February 3, 2025 • 52 mins
Part 2 of our conversation with Sarah about the question, "Is Christian Nationalism bad for society?" as we dig deeper in the good, the bad, and the ugly.
A big thanks to Ryan Canty's book Deweaponize for some of the info in this episode.
All ideas and viewpoints presented should be taken as opinion.
Be sure to give us a 5-star rating on Apple podcast and leave us a shining review. Also be sure to like and follow us on social media on Facebook, Instagram, and X.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Grub and Grace, I'm Mark Flower.
(00:03):
Just like last week, I'm going to be starting off with a little dialogue with myself before
I jump into the episode.
I heard some feedback that it might be helpful to have a little disclaimer before I jump
into this.
Some people are a little confused as it's a little bit of a different format than what
I typically do.
So here we go.
Karl Barth, a Swiss reformed theologian, had a great influence on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's
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teachings.
Barth recognized that if we don't let God be God and tell us who God is through the
cross-dead Christ, we give to God our own image, our own desires, our own prejudice,
our own desire for power, for prestige and possessions.
And we render on the other responsibility for anything that makes us uncomfortable,
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anything that's a challenge for us and anything that generates fear.
1930s German economy was devastated from World War I. So when a passionate activist spoke
in a language that resonated with the downtrodden German people, he inevitably rose to prominence.
Hitler positioned himself as the voice of the common man, railing on elites and the
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establishment.
However, his messages were interspersed with xenophobia and fear-based rhetoric like cultural
degenerates, scapegoating minorities and marginalized folks from the nation's problems,
exploiting societal divisions as us versus them and labeling anyone outside of his party
as Marxists.
Once he became chancellor in 1933, he appointed German oligarchs as economic advisors, privatized
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government utilities, shut down workers unions and any strikes and continued to remove rights
of minorities.
The Nazis collected any books promoted degeneracy or woke today and held large book burnings.
Berlin had a thriving LGBT community and the very first transgender clinic, but the Nazis
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burned that down and with the revision of paragraph 175A, they criminalized homosexuality
and LGBT people were sent to concentration camps and forced to wear triangle badges.
The Nazis were also threatened by independent women.
So Hitler proclaimed, a woman's world is her husband, her family, her children, her
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house.
And this is all said while women's reproductive rights are being rolled back and any doctors
who performed an abortion face the death penalty.
They removed citizenship rights for Jews and started to round them up for mass deportations
for being illegally in the country.
The German press even highlighted a few instances of violence to convince the public that Jewish
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people were the real threat to real Germans.
Hitler became a billionaire and his posse of oligarchs knew that they could get away with
the scam if they constantly had an enemy within to blame while the corporatocracy robbed the
country blind.
Loyalty wasn't just encouraged, it was demanded.
Opponents were silenced and the media dare not criticize him.
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There were only a few who stood up against all adversity.
You wouldn't be remiss to think that this sounds eerily similar to what's happening
today.
Widespread immigration raids, removing birthright citizenship, federal government employees
having to prove their mega revelation, freezing all federal grants for social programs and
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forced states considering bills allowing conviction of women who have an abortion or even a miscarriage
as murder.
White Christian nationalism under a Trump presidency has certainly been turning heads
and drawing critics even within their own party.
So you might be asking yourself, is white Christian nationalism really the issue though?
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Yes and no.
Where Christian nationalism is problematic to a very large degree, the weaponization
of it is a convenient pawn and a symptom of much larger systemic issues.
Xenophobia, racism and creating complacency are just some of the tools used to maintain
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wealth, power and control.
These tools are used to divide and limit the working class's ability to effectively and
collectively organize as well as distracting us with scapegoats to take our attention away
from deeper rooted issues.
Looking specifically at white Christian nationalism, much of today's theological belief system
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is just as much about culture, which can be seen through celebrated heroes such as John
Wayne, General Douglas MacArthur and George Patton.
The image of the strong masculine all American cowboy or the idealized soldier have become
the stereotype of Christian men.
As ironic as it is for picking someone like John Wayne as a moral Christian hero, they
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were picked to symbolize a different set of values that would initiate emotional, nostalgic,
mythical values, a return to gender roles and a reassertion of white patriarchal authority.
During the 60s, preachers like Billy Graham became very deeply intertwined with politics,
heavily involving himself with the likes of Reagan while pushing muscular Christianity.
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In her book, Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Koba's Dumais explains, to Graham, Jesus
was no sissy.
He was a star athlete that could become your life's hero.
Christian life was total war and Jesus was our great commander.
Dumais notes how the sexual revolution and the loss in the Vietnam War facilitated the
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entrenchment of evangelical siege mentality by undermining the natural order that God
had ordained between the sexes and for America's role in the fight against godless communism.
This continued to gain traction through the 70s and 80s with prominent figures such as
Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, Phyllis Schlafly's successful war against
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equal rights movement and Jerry Falwell's creation of the moral majority.
We have seen the reaction within many church communities condemning those asking for mercy
and empathy on the marginalized and the immigrant.
Many have even spoken about the sin of empathy.
We see a section of the population that is okay with changing the definition of words
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and creating narratives that weren't already there.
Biblically speaking, there is no mention of the sin of empathy, nor are there any decrees
in the Bible for power or dominion.
In fact, Jesus harshly rebuked the seeking of power and wealth and criticized those with
blatant outward piety.
Making up narratives such as the sin of empathy as a woke, leftist tool only exposes their
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discomfort when confronted with ideologies that are contrary to their belief.
We see this with Jonah in his discomfort when he says he'd be better off dead when God
forgives the Ninevites.
It is okay to feel discomfort.
Discomfort allows us to sit and challenge our preconceived dogmas and wrestle with them.
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It is within this discomfort that leads us to the cross.
When Jesus calls us to take up a cross, what does that look like to you?
Does it look like feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, loving our neighbor, sheltering
the homeless, comforting the sick, or visiting those in prison?
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Or is there a complacent apathy condemning those who attempt to seek the goodness of
Christ?
Bonhoeffer very famously talks about stupidity.
He says, stupidity is a more dangerous enemy to good than malice.
Against stupidity, we are defenseless.
Reasons fall on deaf ears.
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Reasons that contradict one's prejudgment simply need not be believed.
Bonhoeffer isn't just talking about ignorance.
He's talking about a willful refusal to think critically, question, or engage with
reason.
Without self-reflection on our dogmas, lies and harmful ideas persist without challenge.
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Bonhoeffer has an answer to this and he says, if we want to know how to get the better of
stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature.
It is not an intellectual defect, but a human one.
There are human beings who are of remarkable agile intellect, but stupid, and others who
are intellectually quite dull, but anything but stupid.
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We have a responsibility to hold our friends, our neighbors, our family accountable while
encouraging critical thinking, questioning inwardly, and engage with reason.
That means asking the difficult questions, holding ourselves accountable, and open to
personal growth.
It's not easy, but it's necessary, especially in a world where apathy can feel like a safer
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and more comfortable choice.
Are we willing to be courageous and wrestle with the discomfort?
Are we committed to being more present to those around us and to build a world that
reflects God's goodness?
Yeah, and you did mention that if you know anybody within these groups that women couldn't
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get abortions and they pretty much have to be in a draft upstate and figure out some
other way or just deal with pregnancy, even if it was harmful to the woman herself, and
there's a lot of women that were deeply impacted by that.
If you are around people that were impacted by that and you might get an actual genuine
response as to what they went through, how they processed it emotion-wise and physically
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and everything like that, you allow that relational space to have the person be honest with you
and hear these stories being impacted by policies, by the racism that they've encountered.
I just talked to someone that growing up, he would have things thrown in his head.
He had people beat him just because he was black.
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He deal with racism on a very literal manner with physical violence.
When you start talking to people like that, you start to see the holes through some of
this rhetoric and some of this trying to push of certain things that it kind of takes you
out of the space and allows you to see things with a clearer picture.
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I think a lot of people are missing that nowadays.
I talked about Jesus being a lot more relational in nature.
Once you start having that relational aspect in your own life, I feel like Jesus naturally
shows up in that space.
You're able to see things a little clearer through the eyes of Jesus' teachings.
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Even if you don't know themself, I feel like it just naturally comes upon you.
Even what Kenton said about Jesus was given authority on earth, that should be empowering
in a Jesus way.
When the disciples were imprisoned, they knew that they had Jesus with them and that was
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enough for them.
They didn't need to be the people who were in charge of the prison.
That's not how they saw it.
That should be empowering to believers to know that God is powerful and God does love
people, kids both.
He doesn't need me to have the power for him.
It makes sense.
I don't know if that was a good point.
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I think it needs to be said and everything.
I wonder if we should move on a little bit.
I did want to give a little bit more reason as to why we think Christian nationalism is
bad for society since this is a React video based on that video specifically about that
topic.
If you don't mind, I want to jump into some foreign affairs and talk about immigrants
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and all that.
One of the things that I didn't actually hear brought up within this debate was Trump's
cabinet, everything along that, the stance on foreign affairs and war and everything
outside of the country, not domestic and foreign.
The majority of Trump's base and people who pointed within his cabinet, the majority of
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Trump's base is supporters, the people that voted for him.
They think of him as an anti-war leader, but Trump does surround himself with neocon warhawks.
The green light has been given to Netanyahu to finish the job in Palestine, as has been
said.
Iran has talked about as the greatest threat that needs to be destroyed.
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All these things, all this rhetoric that fuels the industrial weapons complex, the war machine
lines its pockets, while finally an American tax dollars into a system that brings the
death and destruction through the world.
And then you got to also think about the global mining in countries like Canada.
What's his plan regarding all that?
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He hasn't actually come out and said anything about that, but he has put Musk in the governmental
position in his own department of government efficiency, which is also ironically named
Doge, just like his Bitcoin.
Someone who benefits directly off the backs of cheap labor hires and industrial colonialism.
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Also under the policies of Trump, or as of 2025, the US military will be turned and its
citizens under the guise for removing the criminals.
So quote unquote criminals and those who violate their visas, but it doesn't seem to have an
end stage.
They're talking about supporting 15 million people, which is a considerable amount.
And then that's nearly going to be a trillion dollar project on its own.
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So let alone the economic impact that we'll have down the road, immigrants, both legal
and illegal, come to America for a variety of reasons.
And many take on low paying jobs that many natural born citizens don't want to do themselves.
So who will fill that void when the demographic is removed?
So the immigrants that are in the strawberry fields in California, they're picking strawberries.
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Who's going to do that?
Who's going to be doing all these low paying jobs?
Immigrants and undocumented workers also pay an obscene amount of money into the tax base.
Without them, it would shrink the GDP by almost two trillion dollars a year through independent
estimates.
Social Security will also get hit hard.
Visa workers pay into a system that they'll never benefit from.
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That's one of the things that is never said in a right wing media is that it's always
brought out that they are benefiting from our system through the Social Security.
And of course, these workers will stop coming in because they want to deal with the looming
threat of being deported and the hassle of being a foreigner.
There will be a supply shocks cascading at every level.
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I should make a note that there is a statistic about violence toward minors.
So if you're sensitive to this, please skip forward 30 seconds or maybe like a minute
or so.
And Sarah, are you OK if I share this?
All right.
So the administration has stated that immigrants aren't safe at schools or public places and
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will be taken away by the military.
I should remind everybody that any attempt to deport or separate families will ultimately
be to mass child abuse.
To give a quick statistic, between 2014 and 2018, the Office of Refugee Resettlement received
4556 allegations of sexual assault or harassment of unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody.
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I believe this really is a bipartisan issue that we should all agree on that violence
towards minors is bad.
Violence toward children, to be more specifically.
This number will most certainly go up under the banner of a Christian nationalist project
with the 15 million people out there projecting to deport.
So I mean, I would see everything that I've said so far as a big minus to Christian nationalism
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and the policies that are being pushed.
If you don't mind, I'm going to say one more here.
So the CBO, the Nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the immigrants
that were admitted into the country under the Biden administration alone, they will
decrease the federal deficit by about a trillion dollars over the next 10 years because of
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all the productive work that they do and the fact that they actually don't receive a lot
of benefits because they aren't of legal status.
So I don't know if you have any thoughts on immigration or immigrants, both legal and
not legal.
I did trim a couple of clips from Tim himself from other episodes.
So if you want to play that, otherwise, I would love to hear your thoughts first before
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we jump into that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't know if you said it.
So I'm going to say it again in case you missed it.
But if you said it, I just missed it.
I apologize.
But just the immigrants are half as likely to commit violent crimes than native born
citizens.
And then you already did say they do contribute.
I don't know if I said that actually.
But yeah, thanks.
If I did, thanks for reiterating it.
If I didn't, thank you for saying it because it needs to be said.
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Yes.
And that seems like a hard thing if you haven't heard that before.
I actually had to repeat that statistic to people.
And that's from a study that they did in Texas because I think from 2012 to 2016, they did
this study.
It might have been 2018.
They started in 2012 and I think it ended in 2018.
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I could be wrong.
And basically, everybody that gets pulled over or commits a crime, they have to ask
you, are you documented or undocumented or are you a citizen?
And so they went like every person in Texas has that process when you're arrested for
something.
And so that statistic comes from a respected study that did that.
So anyway, thanks for sharing that.
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Yeah, let's go ahead and play the clip.
So these clips are Tim just talking about immigrants and some of the rhetoric and policies
that are projected to take place.
So yeah, if you want to find those, we can go play those.
So now they want to denaturalize immigrants to get them out of the country.
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Think about that.
I know.
It's step by step by step.
Don't worry.
We're just here for the criminal undocumented immigrants.
Don't worry.
We're just here for the immigrants who we don't think are here legally even though they
are.
Hey, don't worry.
Now we're going to denaturalize immigrants who were born here and naturalized as citizens
because they were born in American soil to kick them out.
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Seriously?
Yeah.
I think it's another good example of just like where the far right is going that just
put Trump in power.
William Wolf, he used to be part of the Trump administration in 2016.
He was a former administrative official there.
He tweeted this.
Who is an American?
That might be one of the hardest questions for our current generation to answer well,
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though it didn't used to be like that.
It's also one of the most important.
In order to figure out where we want to go as a nation, we need to know who we are as
a people.
And then he recommends a book.
And I'm thinking to myself, wait a second.
Why is this one of the hardest questions to answer?
I thought an American in his worldview was someone who's here legally.
So is it more complicated than that?
So what else are we defining who an American is and is not?
So it's not about legal or undocumented immigrants.
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That's not what this is about.
That's simply the Trojan horse for what's going on inside of it, which is really you
have to have a certain set of right belief, maybe look a certain way, assimilate the right
way.
And then we dub you an American.
And this is why Trump can also say publicly and still get elected, you know, I'm concerned
about the enemy from within.
Who are the enemies from within?
I thought we're all Americans.
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I thought if we if we have a Social Security number, I thought that we are legal Americans.
But in this world, that's not how it breaks down.
Yeah.
So do you have any thoughts about the denaturalization that they're talking about?
First, I wanted to say on that topic that Stephen Miller isn't just a random Republican.
He is appointed to be Trump's Homeland Security adviser, according to NPR.
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I had to Google it because I couldn't remember which cabinet position he had appointed into.
And he was in the first Trump administration and he's kind of always been anti-immigration
to a point that seems kind of kind of wonder what motivates this guy to be so anti this
like is there a personal vendetta?
Yeah, yeah, I think I've talked to family and friends, you know, who who didn't vote
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the same as me.
And I've heard, you know, they're not going to do mass deportations.
And my thought on it was a lot of the YouTubers I follow played me Trump's rallies night after
night after night.
That's kind of what he promised people.
And I would love for him to break that promise.
That would be great if he was just like, oh, that's a lot of work.
We shouldn't do that.
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But if he follows through on what he said he would do, it's it's all the stuff Tim's
talking about, Tim Whitaker saying in this video.
And I would love for it to not happen because I know a lot of good people that are immigrants
who have, you know, been naturalized citizens.
And I think it's a really slippery slope to other other people in whatever group you want,
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like Tim was saying.
It's really dangerous.
Yeah.
And the guy that you were talking about, was he one of the ones that actually helped pen
the Project 2025?
And I know there's a number of people within Trump's administration that are part of the
process of penning the Project 2025.
I couldn't remember if Stephen Miller is one of them or not.
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That's a great question.
I think he's probably, I would think, you know, I would definitely check.
I'm googling it now.
I know Russ Vote is one that he's appointed.
He was featured in videos produced by the Heritage Foundation promoting Project 2025.
Heritage Foundation.
Yeah.
So Heritage Foundation is the one that that did create the Project 2025.
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So that makes sense.
And he's the head of the conservative legal activist group, America First Legal.
And his strange ads on Twitter.
I've always gotten him being like, stop, don't troll.
You know, that's him.
Yeah, it makes sense.
He can promote it because it matches a lot of his worldviews.
Yeah.
All right.
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So I want to talk about the criminalization of homelessness.
So based on what I've been seeing, I would expect to see and of course, you know, this
is all time will tell, but I would expect to see homelessness or homeless people put
into camps.
But when I say that, the government has already sanctioned homeless encampments by the Invisible
People NGO and are sold as a solution by the media.
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That honestly is very ominous solution at that.
It has been touted as an open air prison and homeless people who refuse to stay at these
encampments are likely to be arrested and put in actual prison.
And if you know anything about the prison system in America, it's a it's a it's a very
major money making machine.
It exploits profits over essentially free labor.
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So with the development of the cops cities on just about every single state, I would
be surprised if you see a record amount of people arrested over these next couple of
years, which will fill many of America's empty prisons.
And if you don't know anything about America's empty prisons, you should read up on that
as well.
We as a nation could literally provide housing for every single person in America based on
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how much tax revenue we bring in and how much we have for projects and stuff like this.
But with the Supreme Court's ruling several months ago with the criminalization of being
homeless is is honestly bringing that in the wrong direction.
Bernie Sanders has been speaking out against this that we cannot address homelessness without
addressing the financial causes of what causes homelessness.
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One thing that was admitted from the conversation regarding Trump is that 40 percent of single
family homes are owned by Blackstone, which is like an umbrella for other real estate
companies.
And they are actually under the umbrella of BlackRock.
If you've heard anything about BlackRock, a lot of a lot of.
There's a lot of conspiracy theorists that talk about BlackRock.
But honestly, BlackRock is one of those big financial institutions that that is an umbrella
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for a great many companies here in America.
There's a mass buyout.
Well, yeah, so there's a mass buyout by Blackstone and mass buyout.
Nobody is addressing that.
And Trump won't address it either.
It's in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which you know, the Sherman Antitrust
Act is basically that no company or no entity can have a monopoly on the market.
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They operate within nearly half of all Americans.
Homes are owned by one corporation, which creates a housing shortage that causes prices
to go up.
You compound that with the interest or the increase of interest rates.
And it's the perfect storm for homelessness.
But people like Trump don't want to speak up because honestly, I think that they are
that things like entities like BlackRock are masters.
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They kind of have them kind of in their grip.
So yeah, about the Supreme Court ruling, do you have you want to tell me more about that?
Yeah, I just hadn't heard of it.
I will say the growing income inequality, wealth inequality is a huge thing that I've
been reading up on, mostly watching YouTube videos of this guy.
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There's this British guy that's like a trader and that's like his main message is talking
about how housing is being owned by the super wealthy and more and more people are getting
poorer and poorer generationally.
Less and less of your house is owned by you than like your parents or their parents.
So the ruling that I've mentioned, it wasn't like straight out like if there's homeless
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person on the street that criminalize them just for being there.
So what the Supreme Court on Friday talks about to articles in June 28th or whatever
the Friday before that was that it upheld ordinance ordinances in a southwest Oregon
city that prohibit people who are homeless from using blankets, pillows or cardboard
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boxes for protection from the elements while sleeping within city limits, which if you're
homeless, you're not going to just sleep in the snow.
I mean, that was was that the Oregon Supreme Court or just the Supreme Court?
This article is talking about the Supreme Court held up ordinances in Southwest Oregon
city.
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So either way, terrible policy that sounds a lot like not allowing people to bring water
while they go vote and wait in line to vote.
So OK, here we go.
I found another one.
This is the US Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in
public spaces.
So it's the US Supreme Court that that that did this.
Yeah.
It was the justices and a six three decision along with ideological lines overturned or
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court ruling.
So so yeah, it's yeah, people sleeping outside.
So if they're caught sleeping outside by police, it's the criminal act that can be arrested
by.
Wow.
That's wild.
Yeah, super wild.
It kind of I mean, you think of course going back to Jesus teachings about taking care
of people that are in need.
Yeah, take care of people that need that basically that can't repay you.
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Moving on with homosexuality, I kind of blocked up these out.
So I'll jump into the what's known as the Calvert passages.
So there are only six passages and seven if you include you from the entire Bible that
address homosexuality.
Only point zero five percent of all scripture out of thirty one thousand verses total.
I compare that to five hundred fifty passages about and one hundred seventy two about justice.
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These are known as Calvert passages like I talked about.
These are Genesis 19, one through eleven, which is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Jude one seven references in references Sodom and Gomorrah with the Greek term that translates
to pursuing strange flesh.
Leviticus 1822, the labeling of homosexuality as abomination.
Leviticus 2013.
It's the same thing.
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It's right around there.
Romans one twenty seven.
Paul's words about men exchange natural and unnatural relations.
And first Corinthians six nine, which is Paul's condemnation of the Greek term arsenicotide
and first Timothy one nine through ten.
Paul's condemnation of the Greek term malachite.
So the term homosexual wasn't even out.
(28:31):
I was translated that way in the Bible.
First you had the Latin Vulgate in 383, which is which was the term.
I'll just massacre this masculine, Lorum, concrete tourists.
So basically male concubines.
The Luther Bible in 1534.
It's the oh boy, this German D.
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Nabin Chander as a boy violators.
The Geneva Bible in 1587.
It was bugger's early word for anal intercourse.
And then King James version 1607 abusers of themselves with mankind.
The Wesley's New Testament in 1765, which is sodomites.
And then, of course, for a bystander version in 1946, which you have that whole film that's
(29:17):
based off of which they translated as homosexuals.
So that's where you actually see the first word of their first use of homosexuals in
the Bible.
So so when you get to I'm just going to go over the Sodom and Gomorrah real quick, just
one little line.
So Sodom and Gomorrah was not condemning homosexuality, but rather a lack of hospitality and sexual
(29:38):
exploitation.
There's plenty of resources to go over this, but I'm just going to leave it at that.
If we look at Paul's writings in First Corinthians and First Timothy, we see the word arsenic
arsenicotai, which often translated as homosexuals, which is a compound word combining two Greek
words, arsenos, male, and coite bed with the euphemism of sex.
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So it's translated to male betters.
The word is coined by Paul and only shows up in these two verses, but it is in reference
to Leviticus 1822 and 2013.
Contextually, it implies idolatry and possibly a difference in age.
In the Greco-Roman world, at the time these passages were written, the practice and by
passages written, I'm talking about with First Corinthians and First Timothy with Paul.
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The practice of petereschi, which was an erotic relationship between an older man and a younger
boy, was prevalent, normalized, and objectively predatory.
Theologians have suggested that Paul was referring to petereschi since it was a ubiquitous form
of homosexuality at the time and would have been the first harmful practice people would
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have thought of when using a term like male better.
All this to say, this should tell you that the subject isn't as black and white as it's
often made out to be.
So when someone like Kenton, I'm just going to use him as an example, but I've heard this
numerous times, and I'm sure you have, that how he desires gay people to go away and often
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be punished for just being gay and someone being a lesbian or someone being trans, even
in certain circles and whatnot.
I personally find that stance very ignorant and lacking in openness of understanding.
And when I say ignorant, I'm not saying stupid.
I'm saying ignorant that they're only looking at one side of things.
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They're only looking at the side that they've been taught all their lives, the side that
is being taught in the church and the side that is a very straightforward reading of
the Bible.
And if you look at how the Bible is translated, those words, if you're taking a very literal
approach to the Bible, of course you're going to take it that way.
But if you actually look into it a little deeper and try to put yourself into the times
(31:52):
of when it was written and also what was going on within the times, it does make it a lot
more nuanced and not as clear cut as making homosexuality as an abomination sort of thing.
So that's kind of what I want to say about that.
Yeah.
Thanks for sharing that.
Yeah.
I think there's a lot of room for people to take things very strongly when there's only
(32:18):
a few verses.
Example I've been saying lately is like, there's a verse where Jesus talks about if you are
divorced from your spouse and you remarry, you are committing adultery or something like
that.
And I'm like, there are a lot of people in my church that are remarried that I do not
believe are committing adultery right now.
Like life is messy.
(32:39):
Life is complicated things.
And I think it's easy to remove nuance when it makes you uncomfortable or when it doesn't
fit mold that you follow.
I also just think just what you're saying is they might not just be as black and white
as some people make it out to be.
I love when things are yes, right and wrong.
This is easy to understand.
(33:01):
I love when things are easy to understand and they're black and white.
I think most of society loves certainty.
But I think people have confused certainty with faith like the name and claim that movements
where they you know, you have to you can't say you're sick or you can't say you're hurt.
You have to just say you're healed and things like that.
(33:21):
It's easy to be certain as a replacement of faith.
I think it takes real faith to say I don't know sometimes.
And I think Christianity needs more of I don't know.
It's healthy to know how to say I don't know.
To admit when you've been wrong, admit when you've led people astray, admit when you know
(33:43):
people show you a better side, a better way of doing things and admit that you may not
have seen the whole picture.
So yeah.
And you know, it's like when I hear arguments about all this kind of stuff that we're talking
about, you know, it's based a lot of it's based on especially apologetics, fundamentalism,
(34:08):
apologetics.
It's that you know, if you can prove even that there's a sliver of possibility that
my narrative is, you know, is right, despite if it's against all odds, and it's more likely
that it's something else or it's not that at all, then I can presuppose the existence
(34:30):
of my narrative to be true.
And it's just such a lose my words.
I don't know if you have a word for it.
It's a weak framework.
It's a weak framework.
And I don't know if I've ever want to live like that.
I'm a very skeptical person.
And I think I've become a very skeptical person.
I haven't always been this way.
(34:51):
But it's one of those things like the more you learn, the more you realize that you don't
know as much as you did.
Yes.
It's like there's this fear of learning too much to that will take apart this comfortable
place that people are in.
You know, everything's already figured out.
I think they want someone to kind of be the parent figure, I guess.
(35:15):
And you know, God is their parent, like especially within Christian circles, God is that parent
figure.
And it's easier to go along with what you've been told.
So if you've read the Bible literally, it's easier to take that as truth and not question
it if that's kind of what you're seeking.
When especially apologetics and fundamentalists are looking at the Bible, they view it as
(35:41):
they want to view the whole picture.
And they almost kind of try to make the Bible as like the cover art on like a puzzle box.
And then, you know, when you take it out, you put all the pieces together.
When more it's like a box of Legos and not just a box of Legos, but it's like hundreds
of different sets of Legos.
(36:02):
So you get like Star Wars, you get Harry Potter, you get like, you know, all these different
Lego sets, but not even just that.
It's on top of that, you get like random assorted Legos that came from like your neighbor's
kids or like your older brother that bought like a Lego set sometime and then they lost
half the pieces and they just threw it in a box.
(36:23):
So you get all that.
And that's actually a more representation of what the Bible is.
You get, you know, the Bible was written by numerous people on earth.
And you get this whole idea of the Bible is uniforcal.
When you start to study the Bible, you see that there are a lot of contradictory ideas
(36:45):
that people bring up in the Bible.
Even about God is very contradictory in some of the parts of the Bible where you get one
thing about God in one part of the Bible and then you get another part that's like, you
know, that's kind of makes you question a little bit like, like, doesn't that kind of
been contradictory to this other part that I've read earlier?
And so it's, it's a very messy thing to go through.
(37:07):
And once you start kind of opening these ideas up, you kind of break free from some of that,
that, you know, what Tim puts it as the basement of fundamentalism.
So yeah,
I'm grateful I didn't, the Bible school I went through was just a small program like
my pastors did.
And so I wasn't really exposed to this fundamentalist ideology and like way of thought.
(37:33):
I don't know if I would have been able to take it.
I think the intellectualism of the Bible is a little bit overwhelming.
The way people do that.
I much prefer Tim Mackey being like, here's what the Hebrew is, you know, like I prefer
that, you know, cartoons.
But the thing I was going to say, just one more thing on this topic is like, do you remember
when, do you remember when Lauren Daigle was on Ellen and then like Christians were like,
(37:59):
okay, well, the Christian world was like, well, Lauren Daigle is Ellen DeGeneres going
to go to hell because she's gay?
And Lauren Daigle was like, I write music.
I don't feel qualified to answer your question.
And it ticked me off because all these people were outraged and like boycotting Lauren Daigle.
And I was just like, if I would, if I could just time travel and be there with Lauren
(38:24):
Daigle, this is what I would tell her to say.
Hi person with your gotcha question.
You are asking the wrong person about if this is a sin or not, or we'll send someone to
hell.
If you were saying this in good faith, you would be asking Jesus, not in front of a camera.
You would be asking, am I qualified to answer that question?
No.
As Lauren Daigle, I'm not qualified.
But who is the person you say you follow and you wouldn't be videotaping him to like get
(38:49):
him to say something.
Like that's so disingenuous.
It's such a, and like you don't, you know, like that whole thing to me encapsulated the,
this is a petty culture war tech thing, not a rooted in beliefs and like standards and
like values.
(39:10):
It didn't feel valid like it was rooted in values and who felt like it was rooted in
we're right and other people were wrong.
And I think when you mix in the hatred element of the things that this community has had
to endure, that makes me as a Christian go, I think I need to stand between the people
(39:30):
who are being hateful and between them and the people they're hating on.
And I should protect those people because that's what Jesus would do.
So that's also what's kind of pushed me towards where I'm at with that, which is it's okay
to not know.
And it's okay to just not tell people how to live.
That kind of goes, I was talking to somebody last night about that exact, very similar
thing and I said a very similar thing to him.
(39:53):
I was like, you know, if there is a marginalized group of people and there is something that
could potentially be harmful against them.
And even if hypothetically that harmful thing is in the right, it's logical, it's, you know,
everything like that, I'm still going to side with the marginalized person because I feel
(40:13):
like that's what Jesus would do.
Yeah.
That's how we would treat homeless people.
That's how we would treat people who are addicted to drugs, perhaps.
I don't know.
Just thinking of like, we say that's bad, but like, you're not going to harm these people
just because you don't agree with them.
That's not Jesus.
Jesus doesn't do that.
No.
See, I had one thing in here about, can we talk about the moral ritual laws?
(40:36):
I don't know.
Do you think I should read this?
You can.
I think it's interesting.
I'm sure if I'm a homeless person who's just really into this book stuff would be really
into this, but I feel like what you're trying to say there is that he was just like mixing
them wherever he wanted.
It was kind of, he was taking-
Do you mind if we go ahead and play that clip and then I can maybe do my little blurb about
(40:59):
it?
I'm not sure it's interpreting scripture through a lens.
No.
Which one was it?
Let's see here.
It was the-
Three-fold division of the law.
Three-fold division of the law.
That was the one.
All right.
Yeah.
Joy.
But that's the crux is how do you decide which laws in the Bible?
(41:21):
And there are a lot of them.
Some could be applicable, some might not be.
How do you decide what God's law is when you use that term?
What's the definition for that?
Okay, so yeah.
What I'm gonna state is, and I'm sure you're familiar, if you're familiar with guys like
Joel Webin, Doug Wilson, Stephen Wolf, some of these guys on the reform Christian nationalist
side, are you familiar with the three-fold division of the law?
(41:44):
You mean like ceremonial-
Ceremonial, civil, and moral, right?
Yeah, I'm very familiar.
And so what I would say is when we're talking about God's law, and I don't have the citation
in front of me, but when we look at the book of Hebrews, the book of Hebrews is going to
tell us that the ceremonial law of God specifically has been totally abrogated, right?
And so the way that the confession that I subscribe to, the 1689 confession is going
(42:08):
to say is that we should obey and subscribe to, or we are not beholden to God's law other
than the general equity of that law.
So what we are going to, or what I advocate for as a Christian nationalist is that the
moral law of God is universal, right?
(42:29):
The Ten Commandments, the summary law of the moral law, or the summary of the moral law
written in the Ten Commandments is a universal principle.
Romans chapter two tells us that the moral law of God is written on the hearts of men.
And so based on that moral law, we extrapolate and exegete all the other laws that God has
given and define them based on how they've been applied in the Old Testament to that
(42:52):
particular people, and we apply that law based on the moral law to our present day.
Does that make sense?
All right.
Okay.
So Ken did talks about how the moral and the ceremonial laws after Tim brings it up.
And I like, Tim actually goes into a little bit more of like, okay, he pushes it in and
what laws actually do, you know, follow along with this?
(43:16):
Like what are the laws that we are to adhere to?
And the argument is that Jesus only filled the ceremonial laws.
So we're only beholden to the moral laws.
And Judaism, moral laws are viewed as universal laws.
So like he was talking about written on our hearts, applicable to all humanity.
The holiness codes were explicitly designed to separate Israel from its surrounding nations.
(43:39):
This necessarily means that these laws aren't applicable to everyone.
If the laws were not being followed by surrounding nations, this means they wouldn't qualify
as moral laws.
So the separation of moral and ceremonial laws by evangelicals, honestly, is just lazy.
And it's a way of picking and choosing verses that justify the rules they want to enforce
(44:01):
and those they wish to ignore.
And I believe Tim actually brings this up in when he's pushing back and everything like
that too, in the further clips.
So if you do want to see some of this banter back and forth, honestly, everyone listening
to this, you should go and check it out.
It was a really good debate.
It was.
Like I said, it was very enjoyable to watch.
Do you have any thoughts on this at all?
(44:22):
So I'm just trying to understand kind of what they're saying.
Ken and people who believe I can.
He's saying that Jesus fulfilled the...
So by dying on the cross.
Which ones are the ones?
So it was the moral, the ceremonial and...
(44:42):
Sybil.
Okay, sorry.
So, but what I think you're saying, and I'm just trying to learn, like I honestly didn't
haven't heard this before, that the Sybil laws, Jesus fulfilled those so we don't have
to worry about keeping them?
Is that what they're saying?
It's the ceremonial and Sybil is what Jesus covers with his blood dying on the cross for
(45:06):
us.
So he doesn't cover all the law?
So it's just the moral laws that he doesn't cover.
Those are the ones that the Christian nationalists declare as what they want to instill as what
the nation is all about.
As ruling the nation from the seven mountaintops.
These moral laws are going to be our guide stones.
(45:27):
I always thought like the ceremonial and the moral kind of mix pretty, it's pretty hard
to tell them apart.
Obviously the ceremonial is like things that they needed to do to stay alive, right?
Like not eating red meat and like things like that, things that were going to kill off basically
them before Jesus could be born.
(45:47):
And I think those are covered by Jesus coming and dying.
I think it's crazy.
I'm not trying to alienate people, but I've never heard that he didn't cover all of the
sins.
That's a weird thing to say.
I've just never heard that.
But again, I haven't been in these kind of circles for this type of reformed stuff.
(46:10):
I just haven't.
So,
and this just goes into like the interpretation, the translations, the, you know, the logic
behind the different things that we see in the Bible and practice in our lives.
You know, like we were talking about, there's 45,000 different denominations of Christianity
in the world.
And, you know, with each nomination, there might be small differences, but there's differences.
(46:32):
And those are things that we all adhere to.
And there's good, valid arguments for a lot of stuff in the Bible.
And so like what you're talking about, like you always grew up that Jesus didn't cover
all of our sins.
You know, there's people that believe that he covered all the sins.
There's people that believe that everything in the Old Testament has been covered, you
know, whether it be moral, civil or ceremonial.
(46:55):
There's people that believe that only moral codes aren't covered by Jesus.
So
I've never heard that.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
There's a lot of different interpretation on this.
And it's a very messy, very nuanced discussion and debate topic and everything that you could
really get into.
So to say that there's, there's one way to do it.
It's a very dangerous path to go down.
(47:16):
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
I grew up thinking like Catholics, not real Christians, you know, like just, and now I'm
like, that seems overly simplistic to just assume I know what denominations are best.
I went to a Baptist high school and it like all grown up and I would just be mad at Baptists
(47:38):
all day long, just like mad at this chapel.
But mostly coming from the point of we should be preaching our messages to like the harshest
message we have should be to our own people, not to non-believers.
And it felt like a lot of times the messages were the harshest towards non-believers.
And my friend had reminded me of a quote my pastor had said where he was like to expect
(48:02):
people who say they don't believe what we believe to follow what we believe is like
going into a graveyard and expecting them to be dancing.
And I was like, that's an interesting thing.
I don't know how I feel about that quote now, but like, yeah, like expecting others to just
conform to our way of life because it's superior is that is a really slippery slope.
(48:25):
Well, I wonder if we should bring this up to a close.
Now the whole debate is Christian nationalism good for society.
I think time will tell if our nation does become a theocracy, which Christian nationalism
does want to move in that direction.
If we do become a theocracy, I'm wondering if we will see the fruitfulness of it or if
(48:48):
we're going to see a lot of damnation out of it.
And my question is, I don't know if you saw this, when Trump takes office and Christian
nationalism becomes the thing and start implementing everything that Project 25 has written in
it and the rights of everyone, including those who voted for him or not become impacted,
(49:10):
whether positively or negatively.
And looking at the primarily the negative impacts of it, if that were to happen, hypothetically,
do you think they would repent?
I don't know what you your idea on that is how you think.
I think definitely the beliefs of Christian nationalism, like its popularity, isn't is
(49:33):
a spectrum.
Right.
And I wonder how many people would be like Kenton and say, you know, that's what I am.
That's what I believe.
That's what I advocate for.
I definitely think there are people who voted for Trump that when you bring up the idea
of Christian nationalism to make people live like us based on our beliefs, a lot of people
would disagree.
(49:53):
And I hope that that's the majority.
I don't know.
But a lot of people that I've run up to, even if they voted differently than me, are like,
that's not how I think our country should be run.
So the extreme people like Kenton, I don't know if he would.
I think he's pretty convinced his way is the right way.
It's a great question.
And this is the merging of Christian and American identities is it mirrors other times in history
(50:21):
like the Nazis, unfortunately.
I'm not saying like we said earlier, Christian nationalists don't equal Nazis, but that's
what happened during that time in Germany is to be a German is to be a Lutheran and
to be a Lutheran is to be a German and you can't be Jewish, you know, and other religions
either.
So that's I think the danger there.
(50:42):
And that's why we that's why we want to have a podcast to talk about the dangers of it
and hopefully warn people and hopefully say you were open to talking to you about it.
That would be helpful to keep the dialogue going.
And we should also say that we hope, honestly, God, that we are wrong in all this.
Honestly, I would be happy to say I was wrong about everything I said.
(51:04):
Like if if good things come out of it.
Awesome.
Like I would love that.
So the next four years is great.
I'm all I'm all for it.
You know what I mean?
Like I want America to do well.
I want people who live here to be safe and to do well.
We're a nation built on the idea of religious freedom.
And I hope that we can hold that freedom more precious instead of adhering to this ideology.
(51:27):
True that.
All right, Sarah, I'm going to go ahead and sign us out here.
This has been a very long conversation.
Sorry.
I'm going to go and sign us out here.
It's been a very long conversation.
I may even split this up into two episodes.
But Sarah, thank you so much for coming out and talking on this subject.
I would love to do another conversation with you in the future and get your friend out
(51:51):
here again, too, and do that.
So thank you again.
And everyone see you in the next episode.
That's it for today's episode of Grub and Grace.
Thanks for joining us on this discussion of is Christian nationalism good for society?
I'd like to give a big thank you for Sarah for joining me on this.
I really appreciate her coming out to talk on this topic.
(52:12):
And I definitely learned a lot.
And I'm sure she did, too.
Keep your eye out for the next episode.
And as always, stay curious, keep an open mind and celebrate the traditions that bring
us all together.
What?
Welcome to Grub and Grace, I'm Mark Flower.
(00:03):
Just like last week, I'm going to be starting off with a little dialogue with myself before
I jump into the episode.
I heard some feedback that it might be helpful to have a little disclaimer before I jump
into this.
Some people are a little confused as it's a little bit of a different format than what
I typically do.
So here we go.
Karl Barth, a Swiss reformed theologian, had a great influence on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's
(00:26):
teachings.
Barth recognized that if we don't let God be God and tell us who God is through the
cross-dead Christ, we give to God our own image, our own desires, our own prejudice,
our own desire for power, for prestige and possessions.
And we render on the other responsibility for anything that makes us uncomfortable,
(00:48):
anything that's a challenge for us and anything that generates fear.
1930s German economy was devastated from World War I. So when a passionate activist spoke
in a language that resonated with the downtrodden German people, he inevitably rose to prominence.
Hitler positioned himself as the voice of the common man, railing on elites and the
(01:10):
establishment.
However, his messages were interspersed with xenophobia and fear-based rhetoric like cultural
degenerates, scapegoating minorities and marginalized folks from the nation's problems,
exploiting societal divisions as us versus them and labeling anyone outside of his party
as Marxists.
Once he became chancellor in 1933, he appointed German oligarchs as economic advisors, privatized
(01:36):
government utilities, shut down workers unions and any strikes and continued to remove rights
of minorities.
The Nazis collected any books promoted degeneracy or woke today and held large book burnings.
Berlin had a thriving LGBT community and the very first transgender clinic, but the Nazis
(01:57):
burned that down and with the revision of paragraph 175A, they criminalized homosexuality
and LGBT people were sent to concentration camps and forced to wear triangle badges.
The Nazis were also threatened by independent women.
So Hitler proclaimed, a woman's world is her husband, her family, her children, her
(02:18):
house.
And this is all said while women's reproductive rights are being rolled back and any doctors
who performed an abortion face the death penalty.
They removed citizenship rights for Jews and started to round them up for mass deportations
for being illegally in the country.
The German press even highlighted a few instances of violence to convince the public that Jewish
(02:39):
people were the real threat to real Germans.
Hitler became a billionaire and his posse of oligarchs knew that they could get away with
the scam if they constantly had an enemy within to blame while the corporatocracy robbed the
country blind.
Loyalty wasn't just encouraged, it was demanded.
Opponents were silenced and the media dare not criticize him.
(03:03):
There were only a few who stood up against all adversity.
You wouldn't be remiss to think that this sounds eerily similar to what's happening
today.
Widespread immigration raids, removing birthright citizenship, federal government employees
having to prove their mega revelation, freezing all federal grants for social programs and
(03:23):
forced states considering bills allowing conviction of women who have an abortion or even a miscarriage
as murder.
White Christian nationalism under a Trump presidency has certainly been turning heads
and drawing critics even within their own party.
So you might be asking yourself, is white Christian nationalism really the issue though?
(03:45):
Yes and no.
Where Christian nationalism is problematic to a very large degree, the weaponization
of it is a convenient pawn and a symptom of much larger systemic issues.
Xenophobia, racism and creating complacency are just some of the tools used to maintain
(04:06):
wealth, power and control.
These tools are used to divide and limit the working class's ability to effectively and
collectively organize as well as distracting us with scapegoats to take our attention away
from deeper rooted issues.
Looking specifically at white Christian nationalism, much of today's theological belief system
(04:26):
is just as much about culture, which can be seen through celebrated heroes such as John
Wayne, General Douglas MacArthur and George Patton.
The image of the strong masculine all American cowboy or the idealized soldier have become
the stereotype of Christian men.
As ironic as it is for picking someone like John Wayne as a moral Christian hero, they
(04:51):
were picked to symbolize a different set of values that would initiate emotional, nostalgic,
mythical values, a return to gender roles and a reassertion of white patriarchal authority.
During the 60s, preachers like Billy Graham became very deeply intertwined with politics,
heavily involving himself with the likes of Reagan while pushing muscular Christianity.
(05:14):
In her book, Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Koba's Dumais explains, to Graham, Jesus
was no sissy.
He was a star athlete that could become your life's hero.
Christian life was total war and Jesus was our great commander.
Dumais notes how the sexual revolution and the loss in the Vietnam War facilitated the
(05:36):
entrenchment of evangelical siege mentality by undermining the natural order that God
had ordained between the sexes and for America's role in the fight against godless communism.
This continued to gain traction through the 70s and 80s with prominent figures such as
Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, Phyllis Schlafly's successful war against
(05:57):
equal rights movement and Jerry Falwell's creation of the moral majority.
We have seen the reaction within many church communities condemning those asking for mercy
and empathy on the marginalized and the immigrant.
Many have even spoken about the sin of empathy.
We see a section of the population that is okay with changing the definition of words
(06:19):
and creating narratives that weren't already there.
Biblically speaking, there is no mention of the sin of empathy, nor are there any decrees
in the Bible for power or dominion.
In fact, Jesus harshly rebuked the seeking of power and wealth and criticized those with
blatant outward piety.
Making up narratives such as the sin of empathy as a woke, leftist tool only exposes their
(06:44):
discomfort when confronted with ideologies that are contrary to their belief.
We see this with Jonah in his discomfort when he says he'd be better off dead when God
forgives the Ninevites.
It is okay to feel discomfort.
Discomfort allows us to sit and challenge our preconceived dogmas and wrestle with them.
(07:08):
It is within this discomfort that leads us to the cross.
When Jesus calls us to take up a cross, what does that look like to you?
Does it look like feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, loving our neighbor, sheltering
the homeless, comforting the sick, or visiting those in prison?
(07:30):
Or is there a complacent apathy condemning those who attempt to seek the goodness of
Christ?
Bonhoeffer very famously talks about stupidity.
He says, stupidity is a more dangerous enemy to good than malice.
Against stupidity, we are defenseless.
Reasons fall on deaf ears.
(07:53):
Reasons that contradict one's prejudgment simply need not be believed.
Bonhoeffer isn't just talking about ignorance.
He's talking about a willful refusal to think critically, question, or engage with
reason.
Without self-reflection on our dogmas, lies and harmful ideas persist without challenge.
(08:18):
Bonhoeffer has an answer to this and he says, if we want to know how to get the better of
stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature.
It is not an intellectual defect, but a human one.
There are human beings who are of remarkable agile intellect, but stupid, and others who
are intellectually quite dull, but anything but stupid.
(08:42):
We have a responsibility to hold our friends, our neighbors, our family accountable while
encouraging critical thinking, questioning inwardly, and engage with reason.
That means asking the difficult questions, holding ourselves accountable, and open to
personal growth.
It's not easy, but it's necessary, especially in a world where apathy can feel like a safer
(09:08):
and more comfortable choice.
Are we willing to be courageous and wrestle with the discomfort?
Are we committed to being more present to those around us and to build a world that
reflects God's goodness?
Yeah, and you did mention that if you know anybody within these groups that women couldn't
(09:35):
get abortions and they pretty much have to be in a draft upstate and figure out some
other way or just deal with pregnancy, even if it was harmful to the woman herself, and
there's a lot of women that were deeply impacted by that.
If you are around people that were impacted by that and you might get an actual genuine
response as to what they went through, how they processed it emotion-wise and physically
(09:59):
and everything like that, you allow that relational space to have the person be honest with you
and hear these stories being impacted by policies, by the racism that they've encountered.
I just talked to someone that growing up, he would have things thrown in his head.
He had people beat him just because he was black.
(10:19):
He deal with racism on a very literal manner with physical violence.
When you start talking to people like that, you start to see the holes through some of
this rhetoric and some of this trying to push of certain things that it kind of takes you
out of the space and allows you to see things with a clearer picture.
(10:40):
I think a lot of people are missing that nowadays.
I talked about Jesus being a lot more relational in nature.
Once you start having that relational aspect in your own life, I feel like Jesus naturally
shows up in that space.
You're able to see things a little clearer through the eyes of Jesus' teachings.
(11:01):
Even if you don't know themself, I feel like it just naturally comes upon you.
Even what Kenton said about Jesus was given authority on earth, that should be empowering
in a Jesus way.
When the disciples were imprisoned, they knew that they had Jesus with them and that was
(11:23):
enough for them.
They didn't need to be the people who were in charge of the prison.
That's not how they saw it.
That should be empowering to believers to know that God is powerful and God does love
people, kids both.
He doesn't need me to have the power for him.
It makes sense.
I don't know if that was a good point.
(11:48):
I think it needs to be said and everything.
I wonder if we should move on a little bit.
I did want to give a little bit more reason as to why we think Christian nationalism is
bad for society since this is a React video based on that video specifically about that
topic.
If you don't mind, I want to jump into some foreign affairs and talk about immigrants
(12:08):
and all that.
One of the things that I didn't actually hear brought up within this debate was Trump's
cabinet, everything along that, the stance on foreign affairs and war and everything
outside of the country, not domestic and foreign.
The majority of Trump's base and people who pointed within his cabinet, the majority of
(12:30):
Trump's base is supporters, the people that voted for him.
They think of him as an anti-war leader, but Trump does surround himself with neocon warhawks.
The green light has been given to Netanyahu to finish the job in Palestine, as has been
said.
Iran has talked about as the greatest threat that needs to be destroyed.
(12:51):
All these things, all this rhetoric that fuels the industrial weapons complex, the war machine
lines its pockets, while finally an American tax dollars into a system that brings the
death and destruction through the world.
And then you got to also think about the global mining in countries like Canada.
What's his plan regarding all that?
(13:11):
He hasn't actually come out and said anything about that, but he has put Musk in the governmental
position in his own department of government efficiency, which is also ironically named
Doge, just like his Bitcoin.
Someone who benefits directly off the backs of cheap labor hires and industrial colonialism.
(13:32):
Also under the policies of Trump, or as of 2025, the US military will be turned and its
citizens under the guise for removing the criminals.
So quote unquote criminals and those who violate their visas, but it doesn't seem to have an
end stage.
They're talking about supporting 15 million people, which is a considerable amount.
And then that's nearly going to be a trillion dollar project on its own.
(13:54):
So let alone the economic impact that we'll have down the road, immigrants, both legal
and illegal, come to America for a variety of reasons.
And many take on low paying jobs that many natural born citizens don't want to do themselves.
So who will fill that void when the demographic is removed?
So the immigrants that are in the strawberry fields in California, they're picking strawberries.
(14:16):
Who's going to do that?
Who's going to be doing all these low paying jobs?
Immigrants and undocumented workers also pay an obscene amount of money into the tax base.
Without them, it would shrink the GDP by almost two trillion dollars a year through independent
estimates.
Social Security will also get hit hard.
Visa workers pay into a system that they'll never benefit from.
(14:37):
That's one of the things that is never said in a right wing media is that it's always
brought out that they are benefiting from our system through the Social Security.
And of course, these workers will stop coming in because they want to deal with the looming
threat of being deported and the hassle of being a foreigner.
There will be a supply shocks cascading at every level.
(14:58):
I should make a note that there is a statistic about violence toward minors.
So if you're sensitive to this, please skip forward 30 seconds or maybe like a minute
or so.
And Sarah, are you OK if I share this?
All right.
So the administration has stated that immigrants aren't safe at schools or public places and
(15:21):
will be taken away by the military.
I should remind everybody that any attempt to deport or separate families will ultimately
be to mass child abuse.
To give a quick statistic, between 2014 and 2018, the Office of Refugee Resettlement received
4556 allegations of sexual assault or harassment of unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody.
(15:45):
I believe this really is a bipartisan issue that we should all agree on that violence
towards minors is bad.
Violence toward children, to be more specifically.
This number will most certainly go up under the banner of a Christian nationalist project
with the 15 million people out there projecting to deport.
So I mean, I would see everything that I've said so far as a big minus to Christian nationalism
(16:14):
and the policies that are being pushed.
If you don't mind, I'm going to say one more here.
So the CBO, the Nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that the immigrants
that were admitted into the country under the Biden administration alone, they will
decrease the federal deficit by about a trillion dollars over the next 10 years because of
(16:36):
all the productive work that they do and the fact that they actually don't receive a lot
of benefits because they aren't of legal status.
So I don't know if you have any thoughts on immigration or immigrants, both legal and
not legal.
I did trim a couple of clips from Tim himself from other episodes.
So if you want to play that, otherwise, I would love to hear your thoughts first before
(16:57):
we jump into that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't know if you said it.
So I'm going to say it again in case you missed it.
But if you said it, I just missed it.
I apologize.
But just the immigrants are half as likely to commit violent crimes than native born
citizens.
And then you already did say they do contribute.
I don't know if I said that actually.
But yeah, thanks.
If I did, thanks for reiterating it.
If I didn't, thank you for saying it because it needs to be said.
(17:17):
Yes.
And that seems like a hard thing if you haven't heard that before.
I actually had to repeat that statistic to people.
And that's from a study that they did in Texas because I think from 2012 to 2016, they did
this study.
It might have been 2018.
They started in 2012 and I think it ended in 2018.
(17:38):
I could be wrong.
And basically, everybody that gets pulled over or commits a crime, they have to ask
you, are you documented or undocumented or are you a citizen?
And so they went like every person in Texas has that process when you're arrested for
something.
And so that statistic comes from a respected study that did that.
So anyway, thanks for sharing that.
(17:59):
Yeah, let's go ahead and play the clip.
So these clips are Tim just talking about immigrants and some of the rhetoric and policies
that are projected to take place.
So yeah, if you want to find those, we can go play those.
So now they want to denaturalize immigrants to get them out of the country.
(18:21):
Think about that.
I know.
It's step by step by step.
Don't worry.
We're just here for the criminal undocumented immigrants.
Don't worry.
We're just here for the immigrants who we don't think are here legally even though they
are.
Hey, don't worry.
Now we're going to denaturalize immigrants who were born here and naturalized as citizens
because they were born in American soil to kick them out.
(18:43):
Seriously?
Yeah.
I think it's another good example of just like where the far right is going that just
put Trump in power.
William Wolf, he used to be part of the Trump administration in 2016.
He was a former administrative official there.
He tweeted this.
Who is an American?
That might be one of the hardest questions for our current generation to answer well,
(19:03):
though it didn't used to be like that.
It's also one of the most important.
In order to figure out where we want to go as a nation, we need to know who we are as
a people.
And then he recommends a book.
And I'm thinking to myself, wait a second.
Why is this one of the hardest questions to answer?
I thought an American in his worldview was someone who's here legally.
So is it more complicated than that?
So what else are we defining who an American is and is not?
So it's not about legal or undocumented immigrants.
(19:27):
That's not what this is about.
That's simply the Trojan horse for what's going on inside of it, which is really you
have to have a certain set of right belief, maybe look a certain way, assimilate the right
way.
And then we dub you an American.
And this is why Trump can also say publicly and still get elected, you know, I'm concerned
about the enemy from within.
Who are the enemies from within?
I thought we're all Americans.
(19:47):
I thought if we if we have a Social Security number, I thought that we are legal Americans.
But in this world, that's not how it breaks down.
Yeah.
So do you have any thoughts about the denaturalization that they're talking about?
First, I wanted to say on that topic that Stephen Miller isn't just a random Republican.
He is appointed to be Trump's Homeland Security adviser, according to NPR.
(20:12):
I had to Google it because I couldn't remember which cabinet position he had appointed into.
And he was in the first Trump administration and he's kind of always been anti-immigration
to a point that seems kind of kind of wonder what motivates this guy to be so anti this
like is there a personal vendetta?
Yeah, yeah, I think I've talked to family and friends, you know, who who didn't vote
(20:38):
the same as me.
And I've heard, you know, they're not going to do mass deportations.
And my thought on it was a lot of the YouTubers I follow played me Trump's rallies night after
night after night.
That's kind of what he promised people.
And I would love for him to break that promise.
That would be great if he was just like, oh, that's a lot of work.
We shouldn't do that.
(20:59):
But if he follows through on what he said he would do, it's it's all the stuff Tim's
talking about, Tim Whitaker saying in this video.
And I would love for it to not happen because I know a lot of good people that are immigrants
who have, you know, been naturalized citizens.
And I think it's a really slippery slope to other other people in whatever group you want,
(21:21):
like Tim was saying.
It's really dangerous.
Yeah.
And the guy that you were talking about, was he one of the ones that actually helped pen
the Project 2025?
And I know there's a number of people within Trump's administration that are part of the
process of penning the Project 2025.
I couldn't remember if Stephen Miller is one of them or not.
(21:41):
That's a great question.
I think he's probably, I would think, you know, I would definitely check.
I'm googling it now.
I know Russ Vote is one that he's appointed.
He was featured in videos produced by the Heritage Foundation promoting Project 2025.
Heritage Foundation.
Yeah.
So Heritage Foundation is the one that that did create the Project 2025.
(22:05):
So that makes sense.
And he's the head of the conservative legal activist group, America First Legal.
And his strange ads on Twitter.
I've always gotten him being like, stop, don't troll.
You know, that's him.
Yeah, it makes sense.
He can promote it because it matches a lot of his worldviews.
Yeah.
All right.
(22:26):
So I want to talk about the criminalization of homelessness.
So based on what I've been seeing, I would expect to see and of course, you know, this
is all time will tell, but I would expect to see homelessness or homeless people put
into camps.
But when I say that, the government has already sanctioned homeless encampments by the Invisible
People NGO and are sold as a solution by the media.
(22:49):
That honestly is very ominous solution at that.
It has been touted as an open air prison and homeless people who refuse to stay at these
encampments are likely to be arrested and put in actual prison.
And if you know anything about the prison system in America, it's a it's a it's a very
major money making machine.
It exploits profits over essentially free labor.
(23:11):
So with the development of the cops cities on just about every single state, I would
be surprised if you see a record amount of people arrested over these next couple of
years, which will fill many of America's empty prisons.
And if you don't know anything about America's empty prisons, you should read up on that
as well.
We as a nation could literally provide housing for every single person in America based on
(23:32):
how much tax revenue we bring in and how much we have for projects and stuff like this.
But with the Supreme Court's ruling several months ago with the criminalization of being
homeless is is honestly bringing that in the wrong direction.
Bernie Sanders has been speaking out against this that we cannot address homelessness without
addressing the financial causes of what causes homelessness.
(23:55):
One thing that was admitted from the conversation regarding Trump is that 40 percent of single
family homes are owned by Blackstone, which is like an umbrella for other real estate
companies.
And they are actually under the umbrella of BlackRock.
If you've heard anything about BlackRock, a lot of a lot of.
There's a lot of conspiracy theorists that talk about BlackRock.
But honestly, BlackRock is one of those big financial institutions that that is an umbrella
(24:19):
for a great many companies here in America.
There's a mass buyout.
Well, yeah, so there's a mass buyout by Blackstone and mass buyout.
Nobody is addressing that.
And Trump won't address it either.
It's in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which you know, the Sherman Antitrust
Act is basically that no company or no entity can have a monopoly on the market.
(24:41):
They operate within nearly half of all Americans.
Homes are owned by one corporation, which creates a housing shortage that causes prices
to go up.
You compound that with the interest or the increase of interest rates.
And it's the perfect storm for homelessness.
But people like Trump don't want to speak up because honestly, I think that they are
that things like entities like BlackRock are masters.
(25:05):
They kind of have them kind of in their grip.
So yeah, about the Supreme Court ruling, do you have you want to tell me more about that?
Yeah, I just hadn't heard of it.
I will say the growing income inequality, wealth inequality is a huge thing that I've
been reading up on, mostly watching YouTube videos of this guy.
(25:29):
There's this British guy that's like a trader and that's like his main message is talking
about how housing is being owned by the super wealthy and more and more people are getting
poorer and poorer generationally.
Less and less of your house is owned by you than like your parents or their parents.
So the ruling that I've mentioned, it wasn't like straight out like if there's homeless
(25:51):
person on the street that criminalize them just for being there.
So what the Supreme Court on Friday talks about to articles in June 28th or whatever
the Friday before that was that it upheld ordinance ordinances in a southwest Oregon
city that prohibit people who are homeless from using blankets, pillows or cardboard
(26:16):
boxes for protection from the elements while sleeping within city limits, which if you're
homeless, you're not going to just sleep in the snow.
I mean, that was was that the Oregon Supreme Court or just the Supreme Court?
This article is talking about the Supreme Court held up ordinances in Southwest Oregon
city.
(26:36):
So either way, terrible policy that sounds a lot like not allowing people to bring water
while they go vote and wait in line to vote.
So OK, here we go.
I found another one.
This is the US Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in
public spaces.
So it's the US Supreme Court that that that did this.
Yeah.
It was the justices and a six three decision along with ideological lines overturned or
(26:59):
court ruling.
So so yeah, it's yeah, people sleeping outside.
So if they're caught sleeping outside by police, it's the criminal act that can be arrested
by.
Wow.
That's wild.
Yeah, super wild.
It kind of I mean, you think of course going back to Jesus teachings about taking care
of people that are in need.
Yeah, take care of people that need that basically that can't repay you.
(27:23):
Moving on with homosexuality, I kind of blocked up these out.
So I'll jump into the what's known as the Calvert passages.
So there are only six passages and seven if you include you from the entire Bible that
address homosexuality.
Only point zero five percent of all scripture out of thirty one thousand verses total.
I compare that to five hundred fifty passages about and one hundred seventy two about justice.
(27:47):
These are known as Calvert passages like I talked about.
These are Genesis 19, one through eleven, which is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Jude one seven references in references Sodom and Gomorrah with the Greek term that translates
to pursuing strange flesh.
Leviticus 1822, the labeling of homosexuality as abomination.
Leviticus 2013.
It's the same thing.
(28:08):
It's right around there.
Romans one twenty seven.
Paul's words about men exchange natural and unnatural relations.
And first Corinthians six nine, which is Paul's condemnation of the Greek term arsenicotide
and first Timothy one nine through ten.
Paul's condemnation of the Greek term malachite.
So the term homosexual wasn't even out.
(28:31):
I was translated that way in the Bible.
First you had the Latin Vulgate in 383, which is which was the term.
I'll just massacre this masculine, Lorum, concrete tourists.
So basically male concubines.
The Luther Bible in 1534.
It's the oh boy, this German D.
(28:54):
Nabin Chander as a boy violators.
The Geneva Bible in 1587.
It was bugger's early word for anal intercourse.
And then King James version 1607 abusers of themselves with mankind.
The Wesley's New Testament in 1765, which is sodomites.
And then, of course, for a bystander version in 1946, which you have that whole film that's
(29:17):
based off of which they translated as homosexuals.
So that's where you actually see the first word of their first use of homosexuals in
the Bible.
So so when you get to I'm just going to go over the Sodom and Gomorrah real quick, just
one little line.
So Sodom and Gomorrah was not condemning homosexuality, but rather a lack of hospitality and sexual
(29:38):
exploitation.
There's plenty of resources to go over this, but I'm just going to leave it at that.
If we look at Paul's writings in First Corinthians and First Timothy, we see the word arsenic
arsenicotai, which often translated as homosexuals, which is a compound word combining two Greek
words, arsenos, male, and coite bed with the euphemism of sex.
(30:01):
So it's translated to male betters.
The word is coined by Paul and only shows up in these two verses, but it is in reference
to Leviticus 1822 and 2013.
Contextually, it implies idolatry and possibly a difference in age.
In the Greco-Roman world, at the time these passages were written, the practice and by
passages written, I'm talking about with First Corinthians and First Timothy with Paul.
(30:24):
The practice of petereschi, which was an erotic relationship between an older man and a younger
boy, was prevalent, normalized, and objectively predatory.
Theologians have suggested that Paul was referring to petereschi since it was a ubiquitous form
of homosexuality at the time and would have been the first harmful practice people would
(30:45):
have thought of when using a term like male better.
All this to say, this should tell you that the subject isn't as black and white as it's
often made out to be.
So when someone like Kenton, I'm just going to use him as an example, but I've heard this
numerous times, and I'm sure you have, that how he desires gay people to go away and often
(31:06):
be punished for just being gay and someone being a lesbian or someone being trans, even
in certain circles and whatnot.
I personally find that stance very ignorant and lacking in openness of understanding.
And when I say ignorant, I'm not saying stupid.
I'm saying ignorant that they're only looking at one side of things.
(31:28):
They're only looking at the side that they've been taught all their lives, the side that
is being taught in the church and the side that is a very straightforward reading of
the Bible.
And if you look at how the Bible is translated, those words, if you're taking a very literal
approach to the Bible, of course you're going to take it that way.
But if you actually look into it a little deeper and try to put yourself into the times
(31:52):
of when it was written and also what was going on within the times, it does make it a lot
more nuanced and not as clear cut as making homosexuality as an abomination sort of thing.
So that's kind of what I want to say about that.
Yeah.
Thanks for sharing that.
Yeah.
I think there's a lot of room for people to take things very strongly when there's only
(32:18):
a few verses.
Example I've been saying lately is like, there's a verse where Jesus talks about if you are
divorced from your spouse and you remarry, you are committing adultery or something like
that.
And I'm like, there are a lot of people in my church that are remarried that I do not
believe are committing adultery right now.
Like life is messy.
(32:39):
Life is complicated things.
And I think it's easy to remove nuance when it makes you uncomfortable or when it doesn't
fit mold that you follow.
I also just think just what you're saying is they might not just be as black and white
as some people make it out to be.
I love when things are yes, right and wrong.
This is easy to understand.
(33:01):
I love when things are easy to understand and they're black and white.
I think most of society loves certainty.
But I think people have confused certainty with faith like the name and claim that movements
where they you know, you have to you can't say you're sick or you can't say you're hurt.
You have to just say you're healed and things like that.
(33:21):
It's easy to be certain as a replacement of faith.
I think it takes real faith to say I don't know sometimes.
And I think Christianity needs more of I don't know.
It's healthy to know how to say I don't know.
To admit when you've been wrong, admit when you've led people astray, admit when you know
(33:43):
people show you a better side, a better way of doing things and admit that you may not
have seen the whole picture.
So yeah.
And you know, it's like when I hear arguments about all this kind of stuff that we're talking
about, you know, it's based a lot of it's based on especially apologetics, fundamentalism,
(34:08):
apologetics.
It's that you know, if you can prove even that there's a sliver of possibility that
my narrative is, you know, is right, despite if it's against all odds, and it's more likely
that it's something else or it's not that at all, then I can presuppose the existence
(34:30):
of my narrative to be true.
And it's just such a lose my words.
I don't know if you have a word for it.
It's a weak framework.
It's a weak framework.
And I don't know if I've ever want to live like that.
I'm a very skeptical person.
And I think I've become a very skeptical person.
I haven't always been this way.
(34:51):
But it's one of those things like the more you learn, the more you realize that you don't
know as much as you did.
Yes.
It's like there's this fear of learning too much to that will take apart this comfortable
place that people are in.
You know, everything's already figured out.
I think they want someone to kind of be the parent figure, I guess.
(35:15):
And you know, God is their parent, like especially within Christian circles, God is that parent
figure.
And it's easier to go along with what you've been told.
So if you've read the Bible literally, it's easier to take that as truth and not question
it if that's kind of what you're seeking.
When especially apologetics and fundamentalists are looking at the Bible, they view it as
(35:41):
they want to view the whole picture.
And they almost kind of try to make the Bible as like the cover art on like a puzzle box.
And then, you know, when you take it out, you put all the pieces together.
When more it's like a box of Legos and not just a box of Legos, but it's like hundreds
of different sets of Legos.
(36:02):
So you get like Star Wars, you get Harry Potter, you get like, you know, all these different
Lego sets, but not even just that.
It's on top of that, you get like random assorted Legos that came from like your neighbor's
kids or like your older brother that bought like a Lego set sometime and then they lost
half the pieces and they just threw it in a box.
(36:23):
So you get all that.
And that's actually a more representation of what the Bible is.
You get, you know, the Bible was written by numerous people on earth.
And you get this whole idea of the Bible is uniforcal.
When you start to study the Bible, you see that there are a lot of contradictory ideas
(36:45):
that people bring up in the Bible.
Even about God is very contradictory in some of the parts of the Bible where you get one
thing about God in one part of the Bible and then you get another part that's like, you
know, that's kind of makes you question a little bit like, like, doesn't that kind of
been contradictory to this other part that I've read earlier?
And so it's, it's a very messy thing to go through.
(37:07):
And once you start kind of opening these ideas up, you kind of break free from some of that,
that, you know, what Tim puts it as the basement of fundamentalism.
So yeah,
I'm grateful I didn't, the Bible school I went through was just a small program like
my pastors did.
And so I wasn't really exposed to this fundamentalist ideology and like way of thought.
(37:33):
I don't know if I would have been able to take it.
I think the intellectualism of the Bible is a little bit overwhelming.
The way people do that.
I much prefer Tim Mackey being like, here's what the Hebrew is, you know, like I prefer
that, you know, cartoons.
But the thing I was going to say, just one more thing on this topic is like, do you remember
when, do you remember when Lauren Daigle was on Ellen and then like Christians were like,
(37:59):
okay, well, the Christian world was like, well, Lauren Daigle is Ellen DeGeneres going
to go to hell because she's gay?
And Lauren Daigle was like, I write music.
I don't feel qualified to answer your question.
And it ticked me off because all these people were outraged and like boycotting Lauren Daigle.
And I was just like, if I would, if I could just time travel and be there with Lauren
(38:24):
Daigle, this is what I would tell her to say.
Hi person with your gotcha question.
You are asking the wrong person about if this is a sin or not, or we'll send someone to
hell.
If you were saying this in good faith, you would be asking Jesus, not in front of a camera.
You would be asking, am I qualified to answer that question?
No.
As Lauren Daigle, I'm not qualified.
But who is the person you say you follow and you wouldn't be videotaping him to like get
(38:49):
him to say something.
Like that's so disingenuous.
It's such a, and like you don't, you know, like that whole thing to me encapsulated the,
this is a petty culture war tech thing, not a rooted in beliefs and like standards and
like values.
(39:10):
It didn't feel valid like it was rooted in values and who felt like it was rooted in
we're right and other people were wrong.
And I think when you mix in the hatred element of the things that this community has had
to endure, that makes me as a Christian go, I think I need to stand between the people
(39:30):
who are being hateful and between them and the people they're hating on.
And I should protect those people because that's what Jesus would do.
So that's also what's kind of pushed me towards where I'm at with that, which is it's okay
to not know.
And it's okay to just not tell people how to live.
That kind of goes, I was talking to somebody last night about that exact, very similar
thing and I said a very similar thing to him.
(39:53):
I was like, you know, if there is a marginalized group of people and there is something that
could potentially be harmful against them.
And even if hypothetically that harmful thing is in the right, it's logical, it's, you know,
everything like that, I'm still going to side with the marginalized person because I feel
(40:13):
like that's what Jesus would do.
Yeah.
That's how we would treat homeless people.
That's how we would treat people who are addicted to drugs, perhaps.
I don't know.
Just thinking of like, we say that's bad, but like, you're not going to harm these people
just because you don't agree with them.
That's not Jesus.
Jesus doesn't do that.
No.
See, I had one thing in here about, can we talk about the moral ritual laws?
(40:36):
I don't know.
Do you think I should read this?
You can.
I think it's interesting.
I'm sure if I'm a homeless person who's just really into this book stuff would be really
into this, but I feel like what you're trying to say there is that he was just like mixing
them wherever he wanted.
It was kind of, he was taking-
Do you mind if we go ahead and play that clip and then I can maybe do my little blurb about
(40:59):
it?
I'm not sure it's interpreting scripture through a lens.
No.
Which one was it?
Let's see here.
It was the-
Three-fold division of the law.
Three-fold division of the law.
That was the one.
All right.
Yeah.
Joy.
But that's the crux is how do you decide which laws in the Bible?
(41:21):
And there are a lot of them.
Some could be applicable, some might not be.
How do you decide what God's law is when you use that term?
What's the definition for that?
Okay, so yeah.
What I'm gonna state is, and I'm sure you're familiar, if you're familiar with guys like
Joel Webin, Doug Wilson, Stephen Wolf, some of these guys on the reform Christian nationalist
side, are you familiar with the three-fold division of the law?
(41:44):
You mean like ceremonial-
Ceremonial, civil, and moral, right?
Yeah, I'm very familiar.
And so what I would say is when we're talking about God's law, and I don't have the citation
in front of me, but when we look at the book of Hebrews, the book of Hebrews is going to
tell us that the ceremonial law of God specifically has been totally abrogated, right?
And so the way that the confession that I subscribe to, the 1689 confession is going
(42:08):
to say is that we should obey and subscribe to, or we are not beholden to God's law other
than the general equity of that law.
So what we are going to, or what I advocate for as a Christian nationalist is that the
moral law of God is universal, right?
(42:29):
The Ten Commandments, the summary law of the moral law, or the summary of the moral law
written in the Ten Commandments is a universal principle.
Romans chapter two tells us that the moral law of God is written on the hearts of men.
And so based on that moral law, we extrapolate and exegete all the other laws that God has
given and define them based on how they've been applied in the Old Testament to that
(42:52):
particular people, and we apply that law based on the moral law to our present day.
Does that make sense?
All right.
Okay.
So Ken did talks about how the moral and the ceremonial laws after Tim brings it up.
And I like, Tim actually goes into a little bit more of like, okay, he pushes it in and
what laws actually do, you know, follow along with this?
(43:16):
Like what are the laws that we are to adhere to?
And the argument is that Jesus only filled the ceremonial laws.
So we're only beholden to the moral laws.
And Judaism, moral laws are viewed as universal laws.
So like he was talking about written on our hearts, applicable to all humanity.
The holiness codes were explicitly designed to separate Israel from its surrounding nations.
(43:39):
This necessarily means that these laws aren't applicable to everyone.
If the laws were not being followed by surrounding nations, this means they wouldn't qualify
as moral laws.
So the separation of moral and ceremonial laws by evangelicals, honestly, is just lazy.
And it's a way of picking and choosing verses that justify the rules they want to enforce
(44:01):
and those they wish to ignore.
And I believe Tim actually brings this up in when he's pushing back and everything like
that too, in the further clips.
So if you do want to see some of this banter back and forth, honestly, everyone listening
to this, you should go and check it out.
It was a really good debate.
It was.
Like I said, it was very enjoyable to watch.
Do you have any thoughts on this at all?
(44:22):
So I'm just trying to understand kind of what they're saying.
Ken and people who believe I can.
He's saying that Jesus fulfilled the...
So by dying on the cross.
Which ones are the ones?
So it was the moral, the ceremonial and...
(44:42):
Sybil.
Okay, sorry.
So, but what I think you're saying, and I'm just trying to learn, like I honestly didn't
haven't heard this before, that the Sybil laws, Jesus fulfilled those so we don't have
to worry about keeping them?
Is that what they're saying?
It's the ceremonial and Sybil is what Jesus covers with his blood dying on the cross for
(45:06):
us.
So he doesn't cover all the law?
So it's just the moral laws that he doesn't cover.
Those are the ones that the Christian nationalists declare as what they want to instill as what
the nation is all about.
As ruling the nation from the seven mountaintops.
These moral laws are going to be our guide stones.
(45:27):
I always thought like the ceremonial and the moral kind of mix pretty, it's pretty hard
to tell them apart.
Obviously the ceremonial is like things that they needed to do to stay alive, right?
Like not eating red meat and like things like that, things that were going to kill off basically
them before Jesus could be born.
(45:47):
And I think those are covered by Jesus coming and dying.
I think it's crazy.
I'm not trying to alienate people, but I've never heard that he didn't cover all of the
sins.
That's a weird thing to say.
I've just never heard that.
But again, I haven't been in these kind of circles for this type of reformed stuff.
(46:10):
I just haven't.
So,
and this just goes into like the interpretation, the translations, the, you know, the logic
behind the different things that we see in the Bible and practice in our lives.
You know, like we were talking about, there's 45,000 different denominations of Christianity
in the world.
And, you know, with each nomination, there might be small differences, but there's differences.
(46:32):
And those are things that we all adhere to.
And there's good, valid arguments for a lot of stuff in the Bible.
And so like what you're talking about, like you always grew up that Jesus didn't cover
all of our sins.
You know, there's people that believe that he covered all the sins.
There's people that believe that everything in the Old Testament has been covered, you
know, whether it be moral, civil or ceremonial.
(46:55):
There's people that believe that only moral codes aren't covered by Jesus.
So
I've never heard that.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
There's a lot of different interpretation on this.
And it's a very messy, very nuanced discussion and debate topic and everything that you could
really get into.
So to say that there's, there's one way to do it.
It's a very dangerous path to go down.
(47:16):
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
I grew up thinking like Catholics, not real Christians, you know, like just, and now I'm
like, that seems overly simplistic to just assume I know what denominations are best.
I went to a Baptist high school and it like all grown up and I would just be mad at Baptists
(47:38):
all day long, just like mad at this chapel.
But mostly coming from the point of we should be preaching our messages to like the harshest
message we have should be to our own people, not to non-believers.
And it felt like a lot of times the messages were the harshest towards non-believers.
And my friend had reminded me of a quote my pastor had said where he was like to expect
(48:02):
people who say they don't believe what we believe to follow what we believe is like
going into a graveyard and expecting them to be dancing.
And I was like, that's an interesting thing.
I don't know how I feel about that quote now, but like, yeah, like expecting others to just
conform to our way of life because it's superior is that is a really slippery slope.
(48:25):
Well, I wonder if we should bring this up to a close.
Now the whole debate is Christian nationalism good for society.
I think time will tell if our nation does become a theocracy, which Christian nationalism
does want to move in that direction.
If we do become a theocracy, I'm wondering if we will see the fruitfulness of it or if
(48:48):
we're going to see a lot of damnation out of it.
And my question is, I don't know if you saw this, when Trump takes office and Christian
nationalism becomes the thing and start implementing everything that Project 25 has written in
it and the rights of everyone, including those who voted for him or not become impacted,
(49:10):
whether positively or negatively.
And looking at the primarily the negative impacts of it, if that were to happen, hypothetically,
do you think they would repent?
I don't know what you your idea on that is how you think.
I think definitely the beliefs of Christian nationalism, like its popularity, isn't is
(49:33):
a spectrum.
Right.
And I wonder how many people would be like Kenton and say, you know, that's what I am.
That's what I believe.
That's what I advocate for.
I definitely think there are people who voted for Trump that when you bring up the idea
of Christian nationalism to make people live like us based on our beliefs, a lot of people
would disagree.
(49:53):
And I hope that that's the majority.
I don't know.
But a lot of people that I've run up to, even if they voted differently than me, are like,
that's not how I think our country should be run.
So the extreme people like Kenton, I don't know if he would.
I think he's pretty convinced his way is the right way.
It's a great question.
And this is the merging of Christian and American identities is it mirrors other times in history
(50:21):
like the Nazis, unfortunately.
I'm not saying like we said earlier, Christian nationalists don't equal Nazis, but that's
what happened during that time in Germany is to be a German is to be a Lutheran and
to be a Lutheran is to be a German and you can't be Jewish, you know, and other religions
either.
So that's I think the danger there.
(50:42):
And that's why we that's why we want to have a podcast to talk about the dangers of it
and hopefully warn people and hopefully say you were open to talking to you about it.
That would be helpful to keep the dialogue going.
And we should also say that we hope, honestly, God, that we are wrong in all this.
Honestly, I would be happy to say I was wrong about everything I said.
(51:04):
Like if if good things come out of it.
Awesome.
Like I would love that.
So the next four years is great.
I'm all I'm all for it.
You know what I mean?
Like I want America to do well.
I want people who live here to be safe and to do well.
We're a nation built on the idea of religious freedom.
And I hope that we can hold that freedom more precious instead of adhering to this ideology.
(51:27):
True that.
All right, Sarah, I'm going to go ahead and sign us out here.
This has been a very long conversation.
Sorry.
I'm going to go and sign us out here.
It's been a very long conversation.
I may even split this up into two episodes.
But Sarah, thank you so much for coming out and talking on this subject.
I would love to do another conversation with you in the future and get your friend out
(51:51):
here again, too, and do that.
So thank you again.
And everyone see you in the next episode.
That's it for today's episode of Grub and Grace.
Thanks for joining us on this discussion of is Christian nationalism good for society?
I'd like to give a big thank you for Sarah for joining me on this.
I really appreciate her coming out to talk on this topic.
(52:12):
And I definitely learned a lot.
And I'm sure she did, too.
Keep your eye out for the next episode.
And as always, stay curious, keep an open mind and celebrate the traditions that bring
us all together.
What?
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