Natural Law vs. Natural Rights with Jared Lovell

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Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am your host, John Harris, as always.

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And some of you know that we did a series, now it's going back maybe two months, maybe three months actually, when we did a series on classical liberalism and liberalism more broadly, trying to understand what exactly liberalism is, enlightenment rationalism.

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And that was helpful for many of you. And I know some of you didn't, this was, you had to take like three

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Advil to get through some of those podcasts, getting all the information in and it's outside the box.

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And I think those who made it through though, knew at the end, okay, this makes sense.

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This is why the conservative critique of wokeism or social justice seems so anemic sometimes, because actually some of the foundational elements of social justice are already embedded within the right in America today and in the

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Western world. And so I could not help myself, but invite our guest today on Jared Lovell, who is a teacher.

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He teaches at the Memorial Academy and he is a deacon in the Reformed Episcopal Church, because I heard you

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Jared on a podcast, the Chronicles Magazine podcast, talking about some of these issues and you covered an angle we didn't really get into, which is the difference between natural rights and natural law.

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And so I figured we'll talk about that and then go any direction that you wanna go, but I thought you did a fantastic job.

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So thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me, happy to be here. Appreciate it. So I thought maybe a good launching pad for our discussion today is this tweet from R .N.

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McIntyre. So there's someone, it doesn't matter who, it's someone on Twitter who's or X, I guess they call it now, complaining that there was a doctor who was stripped of his license because of political views or I think maybe it was

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COVID stuff. And so R .N. McIntyre though responds, and this is the important thing, and says, I feel bad for the classical liberal holdout sometimes.

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They don't know that we've already passed on almost comical number of point of no returns at this point.

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Then I remember that they encouraged most of those revolutions and I don't feel so bad anymore.

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And so then he goes on in this thread and he talks about what he thinks some of those are and how we got to basically where we are.

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And there is this narrative on the right now, on the new right, that things didn't start being bad in 2006, 2015, 2020, that actually the foundations for all of the collapses that we're seeing around us, whether it's the family or our institutions, have been in motion since some would say the 1100s.

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So this is a narrative though, I think it needs to be explored more because it's very hard for people who aren't classically trained or don't have a little bit of philosophy under the belt to understand exactly what's being talked about here.

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And so I think that's where you're very helpful at explaining some of these things. I mean, what's your reaction to a tweet like that?

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Do you agree with that? I do mostly. And to be fair,

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I would assume that there's a decent portion of your audience that would identify as being classical liberals.

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So I don't wanna paint with too broad of a brush to say that if you're a classical liberal and you're a fan of the

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American founding and you're a fan of liberalism of the 1700s, 1600s or something like that, you're just part of the problem.

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But there is a definite difference between classical liberalism and modern liberalism, which is probably not what we're going to explore today.

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And I recognize that is there. And so I just wanna put that out there that for listeners who might think, oh, you're just equating enlightenment liberalism with modern liberalism and you're just painting over a huge swath of differences and saying those things.

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I'm not, I recognize there's a difference between conservative classical liberals and modern liberals. However, there's a reason we use liberal in both of those terms.

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One did grow out of the other and they're not as inconsistent as you would think at first glance.

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And so one example of this is, if you read Thomas Paine and you read

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Woodrow Wilson, you can find a lot of overlap there. It's not a, you would think that these are poles apart.

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These are the opposite ends of the spectrum, libertarian kind of Thomas Paine and progressive Woodrow Wilson.

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But at the end of the day, they argue from similar premises, but come to some different conclusions.

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And the reason somebody like a Woodrow Wilson or progressives writing in his age would come to a different conclusion on some things just because they say, hey, we're going through the industrial revolution.

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So we just need to change some things to adapt to the industrial revolution.

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We need more government in this case, for example, than somebody like Paine would argue because we have new circumstances, but their philosophical assumptions about who man is and how the world began and how man relates to each other, men relate to each other within society are very similar.

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And even Thomas Paine by the end of his life is writing that he's finding that the idea of just getting rid of all of authority and freeing man to be the individual he was supposed to be, freeing him from the burdens of political and social institutions.

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He finds out that this doesn't bring the equality that he was hoping for.

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In his view, equality comes about when you get these man -made institutions, governments, church, whatever, you get them out of the way.

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They're the corrupting influence. If you get them out of the way, the individual can be free and there will be a leveling out.

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There will be a greater equality. And by the time you get to the end of Thomas Paine, Paine recognizes that it hasn't quite worked out that way.

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And so he says, well, everything has been so skewed for so long because of the existence of institutions in the

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West that we actually do need a government to step in and redistribute because it hasn't brought about the equality we're looking for.

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So stuff has been so wrong for so long that we actually do need to do some of this.

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So a libertarian mind, common sense, Thomas Paine, American revolution, you think of get the government out of here.

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By the end of his life, he's actually advocating some kind of welfare program that redistributes money to ensure that there's a basic, something like what we would call a universal basic income, something like that today, because man being freed from institutions hasn't really solved the problem in his view.

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So you can even see in Paine how progressives could come along and how liberals could come along later and say, yeah, let's flesh this out.

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Let's continue. We need to reinterpret the constitution for a new age. Yeah, I mean, Thomas Jefferson, I love

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Thomas Jefferson, but even Jefferson said that we should have a constitution written every 20 years at one point that you can't expect people to abide by decisions made by their parents because they're free to speak their truth as we would say it today or to live their truth in their generation.

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And so Paine was very much like that as well. And so it's not a leap for the progressives to say, yes, constitution was great for the founders.

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We wanna continue that and rewrite everything for today and every generation hereafter.

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So it's not a huge leap from the classical liberal to the modern liberal as some would make it.

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And so while I recognize there's a difference, there's a lot of continuity there as well.

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Well, the French revolution and the American revolution, which I prefer to say the war for independence, but they were both in this kind of in -between world between the medieval period and then the modern world.

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And I know conservatives have typically tried to make big and maybe appropriately so at times a big distinctions between the two of these things.

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But what I was hoping to do is to maybe get to that point. We don't have to get into the modern world, but to get to that point, but to also though begin where the story starts.

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Where do you see the story starting? Is it with like Richard Weaver's thesis? Is it William of Ockham that brings about sort of this post enlightenment rationalism and then all the things that have come from that today or who is it?

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What group of people? Yeah, so now I'm familiar with Richard Weaver's thesis.

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I agree with a lot of it. And Ockham is a decent place to start.

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However, I would say that I think Ockham sometimes gets more abuse and serves as a whipping boy more than he should.

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And I know it was, I think it was Rod Dreher in his Benedict Option also heavily goes after Ockham as basically the start of where everything goes wrong.

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I get it and I agree to a point, but the issue for me is

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I don't think everybody's thinking in terms of Ockham down through history that he gets a disproportionate amount of the grief and the blame.

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And you can take some of his premises and you can go far with them and you can run far with them, but I'm not sure everybody is thinking in terms of Ockham, although that is one culprit.

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Abelard or... Yeah, so what the focus I had in when

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I was trying to discover what was going on, well, let me say first what it was that motivated my interest in my research into these things.

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And that was this confusion between natural law and natural rights.

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So what I mean by that is this, you will hear people talking a lot today about my

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God -given rights, even among conservatives, what are my God -given rights?

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I have a God -given right to speak. I have my God -given right to carry a weapon.

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These are our God -given American rights. Protect our border right now. What's that? Protect our border.

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I just asked someone on the podcast yesterday who was saying that. Or you have this

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God -given right to cross any border you want. That's true. And so we all like to speak of rights.

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And oftentimes we will, at least on the conservative side more, is we will also use natural law language in there and say, because of the natural law,

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God's natural moral law, I have these rights. And so this language was used a lot, and yet there was so much disparity in what people meant by what natural rights were.

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I have a natural right to marry anybody that I want, who I can love who

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I wanna love. I have rights to abort my child. I have rights to do anything.

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I have rights to protect my land, I have rights to travel wherever I want. And there was a time

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I was in more of the theonomy world. And the answer to that subjectivity when it came to rights or natural law was, well, there is no natural law.

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And you see what happens when you have natural law or speak of natural right? It's just a wax nose.

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Anybody just says whatever they wanna do is their right. There's nothing objective about it. It's just completely subjective.

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So the answer then to clear up all this confusion is we just look to biblical law and there's your answers.

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There they are. They're just, this is what the law is. And then anybody claiming natural law is just opening the door for the chaos we have.

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So - I think right now, just so people see how this is relevant. A lot of the angst and opposition to Thomas Aquinas seems to come from, is that right?

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Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, and I was right there. I was right there in saying those same sorts of things.

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So, but it bugged me that as I looked at some older sources and philosophers like Aquinas, like Richard Hooker talk about natural law,

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I got the sense that they're not talking about the same thing that we often do today when we talk about natural right or however that's construed.

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And so I spoke with people. I had the opportunity to speak with some people today.

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I mentioned one in the Chronicles podcast. I don't mean to throw him under the bus in every podcast, but it was enlightening because I talked to Judge Andrew Napolitano.

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Some of your listeners might know who that is. He used to be on the show on Fox. He's a libertarian judge.

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And I got to speak with him one -on -one and ask him this question that had been bothering me.

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Got to sit down in front of his desk and talk to him. And I said, you talk about natural law all the time.

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You're a very old conservative Catholic, well -versed in Aquinas and all this. And you talk about natural law. And, but yet you say natural right, you're against any state having a law restricting marriage to one man and one woman because it's natural right to get married.

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Like, how do you get there? And I came away very unsatisfied with the answer because he said, well, there's several versions of natural law and, you know, we, and then it was saying, well, we can't apply the same penalties that Aquinas would.

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Because Aquinas was in favor of, you know, hanging people for theft. So we've lightened up since then.

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So we don't want to follow that exactly. I'm saying, okay, then what, I'm still,

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I have no foundation here. I'm still, I don't have an answer to my question. So, so I started researching this while I was in law school and thought, you know what, instead of just repeating all the negative lines about Aquinas that I've heard from secondary sources,

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I'm going to read Aquinas. And so I got into Aquinas and what I found there is not, you know, you'd think, oh, you know, this is for the really smart people to read

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Aquinas. He's not that hard to read. He's really actually easy to read in how he lays out his arguments.

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He gives you objections to his position, then he quotes a source and then he lays out his position and then he answers the objections.

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I mean, you do not have to be, you know, as they say, do rocket surgery to read

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Aquinas. So the - It's almost tedious though in your, cause I've read a little bit of him and I'm like really another, like, it's like the same formula over and over and over.

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Right, now it can be because he defines things so specifically and makes so many distinctions, it can feel tedious in that he's dealing with other objections that you wouldn't have thought of and you thought you covered this already.

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You know, you had six questions previously. I think you're just repeating. No, he's actually making another objection, another fine point distinction, but it's not, you're not wading through, you know,

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Nietzsche or something like that. What he's saying, this esoteric language that you're just lost in.

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So I started reading Aquinas on natural law and maybe it would be best in order to show the distinction, to lay out a couple of conclusions that, you know,

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I've come to from Aquinas. And so I'll say this. So Aquinas starts with this idea that, you know,

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God's has an end, just as, you know, Westminster confession, what's the chief end of man to glorify

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God and enjoy him forever, right? So God also has an end. History is going somewhere.

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God has ordained and God rules and makes every decision. Everything he does is aimed toward an end.

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What is God's end? To receive glory for himself. That is his end. And it's our end to glorify him and enjoy him.

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So God's end is his glory. That's his telos. That's what he is aimed at. Then what are the means to that end?

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And Aquinas emphasizes God's reason. God ordains everything to that end.

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And the means to that end is his reason. And Aquinas makes a distinction between reason and will.

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God does not act out of just his will. And he does not,

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God's not all powerful and say, and for that reason says, you know, I feel like doing this today.

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And so therefore you're going to hell. You know, you're going to heaven. He doesn't act in an arbitrary fashion.

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Everything he does is a product of his mind or his nature. He can't act inconsistently with his nature, with who he is.

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And so those silly atheistic kind of objections you hear today, can God, you know, create a rock that's too big for him to lift?

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You know, or can God tell a lie? No, he can't. Because God does everything in consistency with his nature.

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He's not arbitrary will. You know, there's things he does not do and he cannot do. He cannot lie, he cannot sin, right?

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So everything that he does is in accordance with his nature. There's an internal logic to everything that he does.

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He can't act inconsistently with who he is. So you have reason, and then

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Aquinas uses that as the basis for man's reason. That man created in the image of God is given this kind of reason and coherence and the ability to think through things and come to proper conclusions.

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So it's not enough to say man is fallen, so therefore he can't think right and he can't think straight.

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Yeah, man is fallen and the mind is corrupted to a degree. There's always going to be flaws. We can be wrong about things, but we're also made in the image of God, even fallen man who can, that's why fallen, unbelieving human beings are capable of all kinds of great things, all kinds of great discoveries, great mathematicians, scientists, everything else.

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So this is - Can I just stop you for a second? You mentioned the theonomy position. They would account for that by saying -

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In common groups. Well, you're right, that they're borrowing from the Christian worldview. They're kind of like Christians, but they don't know it kind of thing.

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Right, so - This is very different. Yeah, so they would say that, yeah, they are borrowing everything that they find out, they're just borrowing

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Christian assumptions. And they are, but in doing so, they are a walking contradiction.

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Right. And so since they're a walking contradiction, they are walking around every day, seeing black, but thinking white and seeing white and thinking black.

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That they cannot, when it comes to making any conclusions about God, they're just a walking incoherent contradiction because they're walking around saying,

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I see it, but I don't believe it. I see it, I don't believe it. They're just actively suppressing. Now it's true, from Romans 1, men actively suppress the truth of God.

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That's true, but I don't, I would not go from Romans 1 to saying that human beings have no sense of what is right and wrong in the world.

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Like if you see, if human beings were to walk into a third world country in the middle of a civil war and see a massacre of children and human beings, women and children just slaughtered and raped all over, everybody would know intuitively that is wrong, right?

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And you wouldn't say, if somebody came up and said, how is this wrong?

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You can't, that you, you're a walking contradiction. So you have no right to make judgments about what's right and wrong because you don't believe in God and you don't believe in Old Testament law.

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So how can you make a judgment? You're just a walking contradiction. Well, you wouldn't know that it's wrong because you're human, right?

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There are certain things we know to be true. And so there is, human beings have the capacity to differentiate right from wrong, even if they fully can't explain it.

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They can reason to truth, okay? So according to Aquinas. So there are the, so that's the reasoning part of it.

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Natural law. Natural law, Aquinas says, is human's participation in God's divine law.

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So God reveals himself in nature and he reveals himself through reason.

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And humans participate in that. We see nature and we have the capacity to reason.

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So we participate in God's knowledge of the world.

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And we participate in his reason. That's what natural law is. So Aquinas would say that there are natural law principles that we can all know in the world, but he would make a distinction between the principle and the conclusion and say that you can arrive at different conclusions about things, even reasoning from the same natural law principles.

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And as you get further on the tradition, somebody like Richard Hooker would explain in more detail how that's true.

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That this is how you can, we can all agree, for example, that human beings have the right to defend themselves.

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Right? You have a right to defend your bodily integrity and your property. From somebody trying to take your life, taking you, harming your family, you have the right to do that.

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And that's been true across the board of Christians all throughout Christianity. You have the right to defend yourself.

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And even a duty to do so in some cases that some scholars would say, some theologians would say throughout the middle ages in that scholastic tradition.

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Okay. But does that translate into an automatic right to bear arms?

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Now, by saying that, okay, maybe some people are gonna turn off the podcast now and say, okay, this guy's just liberal.

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I assure you, I am very, very, very pro -second amendment. Okay? I'm extremely pro -second.

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But there's a difference between a, what I'm trying to say here is there's a difference between a constitutional right that is a product of English common law, which is a product of unique circumstances in our part of the world, we're descended from Britain, and a natural right or natural law that is universal for everyone.

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So there, what I'm trying to say in this is that the reason you, as maybe a conservative value, the right to bear arms, and you would defend that right, and I would defend that right, is not because I'm human, but because I'm an

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Anglo -Saxon. I come from that background and where we have determined, we collectively speaking in terms of generations, that the best way, the means to the end of protecting yourself is by bearing arms, right?

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And it comes in our constitution and it's based on the English Bill of Civil Rights before that, which is based on the

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English common law. And so it's a particular tradition that we have grown out of.

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Now, why is that an important distinction? Well, I'll give you a quick application of where this is going.

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It feels like I'm getting off topic, but I'm not. But the idea that because it's a universal right, assuming that's true and it's a universal natural right or something like that, we assume then that people can be interchangeable and that if you have a country called

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America that's not connected to the English tradition anymore, we'll all still think the same way because it's just universal, right?

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That you can bring in large numbers of people from different parts of the world who do not have that deep centuries long tradition and they're all gonna think the same way about your constitutional rights.

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They're not. And take the Chinese, for example. If the

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Chinese, let's say, became a Christian nation in a hundred years that we think of China, and that could be possible.

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The church in China is growing, the underground church. What if China becomes a majority Christian nation and they start reforming their laws and they are the model that everybody's looking to?

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What if they don't have any kind of second amendment in their country? Never do, and actually have a lot more restrictions on weapons, less freedoms than we have here.

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Does that mean they're not truly Christian in their thinking? They're not really Christian because they didn't accept this law that we have, that we

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Christians, evangelicals in America accept? No, they can equally agree you have a right to defend yourself, but maybe they don't have a gun culture where they think, well, you need a gun to defend yourself.

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The unique circumstances of the United States leads us to, and say

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China, future hypothetical China, to draw on the same premises, Christian premises, you have a right to defend yourself, but come to different conclusions in our laws about how we enforce that and how we protect that, you see.

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So going back to Aquinas, after that long drawn out illustration, going back to Aquinas, you can share the same premises in natural law.

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They're objective. It's not just, I think it's this, and I have a natural right to this, that, and the other. No, it's objective, but you can't, the subjective element in this, and this is where theonomists get bothered, any kind of subjectivity or uncertainty here, the subjective elements, you can come to different applications.

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One country has the Wild West, everybody carries a gun, another country, nobody carries a gun, and that doesn't mean that one is pagan and one is

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Christian. You can have differences in application because the way natural law comes down to us is through mediated institutions.

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In our mediated institutions are the English common law that was built up over time based on precedence.

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There's a bottom up element to our law and that precedent is built on precedent, and over time, it gains further standing or it is rejected and abandoned and we go a different direction, but that body of law is a collection of wisdom, a wisdom from the ages that doesn't come from just a handful of judges sitting there on the court arbitrarily ruling what your right is and what it's not, okay?

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Richard Hooker is another guy who's really good and he's even better in the sense that he is

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English. He comes from the English tradition and he's drawing on Aquinas and he goes on to say that human beings desire happiness, they desire order and human beings associate together and they form governments and they form rules for associating with each other, but he does this in a way that's different from what we're gonna see in a minute from someone like Locke or Hobbes or Paine who say that in the state of nature, humans get together and they decide what their society is going to be and it's purely based on individuals who are coming together for the first time in a site.

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No, for Hooker, there's an objective reality already there that you can't come together and have a happy society and say, we're gonna have open marriage in our society.

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So just to, yeah, just to the kind of, since we're gonna leave and go sort of to these enlightenment figures, so people understand, correct me if I'm wrong here.

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So the enlightenment like anthropology, I guess, would be man is born, created and designed.

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Design is the big flashing word in my mind that there's certain things that man is programmed almost to know, to fit into, to they have a role to play, a place of belonging, all these things are there.

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It's not a blank slate state of nature. It's, there's, you have responsibilities as you're born to your community, to be fathers and parents and all the rest.

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So this is kind of like the basis for some of the knowledge that you're saying modern theories, theonomy being one, by the way, theonomy is, a lot of modern theonomy is,

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I would say a result of modernity. They would look at that as, you have to have this kind of mindset.

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There's this filter that you have in your mind to ascertain what the truth is.

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But actually you're saying no, actually the medieval scholastic tradition, Aquinas being part of that and Hooker, is that no, you're born with already some programming, some to exist in a garden or curse, but that was the intention.

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And so when we have things like the second amendment or border security or any of the issues, a lot of the issues I should say that come up today politically, many of them are, we are looking at a universal law as much as we can, but we are applying this law through different traditions.

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And the goal being security, for example, with the gun example, right? So I think what you're saying is that people want to be secure, that there is a right to that, that that is the way

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God intended for things to be for us to pursue security, yet it is going to be different in different places.

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And we even recognize this with jails. We don't give criminals guns in jail, right? We say that, no, that your right actually doesn't extend into this because you don't have responsibilities.

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So we can make these determinations based on an outcome.

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So that's the scholastic tradition and we're still living with vestiges of this. It sounds like is what you're saying.

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This is still kind of in our blood, but we've, but now I guess would be the enlightenment time.

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We start to question some of these assumptions and it undermines it. Right. And gay marriage, gay marriage is a good example of that,

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I suppose. Yes. Yeah. And I used the second amendment, that's more of a hot button issue that at least wakes people up.

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The idea of somebody saying that it's not, Adam was not, when

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Adam was created, God says, here is your right as a human being that I've breathed into to carry a weapon, right?

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They carry a gun in particular, obviously they didn't have guns back then, but that is not a, it's not a fundamental natural right, but it is a constitutional right that we defend.

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And that the source of that is not because God breathed into you and made you human. The source of that is your tradition.

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And this is why we should value our tradition, by the way, instead of saying that's just tradition. And some people say, no, you get rid of tradition and just go to rights.

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Well, what happens in libertarians, even conservative libertarians in that world want to go to rights.

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And the problem is that what we're going to find is rights can say, well, that can go anywhere.

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Well, what about my right to do this and my right to do that? So valuing your particular tradition is important.

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It's actually the source of why you can do a lot of the things that you can do in our country that you might not in another country.

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So we shouldn't just discard that and say, oh, that's just man -made. No, man, God works through human institutions.

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He has mediated his power and authority through governments and families and institutions.

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And we should see God's sovereignty there as well and value that. So another example would be, if we take the first amendment, is there an absolute right to freedom of speech in the natural law?

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Does God, this is the other thing that got me thinking initially is that if it's absolute freedom of speech, then what

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God is saying is I give human beings the right to blaspheme. He doesn't, okay?

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So just because he does give, he's a patient and long -suffering

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God and does not strike you dead when you blaspheme and gives you time to repent, does not mean he has given you the right to blaspheme.

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And so if some human institution who through whom God has delegated authority, like a government, says in this land, we do not blaspheme.

34:38

And if you do, there will be a penalty. That is not violating your natural right to free speech because you do not have a natural right to blaspheme.

34:50

So the problem is when we think of natural rightness, absolute is kind of sense, we can lead to all kinds, is there a right to Supreme Court pornography as freedom of speech?

35:02

No, there are laws against certain kinds of speech. And what the Supreme Court has done, the Supreme Court has said, we have the right to limit speech for certain things.

35:11

You can't yell fire in a theater being the famous line from the one case. The Supreme Court decisions in the 1900s have not recognized where that right comes from and really where those rights stop.

35:28

They've based it more on emergencies and the government has the right in emergency to stop you from saying something right before it's going to start.

35:36

But it's not based on anything absolute in terms of content. You can say whatever you want.

35:43

And one of the Supreme Court cases is, you can say, you can yell

35:48

Marxist propaganda and get people to try to riot. But the context is such that, if nobody's listening to you, it's not a threat.

35:59

But if somebody is listening to you and they're about to start burning buildings, then that can be inciting a riot and that can be restricting.

36:07

Well, it's not touching on the content in and of itself. It's looking at context and whether somebody's listening or not and people are about to act on your speech.

36:18

So they've missed it. They've missed where the line should be in terms of regulating speech, in terms of content.

36:24

But anyway, so Hooker, as I said, was good at acknowledging that human beings do come together to make governments and make rules.

36:36

But there are, as you said so well, in summing up what I was saying, there are objective realities that you have to conform to in doing that.

36:45

It's not just, we can make any society that we want. And Hooker's also good in talking about how

36:51

God, how our institutions are legitimate institutions in terms of, we can't just say,

36:59

I, no king but Christ, no ruler except the

37:05

Bible, no authority except the Bible, no law except natural law.

37:12

No, we can't say that as Christians, right? We're under authority in our churches. These are legitimate authorities.

37:19

We're under authority in our governments. Now we can have another whole podcast about whether our current government is, you know, constitutionally speaking, is a legitimate authority.

37:30

I don't wanna go there right now, but governments are legitimate authorities through whom God extends his rule and his order of the universe.

37:38

And so the idea that I don't have to listen to you because I've got my natural rights, I've got my Bible and I've got,

37:43

I just follow Jesus, right? We know you can't, nobody follows that consistently. And Hooker does a great job in providing an explanation of how

37:53

God works through institutions and proper authorities. So moving into the modern era, when you look at the first modern philosopher, we would probably identify him as Machiavelli, is really the first modern philosopher, but Thomas Hobbes might arguably be the second philosopher.

38:15

And Thomas Hobbes begins his political philosophy with this state of nature idea.

38:27

And what Thomas Hobbes is trying to do is provide a modern justification for absolute monarchy that is not based on divine right of kings.

38:40

So prior to Hobbes, monarchs could claim that God gave them the authority to rule and that God will judge them for their wrong decisions, but it's not up to people to judge or check them.

38:52

It's up to the people to obey. If the king has done wrong in the afterlife, God will judge him, but all authority has been delegated to the king.

39:01

That's the theory in the late, especially in the late middle ages. And so Hobbes wants absolute monarchy because he has lived through the

39:10

English civil war and sees how it has torn the country apart. And he's a real pessimist. And he even flees, he goes to France for a while and says, the world's descending into chaos.

39:21

I'm gonna need to write something that will justify absolute monarchy, but he's a nominal

39:27

Anglican at best. Some have theorized that he was an atheist.

39:33

And I don't think that would be far off to assume that. So he goes off to France and he writes a

39:41

Leviathan and he wants an argument for absolute monarchy that would do away with this civil war and strife and division and chaos, but would explicitly leave the basis for that rule separate from religion.

39:58

Cause he kind of sees where the future is going, away from religion. And he needs a secular basis for absolute monarchy.

40:04

So that's what Leviathan is. And so what he says is that human beings in the state of nature basically all had natural rights.

40:15

They all had their rights. And with those rights, they could do whatever they needed to do to survive.

40:21

In the state of nature, life is nasty, it's brutish and it's short to use

40:26

Hobbes words. It's a war of all against all. It's every man for himself basically.

40:33

And you're just out there trying to survive. And now if the example I use with my students when

40:39

I teach this is if anybody has read Cormac McCarthy, if you're familiar with Cormac.

40:44

I'm not, no. I plug for Cormac McCarthy. He's a novelist, but no country for old men.

40:53

Oh yeah, yeah. Well, the movies. And the road. Yeah, he wrote all of those books. If you've ever read the road or seen the movie,

41:01

The Rogue, I think Viggo Mortensen's the main actor in there. It's a hard movie to watch.

41:07

Okay, explicitly. I've seen clips of it. I've never seen the whole thing, but I am familiar. Yeah, it's a hard movie to watch.

41:13

So I'm not giving a full endorsement of it here, but it's a great illustration of Hobbes' world.

41:20

It's a post -apocalyptic and it's kind of every man for himself. And so Hobbes says that, you know, this is not a great world to live in.

41:30

And you actually can. There's no sin in this world, he says. You can go and take from somebody else, kill someone else and take their stuff because you're just trying to survive.

41:41

And everybody has an equal right to survive. So there's no sin in this world.

41:46

It's nasty, it's horrible, but there's no right or wrong in the state of nature. Human beings leave the state of nature, according to Hobbes, and come into society in order to end the chaos, end the war against all, have some kind of rules that govern them and so that they can enjoy peace and pleasure and happiness without having to worry that, you know, as soon as they rob someone else and they go to sleep that night, they're not gonna be robbed by another person.

42:13

So what you do when you enter into the state of nature is every individual turns over their rights to the sovereign.

42:23

And that sovereign is your monarch, your king. And he has all of the rights and all of everybody's individual rights in his person.

42:32

And he ensures the peace. And Hobbes says, yeah, sure. Sometimes he's going to make mistakes.

42:38

He's going to do wrong. He's going to be oppressive. But he says, you really don't have a right to complain about this because you have given over your rights.

42:48

And even if you're not the original people who have given over your rights back in the state of nature, you live in society, you enjoy the peace and security of society.

42:57

So in a sense, you have implicitly signed the social contract, if you will.

43:03

You know, you enjoy peace and security and you're not, you know, fending for yourself at every moment of your waking existence.

43:11

So you've implicitly given over your rights to the state. And so the state rules and keeps order and peace.

43:16

And that's really the best you can hope for is peace and security in your life. So, but he began, where do these rights come from that you turn over to the sovereign?

43:27

Well, they're your natural rights. So man is in state of nature with his natural rights.

43:33

Okay. Those are the rights that have been given over. Okay. So that's where you have the concept of natural rights. There's no mention of natural law.

43:40

No, there's nothing objective. In Leviathan, really? In Leviathan. No, there's absolutely nothing there.

43:46

So you go on to John Locke and this is the character I found most interesting because we love

43:52

John Locke. When I teach John Locke to my students, his second treatise of government, it's very easy to grasp because it's in our

44:00

DNA. Thomas Jefferson's basically plagiarizing the second treatise of government from Locke.

44:06

And so when the way Locke speaks, it just resonates with us. It's not hard to comprehend.

44:12

This is kind of inherently true as we read it. Of course, this makes sense.

44:18

So the problem though with Locke, well, let me say how Locke is better. So Locke is a younger contemporary of Hobbes.

44:26

Where Hobbes dies before the whole English Civil War situation has been resolved,

44:32

Locke lives through the Glorious Revolution. And his second treatise of government is basically a justification for the monarchy of William and Mary who displaced

44:43

James II prior to that, after the Glorious Revolution. So he's writing a kind of theoretical justification for what has happened historically.

44:50

He gets to see the happy ending. So he is not so dismal as Hobbes. But he begins with the same place, in the same place.

45:00

And while Hobbes was roundly condemned in his age church officials, condemned

45:05

Hobbes for his writings. Locke is, I would argue, much more subtle. He uses the same kinds of premises as Hobbes, but in a more subtle way that make them more socially acceptable.

45:18

And this is the reason why as Americans, we identify with Locke and we think of Hobbes as the bad guy.

45:27

So Locke has a state of nature, begins in the same spot, except with Locke, he has a law of nature that he refers to over and over.

45:37

And he quotes people like Richard Hooker, good English teacher he is. And he says, there is a law of nature in the state of nature.

45:45

So for Locke, things are not desperate. Life is not nasty, brutish and short like it is for Hobbes in the state of nature.

45:52

You have a right and a wrong that we know that's part of God's created order.

45:59

So you have a basis for property rights that he lays out there as well. This idea of mixing your labor with the goods of the earth.

46:09

And so they become attached to you, a property right attaches, even though that gets a little funny because he says a property right absolutely attaches to things that when you work for it, but only to the extent that you need them.

46:22

So if you start storing up extra that you can't use, well, then the property, it gets a little mystical in that regard.

46:28

But anyway, you have property rights, you have all these things. And so it's not a desperate situation.

46:35

But for Locke, people come into the state of nature anyway. And the reason they do is because in the state of, or I'm sorry, they come into society.

46:44

They come into society anyway, out of the state of nature, because in the state of nature, what you lack is a source for dispute resolution.

46:53

So you have the right to say, somebody's coming on your property and stealing your stuff.

46:58

You have the right to defend yourself and go after him like a vigilante. Maybe you can go too far and his family comes back at you and you can have these blood feuds that go on forever because you don't have a source of appeal, a source of dispute resolution to resolve differences among fallen human beings in the state of nature.

47:18

And so you enter into society to seek order and not the order that you need a sovereign to rule your life, but you need judges.

47:28

And the government is there in society to protect your property rights.

47:35

And so government exists as something artificially made, that's not inherent to man in the state of nature, but it's made for convenience to protect property rights.

47:49

And as this gets fleshed out and people like Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, if government fails to protect property rights as you see them, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, right?

48:04

But what is sneaky about Locke is he had been referring to law of nature, law of nature, law of nature.

48:11

And you would think, oh yeah, Aquinas' law of nature. Oh yeah, Richard Hooker, law of nature category.

48:17

But what you find in there is that for Locke, law of nature or natural law is basically the right of the individual to pursue life, liberty, and as we would call it, pursuit of happiness.

48:33

That is your natural law, right? And government is there to protect that.

48:39

So what Locke does subtly is take an objective category like natural law, which entails certain duties.

48:48

And now natural law or natural right is the government needs to protect your right to do anything with your body and the labor of your hands as you see fit.

49:01

It's the government's duty to protect that. Now Locke personally would even, he would say, he wouldn't even include, he wouldn't include atheists in his ideal society.

49:11

So he's still, I don't want listeners to think that Locke is some postmodern individualist.

49:19

Locke is still, you can see the tension there with the traditional world that he lives in and the new ideas he's -

49:25

When he talks about children, I think that comes out probably very clear because he wants to make all these exceptions all of a sudden.

49:33

Right, yeah, oh yeah, I know. So you can see in Locke a still a lot of good traditional common sense that he wants to make exceptions to the rule.

49:44

He would try to bind future generations to the agreement that's already been made in the past.

49:51

But what you see there is the root of the shift from objective natural law, which is the engagement with the divine, the participation in divine law, and it's outside of you, to becoming more internal and subjective.

50:06

That the government has the duty to protect my right to pursue my interests kind of thing.

50:14

And it sets the course for people to continue to develop like Thomas Paine being one of them.

50:20

Thomas Paine also starts with this state of nature concept. And the whole state of nature idea is problematic,

50:27

I would say, because it posits the idea that human beings are, and societies are formed based on what the example

50:39

I like to use is that old show, Lost. If you've ever watched that. You know, a plane crashes on an island and they have to interact with each other on this island with no rules and they're all a bunch of grown individuals.

50:53

Yeah, for the boomers, Gilligan's Island, so. Yeah, okay, there we go, that's right. Yeah, or if you were ever into Survivor, you know, that reality show, that human nature, that humans begin as adults on an island and they make their own rules and they make their own decisions to join in that society, okay?

51:13

That's a problem from the get go is this state of nature concept. Whereas someone like Edmund Burke in the late 1700s famously said,

51:22

I've yet to meet a person who was in the state of nature. So for the vast majority of us and the vast majority being everybody except for Adam and Eve we were actually all born as dependent creatures into a culture, into a society that pre -existed us.

51:41

We didn't just get to enter into society of our own free will and say, yeah, I guess I'm gonna be subject to the customs and the traditions and the laws and the beliefs of this.

51:49

No, we come in completely dependent and we are shaped in that society.

51:56

We don't just come in as free agents. And so this mentality that, you know, we start with the individual and that society is formed when individual and what this does here, let me back up one second is for pain or for luck.

52:12

What this does is it's a faulty anthropology because what it says is if we wanna know who man is we need to strip away all of the institutions.

52:23

Everything that has actually shaped man as a dependent human being growing up in the world to get down to who humans really are we need to get rid of these institutions.

52:35

Strip away the church, the government, your own culture your parents, what you've been taught and get down to the essence of who humans really are because all these other things are not natural.

52:47

They're art, they're creations. So Thomas Paine, the human being is sovereign individual who for convenience enters into society and has relations with other people and then having entered into society decides, you know what?

53:01

We probably should have some laws and so we'll create a government but government is at best a necessary evil in order to keep the peace.

53:08

And all of these institutions, as I just said, are art. They're creations of man and not inherent to them.

53:16

Whereas if you go back to Aristotle and you go back to Aquinas and Aquinas was drawing on Aristotle.

53:22

You go back to Hooker, you go back to the scholastics. What you see is that men aren't considered as just entities to themselves that their very nature is that they are social.

53:35

They're social animals. And so if you wanna study who man really is you have to see them in society together not in some abstract state of nature and divorce from the institutions and customs.

53:47

Yeah, no, that's good. I wanna get to Rousseau and the French revolution and make the distinction here in a moment.

53:52

But tell me if you think this is a good kind of parallel for the audience, because we are used to thinking in these terms,

53:59

I believe as Christians when it comes to Darwinism, because we look at Darwinism and we say, well, that is a myth.

54:05

That is a false story about our origins. And it has these ramifications further downstream that are negative.

54:14

But then we can also look at a Jordan Peterson and we can say, well, of course he has a myth at the base of this, but he draws a lot of the right conclusions.

54:22

Despite the myth, despite the story that he's believing he comes to some safe assumptions about things.

54:27

I think there's something going on here that's very similar, although we are unaware because there is no arc equivalent, answers in Genesis, Ken Ham equivalent or whatever to this problem, which is that we tell ourselves this false myth story that there's a state of nature that we're born into, right?

54:45

That's not true. Yet there are people who believing that story also come to the right conclusions and it's not as detectable.

54:55

But the foundation there, the truth is that actually can lead to eventually what we're seeing now.

55:03

And profaning of marriage being the example that we've drawn on a few times in this episode.

55:09

So yeah, I mean, someone who's bright and can figure out how to market it out there needs to get on a theme park or something.

55:17

I don't think that's possible with this issue, unfortunately, but it is similar in my mind. It is a story we tell ourselves to make sense of things and it's just not a true story.

55:29

Yeah, so I'd recommend an article and there's a conversation based on this article over at Chronicles.

55:37

Douglas Wilson actually wrote a piece for Chronicles on the state of nature enlightenment myth kind of idea being the myth that, or no,

55:51

I'm sorry, I'm getting the title wrong. Social contract is what I think what's in the title is kind of the enlightenment myth for the modern world.

55:58

It's kind of like the modern world's creation myth. This whole state of nature idea is a myth that the modern world is built on.

56:06

And so Wilson wrote the article. I don't know if you can access that, if that's public on Chronicles or not, but I'm sure you can access the podcast that was done.

56:15

I'm a member, I can access any of it. Where Wilson sits down with Paul Gottfried from who's the head at Chronicles and C .T.

56:23

Engel's the host there. And they have a whole conversation about the article. It's a really good conversation. So this whole idea that you're talking about in terms of this myth that we don't believe the

56:33

Darwin myth, right? But a lot of us believe the social contract myth.

56:39

And it governs a lot of our assumptions that we are just individuals in the world. And I think

56:45

I mentioned this before, but the idea of the, not in this podcast, but listeners may have heard this elsewhere, that the idea in the modern world is that individuals are sovereign and we walk around in the world with those big, those balls you can get yourself in and you bounce around.

57:05

I don't know what they're called. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was about that you can roll around those balls thing.

57:10

So you're in a big balloon ball and that is your, the extension of your rights. You're in, and everybody can walk around and bounce around in the world like that.

57:19

And the Supreme Court or whatever the lawmaking power is, that says that their job is to basically resolve conflicts when these balls bounce into each other.

57:33

But you're free to bounce in any way you want. You can believe anything you want. You can be this gender or that.

57:41

You can marry this or that. You can do whatever because you've got your bundle of rights here. And as long as you're not bouncing into someone else, you're fine.

57:51

But, and that whole idea is drawn from this myth of social contract, which is the government's job is just to resolve conflict when these balls bounce into each other.

58:01

There's nothing objective there that says the way that the balls are supposed to go. You can go in any direction you want just as long as you don't bump into somebody else.

58:10

And that is part of, I would say, the enlightenment myth that we buy into.

58:16

And why, even as Christians, we, after we've been living in a culture that's kind of pushing these things down our throats, it's not a surprise,

58:26

I think, when Christians start to say, okay, why can't someone get married to the same sex if they're not hurting someone else?

58:33

I'm a Christian and I believe that's wrong according to the Bible, but they're not really hurting anybody.

58:39

So maybe they can't, maybe it's not a Christian position yet, but why can't it happen? Why can't we just have this insight?

58:45

They're not hurting anybody, right? So society should just, government should just keep their hands off of all of that and let everybody live the way they wanna live since they're not hurting anyone.

58:55

And that is the whole theory behind it and why even Christians buy into that.

59:01

And there may be prudential reasons for wanting to let something alone that's not really affecting others, right?

59:08

Like when you see the cure is worse than the disease, but that doesn't mean that you create a right from it and universalize it and say everyone can do this.

59:17

100%, 100%. And that's, I think Stephen Wolf has done a great job with, of saying, he's getting a lot of flack for his book on Christian nationalism and everybody's saying, oh, he wants to throw unbelievers in jail and persecutor.

59:32

No, he's making the argument that just because something's not prudential, you don't wanna go around and arrest everybody at the edge of a sword who isn't a

59:42

Christian or doesn't believe the way you do. That doesn't exactly, as you said, follow that there's some kind of natural right to this thing.

59:51

And so the prudence aspect, but the prudence aspect is what

59:56

Richard Hooker is big on. And that is a major concept connecting the abstract natural law, the

01:00:04

God's divine reason, and the actual institutions and rules that are made.

01:00:10

And they're connected through prudence. And that's why they're not gonna look exactly the same. Yeah, I think of Southern culture versus Northern culture, broadly speaking, obviously there's particularities and even that, but you have,

01:00:22

I mean, we did a whole essay on this, two types of American individualism where in the South, there was more of an acknowledgement that we live in a society together.

01:00:31

We're living on the barnyard. It's like the difference between the barnyard and in the North, it's more of like a stagecoach, right?

01:00:38

We all have to be going the same direction on the stagecoach for this common mission towards the bright future.

01:00:45

Whereas in the barnyard, it's like, well, things get messy. And that's just what we have to live with. The thing might get muddy.

01:00:51

And I know in a lot of the Southern Gothic literature, you have your freakish characters that, they kind of take you aback a little bit, but it's like, it's because there's sort of like this, this place in which they acknowledge, okay, there's gonna be your anomalies.

01:01:08

There's going to be people who don't fit in. There's going to be, and is it prudent?

01:01:15

Is it worth the trouble to go make them conform to everyone else? Most of the time, probably not, but it doesn't mean that we now reshape our entire society, all our institutions to conform to that person, to that.

01:01:29

And anyway, I mean, my mind's in that because I'm working on this project that's about the founding in Jamestown versus Plymouth.

01:01:37

But I think that that's a good maybe launching pad for our last few minutes here. Well, I guess we've already gone over an hour.

01:01:43

I didn't realize that. So if you have a little time to talk about French Revolution versus American Revolution, and maybe a little bit of, maybe we can get into Jefferson versus Hamilton a little too in that.

01:01:54

But let's start here, because I want to defend Jefferson kind of. I know you said you like Jefferson.

01:02:00

I like Jefferson too. And he was a radical, I guess, in Virginia in a way, but he was also a localist.

01:02:06

He was also agrarian. And if you look at the Declaration of Independence, it seems like there's a poetic flourish at the beginning that then leads into, the rest of it's just a secession document.

01:02:18

Here's all the ways in which our king is not defending us. Our king is acting like a tyrant.

01:02:24

He's actually making war against us. His right to govern us is now abdicated because he's not functioning in the role.

01:02:32

And so we have a right to then, it doesn't seem whimsical. Like we can just throw off if it doesn't suit us.

01:02:39

It's more of like a, we're just gonna acknowledge that there's a breakup that's already happened, really, effectively, but the legal work hasn't really been done on this.

01:02:50

We haven't actually said that that's what's happening, thinking of like a boyfriend, girlfriend breaking up or something.

01:02:57

It's more of a formality that's already accompanying something that already took place in reality.

01:03:02

So I look at that and I want to say, well, I think that's a good document. I want to defend that. I don't think that's channeling all of Locke or all of Enlightenment thoughts.

01:03:11

What are your thoughts on that? All right. So first off, I will say, for the record, when it comes to the

01:03:18

American Revolution, I'm more of a loyalist than one. Oh boy. In favor of independence.

01:03:24

Okay, so. You are Anglican, so that makes sense. I am Anglican and so I am more of a loyalist.

01:03:31

I've done some research on that. It's been a development over time. However, that being said,

01:03:38

I teach a lot of American history and I was raised in American history. And when it comes to Jefferson versus Hamilton, I'm a

01:03:44

Jeffersonian. I basically take it as, I try to be relevant in the sense of, okay, if I was living in 1776, where would

01:03:54

I have come down? And I probably would have come down on the loyalist side. However, that side didn't win.

01:04:00

So the next question is, where do I come down in terms of the new government?

01:04:05

Am I an anti -federalist or a federalist? And I've got to, I try to assess on the merits, which side is being more consistent with their principles that they say they believe and which one is kind of moving away from that.

01:04:18

And then I do the same as I go down through American history. And as I was explaining this to students once, one of my students says, wow, you've been on the losing side a lot in history.

01:04:29

I said, yep, I have. So, and so. You're a Confederate sympathizer as well. Yeah. Right.

01:04:35

So if I go to anti -federalist versus federalist, I'm an anti -federalist. When it goes to Hamiltonian versus Jeffersonian, I'm a

01:04:43

Jeffersonian. When it goes to Union Confederate, I'm a Confederate. Because, and those positions are not just because I like losing or because I'm trying to be a contrarian.

01:04:53

It's that based on, I identify as a conservative and I see those as the conservative sides in each of these disputes.

01:05:00

But what I have actually written in terms of the, in defending the revolution is that in, as you say, in the

01:05:10

Declaration of Independence, you really have two parts of it. One that's more abstract and philosophical.

01:05:17

That's your, those are the lines everybody remembers from the first paragraph, right? And then the large body that follows it is a bunch of complaints that are right or wrong, at least have some basis in history.

01:05:34

They're not abstract, right? They're pointing to actual complaints, okay?

01:05:42

Now there was a document written in response to the declaration that's quite fascinating by a loyalist who shows how a lot of these complaints are stretching things quite a bit and not fair perhaps.

01:05:55

But there's still an actual complaint. It's like in a divorce. If someone claims, well, this, you know, if a woman says, he's hitting me, okay?

01:06:07

That's an actual complaint. It might be stretched, right? But it's an actual complaint as opposed to I don't feel loved, right?

01:06:15

One is, well, what does that mean? You know, it's so subjective. So in the first part of the declaration, you have these more abstract

01:06:24

Lockean principles to your point, which liberals like to latch onto those.

01:06:30

But you also have to acknowledge that a good portion of the text is actual historical claims based on English common law saying this right's been violated, that right's been violated, the other has been violated, right?

01:06:46

So that would be a more conservative case for independence.

01:06:52

And so both of those sides of the declaration need to be acknowledged rather than throwing the whole thing out or at the same time, swallowing whole everything that's in the declaration without examining the

01:07:03

Lockean presuppositions of the state of nature behind it. Well, I see the American experience as more of like, there's just a distance thing here.

01:07:14

There's an ocean between these places so that you have, when they planted British common law, you have local governments being now the main receptacles of the allegiance of the people there and not the

01:07:26

King. And so there's this sort of, it's like if a parent drops their kid off somewhere and then goes off for 10 years and comes back and says, that's my kid.

01:07:36

It's like, well, you've been under the guardianship of this person and now the loyalty's switched. Right, yeah, absolutely.

01:07:41

And this is, yeah, this is, so what I would say is that in the revolution, you have the conservatives wing of it that holds to an older school of thought and you have the

01:07:52

Thomas Paine types that are based all in the theoretical. So my favorite founder is from my state.

01:08:00

His name was John Dickinson. He's not well known. Everybody forgets about him. And he's one guy who didn't sign the

01:08:08

Declaration of Independence on that day, but arguably he made a greater sacrifice than most of the names that we remember.

01:08:17

He actually signed up and fought in the army. It cost him his family.

01:08:24

And so he was, he actually did suffer in the revolution and then went on to be the one who promoted the, or who actually wrote the

01:08:35

Articles of Confederation. It was largely his doing that produced the Articles of Confederation and was part of the

01:08:42

Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as well. And at the convention in Philadelphia, he, you can summarize kind of his whole philosophy in one famous line of his there, where he says, experience rather than reason should be our guide.

01:08:59

And what he meant by that is when we're forming a new government, we should not be going to the philosophers that have these theories that we're gonna put in place.

01:09:08

And this is your connection to the French Revolution. Because the French Revolution, the idea was, we'll take all these abstract theories, we'll sit down in a room of really smart philosopher people who say what man should be, and we'll form a government based on that, as opposed to forming a government based on the customs and traditions and experience of our past.

01:09:32

And so this is where Dickinson leaned, is saying, if we're gonna make a constitution, we're not gonna have all the newest theories out there about what man is supposed to be, but we should base it on what has worked for us in the past, given our

01:09:48

English heritage and our history here in the colonies, given the part of the world that we live in, what has worked in the past, draw on those precedents, because they have worked for the most part, and make the amendations that we need to, but draw on that experience rather than trying to be smarter than all of history.

01:10:10

And whereas Thomas Paine on the other wing of the revolution, his is all theory. Now, an idea for, if we're gonna make a constitution, we need to go back to the state of nature and have this theoretical man as our basis and try to live up to that.

01:10:27

And so both of those theories, the enlightenment social contract, state of nature theory, and the more traditional constitutional conservative drawing on English common law theory, that Richard Hooker kind of theory, the

01:10:42

Edward Koch theory, both of those strands are combined in the revolution because really the constitution, a lot of our documents had to be compromised documents in order to keep everybody together.

01:10:56

And so you find language in them that liberals today can reach back to and claim.

01:11:04

And I started out the interview with making the connection between Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Paine.

01:11:11

That's why the progressives will draw on these guys and can to some extent do so in good faith.

01:11:19

I would argue they go off the rails in a lot of ways and distort in a lot of ways, but in some sense they can draw on the tradition in good faith and take it their direction.

01:11:28

And then you have your conservatives who will draw on other aspects of the tradition and take it their direction.

01:11:35

The problem is is when today we don't see these distinctions and we just take everything together.

01:11:45

And what we get is this kind of, we buy the enlightenment lie with, and combine it with our conservative values as best as we understand them.

01:11:56

And we still embrace this kind of modern individualism when we talk about natural rights and natural law.

01:12:03

And this is why some in reaction to it, and I would say the theonomists are there and some of the neo -Calvinists are there saying, we just need to do away with this whole concept entirely of natural law and Aquinas and scholastics.

01:12:19

And we need something certain and objective again. And so we can only find this through my worldview glasses is what it comes down to is that when a

01:12:28

Christian becomes a Christian, they adopt these worldview glasses. And so all we need to do then is convert every, convert people so they become

01:12:37

Christian because when they become Christian, they'll get their Christian worldview glasses on, they'll see everything, they'll vote the right way.

01:12:43

And what it discounts is an anthropology that recognizes we are shaped by our unique traditions as well.

01:12:52

So the idea that you can just invade the world, invite the world, adopt a kind of globalist approach and individualist approach to the world, and it's fine because the gospel go throughout all the world and everybody will see things the exact same way, discounts everything we've been talking about in terms of the particularities of our beliefs.

01:13:11

And I was where you were too, as far as a theonomist or friendly to that, and also thinking that that was the solution.

01:13:19

And you hear it today a lot with more pietistic type people saying, just preach the gospel. If we just did this, we just had people saved, like that would solve everything.

01:13:27

And I've realized that's not true at all on a political level. Like, I'm sure it would help a lot of things because you're going to start realizing killing babies, probably not a good idea, right?

01:13:37

There's certain things that are black and white in the scripture you're going to start seeing, but it does not translate into necessarily being knowledgeable about everything civics related.

01:13:50

And you can see that clearly with there are secular or I should say, non -Christian, maybe

01:13:56

Christian tradition, cultural Christian, but they're not actually born again, Christians who will vote very well, who will think about these things very intelligently.

01:14:05

And then you'll have born again Christians who, let's face it, some of them vote for Biden, right?

01:14:11

Like they're just not thinking deeply about these things. And the only factor is not just that they're

01:14:17

Christian or not Christian, there's something else going on and I think you're hitting it. So, yeah,

01:14:23

I mean, this is, it may be in some ways a little dismal for people because that's the solution that they thought was not just going to save souls for eternity, but also save their country.

01:14:34

And I don't know, as you're a deacon in the Reformed Episcopal Church, I mean, let's end on a high note here.

01:14:40

What kind of maybe hopeful things or practical things would you tell people to do? You weren't ready for that one.

01:14:49

Oh, I'm not the activist type. I'm more trying to discern the problem rather than I'm not great at the, as great as at the solutions.

01:15:03

But I do think localism, this is gonna be, this is almost like a cliche, but it's as cliche as act locally.

01:15:19

Think globally, act locally, as cliche as that is. We really do need to be thinking in terms of our families, even when it comes to ministry.

01:15:35

I don't wanna get too far off on that tangent here, but it does tie in the recent event from just last week.

01:15:42

There were actually two important events. If you've heard about the Alistair Begg. Yeah, I talked about it, yeah.

01:15:49

Okay, and that was followed up by the

01:15:56

Mere Anglican Conference last week in South Carolina where Calvin Robinson was there.

01:16:02

I don't know if you know who Calvin Robinson. I do, I've had him on the show, yeah. Okay, so Calvin Robinson was asked to speak on critical theory and its origin.

01:16:14

And he went, took the ax right to the root and said, critical theory has come in, makes it, ties it to Marxism and that feminism has been the primary way in which critical theory has come into the church.

01:16:29

And he went right after women's ordination as an expression of feminism, which is rooted in critical theory and how it's taken hold in the church.

01:16:39

And that was very controversial because there were, you know, women priests so -called, you know, there in attendance.

01:16:47

And so he was disinvited from the conference. He was not allowed to take part in the panel discussion the next day.

01:16:54

He was just saying, okay, he upset too many people and some women complained and he was pulled.

01:17:00

And so that was a big controversy. Now at the panel discussion on the last day that he was not allowed to participate in, the question was raised about attending a gay marriage.

01:17:12

The same kind of question that Alistair Begg dealt with a few days earlier. And you had

01:17:19

Sam Albury on the panel who said it's a wisdom issue and that you can, you know, it's more of a prudential issue and that it's kind of up to you and, you know, take some factors into account, but yes, you could.

01:17:35

Then following that question, the question was asked, does anybody else on the panel have anything to say?

01:17:42

Expecting somebody would have a contrary opinion and everybody passed on the question. And I was really disappointed that DA Carson was on the panel and also passed on the question, did not provide any pushback whatsoever.

01:17:53

Wow. So all of a sudden I'm thinking, okay, is this now the, are we just gonna wake up and find, oh, everybody in evangelicalism now believes we're personally against homosexuality, but you can attend gay weddings and celebrate and affirm them and bring gifts and be a part of it.

01:18:11

Is that gonna be the new position now that we just wake up and find out, oh, we've always believed this, you know, we've always held this.

01:18:18

I'm wondering, but I mentioned this because I, it's of my, even though I'm an evangelical

01:18:26

Christian, I am really concerned that evangelicalism does not have what it takes to actually fight the war where we are in.

01:18:38

Because we think of every issue in terms of witness. You know, if maybe if I go to the gay wedding and I give, bring a gift and I dance and I celebrate and I'm, you know, chummy with everybody, they'll think, oh, you're a

01:18:55

Christian and really cool. I wanna become a Christian too. Yeah, that's how it works. Maybe, maybe somebody will be affected by this and maybe you can be a witness because we think in terms of just witness.

01:19:07

And that goes into our name, evangel, right? That it's every opportunity should be about sharing the gospel in some way.

01:19:15

And the problem is, is you take, you go to that wedding, you bring your kids, your kids get to see, you know, two men or two women kissing up front and celebrating their marriage.

01:19:27

What have you just done to your kids? Well, you don't even have to bring them. They just have to know that you went, that's it. Well, I just have to know you attended and I know what you're saying, but I'm just like,

01:19:37

I'm anticipating, yeah. Yeah, so even if they, to your point, you're correct. Even if the kids don't know, they didn't see it.

01:19:45

They know you went and you support uncle so -and -so and his husband, you know, or they know.

01:19:53

And so that's what I'm saying. So you are giving them, you're already moving the plausibility structures for the next generation of what they think is plausible and acceptable.

01:20:08

You've already shifted the goalposts in their mind, creating a category for an alternative lifestyle that they did not, were not able to imagine before that.

01:20:19

And you start losing your kids in the process all in the name of witness.

01:20:25

And so I say all that to say that as even, even as evangelicals, we need to,

01:20:31

I'm not saying, you know, don't do outreach, absolutely do outreach. Don't, don't, I'm not trying to say, you know, become inbred and so, you know, navel gazing and internal, it's not what

01:20:41

I'm saying, but we need to think more in terms of evangelism, in terms of your household and your local community and building that up and preserving that because that's what's gonna last into the next generation.

01:21:00

So the idea of, you know, I've given, I'm not gonna have kids or I'm going to expose my kids to all sorts of things so they can be better witnesses.

01:21:07

I mean, when has that worked? I mean, it's to, I'm not a Roman Catholic, but you know,

01:21:13

Roman Catholics for over a hundred years now have been building parochial schools that have become huge institutions, even though, you know, some of those larger institutions might lean liberal today, they've been creating alternative institutions.

01:21:25

They're not gonna go anywhere. What have evangelicals been doing for the last hundred years? We've been telling ourselves public schools are okay because little

01:21:33

Johnny can go in there and tell somebody about Jesus, right? And be a witness and the exact opposite.

01:21:40

The rules are all set against them. Or it's complete secession, it's homeschooling, which I'm, you know, in favor of,

01:21:46

I was homeschooled, but it's not thinking in terms of what can we do to create a lasting impact for the next generation.

01:21:54

Right, yeah. So, and I was homeschooled the whole way through also. So I'm a product and I'm all for homeschooling, but, and not against it, that's not, and I know a lot of more people are homeschooling today, but I'm just thinking in terms of, you know, how many decades have gone by where we have justified the public schools saying, you know, they can be a light, you know, when our job is not to make our kids a light in a hostile environment, especially at a young age, but to really preserve them, to build them up, to give them the weapons and the tools that they need to carry on to the next generation.

01:22:31

And so on issue after issue, I could go into more, but I'm not right now, but on issue after issue,

01:22:38

I think we have conceded too much ground in terms of being, in the name of being a witness and being a witness covers for some really shaky theology a lot of times.

01:22:47

And so in terms of practically what you can do, this is not very practical, but we need to start thinking more about building our institutions, including the institution of the family and how do we educate our kids?

01:23:01

How do we preserve our kids in the next generation? And what are some lasting institutions we can actually collaborate on as evangelicals, even across denominational lines to build up each other so that we have an alternative place to go rather than constantly saying, everything's fine, telling ourselves everything's fine.

01:23:23

And this just gives us a greater opportunity to witness. It doesn't really work that way. Amen. Well, yeah, we have been going longer than I said we would, so we probably should land the plane.

01:23:33

And if people have questions or if you wanna see Jared on again and talk about something else, let me know in the comments.

01:23:39

Jared, is there anywhere you wanna send people? I don't know if you are on X or social media or have a website.

01:23:46

I'm on social media, I'm on Facebook under my name. I'm on Twitter at, well, there goes my loyalist connection, at RogueTory is my handle on Twitter.

01:24:00

And I write for the North American Anglican, which is a very conservative Anglican publication that has a lot of great resources there on it.

01:24:11

So it's NorthAM, A -M, Anglican .com, or just Google the

01:24:16

North American Anglican. It'll be your first hit. A lot of my writings are there. Excellent, excellent. Well, I appreciate it.

01:24:22

Thank you. And if people wanna reach out, I would suggest become friends with Jared or follow him on social media.

01:24:31

God bless, Jared. Thank you for all you're doing. Thank you for having me on. Great to be with you. My pleasure. Take care.