When the Cross Becomes a Brand with Andrew Donaldson | Episode 277

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Church and Maine, a podcast for people interested in the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. I am Dennis Sanders, your host. So, this episode is… I don't know how to describe it. Talk therapy? Bull session? It's with my friend Andrew Donaldson. Andrew kind of wanted to talk to someone, basically someone of faith, really about where faith intersects with the Pentagon. Actually, specifically, the religious musings of the Secretary of Defense, and I am calling it Defense, Pete Hegseth. Andrew is an evangelical, and a lot of what we talk about is really, how is evangelicalism portraying itself in public, especially when it gets in bed with politics and what that means. So, before we go into this discussion, which is timely with considering the current situations in the Middle East, just to talk a little bit about Andrew. He is a frequent guest on Church in Maine, and he is a native of West Virginia, the host of the Her Tell podcast. Don't know if he is still managing editor of Ordinary Times, a blog that he has been a part of for a long time, but he's also a widely published opinion writer. He appears on media, radio, and also as a talking head on TV. So, with all that out of the way, let's take part in this interesting conversation on faith and politics with Andrew Donaldson. Well, Andrew, it is good to have you back. It has been a while. Way too long. Way too long, my friend. I greatly appreciate your counsel and talking, and that's probably why I'm not doing good on things. I haven't talked to you enough, so we'll fix that and do this more often, but it's good to see you, buddy. All right. Well, I got actually, you had messaged me because you wanted to talk about kind of what was going on, especially with, I'm going to call him the Secretary of Defense. Pete Hegseth, and some of the goings-on, especially his religious goings-on, and that we're both aware of, and I know you wanted to talk to me about that and kind of reason some things out. So, I'm going to let you start that off, and we'll kind of go from there. I, uh, I, I, I'm the world's worst Christian, so I'm not trying to tell anybody anything that they don't. I'm with Johnny Cash. I do, C-Modest is my good day of faith, you know, um, to rip off the great Johnny Cash who had multiple personal problems that we won't get into. But he sang a good hymn, so I kind of hold on to that. Um, I, I, I don't want to be preachy with anybody, but I take my faith seriously and my faith has been a mess a lot of my life and I've made a lot of mistakes. I look, there's plenty of people that will tell you all sorts of horrible stories about me. Most of them are probably true. Um, I have failed miserably in many, many aspects of my own life, but I also take my face seriously. And I, whether you agree with me or don't agree with me or whatever, I take it seriously. And I take it seriously enough that I don't feel I need to put it on my profile or put it out on my social media or whatever. I just go about it. And, um... We seem to be in this era right now with certain individuals and our elected officials, and it's a—look, it didn't—what's my core value in media? It didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened in a sequence of events. In my lifetime and in my background and growing up in Protestant Christian, I hate the word evangelical, but for lack of a better term, you know my rant on that one. I is one, so we'll talk about it. But the way I've seen people in my own faith group evolve over the last 46 years that I've been alive almost here coming up in May, I'll be 46, has really dovetailed with some of the changes. And I think we're seeing the end results of it where we can't have a DOD briefing without a prayer and a Bible verse. And we have, you know, government agencies sending out Bible verses on AI placards, you know, or, you know, what my blessed mother would call church cards, right? It's just a nice little border, some kind of flowery something in a Bible verse in the middle. Now that's an official government document, you know, which people are like, well, there's nothing wrong with that. No, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's like everything else. What's the context of it? Why is it being used? You know, can we talk about rescued pilots without bringing up the entirety of the Easter story? Um... I know a lot of my Christian brethren, especially conservative Christians, because so many of them have just gone all in on, you know, politics and faith and Christianity, and it's all one big thing all in the same tube pointing at the sky like a missile. It bothers me. Look, I don't have an agenda for this. I'm just talking because I feel like I want to talk about it. But I think we've got to have some conversations and some honest conversations of, look, we're all failed people. So I don't want to do this thing where it's like, I don't want to drag up Pete Hegseth's biography the way I'd drag mine up. Because we've both got, he's got failed marriages, I've got failed marriages. You know, none of us are perfect. Yeah. I'm also not, you know, the secretary of defense at the same time. Where's that line? You know, President Trump. And look, if Joe Biden, if he was president, I'd be talking about him. My first real political stuff was when Clinton was in office. You want to talk about personal problems and personal wobbles and, you know, the affairs and the things that they covered up to try to protect Clinton. I'd say this if it was a Democratic president, too, so you can miss me with that. But I remember the clip, you know, Bill Clinton carried the biggest Bible in the history of the presidency to church for a reason, because it looks good, right? You know, is that really different than what we're doing here with the current administration? I don't think it is. I think it's more tailor-made. I think there's more of a media ecosystem to it. But there's so many voices are like, okay, if you just put a cross on the front of it or slap the Christian nomenclature on it, it makes it good and we should cheer it because that puts it in the public domain and we should be happy we're in the public domain with it. And I'm like, no. And you get pushed back immediately, and people question your faith, or they think you don't. I'm like, no, we need to have some conversations about this, about the branding of the faith. We need to have conversations about the context of the faith. And we need to have some conversations about what is and isn't appropriate to slap faith labels on. because if you really care about your faith and you care about spiritual things and you care about helping people, you know if you're if your thing is america needs a healthy spiritual life then a healthy spiritual life for the country has to be you know nurtured and treated as such and i don't see the way we're putting politics and faith and religion together as any kind of nurturing for the country right now i see it as a weaponized i see it monetized uh christianity if you put protestants and catholics and the Mormons all together in one bit, you're talking about a trillion-dollar industry, more so. It's like $1.3 trillion just on religion in America. You have those things, but if we don't have some honest conversations about it and be able to parse it out a little bit, it's going to get abused. It's going to be taken over by bad-faith people. It's going to hurt the country. It's going to hurt our politics. It's going to hurt our faith, and it's going to hurt each and every one of us. And I just don't see enough people having the honest conversation about it as like, we can struggle as people that are fallen in a fallen world that are sinful and still be like, okay, I don't need to spout a Bible verse every other sentence just to talk about politics, because that seems like too far that way at the same time. But I just wonder if there's more people like me that are just frustrated with, like, I don't know how to talk about it. I don't know how to address it. I'm seeing it on my screen nonstop because people are making a point to take it. And if you're on a podcast, I'm sorry, I'm using my hand to the camera. They're putting it right here and going, here this is, and you have to deal with it whether you like it or not. I'm supposed to be agreeing with you, but I don't want to deal with it like this. And I just wonder if there's more people like that. Like, we don't even know how to talk about it or push back about it or anything. So I'm coming to you, pastor, you know, talking head on a podcast, friend of mine for some time who I respect and love. What do we do with all this? What do we do when, you know, the DOD is having prayer services with people who are charlatans, frankly? I'll just use the word that is applicable to that individual, and I'm not going to use his name because he thrives off press. And that's not the business I'm in. You know, what do we do when people whose actions tell me completely different than their words, what they really believe? You know, what are we going to do with this? Because we have platforms and we have responsibilities. How do we talk about this stuff? I think part of it is trying to share what we already believe, what we believe the faith demands of us. And what I think it obviously demands of us is not to just slap on a cross on something and call it good, but to talk about this in a way that talks about the – especially in the role of defense secretary. I think your role is there is to help in the protection of the nation. It is not your case to go out and start proselytizing people. And that doesn't mean that you don't talk about your faith or that your faith isn't important to you. But I feel that the role that the Defense Secretary is doing is like, this is an opportunity for me to spout off my beliefs and what America should be like and all of this. And it's like, that's not in the job description, or at least it shouldn't be in the job description. I think what it kind of boils down to is witness. How do we witness our faith? And it's interesting, you talked about. What he said on Easter Sunday. And it was also interesting, on Easter Sunday, they were interviewing all of the astronauts aboard Artemis II, and they talked to Victor Glover, who was the pilot. Yeah, that was outstanding. I saw that. And he is very public in his faith, but his message was not one that was unwelcoming. I mean, it felt at the same time very Christian and very inclusive. It didn't try to exclude people who may have not shared his faith, but it was also very much a representation of his faith, which is very different from Hegsa's view, which is, I think, very exclusive and I really feel tries to use the faith to kind of push certain agendas. And when you're doing that, I think it really makes me question, do you believe in all of this? Or is this just kind of something that you're using to feather your own bed, to kind of promote yourself? Because I think that if you're talking about your faith, it should come off in a way that is genuine and that also understands when it's appropriate to do that and when it just comes off as smarmy. And a lot of times it comes off from him, very smarmy. Yeah, let me jump on the inclusion word because that's a loaded word right now. It's a loaded word, I know, yeah. Words like inclusive and diversity because people jump on it. Here's how I would define inclusivity of faith. And look, all my social media is under my own name, so you can go look all this up. I almost never talk... Hardcore doctrinal stuff on my social media. You can go look very rarely what I do. You and me have had a few offline. I will talk to anybody about, and people that don't know my background, I have studied theology both academically at the college level and just personally, because I like it for over 20 years now. So it's something I study. I take seriously. If you look at my bookshelf over here, these two bookshelves right here are nothing but theology, religion, religious history, church history. I've got bookshelves of it that I've been taking classes on this stuff for years. I study it because I care about it, and I want to learn about it. The way I would say inclusivity of faith is there's people who want to talk the hardcore doctrinal differences. You and me have some very, very east to west doctrinal differences between the two of us, how we do things, how we view things. But we also have some things that are similar. But you and me offline can sit there and hash out that doctrinal stuff and like, okay, we can do this. Doesn't mean I'm going to come speak in your church or whatever because we may disagree on things, but we have a relationship and a conversation. We can hash that stuff out. Inclusivity and diversity is one of those things where it's like, you got to know your time and your place. I don't talk doctrine on Twitter because there's zero point to it. I have friends of mine that I know that I love talking hardcore doctrinal. I'm talking debates like we will get heated, we will fuss at each other, we will, you know, it's, but, you know, push-pull healthy stuff because we know where we stand. That's not what social media is built for. That's not what the news media is built for. So I'm not going to do it. Is that not inclusive? No, that's knowing the context of what I'm trying to accomplish. If I'm having a doctrinal debate with somebody, it's because I'm not just trying to prove I'm right. I'm trying to test what I know against what this person knows. You know, it's a push-pull, not just that I'm right, but to refine what I believe to make sure I'm right. That's how I approach that stuff. Inclusivity in a church environment or in an environment like that is like, okay, it's not my job to fix people. That's God's job to fix people. My job is to make them welcome around the people of God, which we call churches. I want to make sure that person feels so that whatever God's going to do in their life, I'm not in the way at a minimum. Don't get in the way. At a maximum, maybe I can help out a little bit. But whatever they're doing, wherever they're at, my job is just not, you know, it's almost the do no harm in medicine. We could probably use a lot more of that in the Christian faith. Like, start with don't make it worse. Start there. And then whatever they're trying to get fixed in their lives by trying to find some faith answers to the things in their lives, maybe you will be in a position to help, but you have to be in proximity to be in a position to help, and you have to be in a proximity where they'll reach out and help you, which is inclusive. Does that mean I just, does that mean I, you know, validated all their life choices? Does that mean I believe everything they believe? Does that mean I think they're doing? No. But what's your role in the grand scheme of things? Like, you know, faith is a hierarchical thing. There's God up here and you're way down here in number, you know, 4.5 billion somewhere, right? Not to him, but in our human mind. You know, first do no harm. So if you're just starting out with, you have to doctrinally believe everything I believe immediately. There's a time and place for that. If you're in a church, you want to have doctrinal, you know, you wouldn't let them get up and teach if they didn't agree with you. But if you're just going to have a dinner, do you worry about that? No. Time and a place for it. Are you going to disclude people of other faiths? Well, that depends. You know, if we're having a pig-picking barbecue, our Jewish friends, there's probably no point inviting them to that, right? You know, if we're planning something for Friday, mid-morning Friday, our Muslim friends are probably not coming because they're a little busy that day, right? High holidays for other faiths. You know, pick whatever you want. Is it—do I be inclusive, be like, oh, you know, it's Passover, so I'm just going to be respectful of what my Jewish friends are doing right now. And, you know, I'll send them a little message, but, you know, stay out of the way, let them handle their stuff. That's the kind of inclusivity and diversity of just, you know, basic manners we've seen to lose. And one of my little, you know, Occam's Razors for all of this religiosity, for lack of a better term, that we're seeing in America right now is, why are you bringing this up? Is this to help or hurt? Is this to divide or to advance what you think? because I will be told that people that are purposely dividing are doing that for the betterment of what they believe in their faith and for the Christian faith and for God or whatever. But if you're the one doing the viding, that means you're the decider of who's in and who's out. And again, if we're in a church environment, yeah, you have authority to do that. In a political environment, in a social environment, school environment, community environment, we're at the grocery store. Do you really have the authority to do that? I don't think you do. I think some basic manners would go a long way. So one of those little locks and razors is, are you hurting or helping everybody else that may not believe you? or are you just playing to the in-group of your own folks and your own faith group? Because playing to the in-group is never—I'm going to say this very carefully—if you're just playing to your in-group of faith, that's not evangelism by any definition of the world. That is not progressing the faith. That is not showing the world how you believe. That's just showing we're in an in-group and you're not. But I get told constantly, media, Christian media, the way people are living is like, oh, if we just, you know, project to our in-group how much we're in the in-group, that's going to make the world want to be in the in-group. That's not how it works. Why do you think people think that that's the way it works? Because it's easier because you're already in the in-group. So there's a lot of group psychology that—see, you're baiting me to get on the purpose-driven church stuff, and I'm going to avoid it. Nice try. There's a lot of group think philosophy and psychology that has gone into how to build up churches during the church growth movement era. That's not me saying that. The people that wrote all those books, that's what they used. There's good stuff in there to use. There's nothing wrong with using that stuff. But at the same time, there's supposed to be more to it than that. There's such a fine line of building up a community inside of a church. Look, you're a pastor. You tell me. You probably know how hard this is. How do you build up a faith group that is very secure and safe as a faith group, but is also welcoming the strangers to come in and join? That's hard. That's really hard. You know how hard it is? it basically takes something supernatural to make it work. Mm-hmm. Yep. And the only way you can make it work without a supernatural element helping you make it work is to homogenize it so that there's no problems. Because everybody thinks the same and looks the same and does the same thing and are all in the same socioeconomic stratus and you end up with sameness. Might be able to make a sermon out of that. Just thinking. I could make a few sermons out of that. It is so hard to have a community of people that are very interconnected in their lives and their service and their faith, and it still be welcoming to outsiders. But that's what we're supposed to be doing as churches. And I fear that we've replaced some of that with the overall social aspects of Christianity in America. Where it's, oh, I listen to the Christian radio station and, you know, my kids go to the Christian school and, you know, I go to the Christian church and I have this Christian lifestyle. Okay, well, what's your church doing? What's your faith community doing? What are you doing with that? Are you doing anything with that? Are you, is it helping somebody other than you, which it should be, or what's the point? And I think we have a lot of people. Look, I'm guilty of this, too. It's happened to me where it's like, I'm very comfortable in my church. I'm very comfortable here, and I'm doing this. I've had trouble when I've been between churches for various reasons where you lose it quick, and it's like, man, it's hard to get back in the habit. I don't want to find another church again. I don't want to have to find another pastor again. I don't want to have to open myself up to a whole bunch of new people all over again who's going to have to hear the whole story again. That stuff's hard. I get it. But it's not a social club, man. And, and we, because of the business side of it, it's a socioeconomic indicator now. And now it's a political indicator to too many people. And I think that's a bad spot to get with your faith. If your, if your point is to have faith that is useful, multipliable, and effective in a, in a world that's really in a bad spot right now. What well i think especially with some people there is a lot of a i think you said it earlier a religious religiosity that what's important is that you act a certain way but the funny thing is is that their actions betray how they act or how they appear um i just remembered recently in all the talk that we're talking about with the Secretary of Defense of the fact that... They had a picture of the joint chiefs um and i guess there have been a lot of replacements on the joint chief staff since um the new since trump has become president again, and the thing that is the interesting characteristic is that they're all white and male that was not the case a year and a half ago and there's been a lot of um. Promotions of persons of color and women that have been blocked by the Secretary of Defense, and that is unusual. And so it kind of then makes you wonder if all of this performative access of the faith doesn't really mean anything if you're not treating your sister or brother with respect? Well, I mean, we know the answer. Of course we do. I think there's a Bible verse or two about this particular topic. I think Jesus might have had a story or two involved about this once or twice. Look, I, at my stage of life and experience, I've really gotten to where, you know, I just really cleave. And the more media I do, the harder I grab onto this, just as the, it's the buoy in the middle of the lake when we had to swim across the lake and you can't keep over your friends. So we always did it where the buoy is. So if you got halfway and couldn't, you could grab the buoy. This is my buoy in media. You know, believe, believe what people's actions tell you, man. Like I, and I, I, I think I even snarkily said something about one of the, one of the DOD, you know, prayer. Oh, it was, Carolyn Levitt came out to do the press conference in the briefing room. She said, did you hear how loud our amen was? We were just, we just got done praying. That was her exact, almost verbatim, what she said to open the press conference. And I'm like. You know, I got a Bible full of prayer closets and things they probably don't know about. But anyway, to your point, you know, again, I don't even know how to talk about this because I don't want to get preachy because I fail too. But at the same time, if we're going to put that out front and center, like the Carolyn Leavitt thing or like what Hagseth is doing, if you're going to put it out front and center, your standard just went way up. Glover, what Glover said in the space capsule, the dude is the best of humanity. Like he's 1% of the 1% of the 1%. Like go read his bio. You cannot get a better quality human being professionally, ethically, personally. He is just the best among us, which is why he's there. And our friends that like that sort of thing, when he had his shirt off, that really blew up social media. The guy is excellent in every possible way, right? He's who you would hold up to an alien and be like, this is what a human being should be and what they should be able to achieve. This is as good as we get. So when he says it, it hits a certain way because he has everything about that man just screams excellence. His whole life, how he carries himself, how he talks, and everybody else on the crew too because the quality of human being, you have to be there. So people listen to it. When you act, and I'm just going to say this and go ahead and get mad if you want to, when you act like a caricature of the role you're in instead of just doing the role you're in because you're good at it, and then you put the faith on it, people are going to put them two things together. So if you're going to put that front and center, if that's the first thing in your Twitter bio, great, fantastic. But you just set the terms for our entire viewpoint of you through the rest of your bio, you better live up to it. I mean, how many of those accounts, like, I've gotten death threats from accounts with crosses in them. You know, it's just part of the gig, you know, because I got my real name on everything. And they'll call you every name in the book. I'm like, okay, so maybe don't put that first on your bio. It's not in mine. That's one of the reasons it's not on there. You can call me a coward or whatever. Maybe you're right. But it's like, you know, are we going to have a faith where it's okay to struggle, and it's okay to work it out, and it's okay to not have the answers, and it's okay to not need validation from everybody all the time on everything that you're a person of faith? Because I think we're replacing authenticity with validation a lot here. I see it a lot. And I think some of the stuff you're seeing is, oh, it's okay that they're doing it because it validates what my faith is and it validates how I feel and it validates, you know, the in-group that I'm already in. We get validations like, well, no, we're not supposed to be in the validation business. We just did Easter. Easter is not a validation holiday. Easter is the opposite Oh boy, here we're going to go Good Friday was a validation incident How'd that work out? You know, Palm Sunday, oh, you're going to be our Messiah. And it was the exact same people. You know, I think there's something to that of you need to have enough of a faith where you don't need to constantly validate it by people who obviously have some holes in their faith game. To use a sports reference, if your faith depends on that real strong leader all the time, and you should have strong faith leaders in your life. But if your faith depends on that then that's that's not faith that's followership you know and i i think we need to really deal in the social media age and news media age where we're having politics and religion mixed back together in a way we really haven't seen in a in a generation at least if not longer probably the 40s and 50s historically is last time we saw this but say what you want about the fundamentalists they they did separation and they meant and they stayed away they They didn't want nothing to do with any of this mess. This is different. I think we need to start talking more about validation. What validates your faith? Is it quietly working out your faith in your local church and your community? And then when you need to say something publicly and stand up for the faith, that's all good. There's nothing wrong with that. But if politics is validating your faith, you're going to wind up disappointed, man, because I love my country, but this ain't it. Like, that's not what I'm going to answer for. I'm not going to answer for what Congress did. Might answer for some of the people I voted for. So, you know, who knows? So y'all please behave yourselves. But, you know, I'm not, I don't think my judgment's going to involve, you know, the in-depth housing policies of wherever. I don't know that that's going to come up. I'm pretty sure how I treated my fellow man. I'm 100% sure that I have been blessed with this platform where I'm on TV and radio and writing. I'm 100% convinced I'm going to have to answer for all that because not everybody gets to do that. Very few people get to do that. I'm going to have to answer for that. So do you want to do validation or do you want to do the things that actually matter that we may have to answer for down the road if you're in the Christian faith and believe in a judgment, which I do? A loving judgment. There's forgiveness in it, but it still ain't going to be pleasant. Mine's going to take a while. Don't come right behind me. You're going to be waiting. I think this validation piece is bad because it's bad for the practice of your faith. Validation is always bad because it takes you down the wrong path because you're not getting the constructive criticism. You're not getting the feedback. You're not getting the pushback like we talked about those doctrinal debates where you get push and pull and you have to reconsider things. You know, validation always leaves you exactly where you are doing exactly what you were doing. And that is the opposite of what your Christian faith is supposed to be, which is you're supposed to be always working on it, always pushing it, always trying to learn a little bit more, always trying to get a little bit better, always trying to get a little closer to God, trying to have a little bit more spiritual stuff and a little bit less flesh stuff until you die, and then you get made perfect in the next world because you can't do that here. Validation is a poison to that process, in my humble but accurate opinion. So if you're chasing validation... Not only is it not going to work out very well, and you're probably going to look silly on social media, you're just wasting the precious time you have, which is a freaking vapor. I mean, you and me are both middle-aged. I'm talking to my children are all young adults. My oldest is pregnant right now, getting ready to have our first grandchild. And the youngest is getting ready to graduate college. And she went on a trip, and she called me homesick. She's like, it's too long. It's too long. I'm like, you're going to be home Friday. I was like, this is nothing. No, it's too long because that's her perspective. I have mornings I wake up and think something happened yesterday and it was 20 years ago now. Life is a freaking vapor, man, and it's gone. Don't waste your time on validation. Use it on people and use it on the good things. And I think the entire social media, political, news media dynamic of faith right now goes in that validation direction, and that's the end of your authenticity, and it's a sucking chest wound in the middle of American religion right now. Well, I think it's not authentic. It becomes just a mask at some point. I mean, we're all hypocrites. Let's lay this out. We all have our hypocritical things. I know I do. I'm a very fallen, broken person. What is wrong with starting out with, okay, we're all hypocrites, let's all hypocrite in the same direction, try to get a little better. The opposite of that is what we're doing with a lot of faith leaders, which is like, when you're perfect and you have no obvious sin in your life, or you have obvious sin in your life, but you use the right buzzwords and we're going to pretend like it ain't there when it's, you know, on video and we can see it, which is happening in politics right now, as long as you say the right things. You know, what are we doing? What are we doing? Can we have a faith in America where it's still okay to be broken? Here's the thing. It's okay to be broken as long as you're not trying to get money and power. As soon as you need money and power, broken don't fit that model. And the church is supposed to be the place for broken people to get better and to get support and to get healed up, to go back out and do something productive for everybody else. But power and money, man, you're not allowed to be broken. And then it turns all the way the other way. It's like, well, I know this leader is imperfect in his personal life, but we must have him in charge because of X, Y, and Z. And that's not a Trump knock because I heard the same thing about Clinton. I've heard the same, you know, Democrats told me the same thing about Clinton. And Obama. I've heard it from everybody. So that's not just a Trump knock. But if, you know, the hat fits, that's not my problem. That's your problem. You know, I'm frustrated. I don't have good words for this. I don't have good sound bites for this. I don't have a nice, clean narrative sheet for this discussion. Because there isn't one. I just want to see some people be honest about it. And maybe it's just me and I'm not a good enough Christian to hang with the American Christians anymore, but can we just have a conversation about American Christianity ain't hacking it right now. There's a lot of comfortable people. There's a lot of people that can sing along and do the songs and clap at the right spots, but there's a whole bunch of people that are getting left behind, turned off, and don't want anything to do with any of it. So if that's the case, maybe there's some problems here we should have some honesty about it and I don't think politics is going to fix it. And there seems to be a lot of people that think if we just get the politics of it right, we're going to make everybody else see how awesome we are. I'm like, well, tyranny usually doesn't breed love, but good luck with that. What I see a lot of faith these days, especially where it comes in context with politics, is a lack of grace, a lack of understanding that we are people, well, we sin, we fall short, we don't say the right things or do the right things all the time. And there is this sense of appearance that there are certain people that have attained perfection in a certain way, and that can come in many forms. But it feels like that's kind of what we're dealing with a lot and not dealing with enough understanding of people and people themselves as needing grace and to receive that grace. Maybe that's, do we need to just go back and teach what grace is? Yes. I mean, have we just buzzworded that thing to death that nobody knows what it means anymore? Yeah, I think we do. I think there's some fundamentals to the Christian, the American, Christianity Worldwide is doing really good. American Christianity is in a crisis. Why is that? Well, obviously there's something about how we Americans are doing it that isn't working correctly. That's not my opinion. I mean, we've got all the data in the world about it. The Christian church is doing fabulously in really diverse places under horrible conditions. We got more money than anybody in the history of ever, and we can't get it right. Why is that? It's not just because of the money. It's not just because we're wealthy and comfortable. It's what we're choosing to do with it. So maybe we just don't have a generation that understands some real foundational principles like service before self. Like, great. I'm not bashing people. These are people that if you came up to them with a pressing need, they would probably give you the shirt off their back if it was right in front of you. They would give you any amount of money they could possibly give you. They would take you for food. They would help you with your family. Whatever you need, if you went to these people individually, they would help you with it. Somehow, collectively, we haven't figured out how to upscale that. Because then we start getting into personal prejudices or we start getting into um you know our own issues or parents are the worst like well i'm for that but i don't want my kids around that you ever heard that one you know that kind of stuff um people's integrity starts getting real real flexible when it comes to um getting uncomfortable you know and um so i don't know maybe we just need to teach grace. We need to definitely, I don't want to get on a rant on this. I really don't because a lot of this is personal preference. I think we should have different kinds of churches because everybody needs a different kind of church. I don't think there's a one size fits all worship style. I don't think there's one size. I think we should have more and more churches. I think they should be smaller churches. I'm not a big fan of mega churches, although I've attended and been members of a few of them. There's nothing wrong with them, but that model don't work for everybody. You need country churches, you need fancy churches, you need, you know, high faith and order churches, you need really, really non-traditional churches for non-traditional people sometimes. I think we need an all of the above on that. But having said that, one thing we, all of those need is a basic understanding of mission and purpose. Is the purpose of your faith just to have an in-group where we're all comfortable, and we do this one thing on Sunday together and maybe do a small group during the week since that's the new thing. And we're just all very comfortable and we, you know, donate here and there and we do a meal here and there and we feel good about it all? Or are we going to have something that actually shows up as an effect on the world in a positive way? And when you start, if you take the politics part and you lose the grace part, I think you make both of those things worse at the same time. I really do. I think elevating the wrong people politically under the name of faith it hurts the country, number one, because now you've got unfit people in high power. But it really hurts the faith because you just put the faith label on the people that you know is unfit, and then we're going to act all shocked and shaken when the unfit people fail and make a mess of things. And then everybody's like, well, all the Christians said that was okay, so clearly they—so now you're going down with them. Like, I don't understand how people don't see those two things. That doesn't mean you only vote for Christians. That'd be insane. You know, I don't, you know, I vote for the best person for the job possible. If there's nobody worthy of the office, I don't vote for them. That's from president to dog catcher to HOA board, whatever. That's the standard. I don't, I just, I'm very frustrated at my fellow Americans and especially my faith group cohort that I'm in, even though I don't like the particular label. American conservative evangelicals need to stop as a group collectively. And I is one, so I'll put myself in there. Quit having this inferiority complex thing that's going on where you think you're persecuted and you think the world's against you. We're the most blessed. You'd have to go to the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages to find somebody that's got a better money system of religious faith than what we got economically right now. We're the most blessed people in the history of the planet. it. With a religious label on them. And yet we've got this inferiority complex where we need the politics to validate us, and we need this to validate us, and we need people to tell us how great, like, what are we doing? Just don't do that. Just have a little courage, man. Have a little gumption. You know, this is supposed to be hard. Quit thinking it's got to be easy or it ain't right. I don't know. Now I'm rambling, but I just, it hurts my heart, and it's hard to And I'm trying to raise up adult children. And they have these questions because they've seen failings in church, and they struggle with their faith because they see people that they're like, I don't want nothing to do with that. I've had that conversation with my children. They're like, well, they act like that, and they say that. I don't want anything to do with any of this. Are they wrong? No. Do I have to explain it? Yeah. But you know how that conversation starts with, well, your dad who you love has a lot of failings to start with that and work and work up from there, because you know i don't want them to ever think because if if you're if you think your parents are perfect and then you find out when you're 21 they're not now you got a big psychological bill from therapy you're gonna have to work through so my kids don't have that problem they know i'm very flawed they were there for it but it's the same thing with faith it's like can we just have honest conversations, and just when somebody's on the TV screen spouting a Bible verse and their lifestyle doesn't match it, we can just go, maybe you shouldn't spout the Bible verse till you get your lifestyle in order. Or preface it with, look, my life's a mess. I'm not the best person for it, but I find solace in this. Maybe you do too. Here's a Bible verse. What's wrong with qualifying it? Would anybody care? No. Did it take away from the verse? No. Does people think a little better of you? Yeah. If you demagogue it, though, it's, you know, words are two edges of a sword, man. And that's the example. It's how you use it. And if your life and your works don't match it, you know, it's a problem. It is a problem. And now you have otherwise intelligent people like you and me fumbling with words trying to explain it because I don't know what the answer is other than some individual responsibility and then some – maybe that'll trickle into some collective responsibility. But I don't like what I'm seeing, man. I don't like church – I don't want to talk politics in Sunday school class. I mean, if something big is going on. You shouldn't have to. I mean, I get it. If something big is going on, you know, like, you know, elections coming up, whatever. Every Sunday? No, man, what are you doing? How's that get me from Monday to Saturday? Like, I got kid problems, health problems. Like, we're supposed to be all in this together, you know? How's this feeding the hungry and clothing the needy and rescuing the dying, you know? The problem with getting rid of all the hymns, you lost all the challenging words, right? I mean, what do you think is going to be the—or how is this hurting the faith? Especially from your branch of evangelicalism, how is it hurting it? Because I think there is a danger. And we've seen it on my side of the ledger with mainline Christianity when it gets a bit too cozy with politics. You know, what is it, what is this, what do you think that this is doing with evangelicalism? See, this is the thing is, it's popular right now. Mm-hmm. And you can make this whole parallel little world where it's, we have our Christian radio stations and we have our Christian schools and we have our Christian, we don't have Christian bookstores anymore. Because Amazon put Lifeway out of business, but you get the idea. You know, you have this almost parallel society, and it's very comfortable. I grew up in churches, and I've had religion and doctrine and theology classes studying this. I wrote a paper on this about 15 years ago for Theology 350. 50, we would, our little clan of Christianity, we would study the mainline Christian faith and how in the early 20th century it got heavy on social issues and it killed it. Well, not killed it, that's too strong, but it rapidly declined doing that, inarguably. It's not arguable. Mainline Christianity lost a lot of its influence because of socio issues that they were championing. Many of them correctly, by the way. I'm not even knocking it. It wasn't like they were some conspiracy theory. They had some correct theories. They had some stuff they were very wrong on, too. But they leaned heavy on that, and they lost people, and they've never really got them back. You know, a hundred years later, we're sitting here. And yet the people who, some of the same people, the guy that taught me in that class is a name you would know. Because he wasn't that big then, but he was teaching that class. Taught us that, and now they're doing the exact same thing, but they just think, oh, but it's our socioeconomic issues and our social issues that we're pushing. That makes it different, and it's going to work this time. And it's not. It's turning, we've got the data. It's going to turn people off because there's nothing wrong with the church being socially conscious. It has a mandate to be so. There's nothing wrong with the church being politically conscious. You could argue it has a mandate to be so because everybody in your church is a voter. Get all that. But you also have other mechanisms to do things in those spheres. The church is supposed to be the church first and then dabble in that occasionally. And when you have churches that are all in on that, they're not churches anymore. They're social organizations that also say a prayer once in a while. And that's not my opinion. We have the historical precedent of it. And yet, you know, that's the problem. You asked me, is it hurting? I mean, most conservative evangelicals in America don't think it's hurting them because they don't see it. Churches are full. Music's never been better because, God bless them, a lot of the gigging musicians figured out they could make a real nice steady living working two days a week at the churches and have a lot of money in their pocket. God bless them. I'm not judging them. I've done the same thing. The music's never been better, man. Live music quality in church is excellent right now. Top-notch stuff. In fact, if you don't have it, you're considered a lesser church. But that's another language. I need my buddy Brady for that one because he's a real musician. We talk about this all the time. You know, quality of church has never been better. The show's never been better. The seats have never been more comfortable. My church just spent six figures on new air conditioning because the air conditioning didn't work right. Never been more comfortable. You just got to because it's a big building. You know, it's 67% of the electric bills at AC. It's brutal, right? We've never been more comfortable. So they're not going to see the problem. It's the old Titanic thing, right? Oh, we missed the iceberg. We're good. Yeah, for about two hours until the holds fill up with water that you can't see. You know, and when you go hard on the social stuff and you become exclusive to everything lining up right... Iceberg already went down the hall and punched all the holes. And I think the, when you're, the economics of Christianity, keep it floated up. Evangelicalism alone, just conservative evangelicalism is worth like $400 billion to the GDP. It's massive business. So you have to be very, and there's nothing wrong with making money. You gotta have money for the lights. You gotta have money for the van. You gotta have money for the dinner. Gotta have money for the coffee shop because every church has to have a coffee shop now apparently I don't drink coffee guys that's an end joke nothing wrong with the coffee shop I'm picking on you, nothing wrong with money but is that your primary purpose is the business and keeping it going and keeping the building big or getting a big is that the primary thing or do you need a bigger building because there's more people coming in and you want to help more people, those are really finite. Gray area you don't know until you're there working on it kind of things and that's where our that's where the majority of the focus of our faith needs to be on those sorts of things. But it's easier, oh, this is going so well, I'm going to fix the entire country and make everybody exactly as comfortable as we are. And I think that's where a lot of that projection and a lot of that stuff starts coming from projecting your politics out. Well, I'm good, so if everybody else is like me, we can all be good together. And they don't even mean it in a bad way. I've heard people say that, and it just shocks me. Maybe I'm just old. Look, I'm old. This will be a great clip for them to clip out. Maybe I'm just old and cynical and a bad Christian and bad faith and lived a bad life and all those things have some truth to them. But man, just the all good, all the time stuff, it not only wears on me, it gets fake in a hurry. Like, can you worship, can you, I had this conversation with my pastor a while back, and he just kind of sly looked at me and goes, yeah, you're grumpy, but you're not wrong. I was like, we need to be real careful with this whole thing about we can only worship when we feel good. No, biblical worship overwhelmingly was when things were really, really bad. Those Psalms were not written in the sunshine. Nope. But we've got this happy, doesn't make us feel good thing, and that's a doctrinal discussion for another day. But, you know, again, I'm just rambling on this topic because I don't have a good answer, but it hurts my heart. My children are going to grow up in a country where evangelical Christianity is looked down on because of the political decisions they've made in the last 10 years. They're not going to grow up in the country where I grew up, where you could tell somebody you're a faith in group, and for the majority of people, they had a positive connotation of it. That's not the country. And they can't see that yet, but I can see it coming. I can see this change after what's getting ready to happen, and it's already starting to happen, where they're going to get the sins of their fathers, not me particularly, but of the faith group. If they decide that that's their faith group, they're going to have to deal with that label. I don't think Christianity understands how evangelical conservative and they're fine with it by the way they don't even see this as a problem, how they're going to deal with this dispensation of history the last 10 years and how they conducted themselves they don't understand that that's going to be a hindrance going down the road, they don't, I see it maybe I'm wrong, if I'm wrong I'll come on here and say I'm wrong but I don't I don't think I'm wrong I don't think you're wrong either, I wish I was wrong It upsets me. People talk about outrage. This is the stuff that outrages me. It's like, it's a self-inflicted wound on the people who should be doing the most to help the most, but are doing the least because we're so myopic that we think, and I'm using we because, you know, I is one. If our politics and our church don't line up, then there's something wrong with both and we got to fix it. Like, no. Gets your inner faith—I'm going to quote my father here. Here's how it works. Your inner self has to be right. And then that helps you make your family unit, whatever that looks like in your home, your family unit, that makes that right. And then that'll make your community right. And at the same time, your church or wherever you worship, whatever your faith group is, then you can fit into there and that's right and your community's right and then your nation's right. But we want to fix the nation, and nobody wants to start with the inner them and their own family unit. We've got this thing all backwards, man. But national sales, you know, syndicated Christian radio is making a lot of money. It's a lot of sameness, but it's making a lot of money. Same six people are writing all the songs right now. That's not healthy. And people are going to be like, oh, you're just a curmudgeon. And I'm like, no, that's what's happening, and that's not healthy. That's not healthy. I know it's good music, and people like it, and there's nothing wrong with that. But that's not how we did it for thousands of years. You know, local control is not a bad thing. Maybe we should take it back. I'm rambling again, but it does upset me. Because my children and my grand—I got a grandchild. God, just sometimes it hits you. You don't think about it. I got a grandson. September, they're going to grow up in a very different America. And it's a very different America how they perceive evangelical Christianity. And it's not the left's fault, and it's not the devil's fault, although he, you know, if you hand it to him and he hits you with it, that's your fault, not his fault. It's not the world's fault. It's primarily going to be evangelical Christians' fault, how they're perceived for this next generation that's coming up. And it's a self-inflicted, self-festering wound. And I just don't, a lot of those folks don't see it coming because I sit in church with them. Well, my pastor's pretty confrontational on matters like that. He's not afraid to make you mad, but I know a lot of them, they don't see it coming and they're going to take it as victimology and they're being picked on. It's like no we we did this to ourselves we did this to ourselves and it makes me very sad and it makes my heart hurt. You know, I remember back maybe in the, this was in the 90s, and there was a lot of talk, and at that time, I think that there was a lot of more curiosity about evangelical culture and wanting to understand it more. There might be a little negativity but not a huge amount but I think you are correct that maybe within the last 10 years that has changed and it's become much more darker, and I think the question I have I don't know if you can answer it but is why, why throw that away because i think maybe 30 years ago, there was kind of a good thing there wasn't perfect but there was something where people were interested and it seems like that has all been thrown away, this is going to sound again these are not political terms i'm using these as religious terms, so understand non-clature, the 90s evangelical Christianity, which was very imperfect, and we can look back on it with hindsight now with some of the stuff that's going on, some of it very publicly, very recently, some very big names have had some real issues that we could bring up. There was a lot, I'm going to use this word because this is the word we started with, there was a lot of diversity to it. There was a lot of inclusivity to it. There was this explosion of, I'm going to go back to the music, because art tells you where people's hearts are. You know, music, graphic arts. Art gets you to the soul a lot faster than, you know, words you got to work on. You know, songs and art will get you there faster, right? If you take the music piece of it, everything on Christian radio sounds the same right now. And I'm not knocking it. But it all, it's very, Christian music in the early nineties, mid nineties, late nineties, there was a little bit of everything. There was this creative explosion because it was the first time that you could take a drum kit in the church and everybody was getting excited about it, you know, in, in real conservative circles. I know people would be like, God, you guys are behind the top. Look, it was different. Like just people were excited about it. And there was this creative explosion of stuff. I don't see that right now. There's some of it. I'm not knocking everybody's art. But there was an inclusivity to it because everybody was excited about it and there was a diversity to it. And a lot of it was, you know, generational. A lot of it was the beginning of the internet. You had the MTV kids that all of a sudden are like, we want that for us too. There's some of that. Excuse me. I've been doing media for five hours straight. My voice is gone. Um, there was, there was just this perfect storm of the, the peak of the TV era and then the start of the internet area at the same time, right as you had this generation of basically my generation, because I'm a little younger than you, my generation of those Christian kids who's like, okay, we grew up a certain way, but we want our faith to look like this and we're going to, we're going to make it happen. And you saw a lot more of that now. You know, it's almost like the before time of that again, before my time. It's very, this is what it's going to look like. This is what it's going to sound like. This is what it's got to be. This is our, this is how we're going to do it. We're going to have our, I'm sorry if you get offended. We're going to have our TED Talk sermon. And then, and it's going to be exactly 35 minutes. And nothing wrong with 10 minute sermons. Sometimes you go an hour if it's good, but you don't have, like, less is more, guys. Less is more, including my father, who, God bless him, great preacher. Less is more, Dad. You could trim 10%. I'm guilty, too. I need to take 20% out of every piece I ever wrote. It'd be better. But you see what I'm saying? It's the evangelical. You're still mainline, so you guys do it a little bit more formally. You can go in pretty much every non-denominational church, which is hard to tell because we're not allowed to put church names on anything anymore for some reason. I don't understand. You can go in any church in America, and you know what you're getting. That's good in one way is that really healthy. I don't does does does the first community church of of tulsa have the same spiritual needs as you know rockfish baptist church in rural north carolina as you know times square church in new york city as the villages in suburban dallas has as you know mount rainer Methodist church in Seattle, I think homogeny is bad in the Christian faith. Not doctrinally, not faith-based, not, you know, the things that we have to agree on, you know, the deity of God, that kind of stuff. I'm talking about the technical of how we're going to do it in churches that we can have some wiggle room on. There seems, we have somehow figured out in evangelical conservative Christianity that we're going to have church this one way every time, no matter what. And I think my kid's generation is going to rebel against this really hard because I'm actually watching it happen in real time. Yeah, it's already happening. It's starting to happen. And we've become the boomers, man. Let's just go there. We've become the boomer. We're having boomer church, except we have drum kits and electric guitars, but it's the piano all over again. It's the same. Well, we want to do that. No, we're having church this way. But we still think we're the cool hip people, even though we've been doing it for 25 years now, and we don't realize the world evolved a little bit. We've become the boomers. We're going to have our church service just like this. Man, these kids are going to rebel against it. I'm kind of excited for it because I want to see what they come up with because our 90s Christian music had some really interesting stuff happening. I liked it. I don't want to be that guy of, you know, my generation did it better. Well, we dropped the ball after that. But I'm anxious to see what the church becomes when this new group gets a hold of it, because they come from a very cynical place, that COVID generation, the generation that we told doesn't matter. That's a core—people—I was the at-home parent during COVID. I'm not just talking about my own kids. I'm talking about their friends. They believed what we told them. Their education didn't matter. We told them they didn't matter. They're more cynical than us, and it's going to show up. They're going to, when they come to their faith, they're coming from a cynical place of very high media literacy. They have a very honed antenna for nonsense. They can snoop out hypocrisy faster than anything you can possibly believe. I'm telling you, these kids that are like 25 and under, of course, there's the political sycophants and that sort of thing, but a lot of these kids, they've been on social media so much, they can sniff out fake really fast. If they walk in your church and they even whiff inauthenticity, you're done. You're done. I think their rebellion against the current church model is going to be very exciting to watch. And then they're going to do the cycle all over again. They're going to have this revolutionary thing. It'll become that thing, and then they will beat that horse to death to the point that their kids have to rebel again. You know what? I don't think that's unhealthy. Not to get biblical, but if you read your Bible, Jesus didn't just go do his own thing. He went to the existing religious structure and started working from the inside out and saying, this is what's getting ready to happen. Flat out said it, you're not going to understand it. You're not even going to understand it when you see it, but this is what's going to happen. I'm preparing you for it. Worked with what had, they rejected it, and then the new thing came. This is all healthy stuff. But it threatens people's power bases and it threatens people's money bases and it threatens people's comfort base so there's going to be pushback on it but it's a natural thing so i'm excited to see what the next thing of evangelical christianity is hopefully we get a better term because i hate the term evangelical christianity in america i hate saying it i i'm excited to see what my my children's generation does with it because i think, you're going to see it probably it's going to be gradually then suddenly i think in the next couple years you're going to see a real change happen and i'm looking forward to it Thank you. I think that helps us to kind of conclude this on a good note. You're tired of hearing me talk. No, no, no, no. No, let me ask you one quick question, because this has been a lot of me talking, and that's never healthy in a church environment or otherwise. Because you come from the mainline tradition, and I've watched your sermons in church services many times, frequently do. I I'm wondering your perspective on it because and I've had you on my program so just to cross it up a little bit you know you're you're in Minneapolis St. Paul y'all been the epicenter of a lot of crap socio-politically um recently and now you know we had the we had all the you know the George stuff and riots and now you've had the ice stuff and all of that let me ask you because you're my go-to on this kind of stuff a lot of times, like not just your own church, but you're in that community walking around. How does, when it's that palpable, the political environment where it's not just on Twitter, it's in your streets, literally on your street, and you can't get away from it. How is that affecting people's faith right now? Is it driving them from it? Are they questioning their faith? Or is it one of those things where they bring it up at all, and they're just like, why is this happening? Or do you see it as like, man, they're doing some of this bad stuff with Christian nomenclature. It's not good. Is there a wrestling of it there? Because y'all really are in the epicenter of it there. That's a good question. I think there has been— And give two examples. It's an essay question. Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a lot of wrestling. I think the way that I described it, especially after –, Alex Creddy was shot and killed, is I think that there was a lot of, and maybe still is, a lot of lament. You talked earlier about the Psalms and that the Psalms are not all happy-go-lucky and things. And I've learned a lot about the Psalms of lament and what that means, and even to an extent the imprecatory or cursing psalms that kind of deal with that sense of injustice, that things aren't right, while yet believing. Because I think the things about the lament psalms is that sense of still having faith in God, but still wondering where is God in all of this. And, you know, you thought about that a lot, that the trust that you may have had, and I think especially here in Minnesota, there's always been, maybe because of the kind of Nordic Scandinavian heritage, more trust in the government or seeing government as a force for good. And here was a very blatant example where that wasn't happening. And so, there was that kind of loss of trust, and then a loss of wondering, where is God in all of this? And so, I think people have been lamenting, but I don't think that that has been a cause for people to lose faith. I think that that has been—it's a time of questioning, it's a time of a challenged faith, but it's still a faith, but it's a faith where people are doing a lot of questioning and searching of finding God in the midst of all of this. And I think it's something that we continue to do. But I began to think that it's something that we are all continuing to do as a nation, as we kind of see a lot of the actions that have been going on as of late. The loss of kind of trust in, not really just in institutions, in each other, that we kind of are seeking God in all of this, which is very different from, to go back to what we began with, the kind of peacocking way of talking about God, because that's not really seeking God. That's kind of using God as a product. But, um... But I do think there are people that are trying to seek and question and find out, where is God in all of this? But it's going to be something that's going to be more quiet, and it happens in churches where people will just kind of show up and even just be in worship or just kind of seek out someone at a time of need. And I think that that's kind of what I'm seeing right now i i did this on something a while ago but i just i keep thinking about it as like, there's too many people especially on the on the mega right and just call it what it is but there's there's progressives that do this too they they take render under caesar of caesars and then they just go why don't i just become caesar and then everybody can render to me. Like i'm that's that's what i'm seeing from these people it's all power like if all you want is the power of it then you've already told me everything i need to know and there's there's i can think of particular individuals they are all about the power and there is nothing in faith that is ever about power Oh, The Christian faith, like it's just the automatic number one, money's a little harder because you don't want to judge people on money and everybody's in different circumstances and some people are better money. A lot of money is just, you know, can you personally handle it or not? So money's a little harder. If you're a pastor and you have a mansion and I'm like, but the power one is an automatic one. That's the easy one it's like if you just want the power, then you're shining me on because this should never be a power thing this should be a working on a thing it's not that we don't have authority inside of our churches and we don't have discipline inside of our churches that's not what I'm talking about but that's that grace with love thing that's because you love those people and you're trying to help them it's not because you're trying to tell them what to do, and i think the power dynamic is the one i've really gone to with this one is like if if you're this christian nationalist nonsense virus of we're going to get power so that we can force the christian that's never going to happen it's never going to work people are going to reject christianity they're not going to come towards you because you make them they're going to run towards secularism or something worse every single time and number one is it tells me you don't understand it, and you don't really believe it. Exactly. You're only believing it. You're just using it. You're only there to get what you can get out of it. You have told me through your actions, not words, what you really believe. And this is why I'm thankful for social media because we have found people eventually over time on social media will tell you exactly what they are because money, power, alcohol on Twitter. Yeah. Like seriously it just it eventually you're going to use it enough that you let it out what you really are i've like i've had some stuff i had to delete i've had people mess like hey you might want to take that down which is good that means i got a good doesn't happen very often you know nothing malicious just i didn't they that means that if you're oh i didn't even think about it that way because i don't know it you know do you have people in your life like that but i think, the power one is the automatic and if you start doing politics non-stop, if you can it's almost always the power so to me I think I'll look at the power part of it every time it's like if you just want power to make other people do something instead of convincing, them to take a faith journey I think that's that's going to be the dividing line that'll hold up over time. This has been too dark, man. I'm sorry. I'd like to do something happy. I'm sorry to do my, you know, therapy session with you, but you know, mate, it's not fair to not talk about it. If we have these platforms, I don't think that's right. So I don't know if we're doing it the right way, but I think we should talk about it. And I appreciate you giving me a chance to talk about it a little bit, or at least talk through it. Let's keep talking about it. Cause it's, it's not until we stop breathing, it's a struggle. So I think we need to struggle together because if we don't struggle together, we will surely struggle separately. We might as well do it together, man. Well, it is dark, but I think right now, it's necessary to talk about it. And in the midst of the darkness, I think that this discussion is a candle and that's important. Yep. I mean, I just, this stuff, so, you know, we've been talking about Iran nonstop and we're going to talk about Congress here next week when they come back in the hot mess. And then we're going, you know, news, news media has a circadian rhythm to it. Like we got the midterm coming up. That's going to dominate everything. You got the end of the physical year and, you know, you can see a lot of the big stories coming ahead of time. And I just don't want to lose, I don't want to lose, this is why I went to culinary school, so I don't lose track with normal people. I get to work with a diverse group of people. I don't want to lose track of the faith part of this because it gets buzzwords so bad in the circles that I'm in all the time. And you can't talk about it on TV a lot and it's not appropriate to talk about it a lot in a lot of areas. But man, we need to. Because if we don't talk about it and we think we're the people of moderation and common sense, then the only voices out there are going to be the crazy makers, as my father would call them, because he's like, I don't mind having bad people in church. I was like, we got a lot of bad people in church. I don't want crazy makers. Can't do nothing with a crazy maker. Bad people can start becoming good people. Crazy makers just cause crazy. And we have a lot of crazy makers out there right now. We don't want to yield the field to the crazy makers, my friend, and you're not one of them. And I try not to be one on anything outside of Waffle House and WVU Sports. So it's all good. Yep, it is. Well, we need to do this again. Yeah. So definitely we'll try to do this and talk a little bit more about some stuff. Yeah. I got to hook you up with our buddy Brady for the music thing, because he can tell you all the Nashville piece of that. Me and him have a running joke of like, you know, 2,000 years, what really killed Christianity was Nashville. It couldn't survive Nashville Survived Rome Couldn't survive Nashville But that's another song I'll put the two of you guys together You can have that conversation. All right We will talk again soon Yes sir Thank you All right. So, I hope you were enlightened, had some good points to hear from my conversation with Andrew, and I will put links to his Substack for Andrew's Substack in the show notes for you all. As usual, if you want to know more about this podcast, check me out at churchinmain.org. You can also check out churchinmaine.substack.com to read related articles on religion, faith, politics, and culture. Subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcast app and leave a rating or review that does help others find the podcast. Also, you can donate on Substack or you can make a donation using the link in the show notes. That is it for this episode of Church in Maine. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. Thank you so much for listening. Take care, everyone. Godspeed. And I will see you very soon.