What is a Nation with Michael Belch

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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,

00:38

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, there's this becomes a more,

00:57

I think, heavy question and a more meaningful question. Is my nation the region I live in?

01:03

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?

01:10

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.

01:16

Michael Belch wrote this book that I'm holding here. It's called In Defense of Christian Nations.

01:22

I have the not -for -resale copy, which I'm proud of. It's one of the original copies here, and I actually did endorse this book.

01:30

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

01:37

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.

01:48

And with that, I want to welcome Pastor Michael Belch. Thank you for being here. Thanks, John. Really happy to be here and excited for the conversation that we're having today.

01:57

Well, let me give you the chance to introduce yourself a little more. You were a missionary.

02:03

Maybe you still feel that way, but where were you serving? How long did you serve overseas?

02:08

I'm wondering if that influenced your interest in this topic. It actually did quite a bit.

02:15

And in relation to the question, if I still consider myself a missionary, my thinking on that has changed quite a bit.

02:23

I actually, when I served with my family, we were in Taiwan. We were there for six years from about 2013 to about 2020.

02:32

And with COVID and everything, we happened to be back in the U .S. visiting family, and lockdowns happen, and I got

02:40

COVID, and the Taiwanese government basically cut off travel, and we just got stuck there in the U .S. And so that was

02:46

God basically saying, okay, your time doing mission work in Taiwan is done. But even before that,

02:52

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.

03:14

Always, I got it from my dad, always was just the understanding that we were

03:21

Americans. We were serving the people of Venezuela. We were serving the nation and the church in Venezuela, but we were

03:27

Americans. And there are plenty of Americans who are patriots. So I'm not saying

03:33

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,

03:43

I had no animosity, had a great deal of affection for the Venezuelan people and the Taiwanese people when I was there.

03:49

But in the back of my mind was always, we're Americans, and we are away from our earthly home, which leads to the question of the missionary category.

03:59

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.

04:11

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.

04:21

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.

04:30

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.

04:39

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

04:46

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.

05:02

And that does break the kind of the biblical 99 .9 % of the time pattern that God expects

05:09

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

05:34

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.

05:47

Of course, I had missions in seminary and it's very focused on the eschatological purpose of the

05:55

Great Commission is not simply numbers. It is the diversity of people who will be gathered around God's throne.

06:03

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.

06:15

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,

06:27

I suppose. But in retrospect, I realized it's because I have somewhat of an affinity,

06:34

I suppose, for English and Scottish people because those are my ancestors, right? More than I do for Chinese or Indians.

06:41

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.

06:54

And I'm just more skeptical about that. I do respect missionaries greatly, very much so.

06:59

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.

07:11

Because you can go to places like Turkey and teach. They want

07:17

Americans to come and teach. You can go to places like China and do ESL, right? They want that.

07:22

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,

07:30

I suppose, figure out whether you have an affinity for this people and really want to plant your flag there.

07:35

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.

07:50

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.

08:06

And anyway, I'm summarizing a lot of conversations and experiences I've had, but it sounds like you're nodding along.

08:13

So would you resonate with what I'm saying there? I resonate a lot. I have a whole chapter.

08:20

The last chapter of the book is actually, what's the goal of missions or global evangelism?

08:26

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?

08:35

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.

08:44

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.

08:55

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?

09:04

And so just get enough of the people of India or China or whatever nation, and then they will be represented in heaven.

09:13

And then that's kind of mission accomplished. And one of the things that I say in the book is that missions,

09:19

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.

09:30

It was people who I do think had something of a supernatural calling, like to be called to go...

09:36

If you're Hudson Taylor and you're called to go to China and you've never even heard of China, right?

09:43

You pick up a book and all of a sudden, you've got this fascination with the

09:48

Chinese people and this supernatural love for them and a desire that they would know the gospel.

09:54

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.

10:05

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.

10:17

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 these people so they can be a

10:32

Christian nation. It used to be that way. Like John Eliot was a Puritan missionary who served in Boston.

10:40

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.

10:55

And so he started preaching the gospel. What's amazing about that is he worked to translate the

11:01

Bible into their language, but immediately at the same time, excuse me, he was also translating

11:06

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 people could not only be

11:22

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

11:29

Christianized civilization. And that, that largely is not the perspective that missions have at all anymore.

11:37

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

11:56

I suppose to some extent is true, right? They're not going to necessarily have pews and hymns and pulpits like we do.

12:03

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.

12:18

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

12:27

I really want to push. And I think people should get it because it is, I think a responsible take on this whole question.

12:34

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

12:42

I see a lot of podcasters do. It's like, we're going to explore this and you've actually already done the reading, done the thinking.

12:51

So let me ask you, what is a nation according to scripture and natural revelation?

12:59

I know you have these 10 elements. How do you think through all these elements?

13:06

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?

13:15

Well, before the ingredients, what we have to, I think understand is

13:20

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, you know, 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.

13:36

But the reason why the elements of a nation are important is because nations are supposed to do something.

13:44

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.

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And when you look in Leviticus, often service to God and worship to God are so inextricably linked that they're almost synonymous.

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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.

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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.

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Now, the question then becomes, how are we to do that?

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And my thesis is the way that mankind best stewards the earth is by being broken providentially into national groups.

14:55

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.

15:07

That's true. But God's actually after global stewardship, stewardship of the whole earth.

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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.

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And so we can talk about that more later on if you want. But 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

15:47

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.

15:59

And I synthesize it down even more into six phrases that begin with L. So a nation,

16:05

I think, ideally has a land, a language, lineage, a liturgy, a common worship, common loves.

16:16

So that's the fifth L, land, language, liturgy, loves. There's one in there too that I'm forgetting.

16:24

That's okay. I'm just having a, it'll come back to me. But, but so really what it is, is it's a people.

16:32

And, and I distinguish in the book between a people, because you can have peoples.

16:37

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, under the rule of some other governing body or some other empire, that sort of thing.

16:49

So a nation I think is people who have a degree maybe not total, the

16:54

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.

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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.

17:33

Yeah. I'm looking for it in your book. You, you do have a section, land, lineage, language. I, I, I'm trying to figure out what that last

17:41

L is here. Liturgy, law, law, law.

17:48

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.

17:57

All right. So there's this notion that I was exposed to in seminary and I think it's pretty popular.

18:04

Tim Keller obviously champions this, that the reason nations exist,

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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.

18:20

So God divided people up into these different regional places so that now

18:26

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.

18:34

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.

18:50

Right. And this is where we get the logic that the sojourners coming in, we don't even say illegal migrants, right.

18:58

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.

19:09

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.

19:19

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,

19:30

Paul talks about how Christ has come and abolished the hostility that existed previously.

19:36

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.

19:44

Really what he's talking about here was their covenantal position. There was hostility between the

19:51

Jews and the Gentiles because in the old Testament, Israel was the covenantal people of God.

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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.

20:10

They, they, in a sense, while they may have been, if their repentance was, was genuine, well, while they would have been repentant and regenerate to use to borrow

20:19

New Testament language, they weren't necessarily immediately brought into the covenantal people of God.

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So what Paul is saying in Ephesians 2 is that what Christ did was he, he tore down the wall that separated

20:33

Jew and Gentile and had enmity. There was enmity between them, but there was also enmity between God and the

20:41

Gentiles in kind of a unique way. So that is talking about an important spiritual truth that, that we need to love and hold on to.

20:52

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.

20:59

That is incredible, but that is not the same thing as saying that because of that, there are no national distinctions, right?

21:10

There are no national distinctions between earthly nations. It's a spiritual truth. Even in the book towards the end, and this is,

21:18

I'm, 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, um,

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New Jerusalem coming down to earth. So all of the eschatological views are back in alignment here.

21:39

The pre, the post, the amil, they're all in agreement here. We're dealing with the, the final eschaton.

21:44

There are peoples and there are Kings of nations that continually come in and out of, of the

21:51

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.

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And what we, what I think at the core of what people like Keller or people who believe what

22:11

Keller is saying, what we fail to realize is there is such a thing as a good that is not eternally salvific, right?

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Like we can do civic good. The dominion mandate is not about who gets saved and who doesn't.

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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.

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And so that they would seek God. And actually, when you look at acts 17, where it says that from one man, he created all nations.

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Um, so that the end of that, that verse says so that they may seek him. And when we,

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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

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God to punish peoples for disobedience. And so when you have

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Israel living next to Canaan or Philistia, the Philistines or whatever other nations, and God cataclysmically destroys a nation,

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Israel says, oh, they must have messed up. Now, sadly, Israel didn't always make this connection, but they must have messed up.

23:39

We better not do that. Or 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

23:47

God is powerful because he destroyed Egypt, right? We want to make a covenant, a peace treaty with you.

23:54

Well, when we live in a society where there are no national distinctions, if God wipes out economic zone

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A, that's not distinct from economic zone B in any way. And we can't say economic zone

24:09

A sinned in a unique and heinous way. There's no testimony to economic zone

24:14

B. You guys better watch out. The God of heaven does not mess around. And what he did to zone

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A is a warning to you. No, there's no ability to do that. If he destroys Yemen and Saudi Arabia is paying attention or any other nation, well, now

24:30

God actually has the ability to call out to a people in a unique way. Look, you guys only continue.

24:37

I didn't wipe you out like I wiped out that nation because of my grace and my patience towards you. So apart from the civic good that God calls us to do in stewarding the earth, to actually turn

24:50

Keller's argument on its head, dissolving nations actually hampers the ability for the church to make its appeal to peoples to be converted and to have the eternal life that the gospel offers.

25:04

That's a good argument. I hadn't thought of that. I think I've just accepted more or less this is how

25:09

God metaphysically designed things, just like there's distinctions between families.

25:15

And I don't necessarily need to know all the purposes behind it, but you make a compelling point.

25:20

You're a hundred percent right. And that is the story of the children of Israel throughout the Old Testament.

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They are an example when they are in sin to the nations around them, not to be in sin.

25:35

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

25:48

That's what God wanted at least. So that's a good, I think, pushback on Keller.

25:55

And he's not the only one. I've heard others say this same kind of thing. But when we talk about a nation, a lot of people bring their own assumptions of what that is.

26:07

And I think we have, coming from the Christian side of it, what we just talked about.

26:12

But I think the attempt there is to reconcile Christianity to a liberal order that we already believe in essentially, or we have some kind of an allegiance to because we've been trained to have an allegiance to it.

26:25

And it seems like that's a complicated thing, how this all developed. And we don't, unless you want to,

26:32

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

26:38

Cold War had a lot to do with this and trying to contrast ourselves with the and say that these are the things that make us unique.

26:48

We have freedom. We believe in God. And if you come to the

26:55

United States, you'll be welcomed in. You won't be constrained like you are in the Soviet Union. So freedom to operate in the economy.

27:03

But also I think the highlight to me is Ronald Reagan. I think it was 1988.

27:08

You know what I'm talking about. He was at dinner and he starts saying, Hey, look in Ireland 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.

27:22

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.

27:34

And of course, built on the illusion that we are actually like that. And, and this is a higher, nobler good.

27:41

We have discovered some kind of enlightened principle for organizing a people that no one else before us seem to understand.

27:50

So with that, maybe help us deprogram a little bit and get back to a accurate understanding of what a nation actually is.

27:59

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,

28:07

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.

28:14

We both want to participate in an economy. And isn't that enough?

28:19

Can't we just call ourselves a nation with that? It's funny because the term nation, you know, you've got the nation of Islam and with the black

28:31

Panthers, and you've got the Cherokee nation, the Indian reservations are referred to as nations.

28:36

I actually think that's quite a bit more accurate. I've been reading some early

28:44

American mythology and was reading Rip Van Winkle recently.

28:49

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

29:04

Dutch colony a long time ago. But nevertheless, it still remains some retained some of its

29:09

Dutch influence. It's like half an hour for me, by the way. Oh, is it really interesting? The local

29:14

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,

29:23

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?

29:31

Like, why did they early on self -consciously realize this is a bit different than the norm?

29:38

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.

29:49

Israel, obviously, Old Testament Israel had a ton of ideas. They had a unique legal system.

29:55

They had a unique covenantal relationship. They were commanded to be distinct from the nations around them.

30:02

So nations obviously have ideas. They have important developments in legal framing.

30:07

You think of the developments in legal order from the Greeks to the Romans. So there are novel ideas about how we structure ourselves legally and governmentally.

30:19

And yet the American project has always been referred to as an experiment. And we do see in Europe, for instance, the

30:28

English people, that was a fusion of some leftover Romans, the native Britons, some of the

30:34

Celts, and then the Angles and the Jutes, the Normans, Saxons.

30:40

We do see a process where distinct peoples kind of did meld together into a people.

30:48

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

30:56

There's always a bit of ebb and flow. It's not like gender. Yes, yes.

31:03

But in England, that took place over 900 years. And I think what we are saying with the American experiment is that different peoples, different nations colonized

31:14

America. When you study the history of South America, when they rebelled against Spain, seven colonies joined together to fight against Spain.

31:25

And then once they won their independence, they said, no, no, no, we're actually distinct groups now.

31:31

And they separated into the seven countries of kind of northern and central South America. The U .S.

31:37

decided, we think that there's enough commonality here that we're going to try and loosely organize ourselves, a federation of states.

31:44

And we have to acknowledge that reality as Americans, that we took some liberties that maybe aren't entirely natural, where we said, the

31:57

Dutch originating people and the French originating people and the

32:03

Catholics and the Protestants, we are going to try and weld ourselves together. And I think that early on, they did.

32:11

And I think I'm not theoretically opposed to the idea that that could happen. But that means

32:18

I don't know if you've ever seen anyone make Damascus steel, where they take like 13 layers of metal, thin metal, and they stack them all on top of each other.

32:29

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.

32:36

And now you have 52 layers. And they fold it and they fold it and they fold it. What ends up happening is the finished blade ends up being hundreds or in really fine

32:47

Damascus steel, thousands of tiny little lines stacked on top of each other, just through that constant folding.

32:56

I think I don't, I don't even know where I'm going or answering your question with this anymore, John. But I think

33:02

America has to acknowledge that because we started with maybe different layers, we weren't totally united peoples at the beginning.

33:12

And the process happened quickly. It didn't happen over 1000 years. It happened over a couple hundred years.

33:18

And then the Revolutionary War. 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 melting and folding and melting and folding 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 1000 slight gradations.

33:44

And I, to be honest, John, I, you know, I don't know if the American experiment can, you know, happen long term.

33:52

I think you and I have talked about that a little bit. Some of the roots of peoplehood and, you know, shared traditions and shared pasts, those are strong, powerful natural forces that God built into the world.

34:08

So depending on 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.

34:19

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 cleave together as the people that you are.

34:36

So I guess I'll leave it there for now. And we can go. Yeah, that was excellent. That was an excellent summation,

34:42

I think of the current situation. And I think it is important to emphasize there were these conditions that with a war, well, multiple wars, you had the

34:51

French and Indian War, you had the American War for Independence, you had shared religion,

34:58

I think Washington writes about this, and so does not James Madison, but that there were these shades of difference, but you all had a similar language, similar customs, similar religion.

35:12

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

35:32

One was trade, and the other one was common defense. So in that kind of an arrangement,

35:38

I that diverse, those diverse regions make sense, but we've become more and more of a modern state.

35:46

And I think especially in the war of 1860 to 65, there was a forced fusion.

35:53

And since then, it seems like we've gone from conflict to conflict, we've had two world wars, we've had a

36:03

Cold War, we do have a war on terror. And these shared enemies have helped bind us together.

36:11

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.

36:24

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 threads are coming unraveled, even right now.

36:36

I mean, think of Trump, right? If MAGA represents America, which I actually think it does represent somewhat of the old order, the

36:43

Lincolnian kind of American order. It's a very low bar.

36:50

It's a baseline. It's basically like, do you love this country? Do you think it's generally Christian?

36:56

Or at least religious? Because of course, Jewish people are included in this and other minority groups who aren't necessarily

37:04

Orthodox Christians. But do you generally believe that we're Christian? Do you believe in a free and fair market and a man can pull himself up by his own bootstraps, rugged individualism?

37:17

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.

37:25

And that's only half the country. The other half doesn't even want that. I mean, I don't even know, like you go to like Portland, Oregon, or Seattle, Washington, or San Francisco, California, or Boston, Massachusetts, and you are in a different country, it feels like almost, even though they speak the language sort of, and they have some similarities.

37:49

So anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is, I agree with what you're saying. And the solution in my mind, if there is one,

37:57

I mean, it could just be we're going to get violence and that kind of thing in the future. But the peaceable

38:02

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.

38:15

As you said, I just don't know if Americans remember enough to go back to that.

38:21

It seems like we're all kind of nationalists. And I mean, nationalists in the negative sense, not the positive sense that Stephen Wolfe uses it in, but in the sense of we're going to smash all these peoples together.

38:33

And by force, by coercion, they will remain the same unit.

38:40

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

38:53

I just don't know though that people's lingua franca now is Hollywood movies. If you see someone reference something, if they want an example of courage, they're referencing

39:03

Lord of the Rings. If they want an example of some other virtue, it's Star Wars or the Marvel universe.

39:08

And I just don't know that we survive that if that's not enough to kind of like blend us together.

39:15

So anyway, I'm ranting at this point, but I want to hear from you two things. One, practically speaking, someone moves in next door.

39:26

They're brand new to the country, H -1B, right? They barely speak English, but they work, let's say down the street, they work at IBM or something.

39:36

What's a Christian obligation to that person in the Ordo Amoris? Because I think we do have one, but what does that look like in comparison, let's say to someone who has lived in that same region for a longer period of time, and maybe your families have known each other, you've intermarried and that kind of thing.

39:55

Well, let's start there. I had two questions, but let's start there. That's big enough. This is a question that I think we need to be thinking very carefully about as Christians, because two things are true right now, and we seem to be forgetting one of them.

40:12

The two things that are true is that we are members of the church, of the body of Christ, and we are members of our political entity, nation, empire,

40:23

I'll call it a nation for now, just for consistent terms. As members of Christ's body, we have a duty to love our neighbor.

40:36

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus goes out of his way to point out, your neighbor is whoever

40:43

God puts in front of you. Samaritan was not the same people. There was animosity between them.

40:49

Even the rich man in Lazarus, I've heard it said that one of the reasons why God judged Lazarus so harshly is because probably that poor man's begging area was maybe literally right in front of Lazarus' door.

41:04

He would walk past him every day and would not extend compassion or kindness to him.

41:10

As members of the church, the global church, we have to acknowledge that God will providentially bring people into our lives, and we are to act like Christians to them, whatever it is.

41:22

That means having goodwill towards them. It means sharing the gospel with them.

41:29

It means if there is a need that can be met in wisdom, and that's a really loaded statement because that doesn't just mean we throw money at the people next to us or the homeless man on the street.

41:44

In wisdom, we ought to have a disposition to do that. We ought to have a disposition of goodwill, especially if it can lead to the option of sharing the gospel with someone.

41:55

You think of the Ethiopian eunuch, and Philip didn't say, oh, that guy's not my people.

42:03

It doesn't really matter. I'll never know him from Adam. Well, that was God's providential way of taking the gospel into Ethiopia, so we don't know what's going to happen there.

42:11

Now, he was already traveling back to Ethiopia. I realize it's not quite an equal comparison, but that's the side that I think that we're forgetting as Christians in our attempt to recapture our political identity.

42:26

We are members of a nation or subnations, subcultures, and that identity is being completely unraveled intentionally.

42:37

In front of our eyes, we all see it happening. It's like the videos of the slow motion train crashes, which

42:45

I never really got into, but you can see it happening and you can't do anything about it. A lot of us are feeling this real sense of just bringing the

42:54

Haitians into Springfield does not make them American. When we have a neighbor down the street from us who is here on an

43:01

H1B, works for IBM, there is a real tendency to say, because I plan to vote for policies that would send him and his family back to India, I have to have this sense of suspicion towards him or resentment of him.

43:21

These are difficult things to balance because in one sense, we are a little bit resentful and rightly so.

43:29

You go to a store or Costco or wherever and the primary language being spoken there is not

43:37

English. It is jarring and disconcerting and we can rightly say it ought not be that way.

43:45

When you go to your neighborhood pool or playground, it ought not be the case that you're hearing five different foreign languages and very little

43:52

English. We can acknowledge that. As far as order of Morris goes, that is the question of the day.

44:01

I think that you are within your rights to build your intentional relationships with the kind of people, not the kind of people,

44:12

I do not want to say that word, but the people who are of your family, of your church, and actually of your nation, of your ethnicity, your ethnos.

44:21

There is a practical reason for this and that is an H1B worker could be gone in a year.

44:28

Not that we do not want relationships that would yield to the gospel, but the kind of relationship that I want where I want role models for my sons who are not just me.

44:38

I want to know people in my neighborhood that if I'm gone and something happens, they would come and investigate if someone was banging on the window while my wife was here or something like that.

44:51

There is a sense where natural bonds of lineage, shared loves, common cultures are, it's not that I think of someone as less human, but those are going to bind my neighbor or my family, my countrymen, to act for my benefit and bind me to act for his benefit in ways that, even under the best of intentions as Christians, maybe are not going to propel us to act towards someone who is here for a few years and a foreigner and we can hardly talk with.

45:28

It is a complicated question and there's ditches on both sides.

45:34

I just want to maintain that we have to continue to show love for the people that God has brought. The situation in America, while we want to work to change it and undo it, it's also providential.

45:48

Who are we to say that God put someone next to us of a different ethnicity? That's what

45:54

God has done at this point. Yeah. Providence is so key in this. One of the things that I've noticed a little bit of, and it is a little bit, but I think it's growing to some extent, is push back against the propositionation in a liberal order that, because these are complicated questions, perhaps is not maybe prudent.

46:20

It's wanting to foment those differences, highlight those differences even more than what they are, and maybe accelerate things to get to a point of a race war.

46:31

I used to see this on the left quite a bit. I see this also growing on the right, though, this desire and just some nasty things that are said, mostly by people.

46:41

I don't know their names, but they'll be said online and so forth. One of the things, and this is why

46:47

I bring this up, because I want to talk about this as well. We're living under the liberal gaze and we have to push back against that, there's no doubt, and we want to be biblical about all of this and conform ourselves to God's order.

47:01

But there are imprudent ways, I think, of dealing with this as well that don't help.

47:07

One of the things, I've seen this a few times, ironically, is people will ask me, do you think

47:15

Bode Bauckham, and they love to pick him just because he's been on my show, but do you think Bode Bauckham shares the same nation with you?

47:23

Then usually coupled with Black people are not part of, they can't be Americans. Actually, that's usually how it's frayed.

47:29

Black people cannot be Americans. These aren't influential people that are saying this, but I do perceive this as a growing sentiment.

47:38

I understand it to some extent. I do want to say that to begin with. I'm not trying to justify this sentiment, but I am saying that I do understand when you're vilified your whole life for being a white person, and especially if you're a male, that can build up frustration, and frustration can certainly become resentment and anger.

47:57

There's no doubt about that. It's a very understandable place to be at. To pick

48:03

Bode, since that's the example that's been pushed to my face a few times, this is where I think it gets complicated a little bit.

48:11

Bode Bauckham grew up in Los Angeles. He was born in Los Angeles. I was born in Van Nuys, which is probably only 30 miles from where Bode Bauckham was born.

48:21

We had a very different set of experiences growing up, though. It's not just white -Black. It's also urban, and at that time, a little more suburban,

48:29

I suppose. I grew up into a Christian home. I had parents, one set of parents from the

48:37

Midwest, the other with lineage in the South. They also passed that down to me.

48:43

There's these cultural things at play, probably different pastimes, different cuisine, different all kinds of things.

48:49

We do share a geographic area. When I talk to Bode, we can actually talk about that stuff.

48:57

I can't talk about that stuff with someone who's not from California. Actually, it's funny. They could be my second cousin, we'll say.

49:06

I might share more in many other ways. We know what real Mexican food tastes like.

49:12

We'll put it that way. No one else seems to know. Bode and I are also brothers in Christ. That means a great deal.

49:17

We're also part of the same basic Reform Baptist group. There's a lot of similarity there.

49:26

We speak the same language. We think very similar about a lot of issues. When Bode went to Africa, he tells the story of returning to the homeland of his ancestors and feeling this deep.

49:37

I wouldn't have felt that deep sense that he did. I would feel it maybe more in England, that this is the home of my ancestors.

49:45

Anyway, we could go on and on and on about all the differences and the similarities. You and I have differences and similarities.

49:51

Where were you born out of curiosity? Were you born on the mission field, Michael? No, I was born in Washington State. That's where my parents' setting church was.

49:59

Okay. You're a West Coaster then. Anyway, you and I, if we talk long enough, we'd find similarities and differences.

50:06

I think the main question becomes, what are enough similarities to actually share a place, a government, a shared life together, essentially?

50:17

That becomes the question. To make it a very simple mathematical calculation is a difficult thing.

50:25

I'll just say this in closing and then get your response. It seems to me what's happened in the United States, and this is a very big tragedy, and you get in trouble.

50:33

You have to walk in eggshells when you publicly even talk about this. The slaves who came here, they came here not of their own will.

50:42

By and large, I know there's exceptions. You have the Gullah peoples and other groups. By and large, they came from different regions in Africa along the

50:50

Ivory Coast, but they created their own thing once they got here. This formed over centuries. They also merged their music, their cuisine, and other actually beautiful elements of our

51:00

American culture with the surrounding people that they were with. This has become a problem, really, though, a problem in the sense of—I'm not saying

51:10

Black people are a problem. I'm saying, though, this class of people having their own preferences and their own ways of living right next to people who have other preferences and ways of living.

51:24

That friction on both ends has become a problem over time as relationships were cut.

51:32

Dependency relationships were cut between masters and slaves and then reformed between the government and personal government and slaves and then put on steroids during the

51:41

Great Society and the civil rights regime. Now, there's enough,

51:48

I would say, resentment. There are true disparities in some of these regions where there's high concentrations of the descendants of these slaves where they're forced to live in a squalor.

52:01

If they escape—I don't mean forced in the sense of someone's putting a gun to their head. They can leave, but if they leave and they achieve something of themselves, it becomes a brain drain on that area.

52:11

They go and they live in the suburbs with the white people, with a lot of white people. I'm obviously overgeneralizing for the purpose of the issue that we're talking about.

52:19

It makes the greater group suffer even more. The sociologists look at these kinds of things and they want to come up with solutions, but there aren't any easy solutions to the broader problem.

52:33

Anyway, I'm giving you basically a puzzle piece, a ball of yarn that has to be untangled, which

52:42

I don't know that there is a good resolution. I can think of things that would make it better, cutting off certain incentives from the government, encouraging responsibility, and trying to, in organic ways, form shared experience instead of forced ways.

53:00

There's a whole bunch of things I can think of that would make it better, but I don't know that there's an easy solution to all of this. We've had, basically speaking, a nation within a nation, and there's exceptions to this, and there's a lot of commonality.

53:12

I went to a church when I was in Virginia, a Black church. It was different, but I felt very at home.

53:18

These were my brothers and sisters in Christ, and I could have submitted myself easily to the godly men who were there.

53:24

Being in the North and then South, there's a lot of similarities Blacks and Whites in the

53:29

South share that are different than Northern Whites. My Southern family, that was coming out, and I was like, oh, they're eating the same things my family in Mississippi eats.

53:39

It's complicated, and that's my point. It's complicated. As you hear what

53:45

I've just been saying, and this is a problem that is presented more and more on social media, sometimes in ways that are not helpful, how do you navigate some of this?

53:57

How do you think of some of this, of people who are different, who have been here for long periods of time, the

54:03

Navajo Nation? We have had a balance. We have had a shared life together, which we've been trying to navigate.

54:12

Is there hope for us navigating these things, or is it really a math equation?

54:18

Is it really just ancestry is the core thing? If you're White, you're in. If you're Black, you're out.

54:25

Walk us through some of this. Yeah. One of the reasons

54:32

I brought up the example of England is they were formed by quite distinct peoples.

54:41

Even genetically, the Celts were quite different from some of the

54:47

Danish or the Angle people that came over. There are some quite stark differences genetically.

54:55

One of my hunches has been in Europe, because Europe is smaller than the

55:02

U .S. They've just had political borders. The mixing, though, because the political borders are relatively new.

55:11

They were not permanent. They were different nations or countries or kingdoms, whatever they were called at different times.

55:18

There was quite a bit of intermixing between them. It seems that what has happened in America is some of the intermixing, which was somewhat invisible in Europe, although it wasn't.

55:34

The Normans knew that they were French, and they were criticizing the people in France who weren't truly

55:40

French. They knew, we're the real French, and you are not. Nevertheless, from an observational level, some of the differences that we see in the

55:50

U .S. are very obvious on a superficial level, skin color, physical features, things like that.

55:57

Now, there's something to that, but it's not everything. The question is, how much of that?

56:04

When you look at the Mexican people, largely Hispanic is a new people or race, if you would.

56:13

It's Spanish with indigenous people. They look down on some of the purely indigenous people there, but they have essentially become a people, genetically, culturally, historically, legally, to whatever extent the laws in Mexico hold sway.

56:37

That's one thing. The other thing is, biblically, we see times when different peoples joined into Israel.

56:48

I think what we have to realize is largely it's a matter of the rate of influx.

56:59

The Old Testament examples that we see, and so we have to be able to say Ruth was a Moabitess.

57:05

Even Caleb, his father and grandfather likely were not of the tribes of Israel.

57:12

They came in, Caleb became a hero, Ruth became part of the genealogy of Christ. On a practical level, we have to acknowledge it is possible for peoples to join into another people.

57:25

Even within Israel, when you look at the story of the Gibeonites, and it's a really tragic story, but one of the things that you see as they are going out to destroy the entire tribe of the

57:35

Gibeonites is that some of the tribes of Israel don't come and fight. Now, whether they were giving an excuse or not, they said, oh, we had these harvest customs and festivals that we were doing when you were fighting them, and so we couldn't come.

57:50

Even in Israel, you've got the Shibboleth. There was even different accents and words.

57:57

There were different traditions and customs, even between the tribes. Even Israel was not a monolithic culture down to the individual level.

58:08

There was distinction and diversity even among the tribes. Okay, so the question is, has

58:17

America been a project where people have come at a rate that is tenable to be absorbed into a pre -existing people?

58:28

One of our difficulties is even as we were bringing immigrants in from early on,

58:34

I don't think we had a national identity. We didn't have a national we weren't a strong national unit that someone would join, and so even if we give the

58:44

Irish, we give the Italians a hard time, the Chinese, they came and they didn't assimilate, or it took them a long time to.

58:51

Well, we weren't super assimilated into ourselves yet at the same time.

58:56

Okay, so all of that's my backdrop to say this. The consequences, and this might not be the right reason to make a decision, but this is the reason

59:07

I'm making the recommendation or at least offering the thought that I have. The consequences to the peoples and the states and the nation of America are potentially catastrophic if we just say there's no way that any sort of mixing can happen, because then you're left with a couple of conclusions.

59:31

One is there must be a peaceful separation, and that separation must be based primarily on ethnic background, race, whatever you want to call it, because that's an immutable force that cannot be dealt with.

59:46

The only way to deal with it is just to say you have to be with your people. That's the best of the options.

59:52

The worst of the options is we say this land is my land, this land ain't your land, and we're either kicking you out or there's going to be a war of some sort.

01:00:03

Now, obviously, we would be naive to say that that sort of thing hasn't happened in history. It absolutely has happened in history.

01:00:09

So all that to say, John, I think the natural forces that God has built into us are strong enough that over time they're going to exert themselves.

01:00:29

That's a multi -generation perspective, though, and the question for us right now is what about now? My position is similar to Wolf's, where I say one of the reasons we're in the position that we're in is our leaders are contributing to the problem.

01:00:45

But if we could get our leadership to say things like we need to recapture the American identity, we need to prioritize it, and we are going to expressly say that we're a

01:00:56

Christian, American, Anglo -American people, and then say those of you who are here and have been here for a while, if you want to make a concerted effort to join that, you're welcome to.

01:01:11

But if you don't, that's where we're going. I think we have to try to either by emphasizing regionalism and being okay being very distinctly regional, or by emphasizing the fact that we're going to give it a shot.

01:01:26

Because the last thing I'll say about this is there is some evidence that this is the direction that things were going.

01:01:32

If you look at late 1800s Detroit and Chicago, there were Black families who lived in White neighborhoods.

01:01:40

There was no thing as a Black neighborhood. They went to the same schools, they were part of the same social clubs, and when

01:01:47

Black people were given the right to vote, many White neighborhoods elected Black aldermen and city council members.

01:01:55

Part of what we have to acknowledge, and this is my constant, what's been done to America and the

01:02:03

West has been intentional. The Frankfurt School, the Neo -Marxists, they realized economic

01:02:09

Marxism was failing in America, and they said, we still want to destroy America. If we can't drive a wedge between the classes, what's the wedge that we can drive?

01:02:18

They drove it between Whites and Blacks. The question to me is, was there a joining that was going on?

01:02:29

I think that a case can be made that there was, and then if that was fractured along a real line, that line was there, is that fracture so fundamental now that it cannot be brought back together?

01:02:43

My answer is, I think for the sake of all options, because it is,

01:02:51

I think, biblically possible for distinct peoples, for a minority to join a majority and to really join it, it's a biblically possible category.

01:03:02

I think we need to push for that and then say, okay, well, if it doesn't happen, it's not because we didn't give it our best effort to, and then you have to have reasonable men who can have reasonable conversations and say, look, we tried this.

01:03:16

It didn't work. What's the amicable option here for separating?

01:03:23

Yeah, and making sure that everyone in the situation is respected and their well -being is a priority.

01:03:34

Yeah, it seems to me, the southern word is agitation.

01:03:39

It always agitates, but that is the history of our country on this point. There's been a lot of agitation from the general or national government on these things.

01:03:50

It seems like biblically speaking, it's organic interaction, usually at the right scale too, in which these things actually fuse, and there can be a commodious, peaceful environment.

01:04:07

I don't know how much you've read of Dixiecrats and those kinds of guys. They really wanted to keep segregation and this kind of thing.

01:04:14

If you read the Southern Manifesto, which I found this fascinating because it jarred me years ago when

01:04:20

I was studying this topic, they talk about the organic, natural ways in which blacks and whites in the south live.

01:04:31

The reason the south is ground zero is just because there's such a high population of black people and white people living beside each other.

01:04:40

The only comparable other regions would be some of the urban areas in the north. Anyway, they just say that we don't want to disrupt the good thing that's happening.

01:04:50

You wonder, what are they talking about? I thought they hated blacks. Maybe some of them did. What do they mean by that?

01:04:57

That seems to have the best interest of both in mind on some level.

01:05:02

I'm not saying I agree with them on everything. This could be clipped and so forth. I'm not saying I'm a

01:05:07

Dixiecrat or anything like that. I think the conditions then are different than the conditions now. I found that that did not fit the narrative.

01:05:15

I remember I was studying. I don't know why they had this class.

01:05:21

It was an elective, but I took it. It was in grad school called Elvis and Pop Culture. We just learned all about pop culture.

01:05:26

One of the things that I found interesting was Elvis concerts in the 50s. Elvis started out, you'd have these segregated concerts.

01:05:37

By the end of the show, when there's an encore, they're completely integrated and no one cares. No one's doing a thing about it.

01:05:45

Shaking his hips and all that, of course, people have overplayed it, but he did get a lot of this from black preachers, the way he dressed,

01:05:52

Memphis. That was scandalous in the North. It was, I think, it was a

01:05:58

John Sullivan, whatever show it was that he went on. They're like, oh my goodness, you can't show those legs.

01:06:03

In the South, that's just how it is. Anyway, all that to say, there was a coming together happening organically, but it seems like every time you get to that point, there's more agitation.

01:06:14

I felt like under Bush, we were coming to that point a little bit. Then Obama gets in and it's more agitation.

01:06:22

That wedge just keeps getting driven. The Japanese used it. The Russians used it during the

01:06:27

Cold War. Now we have our own politicians on the Democrat side, especially, who want to use that to divide us, to weaken us.

01:06:37

It is obviously taking advantage of somewhat of a weakness because there's these natural differences that have existed.

01:06:48

I think I agree with what you and what I think Stephen Wolfe was trying to say too, is we don't add to that.

01:06:54

That's the big thing. We don't add to that by bringing in people who are even more dissimilar when we already have strains.

01:07:00

We have strains between the four British folkways that came here. Those were there from the beginning. We have strains because of all the

01:07:05

Germans that settled out in the Midwest and Scandinavians in the Northwest. They're all different.

01:07:12

If we just add to it, we have to give it time. That's the main thing I see Stephen saying and I hear you saying, is you have to give this time.

01:07:20

If we're Christians and we interact with each other in charitable ways, then we can actually navigate some of these things in peaceful ways.

01:07:30

If we're not Christians and if we keep adding to the problem, all you're going to get is violence and disturbance.

01:07:37

With that, I would be comfortable saying, yes, Vodie Bauckham, while we share differences and he has maybe a different lineage than I do, then yet we can share a nation together,

01:07:47

I think. He can live in my neighborhood and I can live in his and his grandkids,

01:07:53

I guess, because he's older. His grandkids and my kids can play. It's totally fine.

01:08:00

That should be, I think, the attitude of a Christian, especially toward another Christian who speaks your language and has your theology and has a very similar culture in many ways.

01:08:11

The other thing with that, John, is it is a little bit interesting to me.

01:08:17

I heard the story about Vodie going back to Africa and feeling like he was in his ancestral land.

01:08:23

Black slaves were in America almost as long as white

01:08:30

English settlers, colonizers. The question

01:08:37

I have is why do we say about Vodie that's actually his land and where he belongs?

01:08:42

I'm not saying we. I'm saying the voices out there on Twitter that say these things. We wouldn't say,

01:08:49

John, you belong back in Scotland. The reality is this is where we are.

01:08:57

Vodie's coming back here. He has come back here. He didn't stay in Africa for his whole life. I'm sure there's lots of reasons for that.

01:09:04

I don't know. He has told me personally that his family didn't even really fit in.

01:09:11

They're over there and he's recognizing these heart tugs.

01:09:17

At the same time, he knows, hey, we're different. We're from California.

01:09:23

It's different. We've been shaped by generations now in a different place. What are you going to do about that?

01:09:32

Sometimes people making these comments, yeah, I don't know obviously what their ancestry is.

01:09:39

If you came over in Ellis Island or if you came over during German waves of immigration in the mid -1800s,

01:09:47

Vodie probably predates you in this country. Vodie's ancestors do. Who has more of a right to be here?

01:09:55

The other thing is this is where the question of race and ethnicity, it actually is, there's a reality there, of course, but there's also a sense where it's a social construct.

01:10:11

Let's take a biblical example again. We've got Abraham. He has his sons and then

01:10:20

Isaac. Then from Isaac, we get Jacob and Esau. Esau founded a line, a nation of people, and so did

01:10:28

Jacob, Israel. When you look back in history, it's not actually super clear why people end up associating or gathering themselves around the particular founding member.

01:10:43

Why wasn't it one generation before that? Why wasn't it one generation after that? Why do you sometimes families divide and both of these now are distinct people?

01:10:54

Genetically, before that, or ethnically, or historically, or with lineage, all of that, they were the same.

01:11:00

Yet, as they're looking back, we say, oh, actually, they ended up becoming two peoples.

01:11:08

War is one of the reasons, but that's not all of the reasons. Even there, there's a reason why the

01:11:15

Germanic people became the Germanic people and the Danish people became the Danish people, even though they're in fairly similar regions.

01:11:23

Again, that's to your point. It's not just mathematical. There are providential things going on when

01:11:30

God forms a people into a nation and gives them a distinct identity. He does it with many, many different ways.

01:11:37

Sometimes it is war. Sometimes it's cultural achievement. Sometimes it's just they were in a secluded area and there was no interaction from outside.

01:11:44

The point is there's lots of ways that God goes about forming a people and a nation into the thing that it is.

01:11:52

I think it's the essence of modernity to try to reduce it to one thing. I think just for the viewers, because they've heard me rage against people who say race is a social construct.

01:12:04

When you say that, though, I don't know how much time we have to get into this, but when we talk about race, ethnicity, nationality,

01:12:15

I see those things in a pre -modern sense as basically the same thing. Today, because of modern, because of Darwinism and because of now critical race theory, these things have been divided into these very specific things.

01:12:30

For critical race theorists, race is power dynamics. For Darwinists, it reduces to genetics. Ethnicity is now basically culture.

01:12:39

I actually look at all those things in a pre -modern context as basically the same thing. That's a different people.

01:12:47

They're just different. They're distinct. We have different habits down the line compared to them.

01:12:56

We should probably, since we've been going over an hour, you've been very gracious with your time. I should probably not take up too much more of it, but I do want people to consider these things.

01:13:05

There's so much more we didn't talk about in your book. Here it is, In Defense of Christian Race.

01:13:10

John, let me say one other thing about that last comment. I won't take too long.

01:13:16

Please. When I was researching for the book, I was doing some word studies in original languages.

01:13:23

The word people in the Old Testament, a people, is am.

01:13:31

The Vines Bible Dictionary, it had a really interesting way of describing it.

01:13:38

They said, a people depends on objective things, history, lineage, things like that.

01:13:46

Then they said, there must be a mutual consiguineity. Consiguineity means recognition of similarness.

01:13:58

That's why I say, I agree with you, race and ethnicity are not social constructs in what we mean.

01:14:04

There is a social sense where a people say, we are the same, even though we're only one or two generations descended from those people over there.

01:14:15

There is a social nature to it where they come to have a collective consciousness of being together, whereas it's not always clear specifically why they are together and not with those guys over there.

01:14:29

Do you think that's one of the divides between the boomer generation and the

01:14:38

Gen Zers? I remember in the early 2000s going to these patriotic celebrations and everyone was there.

01:14:50

The Boy Scouts were there, the veterans were there, and everyone was saluting the flag. There was a feeling of togetherness.

01:14:57

I could get chills going up and down my spine just thinking of those times. It doesn't exist anymore.

01:15:06

It seems like the young people aren't showing up to those things. Even at that time, people were already starting to say the young people aren't showing up as much, but boy, they were there in larger numbers than they are now.

01:15:16

Mm -hmm. Despite all the differences that you highlighted, there did seem to be somewhat of a...

01:15:23

What's the word? Consig... No, I can't pronounce it. Consiguineity. Consiguineity.

01:15:30

There seemed to be... I think Renan talks about this in What Is A Nation where he's like, it's these victories and achievements and heroes and you can feel it more than you can think it.

01:15:42

You just feel it. I remember feeling it. I remember feeling this is my country. Maybe that was kind of fake.

01:15:50

Maybe there was elements of that that were just... I don't know. I don't think it was all propaganda, though. I think that there really was a sense.

01:15:59

My grandpa, he died at 101. He died last year. He remembers slaves and Confederate soldiers.

01:16:06

That's how old he is. It's incredible. I knew it. I have his letters sitting right next to me from World War II.

01:16:14

He was from Mississippi, never really been anywhere, and goes to Colorado to train, goes to all these different places.

01:16:21

He talks about all the different people he's meeting. He's rubbing shoulders with guys from New York and from Minnesota.

01:16:27

They might as well have been from foreign countries at that time. They all come together to achieve something.

01:16:34

Now, he had his bigotries mostly against Texans. I'm sorry. I know you're Texan. He thought they were the most...

01:16:40

New Yorkers and Texans, he thought, were both the most arrogant people. New Yorkers thought that they were bragging all about how big shots they were when they weren't.

01:16:48

Texans were just... He'd always say, pretty boys from Texas. He's like, those pretty boys, they're all flashy.

01:16:54

It's hysterical. It's hysterical reading these things. He had this one... Not to get off my grandpa, but he had this one letter he's writing.

01:17:01

This is him at a 20 -year -old. I don't know if this reflected him later on. He was actually a very... He was not your bigot racist you think of from Mississippi at all.

01:17:11

In fact, I found that stereotype is much overplayed. Anyway, he was talking at one of the letters about this

01:17:17

Chinese. He couldn't even... He didn't know where they were from. He's like, Chinese or something. From Oriental, Asian backgrounds of some kind, drill sergeant that came in.

01:17:29

He didn't like the guy. He writes in his letters, like, I wish they'd just send him back to wherever he was from. I'm reading this and I'm like, well, this is a farm boy from Mississippi who's never been anywhere.

01:17:40

Some of his best friends though ended up being guys from other places, from going out of his way to visit friends in Minnesota.

01:17:48

There was a binding that happened in that conflict. Those are your brothers. They're getting shot at.

01:17:54

You guys are both pointing your guns in the same direction. It seems to me like that arrangement is...

01:18:02

The Boomers retained some of that arrangement. We accomplished some great things together.

01:18:09

Our dads went and fought and they were heroes to us. That's what I don't know that the

01:18:15

Zoomers have. The ability to view your ancestors as heroes,

01:18:22

I think, has been completely undermined. You know that with the critical race theory.

01:18:29

It's just been all an attempt to paint those things that were the bonds of commonality to paint them as moral evils.

01:18:40

It's not only I'm apathetic towards it, but I have to completely oppose all of that on a moral basis.

01:18:47

Not even just on a cultural or regional perspective, but I have to oppose it because morally, the things that held my nation together before are moral evils.

01:18:59

That's a fundamental change that, like you said earlier, I don't know if it can be repaired.

01:19:07

Yeah. If you have younger people who... There was a poll a few years ago that if Russia invaded the

01:19:13

United States, would you fight for your country? If it's like 40 % of Gen Z or less, I forget, it was like 30 some percent.

01:19:20

I don't know how you recover from that. It just seems like at that point, your identities and allegiances are somewhere else.

01:19:28

They're not with your country. The thing I fear is that for younger people, I don't think it's with their region either.

01:19:36

If it was one thing, if it's like, well, no, I love my state or my region and I'm willing to fight for that, but I don't know about this

01:19:44

American empire, that'd be one thing. I'm skeptical though. It's more fascination with media or superficial things, online chat groups.

01:19:55

That's the in -group preference. If that's true, that's our kiss of death. We will never recover from that.

01:20:03

I guess if you're... Not to blackpill at the end, but if you're listening, first, you need to get the book.

01:20:08

You need to get Michael's book so you can think through this stuff biblically. But you then I think have to do some work of developing a true love for the people around you and not just for the people who agree with you about political things from other places.

01:20:24

It's got to be shared loves in the tangible real world. That's what we see in the Bible. I'll give you the last word and then we'll end the show.

01:20:33

Well, I'll make my last word what the last word is in the book. It is simply this.

01:20:40

Biblically, there is no argument that says you must abandon your earthly people.

01:20:48

In fact, there is an argument that you must love your earthly people. My attempt, one of the biggest hopes that I have for the book is that people who read it will come away from it thinking, it's not only okay for me to love my people, but I'm actually duty bound to love my people.

01:21:06

This is good and it's not in any way an attempt to supplant the goodness of eternal blessings with something inferior.

01:21:17

This lends itself, I think, to an increase in the eternal good as a people work together and as the church in a nation disciples its nation so that the people in the nation are more and more

01:21:32

Christian and aware of God and the requirements that he has.

01:21:38

My final word is just some of you out there, you sense the desire to love your place, but you have been told most of your life, you can't, that's unspiritual.

01:21:49

No, you can and you should. That's what I hope people come away from the conversation and from the book with a kind of a change of that perspective.

01:21:58

Amen. Well, get the book, go to Amazon, In Defense of Christian Nations by Michael Belge. Give it a good rating so that other people will see it.