Wheaton College's Polarization and Peacemaking Event Continued

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a lot to talk about today. Really, it's one thing, but there's a lot of material there and it is the Wheaton College panel discussion slash, I don't know what you call it, an event.

They had some presentations and then a panel discussion. It wasn't a conference though, it was just one night. But we're gonna talk more about it. I did a video, or maybe a week or more ago now, and I talked about the, I reviewed the first part of this, the first presentation by a national security advisor or former national security advisor, Ms. Newman, who I thought was fairly imbalanced, we'll put it that way.

She started talking about how January 6th and 9 -11 are, you know, they're comparable and exaggerating what happened on January 6th and then blaming Heartland Christians who listened to Rush Limbaugh for carrying this out.

I mean, it was just, it was bonkers. And of course, Wheaton College is a conservative, well, supposed to be. I would argue it's probably not anymore, but supposed to be a conservative evangelical, you know, Orthodox theological seminary and a safe place for you to send your kids.

An alternative, this is the thing, parents send their children who are now young adults to these places, and they pay large sums of money to the tune of tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And sometimes the students are paying themselves. I mean, you know, that's what I did with my parents. They helped pay for transportation. And I had to, well, actually what was it? No, they covered my tuition the first two or three years.

I can't remember. They helped cover my undergrad, but I had to pay for gas. Anyway, whatever the arrangement is, it's a lot of money. And you think when you're going to a Christian institution, you're doing it because you are, you are immersing yourself in something different.

Otherwise you wouldn't go to a Christian institution. I mean, what's the point, right? You would just stay in a secular institution that's probably cheaper, a state school.

That's what I did.

I went to a community college first and then went to a state school. And it is cheaper depending on your major, but there are advantages to going to a Christian university. And I did that for my MDiv and my MA.

So I've seen kind of like both sides of this and I can see advantages and disadvantages, but I think a lot of parents think that they're safe when they send their kids off. And one of the things that they think they're safe on is political, left, woke, social justice, that kind of thing.

They don't want their kids coming back as a social justice warrior. They think they're safe sending them to a Christian college.

I don't think that's true.

I don't think that's true at all. And I've talked about this many times, but Wheaton College is just one example of where this can go wrong. And this event is an example of that. It's not even remotely, they're not even trying, I don't think, to be balanced.

Maybe they think they are. Maybe they legitimately, that'd be crazy to me that if they thought that they were balanced in this. I don't even know if that's, actually, I do know. That shouldn't even be the goal.

But if you are trying to maintain some kind of objectivity and say we are balanced, at the very least, using that as a baseline, right? Forget the fact you're a Christian university and you would assume the voters who 81 went for Donald Trump, the people who are sending their kids there who are gonna be conservative leaning.

You're gonna lean, you would think leaning conservative would be part of even trying to actually infuse some balance into the educational system as a whole and maybe cater to your customers. But let's say you're not even doing that.

You're just saying we want Republicans, Democrats, conservative, liberal, whatever, to be represented equally here. And it's not even that. It's so lopsided, it's ridiculous. It's pretty much only critical about, ironically, conservative Christians, which you think are the ones paying for Wheaton and founded Wheaton and that they would love, right?

But that's not the case. And it hasn't been the case for a while, but a lot of people still don't know this. So we're gonna talk more about this event. Before we get to that, though, I want to play this for you.

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Okay, well, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I had it muted. Sorry about that. No sound ever since your ad. All right, I'm glad the ad came through at least. So that's good. I was worried about that, but I turned off my audio while I was playing that, and I guess I forgot to turn it back on.

Okay, we're back.

So I wanted to let you know too, I'll shorten this, about a book called, Heed the Pilgrims on Socialism and Critical Race Theory. Obviously, the Pilgrims didn't write about critical race theory, but B. Nathaniel Sullivan, who's a friend of mine, he has, I think what he's bringing to this is this mindset that the Pilgrims had, which is antithetical to socialism.

So check it out on Amazon. It's called, Heed the Pilgrims on Socialism and Critical Race Theory. I just wanted to let you know about that. I told him I would plug it on the podcast, and since we're already talking about books, then we'll throw that one in there as well.

All right, well, okay, now that this, thank you, the sound is on, John Tobey has confirmed. That got everyone's attention. We are now on all cylinders and ready to go into the subject at hand. I'll tell you what, we're gonna talk tonight.

I'm gonna save this. We're gonna talk tonight about Daniel Penny, the full acquittal that he just went through. That's gonna be on the American Churchman podcast. We're gonna talk about maybe some other things too.

I just noticed there's a small town in Alabama that a court has essentially said they need to require in their town, the LGBT group that has trans people and all the rest to march in their Christmas parade.

And it struck me that, it's interesting, in New York City, very liberal left-leaning area, right? They had a jury, well, they had a trial, and Daniel Penny's acquitted. And then you go to rural Alabama or small town Alabama, and they're forced to have LGBTQ organization participate in their Christmas parade.

And this country is so divided. It's just so divided. And the election of Donald Trump doesn't really change that. It's, we're continuing kind of where we were. I think, not to give all my predictions, I think there will, some good things will happen, but we're still in this very divided place where you have deep red places where the left has made inroads.

You have, but now, and I think this is a positive development, you have some blue areas where this should never have been a trial really, I don't think, but you actually for once, wow, got some justice.

And it raises questions about where's the BLM movement now? I was expecting if that happened, right? Like we lived through 2020, riots on the street and stuff, we're not seeing that. So we'll talk about that more tonight.

I just wanted to give a plug for the American churchmen as well. But on that note, on that vein of BLM and critical race theory and wokeness and all of that, there are some Christian institutions that are still very much committed to trying to reconcile themselves with the, you could call it the hegemony if you want, but the ruling class that leans very far to the left.

And Wheaton College, I think they're an example of this. I've talked about them before. They came out, I think it was in 2020 with a very DEI infused diversity statement. And I talked about it on the podcast.

I haven't said a lot about Wheaton, although behind the scenes, I've had people from Wheaton tell me what's going on there. And some of it's frankly a little shocking, but I haven't said much publicly.

And so I wanted to say a little bit more publicly and that's where we're gonna talk about the second half of this presentation today. And this presentation, let me actually just pull it up so people can see what I'm looking at.

And this is from right after the election is when this happened. And Wheaton College, of course, one of the big conservative, well, people think, I have to put an asterisk by that, people think conservative universities out there.

It is the name of the event. See if it'll come up. Elizabeth Newman and Caleb Campbell, Polarization and Peacemaking, What's Next? That's the name of the event. And you can go watch it for yourself if you want at the website.

This is what it looks like. No, that's an advertisement, but this is the page for it. So you can go check that out. Now, we already went over Elizabeth Newman. We're gonna talk now about Caleb Campbell and we'll start in on his presentation.

Here we go.

So much for having me. So I serve at the church that I met the Lord at in 20, excuse me, 2001, met the Lord at Desert Springs Bible Church. I got asked to play the drums and now I'm the lead pastor. So we had a great lead pastor transition in 2015.

My predecessor served there for 30 years and it was an amazing transition. One of the best that I know of. And I became the lead pastor just in time for the Golden Escalator thing. You guys remember that?

Donald Trump descended from his Golden Escalator to announce his candidacy for president. And I remember thinking as lead pastor in Phoenix, Arizona, yeah, he's not gonna win, right? I had spent most of my pastoral career under the Obama era.

At the time I was thinking, all right, Hillary's gonna win and nothing's gonna change in my church. As a congregation in a suburban Phoenix, we had been active in things like caring for immigrants, refugee resettlement, even hard conversations about racial reconciliation.

And I thought, we're just gonna keep doing that. We're a classical evangelical church that leans into a high view of Jesus, a high view of the Bible, personal conversion experience and social action. And so again, I'm stepping into the season in my first year as lead pastor thinking I knew what I was getting into.

The day after the election, I pulled into our church parking lot and two of my teammates, staff members, were in the parking lot crying. Then I went into the office and two of my other teammates who are staff members were in the office celebrating, saying, praise God, hallelujah and whatnot.

And I remember thinking, this is gonna be harder than I thought. Fast forward to 2020, which so far has been the worst year of my life. I got COVID in June of 2020.

We're gonna keep playing this, but I want you to notice the way this is all framed. This is supposed to be about political polarization and finding a way through it for Christians, peacemaking in that.

And the way he starts this is, the election of Trump is the initial step in this train of events that has given him a problem and not just him, but pastors throughout the country, churches throughout the country.

They're being ripped to shreds, they're being ripped into and why are they being ripped into and torn asunder? It's because of Donald Trump. It's because of this event that happened. Obama years, fine.

Hillary years is gonna continue to be fine. That's the mentality of so many of the leaders in evangelicalism. I'm telling you now, just listening and studying and being even in institutions of higher learning that are evangelical, the upper class in many of these areas, and there's many exceptions, but by and large, the upper classes in evangelical institutions, they favor stability.

Just like managerial elites in other institutions, they favor stability. And for them, Obama into Hillary would have been stability. It would have been the status quo, keeping things as they were. I mean, he was just talking about, they were already involved in refugee resettlement.

So maybe they were getting money from the government. It's very possible to resettle refugees. And this upset the apple cart. And if you remember in 2016, this was a big deal. Russell Moore was one of the ones carrying the torch.

And at that time, he was still at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, I believe, for the election of Trump being a big problem. And a lot of it did have to do with that. It had to do with refugee resettlement.

And I know Megan Basham's done more work on that and showed how Christian organizations were getting money for this kind of thing. And the spigot was turned off under Trump. And it's one of the things you just saw with Trump being reelected again, Russell Moore and David French on a podcast saying, hey, we just really need to support World Vision right now.

Well, why are they saying that? Because World Vision was one of the big organizations involved in refugee resettlement. So all that to say, that there was a spoil system at work, I believe. And I don't know specifically what was happening at Desert Hills Bible Church, but if they weren't involved in this, many were, and there was benefits from being under these liberal administrations.

And it is seen as the default, even without that added benefit, it's just seen as the default. This is, these are what the experts want. This is a rule by experts. These are the people that have gone to school and they know how to govern and they can do it adequately and competently.

And Donald Trump is this blithering, embarrassing, rich guy who has a working class temperament though. And he just, we don't know if he's gonna push a button and a nuke's gonna go off. We just don't, it's the same fear that a lot of the people that are secular elites have.

It's no exception in the church. You just have to get it out of your mind that the leaders in Christian institutions are that different. They may use different language. They may use Christianese. They may know how to give a good testimony.

They may even be able to exegete a passage, but I'm telling you, so many of them still have the same fears, the same mentality, the same allegiance to the same class of managerial elites, the same, they put blame in the same place when there's division.

So Hillary's not really responsible for this. It's not the Democrats who are responsible. Trump is the one bringing the division.

Because I'm an early adopter, I got shingles in July and then facial paralysis in August. So the whole right side of my face was paralyzed. And I remember going to the emergency room because my face was paralyzed and the doctor said, have you been under any stress lately?

And I said, yes. I'm grateful to God I got about 85 to 90 of the nerves grew back in my face, but I still carry with me some of that paralysis as a memory of that season. And the stress that the doctor was asking me about was primarily around the emotional, physiological, and spiritual stress of leading a congregation as it was tearing itself apart.

80 of the people who were in our congregation in 2016 were gone by the end of 2020. Many of them had re chosen to redeploy to other congregations that were propagating out loud and in public versions of American Christian nationalism.

In my community in Phoenix, there are multiple organizations that promote American Christian nationalism that are headquartered there. And there are now dozens of now mega churches who have grown and they've stated that their church growth model is promoting a version of culture war and American Christian nationalism.

And so as a pastor in that environment, watching so many of my fellow congregants, people that I love, mothers and fathers in the faith, not only were they leaving to go to other churches, but they were making sure that I knew that they really were not in line with the things that our church was doing, which for me in my imagination was status quo.

We had talked about caring for immigrants in 2012, 2013, 2014. You know what people, you know how they would respond?

Yay.

We did the same thing in 2017. And I've had people come up to me in the lobby. Some of the people who were there in 2013 and 14, and they'd put their fingers, you know that thing where people take their two fingers and they push into your sternum?

That ever happened to you? I'm in the lobby and they're pushing their fingers into my sternum saying, don't you bring that liberal propaganda to the house of God. I said, what are you talking about, Ethel?

The immigrant stuff, we gotta send them back. And I'm like, send them, are you talking about the people we share communion with? Moreover, conversations about racial reconciliation were met with some of the same resistance as some kind of, I remember someone referring.

Think about this. The pastor loses 80 of his congregation. That should spark some serious self-reflection. There are good reasons for that. But if you've been at a church for that long and that happens, that's scandalous, right?

I can see someone coming into a church, shaking things up. The church has been in a bad place. This is different. This is someone who's been there and didn't see any type of split on the horizon. What happened was Trump was elected.

That's what happened. And he loses 80 of his congregation. And from his vantage point, I think here's the thing. If you go through that and you wanna save face, because it's embarrassing, frankly, you really do need to come up with a good reason for it that puts you on the moral high ground.

Otherwise, it just seems like you were the problem. And so to say that all these people, 80 went to Christian nationalist churches, these dangerous places, that gives you the moral high ground and it puts the blame on the people.

And you don't have any responsibility in the matter as the shepherd. So, I mean, from his vantage point, all these sheep going off, getting lost. And where is the attitude? This is, I guess, my question.

Where's the attitude of the shepherd, if that's truly what he believes, who genuinely cares and is sorrowful and just views this as a tragedy? And I would expect more self-reflection. What did I do? How did I contribute to this?

I would expect a lot more sorrow. These are people I loved and now they're under this false teaching. Of course, I don't believe what he's saying, but if that's what he believes, then that's what I would expect.

But instead, what you find is an attempt here to let's blame the sheep. And I think that's what's happening at Wheaton too, in this whole event, is it's a blame the sheep type of event. The sheep that created this institution, the sheep that probably primarily still fund this institution.

It's odd. It's one of the few groups that really seems to love. I mean, like white people in general seem to love this. There's a certain class of males that like this. There's Christians who self-proclaim Christians who seem to like this when they get to go to events and it's like they pay their penance or they feel guilty or something.

Like they get to hear about how bad their group is. A lot of other groups don't do that, but this is something that I've noticed evangelicals do this an awful lot. Like they blame themselves, but it's really not blaming themselves, right?

So they actually get something out of it. They feel good because what they do is they blame their group, but then they separate themselves from their group. So it's all these ignoramuses, divisive, bigoted people that are Christians.

But look at me, I'm the one who's not like that. I'm the good Christian. I am more reconciled to the mainstream feeling on things. That's not crazy, but look at all these people, 80%, right? I mean, that's pretty close to the 81 that voted for Trump.

I mean, those are the crazies. Those are the ones that they're in error. We're not, right? So it's this sort of elitism. I didn't really understand this completely till I read a book years ago on Nazi prison camps.

I know, I'm trying to remember the name of it, but in the book, there was a whole section on how when Nazi commanders would put, often they did this, put Jewish people in charge of work details, they would be crueler than the Nazis themselves would be to their own countrymen, to their own nationality.

Very odd, right? You wouldn't think that would be the case. Wouldn't the natural inclination to love the familiar cause them to be easier on their own role? Because they're trying to prove something to their overlords.

And it's an interesting dynamic, but that's what I'm telling you, that's what's happening here, I believe. And it's been happening for years. They're trying to prove something. They're trying to separate themselves and prove we're the ones that you wanna make alliances with and back, because if you're in charge and you have resources and you're elite and you're concerned about these evangelicals who elected Trump, I'm your guy, right?

I'm your guy.

Referring to our conversations about cruciform racial reconciliation as promoting an atheist agenda. I'm like an evangelical pastor. I don't think I've ever promoted an atheist agenda. I don't think I could if I tried.

And so what I found was not only their resistance to these initiatives that we were engaging in, teachings we were engaging with, but the people that were choosing to redeploy to other congregations, it seemed to be that there was this power structure underneath that was causing them to think I was their enemy.

And in 2020, it hit a peak and I was toast. As part of my therapy the following year, my counselor asked me to spend a whole day just going for a walk. So I walked around the park and I said, write down the names of broken relationships as they come to mind.

And so I did. And at the end of the day, I had over 300 names of people that I counted as friends, confidants, mothers and fathers in the faith who now I'd become their enemy because we had, to my mind, maintained course even though they had given themselves over to this what seemed to me to be toxic tribalism, kind of this culture warring combativeness that was really stirring up within people a deep anxiety and rage.

Okay, hopefully there's some culture warring going on. If you're a Christian, you should be opposed to at least the world and the things in it. And right now there's a lot of things to be in opposition to.

So, but if I lost 300 friends, I would be doing some serious self-reflection. And I wouldn't think, well, it's just, I mean, we're talking confidants, he said, mother, I mean, first of all, that's huge.

That's a scale. Like how do you have that many close friends? But if I lost close friends like that, they just abandoned me. I was their enemy now overnight. Something ain't right. Something is very wrong there.

And I would not be assuming it's necessarily all on them. I would be the common denominator in that scenario. And if these are close friends that care about me and even they see that there's an error and want to separate from me, then I'm gonna have to ask myself some questions.

I understand obviously relationships and there's good reasons to take moral stands and lose friends, but a little excessive here. And in his mind, he didn't change. He didn't do anything different. That's an odd thing too, because I don't know his church specifically, but I know a lot of churches that are in this similar, they think they're in the similar bind where it's a complaint you'll hear a lot with woke pastors.

They'll say like, I've always been talking about racism or I've always been talking about immigrants and treating them well. And now all of a sudden people are upset at me for it. And there's two things I think going on in most of those cases.

Number one, conditions have changed. And so I think a lot of people have realized as conditions have changed, what was actually going on, what their pastor was actually saying. A lot of guys who follow Tim Keller are like this.

I've talked to them. They say, oh, I've been in his church. I was a member. I was there since the early nineties. I was there for, I think, when did he start? Like the early, yeah, 91 or something. Like I was there from the beginning and I never heard him say anything woke.

And then I will point out, well, he was on the social justice train the whole time. Here's the evidence. And they're like, well, I never heard any of that. And there's examples from his sermons in the nineties where he's doing that.

Part of it is you hear, like you don't expect, you don't suspect your pastor to be carrying water for the godless left. And so you hear it with a very charitable and sometimes inaccurate ear. And you think, you translate what he's saying into what you think he should be saying.

So if he says, we need to welcome immigrants and we need to provide help for them, you hear it as not a statement about political policy. You just think as a church, you should be in general open and caring and loving and those kinds of things.

Well, when the conditions change and immigration gets bad and you're losing your job or the crime goes up or the city becomes more trashy or whatever the case is that circumstances have changed and you see the sacrifices your parents and grandparents made get spent on welfare for people who didn't have parents and grandparents here, you start thinking this is a problem and you start hearing what your pastor is saying and he wants to welcome in more immigrants.

And he starts and you realize what he's doing and he is signaling left. He doesn't want there to be perhaps the deportation of illegal migrants. He doesn't want ICE to be doing that or border guards to be doing their jobs.

And you ask for clarification and you don't get it. I mean, this is usually how the rigmarole works. You try to go through all the steps and the pastor's vague and doesn't want to upset the apple cart.

And so it becomes a point of contention and the pastor doesn't think he's changed. Maybe he hasn't, but circumstances has changed. Oftentimes though, accompanying this is a legitimate change that the pastor doesn't realize.

He thinks he puts into the category of something like caring for immigrants, all these political policies and things. And he thinks that when he made general statements about it, he was incorporating all of that the whole time.

And now that those issues are really on the line, well, I've been talking about this. Well, not in those specific terms. So oftentimes I'm just skeptical of what this guy's saying. Oftentimes that's how this works.

And there are changes that took place. It's not just Donald Trump was elected and look what happened.

Now, I have a question for you. Thanksgiving is coming up. Has the thought occurred to anyone that there might be people at the Thanksgiving table that you hope that they don't open their mouth and that you're right now, even maybe you've spent the last week coming up with a backup plan on how to exit the table if Uncle Jim starts on that talk track again?

If you haven't, you might be the person that someone else in your family is thinking about as the person that they're trying to create a strategy around. We're doing this and we have been for years, the last few years especially, because the temperature continues to rise as Elizabeth was noticing this extremist behavior.

It's not just in statistics, it's not just nationwide. It's at the Thanksgiving table. It's at the communion table. And so what I wanna invite you into is just to spend a few moments thinking about how we can best love our polarized neighbor.

Now I wanna give you some real tactical ways, methods that you can deploy as you think about how can I love my polarized neighbor? Galatians 6, 1 and 2. I'm not very familiar with Wheaton College. You guys do the Bible here, right?

Is this like they do Bible stuff here? Okay. All right, so Galatians 6, 1 and 2 in June of 2020.

I lost it. I gotta go back and find where we were. Sorry about that. All right, so you do the Bible. He says we do Bible stuff here. All right, I wanted to say that gives them a way as, well, I would normally say that gives someone a way as a youth pastor when they start talking about the word of God in such a casual fashion.

I don't get it, but I've heard this kind of talk a lot. I was actually listening to a podcast the other day and I was realizing it was four guys. And I'm gonna spare the embarrassment. I'm not gonna say who it was.

These are guys who were, they were woke and now they're coming out of it and I'm really grateful for it. But I was realizing some of the things they talk about and the way they talk about it, men don't talk about that stuff in that way in any other environment that I've been in.

It's very effeminate, some of what I was hearing on this other podcast, but I think the reason is because there's this cavalier attitude about serious things. It's almost as if there's this assumption that when things get too heavy and talking about the Bible and Christianity, I mean, especially if you're like this guy, you're aware that these are polarizing things.

In order to kind of let off some steam and let people know not to be afraid if you bring the Bible up, right? You have to make a joke, make it kind of, I don't know, act like you're ignorant of the Bible when you're a pastor, for goodness sake.

Like you had one job, you should know this, you should understand how to interpret it. That's your role, but you wanna relate to the people who might feel awkward and it makes everything awkward because you act like you don't know what you're talking about.

It's another weird thing. I don't see that, I'm not trying to be too hard because I understand, it's one offhanded comment, but this attitude keeps coming up and it is a curious thing. Most solid pastors I know don't do that kind of thing, but it's kind of a youth pastor thing.

That's where I've usually seen it. And anyway, maybe I'm being a little too, let me know. Maybe I'm being too judgmental. Maybe I'm looking at it and I'm like one of his 300 friends that would abandon him or something.

Oh, someone just said that if you have 300 friends, like that might be a problem. Yeah, that is a scale issue. Like I figure I've had a lot of friends, but goodness gracious. All right, well, let's keep going here and we will see what he has to say about Galatians 6 and I guess loving others.

What's the word right there? Can you guys see it? Mm-hmm, if someone is overtaken, I want you just to get an image in your mind of someone who is overcome or overtaken, you got it? If someone is overtaken in any wrongdoing or another way to say that is evil, you who are spiritual or another way to translate it as spiritually mature, you who are spiritually mature, do what?

Don't you hate that? Because Uncle Jim, when he opens his big xenophobic mouth, you know what I wanna do? I want to destroy. But this says, if someone in your midst, if someone is overtaken in any wrongdoing, you who are spiritually mature, seek to restore such a person how?

Come on, with a how? I don't wanna do that. With a gentle spirit, now watch this now, watching out for your own self, lest you too be tempted. Watch this now, when you think about ministering and loving your polarized neighbor, 98 of the work is in me.

It's my own derision, it's my own familial shame, it's my own rage, it's my own anxiety. The Lord here has given us this word because he knows us that when we seek to minister and restore those who are overtaken in any evil or transgression, we've gotta be about the business of watching out for our own self.

If we meet rage with rage, if we meet anxiety with anxiety, we will only be propagating evil.

Okay, after belittling and attributing bad motives to 80 of the people that left his church and 300 close friends apparently who have dropped him and not taking any of the responsibility, now he wants to let you know that 98 of the responsibility for the polarization lies with you or the person who is trying to restore this person who's in sin.

Now, the other thing I guess I'll mention aside from the fact that he's trying to say that you have to be the bigger person, you have to be gentle while these people aren't gentle. So he's further kind of putting them off in the corner and taking the moral high ground saying, presuming we are the spiritual ones, right?

We're gonna restore the xenophobic uncle. He does assume that these guys, and again, we haven't broken context. He's still talking about Donald Trump, 300 people weren't friends with him, 80 of the people left his church.

Those guys I guess are in sin because that's what the passage of Galatians is about. Like if someone is overtaken and they're overwhelmed, they are tangled up in a sin, then those who are spiritual are supposed to restore such a person.

Spiritual, so a gentle spirit, but we know that this also could and sometimes has to include admonition and correction. He hasn't argued that there's a sin going on, he just assumes it. And then he does this weird, just in my opinion, it's odd, role reversal thing where he's had the moral high ground, but he wants to frame it like, he's the one that needs to be humble and gentle and it's not them, it's him.

And if they are going off and there's polarization because they're ranting and they're in sin, like it's still, it's on him to be the gentle, to be the bigger man in this, right? But he, like after, like the switcheroo in my mind is because he just got done just slamming these people.

So like, how is that, like, where's the gentleness? Where's, it's an odd, it's just odd twist. Let's just listen to what he has to say. I mean, this seems like just very basic love your neighbor type stuff, but his application is to MAGA people.

And so in order to seek to restore with a gentle spirit, we got to watch out for our own selves so that we're not tempted to give into that. And then I love this, therefore, and I'll use the translation I'm familiar with, therefore bear one another's burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ.