Stephen Wolfe Answers His Critics (Audio)

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Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, with a guest we've had on before,

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Stephen Wolfe. We're gonna talk today again about his book, The Case for Christian Nationalism.

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But it's gonna be a little different than the last videos that we did on this, where we just went over the book and I asked questions and we tried to figure out what the book was saying.

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And this is different because the book's now been out for a few months and a number of reviews have come in.

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In fact, some of you have sent me some of these reviews and I knew Stephen was gonna be working on crafting some rebuttals.

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And I wanna give him the opportunity on this podcast, since not all of you are gonna go read these reviews or Stephen's rebuttal, to let him speak to this and the response, the reception, and some of the people who are against what he's saying, what is their argument?

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Why does he disagree? And so I appreciate you giving me your time, Stephen. Welcome to the podcast once again.

01:10

Yeah, thanks for having me on. So how's it been? How's the reception to your book?

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It's one of those strange things where it's the reception on the official evangelical outlets has been largely negative, except for a couple people or a few people saying positive things, which they all got beat up for it to say something positive about the book.

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But yeah, it was one of those weird things where I'm not, I mean, usually the evangelical kind of elites go after people who are institutionally connected, who have all these various friends that they can associate his bad ideas with them.

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But I'm really not any of that. So in one sense, I'm kind of grateful that I'm this outlier who's got a lot of attention.

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But the downside is it's all been fairly negative. But it's one of those things where you know how you look at Rotten Tomatoes and it's the movie has like, it's like 99 % of the top critics say it's terrible, but then all like the popular crowd is like, this is the best movie.

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So I've gotten a lot of, overall, it's been very positive. But if you just searched my name, you'd think on Google, you'd think it'd be all negative.

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But in general, the more, I guess, the non -elite people from lower places,

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I guess, I've liked in general, so. It's interesting because I've published two books on social justice and I have two graduate level degrees from evangelical institutions nonetheless.

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And I thought the work, well, people who were kind enough to tell me what they thought who were in evangelical circles, whether they endorsed it or just privately totally talked to me about it, were raving about it, thought it was good research in both cases.

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And I'm not trying to toot my own horn. I'm just saying there's, it's weird to me that my books initially,

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I don't know if they, I don't think they went quite as high as yours did in the category. I don't know Amazon's categories, but they did shoot up pretty high initially and I didn't get any of these reviews.

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Like they just ignored it. And I'm wondering, and you tell me if you think this is off or not, but I'm wondering if, because a lot of what's come out has been, it hasn't been a positive vision.

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In fact, I wanna write something. I am in the middle of writing something that's more of a positive vision, but most of what conservatives write, if we do write something, it tends to be a critique of whatever the left is doing.

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And I'm wondering if that's why you are getting so much opposition because you did something different.

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You wrote a very positive vision for what you want to see and steps to get there. And that is a competing, you have competing purposes,

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I suppose, with the regime evangelicals. What do you think about that? Yeah, that's,

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I think the positive account, yeah, is, I think, but it also, not only that, but I think it's because they deemed it as dangerous as well.

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So they find out that this guy who has a PhD is writing a book defining

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Christian nationalism. And some of the people who saw earlier editions of it saw that it was a very large book.

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It quotes everyone from Aristotle to Calvin to Turreton.

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And so it's very well, I should say, as I'd say, grounded within the

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Christian tradition and supported by a lot of these quotes. And so I think that it was just deemed as, wow, this guy's coming to conclusions that are unacceptable.

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But he's doing it with this large book with a lot of quotations where he's offering syllogisms and all this sort of thing.

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So I think there was like this fear that it was dangerous and that it had to be kind of crushed.

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And so they brought out some of the bigger guns to do it. I don't think it was a conspiracy, but I think there was this interest that I'm not just some,

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I mean, I'm kind of an obscure guy. Not anymore you're not. Yeah, yeah. But I mean,

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I think there was this sense, and I didn't kind of tout my credibility. I'm not that sort of person. You know I'm not like that.

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I know, yeah. But I think there was that fear that, okay, this Dr. Wolf is writing this book and we have to somehow say it's dangerous and unserious and stupid or something.

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So I think that's kind of what. Yeah, no, it's interesting because you went to Canon Press.

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It publishes your book. And you would think with the kind of comprehensive academic high level work that you're talking about it, like an academic press would be interested in that kind of thing.

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And it's just interesting to me that for people like yourself who are very accomplished, who have thought deeply about these things and done a lot of academically rigorous work to form your conclusions, you're going around the guild, so to speak, to get this out there.

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And it's laymen who are buying it. Well, I mean, there's obviously pastors and professors who, actually,

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I'd be curious. Do you have people coming to you secretly, kind of like Nicodemus with Jesus by night and saying, Steve and I really liked the book, but don't tell anyone?

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Oh, I mean, yeah. One of the things about being like outwardly, openly right wing is that other people who are secretly right wing come up to you and be like, oh,

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I love your book and this and that. So I've had, yeah, dozens of people. And just even randomly,

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I was at some school function with my kids and someone walks up and says, are you Steven Wolf? And I'm like, yeah.

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It's like, oh, I love your book. So, and they're looking around. But yeah,

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I mean, there has been that. That's actually been kind of cool that people just randomly have come up to me and said, oh,

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I do like your book. Well, I got one for you. There was a guy in my church in high school who went to a speech class and they were doing some kind of like a,

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I don't know, forming a government type of speech. Like, what's your ideal government? Some topic like that. And he surprised me a little.

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He told me, oh yeah, I did this whole like Christian nationalist presentation and I used Steven Wolf's stuff.

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And this is in a public high school in New York. And so I'm wondering to what extent your book has reached, has gone in these different ways.

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But anyway, yeah, it sounds like it's going pretty well and you're doing pretty well despite some of the backlash from the more,

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I would, I don't know what we wanna call them cause I don't wanna give them a negative pejorative here but the elite evangelicals or the gatekeepers, so to speak.

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I wanna talk about some of these guys. You just wrote an article, was it yesterday?

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I think you published it on, was it Brian? Is it Brian Mattson? Is that the name? Yeah, Brian Mattson, yep.

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And you, I think I had two or three people send me his review when it came out and I don't think they read your book but they thought that this answered your book.

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And so you wrote an extensive reply to him and I know you're planning on doing that with others. Yesterday, I went and tried to just use a search engine.

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I think I just used Google to say, okay, what are the top reviews of the book? And of course the first one, you probably guessed, the first one on the list, if I Google your book and review is, you wanna guess?

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Which one do you think it is? The Young's maybe? Yeah, it's

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Gospel Coalition. Okay, yeah. I mean, I figure the algorithm pushes Gospel Coalition up to the top.

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It does, it's interesting, yeah. So The Young's review is lengthy.

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Some of them are also lengthy. Some of them are shorter but this one is one of the longer ones. And I pulled some quotes from it that I thought might be helpful for you to respond to.

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So I'll just read the first one. And this one came up in a number of reviews which is why

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I wanna start here. He says this, in a footnote, Wolf rejects modern racialist principles and denies that he's making a white nationalist argument.

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But if we cannot accept the creedal nation concept and if ethnicities are grouped by cultural similarity, it's an open question how much cooperation and togetherness blacks and whites, not to mention

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Asians and Hispanics and Native Americans will ever share or if they should even try to live and worship together.

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So the question I have is if your rejection of the proposition nation places a barrier, or I should say, does your rejection place a barrier in the way of working together with other cultures, especially in the church?

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Well, one of the problems with DeYoung's review is as I recall, he basically says, yeah,

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Wolf does have this kind of idiosyncratic view of ethnicity, which I don't think it is.

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But then when he starts talking about ethnicity, it's like he jettisons exactly how

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I describe it in the book and then starts equating it with race.

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So when I say ethnicity in the book, I'm not talking about this, something that ties into blood.

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That is, I describe it, I use a sort of, I call it a vulgar phenomenology, which is how we relate to other people and how we can kind of get along and work together in these common projects of life.

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And this involves some kind of cultural similarity like language. So if you're gonna build a building, if you're gonna build a building, you have to work together and you have to speak the same language.

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If you didn't speak, like Tower of Babel, you can't speak the same language and now you can't actually complete the project you began on.

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So there has to be some level of similarity for you to have civil fellowship in a common kind of civil project.

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But that, even though I do say there is some sense in which your ancestral connection to land matters, and you'll have to like read the book to see how

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I do this. I don't say it's according to DNA. So for him to say that it's an open question how much cooperation you have between whites and blacks and Asian and Hispanics is actually just racializing what

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I said was non -racial. And we've all had, especially as Americans growing up, we've had real friendships with people and who are very similar to us culturally with some differences who have different ancestral origins, right?

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So growing up, I had friends who were ancestrally rooted in China and rooted in Mexico and other places growing up.

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So even though these people are different by DNA, we can still actually really be, have what

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I call like civil fellowship. We can actually be a part, full members of the same project.

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But that's not to say that someone who just arrives from another country, say

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China or Mexico, can just arrive and be with us and have the full, be fully able to fellowship with us in terms of our civil project and our national project.

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It simply is just not the case. Now we can be hospitable to them. We can actually receive them, but it's gonna take time, usually generations, for these people to kind of integrate and become sort of one people, but it's not racialized.

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It's not as if I, so what DeYoung does is he actually, he essentially says that, well, we know who can get along based upon a

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DNA test. Like we'll look up a DNA test and Wolf is like a quarter Italian and Harris is not

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Italian, therefore we can't get along. Or this guy's 100 % Chinese and this guy is

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Scottish and therefore he cannot get along. But that's not at all what I argued. So I think

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DeYoung just kind of, again, he conflated this racialist idea with my account of ethnicity and it messed things up.

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But I think, so let me just address like in the church. We're Protestants and so we believe that there's a ministry of the word, which means that a minister is gonna speak up there and he's gonna use the common vernacular language.

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He's going to speak in our context, typically English. That means that the people in that church, generally speaking, in order to actually have a sort of spiritual fellowship, will have to speak

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English in the event of worship. And this is often why you had, even in like the 16th century, when there was persecution in England, English Protestants would flee to Europe and they'd go to German -speaking places or French -speaking places, but they don't, generally speaking, don't speak the other languages.

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So they'd form their own churches. They'd be called stranger churches. And they'd be actually called strangers in a way because they don't speak the same language.

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And so they'd actually have a different church. And over time they could integrate if they spoke the same language.

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But the point being though is that when there are dissimilarities on important matters, there is probably a good reason, there is a good reason to divide between different churches, simply because how do you minister to people when you can't speak their language?

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So in that sense, there is a sense in which just because another guy is a Christian is not actually good enough to say we can worship together in the same building because worship involves vernacular language.

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So, but that's not to say that someone who's Asian and a white guy can't worship in the same building because they speak the same language.

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And they can also have fellowship and encourage one another because they understand each other culturally. They can understand what a guy is struggling in his job, is to understand how jobs work in our society as opposed to other places.

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So we can understand other people's struggles because of cultural reasons. So anyway,

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I'm kind of going on long here. But the point is that I'm not talking about like a racialist divide.

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It's far more a matter of kind of on the ground similarity. Yeah, what you're talking about to me seems common sense.

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It's, and it's more organic. You can't form, I can't get you a bullet point list to show you all the ways in which let's say, from my context, we have a

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Spanish translation at my church, right? And so the few people that take advantage of that who come,

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I can see that there's a barrier though. They can't really talk with other people at the church who don't speak Spanish.

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So they're not going to be forming relationships as easily.

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And there's actually another church nearby that's been just inundated with immigrants coming from,

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I think many of them illegal from South America and so forth. And I went to a church picnic recently that they held.

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And it was just obvious it's, no one had to segregate anyone, right? No one came in and said, all right, you guys sit over here, you guys sit over here.

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It naturally happened though, that the people who could speak to each other tended to sit with each other.

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And so it was almost like you had two churches and the pastor was trying to hold these groups together through translating the sermon live.

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So he would speak in English, then speak in Spanish, right? And I can't like,

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I guess one of the things that you're saying, I think correct me if I'm wrong, is that this is one example, but there's probably like a lot of other examples.

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Like I couldn't give you a bullet point list, but there's a lot of cultural things that people share in common who have grown up with the same experiences that like even social things, what's appropriate in social situations that can be causes for offense or misunderstanding, or they just, they're barriers to fellowship with, and I don't mean

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Christian fellowship, I mean what you meant by civil fellowship with other people. And so they may choose to be in a context with people that are more like them for that reason.

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And that's naturally just how the world works no matter where you go. It's not like a, it's not what you just said about like what's been more abstract, like did you taking a

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DNA test to see if I can get along with this person. And part of my point is that this is, there's nothing wrong with this.

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I think that in the modern West, we have these like these deep anxieties about this cultural separation that somehow if they are over there and we are over here, we have to feel as if we're not being hospitable, we're not being welcome, we're not being

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Christian enough, which usually, but usually they who group together aren't actually thinking that. They are just, they just naturally are drawn to similarity and they'd go over there.

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I mean, you speak to people who grew up in rough urban neighborhoods.

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I just, I was just at the cigar bar actually of all places. And I was talking to this guy who was in his fifties and he's about to retire from a school district.

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He was a teacher and then a football coach and a counselor in school. And he was talking about how he would be, how he would counsel these young guys who could easily join gangs, had family life that was messed up.

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And as I was talking to him, I was thinking I, for several reasons, but one just culturally would not know how to communicate with these young guys in an effective way to get them not to join the gang, not to kind of be delinquents or whatever.

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But this guy does, like this guy knows how, because he was raised in that culture. He knows what to say, what to do.

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And he was the appropriate guy for the job. And so I can understand then in a church context, why he, why him and like his culture would want to form a church if the church is interested in ministering to people in this kind of, not only in things kind of eternal, but also in earthly things like not going to jail or trying to be successful in your life in some way.

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That it would be, make sense that they would actually meet together because they understand each other, common struggles, common, just this mutual understanding of what they need to do and overcome.

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And I think the same thing could be true of a lot of Asian churches that are deeply embedded in kind of an old age, like an

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Asian culture, not like Asians who have been in the United States for a long time, kind of, you know, similar.

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I can understand why there'd be Korean Presbyterian churches, Chinese, because they have unique, not only a unique language, but unique culture, unique expectations amongst each other.

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And if church is supposed to serve this, it's supposed to serve all of life.

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Like if we're not just confined church to just eternal things, but actually real tangent, like earthly things, then the churches and the people there need to know how to do that.

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They need to have a common cultural understanding and expectations for that to happen. And so that's really all I, I mean, that's actually big.

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It's, I guess, controversial, but that's all I was trying to say.

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And part of the thing is I think people should just relax. And I think that like we should critique our own like anxieties for these things, that it's okay to be different.

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It's okay that they're different. It's okay that you're different than them. But what I did push back against explicitly was, okay, when

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I say us and them, I'm not saying we white people, those black people, we white people, those

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Asian people. I explicitly don't say that. And that's because it doesn't fit with your own experience.

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Again, you've had friends who are Asians or Hispanics or blacks that are culturally very similar to you, if not the same.

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And so to say us first then, because I'm white and he's Asian, doesn't make any sense actually on the ground in life.

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It's throwing out this abstract principle of like a racial division that doesn't make any sense as life actually works.

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So that's what I'm arguing. I think if DeYoung just kind of maintained my own definition of ethnicity, he wouldn't have basically suggested

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I'm trying to do white segregation. That may be true, but I wanna challenge, well,

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I don't know if that's the core thing. Maybe it is, but one of the things he said, and I sensed this throughout a bunch of the reviews

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I read where they were critiquing you, is he says it clearly, if we cannot accept the creedal nation concept, that to me is key.

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Like, because you reject that, then well, what's the only other option? I guess it's white supremacy. That seems to be the assumption a lot of these guys have, and it makes them uncomfortable.

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As soon as you reject proposition nation, then they're like, well, what is it then? Is it Nazi Germany?

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I guess that's the only other thing if we don't have the proposition nation. And I'd like to hear you talk about that a little bit.

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If you can. Yeah, I think Americans just kind of lack the imagination because of their experience to understand how,

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I guess, a non -creedal nation, I don't think the division is between creedal and non -creedal because I think in a

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Christian nation, the statement Jesus is Lord is an essential element of a

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Christian nation. But my point is that that's not enough for actual civil fellowship.

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So, I mean, it seems obvious to me that if we, let's say we just randomly selected a bunch of true

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Christians from around the world, put them in one location, said, all right, make it work. You're gonna have a Christian nation, Christian society.

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It would just be utter chaos and it would be ridiculous. But if you went to Idaho and plucked out a bunch of random people who live in Idaho, I'm not just talking

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Moscow, Idaho, but everywhere in Idaho, you pulled out a bunch of true Christians and put them in one space, there'd be some conflict like there always is, but you'd probably be able to make it work.

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Why? They speak the same language. They're all from the same state, so there's all sorts of cultural similarities with those people.

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So, and they would all kind of affirm Jesus is Lord, but the reason why it would work as a civil community, as a civil fellowship, is because they hold these things, these very particular things in common with each other.

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And so they can get along, they can understand each other. And I think that that is just the, that's how nations work.

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And I make arguments for that in the book. And I also, I think that oftentimes the creeds that we assert, they're asserted as universal.

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So obviously Jesus is Lord is a universally true statement. It's true for every person, no matter what, and the opposite is false for everyone.

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But there's things like the West's emphasis on equality, the West's emphasis on a certain conception of liberty, especially in the modern

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West. Some of the judicial norms that we have that have developed over time from the

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Magna Carta through the English Bill of Rights, through our own Bill of Rights, all these, and then the constitutional developments that have arisen from that within the

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United States, all these things are development within a certain people group, within a certain kind of nation state, if you want to say.

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And we've been kind of raised into them and to have respect for them. And for the people who, I mean, we may not respect the

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Warren Court and other 20th century developments, but we do respect the 17th, 18th and 19th century, especially with regards to religious liberty, we respect these as developments of us, of our country, and explain who we are today.

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But those are usually very particular things. And even if they are, even if it's true that take that double jeopardy, it's not fair to, the principle of double jeopardy where if you tried for a crime and you're acquitted, you can't be tried for that same crime again.

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That's a development within the legal system that's expressed within the bill.

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It's in the Bill of Rights. Yeah, it's expressed in the Bill of Rights. But that's an actual development of the

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Western tradition into this principle that's codified. And even if we want to say that's a universal true thing that ought to be true in all places that double jeopardy is wrong, it's still a particular development of the

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West, right? And so we've adopted it and it's ours. So the point being is that even like these things we think are universal matters of justice are still these things that we as Westerners have developed and adopted ourselves in a very particular way.

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So anyway, I mean, the creedal concept, you can have a creed, but I think we should also recognize that the creed is most often affirmed by people who are actually from the place that holds the creed.

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And there's a million things like that. You just gave one example, but you could talk about why is 18 when we can now vote or 16 when we can drive, or how come we pursue marriage through dating and instead of arranged marriages.

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And I mean, all these things we take for granted. Some groups that come over here to the United States and even

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Christians who form churches, they don't subscribe to all of that. And so it's a, anyways, it's a fascinating topic.

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And I just find it sad that so many of the more, the reviewers who are in the more elite,

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I guess, upper echelons, I should say, are want to focus on this so much that they wanna imply that you're sort of adjacent to white supremacists or Nazis or something along those lines.

27:50

One more thing from Kevin DeYoung, and then maybe let's move on to another, because this is, I think, Kevin DeYoung's thesis.

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It's in the title. He says, perhaps, or sorry, he says, if critical race theory teaches that America has failed, that the existing order is irredeemable, that Western liberalism was a mistake from the beginning, that the current system is rigged against our tribe and that we ought to make ethnic consciousness more important, it seems to me that Wolf's Project is the right -wing version of these same impulses.

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So he's saying you're woke, but you're right -wing woke. What do you make of these parallels that he brings up?

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Well, how do you, how do you approach this? That, again, if he's connecting critical race theory, he's using race again, which is, again, a conflation of what

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I actually said about ethnicity. Do I think that Western liberalism was a mistake from the beginning?

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Well, okay, what beginning are we talking about? Are we talking about post -World War II? Liberalism, then yeah, it was a mistake.

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Before that, if we're talking about the more classical conception of the 17th century, well, I wouldn't say that.

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And in fact, in my chapters on America and the founding, the one chapter I have, if you want to say that America is a sort of liberal establishment or founding, then if that's what you want to call that, then

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I don't think it was a mistake, because in fact, I'm in part calling us to return, in part, not entirely, to sort of some of the founding principles.

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So now is our current system rigged against our tribe?

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Is he denying that there's a sort of negative sentiment towards white males in our country?

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Is he denying that? So is he saying that's not true? That it's not true that there is a sort of, that there are discriminatory practices within corporations, within schools, and that there's an act of hostility towards the white male?

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Is he denying that that's the case? Because that would be pretty, I think,

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I think it's disputable. And a lot of evidence can be presented that that, in fact, is the case.

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And, but the thing is, what's strange though, is that I only mentioned that in the epilogue, when

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I bring up this idea of the white male. But in terms of ethnic consciousness, I actually say that ethnic consciousness is not a racialist principle.

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I do think there should be a sort of revival of a type of ethnic consciousness, by which

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I mean not racial consciousness, but a consciousness that we as Americans are a people, and we ought to be conscious of that, and we ought to have solidarity around that, and we ought to affirm that and seek our own good.

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And what this means is rejecting some of the universal notions that lead us to go bomb other countries and spend resources and lives trying to recreate democracy in other countries.

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So that's, yeah, I think we should look inward and try to have a sort of ethnic solidarity around being an

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American. And to say this is un -American is actually kind of strange, to say that there is no desire to have a sort of ethnogenesis to become ethnic conscious as Americans.

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One of the things that held America together initially, right when the

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United States was founded was George Washington. He was a sort of prince, to use some of my language, that held the

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United States together, because everyone loved George Washington. And I think you can read in his farewell address this idea that I'm retiring finally.

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He didn't want to become president. He's like, I want to retire, but he didn't want to serve a second term. But he's like, I'm done, you know?

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And so in his farewell address, he says that, look, we need to stop having these highly local attachments, by which he meant kind of this identification with the state, which he didn't say, no, you shouldn't have any identification with your kind of state.

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But he said that we should have this sense of being Americans, that we have this common project.

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And he says, we have similar language, we have similar religion, we had a common struggle. And he's essentially saying that I'm leaving,

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I'm not going to hold things together. You have to think of yourselves as a people, and that's how we're going to proceed forward.

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And so I think that the idea, the very idea that we ought to have an ethnic consciousness as I define it, is precisely very

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American. And it describes exactly what happened in the early, kind of in, you say, the early

32:32

Republic. It was the appeal of George Washington and others, not only George Washington, but even earlier, with John Jay and Federalist Two, that we would identify as one people, not as Virginians, not as mass, you know,

32:44

Connecticutians or whatever it is that, but of course not extinguishing the identification, you know, so multi -layers of identification, but having that more general one, which would be

32:55

American. And so that's really all I'm saying, is that that's why we ought to, in America, stop importing thousands and thousands of people who are very different than us, so that we can sort out as Americans who we are as a people.

33:09

And you can't do that when you're constantly injecting foreign people who don't speak the language, who have no actual common interest in the place of the land, besides maybe economic opportunities, who have not born here, who are not born here and have that sort of native connection to the place.

33:26

And that's why, you know, and so that's why I was a critical of immigration as well. But to say that it's like,

33:33

I mean, in terms of like critical theory, I obviously disagree with a lot of the conclusions of critical race theory, but it does seem to me that there are systems in place and being in place that are going to be used to actively discriminate against not only white men, but just males in general.

34:02

And so I think that the, I do think that the impulse for conservatives to outright reject anything that would be, that would look like a critical theory,

34:15

I think is a bad move. Because we're literally in, if we are in the midst of, if we're in the middle of liberal totalitarianism right now, that there is a sort of totalitarianism, that has this crushing liberal, secular liberal, like the elements of that pervade all of our life, then that ought to be critiqued.

34:45

It would be something that we actually would not see well. It would be something that we have to think and reflect on and uncover and disclose through a sort of method that may not, yeah, so that would be called a sort of critical theory.

34:59

So I do think there can be a kind of right -wing critical theory, and I think that should develop a little more.

35:07

But in saying that, that doesn't mean I'm buying into everything they conclude or even their methods themselves.

35:13

But so - Well, there is a - Yeah, I just think it would be very dangerous.

35:18

It would be very dangerous for us to not have a certain method of approaching questions that is just very surface level and not trying to uncover the ways kind of these powers work.

35:30

Well, so I mean, the epilogue, I talk about, I talk about gynocracy, which people kind of laugh at and all that.

35:36

But it's this idea that like, there is a sort of feminine dominance in the workplace that operates subtly through kind of gendered relations, but it's also concealed behind a sort of liberal equality, you know, like, oh, we're all equals, but then the actual rhetoric employed in gender relations will actually then, is actually incredibly gendered.

36:00

And so what I'm saying is that instead of seeing, oh, we're all equal in the workplace, and look at that very surface level element of it, that we had to see, no, there's actually subtle ways in which kind of a feminine centric power actually is wielded to suppress masculinity or men in the workplace.

36:22

And so I think that's a sort of method that if we just say, oh, we're all equal in just the surface, we're actually gonna miss the dynamics that are actually in that play in these various spheres of life.

36:32

I mean, we talked about how, like the idea that the church is feminine, like that there's a feminine aspect to the church.

36:38

I'm sure you've heard this before, that people critique like that the church is not just feminist as in there's a woman preacher.

36:44

You know, the idea that a church can be feminine can actually also be complimentary.

36:49

We know these people who say they're complimentarian, but then we also know that the power is actually in the hands of the non -pastor who's the women, right?

37:00

What are we doing when we say that? That is a kind of critical theory. We're saying that the surface is actually an illusion, but what's actually happening underneath the more subtleties is actually an exercise of feminine power over masculine power, whatever.

37:15

So anyway, going on and on, but that's like the, that's why I think that we should not wholesale reject kind of the critical approach of uncovering the actual dynamics.

37:29

Yeah. Well, I mean, people have always critiqued their leaders. That's as old as, you know, the first government.

37:36

So, you know, I remember James Lindsay a few years ago told me it was in 2020 that he said, if you say taxation is theft, he said, you could call that critical state theory that libertarians are engaged in this.

37:49

And so, you know, this notion of being critical is we were critical of everything as humans, but I think on a pop level,

38:00

I've heard this argument that Kevin Young's bringing up because what they're saying is that you're just flipping the script.

38:08

You're saying, we're saying that black people are oppressed. Well, you're saying it's actually white males that are oppressed.

38:14

And so, you could just take all the placeholders and move them and we would have your philosophy, right?

38:24

Which, and that's because I have studied a little more on especially critical race theory, you know, that's where I think there are some huge key differences that maybe

38:35

Kevin Young's overlooking. For example, and we'll get to this in a moment because Neil Shenvey tries to critique you on this, but you want things to conform to a natural order, whereas critical theory in the proper sense, the academic sense, like a

38:49

Frankfurt school, that doesn't seem to be something they're tethered to. They're not looking to match a natural order.

38:56

In fact, they'll overturn the natural order. This is the tool they're using to do it, right? So, they start off with that assumption that we don't want that.

39:04

We want this egalitarian order that we're going to produce and by means of critical theory.

39:10

And then, of course, implementing postmodern standpoint theory and just other things that are way out of step with I think what you're saying, but that's the main one in my mind.

39:22

And maybe we can just jump there right now because I had a question based on Neil Shenvey's review.

39:29

I won't even read his quote because people can go read it if they want. I'll just ask you the question that came to my mind as I was reading his review.

39:35

Is something good of itself simply because it's natural? And if natural affections conflict, how do we choose which one to entertain?

39:48

Yeah, so, I mean, there's different ways you can take the term natural. So, you can think of what is natural to us with regard to what is good for us.

39:56

And that's how I define it within the book.

40:02

So, if Adam, who is in a state of integrity, is if he followed the principles of his nature as created, then he would be righteous.

40:13

He would not have fallen. And so, that's what I meant by nature, that there's also the use of the word as we are by nature sinful, which is in a sense an improper use of nature.

40:27

Improper doesn't mean bad or wrong, but it just means that it's referring to sort of these vicious habits that we have that are inclined because of sin.

40:38

But yeah, I mean, it's, so that's what I mean. And the, yes, state the question again.

40:46

Well - I think that that grounds like the principle, but what was the more particular? Yeah, so, well, Shenve says things, he asked questions like, well, because Wolf says it's good to desire to live in one's own tribe, is an

40:57

American Christian man wrong to pursue a godly Sudanese woman as a spouse? And so, I'm just at, because the assumption he's making is, you're saying there's these rigid, natural order habits, or lanes we should run in.

41:13

And if we get outside that we're outside of God's will. And so, he's saying you're absolutizing this.

41:20

What about, what about exceptions, I suppose, to this? And what about sinful desires that you might have?

41:26

Aren't those natural too? And so, I'm wondering if he's just using a different natural in a different sense than the way you're using it.

41:33

Yeah, I mean, I'm also talking about sort of collective duties as well.

41:39

It's not just, it's that we are drawn to similar things.

41:46

And, but that's, but we're drawn to those similar, to similar people, because by nature, because being drawn to similar people enables you to live well.

41:59

And that's, and not only you, but also you with others. So, I'm very clear that I'm not, I don't have this very individualist kind of conception where we can all be isolated, isolated individuals.

42:09

And, but we actually need each other to live well. And so, our being drawn to similarity is a necessary element of human society so that we can, being drawn, like we talked earlier, to someone who speaks the same language.

42:24

The reason for that is it's natural to us because that's necessary for a community to live well.

42:31

Now, does that admit of times where you could, say, marry someone who is actually different than you for the society?

42:40

So, that is actually possible. And there's nothing inherently sinful about doing that.

42:48

That if you are, I mean, the West has, in fact, one of the unique things about the West is that we have been fascinated with non -Western cultures.

42:59

It's one of those, this is what Roger Scruton has talked about, is that we have been fascinated by, in a way, the other.

43:07

We've been fascinated by what is dissimilar to us. And that's his way of saying the

43:12

West is great in a sense. So, there's nothing wrong with that, having this appreciation, love, and even kind of combining with what's dissimilar.

43:22

But my point is that we're drawn by nature to that because it's for a good collectively.

43:29

Now, again, we could then say you guys are different and you can be incorporated through hospitality among us and you're dissimilar.

43:40

And there's nothing wrong with that. So, I'm not absolutizing that, such that we can't ever relate or combine in some sense with people who are dissimilar.

43:52

I'm just saying, by nature, as collective social beings, it is something we are drawn to,

43:57

I guess, in aggregate. And it's good. It's good at a collective level. It's good that individuals are drawn to similarity.

44:04

But that doesn't mean that you couldn't have... But that doesn't mean it's absolutized as you ought to in every single case.

44:12

It means that you ought to, as a collective duty, seek for the ethnic kind of preservation of your people, which could include assimilation of people who are dissimilar.

44:27

Okay, so, I mean, this is like, it gets complicated because it's like individual actions versus kind of a collective duty.

44:34

But essentially what I'm saying is that I'm relativizing or it's a relative duty to seek the sort of solidarity of your people.

44:44

So, it's not an absolutized thing. And this at the individual level, but anyway. Yeah, I don't know.

44:50

That makes some sense. Well, to me, it's just common sense in a way.

44:55

Yes, I overuse that term, I suppose. But you can look at patterns of people, like for instance, even transportation.

45:03

Is it natural to drive to work if given that arrangement? Yeah, most people do.

45:10

Is there someone who likes to be physically fit and ride their bicycle? Sure. But that's, it's not like it's wrong to do what's outside of the norm or the convenient.

45:22

So, I think that's kind of similar to what you're saying that there's these general patterns and that these aren't mistakes and these aren't the product of chance that there's something wired within us collectively to pursue things a certain way.

45:40

Well, that's actually a good example because they're a good analogy to what I'm getting at. So, when we drive to work, we can accommodate that those one or two people who like to ride their bike.

45:52

I mean, it's a little, you know, you're driving in the car, it's a little annoying. You guys go around and sometimes you don't wanna hit them. They're a hazard on the road, you know?

45:59

Thanks. I mean, they are. So, we as drivers can accommodate them, can accommodate these bikers.

46:11

But if suddenly half the people decided to ride their bike to work, it would be this hazard that might require a lot to say, no, you can't ride your bike on that road.

46:21

Because then there'd be all these cars and all these bikes and then people eventually are gonna get hit and it'd be unsafe.

46:29

So, that's just an example of where you can accommodate like those who kind of diverge from this norm with graciousness and even say, hey, there's variety.

46:40

You know, there's some variety here. But the moment you kind of inject like a significant difference into the system, it creates actually all sorts of problems.

46:50

And so, I think, and so you can, so in that sense, there's like this, I don't know if people have a duty to drive or whatever, but there's some duty there in that case to arrange yourselves so that everyone can kind of accomplish what they're up to.

47:10

Let's go, let's jump to Andrew Walker, if that's all right. His critique of your book, his was an outlier.

47:18

It was different than a lot of the other ones. And I'll just read for you a quote from him. This is a paragraph.

47:24

He says, Wolf's argument goes something like this. Government has a duty to promote true religion.

47:30

Christianity is true religion. Therefore government has a duty to promote Christianity. The internal logic of this syllogism works.

47:37

It's rational, but that's different from making an exegetical case for the argument or demonstrating that it fits with scripture's own covenantal developments.

47:45

This again is what makes this book as frustrating as it is creative. As a matter of pure argumentation, it's not hard to make logical syllogisms.

47:54

For example, four -legged animals can run in the Kentucky Derby. Unicorns have four legs. Unicorns can run in the

47:59

Kentucky Derby. The problem is while this argument is valid, unicorns do not exist. Go back to the original syllogism.

48:07

Wolf may assert that the government has the duty to promote true religion, but he never argues that point from the

48:12

Bible from any clear command. It's just assumed. So now this actually is similar to statements others have made.

48:21

So maybe you can respond to both where they say that you're just assuming theology and you're not actually doing the hard exegetical work, but Walker's making the extra step of saying, actually, you're just outside the

48:32

Bible completely here and you're just relying totally on logic and not the Bible. So is that true? Well, first of all, it's not assumed.

48:43

It's just assumed. So he says he never argues that point from the

48:49

Bible from any clear command. And that's actually a true statement. So I don't, that argument would be that the government has a duty to promote true religion.

49:00

And that's because that premise, which is a major premise, I argue is actually true by nature.

49:07

It's true by nature. So I argue with it, I argue for that from reason.

49:13

And what's frustrating about Walker's comment here, is that he says, it's almost as if he didn't read like the several pages where I make the argument.

49:23

And he says, just assumed. Well, I guess, well, it's not assumed. I explicitly, I think it's like nine different arguments in the book.

49:30

For that premise, that government should promote religion. And it's arguing essentially from reason, or at least from premises that Christians, I think ought to accept it.

49:39

But whether they sound or not, I mean, it's just false to say that I assumed.

49:47

And to say that I'm not biblical enough, this is a response to the book that I think is a really bad response.

49:55

It's a poor, it's a very kind of, in fact, kind of silly. But it's also has a very popular appeal to it.

50:01

So, okay, Wolf's making an argument for Christian nationalism but he doesn't quote scripture enough. He doesn't exegete scripture.

50:06

Becky says he's not gonna exegete scripture. And I do maybe two or three times in the book.

50:12

And to the average person, that sounds like crazy. Well, if you're gonna write a Christian political theory, you have to appeal to scripture.

50:22

But it's actually not a very good response to the book. It's not a good reason to reject the book because I explicitly say what

50:29

I'm up to. And that is I'm assuming the doctrinal formulations of the reformed tradition.

50:35

And specifically in the early centuries, the first three centuries after Reformation, 15th, 16th, 17th, excuse me, 16th, 17th, 18th.

50:43

And I'm assuming these formulations and I explicitly say who argued them.

50:50

And if you wanna see the exegesis, then you can go to those books and see what

50:56

Turton said or Calvin said, or Vermeule said. I mean, you can all look it up for yourself. But what

51:02

I wanted, I wanted a precise and developed theological system that's articulated in a coherent and systematic way as the framework from which to do

51:15

Christian politics, to do a Christian political theory. And so I assumed it.

51:22

It would be like people, imagine if I were to write a book that was Trinitarian Christian politics.

51:29

Instead of reformed, I was somehow gonna apply the Trinity to Christian politics. Would I have to then write a thousand page book defending the doctrine of the

51:39

Trinity as it's from scripture and how it's articulated? Would I have to do that upfront to write a hundred pages or would it be enough for me to do 10 pages or 15?

51:49

So part of the reason why I did this and I just assumed things is one,

51:55

I have respect for the theological discipline, which means that it's not something that any guy with a PhD in political theory can just pick up and be a theologian.

52:03

So I have respect for the discipline. And two, I respect for the guys who codified the reformed tradition up to the 17th century.

52:12

And so if I'm going to make a Christian a reformed political theory, political thought,

52:17

I'm going to assume reformed theology. So if you don't like, if you don't affirm reformed theology, then as I say in the book, you may not agree with my conclusions.

52:25

I mean, I say that straight up. But if you are reformed and you take seriously your tradition, well, then you have to take seriously the major positions in that tradition.

52:36

And those are the positions I assume. And the positions that are not the majority but are disputed in the tradition, like seriously disputed,

52:45

I argue for them. So like I make an argument that civil government would exist in the prelapsing or pre -fall state.

52:53

Like in the state of integrity, had Adam not fallen, there would have been civil government or civil subjection, however you want to call it.

53:00

Now that's rejected by people like Luther. Martin Luther rejected that.

53:07

Augustine rejected that, as I understand. And then some other people did as well. But other people did affirm it.

53:15

So people like Aquinas affirmed it. And some Protestants others. So there's a dispute over it.

53:21

So instead of just citing Aquinas, which I do cite Aquinas, but instead of just citing Aquinas and saying, oh, I'm gonna assume it.

53:27

No, I actually make arguments for it. And I have like maybe 15 pages or maybe fewer than that, arguing for that conclusion.

53:34

And so, yeah. And the other thing too, is that I say that political theory, even

53:44

Christian political theory, the foundation of it are, the foundation is our natural principles.

53:52

So natural principles underlie our Christian political theory. And grace, the truths of grace are then applied.

54:00

So like when I say government has a duty to promote true religion, that statement I say is a naturally true statement.

54:06

That was true prior to the fall, it's true after the fall, it's true after grace. And how do you apply that?

54:13

Well, you apply that by saying what is true religion, which is Christianity is true religion, which that is truth of grace that we all affirm.

54:21

But again, the foundation was that natural principle. And natural principles are the sort of things we can know and argue from by reason.

54:31

And they can be argued through philosophically and also scripturally, but I chose to do the philosophy side.

54:38

So I don't know if that's gonna satisfy everyone, but whatever.

54:44

That's what I did. Yeah, so I mean, I don't know exactly where Andrew Walker's coming from with this, but there's the word that came to my mind as I was reading it was biblicalism.

54:58

Like, I don't know if he's a biblicalist or if he, you know. Yeah. No, he's not though.

55:06

He's all about natural laws. That's why this thing. Oh, see, you've read more than I have then. But yeah, he's all about, he's like a

55:12

Protestant natural law guy. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. That's why I was actually really surprised that he went there.

55:22

Because he, as a natural law guy, he should know that there, that you can have conclusions from reason and conclusions from faith.

55:31

And if you do scriptural argumentation, that like sound reason, so sound reason and sound exegesis on the same question would lead to the same answer because reason is from God, faith is from God.

55:46

And you can't have these two instruments of God lead to opposite or contradictory conclusions.

55:52

That doesn't make any sense. So somehow God gave us ability to reason, make a conclusion with using that reason soundly, somehow contradicts things of faith.

56:00

That doesn't make any sense. So what Walker could have done, he could have said, well, from scripture, proper scriptural exegesis contradicts

56:12

Wolfe's conclusion of reason. And so then therefore

56:18

Wolfe's conclusion is wrong. But then, I mean, you can, I guess you can stop there if you want, but then if you want to actually have a complete critique, you then say, okay, something went wrong in Wolfe's reasoning.

56:30

It's not that reason itself leads to falsity. It's that bad reason leads to falsity.

56:37

And so let's go figure out where Wolfe went wrong. But he says, oh, it was just assumed, which is actually false when

56:44

I make nine arguments for the conclusion that he's saying I'm assuming. Right. Yeah, I mean, there's sort of,

56:50

I think there's a line he says it was more logical than biblical or something, which I think just caused a lot of people to scratch their heads and be like, well, shouldn't they dovetail, shouldn't they be complimentary?

57:01

So no, that's a good response. And I think that's where Shen V also kind of, one of the places at least he went off the tracks a little bit was on these natural relationships is kind of assuming that there can be this conflict that you could, because sin is a natural thing, but that's not what you're saying.

57:20

You're not saying, you're saying within the bounds of God's established order, with good ends in mind and that kind of thing, you're not saying that any urge you have could be a disordered urge is natural.

57:37

Yeah, well, and let me just say that what's operating here in my work here is that the law of God or what

57:47

God says we ought to do is something that is actually suitable for who and what we are.

57:54

So it's not an arbitrary, or as theologians say, adventitious set of commands.

57:59

Do this, don't do that, as if we're just a pack of meat and that's it.

58:05

And then God just says, do this, and it's arbitrary in relation to what we are. But actually what

58:10

God says you ought to do is suitable for our very nature. It's suitable for our impulses, it's suitable for our desires, it's suitable to our reason, it's suitable to all of our faculties.

58:22

Now, sin, of course, corrupts those faculties, and so we can actually do what we ought not to do.

58:30

But the idea here though, is that when we are as human beings acting properly humanly or acting proper to what we are, we're actually, when we have impulses that are actually, that arise fundamentally from what we are as created, those impulses and inclinations and instincts will lead to what is actually for our good.

58:55

It will lead to us to do what is right, and to do what is right is always for our good. And so, yeah,

59:04

I think, I get the sense that some people, they wanna think of Christian ethics as nothing but the set of arbitrary commands that we follow.

59:13

When actually, whenever we're obeying God, we're actually obeying, in a way, our own nature as created.

59:20

We're obeying who and what we ought to be. We're being human. We're exercising the very faculties that God gave us.

59:30

This is one of my critiques of theonomy too, by the way, but that's - That's for another episode. That's another episode.

59:36

So there are two reviewers I wanna get to that I read, and I think we're gonna save the best for last.

59:45

So we'll get to Peter Lightheart at the end, because he makes some very serious charges. But Mark David Hall, who

59:51

I've had on this podcast, and respect much of the work he's done, he says that Wolfe has written a provocative book, but it is one whose arguments will appeal only to a handful of idiosyncratic patriarchal

01:00:04

Calvinists who reject the American founding and desire to return to church -state relations as they existed in the 16th and 17th centuries.

01:00:13

So are you a patriarchal Calvinist who rejects the American founding? Is that what you are?

01:00:19

And then have you seen other... Is the appeal broader than who he says are going to wanna read it?

01:00:30

If that makes sense. How do I respond to that? No, yeah, it does. I think that what

01:00:35

Mark has failed, which is not an unreasonable failure, even though I think

01:00:40

I'm pretty clear, he has failed to distinguish between the principles that I lay out and the possibilities of those principles and the prudential application of those principles.

01:00:58

So it is true that I say that it's possible that you can, in a sense, that it's possible, according to the principles, to actually execute heretics.

01:01:09

And I appeal, I basically say that that's what everyone believed in the 16th century. Well, not everyone, but that's what a lot of people believe.

01:01:17

But then I say, but even though it's possible, according to the principle, that may not always be the most prudent.

01:01:25

And so what I'm doing though is, again, I'm distinguishing principle, possibility and what's prudent for the moment.

01:01:31

So obviously principles can allow us to do all sorts of things, but that doesn't mean it's wise.

01:01:37

And so if you understand that framework, when you apply what I'm saying, and you apply it to the

01:01:43

American founding, then you can see that, well, you can apply those principles differently.

01:01:49

And part of my, the last chapter, prior to the epilogue, is precisely me showing that, which is saying like early on, there was division between the

01:02:00

Congregationalists and the Baptists, there was tension between them. And, but then it culminated in 1717 or something, when

01:02:09

Cotton Mather gave an ordination sermon for a Baptist in a Baptist church.

01:02:15

And so now there's a sort of togetherness, a recognition of the mutual solidarity in Christ.

01:02:21

And that culminated, I can argue, to the founding where the idea was, it was an expansion of Protestant principles where we can affirm that you're a

01:02:30

Christian, you're a Christian, you're a Christian. It's not a matter of alignment to an institution. And so that went from there.

01:02:35

So basically the idea of religious liberty in the American founding era was still very

01:02:41

Protestant. It was not a, it did not violate the principles of Protestantism, even classical

01:02:48

Protestantism, where they even execute heretics, but it was actually an application, given experience and prudence on what's proper given religious diversity.

01:02:58

And so that, I mean, so that's the, so that's, the argument was, you can disagree with it, but the argument was that the same principles were applied to the founding era, and, but they were applied in opposite ways, given the experience and the circumstances at the time.

01:03:18

So why was there no, well, why was there a first amendment that said no religious establishment?

01:03:24

Well, because you have the congregationalists were in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the

01:03:29

Anglicans were in Virginia, and they're Roman Catholics in Maryland. Right, right, right. And so here we are coming together. So why would there be, say, the no established at the federal level?

01:03:37

Well, because there's diversity. And from the experience of the wars of religion and religious strife, that actually is counterproductive.

01:03:47

So me fighting and wanting to go war, go to war with my, because they're

01:03:52

Anglican and because I'm congregationalist or I'm Presbyterian, the problem with that is it actually is self -destructive, and we can actually get along, especially in American context, we can get along without bloodshed.

01:04:06

We can actually just learn to let live and actually be, recognize each other as brothers in Christ.

01:04:13

And so, but again, I think that the same principles of Protestantism just experience circumstances and being good

01:04:20

Americans. Anyway, so maybe that answers the question. I'll just leave it at that. So I guess the thing is, if you take the entire work, as I argue, and as I argue,

01:04:34

I think clearly, then it should appeal to Americans. It should appeal to patriarchal

01:04:41

Calvinists who like idiosyncratic things, but also see that it's consistent with the church -state relations that occur in 1780s and decades following.

01:04:52

You know, and I don't know why he wrote that exactly. What I was wondering is whether or not maybe the creedal nation thing was part of that as well.

01:05:03

Cause I have a suspicion that Mark kind of leans that way a little bit. And I'm wondering if that, cause that does change the way that you look at America and what it is.

01:05:17

So, but anyway. Yeah, definitely. I think that might be actually part of it. Yeah. Well, let's get to the big one.

01:05:27

Not the big one, as far as notoriety. I doubt most of the people on this podcast know who this is, but this particular critique from Peter Lightheart was probably from all the ones

01:05:39

I read, the most aggressive. And I want to read for you some quotes. Man, I don't even know where to start.

01:05:46

There's two that I want to read here that are the main ones. Okay. Cause he, I mean, he talks about how basically you have a different Christ and it,

01:05:53

I mean, it gets, but the two main ones are this. He says, for Wolf, the voltgeist is a more powerful unifying force than the helligeist.

01:06:04

I think I'm, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. In the church, it's the Holy Spirit is what he's saying.

01:06:10

As much as in the state, even in this sacred realm, blood is at the end of the day, thicker than water.

01:06:16

Wolf does Christian political theory as if Pentecost never happened, as if the church didn't exist.

01:06:23

Why don't we handle that one and then we'll get to the next one, which is even more serious. So are you doing political theory as if Pentecost never happened and as if the church never existed?

01:06:33

Well, no, I, this is, I, this is where theologians drive me crazy because theologians are, they're kind of in their little, they're cloistered in their office, writing, reading the

01:06:48

Bible and writing, writing, writing theology, trying to interpret the Bible. But most of them never actually built anything that is actually out in the world.

01:06:59

You are very right about that. That is so true. They have never cooperated in a project that required, not all of them, but this goes back to what

01:07:12

I said before. Yes, there is a church and that church is the, you know, the universal Catholic church as the

01:07:19

Protestants that understood it, which is the people who profess Christ all across the world. Of course that exists and they're from all tribes, tongues and nations.

01:07:27

And that, we can call that the church. And it's not the Roman Catholic church, but it's the church as we call it the universal

01:07:34

Catholic church. But as I said earlier, I do political theory.

01:07:42

And he says, as if the church didn't exist. Well, again, I mean, I'd asked Lightheart to let's do a random plucking of different Christians from around the world, from every different part of the world and put them into the same place right now.

01:07:56

There'd be a hundred, you know, dozens of different languages or hundreds, how many you want, maybe thousands of different languages.

01:08:04

And we'll all look at each other and maybe make some sign of the cross. And we'll all think, let's make this work.

01:08:12

And Lightheart can lead it, go for it. You make that civil project work, but it's absurd.

01:08:20

But this is, I think that, I think that the theologians lead

01:08:25

Christians into these pious sounding arguments. But because we don't actually think through what this means, like how this would work.

01:08:36

We think that like, I have more similarities with someone who lives like in some, like in Africa than I have with like my secular neighbor.

01:08:49

Like I have more, and that sounds pious sounding. And there is a sense in which I have similarity with that person in Africa than I do with my secular neighbor.

01:09:00

But there are other similarities where I could go to my neighbor and say, hey, I need you to help me put up, build this goat shed or something like that.

01:09:07

There are ways that even though he would deny Christ, that we can communicate to actually build this.

01:09:14

Whereas a guy in a foreign country, I won't go speak his language and we actually can't cooperate as efficiently.

01:09:21

So if you just think through stuff, like I think by what I'm saying to people is that when theologians talk about politics and it sounds very pious, we should actually think through what this means and how it would work.

01:09:38

You know, and most of the time, these people that it's just simply wouldn't work. It wouldn't work at all.

01:09:43

I mean, are we gonna have, let's have a, well, so is the church going to have, let's have the fire department and we're gonna put people at different tribes, tongues and nations in this fire department and they're all gonna be firemen.

01:09:57

Is that gonna work? Or do you need firemen to speak the same language, have the same kind of culture and routine?

01:10:03

I mean, not perfect culture, you know what I mean? It just doesn't make any sense. And I do argue like there's a vulcanized, there's a people and the people in place and they have a connection and they can be

01:10:14

Christian and that's good. But I mean, yeah, but Whiteheart, I mean,

01:10:21

Whiteheart does this kind of stuff all the time. So he says things that sound pious, but they're actually just absurd. I remember in seminary,

01:10:28

I don't know how many times I heard in chapel or wherever that this formula given that, well, the right is to right, the left is to left.

01:10:39

You can't form a society on ethno -nationalism. You can't form a society on these aggrieved groups, necessarily.

01:10:49

So we have unity in the church. That would be like the end of the sermon is like, this is where we have unity. And I always thought like, well, that's dumb.

01:10:57

Like is it, I mean, it sounds really nice and everyone's like, oh yes. Like it makes us feel like we're the best.

01:11:04

Like we see on CNN or Fox News or any people arguing and it's like, we transcend this.

01:11:09

We're not part of this. We have unity. But at the end of the day, ecclesiastical or church unity that you have is also of a very different nature than the kind of unity that you would need for a political project.

01:11:26

And anyway, that's my own soapbox, I suppose. But this kind of language is something that I see so constantly.

01:11:33

It's, I'm almost immune to it, but it doesn't seem to ever go away. It's always there.

01:11:39

It's very similar to something Kevin DeYoung said about you. He said that you prioritize the nation over the church.

01:11:45

And, you know, I immediately started getting those, the memories of these things that I've heard in seminary coming back to me.

01:11:55

Well, yeah, I mean, that's the kind of thing that like they, as Americans, they assume that we can just kind of, that we can kind of bring people over and assimilate kind of, which is kind of true, but they don't realize that there is an assimilation into something, there's assimilation into a nation.

01:12:17

Also, like you mentioned DeYoung on that. I mean, they never define what they mean by like the church. Like what is the church?

01:12:24

And this is why - I separate it into there's instituted church, there's the visible, and then there's the invisible church.

01:12:31

And having those distinctions really matters when we say the church and the nation.

01:12:38

So, I mean, you can have like the visible church, it manifests itself among different nations and instituted churches are in nations.

01:12:49

And then for the invisible church, then you can have spiritual fellowship in a sense with everyone, regardless of nation in a kind of a deeply spiritual sense.

01:13:00

But whenever you talk about the church and the nation, like what do you mean by the church? I think this is Lightheart's problem as well. But -

01:13:07

Well, generally, I think, now I don't wanna speak for Lightheart or DeYoung on this. I just know in my experience, generally

01:13:14

Revelation 7 is somewhere invoked or that's what they're thinking is, well, we have unity of every tribe, tongue, nation here.

01:13:21

There's neither June or there's Greek. And so, and obviously that's a picture of the universal church.

01:13:27

And then they often will apply that to a local congregation. And they'll say, we have this here and -

01:13:37

Speak English language. Right, right. It's always English, right? Oh yeah, we only speak English here.

01:13:42

You're only singing English hymns, right? Songs from a certain tradition. Even if it's a tradition that's only 10 years old, that's

01:13:50

CCM music or something. It's still part of a, it's an offshoot from an English tradition.

01:13:56

And so anyway. Well, let's get to another quote from Peter Lightheart because this is, in my mind, when

01:14:02

I had to go back and reread this, cause I just thought, he didn't say this, did he? He did. Wolf's dualism truncates and so distorts the gospel.

01:14:12

What's new in the gospel, Wolf says, is the promise of eternal life, the forgiveness of sins, deliverance from the power of sin.

01:14:20

Yes, true. But the gospel is fundamentally the announcement of the coming kingdom, the proclamation that the father has sent his son at his right hand.

01:14:32

So this is, in my mind, the most serious charge. Cause what he's saying is that you're, essentially you have a false gospel.

01:14:39

Cause if you're distorting the gospel, if you're truncating the gospel, if you're, which to me says, he's saying you're leaving something out.

01:14:47

You're dividing the gospel up and there's one part of it that you're not taking with you.

01:14:53

If that's true, if you don't have the whole gospel, then what you have is not the gospel really.

01:14:59

It can't save people, I would think. So, I mean, I have my own thoughts on this. I just really want to hear what you have to say though, first, how do you respond to this charge?

01:15:07

And I don't know if you feel the weight of that charge. I mean, this is kind of a lightheart being lighthearted and his followers think this is great.

01:15:19

This sort of thing. If you open my book and you see what doctrinal positions

01:15:28

I take, you will see that I cite dozens of reformed theologians. That I even cite people who are not reformed.

01:15:37

That is even counter -reformation Roman Catholics and Aquinas and Augustine.

01:15:44

I cite all these guys for my theological positions. So, it just simply is the case that if Lightheart wants to say that it's like a sort of another gospel, that he's literally condemning the theology of practically the tradition he claims to be a part of, which he has done.

01:16:03

I mean, he hasn't condemned exactly, but he does have this thing where he wants to always critique the old tradition. You know, he calls himself a reformed evangelical theologian, but he rejects central doctrines of the reformation.

01:16:15

But anyway, I mean, just simply that's the case. I think that if you think that Lightheart is right about this and it distorts the gospel, and even like you said, has a sort of another gospel, then you have to say that that's true of Luther, of Calvin, of most of the post -reformation theologians like Turretin, Maistrich, Vermeely, Junius.

01:16:39

I mean, I can just go through all the lists. And it goes all the way up into Charles Hodge into the 19th century and R .L.

01:16:45

Dabney. You can do the same. You can just go on and on and on. You kind of get the impression that Lightheart and his followers are extreme sectarians, which if you listen to some of their rhetoric in their very assured kind of denunciation of these quote dualisms, then it's essentially

01:17:09

Lightheartism versus the Christian tradition. And not only,

01:17:15

I mean, the idea of dualism is that dualisms are just something that's been a key feature of Christian theology prior to Augustine.

01:17:24

I mean, this is not something just created from in, it's not something created from,

01:17:31

I don't know, in like the 16th, 17th century when they started reading Aristotle. It was just something that was thoroughly within the

01:17:40

Christian tradition. So, I mean, I don't know what else to say. It's one of those, again, it's one of those things where if you're ignorant,

01:17:46

I mean, I just have to say directly, if you're ignorant of the Christian tradition, then you're gonna find Lightheart's critique,

01:17:53

I guess, winsome or solid. But if you do know the

01:17:58

Christian tradition, you would just shake your head and say, well, that's sectarian. Like that's remarkably arrogant for someone to say.

01:18:06

And then, I mean, really, in some way, it's like an honor to me. It's like, he's condemning me, but then in so doing,

01:18:13

I join every big name on your shelf in theology in his critique as well.

01:18:21

So, I mean, I don't know what else to say about it. It's, I get kind of, I'm obviously kind of frustrated by this argument.

01:18:30

The big frustration I have with this sort of thing is that it plays up on people's ignorance.

01:18:37

I mean, I just have to say like, it's like this populist appeal to people who say, oh,

01:18:43

Wolf just brings in these dualisms or Wolf doesn't have, like he has a truncated gospel and like, oh yeah, that's gotta be true because this and that.

01:18:52

But it's just people who are ignorant of the fact that I'm literally assuming and, or at least

01:18:58

I'm either assuming or taking the positions of people, like the most common, like extremely common positions in tradition.

01:19:08

Anyway, I'll just, I don't know, any follow -up? Does that answer the question enough?

01:19:14

Yeah, it's helpful. You'll probably get some hate mail from his followers or maybe some of the other followers of some of these men,

01:19:21

I don't know, but I think it's helpful. And I wanted to give you this opportunity because you have been taking it from all sides, just about.

01:19:30

I mean, in those upper levels, I would say, everyone seems to wanna denounce this book if they have a platform that's academic or,

01:19:40

I don't know if, there's only a few, we'll say, in the upper echelons that are publicly supportive of what you're doing, but yet you have so many who are in the pews that are hungry.

01:19:54

That's the thing that strikes me is that they want someone to figure out what we're supposed to do or what ideally

01:20:02

Christians, what a Christian state should look like, what we should be pursuing, and they don't hear it from their pulpits.

01:20:09

They don't get straight answers. And so you're kind of, like, there's this vacuum that you've filled, and it's like, you know,

01:20:16

I guess what I'm struggling with a little, I was like thinking, do they want this vacuum filled with their stuff or do they just want it empty?

01:20:24

Like, there's nothing there. And that's where the secular, like this principle pluralist idea where secularism kind of is part of the state that controls the state.

01:20:36

Is that what they actually want? And I'm starting to come to the conclusion more, I'm not saying all these reviewers, but with the reason that you've had so much backlash is because perhaps people actually do want that, the

01:20:49

Christians in the upper echelons. That may be, they're ingratiating themselves to a secular state perhaps, or at least there's,

01:20:58

I don't even know how to phrase this. You've probably thought about it more deeply than I have. Yeah, I mean, I do think there is,

01:21:03

I said this on Twitter maybe a month ago or so, but I think there is like a, like you can say really big and bold things.

01:21:10

You ever seen that, like there's videos of like two dogs that are barking at each other behind a fence and they open the fence and now they're all friends.

01:21:17

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, that's a not perfect example, but I think there is something like that going on, not between Christians, but in the sense that Christians exist in liberalism and they have this big, bold presence, like we're gonna do this for, and take over and all that, but they're not actually serious so much as they're just forming like a sort of identity within liberalism.

01:21:41

Like they let us have these views and now you have this tribe, but you're not actually going to, like you're not actually going to act to make that happen.

01:21:50

And if you did end up having it somehow fall in your lap, you wouldn't even know what to do with it and you probably, it would destroy itself because you don't actually, you didn't design your political, your

01:22:02

Christian political thought to actually be successful as a, in practice, like in when you have power.

01:22:12

So I think there is some of that going on. Certainly that's like the very kind of pious sounding talk.

01:22:18

But yeah, I do think that's - Yeah, once they get elected to public offices, like now what? Okay, so. Yeah, and I don't think that's true with everyone, but again, like if you try to make like the most pious sounding political thought and then when you think about it, it doesn't make sense, that's a good indication that they're really just relying on this liberal order that lets you believe weird things.

01:22:43

And you have a tribe, but you're not actually serious about really taking over and asserting power and all that.

01:22:51

Well, we've gone pretty long actually. I wanna give you the final word though. Is there anything that you wanna say, things that you wanna respond to that I haven't brought up?

01:23:00

I mean, what I wanted to say, I forgot to say it, but it's, like why am

01:23:05

I getting hit from all sides? I've thought about this. I think because the book, one, it assumes like Protestant retrieval stuff.

01:23:16

So that's like in the Davenant proud wheelhouse and I've benefited tremendously from various people in that.

01:23:24

But those people also tend to be kind of squishes with regard to ethnic stuff.

01:23:30

And so here I have a chapter on ethnicity that makes them uncomfortable. Okay, so then they don't wanna then associate with that.

01:23:37

And then, you know, Little John writes a Christian nationalism is not racist article, which is really boring.

01:23:44

And so you have that side and then you have the side that likes being transgressive, but they are theonomists, they are reconstructionists, they're like F, like a federal vision light sort of people or a hardcore federal vision people like Lightheart.

01:24:00

So they wanna be like a sort of transgressive, but they come out from very different starting points and they don't like those starting points.

01:24:09

So I'm getting here from that side. And then there's the like the typical people, like the people who are essentially like the neo -Anabaptists like Russell Moore, I don't know, he has a comment on the book, but that sort of person knows that crowd.

01:24:21

And then you have like the Two Kingdom people. I'd say like that Kevin DeYoung is probably a sort of Vandrunian type

01:24:29

Two Kingdom type. And so he's not gonna like the idea of a Christian nation, Christian politics.

01:24:36

So I think that it's just the combination of the different elements of the book that each different group is going to not like, it's not like it.

01:24:46

So you should have had five books, come out with one by one, and then you could build a coalition, but maybe it would fall away when you released whatever offended their sensibility.

01:24:57

But even now, like when I say other things that are part of my assumptions, which

01:25:02

I think are just kind of thoroughly based in early based, but they're thoroughly based in 17th century reform thought.

01:25:12

And I say it, and even people who like my book kind of broadly, they still are uncomfortable with it because, and so there's like this pushback like up from that side, because I'm, again, pulling from a different era, which

01:25:27

I think is better than our current era. And so that distances people as well. So anyway, I mean, I guess in on a positive note,

01:25:34

I keep going on, but I would just ask people to read it as trying to create a coherent systematic that is both account, that is both theological and political, that is logical.

01:25:50

And you can certainly disagree with it, but I think understanding that I tried to make it thoroughly founded upon our reform tradition and so just go, take it from there.

01:26:03

And if you're gonna reject this or that, but, you know. Yeah. Yeah, excellent.

01:26:09

Just approach from that. Yeah, well, thank you, Steven. I know you've given me about an hour and a half in your recording time.

01:26:16

Yeah, I greatly appreciate it. God bless you and stay in touch. Let me know if there's anything else you wanna talk about.

01:26:23

I'm sure this is not over. I'm sure there's more coming. Last question for you.

01:26:28

Are you gonna write a follow -up or what are you doing next to capitalize on it? Yeah, I just wrote a follow -up book.

01:26:35

No, I probably wouldn't do that. But yeah, so I'm starting, I started a sub stack project.

01:26:42

It's called Institutes Rule of Christian Politics. And I'm gonna try, it's just a project where I'm gonna try to answer various questions on politics that I've been doing for time.

01:26:52

But I do have a review, a response to Brian Mattson's review. We'll link everyone to it so they can go check it out.