Foreign.

Hello, my name is Will Spencer and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.

This is a weekly show featuring in depth conversations with authors, leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world.

New episodes release every Friday.

My guest this week is Cody Lawrence, host of the Spare no Arrows podcast.

Courage is a rare commodity in men.

Now what precisely courage is is a tricky concept.

But the root word of courage is the French word cur or heart.

So a man with courage is by nature a man with heart and not heart in the sense of the heart is deceitfully wicked, but in the sense of the heart of a lion or a righteous spirit.

Not a self righteous spirit, however, a spirit inspired by the righteousness of God which naturally involves some amount of self sacrifice.

Courage that is not willing to sacrifice itself, including making the ultimate sacrifice, is not courage because self sacrificial courage is the model set by the example of our Lord Jesus Christ in the ultimate act of sacrifice.

He went to the cross.

It wasn't for his own glory, at least not his earthly glory anyway.

A broken, bleeding, dying body nailed to planks of wood is not glorious, but what comes after is.

So true courage is willing to suffer scorn, ridicule, abuse and even death on the faith that if the process claims the life of just one man, the end result will be worth it, even if the man himself will not live to see it.

And that's why true courage is rare, because, quote, greater love has no one than this to lay down one's life for his friends.

John 15:13 and then Romans 5, 6, 7.

For while we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

For one will scarcely die for a righteous person.

Though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die.

Now how many of us can say we have that kind of great love for our friends?

How many of us have that kind of great love for strangers?

How about strangers who are ungodly?

And that is Christ's to be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of strangers in pursuit of truth and the glory of God.

Now here's the important part that distinguishes righteous sacrifice from unrighteous sacrifice.

Righteous sacrifice is not seeking its own ends.

It has faith that the ends will be beneficial.

But perhaps not for oneself.

Because with the recent crop of quote, noticing that has come up, a lot of men could say that they're making a righteous sacrifice, being willing to sacrifice their platforms or whatever for the truth.

But the real truth is there is nothing more profitable and trendy right now than noticing I'm Sorry.

When Candace Owens, Dan Bilzerian, Andrew Tate, and even Kanye west are doing something, that thing they are doing is now mainstream by definition and is where the herd is going.

And therefore it's profitable, even if only in terms of immediate controversy, which generates attention, which always terminates in money.

When profit is going one way, it is not profitable to go the other.

In fact, defying the herd or the cult often has real consequences in terms of scorn, ridicule, abuse, and more.

And that's why it takes real courage, true courage, to go against the stream.

Because you might die in a sense in the process, but for a righteous end of truth and the glory of God, not money.

Which brings me back to Cody Lawrence and his podcast Spare no Arrows.

Cody has been one of the loudest, most outspoken and confident voices against the so called woke right, which is an imprecise term, but we use it because a more precise term is is something like white nationalist, Christian, ethno, supremacist, fascist, imbued with secret knowledge about the true origins of evil and evil's goal of supremacy through cultural genocide.

However, since that term is too long and unwieldy, we simply say woke right.

Though I'm open to a better one if you have it.

And again, Cody has been one of its most outspoken critics.

I first heard about him from his video breaking down the Antioch Declaration, which is linked in the show notes.

At the time, the Declaration coming out of Moscow was being torn apart on social media for subtle details here and there, lines that men didn't like.

But Cody worked through it line by line in a tone that I'll never forget.

You should watch it.

His approach makes very clear where any level headed and sensible person would land in response to the text.

But that's the thing, are not in level headed and sensible times anymore.

In fact, far from it.

So following that video, Cody has continued to approach the topic of woke rightism with the same kind of straightforward humor and enthusiasm that makes gross topics like that fun to discuss.

And that's what I appreciate about him.

Cody stares into the darkness without letting it stare back into him.

In fact, he laughs at it and we all laugh with him.

Which is the right response.

Now, friends, we're not just recording conversations on the Will Spencer podcast.

We're part of a restoration project for Christian civilization in the west and I need you in this fight with me.

So when you visit Spotify or Apple podcasts, please take a moment to write how these conversations impacted you.

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Supporting them isn't just spending money, they it's investing in an American reformation.

Also, a quick personal note before we begin.

This past Lord's Day at my church, I had the distinct pleasure of watching two infant baptisms.

Like all the ones I've seen, they were beautiful.

In fact, I heard the man sitting next to me say to his young daughter, and this is the part where all the dads cry.

And I could relate because even though I'm not a father, that's what happens to me.

And I don't know why, but it's moving for me to experience.

And in that moment, I realized there are men and fathers like the two baptizing their children all around the world who listen to me on this podcast.

You come to the show for entertainment, for information, for edification, inspiration, and, I'm sure, plenty of other reasons.

You put your trust in me with your time and attention because you have families to lead, futures to build, legacies to grow towards.

And every week you invest me with a couple hours and sometimes more of your time.

In a sense, you rely on me.

Not solely, of course, but in a way.

Hey, I've given this man, I don't know, a little bit of my attention every week because I trust he'll lead me rightly in this little way.

It is an honor to me that you view this podcast as moving you towards the accomplishment of your responsibilities to your households and families.

Because if I didn't, if I somehow moved you away from the goals you have to achieve on behalf of yourself and others, you wouldn't listen.

So again, as you've hopefully heard me say many times, thank you.

Thank you for making me part of your life.

Thank you for making this small project even more fulfilling than it was when I started.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for trusting me.

Lord willing, I will only continue to build and further earn your trust as the days and weeks go on.

May we all move towards our future and legacies together.

Also, speaking of legacies, for those of you who missed it, a video I did about flaws in the theory of evolution and its Consequences went mega viral on X, being retweeted by some of the biggest accounts in the world, including Jenna ellis, who has 1 million followers, and the account Clown World, who has almost 3 million.

It was a very exciting day.

For those of you who haven't seen it, the video is on YouTube.

But if you'd like to be part of the fun on X, you can watch and reshare that video as well.

And both of those links can be found in the show notes.

And please welcome this week's guest on the podcast from Spare no Arrows, Cody Lawrence.

Cody Lawrence from the Spare no Arrows podcast.

Thanks so much for joining me for the Will Spencer podcast.

It's my pleasure.

It's good to be here.

Thanks for the invitation.

Appreciate it.

I have had such appreciation for you and your bold, no nonsense, no compromise approach to some of the issues of our day.

And I enjoyed our conversation last week as well.

So I've been looking forward to having you over at my house for another discussion.

Yeah, me too.

It was great.

It was really fun to talk about masculinity and this interesting trend that we're seeing of people seemingly flocking to Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

That was great.

Really insightful conversation, especially about our topic about masculinity, since that's one of your specialties.

Yes, yes.

From my time in the manosphere and coming up through that world and thinking about what it means to be a man for 20 years, it's been something that's very much been on my mind for half my life.

So I've appreciated that as well.

And you have a very interesting story also.

Now, from my perspective, you just kind of showed up on the scene.

I want to say, for me, it was like two to three months ago, something like that, with your Antioch Declaration video.

And so I watched that and I was like, this is a guy who clearly knows what he's doing, knows how to talk on.

On a microphone, knows how to articulate his thoughts, knows how to do a podcast.

And so it's like suddenly you just, like, surfaced to my attention and just started.

You just started going ham out there.

So you've been at this for a while, but you have kind of an interesting story that led you to this moment.

So maybe we can talk about that.

Like, where did you come from and how did you get to where you are today?

Yeah, so I am just a layman.

I have been in professional ministry in the past.

I have been to seminary and dropped out halfway through my mdiv.

And that's something we could talk about.

I'VE got opinions on a lot of things, but basically I got married in 2020 and my wife and I were trying to hunt for a good church that was after me, me leaving a not so good church.

And we really didn't want to go to the church that we had been going to prior to getting married.

And so we kind of, after a string of going to churches for a few months and realizing like, ah, this isn't that great.

Let's try another one.

And then, you know, it takes a while to really determine if you, if you can't tell right away if a church is not great.

I think it takes a few months.

And then what also takes a few months is making friends.

And so then having to like go to another church and leave those friends is difficult.

So we have this string of just like, ah, these, we're kind of discovering these negative things about these conservative like otherwise seemingly biblical churches from the outside.

And then we discover these things and we leave.

And this was also kind of around the same time that deconstruction was talked about a whole lot.

And I recognize that a lot of there were a lot of people criticizing the church.

Obviously most of them were leftists, but there weren't a lot of people offering conservative biblical correction of churches, not a lot of podcasts like that.

And so that's why I started my podcast.

I wanted to try to equip other people who were in the same situation as I am.

Like, I'm just looking for a good church or like I'm in a church and maybe there are problems and I don't know how to deal with these problems.

And so I wanted to try to reach those people and then also kind of just to educate people about false teachers out in the world and important theological issues and give cultural commentary and things like that.

So I'm kind of all over the place, but kind of focusing on cultural.

Maybe, maybe I would just say cultural apologetics.

So when you say that you are part of a bad church, what does that mean?

Because there are all kinds of ways that churches can go bad.

Well, yeah, we do a number of bad churches.

Well, so my, my youth.

So when I was in youth group back way back in high school, I.

I didn't even know youth groups existed until I was a junior because I grew up a Pentecostal.

Telling the future and healings and prophecy, you know, very interesting environment.

And then when I was a junior, I started going to this youth ministry and one of the pastors was a woman in the church and one of the Youth pastors, quote, unquote, pastors, was a woman.

And I kind of thought, like, oh, yeah, that's probably not great, but, well, I mean, this is a church, and they got hired, and so they probably know what they're doing.

That was kind of my approach.

And then just as the years progressed, things like that, going to just a lot of churches that right now I would not even want to set foot in for various reasons.

And I just learned over time.

But I think one of the benefits of my story is that I got to experience, you know, very liberal churches and very conservative churches with various different kinds of problems and trying.

Trying to teach people how to avoid those.

So, yeah, I can imagine being in a Pentecostal church with woman pastors and.

But not really.

Not really knowing better, right?

That's.

That's just the world that you see.

You grew up in the church?

Yeah, yeah.

So my parents are Christian.

Grew up in the church.

So actually, the.

The church with the female pastor that I ended up going to was Methodist.

So I've been a Pentecostal church.

Churches, Methodist churches, even.

This is funny.

In my junior year, I was one of the leaders in our youth ministry, and we would travel to other big churches and try to copy the big successful things that they were doing.

And we took a big trip to a youth conference in Orange County, California, where we visited Saddleback Church and participated in a service where.

Where Rick Warren preached.

And we got to go to this big conference with Doug Fields youth ministry.

And so I.

I did all that.

I.

I thought Rick Warren was totally cool.

And so I.

I was totally in the big Eva crowd.

I.

I'm, like, terrified because I.

I was.

Even in 2020, before I got engaged, I was interviewing for a job as a youth pastor at a very large church that I would not want to be a part of anymore, probably.

You know, and that's not to say I want to give this kind of qualifier.

That's not to say that everybody in churches that I think have significant problems are bad.

That's not to say that everybody is completely unfaithful.

But that is to say that, like, there are very serious problems in a lot of churches that we ought to know better about.

And the fact that we maybe allow these things to happen anyway or the fact that we're ignorant about the things that happen in churches anyway, I think slowly, over a long period of time, kind of degrades our.

Degrades the quality of our faith, and then over the course of generations or years, degrades the quality of our families and the quality of our cultures, and that's how we find ourselves where kind of we are as a country right now.

Yeah.

I mean, today.

Or was it yesterday, Trump appointed the head Department of Faith or whatever it was a woman Pentecostal prosperity preacher.

Did no one sit him down?

Like, hey, you had Franklin Graham, I mean, you know, on.

On stage at rnc, and it's like, yeah, of course there's.

There's a lot there, but this is.

This is.

No, this ain't.

I would imagine that that progressive pastor who did that prayer exhortation against Trump, you think he would have learned something from that, or you think Vance would read his Bible enough that he would know that, no, we shouldn't.

Probably shouldn't have a female pastor as a head of a faith thing in the White House.

Yeah, I mean, he didn't.

You could have just appointed a man and you didn't have to.

You didn't even have to say anything about it.

He doesn't have to be, you know, Trump doesn't have to get up there and say, now I'm appointing this man because women can't be pastors.

I mean, that would be amazing.

But he doesn't have to do that.

Right, Right.

And so now it's going to be a whole thing.

So.

Okay, so maybe, like, you can talk about to whatever degree you want to get into detail, like, some of the things that you saw, I guess we talked about female pastors.

Were there other things you saw in that experience that, you know, that.

That degrade the faith?

I didn't grow up in the church, so I don't.

I don't have a history.

I did a podcast with Joshua Haymes from Reformation Red Pill a couple weeks ago, and so he was talking about his whole journey, going from kind of Big Eva to.

To Covenantal Presbyterian and what that journey was like for him.

And I.

I don't have the ability to relate to that because I went straight into a Reformed Baptist church at Apologia.

Now I attend a Presbyterian church that that's a candidate that's going to.

Candidate with a crec.

So I had that accelerated timeline, like, go straight to the stuff.

What did you see?

What were some of the things that you saw that you thought were kind of egregious that relate specifically to the degradation of faith and culture?

Yeah.

And by the way, that story of yours where you kind of went straight into the good kind of Christianity is incredible.

Like, it's so rare.

Everybody else has the experience that I have had where you've just been, you know, like in our church.

I go to a CRC church and almost everybody in the whole church is like, yeah, we had this horrible experience in 2020 at some church, and then like, maybe another one after that.

And then eventually we're like, ah, where do we go?

And then, oh, we found this church.

And it's fantastic.

So, like, everybody has that exact same experience.

But I know other people who, who, who, like, were converted and then out of nowhere just like, landed in reformed kind of crec sphere Christianity.

It's incredible.

Like, blows my mind that that's a thing.

But so my story is some.

Let's see, there are so many examples I can point to, but let's say.

So when I was a youth pastor, and that's something that I would.

I hate youth ministry.

Now, that's not to say that I hate ministering to youth, but I hate the thing that youth ministry generally is in our country, where it is a replacement for church.

It's like a lot of the students in my.

I think, even though I don't think youth pastors are a very biblical thing anyway, I think I was far more close to being biblical than 99% of all the other youth pastors because youth ministry in America is like fun and games and pizza.

And the pastor who I worked under encouraged me to shorten the length of my sermons as much as possible.

And that's not to say I was preaching for like an hour and a half.

Like, yeah, okay, you can shorten those.

But no, I was preaching for like 20, 25 minutes.

And he was like, no, you got to get it down to like 10 minutes.

And I was like, well, how do you do that in 10 minutes?

And so.

And it's like, well, so the argument is, and this is kind of the, I think, the broad philosophy of youth ministry, but it's also, I think this kind of venom carries into adult churches as well, because this kind of thing, I didn't only see him trying to push on me in youth ministry, but I saw this in the church.

Like, basically, they cared more about numbers than they cared about faithfulness.

And the argument is, if you, if you don't have people sitting in the pews, you can't reach them with the truth.

And so, like, you got to rope the kids in with the fun in the games and make the sermon as short as possible, because if you're not attractive, then nobody's going to be there for you to share the gospel with anyway.

And I wrestled with that tremendously because something in the dregs of my soul was like, there is something horribly wrong about that.

And now I realize it's like being attractive doesn't matter.

What matters is telling the truth.

Now, there is a right way and a wrong way to be winsome.

I think.

Well, really, there's only a right way to be winsome.

And what I think most people consider winsomeness is not really winsomeness at all, but to.

To win people, we win people with the truth.

And we need to do that in a biblical way, which means, you know, we don't want to.

There is a kind of demeanor that we ought to have when we are presenting the truth to people.

But to be winsome does not mean sacrificing the truth at all.

And that's.

That's what I saw that I was kind of being pushed to do in youth ministry, to sacrifice truth at the cost of bringing more people in.

And there.

There was all this other stuff, like, you know, back.

Back in the old days, 30 years ago, where it was the only church in the whole town, they had a huge youth ministry.

And now that there's, you know, a dozen youth ministries in town, like, the youth ministry is way smaller.

The kids are dispersed through all the youth ministries.

And so it's like, it's your job as the cool new youth pastor to bring, you know, to bring 500 kids into the youth ministry.

It's like, I.

I don't think I can ever do that.

And my job is like, as.

Like, biblically my job.

It doesn't matter what you say my job is as my boss.

What matters biblically is that my job is to try to spiritually lead these students.

And I was also really trying to incorporate, like, I wanted the students to go to church on Sundays.

I wanted to try to educate them, but also, like, I wanted to try to bring their parents into this and teach them, like, you know, hey, you need to take your kids to church.

You need to shepherd them better at home, and that kind of thing.

And it's.

It's an uphill battle when that is not the philosophy that the church itself shares.

It's.

So eventually I quit, and also at the same time, I got engaged.

And so.

So that was kind of my ultimate excuse to leave.

And then that was also right smack dab in the middle of the pandemic.

This was also at the same time that I was interviewing for this other job as a youth pastor at a much bigger church.

And thank God that I think that the pandemic happened when it did, because I Could have been some big Eva goon.

If the pandemic didn't happen and they accepted me at that other church, I could have gone on a tremendously different path.

So thank God that I basically, I quit the job at the church.

And then they were like, well, we don't.

This pandemic thing, we want to wait till it dies down.

And then it never died down.

So week after week I wasn't getting a paycheck and my wife and I were trying to determine like, are you going to move here so we can get married or am I going to move there so we can get married?

And then eventually it was just like, well, I don't have any guarantee of a job here.

We want to get married.

And so I'm just going to move there.

Where was there and now where is here?

Yeah, I used to work.

So I spent most of my life in Kansas City, Missouri, which is where I am now.

Actually I'm in Kansas now, but in Midwest.

And then I moved to Washington and that's where I worked for a year and a half or so.

And then I moved back to Kansas City.

That's a heck of a long distance relationship from Washington to Kansas.

It is.

We met, my wife and I met in college and then we, we kept up our relationship over the course of time and decided to finally get married.

2020.

Well, praise God.

So as she was looking at all this happening, was she.

Was she seeing things the same way as you were?

I reckon she probably was, yeah.

I think like, spiritually we have always been really on the same page.

And also, even like with pandemic stuff, we have also been on the same page.

We were kind of asking the same kind of questions and concerned about the same things.

And we both agree that like, yeah, I'm.

I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to move there and hopefully I can find a new job quick and we can get married.

That's I 2020 was such an awakening for basically.

Well, I won't say everybody because it wasn't for everybody, but for a lot of people, for a lot of people, particularly, particularly in the church and in both good ways and bad ways.

And we'll definitely get into some of the bad ways.

But it's so cool to hear that it sort of took a lot of people and shook them and recognized that there's no foundation under this.

Like it's, it's you.

You watch churches slide off.

That's ultimately how I found apologia, because apologia was one of the one churches that was open here in Phoenix during the pandemic.

In fact, I originally heard about them because they were doing an anti abortion protest at the Capitol.

This was in.

This was in 2020, 2021 is when it was.

I'm like, well, a church that's doing an anti abortion protest at the Capitol during the pandemic, that's a church that's got it going on, Right?

You just look at those together.

So as you transitioned out from the belief set that you had, so you're in this youth pastor mega church, Pentecostal, what was the first thing you looked at?

A bunch of different stuff.

You're like, this is not okay.

What was the first thing that you kind of got a toehold on that.

Like, I don't like this.

This feels kind of gross to me.

Yeah.

So the, the church that I worked for and that I was a youth pastor under, it was a Baptist church.

And so ever since, basically like in.

Ever since, like college, I was a Baptist, essentially, let's say like non denominational Baptist.

And that's the kind of church that I ended up working at, non denominational Baptist.

And the.

Just a lot of, I think through the years there was, I just noticed a lot of mistreatment of people, including me, just in various capacities in churches.

Like, whoa, that's not how I think Christians are supposed to act.

Like, that's weird.

What's up with that?

And then often it was even up to the point of leadership, like, well, this pastor did what?

What?

Like, that's outrageous.

And, you know, then you hear stories of pastors all over the place committing horrible sexual sin.

And it's like, shouldn't we be held to a higher standard?

Like, didn't.

Isn't that stuff I learned in Sunday school?

True?

And also this kind of happened at the same time as I started going to this Baptist church back, like way back in high school, college, and I was kind of studying apologetics for the first time.

And it was kind of the first time in my life, just like most people where they're confronted with other people, peers who are starting to think about heavier things and being willing to argue with the things that their parents believe or they're influenced by the things that the culture says.

And so basically I was, you know, through high school and college, probably like most people encountering these arguments for the very first time that, well, maybe God doesn't exist.

I had never considered that before or like, of course God exists.

And so that really rattled me because even growing up, I think Just in the churches that I went to or in the, I think my parents are broadly faithful people, and they would admit this too, that, you know, they just don't have answers to all of these questions.

And the churches that we went to, they didn't equip us for these things very well either.

And so I, I didn't feel very well equipped to answer these questions.

And so I struggled with doubt and whatever.

And so that made me dive into apologetics for the first time.

And so I was like, very evidentialist.

Now.

I've gone the way of the presuppositionalist very hard the past few years, but grew up very evidentialist.

I would have thought presuppositionalists are idiots and, but knew all the arguments for the existence of God.

Right.

Wayne Lane Craig.

To this day, I really appreciate Stand to Reason and Greg Kohl.

So there are a ton of apologists that I love and deeply respect, even though I lean the presuppositionalist direction, because all those, all those arguments for the existence of God are still true.

They don't stop being true.

I just approach kind of theology a little bit differently now in my head.

But basically over the years I started seeing these cracks and after, after kind of having this more firm faith in God, I thought, you know, the issue here is not God, where a lot of my friends or a lot of people you hear about, or even like progressive Christians, people who deconstruct, they're like bad, bad people who called themselves Christians did bad stuff to me, and therefore Christianity isn't true.

And that, that never really resonated with me, that, that never made sense to me.

I always recognize that as a flawed argument.

The very tip top, most challenging argument in apologetics, at least emotionally for people, is the problem of evil.

And logically, the problem of evil does not disprove God.

The fact that we think that evil is bad actually is an evidence for God.

And so I kind of recognized that very early on.

And when I encountered these bad pastors or churches who were more concerned with numbers than truth or pleasing.

You know, somebody complains to the pastor at the church that I worked at, he would talk to me, we would have meetings, and he would essentially teach me how to, to manipulate people into not causing trouble.

So he'd be like, hey, so if somebody comes to you and says this, here's the kind of thing that you say to get them off your butt.

Yeah.

And I mean like insane, awful, awful stuff, crazy.

And you know, at first I was like, oh, okay, that's that's kind of weird.

But.

And then, you know, as.

As time kind of progressed, I started realizing, like, oh, this guy's actually a terrible guy.

Like, you can't do that.

And.

And so, you know, eventually I was like, I don't want to be here anymore.

I left.

And I was also going to seminary at the time.

And so I.

I kind of developed this love of God and this love of the Word of God, because I also recognize that the Word of God is the thing that we have to build the foundation of our faith in.

I think.

I think my love of the Word of God kind of developed over time because there was a time early in college probably where I was like, well, the Bible can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.

It's tough to interpret the Bible, but, like, you know, what we.

You know, what's good logic and philosophy.

And so, like, that's the thing that.

That I.

That I need to kind of spend a lot of time wrestling with, and I need to read philosophers and, you know, And.

And now nowadays, I am.

I've also gone completely the opposite way from that.

I think that was a terrible mistake.

And it's a mistake that a lot of people, even in the Reformed community, make today to value philosophy and tradition and things like that far over the word of God.

And.

And I even had experience with other pastors who were, like, more recently in history, who were Thomas, and they would preach sermons not over Scripture, but over Plato and over Aristotle.

And, like, that's weird.

Aren't you.

Don't you claim to be a conservative Christian, biblical Reformed church?

Like, that's crazy.

And so I was also going to seminary.

And then during 2020, I dropped out of seminary, and I could have transferred to another seminary here in Kansas City.

And these things started coming out about the SBC and some of the serious problems in the sbc.

And we were going to an SBC church.

And I started to see, like, this odd corruption in this church that was very closely associated with the seminary that I lived near at the time.

And so I was like, okay, no more seminary.

No, thanks.

This is bad.

And even to this day, I think there are, like, I would.

I would highly and tons of people disagree with me on this, but I would, like, highly push back against somebody wanting to go to seminary.

I think you can absolutely get a good biblical education at a seminary, but you have to really have your guard up.

And I think it's not good for people to have to have their guard up when they're in some kind of school, because you're there to learn things.

You're not there to, like, filter and, you know, protect yourself from the things that you're learning.

And so I.

I think people can get a much better biblical education and even.

Even about how to go into ministry if they find a really good church and learn under the elders of that church and also read a lot of really good old books.

I.

I hear all of that, and I see it now as I look around, because I just showed up in this Christian world, and I'm trying to understand how the church got to where it is today.

Sort of.

I walk.

It's like I walk into this room, and I don't know the room that I've walked into, but it has thousands of years of history behind it, but also 100 or so years of history in its current form, more or less.

And so as the lights slowly come on in the room, as I start to understand where I am, I see all the things that you're talking about, particularly deconstruction, you know, the lack of pastors and churches to have good answers to pretty basic.

Pretty basic questions, you know, like, while this person did this bad thing to me once, so Christianity isn't true.

And.

And I encountered that a lot because I.

Before I was active on X, I was more active on Instagram.

And so I started having my own sanctification, started talking about Christianity more on my profile there.

And I would have, you know, guys who came from the New Age, like I did, who would say stuff like that, like, well, you know, Christianity has done all this stuff through the years, et cetera.

And it's like, well, first, the Roman Catholic Church is not Christianity.

Right?

Like, that's.

That's the first thing that was my own.

That was from my own understanding.

But then also to explain to them, like, imagine that the only game of basketball you've ever seen your whole life is played in, like, a rundown stadium with really bad players who are fouling each other, you know, and like, they're jumping into the stands and punching people, and the refs are looking someplace else.

And you're, like, playing with a rock.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like, basketball is terrible.

It's like, well.

But then you actually read the rule book that's like, oh, wait a minute, this is not at all.

And I actually gave someone that metaphor, and that really.

That really clicked for him to recognize that things have been done wrong in really bad ways, I think ways that people are just starting to become aware of, frankly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I made A post recently on X where I said, there's this interesting trend recently of people really enjoying the phrase historical Christianity.

And I don't have anything against historical Christianity.

Like, I love reading, I love history.

I think there is a tremendous amount to learn from Christians historically, obviously, but historical Christianity, whatever that is, is different from biblical Christianity.

So if we're trying to base our faith on historical Christianity, we could, could pick some kind of time in church history and follow those people.

But that's not authoritative, you know, that's not good that those people in that specific period of time may have made some tremendous mistakes that we absolutely do not want to follow.

And how do we figure out what's wrong or what's right?

Well, we go to the Word of God.

And that's kind of the same thing that I started discovering at these churches especially.

So I, my, my faith got stronger and stronger.

I really wanted to go into ministry.

I became a youth pastor.

I even went, I was a missionary in Japan for over a year.

And so I really wanted to serve in some, you know, ministry capacity.

But then, you know, through that time I, I started to really, really value the Word of God.

Because in, in seeing the like, I, I got to see from a layman's perspective, church issues, you know, and kind of growing up, it wasn't that bad.

It wasn't like, you know, this horrible thing happened at church, but kind of as I got older, I started to, you know, be like, see these more bad things happening.

But I also got to see this kind of from behind the curtains perspective of a bad church.

And you know, even, even in studying things for my podcast and looking into things that are happening at the SBC or like politically at these large kind of church organization or things that are covered up that pastors do by their staff or whatever in various ways is like, that's awful.

And the solution to that is the Word of God.

That's the thing that we always have to go back to.

Not historical Christianity, not emotional Christianity, not any Christianity with any kind of modifier, just Christianity.

And how do we define Christianity?

And the answer is the Word of God.

So that's the thing that I kind of started developing and started loving.

And then during 2020, my eyes were open to just even, even more things like the massive cowardice of churches, churches shutting down.

And churches required like something that our church did at the time was they required people to wear masks, of course, like a lot of churches did to go in.

And that was something that I really struggled with because it's like, you are basically going to turn me away from worshiping with the body of Christ if I choose not to wear a mask.

Like, that is.

That is, like, that's one of the worst things I could possibly think of.

And, like, that's.

That's horribly bad.

And you guys are a conservative biblical church that's associated with one of the biggest seminaries in the country.

What?

Just, it's horrible.

And these are the things that kind of opened my eyes to this and realized Scripture is the solution to these things.

And churches that follow Scripture above the government, churches that follow scripture above wanting to please people, churches that follow scripture above wanting to fill their pews and make as much tithe money as possible.

That's the key.

Did you explore out of that Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy at all, or did you just know that, like, that ain't it?

Yeah, that's an interesting question.

I.

I always encountered Catholics.

I encountered fewer Eastern Orthodox people over my life.

But when I think growing up, I always perceived Catholicism as some kind of wacky, different denomination.

And I wasn't really interested in denominations at the time.

I was just interested in Christianity.

And so I was trying to figure out what that was and landed on the Bible.

And so, no, I never really took Catholicism seriously.

And even now, you know, I've done a lot of studying about Catholicism and things like that just because I wanted to learn about those things later.

But before that, no, I never personally explored Catholicism or any of those other different religions that kind of seem wacky to the average American, because that's a.

Really interesting thing that's happening right now is people going walking a similar path to what you have and deciding that Protestantism ain't it.

And so, and we talked about this in our podcast, like, they.

They go into Roman Catholicism, or if they don't, like the Pope or what's happening there, or historic Roman Catholicism, they go into Eastern Orthodoxy.

And I've had to explain to lots of guys who are in faithful Protestant churches, like, yeah, I know it.

Maybe it doesn't look the way that you want it to, but as soon as you begin departing from Sola scriptura and you start saying that there's some other source of authority, like, you start getting on a very dangerous path, because guys will go into Roman Catholicism to look around at that.

They will see that it is not at all what's promised.

That is not the.

That is not unified.

It's not like the people there are more greatly sanctified.

It's.

It's many of the same problems.

And in fact, some of the problems to a much even greater degree.

And then.

So it's like you will bounce out of that, and you'll end up in Eastern Orthodoxy, and maybe you'll stay there for a few years.

And what I've heard is people will come into Orthodoxy, they'll be there for a few years, and they'll start to recognize that the bare ritualism that doesn't produce transformation of the heart, transformation of the character, it gets very tiresome.

And then they.

Then they bounce out of Eastern Orthodoxy, and Lord knows where they go.

Right.

Hopefully they'll end up back in a faithful Protestant church, but of course, those can be few and far between.

For the exact reasons.

The exact reasons that you've listed.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the thing that protected me from desiring to explore that avenue is my love of scripture, sola scriptura.

I cared about churches adhering to the word of God.

And so I think that prevented me from, like, okay, what's all this wacky stuff that they're doing?

Well, it's because dead guys a long time ago did, too.

Okay, I don't care about that.

Where does the word of God say that?

And, and, and so I think that that's why I was protected from that.

And probably this is just a theory.

What's happening with a lot of other people is a lot of people are, you know, they just grow up in Christianity and they, they have similar experiences to me and a lot of other people where they're like, ooh, there are problems here.

Like, there are problems in evangelicalism, but a lot like the deconstructionists, where the deconstructionists are like bad Christians, equals bad Christianity.

I think a lot of these people, they think bad evangelical, you know, bad, you know, fill in the blank, equals, oh, that, that denomination or that, like, that evangelicalism, the focus on the gospel must be bad, which is a weird argument.

And so it's like, so what's better?

Well, something that's older, probably.

Something that's older is better.

What's older?

Oh, well, Catholicism.

And if I don't like the Pope, well, Eastern Orthodoxy is also kind of old.

And so I'm going to go there instead.

But the reality is, what's much, much older than both of those things is the word of God itself, which is the foundation of the very.

Of the world.

You know, in the beginning was the Word.

You know, there's nothing older than the word of God.

And that's, I think, what a lot of people forget.

And that's something that I have kind of developed a true love for over time that I'm really terribly hard trying to instill in other people, because that would solve all of our problems in America.

It would solve the woman faith lady in Trump's cabinet, and it would solve the people doing their exodus to Roman Catholicism, and it would solve churches locking down for Covid.

It would solve literally everything if we used the word of God as our ultimate authority and not the word of man.

I wish more people would really read and meditate on Pilgrim's Progress that.

I keep coming back to that one.

It's like the way is narrow.

It's.

It's narrow, and you have to be okay with that.

And the width is.

The width is the width of a book.

Right.

But the people don't recognize the freedom that comes with that.

That's the part that's been so shocking to me.

Again, now, I came from the New age, false light kind of world, so that's.

That's where I came from.

In that way, as broad as broad can be.

And in that broadness, it's so much real danger.

And it's by walking this narrow path, that's the way that you could be safe and free from the world.

But I guess that path is too narrow.

I mean, I understand, but the path seems to be too narrow for a lot of people.

Yeah.

Ordo Amoris has been trending recently, and this is something we talked about in our episode a little bit.

But we need to properly order our affections.

And so as Protestants, people who love the word of God as our ultimate authority, we're allowed to value history.

We're allowed to read John Bunyan.

We're allowed to love Pilgrim's Progress.

We're allowed to read and love Augustine.

We're even allowed to read and benefit from people like Thomas Aquinas or Plato or Aristotle, because we filter all of those things through the word of God first.

But if we don't do that, if we flip it the other way around, even if we try to aim for actually good things like masculinity or like patriarchy or whatever, if we flip those orders upside down, then we get none of them.

We get absolutely none of them.

What's so interesting about the Ordo Amoris discussion, and I haven't really tracked it closely, it doesn't seem like a complicated subject to me, but someone.

It might have been Rich Lusk.

Rich Lusk is like Twitter All Star for sure.

He.

I think he might have said that the Ordo Amoris without putting your love of God first, the whole thing falls apart.

You can't just say, like, I love my own people more than I love other people.

Well, sure, okay, that may be true.

But you are called to love God above, and even.

You're above even your own people, above your own family members.

Right?

And if you don't do that first, then nothing else stands.

Then you get some sort of arbitrarily assigned set of loves.

And so it seems to me that the Ordo Morris discussion can't happen in an environment outside of confession.

Repentance, restitution.

And I just see that completely left out of the discussion.

Men are not caring at all for the condition of their own hearts.

And that's really bad.

That's really, really bad.

Yeah, yeah.

I think I first heard the concept of ordo amoris.

He didn't use the word, but from C.F.

lewis.

I think probably in Mere Christianity he talks about that.

And then I realized, probably, yeah, yes, that was probably.

He might also mention it in Mere Christianity.

But anyway, you know, we repeat things that are important, and this is a very important idea.

And I later realized, like, oh, he probably got that from Augustine.

But regardless, you know, regardless of where it comes from, it's true.

Because we, we there are ordered loves.

There is like an order of values that we ought to have.

Some things are more important than others.

Absolutely true.

But it's like, yeah, what a lot of people are missing is, yeah, of course you should love your family more than some stranger across the planet.

But the truth is, if you're not loving God, then you're actually not even loving your family.

That's right.

You're not even loving.

Like, you can love nobody properly if you don't love God first.

Now, some Christians who do love God, they can still not love their family properly because they're still not actually loving God properly.

I think, you know, because we're imperfect, we can mess things up.

But, you know, so that's not to say.

And this kind of gets into the presuppositionalist discussion, I think, because people talk about covenant apologetics or covenant theology, and they're like, well, those covenant guys, they're inconsistent.

And it's like, yeah, of course we are.

Yes, that's the point.

Like, we.

We're not perfect.

You know, we make.

Everybody makes mistakes.

But to be consistent, and nobody can be perfectly consistent, but we ought to strive for consistency.

To truly love our family, we need to love God first.

To truly have knowledge of anything, we have to have true knowledge of God, or we need to at Least admit the knowledge that God innately gives us first before we can have actual true knowledge of other things.

Yeah.

I was thinking it's a little bit like a fountain, right?

You poured your love into God, and then it overflows into proper order.

And, you know, one of the things that's funny about the whole order of mortis thing, I wonder how many men love their fathers.

Right?

I love my people.

Like, well, do you love your mother and your father?

And I don't mean like, yeah, of course I love.

I mean, like, not love out of obligation.

Like, do you honor them?

The 5th Commandment Violations has been part of American culture since the 1960s at least.

And where.

I think we're seeing a lot of that.

A lot of that today.

Yeah.

And even.

Even the people, part of the groups who are using words like boomer brain a little too much, they.

They.

They will talk about the importance of honoring your father and your mother.

And, like, we need to honor, like, our father.

You know, even John Calvin in his commentaries is like, not our father is not just our immediate father, but it's our forefathers.

It's.

It's the people who came before us historically.

And it's like, yes, all true.

And then we skip over our actual father, or we skip over our grandfather, or we skip over the people who are older than us generationally.

And then we.

We want to go to people a thousand years ago, and then.

And then we skip everybody near us, and then we want to insult those people and call them boomers.

Like, that's.

Yeah, it's like that.

I mean, it's hypocrisy.

Not.

Not only is it bad, but it's like, you.

You specifically know that we ought to be honoring our fathers and our mothers, and you're still.

You're not.

You're choosing not to.

You're intentionally skipping over people just because it's convenient or you don't like them or, you know, for whatever reason.

Yeah, that's a huge part of it.

When the Westminster Confession of Faith also talks about honoring father and mother means more than just your biological fathers or your forebears, it also means people who are in authority over you.

It means elders.

Right.

It means.

It means everyone who has a degree of seniority over you.

And that is just.

I think that's probably one of the most devastating effects of the 1960s and the sexual revolution.

In fact, it might even be keyed specifically to it.

Is this idea like, oh, dad is just an old fuddy duddy who doesn't understand the changing times.

And I don't have to listen to him.

And if I don't like my boss, I'll just, like, you know, flip him and take off, right?

And it's like, no, when you look into Scripture and you look at David, you look at Saul, David and Absalom, there's a great book called A Tale of Three Kings by Gene Edwards.

And it's a very short little book.

It might be 100 pages less, probably big print, too.

And it talks about the story of Saul, David and Absalom, about how David recognized that Saul was still the rightfully crowned king and that he had to behave in a certain way as a result of that.

And David was faithful in that.

In a way that Absalom was not.

And that story gets told, and you see that, it's like, oh, even if I don't necessarily agree, if someone is rightfully in a place of authority, I'm still called to honor them.

I don't need to follow them into sin.

But that doesn't mean I can be disrespectful or dishonoring to them.

And I think that that's just a tension that's too much for some men to bear in their frustration.

Is it anger?

Is it bitterness?

I think it's bitterness that's, you know, a root of bitterness wrapped around the heart.

What do you think it is?

Yeah, I think the.

Ultimately, the problem is with everything.

The problem with everything is that we're not rooted in the word of God.

Like, if.

If you hate your father and mother, if you're disrespectful to your elders or whatever, you are not.

Like, something with your theology has cracks in it.

And.

And this, this also remember your question, because I want to go back to it, but I.

This is.

I want to say this, too, that I think there is a.

There's this tendency for people.

Well, I forgot I was saying.

So anyway, we'll go back.

I can go back to my question if you want.

Yeah, go back.

I remembered it.

So my question was, we see a lot of men.

We see a lot of men that are saying terms like boomer, boomer, brain.

They're loving their.

They're loving their people, but their people does not include their fathers, their elders, et cetera.

And so I was speculating, is it anger?

Is it bitterness?

Like, what.

What do you think is motivating that specific form?

And it's not.

Just to be clear, it is not a new form of rebellion.

It's just the latest flavor that's continuing since around the time of the sexual revolution.

Yeah, I remember.

The first thing I wanted to say first, this, this kind of direction that the conversation is going is probably like, people, one of.

One of the accusations that us, like, very conservative, reasonable people get is that, like, oh, you're acting like liberals.

What, you.

You don't think it's ever okay to.

To rebel against, you know, evil authorities or, you know, evil people who are elders over us.

It's like, sure, like whenever there are situations where we.

We can.

We can be disrespectful in certain situations to people that are older than us.

Right.

But broadly, the command to honor your father and your mother, like, in other words, sometimes it's honoring to a person to fight them.

You know, like, we want to resist evil authorities, and so we fight them.

And that's actually honoring to them.

But what's not honoring to them is for people who are otherwise being faithful to just throw insults at them or even if they're wrong about something, if we just disagree with them, throw out insults to them.

Like, that's actually not honoring.

Like, there is a time that we need to honor people by fighting them, and there's a time that we need to honor people just by respectfully disagreeing.

But we shouldn't be just fighting people constantly, all the time, all over the place.

But I think, to answer your question, the actual root of a lot of this, I think, is it's a lack of wanting to take responsibility for things.

Very similar to, I think, what happened in 2020.

The world wanted to look for some kind of scapegoat.

And if we don't recognize that we are sinners, if we don't point the responsibility back in on ourselves as the bad guy in the situation and the person who has to deal with the evils of the world around us, regardless of who's actually causing the.

The evils, if anybody's causing the evil at all, that is an important thing to do, to be able to be introspective and to self reflect on ourself and realize, like, you know, whatever's happening in the world, this is my responsibility to deal with it.

But instead, I think a lot of people want to pick some kind of person or some kind of group.

Like, you know, a lot of conservatives might say, wow, Biden is ruining the country.

And it's like, yeah, that's partially.

That's true.

Absolutely, it's true.

But Biden is ruining the country because we have ruined the country in such a way that allowed someone like Biden to get Elected.

We have ruined our churches enough so that Trump thinks it's okay to appoint a woman to the head of some kind of faith committee.

You know, we need to accept personal responsibility for this ourselves, and we need to realize that the ultimate solution is not some kind of asserting any kind of authority over somebody or just making them do whatever we want.

The solution is repentance, and the solution is revival, ultimately.

And everything else is just a band aid.

And so I think the, the root of this anger and this kind of disrespect for elders and a lot of these problems is just people looking for some kind of group that they want to blame their problems on.

If it's white people or if it's black people or if it's the Jews.

Jews, yeah.

Or if it's the boomers or whatever.

It's like this is all just Marxism.

It's picking some kind of group you don't like, calling them the oppressor and then oppressing them.

You know, that's Marxism, and that's what people can do on both proverbial sides of the political spectrum.

Even though I think the people who are doing that, who call themselves on the right, they're not actually on the right at all.

But, yeah, that's what I think the root is.

Yeah, the, the scapegoating effect, the scapegoating of saying, let me identify this individual or this group, and I'm going to hang all the ills of society around their neck.

Now, the thing like the, the psychological phenomenon of projection, where you, where you mistake, you mistake your qualities for someone else's, so you look at someone and you say, oh, that person, you know, that person's so amazing, et cetera, et cetera, you're projecting your, your whatever, your inner stuff on them can be good or bad.

And I think that the function of projection is very much like, hey, it's that person's fault.

It's like, okay, maybe there's a hook there, that of some truth to that.

Right?

There's always a hook that you can hang your projection on.

But at a certain point, you do have to look back at yourself and say, okay, well, how am I contributing to this?

How have I contributed to this?

How can I not contribute to this anymore?

In things that I can control within my own life that don't involve me changing the behavior of another person?

Not to say that that person's behavior doesn't need to be changed, maybe it does.

But these causes for self reflection, to understand I'm a participant in this situation, Is.

Seems to be completely lacking with the desire to get out, like, and start crusading towards the other.

It's like, well, how's your.

How is your house and how's your heart?

Like, what is the condition of your heart?

And that's the question that I don't see being asked.

Maybe because it's.

I don't know, it's boomery, I guess.

I don't know.

Yeah.

And.

Well, because it requires us to take responsibility for our own actions and be introspective.

And that's something that people absolutely don't want to do.

And it could be entirely possible that you are put in a horrible position by somebody else.

Absolutely possible.

Like, let's say your father made horrible choices and you grew up with a horrible childhood.

I grew up in West Virginia, and West Virginia's primary source of income for it might still be today, but was coal mining.

And most of the coal mines, probably.

I don't know if most.

But a lot of the coal mines were shut down.

And West Virginia, broadly, is just filled with poverty.

And it's.

A lot of it is like, you took the government, somebody else, not them, took away their jobs right out from under them, and they are suffering tremendously for it.

And that's on top of all of the damage that happened in a lot of places in the south due to the Civil War.

Like, the north ravaged the South.

It's horrible.

They sacked the south and made it very difficult for people to actually get back on their feet.

But what do we do now?

Like, there's a lot of people who are put in horrible situations, and it seems like they would rather roll around and.

But wallow in their.

Their misery than to say, like, okay, yeah, life sucks.

I'm way behind a lot of other people.

What am I going to do about it?

We're called to rejoice in all circumstances as Christians.

And that's just.

And that's just true.

I mean, do you believe that God is truly sovereign over the period of time that he chose to put you in?

And that doesn't.

That doesn't mean passivity.

Because.

Because I think I said on my podcast, it would have been a week ago or so, I said that there's a.

There's a.

As always, there's a ditch on both sides of the road.

You can be too introspective.

You can be too much like, well, what in this is me?

And you can get too caught up in that.

And.

And you can also be too much in the vein of.

It's all the other person.

And I think the, the righteous way of being is like, well, it's both.

Right, it's both.

And it's, it's both and more in terms like, well, this is the situation that God has me in.

You know, what do I need to learn about myself and the other and my, and God and his sovereignty from this?

And to be able to think that through before choosing, oh, it's all my fault.

Because that's, I would say, wokeness on the left.

Right.

And then wokeness on the right is.

It's all someone else's fault.

Well, let's pump the brakes on that and let's actually have a discussion instead of deciding to go to war.

I get that it's the most important election cycle in human history, but surely there's some time for some righteous introspection.

Sure.

And Trump won.

Trump's in office.

Like, we can all calm down now.

Everything's fine.

It's all good.

Fine forever.

But it's.

Well, not forever, but at least it should be fine.

Briefly.

And I talked about the fact that we definitely should not be dropping our guards.

I was expecting a lot of this to kind of blow over and people to kind of return to normalcy and maybe even complacency.

And I'm sure that's going to happen to some extent because that's, that's always something we have to guard ourselves from if, if there's some kind of victory in life.

And, and I think the election was a big victory.

We, we don't want to be like, you know, just kick back and, and be complacent and just say, like, oh, well, I don't need to do anything over the next four years.

This is the time that we need to build.

This is the time that we need to be growing and preparing and, you know, making it, making our families and churches and states better to either prepare for something bad happening in the next four years or to get the nation in a good enough position so that they can prepare for something for the good thing that's going to happen in the next four years.

Oh, I agree.

I agree.

I think there's also a component of this where, I don't know that people.

I can see it now, and you can probably see it, too.

I, I see a lot of this, we'll call it right wing outrage.

Like, yeah, you know, like a lot of the, the Jews and all that stuff.

I, and I've said this.

I think young men have been, at least for the past year, maybe since the turn of the Year, no, since, since the whole October 7 thing, I think was a big pivotal thing for, for many people I've heard, is that I see the right has been fashioned into a weapon to attract attack Trump with from his right.

So the first Trump administration, he was attacked from the left, and now the left has been roundly defeated like they, they just have been.

Right.

But now the attacks are coming from his right with a lot of this, a lot of this right wing outrage.

And so that's been very interesting to watch that weapon being fashioned and assembled, you know, from otherwise formerly sensible people to attack Trump from his right.

And I think that's probably the most significant danger we'll face in the near term, which I would say maybe in the next year or two, who knows after that?

I mean, it took them four years of the first Trump administration to come up with COVID And so who knows what they're trying to put together now.

But for now, it looks like the attacks on Trump that I'm seeing, the effective, effective, I don't know how effective they are, but the most powerful ones are coming from his right.

And I find that to be pretty troubling, actually.

Yeah, that's, that's interesting.

I haven't thought about that before.

I think more of, I see these attacks on.

And I, you would agree with this.

Just attacks on truth.

You know, the, the attack.

I think a lot of, I mean, Trump's not a perfect person and there are a lot of faithful people, like I criticize or I, I would, you know, I disagree with a lot of the choice, like the, the woman pastor thing.

We have criticized him for that.

And so these attacks, you could say are coming from the right, but those are good attacks.

But, and they're not even attacks.

They're like, there are things that we want to build, we want to fix these things.

But I guess you could say attacks are coming from people claiming to be on the right.

And, you know, this, this has been consistent throughout American history, at least through our lifetimes, where we see a lot of people who like the most effective attacks, I think in general come from within.

You know, the Trojan horse is a lot more effective than people sieging a wall from the outside.

And so people claiming to be conservative, I think, or, you know, people, pastors claiming to be conservative or, you know, Acts 29 did a tremendous amount of damage.

The church that I used to go to used to be Acts 29.

They call themselves conservative and, you know, the SBC calls themselves conservative.

And people who maybe don't have the time or the capacity to really dive into every little detail about everything, which is fine.

Like, you don't.

You can't.

You just think, oh, that's a conservative church.

And then you go there and you, you know, you maybe don't have the discernment that you could or that you should.

And then you end up falling into this, this liberal trap because, because you just believe that, oh, this is a conservative thing.

All these people call themselves conservative.

And so I think that's why it's especially important right now for us to know the difference and the really core of what makes a conservative or just what makes biblical truth.

Is historical Christianity the same as biblical Christianity?

Like, what is a conservative?

Does the woke, right, really exist?

Does it not exist?

Like, all these are, I think, really important questions because we need to be able to draw these lines.

So, so to you, maybe we can talk a little bit.

I know it's, it's not going to be an easy thing to put into, like, a little nutshell, but to, to what does being conservative truly mean to you?

I.

I think we'd probably agree.

I'm.

I'm curious to have to hear you unpack that a little bit.

Yeah, I, I am a simple dude.

I like to make things as.

As simple as possible.

So I, it's probably a lot actually more complicated than I want to make it, but I would make it as simple as just saying a person who wants to conserve truth, a progressive is a person who wants to progress past truth.

And, and there are, and I, you know, no name and no label is perfect because there are things that, that conservatives have traditionally wanted to conserve that are bad things.

Right.

And, and I think GK Chesterton said something like, you know, we, we want to be progressing constantly towards good things.

We don't want to be progressing away from things.

And so, like, there's a good way to be progressive and there's a bad way to be conservative.

But I think in the, in kind of the archetypal terms that we see today between the two social parties, conservative is a person who wants to conserve the truth and also, like, progress towards that truth in an appropriate way.

And a progressive opposite is a person who wants to proceed beyond that truth and to conserve things that accomplish their goals.

So, so when.

Interesting.

Okay, so because you've said you feel like a lot of people who are on the right who are positioning themselves as conservative aren't actually conservative.

So do you mean that they're trying to progress truth?

Yeah, absolutely.

Or they're trying to destroy Truth or whatever.

Like, yeah, there are, there are people who are conservative, who, they call themselves conservative, but actually they're not conserving truth at all.

Absolutely.

Can you.

I, that's a.

I love that, I love that distinction because I've felt, I haven't really been able to put words to it.

I felt that we've kind of moved a little bit past left, right labels.

I feel like there's some, there's some distinction that's getting lost in there.

And I think this is, that this is what causes the friction over the term woke.

Right.

Like how can someone on the right be woke?

It's like, well, that's not precisely what we're saying.

It's probably closer to what you're saying is that there's a desire to progress truth.

So what are some, what are some of those ways that you see people.

This is great, by the way.

This is going to help me a ton going forward.

So what are some ways you see people trying to destroy truth or progress Truth.

Good.

And about the difficulty of using these words, a lot of the truth is a lot of people have different definitions for the words that they use.

Some people think of more historical definitions of conservative and liberal and some people think like, you know, like a Jordan Peterson figure or Joe Rogan is like, I'm a liberal.

I want to say something real quick in response to that.

Okay.

So there does come a moment where two people can be actively in good faith be misunderstanding each other because they have different definitions for a word.

That happens a lot.

But I think a lot of what goes on is people hiding behind a word.

They hide in the fog.

And I think that that is probably closer to what's actually going on.

Right?

Yeah.

So what I was going to say was there are totally legitimate like differences of definitions.

But the key is that we need to be willing to discuss those and be open.

Like the important thing I think for us, for every individual, is to be willing to understand our opponents positions.

And if we don't truly understand what our opponents are trying to say, then it is impossible for us to argue with them.

It's impossible for us to develop a good argument against them.

Which means not only are we not going to convince them of anything and we're not going to convince them of anything anyway.

But the important thing is two things.

We're not going to be able to develop a good idea ourself of our position versus their position.

And also we're not going to be convincing to the other people who are listening to us and that's bad.

But also the most important label that matters to me is not necessarily conservative and liberal, but it's like the good guys and the bad guys.

And typically, just in the way that I've defined it, the conservatives are the good guys.

To conserve truth is a good thing and to progress towards that truth is a good thing.

To proceed to progress beyond that truth is a bad thing.

And so you asked what are examples of this?

So the woke right thing, I think is a perfect example.

And we can talk about how exactly that is this subversive group of people calling themselves conservatives who are actually acting woke, acting liberal.

But a really easy example is we have a name for these people in the Republican Party and they're called rhinos.

Like, you know, Republicans in name only.

They're, they call themselves Republicans, but they're not.

Like these people exist all the time.

We, we would even, like I said Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, they probably would be more uncomfortable calling themselves liberals today.

But people like that have said, like, oh yeah, I'm a classical liberal or whatever.

But we would point at people like that, I think, and say, like, you, you call yourself a liberal, but actually you're a conservative.

So I think it can happen on both sides.

So I, I really like this because it, it, it's a much more biblically, Biblically sound way of discussing left right, liberal, progressive, conservative.

Because it doesn't matter what you conserve.

If it isn't truth, and it doesn't matter what direction you're progressing.

If you're progressing away from truth, that's really good.

Is this a Cody Lawrence original?

I mean, all of my ideas come from somewhere, but I've pieced them together.

I don't know if anybody else has said it the same way I have.

So in some way it's an original, I guess.

Well, I mean, this is fantastic because it also helps me understand why you create the content that you do and why.

Because if you're, if you're operating with this distinction and this and this, it's sort of a worldview, but it's sort of, if you're, if you're operating with this distinction of conservative and progressive as being conserving truth and progressing away from truth or some false truth, that's a solid place to stand.

Like, there's a great quote by this.

He's a mathematician, Archimedes, and he said, give me a solid place on which to stand and I will move the earth.

I love that.

I love that.

And so if you can find a solid place to Stand in a, in a, in a meaningful distinction.

You can create real leverage with that.

And I think it just shatters this left, right, conservative, liberal paradigm to say, well, you know, we don't have to talk about houses and the French Revolution, like sides of the aisle in the French Revolution, where we get left and right and we don't have to talk about these sort of modern political terms, conservative and progressive.

It's like, no, as we're rooting things in a presuppositional worldview that there is truth, then we conserve, then we conserve that truth and that truth produces prosperity versus we're progressing to some new shiny quote, unquote truth that ultimately is, is either going to create.

Well, it's an idol.

It's an idol.

So it will, it may create short term prosperity, but long term devastation.

I think that's, I think that's really good.

And that helps me understand the position you take on the podcast.

Like, is this something that you've been working to put out there, or is this an idea that you've been kicking around or an idea you had sort of as your own for a long time?

Yeah, I bring that up semi regularly on the podcast whenever I talk about political things.

And just in general, I find it deeply important to have solid definitions of the words that we use, especially when the words are potentially so contentious, like conservative and liberal, because they mean different things.

They mean they've meant different things historically.

And I was even listening to a podcast recently about the woke right thing.

And even though, you know, woke right is a word that just started being used, you know, a few weeks ago, metaphorically, very recently, and like, it has not been a word historically.

And so this podcast I was listening to is looking at all these historical examples of like, what is a conservative and what is a woke?

What does woke mean and what is liberal?

My AirPods died, so I had to switch to headphones really quick.

So that's why I look different.

They're back.

So what I was saying was it's really important for me personally to have definitions of words really clear because you can't communicate with people if you're not using the same definition.

And so I think that, I mean, if you're having a sincere conversation, people don't do this on the Internet at all.

But if you're actually trying to have a sincere conversation with people, you need to know what you believe and you need to know the definitions of the words that they're using so that you can come to some kind of common ground and discuss the truth of the thing.

But I was listening to a podcast recently where they were talking about the woke right.

And the woke right is a word that just started being used, you know, a few weeks ago, basically a few months ago, very recently.

And they were giving all of these historical examples of what the word conservative means and where it comes from and the idea of liberal and wokeness and what wokeness means.

And I was thinking, and basically they were trying to say the woke right doesn't exist because this is not a historical concept.

And I was thinking, of course it doesn't exist because this is a new word that we started using.

Like, words can change meaning.

And if we're like, like I said earlier, I'm a simple guy.

I don't think that we need to read.

We don't need to spend 10,000 hours studying something to actually understand what it means.

We can use simple common sense and logic.

And so the way I personally define something, like woke right is a person who claims to be on the right, but who actually acts woke.

It really is that simple.

And so if we're using that definition, and I think that's the common definition that I think most people probably mean when they say woke right.

Like, oh, you're.

You call yourself a conservative, but actually you're woke.

Like, that's what woke right means.

Somebody.

I was having a conversation on X just earlier about.

Or a conversation, I guess somebody confronted me about this because I made some kind of claim about the woke right.

And he was like, the woke right doesn't exist.

That's something that liberals say.

And then I was thinking, like, so I'm a conservative and you're calling me a liberal, and you call yourself a conservative, and I'm calling you a liberal.

Except you say it's impossible to be a conservative or to call yourself a conservative and actually be liberal.

So it's like, what's happening here?

You know, it seems to me that the people are who are actively trying to suppress this idea that the woke right exists are they have some kind of agenda.

They're either deeply deceived or they're malicious.

And they're those people who are trying to infiltrate, you know, good things from the inside.

Like we have, like, we just talked about.

You know, what's funny is, is during the first Trump administration and really before.

But his.

His first administration, I think, made it clear to a lot of people.

And then Biden, of course, cemented the perception is that the left had just jumped off a cliff.

So many people are like, hey, look, I was a center right guy.

Like everyone in Trump's, the whole Trump administration, they're all like, yeah, we were kind of center left guys, but the left went so far to the left, like, we're not with them.

And so now, because the Overton Window, as they call it, has shifted so far to one side, suddenly they're conservatives.

And now like the pendulum is swinging faster than I think anyone could have expected from the left jumping off a cliff to the right.

Going off a cliff.

Right.

And so.

And so, yeah, okay, if you're gonna, if you're gonna run way out into the next zip code and say that I didn't run with you, that I'm somehow a liberal now compared to your enlightened, you know, your enlightened secret knowledge.

You know, I have, I took the red pill.

So I see the institutional impression, oppression.

And like functional Gnosticism, basically.

Amen.

Amen.

Yes.

You have the, you have the secret knowledge that you've watched the documentary or you've seen the meme or whatever.

You've seen all the, you've done all the 4chan stuff and you are the one with the real truth and no one else understands but you.

Not.

The library's full of books.

I don't know.

To say, like to say, to throw out the idea that you, you need to have 10,000 hours to understand common knowledge fully.

It's like, okay, maybe, but like, why don't you start spending.

Start with 10.

Start with just 10.

Like 10 hours.

10 hours is enough time to.

10 hours is enough time to read a 300 page book if you're a slow reader.

Right.

Start with one.

But apparently that's too much like you have to earn a master's degree in things that were that to.

In order to understand common sense, it seems.

And except the irony is the people with master's degrees are the ones who are lying to us.

They would say, and like historic.

Like, so we, we need to be historical and ordo amorous and we, you know, we need to go, go to like a Roman type of society.

Except we can't trust anything that we have learned historically.

Like we can't trust all of World War II history.

It's self contradictory.

And the thing where it's like the woke right doesn't exist and you're a liberal who calls yourself a conservative.

It's like all of these things are self contradictory.

Another thing that I really try to hammer hard on my podcast is self contradictory things.

There is so much, if you have your eyes open of things that People say, and you, you don't need to know, you don't, you don't need to know all the details.

You just need to say like, does this sentiment contradict itself?

And if it does, like, well, maybe they're trying to deceive you or maybe they just haven't thought it through.

But like, either way, you shouldn't take it seriously.

You shouldn't take self contradictory things seriously.

You definitely shouldn't believe self contradictory things.

And that's, that's something I think that is just prevalent everywhere.

Things, things just obviously self contradictory like that, like the, the concept of the woke.

Right.

Not existing.

And then, ah, you're a liberal if you think it does.

Right?

Right.

Well, that's, that's one of the things that I learned from being out there in the world and one of the reasons that I'm so grateful to God for leading me to biblically faithful Christianity.

Because I can tell you, other than biblical Christianity, everything is self contradictory, right?

Every, everything.

A great example is feminism.

Feminism is self contradictory because when you run it out, then you have men and women's sports.

How is that supporting women?

Right?

And you touch that spot, you feel that that's a lie that you believe, period.

And every, every belief system other than biblically faithful Christianity has that.

You just have to dig, you have to burrow until you find the crack in the wall.

And I've said this for a long time, you find that crack, you take crowbar, you jam a crowbar and you pull as hard as you can and the whole thing falls apart.

That's good.

Yeah, and that's, that's the, the foundation of presuppositionalism, that's covenant apologetics.

And a lot of, ironically, a lot of the same people who are, who are pushing the historical stuff and pushing the Thomism type of theology is also pushing or not pushing, but like really attacking presuppositionalism.

And I find that fascinating because it's like, that's not to say you're right, but that's not to say that Christians cannot be inconsistent.

Like, we need to be consistent.

Biblical Christianity is the only consistent religion.

But do people who call themselves biblical Christians act that out perfectly?

No, of course not.

Impossible.

And we're not supposed to.

And we don't want to fall victim to the same stuff that the deconstructionists do where they say, oh, well, people who say they're presuppositionalists are inconsistent, therefore presuppositionalism bad.

Well, no, because everybody's inconsistent with everything.

But the worldview, if we can use that word itself, is like the biblical Christian worldview, I think is the only worldview that is not in some way self contradictory.

Because at some point if you just like logically, if you take any argument down its line, I think if it's not true, you know that like there we can use evidence to counter certain arguments and stuff.

But I think if we really take any argument, no matter what it is, down to its very base elements, at some point it is going to contradict itself like self contradiction.

Ultimately something is not going to follow the law of logic, the law of non contradiction essentially is what I think.

Real quick, can you, can you pull the microphone for your from your from.

Yeah, because it's wrestling against your glorious beard.

Okay.

No, it's okay, it's okay.

Oh, perfect.

Yeah, that'll work too.

So yeah, so that's very effective.

So no, I agree with you.

And that's the beauty of biblical Christianity.

In fact, you know, I've been thinking through some of these natural law presuppositional arguments and it's like, well, you know, if you think about, I think a lot about the creation of Adam and Eve.

So if you just use natural law, if you just use your eyes, then the natural conclusion of that would be, well, clearly man must have come from woman because that's all we ever see as man being born of woman.

Right.

But interesting.

Yeah, the special revelation in scripture says actually no, it didn't happen like that at all.

And there's no way that, there's no way that anyone, if you, if you didn't have the Bible, there's no way that anyone would ever look around and be like, oh yeah, clearly like Eve came from Adam's rib.

Like obviously like there's no way that you would think that.

And evolution is the same.

Like if you look around like, well, we see all these animals that look kind of the same.

One must have come from, from another.

You would never understand the way that God created things if he hadn't told us.

So I think to me that trumps the discussion period.

Yeah.

And that goes back to our previous discussion about just biblical Christianity and like ordo amoris, you could say if you use natural law to interpret special revelation, if you use natural revelation to interpret special revelation, you get things like evolution.

If you use special revelation as the ultimate authority over natural revelation, then that's what truly helps us understand.

And so I think this is actually where a lot of people get hung up on.

I don't really want to Say it that way, because I think both revelations, they come from God and they're perfect.

But natural revelation is, I think, easier to interpret differently, let's say, than special revelation.

The Bible is unclear about a few things, I think we can admit, but the Bible is clear about the vast majority of everything.

If it says woman came from man when God created the world, then we need to believe that it's very clear about that.

And if we, if we flip the, the laws around, like special revelation was given to us to inform us and correct us about our corrupt view of natural law.

And if we flip that around, then we're actually just not helping ourselves any.

It's not good.

And the funny thing is, you know, the people who push the Thomistic thing, like the natural law stuff and who attack presuppositionalism and that kind of thing is like, presuppositionalists.

I love natural law.

Like, I think we can benefit and learn greatly from natural law.

One of the ways to determine if somebody, like I said, we really need to try hard to understand our opponent's argument.

And so one way I think you can tell that somebody is, I don't know, maybe being either insincere or could be malicious in some way or just, just not, not, not offering a good argument in general is if they cannot articulate their opponent's argument.

And so whenever a person says something like, oh, presuppositionalists, they hate natural law.

I was like, what?

Actually the funny thing is somebody from the church that we used to go to, they said he said something like I had a few years ago, I had never heard, I've heard of presuppositionalism.

I didn't even know what it was.

But this guy who was actually a student of one foremost Thomist professors, big, big name guy is he said something like, we were talking about presuppositionalism.

Somehow I didn't really know what it was.

And he made the, I listened to James White and he made the claim something like, hey, James White, he's one of those presuppositionalists.

James White hates natural law.

That's what he said.

And I was like, whoa, that can't possibly be true.

What?

And so then what that made me do.

And he said some other things.

He's like, hey, yeah, those presuppositionalist guys, they hate natural law.

And the reason he said that is because that's actually what they were teaching him in the seminary, which is another reason why I don't like seminaries.

But he and So I was like, oh, man, okay, I want to dig into this and find out what the truth is.

And so I listened to more of what James White had to say about natural law.

And.

And then I started reading Van Till for the very first time.

And I started reading Bonson and Scott K.

Scott Oliphant and all these other presuppositionalist writers.

And I was like, no, these people actually love natural law far more than the Thomas does.

And not only that, but they are lying about these people, either intentionally or unintentionally.

I don't know.

I think a lot of them are absolutely intentionally lying, but some of them might just be ignorant.

But regardless, they're not articulating their opponent's stance very well.

And I think the presuppositionalists are able to articulate the opponent's stance well.

And so I like.

Well, that actually made me a presuppositionalist, seeing the arguments against presuppositionalism and how outrageous and inflammatory and bad they were.

And I was like, oh, I got to do more research into this.

That's what made me a presuppositionalist.

That's great.

I mean, that's the.

That's the right reason to recognize that whoever you're listening to is misrepresenting the arguments.

And so whatever you had previously heard was not the actual argument.

So let me go actually, actually look into it.

There was a book that I read.

I.

I tell the story very often.

It was.

It's the Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

H A I D T.

He wrote this.

He would have written this in the 2000s, something like that.

The late 2000s, maybe early 2000s.

I think it was in the late 2000s.

He's.

He.

Well, I don't know what he would be considered today.

At the time, he was a.

He was on the left, but like a reasonable, reasonable.

On the left, right.

Like college professor.

And this book, the Righteous Mind, it's called why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Way Pre Trump might have been just the very beginning of the Obama era.

And one of the things that he said in this book that has really stuck with me.

I still have it on my shelf.

I should go actually find the quote.

He talks about how it is a consistent result in the social sciences, as in.

This has been documented in study after study that people who are on the right.

Again, he's writing in the 2000s, right.

So people who are on the right can articulate the arguments of people on the left consistently.

They can say they can understand.

Yes, I understand why you believe what you believe.

This is your argument, et cetera.

But he called himself a leftist at the time.

Yeah, but he was, but you know, but he, he wouldn't have called himself a leftist, but I think he would have been, he would have been on the political left.

So we're talking about people who are like, who are sort of hard, maybe harder on the left than him.

Yeah.

Interesting that he would compliment his opponents though.

It's just what I was thinking.

That's fascinating.

Right?

Yeah.

I think, I think again this is, this is the pre woke era.

So we don't really have a good model like meaning pre woke on the left.

Pre institutional oppression.

Right.

So back then in the Obama days, like I was even part of Occupy Wall street before wokeness came around.

So the political issues used to be like social around like abortion and stuff like that and political, economic.

It wasn't, it wasn't cultural.

And so the, the mixing in of the cultural bit changed, skewed everything.

Here's a good example.

So I was like Occupy Wall street was a, was a mega movement on the left, 1000% on the left.

Occupy Wall street wanted accountability for the big banks for the financial crisis in 2008.

That's what Occupy Wall street was about.

It's about the.

That's why I got involved.

Like, yeah, absolutely.

I want the big banks to swing for this.

Now you have.

What is considered the left today is so hard in the tank for all these giant institutions like, like Chuck Schumer.

Like last week Trump is talking about getting rid of the irs.

And Chuck Schumer, one of the leftiest guys out there, was like, next thing you know, Trump is going to tear down the IRS right after.

It's like, what are you talking?

And like we were on the left, like on the left, like within living memory, was not to trust the pharmaceutical industry, not to trust big business.

And who was the biggest proponents of the COVID vaccine?

Everyone on the left.

Like what has happened.

So, so this was back when left was sane, if you can imagine such a day.

A fantasy time.

Right.

So what Height said was that people on the right can articulate the worldview of people on the left, but people on the left think the only reason anyone could possibly be on the right is because they're a bad person.

Yeah.

And I read that I was shocking and that has proved to be true so often and now we're seeing it again.

The only reason you could possibly disagree with me at some is because you're a bad person or you're lying or you're a bad actor.

It's like, no, I disagree with you because you're wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that, that reminds me, I think a cool theme that's kind of running through our conversation is the.

Is ordering our affections properly.

Because if you love truth, actually love truth, you can find value in the things your opponents say.

But if you hate truth, then you don't even want the opportunity to receive truth.

So you're not going to listen to anybody.

And so you're going to shut yourself off from listening to people.

But if you know you have the truth and you love truth and your mind is open to hearing things and having conversations and disagreeing with people, then you're going to be able to have conversations with people you disagree with, maybe learn things from them, and if not, at least you're going to learn things about them or about their position so that you can better deepen your own view of truth yourself.

And that's what, that's why I think it's so massively important to be able to articulate your opponent's views properly, even if they're evil.

Evil views.

Right.

So I'm not saying, like, only articulate the good views.

Like, no, articulate.

Be.

Be able to understand the most evil views that your opponents have, because you got to know that so that you can then crush it.

Well, and that's something that, like, you're not able to do.

You're not able to crush.

This gives me a tremendous amount of hope, because if you look at the people who are arguing against anything that a rational biblical Christian says, the arguments often almost immediately devolve into name calling.

Or like, a woman will tweet somebody on X and somebody will say, like, get your husband.

I'm not going to listen to what you say.

It's like, that's.

Man, you.

You are terrified of the truth is what's happening.

And it's like, you, you are incapable of having a conversation.

You're like a child.

And you, you know, you're stuck in your ways, and it's, it's pitiful.

It's like, that's not how we ought to be, and it's absolutely not how we ought to be as Christians.

Yeah, the name calling, there's a.

And people will say, like, you know, Jesus called people foxes and, you know, whitewashed tombs, like, of course.

But there's a.

There's a character.

Actually, before we get into that, okay, I have a question for you.

So maybe you can Maybe you can.

Maybe.

Maybe you can help me work through this.

So I.

I hear what you're saying about.

You should listen to your opponent's positions.

One of the.

One of my consistent objections.

I mean, yes, you should listen to and understand.

Right.

And appreciate.

I get there are a lot of Christians that listen to guys like Bronze Age pervert.

Bronze Age pervert calls himself Bronze Age pervert.

Right.

Like, let's be very clear.

His book, Bronze Age Mindset is about the drugs and prostitution underworld.

That's what that book is about.

The photo of him on his Twitter profile is.

Is not his back.

It's another man's back from a gay cruising website.

Right.

He like, Right.

So there's all kinds of things about, you know, massive degeneracy.

I'll stop there.

So a lot of Christians listen to this, Listen to this guy, and I think he's abhorrent.

And Christians say, but he says some good things.

Right.

Okay, so what's your response to that, given the things that you had just said?

Yeah, there are, I think, like, this is something that people say about Thomas Aquinas, for example.

He's, I think, a much better example because I think he's dangerous in a lot of ways, but also, you know, is not, like, obviously blatantly pure evil, whatever.

Even though I think his Summa Theologica is the foundation of modern Catholic theology.

And I think it's awful.

Like, we should not put very much value at all in the Summa Theologica.

And then on a little tangent, at the very end of Thomas Aquinas life, he had this spiritual experience where he realized, like, he had some kind of vision or something.

It's not clear exactly what happened, but he had some kind of spiritual experience where he realized he was almost finished with his Summa Theologica, which was, like, his life work.

It's his biggest work that he did in his whole life.

The sum of theology in this book.

And because of his spiritual experience, he had resolved that all of his previous work is like straw, he said.

Like, it's worthless.

It is meaningless.

And so, I mean, in that way, I could call myself a Thomist, because I agree, like, I follow Thomas Aquinas most recent teaching that his work is useless.

And so, like, why do Thomists not take that part of Thomas Aquinas seriously?

Like, that's kind of weird.

But anyway, no, I think, yes, there are valuable things that evil people can say, no matter who they are.

Like, you know, you can point to someone like Hitler, and, you know, people say Hitler Drank water or whatever.

Like, okay, yes, Hitler.

Maybe he did.

Maybe.

Maybe he just drank, you know, children's blood or whatever.

But the point is, it doesn't matter.

It's totally irrelevant because whenever there is some kind of good and valuable thing from some kind of evil place, and it's okay to call things evil.

So, like, what I'm saying is if we are in a conversation or if we have some kind of opportunity to have a productive conversation with somebody, somebody who's just like, pure evil, we cannot have a productive conversation with.

And so I think we need to approach those people differently.

There is totally some time where we just have to be like, I'm not going to interact with those people.

And I think that's totally okay.

But even in those situations, the way we interact with those people is not just necessarily making fun of them.

And name calling.

I think there is a biblical place for mockery.

I think there is a biblical place for name calling because Jesus, you know, the examples you gave, and there are other biblical examples of mockery, satire, sarcasm, and so on.

So I think there are totally biblical examples of that.

But it's also like, we ditches on both sides, right?

We don't want to encounter evil and say, like, well, let me, let me kind of dive into this because there might be some good stuff to get, because all of the good stuff that those people might be saying, you can get somewhere else better and with none of the bad stuff good.

And that's what I usually say.

That's, that's, that's my most common response, is that you can, you can.

Are you getting your worldview?

It doesn't have to be Bronze Age pervert.

I can think of many other examples.

Right.

Are you getting your worldview information from him?

Because you shouldn't be.

You should be straining his information through a scriptural worldview.

Yeah.

So I'm, I'm by no means saying, like, seek these people out and learn from them.

By no means.

I am actually completely comfortable saying, like, you can, you can throw people out.

Like, if there's, even if there's a pastor or some historical figure that had some kind of deep, significant flaw, I think when somebody has, like, a crack in their theology that's big enough, we might not see how it affects other parts of their theology, but it does.

And, and I'm, I'm a lot more willing to do this with more modern preachers than I am with old preachers, just because we, we can look back and kind of see the effect that the old preachers had like, for example, something with Charles Spurgeon that I really am uncomfortable with is his like, mental health, if you want to say that, is like he was horribly depressed through his life.

And so it's like, ah, that's, that's a problem.

But also he.

He is this figure that God chose to put in history as this hugely influential Christian figure.

And so I think we can still learn from him in that situation.

But today I would, I would maybe treat a pastor who has crippling depression a little bit differently, if that makes sense.

And, and I think an example of this, a really fascinating example that I've been thinking about recently is I'm reading through C.S.

lewis's Ransom Trilogy again.

And that Hideous Strength.

Yes.

So you've read.

Oh yeah.

I Left My Heart on Paralandra.

Okay, sweet.

Oh, man, that, that was my favorite book until I tried reading many years ago.

I tried reading that Hideous Strength and I was like, what is this boring?

And then, and then I had to try reading it two or three times until I heard somebody like, kind of explain how the book develops.

And I'm like, oh, okay, that, that makes perfect sense.

I'm going to read it now.

And then now it's my third very favorite fiction book.

But basically I think of somebody like Merlin, where Merlin, I mean, he's like, you, you would look at him today and you would be like, oh, that's a pagan, like, awful.

What the heck?

Like, but for the time that he was in, he was a very faithful Christian, you know, in this fantasy world, whatever.

And that also reminds me, in Paralandra, near the end of the book, Ransom is going through the caves and he sees the, the enormous, like, underground world and he's like, I can imagine like on Earth somebody stumbling into something like this and it turning into like weird pagan worship.

But on this world, in this unfallen world, like, I could perceive that kind of thing just being an offering for like, going somewhere where you shouldn't.

In other words, it's like, it's weird to kind of wrap your head around.

But I, I have this.

I'm kind of developing this weird view of history where kind of what C.S.

lewis says or Dr.

Dimble in that Hideous Strength is good and evil seem to be getting sharper.

And back in the old days, back a long time ago, things were maybe more fuzzy, they were more vague.

And so I'm more willing to give somebody like Martin Luther Grace based on the kind of off the rails ness that he had about the Jews.

And I'm much Less willing to give people grace today because of that.

Because God has put Martin Luther in this significant place in history.

And also I understand that like John Calvin believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary and George.

I think Whitman, Whitfield, I always forget his name.

Whitfield, probably Whitfield, yeah.

The greatest preacher in American history did not have a great relationship with his wife.

And these things are like, ah, that you know, these are struggles.

But also like God put these people in history as important figures and I think we should honor them because we should honor our father and our mother.

But also we see how the cracks in their theology, and certainly they did have cracks, kind of affected history after them.

But we can't see that today.

We don't have that kind of vision, we don't have that kind of foresight.

And so I'm much more happy being like, yeah, this person said some like outrageously crazy stuff.

Throw em out.

Yeah, you just can't, you can't.

And maybe the dividing line then between someone like a Spurgeon or Whitfield and someone like whatever, Bronze Age pervert, just as, just because that's the handy example, maybe the difference between them is that, you know, Whitfield, Spurgeon, et cetera, Luther, they're coming from within a biblical worldview.

So they're, they're, they're within the family of believers, they're within the family of Christ.

They have cracks in their theology or in their line, their personal lives.

But love covers a multitude of sins.

And properly ordering our loves, Christianity is unto itself a nation set apart from other nations.

And so this person who is part of this nation that I'm a part of, I have a greater love for them.

My love can cover their sins versus someone who is outside the family who does not have a biblical worldview.

I have to approach them very, very differently.

And I think I probably made all the Ordo Morris guys really mad by saying that there is a higher loyalty to the Christian nation.

Please go ahead.

Well, yeah, I think that's interesting because I think you're right where I think we can discount people, especially people who call themselves Christians.

And there's a lot of these people today who are just acting like awful, vitriolic, horrible people and they're public figures.

And I am fine throwing themselves out, even though they claim to be, you know, they are maybe covenantally in the body of Christ, but they are not acting like Christians.

But in the same way, kind of to what you were saying, I think there are people historically like, like the, the liberal that you quoted who acts a lot more within a Christian worldview than a lot of Christians do today.

So yeah, if a person has a demeanor of rationality, God has common grace.

God gives imperfect people and even sinners and even non Christians the ability to say true things.

And if we as Christians order our affections properly, like I said, we can learn from those people.

But I think the difference is that if, if there is a person, Christian or not, whose life is maybe defined by something close to a Christian worldview, then we can comfortably learn from those people.

But historically, there are people even who called themselves Christians.

Some people say, like Hitler was a faithful Christian.

Obviously we can look at his behavior and say he was the farthest thing from a faithful Christian, no matter what kind of name that he put on himself.

And so those are the people that I would be comfortable with throwing away.

And so I'm, I am fine if there is like a rational atheist in history.

Like, yeah, learn from them.

Like, of course, whatever, who cares?

Yeah, there's maybe someone like a Jordan Peterson.

Jordan Peterson, very clearly not a Christian.

Clearly he's a Jungian.

He all but says that as often as he can.

I still think that there are, there are things that there are things that are worthwhile to learn from him, but we are to regard him in a particular way.

Joe Rogan, Jocko Willink, you can throw a bunch of names in there.

You know, these might be, these might be virtuous men even, but we are to regard them very, very differently from someone who is professing Christian and behaves as such.

They have the fruit of that in their lives.

And especially when they talk about theology.

Especially like that.

That's why I, I hate it when Jordan Peterson talks about theology.

But I'm, I'm fine when he talks about other things.

And the same thing applies to a lot of other non professing Christians just because of common grace.

Like, I'm cool learning from non Christians.

I think non Christians do have things that they can offer us.

But the key is not just because it tickles our ears, not just because they say something cool that we like.

Only if we compare that to scripture and hold, hold that up to scripture and if it stands, then like, oh yeah, it's good.

I can listen to, to Joe Rogan and, or Jocko Willink and he has some good workout advice or whatever.

And that's cool, right?

So I know that you've got some, some plans of a study to go to this evening, so I know your time might be running a little Short.

But before, before you do, I do want to talk about your podcast for a moment because I, I, I, I have a lot of friends who started listening to it and have been listening to it for a while, and I really enjoy it.

So where did the podcast come from?

How did you start it?

What sort of your, what sort of your focus?

What's your vision, et cetera.

Yeah.

So in 2020 is when it started, basically, after, after a, like I said, a string of bad church experiences, I was like, there are not enough people out there who are conservatives who are calling out the problems in our culture and calling out the problems in our churches and trying to correct these things.

And so I wanted to be a voice for that and also give, like, just theological truth with a biblical foundation.

And basically from that perspective.

And it started being called Good Monsters because I kind of.

Well, it was the same podcast, but basically, like, we are, we're imperfect people, we're monstrous people, but we're good as Christians.

We're sanctified, we're good, but we, we are still this, like, fallen thing.

And then eventually I changed the name to Spare no Arrows, because I thought it's a Bible verse, and it more accurately reflects kind of what I'm trying to do.

And it's metaphorical, so it could be, like, literal attacking things, or it could be just, like, could be building.

It could be tearing down Babylon, like, you know, who knows?

So I think that encompasses what I do.

And so, yeah, I just give, like, cultural commentary, talk about a lot of current events, but I try to apply ideas to it that will be lasting.

And so it's not just like, hey, here's what happened this week in Christianity.

It's like, maybe here's what happened, but also here's a lesson that we can learn from it and apply it to our lives ongoing.

And that seems very natural for you because you were the youth pastor and you sort of came from that ministry background into and out of seminary.

So it's that, that explains a lot why I listened to it.

It's like he seems to know what he's talking about and he knows how to talk about it.

And those two things.

A lot of guys don't know what they're talking about, but they, they're good at talking.

A lot of guys are good.

Right.

So, so I, I've appreciated that.

Now, one of the things that, I mean, how you came to my awareness was again, your episode about the Antioch Dec.

I don't, I don't know if I saw it on Twitter.

Or someone was passing it around.

I just watched it.

I just appreciated because I signed that thing instantly.

Like, yes, of course.

And I appreciated.

And everyone was pushing back, like, whoa, whoa.

It was rushed or what, all the different critiques.

And you just went in, like, let's go through line by line.

Yes.

And you just, yeah, go dive in.

I want to hear what you have to say about it.

If you're.

If you're willing.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, like I said, like, I'm a simple guy.

I don't care about the background.

Like, I know a lot of the people who contributed, and they're faithful men.

I know that people are very tribalistic and divisive nowadays.

And so, like, I don't want to let any of that get in our way.

If the thing itself is good, then let's call it good.

And let's say, like, the people who contributed are bad or whatever.

Like, you know, let's.

Let's have that conversation.

But a lot of people are saying the document's bad because of the situation it was written in, whatever, and.

Or it was rushed.

And then, like, the contributors came out and said, actually, we started writing this over a year ago, so it wasn't rushed.

And so that was just all a lie or some, you know, people try to destroy the people they don't like.

And like I said, if you're not able to articulate your opponent's position or you have to lie about your opponent to get your point across, like, you are the bad guy.

You're the bad guy.

And so I was interested because so many people were like, ah, it's rushed and it's yada, yada.

And like, you know, Doug Wilson sucks and whatever, and.

And I was like, well, I disagree with what they're saying.

But also, like, I noticed that nobody is actually talking about the content of the Antioch Declaration.

And so I was like, well, I'm going to talk about the content because a lot of people are.

Are blasting it and blasting the people who wrote it.

And I'm like, I really appreciate the guys who wrote it.

And also, like, it's not long, it's easy to read, but I know that a lot of people would maybe prefer to listen to it than.

Than.

Than to read it themselves.

And also I saw other podcasts talking about it because I, you know, I did my research before, and not a single one that I found actually read it.

They read it.

They read, like, one line, and they were going on and on about stuff they disagreed with about the line or whatever, but I wanted to just like, hey, let's be simple.

Let's look at it word for word and say, is this true or not?

Is there a way to misinterpret this?

Like, is this something that we should support?

Is this something that should we not support?

And what kind of person would be against this?

I think that's what really riled people up.

Yeah, what.

What sort of person would read this and start splitting hairs on various things?

Like, I don't sign declarations.

Like, okay, I.

You don't have to.

I mean, that's not.

It's not.

It's not a blood oath.

You know what I mean?

It just.

It seemed like a pretty straightforward thing.

A bunch of.

A bunch of things worth being for and worth worth being against.

I just appreciate.

And just to go back to your point about conservatism and.

And progressivism, I just appreciated.

It seems that you brought that level of clarity to that particular discussion.

Like, what is conserving truth and what is progressing away from truth?

And that.

That all makes a whole lot of sense based on what I've seen from you up until this point.

I appreciate it.

Yeah.

Well, this has been fantastic.

I've really enjoyed talking with you again.

I enjoyed our first conversation as well.

I'll link that in the show notes.

This has been great.

I don't know if you have anything else you'd like to offer to the audience who's listening.

Yeah.

The thing that will fix everything is to focus on scripture.

Let scripture be your ultimate authority above everything else.

And we should be reading our Bibles because the way that things have gotten in society is because of our failure as the church.

I think where the pulpit goes, so goes the culture.

And so, like, that.

That is the ultimate culmination of, like, everything I'm trying to get at in my podcast.

These problems exist because the church has failed tremendously.

And that's something that we, I think, can recover.

And we can have hope that the church ultimately will recover.

But also it's something that I think we can actively participate in today to accomplish.

Amen.

Amen to all of that.

Thank you so much.

So where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do?

Yeah, I'm on Xclawrence.

Those are my initials.

And I'm everywhere else at Spareno.

Arrows with underscores between the words.

I'm on YouTube.

My podcast is on all the audio places.

You can just search spare note arrows.

Great.

I'll send everyone your way.

Thank you so much, Cody.

I really appreciated this.

Please welcome Sa.