Can America Survive as a Republic Without Virtue? [The Pugcast]

0:00Hello, welcome to this episode of the Theology Podcast. I'm Sierra Weile and I'm a pastor and a senior editor at Touchdown Magazine. How about you Tom? Who are you? Now that's a profound one. We always wrestle with that, but I'm Tom Price. I teach theology and Christian ethics on the graduate and undergraduate level. I write, speak, and a whole bunch of other things. And glad who are you? I am Glenn Sunshine. I am a retired history professor, senior fellow at the Goldson Center for Christian World View, and I write and speak freelance a lot of it on Substock. OK, today is my day and I'd like to talk about the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and what has become of America since that auspicious event. Lot of us are wondering whether or not we've got another 250 years to go.

1:01There's a lot of worry out there about just kind of the impasses or the impasses that we are witnessing in our body politic and our larger culture. This isn't the first time we've had some rough waters that we've had to pass through. Obviously, there's the Civil War and the Great Depression. So there are other things that have been great causes for concern in the past and made people wonder whether we were going to make it. But I think that the character of the situation that we are facing now has different cast and consequently, it's actually up in the air. It's not just because we've come through these difficult times in the past. It doesn't mean that we're always well. So I want to reflect on an essay from Substack by my friend Matt Crawford. Matthew B. Crawford, of course, is the author of Shop Class of Soulcraft. He's written another of our other books that are really worth your time like the world

2:03outside your head, why we drive. So Matt and I've got to know each other a little bit and I subscribe to his Substack. But he has been asked by the independent review to pull together a number of thinkers, but I see his scholars and so forth to reflect on this very thing. Are we going to be able to keep this thing going? Anyway, I think the name of his Substack is Architalia, if I remember correctly. But rather than I will have us, I will make certain we've got a link in the show notes. But just so folks don't need to go to the link in the show notes, I'm going to read a couple of pages from the article that focuses in on the subject of virtue. We've talked about virtue many times on the show, but what Matt is getting at here and you've all 11 is who's I say he's responding to is I think a really pretty fundamental

3:05sort of starting point question and that is, are we even talking about the same thing when different people use the term virtue? So let me go ahead and read what we have here. So I've not practiced this, I might stumble at certain points. So hold, you know, it's hang with me folks. I'll get through this. So this is Matt. In the first essay of this collection, you've all 11 poses the question, what was virtue to the founders? More than any other type of regime, a republic places demands of good character on its citizens, as self-government in the political sense rests ultimately on a capacity for self-command in the psychological sense. Without such a bulwark of good order in the soul of the citizen, liberty and license become confused. Hence, in the words of Henry Adams, quote, it is the part of a great politician to make the character of his people. In other words, to make the character of his people.

4:07So a politician makes the character of his people. I don't think we'd think in that way at all today. But continuing, in this Adams echoes the pre-modern tradition of political thought in which Solan, founder of Athens and like Kurgus, founder of Sparta, exemplified founding in the emphatic sense by their law giving, they formed a people with a recognizable set of moors, habits of mind and of heart that includes certain defining virtues as well as characteristic vices. The American founders, steeped though they were in this tradition yet, did not take themselves to be law givers in the ancient mold. There was a, would be, or was to be a modern republic, as Levin indicates what it means to be modern is to have a very different conception of virtue, one that can be traced to the influence of Machiavelli.

5:10Da dum dum dum, Machiavelli. Anyway, ancient, by the way, there's recently been a book by Harvey Mansfield addressing Machiavelli and that maybe is a good subject for another show, but continuing. Ancient virtue was understood as a unified condition of the soul that orders it toward excellence. Christianity later modified this understanding by locating the core of such excellence in the love of God rather than in resplendent deeds in the service of the common good. Machiavelli insisted that this christianized virtue was destructive of political order. It turns men toward an other worldly realm. They neglect the political things and become easy prey for ruthless men. What a prince needs is not virtue, thus understood, but virtue. In other words, manliness. Machiavelli's novel redefinition of virtue as mastery of fortune, hence independence

6:15from it, which gives a prince the strength to control events. As refracted and softened through the thought of John Locke, such modern virtue, now understood as control, would become the basis for something like autonomy. This is my gloss, not leavens. Leaven writes, John Locke offered the state as a means of securing the rights of citizens who were then left remarkably free to shape their lives. We are all to be little princes, mastering our little worlds, but this leads to a paradox in which turns out to be the defining problem of modern or liberal republics. On the one hand, republics, whether ancient or modern, depend decisively on the character of their citizens, because those citizens are their own rulers. Leaven writes, but on the other hand, in a free and liberal society, such virtue cannot

7:17be imposed on people by public authority. The internal contradiction of liberal republicanism is that it is uniquely dependent on a virtuous citizenry, yet is founded on a principal disavow of moral formation as a function of the modern state. The purpose of the state is merely to secure rights so people will be free to shape their own lives. The paradox is that precisely the society that allows the greatest degree of liberty and license requires the sternest sort of moral culture as Leaven writes. Perhaps, the Puritan culture of the Northern colonies was what made liberalism seem like a political experiment that had a chance of succeeding. Yet, how is such a stern moral culture to be sustained when set in a surrounding political frame that cuts in a very different direction? OK, that's enough of that.

8:17I might come back to it and read a little more, but I think we get the gist of it. This is essentially the same argument that Patrick to need advances in why liberalism failed. What do you think, guys? I think really the key insight when it comes to this particular section of the essay from the sub-stack is this connection between a new understanding or a modern understanding of virtue and Machiavelli and the situation we find ourselves in. We can maybe nitpick at this a bit, but I think in terms of the history, but I do think that that's an accurate reflection of the situation we should be finding ourselves in. What do you guys have to say? You want to go, Glenn? Yeah. OK. I think that on the historical thing, I believe we did a show on this one before, Machiavelli is regularly misunderstood in terms of what he was trying to do.

9:21But there's no question that he does shift the idea of virtue away from its traditional understanding into something else. The root word for virtue is veer, which means a man. We're talking here about not just the male human being, we're talking about an idealized idea of what a man is almost. The traditional virtues were supposed to be those things that a real man exhibited. When Machiavelli comes along, he switches this around to almost an animalistic instinctive reaction to situations where the prince can act quickly and decisively in any circumstance in response to crises or what have you.

10:21There's no question there's a significant shift in the idea of virtue at that point. I have some question about whether or not the founders understood virtue in a Machiavelli in way, however, because they were all very familiar with Aristotle. They all knew the traditional virtue tradition. And when the founders following medieval thought argued that virtue was the foundation of a republic and republics cannot last without virtue, they're going to a tradition that's older than Machiavelli. I have my doubts that that historical analysis that this modern concept of virtue is really at work in the founders. My guess is that the founders, I'm with you Glenn, my guess is that the founders just believed that the laws had already been established. In other words, it needed to be a modern salon that didn't need to be Moses who laid down the laws.

11:22They were receiving the norms, the standards, the moreays of Christendom. So they just took those for granted. But we live in a very different world where all those things have been explicitly rejected, particularly in the 19th and early 20th century. Yeah, the other thing that they said is he sort of implied that the founders did not recognize a difference between liberty and license. But by having, I assume he's thinking it's a libertarian notion of free will, that they left people to determine liberty or license on their own. That is also completely violation of what the founders explicitly said. They're very clear that there is a natural right to liberty, but nobody argued there is a natural right to license. So I don't find the historical analysis convincing. Well, that's fine, but we are where we are. Well, I mean, historian, I mean, you know, I do have a past. This is what I do. Sure.

12:22But I, you know, dealing with it kind of metaphysical history, I do think shifts that already take in place to where they, no matter how much retrieval work they were doing, they were already refashioning a lot of the concepts that, I mean, you clearly can't take an ancient world and plant it on a new set of circumstances that you just can't. This is why all this attempt at retrieval, even in theology, has to be very wise. And careful about what it's doing because we see the ramifications of putting things into places where that place either isn't ready for or is about to combust when you combine those things. And I think there were already enough shifts in the metaphysical vision in the West to where there were alterations, but they wouldn't have been, you know, they wouldn't have been obvious necessarily. I mean, you, you do see it in bacon and other figures. They know what they're doing. They know what they're up to. They're very aware that they are redrafting conceptions of reality in terms of form and

13:24finality, and many were in terms of redefining the human being and freedom. But not everyone probably was so aware of that. They just sort of saw kind of the taken for granted conception that was around and then looked for kind of intelligent and wise ways of setting up society that drew off the best and didn't realize that there was a new map being drawn that they were a part of contributing to. And so, I mean, I think, Denine, the other figures, sort of the post-liberal critique of enlightenment, conceptions of the human being and freedom in particular, do draw on this change notion of liberty, whether we can pinpoint exactly where it happens or not. But there does develop a notion of the will is unpremised in any way, meaning it has no determination really other than kind of the capacity itself.

14:26And that shifts. Now, when it shifts exactly, I mean, I think metaphysically shift the long time ago, but when did it actually take so much root that it took the US in a different direction? I mean, we see the birth pangs here and there, but really, I think the height of it was the 60s in terms of more recently, the way it just spread like fire. Yeah, it had been incubating among intellectual elites for a long, long time, but the democratization in terms of its ubiquity, its inability to be escaped. That's certainly right. The 60s was when that happened. It spread like fire. Yeah. I think that historically, I blame Locke for this one, not Russo, but Locke. Because his psychology, I mean, I'd like to blame Russo, but I really can't hear.

15:27Locke psychology says that we are born as tabularaza, we're born as blank slate. And as a result, you know, and this has got huge implications to education, educational theory and all kinds of other things. What this means is that there are no innate structures in the human mind. Thus, morality is not something that is wired into us. Virtue is not some concept of virtue, we are not wired into us. There's nothing that's wired into us. And so these are things that you learn as you go along. And if you accept the idea of tabularaza, like I said, it has all kinds of facts, some of which are actually rather interesting and potentially positive, but it also sets up the metaphysical situation where it creates a plausibility structure for the medical situation. Tom, just talked about. Yeah. I think that's the challenge, you know, you've alluded to some of the benefits. That's the challenge of the moment. How do we recover those valuable things we've lost while holding on to some of the gains?

16:30There's no doubt that the Baconian method has given us a lot of things that we take for granted today and really make life better. But on the other hand, the costs have been enormous, particularly morally, socially, in terms of human institutions, these things that people just took for granted forever. I remember years ago I read a book about basically ethyology of the family and the author, when he was interviewed by Ken Myers for Marshal Audio, Ken asked him, why doesn't the Bible dig into the kinds of things that we need to think about today? And the author said, well, they just took it off of granted. I mean, it's just like it was impossible to imagine a world without households at the center. It was impossible to imagine a world where men and women weren't absolutely necessary for the production of children. Just all this stuff was just beyond the pale of what could be thought over, can see, but here we are today. But it doesn't mean that just because we've got new methods for doing things, doesn't

17:34mean that things are actually in a healthy state are really working. Having kids the old fashioned way is a lot cheaper than vitro fertilization. It's just a lot cheaper. Poor people can do it. You also get, just on that level, you get in coherences like surrogacy, which effectively is the buying and selling of children. Yes. We dealt with this with slavery a long time ago. Yeah. And there's all kinds of, there are just a number of things that we're going to discover the hard way. And it just seems like that's the way it is. I've been reading cultural analysis for 30 years and match of it very good, much of it telling us exactly what went wrong and what to expect and it's made no difference. I think back into the 1980s, we had great books like Habits of the Heart or even a heartless

18:35world or a culture of narcissism. They saw what was happening, closing the American mind. They saw what was common and it made zero difference. In other words, as though the arguments just simply aren't enough to restrain anything. But we find ourselves in an analysis of understanding what's happening is not enough. But we find ourselves facing as a moment of either significant cultural collapse where institutions just stop working and no one trusts them anymore. By the way, the no trusting anymore that's already well along the way. But, or getting back to Macchiabelli, the strong man who just steps in and says, this is the way it's going to be. I don't care if you think of me unresumble or tyrannical or whatever, we can't have this love look chaos and expect good things to happen. You may not like me, but I don't care.

19:37This is what is for your own good. It's like a father speaking to his children. This is for your own good. You don't get it. You don't like it too bad. You're children will appreciate it. In essence, that's what Macchiabelli was arguing for in the prints. That Lawrence was properly a republic, but it was sick. It lacked virtue. And so you need a prince to come in and set it in order. And then ideally, when he retires or steps down, he passes on a functioning republic to the next generation. Of course, that step never actually happens. Well, this brings up a question in my mind. How does virtue get established? So as we see in Matt's treatment, it's because there's a law giver. Now if we think about Moses, we have the same phenomenon. This isn't just a matter of like everybody going to classical Christian school and getting smart and developing a sense of personal responsibility.

20:41There's something larger going on. Yeah. I think I work with the Colson Center for Christian World View. Carl Truman really doesn't like the word world view. And he and John Stone Street kind of joke back and forth about this. Truman likes the phrase social imaginary. And I think that is a really useful way of analyzing the situation. How do you change it? You have to create a vision in people's well imagination for what a virtuous society looks like. The people who control our social imaginary, the people who control our view of what a good society is or who shape that are the ones that determine the future. And frankly right now almost everything out there is pointing in a really unhealthy self-destructive

21:49direction. And this is the imagination that people have about the world, about their place in it, about how things work or don't work and so on. This is why socialism, for example, is taking off. People ignore the fact that it never works. But in their imagination this is more virtuous. I also think that there are the kind of unruly passions at work that are looking for a rationale and kind of a self-justification. So I do think some of those passions are understandable. There's fear, fear that more and more of our social order is being controlled by fewer and fewer people. Not depending on what side of the political spectrum you're on, you identify a different group. So if you're left leaning then you think about the tech oligarchy, right? That's the folks that have got worried right now. Who you just like five years ago you thought were your friends.

22:52Now you're afraid of them. And if you're on the right, you're thinking about the administrative state as this Leviathan that's more and more intrusive and not just intrusive but seems to be interested in breaking down any other kind of institution that has some viability or authority still invested in it like the household or the church or whatever and just wants to micromanage our lives. So there's that but then there's just envy and resentment and all the stuff that we can see throughout the history of the human race leading to bloodshed and all kinds of awful things. Well, that I mean that taps into the fact that yeah, the rootedness of all of these pathologies is ultimately spiritual and that's the one thing that you can't just through the intellect manipulate. Neither whatever side you're on. Now, even as a Christian, it isn't about just having the ideas correct. That's a part of the puzzle. It's part of the imaginary but it isn't the driving aspect.

23:55Renewal of mine is holistic. But I think that Taylor's point with social imaginary is exactly that. Social mediated in some sense, not socialism mediated, socially mediated. That is something that is really difficult in enlightenment notions of social imaginaries because of the way in which the socialists become atomistic on one side but also almost uniform on another. And so everyone shares in that kind of social imaginary of hyper individualism or kind of self defining identity and yet they have a longing for community naturally. And like you said, once the passions get out of sync, they gravitate towards destructive ways of trying to calm that. The other thing I think is that very dimension of it is in addressing it.

24:57World view had a tendency to be driven by ideologies or if you could get the right set of ideas it thought in those terms. So a lot of the criticism is around that, especially the German, Velten, Schaum, this notion that you know, it's almost a galean in a way. And so if you just have the right kind of system of beliefs about reality, that's going to do everything. But there's a reason why Christian faith, for example, is participatory and has routine and has places for all these things like family, children, church, worship. Because there you have the imaginary being formed alternatively. And of course that formation gets impacted by the culture around it. So there's always a battle going on. How do you preserve a deposit in a way that you can counter the social imaginary of where

25:59you're sitting? And on the flip side, you know, prevent that one from redefining the way often in evangelical worlds where you almost have the cultural, social imaginary defining the faith. These are very challenging things and technology and its capacities and powers has just made it worse. So we are dealing with a beast, maybe it's a good word for it, that it's going to require more than just idea matching. It's going to require the full rigor of I think spiritual investment and participation. So this is the really the kind of the core, I guess, well, matter that is being addressed at the touchstone conference here in Chicago in a couple weeks. But by the way, this show might be coming out the week of that conference.

27:01But it's going to be the 24th, 25th of September. But in that conference, we're going to have Carl Truman who will be there. J. Buddhist Sheski will be there. Patrick D'Nine will be there. Brad Beers will be there. So there's going to be a lot of really thoughtful people addressing this very thing. And I'm going to be, you know, moderating two panels. The first panel is going to be more or less a friendly exchange and a debate between Patrick and Brad. So Brad, you know, as we've had him on the show, we've had Patrick on the show. Brad is very much a student of the founding. He's an historian. He really believes that we set up essentially the system of government that is the most wonderful thing that we've ever seen and will be with us until the Eskitan. That's really Brad's, Brad is. And there's like, there's no improving on it. And what you have with Patrick is, no, there's like right at the core. Of this Lockian philosophy, you've got this inconsistency, this inner contradiction.

28:05And we're now at the point where it can't just be carried forward anymore. And I think the reason that is is because all of the things that they took for granted can't be taken for granted anymore. So we have to get explicit about things that were implicit. And can we do that? Do we have what it takes to be explicit again? So a much of evangelical Christianity in the United States has taken for granted the cultural legacy of Christendom. It didn't feel any responsibility for reinforcing it or trying to politically and get engaged in order to promote it. It didn't feel any of that. It just was, it'll take care of itself. And now that larger environment is no longer in place. It's actually a hostile, very actively hostile setting that evangelicals find them in themselves and but they just don't have what it takes to rise to the occasion in many cases.

29:07And then there's a big debate about what to do. What to do? Are the integralist right or the Christian nationalist right? Are the Amish right? What do we do in all of this? I'm going to actually suggest something different. What we need to do, the reason I brought up social imaginary is what we need to do is present if we can actually get hold of any cultural institutions that will do this, is to present an imaginative vision of a virtuous world. I mean, to some extent Peter Jackson actually pulled this off with the Lord of the Rings. I remember people walking around with WWAD buttons, what would Erragorn do. I mean, there was a, you know, people picked up on the, well, frankly, the idea of virtue didn't imperfectly displayed in the movie, but they definitely picked up on that.

30:08And if we, I would argue that what we need to be doing is not producing Christian schlock, but we need to be producing art that reflects virtue and Christian themes, not necessarily in your face or explicit, but implicitly within it the way it is in Tolkien. And it's only when we can actually capture the imagination of the public and get that to shift that we're going to see any kind of a shift happening, I think, on a political front or frankly be able to save the Republic. So I've got some thoughts on that, but I'll save them for a moment. How about you, Tom? Well, yeah, it's interesting that, you know, I mean, I don't know necessarily that, you know, I don't know what you could say all different than I think, you know, speaking as a Christian here, different than the kind of things we've been given in terms of being

31:10faithful with, the kind of the right kinds of spiritual formation, the way in which they help us see and discern and the way in which that lives itself out and people that are truly committed to it. I think that's where one begins to see in challenging set of circumstances their way forward. That's, you know, that's one of the things we do have as a gift. Now, what does it look like in all the different dimensions say art and its contribution? And I think that is one area I think that is fundamental to reshaping or showing what it looks like. And I was reading Uzbansky's famous Orthodox work on theology, like two volume work, but it's all about Christian art. And it's all about from the earliest days, from the Old Testament all the way through, you know, church history. And that's exactly it. It did, you know, classic Christian art formed itself within the worshipful communities and had a distinct character to it.

32:10And in the guidelines kind of developed naturally in that, in the impact of it. So you first place of classic social imaginary conversion was right there in the heart of the liturgy and everything that went with it. And it wasn't really a dress down version. You have basically heaven earth connecting. And the full Christian vision is something that people were participating in and being formed bi-holistically. And so these are things that we already have in our worship practices and discipleship practices. And I think it's just really getting to the stage of what does it look like to faithfully enact this in the context we're in. And it isn't just like you said. It's the right kind of creativity. It's the right kind of intellectual engagement. It's the right kind of embodiment of virtue. The demonstrations of it are what create the parameters of other people to be impacted

33:11by it. You knew when Christians were around and were being persecuted in the early church because they were different in it had an impact. So you guys are helping me out here because you're giving me an opportunity to, to play the role I'm going to be playing at the touch-don't conference, which is the pushback guy. I've actually been asked by the editors to be the pushback guy. So let's take a look at both of these scenarios. And by the way, you know, which you guys have brought up are great arguments. But there are certain challenges that I think we have to be honest about. So in the case that you outlined Glenn, you had a caveat right at the beginning. If we can get control of the institutions that create the art, that is a very difficult thing to do if not impossible at the current, at the moment we find ourselves in. There are lots and lots of sort of, you know, startups things, but none of them have any

34:12kind of cultural power. They're very marginal. And we're dealing not just with the unwillingness of entertainment executives to think in these terms. We're also dealing with just the very low sort of standards or the kind of the tastes of the consuming public if we want to talk about art as something you consume. So let's just think about Tolkien. And Lewis, Hollywood is right now working very hard to woke them, to make them wake woke. And they control the properties. You know, the whole rings of power thing. Yeah, there was some pushback on that. My take is that it's one of these things where there's a pushback, but then the sort of the retrieval has lost ground every single time you push back. So it's sort of like, yeah, there's a counterattack in terms of, you know, the old sort of guard, the people who are the true fans.

35:16But in every single case, they after the battle settled, they've lost ground. So we keep losing ground even in those exchanges. You can see it with Homer, you know, just so you know, what do you have with what's going on right now with the chronosinornia? Well, we have a woman who is very intentionally trying to advance a feminist agenda using the chronicles. Narnia is just everybody knows it. How many people do you think in our churches will abstain from viewing the new work? Probably a smaller group than you imagine. I imagine that a lot of them will go along with it. They might say things like, oh, that was a good point or wasn't a refreshing that a woman did aslant, you know, all this kind of stuff in her own churches. And then getting to your points, Tom, the liturgy right now, the liturgical churches are the ones that, yeah, there's been a resurgence, resurgence of interest.

36:18That is a resurgence of interest among people who were already sort of in the sort of evangelical world and got sick and tired of the muckish and sort of shallow Christianity that they got from the big box Christian world. And that is the world that I deal with every week. So even in my church as a pastor in the reformed tradition, I have to assume that I have to explain everything. Yeah. And that in other words, there isn't sort of like a natural appeal a lot of the time. And so again, just on a Sunday morning and really how much good work is being done and by Christians in their local churches when it comes to the arts, how many versions of, you know, I don't know, the latest worship course do we get just without any even apology or acknowledgement that this is really poor work.

37:22Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, first of all, it comes down to ends, right? I mean, is our chief end to basically when the argument and game back culture through a most convincing vision one way or the other? I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think it happened when Christendom happens. As a matter of fact, Constantine's conversion, the Christians other than living out their faith to make that a possibility around Constantine, didn't do much to sway the empire apart from being coming inaugurated after that event. They had very little say in that prior to that. There aren't wasn't winning out the Roman Empire. Yeah, their witness was left to stamp, but it was usually a stamp of a group of people being persecuted that lived counter-culture, really. And that was the extent of it. It was kind of this act that Constantine thought was a miracle and the church kind of thought was a miracle that set up the conditions for what becomes Christendom.

38:24But did their labors and their faithfulness as an early community under those conditions where it all looked impossible, not matter? I think it mattered. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was a big part of setting the conditions up for whatever next act of God was in place, kind of surprised the whole world for that matter. Are we going to dig up the right kind of spiritual resources to be able, you know, kind of to have the right kind of machine tool to make society Christian again? I don't think that's in our competence. Well, yeah, there are a couple of things here that are worth noting. One of them is that the lifestyle of the early Christians was a big part of the reason why they grew even under persecution. They treated women much better. They didn't kill off their children. They helped in when they were epidemics when the doctors were running away.

39:27They ran in. There are all sorts of things that they did just living out their faith that made a tremendous difference in terms of how they were perceived. The elites viewed them as crazy or low class. Nonetheless, there was a lot of growth because of how they lived. So that is an important factor. But one of the things that's different is that we are in a republic, at least if we can keep it to quote Ben Franklin. And they weren't, which means that we have at least the potential to have more of an impact on society than they did. Certainly on the political level, I don't want to put my hope in politics at the mistake, put not your trust in princes as Assam says. But because we have the degree of freedom we do and because of the fact that we are in

40:35a republic that I think changes how we have to think about this. We can't use the early church as a model of exactly how we should live because we are living under very different conditions. But I guess my only thought with that is that, again, we know what we are up against. Do we really think we are going to win out the arguments or just become a fat again? I don't think so. Even if we must drop enough people to take things into a different direction, it is short to live because we know the way in which ideas spill in and things start to denigrate. And then we are also dealing with a change situation even from the founding in which the things that we are talking about that we are taking for granted aren't there. In that case, we are a little bit more similar to the early church. So again, I am not saying that the only thing is just you going and being a disciple as

41:35an individual. I am not trying to say that. What I am saying is the resources we always have had are the resources we have to work with. What that looks like now, of course, is something we need wisdom for because other than these different episodes where things radically changed, we don't have a lot of wisdom to go off of. Yeah. The two comments there, one of them is that we shouldn't neglect a prayer on this, which is a tremendous resource that I think we don't use often enough. But the other thing is, frankly, I, with you on this, Tolkien talks about the elves fighting with a long defeat. And in a lot of ways, I feel like that is the situation we are in, but we have to keep fighting and we have to think about how to do it. Right. And then, of course, you could task to be the unexpected, and joyous turn happens on its own without us manipulating it and bringing it about. But I do think there's another dimension to this to consider that has to do with the work

42:40of loving our neighbor, both outside the church and inside the church. So what comes to inside the church, we have people in our churches who are subject to the forces we've been describing because they belong to large corporations, work for large corporations. And or maybe are in markets, environments where doing business means there are people who will boycott you if you don't appear to be on board with them on a particular social issue or whatever. So in terms of employing the means of sort of political power, using political power to secure the interests of our own people, make sure that they can work and that they don't have to compromise their convictions to do so is an example of how the political option

43:44can be employed in not in the grand ui's or overrealize that's etology sense, but just to live. And then there is the fact that the people around us don't know the right hand from the left hand to quote the Lord from the end of Jonah. And they're cutting off genitals and they're doing all kinds of things to harm themselves. And they don't have enough sense to realize that that's the case. And we could be in a position to serve their true interests by actually using the state to keep them from doing things they want to do. In other words, the things they want to do are harming themselves. You know, rampant drug use kind of the craziness that's going on with gambling, human trafficking, the sexual craziness that's going on all around us, all that stuff.

44:44There are people who really will say, I'd rather have to live with that stuff than not be able to indulge my appetite on my particular picadillo. You know, I'm happy to just sort of like make that trade. And they're harming themselves, they're harming the community, they're harming their neighbors. And is it possible that the most loving thing we could do is say, no, and we're going to say, that's illegal? I mean, I think I'm with you on it. Again, I think it's what we're up against in a lot of cases, even if you can build up more people, you know, the silent majority to, I mean, I'm up in New England. You know how it is here. I mean, look at Massachusetts. They just pass a law basically, abortion all the way up to birth, and they're applauding. They're applauding when this went. I mean, anyone, you know, I mean, and it's just, again, if, I mean, they understand that

45:45game. That's why they're all in on it because they utilize it to get their morality basically enforced. And I think sometimes Christians have underplayed it basically, oh, we'll leave that basically to them because we're not going to win that anyway. And I do think part of proper Christian exercise, I mean, of Christian life is to be intensely involved in these things as much as one can be. Like you say, not even if you're up against the beast like that, you think you can never, you never make a difference because that was the point with consulting. They never imagined that. Right. Yeah. And in the case of Massachusetts, you now have a significant, I don't know, that it will maybe settle by the time this comes out, but you've got a bunch of people who are defending a woman who has murdered her three children. Yeah. Yeah. So abortion by the unposted birth.

46:45Yeah. Right. Yeah. So we have, we have all these, these realities that surround us. It's affecting our, these things are affecting our people, but they're also affecting people that are not our people that we ought to care about. And they just don't know. They're so, they've given themselves over to their passions to such a degree. And this gets us back to this whole question of what is virtue, being the prince of your own little world as, you know, use Matthew Crawford's take on things. You know, what we're, you know, I've heard it described as being, you know, we're a nation of little gods, you know, who make up laws for ourselves and they're subject to nothing outside or so, so nothing apart from our, from our desires. So this is the scenario that we find ourselves faced with. I've been making a case for a judicious use of state force, not a, you know, you know,

47:50surveillance state or anything like that. But just the, the ability of like, let's say you have a group of local people, very local citizens, who decide that, you know, it's really not a good thing for kids to be exposed to men, you know, sort of creating around in drag, you know, at a local library. And we're just going to say that's, that's it. And then the person says, well, but about my freedom of expression, there are people who want to have this sort of thing, you know, so again, we're kind of throwing back and just sort of this mere majoritarianism. If there are, if there are just not enough people who actually understand the nature of truth and virtue and goodness, then essentially the republic that we find ourselves in is just a place where people get to vote for vice. And, and, and, and then there are the consequences of that, you know, and then we have to think about our children or grandchildren. What about them? And that's where I do think that the notion of being salt and light, living out the

48:54faith that way is engaging on the level of ideas and passions and law and, and all these things. That is, that's a, that's a place where it's done. I think, I think two different things. One is how much is the effectiveness in our competence? That's the one thing I was trying to do. But the flip side is it doesn't matter because we know that these are aspects of what we're supposed to be doing and they, they do have a promise tied up with them. So being salt and light is important. If the salt loses its capacity, it does make an impact. So, and how far that salt can go, we don't know. It could go to do things unimaginable in transforming the current situation and, and the situation for generations ahead. So it's worth it, no matter what. And, and I think utilizing, you know, all this kind of insight is, is, is something we need to be all on board with. So I want to play a little, I want to, I want to install, pretend we're not Stadamis.

49:57I want to. What, what was the character that Jenny Carson played when he put on the turbine? Oh. You know what I'm talking about, right? No. But anyway, it'll come to a sentence show. The great car neck. The great car neck. So I'll play the great car neck. Okay. So what we're going to do is we're going to pretend that we can see down the quarter of time and make our prediction. Okay. So since this is my show, I get to be last. So I get to pick you, you guys to, to give your best takes and then I'll give my take and then we'll probably be at the point where we need to call it for the day. So you've got the longest beard. So you are called upon to give us the most wisdom. So what's your take? You're up probably starting in Britain to send into civil war because of the problem of mass immigration from incompatible cultures who are unwilling to assimilate.

50:58The US, the US system, I don't know if it collapses completely, but it turns into a parody of itself as one side or the other consolidates power and effectively creates a, you know, the kind of near totalitarian government where they take control of everything, control media control, what can be said, mass surveillance state, that sort of thing, possible civil war, but that's further down the line than Europe. I am not optimistic about the world. Yeah. Well, that's clear. Now essentially you're saying, not only is the American sort of experiment over, I don't mean to be putting words in your mouth, but this is what it sounds like you're saying, but Christendom is over. Depending on how you define Christendom, I would say that that is, but it's already

52:03the case. Okay. Depending on your definition. The kingdom is not over. Sure. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, if we, if we think about timelines, you know, if we were witnessing the fall of Rome, we'd be at kind of a similar point, but we couldn't look a thousand years down the road and see what was going to happen in Europe and so forth like that. Right. I think it's a Rod Draer was talking about an author who was discussing the view of pagans after Christianity came into, you know, was legalized and then the Adosis made it the Imperial religion. And what he was saying is, their end was inevitable at that point, but none of them could imagine it. Yeah. And in many ways, I said, I think Draer was talking about this. In many ways, I think that's the situation that we're in right now within basically the entirety of Western civilization. That doesn't mean we don't fight. It doesn't mean we don't resist. It doesn't mean we give up on what we're called to do in terms of being salt and light

53:08and carrying out God's purposes in the world. But the, you know, we have to, you know, as I look at the situation as a historian, we are in a situation where I cannot think of any civilization that has survived the kinds of stresses that we're under. We did show a while back on the signs of collapsing civilization and it's just worse now than it was then. All right. Okay. Tom, we turned to you for the whole poll. I'm a linear gloom here now. I mean, like I said, they, I mean, one side is the hope side. I mean, that is that no matter what happens in terms of the negatives, in terms of preservation of the goods that are still lingering, if we can find them. And I think, like I said, the kingdom, the kingdom will not be defeated. The gates of hell will not prevail against the work of Christ and the church.

54:13That being said, some of the privileges that we've lived under of the social benefits of Christianity and that society has, they've already been, has already been losses. And we, we may be one of the last that have any memory whatsoever of its lingering goods. And you, you have encouraging turns. Even if it is, you know, these young people kind of being drawn to these, these traditions, you can look at it negatively. I look at it positively. There's a hunger for something that, that, this move away from Christendom is not giving. So we don't know what will happen on that level. But if things keep running full steam ahead the way they're going, I'm kind of with Glenn. It's, I think Europe definitely is, is about to explode. And especially in terms of the breakdown in societal identity because of this rapid, you know, immigration issue. But I think also here, I don't think that that dark parody of Christianity, real dark parody of

55:21wokeness is gone. I think it went, it's gone under the surface under Trump. Trump is just one of these kind of, you know, again, weird, constantine throw them in to, to stop something for a while on one side. But he really hasn't dug into the roots of it much less dealt with it in any significant sense other than just raw power. It's not going to happen under my watch. But you get someone out there who, who lets the watch back in. And this time they're out for blood. And this time it's, it's an all or nothing. It's turned into more traditional Marxism at this point where there are the, the, the social things are taking a back seat economics. So it's, you know, but it's basically the same sort of, well, it's woke to point out as it's been called. Yeah. Did you see, there was an article on sub-stack where somebody was talking about, that there is a significant number of people in Britain who are actually beginning to take

56:26a positive view of the new IRA. Well, I've not read that, but I'm not surprised. Because the IRA is, or the new IRA is resisting the immigration thing. Right. You know, and the people, the, yeah. So I mean, the fact that people in Britain would start thinking, well, at least they're doing something about the IRA of all things. I don't think most Americans understand just what that means. I agree, I agree. Well, let me give you my take for what is worth. So not as bleak, but I'm not, as, I'm not polyannish either. My take is that we're going to see a devolution and that there's likely to be small, smaller entities that find ways to preserve their, their territory, you know, culturally speaking,

57:28even geographically speaking. This could lead to a significant transformation in terms of the kind of the political world. Because just things aren't functioning at another level. At the same time, I think that the countervailing force is there are just so many dependencies that now have developed on the global economy that you will find, my, my belief is you will find people who will say, okay, I was okay with, you know, you know, drag queen story hour at the library, but I'm not okay with not being able to, or my air conditioning. And whoever can make sure that the air conditioning doesn't go off, I'm voting for that person, even if they don't like drag queen story hour. So I think we're going to find a situation in which kind of the global economy and the

58:30need for it to continue to function will provide a basis for justifying, much more local control. Now this is, you know, I could be wrong. I'm not saying this is, you know, people have done crazier things and people blow up things that they depend on all the time. But I do think that, you know, the global financial market situation for a one case, all these things that people just, just will say, you know, I'm willing to put up with a lot in order to preserve that will mean that there will be a series of, I think what will happen is that we'll have a series of sort of like sundry experiments that say, okay, you guys over there in Portland want to do your thing. Let's just let you keep doing it and see how it plays out. You folks down in, I don't know, you know, Florida who have decided to take this other approach, let you play it out.

59:33But I do think that we're going to find kind of regionalism, localism, kind of paradoxically thriving alongside globalism. That's my take. But I do think that the nation states, as we now think of them, whether we're talking about England or, you know, United Kingdom or United States or Germany or whatever, they're going to get weaker and weaker. That's my take. Anyway, so that's all that's what I have to say and that's all and I've got to pray. Anyway, I would have to come up with that. Right, we can do another show. Anyway, thanks for listening to this very depressing episode of the Theology Club cast. You asked the question, Chris. No pray. That's right. That's right. I believe in that. And if you'd like to support one of the last sane institutions in our world, you can support Theology Club cast by going to our Patreon page.

1:00:35And by the way, we will also have a link to the show notes to this article at Matt Substack. Anyway, that's enough for now. Thanks a lot. Bye, bye. Theology Club cast is a ministry of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Battleground, Washington. The Theology Club cast is produced and edited by a widely craft productions of Nashville, Tennessee.