What is a Nation with Michael Belch

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The link is in the description. Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, and we have a wonderful conversation today for you, an enlightening one, I think a clarifying one about a question that many people are asking, which is what is a nation?

And I think in 2025, especially after America has gone through so much in terms of immigration, expansion, and deracination now, this becomes a more, I think, heavy question and a more meaningful question.

Is my nation the region I live in? Is it this empire I'm part of? Am I a global citizen? What about people who live next door who might not even speak my language? Are they part of my nation? These are all practical questions, and I want to dive into some of this today with Pastor Michael Belch.

Michael Belch wrote this book that I'm holding here. It's called In Defense of Christian Nations. I have the not-for-resale copy, which I'm proud of. So one of the original copies here, and I actually did endorse this book.

You can find that on the back of this, but it's a long book, and it's a detailed book, and you can follow Pastor Michael Belch at MLBelch on X, or you can also go to Iron Screw Publishing, which is his publishing company, which he published this through.

And with that, I want to welcome Pastor Michael Belch. Thank you for being here. Thanks, John. Really, really happy to be here and excited for the conversation that we're having today. Well, let me give you the chance to introduce yourself a little more.

You were a missionary. Maybe you still feel that way, but where were you serving? How long did you serve overseas? I'm wondering if that influenced your interest in this topic. It actually did quite a bit, and in relation to the question, if I still consider myself a missionary, my thinking on that has changed quite a bit.

I actually, when I served with my family, we were in Taiwan. We were there for six years from about 2013 to about 2020. And with COVID and everything, we happened to be back in the U .S. visiting family, and lockdowns happened, and I got COVID, and the Taiwanese government basically cut off travel, and we just got stuck there in the U .S.

And so that was God basically saying, okay, your time doing mission work in Taiwan is done. But even before that, I grew up on the mission field. My parents were missionaries as well. And it's interesting that all of this bears on the question of nationality and nationhood because even though my parents were incredibly committed to the work they did, they loved and served the people of Venezuela very well their entire careers.

Always, I got it from my dad, always was just the understanding that we were Americans. We were serving the people of Venezuela. We were serving the nation and the church in Venezuela, but we were Americans.

And there are plenty of Americans who are patriots, so I'm not saying I have an extra measure of it, but I got a full dose of Love Your Nation, and partly it was, for me, just the fact that I lived in a nation, I had no animosity, had a great deal of affection for the Venezuelan people and the Taiwanese people when I was there, but in the back of my mind was always, you know, we're Americans, and we are away from our earthly home, which leads to the question of the missionary category.

And, you know, growing up in the mission community, people always paint their, this is not a bad thing, people always paint their own profession or their own perspective in the best possible light. And so I would hear from a lot of missionaries statements like this, everybody's a missionary, even the people back in the churches in America that have sent us our missionaries, it's just God calls some of the missionaries to go overseas, and some of them are called to work as missionaries in their home country.

And actually being in Taiwan as an adult, doing mission work as an adult, the perspective on that question changed quite a bit for me, and I realized actually that's not the way to think about it. We are all called to be evangelists in a sense, like we are all to share Christ with the people around us, but missionary is an unusual calling.

It's permission that God gives to someone by virtue of a calling to leave the work that they ought to be doing to disciple their own nation and go to another nation to do that. And that does break the kind of the biblical 99 .9 of the time pattern that God expects Christians to do.

He expects them to disciple the nation that he's put them in, and in some of them he gives a call which kind of selects them out from that, either for a career or for a time period, to go and love another people as closely as they can to loving their own people by becoming like them, learning their customs, sharing their language, and preaching the gospel, and trying to teach them to obey Christ's commands.

I wonder, this podcast is not supposed to be about missions specifically, but I do wonder whether we could do better at approaching that whole topic of missions. Of course I had missions in seminary, and it's very focused on the eschatological purpose of the Great Commission is not simply numbers, it is the diversity of people who will be gathered around God's throne, and so we're part of accomplishing this purpose.

And it's interesting, I remember someone from Scotland had come into our missions class and had talked about, they call them the schemes in Scotland, but try to attract students. Of course you have all these presentations every week with some other organization trying to attract young seminarians.

And I felt a particular interest in that, which is something that I was feeling more than thinking through, I suppose, but in retrospect I realize it's because I have somewhat of an affinity, I suppose, for English and Scottish people because those are my ancestors, right?

More than I do for Chinese or Indians, not that it's wrong to go to those places. But anyway, I guess I just want to say that it seems like this has been championed as the highest of Christian callings for a long time, and I'm just more skeptical about that.

I do respect missionaries greatly, very much so, but I do wonder whether financially speaking and just even culturally speaking for our own country, whether this is a good thing to see the scale at which this is operating.

Because you can go to places like Turkey and teach. They want Americans to come and teach. You can go to places like China and do ESL, right? They want that. You can actually be pretty self-sustaining if that's something you're truly interested in, and you can get your feet wet and sort of, I suppose, figure out whether you have an affinity for this people and really want to plant your flag there.

But instead it seems like what often happens is you do the short-term thing, you have the very emotional experience, and then based on that experience, you determine that you're going to spend foreseeably the rest of your life in some very foreign place.

So you start learning the language and trying to learn the culture and all these things. And it seems like more often than not, a lot of Christians come to support that effort, but it's not as successful sometimes as I think we're led to believe.

Anyway, I'm summarizing a lot of conversations and experiences I've had, but it sounds like you're nodding along. So would you resonate with what I'm saying there? I resonate a lot. I have a whole chapter.

The last chapter of the book is actually, what's the goal of missions or global evangelism? And in the mission community, I want to represent it fairly, but there's kind of a number that's thrown around, which is we want to reach 2 of a nation, right?

And then we're going to call that nation reached. Now, the calculus is if we reach 2 of the nation, that should be enough. That's kickstarting the engine. The nation should be able to reach itself at that point.

But even that has this idea that we're not trying to Christianize the nation through missions. We're trying to get a presence, enough of a presence that we can say Revelation 5 and 7, they're represented around the throne, right?

And so just get enough of the people of India or China or whatever nation, and then they will be represented in heaven. And then that's kind of mission accomplished. And one of the things that I say in the book is that missions, I think missions is a biblical category.

But when you look at how the missions movement in America started, it was not high schoolers going on a two-week mission trip. It was people who I do think had something of a supernatural calling, like to be called to go...

If you're Hudson Taylor and you're called to go to China and you've never even heard of China, right? You pick up a book and all of a sudden, you've got this fascination with the Chinese people and this supernatural love for them and a desire that they would know the gospel.

That's the kind of calling that I think a missionary properly has. It's not just an experience necessarily that they have as a high schooler. And then they say, well, I've got nothing else or not all missionaries are this way, but you do get some men who don't have a lot of ambition and yet they want to do something.

And so mission seems like a viable option. And I would largely agree with the critique that the mission movement is more what you were saying and less about God has called me to go and reach this people so they can be a Christian nation.

It used to be that way. Like John Eliot was a Puritan missionary who served in Boston. And he, when he was reaching, when he was ministering to the people in Boston, he had just a compassion and a kindness to the local people in the area, the natives.

And so he started preaching the gospel. What's amazing about that is he worked to translate the Bible into their language, but immediately at the same time, excuse me, he was also translating English common law into their language.

And he was building a way that within, he knew it wouldn't happen overnight, but he was thinking, okay, in a generation or two, maybe these, these people could not only be Christian, but they could be civilized and they could participate.

Really his goal was that they would participate in the British Commonwealth, that they would have a Christianized civilization. And that, that largely is not the perspective that missions have at all anymore.

Yeah, we were very it was impressed upon us very heavily, not to do those kinds of things culturally that the gospel was the only thing and more or less the cultural forms would grow up around this and they would have a unique flavor which I suppose to some extent is true, right?

They're not going to necessarily have pews and hymns and pulpits like we do. But at the same time, I think what you just said about civilization is so true. When you have a paganized society, they have to navigate questions that go beyond just even the religious kind of worship things.

They're going to be cultural things that they must figure out. But let's bring it back to the book because I would love to spend all day talking about this, but the book is what I really want to push.

And I think people should get it because it is, I think, a responsible take on this whole question. I'm not sure if you and I line up a hundred percent, but the thing I love is that you've actually thought about these things and you're not just making it up on the spot, which is what I see a lot of podcasters do.

It's like, we're trying, we're going to explore this and you've actually already done the reading, done the thinking. So let me ask you, what is a nation according to scripture and natural revelation?

I know you have these 10 elements. How do you think through all these elements? I don't know if there's an analogy, but is it like a cake with all these ingredients and they all must be present or what exactly is it?

Well, before the ingredients, what we have to, I think, understand is God has a purpose for nations. And so I do think it's possible that you can have a nation without all of the elements, just like if you have a family where the father dies, that family remains a father, they're missing an element, but they will continue on as a family.

But the reason why the elements of a nation are important is because nations are supposed to do something. They're supposed to mean something. And I guess if I could boil down the thesis of the whole book, it is that God gave the dominion and stewardship mandate to mankind, and he gave them a calling to worship him.

And when you look in Leviticus, often service to God and worship to God are so inextricably linked that they're almost synonymous. And so when we say mankind is supposed to worship God, well, one of the primary ways that we do that is by serving him.

And one of the highest services that we offer to God is actually fulfilling the dominion mandate, which is to subdue the earth, to spread out, to subdue the earth, and then to present it back to him in offerings of worship that we have accomplished.

Now, the question then becomes, how are we to do that? And my thesis is the way that mankind best stewards the earth is by being broken providentially into national groups. And so a nation will enable and promote a kind of stewardship that sometimes when we think of stewardship, we think of, you know, my family, we need to steward the paycheck or the resources or things like that.

That's true. But God's actually after global stewardship, stewardship of the whole earth. And there are some things that are beyond, many things that are beyond just the scope of an individual or a family that he has given to nations.

And so we can talk about that more later on if you want. But before, the reason we understand that the elements of a nation are important is because nations are supposed to do something, and that is steward the earth and provide a rich and fertile kind of set of guidelines for the people of the nation to steward and to know God, to serve and worship God.

And so because I believe that's what nations are primarily for, then you get into, well, what things compose a nation? And I synthesize it down even more into six phrases that begin with L. So a nation, I think, ideally has a land, a language, lineage, a liturgy, a common worship, common loves.

So that's the fifth L, land, language, liturgy, loves. There's one in there too that I'm forgetting. That's okay. I'm just having a it'll come back to me. But so really what it is, is it's a people. And I distinguish in the book between a people, because you can have peoples.

I think there are peoples in China. I think there are peoples in America. They don't have their own land, right? They're kind of under the rule of some other governing body or some other empire, that sort of thing.

So a nation, I think, is people who have a degree, maybe not total. The Jews were a nation, even though there was Roman imperial authority over them. But they had the ability to exert and organize themselves on a piece of land towards hopefully heavenly and spiritual good, like Stephen Wolfe says.

And so the land, the commonality of the bond, the shared history, all of those things are to give kind of these rubber bands of commonality that hold the people together so that they can organize themselves on the land that God has given to produce something worthwhile.

Yeah, I'm looking for it in your book. You do have a section, land, lineage, language. I'm trying to figure out what that last L is here. Land, lineage, language, loves, liturgy, law, law, law. Oh, okay.

That makes sense now. Yeah. Okay. So, so I want to get into that a little bit. I'm trying to think where to start here. All right. So there's this notion that I was exposed to in seminary, and I think it's pretty popular.

Tim Keller obviously champions this, that the reason nations exist, I think this is actually more implied than explicitly taught, but that the reason nations exist is because there was disobedience and they were cursed at Babel.

So God divided people up into these different regional places so that now I think you and I both know this is so that they would fill the earth, but but Keller makes it out like this is some kind of a punishment.

And then that curse was reversed at Pentecost. And so the church should be in the business of not just on an ecclesiastical level, but also on a natural level breaking down barriers between peoples, right?

And this is where we get the logic that the sojourners coming in, we don't even say illegal migrants, right? The people who are coming in legally to the United States are should be welcomed into the church and, and, and not only that, but welcomed into the country as a whole.

So I want to address that first because I think we've all, many at least listening have been consumed by this error and it affects our thinking. So maybe deprogram us a little bit here. Yeah, the first thing to say there is we have to acknowledge that there are verses that seem to say this, you know, so in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about how Christ has come and abolished the hostility that existed previously.

And it seems like he's talking ethnic categories here because he talks about Jew and Gentile and making the two into one new man. Really what he's talking about here was their covenantal position. There was hostility between the Jews and the Gentiles because in the old Testament, Israel was the covenantal people of God.

Gentiles, while we have examples of them repenting, even like it doesn't necessarily say that Nineveh entered the covenantal people of God at the point where they repented. They, in a sense, while they may have been, if their repentance was genuine, while they would have been repentant and regenerate to use to borrow New Testament language, they weren't necessarily immediately brought into the covenantal people of God.

So what Paul is saying in Ephesians 2 is that what Christ did was he tore down the wall that separated Jew and Gentile and had enmity. There was enmity between them, but there was also enmity between God and the Gentiles in kind of a unique way.

So that is talking about an important spiritual truth that we need to love and hold on to. It's glorious that there is no longer that enmity that the people from all nations can be now part of the covenant people of God.

That is incredible, but that is not the same thing as saying that because of that there are no national distinctions, right? There are no national distinctions between earthly nations. It's a spiritual truth.

Even in the book towards the end, this is, I'm pretty clear in the book that this is a little bit more speculative, but I think you can make a biblical case that into eternity national distinctions remain because Revelation 20 and 21 talk about this is post New Jerusalem coming down to earth.

So all of the eschatological views are back in alignment here. The pre, the post, the amil, they're all in agreement here. We're dealing with the final eschaton. There are peoples and there are kings of nations that continually come in and out of the New Jerusalem seemingly into eternity.

And so even though we're brought in, in a sense, into one body through the gospel, there will remain national distinctions. And what we, what I think at the core of what people like Keller or people who believe what Keller is saying, what we fail to realize is there is such a thing as a good that is not eternally salvific, right?

Like we can do civic good. The dominion mandate is not about who gets saved and who doesn't. The dominion mandate is about how God is providentially caring for the earth and organizing peoples so that they would do that kind of good.

And so that they would seek God. And actually, when you look at acts 17, um, where it says that from one man, he created all nations. Um, so that the end of that, that versus so that they may seek him.

And when we, I think when we divide the distinctions between nations, we actually hamper even the gospel's ability to call out to peoples, because one of the things that dividing people into nations does is it allows God to punish peoples for disobedience.

And so when you have Israel living next to Canaan or Philistia, the Philistines or whatever other nations, and God cataclysmically destroys a nation, Israel says, Oh, they must have messed up. We now, sadly, Israel didn't always make this connection, but they must have messed up.

We better not do that. Or if, if the Philistines saw God destroy another nation, and we see that where some of them come back to Israel and they're like, we know that your God is powerful because he destroyed Egypt, right?

We want to make a covenant, a peace treaty with you. Well, when we live in a society where there are no national distinctions, if God wipes out economic zone A that's not distinct from economic zone B in any way, and we can't say economic zone A sinned in a unique and heinous way, there's no testimony to economic zone B.

You guys better watch out. God, the God of heaven does not mess around. And what he did to zone A is a warning to you. No, there's no ability to do that. If he destroys, you know, Yemen and Saudi Arabia is paying attention or any other nation.

Well, now, now God actually has the ability to call out to a people in a unique way. Look, you guys only continue. I didn't wipe you out. Like I wiped out that nation because of my grace and my patience towards you.

And so apart from the civic good that God calls us to do in stewarding the earth to, to actually turn Keller's argument on its head, dissolving nations actually hampers the ability for the church to make its appeal to peoples to be converted, um, and, and to have the eternal life that, that the gospel offers.

That's a good argument. I hadn't thought of that. Um, I, I think I've just accepted more or less, this is how God metaphysically designed things. Just like there's distinctions between families and I don't necessarily need to know all the purposes behind it, but you make a compelling point.

You're a hundred percent right. And that is the story of the children of Israel throughout the old Testament. Uh, they, they, they are an example, right? When they are in sin to the nations around them, not to be in sin.

And they're a positive example, a light to the nations when they follow God's law and, uh, making them a distinct people that would be the carrier of this truth, uh, seems to have a global impact. That's what God wanted at least.

Um, so, so, so that's a good, I think, uh, pushback on Keller and, and he's not the only one I've heard others say this same kind of thing. But, um, when, when we talk about a nation there, a lot of people bring their own assumptions of what that is.

And I think we have coming from the Christian side of it, what we just talked about, but I think the attempt there is to reconcile Christianity to a liberal order that we already believe in essentially.

Um, or we have some kind of an allegiance to, because we've been trained to have an allegiance to it. And, you know, it seems like that's a complicated thing, how this all developed. Uh, and, and we don't, unless you want to, I don't know if we have time to get into all the reasons we came to this point of the proposition nation and all that.

I do think most recently the cold war had a lot to do with this and trying to, um, contrast ourselves with the Soviets and say that these are the things that make us unique. We have freedom. We believe in God.

And, uh, if you, if you come to the United States, you know, you'll be welcomed in. You, you won't be constrained like you are in the Soviet union. So, uh, freedom to operate in the economy, but also, uh, I think the highlight to me is Ronald Reagan.

I think it was 1988. You know what I'm talking about? He was at a dinner and he starts saying, Hey, look in Ireland, uh, or in Spain or in some of these other countries, you can't just become one, a member of their nation by walking in the door.

But in America, you can, in America, we are the exception. And this is, this has become a crusade to try to make the rest of the world like us in that sense. And of course, built on the illusion that we are actually like that.

Um, and, and this is a higher, nobler good. We have discovered some kind of enlightened, uh, principle for organizing a people that no one else before us seem to understand. So with that, maybe help us deprogram a little bit and get back to a accurate understanding of what a nation actually is.

You already said it's not an economic zone. Can it be just people with shared beliefs? So if they, and obviously the low bar being, Hey, I want to do whatever I want to do without molesting others. You want to do whatever you want to do without molesting others.

We both want to participate in an economy. And isn't that enough? Can't we just, uh, call ourselves a nation with, with that? It's funny because the term nation, you know, you've got the nation of Islam, um, and with the black Panthers and you've got the Cherokee nation, the Indian reservations are referred to as nations.

I actually think that's quite a bit more accurate. Um, I've been reading some early American mythology and, um, was reading Rip Van Winkle recently. And it's interesting because Washington Irving is tracing Dutch kind of mythological ideas through the story of Rip Van Winkle, because that was the fictional village that he's talking about was a Dutch colony a long time ago.

Uh, but nevertheless, it still remains some retained some of its Dutch influence. It's like half an hour from me, by the way. Oh, is it really interesting? The local Lord, there's a statue of Rip Van Winkle in Catskill, New York, which is not far.

There you go. Yep. Even from the beginning early on, I don't know about from the beginning, but the idea of America has always been called the American experiment. And why is it an experiment? Like why did they early on self-consciously realize this is a bit different than the norm?

Well, I don't know all of their reasons for calling it an experiment, but I have to think that to some degree it's because not that nations don't have ideas. Israel, obviously Old Testament Israel had a ton of ideas.

They had a unique legal system. They had a unique covenantal relationship. They were commanded to be distinct from the nations around them. Um, so nations obviously have ideas. They have important developments in legal framing.

You think of the developments in legal order from the Greeks to the Romans, you know, so there are novel ideas about how we structure ourselves legally and governmentally. Um, and yet the American project has, has always been referred to as an experiment.

And we do see in Europe, for instance, the English people, uh, that was a fusion of some leftover Romans, the native Britain, some of the Celts, and then the Angles and the Jutes, the, the Normans, um, Saxons, we do see a process where distinct peoples kind of did meld together into a people.

And I actually think that's one of the things we have to be careful of as in this discussion, I think nations and peoples are never actually purely static, right? There's always a bit of ebb and flow.

It's not like gender. Yes. Yes. But in England that took place over 900 years, you know, and I think what we are saying with the American experiment is that different peoples, different nations colonized America.

When you study the history of South America, um, when they rebelled against Spain, seven colonies joined together to fight against Spain. And then once they won their independence, they, they said, no, no, no, we're, we're actually distinct groups now.

And they separated into the seven countries of kind of Northern and Central South America. The U S decided, we think that there's enough commonality here that we're going to try and loosely organize ourselves a Federation of States.

And we have to acknowledge that reality as Americans, that we, we took some liberties that maybe aren't entirely natural, where we said the Dutch history, the Dutch originating people and the French originating people and the Catholics and the Protestants, we are going to try and weld ourselves together.

And I think that early on they did. And I think I'm not theoretically opposed to the idea that that could happen, but that means, I don't know if you've ever seen, um, anyone make Damascus steel, where they take like 13 layers of metal, thin metal, and they stack them all on top of each other.

And then they melt it and they fold it in half. And now you have 26 layers and then they heat it up and they fold that in half. And now you have 52 layers and they fold it and they fold it. What ends up happening is the finished blade ends up being hundreds or in really fine Damascus steel, thousands of tiny little lines stacked on top of each other, just through that constant folding.

I think, I don't, I don't even know where I'm going or I'm answering your question with this anymore, John, but I think America has to acknowledge that because we started with maybe different layers, we weren't totally, uh, uh, united peoples at the beginning.

And the process happened quickly. It didn't happen over a thousand years. It happened over a couple hundred years. And then the revolutionary war, um, I think one of the things that we have forgotten is as a people, because of the uniqueness of our beginning, if we wanted to remain a people, we had to keep melt, um, melting and folding and so that the lines, though they're still present, become so small that when you look at the blade, it's not 13 different chunks, it's a thousand slight gradations.

And I, to be honest, John, I, you know, I don't know if, if the American experiment can, you know, happen long-term. I think you and I have talked about that a little bit. Um, some of the roots of peoplehood and, um, you know, shared traditions and shared paths, those are strong, powerful, natural forces that God built into the world.

So depending on what, what someone's goal is, they say, we want America to be a nation again. Then the answer is you got to start welding and fast. You got to get rid of some of this stuff and you have to start welding again, super fast.

Or you say, we're just going to resolve ourselves to the fact that we're an empire made up of multiple peoples who do have a degree of sovereignty over their land. Then, then you have to say, okay, you guys need to, to cleave together as the people that you are.

Um, so I guess I'll leave it there for now and we can go. Yeah, that was excellent. That was an excellent, uh, summation, I think of the current situation. And I think it is important to emphasize there were these conditions that, uh, with a war, multiple wars, you had the French and Indian war.

You had, uh, the American war for independence. You had, um, shared religion. I think Washington writes about this and so does, uh, not James Madison, but that there were these shades of difference, but you all had a similar language, similar customs, similar religion.

And it was similar enough that they could function in a federal Republic, which is what we had, not a national, uh, government that was forcibly conforming every colony to itself. And it only had really two reasons to even, uh, to exist.

One was trade and the other one was common defense. So in that kind of an arrangement, I, those, that diverse, uh, those diverse regions make sense, but we've become more and more of a state. And I think especially in the war of 18, uh, 60 to 65, uh, there was a forced fusion.

And since then, it seems like we've gone from, uh, conflict to conflict. We we've had two world wars. We've had a cold war. We do have a war on terror and these shared enemies, uh, have helped bind us together.

And in addition to that, maybe even more importantly, also the expansion West where immigrant groups could come and fuse with those from different regions of the country, as they settled in these different regions, that that was a unique set of circumstances that doesn't exist in most places.

And I think you're right though, it's going to, the, the threads are coming unraveled even right now. I mean, think of Trump, right? If MAGA represents America, which I actually think it does represent somewhat of the old order, the Lincolnian kind of American order.

Um, it's, it's a very, uh, low bar. It's a, it's a baseline. It's basically like, do you love this country? Do you think it's generally Christian, uh, or at least religious? Cause of course, Jewish people are included in this and other minority groups who aren't necessarily Orthodox Christians, but do you generally believe that we're Christian?

Do you believe, uh, in a free and fair market? And, uh, you know, a man can pull himself up by his own boot bootstraps, rugged individualism. I mean, these are some of the things that we've all come to appreciate about the United States, but those are all very low bars taken together.

And that's only half the country. The other half doesn't even want that. Right. I mean, I don't even know, like you go to like Portland, Oregon or, um, Seattle, Washington, or San Francisco, California, or Boston, Massachusetts.

And you, you are in a different country. It feels like almost, even though they speak the language sort of, and they have some similarities. So anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is, um, I agree with what you're saying and the solution in my mind, if there is one, I mean, it could just be, we're going to get violence and that kind of thing in the future, but the peaceable Christian kind of solution that I've tried to tap into is let's lean hard back into that decentralized tradition if we can and start gaining local autonomy and identity and see ourselves as part of an empire.

As you said, I just don't know if Americans remember enough to go back to that. It seems like we're all kind of nationalists and I mean, nationalists in the negative sense, not the positive sense that Stephen Wolf uses it in, but in the sense of, we're going to smash all these peoples together and, uh, by force, by coercion, they will remain the same unit.

Um, people seem to just accept that now. And, and I don't know, I I've tried to encourage people, get back to the legends, get back to the Lord, kind of like what you're doing, like understand what happened under your feet.

Um, be involved civically. I just don't know though, that, that people's like lingua Franca now is Hollywood movies, right? If you see someone reference something, if they want an example of courage, they're referencing Lord of the Rings.

If they want an example of, you know, some other virtue at star Wars or the Marvel universe, or, and I just don't know that we survived that. If that's, that's not enough to kind of like blend us together.