Loving One’s Neighbor

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We have another special edition, special guest.

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Actually, I think it's your second time, right? To be on the podcast, Thomas? Yeah. We have a reoccurring special guest, a frequent flyer hopefully for months and years to come,

00:17

Thomas Accord. He's gonna be talking about a book that he just helped compile.

00:23

And it's called, I had it pulled up here. See, this is professional podcasting.

00:30

Who is My Neighbor is the name of the book. You can get it on Amazon. And I actually,

00:35

I got it on Kindle, but I'm wishing that I got it on hard copy because I think this is something that, hopefully it'll survive a purge, but it's something

00:45

I want to be able to pass down because there's just so many good things that you compile here. How big is it, by the way?

00:51

It's a large Kindle book. Do you have like a hard copy of it there that you can show us or? I don't have one with me right now, but it's as big as like a dictionary or something.

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I mean, it's a big fat thing. Okay. And you didn't write most of that. You're the compiler. You helped write the forward then and some introductions and so forth, right?

01:11

That's right. It's an anthology. It's a reader. And so it's more of like a reference work.

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And we did write little introductions for each section and the intro and the afterward.

01:24

Okay. I was just actually trying to pull up where people can get it. Is it just Amazon or are there other places as well?

01:31

It's at Amazon. It's also at Apple iBooks. And I think that, I think the Nook store is going to carry it, but I don't even know.

01:39

Okay. Amazon's the big place where people are getting it. Yeah. All right. I found it there. It's paperback, 25 bucks.

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Kindle, 10 bucks. Markdown from 25. So it's a reasonable price for all the information you're getting and it's arranged by someone yourself.

01:54

And Daryl Dow is the other person who you guys know what you're talking about.

02:00

And so I want to just first ask an open -ended, why did you decide to put this together? What's the book about?

02:07

So this came about, the idea of it came about in 2015 when all the sort of the national discussion in politics turned toward some of the themes in the book, which deal with nationhood, borders, immigrants and things like this.

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And we began to encounter a lot of new literature, a lot of old literature that we had never read.

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And as we were reading this, we were finding a sort of contrary view to the prevailing narrative in America and that many people had never accessed this.

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And we wanted to provide a way, a sort of a record for ourselves of some salient selections that were really impactful to our own thinking, but also to helpful for others.

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And the big idea for us sort of goes back to something C .S. Lewis did in his book,

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The Abolition of Man. He argues that there's such a thing as the way, he calls it the

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Tao or the Tao. There's this way, this universal way that all humans have always seen the world, a set of values like courage has always been favored, honesty, truthfulness.

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And at the end of his book in the appendix, he writes, he records some of these values.

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He actually goes in and talks about friendship and honesty and loyalty from the

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Greeks and from Egyptian sources. And that's sort of what we did. We've taken just one theme, not many themes and recorded as many sources as we could find over the years into a compilation that we've made.

03:41

All right, so the theme of the book then are these natural relationships, these social bonds, right?

03:49

Right. Could you just expand on that a little bit? Because I think this is really important. And I think this is one of the things that is one of the reasons that I keep saying the issue is not critical race theory right now confronting

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Christianity or something. I mean, that, yes, that's important, but it's not critical race theory, that's not the root. I think what you're talking about is more the root of what we're dealing with.

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So explain those concepts to us, if you would. So some of the concepts are things like,

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I would say a sense of one's being in the world in relation to other people.

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This would be, it could be family, it could be place, it could be geography, it could be language, religion, but there's a sense that emerges when you combine many of these elements together that produces a place of one's own, a sense of one's own belonging with other people.

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And throughout all literature, it could be poetry, it could be epic literature, fiction, history.

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People have spoken about that. And it's sort of like it comes out sometimes and people don't even know it.

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And so for instance, one of the things we have here is a quote from Homer.

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And this is a beautiful story, but this is the thing. We've left out so much in our book. There's so much more.

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The whole story of the Odyssey, for instance, is a man trying to get back home because he loves his wife, he loves his son, he loves the wheat fields around his house, he loves his island, he loves his dog.

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His dog is waiting for him when he gets back home. And he's got this beautiful goddess who wants him to stay on this like paradise island with her.

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And he's like, yes, I could stay here and have immortal love with you or whatever, but I wanna get back home to my wife because that's what's natural to man.

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And you have thousands of examples of this going back through all civilization.

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It's not just Western history or Western civilization. It's not just modern, it's ancient.

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It's the East, it's the Middle East. You can find this in all cultures and all times.

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And so some of those themes, again, are just love of what's near, the enjoyment of what's familiar, and a sense of peoplehood, sharing things together, whether it's suffering or joy, victory, or symbols, songs, foods, even food.

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And so there's like a mountain of writing and evidence for us in the historical record.

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And we've tried to compile as much of that as we can. And we really feel like we've only just scratched the surface, believe it or not.

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The book's like 600 pages, but we feel like there's so much more out there. Well, yeah,

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I'm grateful that you wrote it. On a personal level, I think, I don't know how to phrase this.

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I feel like I resonate with it. Maybe most people would, because everyone hopefully loves home.

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They love the things that are familiar to them, whether or not they are virtue signaling about abstract principles and saying that they're in love with these grand things like equality and revolutionary things.

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At the end of the day, I think most people do resonate with, yeah, but when I go home, when

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I go to the place that I'm familiar with, there are things there that I love.

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And those are the things that I take care of and that I try to steward well. And so I resonated with this personally, but I also feel as though there's a dividing line right now in our country, which is,

07:51

I think you had hinted at, maybe that's why you wrote it. Are there just some people that kind of get this and some people that don't, or people that are,

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I should say, self -aware of the fact that loving your neighbor, loving the things that are close to you, there's a greater responsibility there, there's more social bonds there.

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And then there's the people who just, they just don't see that. They live that way in part, but they think that they have to be in love with or prioritize things that are not near in proximity to them.

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Do you see that? Yeah, I think that there's, I mean, we've said this before in different ways, but I think there's this ideology today that tries to undo the natural way of living in the world.

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G .K. Chesterton wrote about this in his book, Heretics, and it's so many places you can find people expounding upon this, but everything that was natural to human existence before maybe 150, 200 years ago, has people have tried to invert that.

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It could be gender roles. It could be social hierarchy. It could be, and some of this stuff might've been bad, but whatever it was in the past, we have to undo that.

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And so even though people might feel these natural things, there's also this ideology that tells them you have to value things in a certain way today.

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And for instance, you have to place one principle of Christianity is place others' needs ahead of you.

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So treat others with deference and all this. But when it comes to politics, if you apply that politically, treat other countries' needs ahead of your own, that's not a good policy, and it's not one that actually finds any referent in history,

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Christian or otherwise. And so, yeah, you can find this natural sentiment in people, but, and you can call the ideology whatever you want.

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You can call it liberalism or critical race theory. So I think those are just, the critical race theory is just an iteration of this larger sentiment.

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It's not really that new. Right, that's right. Yeah, so I've noticed this even with people in my own generation, people

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I'm close in proximity to who, let's take a crisis like the immigration crisis or something.

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And I think there's kind of an emotional hook maybe through technology. We can see these images and hear these narrations and feel the melodrama.

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And there's a false sense of proximity in that. These aren't people, they did,

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I don't know who it was, but there was a kind of a humorous bit that some comedians did in Canada where they had this tall

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Turkish man walk around, and they were asking people, hey,

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I think it was Toronto, if I'm not mistaken, what do you think about immigration, specifically refugees?

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And, oh, I'm all for refugees coming here. And they say, well, great, we have this person right here. He needs a home tonight. Can we come to your house, right?

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And of course, every single person who was for, in principle, refugees coming to their country would not allow someone to come into their home.

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And so I've wondered whether or not there's kind of like, technology has tricked people sort of into this, thinking that they're proximate to something, thinking that they have a responsibility to something when maybe that responsibility isn't as great as perhaps whoever's behind that agenda is trying to promote it to be.

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Do you see that kind of working its way into our culture? Yes, one of the studies, so if you get into the scholarship on nationalism, there's actually a lot of scholarship on this from like the 1940s until today.

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There's a debate on how nationalism came about. And one of the theories is that with modern technology, the industrial revolution, the means to communicate, transportation, the fact that we ship goods all over the world makes you conscious of people all over the world.

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And so the theory, one of the theories is that nationalism came about at first because we could travel across the nation, like the radio drew

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Americans all together. We could have this sort of national discussion all at the same time and that increased nationalism.

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Well, how did globalism or cosmopolitanism come about? Well, the same thing, just all over the globe, transatlantic cables, shipping, and now the internet makes you conscious of people everywhere.

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But at the same time, there's something called a human scale to politics. And Aristotle talked about this.

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And I know Aristotle was thousands of years ago, who cares about this guy? Well, he had something true to say.

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You don't, when you build a house, you don't build a house that has a door that's 40 feet tall, okay?

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You build one with a door that's seven or eight feet tall because that's a human scale. When you build cities, you build cities that are a human scale, large enough for us to all kind of know each other.

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And even if you don't know the person, you know how they think, like where I live, it's Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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I don't know everyone in Baton Rouge, but it's big enough, but small enough to be a human scale where we all, we eat the same foods.

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We celebrate the same holidays. We watch the same football team. We're a city. If you go too big though, if things get too big, the city, the nation, a house, it starts to feel unhuman.

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And you can have some sentiments and say, oh yeah, I love these people far away, but you don't ever see them.

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Right. And you don't listen to their music and you don't eat their food and you don't dress like them or talk like them. There's nothing wrong with that.

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It's just that it's too far away. And you can find politicians talking about this too. Like I mentioned,

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I think last time I was on, I mentioned John C. Calhoun, but he talked about this. People's loyalties are strong in relation to their distance.

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And he wasn't just Calhoun, maybe he was a Southerner, you can critique him. Augustine said this too.

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Aquinas said the same thing. Depending on how far away you are from people is how weak or strong your actual social ties are gonna be.

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And so while you can say you love people far away, your love for them, when it comes to actually sacrificing for them is going to be very, very thin.

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And I think also one of the images G .K.

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Chesterton used was that there's people today called cosmopolitans and they love humanity.

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They love humanity so much. But if you ask them if they love any of the portions of humanity, you'll find that they hate them all.

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They hate kings and they hate priests and they hate soldiers and sailors, but they love humanity. And so I think that captures what you're getting at.

14:52

Let's walk through some of the content. You mentioned Calhoun, you mentioned Aquinas and Aristotle.

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You're not gonna be able to mention everyone that you have here, cause there's a lot, but give us some of the names, give us some of the categories.

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Cause I noticed you have a bunch of different categories. You have economics, you have history, you have, you divided up in tons of different ways here.

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So kind of just give us a run through of the content that is in this anthology and then let's drill down a little deeper.

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Sure. So we tried to go chronologically, but then it just, it got difficult. We started off with the ancient world and we talk about the

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Greeks and Romans. We also get into Egypt. We have some Egyptian sources,

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Hittite sources, Jewish, Chinese, Indian. And then we kind of move into, because at least my scholarship and Darrell's is a lot of my academic training is in theology.

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We have a lot to do with the church. And so we have the church fathers, we have the early church.

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We go into the middle ages, the reformation period. We talk about, we have

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Puritans and Presbyterians, Baptists, Catholics, Orthodox.

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We could do some scripture scholarships. So Bible commentaries, dictionaries, things like this, which by the way, we could have done a lot more.

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It's just how much time do we have to devote to this and how many resources do we have? We get into the modern period and that's probably the biggest section.

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And I can't go through everything in the modern period because if you look at the history of this discussion, sort of national feeling, fellow feeling, there's not as much writing in the ancient period as there is today.

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And so in the modern period, it sort of explodes with founding fathers, general politicians and statesmen, political philosophy, historians, literature, poetry.

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We also get into some sociological studies. Personally, I don't find the sociological studies as convincing as maybe the historical record, but we included those because there are a lot of them, hundreds and hundreds of sociological studies demonstrating some of the truths, the perennial truths that our ancestors knew.

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And some people like to see that data. So we included that section sort of like as a support.

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Yeah, we also have an economic section in there too, dealing with sort of, it's sort of like the economic implications of some of the theories that we, the themes we talk about in the book.

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And then we end with a short discussion on immigration. Okay, so you're making this relevant.

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You're trying to address topics that are actually even in the news today. Immigration is one of those things, but economic issues, et cetera.

18:12

Since I think most of the audience or a good portion of this audience are Christians, why don't you talk to us just a little bit about the

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Bible? And let me preface it with this, if you would. I actually, I just posted this on Twitter today because I was reading it and I just feel like it sets the tone.

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But let's see if I can find it here. In Numbers 2, I was reading Numbers 2. Verse 2, God charges

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Moses to tell the sons of Israel to camp each by his own standard with the banners of their father's households.

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And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, well, this is God implementing symbols of identity based upon social bonds formed through natural relationships and proximity.

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And that's not popular with the evangelical elite crowd. So what are some other passages?

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Where do you find this in scripture, this idea that loving our neighbor is, first it's to your family, then maybe to the household of faith, but your circles kind of, as they get wider, your responsibility decreases.

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Yeah, one of the things I would say is, you can find a lot of this in the Old Testament. So just big picture, it's clear in the

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Old Testament that there is a preference for my tribe or my people group, as opposed to the

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Gentiles. Just everyone else is called Gentiles. Like, you're just the out group. So you can go to the

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Old Testament and show a lot of passages that talk about this. God, you know, for instance,

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Genesis 10, where you have the sons of Noah, and from them, all the boundaries are set.

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This is Genesis 10, 32. God set the boundaries in place according to the numbers of the sons, according to their genealogies, according to their nations.

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So you have sons, boundaries, genealogy, nation, language.

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You have that sort of thing over and over and over. You have, for instance, Joshua. You know, he's gonna say, as for me in my house, you guys do, if you're gonna do one thing, great.

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But for me in my house, we're gonna do this. And what was me in my house, it wasn't just the nuclear family back then.

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It was probably him and all his relatives to cousins and perhaps servants and things like this.

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But some people might say, and again, you can find this in the book of Psalms. I think one of the most poignant examples is in the book of Psalms.

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And this is Psalm 137. And the Israelites are captured and they're exiled in Babylon.

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And their captors asked them, hey, sing us a song of Israel.

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Sing us one of your Israelite songs. Sing us the national anthem. And what is the song?

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It says, by the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered

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Zion and our captors required of us a song. And then the question is, how can we sing of a song?

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How can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? Like, how can we do this?

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And again, this is Old Testament. People might say, well, in the

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New Testament, Christ does away with all this, right? He does away with the sense of a feeling of place or belonging and ties to family and things like this.

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But I would disagree. The New Testament isn't as long as the

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Old Testament and it's more of a epistolary and didactic than it is. I mean, there's some narrative to it.

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But there are examples of this in the New Testament.

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For instance, the book of Acts. Paul goes to the Gentiles in Athens, and he says, look, you're worshiping false idols.

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All these gods are not right. God, there's only one true God. He made everything. In fact, he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the whole earth.

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And he determined their appointed times and boundaries of habitation. And I think that's a key verse here because he's showing both unity and diversity.

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So we all come from one man, right? We all come from one man.

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However, from that one man, he made all the nations and he gave us boundaries and he gave us times. And he's saying this to these non -Jewish people as a way of saying, look, you're not

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Jewish, and I am, you're Greek, but there is one God and he commands all men everywhere to obey him.

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And so it's a beautiful concept here. We're diverse peoples, but we're united, not merely in our shared humanity, but we're united in God.

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God brings us together. However, we do have our own separate nations. And there's other examples too, where you have the verse that says, if any man provide not for his own, and especially for those of his household, he's denied faith.

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This is 1 Timothy 5 .8. And it's almost like it was so obvious that they didn't need to go on and expound upon this, and write large tracts and treatises, things like this.

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It was just like, by way of introduction, you should take care of your people. And if you haven't, you've denied the faith.

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So not taking care of your family and your household first is not just a natural principle.

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It has something to do with not denying the faith. So there's some moral religious principle here as well.

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We also see in Galatians 6, while we have opportunity, let's do good to all people, especially to those who are of the household of faith.

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Paul wishing to be accursed for the sake of his people. So this is,

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I think people who are listening, hopefully are already starting to connect some dots and realize this is stepping on some toes in elite circles, not just in Christianity, but really just about every institution and organization that we're probably familiar with.

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Because this falls, this contradicts this kind of equity, diversity, inclusion narrative, to have a love for your own.

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And that's an okay thing, that you like your people. You like the symbols of your people.

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You like the place that you grew up with. And you feel that your responsibility is to them primarily.

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I can already see the accusations. That's racism, that's nationalism. That maybe that's kinism if you take it too far.

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So talk to me about that. Do you see these objections? What are they?

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And then what would your answer be to people who maybe would accuse you of that? Oh, and actually real quick, could

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I just give one example too? I just thought of this. Sorry. So while you're answering that,

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I just thought of this, the multi -ethnic kind of church model, maybe being a good one to talk about.

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Because in that model, the assumption is that there's all these separate ethnic churches because there's some kind of racism or discrimination.

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But if what you're saying is true, there could also be another motivation in there, maybe even a stronger one of a preference for one's own.

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And it might not be a sin that some people are in congregations with others who have the same kinds of foods.

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And you see what I'm saying. I grew up in a very multi -ethnic church and love it and all that.

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But I just wanna hear your response to some of that. Well, so as far as the multi -ethnic church,

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I think people miss things. I've traveled a little bit. Okay, I lived in Europe for a while, in Germany and Italy, and I've been to the

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Middle East for a time. People who are away from their homeland tend to gather together.

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It's just what people do. I saw some Filipino people in Kuwait one time.

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And they huddled together, they ate together, they walked together, they banded together, they bunked together, they lived in the same tent together.

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And they didn't have to, but they just kind of found each other. And the place that I work at right now,

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I work in a church, and it's a very big church. And there's a Mexican group that meets there for their services.

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And they could easily, these people, they speak English. They could easily fit in to go into the large congregational area during the normal service, but they hold their own services.

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Why do they do that? Do they do it because they're xenophilic or whatever the word is?

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Or no, it's because they're not in Mexico, but they miss it. They miss the hills and the mountains.

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They miss the air. They miss the sounds and the foods. And I lived in a neighborhood.

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It was like 800 square, 800 house neighborhood. And there was like, it's funny how this worked out.

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There was like the Asian section and there was the Mexican section and the African -American centers, like a bunch of old white people in one section.

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And no one told anybody to live like this. They just, people just kind of naturally congealed and it's,

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I ride by all the Mexicans out there and they're barbecuing and things. It's not because they don't wanna be around Asians.

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It's because they do wanna be around each other. They do wanna listen to their Mexican music or whatever it is.

28:08

And so this is not a bad thing. It's to love the people with whom you most identify doesn't mean that you hate others.

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And in fact, traveling around others sometimes makes you love your group even more.

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It makes you appreciate that even more and long for it. And I've personally experienced this in my travels.

28:34

So that's it. So the answer, if I were to summarize is that it's not a hatred for other people that causes one to preference or feel a sense of attachment to one's own or people like yourself necessarily.

28:48

It's actually probably what would be more natural is just you have a love. It's actually a love.

28:54

Right. Yeah, it's not a hatred that pushes you away. It's a love that attracts you and that's natural to humanity.

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But as far as the, you know, like this could be used by people with different motives and things like this.

29:10

I mean, sure, I'm sure it could. That's not necessarily, that's not what we're trying to go for.

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I mean, we actually had, for instance, we had a lot, we found a lot of material on slavery.

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I mean, a whole lot. And we cut out like 90 % of it because we just thought it's probably gonna detract from the whole purpose of the work.

29:31

Purpose of the work isn't to promote. We did include some of it, but the purpose isn't to promote that.

29:38

And so that's not. How did that specific, how did that relate to the central thesis of your anthology?

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What do you, I'm sorry. That specific topic of slavery. Yeah. Well, that's what

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I'm saying. Oh, it was just showing people were saying that there was a social hierarchy that justified slavery, essentially.

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And so we thought this, you know, this is material along the lines of the idea of difference.

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But it wasn't, it took it in a direction that we thought was not conducive to what we were trying to say.

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When you put an anthology together, people are gonna ask, so what are you saying? What are you doing?

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And so we think, okay, well, people are gonna ask that. And so we want to just ward that off right away.

30:26

The only bits of slavery that we did include were like in the early, like the first couple of hundred years of the

30:33

AD period. But - Early church history. Yeah. I would say one big answer, or one quick answer,

30:41

I guess, versus to like the racial tribalist narrative is that there are people within ethnicities throughout history that butt heads together.

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And so you can find this happening within Israel, as an example, where the different tribes of the same people all fight each other.

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I mean, the whole split of the kingdom between North and South, and they split for good and they never got back together.

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That's an example of this not working out so smoothly. And the same thing

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I would say too, with any kind of like color marker conglomerate, like if you're gonna wanna say something like white people or something, one of the most obvious things to me of the history of white people is how much we have not got along.

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And so you have English versus Irish, the Normans, the

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Vikings coming in, taking over everywhere. I mean, just, it doesn't, the whole World War I and II are like not these small little things in history.

31:46

So - White people, Europeans, I'll say, they've killed each other a lot more than just about any other group in the world, yeah.

31:56

Right. Yeah, no, I see what you're saying. One thought I had as you were talking is, taking, let's say an issue like segregation in this country, that was something that had to be forced by law.

32:07

It wasn't, I don't sense that that would actually be necessarily a misuse of what you're trying to say.

32:14

It's more of, it's actually outside of it because you're talking about natural relationships.

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And if you have to enforce something, that's not natural anymore. Right. You're legally, which is interesting that in some of these more

32:26

Southern urban areas, during like the 1930s, 40s, 50s, they had to enforce that.

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Because if they didn't, the natural thing was for Southerners who had been living together for generations to live together and interact.

32:41

So they, some of the elites wanted these laws to keep things separate. Right. So that's way outside of this, in my view, at least.

32:49

You can correct me if I'm wrong. Slavery in general, when we look at the

32:56

Old Testament and stuff, oftentimes it's the result of warfare, poverty, famine, and these kinds of things.

33:03

And maybe there's, if you look at ancient cultures, there's kind of a, that's the state of humanity.

33:09

There's a natural thing when you need food, and that's the only economic way that you can obtain that food and then survive.

33:16

That would be natural. But then if you use the Darwinian logic or something like, well, this race is superior to this race, then maybe you're stepping outside those bounds.

33:27

Am I onto something there? I just, I was hoping you'd explain it better. That's correct.

33:33

So my understanding of biblical slavery, like in ancient period, was that it was a system for, in one sense, it was a system for survival, but it was also a system that tried to improve the lives of people who had been slaves and eventually see them off in a different situation.

33:52

There were instances where, yeah, you could inherit slaves, like Abraham had a servant who would inherit his household.

33:58

But at the same time, it wasn't this sort of complete subservient class.

34:04

I mean, the servants could actually inherit the house. They could be considered sons at some point, whereas the slavery in like the modern period or whatever, it had a whole different dynamic.

34:15

Well, even in Roman times, there was probably a different dynamic as well, because there was sort of a Roman supremacy injected into that, if I'm not mistaken.

34:24

No, yeah, yeah, that's correct. I mean, that's why Paul, for instance, used his Roman citizenship to get out of prison. I'm a

34:30

Roman citizen. They were like, oh, oh, you're here. Let's give you a red carpet out of here.

34:36

Yeah, so the people couldn't, I guess the point being that if someone wanted to accuse you, let's say, of promoting some of the worst things in the world by putting this anthology out and showing that across multiple cultures, including non -Western cultures, by the way,

34:54

Egyptians and you have some sort in the Far East, showing that they have a preference for themselves and there's nothing wrong with this.

35:02

And we see this reflected in the Bible. You would not be guilty of the crimes of history. You would not be guilty of the

35:08

Holocaust or any of the things that they'd wanna pin on you. And I wanna just make that point because I think there's a propaganda machine that keeps emphasizing over and over, love for your region, symbols of your region, the history, where you've come from, pride in your nation now.

35:30

These things are all somehow evil and somehow unbiblical. That's the other thing you hear. This is not a

35:36

Christian thing. And I think your book is proving that not only is it a Christian thing, but it's also a natural thing.

35:45

Let me ask you this, cause this is another critique I could hear someone leveling.

35:51

Something's not right just because it's natural. Is it? Question. So in other words, is the point that because it's natural, it's right, or maybe you wanna expand on and tell me kind of more what you mean by natural when you use that term.

36:07

Yeah, I would say that this is something, so by the word natural, I'm using it in the sense of like a natural law that is supposedly theoretically derived from divine law.

36:20

And so this is why we include a lot of theology here. I mean, a great deal of it.

36:27

In fact, I think one of the weak points of the book to criticize my own work is that we have a little bit too much of that.

36:34

But if you can read the Orthodox church talking about this, you can read

36:39

Baptists even who are more apt to not be nationalist or whatever you wanna call it.

36:46

But there's a lot of people in almost any church tradition who take the opposite view of that approach, which says, well, just because it's natural doesn't mean that it's biblical.

36:59

And I don't have time to quote to you all of the people, but I think the

37:04

Orthodox church probably has the strongest position on that. And the second would be the Presbyterian church. But the idea is that God established a certain way in the world.

37:15

And this is what C .S. Lewis was trying to get at too in his abolition of man, the

37:22

Tao. There's a certain natural law in the world that all humans recognize.

37:28

Everywhere you go in the world, you'll never find a people who think that it's a good thing to be a coward or that it's virtuous to betray your mother.

37:38

You'll never find people saying that. Well, you never find people also in history saying that it's an honorable thing to betray your country, that it's actually the highest calling to be unpatriotic, to turn coat, to be a

37:56

Benedict Arnold, so to speak. You'll never find this. And why not? Because God put it in man to act a certain way.

38:07

And this is like sort of the Gentiles who don't have the law do the things of the law.

38:12

Well, what is the law here? I would say the nearest thing, 10 commandments, would be the commandment to honor your father and mother.

38:20

And every single commentary that I could find on this that talks about this would say, this is not just your immediate father and mother.

38:29

In the biblical, in the ancient concept, it would have been your fathers and your mothers. Well, the first of the passages,

38:35

I just read from you from Numbers. That's exactly what you're indicating, the symbols of your fathers.

38:41

That's right. Not just your dad. I mean, this is plural. These are people going back generations that had the same symbols that carried through.

38:49

Right, right. Interestingly enough, the early church had to argue a lot about this because they were rejecting the religion of their fathers.

38:58

And if you and all your people had always been pagans and suddenly you become Christian, the charge against you is you're rejecting the gods of your fathers, right?

39:09

You're abandoning your family. And so they had, the apologists had to argue this all the time.

39:15

And they would, you should see the care and precision with which they explain themselves.

39:21

And they're not just saying, well, who cares about that? That's irrelevant, carrying on the traditions. No, they would say, yes, we are.

39:29

But we believe we found the truth though. And we're, they're reformers. They're not revolutionaries, right?

39:35

They're not burning everything down. Right. As they do reject some of the things of their fathers.

39:41

And this is why Augustine, his city of God is like 1200 pages. You know, when Rome was falling, he didn't think, oh, well, good, good riddance.

39:50

You know, he didn't put it in a tweet and say this, you know, America is no longer a Christian nation. He said, Rome is falling and I'm so sad about it.

39:57

And I'm so broken up. But let me explain what I think is happening. And it's him trying to work through this process of really losing his civilization.

40:07

And it's not an easy thing. Didn't call him an idolater for loving Rome too much. That's right. Like Americans are called today.

40:15

One of the other objections I could see is someone saying, well, what about this pagan literature? And you may have already kind of answered this, but you know, the

40:22

Puritans, for instance, you know, they did not even use Greco -Roman architecture. They did not read the classics.

40:28

I mean, it was Charleston, South Carolina that was keeping Oxford University afloat by ordering massive amounts of classic literature.

40:35

And you see it in the architecture in the South. There's a clear difference, it seems, between the regions. But much of reformed evangelical

40:42

Christianity looks to not the Presbyterian, you know, divines, but more to the

40:49

Puritans today. And I think maybe John Piper might be responsible in part for that. I'm not sure, but so there is this strain that I have witnessed.

40:58

Maybe you've seen it as well. I know you're, you know, into classical education where we should just throw out,

41:05

I mean, you mentioned the Odyssey. Why would we read the Odyssey? Why would we look at some of these sources?

41:11

So because you include so many of those sources, could you just maybe talk about that for a moment? Sure, so there's a typical response to this.

41:22

I'm not being original here. The early church fathers themselves didn't do that.

41:28

They didn't throw out pagan literature. You can read many books on this. The shortest book that I know of, most easily accessible book on this is a book by a guy named

41:37

Steve Turley. He's a political commentator, and I think it's called Awakening Wonder or something like that.

41:42

Anyway, the early church fathers themselves didn't do this. They appropriated the ancient pagan texts over and over and over.

41:52

Augustine, for instance, he's got a book called On Christian Doctrine. And there's several chapters in the book, and it devotes one entire chapter to justifying the use of pagan literature for purposes of learning how to speak well and argue your case well.

42:11

And so the early church didn't do this. The Middle Ages, to the extent that they had, late

42:17

Middle Ages, access to these documents, they used them. The scholastics used them. The early reformers definitely did.

42:24

If you read Calvin or Turretin or Althussius or anyone, they make reference, they make free reference to these people.

42:33

They wrote in Latin. I mean, for goodness sakes, there was a reason people were writing in Latin. And so the

42:40

Puritans may have rejected this to some extent, but I would say they didn't reject some of the theories that were gleaned from that era, like natural law.

42:50

Some of the things that Cicero said, for instance, find their way into the writings of the

42:56

Puritans who are referencing the idea that there is a natural divine lawgiver who gives man a natural law.

43:04

And even the pagans, this references even in the pagans' minds. Another answer is that pagan literature contains fragments and shards of truth.

43:16

If we're created in God's image, we have some of that residual imago dei in us.

43:24

And so we're going to say things, we're gonna create things in our culture, much of which is gonna be bad perhaps, but some of it is gonna point to truth.

43:33

And even the pagan poets do this sometimes. They say, like Virgil, he's got some writings in his eclogues where he's saying things about Caesar Augustus, but it sounds eerily, it sounds very creepily similar to what

43:51

Christians said about Jesus Christ a century later. And so there's these fragments of truth.

43:58

And C .S. Lewis points this out too. One of the claims against Christianity in the early church period was that you guys just made all this up.

44:08

It's a brand new religion, you just made it up. So it's like Christians today criticize

44:13

Mormons or somebody, and you're like, yeah, you guys made that up 150 years ago. Well, and not only did you make it up, you borrowed from the pagan classics.

44:21

This is Bart Ehrman. He loves to publish a book every year showing how Christians just made this thing up by borrowing from Ishtar.

44:29

Easter is just Ishtar. Well, the Christians knew this and they responded by saying, we didn't make it up.

44:36

You guys made it up. You guys made up all these myths. You were stuttering and babbling and you were blind guides leading the blind, but you did get a few things right accidentally.

44:49

You were like a broken clock that was right twice a day, but wrong for the rest of the day. You did get a few things correct.

44:55

And so when you read these ancient pagan writings, you will find things in them that are of worth keeping, such as, for instance, the example of Odysseus.

45:09

He gives up fame, he gives up wealth, he gives up lust and the beauty of a goddess.

45:16

He gives up his aesthetic life of self -individual fulfillment to go back home, to be a good husband to his wife.

45:24

And this is the concept of virtue. This is not the virtue signal that we all talk about, but the actual virtue.

45:34

And I'm thinking of the founding fathers when they were debating about the constitution and what form of government to set up.

45:42

And you see kind of two things. You see kind of an awareness of biblical principles.

45:48

Of course, they're coming from British common law. So these principles have been distilled over time by tradition, but they reference the

45:54

Bible constantly, not only for examples, but because of the core truths contained in the

46:01

Bible. But then much of their experimentation, for instance, democracy or a republic form of government, they talked about this kind of Hebrew republicanism, but they didn't have examples necessarily in scripture.

46:15

They just knew that there was a form, but it wasn't expounded upon. So they looked to the Greeks and the Romans. They implement representative forms of government.

46:24

And that's how they came up with the document that was governing us up until a short time ago in some ways.

46:34

So, this is different in my mind than people who wanna use like critical race theory as an analytical tool, because when they do that, they're ignoring the fact that critical race theory is based on a set of assumptions about power relationships, systemic or systemic and embedded in everything.

46:53

And we need these minority perspectives to know true. So there's postmodernism. It's resting on these false assumptions.

46:59

And that's why you can't use it as an analytical tool. But what you're talking about are people in history, pagans even, who because of natural law, because of the fact that God created this place, they have used tools like mathematics and logic and these kinds of things that are just fundamental to reality.

47:24

And I think that's a difference. I'm trying to head off at the past, someone who would say, well, why not use like CRT or something?

47:30

And I think that might be the answer is some of these things are fundamental to reality and existence.

47:36

And CRT would be, this is artificial. This is in the imaginations of some sociologists' mind, they've made up a false reality.

47:44

So you can't use that. Is that, would you agree with that analysis or would you have anything to add to that? No, the way

47:50

I would say it is, you can look at this very simply. Last summer, one of the leading thinkers of this

47:59

CRT, well, he's against it. His name's James Lindsay. He actually got, he said something on Twitter.

48:07

He said, two plus two equals four. And it created this firestorm controversy from people arguing that two plus two can equal five.

48:18

And to common folk, to us unlearned people who do our taxes according to two plus two equals four, we know that that's false.

48:29

Well, what's happening? There's an ideology going on today that causes people to deny the fabric of reality, even to the fundamental core of it in math.

48:40

It's not just that they're denying gender and they're denying all these other things that people may disagree about. They can't even admit that two plus two equals four.

48:49

And however, they do go out and they go to the store and they need three bananas and they go get three, they don't get five.

48:54

They get, they do their taxes and they want a certain amount back on their taxes. They don't fudge there, but they can deny reality in the abstract.

49:03

This is what we mean here. There's a certain set of natural laws that are embedded in reality and the fabric of the created order that God put there.

49:11

And all humanity has always recognized them, even pagans. Aristotle is not, he didn't invent logic, but he discovered many of the laws of logic that we know today and still teach today and they're valid.

49:22

The same thing with early taxonomic forms, things like this, other types of math, like Euclidean and Pythagoras and all kinds of things.

49:33

These pagans are finding these things out. And just because they were worshiping idols doesn't mean they didn't find something accidentally correct.

49:42

And today, however, you have these pagans, but they're denying even what the ancient pagans knew.

49:50

So it's like they're twice over pagans or something.

49:56

They're pagans denying pagans, I guess you could say it. It's a denial of reality than a rejection of the natural order that everyone's recognized.

50:07

Yeah, even Cornelius Van Til, and I'm not trying to put his words in your mouth.

50:13

I don't even know if you're a Van Tilian kind of guy. And I'm not even going there in that discussion right now.

50:18

I just remembered one quote from him that I think is true where he talks about borrowed capital and kind of, and we see this kind of in Romans one, we see this in other places in scripture where people will do things that are not consistent with other views they hold because they live in God's world, right?

50:38

And so they're on borrowed capital and Christians can explain, they can give an interpretation of the real world because they have the manual for it.

50:49

So you go ahead. I was gonna say, this is what Nietzsche tried to say to everyone, which was, look, and the early atheists, like the late 1800s, early 1900s atheists, if you're gonna deny

51:02

God, if you're gonna really, like then do it, be man about it, go all the way, don't deny him, but try to keep morality.

51:11

And that was Nietzsche's whole, his whole pitch was, will to power, trans value the values, ubermensch, go over and beyond.

51:21

And you get this in the writings of H .G. Wells, for instance, when he writes his time machine and he tries to show what it would really look like in an atheistic universe if you go into the future, it's a much different than a

51:33

Richard Dawkins who will throw Christianity out the window, but at the same time, try to uphold to values of fairness and tolerance and kindness and brotherly feeling and things.

51:45

Even Wells though, couldn't be consistent with it. He, yeah, but he gets to like the millions of years in the future and he's, the sun's about to like die, the earth is dying and it's, so he has to backtrack a bit to a point in time where he feels a sense of place and a purpose, there's some purpose for me in this specific time.

52:07

So it's still a man hunting for a purpose and without being able to make sense of why there even is a purpose.

52:16

But so, so question, what's going on today? You were just talking about it.

52:21

People are denying even basic math. I mean, I think, I think right after that, we saw that, wow, okay, you know, with the election numbers and everything, people really don't care about math.

52:32

Like math really doesn't count anymore. And Epstein didn't kill himself.

52:38

Anyway, we gotta sneak that one in there while the overlords at YouTube are, you know, plotting to delete this video.

52:48

But so, so why are people doing that? Why is there an attack on, really it is an attack on science in the name of science with,

52:56

I see that with the COVID stuff, we have denial of reality with the BLM protests and all that.

53:02

We have a denial of reality with the election. We're trending in this weird direction. And it seems like that same crowd, the same people denying reality are also denying natural relationships.

53:13

That seems to be part of it somehow is they don't want those attachments and responsibilities.

53:19

They'd rather in some, they're in love with these abstractions. Right. So explain that to us.

53:25

Why is this happening? Like, how does your book help people recognize and then kind of combat that?

53:34

Well, there are so many explanations for why this is happening. I can't,

53:40

I can't get into all, I don't think there's any one reason why. It's been happening for at least a couple of hundred years now.

53:45

I mean, I just read something from Jonathan Edwards talk and he was saying, this is early mid 1700s.

53:53

And he's saying he was dealing with it among people in his revival, but to a lesser degree. One explanation that I think really helped me understand things was that in the post -war period.

54:05

So after World War II, everyone became really afraid of national sentiment because of Germany, what happened in Germany and Italy and many other countries, by the way, it's happened in many countries.

54:19

People became really afraid. And there were especially Jewish people who, you know, fled to different countries.

54:27

And in the post -war period, you have a lot of literature that tries to promote this idea that this authoritarian personality in the

54:38

Western soul that believes things with strong convictions, that has a sense of we, a sense of place, culture, authority, tradition, all of these things led to Hitler.

54:51

And so we have to reject all of those things so that we never have fascism again. And I think that's just one explanation.

54:59

It doesn't account for anything in the 1800s, but I think that's a big one driving today.

55:05

Another one could be slavery in America, at least race relations. We have to continually undo, not just like getting, doing away with slavery did not do away with the thing that allowed for slavery, do you see?

55:21

And so what was the thing that allowed for slavery? Well, everything, every bit, every facet of society during that time did.

55:28

So we have to undo all of that. We have to continually come out with statements every year saying, we're sorry again.

55:35

We have to give up more and more and more political rights or power or money. And so I think those are just a few.

55:43

Okay, there are more, but those are a few big ones. Well, historians, they tend to view events sometimes and time periods in the past through kind of, and this isn't all the time and I'm not saying all historians are like this, but I've just noticed a tendency.

55:59

They'll view it through the lens of other events. So for instance, slavery in America, there's been a number of interpretations, but the popular one that sort of emerged more in the 60s and the 70s was kind of viewing that through the lens of the civil rights movement and attaching them.

56:17

And they were never, that wasn't something that had happened. And so it wasn't, those were not attached and associated in people's minds.

56:24

Well, now they are because of the way historians have interpreted that. The other thing I think is though, a lot of, and this isn't just slavery, but the

56:33

Crusades, a lot of things that have happened in history that are deemed to be very negative have been interpreted through kind of the lens of the

56:40

Holocaust. And that this is, I was just reading a book, it's on my shelf and I don't remember where it is or I would pull it down, but it was on the

56:48

Holocaust and basically blaming the church for the Holocaust, not even really going into the scientific racism.

56:55

And it was written by someone very influenced by critical theory, but basically saying like the Holocaust started in the early church.

57:02

That sent, it was brewing, bubbling up. And then finally like it bubbled over and then

57:08

Hitler like finally did it. That's right. The Christians were just pushing for this, John Christosom and Augustine and Martin Luther.

57:16

And then finally Hitler, he just went and did it. Like that interpretation is bogus historically.

57:23

I was required to read it in a class. So that's why I read it. But anyway, it's kind of, it's that ideology

57:32

I think you were referencing before. Like everything becomes like this abstract thing and they shut the door on anything natural.

57:41

And it seems to contradict the way that probably these historians even live. They don't live that way.

57:48

Where they're drawing all these lines all the time. They live coming home and like you said, loving their pets, loving their kids.

57:57

And not thinking like, oh my goodness, I'm like on Adorno's F scale right now because I love my kids so much.

58:03

I must be a Nazi. Like, so how do we communicate that to people?

58:08

How does your book help communicate that? Like, hey, you're not a bad person for just loving your family, your people, your region, your country.

58:18

One thing I think that at least my research, my personal research has found is that that line, that narrative that people are trying to draw from like early church to the middle ages to white

58:34

Europeans to slavery to the Holocaust, that line is actually one thin line among thousands of lines of history and historical development.

58:45

So John Chrysostom did not just influence Northwestern Europeans in the modern period.

58:52

So if whatever John Chrysostom said in the ancient times, why didn't it affect

58:58

Holocaust all over the world into all kinds of people everywhere? So why didn't it cause many of these over and over and over and over?

59:08

You find, in other words, sort of this, I'll just call it for the sake of simplicity, I'll call it national sentiment.

59:13

You find national sentiment among the Hungarians in the late middle ages, right?

59:21

You find it among the Swedish people. You find it among Romanians and Bulgarians.

59:26

You find it among Arabic peoples all over. Armenians during the

59:32

Armenian genocide, which is enforced upon them by the Ottoman Turks.

59:37

So like, why did this happen to this other people but it didn't cause what it caused in the

59:44

Western world? So if you're gonna say this thing back in time directly caused this other thing later in time, post -Hakka or post -Hakka, why didn't it cause that same thing to happen in many other instances?

59:59

In fact, why did the exact opposite happen in all the other cases? And so one of the things our book shows is that you can find this, again, nationalist sentiment or whatever you wanna call it, family sentiment, local sentiment.

01:00:13

You can find it in people, all peoples at all times for all kinds of different reasons and different situations.

01:00:21

So, and it didn't lead to the same things each time. So some people will say like, this was used as sort of an imperialist stamp in the

01:00:34

Western world. Well, national sentiment arose so often as a reaction against imperialist advance.

01:00:43

Anytime you have some group of people imposing themselves on others, you have that group of people imposed upon rising up and saying, let's all of us, we, gather together against them.

01:00:56

This actually happened, I think the earliest instance that I've recorded of this is from like the 2000s or 3000s

01:01:04

BC in Egypt. The upper Egypt and lower

01:01:09

Egypt were going at it and the lower Egypt gathered their forces together in sort of this ethnic solidarity against the others.

01:01:18

And so it was a defense mechanism, in other words. Anyway, one of the things our book does is shows that this is not, this standard narrative that you're told is a very provincial and narrow view of the history of this feeling among mankind.

01:01:39

Yeah, and that's important because it really, it closes the door, in my opinion, on not just progressivism, but also kind of an extreme libertarianism where the individual is the only social unit that matters.

01:01:49

And everything becomes about that. There actually are social bonds, but that's not socialism.

01:01:55

And so you trace back, the Romans were not, they're not exercising in Marxism or anything like that, but there was an attachment and a duty one had to one's own people, militarily, to defend your people.

01:02:09

That was just an expectation and sort of many other responsibilities. So how do you rebel against this sort of on a personal practical level, this kind of Tower of Babel version two that we are now kind of heading toward where we're just this global community and we should just give up all our rights to the central authority because they're gonna give us security and equity, inclusion, diversity, loving your national symbols and stuff is wrong.

01:02:41

How do you rebel against that in your own life, if you have any examples? Well, one of the,

01:02:47

I'm gonna kind of be corny here, I guess, but the book is titled, Who Is My Neighbor? And Jesus gave the parable to Good Samaritan as an example of a good neighbor.

01:02:57

And I think that's a perfect way of fighting back against, people might think, oh, that's an example of universalist sentiment.

01:03:06

Well, actually, it's not really. The guy was walking along the road and he saw that person directly and helped that person directly.

01:03:14

He didn't help, theoretically, these four foreign people through some state program. By voting for a, yeah.

01:03:20

Yeah, right. So my advice, I guess what I do is do life with those around you and whoever you see around you, those are your neighbors.

01:03:31

That's your neighbor. And if that person, so I live in a place that's, my, in Louisiana, we have parishes, not counties.

01:03:40

My parish, it's like 50 -something percent black and 40 -something percent white.

01:03:46

So what do I do personally? I do life with the people around me here. That's what

01:03:52

I'm doing. No, I am involved in considering national politics and I'm aware of global affairs and things, but I come home to my wife every day and I love my wife.

01:04:06

There's something to be said for that. I mean, today that doesn't happen all the time, right? Get married, have kids, love your kids, provide for your kids, build your house, love your neighbors, get involved in them.

01:04:16

Start traditions or continue on the traditions of your ancestors with joy and don't neglect them.

01:04:22

Don't think that they're, because they've been commercialized, you can't celebrate them anymore. That's right. The church and Western history is full of rich, rich traditions that are wonderful.

01:04:33

And so those are just some simple, I know it sounds kind of like common. It might be, the answer is, you're thinking the answer is going to be maybe way over here and more complex, but just get married, have kids, love your neighbor physically.

01:04:47

Like go over there and help them cut their grass and do things for them and get to know them. Yeah. That's the simplest way.

01:04:53

The John Doe party over there. I had a professor about a year ago say to me, and he's a

01:05:02

Christian. He said, I think Christians need to get back to loving things. And of course I was like, wait, what?

01:05:08

And all of a sudden the materialistic bells start going off. He's like, no, seriously, like things that God has put close to you and given to you specifically.

01:05:18

And this could be family, but this could also be just material things that are in your life.

01:05:24

He's not saying idolize them. He's saying that like live in the life that you're actually in, that God's given you.

01:05:30

And too often, and I have to watch myself because even right now we're speaking, we're on a Zoom call, right?

01:05:37

We are having a conversation and it does matter as the podcast title says.

01:05:42

But at the same time, it's not the same as me being in the same room with you. For instance, it's not the same as my wife who's in the other room right now or my neighbor who's right across the street.

01:05:55

There is a natural proximity that God's created. And I don't want to neglect that because of online interface.

01:06:02

And I guess I would just challenge people to just be careful that you're not just in your cell phone all the time or just always in kind of this digital world because I'm not saying it's not important,

01:06:13

I'm in it, but I think you're onto something with the Good Samaritan analogy and the idea of natural relationships.

01:06:22

These relationships are bound through not just physical proximity, but also responsibility and also genetics to some extent.

01:06:31

Your family, these are people, someone at some point got together and those kids who listened, they did the do and here you are.

01:06:40

And there was a bond there. That's something God created. That's not racism or hate.

01:06:46

That's to say that there's a long line in a group of people who have done this. No, that's actually love.

01:06:51

They've come together. And at least the way God intended. Right. But it's in many ways though.

01:06:57

It's in many ways too though. I mean, passing on language to your kids. Teach them your language.

01:07:05

That's it. Teach them to dance if you know any of your dances. If you play music, teach them the music that you listen to.

01:07:12

That's one thing that I hope to do is to pass on music to my children that I love.

01:07:19

And so that they have some connection with me there. But there's so many ways. My neighbor, there's a child being born.

01:07:27

And so some of the ladies in the area are getting together and making a quilt. It's a tradition that they do. And it seems kind of quaint and kind of homey.

01:07:33

And like, how is this fighting against the forces of globalism? Well, there's this old saying that's the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

01:07:40

All this starts at home. And the family is the bedrock of, socially speaking, of society.

01:07:50

And if you are, I guess, to put it in a corny way, Jordan Peterson said, go clean your room.

01:07:58

If you can't clean your room, don't think you're gonna clean up the world or whatever. And he's right.

01:08:03

There's a profound truth there. Well, go ahead and get the book. You can go to, I just actually, while we were doing this,

01:08:10

I ordered it on Amazon. I ordered two copies, actually. You can go there.

01:08:16

I'll put the link in the info section for people who wanna order it. I bought one for myself. I bought one to give as a gift to someone.

01:08:23

I think, I might give it to my brother. He's a teacher and it might benefit him. But I appreciate you putting this together.

01:08:29

And any final thoughts for us? No, I'd love to hear feedback on the book.

01:08:36

We plan to be updating and making another version in another five years, maybe a second volume or something.

01:08:43

Cool. Where can people find you? Is it just Twitter or? I'm on Twitter, Thomas Acord.

01:08:48

I'm on Facebook. I got on Gab recently. I'm not there a lot, but I'm there.

01:08:55

And yeah, that's where you can find me. Perfect. All right, we'll put some links in the info section. I appreciate it, Thomas. Thank you.