you've changed your accent. You've changed your entire wardrobe because of this band.

And you knew it was probably a phase, you knew, but it was also kind of damaging and harmful to just kind of drop everything that the way God wired you and the place God puts you in to adopt this. Like, you wanna be a little more gradual about these things, you wanna learn, you wanna actually be rooted.

So all that to say, I already had some of these roots. I'm not saying that, like, and I'm not trying to say like, everyone else is unstable, I'm the only functional person. That's not the message one bit.

I'm saying though that because of the nature of our society, people moving around a lot, a lot of divorces, a lot of relationships being facilitated online instead of in real life, there's, I think, a lot of short circuiting of the human interaction that God has intended for us to have.

And it's that interaction that provides for us a basis upon which we can naturally function and know our responsibilities and duties and where those things lie. So you have spiritual duties to the people of God, you have natural duties to the people who are part of your family and community.

This is something I fleshed out in my book, Against the Waves, you can go get it. I mean, I've connected all these dots and I've tried to show you this. Those are the two things I talked about. It's like, look, don't just latch on to like, I'm just white and it's a genetic thing or I don't care if you try to do it two or three steps, you're gonna do the traducian thing or I don't care.

It's just, it's sort of a shallow, like I'm becoming part of this very sort of narrow, abstract thing, because white can mean multiple things. But what I've noticed online is it sort of takes very often this very narrow abstract kind of dimension to it.

And it's not really fulfilling. Like you have a culture, you have a cuisine, you have manners and language and religion plays into this and customs and all of those things make you who you are and provide security.

So that was probably way too long. And I probably said everything I said at the conference, but I said those things, because I was like, here are the two like warning bells that I'm going to ring. Like if you start getting into ideology land where you just abstract identity and everything's rigid and you start like, it's not holistically rooted.

Identities, it's more just like I'm part of this chat group. And now this is what I'm, this is the clothing I'm going to wear. And if it's, if you lose orthodoxy as a primary identifying factor, certainly then it's not going to be Christian anymore.

It's going to go in a direction where it slides into compromise. That's basically what I said. And I hate to be, I think kind of right about this. So here, here's the concern, right? The concern with this is the big front and center is Christ is King.

So it's very overtly about Jesus Christ. Can you do a political conference that's Christ is King? I think you can, but I think it's dangerous and you got to be careful of it. Okay, let me give you an example.

I did Christianity in the founding. That was last year. It was, Stephen Wolf was there. The number of Christians, Zach Garris, a lot of people who were going to focus on various strands of Protestantism.

So we all agreed on the gospel and basic Christian doctrine, fundamental Christian doctrine. But the last speaker, I did this on purpose and I even clarified it on the podcast. I think I clarified it in the room while I was there was Paul Godfrey.

And Paul Godfrey is, has a Jewish background, but he is not a practicing religious Jew. He is, according to what he told me, he is attracted to and sees himself more as a Christian. However, Paul Godfrey has not made a profession of faith in my understanding.

I haven't seen it if he has. I don't believe he attends a particular church. He has not articulated a testimony to me. So in that situation, why did I have Paul? What did I do? I had Paul because it was an academic pursuit.

It was an academic conference. We were exploring the nature of founding era Christianity. Paul Godfrey, I invited because he is an academic who has studied these matters quite extensively. He is one of the premier conservative political thinkers and he is an advocate for Protestantism over Catholicism, Orthodoxy, even his upbringing, his Jewish identity.

He's, he advocates for Protestantism because that's what America is about. And you know what the conference was about? America is fundamentally Protestant. That was what the conference was about. So I could have a Paul Godfrey there because it's an academic pursuit.

And these things happen all the time in academic settings. Now, the challenge was the venue, which I did not choose, but the venue that was selected for this was a church. So I determined that in order to pull this off, in order to do this conference, I had to make it very clear.

Paul Godfrey is coming at this as an intellectual to enhance, to forward, to promote, to reinforce the message of this academic pursuit, which is that Christianity and Protestantism specifically is foundational to American identity.

He is not, so that's the positive. The negative is he is not coming to you as a role model for Christianity, as a Christian himself. So those, that's something that I did on the podcast. I was very aware of this and it's a prudence thing, but the line has to be there.