Fathers, Adoption & the Natural Family

In response to this tweet , pastor Andrew Isker wrote when you have been marinated in the post-war liberal democratic moral consensus , the views held universally by reformed Protestants and all the rest of Christendom do look like a dark alchemy . This is , of course , an unstated reference to Eric Kahn's post about adoption , among other things .

But the truly dark spirit that is foreign to all of humanity until very recently is that of universalism over and against particularity . You see this for decades among middle-class conservative evangelicals riddled with unspoken white guilt who will go to great lengths and great expense to promote foreign missions in foreign adoption .

No one is saying any of those things are bad . Of course it is good to support the work of the Church throughout the world and to bring orphans out of dire poverty . What is off about this is the priority for the very far away over against the very real needs .

Nearby , not far from the large , wealthy evangelical church , are communities that have been ravaged by globalism . The entire Midwest is gutted . Factories that paid a good wage gone , replaced by nothing but fentanyl and meth .

While the respectable evangelical crowd watch their IRAs and 401Ks grow fat due to the GDP gains from globalist devastation of our heartland , many people very close by have suffered greatly . People travel the far corners of the world to make one convert while those nearest to us suffer . Who is my neighbor ? The Pharisees once asked Jesus .

Universalism will say all humanity across the globe is our neighbor . But such abstractions allow us to pretend that we are . Quote saving the world without having to get our hands dirty .

A few twenties in the offering plate for missions to Africa absolves the conscience hanged by historically unfathomable wealth , and we can watch our countrymen become further wracked by despair without feeling a thing . The Maga Chud is set upon by thieves and left to die .

Russell Moore and David French pass by on his left , not wanting to associate with such a deplorable man . Owen Strand passes by on his right in a hurry to give his next Jeremiah against cynism . But the new Christian right Dark Alchemist takes the man to the inn and pays to have him cared for .

Everyone wants to save the world , but no one wants to help mom with the dishes . Everyone wants to be lauded for how much they care about foreign missions and foreign adoption , but no one wants to minister to their own people , who are discarded by every respectable person . End quote .

The Kings Hall podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well and win the world .

Wow , when you , yeah , when you read it out loud man , that's a , that's a fireball .

Is this somehow like a racist tweet , or you know , et cetera , et cetera ? And so I think , just from the beginning , I think I'm using language that Paul is using , saying he who does not take care of his own household is worse than an unbeliever .

This would have been a pretty normal way , I think , for the reformers , the Puritans you can think of William Gouge on his instruction and Ephesians 5 on the family . This is a pretty normal way to talk about natural affection for , yes , your biological children , and we'll continue to unpack some of the responses and questions that arise from this .

It was interesting at this time of recording . I checked again . The post has almost 700,000 views , 300 reposts , 833 likes and 400 comments , interesting to note , james White . Dr James White , he claimed you were being ratioed and I kindly pointed out this is actually not a ratio .

Ultimately , yeah , but what do you think ?

I mean you have to scroll down my feet a little bit to find it and it was the adoption tweet . No , I mean , just knowing the character of Pastor Eric Conn , I don't think this was engagement farming . This was just normal Eric rhetoric observing something that's true and just saying it .

This was my modesty tweet that I did get ratioed , by the way , like hard as bad as you can almost get ratioed .

Yeah , we don't want to do the ad-populum thing , but that was also something that was pointed out by somebody else was that's actually ad-populums ? So this is what happens when you're hanging around classical school people , yeah immediately .

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I'm going to tweet about modesty , or I'm going to tweet about feminists , or I'm going to tweet about men leading in the home or women submitting to their husbands , and a lot of what happens is people will assume that you are just trying to drop bombs , that you're just trying to explode things . Sometimes they'll assume you're talking about them .

When a lot of people did that with your tweet , where they're like oh , so you're saying that look at all of my adopted children and I'm clearly unwise and whatever you said . Well , you didn't say that . You said that it can often be unwise , which is absolutely 100% true .

And the thing that happens is that you see that you're talking to people who are like yeah , really got burned because of some of this adoption rhetoric , ended up in some unwise family decisions , really a lot of devastation on our family . They don't see any of that context . They just go oh , it's Eric . Underscore con .

Therefore , he's just trying to farm outrage .

These are not things that , like , I can say publicly hey , let me tell you about this situation . I also thought it was interesting that I had scores of messages text messages , twitter messages , facebook messages , instagram messages of people saying you're absolutely right and this is how it destroyed my family or this is how harmful it was .

Because of all the rhetoric of the 2000s , young wrestlers reform their emphasis . Even today , there's a huge emphasis on adoption . A lot of the people said I would post this publicly , but I don't want to be shamed . It's already hurt our family enough .

So I think it's sort of like it turned into a mob pretty quickly and we'll continue to maybe ask some questions about why that was .

We've seen people in first things and even Desiring God , erlc articles , calling it things like a moral obligation to adopt or a secondary moral obligation to adopt , and really my point here is you can adopt , but the whole emphasis of saying you can is that it's a wisdom issue , and what we can't do as pastors is bind the conscience to something that we don't

have a scriptural warrant for . I think we'll get into this too , but I think what's really interesting about this discussion is that so much of the same people in the same movement are really uncomfortable telling people that you should have children if you're married .

So in the past I had gotten into it with Stephen Outroach , who's written on Twitter , who's written for Desiring God and also the Gospel Coalition , and I had said , based on another conversation , that I think it's not a biblical , it's not a picture of biblical obedience for dinks dual income , no kids to say , hey , we want to be married and we don't want

children , right ? We talked about this in the fertility episode . I don't think that's a viable , obedient biblical position . And Stephen said to me in that case . He said you were wrongfully binding the consciences of Christians right by telling them that they should have children .

And I said , well , in this case I actually have a command , genesis 128 be fruitful , multiply . And this still applies in in the new covenant . Well , and then you fast forward to the adoption issue . Stephen was going back and forth with me about it again and he said no , christians absolutely have to adopt . And I was like well , that's really interesting .

You're willing to take a biblical command and just discard it , but now you're importing a biblical command where we we don't have a Genesis 128 for adoption . You know we don't have a similar passage .

This is one of the key failures of thinking and ethics in our current evangelical world and it's a failure of ethics when it comes to globalism versus particularism . With that , pastor iskher was pointing out in our cold open that we so often we actually Illegitimate , we , we discard the real commands of God by globalizing and generalizing them .

Where we say , yes , we have a command to widows and orphans and we have a command to , when we turn that into a globalist , well , you have this duty to everybody . The whole church has this duty to everybody . You are of no use to anybody .

You have to actually start with who were the people who were morally responsible In sinned when they walked by the man beaten on the side of the road . It was the people who walked by him right and saw and said , eh , not my problem , rather than all of the other people in the town who had no idea that that guy was laying beaten on the side of the road .

They , they weren't in sin . They didn't have a sin of omission by walking by .

But what we so often do in evangelicalism is we Neglect practical teaching on things like how to be a father ahead of his house , who leads his wife and his family well , who provides well , who takes care of his own children first and then works his way on outward in the in the outward ring Sphere of responsibilities .

We don't do a good job of talking about that . Instead , we send our kids to public school To be educated by pagans . We send them off to our daughters , off to colleges to be educated by pagans To become , you know , things that Eric Khan has also tweeted about controversially .

We , we , and then we do so while and then we say a lot of many of us say , oh , we don't , we want our kids to be self-reliant , we're not gonna help them with housing when they're 18 . They're out , they're on their own .

While we continue to send money to compassion international and we continue to send money for foreign missions and again , like Isker said , those things aren't bad . But you got to get the the first things first . You have to get the natural affection that even the pagans understand right first Before you work out like that .

You don't see , like , have you made adoption an idol ? Mm-hmm , which I think actually you know . Dan and I were talking about this . It seems like , dan , this is a case where did you touch the idol ?

Based on people's responses and a lot of times , people who are capable of clear thought were not thinking clearly yeah , there was a lot of emotional responses and outrage . Did you think it was like , was there an idol being touched ?

It can be a moral good , yeah , and it becomes elevated to a status in which you know not to get ahead of us too far , becomes almost like a sacrament of the church or , as Erica has said in private conversation with me , like an indulgence of the church .

And you can tell that this is actually true , because when you start to question it , like Eric did , you just said , hey , maybe adoption isn't wise in every case . It's not actually a yoke that Christians all ought to bear , mm-hmm , where if you have an extra room in your house , you are morally obligated by Jesus Christ himself to adopt a kid from Sudan .

Yeah and people don't have a Category in which to actually question this , this moral good , this adoption , you know , taking care of these foreign orphans . In saying , well , maybe there's a category in which it wouldn't be wise for somebody to adopt .

It's so baked into the foundations of their presuppositions that people ought to adopt that , you know , when somebody says something about it , when they poke that idea , there's absolute Explosion . Yeah , in fact , there were multiple cases in which Eric himself was referred to as a heretic .

Yeah , because of the denial of Universal and absolute Moral obligation to adopt foreign children from foreign countries .

They're better than black children from Sudan , or something Like that , which is not what . In fact , if someone in Sudan had been reading your tweet , the correct response for them would have been I shouldn't . If I'm going to adopt , I shouldn't be looking in Atlanta , georgia .

I should be looking and seeing is there anybody in next door to me that I can First bring into my ? You know that . That's the principle . It applies locally to everybody . It didn't . There was no that . There was no like Kinnism or . And yet people were . They , they were , they were ascribing some things to you .

There was another pastor named DJ Jenkins who said that you were quote absolutely depraved .

Yeah , and Brian , you were teaching Sunday I think was this last Sunday morning Sunday school and Westminster Confession chapter 20 .

So one of the key things here is , as we've said , is we want to be really careful . Forcing a command of a man on people when scripture doesn't warrant that , okay .

So that's part of it , but the other part of this is it means that you can't have emotional reasoning when you're going through stuff Like maybe you adopted , maybe it went well and maybe it's really important in near your heart , yeah , but I think this is especially true with women .

When they get really attached to something , any subject , when and I mean women and also women of both sexes yeah that they just it's like , they're just kind of like , say , anybody who even questioned what I did , or take it personally like I was . You know , dan said I was personally questioning them .

It seems like , though , this is where pastors ought to be stepping in , rather than doing what a lot of pastors did , as , as Dan just read , you have to help your people think through this right and then provide guardrails .

While I've adopted three , I've you know our families had three foreign adoptions . We're so thankful for these children . They are our own . Eric , stop saying they're not , which is not what you're saying . Once you adopt a child , it that child is your own ? Yes , and you have an obligation to provide for them .

They're a member of your household , of course , obviously . Only an idiot would say otherwise . Right , and Eric's not .

They read you in the least charitable possible light and what they end up doing is if that person's standard became the past , the way to pastor anybody through the question of adoption , lots of families would make radically unwise choices because think about this when you're adopting .

Even people who have done it before will give you like Lexie and I looked into fostering at one point , young children in our home . It was closer to this period that many of us went through where where adoption was Really being pushed as like the gospel issue of the time and we had been looking into fostering .

So we began to ask some people from who had done it , who had fostered , adopted , done local and foreign adoptions , babies and other you know ages , and the advice we got over and over from many of these families was many of them said don't do it in your current stage of life .

I'm very thankful for that and Almost , I think , universally , every single one of them said if you do , here are some things that you must think through . Don't adopt out of age order . So if you're adopting and you have , if you're a youngest kid is for you should only adopt children under four , so that there's really natural up birth order .

Yes , age , birth order . You're not introducing a 12 year old all of a sudden . They gave a lot of you know .

Here's some issues that we ran into some discipline issues , some and , and and I'm thankful that we actually didn't at that time I don't think it would have been wise for our family and I think it might have caused big problems with our own children in hindering us from doing a good job with our own children at that stage of life .

So if you universalize this command and say , or even get all outraged and act like any questioning of it or any urge to caution or any urge to wisdom is inherently heretic , gospel denying , you know , twitter , engagement , farming , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah . It's like well , no , but have you , ladies , pastored families ?

Have you talked to families who have had their entire families blown up through adoption ? Have you dealt with that pastorally ? And the answer is no , they haven't .

And again , and maybe you can speak to this , some of the examples of people you've spoken with , some of where this came out of , I think , would be helpful for people to understand without and this is difficult because the other and I'm gonna actually let you talk but the other thing that happens is that all of the good and glorious and God glorifying , like ,

yes , we're thankful for all these successful adoptions , that they are a picture of the gospel , praise the Lord , all of that . But do you think that people are going on Twitter and posting when they have an adoption horror story ? Do you think that that's getting the same amount of press ? It was all DMs . No , no , no , no , no .

No one is gonna go , because they value those relationships and hope for the renewal of them , even when there's been total breakdown of the family and the adopted child's curse the family's name and disown them and said I want nothing to do with . You're not gonna go on Twitter and be like well , this is what happened everybody .

So of course you're not gonna hear those stories that we hear . So , eric , I think it'd be helpful if you could speak to that a little bit .

My parents decided to adopt three girls who were in foster care . My parents separated seven years later and are now divorced . Obviously , I wouldn't say it's my sister's fault , but there's no doubt in my mind that bringing them into our home caused strife and division with my parents . My mom always said they brought a spirit of deception into our home .

We love them , but our family is in ruins today and I don't believe it would be had we never adopted . I mean , you can see what happens . I've heard a lot of people say like , okay , we brought these kids into our home and it was like having a boys or girls home and it's really wasn't healthy to expose my other children to that .

Somebody who was in this kind of young , restless and reform movement I was talking to recently pastor poor , you're kind of in a movement in the SBC where it's like be poor because that's righteous , more righteous right Poverty theology .

So he told me he was like here we were , we're like poor , but Russ Moore is like you need to adopt , you need to adopt , you need to adopt . We adopt a child through foster . They say , yep , it's , you know , he's healthy , everything else .

Two , three years old they start to realize he's got some major mental retardation , severe autism type stuff going on , very costly and expensive to take care of . They were not prepared for that . It greatly disrupted , you know , with having biological children and having to spend so much time caring for this child , who is now late teens .

And I was talking to the dad and he said this child will live with me forever . And he said I believe in God's providence , god's sovereign . But he said I genuinely believe the rhetoric coming out of the pulpit about adoption is extremely harmful and basically because it was like , gospel is adoption .

So therefore , natural , imperative outflow of the gospel is you must adopt .

And then many of those families without anybody , or very few people , telling them any kind of like whoa there , hey , let's think this through , let's make sure that you're prepared for this , let you know . It's like no , it's the gospel picture .

Like you gotta do it , like let's , yeah , let's fundraise , let's raise the 20 or 40 or $60,000 and let's make this happen . And it's like this rush of external display that then goes through and again , the only ones you'll hear about are the ones that were successful .

You won't hear about the ones where it was like wow , that actually really damaged our family , harmed our kids and harmed our ability to be faithful to the duties we had before the Lord .

Not knowing how much delinquency it was in the past of the boy child can become so egregious and people in those situations that I've had conversations with they said like we were not told , we were just said like adopt gospel , adopt the other one . That is probably the most egregious one . Russia has since banned adoptions .

Yeah , they've banned foreign adoptions , and this is maybe one reason why A church situation that I was I knew of was a girl who was adopted from Russia into a Christian family . She had been abused as a child comes over , father ends up going to jail because daughter is performing sexual acts on father . You know adoptive father .

So these are examples of , I think , just extremes that , like when you go to the ERLC website , they're not talking about this one , they're not talking about what could go wrong , and then maybe one that's not as severe .

But speaking to some friends recently who , years of miscarriage and fertility , finally were able to have a child and all the adoption posting was going on and the dad said to me he said thank you so much for what you said . I was like what , why would that matter to you ? And he said well , when we were in fertile people were like you must adopt .

It's like heavy pressure , yeah , like heavy pressure , like you have to do this . And he said that really meant a lot that you would take the shot and just kind of defend us , give the warning . I didn't even realize it was doing , but I think a lot of this . This is why it's an important wisdom issue that you have to think through this and not just .

I think it's actually irresponsible .

Absolutely , avoiding the ditches did their homework , did this well , very thankful for those children , very thankful for those families , and it absolutely is one expression of how we obey James 127 and other passages about caring for widows and orphans Absolutely , and we're thankful for those families that have successfully done that . We're not throwing shade on them .

I actually think those families who have been through the reality of the process and also know you and know like , would say no , that's a warning that people absolutely need to take seriously . Like , don't do the Owen Stran performative . God loves adoption , looking after orphans in their affliction . Woe to those who speak against what God loves .

What the implication of that to you , especially if you read what you actually said and not what people emotionally , not what people felt in their emotions when they read what you said , which is a different thing . Anybody who reads that . The implication is pretty clear .

Anybody who doesn't adopt is , or anybody who disagrees or urges any caution whatsoever in wisdom taking and thinking through this process for a family . Woe to them . They're speaking against what God loves , like what ? That's actually a pretty serious plan . Are you kidding me ? This is another thing you think .

Here's what I love about this tweet is that , first of all , it is a common issue with this G3 Christian nationalism divide here , where the what I would say is trending in an Anabaptist direction theologically is that they don't understand categorically what you're talking about when you just use classic , reformed doctrinal categories like natural affection or the order of

loves , and those are all clearly biblical doctrines that theologians have been un what's the word ? uncontroversially using for hundreds of years .

And then they pour into it , like Owen is implying there , that you're saying that Christ's atoning blood is not enough to unite Jew and Gentile and that you're saying that somehow this duty to love your own , which is a direct biblical commandment , is you saying , and don't you love those other skinned people ?

I wouldn't be speaking so strongly if Owen hadn't given example after example after example after example after example of this kind of honestly cowardly and sinful treatment of his interlocutors . Like the implication don't miss this people , don't just be like , oh yeah , classic Christian nationalism . Tweet debate . He's saying that Eric is a Christ denying racist .

That's the implication , which is slanderous in the extreme .

They treat foreign missions the same way , and the reason I would say this is like a sacrament or an indulgence is because , automatically , in these sorts of camps , if you adopt or if you're in foreign missions , you are actually in a different class of Christianity . You are set apart . Because of this emotional reasoning . It's like a higher caste system .

Yes , absolutely , it is a higher caste system .

It was very helpful on this conversation was the person who said a lot of older people and even a lot of younger people today didn't live through the period that , if you're about between the age of 28 and 40 , you lived this period of the 2000s where the dominant narrative was being ruled by David Platt radical , desiring God at its most , I would say proto-woke

, which I'm not saying . Desiring God is everything they've ever done as woke or worth . I'm not saying that .

So yeah , Dan , I think it'd be helpful to read this tweet .

That was actually one of them .

We were all in this era , at a formative time , when you're not the teacher , you're saying I'm here to be taught like , okay , Christian leaders , thought leaders , public theologians , help us to become godly pastors and ministry-aspiring men .

Or there were so many packaging put on it and it has implications for so many areas of life that we're all still kind of detoxing from . But , as controversial as it is , I understand why adoption narratives were a big part of how this pack , this radical plat kind of gospel , got out there . It was a huge constituent part of that messaging .

They were going to like a gospel center church and they said , oh no , we knew people like many couples who got married and they said like one couple in particular they were telling me about was they both got sterilized , permanently sterilized , and they said there's too many orphans in the world .

We're going to reject children from our own loins and we are going to start pursuing adoption . So there's a lot of said cases . It's interesting . Another friend from the South told me he goes oh yeah , you're going to like any SBC or Fundy Baptist Church and like it's pretty normal for like every family to have like one or two black kids .

It just became the thing to do . It's also interesting to me because there wasn't all of this but a lot of dishonest engagement about James 1.27 . So people were claiming that I was denying James 1.27 . What's interesting about this to me is when you look at how the history of the church and how we've treated orphans and widows .

Correct me if I'm wrong , brian , but there is a command to care for orphans and widows , but that doesn't necessarily mean you have to adopt all orphans or marry all widows .

Local churches ruled by elders giving wise counsel , overseeing the process , are going to go to 1 Timothy 5 , and they're going to say what kind of widow is this ? Does she have a relative ? Is she a pious , older , godly Christian woman who is too old for remarriage and should be enrolled in the care of the church ?

And if so , then yes , we're going to ensure that she's . Is she a younger Christian woman who should be urged to marry so that she doesn't become a gossip and she doesn't go from house to house ? And well then , I'm going to urge her not to be enrolled but to be remarried . Okay , what kind of orphans are we talking about here ?

Is it a 14 year old , unruly child who didn't have a father and he's not a Christian in any sense ?

Okay , that's a different kind of duty than the Christians who were going out and they were saying the Romans are leaving these girl babies or these children to be exposed and die , and they picked that infant up and they bring it home , and Christians were both reviled and renowned in the ancient world for this kind of behavior .

What it didn't mean , though , is that any orphan , all of a sudden , the local church had that immoral obligation to adopt them fully into the family .

Christians , throughout the ages , have wisely ordered how they care for , and one of the wise things that they've done is that , in many cases where there are older children who would genuinely again I know this sounds controversial , but older children for whom it would be very unwise for your other children , for many families to bring them in as their own , be very

unwise for the culture and the discipleship of the other children in the family that you have a direct duty to . Christians would often start orphanages , george Mueller .

They would start boys' homes , girls' homes , keeping them separate the boys from the girls , knowing the egregious sexual abuse and sexual issues that arise in some of these , because you have 12 , 13 fatherless boys who have not been discipled whatsoever , going through puberty , and then , all of a sudden , some families have adopted children like this , and they've ended

up having to run a lockdown in their home , where one wing of the house is where the girls go and it's got a different key , and at night it's like there's a full lockdown system to keep them safe from the adopted sibling Guys . That's not made up . That happens right .

So you have to take a command like this particularize it , let it be governed by the local church in their local area , and be very careful in the way you talk about it that you don't heat burdens on people that might lead them to make an unwise decision for their family .

Give them wise ways of loving the widow and the orphan that are consistent with the biblical ordering of loves , consistent with biblical wisdom .

And what was so criminal about the way people are reacting to this is they were making it act like , when you were saying the order of loves being properly worked out from the middle , that you were saying that all of those people who have adopted , all the white families that have adopted black children are unwise and that they're not really their own .

They imported all of that . They brought that with them to your tweet . You didn't say any of that .

Paul causes riot at Ephesus because he's denouncing idol worship , but the problem is that the silversmiths are making a lot of money off of this and we're told I think 50,000 pieces of silver was the amount of the books that they burned . This is like you guys are haunted cosmos , so this is like witchcraft .

The reason I started looking at this was because one of our listeners and somebody who follows on Twitter , said well , you know , a lot of these conferences are sponsored by adoption agencies , these mega conferences that people are having . So I haven't tracked that down yet , but that was worth noting . So I did look this up , though .

In 2022 , it was reported that the adoption industry and that's what it is , the adoption industry was worth something like $24 billion in a single year . One of the things we need to be aware of is that this is you know , we were told in journalism like follow the money . There's definitely money involved in the financial equation .

Think about if you're an adoption agency and you have all these pastors who maybe you're donating to their charity . You have all these pastors who are promoting your message , which brings in more clients . Think about this is the other thing I think people don't realize . They're pointing to Christians in the Roman era adopting children .

I'm guessing they weren't paying $70,000 to do a domestic adoption . They were probably just taking the children and not paying anything .

They come in and they make a living on it , they monetize and basically , at adoption , what happens is that you take something where you're actually monetizing people's virtue and you're doing it in a way that can functionally end up being like human trafficking , where foreign countries do this all the time .

They take advantage of a wealthy American philanthropy by they basically sell children . It's absolutely wicked .

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Well , we've read the articles about the homosexual men who are adopting children and then abusing them , putting this stuff online for people's consumption pornographic , otherwise absolutely wicked , absolutely wicked and criminal . I think you also have to acknowledge that reality , that I'm not saying everyone in the industry is bad , absolutely not .

Often it's in government regulation and dealing with foreign governments . You just have to realize that people , wicked men , will actually take your Christian virtue and they will try to take advantage of it , like monetize it In order to monetize it .

And so I think , if we're winding towards kind of a landing place for this episode , the question , I think , that's last for us to discuss , that would be really important and connecting it to our season , like it's not random that we're doing this here in a season on fatherhood .

We're not just doing this because , oh , this is a big tweet that's happening to be controversial now is that fathers , men , need to think very carefully about how they protect their homes from emotionalist thinking , people who will prey on their wives' emotions , because people will prey on your wife's emotions in order to try and convince you to do something without

thinking it through clearly , without seeking godly counsel . So how should a father be thinking ? Let's split this into two categories , maybe even three categories , and the one would be how should a father , considering that they've been thinking about adoption . What should they be thinking through ?

Second would be okay , you've adopted children and that's your situation as a father . What are some things that you should be thinking through to make sure that you do a good job ? These are now your children . And then also , I think maybe the third category would be what should ?

What would we say that people should be who were offended by your tweet Because some of our listeners I even saw some people say you know , I'm usually with Eric , but I think he went too far here . I think any last words on that this is probably too big of a question . This is why you're usually the one who's leading it .

I think in like complex three-part questions and you just like say so , dan , what do you think about this ?

One of the ones that didn't do that the handle is patriarchy , Hannah , and she responded and she said okay , I've trusted a lot of what you said . I'm having a hard time digesting . We've adopted walk me through this . She said where are people saying moral obligation ?

And I shared an article from Russ Moore and I shared an article , I think , from First Things where they literally said moral obligation to adopt . And then we talked about it and she said wow , I did not know that . Thank you , I'm gonna talk with my husband about this and then I think I'll end up actually doing some podcasting with them .

But I think that is the better way for women to say and this is a woman you can I don't know who it is , but generally it's like okay , you can tell that her husband has a firm leadership role in the home Right respects .

But I said this is a guy that I trust I've gotten counsel from , so I'm just gonna go ask him , without importing all the false narratives what did you mean ? And here's some of my questions . And then afterward it usually always went well . So I would say be that kind of particularly be that kind of lady Husbands .

If you're leading your wives through stuff like this , you always have to guard , help her think through . Like , especially with social media and things online , we live in an age that is outrage farming and so people are easily . What I would say is , just like Brian said before about anger it's easy to manipulate . Your outrage is easy to manipulate .

Oh , I saw this story about dead babies in Israel . Like let's launch the nukes and then maybe a wise father would say well , let's wait and see if that's actually true .

I said a single sentence instead of multiple sentences , but that you've been told it's a moral obligation to adopt and instead you should apply wisdom . I mean , that's really all that you said .

A lot of people stop following him , and then his disciples will come to him and they'll be like what did you mean by that ? And he'll explain and they'll grow deeper in faith . But it seems like there's at least a place for you know , like people were saying , like , well , why didn't you provide every exception ? Why didn't you provide every nuance ?

You could have nuanced this more .

Like there's a couple that now Lexi's been tweeting again recently and they're just like nagging her in the comments too , like babe , block them . But for those serious 5% that are like no , no , I respect you , I'm hearing you out . I haven't just decided that you're an idiot a year ago and I'm just gonna rage tweet back at whatever .

I'm gonna be a rage reply guy or reply gal to your tweets all the time . To those people I would say , yeah , totally . I understand why , like any of the tweets that have been controversial from any of us , will often have some serious people saying I don't like the way you said that . And to those people I would say that's fine .

I'm not telling you how you have to communicate every truth , but as somebody who does communicate truth into culture and to real people all day long , every day for years , you have to reckon with the reality that sometimes saying things in a way that's intentionally going to unsettle the reader or listener is actually a rhetorically effective and wise move .

Because when you're dealing with your countering narratives that are deeply ingrained in a culture like the one about it clearly the one about adoption in order to get a hearing at all , sometimes you have to really unsettle people to get them to question their foundational thinking on an issue at all .

Sometimes you really have to shake their foundations and say no , no , no . But think like the modesty tweets , a good example . And I said don't , ladies shouldn't be posting immodest pictures , even to show their newborn baby .

And that was because I had seen a lot of Christian women online that I thought were otherwise like godly and respectable women , all of a sudden posting here's my baby on my breast , with 80% of my breast exposed . But it's okay , because I'm in a hospital room or I'm in a home birth center or I'm in my home and I just had a baby .

And I said that , knowing that a lot of people would be like how dare you sexualize this intimate motherly moment ? I was like , well , no , no , no , no .

So you have to , like , get them to actually stop and think about the thing you're talking about .

And I would just say , especially for the ladies who are upset , who do or who aren't unreasonable beyond , who are like no matter what we say , they're gonna hate , I would just say like , okay , think about why you respect Pastor Khan , and a lot of it's gonna come back to him saying hard things bluntly about situations other people aren't .

And then I would say , give them the benefit of the doubt when it strikes you . As you know , wow , and know this that , like the all the regularly in this room or in this church , we're fallible men . We have brothers and pastors around .

There are absolutely times when we've said to one another dude , you were off on that , You're just wrong , you shouldn't have said that . So there are also checks and balances here , where if Dan and I had genuinely been like Eric , was out to lunch on this , he is wrong . Take it out , we would have said it .

So there would not have been the outrage around this tweet if there weren't a certain group of men , the G3 guys in particular that had drawn attention to it , and I think this was definitely a strategy , because I think Is it really G3 ?

And so you have men and I hope you haven't heard of most of these guys because they're rarely not worth following , but if you have , like Anthony Bradley or Virgil Walker , owen Strand , phil Johnson , greg Thornberg , scott Anial , josh Buiz , josh Buiz all of these guys responded to Eric's tweet , and the reason why , I think , is actually because they're coordinating

efforts in order to gain ground and to see a movement that is possibly growing , but there's a bigger issue going on . So I think that's a strategy or a tactic that they might be using , and I say that because they all dog piled under this one tweet .

So it's a false witness who breathes out lies and one who sews discord among brothers . I think , ultimately , what you see is a sin that's being cultivated , like Levin , within a lump of dough in this G3 leadership is a sin of false witness in order to sow discord for their own purposes . Yeah , owen .

That essentially says hey , people said that you were morally obligated to adopt and that it's something that you needed to do and it might not be wise . And all of a sudden he's got this- .

Dan , if you could pretend like you're arguing for some ridiculous position , like let's say that Dan is arguing that Christians should desire for their politicians to bend the knee to Christ , some ridiculous position like that . And then I said , as an opponent of your view , you were like Psalm two .

No , but you know , brian , it says in Psalm two all these things . Maybe we should consider these pastors . If I said that really sounds like something a serial killer would say yeah , therefore I win . And it's very , it's hard to see .

I just it's step one , I'm just saying the other person is guilty of an insanely bad sin , and then step two , you win the argument .

Yeah , it's what Russ Moore did for years , it's what Tabidi did for years , it's what you know , beth Moore , all these people have done for years , and so I think , if you're following any of the debate hopefully you're not , hopefully you're like I have a peaceful life because I don't look at that trash here's one thing to consider .

Joe Rigney said this in the interview . This will be coming out for listeners in coming weeks , so look forward to that .

We did get into the Christian nationalism G3 thing and Joe said I would say this about our Anabaptist brothers when you are continually strawmaning people , eventually people will go back and see that that's not what they said , and then you are gonna lose all credibility . You'll lose credibility .

That's not what he said . They'll eventually see through it and you'll lose credibility . It's like .

This is why I don't worry when a lot of people hate something that comes out of Ogden , as long as we've sat down and thought , let's have the high ground in the sense that we really are convinced of what we said was true and timely and helpful , which we try to do .

That , obviously , If 80% of the world reacts negatively to it and tone police and all of that , I just say we're playing . The long game Must actually be an issue .

In 20 to 50 years we'll see who was right about these principles and I'm willing to say we'll stack the fruit up , We'll let our fruit do the talking at the end of the day and they can let their fruit talking and I hope the Lord bears good fruit and all these brothers who hate all of us . I hope , because I think it would mean repentance .

But I mean , let's let the fruit do the talking at the end of the day and we'll see how it comes out . People will say , like , what's up ? The fruit do the talking . Oh , they're anti-adoption . Well , no , here's some families in our churches that were very much behind who adopted , doing a good job . Love those kids .

Next , oh , they're racist and they hate all people of . Yeah , okay , well , here here , look , why don't you ask any of the people in our church who are not ? They don't look Nordic If we regularly put on white hoods and burn crosses in their driveways . Well , no , they don't .

It's just , it's so much of it is so silly that we just chuckle and we chuckle , we move on and we record hour long podcast responses .

I'll be on with Joel Webin later today , for right response ministry is talking about the issue Joel , by the way , has adopted and Joel said I'm adopted and I agree with your tweet . I actually adopted , joel . I actually was gonna beat you to it .

From what I understand , if you've heard of Mariah Carey Christmas albums , this is 100% not like that .

A professional harmonica player came in and played some harmonica on one of them . Was that you ? It was me , so professional I saw the professional .

32nd ?

Find out on this week's episode of Haunted Cosmos Dude you did that without notes , no notes , do-do-do-do-do-do-do . Well , here's why because we sat down and recorded . These are two hour episodes . Ben and I sat down and recorded Deat Love Pass . We got an hour and 35 minutes in and then we're like , hey , let's pause .

Gotta go to the bathroom , reach down to pause the recording . Realize we hadn't . You can't pause the recording , you haven't started .