Jesse Covington, Bryan T. McGraw, and Micah Watson | Hopeful Realism: Natural Law, Politics & Christian Public Engagement

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, everyone. Before we jump into this episode of Thinking Christian, I wanted to let you know about some of the resources that we have available at Useful to God. Useful to God is dedicated to preparing God's people to build God's kingdom. And we do that through a variety of biblical and theological instructional resources. So we have courses. We have downloadable guides. We have podcasts. We have blogs. And I just encourage you to navigate to usefultogod.com to check all of those out. Right now, we're offering a downloadable guide. It's a free downloadable guide on making everyday decisions for God's glory. And I just encourage you to navigate to Useful to God. It's right there on our homepage. You'll be able to see it. And you can download that for free. If you're interested in taking a course, we're offering Knowing Jesus, a walk through the Gospels for $9.99 right now. And it just goes to help us sustain our ministry, but it also helps you, hopefully, understand the Gospels a bit better and really encourage you to walk more closely with our Savior. So with that said, on to this episode of Thinking Christian. Thanks, everybody. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer. And I'm joined today by three gentlemen who wrote a book called Hopeful Realism, Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics. So who you're going to see on screen or listen to as we go are three authors, Jesse Covington, Brian T. McGraw, and Micah Watson. And I've been told that Micah gets all of the difficult questions. So for those of you who are watching on video, you'll be able to see the names on the Zoom screen here and kind of identify folks. But maybe what would be good for our audio only listeners is just kind of go around and introduce yourselves just a little bit. Maybe tell who you are, where you're from, you know, what you're doing and give them a sense of your voice. So, Jesse, why don't we start with you, if that's all right? Sure. Yeah. So I'm Jesse Covington. I'm a professor of political science at Westmont College. I also direct our Augustinian Scholars Program, our Honors Program here. I've been at Westmont for the last 18 years. And I do political theory and constitutional law. I also teach a lot in the Christian intellectual tradition. And that's me in a nutshell. Very cool. And Micah, how about you? Yeah. So Micah Watson. And I grew up in California, but I am now in the Midwest, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and I teach at Calvin University. And I am involved with an institute here called the Paul Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics. Fantastic. I would have had one of your colleagues on, Derek Sherman, just the other, yeah, probably a few weeks ago, I think we did the interview. So fantastic. Yeah, yeah. And Brian, last but not least. Sure. Brian McGraw. I teach political theory here at Wheaton College outside of Chicago. And I am the dean of natural and social sciences. And I also direct our Equitas Fellows Program, which is our honors program. We don't call it an honors program. And I've been here about 17 years. Very good. Well, how did you how did the three of you connect? And I'll try to call on one of you just so we can manage this. But I'm not putting anybody on the spot. I'll default to Jesse for this one. How did you guys connect to do this book? What was the impetus for actually writing it? Well, I think the question sort of the story of us connecting goes way further back than the collaboration on this book. I think we, you know, I met Brian first, I think before I met Micah. And this is this is going back 18 years. I think it was summer of 2007 that Brian and I first crossed paths. We realized we had some kind of shared shared interests, hit it off. And then the three of us began collaborating on on some of our shared interests. Oh, probably what? 17 years ago, 16 years ago, something like that. 2008, 2009, somewhere around there. Yeah. And I tell you one of the first thing, one of the first places that that was manifest is we hosted a conference on evangelicals and natural law here at Westmont College in Santa Barbara back in 2011, 2010. OK, it might have been at the end of 10. The fruit of that was we published an edited volume that was kind of the fruit of that conference. And over the years, we've done lots of conference panels and a lot of work together trying to speak to what we take to be the needs within evangelical Christianity in relation to political engagement and saying, all right, as political theorists, what's the what's the slice of the needs within evangelicalism where we we might be able to to serve? And a lot of that has focused on questions of political morality in liberal democracies. OK. Yeah, I just to add on to that, I think all of us are kind of motivated. And it's sort of you can see it through our current project by kind of dissatisfaction with the with the kind of the I would say the framework available, any kind of framework available to your kind of ordinary evangelicals. I always tell the story. I recall teaching a Christian political thought class the first time I taught it and thinking about, well, what should I assign? And was like, didn't really find very much that I liked or that I thought that students could really get a lot out of. And it was sort of this, you know, there's probably things out there I didn't know about, but I think all of us sort of just think that, you know, one of our one of our community's problems is we don't have a particularly good or sort of like well-developed kind of framework for thinking about politics or making political judgments. Yeah, it's really interesting you say that I was so I was an academic dean at Moody Bible Institute for a while. And we had a period there where I think it was gay marriage had just been legalized. And we had a sort of a little bit of a kerfuffle on campus there because the many of the faculty were watching the students sort of celebrate this decision and saying that, you know, our students are all going liberal. And as I talked to them, it didn't seem like they were going liberal. It didn't seem like the students were sort of wanting to affirm homosexual marriage as if it were biblical or something like that. They just didn't understand how to think faithfully in the political realm. There was a disconnect there. There wasn't an appropriate framework for them to understand how to think about how these things, how these policies that were being passed fit within the framework of not only the church, but then also American society, democratic process, those kind of things. And honestly, it didn't seem like a lot. Some of the faculty did either. And so I think this this project that you're on is and I'm not saying I had any better perspective on it. I just didn't quite react as strongly as they did. But I think this project and the book you've written is actually really helpful because this understanding of natural law seems to be something that is much more prominent in the Catholic tradition, but not so much in the evangelical tradition. Is that I'll go to Micah since he hasn't talked yet. Is that is that perception accurate, would you say? Yeah, I think that's that's been true. And we could talk about the different reasons for that. There's, you know, in the Academy, there's been major figures like Karl Barth and others who have who've seen natural law as a real problem. And then there's probably just some cultural reasons. I mean, the reality is, you know, Martin Luther and John Calvin both explicitly affirmed natural law. And we try to make the case in our book that the Bible, while not saying, you know, you shall believe in natural law, does have affirmation of that. God has made us to flourish in certain ways and that Scripture is our highest authority for knowing about that and knowing about God's revelation. But Scripture itself points to us being able to figure some things out with the reason that God's given us. So I do think that evangelicals have been a little suspicious of natural law because they might see it as a Catholic thing in that co-edited book we did a while ago. We made the case in a chapter, you know, evangelicals love C.S. Lewis and he's a big natural law guy. So that was one of the doors we tried to use to get in, say, hey, if you guys think C.S. Lewis is, you know, you may not think he's right about everything, but you think he's a pretty good, you know, someone to look up to in terms of Christian thought. He's a big natural law guy. And as we make the case of that, we think the Bible makes this case as well. So we're kind of hoping to make the case that part of what it means to be biblically faithful about our earthly political roles includes thinking about and perhaps even applying natural law thought. 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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own 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. And I'll just, I'll add on, Micah's not going to toot his own horn here, but Micah co-authored with Justin Dyer an excellent book on C.S. Lewis and natural law in politics that I think for those that are interested in chasing down that question in particular, highly recommend it. Very good. Well, when we think about natural law, so you mentioned Karl Barth, and I kind of understand where that's coming from. He had, you know, a really strong sort of pushback against that. C.S. Lewis, I actually just finished up an interview this morning with Jeffrey Barbeau, who wrote the last romantic. Yeah, he's a Wheaton there too with you, Brian. And so we talked a little bit about natural law and C.S. Lewis. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on when we're looking at this through an evangelical lens, do you think that part of the problem with natural law is that we don't understand how to move from natural law to special revelation and sort of back again? Like it feels to me that whenever we have these conversations about natural law, we either get stuck there, right? Oh, well, they're being moral. And so let's just leave it alone. It's all good. This is fantastic. And it tends to get rooted more, as I've said before, in wholesomeness as opposed to holiness versus this total rejection of natural law that says natural law is just the vagaries of human existence. What we really need to get to is Jesus Christ. Now, I think both of those are probably true. But do you all see that tension as you're doing the more scholarly work on this as opposed to just sort of perceiving it as an outsider? Brian, maybe start with you. Well, so when I think about sort of the challenges of doing natural law or thinking about natural law as an evangelical, yeah, I mean, I think that one of the kind of historical challenges has been that there is this way in which, you know, even even some, you know, I think well-meaning and obviously very smart and sort of very faithful sort of, you know, fellow Christians who are doing sort of thinking about natural law because the tradition has historically wanted to sort of make the claim that the sort of the norms and obligations associated with natural law are accessible to all human beings according to on their own reason. There's been this kind of historical sense that we could sort of divide that neatly from sort of special revelation. Like over here is nature and over here is Jesus, right? And then if you buy, if you're all doing, if you're doing sort of all the nature stuff, then you kind of don't even really need the Jesus stuff, right? You just, you just don't need it. And then, and so then if you're really committed, like he's like, oh no, I think that, you know, Jesus should actually have something to say about all the parts of my life and should sort of like all of my thinking should be sort of reflective of Jesus. You should be, you know, that the theological term would be like Christocentric. Then you're like, then you're kind of suspicious of the people who are over here saying, well, just, just, just think as, you know, in nature or just think that way. That's, that's more or less kind of, I think where Karl Barth ends up. I mean, it's a very simplistic, simple view of sort of a sort of retelling of what he's saying. Sure. And so, yeah, I think one of the, one of the difficulties, and we, you know, we, is to think about, okay, how, how as Christians can we think about nature as Christians? And I think for us, you can, and you can see it in the book again and again, is we can think about nature as creation, right? It's not just nature. It's not just this kind of nature as such. It's in fact, nature as created by God, imbued with God's presence, imbued with God's kind of nature, right? His own nature. And because of that, we can start thinking, you know, alongside with, with out of nature and revelation to, to think about how we ought to act and think. And I just want to chime in, totally agreeing with Brian. I'll just say that something that's distinctively evangelical that I think is a little bit different about our approach to natural law on this question is along with a lot of the Protestant tradition, we're going to emphasize the consequences of the fall, but not just, not just on the will, corrupting the will in original sin, but also epistemically. And so our, our knowledge of general revelation is always going to be imperfect. It doesn't mean it's not there. It doesn't mean it can be ignored, but it's, I would say it's a particular approach to general revelation that has a, I would say an epistemic humility and expectation of disagreement and a, an explicit need for the corrections of scripture and the clarifications of scripture, which is just, it's a little bit of a different emphasis. I mean, Thomas Aquinas, you know, gives us one of the reasons for the need for the divine law is for the corrections on this point. But it's a higher emphasis in our approach, which then keeps, it keeps the need for special revelation, not just for general revelation. Yeah, I would say, as I was reading through aspects of the book, one of the things that I sort of was thinking about is there's, I think you did a, you all did a fantastic job of saying, look, let's not throw out natural law. Let's not degrade the people who are recognizing things that are actually there within God's order. Let's affirm when, when humans recognize the true, the good, and the beautiful. Let's affirm when they're understanding that natural law, but then let's not allow them to close themselves off to anything more than that. Let's make sure that as Christians, we're both, you know, recognizing the good when we see it, but also pulling that good forward toward a gospel-centered sort of movement, right? That there's more here. Don't just stop with this good, but let's pull you into the special revelation. And I think you, I think you all in the way you treat it in the book, I, that was the sense that I started getting from you all, is that there's this very real sense in which the church is looking out and recognizing that people can see the natural law, recognize it imperfectly, and that our role is really to correct that and push people beyond it. Is that a fair sort of summary of where you guys would, would sit? I think that's, I think it's really part of it. I mean, when we are talking with our neighbors who aren't believers and we have common cause in the importance of cleaning up a local creek or in fighting against human trafficking, and that's, there's a, there's an apologetic function there, right? I mean, if we go back to Lewis, Lewis starts off mere Christianity by appealing to the norms everyone kind of recognizes. Well, isn't that interesting? Where do those, where do those come from? We certainly would never want to say that that knowledge of the natural law or acting in accordance with it is salvific. And we, you know, if we're looking at passages of scripture, the passage in Colossians that talks about, you know, in Jesus, all things were created, visible and invisible. We, we actually think he's the author of our natures, right? So to have people talking about what human nature is, even if, even if it's partial and we see through the glass darkly, we think those things with the help of the Holy Spirit can lead people to recognize what kind of makes sense. There'd be an author of this. And who, who is that? And we have a nice response there. It's Jesus of Nazareth. So we, I would, I would think we would, we do think those things can go, go together rather nicely. And, and there's a, there's a flip side to it as well. And something that I think that, you know, deeply pains all of us. And that's is sort of Christians whose engagement with the world in, you know, various, various spheres reflects a kind of a disdain for kind of, you know, real moral norms, right? And the, and the ways in which that can sort of be what our Catholic friends would call a scandal for the church, right? We've all, we probably all know people who have walked away from the church in part because of their frustration with, you know, their, their fellow believers and what they, what they see around them, whether, you know, and then sometimes it's not, not fair, but sometimes it is fair. And, and, you know, part of, part of our, part of our motivation for writing the book and for encouraging others to sort of think along these kind of lines is, is because of the ways in which, you know, all too often, I think evangelical politics has harmed the gospel, right? That's just a, that's just a terrible tragedy. Yeah, as I've thought and written and talked about politics over the years, I'm really glad you said that because I, I was captured sort of by the passages where Paul talks about the actions of believers causing the gospel to be rev

And D6-1, you see it in Titus 2.5. Now, neither of those are related to specifically to politics, but I think the very fact that he's referencing that, you know, our behaviors can have a detrimental impact on the reputation of God and the gospel is something that we should take pretty seriously. So, yeah, I appreciate you bringing that out. Somebody else was gonna say something? No? We moved on time. Okay, sorry about that. No. One thing I really appreciated about what you wrote about in the book is this idea of shared governance, not in an academic sort of setting. I'm sorry if that's triggering anyone on the call here. Just the dean. Yeah, exactly. It sort of gives me a little PTSD when I talk about it. But no, this idea that we are sharing the governance within a democratic society, that we don't get to determine necessarily, but that we are sharing how our society is governed. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit through that and help listeners understand what you mean by that. What does it look like to do that sort of shared governing alongside people who don't know Christ, who may not share our same moral frameworks or even moral convictions? Because I would say, you know, just, Brian, your comment of the church hasn't done a great job and maybe we have been detrimental to the gospel in certain points. I think part of it is that we're not particularly good at sharing. And so I'm wondering if one of you would want to talk through that just a little bit. Anybody want to volunteer? I'm happy to take first crack, but also I'd like to hear how Brian and Michael would approach this. I would say there's two different directions that we could come at this from. One would be from sort of the descriptive perspective of the kind of political environments in which we find ourselves, which are democratic in some respect, and therefore they're going to, you know, they need to account for the entirety of the population that's contributing to giving democratic voice. But the other would be kind of normative, and that's where we spend more time in the book, which is just simply the idea of in, and we use an Augustinian framework a lot, right? But one of the language that he uses to talk about the fact of plurality and what are the implications of plurality of people with differing ultimate commitments within a political society. I mean, he really describes politics as a compromise of wills about the things relevant to mortal life, which has this important qualification on sort of what are we going to expect from politics? Well, if you're describing it as a first as a compromise, it's non-protectionist. And then secondly, about the things relevant to mortal life, it's about kind of creational goods of earthly peace, not about kind of ultimate teleological orientation. Those are significant limits, and those are, I'd say, the framework of that sharing, because they're, in a sense, the refusal to share, A, isn't making a compromise and accounting for the volition of those that we share with, and potentially is usurping the role of Christ at the final judgment and sort of saying, well, you know, to borrow Eric Boglin's phrase, you know, we're going to imitize the eschaton. And so I think our vision for sharing is really shaped by both the time in redemptive history that we find ourselves in and by what's possible in the relationship between those who follow Christ and those who don't. So it enables the shared creational context and enables that to be a meaningful sharing, but it also puts parameters on what the Christian vision for it would be. I thought it was interesting, you know, in your chapter in the book on where you're looking at various biblical passages, you ended up talking about, you know, the shared governing aspect, I think, under the rubric of Romans 13, 1 through 7. But as I was reading it and I got to that part, I was like, wow, it really could apply to the conversation that Jesus has with the Pharisees about is it appropriate to pay taxes to Caesar? You know, because here's Caesar, he is not in any way, shape, or form, you know, even Christian friendly for depending on which Caesar you're looking at. And, you know, he's minting his own coins. He's putting his image on those coins. And so Jesus is in that moment tacitly saying, look, we share the world, you know, and so, yeah, it's fine. Pay the taxes, right? There's an interesting interchange there where we're not designed or called to maybe destroy these systems and tear them down, but to be a transforming influence within them. And in that, we tend to share and negotiate our participation without giving up our convictions. So I thought that was really interesting. Anybody else want to talk a little bit about that, that shared governing? I would just echo what you just said and say when Jesus kind of gives that permission while still acknowledging God is our, you know, our first call. He's following a lot of examples we see in the Old Testament. Daniel serves in a foreign government. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Joseph, Esther, Mordecai. I mean, there's been God's people have served in politics, even if the whole system was not oriented towards God. And yeah, I think that there's been three kind of postures. The New Testament doesn't tell us everything we might want to know about politics. Some Christians have said, well, we have the truth about spiritual life and we have the truth about things. So we should be in charge, right? So think about how many centuries the norm was. Well, you know, we're Christians, of course, we should be in charge. And other Christians have said, politics is so worldly and so polluting. We need to withdraw entirely. And this is where some of our more Anabaptist brothers and sisters go. And so we don't think that Christians have done terribly well or have a mandate to be in charge politically. I think if Jesus had wanted to make that clear, I think he would have done so. So if we don't think that's the way, and if we do think that one way to love our neighbor is through politics, it's not the only way or maybe not even the most important way, but it is a way. Then sharing seems to be the right place to be. And then we trust that we want to do that perfectly. That's where our hopefulness comes in. We hope that God, who he's called us to that, will equip us to try and do that well. Standing up for our convictions, like you said, voting, writing, proposing things. We don't impose, we propose. And then, you know, seeing what happens and going back to the drawing board if it doesn't go our way. I think that one of the interesting things that all three of us have experienced as teachers at different Christian colleges is our students, and I think this is probably true of the broader Christian community in general, are oftentimes caught between two impulses. On the one hand, because they know they live in a world, they live in a country even, that is not, you know, governed Christianly, right? Whatever that might mean. But they know lots of people, you know, that they are neighbors with, friends with family members with, are not Christian and don't share their moral convictions. And so they're kind of, they're reluctant to, they're reluctant to, well, they're, they find it hard to think about how to bring those moral convictions into politics without sort of seeming theocratic or seeming sort of, you know, authoritarian or whatnot. Because they're like, ah, you know, and we all get these in papers where the student will say, well, this doesn't seem right that we sort of would sort of impose a kind of a Christian morality on people who don't accept it, right? And so they have that, they have that sense of things. And they also have this other sense of things where they say, but, but we kind of know what's true. And wouldn't you, wouldn't you want to be driven, wouldn't you want to be governed by what is true as opposed to what is false? And I think that kind of tension is, is just, it's just real. It's inherent and it's, you know, it's at some point irresolvable. But part of what we're trying to do in the book is help people think about how to navigate that tension, right? Navigate that, both of those kind of realities in ways that are productive and that are faithful to the gospel, but also are, we think, sort of good for the communities around them that we all inhabit. I'll just, I'll pull in Brian just very briefly and just say, I think that one of, speaking about our students in that kind of framework, I think some of the root of that tension for students from evangelical backgrounds who are thoughtful, engaged with politics, is at some point they're faced with a tension between kind of, am I going to be a good Christian or a good participant in a liberal democracy, a kind of a pluralistic political context? And when faced with that choice, you know, they're sort of, you've got two bad options. I mean, you could say I'm going to be a good Christian, but then impose on people. Or you could say, I'm going to be a good citizen, but I'm going to be unmoored from any moral frameworks. I really do think that, like, our heart is to say, here's the framework.

We think the natural law equips that to not be a dichotomy. I see. I'm wondering, so, so much of this seems like it comes down to making the right distinctions between these different options. So last year, and again, I dealt a lot with Christian nationalism. I sat on this panel with Christian Post Politics in the Pew on their Christian nationalism panel. And one of the things I argued on there is that Christian nationalism, the problem I was having with particular forms of Christian nationalism, is that it tended to merge two entities that should be kept distinct, that the church and the state are established in Scripture as two different things. It's hard to read Romans 13 and say, this should be the church. It really isn't that. And so, you know, why are we trying to merge these two things? They do need to be distinct. And I think as I read through your work, now I'm, you know, I'm kind of understanding, okay, the natural law side actually is distinct. It's connected, but it's distinct from special revelation, right? These are not things that are pulled apart, but just in the same way that my right arm is not my left arm, but they're still part of my one body, right? You can tell the difference. And that difference is actually kind of important. And so I'm wondering, how does the merger of some of these concepts, the bleeding over of some of these concepts, contribute to the problems that you're seeing versus the way you maybe can draw the boundary lines and distinguish between these various areas? Is that helpful? Is that not helpful? Kind of, I know that's a mess of words there, but maybe you can make sense of it. 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. No, I actually think you're getting at something real. So I think the way I would think about it, I don't know how necessarily Jesse and Micah would answer this, would be to say that for a lot of folks, and I think this is one of the reasons that I think Christian nationalism is attractive to a ton of Christians, is they feel like the more moderate, temperate, kind of getting along, sharing in politics has failed. It just failed politically. It's failed practically. So it seems like that was a nice try. We can all get along and be in liberal democracy and it's just going to fail. And the reason I think they think it's failed is they think that the kind of the broad swath of American culture that is not particularly Christian, they're opponents, they would sort of think about it, are basically just kind of making stuff up, right? That they don't really kind of have a real moral framework. And so there's this way in which there's sort of this idea like, well, only Christians kind of have these kind of moral frameworks. And then if we sort of do the kind of like extra Christian or natural thing or just kind of whatever it is, then we're just going to be, I don't know, embracing nihilism or something like that, right? And I think part of what we're trying to do is trying to say, well, no, like, yeah, your neighbors actually believe some things that are true and they might not even realize why they believe the things that are true. And you can have conversations with them on, you know, in ways that don't don't require them to accept Christ and even cooperate with them. And you can actually, but without sort of like collapsing either into kind of, I don't know, nihilism or that's not the only choices. So I think that's that's kind of how I would sort of like parse some of the kind of the stuff that's been sort of in the air for the past, I don't know, 10 years or so. I mean, I tend to resonate with that as I looked at it. One of the things that I saw was that Christian nationalism was coming up. And I would say this about nationalism more generally, is that it tends seems like in democratic society, it tends to arise when the there's a group of people who become disenfranchised with the way of the nation. In other words, as democratic processes work themselves out, as you get more pluralism, as you sort of start to move away from maybe some of the early moorings where everybody had more of a consensus about what morality was, you're starting to see that sort of civic side of this fracture as opposed to the governmental side fracture. But the civic side fractures. So the civilly, we don't get along as well. And then ultimately you're trying to reinstitute that moral order within the civic realm through governmental processes. Now, that might be a little too far afield, but I guess all that to say, I resonate with what you're saying there, Brian. It does seem like that to me is the right story. Micah and Jesse, any any thoughts on that? I just add maybe two things. One is, I mean, hearing how your Moody students responded to a Burgerfeld, and that's not specific to Moody, that would be across the board, makes me think, well, you know, if we as the church haven't raised our own kids to kind of know about this yet, it seems really audacious to think that the solution then is to get the reins of government to do it that way. Like, let's try and get things right in our own. And then the other thing, I think, as Brian mentioned, it's attractive in part because it's a shortcut. And it reminds me a little bit of the crowd that wanted to take Jesus and make him king. Like, hey, you know, Jesus can be king. Boom, we're good. And we understand that the temptation of the shortcut, but we also, if we look, Jesus rejected that, right? He could have done that. And he was tempted in the wilderness with that very same thing and said no. And so I think we should also resist that temptation. It's much harder to do the neighbor to neighbor, family to family, witnessing in our churches, raising our kids in the truth. That's a slow, long, you know, generational project. And the political temptation is a shortcut. And I think the fruits of it have been pretty awful when we've tried to do it. I think that's a great framing. Yeah, Jesse. And I'll, yeah, boy, there's so much, there's so much that we could continue to reflect on here. I'll just say that two things. One is, I think the weakening of the church as an institution has increased the extent to which Christians are tempted to put their confidence in politics. And so part of our orientation is explicitly to the church so that we're not kind of overinvesting in the political and kind of locating our hopes in political realization of of these goals. And as well, the other thing I would just say is, I think, well, caveat, Christian nationalism can be defined a lot of ways. And there's some definitions of Christian nationalism that are so broad that even having this conversation would, you know, just even wanting to think Christianly about politics qualifies. But I'll just say that my disposition, particularly when I'm talking with students about a theological frame for why make some of these distinctions, is, you know, I put it in the song of Simeon when the infant Jesus is brought to the temple and he's a light to enlighten the nations and the glory of his people Israel. This idea that the doors of the covenant community or the worshiping community, which, you know, Israel in the Old Testament, where it's also a political entity, is by the coming of Christ is thrown open to people of every tribe, tongue and nation. Kind of any any effort to then identify the any particular political community with the worshiping community is losing our place in redemptive history and is failing, failing to acknowledge what Christ's incarnation means like politically. Yeah, I agree. So we should qualify the Christian nationalism bit. I was, you know, that is a slippery term. Fair enough. I think we all kind of had the same conception of it. It's this idea that, you know, Christians should take over the government kind of vibe as opposed to Christian participation in government. And I think those are really, you know, there's so much there. You're right that we can unpack. But I love what you said about, you know, these are the things that there's an area here where we need to be participating. There's an area here where we need to be understanding how to navigate these political sort of realms. And.

natural law does really seem like that's the, it's a good path for this. So let me ask this question, because this is something that I think you all will have a unique answer to, and I'm kind of interested in seeing. When the Republican platform in, watch me dive into the most, like, politically, you know, divisive issues here for you guys. Mike, are you ready? Yeah. So, yeah, this one's for Micah. So, it was interesting to watch the Christian response to the change in the Republican platform regarding life in 2024. And as I looked into it further, one of the things that I sort of began to question was, is this a problem of the position now or is it actually a problem of the position then? In other words, if we have a right understanding of natural law, a right understanding of government as restraining evil, I go to, like, Matthew 19 where Jesus is talking about divorce. He's obviously not saying that we're going to legislate the ideal. We're going to hold back the craziness that you all would do if there was no law here. And so, if we just look at it from that angle, it's like maybe this wasn't such a bad deal. Maybe it isn't the compromise that people are framing it as. Maybe this is just the outworking of a shared governing that's appropriate to what the government actually has a scope of authority to do. So, I'm wondering, how do you see natural law working in those situations? Obviously, as Christians, we have convictions about life and those kind of things, but at the same time, when that platform changes, how should we think that through from that perspective of natural law and maybe even just the limits of government overall? All right, am I supposed to go, guys? Yeah, yeah, I think they're giving this one to you. Yeah, so it's a great question, and I think what it invokes is the concept of prudence, which is to say that natural law and Scripture can help us identify the ends towards which we should be striving to achieve, but we also have to read the room, the political room that we're in. So, to give you a historical example, you know, in the 1850s and 60s, Lincoln thought slavery was wrong, was pretty clear he thought it was wrong, and the abolitionists really thought it was wrong. They both agreed on the end that slavery's demise would be a gain for human freedom and for what's right. They very much disagreed on the means. The abolitionists, you know, Lloyd Garrison said, you know, something to the effect of, and forgive the language, but to hell with the Constitution, or it's a deal with the devil. Lincoln felt constrained by the Constitution and had a very different means of trying to achieve the end that he was seeking. Both agreed on the end, but disagreed on the means. And so with the abortion question, it could be, you know, what natural law informed by prudence would tell us is we should be aiming to make progress. If we look at what happened post-Dobbs, many, the pro-life movement was, I think, for so long, just focusing on reversing Roe, that we really weren't ready for the state-by-state retail politics that would be necessary to advocate for life in an effective way. And so we overshot in some of the different states with the legislation, with where it was going to protect, you know, six weeks or whatever it was, or complete bans. And we would have advanced the cause more by being more circumspect and going for a 15-week ban or something like that. So I think the concern about both changing the platform and the appointment of RFK Jr. as Health and Human Services, someone who's been pro-choice advocate up until, you know, late-term abortions, rests more on the judgment that Donald Trump is a purely transactional figure and that when it came to the pro-life movement, he was not in it for his convictions, while we can be grateful for the progress that was made, given he's transactional. The concern then was, well, now that it's no longer as helpful, we now have a very pro-choice party and a somewhat pro-choice party. So I do think you're right that prudence plays a part. There may be cases where we would say, well, we got what we could get here, half a loaf, that's great. We're not going to make the perfect the enemy of the good. But I think in that particular instance, it was fueled by more genuine concern that this figure who had done very good things, we've got to give him his credit for that, but at the end of the day was not with us in terms of the end that we're trying to make progress towards. Good, yeah, that's helpful. If I could just hop on the end of that with another 19th century example, which is just a clarification about the relationship between ends and prudence. I think, and Micah is not fuzzy on this, but I just want to say explicitly what I think is implicit in what you said, is where a natural law approach that incorporates prudence does not mean landing where Douglas was on slavery in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which is morally neutral and deferring to popular sovereignty at all. It is not morally neutral on a creational good that includes the protection of human life. So when we say prudence, it's clear on the moral good, even if the how to get between here and there has a variety of strategies, as Mike was saying. So just to say it, prudence speaks to the process that you're going to walk through, given what's happening within a given situation and culture, not necessarily it does not define the end, Micah, to use your term. It doesn't define that end. The end is recognized as, you know, reality. And that reality has that claim on us. Now, prudence is what path do we take toward reality, given all these other situational factors? That's right. Brian, please. Sorry. Well, and I think just one of the dangers here, this is just a hard, this is one of the things that makes, you know, democratic politics particularly difficult, is that prudence can sometimes eat the ends, right? And just kind of like to identify it as like, you know, democratic politics is a team sport and you're on one team or the other team, right, in terms of kind of just electoral politics. And I think one of the difficult things that a lot of political activists have to sort of manage, and this is true across the political spectrum on a whole range of issues, is to think about how do they advance their goals, their sort of normative, their sort of substantive kind of goals, within the context of a party when the party seems to be going in a direction that's not particularly helpful to them. And they have to kind of make the question, the judgment, like, well, do we stick with this party because it's sort of a little bit better than the other one? And I think this is true of the pro-life movement that has like, you know, they have, they just made the judgment that, like, you know, we, this horse is better than that horse, this horse really isn't going in the direction we want it to go or seems to be drifting off the path. And the danger with that is that, at some point, you know, the horse just keeps carrying you. And you actually lose that end. And I, you know, I think that's sort of the real danger in these kind of things. But there's also no other necessarily way to do that, right? I mean, it's not like you can sort of, like, escape and somehow avoid kind of the messiness of everyday electoral politics. Yeah, and I think it's, I think what I reacted to when I saw the change was a statement, really strong statements from Christian pastors and influencers that would say things like, you know, if the Democrat party is going to be for abortion, I can't vote for that. And now you're in a situation where, you know, that strongest statement, all of a sudden, the Republican party is also for abortion. Now, it's not for abortion in the same way, but it's certainly not preserving that sanctity of life. It's almost, you know, you've gone from agreement to they're now gesturing toward the sanctity of life, right? They're compromising on this to some degree. And so some of the rhetoric prior to that decision is what I found really interesting to think about because, you know, just on the rhetoric, if you can't vote for a party that's going to advocate for, you know, abortion, how can you vote? Right. You sort of run into that. And I guess my thought was, it's a fallacy in the previous understanding of what we're doing here. It wasn't bad to vote. It wasn't bad to be principled in the way you thought through who to vote for, but I think that it was an expression of probably hope and certainty in the durability of these, this party's views that overshot the actual durability of that party's views. And so even the way we talked about that back in the day, the people who did talk about it back in the day, I think they probably weren't coming at it with an appropriate political, a theological theological framework, so to speak. Yeah, they probably, they probably weren't realistic enough. about like, what do these politicians actually believe, right? What are they willing to do? It makes me think of a kind of when...

Just as defending his sort of non-perfectionist definition of what makes a political community a commonwealth in his language, when he's saying, you know, it can never be perfectionist, it's going to be just whatever you can kind of get a body of people to agree on as shared objects of their love. And he says, well, the better the people, you know, the better the objects of love, the better the people, the worse the objects of love, the worse the people. And then just sort of recognizes potential for variation and even change, where you can't bank on better shared loves all the time. Yeah, yeah, I got a lot of Veronica Ogle wrote on, I can't remember the title of her book right now, but I really love the way she dug that out of Augustine. You know, it's some societies are going to make you, are going to be less sick than others, you know, but none of them are going to be in perfect health kind of idea, which I think is a really important thing for us to keep in mind. Yeah. Let me ask one, kind of, we're closing in on an hour. I want to get this in because I just find it interesting. You know, you have this whole post-liberal movement, and there's definitely a post-liberal theological movement. And I'm, you know, I've read some of the stuff on the French Revolution and liberalism from that perspective, and I realized liberalism is kind of like Christian nationalism. Like, what are you talking about? Right. But if we just took it as its basic kernel, you know, giving people the liberty to live as they choose to live, that seems to me, from just a theological perspective, to unwind itself relatively quickly, right? That, you know, you can't, just like you couldn't trust one tyrant over everyone, you can't trust a million tyrants in charge of themselves, right? That kind of idea, right? And so, how do you think about liberalism, the sort of liberalism maybe we have in the United States, and from this hopeful, realistic perspective? What does that look like for you? And, yeah, I'll just leave it there and let you guys comment. We don't have to dig deeper than that. So, I think that we affirm the idea that one of the claims that's oftentimes made in favor of liberalism, which is that human beings are what folks would call autonomous, right? That we ought to be regarded as having kind of a, you know, being sort of self-validating sources of value. Like, we are always our own bosses all the time. And we actually, we reject that. I mean, as a kind of, at a deep philosophical level. In fact, the way I, you know, in my classes, I will oftentimes sort of think about what the serpent is offering to Eve in the garden is kind of autonomy, right? To be like God. And, but that doesn't mean, in fact, but that doesn't mean that human beings don't have what we call in the book agency, right? That, in fact, we have both responsibility and capacities to make choices, to think about sort of how we want to live our lives, think about sort of like, you know, how do we, how do we value God? How do we understand those kinds of things? And so we would sort of think that that, like respecting that agency, respecting sort of, still respecting these kind of individuals without sort of like jumping whole hog into individualism, is something that we, we would find valuable. And it provides a kind of a, along with a kind of a decent suspicion of untrammeled political power, provides kind of the ways in which I think we, we would all consider ourselves kind of within the very broad kind of liberal tradition, right? In the sense of liking constitutionalism, limited government, you know, markets, all that kind of stuff. And, but it's, but it's founded in a different understanding of who human beings are than like some versions of, of liberalism would, would, how they would conceive of it. Really helpful. Jesse or Micah, anything to add there? I'll, I'll just, I'll just chime in. I mean, part of, part of the framework that we use to describe the goods that are in view of natural law is that there are physical, rational, relational, and volitional goods. And I think we see liberalism rightly understood as maintaining the, the volitional part of what human flourishing looks like in the context of not making it preeminent among those other goods and saying, you know, only this one matters, which is what I took you to be saying when you said it, it unwinds fairly fast. Sure, yeah. But I think part, part of what that means is, I think that we see law enabling freedom, both in scripture and in politics, right? So whether you're talking about God's law for the Christian, or you're talking about good political law, good law enables freedom. You know, when I teach constitutional law, I often try to help my students kind of, sometimes we talk about like, how does our faith inform the topic that we're, that we're teaching on? Other times, how does the topic that we're teaching on maybe inform our faith? When I, when I ask students, you know, do you think of kind of the constitution as a burden? I mean, just like this, the set of rules that you have to keep, that you have to live up under, and the answer is like, no, this is what protects us and kind of makes kind of a flourishing polity possible. They probably wouldn't, they wouldn't say polity, but okay. But the reality is, is the way that, the way that I think, you know, contemporary Americans view the constitution is much the way that I think like the psalmist in Psalm 119 views the law of God as the sort of source of, of what makes healthy freedom possible and is worth really committing to and investing in. And so the relationship, I think, at least as we see it between good law and liberty and kind of rightly understood is not one of opposition, but of, of cooperation. In fact, inseparability. Okay. Mike, any thoughts? Amen. It strikes me, Jesse, when you're saying that, Alicia Uaro, I think is how you pronounce her last name. She's written an awful lot on the idea of constraints. And her notion is that constraints, we often view them as limiting. That's the way we think about constraints. And these are bad things and we need to overcome those constraints. But she also sort of looks at it from the other perspective and says, no, constraints actually allow us to do a lot of things. And so, you know, we can't have this conversation without the constraints of the English language. We all have to follow those rules. We all have to play that game. And if we don't play that game, we're not going to have much of a conversation. And that's her idea is that the, that our capacities actually emerge out of these constraints. And so it just strikes me when you're talking about the constitution and law and good law, that what you're doing is you're creating the context, the constraining context, the rules of the game that are going to allow for some level of human flourishing, which I think is actually a really helpful way to put it. Thank you. One of my favorite analogies for this is, I'm borrowing this from an old friend named Glenn Town, but he was a kinesiology professor, but he talked about studies of kids on playgrounds and the level of kinetic activity. And the studies revealed that playgrounds that had fences produced higher levels of kinetic activity and playgrounds that didn't have fences that were just an open field had lower levels. And it was the kind of knowing where the parameters were actually enabled greater levels of activity or freedom. And so kind of good, I think good, good laws make good freedom. Fantastic. Yeah, I like that analogy. Well, let me, let me, we're coming up on an hour, so I wanna I wanna respect your time. I just wanna close with this one question. You know, this is such an interesting topic and I know I kind of hate to boil it down to one thing, but if we could just kind of go around the horn and say, what's the one thing you'd really like your readers to take away from your book to understand about natural law and how to apply that into Christian political participation? Let's do that and then we'll close out the episode. Micah, do you mind if I start with you? I don't mind. It's a good question that makes me wanna ponder it for a bit, but under the constraints of time, I will be free to try and give you something. I guess I would want our fellow evangelicals to see as a false choice between living our convictions into the public square and respecting our non-believing neighbors. That God's creation, the law written in our heart and theirs, gives us a commonality with which we can reason with them, which we can, they can reason with us, and we can both look to advance the earthly good, the things that we all need, clean water, good schools, that sort of thing, but also gives us the opportunity to share who we are and, and why there's actually an internal good that they should also be interested in. And hopefully we're living our lives in such a way as to, as to prompt that interest. Demonstrate that. Great. Thank you, Micah. Jesse, how about you? Yeah. I mean, created order is morally normed and we should, we should study and apply these norms for the flourishing of.

That's what I hope people take away. Cool. Brian? I guess for my part, I would hope that, I mean, one of the things that we, I think we've all come to realize is that within this kind of broad tent of evangelicalism, there are a lot of tribes. There are a lot of sort of different groupings. And I really want us to sort of recognize the ways in which the natural law, as we sort of have framed it, can provide a kind of a bridge among those different groupings and set up conversations. And really this, and our book really is a spur to a kind of a conversation among us to think again about how it is we're going to think about politics, think and act politically. And that we can, we can do better and we should do better. Very good. Well, gentlemen, I appreciate the time. For everybody who's listening, Hopeful Realism, it's available on IVP's website. I'm going to have the link in the show notes, and IVP has given a 20% discount to anybody who wants to order it. So the discount code will be in the show notes. So please click through there. Don't buy it on Amazon, buy it on IVP, get the 20% discount for yourself. But gentlemen, great book, great stuff. Really appreciated your thoughts on this. I think it was fresh. Like I said, I've been kind of researching the intersection of faith and politics for a while now, and you don't run across a lot of natural law stuff outside of Catholic circles. And so we really appreciated this emphasis and appreciated seeing your work. So thank you very much. And just thanks for being on the show. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. Yep. All right, everybody. Well, take care and we will see you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. 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, Bible study, parenting, and more. You know, everybody talks about life after death, but what about life during life? Hey, everybody, Greg Laurie here, and on The Greg Laurie Show, we're tackling life's biggest questions like, Why am I here? What really matters? And what happens when I die? I'll discuss cultural topics with friends and experts and examine the biblical truth behind everyday issues and even share stories about my own personal spiritual journey. Listen now to The Greg Laurie Show on lifeaudio.com or wherever you get your podcasts.