Chase Davis, host of Full Proof Theology, joins me to talk about his recent article, "Why Christians Have No Place in American Culture." He argues that Christians have always had a role to play in American culture, and that they should be more assertive in public life.
00:00:57.140These are all the doctrines that the left seems to pull out of Christianity.
00:01:01.740And now, in this moment where we seem to be shifting back a little bit,
00:01:06.700where people are recognizing that actually Christianity does have an important role to play
00:01:11.420in the culture, that authority is a natural part of Christianity,
00:01:16.160that hierarchies are a natural part of the world that God created,
00:01:20.180and that it's okay to recognize that these things have a role in public life.
00:01:24.140All of a sudden, we're hearing that this is somehow heresy, that this is all made up,
00:01:29.640that people who are trying to put Nietzsche into your gospel or something ridiculous like that.
00:01:35.460And recently, Chase Davis did a great article on The Blaze addressing this issue.
00:01:41.780He's a pastor and he's the host of Full Proof Theology, which I've been a guest on a few times.
00:01:46.720It's a great podcast. I encourage you to check it out.
00:01:49.640And he's going to join me today to kind of talk about what the case he put forward in that article.
00:01:54.480So, Chase, thank you so much for coming on, man.
00:01:56.600Hey, glad to be here, man. Thanks for having me.
00:01:58.840Absolutely. So let's just start from the beginning.
00:02:01.760You know, we hear very often that the only role that Christians can play is basically the whipping dog of the left, right?
00:02:10.720That they don't like Christianity. They hate Christianity. It's evil and demonic and they want to destroy it.
00:02:17.420But also, it's really important that you listen to it when they rephrase all of its teachings to tell you to be subservient to them.
00:02:25.020So I guess we could start at the beginning.
00:02:28.320Why did this idea, the way that this is framed for Christians, where did this come about?
00:02:35.680Why has this become so popular? And often it is even regurgitated in many pulpits across the United States.
00:02:42.600Yeah, I mean, it's a big question. We could go back a long time.
00:02:45.860I mean, it's been kind of a prevailing theme in Christian preaching for the last century, at least, in pulpits and seminaries and books.
00:02:54.980This idea that somehow Christians having power is not good or we shouldn't be just confident in our Christianity and asserting our will in politics and culture as Christians forthrightly.
00:03:09.200You know, I tend to go more philosophical in terms of like where it came about, whether it's the Enlightenment or Romanticism.
00:03:16.200But in the preaching going back into the 18th century, mainly, you see a lot of the rise of feminism in the church.
00:03:23.160You see a lot of the church kind of like getting really distracted.
00:03:28.080One example, it becomes more pragmatic. Church becomes more about pragmatism.
00:03:32.500So you could talk about revivalism with Charles Finney up in the Northeast and how a lot of the emphasis of Christian preaching and a lot of the emphasis of Christianity was a motive.
00:03:42.880Mainly, it was mainly to be kind of a spiritual antidepressant to give you good feelings about your suffering.
00:03:52.160And so it was in a large way, it was like a cope, a giant cope.
00:03:56.220And people have been picking up on this for a while.
00:03:58.880One of the most insightful people that's picked up on it, obviously, is Christians.
00:04:02.740There's places we can't go with him at all.
00:04:04.820But Nietzsche was criticizing this when he saw it in Germany and, you know, German liberalism and all that kind of stuff.
00:04:10.160And so he was critiquing Christianity from this angle, saying, what do Christians have to offer?
00:04:14.800Now, if we go back further than that, if we go back earlier than the 18th century ago, centuries prior, we see Christians are not ashamed of having political power, of operating prudentially in governance and culture, being accommodating and tolerant of various, whether it's sex or even other religions in different nations and times and places, depending on the context.
00:04:35.460And so really what that's turned into today, though, is a version of Christianity where most of it is very coded towards a feminist framework for how we view life.
00:04:47.500So it's very womanly. A lot of the sermons are very womanly.
00:04:50.980In fact, it was just funny. I was watching a silly like Instagram reel comparing guys and girls at the gym this morning and guys, when they go to the gym, they're typically like, do better.
00:05:00.660Your family's going to die. You know, you've got to be strong.
00:05:03.160You've got to defeat your enemies. And girls that go to the gym, they're trying to like comfort themselves and like, you're enough and you're enough.
00:05:09.360And this is what you see in a lot of Christian literature is it's very feminine coded.
00:05:12.400It's very much like you're enough. It's OK.
00:05:15.460Like it's a very much like an antidepressant, like I already said.
00:05:18.620And I think there needs to be a kind of a recapture of the spirit.
00:05:21.540That's not new. It's not a new marketing ploy.
00:05:23.500But going back to Christians and how they preached and taught and understood their faith for centuries before kind of this weird deformation of Christian teaching and preaching was very much assertive.
00:05:35.300It was very much confrontational. You're a sinner. You're going to go to hell.
00:05:39.240You need to aspire to righteousness and holiness and repent of your sins.
00:05:43.360These are just clear things that nobody was ashamed.
00:05:45.960Nobody called that like fundamentalism. That's scary.
00:05:48.000It was just like normal preaching. And so there needs to be kind of a resurgence of that.
00:05:52.420And so, like I said, you go philosophical, you go just like normal cultural stuff now where a lot of like even Christian publishers are just promoting books that are very watered down Christianity on pietism and kind of this other worldliness.
00:06:06.980This how this theory that this world is not our home.
00:06:10.280We don't really have any stake here. We don't need to make the world a better place.
00:06:13.540Let go and let God. All of these different aberrations of our faith have been really.
00:06:18.000really bad. They've been really bad for helping Christians understand the times we live in and how to engage them wisely.
00:06:24.500Yeah, there's always this confusion because, of course, you know, the Bible itself is written in a time in which Christianity is not dominant because obviously it's just starting.
00:06:34.220The Christian revolution would eventually conquer Rome, but at the time it was a religion of minorities.
00:06:40.920It was persecuted, these things. And so that is the focus of the Bible.
00:06:44.540And you even have early church fathers after Christianity conquers the Roman Empire, like Augustine, who are writing about the city of God in a way that is understanding that a falling Roman Empire doesn't mean that the kingdom of Christ is coming to an end, that these are not necessarily the same thing.
00:07:03.320But oftentimes, because these are the examples that are brought early on, people act as if Christianity never had this period of world dominance.
00:07:13.320When we talk about the West, people say the West, Western countries, what they're talking about is Christendom.
00:07:19.320What they mean is the countries that were united through through Christian faith, often with an influence of European heritage, but predominantly those that were united through Christian faith.
00:07:32.360And this didn't just happen because Christians were weak, because they did nothing but suffer, because they were quiet in the closet and simply using Christianity as some kind of way to cope with a difficult world.
00:07:46.100You know, the Christianity of Charles Martel or Constantine is not a weak Christianity, and it's very confusing because even modern critics, you brought up Nietzsche, and there are many descendants of Nietzscheans calling themselves pagan at this point.
00:08:04.380But they'll say, oh, well, Christianity is the issue. That's why we got wokeness. That's why we're in this situation that we're in. And the answer is, well, no, because everything you love about the West, quote unquote, is tied to its Christian heritage.
00:08:19.440And so there must be something about Christianity that is able to invigorate a society, to point it towards the good, to create a robust and natural hierarchy that leads us toward the things of both God and things that create a well-ordered society that has to exist or wouldn't have dominated as much as it did throughout the centuries.
00:08:40.640And so I just don't know if you want to touch on that a little bit. Where did we lose this idea that this religion and culture that dominated the world and mastered so much of the known world for well over a century was always this religion that was only based on losing at any given time?
00:09:01.120Yeah, there's lots of threads you could point to. I mean, I know some have pointed to kind of the end of World War Two and whatever political arrangements were were birthed out of that or even liberalism going back to, you know, the the religious wars in Europe and trying to settle peace there between different factions within Protestantism.
00:09:19.540But I really do think it was it was mainly a 20th century phenomenon where the soil was already laid in universities to take advantage of Christianity.
00:09:29.000Christianity is what gave birth to the United States, like you said, Christendom in the West.
00:09:35.140And so when we had a society that was open in a sense, open meaning there's a dominant culture, but there's going to be carve outs and exceptions for various factions or whatever it might be.
00:09:47.060That that that that was somewhat maintainable. And then that was taken advantage of by various factions, particularly liberals who wanted to recreate the world and wanted to recreate the government, culture, arts, all that kind of stuff.
00:10:03.480And so it really came full bloom in my mind in the 60s, where you have kind of this feminist framework.
00:10:09.240You have the rise even back then, it's kind of proto critical race theory, all that kind of stuff.
00:10:15.080But in the 60s, with the cultural revolution that's been unfolding since for the last 60 years, there's been an eagerness for these radicals in the universities to get in there and begin to tinker with the faith.
00:10:29.140And you see this in seminaries, too. You see this in a fuller seminary is a great example.
00:10:33.280Fuller seminary started out as a good, solid biblical seminary, and then it was taken over by radicals.
00:10:38.640You've seen it most recently in the last week, as has been made clear that it's been going on for a while at a place like Wheaton, what used to be called the Harvard of evangelicalism.
00:10:48.380And so what these radicals will do is they'll get into power and institutions and they'll hollow it out.
00:10:53.000And I know you've talked about this and they'll just use the trappings of Christianity to say this is what you should believe as a Christian.
00:10:59.620And you should always, you know, love your neighbor doesn't mean what the Bible means.
00:11:04.200We're not going to tell you that. We're just going to say it means take this medicine or it means approve of this marriage or it means this.
00:11:12.020That's what love means. And so in my mind, I don't know that it was so much like going back to the 18th, 17th century that it was so prevalent.
00:11:20.540There were definitely signs of it with revivalism, but particularly in the 60s and with these radicals taking over various Christian institutions, including seminaries and then book publishing as well.
00:11:31.480They're starting to warp the faith into a doormat religion, which is, and that's what I try to say.
00:11:38.040It is a fair critique if you look at the broad landscape of evangelicalism at large, but it's not representative of our faith and it doesn't need to be this way.
00:11:45.600And so what we're trying to do is encourage pastors, Christians say, look, what you've been told, I know it has a lot of like sentimentality to you when you read someone like David Platt and his book Radical.
00:11:56.560And you think the best thing to do is just kind of like give up everything because making money is bad and going to the nations is good and missionaries are good, but there is no sense of will and agency in a lot of these teachings.
00:12:09.080In fact, I think it was the late Tim Keller who advocated that the best thing you could do with power is to give it away.
00:12:14.240And all this kind of weird relationship with Christianity and power has been undergoing, it's been going on since the 60s at least, but it's been getting a serious reevaluation since 2020 in my mind.
00:12:29.160I know there were guys reevaluating it before then and early to that kind of reevaluation.
00:12:33.140But since 2020, all of a sudden you've seen on what they call the Christian right, a kind of like, wow, this is like, this is really bad.
00:12:41.420This is not, we're going to get run over.
00:12:43.000We're going to continue to get run over.
00:12:44.320And it kind of maps on, I mean, I know you've talked about it with kind of the neocon movement and that kind of thing.
00:12:49.640But it's also happening in the pastor and in the pulpit and even in the churches where they're dominated by the kind of the sentimentality, this coexist Christianity, this keep your faith in your home and in your, in your church.
00:13:02.340It shouldn't come into the public square.
00:13:03.720You see politicians taught this way where they're afraid that somebody is going to accuse them of bringing Christianity into politics.
00:13:08.920And they sheepishly go, no, I would never do that.
00:13:11.080You know, I got to, I got to check it.
00:13:12.540And, you know, we, we, we're about liberalism here.
00:13:15.100And so you see all this stuff going on, but I think in the last four years, this seems to me to be a great deal of interest, not just from Christians, but from others.
00:13:22.760Like you mentioned the Nietzscheans or whoever, also on the left, liberals who are fed up with tyranny and government overreach.
00:13:29.360They're very interested in like, so you, you think Christianity has something to say about this?
00:13:33.620I think we have a rich faith that we have a wonderful, we have the word of God and we can understand it and we can divide it and see what to do in these types of situations.
00:13:42.600And so I think there's a great opportunity today to reach people.
00:13:45.240And that's why I like to write on this stuff.
00:14:21.780It's about acceptance and all situations for everyone.
00:14:25.480And this dovetailed a lot with the civil rights movements and the different, you know, the different waves of that that came.
00:14:31.840Each excessive one straining against the Christian message more and more, but still calling on it on a regular basis.
00:14:37.800I think that's why Martin Luther King's pastorship is played down so much now.
00:14:43.940Unless it's time to start beating people over the head with the Christian message, which he didn't actually believe.
00:14:50.360He didn't believe in the deity of Christ, along with many other personal moral problems with Martin Luther King Jr.
00:14:57.920But you can kind of see how the shell game is played.
00:15:00.820He's a doctor when most of the time when we're trying to secularize this message.
00:15:05.380But he becomes a reverend when it's time to kind of concern troll Christians, try to pull this moral blackmail on them.
00:15:13.020Another thing that happened simultaneously with this shift, I noticed, and this is when I grew up.
00:15:18.120So this was very much in the forefront of my mind was this idea of the moral majority and the satanic panic and the religious right.
00:15:26.160And these are all the things that are censorious and hold our society down.
00:15:30.760And these are the people who are intolerant and they're keeping us from achieving our true liberal utopia.
00:15:37.220And it's a very awkward relic because in a way this manifestation of Christian power politically was actually the weakest form of Christian Christianity to ever enter in the public square.
00:15:51.500It's made up by like MTV and VH1, whatever, and they're like documentaries as this incredible force that was stifling all of free speech.
00:16:00.380But really, it was the last gasp of public Christian sentiment.
00:16:05.940It was it was is in many ways a lot of scared grandmas recognizing that their children may not their grandchildren may not be raised with the values that they recognize as being important.
00:16:16.340And so the adjustment of this media portrayal of the Christian right was for many pastors to be really embarrassed of the idea of public Christianity.
00:17:01.060And this was really the attitude that has been carried all the way up till just a few years ago in the Christian community that, you know, Christian culture.
00:17:09.820Maybe we make these little kind of ghettoized Christian films or books.
00:17:13.580And every once in a while, if a Christian artist breaks through into the mainstream, that's really exciting.
00:17:17.960But the idea that Christian culture would be the dominant culture, that it would be the ideas that drive the values and the moral vision of our united culture forward really was something that Christians were embarrassed about.
00:17:33.280It's not just that they couldn't obtain it.
00:17:35.420It's that they were taught that they shouldn't want to obtain it.
00:17:45.580They're embarrassed by Bible Belt Christianity.
00:17:47.840A lot of people have said, like, good riddance to Bible Belt Christianity.
00:17:51.100They view it as backwards, as legalistic, as constraining.
00:17:55.180And that's another thing you'll notice typically with people who are against power, will, agency within the Christian community and pastors encouraging other men to have to just use their agency and will to go out and start a new business, find a wife, have children, interact in the public square, engage politically.
00:18:12.280They very much hate that Christian culture.
00:18:14.480What's interesting to me, Oren, is back when the Puritans, Protestants, who were asserting their will and who had kind of cultural hegemony at the time, they also had the problem of nominalism in the Anglican church.
00:18:27.100And they didn't go like, well, I guess we should burn it all down.
00:19:02.520They called their nations to repentance.
00:19:04.480So we just live in very confused times.
00:19:06.200And I think a lot of it comes from kind of a managerial approach to Christianity.
00:19:10.340Like I said, in the latter half of the 20th century, and you highlighted it with the churches in this seeker sensitive approach where the main thing we got to be about is a market share and whatever market share we can retain.
00:19:21.720You've heard people like Tim Keller talk about this, Rick Warren talk about this, a lot of famous pastors who get elevated seem to be saying the same thing, that in order to either reach the next generation, we've got to approve of this, or in order to reach the next generation, we've got to make sure that we don't speak too harshly against this.
00:19:40.360And so what they end up doing is like taking down crosses and churches, they end up hiding their denominational name and their church name.
00:19:48.080And so they sense a great deal of embarrassment, not just because culture is out there telling them, but they do genuinely want to reach the lost.
00:19:56.020But they've adapted kind of a seeker sensitive business model to church, where they've got people who are deeply confused coming to their church.
00:20:03.540And instead of just telling them the truth from God's word, they want them to kind of stay and hang out.
00:20:08.580And maybe they'll like, you know, bump into Jesus one day and, you know, they'll find Christianity better.
00:20:13.720And I'm like, yeah, man, like, just go for it.
00:20:16.020You have, if you're a pastor specifically, like you have nothing to fear, except for God himself who judges the living and the dead.
00:20:23.580And so you should be bold, you should be courageous, and you should be preaching the full counsel of the word of God and the gospel.
00:20:29.680And so I think that for a lot of pastors, they adopted this subconsciously.
00:20:38.500And you kind of see where he ends up marching in a BLM rally with a mask on.
00:20:42.580And so like while all the way claiming that he's third way, which is wild to me that he can't see the inconsistency.
00:20:49.320But that's the predominant mood for a lot of evangelicals where it has been.
00:20:53.380And like you highlighted, and when 2020 hit and people realized how dire the situation is, people were willing to go, maybe I've been lied to.
00:21:01.780Maybe like what I was taught Christianity is all about in terms of my marriage, my home, my work, and our political establishment and culture.
00:21:09.640What if like, what if pagan cultural, what if cultural paganism is worse than cultural Christianity?
00:21:15.380And so how might we rediscover what it looks like to advocate for the things of God publicly to when we pray, your will be done, your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
00:21:26.800What would that actually look like in practice rather than just praying it in our hearts and our homes and our churches?
00:21:31.320What would it look like to engage in the public square in a different way than simply this subservient, woe is me, I'm so scared, please don't hurt me.
00:21:39.220And then we go to church and your message is like, I know you're hurt.
00:21:41.500The other thing I want to highlight, Orin, is that for a lot of Christians, they've been taught wrongly about persecution to where they view persecution as kind of the end all be all of the Christian faith.
00:21:51.400Like we're, we're designed to be persecuted.
00:21:53.620And it goes back to what you highlighted at the beginning of the episode, that somehow persecution is inherently like a virtue.
00:21:59.740And of course we can look to Tertullian and other church fathers, and we can look to church history, that martyrdom and Christianity is typically honored and revered.
00:22:07.840And we celebrate these men who are courageous and died for our faith, but we don't make that out to be somehow like the goal of the Christian faith.
00:22:15.240The goal of the Christian faith is not persecution.
00:22:19.220I, you know, and unfortunately many Christians have this backwards when, when Christ and the apostles, when God's word speaks to persecution, it's meant to be comforting to those who are being persecuted, but not act as if persecution is good in and of itself.
00:22:33.840God can use it for his glory and he does, but persecution is not some like goal of Christianity.
00:22:39.300I think that's a fallacy that many Christians have adopted.
00:22:42.380Get unlimited grocery delivery with PCX Press Pass.
00:22:57.300Yeah, remind me to come back to that, because there's a lot I wanted to talk about in what you just said there, and that's just one of the many things.
00:23:03.700So to rewind just before that point, you highlighted the fact that many people who are against cultural Christianity also then have this kind of very wishy-washy, I mean, frankly, weak approach to their own delivery once people are in the door.
00:23:22.260And it's very strange because, as you say, they think, well, if you hang out enough in a church, then maybe you'll just kind of catch God, right?
00:23:29.540But they don't think that about culture.
00:23:31.940Like, everyone recognizes that if you're at this point, that if your child sits through 12, 13 years of public school education in which it gets a very particular delivery of woke doctrine, anti-white, anti-Christian stuff, all the stuff that gets pushed around in public schools today.
00:23:49.380By the way, Christopher Rufo is over on Twitter just posting all the horrific stuff that Department of Education funds.
00:23:57.380I'll definitely be doing an episode on that soon.
00:23:59.620But, you know, we all recognize that marinating in this indoctrination for 12 or 13 years fundamentally changes the outlook of a child, shapes their worldview.
00:24:10.540This is why the left has fought for this control for so long, why they've worked to push Christianity out of the public square.
00:24:18.800And then you have these guys who turn around and say, OK, but yeah, cultural Christianity just doesn't matter.
00:24:24.940OK, so why does why does 14, 13, 14 years of public school education shape somebody in one direction?
00:24:31.100But it can't shape you towards Christianity.
00:24:33.720Like I get the problem in theory of cultural Christianity.
00:24:37.280You have a lot of people who, you know, go through the motions and say they're Christian when they're not because it's just socially advantageous.
00:24:44.280I understand that there's some level of problem with that.
00:24:49.400However, there's a much bigger problem in people who would rather mouth the pronouncements of wokeness and be steeped in the values of wokeness.
00:24:58.320It is important and critical for people to come to a saving knowledge of Christ.
00:25:03.320But even living, even mimicking Christian principles and family structures and values has a positive effect on individuals, families and societies before they achieve that full communion with Christ.
00:25:18.160Other than cowardice, I cannot find an explanation for this dichotomy between the idea that cultural Christianity doesn't do anything positive, but cultural leftism or wokeism or progressivism indoctrinates people deeply into its own faith.
00:25:42.080Yeah, and I think it comes back to that framework of liberalism, the ideals of liberalism when it comes to kind of the neutral public square and the role of Christianity in that kind of environment.
00:25:52.280And a lot of these pastors have just adopted kind of this vision of Christianity as perpetual loserdom, where, you know, the only good thing you can do, like you'll hear pastors encourage people to go into the public schools and Christian children into the public school to be missionaries.
00:26:07.620And they're leading children to the slaughter, sheep to the slaughter, these innocent children, to go into the public schools thinking your six-year-old is going to go evangelize this radical that got trained at a public university in wokeness and DEI.
00:26:32.020And we could say the same thing about a lot of media, even a lot of the, I enjoy watching movies.
00:26:36.120Most of them have zero mention of God.
00:26:38.340It's a completely materialist framework.
00:26:40.260And when you adopt that, you start adopting the language and the framework of that cultural viewpoint.
00:26:44.920And you think you're going to, you know, bathe yourself in all these movies, literature, and music, and all of a sudden show up on Sunday one day a week.
00:26:53.480And that's going to be sufficient for you to not adopt that stuff.
00:27:29.340It's such a deformation of our faith that I think there is a worship going on of some kind of liberalism, liberal ideal, of kind of this free market of ideas.
00:27:40.700And we can't assert ourselves too strong.
00:27:42.740You see this even the way they write articles.
00:27:44.820They typically view everyone as like a good faith conversation.
00:27:48.940And they don't have a framework for even having enemies.
00:27:52.280They'll talk about enemies, but all of our enemies are spiritual powers.
00:27:55.700That are not material, don't manifest themselves materially.
00:28:00.280And so they don't even have a framework to engage reality.
00:28:02.960There are people out here who want to stamp out Christianity.
00:28:06.220There are people in America who want all Christians to go away, want Christianity to go away, and want to cause harm.
00:28:39.780That is not the vision that God has for humanity and for people to have human flourishing, as it's often said.
00:28:46.420That's not the vision that God gives us in his word for what he designed the world to be.
00:28:52.180Yeah, which, you know, to go back to your earlier point there about persecution, there, as you said, there is this idea that the persecuted Christian is the only Christian.
00:29:03.820That that's the only true Christianity that those who are seeking to wield power for the good of their family or community are denying the true Christian path of martyrdom, these kind of things.
00:29:17.440And it's interesting because you've already pointed out this is a time in Christianity, right?
00:29:23.240Like this is a time where and martyrdom has come in many forms across many different cultures and time frames.
00:29:30.500But the fact that this is what is happening again was, as we already acknowledged, this was, you know, Christianity is an underground religion.
00:29:38.300It is a persecuted religion in the Bible.
00:29:40.380This then becomes the only identity that the Christian can have.
00:29:44.120And I've noticed that this is a larger problem, especially when it comes to masculinity in Christianity.
00:29:49.340Because, of course, Christ had many different teachings and actions that help us to understand how we should behave, that we can model ourselves after.
00:29:59.780But the Bible does not provide Christ in all of these situations, right?
00:30:23.720I have not seen faith like this, you know, in all of the Jewish people.
00:30:28.160Like he sees something deeply respectable in the centurion.
00:30:31.560He tells the rich man to go sell him everything.
00:30:33.760He doesn't tell the centurion to stop fighting.
00:30:35.920You know, that's always been a distinction that mattered to me.
00:30:39.060And so it's clear for me that Jesus understands the, you know, need for masculine protection, fathers, protections of nations, duties, hierarchies, authority.
00:30:55.000He wields these things in different opportunities.
00:30:57.200But he's not always directly one-to-one demonstrating these things throughout his life because those just weren't roles that he filled while he was here doing his earthly ministry.
00:31:08.640You know, he didn't quite get around to them.
00:31:10.820But it does lead me, it does feel like it leads a lot of people into this weird scenario where they're like, well, because Jesus wasn't a soldier, being a soldier is wrong.
00:31:22.100Because Jesus wasn't a father, there is no valuable biological masculinity that Christians can manifest.
00:31:29.640You know, because, you know, Jesus didn't do these direct things or because, for instance, the Christians of the New Testament weren't in charge politically, then that's the only mode in which Christians can exist in.
00:31:44.880Just because it wasn't directly depicted in the Bible, therefore, there's no application of Christianity that we can understand in these moments that aren't depicted in the Bible.
00:31:54.020And I've just always found that weird because pastors have no problem stretching and contorting pretty much every verse or two in the Bible into larger lessons in the modern day.
00:32:04.060But for some reason, we can't just take the lessons that Christ taught us about right order, hierarchy, and masculinity and take them into these scenarios where we have political power or we are soldiers or we are fathers.
00:32:18.380These things that aren't directly modeled by Christ, but are obviously spoken on and that he would have a correct way for us to do this if we pay attention to his teachings.
00:32:29.160Yeah, you see this often where people talk about they just want to get back to first century Christianity, you know, and there's a sentimentality there where they want to strip down the Christian faith to the basics.
00:32:50.100There's kind of this utopian kind of, I would even call it socialistic reading that a lot of people, young people, especially if they've gone to a public university, have of the life of Christ.
00:33:02.740When we look at the life of Christ, every gospel writer is trying to emphasize how we can understand him as Lord and Savior.
00:33:08.700Each gospel writer is going to have a different emphasis in there.
00:33:11.200But they're highlighting various stories from the life of Christ in order to highlight that he was the Son of God, that he came to save the world, that he died for the sins of the world, and he was on a particular mission.
00:33:21.940And when we take that gospel account and then we kind of, you know, read it through a modern lens that's very feminized, it's very easy to get to places you're seeing today.
00:33:32.300Instead, when we look at the life of Christ in the gospels, we should understand it in context.
00:33:36.460We shouldn't diminish his humanity by reducing him to, like, well, Jesus said this one time, and that means that anytime I'm in a physical altercation, like, I couldn't even, like, go practice jujitsu.
00:33:51.300There's no, like, there's nothing about that that I can be, that a Christian can do.
00:33:56.040And so we end up really, like, having a really bad understanding of, and this starts in seminaries, but you have a bad understanding of Christianity.
00:34:03.580When you look at the entire Word of God and you understand the people of God in the Old Testament, the people of God in the New Testament, even the apostles, how Paul used political, his agency and power to get to Rome when he was being persecuted, you start to understand the life of Christ more dynamically because it is important that he came as a man.
00:34:24.020A lot of people try to downplay the importance of masculinity by, like you said, diminishing that he didn't have children, he wasn't married, but the reality is he did come as a man.
00:34:34.240And that actually has great significance to our faith because he's the second Adam.
00:34:38.260And so when we look at the life of Christ for masculinity, we have to look at the full corpus, the great example.
00:34:44.380And I think many Christians are uncomfortable going here because they don't, they really do uphold the Word of God.
00:34:50.340They go, how can the same man who advocated for foot washing and turn the other cheek, go outside the temple, make a whip with his own hands, and then go into the temple, flip tables, and use that whip to drive out other people?
00:35:15.040No, like we can understand this is a dynamic, fully God, fully man, son of God.
00:35:21.060And he came to save the world, and he's on his particular mission.
00:35:24.980And just using those two examples, we can kind of walk and chew gum at the same time, as they say.
00:35:30.840We can understand that, like, look, there's a lot more wisdom from the life of Christ than you've probably been given.
00:35:37.560And on top of that, many Christians and even just kind of cultural Christians or even people outside of Christianity read God's Word as if it's kind of a law book.
00:35:46.480So they're looking for right and wrong, which is fine.
00:35:50.900I mean, there is right and wrong in the Bible, no doubt.
00:35:53.040There are clear laws you cannot violate, but there's also wisdom in the Bible.
00:35:57.060And what we miss is that Christ is the fulfillment of wisdom, that he gives us wisdom, not just through his life, but even now as Christians, as we're unified with him by his Spirit or by the Spirit of God, we have wisdom.
00:36:08.320And so we can operate prudentially in any given situation with the mind of Christ.
00:36:12.400And that's what I think a lot of people are missing is they want to gird Jesus.
00:36:16.020They want to make him some kind of like he was the fulfillment of the law.
00:36:36.160Instead, we settle for just being children and not growing up into maturity in Christ's likeness and in every aspect of life by operating with the mind of Christ.
00:36:44.040So as we've seen in the last few years, there has been a resurgence of people who are not afraid to say that there should be a public presence of Christianity, that ultimately this is the foundation of not just the American experience, but the wider Western Christendom.
00:37:04.120And that this has not just a role to play, but a central foundational role in our public life.
00:37:12.920And in some ways, this has manifested more originally in the Catholic subset than it did for the Protestants.
00:37:23.620But Protestants are, even though Catholics tend to have positions higher up in the social order, Protestants are the ones who make up the bulk of the Christian belief structure in the United States.
00:37:38.160And so the fact that is now, you know, kind of moved into the Protestant sector has had a big change in what's going on.
00:37:45.580And as that has arisen and, you know, some people will point to the Christian nationalist movement.
00:37:50.080I've got my own problems with the term Christian nationalist, but we understand, you know, kind of where people are coming from with that.
00:37:57.120As that has come about, a lot of people have started screeching, especially a lot of mainstream Christians, ones that are politically connected, ones that have large public ministries.
00:38:08.160And they're saying, no, no, no, no, of course not.
00:38:11.160Like Christians should not be seeking power publicly.
00:38:13.820They should not be engaging politically.
00:38:16.100They should not be organizing as Christians for the public good.
00:38:22.500These people, again, have built giant ministries.
00:38:25.920They are some of the most visible people in the public order.
00:38:30.360Why are they so militant against the idea that the faith that they profess to be involved in would manifest itself in good laws and good policy and good beliefs for the wider American culture?
00:39:20.360And what the different thing is, is liberalism, the open society, kind of like this free market, free exchange of ideas.
00:39:27.320And I think that, Oren, that's what really rattled me in 2020 is like a lot of the people, like you said, with these big budgets, these high platforms.
00:39:38.660And we saw kind of three things going on.
00:39:42.300We saw medical things going on, which we have replete examples from church history of how Christians should engage in this stuff.
00:40:24.040You know, this is not good for society.
00:40:26.360And so I think there is an idyllic liberalism that they still are worshiping.
00:40:31.480I pray that they would repent of where those ideas are inconsistent with our Christian faith.
00:40:37.300Sincerely, they should repent of that.
00:40:39.200But they've been so married to the spirit of our age and kind of this liberal, neutral, public square vision that they have no other framework with which to understand their Christian faith.
00:40:53.680It is embarrassing that they went silent.
00:40:55.860You know, I've used this illustration before.
00:40:57.360But for a lot of pastors, and especially members of churches who are on the front lines in this stuff, they were seeing it in their workplaces, in their schools, and they're going, what are we going to do?
00:41:07.540The pastors are used to recommending, hey, we got this book from this big name.
00:41:55.120And so I think a lot of people are fed up and they're really excited that, hey, this is a new thing.
00:42:00.580And my pitch has always been, it's not new.
00:42:03.000It's just like reading all those guys who came before us who had no problem.
00:42:07.480Like in my article at the end of it, we have Charles Spurgeon, 18th century.
00:42:11.840He says, young men, to you, I would honestly say that I should be ashamed to speak of you of a religion that would make you soft, cowardly, and effeminate.
00:42:26.140And yet today, if you said that in some pulpits, that would be, oh my gosh, you know, that's going to upset women or that's going to upset womanly men.
00:42:34.220And it's like we've become so obsessed with not offending people, inclusion, tolerance, all the values of the spirit of our age instead of the faith that was handed down to us.
00:42:43.160And that we represent and we should be preaching to people and equipping the saints for the work of the ministry in that, wherever they are, whatever vocation.
00:42:50.420And so I do think that he goes back to a lot of the problems that Machen highlighted in Christianity and liberalism.
00:42:55.660And he was a Presbyterian and he was a Protestant and he identified it very, very accurately of what was going on in his day.
00:43:04.400Yeah, it's very interesting that a lot of the people who are crying about, you know, the possibility that Christianity might become ascendant, that it might become culturally relevant, that it might seek leadership positions and authority,
00:43:22.020that it might be the basis for national revival, both culturally and spiritually, but also politically.
00:43:29.340The very people who are talking about how this is heresy and it's against the Bible and it's against the teaching of Christ.
00:43:35.720Now we start to find out, especially through this USAID stuff, that the very people like Russell Moore and David French and these guys who have been talking about the dangers of this, you know, conflating Christianity, crossing the church and state barrier, they are receiving government funding.
00:43:57.040Their ministries are being funded by the government and even better that several denominations to their great shame are having the majority or a large chunk of their charity funding created because they are complicit in human trafficking,
00:44:14.880breaking the law in the United States, bringing illegal immigrants in there.
00:44:19.080And I've been in churches where I've heard this argument, look, these people are here either way, man, we've got to take care of them.
00:44:23.880And it's like, okay, first, no, that's not how it works.
00:44:26.820Like you don't, you don't facilitate crime and then say, oh, well, I mean, the, you know, the, the, the, the murderer is already murdering.
00:44:34.400So there's just nothing we can do about it.
00:44:36.140We, we just have to feed them while he's around.
00:44:38.480But also the fact that they are not just helping people who are already here, they're actively involved in bringing people over.
00:44:48.500And so we have this strange dichotomy where again, people who are warned us about the dangers of this mixing of church and state.
00:44:56.720We can't have Christianity asserted in the public square are actually directly being funded by the government itself and are involved in a larger human smuggling operation that brings in millions of dollars and make sure that they maintain their jobs.
00:45:13.260And so one organization that you saw this with, and I, I didn't look up if they got federal funding, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did the evangelical immigration table.
00:45:22.280And a lot of institutional leaders and evangelicalism signed onto the statement, because like I said, at the beginning of the episode, so much of Christianity today is riddled with sentimentality.
00:45:32.140It's riddled with emotional appeals and kind of getting people and manipulation and, and to their credit, you know, many people are fed up with it, whether it's Christians or, or lost, you know, when you live in a more secular context, typically a lot of the people that are there that are not Christians, they've seen the show.
00:45:53.020They know that another church is going to come to town, going to set up shop with a big rock band, and it's going to be kind of this, like, we're not a church.
00:46:00.880And then all of a sudden they're going to spring it on you later that you're a church and lost people are so fed up with that.
00:46:04.940And it's the same stuff that's going on in the church with evangelical immigration table and others.
00:46:12.520And that's our job to care for hurting people.
00:46:14.300And it's like, you're not helping, like you're, you're actually making it worse.
00:46:18.000You're not teaching people how to think both as Christians and what we should do as Christians that, yes, if somebody shows up in your life that has a need, as much as you can meet that need, and also uphold the law and justice matters, and you should obey the law.
00:46:30.200And if somebody has broken the law, it's totally legitimate to go to the magistrate, to go to the local authorities and say, this is a lawbreaker.
00:46:38.740And so there's just so much kind of feminist idealism out there in terms of how, how people are appealed to, how Christianity is represented as kind of this cope to all of our sufferings and persecution is the greatest thing.
00:46:50.620And so now we have a cope to deal with our persecution as we invite persecution on ourselves.
00:46:54.780And like you highlighted, these guys who have been calling out Christian nationalism for, well, gosh, I mean, the term has been around since 2003.
00:47:02.120Before that, it was something else altogether.
00:47:03.760It's always been this kind of like, they come up with a phrase, the left does, to make you scared, like you highlighted with the religious right.
00:47:09.100But especially in the last four years, the same voices like you highlighted with Russell Moore, David French, and then you've got academics like Samuel Perry out there highlighting the dangers of Christian nationalism.
00:47:20.420This is a very scary thing, and yet look in the mirror of the very things they accuse Christian nationalists of doing.
00:47:30.140They're taking government funds to advocate for what they believe Christianity is, when I don't think it's Christianity, it's liberalism they're advocating for.
00:47:38.460But they're doing the exact same thing.
00:47:40.020And so there's this marriage, they have the audacity, dude, to call out Christians for pursuing power and for operating with agency, while behind the scenes, that's exactly what they're doing.
00:47:52.560It's rank hypocrisy, and it's disgusting.
00:48:06.460Like, great, at least you were honest.
00:48:07.920But how dare you try to suppress Christianity, suppress Protestants in America, and take government funds behind the scenes and say we should never advocate for our interests.
00:48:25.140And that's so much of what is a stink in the nose of the world and in the nose of God is a lot of the world accuses Christians of being hypocrites.
00:48:42.420And I can't believe these guys still get a fair shake.
00:48:45.320I can't believe they still have institutional credibility.
00:48:47.620I hope more of this from Rufo and others will expose it because these names that are associated with respectable Christianity, whether it's Rick Warren or others, they need to be shown for what they are.
00:49:01.700And I would respect them more if they did that.
00:49:03.680But they're operating as subversives within our own church, and that is awful.
00:49:07.160And to kind of hit on this continuing in the church, one of the things that I've noticed is that, you know, in many ways, and I don't think that this is over by any stretch, but you can feel the cultural cachet of wokeness waning.
00:49:25.640It's going to be with us for a long time, but the idea that it is culturally ascendant, that it's going to remain dominant, that seems to be on the ropes.
00:49:33.800Again, it's not completely defeated, and I think people who think it's just going to disappear are being foolish, that there is still plenty more of that around.
00:49:43.100But it's obviously losing its cultural momentum in some way.
00:49:47.320At the same time, it seems like Christian leaders are doubling down on it, that they are treating it as if it is the true religion, and it's their jobs to continue to perpetuate that belief system, even as the culture turns against it.
00:50:01.360And so this moment where a lot of people, especially Christian men, are asking for a return to a more robust traditional Christianity, you almost have this kind of last soldier on the island in Japan scenario where a lot, especially evangelical pastors, but this is, you see this in things like Catholicism as well.
00:50:21.020They're fighting for the continuation of woke doctrines inside their church that were already foreign to them and were never biblical and now are losing even their cultural power.
00:50:32.460So it's this weird dynamic where like Christianity is always like 20 years behind, right?
00:50:37.280Like it's always culturally lagging, even when it picks up the worst aspects of culture.
00:50:41.120So even when culture is like, actually, we would like you to correct back and be more of what you were supposed to be, the thing that we were threatened you would be in like the 1950s or something, can we get that Christianity?
00:50:53.160And church leaders are like, nope, sorry, all we got is the woke version, sold out of that traditional one, never bringing it back.
00:50:59.820All we got is the worst, most watered down, most effeminate version available.
00:51:29.360And I think what's important to distinguish here, Warren, is like, this isn't, we can't fall prey to the same kind of managerial marketing approach of Christianity to meet the needs of the day.
00:51:38.800Because that's what led a lot of the woke people into their woke ideology in the church as they're like, well, this is what's necessary in this time and place to reach people.
00:51:46.400No, it's not just like a marketing ploy.
00:51:50.160It's getting back to like what the faith has always been and not being ashamed of our forefathers, not being ashamed of those who came before us, who built Christendom, who came before us to conquer America, to make it, to settle America and make it a great nation.
00:52:04.680And so there's this weird thing where it's like you want to resist the temptation to kind of just, okay, well, now the winds have shifted and you're going to see this.
00:52:12.000A lot of big names are going to do this.
00:52:13.460They're going to shift and they're going to go, well, I guess the needs of the hour in order to maintain a market share in America, we've got to talk about these issues.
00:52:21.400You know, we've got to bring up these actors.
00:52:22.820We've got to bring up these topics and that's how we maintain a market share.
00:52:25.840And I think what's really important and what's going to distinguish those who are genuine and authentic about it and are really trying to educate and kind of reinvigorate Christian men today versus those who are opposers is who is openly repentant of the way they've compromised in the past.
00:52:40.060You know, who has openly said, hey, this was either a mistake or an outright sin.
00:52:52.780If a guy who's out there trying to maintain a market share and pivot nowadays is unable to own mistakes he's made in the past, say, yeah, I blew it with that one.
00:53:06.380That's a telltale sign for me that this is a person who's not intent on actually helping people.
00:53:11.780He's intent on maintaining a market share.
00:53:13.680And when Christianity becomes that and commoditized to where it's just like, you know, business and we got to keep the doors open, that's very dangerous for a church to be in that position.
00:53:36.620There's a book that came out recently talking about how woke operates as a religion, like kind of the reawakening of America.
00:53:41.740It's another kind of revival in America.
00:53:43.820And a lot of these pastors and evangelical leaders went through that revival type process with the tears and the emotion and the kind of confession with the black square and all this kind of stuff.
00:53:53.440And so now they're like they've blended.
00:53:56.040They've syncretized Christianity with wokeness.
00:53:58.640And the only way out is through repentance.
00:54:27.300It's like they have no – they seem to have no self-awareness.
00:54:30.920They're just sold out to these kind of policies and this kind of attitude towards Christianity as being a doormat and only being good insofar as it serves liberalism.