The Case for Christian Localism

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, where we are forging a bold Christian vision for America. I'm your host,

John Harris. We are going to talk today about localism, which is such an important topic. It is the need of the hour because it channels where our loves, our loyalties, and our investments should go, primarily to those we know, who we love, who we are in tangible proximity to on the local level, and that is where lasting change really does happen.

I know most of you were probably raised not to think about government or society the way that I'm going to present it to you today, which is why it is so important that we recover the blueprint.

That's what we're going to do today. We're going to recover the blueprint from our, not just Anglo -Protestant past, but from the biblical framework and the natural order that God has set up.

So hopefully that sounds good and it will be an encouragement to you and maybe even touch your heart a little bit as we talk about it.

I want to first let you know about something that's coming up, though, before we get into all of that. On May 1st through 3rd, there is going to be a conference in Tampa area in Florida.

If you live in the Tampa area in Florida, I encourage you to come out. It is called the Truth Conference, and you can find out more about it by going to thetruthfellowship .org.

The truthfellowship .org, I will be speaking there. I know Dr. Russell Fuller will be there and a number of other people, and it'll be a big blessing for you.

You can look forward to that, thetruthfellowship .org. Let's get into it. Let's talk about localism a bit.

It's not an ism. That's the first thing. I refer to it that way, but it's really not an ism. It's just the normal way that people interact with each other because humans are social beings that God created.

And so I start off in my substack piece, which is called The Case for Christian Localism, which is on this very topic.

I start off with a quote from Robert Louis Dabney, the Presbyterian theologian. He says, government is not the creator, but the creature of human society.

Let me repeat that. Government is not the creator, but the creature of human society. It is so important to understand that because progressives often think of government in very revolutionary ways.

And now it's not just even progressives. It's just revolutionary thinking about the way that society and government interact together.

They tend to think of the government as a change agent, as a tool of the revolution to turn things upside down and make them equal.

So if you have a hierarchy that's not fair, we need to make it equal. And so the government's going to come in and use its force to erode the hierarchy and put those on top who are on the bottom and so forth.

And so the government is this engine for human equality and fairness. Well, I think that this actually gets the role of government wrong, which we'll talk about in a moment.

But it also assumes something else about society, that the government can actually just create society or change it in such a way that it's near creation, is making it fundamentally different.

And you'll even hear progressives talk this way sometimes, right, that we're going to get in there and fundamentally alter the identity or the character of this country or this city or this state.

That's our goal. And we're not going to stop till we're done and the revolution must continue and we have so far to go.

I mean, that's the kind of language they use. And conservatives don't think this way, real conservatives.

Conservatives are, they start out with a different assumption. It's the one that Robert Louis Dabney hints at here.

They start out with the assumption that actually God is the one who creates humans as social beings and those humans form interactions.

For example, when you were born, you were born into a society that likely had a fire department.

Let's say you were born into a hospital or a house. Those houses, those hospitals are being protected by a service that you did not pay into.

You never asked anyone to make sure that the house didn't burn down that you were born into. Just the way it was.

And maybe when you grow up, you will sense an obligation to society and you will join the fire department yourself.

That's the kind of thing that forms organically over time. That's the kind of thing that humans form in relationship to one another.

They figure out there's land here. We need it for grazing in the field. We need it for our sheep, our oxen, whatever livestock we have because we need to eat.

And let's form an arrangement whereby we share this land or whereby that's your land and this is my land like Abraham and Lot.

It is an organic thing and it happens. It forms these attachments, these connections, these arrangements because humans interact with one another.

They get married. They have children. Those children become friends. They get together to appreciate art.

They get together to appreciate music. They get together to worship God. They get together for commerce and they start forming all of these attachments.

So why do we need government? Well, we need government. Now there's different answers to this, but one of the biggest answers is because man's sinful and government is there to stop evil.

Government needs to ensure that chaos doesn't ensue when people who are interested in robbing, stealing, and doing other kinds of evil things to their fellow man don't have the biggest force and don't get their way because when they get their way, society crumbles.

There's not an incentive anymore to even form these arrangements and keep them healthy because you don't know if you engage in commerce if what you make from that is going to be stolen.

Government ensures that those things flow and that the law is followed, that God's law is reflected in man's law, and that society continues on in stability.

So man is a social being. That's the first thing we need to assume about society and government and all these things.

And in order for man to continue in a healthy arrangement, man needs to have virtue.

And when they don't have virtue, the government needs to step in. But if men were all angels, right, as it was a

John Adams who said that, if men or Alexander Hamilton, I forget which one, but if men were all angels, right, you wouldn't need government.

Well, men are not angels. And the more a people has a high virtue level, the less you need the constraints of government and the tax burden that that poses to people.

You can actually just get along with other people. So if you're going to have virtue, though, it is going to be cultivated and incubated on the local level as well.

It just doesn't fall out of the sky. Governments cannot actually force people to be virtuous.

They can force people to behave virtuously, but they can't change your heart directly at least.

But if you grow up in a stable environment that teaches you right from wrong, especially a

Christian environment where you get to know the Lord Jesus Christ and what he says in his word, then you have a much higher chance of reflecting those kinds of virtues in your own life and being a contributing member of society and helping society not just form and grow, but also be strong.

And when there's an empire or a country you're part of, these communities all can band together and the strength of them combined makes the whole entire country or empire stronger.

Now, there are three factors that make a local approach essential for any conservative movement.

Number one, all politics is local. That requires a rooted connection to communities to sustain any political movement.

So if you aren't connected to the real needs of everyday people, especially in a democratic form of government, you can kiss victory goodbye.

You have to be able to understand the needs, wants, desires of the people that you're actually serving, and that only can be figured out on the local level.

You can do national polls and that kind of thing, but it really is in the lived experience of being with people, seeing and understanding their plight, experiencing it yourself, that you're able to connect with them in a meaningful way.

Second, local ties foster stability and cultivate virtue.

I mentioned this before, but these local associations, think about not just parents, but a church leader, a pastor, a shopkeeper.

Look at those old movies and someone's got a problem. A kid's wondering how to navigate some kind of a perplexing question.

Who do they go talk to? They'll go into the ice cream parlor. They'll talk to the guy who's sweeping the floors or behind the desk or the counter there.

You don't have that as much today. You're not going to go to the Walmart greeter, probably. You're not going to call the Amazon rep and say, hey,

I got this problem. But when you have a thick community, you have people all over the place who are able to help you navigate with hopefully wise advice, and they serve as kind of a stability.

And third, within the Anglo -American tradition, Christians have historically embraced and still uphold a pastoral ethos grounded in local communities and regional identity.

So the regional identity thing's, I think, the most important part. People don't just exist as individuals.

We exist in groups, and the groups are formed by the providence of God as he places you in proximity to others.

That happens in an area. It happens on a map. You can look at it.

Now, today, with other means of connection, you can say, well, you can transcend some of these barriers by talking to people on the internet.

That is true. But you also lose something when you talk to someone on the internet.

Think of dating online. You have to eventually make the jump from things to line up online, but do they line up in person?

And you have to then go and meet them in person, see if everything they're saying is legitimate.

Sometimes it's not. That's why catfishing is so big. And so the trust level just isn't there on the internet.

But in a local area where you are watching someone, where you know their people, where they've been there for a long time, families have reputations, they're interacting in such a way that they can't hide who they are as well because everyone's watching because they're not just turning on a camera and choosing when they want to be seen.

They're actually just always seen because they live there. That is what builds trust. So these are the three factors that make a local approach essential.

Non -negotiable. All politics is local. Local ties foster stability and cultivate virtue.

And it's within our tradition and part of our identity to think of ourselves on a local level. Now, Vice President J .D.

Vance alluded to this at the Republican National Convention when he said, people will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

And Edmund Burke, actually, he said something very similar to this. He said that man acts from adequate motives relative to his interests and not on metaphysical speculations.

What he's trying to say is men are tangible, and women, tangible creatures that have actual needs in the real world, and they will die for their loves.

They will sacrifice. They will do whatever they need to do for the things that they actually are surrounded by and care about.

You give them an idea, they may like the idea. They may love the idea that if we just arrange society according to the way

BLM thinks it should be arranged, that it would make a lot of sense, right? It would be so fair.

But at the end of the day, what are they actually willing to sacrifice for? What's going to motivate them the most?

Well, people can be motivated by ideas. That's true. But God wired us to be more motivated by actual tangible people that we love.

The idea that you can love an idea in your head more than your own daughter or son, that's a very twisted thing, right?

And generally, the ideas in our heads are somehow ways that we try to justify our own sin.

Usually, it's a love for ourself that's motivating us, right? But a healthy society is going to be motivated to continue its existence and protection because of a love for real people in real places and experiences and memories and joys and sorrows and all the things connected to that.

So this is something that is just inescapable. This is who we are. This is the world we live in.

And a deep sense of home has characterized our Western tradition from Odysseus to King Arthur. The idea of home is a very deep idea.

I want to read for you something that I found very helpful from George Eliot.

He said, he once wrote that a human life should be well -rooted in some spot of native land where it may get the love of tender kingship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.

Meaning, your home is unique. That's what he's saying. Your home is unique. You got accents. You got things you're comfortable with.

Food, smells, sports, and familiar expressions.

And you know what to do. No one's questioning what they should do in their home. They know how to act when they're home.

But when you're in a foreign place, you don't feel that way. I wrote this. You will not find the meaning of home on a map.

It lives in the smiles and tears, the celebrations and sorrows, the triumphs and failures, and in every meaningful sentiment

God chose to bestow on humans. It is where real people live with whom we share the deepest joys of connection.

It is the place where our stories never die and our secrets are always kept. It is that formative place that shaped us and continues to shape us still.

And in the end, home is where we belong. And somehow we know it, not through our reason, but through the memory and gravity of our own heart.

I wrote that out of the way I feel about home. This is what it means to me.

I sense it. It's intuitive. I don't need to be argued into it. I just know that these are my people.

This is my place. Well, let's talk about these three qualities, these three factors.

Let's first talk about regional identities. They are inescapable. It is an inescapable fact that humans must inhabit a space, right?

We have to live somewhere. Even in the digital realm, people will find their nook, their space, that you think of like Minecraft.

They're still trying to create some kind of space that they inhabit. I give some examples. A person who immerses themselves in fantasy novels may wish to live in fictional worlds, but this is still because they possess a sense of place, even if it's a misdirected one.

So even if you're just living in the Marvel universe all the time, there's still this, you're looking for a sense of place.

Usually sitting in a chair or a library nook becomes a place when you live at a university.

A student from Miami University recently wrote about his need for a third place, a separate place from home and work where he could talk to friends and play video games.

Yet even this experience required a calm designated area. In other words, he couldn't play his video games without a space for even playing the video games.

You have to have a space. And there's a human longing for rootedness in that space.

Herman Melville wrote about seafaring Nantucketers who, while raised on the shore, made their homes and their ships at sea.

And you see this with truckers and people who travel around. Their vehicle becomes their home.

That becomes the space. Maybe it's not the best space. It's mobile, but it's still a familiarity that they treasure.

And I know this because whenever I get rid of a truck, I always feel sentimental. Possessing a place of belonging is fundamentally different from merely occupying a space, though.

I have often noticed that subtle linguistic shifts are happening, such as neighborhood to development or person to individual or place to space.

These all are deracinating shifts. Taking the human element out of it and making it sterile is what those shifts in language seem to indicate to me.

Who in their right mind would equate an impersonal prison cell with a childhood bedroom adorned with personal touches, memories, and tastes, even if both occupy the same square footage?

You wouldn't. One is a real place with real memories and real experience, and it's treasured more because of it.

That's why we need to cultivate real place, real space, and not just think that we can move around without it affecting us so often and not putting down roots.

We need roots, actually. We need to put down memories because that's just who we are as humans.

You could look even in the Bible and see that the tribes of Israel were given these designated areas to live in that were not supposed to change.

They were going to revert at the year of Jubilee because that was a place that belonged to that specific tribe.

So this fills us out. It gives us a sense of possession, of belonging, stability. If you don't have those things, then it can be very disorienting.

God gave Adam dominion over the earth, yet his home was a specific garden, and he was supposed to cultivate and keep it.

So his descendants were commanded to fill the earth, carving out their own domains. Tower of Babel was one of the ways that God, the mechanism

God used to make that happen. And then God promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants, dividing it among the tribes of Israel, as I mentioned before.

On a broader scale, the apostle Paul taught that the boundaries of every nation's habitation have been providentially set by God as part of his mysterious plan.

Homelands, therefore, are not simply places people choose to live from a vast array of market choices, but an inherited stewardship that takes time to develop a connection to.

And there are no shortcuts in this process. If you move into a house tomorrow, it's not really as fully yours as it will be 10 years from now.

There's no shortcut. I can't make you feel the sentiments that you will feel in 10 years when you've just moved in.

And this is a stabilizing feature of modern life, when you're able to have a place.

If you don't and you relocate, well, it's not good. The average American moves nearly 12 times over the course of their lifetime, and frequent moving is linked to relocation depression.

So it's not hard to figure out why people feel deracinated, why they're looking for their identity in things like even

DNA tests and finding their chat group online or whatever it is, because it's like they don't have a place.

They don't have a place to call their own that they feel that they belong in. I felt this connection in a real way when

I was young. I remember going to the old homestead where my grandpa grew up in rural Mississippi. And even though I was a generation removed from the family farm, something about the place spoke to me in a deep, almost intuitive language.

And despite having no personal memories of it, standing where my ancestors were buried,

I felt an undeniable pull to be laid to rest beside them. Though I never knew most of them as they died before I was born, and though life choices made long before my birth placed me far from their land,

I still felt a profound link to their lives. And it was as if the land itself had woven me into their history in some mysterious way.

I think that's meaningful. I think that's rich. And I think this experience also runs very counter to the ideals of modern liberal society, which prioritizes self -actualization, limitless choice, an ever -expanding array of market goods.

In such a society, we were told that people should be free to be whoever they want, unbound by traditional elements, such as religion, language, ancestry, custom, land.

But for some groups, this connection to place is undeniable. And I think of Jewish people, right?

Not every Jewish person, I suppose, feels this way, but many do, that there's this place, this place of their ancestors that was recorded and written about in the

Bible. It means something to them, even if they weren't born there. I know from just being in New York and knowing

Italian families that are the descendants of immigrants from Italy, there's something that they have special for Italy.

There's something I think I have special for even England. I've never been there. I really want to go and see the places where my ancestors were at one point, because there's a connection to that place.

And the Bible even speaks of certain regions as inhabited by particular peoples with claims to the land they live in.

When the Bible gave Mount Seir to Esau, for example, it included his descendants who constituted the nation of Edom.

Frequently, lands are demarked as belonging to the sons of a particular person, such as Israel, Lot, or Ammon.

People are expected to dwell in the places for generations and make an impression on the land. And how do we do that?

We put up monuments. That's why the monument issue is so big. It's taking the ownership tag off of the land.

That's what ripping down a monument does. Monuments, you drill wells, you cultivate the land and build hedges and gardens and foundations for houses and buildings and all the rest.

It makes it yours. In Albion Seed, David Hackett Fisher talks about these four

British folkways that created the United States and where they ended up settling and how those regions became a reflection of the places that they had been before.

The Scotch -Irish made the Appalachian Mountains very much like the border regions between England and Scotland, for example.

And they still bear that mark today. As the United States population grew through birth and immigration, new arrivals brought their distinct regional differences.

And I was reading a book about the Catskill region of New York and how even just those who are local and then those who are coming up from the city had problems with one another because of their own different ways of living and viewing the region and the land.

So these regional differences shape us. They help order us and give us identity.

And that's an important aspect of creation. While human actions can improve a place, they can also impact land in a negative way.

There's examples of this in the Bible, like the Canaanite sexual immorality. God speaks very interestingly about the land.

He personifies it, that the land had become defiled and had vomited out its inhabitants.

Prophet Jeremiah warned Judah that their idolatry defiled God's land. I mean, you see these references in the Bible to the land being defiled or sometimes the land being blessed.

And the actions that humans take in a place, when they mix their labor and their activity with the land, it actually makes a difference on the land.

And some of this is mysterious. I don't know how to explain it to you. I just know that we get glimpses of it in scripture. And this reveals a third dimension that makes regional identity inescapable.

It's spiritual significance. So I think, what did I mention before? I guess, number one, you have to occupy a space.

Number two, your experience mixed with that place provides a sense of identity and belonging.

And then three, there is a spiritual significance to place beyond physical boundaries.

And we have some of that in the United States, right? We have church steeples that line our skylines. That used to be the tallest structure.

It wasn't the marketplace, it was the church. That meant something. We're innately religious as people.

And so we're going to, wherever we live, have a religion that sanctifies or authorizes, has a certain sense of power, and just gives us a greater sense of belonging and connection to the place that we live in.

In ancient Israel, Solomon's Temple stood atop Mount Moriah and became a symbol of divine presence and national unity.

Every native Israelite understood what it meant to ascend to the Temple of Jerusalem, especially during religious festivals.

Even in exile, during the Babylonian captivity, they remembered this. It's in Psalms, longing for Zion and the things associated with it.

Crossing over the Jordan, right? This wasn't just a geographic area. It wasn't just a body of water. It was something that God did.

There was something that he did that they were supposed to remember by putting up stones as a memorial. There were sacred pagan sites, right?

On the negative side of it, high places. These are places. So we have these things in our country too, for good or for bad.

We have some positive examples here. The National Cathedral. We have Plymouth Rock. We have First Landing State Park.

We have these amazing places like the Alamo and Gettysburg and the

USS Arizona and Pearl Harbor. These are important places for our national identity because important activities took place on them.

There's sort of a spiritual dimension to it almost. That this is where our ancestors were.

This is what they fought for. These were noble things. There's a grandeur, a beauty. You feel small, just like you feel small when you're standing on the edge of the

Grand Canyon because of the difference that size of the big hole in the ground and you.

The difference between the two is just amazing. Well, there's a sense of that when you go to like a battlefield and you go to the

USS Arizona and you just think, wow, the grandeur of the deeds of these men and the hollowness of the graveyard and where they died and died defending our country and that kind of thing.

So you can't transcend place. You're going to belong to somewhere. You're going to live somewhere.

And we have a responsibility towards the places we inhabit and the people who live in them. And we need to cultivate the virtues to care for those places both now and for generations to come.

So let's talk a little bit about virtue. So it's inescapable. You're going to live in a place. Number two, this place should help you see your responsibilities and cultivate virtue.

Woven into the fabric of creation is a human scale that shapes our experience of the world. This is reflected in architecture, cognitive limits, and social networks, meaning you can't remember everyone's name, that kind of thing.

We build structures for human beings designed for their eyes to appreciate and their bodies to find comfort in.

And when buildings fail to meet these criteria, we see them as cold and unwelcoming, like Soviet -style architecture.

It's like they're not made for humans. Now, the principle of human scale is an important one and it extends beyond architecture.

Popular books tend to be around 200 to 300 pages. Popular films are about 90 minutes to two hours.

There's outliers, but they're outliers precisely because they break the scale. The scale can only be so much before it's too big or too small.

British sociologist Robin Dunbar famously proposed that humans can comfortably maintain around 150 stable relationships.

So you have to pick and choose. You can't know everyone. You can't have every experience. Life is a breath.

Who are you going to invest in? It cultivates virtue when you have to live in a particular place.

That means the decisions you make are going to come back on you and the people you love. There are only so many people that you can know.

You can only remember so many names. You can only, there's only 24 hours in a day. You can only spend so much time with people.

And that limitation is something that will direct our loves and our resources to those within our proximity, family, neighbors, and nation, okay?

Family, neighbors, and nation. That's how it should work at least. We drive through our old stomping grounds. We have memories of our first love and these kinds of things.

And this attachment only grows deeper over the generations. Economists often speak of the tragedy of the commons where if everyone owns something, no one really owns it, right?

But there are places in Europe where there's these social bonds that have formed over generations where you have shared grazing lands and things like that.

And it's tragedy of the commons doesn't seem to exist there. Why is that? Well, it's because you have families that have been living there generations that take responsibility and it's their place.

Children learn to respect the rules of their household, not simply because the rules make sense to their own, but because they belong to the family.

It's part of the family identity that we behave in a certain way. We had rules when I was younger called the

Harris Family Rules. And they reflected our values, our heritage, our routines. And it cultivated a sense of family identity.

And so it was important for that reason. This is how actually a lot of people naturally gain their morality.

It's just not done here. So we don't do that. And this is what is done here. So that's what we do. That's not saying that that is the ultimate justification for right and wrong, but that is how human beings oftentimes function.

That's how little kids function. When they're younger, the parent guides them and they just learn these are the activities that are acceptable.

These are the ones that aren't. Ideally, the sense of kinship should inspire virtue.

Dishonesty undermines trust in the community. Foolishness diminishes regions dignity and cowardice threatens its survival.

Intemperance degrades its integrity. Those who love their home will strive to improve it. People who carry their accents, customs, and cultural marks of a place will either be ashamed of them by seeking validation from outsiders while risking alienation and rootlessness, or they will embrace their heritage, acknowledge its imperfections, and work to strengthen it.

So what I'm trying to say is this. If you notice there's a problem in your society and you love your society, then you work to correct the problem.

You don't just start trashing your society and seek membership somewhere else. That's a sign of dysfunction.

Edmund Burke championed the influence of landed interest in governments because they were, they had a responsibility to the land and they wanted to pass it down to their children.

Said, look, this is healthier for your society than the merchant class, which doesn't have the same attachment to land.

It's good to have landed interests, people who own property, and they will naturally seek to steward that property better is within their family, when it is something that is passed down as an inheritance.

And he said in Reflections of the Revolution in France, to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle, the germ as it were, of public affections.

It is the first link in the series of which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.

Now, the challenge that we face in our age, which is dominated by global markets and international media and universally applied political ideologies, is not to replace one set of impersonal systems with another that are merely controlled by a different class of global elites.

Rather, the task before us is to rekindle the spirit of localism that once upheld ordered liberty, reinforced

Protestant -informed moral customs, and cultivated virtuous leadership. And that's why I'm doing this podcast.

That's why I wrote the article. We need to get back to this. We need to love the real tangible things right in front of us.

The world right in front of you is so much more important, and God will hold you so much more responsible to that.

Your children, your neighbors, your church, the local market that you interact with, how you treat people there, that is so much more important than the things that you...

not that they're not important, but it's more important to first exercise your responsibility to those people and those institutions than it is to go online and do something that you think is important online, building some kind of a brand, clicks and ratios and Twitter followers or whatever.

That is so far down on the list, and it really only should exist and be beneficial if it helps in those local things.

I really believe that. I have to think through that myself constantly, and I always am thinking about like, okay, how involved should

I be? Is this helping real people in my community? Is this taking away resources that I could be applying to the real people and making real differences that are deeply rooted?

Now, the neo -evangelical movement, with its polished appeal to urban elites and its production of leaders aligned with managerial agendas, and it has failed to form the moral character necessary for sustaining a healthy civilization.

Like all systems driven by managerialism, it has contributed to growing public mistrust towards elites across every major institution.

And as local ties weaken and leadership becomes increasingly disconnected from place, the only force left to hold society together will be coercion.

You're going to get totalitarianism. You're going to get the state. You're going to get loneliness. It's going to be miserable, and we already have a taste of that a little bit.

If we want to stop this centralization and this loneliness epidemic, then we have to get back to interacting with the people around us.

Now, avoiding this dissent requires a serious reevaluation of how leaders are formed. We're going to need to cultivate virtuous leaders, and that can only happen on the family and local level.

This is inextricably linked to place. Jesus transformed the world, but he ministered within a region smaller than Rhode Island.

The Apostle Paul planted churches in influential cities along trade routes, yet he stayed in those physical locations sometimes for years to raise up leaders who were embedded in the life of the community.

His qualifications for leadership focus not on institutional prestige, but on traits recognizable to those inside and outside the church who share daily life with these men.

So think about this. I want you to take evaluation yourself. Think about your ties to podcasts, seminaries, celebrity conference circuits.

These are all sort of evangelical -coded things, but where do those things line up?

How excited, how much are those things important to you versus the things right in front of you, your local church, the people you know personally?

And that's only something you can answer, those who are listening to this podcast. This isn't the greatest strategy, by the way, for me as a podcaster to be asking you to ask this question because maybe you won't like me anymore, not like me, but you won't listen to me because you're going to go do local things.

You know what? That's a success in my mind. If you're going to spend that time, and hopefully you're getting a lot out of this podcast, so you'll continue to listen, but if you feel like, you know, look,

I got real responsibilities in front of me. I need to be listening to my pastor. I need to go to Bible study. I need to get off the podcast.

That's a success, okay? The post -war liberal order encourages a leadership class of carpetbaggers who move from region to region and institution to institution through revolving doors of managerial bureaucracy.

The proposed solutions, like meritocracy, often fail to address the problem. Children do not prefer a housekeeper over their own mother, even if the housekeeper does a good job, right?

They need their mother, and it's the same. You need your pastor. You need the real people that know you.

That's what you need. What American Christians and conservatives ought to do is reinforce networks grounded in shared custom, heritage, and land.

We should favor leaders we know, leaders who arise from our own natural aristocracy, and men and women formed by the place and people that they serve.

Now, if we make these kinds of changes, it's not going to fix every problem, right? But it will begin,

I think, to restore the mechanisms of accountability and virtue that once characterized our communities. It's going to make for stronger leaders.

You're going to know them better. You're going to encourage them and give them resources they need. It's just going to be a better situation overall.

This is why Scripture places so much emphasis on the new identity Christians receive in Christ. The believers' distaste for sin and desire for righteousness springs from knowing who they are.

If you know that you're a person who belongs to this region in this town, then it makes a difference.

You're going to carry yourself differently. If you know you're a person who your identity is in Christ, you're going to carry yourself differently.

It's part of your identity. Do you see yourself as, I don't know, like part of some podcast fan club?

Are you part of... To pick on one podcast that's made a little bit of a stir recently for immature comments and stuff, are you part of the

Groyper army or something like that, right? Are you like a groupie of a band?

Is that your primary identity? You follow around some band? What's your primary identity? And it's going to reflect your loves, and that's going to help strengthen and redirect your virtue.

Our obligations to others, including parents, spouses, and neighbors, operate in a similar way as our obligations to God. Jesus affirmed these responsibilities as fundamental to social life.

So our connection to place is not incidental, but part of our calling. That's really important to realize.

Where you are, God puts you there. Even if you don't like it, that's where he puts you. For such a time as this, that's why you're here.

And it's not an accident. It is part of the job God gave you. My encouragement to the citizens of any particular community is to be involved.

See yourself as linked to the place God has called you. You are obligated to your fellow locals because you are one of them.

Love your place. Love your people. Act in the best interests of your community. Not just as a duty, but because that's who you are.

It's part of who you are. And this is central to your identity and calling. Now, what should a local political vision look like?

And I close my piece with this because I talk about localism in a revolutionary age too, but let me just sort of summarize both of these subtitles.

A local political vision means that you start with the people in front of you and you work out in concentric circles.

And so if you're operating even on a national level, you're thinking of the folks back home. Your primary identities and loves are like,

I'm here for my people. That's why I'm here. People will either be compelled by love and duty or fear and self -interest.

That's the precipice we stand before right now. Are people going to go totalitarian and fear and self -interest will be the driving force and government is going to just force a certain way of life?

Or are we going to reattach ourselves to one another through the kinds of things that organically have attached people to each other over time?

Throughout history, empires have had to navigate this reality, often resorting to puppet governments to legitimize their authority, right?

Say, hey, we are the local leaders. Not really, but we're going to try to fool you into thinking that, so you'll give us allegiance.

Soviet Union's a good example of this. I give some examples from why that failed.

Leaders of every empire from the Babylonians to the modern United States know that control becomes more difficult the greater the size and diversity of the region the empire encompasses.

Technology and modern transportation make propaganda that attempts to bind the nation together using general slogans easier, but nature cannot be denied.

Humans still operate on a local scale, even if distracted by global markets and social media.

And there's many examples of this, even in our own country, of movements to, like greater Idaho movement to be with people that are like you, secessionist movements that are still around in places like Hawaii and Texas and Alaska.

There was actually a parish, or not a parish, I guess it's, is it a parish? It's the southwestern part of Baton Rouge.

They formed their own incorporated city called St. George because they had said, look, we're our own thing here.

And that's part of trying to govern yourself because you recognize something unique about yourselves that's different than the area around you.

Now, currently, there's a lot happening. There's a great sort happening. California is dumping its people into various areas.

Colorado's gotten more blue. Florida's gotten more red. There is this sort of sorting going on, and it is somewhat disrupting.

But there's also an opportunity, I think, for traditional American conservatives to reapply their vision of a federal decentralized government in this situation, bound together for mutual interests, trade regulations, and so forth, in which states are treated as sovereigns and regional interests are preserved.

In other words, as people align themselves more politically and see themselves as, their lot is attached to people more like them in other places, and then they make the call to move to those places and become part of those communities, over time, you're going to see differences that are even more stark form between various states and regions.

And those differences present an opportunity for local self -government. If we actually are able to tap into it and love the people around us and reinforce a local identity.

Thomas Jefferson championed the support of the state governments and all their rights as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and surest bulwarks against anti -Republican tendencies.

So basically my point is this. My point is, a localist vision is going to lead to decentralization eventually.

That is the goal. Because you want to have the mechanisms for being able to put resources towards your people in the best way that services your people.

Instead of people somewhere else, right? It's the problem with globalism. It's also the problem when you get an empire that's as big as ours.

More organically rooted communities are desirable because they can more easily vet leaders, resist tyranny, and preserve high -trust societies.

And this need has grown especially since COVID. We can see this independent spirit. We can see it in 2024 when you had people in North Carolina and Virginia banding together to help each other even when the government wasn't doing its job.

I mean, there's still a neighborly instinct out there. But that's reflective of the Scotch -Irish people who live there. And that's something we need in the whole country.

Despite public schools often overlooking local history, global markets, flooding communities, the corporate hubs like Nashville and Los Angeles shaping entertainment trends, a distinct local spirit persists in the

United States. It's not all gone. We still have homeschooling and locally sourced foods and farmers markets.

And we have passionate support for local sports and organic ways people come together for volunteerism, hobbies, and spiritual fellowship.

And most Americans still recognize this. We have a nostalgia for that Norman Rockwell world, for county fairs, for small town

Christmas traditions. We see these things and it resonates with us because we know that's real. That's true.

We know there's local heroes that George Washington, Clara Barton, John Glenn. These are the kinds of leaders that existed on the local level and their virtue is something that came from the house that they grew up in.

Now, how do we get there in a revolutionary age? This is the big question, right? And I give,

I think, an answer most people probably aren't expecting. John C. Calhoun said in 1837, because I am a conservative,

I am a state's rights man. This is often quoted as what conservatism should be about. But there's something else he also said.

He said, while I thus openly avow myself a conservative in the same speech, God forbid

I should ever deny the glorious right of rebellion and revolution should corruption and oppression become intolerable and cannot otherwise be thrown off.

And so here's one of the things that I want people to think about. We may end up needing, if government continues to grow, the deep state continues to be where it's at and Republicans aren't really able to do anything about this and things keep going in the direction they're going.

It may be that some kind of a cesarean figure needs to arise to basically absorb the power of the government resisting him as he tries to dismantle it.

And he may need to wield the power of the executive office in ways that we're not even comfortable with now in order to restore things.

And the hope is that whoever that is came from a small town or a city, but somewhere where they had virtue cultivated on a local level and they love real people and real things.

That is the hope. And the goal in such a move like that, I'm not advocating it, but I am saying it is a possibility we come to that point if and when we do.

It will be a sad day, but if it's necessary, then the goal for a conservative is still to use that mechanism to then once again restore localism.

It's not going to be to keep power forever and make sure that that power is consolidated, centralized, and people are constantly forced into some kind of a mold.

In fact, I don't think that works long -term very well anyways. It would be to be like a

Cincinnatus, to restore things, give up that power. And even like George Washington, he had a standing army that he could have used to control things if he wanted to.

It's to go back home to your farm and to circle back to the beginning to realize that society actually exists.

It pre -exists government. So that's my essay on the case for Christian localism.

And I actually did a follow -up essay, which I'll just briefly talk about a little bit here.

I grew up being very aware of some of the debates over evangelism versus Christian worldview promotion, we'll say.

New evangelicals tended to be more about, we need to really get professionals to think like Christians, and then we'll control things.

Fundamentalist types tended to be about, we'll do a Bible school. We'll increase Bible knowledge and evangelism, and that's how we'll change things.

And neither of these approaches is necessarily wrong in and of itself. But there is, I think, an assumption behind both that we have lost power as Christians, and we are on the outside looking in.

We are trying to figure out a way to get power back in the culture, and so we're going to implement various strategies.

And I would submit to you, the strategies haven't mostly worked. It hasn't met the expectations.

I cite Jack Wurzen as a fundamentalist who said, your job is basically to reach your generation for Christ.

Now that's a big scale. That's a bit daunting, to reach your generation. You're told this as a little kid. I don't know.

I also talk about Carl Henry, and he basically said, look, we're going to need elites.

We're going to need people who can ascend in these secular fields and exercise a

Christian worldview in them, and that's how we're going to regain cultural power that we've lost and influenced.

And I think both of them look at culture as this thing that can somewhat be...

You can just do a human action thing. It's sort of hackable. Now, Jack Wurzen is right in that.

The gospel really does change society, and we really need the gospel. But to operate on this large scale, you're going to go out there, and we're going to just retake everything, either because we're sharing the gospel with everyone or because we are excelling in these certain fields.

And creating organizations around that, like Seven Mountain Mandate stuff, where we're just creating all these 501c3s that are supposed to reach these various aspects of art and culture and government, etc.

I think we forget how cultures actually, naturally are secured and promoted.

I want to give you a few examples of that. I noticed this working in the

Hasidic communities at times, where they were very focused on their kids studying.

Even if the home was a wreck, our kids are going to study. And it's the famous, you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer when you grow up.

You're going to have this social influence. And I think as a minority who has a history of persecution, this is something that they've cultivated, and it serves them well to get into socially advantageous positions that actually can wield influence.

Especially when you don't have the numbers, that's what you have to do to secure your survival.

I was in Mexico recently. I noticed the Aztecs were conquered. They were at one time the top of their region, and then the

Spanish come in. Well, there's still Aztecs today. There still are people that are trying to pass down their art and their religion.

And the way that they progress their culture, even in the midst of defeat, is by doing what?

Having babies, transmitting their culture in a process of raising their kids, and then repeating the process over and over and over.

Now, there's many, obviously, examples of this, but I think one of the things that stands out about evangelical

Christians in the United States is they make up the base of the Republican Party, but they are very underrepresented in education and in all kinds of other facets, influential facets of our society.

And so what needs to happen, right? If we want to regain some cultural capital, and if we want to be able to secure ourselves, especially, it's pretty obvious what needs to happen.

We have to keep having children. Those children have to grow up, and the culture has to be transmitted to them.

That process has to continue. And so having more children, I think, is important. I don't think that's the one ticket or anything, but that is important.

And then the other thing is trying to aim high at the beginning of life.

So making sure that whatever potential that someone has, if it's your child, that you're helping them reach that potential, that you're identifying what giftings they have from the

Lord, and it doesn't matter what it is, whatever those things are, helping them pursue excellence in those things.

And not just coast through life and be satisfied with second.

Let's try to cultivate people who can excel and pursue excellence and be first. And I think there's no substitute for that.

That's just how cultures naturally progress. You actually win by winning. You actually build by building.

Quite literally building. Building a family by having children. Building income by working hard and learning things and getting the education.

Oftentimes, evangelicals have wanted to just create their own groups, their own 501c3s, educational institutions, those kinds of things.

And I'll give you an example. If they're going to do art or Hollywood or education, it's like, well, we're going to make our own film school.

There's nothing really innately wrong with that. But if you recognize that getting an education really does require going to an

Ivy League if you're going to be influential, and getting into art really does require going or film going to Hollywood and getting involved in that industry, then it may be difficult, but you have to go where you're going to be able to be an influence.

And this, I think, is where Christians can help each other on the local level by providing resources to those who are going in that direction.

I'll give you an example. I have someone very close to me who is a teacher and doing great work.

It's an influential position that this person's in, but they can barely scrape by with the money that they have.

And this would be a great way for Christians on the local level to say, look, we recognize you're doing something that's helping all of us.

You are exerting influence, and not just as a teacher, but you are also testifying this particular person in governmental capacities.

You are taking your education, and you're using it. You are being a voice for us.

We are willing to chip in and help with that. I think there needs to be more mechanisms, local mechanisms, organic mechanisms, to help with that kind of thing.

Nothing against global missions. I do support global missions. Nothing against national politics.

I support that as well. But we also, I think, need to first look around at the people who are in need around us and support them in those kinds of endeavors.

The community needs to come together and help bolster that kind of a person who's going to do good things for the rest of the community, but may not have the resources or may be expensive to go to school.

So I know just from my own experience going to various places, so oftentimes all the scholarships are like,

I'm like, why does every group have a scholarship? But there's nothing for evangelical Christians here. Maybe that's something that needs to change.

So these are some practical ideas that I threw out there to just say, look,

I think we need to start building on the local level here. But building also means reaching high, aiming high, and not expecting that we're going to just run the tables and quote unquote retake, recapture our country or our culture and the influence that may have been lost simply because we formed another 501c3 or we decided to add another wing to the church or whatever, as good as all those things are.

I just think that we need to be thinking in terms of how do cultures traditionally actually survive and continue.

And it's really, it comes down to two things. It really does come down to these two things. Number one, you keep having kids and you transmit your culture to them.

And number two, you are able to have enough influence to repel threats and to create favorable conditions for doing number one.

That's all there is to it. And if you lose number two, then number one becomes harder. And if you lose number one, then number two doesn't matter.

You need both of them. And so right now, I would just encourage people, hunker down in your local area.

Think through what voluntary associations do you want to be involved with? Maybe it's just church, but whatever it is, get to know the people around you.

Think about how much time you spend online, whether it helps you achieve actual goals that have lasting impact.

And this is how change actually really does happen. What resonates through time generationally is when the local area is changed so much because of the actions that people took in those places.

Real actual physical things you built, like houses and businesses, that's how you leave a real legacy.

So that is, I think, how change happens more often than not. And that can get bigger, but big things usually start out small.

Now, everyone's going to have to take inventory of their own skills and what it looks like for them.

You know, I can't speak for anyone in particular. You're going to have to examine yourself, pray to the Lord, and see what kinds of giftings and abilities he's given you and where you want to invest those things if you don't know already.

But I think that starting off with the world right in front of you is the best place to start because those are the people that God's put in your life.

So those are the two pieces that I put out there on Substack. Hopefully you understand a little bit more about what localism is about.

It's not just going to a farm market and getting organic honey, although that is part of it.

It is much more than that. It is a way of living, and it is the way I think God intended us to live. And if everything is facilitated online, if everything is from our dating relationships, for some people, their church they attend, it's all online, to the businesses that you frequent, and you just order things online, to the friends that you cultivate are all just in chat groups.

You don't even know who they are. It's all online. If everything is online, then you've become a deracinated person, and you may not know that you're lonely, but you are.

And I would encourage you to be fulfilled. So that's my message. God bless, and we're coming.