Liberalism Isn't Cruciform. Neither is Conservatism.

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer. I'm joined by Dr. Ashish Varma. And today we're going to talk about, I'm not exactly sure what we're going to talk about. We're going to start by talking about this survey that kind of a friend of the show, I'd like to count her as a friend of the show, Beth Allison Barr, she's been on a couple of times. She posted this on her Instagram. It's a graphic from Billy Graham Center's Gen Z survey that was posted by the Religious News Service. And it says this, In the sample of Gen Z, nearly half, 48%, agreed with the following statement. Christian support of Trump has made me less likely to go to church. And then it says about one in five young adults said they strongly agreed with that sentiment. And so the graph has actually, you know, strongly agree. It counts for 19%. And another 14% agree with that statement. So you've got, you know, good 33% who are in the strongly agree category, another 15% slightly agree. And then you've got about 21% that strongly disagree. It's interesting, you know, they're counting the, the, all the agrees together there, but you can, you can strongly say about a third, I think. 48% might be stretching it, but I would say a third of these folks agreed that Christian support of Trump has made me less likely to go to church. Now, there's no other context to this survey. There's no other real, like, texture to it. It's just one infographic. And I'll be honest, I looked up the Gen Z, you know, sort of survey that was done and it didn't give a lot more than just what I saw on that Instagram post. They didn't have the time to like dive in and ask why, you know, is it about Trump or is it about politics? You know, if they, if, you know, the church had supported some other candidate, would it bother you as much? So it's unclear whether this is a political issue or whether it's a theological issue, you know, sort of in that if we're going to split the baby sort of way, right, and segment these things out. But my sense is, you know, especially given the conversation we recently had with William Kavanaugh that is yet to be released or some of the conversations we've had with Kevin Flatt about sacred social orders, that these things are just deeply intertwined and that what we're starting to see is that There's a rejection of this sort of rival sacred social order that has said the church and politics need to be joined at the hip. And more than they need to be joined at the hip, that there is a conservative political stance that the church has to take. And it needs to toe that line almost disregarding anything else. And so to me, if we're putting it in Kevin Flatt's language, I think this is a rival sacred social order issue that what maybe Gen Z is seeing is that the church is no longer really reflecting, particularly in this aspect, God's order. So I'll leave the preamble there, and Ashish, let you weigh in a bit. I agree that the issue is intertwined.

00:03:55
Speaker 2: It's hard to separate the theological from the political.

00:03:59
Speaker 1: Right.

00:04:00
Speaker 2: The immediate anecdote that comes to my mind is when I was on the faculty somewhere, I was accused repeatedly of being politically motivated for some of the things I was saying, even though I never once advocated for a political candidate party. I never told people to go vote this way or that way. I never even told them to vote. My arguments were theological, they were sociological, they were philosophical, but Well, the person who most frequently wanted to accuse me of being politically motivated one day was sitting in a meeting and all of a sudden blurted out, so in fairness, the conversation was on issues in abortion. It was an attempted colloquium. And I think it's a complicated issue. I also had learned that trying to nuance in that environment was, you know, was mental and emotional suicide.

00:04:59
Speaker 1: Let's say that.

00:05:03
Speaker 2: So I didn't say much. I just sat there. I asked a couple clarifying questions to a couple comments that I thought were pretty bewildering. And I'll leave that at that. I won't even give what those comments were. No, I'll give one of them. One colleague said that the Old Testament cited a biblical passage in which there was a punishment given for a pregnant woman that was different for the punishment given for a non-pregnant woman. And his conclusion was, the Bible seems to take the life of the baby inside the womb as more important than even the mother. I can't make this stuff up. So I asked some clarifying questions on things like that. But just to be clear, I find that to be an utterly absurd and bizarre takeaway from the passage. Now I don't even remember what the passage was at this point. Someone else then piped up and he said, same person who had been repeatedly calling me politically motivated, he said, I don't understand how anyone can vote for, at that point it was Joe Biden, because Joe Biden is a murderer. Democrats are murderers. They support abortion. They're killing babies. How can you vote for someone like this? And all I thought they're thinking was, um, I actually did respond to him, but, uh, All I could think was, frankly, why is it that you can make these overt statements about voting and who you should and should not vote for on supposedly purely theological grounds that are far more complicated than he was giving them credence for? And I'm politically motivated, but you're not. Now, that's one instance, but it is a pretty regular thing that I've noticed. And I think historically, truthfully, this is the Constantinian thesis, right, that And Hauerwas loves to talk about this. Many others have built upon it. But the idea that the church, in Hauerwas' case, made a bad move. I tend to agree with Hauerwas, but we'll leave the value judgment on for the moment. But the church made a move, and a pretty decisive, significant move that shaped much of the rest of its history, at least in the Western world. The moment that the church... not just accepted that Constantine had taken up the sign of the key row, the first two letters of Christ in Greek as his symbol to conquer by and his claim that God had given him a vision to conquer in the symbol. But specifically then when he takes up in three 25, the mantle of being able to call the church to a council to work out its issues with what became the nice scene versus Aryan split.

00:07:49
Speaker 1: Right.

00:07:49
Speaker 2: Um, That's a pretty remarkable moment, right? Where we go from the church having waves of persecution against it and the church being a marginal community to we're in a position now where the church has to decide whether they're going to heed the call of the emperor to a theological meeting. That is the ultimate beginning of accepting the theological political intertwinement. And you can't go the rest of Western church history without seeing it, right? The medieval period is characterized, among other things, as this battle between papacy and throne. Who annoys whom? Who affirms whom? There's this period in the medieval period known as the Babylonian captivity of the church where the political rivalry had resulted in, at one point, three people having been claimed as the pope, right? Three sets of cardinals electing three different popes And these were all on political grounds. The Reformation in many ways, especially the magisterial part of it, you can't untwine that from political issues. You can't understand colonization, whether it be the doctrine of discovery in the Catholic Church or the parallel beliefs and opinions in various Protestant churches and countries, and understanding colonialism and the carving out of the world as we know it. And you can't understand the United States. And the question here isn't whether the US was founded as an explicitly Christian nation. There's a lot of important nuance here. That's its own conversation. But you can't understand Christian formation of the idea of America and within the idea of America without understanding this deep sense of Christian theology meaning political action and Christian political action meaning formation of theological ideas. Now that's a really truncated look at it, but it's impossible to get away from. And when we come to the present, to sort of make the claims that only one group that you don't like is politically motivated, and I really don't think I'm politically motivated. by the way, but people can tell me otherwise. But when you make a claim that is overtly political, you're showing that your colors play there, right? And I think when you have that reality of this intertwining, this entanglement, it's going to create a whole host of pressures. Why do we make the theological decisions we do? Are they being coerced or influenced at the very least by concerns of power, concerns of donors, money? What leads those donors? What leads that money? It's a complicated web.

00:10:38
Speaker 1: I think I want to step it back just one step because I think that part of the issue I see is we should be pushing for, and I'm going to use Kevin Flatt's terms, I really like his sacred social order sort of notion. And what a sacred social order in my mind, and I think the way he would describe it, or at least faithful to the way he would describe it is, a social order arranges itself such that it is reflecting the sacred order above. And that social order then entails a variety of different things, including laws, it includes You know, the way we interact with God, it includes, you know, our use of time, our relationship to space, like all these different sort of aspects. It would include government as well. How are things governed? And so there's in Christian sacred social order, which is, I think, what all of us are really shooting for. Right. We have a particular way of relating to government. And I think that way is recognizing that God has given the government a certain scope, or at least this is the way I think about it. God has given the government a certain scope of authority. And within that scope of authority, when they're exercising their God-given authority in appropriate ways within that scope of authority, Christians are told to subject themselves to that. So we don't have to, for instance, put up with a government that is constantly performing injustice, right? We can sort of resist that by certain means, but we can't just, you know, if the government's trying to do good for us, we can't say, ah, we don't want to deal with that. We're just going to answer to God, right? The government is in some degree, some way, shape or form, it is a vehicle that God is using. And so again, that's sort of truncated. But I think what's starting to happen is we're starting to pull in political procedure and allowing that to shape our behavior and our thought process. So we begin to think that what we're trying to do is we're trying to arrange America as the social order. And when we're trying to turn America into the social order, that reflects the sacred order, we do that through political procedure. But it turns out that when we start using these political procedures, when we start leveraging money, when we start lobbying, when we start becoming advocacy groups, when we start to try to elect particular officials, all of a sudden, without really noticing it, we become disciples of something other than the way, the truth, and the life of Jesus. And I think that Part of what we're struggling with, at least part of what I'm struggling with, is I don't want to say Christians shouldn't participate in government. That's not at all what I want to do. But I also want to say that there's a way of being captured by our political apparatus that deforms us. It conforms us to something other than the image of Christ. And I think a lot of times that's what we're seeing in these conversations. I think this person you're talking about in the meeting who's very happy to say you can't vote for Democrats because they're murderers, is captured by that sort of political process and procedure, as opposed to being held captive by the word of God. I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I really could care less who people vote for. I think what my big concern is, is that people recognize God's word is the final authority for life and faith, that they are reasoning through that well, discerning who they should vote for, whether they should vote, how often they should vote, should they vote locally or nationally, like all those choices sit underneath the governance of the word of God. I don't think that it should be like hey, Christians, there's only one side you could ever vote for, and if you vote for the other side, you're anti-biblical. I think that gets us into a real mess, and it creates, oddly, a rival sacred social order to the kingdom of God. We're now reflecting something that I don't actually think is on earth as it is in heaven. I don't think this is reflective of what God is doing. I think that either way you go in any political issue, you're running afoul of God's word because these systems, political, and when I say systems, I mean these political parties are going to bend away from God's order in different ways. But they're both bending. There's no perfect choice here. Neither are perfectly aligned with it. And thus they create these different sort of sacred social orders. When I have these political conversations, I find that when people tend to talk like care for the poor, it automatically goes to welfare. It's like, well, that's just a capture of the imagination of the political system that we're in. Welfare is not the only way to solve that, right? It goes to communism or Marx or whatever, right? But those aren't the only ways for us to solve this. These aren't the only ways for us to address this. In fact, The church is called to care for the poor multiple times in scripture. One of my favorite passages, Romans 15, Paul's been aching to go to Rome for forever. And he's like, I finally have an opportunity to come to you. But first, I'm going to deliver this gift from the Corinthians to the poor in Jerusalem. And I may not make it back. But he sees that as so crucial and important, partly because I think he wants to care for the poor, partly because he wants to demonstrate the unity of the church. But either way, it's an example of of the church caring for the poor that is not socialist. It's not welfare system. It's not, you know, Marx. It's the church. And so I just feel like we're sort of adopting these procedures and these ways of thinking, um, that only give us certain buttons to push and levers to pull. And that that is a big part of the problem we're having in these conversations.

00:17:16
Speaker 2: So what I hear in the way that you're describing that, um, makes me think of Augustine's City of God. And the real issue he's trying to address there is this is just after that Constantinian shift, right? Just after, you know, about 100 years, roughly, after that. And in some ways, the City of God is a magnus opum apologetic work by Augustine responding to the remaining intellectual pagans who've said the decline of Rome is because of you Christians.

00:17:46
Speaker 1: Right.

00:17:47
Speaker 2: You Christians have undermined our traditional ways. That is what built up this city and this empire. And specifically, that's meant you've undermined the traditional gods that lifted it up.

00:17:59
Speaker 1: That's right.

00:18:02
Speaker 2: My understanding of Augustine is he's wanting to say, nah, it's really because of Christians that we've lasted this long. Now, I think the strength of Augustine's argument is in his description of these two cities. I'll say to start out that I actually disagree with Augustine. I do actually agree that Christianity was a big reason for the demise of Rome. But I think it's because of what Augustine says that it's hidden within what he's saying. I think he missed the entailment. And what he points out is that these two cities have two sets of a citizenship with two sets of allegiances. They're about different things. This isn't the same kind of different things as if we describe the United States versus, fill in the blank, Russia, China, Iran, some other country where we have different constituents, different ideas. We're vying for the same kind of power, the same kind of wealth amid the same kind of global structures. Those are rivalries within the same kind for who's going to be preeminent. But what Augustine's describing is not that kind of a rivalry between two citizens. but rather citizenships that overlap. So you can have a Christian who's also a Roman, but because they have two different priorities, it's going to mean two different ways of engaging reality.

00:19:24
Speaker 1: That's right.

00:19:25
Speaker 2: So case in point might be like the early church. They were pretty notorious in the Roman world in the early church for Christians for refusing military service. And it's because they had, frankly, a pacifist understanding of long before we have the movement of pacifism we think of today as politically motivated. These are Christians who said, our job is not to take life. Our job is to bring healing.

00:19:49
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:19:50
Speaker 2: When they were criticized for it by the Roman authorities, and this was used as one of the markers to show that they were subversive to the empire, and for pagans, it was a marker later on to say, see, this is one of the ways you subversed the empire. And I actually think that's true in some ways, but their response was, No, we're actually uplifting it because instead we commit to prayer, and we commit to helping those who are hurt.

00:20:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. Right?

00:20:16
Speaker 2: But the goals were different, and they knew that that meant for them that they could not be part of the Roman military and its goals of conquering, its goals of bringing under its controls, its goals of ordering creation in a way that wasn't bringing life to all of creation, but rather bringing some subservient to the good of a few that supported Rome, right? Yeah. The idea of conflation that we're talking about now that I'm hearing in what you're saying is I don't hear that kind of distinction being made, right? Occasionally there might be lip service to it, but instead the idea of the pulling of the levers of this system isn't just simply, well, these are the levers available for this task that is deeply Christian, but rather these are the levers that I need to make sure are bent towards the will of the idea of Christian empire.

00:21:01
Speaker 1: Hmm.

00:21:05
Speaker 2: And that's actually precisely the opposite of what, as you said, church, the church was advocating early on, right? The idea of Christian empire was, in this early stage, an oxymoron. Because the very mechanism of empire entailed a certain idea of emperor and king and power and control and hegemony, right? And for Christians, it meant an overcoming of that sort of hegemony, an overcoming of that sort of idea of a certain kind of king, right? Right back to the Old Testament. God doesn't want a king like the nations among his covenant people. And the impulse that we're talking about in this conflation in the present, which is long-rooted, this isn't new, and that's kind of the point that I'm trying to bring out, that it's not new, but it's a conflation that is at odds with the text. And so we find ourselves now having to do creative enterprises, and I'm for creativity, but when the creativity is to explain away The differences in goals, agendas, ideas of the world, of creation, of what makes creation thrive. What we end up with is still a kind of sacred social order, right? But we now have a kind of sacred social order in which the ideals of empire building are what the church is playing with, and we no longer have an idea of two cities. We have an idea of bending the one city to our purposes that look strangely like the purposes of empire building just with a cross on it, right? It looks like Constantine, the hero.

00:22:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. That's a sharper way of putting it than I was explaining, but you're getting the gist of what I'm saying. I think that we've become so enamored with the world that we want that we're no longer pursuing the pattern of the world that God has given us. And so I take it back to like, as a strange person, reference, but Exodus 31. Exodus 31 is the first time that anyone is referenced as having been filled with the Spirit of God. Now, there is a previous passage. I think I'm citing the later one. I think it's in Exodus 28, where Bezalel, same guy, is said to have been filled with the Spirit of God. Moses is given the pattern for the tabernacle that is to be built. And then God tells him that Bezalel and Aholiab are given the wisdom and the craftsmanship to make the tabernacle the speck. And Bezalel is specifically said is filled with the spirit of God in order to do this. And so when you reference creativity, I think part of our problem with creativity is that we're trying to be creative in a way that is not patterned after something God has given us. Our creativity should be constrained by God's vision, not expanded with our own. Right? That kind of idea. So, Bezalel doesn't get the option of, you know, adding a second holy of holies to the temple. Right? There's only one. It doesn't matter how convenient having a second one might be. There's only one. Because the creativity is in service of a particular vision. It's in service of a particular pattern. And I think that's part of what we're running into here is that we are trying to do something by ourselves, through our own power, for ourselves, however we want to sort of describe that, that we should be waiting on God to do. And in that waiting on God to do it, we're doing something that very much is in keeping with what the Christians in Rome were saying. No, we're praying for the empire. We're lifting the empire up. We're doing the things that God has told us to do. And that's our best strategy. And guess what? It's also your best strategy. And so I think that there's a sense in which we've just sort of lost this notion that governments are not trivial governments. but they are to some degree provisional. I think, you know, Acts 17, you know, God establishes these things within a certain degree of boundaries and, you know, with certain limitations. But I think at the end of the day, where I kind of sit, this conflation of the conservatism with the Christianity is very much driven by the selective use of biblical texts and that selective use of biblical texts on some level undercuts the authority of the scriptures. I think it's very difficult. And I know this isn't the way we usually think of it. We usually think of it as I'm going to wholesale reject the Bible because Right. That's definitely a rejection of of that authority. But if I just say, no, I'm only going to I'm only going to listen to the parts of the Bible that are really convenient for me. That's also a rejection of its authority. And so there isn't it isn't a question of. I guess what I want to make sure people don't hear me saying is, you know, be liberal, don't be conservative. I think the liberal side has the exact same problems, right? They're just sort of mirror images of each other. But the point is, we shouldn't be following the doctrines of conservatism or liberalism. We should be following the doctrines that are taught in the scriptures. We should be developing a shared understanding of what our lives are supposed to look like on this earth. from that text. Some of those are going to entail political decisions, but they're never going to be able to align us with a political party. One of the things I mentioned when I was at this Politics in the Pews event with Christian Post a couple of years ago now, I basically said, Christians can be conservative. I don't really have a problem with Christians holding some conservative values. But I don't think that conservatism In fact, I think I said it even stronger than this. Conservatism can't encompass Christianity because it has no place for Christ. And I mean, I think that's the real issue. Conservatism isn't cruciform. It's not following Jesus. It's not patterned after him in any particular way. There are points where it may intersect and you see these sort of points of contact where you say, oh, okay, yeah, that part of conservatism makes sense with Christianity. You could do the same with liberalism. But neither of them has real space for Christ. Neither of them cares one way or the other whether we are conformed to Christ's image, right? That's sort of incidental to those philosophies. If we can be conformed to the image of Christ, but still uphold all the conservative doctrines or all the liberal doctrines, that's great. But what Christians are called to is something very different. It's the reverse of that. We're to be cruciform, and then we're to interact in the world in ways that deny these other entities any level of sway over how we think or how we behave.

00:28:55
Speaker 2: I appreciate the way that you describe the conservative and liberal as, I think you said, negative images of each other. I tend to say two sides of the same coin, by which I don't mean that they're saying the same thing. I mean that they belong to the same kind of program. And it's that program that I think is ultimately at stake, right? In this country, most Christians tend to be on the conservative end. But that doesn't mean that we've solved the problem if we make most Christians on the liberal end. Right. Right. conservative and liberal, right? Where we have to ask the question of conservative what? To what? What is the full premier? Progressive to what? And for both of them, the idea is empire building. It's even a related image of empire building insofar as what is it that we want to create? What are the values that we're working off of historically or tweaking historically that we're trying to get there? What is it that we We desire out of people. What is our view towards the land, right? It's worth noting that progressive American regimes and Canadian regimes were involved in trying to suppress Native Hawaiians who were saying, you cannot use our holy land to build your observatory. And the language that was returned to them was, we need to use this land because it is one of the most ideal places for us to get deep looks into space and without having to launch into orbit another grand telescope, right? So the idea of caring about other peoples that is often tied to liberalism or progressivism apparently comes to end when that program is at risk. Now, my point in saying this is that as two sides of the same coin, we got to ask, what is that program? And that gets us to this notion of the city of God and the city of humanity, right? The structures of this world. Where we do recognize it's not we can choose the city of God and ignore the other. We live within them both. But the tensions that are created are real, right? Now, I think there's a lot of things entailed within this that is worth bringing up in other conversations because we have to ask the question then historically, who is elevated? Who is not elevated? Has that changed in the present? Do we think it's changed? Has it really changed? Or does it just look a little differently? I think those are questions worth doing in an episode into itself. But what we gain within this is a recognition then of even when we say we're Christians who have certain conservative ideals, certain progressive ideals, we still have to ask the question of where did those ideals come from? So perhaps one of those ideals is we need to take care of the poor. And that's why we have a program like Welfare. But to your point, that's a command given to the church. So if we want to say the government is not in that business and that's not what tax dollars should go to, we haven't solved the question given to the church of why aren't you doing.

00:32:12
Speaker 1: It?

00:32:13
Speaker 2: And I would argue that perhaps the reason that has had to be taken up by the government is because the church is not doing it. That's an abandonment of the requirements of citizenship. or the markers of citizenship within the city of God, in Augustine's language again. And that's where the conversation has to be. That's what churches need to be attentive to. What is this text saying? Not just what do we want the text to say, or what are the parts of the text that bolster our particular doctrinal formulations that give us mastery or control or power or influence or whatever. What does the text say? And that's one of my deepest concerns that goes on within evangelicalism, that for all the concern formally about interpreting scripture, I actually find that if you try to engage difficult passages of which scholars have noted tons of different ways of looking at a text, if you try to address trying to understand that text, you get met with a stonewall of, well, that's political motivation here, or that's heresy there. And I okay, there are things that the church has historically called heresy, but let's not arbitrarily expand those boundaries, right? What's significant about the church having called things heresy was the sheer buy-in from vast geographic spaces to recognize together, not for one person to look at another and say, you're not saying the thing that I want you to say or that my community has decided for a long time, and that's therefore heresy. Whereas conservatives like to say, you're just being a liberal. do you know what a liberal is why is this a two-dimensional spectrum here why are there not more options what if i'm not working off of your presumption about the goals of citizenship right then i'm not a liberal right or on the other side liberals love to call anyone more conservative than them fundamentalists need to break it to you but there are a lot of liberal fundamentalists if we want to be true to the language of fundamentals right yeah The church needs to be attentive to the church. It needs to be attentive to the things that it says it's attentive to, like scripture. It needs to be attentive to history, both positively and negatively, right? We need to learn from history. We need to be honest and repentant about our past so that we can move forward, not merely repeating.

00:34:35
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I think part of that, you know, we've sort of come through that, you know, you're saying be honest and attentive to your past so that we don't repeat it. I think sometimes people hear that it gets tied into, again, these sort of governmental or policy concerns about like paying reparations or something like that, like very particular policy issues. I can remember reading Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi, thank you. And there's a line in the book, and I'm paraphrasing it, so I'm hoping I'm getting this right. It was something like, The only way you can be anti-racist is to be for the payment of reparations. And it's like that sort of closure, I think, when you say we need to attend to our history, that's what people sort of ultimately go to. But I don't actually think, again, that's what the Bible is teaching us. You can cite numerous examples in Scripture, especially in the New Testament, where there's a looking back on the mistakes that Israel has made. and an encouragement for the church not to make those same mistakes. There's this sort of cautionary tale that comes along with Israel's life and the failures that they exhibit in their life. That is then the church is called not to repeat that pattern. And I just, so I find it interesting when we get kind of stuck in that loop, which I can understand why people are leery of getting stuck, you know, like, They don't want to agree to some of these things, and they don't want to get stuck in that sort of, hey, this very specific thing is what has to change. But at the same time, to your point, we do have to learn from our patterns of history. And part of that, part of what we're learning from those patterns of history is, look, this aspect of our society was not aligned with God's order, and we need to be realigned to something different. Um, it's, it's not necessarily, Hey, we have to make up for all these things in the past. Part of it is just in order for us to be different in the world, we have to make sure that we're not just going along with the flow and never seeing the problems that we're living into on a day-to-day basis. Um, and so that analysis I think is really crucial. Um, One of the things I'll throw out there, you had mentioned, you're talking a little bit about the church's abdication of care for the poor as being part of the problem or part of the impetus for why welfare has to come in. I've done some research on Engel versus Vitale. It was the court case where prayer was banned from public schools. And people were really frustrated by this. But I don't know. I've been to prayer meetings at churches that I've attended previously, and it's like, you know, three people on a Wednesday night. And so as frustrated as Christians got about the elimination of prayer from public schools, and as much as we're starting to hear sort of rumblings about bringing some of those things back, let's post this kind of commandments. Let's bring prayer back into public schools. Let's, let's put Bible back into textbooks. Um, You know, that sort of is what it is, right? I don't feel like I have the time to weigh in on all that right now. But I guess my point is, nobody seems all that upset about the three people at the Wednesday night prayer meeting. And I think that's so interesting because that is the church's, that is sort of the, that is the church's vocation, right? Show up, study the word, pray, like do the hard work of faithfulness. Don't try to outsource this all to the government because the government doesn't exactly have that particular, they're not, the government has no vested concern or vested interest in conforming us to the image of Christ. And so anything it's going to do is going to be in service of civil advancement. Not saying those two can't overlap, not saying they're mutually exclusive, but the reality is that If the church wants to pray, it doesn't need permission to pray in public schools. It can pray whenever it wants, right? But we've sort of lost the lack. We've lost the coordination necessary to do that as a people to a large extent. And so many times what we see as sort of national prayer gatherings are just that. They're prayer gatherings arranged by the nations. where we're involved as Christians, but so are you know, Jews, Muslims, you know, everybody is involved. The church isn't doing that. The church is involved in that. We're not coordinating that. We are coordinated into it. And it's just such an interesting sort of, um, challenge, I think, for the church to face up is to say, we need to be better about coordinating amongst ourselves and making sure that the body of Christ doesn't look like a gawky teenager who just, you know, grew seven inches in a year and hasn't grown into his, you know, his limbs yet. Like we need to be, we need to have that fluidity about us, right? Where we're moving and addressing and adapting to these other, you know, these things that we're seeing in society in service of Christ. I'm not saying that never happens, but I am saying that I think we're being out-coordinated in a number of different areas by a governmental bureaucracy.

00:40:33
Speaker 2: I see you, and I'm going to raise you a tad bit more cynicism.

00:40:36
Speaker 1: Go for it.

00:40:39
Speaker 2: It's not just that expecting the government to do this, that, and the other for us or to educate us. is an incomplete work, or to expect government to make policies for us is an incomplete work. It's also an agenda-oriented work. The government has no vested interest in helping us understand issues. The government, divided into parties, has a vested interest in recruiting our support. And the blinder, the better. And so part of the task of recognizing what seemed like really common sense things of we're, we're making a big deal out of prayer in school, but we're not actually praying, right? We're not praying on Wednesday nights. So why do you care about praying before math?

00:41:33
Speaker 1: Right.

00:41:34
Speaker 2: You know, or what's to stop you from praying before math or what's to stop you from grabbing your three friends. And as you walk into class, Saying a quick prayer. Isn't that the point? That's not a government problem in the sense of we can't do something that we need to be able to do. It's that the government has no vested interest in saying, hey, you have other options. But I think even on a more cynical note than that even is the fact that I mentioned, I just used the example of welfare, and I It's learning from the past, but there's even more to learn from it, right? It's to understand why are these issues here that are dividing us? It's worth looking into the birth of welfare, and it's worth looking into all the pressures that went behind it, right? Among other pressures that were into it was that it was a program that was supposed to be part of FDR's New Deal, and it was something that was largely criticized and left out or truncated because of the people who wanted to say, you know, the sort of standard lines we know of, if you don't work, you don't eat. But the same people who were saying that were the people who were getting government handouts in order to buy houses. So the real question worth investigating, that again, the government has no interest in teaching you. It's just not part of their task, nor is it in their vested interest. But we can learn history. Who were these people? and I'll leave it to myself for the moment, I know the answer, but who were these people that were happy to receive government handouts so that they could begin wealth accumulation, but weren't willing to give it to these other people? Who were those people that they didn't want the money to go to, that they were wanting to say, if you don't work, you don't eat? Could we say, if you don't work, you don't get house?

00:43:39
Speaker 1: I mean, I... Feels like we could.

00:43:42
Speaker 2: The same sorts of things can go into.

00:43:43
Speaker 1: All sorts of issues, right?

00:43:44
Speaker 2: How did... 85% of American Christians become synonymous with the Republican Party. What happened in the 1970s when that wasn't true?

00:43:56
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:43:56
Speaker 2: Why is one issue suddenly the only issue that's born in that movement? Which, by the way, was seen at the time to be, ironically, a Catholic issue among evangelicals. Evangelicals refused to weigh in on it. In fact, they said it's a complicated issue, right?

00:44:14
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:44:15
Speaker 2: Why is it that we have... Houses built the places they are. Roads built the way they are. Highways built the way they are. If you go to the south side of Chicago, the highways are built as walls. You go to the north side of Chicago, they're built on beams. They're not as walls.

00:44:31
Speaker 1: Why?

00:44:32
Speaker 2: Why is that the case? This is the sort of hard work of doing the history, and you might say, I don't know where to find it. We probably have people around us that can help us do the research. We're not all trained historians, but we have people around us that can help us do the work. And part of that is beginning to help us understand that there really was a motive and agenda behind these different sorts of things. And do we really want to tie or conflate the fullness of our Christian identity with these sorts of things? My answer is, I hope not. And that's a very different conversation than saying we also have civic responsibilities. And perhaps that civic responsibility leads us to, with a well-informed and robust wrestling system, Determine who to vote for.

00:45:17
Speaker 1: Right.

00:45:17
Speaker 2: But that robust wrestling is very different than the one box, one size fits all truncated failure to understand the depths of issues. And now we all suddenly vote the same way because one group of people had a vested interest in getting us to be convinced that's who we should vote for. Yeah.

00:45:38
Speaker 1: And it's very different than the sort of advocacy that we see. It's very different than the sort of campaigning that we see. Um, it was interesting again, you know, I think it was back in 2024 when I did this, but the Republican position had just changed. Um, so that it was no longer a hard line on abortion, but that they wanted to make sure that these weren't being done too early or I'm sorry, too late. So they were now no longer advocating for a strict pro-life position. They were advocating for, um, An early term abortion position. And yet the people who were and who had in the past advocated for the Republicans just continue to move on that forward. It was a really interesting moment. Now, the way I think about that is, you know, in the way that Jesus talks about the law, the law is not intended to legislate the ideal. The law is often intended to ensure that we don't go off the rails because if we don't have some sort of restraints, we'll be more and more and more evil. And so I don't have a real problem sitting back and saying, well, from a legislative perspective, It does make sense to restrain this if you can't stop it, right? If it's going to happen, it needs to happen within a certain degree of restraints, and there needs to be punishment outside of those constraints. Ideally, from a theological perspective, I prefer it didn't happen at all. But legislatively, you look at it and you say the law can only do so much, and then other things have to kick in. And so it's just one of those moments where I can remember distinctly sitting back and going, yeah, my theological convictions about this issue don't hinge on whether or not America passes this very specific law or makes this very specific precedence in the Supreme Court. And it doesn't necessarily have to entail me voting one way or the other, right? But you can kind of hold the two in tension and recognize that there are different ways to attack the issue, to approach the issue, right, that may actually be effective. And so when the Republican position changed, I felt like that was, oddly, a more consistent way of looking at it than of trying to think that we are going to legislate this sort of act that we find reprehensible out of existence. I don't know that that was ever realistic before. And so it was just interesting to watch the folks who were in that sort of Republican mode. They didn't blink. They just kept running at it. And it definitely suggested something to me about their convictions about that issue and how they were related to other political points in that agenda. that, um, aren't always as clearly articulated as the abortion issue was. Um, I'll leave that there. And, and, and, um, I did want to just sort of to give this a little bit of biblical closure. I thought maybe I'd go to Isaiah seven. Uh, I think it's an interesting passage to go to. It's the sign of Emmanuel. Um, I think this, you know, in the spirit of we need to look back at history and not repeat the bad patterns that we've had in the past, I think this serves as an interesting cautionary tale because in this passage, Ahaz is waiting for the Syro-Palestinian alliance. Syria and the Northern Kingdom have aligned against Judah because Judah refuses to be part of their alliance. And so what they want to do is they want to kick Ahaz out set up a puppet king who will join their alliance, and then they have Syria, Northern Kingdom, and Southern Kingdom all aligned against Assyria. Ahaz has already decided that he's going to side with Assyria. He doesn't need to do anything with this Syro-Palestinian alliance. And so Isaiah comes to Ahaz, and he delivers this message and says, hey, you don't have to worry about Syria and the Northern Kingdom. That's going to come to nothing. And then God offers him a sign as a surety that this will happen, that this alliance is not going to harm the Southern Kingdom. And Ahaz says something really interesting. He says, oh, no, no, I will not ask for a sign. And I will not put the Lord my God to the test. Sounds very pious, right? Very, you know, right out of Deuteronomy. Don't test the Lord. Don't be like the Israelites at Massa. You know, don't test God and try to get him to prove that he's on your side and that he's faithful. The problem is that God actually offered him a sign and Ahaz is now rejecting that sign. And so this is where we end up getting the sign of Immanuel. Nothing worse going into a military battle than a new baby. Not exactly the most useful sign to have when you're about to go into a military context. But my point here is Ahaz makes the absolutely wrong decision because he's playing a different game than he should be. He's playing a political game. He's looking out at the military landscape and saying, siding with the Syria is going to give me the best chance of survival. And so that's what I'm going to do. Syria and the Northern Kingdom, they're going to lose regardless of whether I'm with them or not. So I'm just going to reject them. And he's already made that decision. He's already gone through that thought process. He knows this is the decision he's going to make. So he doesn't need God's signs. He's not depending on the Lord anyway. So it doesn't really matter whether God secures the victory for him. He's already done the math. Assyria is going to win. I'm aligned with Assyria. God, you can go home. You can kick your feet up on, you know, on the footrest and just chill, right? Like hit the Barco lounger. Like this is all good. And so in rejecting God and Ahaz is making this bad decision, but he couches it in this pious language.

00:52:26
Speaker 2: Right?

00:52:27
Speaker 1: But he's already done the underlying mechanistic work to align himself with a powerhouse. I think this is what we need to avoid in modern day. I think we need to avoid making a decision about how we're going to go about changing our world, whether that's our small local family, our city, our nation, whatever it is, right? We need to Avoid making those calls and then acting as if we're really just following the Lord. We need to avoid, you know, deciding what we're going to do and then praying about it afterwards. Right. Would be, you know, sort of a concrete example about this. Because in doing this, in deciding what we're going to do, in looking out, reading the tea leaves of the world and saying, this is the clear path toward victory. This is the clear path toward success. And so this is what I'm going to do, regardless of what God is asking me to do. We subtly close ourselves off from actually getting to see what the God who can do more than we can ever ask or think is going to do. We settle. We settle for our own comfort in the moment. And I think that's the story of Ahaz while we usually look at it in a slightly different angle. I think understanding the background and why Ahaz refuses to ask for the sign is really crucial because it illustrates this idea that it is possible for us to make decisions without God and to make them seem really, really pious when we do it. And that is part of what we need to avoid in today's world.

00:54:20
Speaker 2: That's a really helpful passage, I think. It's a good last word for speaking to what I think we too often fall into.

00:54:28
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:54:31
Speaker 2: It's, again, really easy to pick one reading of one issue spoken in one way in order to make it seem like there's a righteous cause at play for the entirety of a group. And that often is the case, frankly, with good intentions.

00:54:51
Speaker 1: For a lot of people.

00:54:51
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's very easy to fall into it. You and I can fall into it. We're all susceptible to it. And I think that's all the more reason to be clearer on what the goals are of what we mean when we say we are the church, we are awaiting another kind of kingdom with another kind of king in the return of the sun. And I think that also requires us to be very careful to not over-expect whatever levers we can pull at the moment in good conscience to be identical with.

00:55:34
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:55:34
Speaker 2: That what we theologians probably unnecessarily in a fancy term called that eschatological reality, the reality of the new heavens and.

00:55:43
Speaker 1: The new earth.

00:55:45
Speaker 2: Yeah. We're at best cultivating local local images that are supposed to point. I think the image that Karl Barth would have kept behind his desk is a really powerful one. He had a painting of John the Baptist pointing to remind himself that the theological task is always to point, and it's specifically to point. Like John the Baptist to Jesus, that he might increase and I might decrease.

00:56:11
Speaker 1: Yeah. The last thing I'll say, and then we can close this out, but Ian McGilchrist has this Great quote. I go back to it all the time because I just love it. It's in his book, The Matter with Things. And he basically says that we're like the sorcerer's apprentice. We're messing around with stuff that we can't hope to understand and certainly can't control. And so oftentimes while we try to manipulate the world by pulling levers and pushing buttons, we end up messing things up worse than they were because while we can manipulate the world, we don't understand it. And I think this is the point where Christians just need to grapple with this really deeply. Something like Deuteronomy 30, 20 gives us a deep understanding of how the world works. In that text, God says, you know, he's given Israel a choice between life and death, between good and evil, between obedience and disobedience. And he tells them to choose life. And in Deuteronomy 30, 20, he says, for the Lord is your life and the length of your days. And that is to me like the underlying dynamic. It's the governing dynamics of reality that our loyalty to the Lord is what makes everything else work. And even though we're in, you know, sort of a, the midst of broken relationships after the fall, that governing logic never changes. And so our allegiance to the Lord is always the governing logic that we are using as we're navigating life. We're going to miss. That's why we have confession. That's why we have repentance. We're going to miss. It's not about being perfect, right? It's about, to your point, pointing to God. And in our confession, when we say, I screwed this up, we're pointing to God. And so to have the depth of understanding to realize that when we pull a lever or push a button, right, we may be manipulating something we don't fully understand What we need to be doing is we need to be leaning into what we do understand, and that is all the word that God has given us and the way that we are to interact with him, to depend on him, to wait for him, and sometimes to exercise deep restraint rather than trying to control and change. So I'll end it there. This has been a cathartic conversation, I think. And, uh, and super helpful. So, yeah, so, um, much appreciated and, uh, hopefully everybody else enjoyed it and we will catch you next time on thinking Christian. Take care. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.