How Should Christians Think about the Relationship between Church and State? Reflecting on the National Conservatism Conference

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I am joined with my co-host, Nate Gerantano. I did it again, bro. I say your name constantly wrong. We just went through this in the pre-recording. This is hilarious, everybody. It is Nate Gerantano, not Gerantano, but I somehow can't seem to get this right. It's a hard one. Without erasing this, just so that everybody can see my flaws, everyone welcome to Thinking Christian. This is my host, Nate Gerantano, and I am James Spencer. And we've been talking a little bit about politics and culture as part of the podcast. And we've been looking at a Pew survey. We had an initial episode. It did really well. Thanks for everybody who listened. But we've been looking at a Pew survey on politics and culture and trying to understand how the politics and culture would then relate to biblical framework for thinking through it. But I wanted to take a little break from that today. This week at the National Conservatism Conference, the National Conservatism Conference was held in Washington, D.C. I believe it was on the 9th of this week, July 9th. There was a report that came out on it, and we've seen some blurbs about it on Twitter. We've seen certain, you know, full-length speeches of it on different platforms. And I just thought it was worth us talking about it because, yeah, here's the thing. Here's my conviction. And I actually wrote this down so that I don't get it wrong. So everybody who normally listens to the podcast, I'm usually a little bit more off the cuff than this. But I felt that this was so important that I wanted to write it down. I think there are five things that Christians really do need to understand in order to interact with politics. Number one, the church is ontologically distinct from the state. What am I saying there? I'm saying that it's actually separate, that it's two distinct things, that there's the church and the state. Ontological is just a fancy way of saying essentially, or its being is different than the state. It's a separate entity, distinct in almost every way. So crucial. Number two, distinguishing the church from the state is crucial for Christian witness. We can't assume that the church and the state can merge together and us still have a witness for Christ. Right. I firmly believe that. Number three, God's name matters. God's name matters. We'll talk a little bit more about this, Nate, but I mean, we had Carmen Joy Imes on the podcast. She wrote a book called Bearing God's Name. It's all about the third commandment and how the command not to take the Lord's name in vain really probably should be rendered something more like, you should not bear the Lord's name in vain. In other words, if you're going to apply the name of the Lord to your life, that means something. Right. It's not something that can be done flippantly, like we're seeing done in Christian nationalism or in calling America a Christian nation. It means something. Or just to get the votes on the other side. Or just to get the, that's right. It's not something to be used like that. And I've always struggled with that. It's very frustrating. Yeah, it's not a ploy. And so those three are the first three. Number four, we need to be careful to make a clear distinction between the, I'm sorry, we need to be careful not to make a strong distinction between the sacred and the secular. And we'll talk a little bit about this again, but I think at the end of the day, a lot of what we're struggling with right now is misrecognizing the fact that the secular, what we normally think of as the secular, also has its sacred objects. The secular professes a theology, in other words. And it relates to God in a particular way. It's in a rebellious way, in a way that diminishes him and distorts him, but it relates to him. And so we've got to be careful not to make such a hard distinction between the sacred and the secular. And then finally, I would just say this, conservatism cannot replace Christianity. So that's sort of the five points. Say it a little louder for the people in the back at some of these rallies. Yeah, conservatism cannot replace Christianity. Conservatism cannot replace Christianity. Yeah, people so easily swap one for the other, I feel like. And I've seen it happen to people that I never thought would happen to. I'm like, you realize that you're kind of putting one to the side and putting more emphasis on the other, right? That's right. That's crazy. So maybe, you know, I'm kind of referencing this Christian Post article, and we'll put a link to it in the show notes, but I'm referencing this Christian Post article that provided some of the different videos and blurbs and different things. That'll be my primary source material, but I've also watched several other things, read several other things online. I know you have too. But just to give people an easy place to sort of access some of this information, I think that's the easiest place for them to go. So we'll link the Christian Post article in the show notes so people can go and read it and view it and what have you. But why don't we just walk through a few things here, Nate? Sure. You know, it doesn't seem like any of the speakers really address the issue of the separation. I don't want to frame it like that. The distinction between the church and the state. It's not so much a separation. When we think about separation of church and state, we start to get into issues that are very Americanized, right? The non-establishment clause in the first amendment where the government is not going to establish a particular religion as the religion of the state and give it privileges and rights and use the coercive power of the state to advance that religion. That to me is sort of where we usually talk about the separation of church and state. And then we negotiate, you know, well, when is the state stepping over that line, right? So to me, it's not the question of separation of church and state. It's the question of the distinction between the church and the state. That's what we're really trying to dig into. Yeah, and I'm so glad that you wanted to have this conversation and kind of take a look at this because especially being in an election year, I find myself kind of getting lost and confused. I know a lot of people will benefit from this because the Bible calls us to be in the world but not of the world. We're supposed to be separate. We're part of two kingdoms. We're citizens of the United States, but we're also citizens of heaven, of God's kingdom. And it's like that stark contrast. And then when it's kind of blurry like this, even when this comes out, I think it's important for us to have these conversations and really kind of dive into it and dissect it and explain it so people like me can understand better. So I'm excited to learn more about it today and just kind of get clarity myself. Yeah, well, let's dig in. So when I think about the distinction of the church and state, because this is the basic observation that I make that isn't being addressed here in this conference. Here's what I mean by that. The church has convictions that the nation simply can't share. Right. It's nonsense to say that the nation can accept Christ. It's nonsense to claim that the nation can be as a collective constituted within the body of Christ. When we think about the church, what is the church? It's constituted, it's a conglomeration, we'll say, of, as I like to put it, a mixed multitude of Jews and non-Jews united in Jesus Christ. But the unity in Jesus Christ is the thing. That's what it means to be Christian. It means to be united in Jesus Christ, where Jesus is completely and totally essential. And if we are willing to push him to the background, if we're willing to jettison him altogether, we're no longer Christian. Right. And so that distinction in and of itself is crucial because now what it opens up is this whole wide divide between what the church understands and is capable of doing and what the nation understands and is capable of doing. I love the quote from Jonathan Tran. He wrote a book on theology and the Vietnam War. Fascinating book. But he basically says this, and I think this is a paraphrase, but he says, for people who have been set free to obey, obedience is always an option. That is the church. We're always capable of living under the authority of Jesus Christ. But for those who have not been set free, they are incapable of living under the authority of Jesus Christ.

That's right. And so, to me, this basic distinction is actually really, really crucial. And it's not a conservative or a liberal political point. It's a theological point. The theological point is that Christians are now capable, through the grace of God, of obeying and following and imitating Christ, living underneath his authority, and learning to do that in increasing measure. Not saying that we're perfect, not saying that we don't need to confess sin, not saying that there's no need for repentance. What I'm saying is that we're capable of it. Right. Whereas everyone else is incapable of it. And that does not make them morally inferior or something crazy like that. It makes them lost. And sometimes you'll see people even kind of dip their toes in or kind of just, you know, step to that side for a minute and then they come back. Well, that's not true obedience. That's not true change. It's not true understanding of what that is. And it's not something like, like I keep thinking of like a keto diet or trying paleo. If you're trying two of those simultaneously to see which one works, it's not, this isn't a case like that. You can't just like, well, today I'm gonna try this just to see if it works. It has to be kind of an all in kind of a thing. And you can't just like, you have to fully understand. So I think that is true. I think a lot of people just skip right past this first step, but this is a basic part that a lot of people maybe misunderstand or don't fully understand themselves. Yeah. And I think it's really crucial because it goes to the second point that I made, which is distinguishing between the church and the state is crucial to Christian witness. So there need to be things that the church does, that the church believes that are constitutive of what it means to be united with Christ that are different than the world. And if we don't have those differences, what's the point? Why are we making the distinction in the first place, church and state, if there is no real difference? But the reality is that there is a real difference. And that, you know, part of that difference is just Christ. I mean, Christ is always the crux. He's always the stumbling block. He's always the, we could call him the problem, right? The dividing line between Christians and non-Christians. And again, that isn't intended to cultivate some sort of hubris on our part. It doesn't make Christians arrogant. But we recognize that because we're saved by grace through faith, that other people need this as well. And so we're no better off than they are. We're no better than they are, I should say. We're just better off than they are because we have been saved by grace through faith. And so we want that for them. But in order for them to even see that they need it, we have to be different. This distinction is crucial then for us to mark ourselves off as an alternative to the world, as opposed to being the world in a slightly different way. Does that make sense to you, Nate? Yeah, absolutely. It totally does. I think we just have to get this basic part down because even myself, you know, when you hear about like the Ten Commandments getting posted in the schools or having a Bible in all the classrooms, people are really in uproar right now, one side or the other. But as Christians, like I can kind of see where they're saying, like, why don't we include this, this and this then? I can understand like some of their... So it just makes me realize that I need to have a more firm understanding and basic, you know, grasp of this as a Christian so that I can stand on it and move forward. You know what I mean? Like, I could see how this is confusing for Christians and non, but what you said is so, so true. We have to make that distinction. Otherwise, there's no difference between us and them. Well, I think there's this really interesting, and this came out of the conservatism conference. I believe it was Pastor Wilson who emphasized this. But essentially what he talks about is the potential for there to be an arbitrary and capricious morality that results when there is no God involved. I think his exact quote, and I'm pulling it up right now. You know, he talks about this idea that if there is no set standard, if there is no specific claim about Jesus Christ or not even about Jesus Christ, but just about morality, about, you know, anything like that, then the way he phrased it was, if there is no God above the lunatic state, then the lunatic state is God. And essentially what he says is that this, you know, this lack of God, this impetus toward we are our own God... Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? 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Now, I want to push back on that a little bit because what I would say that when he says if there is no God above the lunatic state, then the lunatic state is God. What I would like to say is if there is no triune God that the state is willing to acknowledge, then the state is always going to create its own God. It isn't about some sort of generic theology or gesturing toward a higher power. It's about the reality of the triune God. And so this notion that we can somehow select for ourselves, just sort of look at the Bible, open it up and say, I really like this verse. I think this would work well for our nation. This one, not so much. That whole Jesus thing, we need to push that aside. But hey, we probably shouldn't murder each other, don't you think? Right. It's cherry picking and it's very subtle cherry picking. Yeah. And so I just tend to think that there's a misunderstanding of the sort of morals and theological vision that develop outside of the scriptures. You imagine a moral and theological vision that is decoupled from the whole of the Bible. Right. It's not that I'm taking, you know, X verse and saying, you know, like we can say, you know, thou shalt not steal. OK, let's not steal. But, you know, coveting, I don't know how we're going to enforce that, so let's leave that one out. This whole thou shalt have no other gods before me. That really seems like it's going to curtail religious freedom. So not so much. But we like the whole not stealing thing. That's great. Yeah. So they just pick on certain ones and kind of scoot by the other ones. That's right. And even the idea of just posting the Ten Commandments, if you think about it, pulling those Ten Commandments out of the scriptures and posting them in a classroom with some sort of American preamble or whatever, that is not serving God's word. It's not pointing people toward the authoritative nature of the final of God's word, the final authority for our life and faith. That's not what that's doing. And so I think we have to, you know, again, when Pastor Wilson talks about, you know, if there's no God above the lunatic state, then the lunatic state is God. What I would just argue is there's never a God above the lunatic state. So the lunatic state is always God. And what I mean by that is this. Obviously, we know that the triune God's above all things. We believe that God is sovereign. But until the state recognizes him as such, it is operating.

As if there is no God. It's operating as if the God it conceives is the God that it serves. And so if God becomes a fiction of the human mind, is that not automatically arbitrary and capricious? Right. Well, and there's other components too that we haven't even brought into the fold yet that make it even more confusing and more diluted and more hard to understand, comprehend, and there's arguments on both sides. I've seen a lot of people saying, what does that mean for Muslims? Because their argument is, who's to say that our view and our perspective of what the sovereign triune God is, is right compared to what they're saying. And so not only do they have, you know, it's like not just one or the other, then there's also some in the same category as us, and there's Muslims here in the United States that are citizens. So it's a very compound, very complex, very, it's just, it's hard to get to the meat of it. But I think we're on the right track. I do think that we are doing the right thing, at least talking about it. Yeah. And so what I would say to that, you know, Al Mohler kind of addressed these comments and he made a statement, he says, I don't think a nation can survive without theological commitments. And then he went on to say that it doesn't mean that there can't be others a part of the community that aren't Christian. But what it means is that there has to be this, and this is a quote from him, the explicit acknowledgement that this is a nation with specific theological accountability and theological commitments. Those coming should respect that, must respect that and understand that. And so the kind of modern secularist dream is, I believe, a constitutional nightmare. Now, what I'd like to key in on in that is something you were kind of gesturing towards, which is these theological commitments. Because what do they actually do? When early on in our nation's history, we had state-established churches. Despite the fact that we had an amendment, a federal amendment, you know, governing against that, at that time the states had more power than the federal government. And so there were different states that had different churches that were established state churches. They were funded in part by taxes from the citizens of that state. They had certain privileges underneath the state. And so you had, for instance, Baptists pushing against the Episcopal churches or the Presbyterian churches who were the state-established churches and saying, I'm Baptist, I don't want to support the Presbyterian church. I want to support my local congregation, giving my taxes back. You also had religious tests for government service. And so in Pennsylvania, there were laws on the books that said that you had to agree that the Old and New Testaments were the inspired word of God. You can imagine that Jews might have had a problem with that. Right. And so they did. And so how did they change it? Well, they just said, well, we'd like people, the religious test is no longer going to be the inspired word of God. The religious test is going to be something like, we want you to believe in God and believe that there are rewards and punishments in the afterlife. Okay. The former theological commitment of the inspired word of God is the Old and New Testaments roots the religious test in a tangible authority. Now, people can disagree with that tangible authority. I understand that. Non-Christians are going to sit back and say, it's just as arbitrary to claim that the Bible is the authority, the final authority for life and faith and to claim that my moral compass is the final authority for life and faith. So I don't want to dismiss that. But for Christians, the Bible is the final authority for life and faith. And so generalizing that, decoupling it from this book that God has revealed to us, that shows us how to live our lives, in my mind is tantamount to a false theological claim. You know, if we just need theological accountability and theological commitments in order for our nation to survive, why is it that the Moloch cult in the ancient Near East that sacrificed children wasn't sufficient? There are theological commitments there. There's theological accountability there. There's actually theological accountability that led to child sacrifice there. Why isn't that sufficient? Well, it's not sufficient because it's not true. Because there's not a God standing behind it who's actually reinforcing those practices, empowering those practices. And I would say the same thing here. That a false theological foundation is no better than a kind of just generic moral foundation. Yeah, and I think everyone's looking for something to justify what their, you know, what their stance is. And at the end of the day, you have to run it through this filter, like you're saying. Like, is it actually by God? And, I mean, you just shared this very stark contrast that people could see some of the same similarities, but the difference is God wasn't behind that. That's right. And I think that part of what the impetus is, really, is how do we sustain a national stability when people are so different? If you and I didn't share any of the same sensibilities, Nate, we couldn't have this conversation. Right. Right? We'd be interrupting each other, or you'd be, you know, you'd be saying the F word, or, you know, I'd be, you know, I'd be doing something, you know, like, you know, it'd be weird if one of us took our shirt off on camera. Like, there are certain sensibilities, right, that we are willing to adhere to and that we understand and we have in common that allow us to have a civil conversation with one another. Right. And some of that's rooted in Christian faith, right? We're both people of faith, and so we both respect each other in that sense, and we both know that we're brothers in Christ, and we have this common goal of trying to exposit the truth, even in our conversations. But part of it's also just cultural convention. Right? I mean, neither of us is wearing robes and sandals right now. Right. So there's a sense in which, you know, I think what people are searching for is, what is the common ground by which all the various different citizens of the United States can continue to coexist together? What is that? Right. Do you think that this assembly that just happened and this conversation that's kind of gotten a lot of commotion, a lot of eyes on it, do you think that it's a step in the right direction to kind of figuring that out? I don't. I'm sorry to say that I don't. I think that America definitely needs some sort of shared values undergirding it. That's just a practical matter, though. A nation is a collection of individuals governed by sovereign. In its broadest definition, that's basically what it is. A group of individuals bounded by a certain geography, ruled by a sovereign who agree to live according to certain rules. And so there has to be a shared understanding of all of that. And that works out in a number of different intricate ways. I suppose my concern with the conversation that was had at this National Conservatism Conference is that the moral and theological concepts that were presented were very much decoupled from the reality of God. And so instead of talking about, just like I said, sure, there needs to be a shared understanding and a set of shared values in order to allow for a lot of different people to coexist together. That seems just sort of commonplace and as a practical matter, that makes sense. I think some of the solutions were a little too sure. You know, a nation cannot survive with, I don't think a nation can survive without theological commitments, was one of the statements Al Mohler made. Do you think that a nation can survive with theological commitments? With any theological commitments? You see what I'm saying? Like, it's like once you examine the statement, you realize how empty it actually is. And I'm not one that's prone to being that harsh with another theologian. I know I make statements all the time that are probably just that empty. But reading it on paper, thinking about the conference, I just sit back and say, no, this wasn't helpful. It wasn't helpful. It didn't really reinforce Christ. It didn't try to point conservatives to Christianity. I think what it really tried to do was...

Allow conservatives to develop their own theology apart from Christianity. I don't think that's helpful. No. And then that also gets close to the point we were making earlier about, you know, choosing your political stance as kind of like your identity spiritually, and you can't muddle those two, you know. And we've really seen that on the right the last few years. We've talked about it, seen it in person at different events we've been to, and yeah, I think my, just my stance from what I read and what I gathered, and I have very little understanding and knowledge in this department compared to you, but I think it just added to the confusion and it added to the division more than it did. I think the goal was to try to bring some clarity and solution and, you know, some resolve there, but I think it did the opposite because it just brings up all these other questions that you have to answer. And it's again, like you said, because it's not based and rooted in the right things. Yeah, I think because we didn't, the conference didn't tend to retain the distinction between the church and the state, what you ended up with is an odd merger of the church and the state in almost every statement. As if a, you know, I always go back to something my dissertation advisor has written about, Dr. Richard Averbach. He talks about the Old Testament law as being both good and weak all at the same time. It was good and then it was given by God. And so there are certain things that we could point to in this conference that we would say, those are good. They're very good. Thinking about the moral structure of our society, right? Having our society and our government align with God's order in some way, shape or form, right? Not Christ, but God's order is available to us in creation. We can catch glimpses of the sort of stability and some of the attributes, we see this in Romans 1, that are evident about God in creation. And so when our government and our governing authorities, they align with those, that's a good thing. It's not bad. Morals are not a bad thing. But we don't seem to want to acknowledge how they're weak, how they're incomplete, how they're incapable of doing something that only Christ can do. And in that, I'm afraid what we're doing is we're conveying a false hope. And that's where I have the bigger trouble with this kind of conversation, is that we aren't able to distinguish or we're not doing the job of distinguishing between what is good and what is true. Maybe what is good and what is Christian. Not making that distinction, I think, is actually harmful to this conversation. I think it leads to something like we talked about Carmen Joy Imes, I don't want to get back around to that point, but when Josh Howley spoke, he spoke about being a Christian nationalist, affirming and advocating for Christian nationalism, calling America a Christian nation. If I understand what Carmen Joy Imes is arguing, and I think I do, that bearing the name of the Lord is actually what is the substance of that command in the Old Testament. That we should not take the Lord's name in vain means that we should not. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Apply the name of the Lord to ourselves and then live however it is that we want to. That the Lord's reputation actually matters and that if we're going to bear that name, or if we're going to have another entity, I would argue, bear that name, it needs to be committed to upholding the Lord's reputation. I have a lot of difficulty believing that America is really dedicated. Not saying it never does, not saying it's horrible. I love America, right? Like all the necessary qualifications. But the reality is, it is not committed to upholding the triune God's reputation. And Christian nationalism is in no way, shape, or form committed to pointing to and glorifying the triune God. It simply isn't. It's not. And even if it was to give it its best shot, you and I both could probably think of times in our lives. I know I have many in my life where I've just been able to work with Christians and non-Christians. And it's like, sometimes you work with Christians that you think their moral compass, their character, their moral code, whatever you want to call it, is sometimes inferior to somebody out in the world that doesn't acknowledge God. So I think it's a human issue, too. Because not everyone's going to have the same... We're all human. We have that human nature that's constantly fighting with each of us every day. Whether we acknowledge it or not. If you, you know, are a servant of God, if you have accepted Christ and He's Lord of your life, or if not, like, we still all struggle with the same stuff. We still have human nature that's going to sometimes cloud those things. And so it's hard enough. Like, I think that's why discernment is so big for Christians when you're aligning yourself with people. Because I've certainly worked with Christians where I'm like, oh, I probably wouldn't work with them again. And then there's, you know what I mean? Like, it's just a people issue. It's a hard issue. It's a human nature issue. So that's on its own. Yeah, and I think it's, you know, again, I'm not trying to argue that only Christians do this, right? Or that we do it perfectly. I'm saying that only Christians can do this. And that we're the ones who bear the name of the Lord and we're the ones who have the responsibility to uphold that reputation. That's our unique purpose and task. Putting that on people or institutions who do not have the Holy Spirit, right, who have not recognized Jesus as Lord, seems to me completely unfair. Right. Because there's no chance in the world. I mean, if you think we're bad at doing it, think about somebody who doesn't have the Holy Spirit, who doesn't have the, you know, doesn't recognize the Word of God as the final authority for life and faith, who doesn't know that Jesus resurrected from the dead. They're not going to have a shot. Right. Because it didn't start at their heart. I really do think we've got to come back to the heart issue because if those people, if something's mandated at the top, sure, people are going to go along with it, but it's never going to be true. It's never really going to be in the center like it's supposed to be because it's not from the heart. And that's what it says everywhere through scripture. You know, you confess with your mouth and believe with your heart. You can confess that you're going to go along with something because someone's mandating it. If you don't believe it in your heart, you're not really, you know what I mean? It's not really, it didn't take. Well, I would just say, you know, we've been, I've been critical of the conference, but I will say this. I have a feeling that if I had a conversation with either of these gentlemen that we'd probably have more common ground than not. Right. So I do want to sort of take a step back and say that I, I am not trying to place these gentlemen in a camp that I, you know, that would be diminishing to them and their work. I think oftentimes when people speak, especially when they're doing a Q&A, it's difficult to keep your language clean. I can guarantee you if people go back and listen to different episodes of this podcast that they will hear me say things that I don't actually, like if I were writing them down, I would use far more precision and far more nuance than I am when I talk. Right. And so I don't want to, I don't want to blow up what these people said. What I think, I think needs to happen is a more public conversation about these issues with more Christian theological rigor about them. A real deep understanding of the distinction between church and state, a real deep distinction between what it means to live for Christ versus what it is to be influenced by aspects of Christianity. That's what I'd say our country is. It's been influenced by aspects of Christianity, but I would hesitate to say that anyone, you know, if you're looking at, uh, you know, I want to start a church tomorrow and I just go down on the street and somebody says, Hey, what's your church all about? And I'd say, well, we're influenced by aspects of Christianity. Is that a church you'd be excited to go to, Nate? Absolutely not. Yeah. I mean,

Some of the parts of the Bible we really, we really believe. Yeah. Some of them. Come to Sunday to find out which ones. Yeah, come on over. Like, and, you know, occasionally, I do change them, because let's face it, it gets a little weird sometimes. Yep. You know, like, that's not a church you're going to attend. Right. And yet, when we talk about this in the public sphere, people tolerate this kind of mess. Right. I mean, functionally, this is what seems to have been said at this conference, that there are certain aspects of Christianity that have influenced our nation, that certain aspects of the Bible seem to be more or less authoritative, at least guiding for our nation, and that that should be good enough. And on some level, I agree. I agree it's good enough for a nation. What I want is for them to stop applying Christian to it. Right. I wanna stop confusing the two. Yeah. Like, the influences are great. The labels are horrid. Mm-hmm. They absolutely do a disservice. Oh, totally. And that's where I sort of sit back and say, that's where our real trouble is on a cert, at a certain level, that's where our real trouble is. Well, and I think we've been conditioned too, because, you know, especially post-2020, I feel like the general consensus is if something's uncomfortable and it doesn't seem like there's gonna be resolved, let's just move on to the next thing. So people kind of just like step over that, like, you know, two, two steps worth to step over it, to not deal with it, to deal with something else, and that's why we never get anywhere with this. But also people are afraid of offending or making someone feel a certain kind of way, and it's like, we've got to get away from that, because otherwise we're never, and it's just gonna keep compounding and it's gonna get pushed further and further down, and we're never gonna get to the root of it. We're never gonna get to the issues of it and, and I, I think it's very important that we continue to have these conversations, for sure. Well, let's talk about this sort of last point as we're winding down here. What, you know, conservatism cannot replace Christianity. So here's what I mean by that. I think there can be a fair degree of overlap between conservatism and Christianity, but I would also say there's a fair degree of overlap between liberalism or the left and Christianity. So maybe conservatism is the wrong word because liberalism is sort of the system we live in, right? Formal liberalism is just a question of, you know, what freedom should people be able to exercise, right? There's that formal, it doesn't mean liberal in the, in the opposite of conservative, but so let's use left and right. The right cannot replace Christianity, but I think there can be deep overlaps between the right, the left, and Christianity. What I would argue, though, is that those overlaps don't make them the same. It's the differences that matter, not the similarities so much. Conservative, uh, the right can never replace Christianity because it will never hold the Christ as the authority. Right. The left will never replace Christianity for the same reason. But that doesn't mean that some of the values that the right and or the left hold aren't shared by Christianity. Mm-hmm. I mean, we care about meeting the needs of the vulnerable in our society. We care about impartiality and judgment. We care about justice and mercy and peace. We care about all these things. The difference is that we define those things. Those concepts are rooted in our faith in Christ. They're not generic and abstracted away from our theology. They are informed, controlled, and governed by our theology. But for conservatives and liberals, you could say, let's just take an issue of fairness. Unless you've had your head in the sand over the last several months, we've had a lot of conversations about fairness in our country. Should transgender athletes be able to compete in female sports? Should, should biological males who identify as women be able to compete in women's sports? Fairness and conversations about fairness won't solve that problem. Right. Is it fair to the women, the biological women who are trying to carve out a space to do their sports? Is it fair to the biological males who identify as women not to be able to participate? Fairness doesn't answer that question. It simply doesn't. And you can try to get as definitional as you'd like. What is a woman? What is a man? Right? But for Christians, what solves that problem isn't fairness. It's all the other aspects of who God is, how he created the world, how these terms take on a theological nuance. That's what solves the problem for us. And that is very different than the way it's solved for conservatives or the right or the left. Right. And so conservatism can never take over Christianity, can never replace Christianity, isn't even really a good substitute for Christianity because Christ is not at the center of conservatism. Right. I think one of the biggest differences, whether you're a conservative or a liberal, if you're a Christian, the difference is you're going to be doing and molding and shaping your life and living your life in accordance to what Christ has ordained regardless. And I think I've seen, and as you grow up, as you get older, as you experience more life, as you see more stuff, how many times do we see people, especially in our generation, flip, like go from conservative to liberal or sometimes the other way. I think they're searching for something, but for us, we have the benefit of like, we still have our center no matter what. And as a Christian. So I identify as that first. And is there overlap? Like you're saying, absolutely. Like this is, this is really good for me just to think about. This is a really good conversation and kind of, I haven't heard it or seen it portrayed this way. Like just thinking that through is really, really, really good. So I appreciate you bringing that up. I will say somebody left a review on the podcast. I don't usually read the reviews, but I happened upon it the other day. Um, and they, they said it seems like we're Trump evangelicals, Trump evangelicals, I think. I would say that I'm the farthest thing from a Trump evangelical ever. Yes, I would agree. I have virtually no interest in who gets elected. Virtually none. And I know that saying that will probably uh cause some concern for people. But here's my point. I think Christians just need to be Christians regardless of our circumstances. I would appeal to 1 Corinthians 7 where Paul talks about whatever circumstance you find yourselves in, stay there. Whatever, wherever God has called you, remain there. If you're uncircumcised, do not try to be circumcised. If you're circumcised, do not try to remove the marks of circumcision. If you're a slave, do not try to get free, but if you can gain your freedom, go for it. And I think his point there is, we don't have to have our situation change. Our circumstances don't have to change for us to be faithful within those circumstances. Mm-hmm. And my concern is far less, I would say infinitely less, who's in charge of the country and far more with Christians being deeply committed to discipleship because it is through discipleship that God is going to open up opportunities beyond anything we could ever ask or think. We don't get this done through political strategy. That's crazy talk. We get this done by being obedient, by living faithfully. It's not that that excludes political participation. I think people hear me say that all the time, right? Like, when I say that, hey, we just need to be faithful. I am not precluding, I'm not calling for us to just go out in the wilderness somewhere and read our Bibles and pray. Right. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that if our tactics lead us to be unfaithful, we have lost something. We've lost opportunities. It's not that we've gained opportunities. We have lost opportunities. 100%. Our political participation has to be nested inside that faithfulness. Mm-hmm. And so I just really truly believe that whoever's in charge, right? Trump, Biden, whoever fills in for Biden, like, whoever gets elected in the next election cycle, it really doesn't matter to me. What matters to me primarily is whether or not the church has learned to please God together.

Whether or not, as a group, we are pointing to and glorifying the Lord Jesus Christ, and whether or not that is our singular focus, that's what I care about. 100%. Yeah, it's mind-boggling, dude. I see stuff sometimes people post, and they're like, man, if Trump doesn't get in this time, our country is over. And it's like, how belittling and how much does that say about your faith in Christ, that you are putting the future of our world, our nation, in the hands of who gets picked between a 50-50 shot? You know what I mean? Last time I checked, whoever gets in there, God is still God, and he's still in charge, and he's still our number one. He's still what I'm basing my life on, not politicians, because nine times out of ten, politicians waver like we were talking about earlier. I just want to make this one point really quick. I used to put so much emphasis, because growing up in the church, being very much in a religious bubble, being in ministry, I was young and just didn't know. I hadn't gone through enough elections or whatever, just didn't experience enough in the world. I remember when Obama first won the election, like a lot of people at my church, Christians were just like devastated, like it was going to be the end of the world or the start of the end of the world. And it's like, nope, it's still the same as yesterday. It's just that doesn't affect us, you know, like you're saying it does. Like you're basically putting God in the backseat of our electoral, you know, plan, the way that they come up with it. You know what I mean? I'm not choosing the right words, but like that stuck out to me even when I didn't know what I know now back then. I was just like, man, people are losing their minds and they don't have to. Like God is still God. He's still the same yesterday, today, and forever. Like people dealt with this in Bible times, just in different ways. But we feel like this is different because it's closer to us. I think I can't help but keep coming back to it. It's a heart issue and where our heart aligns with and who it aligns with. And are you putting a lot of that emphasis on your political party or are you putting it on as being a Christian? And I think you're right. That's why it's so important to dive into discipleship and that we have good, true stewards of what God's giving us to be representation of him in a good light. Whether we're not going to be swayed one way or the other by the way the political stuff goes, because guess what? It's going to get worse. This is not the worst it's going to be. It's going to get worse if it tells us. Yeah, I mean, the world doesn't fix itself. Right. And so, you know, worse, better, you know, whether it falls into complete and total chaos and anarchy, I don't know. None of us know that. But the reality is it's not going to fix itself. It's at the very least going to stay as bad as it is right now. Right. It may be bad in different ways, but it's still just as bad. And so my encouragement to people and to Christians, and I don't know that I would say that this is like a systematic teaching regarding the ebb and flow of nations. Right. I think God's mind with regard to how the nations rise and fall is something that the Bible doesn't give us enough information to truly systematize and contemplate 100%. Right. But I almost, I've been increasingly going back to Genesis 15. Genesis 15 is probably best known for, you know, Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. It's Genesis 15, 6. It's cited in the New Testament a couple of times, and Paul uses it to emphasize that salvation comes by faith or justified by faith. But I think there's a really interesting section in 12 through 16 that people, that really inform this conversation. And it's where God is talking to Abram and he's saying, hey, Abram, you know, your offspring are going to be sojourners in a land that is not theirs, and there will be servants there and they will be afflicted for 400 years. So I'm going to make you a great nation, but in the midst of that, they're going to be stuck in a foreign nation for 400 years, and they're going to be afflicted. Why is that? First, God says, before he answers the why, he says, well, I'll bring judgment on the nation that you serve. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. 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They'll come back here to the promised land in their fourth generation for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. Wow. For the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. Like I said, this is not a systematic teaching. This is not a, get right, this is not a, this is how God thinks about every nation. But if we just think about this as a factor, and we say, God looks at the buildup of iniquity, sin, essentially, of a nation to determine when its time should be over. There's no sense in which we could build up our nation to be sufficiently moral that the iniquity would not keep building up. All of these reforms that we're looking at, all of these things that we're looking to change, they may be very good things and appropriate things, things in keeping with general notions of justice, even theological notions with justice. Even sort of driving into what we would consider in the church as, you know, Christian values. Caring for those who are vulnerable, making sure that we love our neighbor, really demonstrating an allegiance to God. Right? All of those things are good things. But those good things will never counteract the iniquities that go alongside it. Right. And so if we look at this passage and we really just contemplate that for a moment, we recognize that every nation that is not chosen by God as his special possession, Israel, and I think the people of God in the church, who are now incorporated into Israel, right? We become sort of the part of the mixed multitude that has now entered into faith through Christ. As the bride, yeah. We are the eternal entity. We are the thing that is going to last perpetually into eternity. Nations are provisional. And even factors that we don't understand, like when a nation's iniquity has built up sufficient that God is going to topple it, we don't have any insight into that whatsoever. Right. We have no clue what's happening there. None. And so we have to take care not to give the world a false hope. We have to be framing this in terms of, look, we should be doing this, and we talked about this on a podcast previous, we should be doing it like Josiah. We're not reforming it so that it survives. We're reforming it because it's the right thing to do. We're reforming it because we so want to honor God that these reforms, this theological speech, these things that we're proposing and suggesting, we can't help but propose them because God exists. Right. He's there and we want to honor him. Whatever else happens, don't know. But I can almost guarantee that Trump is not the Messiah, and he's not going to save our nation, and he's not going to save anyone else, and that I would say that he's no more a servant of God than Biden is a servant of God. Right. These governing authorities are instituted by God. And we have to believe that he's still sovereign over them, even though they wouldn't. Right. And so there's just this sort of weird mix of things that we don't talk about particularly well. And I'll go back to my initial insight and we can kind of close this out. I'd be interested in your comments, but I would just say the basic insight that I believe we need to really wrestle with and own is that the church is fundamentally distinct from the nation. And that we're not wavering. We're not getting watered down. Like, I can't help but think about, we talked about the whole issue that's been huge for us in the last two years in the media about transgenders in sports. If you, just 10 years, but definitely 20 years ago, I know for a fact this conversation would not have happened. You know what I mean? So it goes to show, like, how much the outside has kind of moved, you know, from the center. And it's kind of scary because I feel like even Christians, to a degree, are being, not

Kind of, some are being swayed, but we're always like having to come back and question, like, is this okay? Because it's like constantly. I see it all the time, and it's not going away. Where 20 years ago, and maybe this is not the right thing to say here, but I'm just going to say it, 20 years ago, it was looked at as the mental illness. And it was a way different light than it is now. And so that shows, like, as Christians, we're supposed to stay in our center and not be swayed by the way the world moves. But the world has certainly moved, even in the last five years in this regard. I think things that are in question now wouldn't have been a question like 10, 15, 20 years ago. So it is interesting, I think, as Christians, we have to kind of plant our feet and stay and stand firm because, obviously, everything else around us is definitely shifting. It's going down kind of like you were saying with the iniquities building up and building up. I think that's where our world is today. And it's not like crazy. The Bible says that nothing's new under the sun with Sodom and Gomorrah. Like, people sometimes say to me, for instance, that, oh, this is crazier probably than it's ever been in the world. And I'm like, well, we weren't there, Sodom and Gomorrah, but what you read, you're just reading the highlights of it. It was pretty bad. It was pretty rough. And many places in the Bible. Well, let me just riff off one thing you said, and then we'll close out. I would say this. When you say that Christians have to stand firm, I agree with that. We need to stand firm. We have to stand firm. But I would also say we have the ability to stand firm. See, I think a lot of this is conditioned. Our conversations about our nation are conditioned on this idea that there was some sort of sure footing that we lost as opposed to the idea that this whole thing was built on sand and that that sand eroding is a natural process. Where we are now, the specifics are interesting. They're odd. They're culturally conditioned. They're, you know, sort of in the moment sort of issues. Right. I don't think every civilization that has declined has made it in the exact same spot we have. Right. So there are cultural and specific issues that we would deal with in a time bound sort of way. But the reality is that when you build your house on the sand, that sand is going to erode. It's the natural, organic way that this has to go. It's the natural outworking of a system that is not rooted in and founded on Christ. And so there's no reforming it other than pulling people over to a firm foundation. I was just going to say that. Right. And I think that's the difficult part here is that when we think about this, we think about just even Trump's slogan to further underscore the fact that I am not a Trumpvangelical. If we think about Trump's slogan of make America great again, I've always found that comical. Again, what do we really mean when we say make America great again? If I'm in my most pithiest moment, right, my honriest moment, what I would say is it's the moment where we felt most comfortable with the sins that were being committed around us. Right. It is not a sure place of stability like Christ is. It was a place where we felt most comfortable with the sins that were being committed around us. And the reason that we want to go back there is because we are highly uncomfortable with the sins that are being committed around us now. Right. So we're really shooting for something that is far more convenient and comfortable for us than it is Christ centered. And it's only comfortable for potentially four more years. It's only comfortable for potentially four more years. And then you're going to be back to like figuring out, oh, man, if I could just get us back to where we were. So, I mean, it really is silly when you think of it in that context. It's very difficult. And I think we just have to be, I think my biggest, what I want people to take away from this conversation is not that, oh, James and Nate solved the whole problem because I don't think that's true. What I would say is that we have to be more precise with our language. We have to be more precise with the way we're talking about this to make sure that even when the world mistakes us or Christian nationalists, we are clear that Christian nationalism is an idolatrous, crazy sort of ideology that does not fit biblically and theologically with any sort of Orthodox rendering of Christianity. We've got to be more precise with our language because our witness is at stake. Yep. We're trying to gesture. We're trying to point to and glorify the Lord Jesus Christ. And if we don't do that well, the world misses out on something huge. Well, and what does it say about how gross and how disturbing it is if us as Christians are at a Christian conference in February and we see some of this playing out right in front of us and it's like, ah, it's just so off-putting and almost like I use the word gross because it's like, this is, I don't want to be associated with this. Not because it's the person, but because some people are putting the person above God. Yeah, we've really, yeah, we've really got to reform ourselves. Right. It's just, it's gotten way out of hand and I feel like people that don't really look into this deep enough and dissect it, they think all Christians are that way. And that is not the case. Not even close. It literally turns my stomach when I see some people just drooling and foaming at the mouth over this. I'm like, he's a guy. I mean, both sides of the playing field. I don't think we're seeing that near as much as Biden, but my goodness, like just, and if you don't believe, just go to the lake. Well, and I think, you know, and we could do a whole other episode on this, but we're running out, we're running low on time. But I would just say, you know, a lot of times what we do is we valorize the good, the good aspects, the things that we like about a particular candidate, in this case, Trump. Right. We miss the dangers that he poses. You know, the Trump Bible is not doing anyone any favors. It is not something that Christians should be endorsing in my view. It's highlighting a sort of merger between Christianity and the state, a civil religion that I would argue we see talked about in Revelation 13 and 14 when the two beasts emerge, one from the sea and one from the land. This is not something that we are interested in. And I'm not saying he's the eschatological fulfillment of those beasts. What I'm saying is that there is a danger when the government begins to merge with religion that we're missing completely when Trump is pandering to Christians. Right. So, you know, I don't speak explicitly about the candidates too often, but I would just say, you know, I have a lot of issues with both of these candidates. I would say that I have moral problems with a lot of the things that Biden is doing. I think he's gone a little bit off the deep end on a lot of the different policies that he's instituted, Title IX being one of them. I would also say that Trump is, in my mind, dangerous because he is confusing. He is blurring the distinction between Christianity and the nation that is ontologically or essentially there. And we've got to be extremely careful about supporting that. Yep. Well, this is celebrities. The last thing I'll say is celebrities getting an acceptance speech or if they're talking like one second, they're saying something completely out there and that you wouldn't hear come out of a Christian's mouth. And then the next thing they're like, well, you know, I'm a Christian. I believe good Christian moral values, whatever. It's gotten so muddied. Like you keep coming back to this and it's so true. Now, more than ever, it is so crucial that Christians not only stand firm, like we're talking about earlier, but raise up and really like showcase like what we're supposed to. That way it's a clear distinction. It's not like, I don't, when someone looks at my life, James, I don't want people to be like, I wonder if he is really a Christian. Like, I want them to know that they know that they know. You know what I mean? Right. And that's like my, that's at the center of me. That's, that's first and foremost. And then you throw all these other confusing things. It's just now more than ever, it's so watered down. Christians need to stand up and take their rightful place at the, you know, underneath our heavenly father and, and show people really what it is, not being clouded by this. And that's why we're able to have these conversations. To be honest, I'm normally uncomfortable having these conversations, but I'm just sick of it because I feel like it's, it's so muddy on both sides that we've just got to come back to center. And now more than ever, God needs his church to raise up and show the world, you know, what it's really about. So. Well, I think we'll leave it there, man. Thanks a lot for having this conversation. Thanks to you all for listening and we'll see you back on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer,

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