Based Camp - Paul VanderKlay： How to Strengthen Churches in The Age of The Internet

00:00:00.000 Traditions of almost every kind are being tremendously tested and most of them are, are, are found wanting. And this includes now every day, all the Christians listening to this, I know a bunch of my people are going to find their way to your channel and listen to this.

00:00:15.820 This includes the church. And what, so GK Chesterton talked about, I don't remember if it was five or seven, but the five deaths of Christianity. He said, basically, Christianity has died five times.

00:00:33.360 And I think that's true. And I think the church, as most of us have known it, which again, generalizations are really tough, but many of us have known churches that are fundamentally modernist institutions, sort of created around modernist assumptions, including my own denomination.

00:00:56.800 Many of these churches are going away and they are going away fast.

00:01:05.440 Would you like to know more?

00:01:07.040 All right. All right. So for any of our audience who does not know Paul VanderKleid, the man who is on the show here with us today, you might be surprised to know that you're probably in the minority of our audience.

00:01:18.020 Cause I just now was reviewing our most overlap channel subscribers and you are one of the most overlapped and I watch your videos pretty regularly.

00:01:26.380 I like, I haven't watched all of them. You produce videos most frequently as we do, which may be why we are.

00:01:31.500 You are extremely prolific. Yeah.

00:01:32.840 Yeah. But they're actually really, really solid. If you want to get, I think one like insider politics of competent Protestant theology these days, as well as what is like, what do like competent Protestant theologians think these days?

00:01:52.660 How are they engaging? Because the truth is, is that if you are listening to, and this is something I always talk about, if you're listening to like the conservative elite class, the vast majority of them are Catholic or Jewish in descent.

00:02:04.400 And so, you know, finding really good Protestant theologians who talk competently is, is, is, is much rarer within the current media landscape.

00:02:12.540 And so I want to start with one talking about how you came to the media landscape, because to me, you are somebody who is really, I'd say almost the, the paragon of an individual who is adapting new technology and new social structures to serve an older religious position, which was the position of the preacher.

00:02:37.860 How are you doing that? And how are you thinking about that right now?

00:02:41.760 That's a great question. I'm constantly thinking about it, actually.

00:02:46.420 So I, I pastor a small dying church in Sacramento, California. Most churches this size have about a 60 year life cycle.

00:02:55.300 And I would always have interests beyond just the local church.

00:03:01.860 And so I was involved with denominational things and all of this stuff. I blogged for years, just, just sort of playing with it.

00:03:08.840 And then Jordan Peterson arose and I thought, this is probably the most important thing for me to pay attention to in my pastoral career.

00:03:23.340 And I looked around because, because, well, the reason was, I mean, you guys talk about this, basically this monolithic urban culture.

00:03:32.560 Yeah.

00:03:33.560 What, what, what this has done in churches is that people have sort of either strayed into new atheism or strayed into a light new, new ageism.

00:03:42.160 And everyone was going down that road. And what I saw happening behind Jordan Peterson were people coming back down that, those roads.

00:03:50.320 And you hardly ever saw that before. And significant numbers were doing it, listening to Jordan Peterson.

00:03:55.840 He was reopening the conversation in a way that I didn't understand. And so I wanted to understand it.

00:04:02.180 And the way I understand things is by talking to people, but people in my church weren't going to watch Jordan Peterson.

00:04:08.880 They were all mostly older people. So then I looked to colleagues. Well, most of my colleagues weren't listening to Jordan Peterson and those who were, wouldn't admit it.

00:04:18.060 So I knew I needed some new conversation partners. So I thought I was reading, I was rereading, I was rereading, amusing ourselves to death at the time.

00:04:26.220 And I thought there's something about this medium, YouTube. And I had played with it a little bit with a member of my church, the Freddie and Paul show.

00:04:34.120 You can still find it on my channel.

00:04:35.220 But so if you want to get a sense of what my church is like, watch the Freddie and Paul show.

00:04:40.140 Nice.

00:04:40.820 But so, so I was seeing this and I thought I'll make a YouTube video. What can, what, what, what can it hurt?

00:04:50.600 There are how many YouTube videos out there that have 10 to 20 viewers? And that's, I just needed a few people to talk to.

00:04:57.360 And then something happened, which I didn't understand, which was this overwhelming response, emails coming to me.

00:05:07.000 And because I'm a pastor, I wanted to talk to these people. I wanted to hear from them.

00:05:12.520 I wanted their stories. And so then I would zoom them or Skype them and have a conversation.

00:05:19.520 And of course that didn't end the relationship that began the relationship.

00:05:23.160 And this was happening locally as well. So I started a Jordan Peterson meetup where before, you know, churches do all kinds of crazy things, try to get people through the door, you know, hot dogs, trunk or treat, you know, vacation Bible school.

00:05:39.000 And so I, and so a bunch of people, well, we should do a meetup. I'm like, nobody will come. So I did a meetup and a dozen people came who I had no idea who they were before.

00:05:49.300 And the next month, another dozen came and it just kept growing.

00:05:54.360 So this thing took on a life of its own pretty quickly. And at about 2000 subscribers, I thought seriously about just shutting the whole thing down because where's this going to go?

00:06:04.960 But I couldn't shut it down because the conversations were too real and the people were too honest.

00:06:14.040 And what I saw was that all real people really wanted was, can I, can I just talk about this? Can I just process it with you? Let me know what you think.

00:06:23.360 And I, my church is in a very distressed part of town. I'm always dealing with homeless people and handling people who were right across the street from a gas station.

00:06:32.420 So people, they want 20 bucks. They walk across the street, they knock on the church.

00:06:36.020 And I thought, knock on the church doors, looking for 20 bucks, but nobody knocks on the church doors, looking for a reasonable conversation about what's most important and where they can actually be honest about what they think and believe.

00:06:50.120 And I thought, I've always wanted a church that could do that.

00:06:53.320 And I'd be, I discovered, oh my goodness, that is exactly what we have happening here.

00:06:58.820 So I began to post with permission, some of the conversations that I was having with people.

00:07:04.160 And then once people saw that I would talk to strangers, randos online, then the flood really started because then, you know, people just wanted to talk.

00:07:14.900 And so the, the local meet, then other people wanted meetup groups because they can't get to Sacramento.

00:07:20.100 So I'm helping other people start meetup groups in other churches and in other places that became estuary, which is this whole, it's basically a conversation format where we have very open conversations with people.

00:07:31.460 And then the channel has just kept growing.

00:07:33.900 It's grown slowly, which I'm grateful for.

00:07:36.020 You know, I look at what happened to Jordan Peterson as kind of a cautionary tale, because when you grow that fast, it completely destroys your life.

00:07:43.300 And I, I have, I have a wife, I have five children, I have a church, I didn't need my life destroyed.

00:07:50.600 And I didn't want my church pushed out of my life by this.

00:07:55.680 And so, you know, the church and I, the church has been, people who watch the channel have been very supportive of the church.

00:08:01.840 The church probably still wouldn't be open if people didn't financially support the church.

00:08:05.820 Where's the church, by the way, in case any of our listeners live in this area?

00:08:09.060 It's on Florin Road in Sacramento.

00:08:11.580 Okay, great.

00:08:12.620 And it's, it's Living Stones Christian Reformed Church.

00:08:14.840 You can find it.

00:08:15.600 Just Google it.

00:08:16.220 You'll find it.

00:08:17.140 And, and so, and so the church, then, then, then visitors would start coming into church.

00:08:22.200 But most of the people who would wander into church would sit there and, and people are always saying, well, I want authenticity.

00:08:27.480 And I always tell them, my church has so much authenticity, you really don't want it.

00:08:33.720 It's just what it is, okay?

00:08:35.940 You might say, oh, I listen to Paul Online.

00:08:37.880 Okay, but Paul Online is just one little element of what a church is, because a church is a community.

00:08:44.540 So, so talk about this.

00:08:45.560 Talk about what you can't achieve within the online sphere that you can't achieve within in-person spaces and, and where you feel that you're achieving more within the online sphere.

00:08:57.040 That's an excellent question, too.

00:08:59.240 People want to know and be known and to love and be loved.

00:09:05.700 Online is an attentional economy that just basically saps our attention.

00:09:11.920 And what this means is that a limited number of us who get a certain degree of visibility with the algorithm get a decent amount of attention and get all sorts of good things from it.

00:09:23.020 But the vast majority of people are participating in this online space.

00:09:27.520 You know, they get a little entertainment.

00:09:29.940 They get a few ideas.

00:09:30.920 They get a little amusement.

00:09:31.800 But they don't get anything behind it.

00:09:33.660 And, I mean, loneliness has gotten to, has gotten to a point in our culture where even governments are doing things like, you know, you know, creating ministry of loneliness.

00:09:47.780 And I'm thinking a government is creating a ministry of loneliness.

00:09:51.020 People have, people have no, I, I, another thing that I think of is that part of what happened with radio and especially with television and then magazines is that the images that we are completely surrounded by subtly form our expectations of what life is.

00:10:11.320 And as a pastor, you get a very real sense of just how hard and grimy and uncomfortable and painful life is for many, many people.

00:10:25.860 And, you know, all the way back to Thoreau, people live lives of quiet desperation.

00:10:30.380 They do all the time.

00:10:31.920 And what churches have been able to do, at least to some degree, and what families do to a degree, and what friendships do to a degree, and pubs, and all sorts of things, is at least give people a little tiny sense of community.

00:10:44.460 That's someone out there.

00:10:46.120 I remember, I think it was Jonathan Haidt talking about friendships.

00:10:48.800 He's like, you need a friend.

00:10:51.980 If you go to school, if you don't have one friend, boy, you know, you're in trouble.

00:10:58.280 And you think about it, just one.

00:11:00.500 And many people don't have that.

00:11:02.900 And, in fact, partly due to all of these screens and what we've done as a society, people are desperate and lonely, and their lives are filled with pain.

00:11:15.140 Now, they can mediate that to a degree with television and radio.

00:11:19.740 I can't tell you how often I'll go into a shut-ins home and either AM radio or television is on all the time because they just want to hear another human voice. 0.78

00:11:31.060 Yeah, this is something I often think about.

00:11:33.120 We live in this society today, which is something I often know, where you move to a new city often after college or something like that.

00:11:38.960 And yet your entire – one of the things people always complain about our school system is they're like, well, where will kids learn to socialize?

00:11:44.680 Where will kids learn to make friends?

00:11:45.820 And one of the things I point out is that in our existing high school and college system, people only learn to make friends with people they're forced to interact with.

00:11:52.360 When somebody first leaves college and moves to a new city, I often wonder how – like what percent of America has no friends at all, literally talks to no one else.

00:12:03.720 My guess would be it's probably between 15% and 21% of people living in the developed world right now just have not a single friend.

00:12:15.620 Yep, yep, yep, I wouldn't be surprised.

00:12:18.640 And as a pastor, I – well, and this is only accelerated by YouTube, I regularly bump into people who are, if not hermits, almost so. 0.92

00:12:28.080 And their main form of mediation is this internet because with radio and television, it's completely one-sided.

00:12:38.600 The internet, maybe that fourth wall will be broken a little bit.

00:12:42.260 So one of the things that I wanted was not just a big channel where I could get my ideas out there and maybe have a strategy for employment when my church dies.

00:12:52.640 But I wanted – I wanted people to be able to find each other.

00:12:59.620 I wanted people to be able to make friends.

00:13:02.040 They need friends.

00:13:03.420 Yeah, talk about TPI because this is something you haven't talked about and some of our listeners don't know about.

00:13:08.220 TPI?

00:13:09.020 No, TCI, this corner of the internet.

00:13:11.700 Oh, this – TLC.

00:13:13.760 No, no, sorry, TLC. That's it. This little corner, right?

00:13:15.880 So I started with Jordan Peterson videos and then people were like, oh, there's an icon, Carbonate, Jonathan Peugeot you should talk to.

00:13:23.660 And Jonathan at that time had 4,000 subscribers, had about 1,000.

00:13:27.140 So talk to Jonathan Peugeot.

00:13:30.080 And Jonathan Peugeot also had been a foreign missionary in his past.

00:13:34.920 And so we develop a relationship.

00:13:36.900 And another viewer starts sending me videos from John Verveke, who's doing courses in Buddhism and cognitive science.

00:13:43.140 And so I start looking at his – and so part of what I did initially with his stuff was I didn't know who to talk to.

00:13:50.660 And so I would just talk to the videos.

00:13:53.140 So, you know, and I didn't even understand that YouTube had a genre of this.

00:13:57.640 I didn't know anything about YouTube.

00:13:59.840 So I just started talking to the videos because who's going to talk to me?

00:14:03.280 And so then I start doing this to other people's videos because I'm interested in the thoughts.

00:14:07.360 And I also noted because of my kids that there's this thing called Twitch where people watch each other play computer games.

00:14:15.140 And I thought, well, that's kind of crazy.

00:14:17.360 But then I thought, I wonder if people watch each other watch videos.

00:14:21.260 And then I learned that that's a thing too.

00:14:23.540 So I started talking to John Verveke.

00:14:26.220 And he was a wonderful guy.

00:14:27.440 And so the three of us start talking.

00:14:29.220 And then it's like, well, we've got to really do some live events because we have to get people away from their screens into real spaces, getting to know each other, to actually build the kind of bonds that human people, that human beings need.

00:14:42.520 One, and so then because we're doing this online, a bunch of other people start YouTube channels and start doing the same thing that I'm doing or having conversations.

00:14:51.180 And then one woman who, Sevilla King, she had gone to art school.

00:14:56.520 She was a therapist.

00:14:57.520 She did a bunch of things. 0.99

00:14:58.320 She had been doing little videos on piercing.

00:15:00.660 One day she basically says, this little corner of the internet.

00:15:04.820 And the funny thing about naming is that nobody knows quite what's going on.

00:15:09.800 And then when a name comes in, it kind of gels it.

00:15:13.360 Then the group sort of has a degree of identity.

00:15:16.180 And so what happened was that, so we had a Discord server.

00:15:24.520 I was always a little frustrated with the format of Discord because with these blocks, these walls of text, a lot of the people are autodidacts, which means that, well, it means a whole bunch of things.

00:15:36.680 But then you tended to get like, first we had hardly any Christians, and then people start becoming Christians, and then the Christians want to fight about theology.

00:15:44.660 And it's like, I've grown up.

00:15:48.440 I've lived all my life in the church.

00:15:50.160 I know theological fights.

00:15:52.000 I know my theological positions, but I don't want to face, if I have a limited amount of time with people, I don't want to fight about theology with them.

00:15:59.840 I want to find out about their stories because I want to find out about their lives.

00:16:04.460 And I'd like to, I'm a pastor.

00:16:06.780 I'd like to help them knit together community around them.

00:16:09.480 So a bunch of people start YouTube channels, a whole bunch of different things, and eventually that sort of becomes a kind of community.

00:16:18.220 But that's where you get this internet question because the internet affords a capacity for community, but it's different from real-life community.

00:16:33.700 And figuring that out, I think we only are barely in the, barely at the frontier of this right now.

00:16:44.700 Yeah.

00:16:45.280 So in a lot of ways, that's sort of what I'm exploring.

00:16:48.020 And it's a mess, but it's kind of cool.

00:16:50.540 Before you go further, I really, I've been writing down, I've got a whole series of tabs open with questions that we need to get to.

00:16:56.780 Because the first one is, what do you think Jordan Peterson was doing or saying that started bringing people back, that other people hadn't done before?

00:17:10.020 That's, I have hours of video trying to figure this out.

00:17:14.180 There's a lot to this.

00:17:15.900 So part of what happened, this is going to be a little theoretical, so my apologies.

00:17:23.700 Part of what happened, even before Descartes, I think Tom Holland is right about a lot of his ideas about Western history.

00:17:31.900 At the beginning, or kind of in the, about the year 1000, there's, there becomes a separation of sort of these two realms that we have.

00:17:45.160 And you can map these two realms in all sorts of different ways.

00:17:48.480 Ian McGilchrist sort of has the master and the emissary.

00:17:51.440 People commonly can, today, and this has only been true for a couple hundred years, talk about natural and supernatural.

00:17:57.700 We can talk about it in terms of mental and physical, but we have the kind of experience that suggests, you know, for example, C.S. Lewis, when he says, you know, every instance of human love will die by death or betrayal, but love itself doesn't die.

00:18:16.700 Plato gets into this in terms of the form.

00:18:18.380 So you have this separation and, and the separation eventually became in the West, sort of a dualism and Descartes sort of nails it.

00:18:28.080 And so, and he's trying to figure out what's the, and it's, it revolves around the idea of substance.

00:18:33.740 So there's like, matter is a material substance.

00:18:36.640 And then Descartes says, well, there's a spiritual substance.

00:18:39.180 And what eventually happens in the West is that we have degree, we have a degree of skepticism about material, about immaterial substances or spiritual substances.

00:18:48.440 And you get this differentiation.

00:18:50.860 And what Jordan Peterson starts doing through psychology and the Bible is to begin to give the Bible a degree of plausibility that a lot of people who have sort of thrown off this supernatural said, oh.

00:19:07.320 And when he did the biblical series with Genesis, that really triggered something because people began to read the Bible and say, you know, unlike Sam Harris, unlike the new atheism, maybe in fact, there is wisdom, perennial wisdom, even in a Darwinian sense that's encoded in the Bible, that in fact, if I listen to and learn from, I can maybe make my life better.

00:19:33.220 And one of the things that I noted, especially in the early years of doing this conversations, that nihilism in a good number of people, especially men, basically causes depression.

00:19:45.740 Totally.

00:19:46.640 Jordan Peterson did.

00:19:48.480 I call him sort of the unauthorized exorcist because there's an unauthorized exorcist in the Gospel of Mark that Jesus' disciples are sort of saying, this guy's casting out demons in your name and we should stop him.

00:20:00.700 And Jesus says, leave him alone.

00:20:04.000 So Jordan Peterson, completely outside the church, is basically casting out on a variety of levels, a lot of the demons that have sort of been possessing our culture and possessing individuals.

00:20:18.620 And when people, he sort of would break nihilism in people, and when they woke up from their nihilism, well, guess what?

00:20:25.920 You know what they want to do?

00:20:27.380 They want to get a job.

00:20:29.000 They want to start eating better.

00:20:30.500 They want to maybe turn that love interest into a girlfriend and that girlfriend into a wife. 0.95

00:20:36.040 And then they want to have kids.

00:20:37.420 And then they want to build something.

00:20:39.620 I mean, basically, this whole group of men sort of woke up and decided to once again participate in the human race instead of wasting themselves, as the cliche says, in their mother's basement watching porn covered with Cheetos dust.

00:20:56.560 Yeah.

00:20:57.940 So I want to know what you think of Simone's criticism of Jordan Peterson's teachings, which you have in the past, Simone, said that it feels to you very much like Jungian psychology dressed up with a conservative aesthetic.

00:21:11.500 Am I accurately?

00:21:13.260 Yeah.

00:21:13.680 What's so interesting hearing about your experience of Jordan Peterson, Paul, and I'm sure you've consumed like way more of his content than Malcolm and I have, is that maybe like I'm not looking at it through a religious lens at all.

00:21:26.060 Like I'm looking at it more through the lens of the things that I understand.

00:21:29.840 And there's just so much Jungian psychology and it just rubs me the wrong way because anything that's like Freudian or Jungian, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:21:39.340 And I don't know.

00:21:41.140 Like I get, I, my feeling about him is he told the internet to make their beds and they were like, yes, thank you for being that father figure.

00:21:51.980 I'm going to take a different answer here.

00:21:53.920 Yeah.

00:21:54.240 I think that he was literally the first person.

00:21:57.900 I think it was about branding.

00:21:59.320 He was the first person who created an intellectually feeling path to conservative traditions. 0.99

00:22:07.340 And, and before this, nobody, there was this branding in society that conservative traditions meant stupid. 0.99

00:22:15.140 And he was the first person who said conservative traditions don't mean stupid. 0.99

00:22:20.520 And he rose to fame through the left attacking him. 0.98

00:22:25.660 So he used a debate.

00:22:28.040 Like if you look at how he rose to fame, it was a debate he had with a feminist reporter in Canada that then went viral. 0.95

00:22:34.400 And then when people saw this and they saw that conservative attitudes didn't mean stupid, that led to his rise to fame.

00:22:41.680 What's interesting to me actually is contrasting Jordan Peterson was Milo. 0.68

00:22:47.340 Because Milo came before.

00:22:49.260 Milo Anobalus, he's referring to.

00:22:51.120 Yes. 0.99

00:22:51.520 And, and Milo equally showed that conservatism didn't mean stupid, but he also made conservatism look kind of crazy and unhinged. 0.89

00:23:00.800 Whereas Jordan Peterson made conservatism feel very, like, I think it was all about the aesthetic and the narrative. 0.92

00:23:08.800 Made it feel very much constrained and put together.

00:23:12.660 I don't know.

00:23:13.060 These are just our thoughts.

00:23:14.260 You can.

00:23:14.440 Yeah, but Paul, do you really think that Jordan Peterson is first and foremost about faith?

00:23:20.380 Jordan Peterson is first and foremost a university professor who cared about his students and a clinical psychologist who cared about his patients.

00:23:29.620 You have to understand that about Jordan.

00:23:32.060 Now, this second phase of him as sort of a getting into the political realm, that's not really his native environment.

00:23:40.900 If you really scratch him, he cared about helping regular people make their life better.

00:23:47.760 I think you're both right.

00:23:48.700 He's clearly a Jungian.

00:23:49.960 And he, at the same time, I think you're also, I think you're also right, Malcolm, that he, he, the man in his moment sort of found their, their time together.

00:24:01.240 And, you know, it's, it's not an accident that this happened at the same time as sort of the Trump emergence.

00:24:08.600 So there's a populism.

00:24:11.360 I mean, Peterson also, it's, it's really helpful to go to the live events and meet the people and talk to them.

00:24:18.060 Now, this is, this is part of the reason when you introduced me as a theologian, this is part of the reason that I always sort of correct people.

00:24:23.600 I'm not a theologian.

00:24:24.420 A theologian is an academic.

00:24:25.800 I'm a pastor.

00:24:26.440 Now, pastors have to dabble with theology, but I've got part of the reason why I don't fight about theological models on the internet is because all of these models are limited.

00:24:40.600 And the emergence of Jordan Peterson, in reality, we can sort of speculate on models, models have their place and they're super, super useful.

00:24:51.200 But it's this, it's, it's in the commotion of everyday life down here, where heaven and earth come together, that things actually happen.

00:25:02.540 And so I could probably write a list of a dozen reasons why Jordan Peterson changed as many lives as he did.

00:25:12.640 And probably a lot of them are valid, but that doesn't mean that any one of those things is sort of key to why it happened, because reality is just that complex.

00:25:24.100 Because there have been a lot of people who've done similar things to Jordan Peterson.

00:25:27.820 I mean, I've got books from him.

00:25:29.060 A lot of people have sort of worked Jung in this space and had sort of little eruptions.

00:25:33.340 And I talked to one Canadian academic early on that basically said, yeah, another year or two, and Jordan Peterson will pass out a favor.

00:25:39.140 And he listed three or four guys who I could recognize, and it hasn't happened.

00:25:43.400 And there's a lot of different reasons for that.

00:25:46.260 So why do you think, so you talked about the people coming back to the faith.

00:25:50.700 Why do you think people were leaving the faith?

00:25:53.300 What do you think were the core hooks that this force, whatever we want to call it, the urban monoculture, was using to pull people out of the faith?

00:26:02.700 Why do you think it was working so effectively compared with historic conditions?

00:26:07.940 Well, the video that someone sent me, the first one I'd watched of yours in terms of why people are leaving, I thought you're dead on right about a ton of that stuff.

00:26:16.240 So I think in my experience for a lot of people, I think there are a lot of factors to this.

00:26:24.040 Number one, people are formed by, their expectations are formed by technology.

00:26:28.660 And we now are accustomed to certain kinds of technology that works so reliably, we have a sense of, well, that's what truth is.

00:26:41.860 And the scientific revolution and really the technological revolution, the industrial revolution really created those expectations for us.

00:26:49.340 So therefore, when, so one common story of why people leave a particular religious tradition is because they had a bad experience, something bad happened.

00:27:00.820 And at some deep place in their heart, they thought something like this, that if I am a good boy or girl, if I show my allegiance to Jesus or whatever God they have, bad things won't happen to me.

00:27:13.140 Now, ask almost any pastor if that is true, and the pastor will say no.

00:27:18.240 Even ask almost any of those people if they believe that, they will say no.

00:27:22.200 But when that bad thing happens, at a very deep level in their life, a plausibility structure begins to break free.

00:27:29.940 And this urban monoculture has, in many ways, delivered on some promises in a way better than a lot of religions have, at, I think, a fairly shallow level. 0.75

00:27:44.420 And I think for this reason, we're going to see, the urban monoculture will hold people to a degree, but it's only going to hold a certain segment of people.

00:27:55.640 But those people tend to be highlighted in all of the media that the urban monoculture really uses for its, for proselytizing.

00:28:06.780 And I've known this because, so my grandfather pastored churches, mostly of Dutch immigrants and Dutch farmers.

00:28:15.300 My father pastored a church of African-Americans just outside of New York City.

00:28:20.940 And what you begin to realize, if you spend a lot of time with African-Americans, is that, well, they also have a culture, and their culture has roots.

00:28:28.500 Their roots are in the South, so they've got a deep amount of Christianity built in them.

00:28:32.560 They've got some Africans. 1.00

00:28:33.420 They've got a whole ton of stuff in it.

00:28:35.020 And so I remember when COVID hit, and everybody in California was like, we've got to get this vaccine into people.

00:28:40.420 I thought, I've lived in the Black community all my life.

00:28:44.920 Guess who is not really going to be too quick to queue up for that vaccine?

00:28:48.680 They are not going to jump on these bandwagons, because they have seen these bandwagons before.

00:28:54.160 So American culture tends to have this little level that's in the media.

00:28:59.100 And it's just a reinforcing narrative.

00:29:02.960 And, of course, now with social media, all kinds of other narratives now have space again.

00:29:12.180 Those narratives had space before just because there weren't the kind of mass media that happened in the 20th century.

00:29:19.800 And now with other medias, things are breaking down again.

00:29:23.460 Gosh.

00:29:24.360 It's really interesting that you point this out, because this is something that we've noticed as well.

00:29:28.920 This idea that the media class was in our country right now, and it's almost like they've become a narrower class than they were even historically.

00:29:36.960 Yes.

00:29:37.360 It's so out of touch with the other groups, especially the groups that they purport to protect or help.

00:29:44.620 One of the groups that we're really, really close with, because of our company and our work and everything like that, is the recent Hispanic immigrant population.

00:29:52.500 And they communicate, the way that they relate to truce is so different from the way that the left thinks they do and from what the left is saying.

00:30:04.880 Their truce networks, which is very different from the black community, because I think you're absolutely right about the American black community. 1.00

00:30:10.940 Within the Hispanic community, their truce networks are family-based, where they have large networks of intermarried families, and that's how they transmit information.

00:30:22.640 And stuff like what's going on in the news is largely irrelevant outside of these family networks, to the extent where they're actually, you know, we talk about all the problems that we're having with the internet and everything like that.

00:30:34.460 You're not seeing this within the traditional Hispanic community.

00:30:38.080 As much.

00:30:38.660 Yeah, as much.

00:30:40.100 But they've just retreated back to these family networks, to the extent where, you know, one of our friends was telling us he has friends outside of his family, and he gets teased by his cousins about it.

00:30:49.880 Like, they call him a white boy for having friends who are not family members.

00:30:54.160 And it's like, that's how, like, intense these family networks are.

00:30:58.260 And it shows to me, when I look at, like, this, or the way the black community relates to authority, which, like, the Democrats don't get at all.

00:31:05.440 These communities are not talking to each other, even in the slightest way anymore.

00:31:13.000 And we do not realize how different, different American populations are.

00:31:19.160 Yep, yep, yep.

00:31:20.600 That's exactly right.

00:31:22.260 And, no, that's exactly right.

00:31:24.660 And part of the reason, so there's a, there's a thesis by a scholar named Mark Knoll, who was from the Christianiform Church, I think went to Notre Dame, has sucked up a lot of the Christianiform intelligentsia.

00:31:35.600 And he basically had the frontier thesis in terms of American church.

00:31:40.580 So what happens in the history of the United States is that, of course, the British, the British really wanted to sort of contain the colonies so they wouldn't have Indian problems west of it.

00:31:49.300 And a big part of the American Revolution is people wanted that land, and they could sort of push out the Indians. 0.94

00:31:54.900 And so, and so America has always been an amalgamation of different tribes within it.

00:32:02.260 And more recently, more American history books have, have looked at that.

00:32:07.220 But part of what happened in terms of the church was the, the churches in the, in the colonies were the ones that came over from Europe.

00:32:16.340 What happens when Americans went out is that family bonds are ruptured, all kinds of bonds are ruptured, and Americans sort of have to sort of make new bonds.

00:32:26.140 And so it's a very open space where things can happen.

00:32:29.080 And that's part of the reason why the Bible takes on such primary focus in American evangelicalism, because the only thing they had in common was the Bible, not all these historic creeds and confessions of Europe.

00:32:39.360 Well, similar things have been happening, and it's, and it's for a while when we had mass media, when there were three TV networks, and we had a common culture, and partly also because at that time in the 60s and the 50s and 60s, there was a great degree of attention of trying to bring Catholics, Jews, and African Americans into this group.

00:32:59.780 You know, so the Hispanics sort of were somewhat Catholic, but I mean, and for that, and now that the sort of the mass media has broken down, people are just unfamiliar with, people who are mostly familiar with screens are unfamiliar with their neighbors, unless they're from a community that has its own ways of deep connection.

00:33:25.520 And so that's why, yeah, the, I often, I watched the woke stuff, and I was thinking, there's a certain class of African Americans who have sort of been brought up into the ruling class, but most of them, they watch this stuff, and they just kind of watch, because they've seen regime after regime go through, and they're not believing much of it, because they mostly believe what they know from their own lives, which is how most people do it.

00:33:54.080 So back to your question about the deconversion. So you're right that this urban monoculture took a lot of people out, and the more and more of our world is mediated by these images, that subtly frames expectations and incentive structures.

00:34:13.420 And so that has really broken apart a lot of traditional white churches.

00:34:21.100 Yeah.

00:34:21.700 But, you know, it's, to me, one of the more, one of the most interesting things that we're going to watch is going to be what happens with Islam in the West.

00:34:29.600 Because, I mean, again, all of these systems are far too complex for any of us to actually be able to accurately track.

00:34:42.180 There's just way too many variables.

00:34:44.600 But Islam is, you know, that's going to just be a fascinating thing.

00:34:50.540 And that's mostly going to happen in Europe.

00:34:52.000 In the United States, it's Latindom.

00:34:55.540 And the history of, so I spent my first eight years of, seven years of professional ministry in Latin America doing missionary work.

00:35:04.160 Oh, cool.

00:35:05.420 And so you begin to get a sense of, you go to that place, and it's like, yeah, a lot of people just fly down here to go to the beach.

00:35:11.080 But if you live there, it's like, yeah, you know, culture is real.

00:35:14.380 And part of where I learned that is, again, I was growing up in a black community, in a mostly black church, in a white denomination, in Christian reform schools, which were sort of, you know, one of the things that I find so interesting about your project is that I have watched the Dutch try resisting cultural assimilation all my life and fail.

00:35:37.900 And right now, my denomination is just sort of being completely pulled apart and assimilated in some of the larger things in our culture.

00:35:47.820 But we had our own Christian schools.

00:35:50.040 You didn't marry outside the Christian reform church.

00:35:53.100 You know, we had all of these enclaves.

00:35:55.760 And this has just been pulled apart.

00:35:58.360 And so now Hispanics, we're in the middle of a crazy, crazy social experiment. 1.00

00:36:04.660 And of course, the internet is just gasoline on the fire.

00:36:08.480 Yeah.

00:36:09.860 Yeah.

00:36:10.620 I do.

00:36:11.260 I want to pull on, though, what you've said.

00:36:14.180 And this isn't the only time you've said it, where, like, if you got too big, especially too fast, that it would sort of destroy you and destroy the community.

00:36:22.820 I mean, part of me, I want to push on that and understand why you believe that.

00:36:27.980 Because you've reached an amazing number of people.

00:36:30.700 You've changed their lives.

00:36:31.960 Like, it's super clear that you've created a community online that is very, very real for these people.

00:36:37.040 And you have found ways to make it participatory.

00:36:39.760 I mean, even as a pastor, you're in a one-to-many relationship.

00:36:43.660 Like, you can't speak one-on-one with absolutely everyone who shows up.

00:36:48.260 And so even in person, there's a limit to your reach.

00:36:51.920 But online, your reach is scaled in a way that's incredible.

00:36:55.720 Can I understand a little bit more about why you think growing your community online would be damaging?

00:37:01.640 Because, yeah, I just, I really, I'm not sure if I think that's true, but I would be open to you convincing me.

00:37:08.180 Okay.

00:37:08.580 Well, I'll say a few things.

00:37:11.080 My main employment remains my local congregation.

00:37:16.240 And I've been with these people 26 years.

00:37:20.180 A number of them are in the last few years of their life.

00:37:23.940 And all they really want is for their pastor to bury them.

00:37:28.760 And I want to be able to do that for them.

00:37:33.380 The number, so, you know, there's the Dunbar number and how true that is, I don't know.

00:37:37.460 And you're right.

00:37:38.040 As a pastor, I'm used to one-to-many relationships.

00:37:40.500 But I also, and for that reason, I have a sense of you have to fairly quickly try to hand off people into other relationships if the community is going to cohere.

00:37:53.860 And it's a little bit of a dance because usually what happens, and nothing, the internet hasn't changed this, people come to my church because maybe they saw a little thing online.

00:38:01.780 Or, you know, maybe they just walked in and saw me on stage preaching, and then something touched their heart, and they say, wow, he touched my heart.

00:38:09.380 I want to be friends with Pastor Paul.

00:38:11.540 Okay.

00:38:12.560 How many friends can Pastor Paul have?

00:38:15.100 Pastor Paul has five children.

00:38:16.640 Pastor Paul has a wife.

00:38:18.060 Pastor Paul has a job.

00:38:19.520 Pastor Paul has all of these things.

00:38:21.260 And so it's sort of the pace at which things grow impacts what exactly you're going to have grow.

00:38:32.600 And so I wanted things to grow at a rate where people could find each other and actually be able to build friendships with one another to scale the way.

00:38:45.520 One of the things that I noted is that, just like with that, I mean, when we talk about getting it on the ground floor of, let's say, a company or something, that's a real thing.

00:38:54.080 And so as this little corner of the internet has grown, a lot of, so there's, let's say, I'm at the top of a certain hierarchy.

00:39:03.000 Then there's a whole group of people who found me within the first month that are right there at the second level.

00:39:09.340 And now there's always a few anomalous people who sort of shoot up beyond themselves, but the whole community sort of grows together.

00:39:17.820 And there are very subtle ways in which these lieutenants are gatekeepers.

00:39:22.440 And also part of it is what we have done in this little corner of the internet is not really premised around, let's say, a doctrinal statement.

00:39:34.520 This is a statement that we agree with.

00:39:36.620 No, we, we, we're hard pressed to find a lot that we agree with.

00:39:42.500 What we have is sort of a style of relationship.

00:39:48.840 Now, I just got to, actually, I was late to this because I got a message from someone that said, oh, yesterday's, yesterday's live stream was ugly.

00:39:57.360 They were calling you a liar.

00:39:59.120 They were saying you're not a leader. 0.92

00:40:01.200 And they were bad mouth.

00:40:02.960 I know you're thick skinned and winsome, but, and, and so, but the thing is being pastor of a real life church is really good for those kinds of things.

00:40:11.620 Because if you think people get mad at you for things you do online, try doing it in a real life church.

00:40:17.500 That's where people really get mad.

00:40:19.460 And so a lot of the stuff online is like, yeah, someone online is angry with me.

00:40:23.660 They don't believe me.

00:40:25.800 Wait, wait, wait.

00:40:26.620 A live stream?

00:40:27.520 Was this like some random live stream was in your community where they decided to?

00:40:31.120 See, and this is part of the difficulty is that right now, in terms of this little community, it's funny because there's a sort of a fear.

00:40:39.720 And you see this with churches too.

00:40:41.480 There's a sort of this little fierce debate.

00:40:44.220 Is this a real thing or not?

00:40:45.920 They have all this philosophical ideas, so that's something they can chew on.

00:40:49.840 And then, is Paul our leader?

00:40:53.980 What is a leader?

00:40:55.600 A leader is someone who says yes and no.

00:40:57.660 Now in the church, in an actual organization, an institution, there are things that I can say yes to and no to and ways I decide things that have consequence within the organizational structure.

00:41:10.440 This isn't quite that.

00:41:12.300 There's no organizational structure.

00:41:13.980 There's no, yeah, there's, you know, there's a little bit of money going, moving around and memberships and YouTube AdSense and that kind of stuff.

00:41:20.900 But I'm not paying anyone.

00:41:22.700 I have zero employees.

00:41:24.480 I can't hire and fire anyone.

00:41:26.360 And we don't have a structure like we have in the church where someone might go under formal discipline for believing something or doing something, what have you.

00:41:33.520 There's none of those things.

00:41:34.520 And so part of what's happening is, you know, there's people, and this is another thing you learn as a pastor, people come to communities with their expectations.

00:41:44.020 And they don't even know what their expectations are.

00:41:46.800 But you begin to discover them when certain expectations don't get met or fulfilled.

00:41:53.620 And then people get a little bit upset because I thought Paul was going to do this.

00:41:59.280 And the thing you also have to realize is that, you know, let's the AA people say, well, expectations are preconceived resentments.

00:42:06.580 Because.

00:42:08.540 Hold on.

00:42:09.280 If you would mind indulging us, what are the expectations people are coming in with that are causing the conflicts?

00:42:14.280 Oh, I really have.

00:42:17.540 I don't have a very clear idea of it because they themselves don't have a clear idea of it.

00:42:22.900 I assume they want you to be more conservative or more progressive.

00:42:26.080 Is that it?

00:42:26.900 Like, it's a political fight?

00:42:28.320 It's a political.

00:42:29.240 They'd love for it.

00:42:30.360 So about four years ago before COVID, when this thing sort of started taking on steam, people wanted me to found a 501c3.

00:42:39.660 And to develop a board of directors and to basically institutionalize this thing.

00:42:48.260 And so Paul Vanderclay Inc. or This Little Corner Inc. or Estuary Inc. something like this.

00:42:53.000 And I said, no, things are way too early.

00:42:56.440 We don't even know what we're doing here.

00:42:58.960 And one of the things, so before I did any of this, I was involved in church planting.

00:43:03.120 And one of the things that you realize with church planting is that pace of growth and institutional structure, these things sort of have to find themselves.

00:43:14.060 And sort of a rule of hand is don't start a structure until you really know you'll need it or at least anticipate needing it soon.

00:43:23.280 Because with the pace of change right now in our culture, you'll almost always structure badly.

00:43:31.300 And it will hurt the sort of the organic growth of the thing.

00:43:35.940 So I don't, you know, so people wanted me to start an organization.

00:43:40.580 And then people, you know, and then suddenly there'll be guidelines and boundary rules.

00:43:45.440 And I said, first of all, I said, I don't have time to manage that.

00:43:48.840 Second of all, I know myself well enough to know I'm not a great manager of those kinds of things.

00:43:53.640 I run a small little church.

00:43:54.860 And even the tiny little bit of administration I have to do here, I really don't like.

00:43:59.160 So if we're actually going to do something like that, then suddenly I've got a board that I've got to deal with.

00:44:04.880 I already have a church board I have to deal with.

00:44:06.860 Then I'm going to have to have a structure.

00:44:08.680 And I'm probably going to not be able to work in the church.

00:44:10.800 And then I'm going to need a budget of somewhere probably about half a million to a million dollars a year.

00:44:16.360 Then I'm going to raise that money.

00:44:17.580 Then I'm going to be, and I said, I don't want to do any of these things.

00:44:21.220 I would love to do what I can to facilitate community for people.

00:44:26.520 But in my opinion, it's going to be fairly ad hoc.

00:44:29.440 It's going to be fairly loosey-goosey.

00:44:31.600 And that's what I'm comfortable with right now.

00:44:33.940 And that's what I can do right now.

00:44:35.280 I imagine this is what people actually want.

00:44:37.300 I mean, other than the people who are high within the status hierarchy, there's always different motivations depending on where you are within a status hierarchy.

00:44:43.120 One question, one final question I had for you, because this is something that you've mentioned on our videos, and I want to hear your thoughts on it.

00:44:50.620 If you were going to give advice to someone today to keep – and I know this is hard, and I know this is not something you do – but to keep their children within the tradition they grew up in, what would that advice be?

00:45:01.780 What are the biggest threats to our children?

00:45:12.700 Whenever I'm asked for parenting advice, I say this.

00:45:18.800 Be who you want your children to become.

00:45:23.180 Uh-oh.

00:45:24.700 Yeah.

00:45:26.120 Because first of all, let's talk about human beings.

00:45:30.080 We think we know what we are.

00:45:33.500 We think we know ourselves.

00:45:36.720 We really don't know ourselves very well.

00:45:39.860 My children know me in a way that I don't know myself.

00:45:44.260 My wife knows me in ways I don't know myself.

00:45:46.960 My church people know me in ways I don't know myself.

00:45:49.300 I have a certain degree of delusion about myself that is really difficult to cure.

00:45:55.340 So part of what is happening right now is that traditions of almost every kind are being tremendously tested, and most of them are found wanting.

00:46:11.500 And this includes – now, all the Christians listening to this, I know a bunch of my people are going to find their way to your channel and listen to this.

00:46:19.860 This includes the church.

00:46:21.500 And what – so G.K. Chesterton talked about – I don't remember if it was five or seven, but the five deaths of Christianity.

00:46:33.040 He said, basically, Christianity has died five times.

00:46:36.680 And I think that's true.

00:46:41.940 And I think the church, as most of us have known it, which, again, generalizations are really tough, but many of us have known churches that are fundamentally modernist institutions, sort of created around modernist assumptions, including my own denomination.

00:47:00.140 Many of these churches are going away, and they are going away fast.

00:47:09.200 Now, I continue to be a Christian, and I continue to believe in the church, but I think what we are going to see is churches continue to – there's going to be new kinds of churches that we cannot imagine yet.

00:47:26.940 And that's really hard for the church.

00:47:30.300 Now, part of what's been interesting in this whole thing is that a lot of people have grown interested in orthodoxy and Catholicism.

00:47:38.500 And I think there are real reasons for people's desire for these very sacramental, very ancient churches with certain constructions.

00:47:49.380 And I think that's because modernity, as we've experienced it for the last 500 years, especially the last 200 years, is receding quickly.

00:47:56.900 And so people are looking for something old, something reliable, something structured, and something they can get their hands on, like a sacrament.

00:48:05.460 Yeah.

00:48:05.640 I think the people coming into those churches are going to change those churches in ways that many of the older people who are really excited about these new people coming in, they don't have any idea.

00:48:17.400 Because the people themselves coming in, they don't have any idea.

00:48:21.040 And so for this reason, I mean, I've seen it in my own denomination.

00:48:27.080 Like I said, the Christian Reformed Church, ostensibly Calvinist, which talked about divine election, did everything in their power to ensure that their children would maintain the faith.

00:48:39.980 And I think the Christian Reformed Church is probably in the top 10% of denominations that succeeded until the 1980s.

00:48:50.340 I mean, the Christian Reformed Church had a thick, thick culture. 0.99

00:48:55.440 But it's basically been torn apart.

00:48:58.460 The urban monoculture has had its way with it.

00:49:01.820 And what that means, not only is that churches that have sort of bought in completely to the urban monoculture, they're going the way of the main line.

00:49:09.980 The other side of churches has been like, you know, double down on having a bunker mentality.

00:49:16.640 I don't have a lot of confidence in that path either.

00:49:20.860 Yeah.

00:49:21.120 Because it's, you know, Rene Girard has this mimetic rivalry thing.

00:49:25.780 If you decide the urban monoculture is your enemy, you are probably going to become a bizarro alternate, you know, it's going to map on you.

00:49:35.860 So in other words, what you need to actually create a sustainable culture is something that has a different root from the opposition.

00:49:46.640 It's going, and for that reason, people are looking for very old things.

00:49:49.720 I think that's part of the reason people are so interested today in evolutionary psychology.

00:49:54.220 Because it's the new natural law, as one of my friends just recently said.

00:49:58.840 I love this interpretation.

00:50:00.840 So today, we have the longest episode we've ever done going live soon.

00:50:04.920 It's going to be like two hours or something.

00:50:07.360 I was working on it today.

00:50:09.300 And it's on this question.

00:50:11.920 And it focuses on a specific hypothesis or a sort of conundrum where I was like, okay, my kids are like me, right?

00:50:19.300 So if I'm going to understand why have I joined a traditionalist religion, I need to look at why my dad left.

00:50:24.400 And the answer that he chose to leave Christianity was he got punished for questioning the Noah's Ark story.

00:50:31.460 He was like, this does not seem logically plausible.

00:50:35.000 Let's go through it.

00:50:36.120 And he was like, I will not stay in a tradition that punishes – and people who know me, they're like, yeah, Malcolm would have done that too had he grown up in a conservative Christian family.

00:50:46.100 And so it's made me think, well, one of the problems that we have is that when we say we want to be looser about these kinds of stories, every option I have for my kids today loosens up on all the morality as well.

00:51:01.820 When you loosen up on all the stories, you loosen up on all the morality.

00:51:06.640 And for me, the question is, is there a way to reconstruct things that loosens up on the scientific plausibility stories but that doesn't loosen up on any of the moral restrictions?

00:51:21.360 And that might be an absurd thing to try to create.

00:51:23.900 But I do suspect that's what the winner of this – I don't think it's going to be necessarily what we're trying to build.

00:51:29.500 But I think it's going to be whoever builds that successfully is going to be the person who wins.

00:51:35.040 So if there's something at the heart of sort of what has been happening with Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Peugeot, John Verveke, it's the idea that John Verveke calls combinatorial explosiveness in that the world is too complex for any of us to manage.

00:51:58.860 When we talk about morality in a context that is being colonized by evolutionary psychology, the idea is what practices – what do we say yes to?

00:52:14.060 What do we say no to that will finally achieve what in terms of a Darwinian process?

00:52:20.860 Nobody can figure that out because there are far too many elements.

00:52:27.280 And this is part of the reason, again, to answer the Jordan Peterson question, why are people now interested in religion?

00:52:32.940 Ironically, it's because of Darwinism, that people have begun to – and I don't think they know this intellectually yet.

00:52:42.560 They have begun to sense that, huh, if I want to figure out how human beings work, I have to sort of look at an ancient record of track record, an ancient track record.

00:52:55.040 And you know what? There is nothing that we have like religion for providing that data.

00:53:03.820 And so the winners in religious competition are probably the best place to start to think about how should we live in the future.

00:53:15.180 I mean, that's at the heart of – and Jordan didn't sort of say it directly that way, but that's what's happening.

00:53:21.800 And so when I saw your channel, I thought, oh, these people get it.

00:53:26.840 And part of why you two are so fun – and this is why I love the Estuary Project.

00:53:30.680 So what I started doing in churches, as I've told churches, you need to have conversation groups where that little boy can go and say, I think a worldwide flood is bunk.

00:53:42.180 And everybody says, all right, cool.

00:53:44.760 I mean, it's Tom Holland's story, it's a story of how many people?

00:53:48.380 Because what happens – it used to be that the university was supposed to be a place where you could have open ideas, blah, blah, blah.

00:53:55.560 That's done.

00:53:57.580 Ironically, churches are places, potentially, some churches perhaps, where you can go and have an honest conversation.

00:54:03.560 And so that's what I want for churches.

00:54:06.240 I want them to be places where people can come in and then the group – so we have this little process where the group can have a conversation about what those people that day want to talk about.

00:54:18.120 And that, again, I think – back to this leadership thing, that involves more modeling.

00:54:24.720 You know, we've had people that say, we need to list the rules of this.

00:54:28.320 Like, well, usually by the time you have to list rules, something's already broken.

00:54:32.680 So the longer you can put off listing rules, the more modeling you can do, probably the further you'll get along.

00:54:38.860 Nice.

00:54:39.720 Yeah, I really like this insight here.

00:54:42.100 Yeah, that's great.

00:54:43.680 Well, this conversation has been fantastic.

00:54:45.920 And I hope we can do something like this again.

00:54:47.860 This will be one of our longer episodes.

00:54:49.320 But we've started doing that with interviews recently.

00:54:51.660 But this is fantastic.

00:54:52.580 And I really do hope our listeners who are interested in what you're hearing from him, either check out his church in person if you're in his area or at least check out his YouTube channel.

00:55:04.760 Come at 9 a.m. to the estuary meeting.

00:55:06.720 So we have an estuary at 9 a.m.

00:55:08.200 And then we have the worship service at 11.

00:55:10.060 Now, again, the worship services, some music, me preaching.

00:55:14.420 It's a – you know, I've got an older church here.

00:55:16.640 This is what they like.

00:55:17.840 And I work for them.

00:55:20.220 But at 9 a.m. we do estuary.

00:55:21.740 That's where you'll have a much more open, free-flowing conversation.

00:55:26.720 Spectacular.

00:55:27.820 And look, five kids, right?

00:55:29.760 You see?

00:55:30.560 We've got to be working on this, people.

00:55:32.300 This should be the norm.

00:55:34.940 You won't know what your kids believe until they're in their 50s and 60s.

00:55:39.380 Oh, maybe.

00:55:40.520 Think about that.

00:55:41.700 Maybe.

00:55:45.200 I hope I live long enough to have a wager with you guys.

00:55:51.740 I think we're going to have little firebrands.

00:55:54.420 You know, one of the people –

00:55:55.320 Oh, that I agree with.

00:55:56.900 One of the people coming on our show soon again is Ayla, who came from a – I don't 1.00

00:56:00.660 know if you know Ayla.

00:56:01.600 Yeah, I know what she is.

00:56:02.280 We were having her back on.

00:56:03.680 She came from a Calvinist tradition.

00:56:05.180 And just – I think her dad –

00:56:07.160 I'm a story.

00:56:07.420 And yeah, we'll be doing – no, I expect our kids will be that way too.

00:56:15.720 I think if they're going to break away from whatever we're doing, they're going to do

00:56:18.700 it loud and early.

00:56:20.840 Yes.

00:56:22.660 I'm going to say this.

00:56:25.100 I would not be surprised.

00:56:26.340 I'm not saying it's going to happen.

00:56:27.400 I would not be at all surprised if Ayla, when she gets in her 50s and 60s, doesn't look 1.00

00:56:32.800 a lot like her father.

00:56:35.280 I think she looks a lot like him now.

00:56:37.860 I think she has an incredible amount in common with him.

00:56:43.160 And if you read her writings, she has meditated on this recently where she's like, yeah, I

00:56:48.400 actually am a lot like my dad.

00:56:50.180 It's funny because she's like, why do you guys feel so close to me?

00:56:52.820 And I'm like, oh, we're like dissidents from the Calvinist cultural group.

00:56:56.660 You're a dissident for – you feel very similar to us culturally.

00:57:00.020 And she's like – she doesn't – like she gets it.

00:57:03.300 Like she's friends with us, but I don't think she understands what we mean when we're

00:57:07.080 like, yeah, like we're part of the same family.

00:57:09.740 Like we're distant and we have different beliefs, but we're still part of the same

00:57:13.920 larger family.

00:57:16.600 Well, I – you know, again, part of what – part of the beauty about an actual community,

00:57:22.800 I remember some of the fire brands when I was growing up were the preacher's kids.

00:57:27.300 See, my father was always very open.

00:57:30.800 And so we didn't have a strict house at all.

00:57:33.420 But the stricter the house, the worse the preacher's kid.

00:57:37.240 And now that, you know, I just turned 60 and these people are about my age, they're just

00:57:42.380 like their parents.

00:57:43.400 Oh, no.

00:57:44.320 It's an amazing trajectory to watch.

00:57:46.900 Oh, I love it.

00:57:48.740 I love it.

00:57:49.680 Well, we'll recreate that for our kids.

00:57:51.840 And hopefully we have a lot.

00:57:53.240 You know, you're on number four now.

00:57:54.440 Oh, you're not at five yet, Simone.

00:57:55.800 You got more work to do to catch up with Paul Vanderclay.

00:57:58.940 True story.

00:58:00.300 Yeah.

00:58:00.780 We deeply admire you.

00:58:01.900 And we're so glad you came on the podcast.

00:58:03.500 So thank you so much for joining us.

00:58:05.160 Well, I'd very much like to continue talking with you guys because you're so open and you're

00:58:10.660 so smart.

00:58:12.220 And I just enjoy people.

00:58:14.960 I mean, I wouldn't be a pastor if I didn't enjoy people.

00:58:16.980 And you two are really a breath.

00:58:19.140 Like one person said after our conversation on my channel, oh, what a breath of fresh

00:58:23.800 air these two are. 0.91

00:58:25.120 And again, you'll get a lot of crap from a lot of other people for a lot of other reasons. 0.91

00:58:29.100 That's just the internet. 0.94

00:58:30.000 But you two are well used to that.

00:58:33.220 But we utilize it to spread.

00:58:35.160 We're not like you.

00:58:36.100 I want to grow as fast as Jordan Peterson.

00:58:37.980 I want to replace Jordan Peterson.

00:58:40.440 That's our long-term goal.

00:58:42.140 I want a loving, happily married couple that respects each other to be the next Jordan

00:58:48.520 Peterson.

00:58:49.280 And I think with a lot of kids, not with like one or two measly kids, I think that that's

00:58:54.880 how we save this whole system.

00:58:57.360 And that's what we're working on.

00:58:58.920 And I told this to one.

00:59:00.380 She goes, can't we all work together?

00:59:02.920 And I go, yes, but there can only be one best.

00:59:05.500 And that's what we're working on.

00:59:08.540 So there you have it, Paul.

00:59:10.300 Well, now we have it.

00:59:12.600 Yeah.

00:59:13.580 Have a good one.

00:59:14.560 You can always look to Brigham Young.

00:59:16.420 I mean.

00:59:16.780 Hey, I like Brigham Young.

00:59:18.100 I think Brigham Young is the true founder of Mormonism.

00:59:20.560 I don't think Joseph Smith really founded what we today call Mormonism.

00:59:23.720 I could go deep into Brigham Young.

00:59:25.060 I think he's intellectually very sophisticated.

00:59:27.220 I think a little less sophisticated than Orson Pratt.

00:59:30.600 Sorry, I don't want to go too far into Mormonism here because we're going to talk about this.

00:59:34.500 Yeah, let's just say the man has pizzazz.

00:59:36.740 Yeah.

00:59:36.920 Yeah, Brigham Young is quite a very interesting guy.

00:59:40.760 I'll say that.

00:59:41.480 Very interesting guy. 0.79

00:59:43.420 I know most of what I know about Mormonism from a very Mormon homeless addict. 1.00

00:59:50.180 And I've learned a ton from him.

00:59:51.620 Interesting.

00:59:52.760 Yeah.

00:59:53.060 Addicts are.

00:59:55.920 The homeless people are just an incredible source of learning about the real world.

01:00:02.120 They really are.

01:00:03.200 True story.

01:00:03.980 When I think that this is actually an interesting point that I want to point to people is historically people had multiple sources of information about the world.

01:00:12.560 They had the media elite and they had their local pastor and their local pastor or, you know, rabbi or whatever was always learning from homeless addicts as well as learning from their congregation.

01:00:22.620 Whereas the media elite never had that connection to those flows of information.

01:00:27.920 And this is one of the reasons we've become so dissociated as a population is because we disintermediated our pastors as a source of information.

01:00:37.360 Yeah.

01:00:37.700 Yeah.

01:00:38.000 And that's fairly recent.

01:00:39.120 As early as the 50s, pastors, you know, if the government would do a panel, they'd always have a minister or two on it.

01:00:45.920 And that went away.

01:00:50.600 Anyway, this has been fantastic.

01:00:52.620 Yeah.

01:00:52.820 Please come back on at some point.

01:00:54.620 Oh, I'd love to.

01:00:55.420 No, you guys.

01:00:56.360 And I want to continue.

01:00:58.320 I keep watching your stuff.

01:01:00.060 Oh, great.

01:01:00.540 I'm really excited to hear if you do do a response to this mega-sode that I was doing today.

01:01:04.480 Because I'm really.

01:01:05.240 We go over every one of the major reasons that people leave the main traditional religions.

01:01:10.200 Oh, really?

01:01:10.620 And we try to come up with solutions for them.

01:01:13.020 Yeah.

01:01:13.340 Like, I go through, like, the good God problem.

01:01:16.440 This is, how can I, and it's a lot of stuff where, like, atheists pull at the wrong strings often.

01:01:21.740 They pull at nuances.

01:01:23.760 The good God problem is actually a problem that drives people away from religion.

01:01:27.780 The local revelation with miracles but a universalizing religious tradition is also a big problem that we go into.

01:01:35.320 We go into, yeah, we just go into all of these.

01:01:37.560 It's like, how can you have good answers to these when people attack them?

01:01:42.360 Because I think about them in terms of my own kids.

01:01:44.480 I think too often people in religious traditions, they say people left because they didn't like the rules.

01:01:49.560 And I actually have almost never seen this.

01:01:52.220 People usually leave because they're disappointed in the leadership.

01:01:56.060 They don't understand the logic behind one of the rules that they see as arbitrarily cruel or they see a logical inconsistency.

01:02:04.200 Like, those are the only three reasons people really leave.

01:02:06.340 So, if you can build a structure without those, you don't have to worry.

01:02:10.480 We'll see.

01:02:13.900 There's almost always a lot of reasons.

01:02:18.860 And even the ones who leave probably aren't fully aware of all of the reasons they're leaving.

01:02:25.540 I mean, people are just complex this way.

01:02:28.080 And you just never get around that.

01:02:29.400 So, we talk a good game.

01:02:32.440 But, you know, I think Jonathan Heitwood is the rider and the elephant.

01:02:36.080 It's a strong point.

01:02:38.180 Yeah, yeah.

01:02:39.420 Oh, by the way, if I was going to tell my listeners to start with one video by you, what would it be?

01:02:43.260 Oh, good question.

01:02:44.200 I'd say let the algorithm decide.

01:02:48.520 Because, I mean, the algorithm for as flat-footed as it can be sometimes, it knows what you have watched and what other people who are watching what you're watching.

01:03:01.420 I mean, there's a reason our channels have a crossover.

01:03:05.740 Yeah, because we didn't have any initial audience crossover.

01:03:08.800 Our initial crossover was all the Evolution Bros, i.e. mostly Jolly Heretic people because we talk with him and we have a lot in common with him.

01:03:15.480 And a lot of crossover was the Manosphere, like the Red Pill Sphere and everything like that because we've done a lot of stuff with Sandman.

01:03:22.360 But, like, MGTOW and stuff like that.

01:03:23.900 But you, that's totally new.

01:03:26.500 Like, there's no reason for us to have a viewer crossover.

01:03:30.240 And yet viewers who we had reaching out to us in the early days were watching your channel before they were watching ours.

01:03:36.220 Right.

01:03:36.640 And for that reason, let the algorithm, even just because you watched this, you know, you guys are probably going to put me in the show notes or something.

01:03:46.020 That algorithm is going to look at that and they're going to serve you up a video from me.

01:03:52.060 And, you know, 50, 70 percent, you might be interested because the algorithm knows all the details.

01:03:58.760 I put out over 2,000 videos and most of them are long.

01:04:02.740 And so it's really hard to get a sense of, you know, what you'd be interested in.

01:04:08.500 Very conversational and authentic.

01:04:10.600 Very different from ours.

01:04:13.620 We try to make them memeable.

01:04:16.020 Yeah, it's, see, and again, also for my channel, the videos that I think are most important are the ones that are most difficult to watch because they're usually conversations with random people.

01:04:27.880 And the way YouTube sort of functions, I mean, if I, I did a conversation with Jonathan Peugeot last week and, of course, that one just shot right up because Jonathan Peugeot is an audience.

01:04:36.680 And one of these days, I'm sure, you know, I'll say, okay, Jordan, it's time.

01:04:40.860 And then Jordan Peterson and I'll do a conversation and that one will go crazy.

01:04:44.460 But the most, the people, the most important people in your life are not the ones on the screens.

01:04:51.280 They're the ones you share your home with and they're your children and they're your parents.

01:04:55.680 Those are the most important people in your life.

01:04:57.720 And actually, that's what your channel is about.

01:05:00.220 Yeah.

01:05:00.420 Well, I disagree.

01:05:01.500 I'm the most important in all of our viewers' lives.

01:05:04.500 I'm just going to work.

01:05:05.120 All of our kids' lives, too, Malcolm.

01:05:06.500 Um, anyway, Malcolm goes, we all go.

01:05:10.280 It's so sad.

01:05:13.260 I'm joking.

01:05:13.880 Of course, it's Simone who's the most important in your person.

01:05:16.820 No, no, no.

01:05:18.260 But like, actually, you know, Jordan and Tammy, they have a, they have a, I believe those two have quite a fine relationship.

01:05:23.760 And again, I think probably one of the most important thing about your channel is, in fact, the way I hear you two talking about each other.

01:05:30.500 And you are modeling, you are modeling something in a relationship that I think is profoundly important.

01:05:38.220 And what's interesting about you two, I mean, Jordan and Tammy are about my age.

01:05:42.620 You two are a lot younger.

01:05:44.160 And I can see the models of, I mean, you've, you've brought into your relationship a lot of the values of the urban monoculture.

01:05:53.080 You defer to each other.

01:05:54.520 You value each other.

01:05:55.780 You very much are of this culture.

01:05:58.000 That's true.

01:05:58.360 You're also playing with it.

01:06:00.080 So, anyway, have a great one.

01:06:04.400 Yes, thanks again, Paul.

01:06:06.440 Good to have you on.

01:06:08.160 All right.

01:06:08.720 The first of many.

01:06:09.860 Well, the second of many.

Based Camp - January 24, 2024

Paul VanderKlay： How to Strengthen Churches in The Age of The Internet

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