In this episode, Pastor Paul VanderKleid joins us to talk about how he became a pastor, how he got started in the media landscape, and why he thinks the church is going away fast. He also talks about the impact Jordan Peterson has had on his church and how he thinks about the future of the church.
00:00:00.000Traditions 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.
00:00:15.820This 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.
00:00:33.360And 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.
00:00:56.800Many of these churches are going away and they are going away fast.
00:01:07.040All 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.
00:01:18.020Cause 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.
00:01:26.380I like, I haven't watched all of them. You produce videos most frequently as we do, which may be why we are.
00:01:32.840Yeah. 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?
00:01:52.660How 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.
00:02:04.400And so, you know, finding really good Protestant theologians who talk competently is, is, is, is much rarer within the current media landscape.
00:02:12.540And 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.
00:02:37.860How are you doing that? And how are you thinking about that right now?
00:02:41.760That's a great question. I'm constantly thinking about it, actually.
00:02:46.420So I, I pastor a small dying church in Sacramento, California. Most churches this size have about a 60 year life cycle.
00:02:55.300And I would always have interests beyond just the local church.
00:03:01.860And so I was involved with denominational things and all of this stuff. I blogged for years, just, just sort of playing with it.
00:03:08.840And then Jordan Peterson arose and I thought, this is probably the most important thing for me to pay attention to in my pastoral career.
00:03:23.340And I looked around because, because, well, the reason was, I mean, you guys talk about this, basically this monolithic urban culture.
00:03:33.560What, 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.
00:03:42.160And everyone was going down that road. And what I saw happening behind Jordan Peterson were people coming back down that, those roads.
00:03:50.320And you hardly ever saw that before. And significant numbers were doing it, listening to Jordan Peterson.
00:03:55.840He was reopening the conversation in a way that I didn't understand. And so I wanted to understand it.
00:04:02.180And the way I understand things is by talking to people, but people in my church weren't going to watch Jordan Peterson.
00:04:08.880They 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.
00:04:18.060So 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.
00:04:26.220And 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.
00:04:40.820But so, so I was seeing this and I thought I'll make a YouTube video. What can, what, what, what can it hurt?
00:04:50.600There 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.
00:04:57.360And then something happened, which I didn't understand, which was this overwhelming response, emails coming to me.
00:05:07.000And because I'm a pastor, I wanted to talk to these people. I wanted to hear from them.
00:05:12.520I wanted their stories. And so then I would zoom them or Skype them and have a conversation.
00:05:19.520And of course that didn't end the relationship that began the relationship.
00:05:23.160And 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.
00:05:39.000And 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.
00:05:49.300And the next month, another dozen came and it just kept growing.
00:05:54.360So 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?
00:06:04.960But I couldn't shut it down because the conversations were too real and the people were too honest.
00:06:14.040And 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.
00:06:23.360And 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.
00:06:32.420So people, they want 20 bucks. They walk across the street, they knock on the church.
00:06:36.020And 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.
00:06:50.120And I thought, I've always wanted a church that could do that.
00:06:53.320And I'd be, I discovered, oh my goodness, that is exactly what we have happening here.
00:06:58.820So I began to post with permission, some of the conversations that I was having with people.
00:07:04.160And 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.
00:07:14.900And so the, the local meet, then other people wanted meetup groups because they can't get to Sacramento.
00:07:20.100So 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.
00:07:31.460And then the channel has just kept growing.
00:07:33.900It's grown slowly, which I'm grateful for.
00:07:36.020You 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.
00:07:43.300And I, I have, I have a wife, I have five children, I have a church, I didn't need my life destroyed.
00:07:50.600And I didn't want my church pushed out of my life by this.
00:07:55.680And so, you know, the church and I, the church has been, people who watch the channel have been very supportive of the church.
00:08:01.840The church probably still wouldn't be open if people didn't financially support the church.
00:08:05.820Where's the church, by the way, in case any of our listeners live in this area?
00:08:45.560Talk 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.
00:08:59.240People want to know and be known and to love and be loved.
00:09:05.700Online is an attentional economy that just basically saps our attention.
00:09:11.920And 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.
00:09:23.020But the vast majority of people are participating in this online space.
00:09:27.520You know, they get a little entertainment.
00:09:31.800But they don't get anything behind it.
00:09:33.660And, 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.
00:09:47.780And I'm thinking a government is creating a ministry of loneliness.
00:09:51.020People 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.
00:10:11.320And 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.
00:10:25.860And, you know, all the way back to Thoreau, people live lives of quiet desperation.
00:10:31.920And 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.
00:11:02.900And, 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.
00:11:15.140Now, they can mediate that to a degree with television and radio.
00:11:19.740I 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.
00:11:31.060Yeah, this is something I often think about.
00:11:33.120We 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.
00:11:38.960And 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?
00:11:44.680Where will kids learn to make friends?
00:11:45.820And 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.
00:11:52.360When 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.
00:12:03.720My 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.
00:12:15.620Yep, yep, yep, I wouldn't be surprised.
00:12:18.640And as a pastor, I – well, and this is only accelerated by YouTube, I regularly bump into people who are, if not hermits, almost so.
00:12:28.080And their main form of mediation is this internet because with radio and television, it's completely one-sided.
00:12:38.600The internet, maybe that fourth wall will be broken a little bit.
00:12:42.260So 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.
00:12:52.640But I wanted – I wanted people to be able to find each other.
00:12:59.620I wanted people to be able to make friends.
00:14:29.220And 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.
00:14:42.520One, 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.
00:14:51.180And then one woman who, Sevilla King, she had gone to art school.
00:14:58.320She had been doing little videos on piercing.
00:15:00.660One day she basically says, this little corner of the internet.
00:15:04.820And the funny thing about naming is that nobody knows quite what's going on.
00:15:09.800And then when a name comes in, it kind of gels it.
00:15:13.360Then the group sort of has a degree of identity.
00:15:16.180And so what happened was that, so we had a Discord server.
00:15:24.520I 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.
00:15:36.680But 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.
00:15:52.000I 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.
00:15:59.840I want to find out about their stories because I want to find out about their lives.
00:16:06.780I'd like to help them knit together community around them.
00:16:09.480So a bunch of people start YouTube channels, a whole bunch of different things, and eventually that sort of becomes a kind of community.
00:16:18.220But that's where you get this internet question because the internet affords a capacity for community, but it's different from real-life community.
00:16:33.700And figuring that out, I think we only are barely in the, barely at the frontier of this right now.
00:16:45.280So in a lot of ways, that's sort of what I'm exploring.
00:16:48.020And it's a mess, but it's kind of cool.
00:16:50.540Before 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.
00:16:56.780Because 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?
00:17:10.020That's, I have hours of video trying to figure this out.
00:17:15.900So part of what happened, this is going to be a little theoretical, so my apologies.
00:17:23.700Part of what happened, even before Descartes, I think Tom Holland is right about a lot of his ideas about Western history.
00:17:31.900At 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.
00:17:45.160And you can map these two realms in all sorts of different ways.
00:17:48.480Ian McGilchrist sort of has the master and the emissary.
00:17:51.440People commonly can, today, and this has only been true for a couple hundred years, talk about natural and supernatural.
00:17:57.700We 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.
00:18:16.700Plato gets into this in terms of the form.
00:18:18.380So you have this separation and, and the separation eventually became in the West, sort of a dualism and Descartes sort of nails it.
00:18:28.080And so, and he's trying to figure out what's the, and it's, it revolves around the idea of substance.
00:18:33.740So there's like, matter is a material substance.
00:18:36.640And then Descartes says, well, there's a spiritual substance.
00:18:39.180And 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.
00:18:50.860And 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.
00:19:07.320And 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.
00:19:33.220And 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.
00:19:48.480I 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.
00:20:04.000So 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.
00:20:18.620And when people, he sort of would break nihilism in people, and when they woke up from their nihilism, well, guess what?
00:20:37.420And then they want to build something.
00:20:39.620I 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.
00:20:57.940So 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.
00:21:13.680What'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.
00:21:26.060Like I'm looking at it more through the lens of the things that I understand.
00:21:29.840And 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.
00:21:41.140Like 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.
00:21:51.980I'm going to take a different answer here.
00:23:14.440Yeah, but Paul, do you really think that Jordan Peterson is first and foremost about faith?
00:23:20.380Jordan Peterson is first and foremost a university professor who cared about his students and a clinical psychologist who cared about his patients.
00:23:29.620You have to understand that about Jordan.
00:23:32.060Now, this second phase of him as sort of a getting into the political realm, that's not really his native environment.
00:23:40.900If you really scratch him, he cared about helping regular people make their life better.
00:23:49.960And 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.
00:24:01.240And, you know, it's, it's not an accident that this happened at the same time as sort of the Trump emergence.
00:24:11.360I mean, Peterson also, it's, it's really helpful to go to the live events and meet the people and talk to them.
00:24:18.060Now, 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.
00:24:26.440Now, 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.
00:24:40.600And the emergence of Jordan Peterson, in reality, we can sort of speculate on models, models have their place and they're super, super useful.
00:24:51.200But 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.
00:25:02.540And so I could probably write a list of a dozen reasons why Jordan Peterson changed as many lives as he did.
00:25:12.640And 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.
00:25:24.100Because there have been a lot of people who've done similar things to Jordan Peterson.
00:25:29.060A lot of people have sort of worked Jung in this space and had sort of little eruptions.
00:25:33.340And I talked to one Canadian academic early on that basically said, yeah, another year or two, and Jordan Peterson will pass out a favor.
00:25:39.140And he listed three or four guys who I could recognize, and it hasn't happened.
00:25:43.400And there's a lot of different reasons for that.
00:25:46.260So why do you think, so you talked about the people coming back to the faith.
00:25:50.700Why do you think people were leaving the faith?
00:25:53.300What 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?
00:26:02.700Why do you think it was working so effectively compared with historic conditions?
00:26:07.940Well, 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.
00:26:16.240So I think in my experience for a lot of people, I think there are a lot of factors to this.
00:26:24.040Number one, people are formed by, their expectations are formed by technology.
00:26:28.660And we now are accustomed to certain kinds of technology that works so reliably, we have a sense of, well, that's what truth is.
00:26:41.860And the scientific revolution and really the technological revolution, the industrial revolution really created those expectations for us.
00:26:49.340So therefore, when, so one common story of why people leave a particular religious tradition is because they had a bad experience, something bad happened.
00:27:00.820And 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.
00:27:13.140Now, ask almost any pastor if that is true, and the pastor will say no.
00:27:18.240Even ask almost any of those people if they believe that, they will say no.
00:27:22.200But when that bad thing happens, at a very deep level in their life, a plausibility structure begins to break free.
00:27:29.940And 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.
00:27:44.420And 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.
00:27:55.640But those people tend to be highlighted in all of the media that the urban monoculture really uses for its, for proselytizing.
00:28:06.780And I've known this because, so my grandfather pastored churches, mostly of Dutch immigrants and Dutch farmers.
00:28:15.300My father pastored a church of African-Americans just outside of New York City.
00:28:20.940And 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.
00:28:28.500Their roots are in the South, so they've got a deep amount of Christianity built in them.
00:29:24.360It's really interesting that you point this out, because this is something that we've noticed as well.
00:29:28.920This 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.
00:29:37.360It's so out of touch with the other groups, especially the groups that they purport to protect or help.
00:29:44.620One 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.
00:29:52.500And 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.
00:30:04.880Their truce networks, which is very different from the black community, because I think you're absolutely right about the American black community.
00:30:10.940Within the Hispanic community, their truce networks are family-based, where they have large networks of intermarried families, and that's how they transmit information.
00:30:22.640And 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.
00:30:34.460You're not seeing this within the traditional Hispanic community.
00:30:40.100But 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.
00:30:49.880Like, they call him a white boy for having friends who are not family members.
00:30:54.160And it's like, that's how, like, intense these family networks are.
00:30:58.260And 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.
00:31:05.440These communities are not talking to each other, even in the slightest way anymore.
00:31:13.000And we do not realize how different, different American populations are.
00:31:24.660And 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.
00:31:35.600And he basically had the frontier thesis in terms of American church.
00:31:40.580So 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.
00:31:49.300And a big part of the American Revolution is people wanted that land, and they could sort of push out the Indians.
00:31:54.900And so, and so America has always been an amalgamation of different tribes within it.
00:32:02.260And more recently, more American history books have, have looked at that.
00:32:07.220But 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.
00:32:16.340What 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.
00:32:26.140And so it's a very open space where things can happen.
00:32:29.080And 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.
00:32:39.360Well, 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.
00:32:59.780You 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.
00:33:25.520And 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.
00:33:54.080So 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.
00:34:13.420And so that has really broken apart a lot of traditional white churches.
00:34:21.700But, 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.
00:34:29.600Because, I mean, again, all of these systems are far too complex for any of us to actually be able to accurately track.
00:35:05.420And 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.
00:35:11.080But if you live there, it's like, yeah, you know, culture is real.
00:35:14.380And 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.
00:35:37.900And right now, my denomination is just sort of being completely pulled apart and assimilated in some of the larger things in our culture.
00:36:11.260I want to pull on, though, what you've said.
00:36:14.180And 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.
00:36:22.820I mean, part of me, I want to push on that and understand why you believe that.
00:36:27.980Because you've reached an amazing number of people.
00:37:38.040As a pastor, I'm used to one-to-many relationships.
00:37:40.500But 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.
00:37:53.860And 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.
00:38:01.780Or, 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.
00:38:09.380I want to be friends with Pastor Paul.
00:38:21.260And so it's sort of the pace at which things grow impacts what exactly you're going to have grow.
00:38:32.600And 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.
00:38:45.520One 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.
00:38:54.080And 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.
00:39:03.000Then there's a whole group of people who found me within the first month that are right there at the second level.
00:39:09.340And now there's always a few anomalous people who sort of shoot up beyond themselves, but the whole community sort of grows together.
00:39:17.820And there are very subtle ways in which these lieutenants are gatekeepers.
00:39:22.440And 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.
00:39:34.520This is a statement that we agree with.
00:39:36.620No, we, we, we're hard pressed to find a lot that we agree with.
00:39:42.500What we have is sort of a style of relationship.
00:39:48.840Now, 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.
00:40:02.960I 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.
00:40:11.620Because if you think people get mad at you for things you do online, try doing it in a real life church.
00:40:55.600A leader is someone who says yes and no.
00:40:57.660Now 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.
00:41:13.980There'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.
00:41:26.360And 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.
00:41:34.520And 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.
00:41:44.020And they don't even know what their expectations are.
00:41:46.800But you begin to discover them when certain expectations don't get met or fulfilled.
00:41:53.620And then people get a little bit upset because I thought Paul was going to do this.
00:41:59.280And the thing you also have to realize is that, you know, let's the AA people say, well, expectations are preconceived resentments.
00:42:30.360So about four years ago before COVID, when this thing sort of started taking on steam, people wanted me to found a 501c3.
00:42:39.660And to develop a board of directors and to basically institutionalize this thing.
00:42:48.260And so Paul Vanderclay Inc. or This Little Corner Inc. or Estuary Inc. something like this.
00:42:53.000And I said, no, things are way too early.
00:42:56.440We don't even know what we're doing here.
00:42:58.960And one of the things, so before I did any of this, I was involved in church planting.
00:43:03.120And 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.
00:43:14.060And 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.
00:43:23.280Because with the pace of change right now in our culture, you'll almost always structure badly.
00:43:31.300And it will hurt the sort of the organic growth of the thing.
00:43:35.940So I don't, you know, so people wanted me to start an organization.
00:43:40.580And then people, you know, and then suddenly there'll be guidelines and boundary rules.
00:43:45.440And I said, first of all, I said, I don't have time to manage that.
00:43:48.840Second of all, I know myself well enough to know I'm not a great manager of those kinds of things.
00:44:35.280I imagine this is what people actually want.
00:44:37.300I 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.
00:44:43.120One 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.
00:44:50.620If 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?
00:45:01.780What are the biggest threats to our children?
00:45:12.700Whenever I'm asked for parenting advice, I say this.
00:45:18.800Be who you want your children to become.
00:45:36.720We really don't know ourselves very well.
00:45:39.860My children know me in a way that I don't know myself.
00:45:44.260My wife knows me in ways I don't know myself.
00:45:46.960My church people know me in ways I don't know myself.
00:45:49.300I have a certain degree of delusion about myself that is really difficult to cure.
00:45:55.340So 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.
00:46:11.500And 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.
00:46:41.940And 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.
00:47:00.140Many of these churches are going away, and they are going away fast.
00:47:09.200Now, 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.
00:47:26.940And that's really hard for the church.
00:47:30.300Now, part of what's been interesting in this whole thing is that a lot of people have grown interested in orthodoxy and Catholicism.
00:47:38.500And I think there are real reasons for people's desire for these very sacramental, very ancient churches with certain constructions.
00:47:49.380And I think that's because modernity, as we've experienced it for the last 500 years, especially the last 200 years, is receding quickly.
00:47:56.900And so people are looking for something old, something reliable, something structured, and something they can get their hands on, like a sacrament.
00:48:05.640I 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.
00:48:17.400Because the people themselves coming in, they don't have any idea.
00:48:21.040And so for this reason, I mean, I've seen it in my own denomination.
00:48:27.080Like 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.
00:48:39.980And I think the Christian Reformed Church is probably in the top 10% of denominations that succeeded until the 1980s.
00:48:50.340I mean, the Christian Reformed Church had a thick, thick culture.
00:48:58.460The urban monoculture has had its way with it.
00:49:01.820And 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.
00:49:09.980The other side of churches has been like, you know, double down on having a bunker mentality.
00:49:16.640I don't have a lot of confidence in that path either.
00:49:21.120Because it's, you know, Rene Girard has this mimetic rivalry thing.
00:49:25.780If 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.
00:49:35.860So in other words, what you need to actually create a sustainable culture is something that has a different root from the opposition.
00:49:46.640It's going, and for that reason, people are looking for very old things.
00:49:49.720I think that's part of the reason people are so interested today in evolutionary psychology.
00:49:54.220Because it's the new natural law, as one of my friends just recently said.
00:50:36.120And 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.
00:50:46.100And 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.
00:51:01.820When you loosen up on all the stories, you loosen up on all the morality.
00:51:06.640And 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?
00:51:21.360And that might be an absurd thing to try to create.
00:51:23.900But 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.
00:51:29.500But I think it's going to be whoever builds that successfully is going to be the person who wins.
00:51:35.040So 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.
00:51:58.860When 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?
00:52:14.060What do we say no to that will finally achieve what in terms of a Darwinian process?
00:52:20.860Nobody can figure that out because there are far too many elements.
00:52:27.280And this is part of the reason, again, to answer the Jordan Peterson question, why are people now interested in religion?
00:52:32.940Ironically, it's because of Darwinism, that people have begun to – and I don't think they know this intellectually yet.
00:52:42.560They 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.
00:52:55.040And you know what? There is nothing that we have like religion for providing that data.
00:53:03.820And so the winners in religious competition are probably the best place to start to think about how should we live in the future.
00:53:15.180I mean, that's at the heart of – and Jordan didn't sort of say it directly that way, but that's what's happening.
00:53:21.800And so when I saw your channel, I thought, oh, these people get it.
00:53:26.840And part of why you two are so fun – and this is why I love the Estuary Project.
00:53:30.680So 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.
00:53:57.580Ironically, churches are places, potentially, some churches perhaps, where you can go and have an honest conversation.
00:54:03.560And so that's what I want for churches.
00:54:06.240I 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.
00:54:18.120And that, again, I think – back to this leadership thing, that involves more modeling.
00:54:24.720You know, we've had people that say, we need to list the rules of this.
00:54:28.320Like, well, usually by the time you have to list rules, something's already broken.
00:54:32.680So the longer you can put off listing rules, the more modeling you can do, probably the further you'll get along.
00:54:52.580And 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.
00:55:04.760Come at 9 a.m. to the estuary meeting.
01:00:03.980When 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.
01:00:12.560They 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.
01:00:22.620Whereas the media elite never had that connection to those flows of information.
01:00:27.920And 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.
01:02:48.520Because, 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.
01:03:01.420I mean, there's a reason our channels have a crossover.
01:03:05.740Yeah, because we didn't have any initial audience crossover.
01:03:08.800Our 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.
01:03:15.480And 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.
01:03:36.640And 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.
01:03:46.020That algorithm is going to look at that and they're going to serve you up a video from me.
01:03:52.060And, you know, 50, 70 percent, you might be interested because the algorithm knows all the details.
01:03:58.760I put out over 2,000 videos and most of them are long.
01:04:02.740And so it's really hard to get a sense of, you know, what you'd be interested in.
01:04:16.020Yeah, 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.
01:04:27.880And 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.
01:04:36.680And one of these days, I'm sure, you know, I'll say, okay, Jordan, it's time.
01:04:40.860And then Jordan Peterson and I'll do a conversation and that one will go crazy.
01:04:44.460But the most, the people, the most important people in your life are not the ones on the screens.
01:04:51.280They're the ones you share your home with and they're your children and they're your parents.
01:04:55.680Those are the most important people in your life.
01:04:57.720And actually, that's what your channel is about.
01:05:18.260But like, actually, you know, Jordan and Tammy, they have a, they have a, I believe those two have quite a fine relationship.
01:05:23.760And 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.
01:05:30.500And you are modeling, you are modeling something in a relationship that I think is profoundly important.
01:05:38.220And what's interesting about you two, I mean, Jordan and Tammy are about my age.