00:01:21.280by which she meant more expansive immigration,
00:01:23.840on the basis that America is a nation of immigrants founded by immigrants.
00:01:28.480The phrase seems to have taken off thanks to a book by John F. Kennedy,
00:01:32.860A Nation of Immigrants, in the late 1950s,
00:01:35.440which then exploded in discussions about race during and after the Civil Rights Amendment of 1964.
00:01:42.640But when you look at America's founding, this storyline fails to hold the water it was intended to carry.
00:01:48.280In point of fact, America was founded predominantly as a nation of northern and western Europeans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to become a part of the white colonial expansion of their mother countries.
00:02:00.760For example, in the 1790 census, America's population of roughly 3.9 million was comprised of 3.2 million whites.
00:02:10.320Of those, almost 90% were English, Welsh, Scottish, or Irish.
00:02:14.800Germans were 9%, Dutch 3%, French 2%, and Swedish less than one quarter of 1%.
00:02:21.600The remainder, excluding Native Americans, were black slaves who numbered just shy of 900,000.
00:02:27.920Even as late as 1940, the U.S. population was about 90% white European lineage.
00:02:34.940Today, the monoculture of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, WASP, has been intentionally eroded.
00:02:41.280As of 2025, the nation has grown to almost 360 million, with the fastest-growing ethnicities being Asian and Hispanic.
00:02:51.360Those groups make up about 33% of the U.S. population currently, but are expected to make up 40% by 2060.
00:02:59.880Whites are in steep demographic decline, making up about 57% of the current population,
00:03:05.780but are expected to drop to 40% by 2060.
00:03:27.800It seems there was a concerted effort after World War II to erode the WASP stronghold, which culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Amendment and the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which majorly restructured the country's stance regarding immigration.
00:03:43.840While the previous immigration policy favored European immigrants to help maintain a mono-ethnic principle in American civic life, the Hart-Celler Act reversed this.
00:03:53.400It favored immigrants largely from the Third World, including Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
00:04:00.940One of the primary framers of the act was Emmanuel Seller, a Jewish congressman who partnered with the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress to garner support for the bill.
00:04:11.660As chair of the House Judiciary Committee,
00:04:14.460Seller was a key figure in pushing for immigration reform
00:04:17.260and long sought to dismantle the 1924 Immigration Act,
00:04:21.860which favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe.
00:26:21.340You will have liberals who reject utterly
00:26:25.620all the central claims of Christianity
00:26:27.140that will say, Oh, I love Jesus though. I love, I think, you know, it's two Christians. I don't
00:26:31.680like like Gandhi. Oh sure. Yeah. You, you really love Jesus, but you don't love his body, the
00:26:36.800church. It's like, it's not enough. It's not, it doesn't have a potent enough center. It's not
00:26:41.840worth replicating. It has no defense. And ultimately all it will become because our
00:26:46.260enemies are crafty is another faction of their own army defending and promoting their view.
00:26:53.140Yeah, and I think part of it, too, obviously, if you look at the megachurch culture, you could see much clearer distinctions between us and them.
00:27:01.380But even in something like, say, the PCA, like if you guys are both Protestants, you're Reform, love John Calvin, et cetera.
00:27:09.600And yet even there, we would have vast differences to where not all, we have many friends in the PCA, but we also have a lot of people who are like, we absolutely hate what you're doing.
00:27:19.760and we we would not be seen in public with you we would never acknowledge that we you know read or
00:27:26.760partook of any of your content yeah no so that just kind of goes to show we are there's a lot
00:27:32.880of effort going into how we define the community yeah you could ask the question like what what
00:27:38.520armies have marched on america what what forces have invaded our borders did they set up artillery
00:27:45.120Did they roll in with with mechanized forces? Did they airdrop troops in behind our borders? No, they slowly, carefully, intentionally, subversively won the gatekeeping and culture forming mechanisms of our nation in law and education and media and all of these areas of human life.
00:28:06.700and then after seizing those institutional microphones they promoted their views subtly
00:28:13.720and carefully and one of the craftiest things they did is that they wrapped it in a veneer of
00:28:18.360christianity so that once the people were conquered they wouldn't know it well and it's interesting i
00:28:25.340think pivotal time periods we mentioned in the cold open like the 1960s um it was fascinating
00:28:31.100to me that even in like 1940, you still had a 90% European population, Protestant, white
00:28:37.620European population in America. So you can definitely trace, wow, something must have
00:28:41.720happened shortly after that. We've talked about the post-war consensus, but you have these pivotal
00:28:47.440passages of law. And this is one reason with Hartzeller immigration reform in 1965 and also
00:28:55.140the Civil Rights Amendment 1964. One of the reasons I think in Christian circles, especially
00:29:00.360reform theonomic camps we've often said things like well culture is downstream from the church
00:29:06.240but what we actually found in in another true sense is that of course church does impact the
00:29:12.040culture but in this case it was really culture is downstream from the law from legal changes yeah
00:29:17.940and i think that the people uh who were you know we we've talked about but the people who are
00:29:22.640involved in those cases lots of jewish influence uh martin luther king the black influence they
00:29:29.160understood how culture is shaped fundamentally communist yes um forces fundamentally subversive
00:29:35.960communist forces and here's the thing like we we say that culture is downstream from the church
00:29:41.200is absolutely true we say that you know apostasy in the church led and gave way to many many sins
00:29:47.960and corruptions of our nation and that's true but you also have to realize that our enemies were
00:29:53.220very crafty in this time period and if you asked the you know Caldwell gets into this in his book
00:29:58.100in the age of entitlement. But if you ask, you know, the average person in the sixties about
00:30:02.280the civil rights act and what it was going to do and the heart seller act and what most people
00:30:07.180wouldn't have known at all what it was intended to do. Well, it's interesting. He wouldn't have
00:30:12.100understood it. He points out in the book, the majority of Americans were opposed to it. I saw
00:30:16.860Tucker on with Charlie Kirk the other day. They were talking about boomers, but they were talking
00:30:21.340about the civil rights act. And they said the people who were like least favorable to it at
00:30:24.980the time were blacks it wasn't it wasn't like popular the nation so the point is that the
00:30:30.540nation didn't rise up culturally from the bottom up and say we demand the civil rights act we demand
00:30:35.860the heart seller act we demand all these things not at all instead it was imposed again via
00:30:42.680institutional power by political elites who were subversive and knew what they were doing yes is
00:30:48.180it if we're going to change the christian um the the cultural christian uh ethos of this people
00:30:54.760we actually have to change the makeup of that people.
00:30:57.680We have to flood them with other alien cultures
00:41:03.360men with tremendous force of will to accomplish something like the protestant reformation. I mean,
00:41:11.380you can look back, you know how people did this like young wrestlers in reform. They would look
00:41:14.960back on Luther and they would say, he wasn't very gentle. And I'm just going to tell you now,
00:41:20.640it's not the gentle men who affect massive wide scale change like the protestant reformation.
00:41:27.260Yeah. And even when you think about what gentleness biblically is, like Jesus is,
00:41:31.380His yoke is easy. His burden is light. He is, I'm lowly and come and I will give you rest to the
00:41:38.640weary. But that is to those who come and bend the knee to Christ as Lord. Not to the Pharisees.
00:41:44.140To those who hear his stern rebuke of their sin and turn from it and receive this great living
00:41:48.920water and grace of forgiveness, the Samaritan woman at the well who's had five men and they're
00:41:53.900not her husband. Like all of this, he's bringing out the worst thing she's ever done. And then he
00:41:58.040says, I have living water for you. Jesus was a gentle man in the way that a good field general
00:42:03.660is gentle with his people, but he is not gentle with his enemies. The Lord Jesus is crushing
00:42:09.600Satan underfoot. Paul in Romans 16 prays that the God of peace would soon crush Satan under your
00:42:16.080feet. So like we, you need a masculine edge. And this is why men are given to lead and women are
00:42:22.580not in these things you need a masculine fortitude that is willing to not even be manipulated by
00:42:29.460calls to being gentle and lowly in a gay and effeminate communist way well and this is part
00:42:33.840of it is uh as as we think about the community we'll get into the components too here but
00:42:38.600one of the things that you have to have as you said masculine leadership
00:42:42.460you cannot even have the subtle forms of feminine rule yeah which are often hidden forces in a0.97
00:42:50.460church or a community. It absolutely cannot be the case. This is why we've, uh, we did an episode
00:42:56.440on it. We've reject the Gilderism. Absolutely. The George Gilderism, these principles of Boomer
00:43:01.880quasi-feminism. It's 20th century, uh, feminist slop. Yes. That, that, you know, basically1.00
00:43:09.260what you need in a community is for, um, the feminine to, to civilize the men. The reality1.00
00:43:15.960is that men build civilizations with women as their helpers yeah it's it's not the inverse
00:43:22.980well and i i think there's a good um there's a duality in good men uh we've actually got an
00:43:28.800episode upcoming on the hard men podcast with myself and thomas acord where we're talking about
00:43:33.540throughout western literature the western canon the ethos of the west there was kind of this
00:43:39.420duality that that men ought to be both gentlemen and chivalric and they should also have a
00:43:45.640barbarian side meaning there is a time where you have to be like david and go slay a giant and cut
00:43:52.320his head off and take his sword yeah and there's another time where you're tender to mephibosheth
00:43:58.380and even the son of one of your kind of enemies yeah you know so there's this duality that we
00:44:04.640have to have within the culture and that's what we're seeking to do um one of the things i would
00:44:09.620say as we talk about monoculture it would be helpful to highlight you're we're not talking
00:44:16.180about a monocrop meaning when when people hear monoculture i think what they think of is like
00:44:22.920handmaiden's tale yeah which i don't even know it is i just know it's a bunch of ladies who wear
00:44:27.240the same thing yeah i've i have no i could not tell you the barest summary of the plot i don't
00:44:33.320know, I don't know it, but people think of this, like a kind of conformity that would crush
00:44:39.860any kind of diversity. Yes. And this would be a misunderstanding. When you think about farming,
00:44:45.540um, like a monoculture is, is a field that's going to have one type of seed exactly the same.
00:44:50.600And there's arguments for and against whatever. That's actually not what we're talking about,
00:44:53.980where you could look at the people and say, everybody in this community is like a bunch
00:44:59.080of grains of corn from Monsanto lined up. You're like, I can't tell the difference between any of
00:45:03.380them. That's not how Christian monoculture works. Because what you're saying is everybody is being
00:45:08.580conformed to this identical standard. And yet the way that that standard works out is very diverse
00:45:14.440in a certain sense because of the way God made the world. So the standard is the Lord Jesus Christ.
00:45:20.640We're all being conformed from one degree of glory, being transformed into the image of Christ
00:45:25.180that we behold. Men, women, all of us, all Christians, that's what God is doing with us.
00:45:30.200But what that looks like is that the way we often talk about it, even in counseling,
00:45:35.320is that every member of our community is becoming the most them version of themselves. Like you can
00:45:42.540imagine that there's this person, say there's a guy named Bill, and Bill has strengths and
00:45:47.360weaknesses and he's caught in certain sins and he's, you know, and then the Lord saves Bill and
00:45:51.820he comes into the church and the process of his sanctification from that point forward is bill
00:45:56.960becoming the true bill yeah it's him becoming the truest bill where all of the things that were
00:46:02.360corruptions and warpings of of what god made when he made bill they're all falling away until in
00:46:07.920glory you'd look at bill and you'd say that what a glory but he would be different from susan and
00:46:13.260he would be different from walter and he'd be different from me and he'd be different from you
00:46:16.420so it's not the case in our church church that the monoculture we're making is that everybody
00:46:20.900becomes exactly like Brian Sauve. That would be insufferable. And all of my enemies agree,
00:46:27.360but my friends do too. Like it would be insufferable. That's not how God made the world.
00:46:32.240He made an Eric and he made a Martin and he made a Ben and he made my wife and he made your wife
00:46:36.640and he made it. He made this great community where we're all, it's more like a great, if you've ever
00:46:43.060been in a high mountain valley, it's beautiful up in the high Uintas in the spring or the kind of
00:46:50.000early summer and it's just alive. There's true, there's aspens, there's pines, there's wild
00:46:56.640flowers, there are birds everywhere. Just 15 different birds. If you know what you're looking
00:47:02.540at, even just listening, there's ground voles, there's elk, there's deer, there's the wind,
00:47:07.180there's the cloud, there's beauty, but it's, and it's all coherent. It all, it all sings in the
00:47:11.940same tune. Yeah. It's like one ecosystem. It's the monoculture of a choir singing to the same
00:47:18.020conductor with their male and female voices and all the nuances, not the monoculture of a Monsanto
00:47:23.740cornfield. So there are things we must enforce. And it's like, if you want to sing in the choir,
00:47:28.800you have to sing to the conductor. You can't decide that you're in five, four when the song
00:47:34.020is in six, eight, it just won't work. Like that, that's not how music works. So the leaders of a
00:47:40.120community have a duty to constantly be pointing people towards heralding the marching orders of
00:47:46.860the Lord Jesus Christ and saying, you must sing in tune with this. And, and, but not only generally,
00:47:52.740but this is what that looks like in this day and in this place and this time. And we're whole hog
00:47:57.840convinced of this. Yeah. We have principles that we are deeply committed to, deeply convinced of,
00:48:03.580and we will not be moved by a fusser or a subversive who's trying to come into our church
00:48:09.520and say, your church would be great if I could just change this 10%. Well, it is interesting
00:48:13.840because i i totally agree and and when you think about the analogies that paul uses
00:48:19.080in the new testament it's the church is like a body you have very different parts but they're
00:48:24.620working in unison together um they're aimed at the same thing yeah i think this brings us it's
00:48:31.000a nice segue into some of the challenges we've faced yeah in building a monoculture one i'll
00:48:36.480just start with right off and get your thoughts on yeah is because our age is so steeped in
00:48:42.320egalitarianism, that even we in cultures where we say, hey, we're patriarchal, yet we have found
00:48:50.340on our church leadership team, we've found it in the church, we've found it among the people,
00:48:55.480there is this long process, this long obedience in the same direction where we have to keep
00:49:02.460working out hierarchy into the warp and woof of what we do because egalitarianism is so steeped
00:49:10.880in our bones that, you know, we, we may think that we've eradicated it. And then you start
00:49:17.620looking and you say, wait a minute, we're acting like egalitarians here. Yeah. Hang on. There it
00:49:21.660is again. The impulse for sameness, that old specter rattling its bones. So I guess on the
00:49:27.480hierarchy front, um, I know that we've, we've wrestled with this and, and I think done an
00:49:32.600excellent job as leadership, for example. Um, but even having to wrestle with something like,
00:49:37.360you know, not all pastors are the same. No. Um, you look at what Paul says about the giftings of
00:49:42.640pastors. Some of them are gifted at evangelism. Some of them are gifted at counseling. And so
00:49:48.080as our team has grown, we've actually, um, we've had more hierarchy and more expression of diversity
00:49:54.420among giftings. Yep. So now we have a Kevin Griffin, who's a pastor of counseling and we
00:50:00.460have a more clarified i think uh leadership team on on the leadership staff um why is that so
00:50:08.620important that you know well first of all i would say like the head the leaders are obviously going
00:50:16.200to affect the body yep but why is it important that we get egalitarianism egalitarianism eradicated
00:50:22.400and then we say we need clear hierarchy yeah one of the principles one of the like if there's this
00:50:26.640manned wall and inside is the monoculture that we're trying to build and defend, which is we
00:50:30.140believe just obedience to Jesus in our time and what that means in our place and time as our
00:50:34.620people in this day and all of that. One of the things you immediately realize is that a huge
00:50:40.980amount of what needs to be eradicated is egalitarianism. It is communism. It is a
00:50:47.820flattening of the world. It is a looking out at this glorious variegated world that God made
00:50:54.200and saying, I hate that. I must flatten it all. I must flatten it. I must make everything gray.
00:51:00.060I must make everything one note. I must make nobody rule and nobody be ruled. And what that
00:51:04.420really is at the bottom is it's Satan's tactic to rule over everything. Trying to say the world
00:51:11.620is not as God made it. It's as I want to remake it. Right? So egalitarianism is everywhere. So
00:51:17.380you have to not only learn what a hierarchy looks like, what God's design looks like,
00:51:23.320But you have to love it. You have to learn to love it to where you start going, man, I am so, so thankful that God made a world where I am not good at everything and where I should not be in charge of everything, where I should, God did not make a world where, you know, even in our community, where I should be in charge of every aspect of everybody's life.
00:51:49.340God raises up leaders, some over, you know, think of in Exodus 18, Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, his counsel to Moses, that Moses, what you're doing is not good.
00:52:00.520He's trying to rule over all of the people by himself and hear all of their complaints and cases by himself.
00:52:04.980There's functionally no hierarchy of leadership.
00:56:47.820So one of the impulses I think that has to be, it's on the egalitarian spectrum, but that we have to kind of do away with is this idea that we won't have authority.
00:56:58.760We won't have elites because I think one thing that is in the Baptist impulse particularly, and it's not just them.
00:57:04.940So I don't, I don't want to pick on just Baptist, but I think it's, it's, it's dominant there is, and for historical reasons that are understandable, but a complete allergy to being ruled.
01:10:30.560I'm curious, before we jump into the components, now that we're all the way at this point in the episode,
01:10:36.240Any other challenges that you would describe as having been, you know, challenges to building the monoculture, things that have really been a difficulty for us as a church?
01:10:50.140I know you've been through a lot of change, a lot of.
01:10:54.420Yeah, I mean, one of the greatest difficulties is in finding and developing leaders to complement and bring, because you as a leader don't have everything.
01:11:05.440I don't, I certainly don't have everything. I have areas of concentrated gifting where I'm
01:11:10.720confident the Lord gave a gift. And it's like my job there is to cultivate it, to take the two,
01:11:16.180three, five, whatever, how many talents and say, I'm going to double it and give it back to the
01:11:19.540Lord. That's my, that's my job here. But then the, and the longer you go in ministry or leadership
01:11:25.440of any kind, the more you discover your own deficiencies. So fathers, husbands, business
01:11:30.920leaders, we all experienced this where you start to go, wow, when I started, I really thought I
01:11:35.600was good at this aspect of leadership and I'm not. So the answer is when it's just you, you have to
01:11:44.260figure out how to do your best, but that's not actually good enough long-term. What that means
01:11:49.500is the Lord is telling you, I want someone who's good at that, that I've gifted to come and be
01:11:54.740enabled to do this. So there's a lot in that. And I think we need to do some whole episodes on this,
01:11:59.920on leadership development, like you said, because it is a difficult process with about a million
01:12:05.720different relevant principles that I'm, you know, you learn more of them as you go. But this is like,
01:12:11.500I think one of the key difficulties, it's also important. It's related to the fussing thing. If
01:12:16.540you spend all your time on the fusser and the person who's not really in, and you don't just
01:12:21.360have an immune system to say, I would rather have fewer people who were bought in than more people
01:12:24.920who aren't, because that's a lot of the challenges pastors, they're proud, they want big churches.
01:12:29.380And so they're like, I'll put up with any number of things to keep the church big.
01:12:35.300You won't ever have the bandwidth and capacity to go do this leadership work if you focus
01:15:39.800And if they preach and everybody goes, wow, he did so well.
01:15:42.460he's gifted that senior guy can't feel offended. Oh, it's so funny though, because we're people.
01:15:48.540So you all like, you will have an instinct of the flesh that is challenged in this process of
01:15:54.420raising up, identifying and deploying leaders. Um, you'll have like 50 different ways your flesh
01:15:59.240will want to derail it because your flesh is trying to protect this idolatrous view of the
01:16:05.080self constantly. But what the new man has to do in ruling your spirit is tell the truth,
01:16:13.140which is, hey, do you want, do you actually want honor and glory as a leader? Do you want
01:16:19.440people to rise up at the end of your having run the race and say, well done, that was an honorable
01:16:25.320man who ran the race. Be humble and empower other people to do things better than you.
01:16:30.880yeah and and you will people will guarantee even if it's only the lord but i mean i'm pretty sure
01:16:36.740that people will say that's an honorable man when you do that because multiple things happen
01:16:43.000um the organization works better like in our in new christian press and in the church if i said
01:16:51.080you know like i have to kind of be the guy in charge of everything so eric is good at executive
01:16:57.420leadership. He's probably better than me at it. You know, but I can't give up all these titles
01:17:04.760and seats, right? New Christian Impress and Refuge Church would suffer because the gifts that God gave
01:17:09.700you that are totally different from the gifts he gave me, they wouldn't be deployed. They'd be
01:17:14.580sitting there buried in the dirt and it would be my fault, right? It'd be my fault as a leader who's
01:17:19.480not saying, let me step out of a seat and put someone else there. So all of the things we need
01:17:26.280we keep saying it. We need to do some episodes on this because this is one of the most important
01:17:30.700aspects of building a Christian borough. And the reason we're doing this series is because people
01:17:34.840ask us this constantly. What is Ogden? What makes Ogden, Ogden? How do we do this other places?
01:17:42.260What is your leadership like? What is your training like? How do you defend the culture?
01:17:46.980And there's a million aspects of it, but so many of them I keep finding come back to leadership.
01:17:51.440Yeah. And I think developing your culture, people probably on the outside, you listen to a podcast, but you don't see how much time, effort, energy we put into working on the leadership team, building relations, working through conflict, making sure that we have a shared vision, working out principles of hierarchies, as we've said. That is time consuming.
01:18:16.880we spend far more time on that all of us than writing and recording shows for new christian
01:18:23.160press that's right i mean all of them by far it is multiple times more volume of hours spent
01:18:29.640because we've looked at the landscape and we and considered and said we believe the thing that the
01:18:34.680lord has given us that we could do with greatest fruitfulness is to establish raise up cultivate
01:18:40.320and deploy leaders yeah that's the thing if you want um to have a great christian borough and you
01:18:46.280know God's raised up leaders over tens, fifties, hundreds, thousands, and beyond, then one of your
01:18:50.920biggest jobs is to go find those people and give them the right job. Yeah. And I think keeping a
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01:23:19.320I think part of this means that we've kind of done this in two ways.
01:23:23.820We've done it through the air war and we've done it through the ground war, which is local ministry.
01:23:28.960Air war meaning media, podcasting, books, that sort of thing.
01:23:33.220But I would say the number one thing that if you came to refuge, you would be shocked that the truck driver or the housewife, they could pretty clearly articulate what this community is about.
01:23:48.940Yeah. And there's a vibe about that vision. It's not just like I'm going to read the list and here are the, you know, it's like reading the phone book. Yeah. But people are excited about it. They feel privileged to be here. There is a sense of there's no place like this place. Like we're fortunate. We're blessed. God's doing something here.
01:24:11.780And I want everybody in their community to feel that way about their community.
01:24:22.240Whether one of the books, Tribal Leadership or Jim Collins in Good to Great, Great by Choice, Built to Last, he talks about this all the time.
01:24:29.900He said a great tribe, a great culture, whether it's a business or any institution or community, there will always be a cult-like description of it by outsiders.
01:37:54.400like, cause we're going to have beautiful music and make, you know, and we believe that God
01:37:59.220created a world where there are things like instruments and they're actually beautiful.
01:38:03.820But on the other hand, you also couldn't come in and be like, I really am convinced that you need
01:38:07.820a rock band and seeker sensitive type of CCM worship. We're literally never going to do that.
01:38:12.860It's not going to happen. And if you couldn't be satisfied with that without arguing with
01:38:17.720everybody all the time, it wouldn't work for you. Yeah. I even think if you were maybe in the camp
01:38:22.000of like, you know, every other song needs to be like a Getty song. Yeah. You'd, you'd probably
01:38:27.540just be disappointed. Yeah. Um, I feel like a lot of those people, this is kind of the other side
01:38:32.200of the gates though, that often gets missed. It does keep people, keep people out, but it also
01:38:37.140conforms people. Oh yeah. Um, so we've had couples, I, you know, sat through a number of these
01:38:42.900membership interviews where they're actually misaligned on a number of these things. Um,
01:38:48.440You know, one example could be a couple is living together and they come to the church and they say, like literally just brand new, brand new believers just discovered the Christianity and the faith.
02:07:23.400and to have present quality time together.
02:07:26.640And so the men, we want the men to love that about women
02:07:31.520and their particular wife, but about women in general.
02:07:33.660So that on the other hand, they don't say to their friend,
02:07:36.300hey every night this week do you want to go bowling well i wouldn't do that to my friend
02:07:41.360because i actually love that he has a wife who loves him and needs him home it is interesting
02:07:46.660on that mix too because i was thinking like the elders wives they'll get together and they'll have
02:07:51.900dinner once every so often yeah and they're like and they hang out and chat and they have a group
02:07:56.360chat and all that and they're very respectful and have a good time yeah um but it's interesting
02:08:00.980because the men are like three times a week now some of it too for us is we see each other every
02:08:06.520day oh yeah so a lot of the things that we're doing are actually during the work day or you
02:08:10.380know we're having different work-related activities that that we have to partake in
02:08:15.760so that's true um but it is just interesting to me i would say they're the idiosyncrasies
02:08:22.260and the quirks of both men and women where in our community i don't know it's like the ladies will
02:08:29.100do something and it's just it's just something that's funny and quirky geared around the feminine
02:08:33.320sensibility but all the men are like oh that's adorable we love like we're not annoyed by women
02:08:38.760we love women we love the way that they are i love my wife i love the the women of the church
02:08:43.760that they are like they're just quirk i mean we all i think people know we're getting at but like
02:08:48.920the quirks of women that they you know we talk about like my wife was driving somewhere the
02:08:55.160other day and man, like I was worried when I saw it or, you know, the, the women get together and
02:09:01.740like, they, they love to spend $600 and 400 hours to make a quilt that they could have bought at1.00
02:09:07.840Target in five minutes for $13.99. Or even like the ladies toward the men, right? Yeah. Where
02:09:13.720you're like, you know, they're like, oh yeah. Um, we're kind of joking about which man was leading
02:09:20.600them and being so obsessed with the recent activity and the ladies will joke about it you
02:09:26.220know and it's fun eric or like uh lexi and i were talking the day about ben's um just wild
02:09:32.960overconfidence and his ability to do certain things like sing or play golf or do a standing
02:09:38.100back tuck but he believes but he 100 believes and the thing is like men have to have that gear of
02:09:43.760wild unearned overconfidence because otherwise we would never do half the things we do and so it
02:09:48.860wasn't Lexi being like, Oh, Ben's such a, she wasn't disrespecting him. She was actually
02:09:52.540respecting him. She was saying, this is such a funny, great thing about Ben and about the men
02:09:57.800in our church is that there's a lot of guys who are like, no dude, I could, I could, I could hit
02:10:02.840the thousand yard target. Like with, with the, with the, with the 300 win mag and like, have you
02:10:07.160ever done that? Well, no, but I mean like I could do it. I could do it. I could land a 747. Like if
02:10:11.980I needed to. And it's like, well, God put that wild overconfidence there in men so that they
02:10:17.140would go out and do like ridiculous impossible things like build suspension bridges and create
02:10:21.340civilization so i totally agree i want to ask you on the sex piety question just just overall um why
02:10:29.020do we put such an emphasis because some people could say hey that's really not a central issue
02:10:33.660to a monoculture wrong yeah and and what but like we really haven't i know even before i got here
02:10:40.420Like I was seeing culturally that sexuality was one of the central areas that we are being attacked and that we needed, like the church was not really putting up a fight.
02:10:53.840And we need to be like, if you can't decide what a man and woman is and what they're for, how are you ever going to keep a consistent culture?
02:11:02.240Now it's hard, but we have said, no, this is a first order thing.