An Interview w/ Mark Rushdoony #Theonomy #presup #apologetics

R. J. Rushdoony’s Legacy and Christian Reconstruction

Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala, and today I have a special guest. If you've noticed the thumbnail there on YouTube, I am going to be talking with Mark Rushdooney, the son of the late R .J. Rushdooney.

And just to give a little bit of information about R .J. Rushdooney, he was a Reformed theologian, philosopher, historian, who was a major influential figure in the Christian Reconstruction movement. He's best known for his work advocating the application of biblical law to every area of life, including politics, education, and culture, emphasizing the Lordship of Christ over all society.

Rushdooney's teachings were deeply rooted in a presuppositional apologetic framework, heavily influenced by Cornelius Van Til. We'll talk a little bit about that here in this episode as well. And he's written a lot of books, so if you've never heard of R .J. Rushdooney and you're interested, hey, who is this guy?

I highly recommend you type in his name on Amazon or anywhere on the internet, and you will learn very quickly that he was a very prolific thinker and writer, writing over 50 to 60 books, with some of those books which include the Institutes of Biblical Law, The Messianic Character of American Education, and particularly of interest to those who are interested in apologetics, he wrote a book called The One and the Many, which is not primarily an apologetics work, but is relevant to the topic of the problem of the one and the many, and the Trinity, and things like that.

So folks who follow this channel will find that information very useful. And he wrote a book on apologetics, I suppose he's probably written more than this one, but I'm willing to be corrected on this.

He wrote a book called By What Standard, which is a book on presuppositional apologetics. And so I'd like to welcome on the show Mark Rushdooney. Thank you so much for making the time to be on here with me.

Why don't you take a few moments to introduce yourself to the audience?

Well, I'm the son of R .J. Rushdooney, and I've been working with Calcedon, the organization that he founded, since 1978. I was about 11 years old when he began it, and so I've been around it my entire life.

And we're continuing to keep his materials available. More of his materials are in print now than ever before. And we're also putting them in audio books, and e-books, and the like. One of our major purposes is to keep his material alive, because he spoke to such a vast assortment of topics.

We think these are issues that he addressed very early on that are still very timely, and they're issues the church still needs to.

Deal with and come to terms with. Yeah, excellent. Well, folks who just heard me kind of make a brief introduction, I did mention the phrase Christian Reconstruction. Do you mind kind of giving us a definition of that?

Maybe expand a little bit on the brief comments that I made, so folks could understand what that is from kind of a helicopter perspective. Right.

Christian Reconstruction is a term that my father coined in 1965, just after he had started Calcedon. And I define Christian Reconstruction as merely an analogy of the believer's responsibility into a sometimes hostile world, and a world that has become increasingly anti-Christian.

In other words, what do we do in the culture that we are faced with? And so that's the basic issue that my father was addressing. Where do we go from here? Francis Schaefer asked much the same question in How Then Shall We Live.

My father got a little bit more specific, and to his theology, you know, developed that in a particular way. My father, in his very first newsletter when he started Calcedon in 1965, he compared what he was doing and what his supporters were doing to the Renaissance artists.

And the great art of the Renaissance was financed by sponsors, rich people, nobles and such, paid for these great artists to spend their time creating works of art. So he compared it to, you know, Renaissance artists.

And then in the second newsletter, he referred to having to begin the work of Reconstruction. And so that name really stuck. And so he began referring to his worldview as Christian Reconstruction. It's essentially a worldview.

How do we look at the big picture? And I think that was my father's great contribution. He looked at the big picture. Many Christian thinkers and leaders delved into very specific ministries, very specific endeavors.

For instance, they wanted to promote Christian education. They wanted to fight abortion. They wanted to start a college. They wanted to do something. And they attacked very specific issues. My father always kept the big picture in view.

And so he wrote on numerous topics, hoping that others would take the initiative to delve into these areas more specifically. And so he was all in favor of targeted ministries, but he wanted to basically keep the door open to Christians going into more and more activities.

All of faith in life, he sometimes referred to it as.

Presuppositional Apologetics as a Worldview

Yeah, that's excellent because this channel focuses on apologetics. And so we talk a lot about presuppositional apologetics and methodology. But when you get a lot of the folks on the Internet who use the Internet as their main source of education, they kind of fall into this niche.

Like I do the apologetics over here and this is where I get all of my information. And then my life is kind of a separate over there. And so what I appreciate about your father is that emphasis on worldview.

Being presuppositional is not merely an apologetic issue. It's a world and life issue, which I think your father did very well in trying to apply that in a wide range of areas.

Right. None of these issues are ends in themselves.

Absolutely.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

Amen. Excellent. Well, I know folks will get into a little bit more of your dad's ideas, but what's always interesting to me, Mark, is when I read the works of someone as prolific as your father or other Christian apologists or scholars, we can be so enamored with their work.

But what interests me is like behind closed doors, what kind of person is this person when no one is watching and he's not talking about quote unquote scholarship or whatever? What is it like growing up with someone like your father, someone as a great thinker, prolific writer?

I would imagine he's super busy even at home. I mean, what did that look like for you growing up with him?

Well, that was one unique feature of my father is other than about a year when he worked for another foundation before Chalcedon, this is in the early 60s, he worked from home. He was a pastor and then later when he worked from Chalcedon, Chalcedon was mostly out of his home for all of the years that he was alive.

So he worked at home. He was always there, which is a little unique to have a father that's just at home 24 -7. Although, you know, there were times in his life, mostly after I was an adult that he traveled extensively.

But something that came up on Facebook recently is we posted a picture of my father where he appeared to be laughing and people says, that's not the rush that I picture, that's not the rush I understand.

That rush was his nickname. And he did like to laugh a lot. In fact, when he wanted to relax, when he and mother wanted to relax, they would watch silly comedies on TV, even the reruns. You know, Gilgan's Island, I Dream of Jeannie.

Silly stuff. Because my father would say, I don't want drama. He dealt in very heavy topics. So when entertainment to him was something that he wanted to be very, very light. And even though, even when he did watch shows like that, he often had a book and he was reading a book while he did.

My mother would sometimes say, you're not paying the least bit of attention. And he'd tell her exactly what was going on. But he could do that. He was an avid reader all his life and he almost always had a book at his disposal.

In fact, when I was young he'd go to the post office and when he knew he likely had to stand in line, he would take a book with him and he would read the book while he was standing in line. And he didn't waste any time.

The first time he took us to Disneyland, he took a book. While we were on the ride, he was reading the book. That was normal for him.

What kind of books can you possibly be reading while standing in line? Was it like some deep academic book or is it just like any... He could read very heavy.

Stuff. And he could stop at any... He had a phenomenal memory. He could stop at any given moment and put the book aside and then pick it up again. And he kept the train of thought. That's why he could read a book while he was watching television.

His desk, often while he was writing all these books, it was not isolated in a separate room. It was usually in a room where there were other family activities going on, including sometimes a television.

So he had a phenomenal memory and a phenomenal ability to focus. And he had a very strong and a remarkable work ethic. What he got accomplished is truly amazing.

I remember N .T. Wright. I'm not a big fan of N .T. Wright, but I remember N .T. Wright said this in an interview and it reminds me of the fact that your dad wrote so much. There was a point in N .T. Wright's career where it looked like he was coming out with a book one after the other.

And an interviewer said, hey, how do you write so many books? And he's like, well, I've been reading for so many years, I figured I might just begin to jot it down. And so the same thing with your dad.

I would imagine he wrote so much because he read so much. There was just so much there to synthesize and to get out. And so that's hilarious. Disney, I can just imagine him standing on a line.

That's hilarious. He didn't begin to write till after he was 40. And so he got to the point where he would pretty much formulate an entire chapter in his head and he would sit down and write the chapter, often without.

Interruptions. That's incredible. Now, with someone with those kinds of reading habits, how did that impact you personally growing up? Did you pick up a habit of being a voracious reader or are you kind of like, man, I'm sick of all those books?

My dad always had a book with him.

I think I'll pass. I'm very much in between. My grandfather may have had a photographic memory. He had a phenomenal memory. His father had an amazing memory. I did not inherit that. So I do read, but I don't read voraciously.

Okay. All right. Well, have you read all of your father's works?

Most of them. Okay. All right.

Many of them I heard as lectures growing up because most of his books he presented as lectures. So often I'll read something that I hadn't read before, but it's familiar.

Material to me. Okay. Now, I'm happy that you said that he liked to laugh because I was just listening. There's this thing. I think it's not an app. It's a website that I have saved, and it's called the Pocket Seminary, and it's got all of your dad's, well, not all of them, but a lot of your dad's lectures on systematic theology.

And it's got all these topics here. It's called the Pocket College or something like that. Pocket College. Yeah. And I'm loving it. But he sounds so serious in all of them.

That was like he didn't it wasn't usually photographed smiling because he just had this old-fashioned attitude that scholars need to be serious, and they need to be taken seriously, and they need to act in a serious way.

That was the public persona. When he was speaking he rarely said anything that was, he rarely tried to be funny. When he was preaching, never. He believed scholars behaved in a certain way, and so that was just kind of that old-fashioned.

And people would often ask him, Rush, could you smile? And it was very difficult to get him to smile. That picture that I was talking about that we posted, I posted a note that I, my guess is that it was a studio photograph.

My guess was that the photographer said something and he laughed and he snapped the picture remotely, and my dad didn't know that he was about to take the picture because that wasn't typical of my father.

And my guess also is that my mother saw that and says, we want that picture.

That's awesome. Very cool. Now, my next question here, what are some key events or experiences in your father's life that you can think of that shaped his thinking and his ministry? Is there anything that stands out to you that was really definitional in terms of guiding his thinking and leading to some of the things that he wrote, some of the things.

That he did? Well, there's a lot that we could say about that. He grew up in the son of Armenian immigrants that had escaped the massacre of Armenians during World War I. Through a series of providential circumstances, they were able, they were not stuck in Russia as many Armenians were.

They were able to get to this country within a matter of weeks. But he grew up in Armenian churches, so his, the community that he lived in was Armenian speaking, so he grew up learning Armenian. He knew Armenian before he knew English.

It was really in school where he developed his English speaking skills. And in fact, he said that he did not, his thinking didn't shift to English permanently until he was in the university. So, his Armenian background was a huge impact on him.

And many of these people in these Armenian churches, my grandfather served in five churches and they were all predominantly of Armenian immigrants. So, he always was around people who had grown up and survived the massacres.

That was a very big part of who he was in his, through his teen years. And that was a huge impact on him. At the university, a few professors he found of great interest, and sometimes it was just one or two things they said that greatly affected his thinking, based upon the fact that he was a voracious reader already.

He was an avid reader and was already well read by the time he was at the University of California at Berkeley. One professor discussed the iconoclastic controversy, and my father years later would recall that he said it really wasn't a religious matter per se, as far as the propriety of whether images should be in churches.

He says it was really about who represented Jesus Christ. Was it the church or was it the state? And that was what the controversy was about. And the state really won that round of that debate. And of course, the church maintained and continued to maintain that it was the embodiment of the kingdom of God.

Well, neither is really accurate, but he saw that development and that problem of statism continuing, and we're still facing the problem of the authority of the state and statism. Another thing that influenced him when he was in the university is, and this gets a little bit more to apologetics, is one of his professors, a Professor Strong, Edward Strong, spoke of the given.

Before he heard the term presupposition, this professor had told another student, don't argue with Christians about origins, because inevitably you end up with a miracle of some kind that really can't be explained.

And he said Augustine would never discuss the origin of God, so don't discuss the origin of the universe. It's a given, and start from that position. And my father thought that that was a very honest thing to say, and a self-apparent, really, thing to say, and he never forgot that.

And so he had this concept of the given from the late 30s, and it wasn't until after the war that he picked up a copy of Van Til's The New Modernism, and he said, now here's a professor of religion at a seminary who's saying the same thing, but it's in more Christian terms.

And so he was already primed to be delighted with this book by Van Til, and Van Til called it presupposition.

Pastoral Work, the Indian Reservation, and the Shape of His Theology

Yeah, that's excellent. Yeah, and that's interesting that he had that experience with the professor. I mean, presuppositions are so important, right? They kind of, they allow us to identify the reasons why we're disagreeing with unbelievers so much.

They guide everything that we say, how we interpret reality, and so that's super important. Now, I do want to get into the influence of Van Til on your father in a little more detail, but before I get there, your father did pastoral work, am I correct?

Yes, out of seminary. He actually was a missionary to American Indians in a very remote area in northern Nevada. It was very close to the Idaho border. He was a hundred miles, I think 20 or 30 miles from the nearest paved road.

He was a hundred miles either going north or south from the nearest town, and by town, we're talking about 3 ,000, 4 ,000 people. He was in a very remote area of Nevada. He was there for eight and a half years.

He went there in 1944 when the war was on, and he didn't leave until early 1953. That was his first pastorate, and then he was a pastor of churches in California for a number of years.

Now, how did your father's pastoral work inform his later theology and his more philosophical writings? Is there a connection there, or am I kind of way off there in terms of his ministry and his later ideas?

Well, he went to the Indian reservation because he felt that if he could make the faith relevant to another culture, then he would be better prepared to make it relevant to anyone in any context. It was a very foreign culture, and the Indians had some ideas that he wasn't prepared for, and his ideas of the Indians needed some adjusting as well because he had read the first thing when he found out he would be going to the Indian reservation is he read what the anthropologists said about these Indian tribes.

He went into the University of California library, and he found these reports by anthropologists, and he studied them, and later, actually, he was able to meet with some of the individuals who had been interviewed by the anthropologists and get their take on what the anthropologists had said about them.

And very often, they thought it wasn't at all accurate. And that was a very hard ministry. I mean, life on an Indian reservation was pretty tough. It was basically a socialistic environment. It destroyed the American Indian and their ability.

A lot of the old Indians. My father spoke to Indians who could remember actually fighting white men in some of the later Indian wars in Idaho and Nevada. And some of those Indians remembered when they were forced to go on the reservation in the 1880s.

And it was a very different experience, and he saw how they were perceived. And he had to try to make the faith relevant to them, because when he went to the reservation, the idea of the Indian was that, here's another white man with a cast off, something secondhand, Christianity, that the white man is rejecting, but he wants to give the Indian.

And so they had a very negative view of Christianity, because they saw the increasingly abandonment of Christianity in American culture. And so their attitude was, this is just something else you don't want anymore that you're trying to foist on us.

And so there was this negative thing. So it was a very difficult first pastorate, and then all the social problems of addiction and alcohol and such. Quite brutal. And he often used the experiences he had as a pastor as examples, and he had some extreme examples.

Wow, that's incredible. I didn't know that about him. You almost forget, yeah, there are some Indian reservations even today. You kind of just forget about that segment if you're not in touch with American history and things like that.

Wow, that's actually pretty fascinating. Did he ever write on that? Is there any way we could get a

He did, and we published, we have a little booklet that we offer called The American Indian. I forget the subtitle, but it's something to effect of how we destroyed the Indian through the reservation system.

Wow. Because see, the Indians characterized their life before the coming of the white man as one of their survivors. And that survivor to be a survivor in a very harsh environment with that primitive lifestyle meant that you developed some character habits.

They weren't necessarily Christian character habits, but they were habits of character that enabled you to survive. Well, the reservation system was a welfare system basically, and it really destroyed that amongst the Indians in about a generation.

And my father was seeing that transition in the 40s and the problems that were just systemic in the reservation system.

I think someone in the chat said here, maybe is this the title of it? The American Indian, a standing indictment against Christianity and statism in America. Yes, that's it. Okay. Oh, interesting. I got to look that up.

See, I like stuff like this. I'm like, I didn't know that. So I want to pick that up. All right. Well, let's take a little shift here. So your dad is very well known for Christian reconstruction, issues relating to theonomy.

What was his role in that movement? Was he the one who started the movement? Was he continuing it from some previous thoughts? What is his role in Christian reconstruction and what led him down that path to focus on the importance of the application of God's law to modern society?

I mean, I would imagine this is a development in his own thinking, and then he kind of went with it. He leaned into that. What was that process like for him?

I think my father from a very early on, and you can sometimes find an old transcript of an old sermon or something he wrote in the 50s before most of his writing or the early 60s. And you can see some of the themes he was developing.

This idea of Christian reconstruction was basically part of his worldview fairly early on. He coined the term Christian reconstruction. So I don't know that it had any origins before that. But nothing in Christian reconstruction is necessarily unique.

It's not a new theology per se. It's more of an approach to what are we supposed to be doing? When he wrote the Institutes of Biblical Law he was very clear in saying that this is not contrary to Reformed doctrine.

He said the Reformation addressed the issue of justification by faith, and it pretty much settled amongst Protestants that justification was an act of God's grace received by faith alone. But what Reformation never really resolved was what about sanctification?

And my father saw biblical law as what do we do? How do we grow in grace? How are we sanctified? And my father said this is the next issue. This needs to be the next Reformation of the church. There were several trends, and in Western Christian today it's some sort of pietism.

It's a general vague idea of morality and goodness that's vaguely Christian, vaguely biblical, but not a lot of specifics. My father said God's law was how he expects us to live. If we live and think along the lines that God has directed us, then we're safe.

And you get into something of presuppositionalism. In other words, if God created the world, if he's the sovereign Lord of it, then doing things God's way is the safe way. It's the way of blessing. And so he just had this big perspective.

And I don't think he ever set about to try to do anything that was radically new in Christianity. I've sometimes told people that I think my father, if he had been born in the 19th century, he would have been just considered an old-fashioned Presbyterian theologian.

He wouldn't have been so radical. And he was in the Presbyterian Church USA. He grew up in it, and he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA. And as it became modernistic, he basically had a hard time with it.

And he eventually left it in 1958 entirely. And so these are some of the things that affected him. But he never saw anything that he did as innovative. In fact, he really didn't like the idea of some younger men who thought they had to be innovative in their theology.

He says, we need to be faithful, not innovative.

Theonomy, Grace, and the Church’s Resistance to Biblical Law

So would you say that the reason why many people in the church today would see your dad's views as extreme is because of the watering down of morality in the world and the church? That when he's just putting forth these ideas, which he's arguing, this is just biblical application to everyday life, which was completely normal when the United States was more biblically grounded in the past.

But because we've moved so far from that, it seems extreme. Because you know how people talk today, right? Like, well, Jesus fulfilled the law. So that means and what that means is the law doesn't matter anymore.

How would you explain that in terms of where the church is today in terms of how they view morality? And then along comes your dad saying these things, which shouldn't be too controversial, but they're really controversial when he says it.

Right. I think the church, even the Reformed tradition, has fallen into what I consider a type of dispensationalism, basically the law versus grace, that somehow the law is opposed to God's grace. And that's why a lot of people oppose my father.

They think he's anti -grace. They think he's talking about justification, which tells me they've never even read what he wrote on the subject. But there's this general feeling of that, yes, we should be moral, but in a vague way.

And the historian Otto Scott once said, God is no buttercup. When God speaks, people should listen. And that was my father's position. Well, this is what God says. And I can remember once a paper in Sacramento kind of did a hit piece on my father, particularly his stance on homosexuality.

He said it's a capital offense in Scripture. It should not be tolerated. My father's response to that was, and this was to me personally, he said, I wrote a book on what the Bible says. What did they expect me to say?

And so a lot of people don't like the fact that the Bible is hard-nosed about some things. When God speaks, he speaks definitively. And when we say, thus saith the Lord, it's not us. It's what God says.

There's a lot about what God says in his words that we might be a little uncomfortable with, that we wish he had made a little bit softer. It would make the job of Christians, the job of preachers a lot easier if God had said it in a more genteel way.

But there's some things in the Bible that just have a very hard edge on it. There's some things we don't like about Scripture because they rub us the wrong way. But that's because we're sinners. When God talks about sin, it grates on that aspect of who we are.

It hurts. And so yes, discussing God's law is going to be a sensitive topic. It's going to be something we're uncomfortable with. But look at the world we have today and what a mess we've made of it by thinking we could do things better than God's way.

I was basically a teenager in the 60s and the world of the 60s was supposed to usher in this age of Aquarius, this age of love and acceptance and such. We've made a mess of things by doing things our way.

And so theonomy says, look, if we want to be blessed, we have to do things God's way. And this is really true of our whole world and life view. I mean, it's the lesson of the Old Testament. Everything was going wrong for the Hebrew kingdoms and the prophets kept saying, it's because you've turned away from God.

It's because you do things your way. And very often the prophets would look at a condition and say why do you have this social situation? It's because you're depriving widows and orphans of their property.

It's because you have false weights and measures. You're not doing things God's way and therefore you're paying the price for it. And so addressing the real issue in terms of God's law is really the most loving thing that we can do in saying this is why we have problems.

So to believers it says, look, there's an alternative. Obey God and be blessed. To the unbeliever, it's a way of saying this is why your life is a mess. And you have to believe and accept the salvation that God has offered.

And then you need to clean up your life and do things differently and things will turn around for you. So it's not easy discussing the hard things because a lot of what God says is very hard for us.

Your dad was promoting the idea of in some way applying the biblical law to our modern context and this has been obviously very controversial because even if someone were to agree and say sure yes, let's do that.

What does that look like? To try to apply it to our modern context has been seen as a challenge. I know that Dr. Bonson tried to flesh things out in terms of how it might look in society. What did your dad have in mind in terms of what that would look like where the rubber hits the road?

What does it look like to apply certain biblical principles in the Old Testament to our modern context?

Right, and I know Gary North put out some biblical blueprint series where he tried to flesh out how things would look. I think we can it's difficult to try to project how things will look in a godly society when we're not there yet.

In fact, let's go back to the term Christian Reconstruction. What happens when you have a building, let's say it's an historic building. When you want it to be restored, you first of all have to assess its current situation and all of its problems.

And some of those problems may be structural. Some of them may extend all the way to down to the foundation. And it's very possible you might have to spend far more than it would cost to tear the building down and start with something new.

So if you want to fix it, sometimes it's a very.

Involved.

And painful process to do it. But you have to begin somewhere. You can't just do service fixes and superficial things. You really need to address the problems. And that's true when we're reconstructing society.

Obviously we need to begin with a gospel. We need to begin with a change that is only possible by the Holy Spirit. But in the meantime we can speak to Christians and tell Christians, look, if you want to fix your life you need to start complying.

You need to organize your life personally, your family, your business around biblical principles in order to be blessed. Because God won't bless you if you're in rebellion against him. And to the unbelieving world around us then we have to say, you need the change that only the Holy Spirit can give you.

And that's going to also require then that you do things differently. Because you're creating your own problems in society. And so the answer is not trying to figure out what the perfect biblical society is going to look like, or what the perfect laws are, because changing the laws is a top-down thing.

It's really going to be a bottom-up change. But that's really what the kingdom of God is all about. So Christian reconstruction is not reconstructing the political order. And a lot of people want to start by imagining a godly political order, when what we need is a godly social order because people are changed and therefore the social changes are going to come from the ground up because people are changed.

And people have to be willing to change the way they live. Because even a professing Christian population that's disobeying God isn't going to be blessed. They're going to have as much of the same problems as the unbelieving world.

So it's not a simple matter of saying this is what it's going to look like. Let's look back at the kingdom of God. It began with twelve apostles and maybe a few hundred other followers, probably. And Jesus said, I'm leaving you here alone and now go out and spread this to all the world.

It wasn't an easy process. But look at the kingdom of God now. It's bigger than it's ever been before. More professing Christians in the world today than ever before. The kingdom of God has grown and I think it's going to continue to grow.

It's not perfect but it never was, even in the beginning. A lot of heresy, strange ideas in the early church and they had to weed them out slowly. But look at Rome. What happened to Rome? Rome is museum pieces now.

It's in the history books. The religions of the Romans, the philosophies of the ancient world are largely forsaken, although they still try to pop up now and then. So the kingdom of God has grown. And Christian reconstruction is really about the growth of the kingdom.

And that involves eschatology.

I appreciate what you said, that it's a bottom-up approach. I think a lot of people who look at theonomy and Christian reconstruction from the outside, they'll say, oh, there are those Christians trying to take over the White House so they can impose the Bible on everybody.

And I think the big focus is, I think it was a quote from a movie that resonated with me as you were saying that. Have you ever seen the movie back in the day? I think they made it in the 70s. It started off as a series, Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus of Nazareth. Remember that movie? Obviously the line is not from the Bible, but I resonated with the line and it's very much in line with what you said, where these Jewish leaders were discussing the Messiah and how the Messiah is going to rise up and overthrow the Roman Empire.

And one of the characters, he says, before kingdoms can change, men must change. And that really resonated with me because in terms of eschatology, post-millennialism and proclamation of the gospel, bringing people under submission to the Lord Jesus is the work of the Spirit through the proclamation of the gospel as the gospel conquers the hearts of people.

So when people change, then society changes. And I think that's a very important aspect to all of this. Would you agree? Would you disagree? What do you think of that?