JON HARRIS | Hit By the Woke Train: Social Justice and the Christian Church

My name is Will Spencer and you're listening to one of the last episodes of the Renaissance of Men podcast. The shift is coming up quick. I have an official release date and I'm thrilled to share with you the results at last. My guest this week is the director of the documentary film the 1607 project and the host of the Conversations that Matter podcast. Please welcome John Harris. You are the Renaissance.

I gotta tell you guys, it has been a trip watching the american evangelical church wake up to Wokeness. Because before becoming a Christian, I'd been living in wokeness for decades. Even as far back as my senior year in high school, my classmates and I were joking that there was no way a white guy from Phoenix would get into Stanford, which is one of the reasons it surprised me most of all when I did my freshman year.

Everyone then began separating themselves into their various ethnic groups, which is how I ended up as the social chair of the Jewish Students Association. I had never thought much about my family's religion, but everyone had to identify with something, right? I didn't want to be left out. As many of you know, I also lived in Stanford's african american theme dorm, ujima, for two years.

The african american, asian american, native american, and latino american theme dorms were all a product of the same critical racial consciousness we see around us everywhere today, being beta tested on a university campus in the nineties. Fast forward to 2013 and thats when I heard a man say check your privilege for the first time in a mens group of all places. The words felt like a whip crack. I had no idea what they meant, just that they were supposed to hurt me somehow. They didnt.

But they did stick with me as a moment when a man was attempting to use a very specific linguistic device to control me. It wasn't about the meaning of the words, but the feeling they were supposed to impart. He clearly expected my response to be an apology, perhaps because he'd tried that strategy before with success. And I believe that around that time is when what we call wokeness fully began to enter public consciousness, though no one called it that.

All of this is also what I had to deprogram myself from while traveling overseas. Nothing will scourge feminist beliefs from you faster than traveling to a latin american nation like Colombia, where traditional sex roles between men and women are as fundamental as gravity and just as widespread, not to mention celebrated on salsa dance floors.

So I've been living and breathing wokeness for almost 30 years, which is again why it's been such an awakening to me to realize that christians, by and large, didn't really begin identifying it formally until 2020, when Covid happened. How could a faith that is so clear about the nature of men and women, guilt and shame, sin, salvation, justice, mercy, grace, confession, and redemption, fall prey to such an obviously counterfeit version of those transcendent principles?

Many are trying to unpack that fall even today. But for those who have been in the church for a long time, there have certainly been signs. Which brings me to my guest this week. His name is John Harris, and you may know him best from the conversations that matter podcast, where he hosts daily livestreams and interviews with christian leaders, influencers, and newsmakers about the headlines of the day.

But what I didn't know is that John is also a documentary filmmaker, having recently produced the excellent 1607 project, which is about the clash of collectivist and individualist principles during the american founding. These manifested as cultural divisions between the north and south and crystallized in the unique culture of the state of Virginia, which existed long before the arrival of slaves in 1619. So think of the 1607 project as a very needed christian rebuttal to the 1619 project.

John is also an author, having penned two books on the influence of social justice on the christian church. These followed his experience in seminary, where he witnessed the slide of wokeness firsthand, his testimony of which literally catapulted him into the public eye.

Put all of this together, and it becomes clear why John is the influential voice he is having amassed almost 50,000 subscribers on YouTube alone, which is no small feat, especially for a podcast that describes itself exclusively with three small christian traditional, masculine a much needed voice. Which is why I'm grateful to have had John on the show.

In our conversation, he and I discussed the origins of conversations that matter, how he caught wokeness infiltrating his seminary, how social justice spread through the church, why architecture wont give you orthodoxy revealing the fall of christendom, why feminism is the church, and finally getting the baby boomers to let go. If you enjoy this podcast, thank you. Please leave us a five star rating on Spotify and a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

If this is your first time here, welcome. I release new episodes about the christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family every week. Just a quick note, this podcast is available for advertising and sponsorship, so if you're an advertiser with a high integrity product or service looking to reach thousands of christian men, women, and families every month, please email infoenofmen.com for more information.

I'm thrilled at this podcast growth year over year and to find that people are listening literally around the world. And with the rebrand coming up, plans are in motion to expand the show's reach dramatically without compromising the quality that makes the show unique in the podcasting world. And to my listeners, I'm honored by your time and attention. Thank you so much.

You're also going to start hearing more ads on the show, so if you, like me, prefer an ad free experience, check out my substack at will spencerpod dot substack.com and become a paid subscriber to to enjoy advertising free content in both audio and video every week. And please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, the director of the 1607 project documentary and the host of conversations that matter, John Harris. John, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. I do appreciate it.

I'm looking forward to it. I've really been enjoying a lot of the stuff you've been putting out. I watched the 1609 documentary, and of course, you had me on your show a while back, and that's been really great to get to know your show after that point. And so I've been just looking forward to this conversation to find out more about your story and some of the things you've got going on. So thanks for jumping on. Yeah, thanks, Will. Yeah, I've appreciated you.

I mean, I haven't known about your work for, I guess, that long. I think the first time I talked to you was when we did our interview, which was maybe a year ago now. Was it? Was it? Was it really a year ago? No, it wasn't that long. Yeah. Okay. So six months, whatever it was. And you are really knowledgeable on some of these things that I'm not as knowledgeable on some of these cults, and just there's a lot of, in my area, especially a lot of spiritism and stuff.

And I just felt you were such a good resource, and I appreciate your humility and your love for the Lord. And so I'm looking forward to talking about, I guess, what I got going on. Yes. Well, I first heard about your show because you had my friend David Edgington on, and so that was really cool.

I've just found my way into the reform world, and I found that there are people that have been exploring these topics for such a long time, and it's been such a wealth of information for me to dive into your channel and see the things that you've been talking about for a number of years and to have learned so much because I'm trying to figure out the reform world kind of is where it is today and how did it get here?

And so there's a lot happening now politically, there's a lot happening socially, and you've been tracking it for a long time. So that's been like, oh, okay. These are the steps that have been taken along the way. So I guess my first question would be, just for my own edification, what led you to start conversations that matter? What was the inspiration behind it? And kind of what has been the growth path that you've been on since you started the channel or the podcast?

Yeah. Personal growth, I'm guessing. Yeah. Or the growth of the. The numbers and everything. So I did start it in early 20 January of 2019. And the reason I started the podcast was because I needed an outlet. And I was in grad school at the time. I had been, at certain times in my life, writing blogs here or there. And for me, writing blogs was more of a process that I underwent to understand something.

I don't know if you have that, but I don't always understand or grasp something by reading something, including in scripture. I don't always understand directly by reading a passage. But as I mull it over and I try to figure out what those words mean practically, I gain a greater understanding. And that's how my mind works.

And so I didn't have time in grad school to write blogs anymore because I was writing all these term papers and things, and I thought, there's a lot of things I want to talk about, things in politics, especially things socially, that I can't really talk about it anywhere else. So why don't I just start a podcast? That'll save me time. Talking is easier than writing, and I can have a library of my thoughts on these things.

And it was, I assumed, going to be more private because my blog didn't get a lot of hits. I think there was a few posts I made that might have gone semi viral, but to me, if I got 100 and people going to the webpage, I thought that was great, you know, so if I had a thousand, that was really big. Well, what happened was I did a podcast on my seminary experience, especially related to wokeness, social justice. I didn't know those terms and how they related quite at that point.

I knew social justice was part of it, I suppose, but I didn't realize the full extent of what I had just underwent. I knew when I was there that it seemed marxist to me at some point level, but I just thought that the seminary was being disingenuous with students who would go there thinking southeastern.

Where I went was the great missions school, when in reality, when they get there, a lot of what they're going to be hearing in chapel, reading on the seminary blog at the time, even in some of the classes, is going to be focused on political or social activism. And I felt that people needed to know about this, and I thought that I had gone through the right channels while at the school to try to address those things and didn't really get anywhere.

After some talking with some wiser men, I decided that this was the right thing to do. I put out an hour and a half podcast of me just relaying my experience, and it went semi viral, and it got picked up all around the Southern Baptist convention. Within, I think, two days, I was at the g three conference, which I had not planned to go to at all. But there was a filmmaker there who was doing a documentary called enemies within the church, and he called me up, wanted me to come.

So I went, and I was filmed for an interview with them. And then they said, would you mind going to different events across the country to promote this film? I said, sure, if my story helps. And so I started going across the country with them and supporting the film. And, of course, that made more connections.

And I started talking more on my podcast about social justice, which it's funny, because I think the podcast before social justice was on hiking, you know, so it was supposed to be a very broad podcast about things I was interested in. And it became focused singularly on social justice and Christianity for about at least the next two or three years.

And then 2020 happened, and I had already been talking about this issue, and there was a dearth of people talking about it from a christian understanding and especially exposing where it had made inroads in Christianity. And so my podcast gained a lot of traction at that point. I wrote a book that year I actually changed.

I was going to write about the dutch history of New York, especially as the Dutch interacted with the Puritans, because a lot of people don't know this, but the Dutch didn't really care for the Puritans at first, and I wanted to write about that history, but I decided to change that all around and do one a thesis on social justice and Christianity in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. And that became eventually, I added some more things to it.

But my book, social justice goes to church, and I wrote the next year, I came out with Christianity and social justice, religions and conflict, two books on social justice and Christianity. And so that kind of pigeonholed me into like, this is what I do, this is what I talk about. These are the kinds of things that you'll hear if you come to see me at an event and I had churches reaching out and conferences and that kind of thing for me to come and speak. So that's how it's grown.

I suppose I could tag on that. I did do some documentary film work as a result of this and I've continued some of that and a lot of talking behind the scenes with people, some people that are somewhat influential in various organizations and how dressing and advising and informing on how to approach this matter of social justice. And so it's taken me places I never thought I would go. And on a personal level, I'll just end with this.

The Lord, I think, has been behind all of this and he has allowed me to be in a position that I never would have been in had I not opened my mouth online. And if I had seen everything that would transpire, maybe I wouldn't have done it. I don't know, looking back, seeing cost benefit. But I think that initially, not knowing what I was going to get into, the Lord knew and he had me at the right place and the right time for such a time as this.

And people always say, ask me, how do you grow a podcast? They say, I don't know. I just kind of fell into it. And I think the Lord was the one that put me in the place that I was. So that's what I've been focusing on. I think more recently I've started to focus more on liberalism and other matters. But typically what people think of when they think of me is social justice concerns in Christianity. Hmm. I mean, thank you for that background. I have a couple different thoughts about that.

I think the first one that comes to mind is, so you just put out this podcast and then a couple days later you're at g three and then you're in a documentary film and then you're touring around the country. What was that like you said, if you only had opened your mouth. Well, you did. And it's like you just got whisked away on this magical mystery tour very quickly. What was that moment like? It was weird.

I was starting class, I think for, because it was January and the semester was starting like the next day or two. It was an overlap. I'm trying to think. It was like the first week of school that they had g three. And I talked to one of my professors. I think I missed a class, if I'm not mistaken. But I said, I'm going down to g three. And at the time, I actually didn't even know it was g three. It was a pre conference called, I think, social justice and the gospel, something like that.

And it was the Dallas statement signers that were primarily speaking. And so that's what I was asked to go to. I was only there one day, but when I walked in, I remember James White was there, Vodi Baucom was there, and all sorts of other guys, some of them whom I did not know. I didn't know who Tom askel was at the time, as I remember. I didn't know. I certainly didn't know who Tom Buck was. Some of the other signers, I didn't know who they were.

I knew who those James White and Vodi Baucom were. But the weird thing to me was they all seemed to know me. And I remember James White was the first one who saw me. And he just stared at me and he said, I know you. I don't know. And I listened to James White. I didn't miss an episode for probably, like 15 years of the dividing line. And I just. It was surreal. I thought, you know me, you know? And he's like, yeah. And I said, did you watch my video on Southeastern? He goes, yes.

And he told me he just lit up. And then he grabbed Bodie Baucom and introduced Bodhi Bakum to me. And I'm just kind of like, what is this? I don't understand. Like, I'm gonna pinch myself. This isn't reality. To go from kind of where I was to these guys know my name and know kind of what I said. So. So, yeah, it was interesting. And then to support the film, I just counted it a privilege. I wanted someone to take a whack at this.

I had been in seminary for years watching this develop, and it seemed like no one cared in my mind. No one was talking about it. If it was brought up, people denied it was happening. And finally, there was a group of people, enemies within the church. Carrie Gordon, Judd, Saul, Trevor Loudon was one of the guys involved in that who were going to expose it. And I said, you have my sword. I'll do whatever I can. I'm just a little guy. I don't have resources.

But if my story's compelling, then it's yours. And that's how that all came to be. So it's kind of like you walked into the Jedi council meeting and they're like, oh, wait, come here. Yeah. Well, a little bit, I guess. Yeah. So what was it? So all this context is very, very helpful. I came from the secular world, and wokeness doesn't even really have a name. It's just how the world works in that. And so coming into the faith and finding it in the faith, it's like, oh, wow.

And so you kind of marinated in it in seminary, it sounds like, and you had the courage to speak up, like, hey, this is unbiblical. It's anti biblical, maybe even heretical in some cases. Is that kind of some of the things that you were experiencing, like, what stands out from your time in seminary that you're like, that's really bad?

Well, I. In 2014, when I first started attending southeastern, I noticed that there was a lot of chapel speakers who came and either didn't focus on the Bible, or if they did, it was pretty weak. And it surprised me. Cause I thought this was a school that was big on expository preaching and oftentimes not even being affiliated directly with the Southern Baptists, which I also thought was odd, but they would be talking about racial justice.

I think that was the first thing to get its foot in the door. It wasn't the homosexual stuff or the feminist stuff as much. Although now, looking back, I realize there was a default kind of complementarian, weak complementarian idea there. But what we think of as associated with the hash metoo movement and Black Lives Matter and the modern lgbt stuff, that wasn't really present. Well, I should say that wasn't present, with the exception of some of the BLM narrative.

And I remember I wrote a blog later on about my experience in 2014 hearing some of these things. And I think I just called it the gospel of racial reconciliation, because that was the term they often used. But I realized that what they were doing was they were ascribing all this guilt to people who weren't really guilty, and then saying the way to rectify this and even using the term gospel to headline what this rectification would look like.

But the way to rectify it was to diversify your churches and your theological books that you read and the speakers you listen to and the leadership. And in doing so, you would be fulfilling not only what revelation says about every tribe, tongue, and nation around the throne of God, but you would be fulfilling the reconciliation that Jews and Gentiles are to have in Christ. And it just struck me that that was so wrong. It just hit me.

I knew at the time, hearing that kind of stuff, that that was just wrong. No one had to really tell me, but it wasn't a huge, huge deal because it was mostly in chapel. It wasn't in my classes that I was taking at that time as much. And I ended up. My seminary story's a little bit non traditional. I ended up leaving seminary. I got married. I came back in 2017. When I came back, it was like everything had changed for the worse.

I remember in the fall of 2017, there were three statements that either originated at or were heavily supported by the faculty and administration at the seminary that were denouncing Donald Trump or the alt right. And, you know, the thing that bothered me was that I couldn't locate in the previous eight years of Obama one statement that they had been as enthusiastic about.

And I remember the whole Paige Patterson thing that was not too long after that, where you might not know what this is, and it's a little too complicated to probably get into all the details, but they. Me too. Basically a conservative guy in the convention, and they set up a safe space thing at the school. I remember those pamphlets for safe spaces, and I saw the me too stuff now getting in, and there started to be a heavier concentration on abuse.

So not only was there, I would say, a heavy CRT adjacent focus, and I could get into some details on that if you want. There's a lot of examples to pull from, please. But there was also a me too stuff coming in and a hint of some of the soft pedaling of LG, or I should say homosexual orientation and that kind of stuff. So the train was starting to make its way in, and I didn't see anyone. I'll just say this one thing.

I talked to a few professors, and I couldn't really get anywhere with anyone completely, but the one professor who was actually sympathetic to, and he saw what was going on. I remember he wanted me to close the door, and he kind of whispered at me. You know, it was kind of like the Gestapo might hear us or something, or the stasi. And he was just kind of like, what's going on is a travesty. Like, he was so against what was happening, but he's like, if I say anything, I'm going to lose my job.

And this is a guy who had been there forever, and I just. It shocked me. And he was basically like, keep your head down. Don't say anything. That was his advice, and that was very hard for me. This is wrong. But I tried to follow that to some extent. When I left, though, I'm not a student anymore. And I thought, well, if no one's gonna say anything, if the faculty is not gonna say anything.

And I know about faculty members who tried to do something kind of, but no one was willing to go to public opinion or to talk to the people actually funding the school who are the Southern Baptist convention members. No one was willing to inform them about what was happening at their institution. And so I said, you know what? I'm gonna do it. And that went viral, and that also got me a lot of hate.

I even remember not long after I came out and started talking about what was happening, I remember a death threat, and I remember thinking, I never gotten one. So I remember, like, it was in my inbox, and I'm looking at it, and I'm like, so do you call the police? Like, what do you do? Someone's saying, he's gonna kill me. But I didn't know who it was. It was anonymous. And now I'm realizing that's not a very uncommon occurrence with public figures. But at the time, I wasn't a public figure.

So I thought, what do you do with this? And that was in the christian community. I can't imagine. Like, what? Like, who's saying this? Someone's very concerned about christian institutions. Really? Weird. Yeah. So that was kind of my thinking. Someone needed to say something. No one was doing it, so I'll do it. Well, I'm glad you did, because more needs to be said. Of course. I'm reading Meg Basham's book right now, and it just seems like a very long, slow slide.

And I wish I could say that the way that you describe it and shepherds for sale describes it, I wish I could say that it sounds like a slow frog boil, but it kind of doesn't in some ways. It sounds like it just kind of started happening overnight, and everyone just kind of just went along with it. Like, okay, well, this sounds about right. And that's the part that doesn't make any sense. I mean, I guess in some sense it does, right?

Because people don't like to pop their heads up, and that's not uncommon. But it just seems like everyone. It was just pushed on everyone all at once, and everyone's like, well, okay, I guess it sounds like the gospel. I mean, was that kind of your experience? Because I had to deprogram myself of stuff that I had been marinating in for years, but instead it sounds like in the christian world, it just kind of all landed quite quickly somewhere in the 2010s. Yeah. Then it's a complicated question.

I've thought about this a lot, and. Cool. I think you are onto something. When you say it happened immediately I think for a lot of people, they felt they were hit by a truck, and 2020 was the year that they felt that way. Of course, for me, it happened years before that in seminary.

But when it finally filtered down into the promotional pamphlets and policies of various organizations like Crew or Samaritan's purse or World vision or these big christian organizations, I think that's when people finally realized there's a problem. What they're saying sounds exactly like what the Democrat party is saying. But this had been going on behind the scenes before that, and that's important to point out.

It was a more gradual thing, I think, in the halls of power than it was with the populations that actually funded these halls of power. So there's a populism that reacted against this. And we're seeing that in places like, well, Megan Basham's audience, I would say, like, it's composed of a lot of people on even x. If you're following that, when Megan Basham has someone oppose her, she ratios them something bad, you know, the people are with her.

Well, that's not something that was present at all in 20 19, 20, 20, 20 21 even, really. And some of that could have been Twitter controls and all of that. But I know of a bunch of people that I can think of off the top of my head who at that point were buying into some of the woke garbage, and now they've rejected it. And so I think the train had to hit them. The train, it had to get personal, possibly. It had to affect their local church.

Those are the people that I see as most ardently against it are the ones where it affected their business or their church directly. And they saw it rip everything apart like a tornado coming through. But yes, it is important to know that this was going on in the background for a long time. And one of the things I write about in social justice goes to church. Actually, I didn't realize. I have a copy of that right here. I write about it in this book.

Is that in the seventies there were a lot of people who thought, well, observers, I should say, who paid attention to these kinds of things, who thought evangelicals would wind up on the left. If you remember, Jimmy Carter was promoted as an evangelical. There was a document called the Chicago Declaration in 1973. And it was a social justice declaration. You can look at it. It sounds like it was written in 2020. There was before Jimmy Carter, there was an evangelicals from a governed group.

And it seemed like the evangelicals could be open to Democrat party politics. But it wasn't a broad thing. It wasn't like the evangelicals were lining up for this. It was more academic types and people who would later become the founders of organizations and people teaching at schools, more elite types that were attracted to the leftism.

One of the things that I try to point out, and maybe you could even say it's the thesis of the book in some way, is that these figures, and I'm talking about people like Ron Sider, people like Jim Wallace, Tim Keller. I have a whole section on Tim Keller. People like Richard Mao. I mean, there's a lot of figures I talk about. These guys ended up gaining influence kind of behind the scenes.

And as the religious right, which was a populist movement, gained traction in the eighties, these guys didn't go away. They were still in the backgrounds. They were still. And they had people who followed them who were gaining positions in influential places. And Russell Fuller will tell you, who's a former Hebrew professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that there were a lot of liberals that he even worked with and knew were liberal.

They did not have orthodox theology that ended up at conservative places because they needed a job. And so the southern Baptists like to talk about how they purged in the eighties and early nineties, they purged themselves of liberals at these schools. But Russell Fuller will tell you that's not entirely accurate, that a lot of these people ended up staying, and they ended up people who were influenced by that first crop of social justice activists and evangelicalism.

They ended up gaining more influence. And so I think, I know that's a long way of saying it, but I think what happened in the 2010s is with organizations like the gospel coalition and others. We like to use them as, like, the focal point. But Christianity today, I would say, had been on this train even before that. They ended up with these popular leaders who used mass media, who used the Internet to get their message out. But these guys had already been somewhat influenced.

And I'm talking about guys like David Platt. I talk about him in that book. There's a picture of David Platt and Russell Moore, and Ron Sider is in between them, and it's on Instagram. And I don't remember who posted it, but it says that one of our heroes influences these guys that were basically socialists, ended up impacting the people who became popular preachers, two popular audiences in 2010. So it escaped the LAPD.

It got out of the more elite circles, and it got into the popular circles in the 2010s. It started mostly in the seminaries, and then in 2020, that's when it really jumped to filtered down to the congregational level, and I knew that would happen. That's one of the things. I probably said it in 2019, in January, when I made my first video that we are going to see in the next few years, as the graduates from these institutions make their way into churches, they will split them up.

That is exactly what's happened. They have gone into these churches, and they have split them up, and it's terrible to see what's happened. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense to see the way the seminaries and the institutions were infiltrated at the highest level. The men went underground. They had some rising popularity, but then through the eighties, they went underground.

They trained the next generation of pastors who emerged into the public, and then they started bringing it to the congregations. And then it all kind of happens in 2020, crystallize everything, where for the first time, the general churchgoer can see and feel something that's been building for 50 years. That's when it finally surfaced to the everyday average. Okay, that makes sense. I think that's exactly right. Yeah. Okay. And I don't know where all the lines are.

I mean, sometimes you see evidence of lines. You know they're there, but it's more private. But I do trace a number of lines in that book, and I. I talk about a lot of modern examples of pastors and influential christians who will say things in their own writings or their own speeches commending the work of the guys that I told you about. I guess you could call them the new left evangelicals from the seventies. They had a profound influence that we're feeling now.

It was a delayed impact, though, so we don't know where it came from. That's one of the ways to look at it. So are those people still influential? Are they still. Okay, great. Okay, well, not great, but what do we do to dislodge them? Tim Keller's the most. He's not with us anymore, but he is the most popular name that he truly is from that group of evangelicals. He didn't have the prominence of Iran Sideror Richard Mao, although he was influenced by Richard Mao, but he was there.

He talks about, to use Tim Keller as an example, he talks about in 1970, there was an intervarsity event called Urbana, and there was a guy named Tom Skinner who gave their keynote at the Urbana Youth conference. And in that keynote, Tom Skinner gives a plea, he gives a call for activism, social activism. And he says that the social gospel guys from the early 20th century, they had a social gospel, but it was incomplete because they didn't have the personal gospel.

He talks about the fundamentalists then, and he says, well, the fundamentalists, they didn't have the whole gospel either because they just had the personal gospel without the social gospel. So he says, what we ought to do is we need the whole gospel. We need to combine these things. So you have the social gospel, you have the personal individual gospel, and only then will evangelicals regain their witness and be the light of the world and all these kinds of things.

They'll be successful and they'll obey Christ's commands. Tim Keller says that he listened to that speech, I think he says three times because it had such a profound impact. And he was a mandehead that was, you know, basically he was on the hippie train and he was on the left on issues like, you know, racial justice, the Vietnam war. I think those were the two main things. But, you know, I think even if I remember correctly, even like some of the patriarchal stuff. And he just didn't like that.

Christianity wasn't saying anything about this. The more conservative, you know, Christianity wasn't saying anything. They weren't opposing Vietnam and out there in the streets protesting, where are they? Once he listened to that speech, it changed him. And he got involved with inter varsity. And then. And I go through.

I have a whole biopic basically of him, of showing how he went from where he was to where he eventually was when he passed away, of getting influenced more and more by guys who were on the left. And in Christianity, part of that new left crew, you know, Tom Skinner was one of them. But also Harvey Khandhe played a big. Had a big influence on him at Westminster. Gave him a hermeneutic that I would say is pretty similar to a liberation.

The. In fact, it might even be the same really of a liberation theology hermeneutic as a way of reading scripture. It's very similar, like an evangelical version of it. He talks about Carl Ellis and Carl Ellis really allowing him and his wife to see that they had white privilege. He doesn't use the term because the term hasn't come around yet, but that's the concept he's talking about. He didn't think he was racist, but then Carl Ellis, or I think it's actually Elwood Ellis.

There's Carl Ellis and there's Elwood Ellis. But he shows him that, no, you actually are racist because you have this privilege. And through no choice of your own, the world just bends to you. I go through all of that stuff and show Tim Keller was influenced by these guys. Then he becomes a popular author and pastor. And now who has he had a profound impact on? Everyone. Most of my seminary classmates, I would say, respected Tim Keller on some level.

So he was the one who carried the water for people who, they're names you never would have heard of unless you probably read my book or studied the issue more. I think the thing that surprises me to hear about this, while it makes sense and there's something very human about it, I spent a long time living in a world with no objective standards. I didn't have the word of God.

One of the things that surprised me is to see the deference paid to people who are sliding off of God's word into directions that seem to want to appeal more to the mainstream. That particular phenomenon and how much resistance there is to call that out. I get it. It's a very human instinct. And coming from the secular world where no one has any basis to do that, well, I guess that's just their path. It's like, well, no, there's the standard here that we're supposed to be listening to.

And so to have seen the same pattern take place within evangelicalism makes me even happier to know that people have been calling it out because it should be called out. It must be called out. So thank you for highlighting all this for me, because I see now that a lot of people are on board the train now, post 2020, everyone can see how destructive these things were. But to have made the call pre 2020, you know, it took real courage, it sounds like. Yeah, somewhat.

Yeah. It was not something that my, let's just say it probably caused my wife some stress to see her husband taking these very controversial stands very publicly. What? No. And I had to think through things. Do I really want to say this? Do I really want to do this? But like I said before, it came down to the fact that no one else was going to do it. Praise God. There were a few people. I remember.

James White and then John MacArthur were some prominent, more prominent names that started to tackle some of these things. But even when James White was talking about my seminary, he was talking about a guy named Walter Strickland who teaches there, and liberation theology that was present there. I remember listening to him saying, yes, someone saying something, but I remember also thinking, like, he doesn't know 95% of it. You know, he's.

He's seeing some of these things that are happening, but it's just so much worse. It is so much worse. And, you know, it is. It's crazy. I didn't even realize until I came out. So maybe there was some ignorance there. I didn't know the risk I was taking fully that this was all over evangelicalism. I thought it was mostly my seminary. At first I thought I got a weird seminary, and the other seminaries are probably not like this.

And then when I started getting people from all over the country saying, keep going. Keep saying what you're saying. If I were to say it, I'd lose my job. But my seminary is the same way, in prominent names. I mean, I can't betray secrecy, confidentiality, but I had some prominent people reach out to me and encourage me, people that, because of their position there, and they can't say anything because it's all about relationships. And I get that.

I just thought, someone's got to say something that poor people funding these institutions don't know. It must have been quite a thing to say that. And then you have a whole bunch of people come to your side, and you're kind of brand new in this world. You've just graduated, and so you have James White and Vody Baucom. Excited to meet you. There must have been a large number of people who, I mean, you mentioned you got death threats.

There must have been a large number of people that you felt that as a young man just graduated, suddenly you've got a big target on you and. Yeah, I can imagine that's. I mean, it's pretty frightening. There's really no other word I can think of. It must be scary. You didn't think this was on your first day of seminary. Yay. First day of seminary. And then, like, you graduate, and then you're immediately. Immediately targeted in some ways. Well, you're a millennial. I think I'm a millennial.

Right. So Gen X. Are you Gen X? Mm hmm. Okay. All right. You must be barely Gen X then. So. Because you look young. So I think this goes maybe for Gen X too, though. But as a millennial, the Internet wasn't real, right? We could say stuff online, and it didn't seem to. That wasn't real life until it was. And I think that I was on that. Like, that transition kind of happened because 2020 is the year when so many people are canceled, and, like, you couldn't say certain political things online.

Before that, it seemed like you kind of could. There were some examples of people who got in trouble, but it wasn't, like, a big thing. And so I probably didn't fully know all the risks I was taking, but I found out pretty quickly, and that made me all the more motivated to do what I was doing because I realized that this was a need that people. People really did need to see what was happening. It needed to be exposed and explained and, yeah, so I'm grateful again.

God is the one behind all this, in my opinion. He's the one. And he chooses the weak things to shame the strong. That's one of the things that God does. He also will give grace to the humble. And I think, you know, not to toot my own horn, that as soon as you start saying you're humble, you're not, right. I have my own pride. I am so humble. I'm so humble. I'm so humble. I really was, though, someone without a lot of, like, ambition in Christian, in Big Eva.

At one point, I wanted to be big in the Southern Baptist convention, and I realized after going to seminary, I do not want to even be in this denomination, I don't think. And so there wasn't any, like, ambition there for gaining a place, a seat at the table. There wasn't. And I was weak. I was. I was a small potato. Like, no one knew who I was. You could have squashed me like a bug at first, I think, like, I just didn't have any platform, any defense. I had nothing. Now I have more.

But there were no resources. And so for me to just turn on a webcam, it wasn't even a webcam. It was my cell phone. I think I just held my cell phone, you know, to turn on my cell phone and just start talking to it about this, these issues that was. I think the Lord is the one that had to take that and make it something powerful and big and meaningful in people's lives.

And it really has been, I know for a fact, based on private correspondence and even just some public things, things would not look the way they do now if it wasn't for the fact that I spoke out. And I'm not taking credit for everything at all. This was a team effort. But there's a reason Megan mentioned me in the book. And it's not because she needed me for her research.

It's just because I knew where a lot of the skeletons were buried, and I was able to give her information if she asked for it and help her to see. See things that were harder to see if you hadn't been paying attention. And, yeah, I mean, like, one of the examples, there's so many I could think of, but one of them that I'm really proud of, I guess, is we did a documentary called paint the wall black of a guy named Juan Riesco who was canceled. He was a christian business owner. Canceled.

He had the number one restaurant on Yelp in 2020 in Chicago. And overnight, they. Thousands of people showed up to protest him because he wouldn't post a black square because he didn't agree with BLM. And it seemed like Christians didn't even want to tell his story. I found out from a blog, and then I think TbN had done a little piece with him or something. But I talked to him on the phone, and he actually, I mentioned him on podcast. He reached out.

I talked to him on the phone, and I said, where are the teams of filmmakers that are lining up? You have such a compelling story. Juan, what happened to you is incredible. You former homosexual children of immigrants, you know, he just. He fit the woke kind of social justice, like what they're looking for, the intersectionality, you know, bent. It was in his favor, and I. And he was hated, and he was canceled. His business basically destroyed. And so we told his story.

I never made a documentary film before. We made paint the wall black. I went out to Chicago, someone I had never worked with before, another Christian who supported the podcast, said, you do some film work. What can we do here? And it really got his story out there far and wide. And it exposed BLM, in my opinion. It also exposed christians who don't seem to, who seem to shy away from him. I mean, he talks about this.

He talks about people from, I think it was moody Moody Bible institute out there in Chicago, people showing up who had been, you know, moody students to protest him during BLM. I mean, it's just. It's surreal. But he's a cheerful guy. He's a happy guy. And for him, who cares about the business? I've been saved by Jesus Christ. That's what really matters. God loves me. He's going to protect me. Story of faith. And I'm just glad I could have never made that documentary.

I could have never made the 1607 project or any of the other things we've done if it wasn't for the fact that he initially opened my mouth and had a little bit of courage to say, hey, there's something bad going on at Southeastern. So I see all these blessings coming from that initial step. Mm hmm. Yeah, praise God. Very much so. And you're right. Like, God is behind all of it. You couldn't. You couldn't if you had gotten on your phone. Like, I'm gonna say something that's gonna go viral.

Like, it doesn't work that way. You know what I mean? It just. It's impossible. It's a gift and a blessing. And if you. I believe if you act in integrity, you speak truth. Right. The consequences that come from that are also him. Right. And so you're just. You're offered an opportunity, a path to walk, and you could walk it. It was lawful to walk it, and you chose to walk it. And I think the impacts are speaking for themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. So just a quick question then.

So I'm hearing about these pastors and seminary professors and even the everyday believers who take these ideas in. Now, again, my journey was the other way. I just lived in these ideas and using Christianity. And in part because of encountering Christianity, I was able to unwind them from myself. In fact, the black squares thing actually played a role in my conversion to Christianity, at least from my subjective experience, where I could feel the weight of shame.

Because I had traveled for a while, I had instagram with all my travel photography, and everyone wanted to take this travel photography page, which I had curated, and just dump a black square on there. I'm like, no, I'm not going to put a black square on this. Right. With this thing that I try to curate and take good care of. And I could feel the weight of shame and exclusion and being cast out of the tribe and understanding the kind of grip that it was trying to get on me.

Once I encountered christianity and started understanding the notions of original sin and redemption, I was like, oh, this is playing on some of the same themes. So Christianity wipes all this away. And so it was through that experience, in part, that I was able to understand some very deep things about Christianity.

But to see people within the faith who travel the opposite direction, they grow up in the faith, and then these very seductive ideas begin wrapping themselves around the axle of people's identity. I don't exactly understand how that happens. That's not to say there isn't a good reason for it. And I know that some percentage of them are just going along with it. They're keeping their head down, or they don't have the courage to speak up.

All those things are true, but it seems like it starts to wrap itself around people and they become true believers. How does that happen? And does that happen because of social pressure? Well, my pastor, he believes it, so therefore I should. Or do people actually believe the scriptural arguments that are made in favor of this, or maybe all of the above? Yeah, I think there's a lot that goes into that. We have a basically watered down kind of Christianity anyway.

That's the default Christianity in America. We don't have to talk about the social justice thing. I think to totally understand this, you can look at the. I'm just saying, before social justice stuff, you can look at the kinds of things churches were doing. So I went to southeastern. Obviously, Southeastern is considered a conservative, biblical, some would even say fundamentalist kind of school. It's not Princeton seminary, it's a Southern Baptist school.

And the church plants that are like the people who graduate and then want to go on and plant a church. And the way you're even encouraged, I think, to think about church is to look at it as a social organization that obviously has an important role to play in your spiritual life. But there's a lot of focus on reconciling that organization with modernity in some way.

And so what I mean by that is, you know, and I want to phrase this the right way because I understand there are people who are in strip malls because that's where you could get a space to worship the Lord. And there's no shame and nothing wrong in that, let me say that. But the preference for strip malls, the preference for the ideal, is we should not have christian symbols.

We should have corporate looking symbols, and we should call our buildings and our organizations something that does not sound like a church. It should be liquid or the river or some kind of odd name that doesn't clue you into the fact that this is actually even a religious organization. Steeples. I'm looking at architecture. We're not going to have graveyards. That's too sad. And you walk in your experience, oftentimes it's all about you. We want you to have a good experience.

Get a free coffee if you're a visitor. The pastor is not very formal, and I'm not legalistic on this. I don't think it's a sin to be casual. I think, though, the motivation behind much of that was, again, a reconciliation with trying to make Christianity palatable and comfortable for people who don't like traditional church settings. The problem is the people who often don't like traditional church settings aren't. They're not as winnable as we think.

When we do win them, oftentimes we don't win them to Christianity so much as we do. This is my theory, obviously. I think we win them to community, we win them to a show, we win them to other things. But I don't think we win them to true Christianity because true Christianity will always point you towards the good, and it'll point you towards God. It'll point you up and it's supposed to have. There's a loftiness to it.

Thinking about death, thinking about eternity should be on the front of your mind as you're looking at true biblical Christianity. There is definitely a hierarchy involved in Christianity. There's definitely the exaltation of good taste and there's a formality to it in how you approach the Lord. I mean, I'm talking about true Christianity. All of those things play into how we approach the Lord.

And they say something about who God is, I think so we've, in a large part, we've dropped a lot of these things. There are still obviously churches who keep some of these things and they're legalistic and you don't want to go in there and it's dead man's bones. And I understand that. That's often the retort. That's also true because those things in and of themselves, architecture won't give you orthodoxy in and of itself.

I could show you a lot of beautiful buildings and nothing spiritual is going on in there. But my point though is that we orientated ourselves away from heaven and eternal life and towards temporal life. And so when you have a political movement come in like wokeness or it could have been any political movement, I think we were already weak enough to buy into it because we are in this reconciliation posture, reconciling ourselves to whatever the world is putting out there.

And the world of course, being not just what John, obviously there is what John talks about, the lust of the eyes, lust, the fetch, boastful pride of life. But I'm talking about powerful institutions, I'm talking about the media, academia, Hollywood, education. All of these things are lined up against Christianity.

And the way to neutralize it, the way to accommodate it, the way to try to live within it has been to not be the church anymore, not look like a church, try to be the kind of Christian that proves to everyone else that overturns the stereotypes they have of christians and proves that christians are actually good people and we have social good. I think I give you so many examples. They're just flooding into my mind of people who have done this. But those are the architects.

That's at least what the architects of our current demise, I think have given that to us and that weakened us in my opinion. This is so interesting because I had never thought about this before, but it's something that I've observed the churches in the strip malls like, yes, okay, if you have to meet there, you have to meet there. But I had never thought, but I can see it now, that there's a preference for that.

There's a preference for churches without christian sounding names, with very secular kind of appearing logos and all. There's nothing overtly christian about it. It seems profoundly watered down. I had never really thought about that as a strategy to reconcile with the world. I thought about non denominationalism, I thought about Baptist, Presbyterian, I thought about all that stuff. But I've seen so many of these churches and I'd never thought of it that way.

It's been a big question in my mind of, like, what's. What's going on there? Like, I think I understood on the surface what it was not trying to do, but I didn't understand, like, it was trying not to be traditionalism or legalism or whatever. It's trying not to be, you know, your father's church or your grandfather's church. Like, I guess I understood that. But for the age that we're in, you know, that wants to seem modern and innovative. Right.

Maybe that's the way that I thought about, like, we're innovating on church, which maybe is just a euphemism for, like, we want to reconcile with the world. I never thought about that because there's lots of those in Phoenix. It's really. So, yeah, you could say reconciled to the world, reconciled to elite institutions. You could also say reconciled to modernity. Cause all those things are very modern.

There's a practical atheism almost at play in it, where they don't want to actually think too much about eternal things. The only eternal things that you need are the more therapeutic things. So the pastor, the office, or the role of the pastor ends up being more of a life coach, a therapist, or a social activist. That's where. And of course, social activism today and the social justice movement is really just building a utopia. It's finding heaven on earth.

And I think there's an attraction to that because we've gotten rid of the idea of heaven after death. We hardly talk about when was the last time. I mean, you probably go to some good churches, but maybe for people listening, when was the last time you heard your pastor talk about hell or heaven? They probably talk about heaven. More therapeutic way to comfort you, and it should be used to comfort.

But the idea of orienting our lives, though, towards heaven, towards the eternal, towards the good, towards goddess, and looking at that realm for guidance, I don't think that's at play in most churches. Not prominently. I think there's a big focus on a personal relationship that you have with Jesus.

And then I think when you focus on that too much, to the detriment, I should say if you focus on that to the detriment, because you can't really focus on that too much, but to the detriment of these other things.

And it's just about you and God and not the corporate ness of the church as the bride of Christ, not the formality of who you're actually approaching, who God actually is, but it's more of a buddy casual kind of thing, then that is going to leave some things unaddressed in your human nature because we should be orienting ourselves to some kind of moral vision. So if you get rid of that in the church, where are you going to find it?

You're going to find it in social activism, you're going to find it in other places, I think. And the social justice movement, I argue, is kind of a christianized heresy. It is because they do have their own holy books that you can't question, which are press perspectives. They do have missionaries who are essentially their professors and elites in society. They have at every step, I mean, they have their penance, the born again experiences, getting woke. I mean, it's all there.

It's all there like the augustinian structure of wokeness and social justice. So if you're already hungry for that and your church doesn't really fulfill those things, then you're going to try to integrate that into the church to fulfill what's missing. And I think it'd be better if we just went back to the way things, the way churches used to be.

You don't have to have like some super specific brand that you have to come up with that looks like every other brand out there to convince people that you're not a church. Like you can just build a building that looks like a church. You can sing songs that are appropriate for church dressed in a way that is suitable for a church, and act like this actually matters, and act like God's actually going to come back and judge things instead of pretending like he's just there as your life coach.

I don't know, I guess to enrich your life a little more, he will enrich your life. But those other attributes of God can't be suppressed. That really lands because I'm putting myself back in the shoes of when I was still secular and I can see the churches that have that branding as something that would be more appealing to me and would feel safer. Right.

And that's not necessarily a good thing, but like, oh, I can step in the doors here rather than something with a scary word like orthodox, you know what I mean? Or with all the families dressed nicely, that might be too much, but I can walk into a big gray box and with sort of a modern style logo with a name that's vaguely maybe spiritual sounding and that would be safer. But it makes me wonder what low expectations a church like that would set for its believers, right?

Like, if you have someone come in the door and you don't ever make any sincere effort to mature them in the faith, right? What are you expecting? Like, people are just going to stay there because it's pleasurable, but the real believers will end up leaving. Maybe they will actually get saved and they will want to grow up in the faith and they will look around and say, hey, can we start talking a little bit more about orthodoxy?

Like, yeah, the pastor read this, but then I found this other passage I was reading on my own. And so it seems like a losing strategy. But I can also understand if you've lost thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. If you've lost a sense of a church having that mission, the social justice ideology will plug right into that spot, bringing about a utopia, a utopian vision that doesn't align at all with God's plan for the world. And so this now a lot of sense why they catch on.

There's sacrifice, there's judgment. These are things that we don't like to talk about in church. But the social justice movement has those things. So if you're lacking that and, you know, I think we all know deep down inside we have sinned, we are guilty. And there does need to be some kind of rectification of that. Now, of course that's the gospel.

But if you have a weak gospel and the social justice movement comes in and says, we're gonna punish the bad guys, there's gonna be a reckoning and we're gonna, you know, be part of the judgment with us, which is basically what they're doing. We're going to cast people out in the outer darkness who are bad and racist and sexist and all that. That's called canceling them. There's something about that that does resonate with human nature and it fulfills, it gives you purpose in your life.

And for all the talk that a lot of modern settings, modern churches, they'll use words like purpose. I mean, it's almost like, like there's a, what do they call those focus groups, you know, that are finding out what words do people like to hear and stuff. I would have. I have no doubt that there are probably focus groups that are being used to figure out church growth strategies and all of that kind of thing. There's firms, I come across a few of those.

I remember first Baptist Naples, when we did a documentary on them, because that was a whole story. But anyway, one of the things, the. New pastor from the SBC, was that the one in Meg bash book? Yep, yep, yep. So I was the one who was, you know, I talked to the people there and kind of set it up. Set. Set them up to have a documentary. I went there and I was screening everyone who was going on camera for that.

And that one of the things that happened was they brought in a group to this megachurch to give them advice. And it was called Oxano. That was the group. And some of the advice that they told me this group gave was, in my opinion, just awful. But it was along the lines of what I'm saying, like, you need to get rid of these programs. You need to instead do this. And really with, I think underlying it, the idea of we need to diversify the church, so make it attractive to.

It's too white, it's too old, or it's too this or that, right? So we need to have the United nations in the church. And so that means changing the way we do church to attract them. We need so this focus on diversity and equality and all of these kinds of things. And those actual ministries who are doing good, some of them, well, they're draining resources from the church. Well, what is the church supposed to be doing, though? This is one of the big questions.

The church doesn't exist for itself as far as a local church is not an institution that exists just to perpetuate itself. And it doesn't care about people, it doesn't care about the church around the world. It's just its own church, its own institution, its own success. That's a really bad way of looking at church. But that's how a corporation would look at itself, right? That's how a business might look at itself.

And so I think we've taken these principles from business and the corporate world and inserted that into church. And it's to our own peril, really. We may be able to. I'm open to the idea that we may be able to get more people in the door for some things, but what are we really giving them? Are they really growing in Christ? If one of the points of diversity in your church, and I can say that this is common, is that we not just.

It's not just that we need other races, every race present, but we also need Democrats and Republicans sitting next to each other without any offense. And we need homosexuals there, and they shouldn't be offended. You know, if that's your idea of diversity, which is how it is now, uh, then you're just watering down the message more and more and more and more, which is what we have. We have a watered down message. It doesn't really help people much.

It might give them a pep talk, but it's like, uh, hearing a TED talk every week and being part of small groups that might help you gain connections in a world that's otherwise disconnected. So there, you know, there's. There's the social purpose it serves.

But I think as far as the things that traditionally a church is actually there for, which is to worship God in spirit and truth, to do it corporately, to really come before him and know what he requires of you, and then conform your lives to that and pledge together to be accountable, to do that with each other. Where is that in the modernization, most modern church settings? I don't see it. It's hyper personally focused, too.

It's not this idea of corporately pledging to each other, confessing sins to one another. I don't see much of that myself. So I think there's been a weakness, and the malady the church is going through is not social justice related. And I had to come to this, by the way, over time, I did think. I think initially I was more thinking that social justice killed it. Right. Like, the church was going along its merry way, doing pretty well. And then this. This woke stuff came.

And for some individual churches, that does appear or feel like the way it happened. And it might be. I think overall, though, the broad picture of this whole thing is there were some really bad things that were happening before social justice ever was popular. You know, the fall of the church preceded 2020. 2020 just revealed, I think, what was already there.

And I think there were a lot of christians caught off guard because they thought, similar to how I thought, that things weren't actually that bad, that things were going along pretty decently, and especially in the young, restless, reformed world. The reformed world obviously thought, we have really good theology on soteriology, and I'm not even so sure we had good soteriology, to be quite honest.

When everything's a gospel issue and you widen the gospel to be like, you're already playing into the whole social gospel stuff when you start doing that. But let's just say, hey, we got predestination right? We got tulip, right? Man. There's so many things beyond tulip that we need to get right, I think in order to have a good, functional church. And a lot of the guys who were popular because they were resurrecting tulip, they had a lot of those other things wrong.

Yes. I saw a tweet about that two, three weeks ago that what the young, restless and reformed had revealed was that they brought forward some of the soteriological doctrines of the reformers and they left literally everything else. And that lack is being revealed right now, including in the reformed church. I've got Zach Garris, honor thy fathers. He's going to be coming on the show. He's talking about it. I love him. Yeah, I can't.

His book, Masculine Christianity, that's on my recommended reading list for sure. It leaves no room for doubt. And it seems to me that that's the sort of stuff that was completely left out in the young, restless and reformed. It was almost like, and I'm sure that this much thought didn't go into it. It was almost like a movement was crafted specifically to ignore social issues. Like, we're going to focus so heavily on this, so don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

Maybe that's the case. I don't think so. I think that's probably outside conspiratorial thinking, even for me. So. But it does have that effect. Like, wow, what's the stuff that we can leave out that people will really need to know? Let's leave that stuff out just real quick. There's something that I heard that's happening here in Phoenix, and I think this speaks to the phenomenon that you're describing.

And now I don't know if this is happening, but someone had, someone had said they had heard about it. So take this for what it's worth, but they said that there are a lot of churches around the valley that are failing, which is not an unusual thing, and that all of those churches now are being bought up by a church conglomerate. So they're all being rolled into one mega church kind of corporation with all these different essentially franchises.

And so it speaks to the corporatization of the church worship experience. And you can imagine, like, I don't even know what the name of the organization doing the buying is, but you can imagine that like something of that size and scale with that kind of economic or scale ambition anyway, is probably not going to have the healing kind of doctrines that people are going to really need in their lives.

And it's really, when I heard about that, well, first of all, that makes a lot of sense because so many churches are failing. And it goes without saying that people would see that as a business opportunity in some ways. So, I mean, I don't mean to call it exclusively a business opportunity, but it's like you can kind of see that, well, what is this church doing?

Are they really like, we're going to bring, you know, true, strict biblical truth, or are we going to bring some of the model that you've been describing, which is like, ted talk, social gospel, feel good, you know, easy kind of stuff? Is that what's actually going to be spreading? And it seems like logically that it would. So all these pieces really fit together and help me identify things that I've been seeing, but I haven't really been able to explain.

Yeah, I have not heard of what you're saying. That's interesting. And the concern, without knowing anything else about it, I would have is that once you become a franchise, I guess you end up having to respond to market forces, and that's going to do. And it's not just market forces you're responding to. The bigger you get, the more you're noticed by governing authorities. And so you end up having to respond to pressure from governing authorities as well.

I think this is why denominations at the highest levels, you see the most compromise, and it's your local church pastor in usually smaller churches that tend to be more solid and stable. And there's very few megachurches that I can say that have good pastors that seem like they have good character and they're not corrupt and they're not compromised on social justice or other issues. So that would make me nervous. Just the scale of it.

It could be a great, I don't know what you would even call that, but it could be a great organization. But just the scale of something like that and having churches, then it's not a denomination. It sounds like that would be a major concern. In my mind, it seems like smaller churches did much better in 2020. I think so. I think so.

I mean, finding small, faithful churches that stayed open and that were, that had to be less aware, let's say, of market forces that had less visibility, that it's a small local, almost an underground congregation, kind of expect them to draw the ichthus fish sign to signal that they're still open. But that's the feeling. And this also helps me understand why the pushback on reformed theology specifically. Because this is a world like literally just warp speed through the faith. Right.

In reformed theology. Yeah, this is great. From the apology of membership class that I took, like, oh, fantastic. And so as that has been kind of spreading out into the christian culture more broadly, particularly in the past couple, few years, the pushback that's being received within Christianity around that, that hasn't made any sense to me either. And so now all these pieces are kind of clicking together like, oh, okay, this is now the larger.

Of course, yes, I'm aware of the national posture towards Christianity, negative world like, I'm aware of that. But reformed theology specifically embedded in a larger church culture. The response of that larger church culture to reform Christianity has been somewhat baffling to me. I mean, I have assumed that there's old reasons for it, but now this makes a lot more sense because it's actually two different models. It's two very different models.

You have something that's more responsive to the world in both economic and social and political terms versus responsive to. What does the actual book say? And so those worldviews would be very much conflict. Yeah, yeah. And I don't want to downplay the. I mean, it's good that reformed theology kind of made a comeback there for a little bit, I think, like at least soteriology. But yeah, I wish that we would have been. That was the emphasis. Right.

And it seems to me like the solas are more what we needed. And perhaps even now Stephen Wolf's bringing this up quite a bit. But the order of loves, really understanding, hierarchy, structure, responsibility, duty before God, those are things that we didn't really have as much. And, you know, it's a cure. I don't have the answer to why. That kind of got popular for a while. The Calvinism was kind of. It was cool to be a Calvinist, right. Like, it was the thing. I was part of that to some extent.

Like, I really thought if you got that right, you got everything else right. And now I realize, wow, okay, there's some. Some of the biggest, you know, calvinist churches were some of the biggest woke churches, too. They learned to marry those things together. But. But yeah, we have a weak church. And really this is the.

So what I've done is I've tried to educate, I've tried to expose, I've tried, you know, I'm trying to, like, hold people's feet to the fire and show this is the direction I think we should go. And the next book, I'm finishing it up now.

I'm giving some positive plan, both politically but also in the church, ecclesiastically, where I think we should go, but ultimately I think as christians we need to remember that in the end the church belongs to Christ and we need to be on our faces before the Lord, pleading with him that he would do something and not being passive, because I wanted to preface it the way I did.

I'm not passive about any of this, but I'm open to the Lord using me, and you will, as the means to accomplish some of these things. But we need to be on our face before him to raise up godly leaders. We are lacking in faithful leaders with character so much in the church today, and we need that. And we need men who orient their lives to heaven, to the divine.

And it sounds maybe a little mystical, and I don't mean it to sound overly mystical, but I do think there's an element to Christianity that we can't quite quantify, that there should be an element, almost mystical element, of communing with God and understanding from the word, obviously his plans, but then through circumstance and as we walk with him, the specific ways in which we fit in, how our good works that were preordained by him fit into this whole thing.

And so I would just say to people listening out there, really pray for the church, because ultimately God has to do something. All our efforts at reforming and all these things, they can fail. And that's been the lesson of the last 15 years is these guys who thought young, restless reform guys, they were reforming the church and bringing it back to orthodoxy. They did some, there were some good things, but it has, the harvest has not been good, in my opinion.

And so we need to pray to the Lord of the harvest to really reform us in the way that we actually need and not to be afraid of the world. I think that's going to be the number one barometer going forward that we will use to evaluate leadership in the church. And whether a church is compromised or not compromised is how afraid of the world and the power structures that be, that love, sin are they? And what do they respond to that pressure?

Or do they say, you know what, when the world comes by and says you're a bunch of bigots because you believe a, b and c is the response, well, you don't understand, let's have a cup of coffee, come to one of our services, it's so great. It's not going to offend you like you think, or we're going to cushion it somehow. No, let's just be unapologetic about it. No, this is what the word of God says. We're not backing down from it.

In fact, we're going to emphasize it even more because apparently you need it, you know, not, not as jerks, but we need to contrast even more so with the world. And that's what I want to see. We just got to pray that the Lord raises up people to do that. I like that answer. Can I push on it in a particular spot? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So one of the things that is kind of going around today is just how many, just how left leaning young women are. I think it's 25 to 44.

Is the demographic right that they are just so hard to the left and they're leaving churches as well. And so it would seem, and the opposite phenomenon is happening with young men. Young men are getting more conservative and are returning to church. So it would seem on this particular point that if we were to really lean in to being gracious but firm. Right on this is what the book says that it could and maybe even will and maybe even is drive away an entire generation of women specifically.

And so what do we do about that? I mean, that's where I want to push because that seems to be something that it's not quite happening yet, but it might happen real soon. So what's the response to that? I mean, I have my response to it, but I'd like to hear what yours would be. Yeah. What were you pushing back on? I don't know if I disagree with the.

Well, so if we're supposed to really lean in, if we're supposed to really lean into the gospel, really lean into what the word says, and that specific leaning. Oh, the consequence of it accelerates a. Trend of specifically women fleeing. What do we do about that? I mean, my answer is going to be pretty simple. Just do it anyway. I don't really. That's a good answer. Yeah, I don't have anything to expand on there.

I was just preached this last Sunday on the verse that says first Thessalonians 514, that we are supposed to help the weak. We're supposed to be patient with all men, right? We're supposed to encourage the. Now it's kind of weird because I had this whole memorized that was like two days later, and I'm like, what did I preach on? Encourage the faint hearted. And I did this all backwards and admonish the unruly.

It starts with, admonish the unruly, encourage the faint hearted, help the weak, patient withal. That's how it goes. So I reverse engineer it there. But when it comes to women who are in the church, that are thinking of leaving because it doesn't match, I guess, an egalitarian standard they have or something, a feminist idea. Then you have to triage it and you have to, on a case by case basis, I think, look at the circumstance. Are these women, you never shy away from the truth.

Are these women unruly? If they're unruly, then I guess you turn up the volume a little bit. You actually admonish you correct. That doesn't mean punish. That means you correct the thinking. But if they're weak, if it's a circumstance, I can think of a circumstance where it's a woman who just, maybe they're a bit deceived. They're open, humble, but they don't like the patriarchy stuff, and that just puts a bad taste in their mouth because of whatever reason.

Then I think that maybe there's even a personal thing in their own lives. Their father was terrible. They had a bad boyfriend. Then I think if they're faint hearted, then you have to encourage them. You're not going to approach them in the same exact way. It's amazing to me how many girls, too, they're raging feminists. You've probably seen this phenomenon, or a girl who's more on the feminist side. But then they get married and it like, I think it like their worldview changes.

If it's a good man, you know, they start seeing things differently. That's what we would hope would happen, you know, that some of these people who are deceived because that's what it is, would realize that they're the error of their ways. But how are they going to realize it unless you say something? Something has to be said at some point. Point, yeah, I've called it elsewhere, civilizational brinksmanship.

Be nice to us, or we'll just withdraw from civilization and we'll just let it all collapse. I've seen women say that on Twitter and all of that. It's quite odd, really. I've never seen that. Oh, yeah, there's a whole cadre of conservative female influencers, I don't know how many other Christian, but they're saying conservatives are really mean, and if you're not nice to us, we'll just go vote Democrat. And I have seen that. And it's quite odd. It's quite odd to see.

There's a spitefulness to it. It's particularly, some of it centers around the abortion issue. Some of it centers around the real questions that conservatives have over, for example, the 19th Amendment. And we don't have to unpack that right now. But my stance on that is just that when you set men and women as opposition groups in a voting bloc, you immediately cut the population in half. You're going to get chaos. Right. That's how I see that. But that's a much longer discussion.

So they say, well, you have to be nicer to us, and you have to essentially trying to move the goalposts on feminism. We want the conservative party to be more accommodating to feminism. And when you have men who say, no, that's wrong, and we can't do that, and we have now 60 years plus of history to say why all these things are a bad idea. The girls fold their hands and say, fine, well, we'll just go vote Democrat then. And it's like, well, yeah, exactly.

But it's the, but within a church context, within a church context, it's like it shows up there as well. And so I think that's what I mean by the civilizational brinksmanship. There's a resistance to any amount of masculinity. It tries to pick away at it. It's bizarre in my mind. But when it comes to, like, if. You'Re in a church, you're part of a, an organization that by definition has a male hierarchy. And that male hierarchy does it. Well, biblically speaking. And traditionally speaking.

I got a dozen lady pastors that disagree with you. Well, they can call that a church, but that's, you know, they're out of step. So they're, and that's a pretty fundamental thing. I would say that elders should be men. But you worship a God who presents himself in scripture using male pronouns. And there is certainly Jesus himself being masculine and his disciples all being men, all the authors of scripture being men.

You're entering a religion that is, and I don't think I have to shy away from saying this. It's dominated by men, and that doesn't mean there's not a place for women in it. There's a very special, prominent place for women in Christianity, but it's not being in charge of where the direction of a church, not directly in charge. So that's the thing you have to assess, I guess. Do you really want to be part of a church?

It doesn't sound to me like someone who has the attitude you're describing is really interested in being part of that organization. So if they're gonna go vote democrat, that sounds like a much better organization or like it's an organ, not better, but it suits their assumptions about reality. So the problem who I fault with a situation like that is the church.

You know, where did the church, whether it's a local church or a denomination, where did they ever give the impression to a woman who thinks the way that you're saying that this organization is somehow accommodating to you or you would be a good fit for this like that? Or your ideas can be at home here? That's ridiculous. You know. You know, Amy Bird needs to know that the OPC is not her home. Like, this is not, you know, to pick, you know, I don't know enough about Amy bird. I'm assuming.

I just hear people say things, so I'm assuming, and I've seen some of her quotes that seem to be go along with what you just said. Sure. Like, it just doesn't sound like that's the organization you're interested in, so you're gonna go find another one. And we can't bend over backwards to change our organization. Otherwise, we fundamentally change it, and it's no longer a church. If you really take that to its conclusion, it's no longer a church. I agree with you. I agree, and I'm glad.

And I'm glad you said that, because I think that there does come a point where, again, you have to be gracious but firm and say, this is what it says, and this is not what we do around here. And if that's what you're looking for, there's a better organization for you, and I wish you blessings to go towards it. And I think that's a really important stance to take. It doesn't need to be angry. It doesn't need to be vindictive. It doesn't need to play into the victor victim kind of dynamic.

But to say that, hey, the bitter fruit of feminism is we have. I mean, the numbers are there. It's generational rebellion from God, right? And this goes right along with awokeness. In fact, I see it as the root of all the wokeness. And so, like, if that means that there's going to be an entire generation that walks away from the church, that it expects to bow down to their needs, like, well, you're just going to have to walk. Right.

And so that's why I'm glad you said that, because I think that in many ways, that's just in the air, right? That's just in the air. In the conflict around the election, around abortion and all this different stuff. You have a specific set of the population, half of it, in some sense, that's demanding things be done on their terms. It's like, well, in the secular world, that's certainly one thing, but when it comes to the word of God, this is God's word.

Not a whole lot of wiggle room in some of these things, particularly around lady pastors and stuff like that. And if you don't like it, yes, it's very good. It's great. And it's difficult. The Chesterton quote, it's been found difficult and not tried. Right.

And so that's why I ask, is because I think all of us, in many ways, many of my listeners, male and female, and I hear this a lot from women especially, which is why I talk about this, is women who deal with rebellious women in their own lives, say, well, the word of God says this. And so I submit to. To my husband and then the vicious attacks that they get from the women around them.

So to hear you say that, there does come a point where a clear line must be laid, and if people fall on one side or the other, bless them in that. And I think that's really important, that. There are two groups that matter. I just thought of. There are groups because I think almost every girl who's raised in America at this point has a bit of feminism in them somewhere. Or at least people have tried to inject it somewhere. Lots of men, too. And men, yeah.

Through, whether it's through media, through education, through, I don't know, like, oftentimes, parents and relatives. And I do think that there are women like that who have a bit of feminism. They're not full, you know, they're not the purple hair, you know, raging about abortion, but they are, like, they do, let's say they see marriage as a 50 50, you know, like, they're not really the helpmate of the husband.

They think of it as a project, that they're on an equal setting in the sense of, they are equal in the sense of worth, but I'm saying equal in the sense of, like, they should be able to call the shots in the marriage 50% of the time. I mean, this is a very common thought, and many of these people go to churches with good, orthodox statements of faith that have, uh, pastors who are preaching the Bible.

And, um, I think what will happen is if, when they're exposed to truth in the scripture, they will bend. That's really the key thing, is, like, it's not to. I don't want to vilify people just because they have feminist tendencies. Uh, I I think that I would be more concerned about someone, uh, who, let's say they're only two inches off, like, or two, two clicks off from the biblical view, but they were unwilling to bend.

I have less hope for that person than I do the purple hair raging feminist who's willing to bend a scripture, you know? So I think that's the first thing. The second group, though, I was thinking of is there are people who, and I've met them, who legitimately, I think, probably have gone through some abuse and possibly in the church in some cases. The pastor was a hyper patriarchal, very assertive figure, but who was unfortunately abusive and sinful. And so they have an incorrect picture.

And I think of it, I don't remember what shooting it was. I mean, the NRA does this a lot, but there was a shooting, and the NRA came out and basically said, the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. And I think of the same thing in this context. Like, the only thing that can really stop a bad pastor from doing evil things is a good pastor. Like, you have to. Your alternative is not just get rid of pastors, just get rid of male leadership.

Men shouldn't run anything. I'm going to run to a female pastor, or I'm going to do my own thing with the Lord. The solution to that is find a pastor who also takes initiative, but is actually good, cares about his flock, obeys those commands. So throwing out the baby with the bathwater is something I see. And I've seen this all too often with some of the people raised in the most conservative fundamentalist type churches can be the most raging social justice warriors partially because of this.

There's another dynamic at play, too, I think, that causes this. But that is one of the things I think often that happens is they saw things that they think they don't like, and then they overreact to it and just say, well, I guess these pagans over here who really hate what I grew up in, they must have the truth or something. And some of them, they find out pretty quickly that the pagans are. The grass was not greener. Grass is brown. Yeah, interesting.

I didn't think we were going to go down this rabbit hole, but this is interesting. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate you saying that about bending to scripture, because I think that's a really important thing, that the social justice world wants to bend you to its gospel. Right. And it's very effective at doing that. And I think we've all been enculturated in that. And in the same way, like, we can hold the word and say, no, you're supposed to bend to this, and this bends the social justice gospel.

This is what it's supposed to do. So I appreciate you framing it that way, because I think that's really important for both men and women, because being bent to the word of God is. I don't know how to phrase this, but it's a great privilege in a way. Maybe that's not the right word to describe it, but it's a gift, and to treasure that gift for men as well, so that you don't have to be a law unto yourself so that you can have a law to guide you.

What are you as a man using to guide yourself, if not God's law? Your own. Don't do that. That's not going to work out so well. Scripture warns you about that. And the world is full of men who follow, who are a law unto themselves.

And so to say that to treasure the experience of being bent to God's word I is something that a lot of young men right now are discovering, because maybe they grew up fatherless or maybe they had absent father or whatever, all kinds of different reasons why young men are finding their way into various churches, multiple different denominations, not only reform theology. Right. So. But I'll take it.

Yeah. And at the right, and at the same time, being bent to God's word is something that is documented to be very unpopular with women. And so that's why I brought it up, because this is what's in the headlines today. This is what we're looking at in November. And so I'm grateful to hear you say, like, no, we have to hold to these principles in God's word for how we shepherd our flock for who comes into our community.

We can't bend our entire community to this person because this is what they're looking for. This is the book that we follow. And to give christians the courage to stand up for that, discovering what sounds like the courage to stand up for that after God's word was the one that was, so to speak, was bent. In your experience in seminary, et cetera? Yeah. That seems to be the biggest dividing line.

Are you willing to bend to God's word, or do you bend God's word to your own thinking and your own preferences? So we need, obviously, men, as you said, that are convictional. And I think you're right. I think there is a stirring going on. I feel something gurgling up, and we just got to pray that the Lord nurtures this and that older men don't. One of the things I noticed about the boomer generation, they tend to hold on to their positions for a very long time.

They don't like to, they don't like to retire as much as other generations. And my grandfathers, both my grandfathers, they retired, I don't know, in their maybe like when they were late seventies, 80, I don't know. I think seventies for one. But what did they do for the rest of their lives? They were your grandpas, like the normal grandpa. They weren't trying to hold on to a position in control for a long time.

And so my hope is that these young guys you're talking about, that they are nurtured, helped along, encouraged by older men who are in churches and christian organizations, the solid ones who do existential, and that there's not a clash there that they're welcomed in, even if their ideas are a little different. Like that both can come around the word of God and say, what does the word say and how should we apply it?

And I think if that's the humility and the posture, we can really get through anything. I mean, as far, like any serious issue at least, like, we can really come up with solutions. And we don't need to be shooting at each other or I crossing swords. Like, there's a lot of unity, I think, that we can have, and I think we're still waiting to get there. I don't, I mean, hopefully, and I don't think this is the case. X social media is not necessarily the greatest barometer for this.

You know, if you looked at X, you would think that there's not a lot of unity right now. Christians are just fighting with each other all the time, sometimes solid brothers. But I think that, and my hope is that actually there's a stirring going on, though, beyond that. People who aren't even on social media and stuff are discovering what the word of God teaches about all kinds of things that conflict with our modern understandings.

And I hope that there's older people there to nurture, to guide, and then to place them in positions of authority, because that's what we need more than anything else, is male, solid male leadership in the church. So you actually mentioned something that a friend, I said, I'm interviewing John Harris from conversations that matter. Do you guys have any questions? And someone actually did give me a very interesting question. He asked, what can we do?

Because there is a generational divide between the boomers who have been holding on for a while, and this younger generation that wants to try doing things in a new way, kind of scripturally all things being equal, there seems to be a sort of power struggle where it's like, hey, grandpa, with great respect, thank you very much for your time of service. It's time to let go and let the next generation come in and take over.

And it feels like in lots of different ways, all across the board, in America, perhaps even worldwide, there's a reluctance to let go and a holding on past the time. And so what my friend was asking is, what can the younger generation and the ones younger than the boomers do to maybe try to get the boomers to let go a little bit and like, hey, you gotta pass this on now. Like, we're grateful for you, and, like, you know, we need the keys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How did Kamala Harris become the nominee? Maybe that's what we gotta. What was the strategy there? No, I think the first thing that comes to mind for me is this is related to social media, but we can't slam each other. We can disagree if we want to model good christian disagreement. That's one thing I do see far too much slamming of, and I'm one to, I will slam people who are, in my opinion, belligerent fools, people who aren't necessarily even christians, but posing.

I built my platform, I guess, on social media, a lot of it not knowing I was building anything. But that's how it got built, uh, really going after some of these social justice compromised pastors. Um, and, uh, and sometimes I can be pretty strong with it. Like, what you're doing is wrong, your ideas are evil, whatever, but. But I think when it comes to those who are, um, you know, they're not heretics. They're, um.

Like you just said, like, maybe it's just grandpa's holding on to the keys too long and he needs to stop driving. Like, I don't think we slam grandpa, and I don't think grandpa should slam us. That's a really big turn off when grandpa starts, you know, he needs to be willing to give the keys up at some point and just enjoy his grandkids. I don't know. It's a hard thing. I haven't thought about it, like, too deeply.

I do see something, though, and without naming specific organizations, I do see that there are young guys who are starting organizations, I think, part, and churches, I think, partially because those opportunities are not being open to them in places where they perhaps should be open to them. And it seems to me, like, in the organizations, I'm being so careful here, aren't I?

Not to name organizations, but in the organizations, some of which I am very familiar, where it's basically an industry built around a guy, a boomer, who's had a successful ministry of some kind. The people who are filling those ranks tend to be, they tend to be people who follow the party line. They're not necessarily the guys you want in leadership. They are the people that you put in management positions. They're managerial elites, is what they are.

They're riding the coattails of a guy who had success. And so there's really, when boomers end up dying and their organizations or their churches are left without them, it does leave a big hole. And so I'm leading up to this, but I think that if you're a boomer and you've had a successful ministry, you got a church, you got an organization.

If you're listening to this, please be thinking about the next generation and who is going to take your place when you're gone, and then start making that transition. Start giving them more authority. Do whatever you need to do to train them. But they may be different than you in some ways. Their leadership style may be different. They're going to be ministering to a different kind of world in some ways. Obviously, the essential, the core things are still going to be there.

But start doing that transfer and locate that person. Don't leave it up to people to figure out after you're dead or you have a heart attack and you didn't think you were going to die, don't. And don't just give it to people who are there because you're their bread and butter. You know what I mean?

Like, it's hard to explain this, but the christian institutions I've been at, there are just a lot of people that I know for a fact they probably would not be that successful outside of that hierarchy. It's the only place that they feel they have authority and they've managed to work themselves into a position, I think, because they know what things to say to the person in charge. Right. And there's just. I don't know if it's a boomer thing. I really haven't thought about it deeply enough.

I've wondered if it is, but when they die, it's like the organization's gonna die with them. Like, they just don't have great. They don't have someone there to take their place for a great transition. Oftentimes it's. I'm thinking of, like, either that movie the Hobbit, or, I guess there are three movies, but the one who's the guy, not wormtongue, that's from Lord of the Rings.

But the other, like, there's the king, and then there's that guy who, like, tells the king whatever he wants to hear, and he's, like, sort of in second command. I can't remember the name of the Hobbit character. You haven't seen him? No. Oh, man. Bummer. Okay, so. But, you know, like, it's the character who's kind of like, I guess in the world they would call it a suck up. I hate using that term.

But, like, someone who's a ladder climber but doesn't actually have the requisite character, virtue, ability to lead. When it comes to down to it, they're cushioned in a structure that allows them to operate with some authority but does not expose them to the dangers of actually being at the wheel of the ship. That kind of person. Don't let those people near the steering wheel. And that takes some discernment, I suppose.

But just because someone flatters you, I mean, there's a lot of warnings in scripture about this. A flattering tongue. That's not someone you should necessarily listen to. You need to listen to somebody who's going to tell you the truth. And so choose your leaders wisely and start making that transition. Amen. So you mentioned the documentary film work you've done. And I wanted to get a chance that I know, like, we know from way downtown, so I wanted to get a chance because I watched your.

We've already set up, upset a bunch of people, so let's upset a bunch more. So I wanted to talk to you about the 1609 documentary, which I watched and I actually really enjoyed. Like, I can already feel the impact that that is going to have on my. On my thinking about american history and all of that. So maybe we. Maybe we can talk about that for a little bit. We've let the boomers have their fun. Yeah. 1607 project.com dot yeah. Yeah, it's fine. 1607 is when the settlers of Jamestown came.

First permanent english settlement in the new world. And this is obviously before 1620, when the pilgrims came, which is often what people think of when they think of the settlement of the United States. And we had a lot of significant things that happen in this country. Churches were built, communities were established up and down the James river. You had the first, really the first elected representative government in the western hemisphere in the house of Burgesses in 1619. You had the first.

Thanksgiving was 1619. That's a year before the pilgrims came. And the pilgrims were trying to get there. They wanted to go to Virginia. Storm blew them off course. So we recenter Virginia in that story as the origin, as the headwaters of America, and then as the state that has probably contributed more to the american character, culture, ethos than any other state.

And so we talk about political tradition, cuisine, music, all kinds of things, and hopefully leave people with a sense of pride, even if you're not from Virginia, a sense of, this is what America is. This is what. Even if you're someone who's immigrated to the United States, this is what I'm tapping into. This is the story that I'm part of. And we don't want to forget some of the true and valuable things that I think have been somewhat overlooked. So that's what the 1607 project is about.

So what were some of the things, I mean, from having watched the documentary, understanding the role that Virginia played in the american founding and the specific culture of Virginia, the kind of men that it cultivated and then its encounter with, I'm guessing the north or a more northern culture was like, oh, this is very interesting because I grew up in Arizona, and so we're out here in the west, and I think in some sense, kind of a little bit disconnected from what it's like on the east

coast. I probably very disconnected. But certainly I could see from my own education the way that the emphasis tends to be on more of the actors in the northern part of the story and less on the influence of the south. We don't really talk about that part. And so I found it really interesting to sort of have all the men that you interviewed lay out the case like.

No, particularly virginian culture and southern culture as well, played a much bigger role in America up to a particular point than I think we realize. Yeah, I think it's seven of the first 13 presidents, or twelve presidents were from Virginia. George Washington, obviously, Virginia. And Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, was really behind the american education with the University of Virginia. He was a pioneer in that he wrote the bill of religious toleration in Virginia.

Him and James Madison. James Madison, we call him the father of the Constitution. He's Virginian. Patrick Henry's Virginian. The Revolutionary War, the war for Independence ends in Virginia. And that's where Cornwallis is. Or now I'm free. Yeah, Cornwallis is defeated. You have even the first president of the articles under the articles of Confederation. Peyton Randolph is virginian, first Supreme Court justice. John Marshall is virginian.

So Virginians had an outsized influence on the country's beginnings. And so just a few things you had asked of the important, true and valuable things that come from Virginia. Well, I think you have, as you rightly already said, a leadership model that comes out of Virginia that is very unique. You see more the management type, managerial business, modern model, I think come more out of New England, and there's more development with factories and infrastructure and those kinds of things.

But in Virginia, you have more of an older, more medieval, I would say, type of leadership model. It's more cavalier. And the family, the family lives on the farm or the plantation. It's managed in connection with the family. And there's not a disconnection between your labor and yourself. You are part of the land that you're living in. And Virginians very much saw their political duties when they went into political office as part of their social duties and part of their family duties.

These things were all connected. Of course, I'm going to serve in a political position, and I'm not going to take pay for it because this is my duty. And so duty was very important to people like George Washington and Robert E. Lee that affected the way they even did warfare, this total war stuff that you get in the civil war from General Sherman. Unfortunately, some of the things we even have done in World War Two. And since then, you don't see that in the south as much. There's an honor code.

There's a hierarchy. There's an honor code in some ways. And I've said this before, I've gotten in trouble for it with people because they think, well, they had slaves, so you can't say this, but I have said they were kind of the high point of christian civilization. And what I mean by that is that they had in their society, it was so ingrained with biblical virtues. Biblical thinking doesn't mean that there weren't sins. It doesn't mean that there weren't.

Sometimes they were out of step with all societies have their problems, but I think more so than other societies. They had reached a point of trying to honor what the Bible taught as far as the relationships between men and women, the relationships between those in authority, in labor, and those who slaves or not even slaves, just people who worked for you. There was a respect there for people. And it's people. They're not numbers. They're not machines. They're people.

So I think Virginians can teach us how to live. I think the music, that's one of the aspects we talked about music and cuisine. I mean, we get barbecue from the south. And we had Lance Nadihara, culinary chef, talk about that in the documentary and we get really all forms of american music traced back to Jamestown in some way, according to Tom Daniel, who is a professor of music, who talked a lot about that, and I found that fascinating.

There's more I can share on that because we obviously talked a lot that didn't, things that didn't make it into the documentary, but a lot of these things that confer identity to us, like. Like art, like social mores and habits and ways to interact with each other, these. All of these things, I think, are under attack in America. I was just seeing an article the other day that guys don't even know how to approach girls. Like, they don't even know what to say. They're afraid.

You've probably covered this with your masculinity stuff. Well, there was a society at one point in this country we can stretch back and remember that had very firm guidelines. Men knew exactly what to say, exactly what to do. Those are the social codes, social mores, those kinds of things. And we see a lot of that. I think in Virginia, it was medieval in a way. There were lords and ladies, like I said before, hierarchy.

I think the federalism, we focus on that quite a bit in their political tradition is very important. This idea that local communities have the right to govern themselves and decide what's best for them without the interference of those outside their communities. And so this really did give us the federal compact that 13 states could live separately and differently and still have a shared government and a shared I alliance on things like trade and immigration and war.

I think that that localism that is most often associated with Thomas Jefferson still exists not just in Virginia, but across the United States, across even the Midwest and other places where small towns, they will even change their zoning laws and things to keep things the way that they are. A conservative posture. And Virginia is also more traditional. They're more christian than what eventually happened to the north. And so the south has been able, they're called the Bible belt.

They've been able to hang on to traditional values and orthodox doctrine. So, I mean, I could probably go on and on, but these are all things, looking back, that we get from Virginia. They weren't aggressive abroad, the Virginians. They wished to be more or less left alone to themselves. I think there's just a lot of wisdom that we can glean, but we don't because we tend to center everything on New England, and that's the story of America, and that's not the story of America.

So we wanted to kind of right the ship. In all of my travels the sense that I've gotten that the three most misunderstood parts of the world are eastern Europe, Mexico, and the american south. I think those are. Wow, really? Yep. I'm kind of curious about Eastern Europe and Mexico. Yeah, I mean, I think because Eastern Europe is kind of between two worlds, right. It's between Russia, former Soviet Union, and Western Europe and that whole region of the world.

It's not really well understood, kind of who they are, what they're about. Maybe we've heard about some wars and stuff that are happening there. But what is eastern european culture? I don't think it's well understood. It's just that people don't usually go there. They're not big travel destinations. It's like this part of the world that played a really central role in some ways in the 20th century, and then everyone just kind of forgot about it. Right.

And Mexico, because Mexico is one of those countries that's trying to. That's trying to kind of assert itself on the world stage and is struggling with some very deeply ingrained social, political issues. For example, the drug trade, for example. That's just an example, but it's struggling with who it's trying to be. And so the worst parts of Mexico get highlighted to the world when in fact, there's lots of beauty in the country as there is in lots of Latin America.

It's just that Mexico's problems have been blown out to such a large proportion, really, in terms of scale and in terms of impact. But real quick side note, because I was in Mexico, I went to, you know, I did the typical thing. I went to Cancun, right? But then I. We drove, but we did a lot of driving while we were there. We went to Chichen Itza and, you know, drove, drove back through some small towns and stuff.

So I was just going to say, it's funny because I think there was like a cartel, like a shooting or something that happened that week. And there were people in our family who were kind of like. Or maybe it was their friends. It was friends, I guess, but they were like, oh, you're like, hey, be careful down there. And I'm thinking, we are so safe. You know what I mean? Like Mexico. You're right. I realized that when I was there.

This is nowhere near or like the border towns where the violence is going on. So anyway, sorry, continue. No, that's exactly. It is that Mexico is such a complicated country, but its problems are magnified because of its problems being so related to America. Drug trade, mass migration, et cetera. It taps into the american media system that then broadcasts it around the world, because America exports news, we don't import it. So we're exporting all this bad news about Mexico.

But I think the country is much, much more than that. But usually people don't explore it to that degree. And the third one is the American south. And I think the American south has gotten such a terrible reputation. It's been slandered, really, in the media as a result of lots of long, old hurt feelings over slavery, that people don't understand what the American south was about. They don't understand what it is about.

And it's really a shame because as I've discovered for myself and as your documentary speaks to the south is an important part of american history, american independence, early american history, and that the focus of everything since the 18 hundreds has been exclusively on this one problem, taking an anachronistic viewpoint on it, holding people to a moral standard 200 years ago that they didn't hold it papers over this entire region.

Not to say that it's all sunshine and rainbows there, obviously, it has its own problems. Guess what, so does the north. Guess what? So does the Midwest. Guess what, so does the Southwest. So to watch the documentary and to get that view into the American south and Virginia during these formative times was like, it was very eye opening. Oh, I'm so glad. I mean, that is one of the reasons that we made it, was to challenge people's assumptions about Virginia and the south in general.

And you're so right. I remember when my wife and I moved down to North Carolina, and then we went to Virginia and lived there for a few years. She had been raised up in, she was in a country area, but with a very standard viewpoint that those are where all the racists live that hate black people, hate anyone different than them. They're bigots on everything. They're just bigots. And she thought, well, I'm going to just see a lot of that when I go down there. And she was just shocked.

She was shocked that overturned all the stereotypes for her. And it's a very common story. And I remember one of my first jobs in New York was working with a bunch of older italian guys out of town. And I would hear a lot of language that was just racially insensitive at times. And I remember those same guys, though, and they would trash the south. You know, the south is racist. The south, they're lazy. All the, every time they were going to go on vacation, where did they all go?

They went to South Carolina. They went to Georgia. They went to North Carolina. And obviously, on one level, this is propaganda that you have to repeat. You have to believe. On another level, I think that people don't really believe it. They know that there's something not true about that narrative. At least it's a cartoon. It's overly simplistic, I'll say. And so that's one of the things we were hoping to point out, was that we do talk about slavery, but we talk about some of the.

I mean, I mentioned barbecue before. I mean, this is a positive contribution. There's a lot of things to be proud of that all Americans can take pride in musical genres like jazz and blues. I mean, we wouldn't have some of the stuff we have if it weren't for the interaction with peoples from Africa who came here, whether as slaves or later on, freemen who were able to gain their freedom and make contributions. So I dont think we need to be guilty about it.

Virginia, in particular, was one of the first colonies trying to outlaw the slave trade, penalizing the slave trade. It came very close at one point to outlawing slavery, as I recall, and doing. We didn't. I don't think this part made it into the documentary because we, you know, you have to choose what you're going to keep and not. But it was. I believe it was the Nat Turner rebellion that was a big. It made a big impact in the legislature because it scared every.

That was one of the things, too, in context, there's. During the federal period in american history, a lot of southerners were afraid that the northern abolitionists were going to cause slave insurrections and these kinds of things. And so they didn't want to encourage or fan the flames of that. But you do see the moral will in the south to end this institution on multiple levels. You see it in the confederate constitution. They outlawed the slave trade. In that document.

You see it in 1865, at the end of the war, Jefferson Davis signed a law that said slaves, if they fought for the Confederacy, could gain their freedom. And unfortunately, there wasn't enough time for that to do much for the Confederacy, unfortunately for Davis. But the moral will to do some of these things was there. There was just, I think, a sense in which this was an inherited thing, and to end it, it needed to be ended responsibly.

And the way the abolitionists wanted to approach it was just not a responsible way to end the practice. And it ended up, honestly, in the worst possible scenario, with a war torn region and about a million slaves, it's estimated, starving or getting diseases and dying from it. And that's a sobering thing. I mean, every other country in the world seemed to be able to end this without a war, and the United States is the exception. Every other western country, at least.

So we did focus on that somewhat. We focused on the christianization of the slaves. I mean, that's another positive thing. I mean, people like Samuel Davies really did a great missionary work among the slaves, teaching them Christianity, things that they did not know they would not have been exposed to in Africa. I mean, this is one of the greatest. I don't even know what you want to call it. It's a missionary.

It wasn't meant to be a missionary effort, but it became a means by which the Lord gave the gospel to a people group. And so, if I remember correctly, I think we do talk a little bit about the slavery conditions and some of the misnomers about what slavery was like and that kind of thing, but it's not really meant to be an apologetic for Virginia's participation in slavery or anything like that. It's really more just to give you a sense of, like, you know, good, bad, ugly. This is who we are.

And that us, that we. That possessive pronoun is what we want to give to people. That you have a story, we have a story. This is part of that. You're not told this part of it, but this is part of that story. It makes sense of some of the things that you're seeing today in your country. And because of that, because it belongs to us, we ought to preserve it. We ought to gain lessons from it. And we shouldn't be tearing down all these monuments. We've torn down hundreds of them in this country.

And it's evil, it's wrong. And I think people hopefully walk away after seeing something like that, and they realize that people like Robert E. Lee, these were upstanding, good men with a lot of noble things to learn, that we could learn from them today. No, thank you for saying all that. One of the things that has been happening since 2020 is everyone has been questioning everything.

Because 2020 was like, for a lot of people who were awake, it's like, now would be a good time to start asking questions about everything. And one of the things that hasn't been happening is people will go through and they will debunk some mainstream narratives, and then they'll think that that's the end of the process, and then they won't go any further to try and actually determine what did happen. It's like, well, that's not true. And so everything I've been told is lie. Throw it all out.

It's like, well, hold on. Why don't you try taking that a few steps further? Right. And so it's possible to look at an institution like slavery and say, like, the picture was more complicated than that because the debunking would say, like, oh, no, I'm just being an apologist for it. Like, no, no, no. I'm not being an apologist for it.

I'm trying to paint the picture that when you have millions of people inside the country, maybe you have to propose other ways to liberate them other than a war that devastates both the north and the south and everyone caught up in it. Maybe there was another way to handle that problem that would have had less of a devastating impact on all involved. And I think that that's a completely okay question to ask, but it makes people really upset. Well, I can tell you why.

I. I think this is my theory. Please. I think, well, if you've, let's say you've devoted your life to something, right, and then you find out in the end it was all worthless, or there was a better way to go, right. You're going to be awfully defensive about the work you put in.

There's six, over 600,000 men that gave their lives in that conflict, not to mention everyone who, in the south, because they're the ones left in the ruins, died, civilians who died as a result of the total war policies that strip the land of. I mean, it's horrible. Some of the things that happened strip the land of the crops and the animals, and there was nothing to eat.

And you ever want to read books on that, read like, Karen Stokes has a book on what happened when Sherman's army got into Columbia, South Carolina. It's called legion of devils. And, I mean, ripping the earrings out of slaves, earth women's ears, raping slaves. I mean, there are some horrific stories about what Sherman's army did.

And this has caused, I think, also a lot of the political problems that we have today in regards to race and so forth, because now you have a class of people who are used to relying on their masters for their economic means, and now that relationship is cut. It doesn't exist anymore. And instead, now they're relying on essentially politicians that the freedmen's bureau, the Union League.

I mean, there was these organizations we only hear about the Klan, but you had these other organizations that existed in the south that were the Freedmen's bureau especially, that were trying. They presented themselves as the ones who were going to help these former slaves. But what ended up happening was there was a dependency created, and that dependency is with us to this day. We still have that dependency.

We still have a political party, basically, and now couple it with generational welfare and everything, and how bad that's gotten. You're left without dignity in many of these urban communities where the men don't work and they don't know anything else, this is what they've been raised with. And in slavery, at least in the best case scenario, and Fogel and Ingram say 60% to 80% of the slave narratives, they say that they don't say negative things, which is kind of eye opening to people today.

How could that happen? But in the best case scenarios, there was at least some dignity in work, and you don't even have that with welfare. And so I'm not saying that in every way, welfare is worse than slavery or anything like that, but what I'm trying to say is that we've gotten into a position where race relations were poisoned after that war and dependency was created, and we've never recovered from it.

This has always been a sore point of contention in the country, and so I'm just pointing that out to say that I think what you said is 100% right. There were other ways of approaching this, and I think southerners have been blamed for every problem related to this when it's just not accurate. It was northeasterners who brought the slaves here. They were the merchants. This is an american problem that has been created, and a lot of, frankly, not great decisions that have brought us to this point.

And it's not like the south should have to be the ones that are blamed for the whole entire thing. And Virginia stands out to me not only because of its significance, but because of its moral sense. It was the cavalier culture that existed there as being a particularly noble place for a long time.

And even when it came to the civil war, Virginia, when they entered the civil war, you can read their document and their secession document, and their declaration says that they are seceding because of an invasion. Essentially, they're going to defend the states that are being. That are, well, there's a call to arms. Virginia said, we're not supplying troops. We're going to defend the lower south because we don't want to live in that.

And so they always had, I think, a high sense of duty, a high sense of justice, and also prudence mixed in with that. What is possible, so what is right and what is possible. And this came from a very mature, I would say, class of men in the planner aristocracy. And we just don't even know what that looks like today. We don't have leaders like that today that are so concerned with the well being of their families, of their people, and including, even if they had slaves, they're slaves.

And not just their humans, the humans that they knew in their lives, but their animals, their crops, their land. We need to get back to that. We need, I think, men who take their stewardship, the dominion mandate and stewardship very seriously. And that's one of the things that the documentary highlights.

I think that I really was proud of men like I mentioned Robert E. Lee, but I think also men like Thomas Jefferson and very prudential man, people like Lewis and Clark, very brave in their exploration of the west. They're Virginians and men like George Washington, who also exercised a lot of prudence. So anyway, I could ramble on, but that's really the documentary. That's what we're trying to communicate. And on the subject of slavery, there's no exception there.

The Virginians seem to have cooler heads, in my opinion, about the whole thing and hotheads around them. But I don't know exactly how we get back. But I know the first step to getting back to that leadership class is letting people know that it once existed. I think one of those steps would be like, the north has driven the agenda, and maybe now would be a good time.

The north says, okay, so if I were from the north, I would say, okay, all of this noble virtue, value, stewardship is great, and they treated human beings as property. And so what they're saying is, that's hypocritical. Right? So that's hypocritical. Okay, cool. So I'll grant the point, but now why don't we take a look at the ways the north is hypocritical, which are multifarious. So if we're going to with a measure that you measure, it'll be measured back to you.

And I think now, in the same collectivist, we need the big hand of government to solve all problems, which was kind of the big coming out party of the civil war, is to say, okay, so now we see this great concern and compassion and empathy for humanity, and you have homeless fentanyl zombies walking around in your streets. Right? Like, how compassionate. How compassionate is that? Right? I mentioned before, though, the north, the northeasterners are the ones who brought the slaves.

And the worst conditions of all of slavery was during the middle passage on the slave boat. So if you want to talk about treating people like property and the conditions being horrific. I would say the north probably bears more blame even in that.

And I'm not about spreading blame, but I'm just saying if you're going to make the accusation, you at least need to consider that and then also consider what some even called wage slavery, where a lot of immigrants coming into the north really were forced into conditions that would be worse than the average slave in the south.

And there's many foreign observers that actually said as much that when they would travel north, travel south, that the slaves on average, seem to have a better life than many of the wage slaves in the north who, it's great. You have freedom. You can go anywhere you want. Guess what? There's nowhere to go. And the conditions that you're working in are subhuman. I mean, they are just monotonous, long hours, child labor. I think some of these notions, I understand some of these notions.

But like, slavery, and this is not about. I know this whole thing's not about slavery, but I would just say this. Slavery has been around since, until modern times. Every civilization has had slavery, and every civilization, they would look at you in ancient times like you had two heads. If you went to them and be like, I can't believe human or humans are property. They'd say, our children are property. You know, they would like, they belong to us, not to you. Right? That's right.

They saw the dependency was everywhere. In pre modern societies, we didn't have a modern state that just gave you a safety net. And so now what we have, just to put things in perspective, we have this modern state that gives you the safety net. Guess what else this modern state does, though? It has a prison system, which is basically slavery. They get work from you and they don't have to pay you. What would they give you? $1 an hour in some of the. But you can't go anywhere. You're in prison.

Right. That's very. That's not really biblical. It's not a biblical model. And obviously the 13th amendment leaves that out because that's the kind of slavery they allow. You also have, obviously, sex slavery. There's a few films that have finally focused on this going on. You have the fact that when we go into Walmart's or targets, hopefully we don't go into targets, but they have the clothing and stuff we buy. Some of that is sweatshop labor. I mean, it might as well be slave labor.

We have a welfare system that has generational dependency. I mean, just look around you at all the things that would be in many ways morally similar or equivalent or economically similar to slavery. And they're everywhere. We have civil slavery that we're worried about now, really. We have an all powerful federal government that views you as a number. And as they increase their power over your life and take care of your healthcare and everything else, you become a slave to them.

I mean, that's essentially what happens. I mean, proverbs even says debt slavery. How much debt is the average American in and how much is our national debt? So you see what I'm saying? It's just to take this one thing and say, well, that's the only, as if that's the only version of slavery that exists. And it was unique to this one region. And that's why they're uniquely horrible people. And that's why we can just dismiss christians because that was the Bible belt.

You have to ignore everything you're living around. You're living around trash world, you know? And so I don't have patience for that anymore. I get in trouble for saying these kinds of things with some people. But it's like the question I have at the bottom of it is like, do we actually care about people and their condition?

Knowing we live in an imperfect world and not everyone's going to have, we're never going to reach equality in the sense of like, not everyone's going to have the same economic income or ability to get an income like that. We're just never going to happen. So, granted, we live in that world with differences between peoples and different situations that arise at different historical times. Do we care about people's conditions or do we care about their status? So it's condition versus status.

And the Virginians, I think they uniquely cared about people's conditions. You see that sense even in letters that you read from any of the pick any famous Virginian and Patrick Henry and when he would travel and his concern for back home and how is everyone doing? How were the slaves? There was just such a responsibility that he took over what he believed God had given him to steward. So their condition meant something to him. Jefferson, the same thing with his slave.

John Randolph, same thing with his slaves. They were very concerned about their condition, whereas I think in the north you had developing, and now we're all living in this to some extent, an obsession with status, that we can all be equally free and miserable and destitute. And that's just fine because at least we're all equal. At least we all can vote. At least we all have the same rights, even if it's a dismal situation, then the status seems to be more important.

I'm hoping in the project, when people watch the documentary, they can walk away and they get a sense of what Virginia was like, what the people there valued, what their priorities were in life, that they could smell the roses, enjoy the. The finer things of God's gift, because they had you, their humanity. And it wasn't just about ideology, abstractions, nuts and bolts, and gaining a profit of some kind, a numerical value.

It was really more just about enjoying a good life and what's the best way we can enjoy that good life in the order that God has set up for us. That's how I try to measure my life. I study these men because I want to be like them in those ways, even though they came from a very different time with different conditions.

And I wouldn't have agreed with all the different relationships they had set up, but I want to understand a sense from them of how to live and how to manage things and how not to lose myself in a very task oriented mindset, which is, I think, what we have today a lot. But to really see deeply into the purpose behind things and value people for. People, it makes me think that there's something very important about the men of the south in a way that can inform american men today.

Like, these men are part of who you are, too, right? This papered over part of american culture, american history. What's actually been hidden is what you just described. Who were the gentlemen of the south? All we hear is that, oh, they just own slaves, so they're absolutely moral abominations in every possible way, and don't ever go looking again. But in fact, the honor that was held in the south, I think it issues from a scotch irish kind of thing.

What I've heard is that in the early american founding, there were actually old european and british social divisions that were informing a lot of that. I think Brett McKay, who runs art of manliness, that podcast and blog, he did a great book called what is honor? And there's a section in that book about where the southern sense of honor came from. And I think he said it came from the Scotch Irish. And like, where, yeah, cavalier. But the south is a mix.

You know, in Appalachia, you have Scots Irish, and they have an honor culture, and. And then the cavaliers also have their own honor culture, a very high sense of hierarchy in that honor culture. So there was a dashingness and just, I don't know how you would describe it, but like a regal's probably too strong a word, but they had a command, you know, when they entered the room, they had a certain command to them and a sense of orderliness and decency, and they were dashing.

I don't know how else to say it. Like, you don't have the same figures as much in the north, at least by the time you get to the civil war period, as much. And I think when we go from. Really, you could see this from the knight to the cavalier to the cowboy. That's sort of the. Because the cowboy, too. I know you're in Arizona, so you're probably more familiar in some ways. I don't know if there's still kind of a cowboy culture out there in Phoenix area. I mean, you're in an urban setting.

But cowboys always were portrayed, at least in popular media, as having an honor code. And that really comes from the cavalier and then the knights before that, there's chivalry. Just the north didn't have it as much. Even the dueling culture, you know, which is often very misunderstood, too, that came from a sense of a high sense of honor and that there were some things worth fighting and dying for, you know, so it wasn't something you entered into lightly.

And I thought that was one of the inspiring parts of the documentary, was to paint the picture of the average southern man. Like, cowboys were many things, but they're not usually, like, dashing. Right. Cowboys are, like, strong. They're rugged, right? Yeah, rugged. Yeah. Like, stoic. You know, I don't know if they'd ever describe themselves that way. But the dashing southern gentlemen, like, gone with the wind rhett. Right. Like something like that.

That is an american, exclusively american archetype that doesn't exist in our culture anymore precisely because of the overemphasis on the historical conditions of slavery. And so Americans are cut off from their own, part of their own history before the civil war to understand this is part of who we are. And so that's what I mean when I say, like, it's just a very misunderstood part of the world. Right. And maybe some of I haven't spent that much time in the south. I have been to Virginia.

It's beautiful. Been to Raleigh and driven through the countryside. It's one of my favorite drives ever. Sun was setting this golden mist in the air. I was like, oh, where were you coming from? From Virginia to Raleigh. You were driving, so from something? Yeah, yeah, something like that. Where was I? I was visiting. No, I'm wondering if you were, like, on the Blue Ridge parkway or, you know, like, by the Shenandoah mountains or something. I've driven the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Yes. Oh, that's stunning. Yeah, yeah. And so, like, it's just. It was one of my favorite parts. Right. Of the country. And so. And so when I was driving through that area, working on my own documentary, actually. Oh, I didn't know you had one. Yeah. So the renaissance of men was originally supposed to be a multi part documentary series. Oh. Oh, yeah. I can send you. I did a trailer and a whole break. Yeah. I'm very proud of the work that I did there.

And of all the men that I interviewed, I think interviewed. It was a 20 in 2021. I drove, what, 14,000 miles across the country. Yeah. And did 21 interviews, 108 days. I didn't come home for 100 days. And so. But I did all these interviews, and then one by one, all the men that I interviewed, you know, had these major personal crises, so God spared me from putting out this documentary with my name on it. Excuse me. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, yeah, I'll send. It's awesome. So that's pretty fun.

So, anyway, so I got to drive, as I was driving through that area, and that was my experience. I'm like, that was confirmation for me that this part of the country is very misunderstood. And to bring out that cavalier spirit, to bring out that tradition, to bring out that honor, there's something in that for american men today that we're so forced with the New York mindset, the New York, DC, Boston kind of way of being. Well, what is it?

In a more rural, traditional, honorable setting, like Jeff Wright from backwoods belief. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, let me give you, like, just a real, real quick story. I was out in the middle of nowhere, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, and someone asked me there. I was in someone's house, and they said, okay, so you're probably used to when you're somewhere in the south, generally, it's where you're from. In the northeast, it's, what do you do for a living?

And in California, it's, what's your hobby? Right. Like, what do you like to do? These are like, I've lived in all three areas, and that's what I notice. And it's like, your identity is confirmed through these things. In California, it's hobbies. So, anyway, I was in this rural area in Virginia, and the guy asked me, who are your people? Which is a little different than where are you from? But it's kind of getting at the same thing. But he said, who are your people? And I turned to my friend.

My friend had been raised in the Shenandoah Valley, and I said, well, I mean, I'm not from here. And I was like. And so after we left, I said, what did he mean by that exactly? And he. He goes, well, he's like, you know, your name is Harris, and there's probably some harrises that have settled in that area, but he wants to know, like, are you with those harrises? Like, there's a few different last names, and they have reputations, you know, they have. And so, like, I don't know.

It just kind of threw me. I was like, wow, that's what a wonderful thing to. And what a beautiful thing to ask someone, who are your people? You know? And what a sad thing. Probably for some people, it'd probably be a hard thing to answer. Like, you start realizing. You start to. That starts merit, like, setting in. You're like, I don't know. I don't know if I actually have a people.

But I think southerners have typically had a strong sense of that, that they do have a people that they are responsible for. And when it comes to manliness, I just thought of Jeb Stewart and Turner Ashby, but Jeb Stewart in particular, a cavalry officer in Robert E. Lee's army. Probably the reason that Lee, some people think, lost Gettysburg, Washington, you know, Stuart was out gallivanting around and in the cavalry, and he should have been with Lee.

But anyway, Stuart, though, had this big, like, plume on his hat, you know, and just drinks. He dressed to the nines. You know, he was very. Well, he was dashing and, you know, his beard, even in the paintings, his beard is, like, curated and everything. And I think that for men, like, there is this also model of manliness that's, like, you can't really be to put together because that's girly and, like, having a plume in your hat, like, that's gay or something. I don't know.

But. But, like, no, like, there are actually some men who were, like, they were very well dressed. They knew style. You know what I mean? Like, they knew how to put a suit on and what it would look like. And, like, that's something, too, that I hope we can get back to somehow is I'm probably not the greatest poster child for that at all, but I would like to dress better, and. And that says something about who you are. Virginians were very well dressed.

Well, I will connect you to my friend Tanner Guzzi. And that's what he does. He does men's, men's style coaching. And he's been a big impact on my life, helping me learn how to dress better. And he talks about this, his whole line on Twitter especially. It's a joke. It's meant to be ironic. Real men don't care what they look like because that's the line that a lot of men apparently say today.

And he'll post all these ornate, tribally decorated men and suits of armor and samurais and guys with plumes in their hats. Real men used to care very much what they look like, and there wasn't anything effeminate or gay about it at all. It was like, this was how men, and this was Tanner's angle on it. This is how men project power. They project power with their clothing.

And now sort of adopting the Silicon Valley tech ethos, where the way that you project power is, you appear like you don't have any power at all. The Mark Zuckerberg and the hoodie and the blue jeans. Right. And so Tanner's like, no, that's ridiculous. You can learn how to dress. You can learn how to dress for your tribe, for your people, for your community, for your own personal style. Matt Reynolds from barbell logic works with him a lot as well. So he's in. I'll have to check him out.

I need help. Yeah, maybe he'll teach you to dress like a modern southern gentleman, a modern virginian. Well, I do have, I do have a seersucker, so I do have that. But forget about. I tried to tie a bowtie. It took me an hour, and it looked awful. I got so impatient with it. Right. Well, I really appreciate you highlighting the need to bring that spirit of manhood back, especially in America. It's not really a devil may care attitude because that's not it.

Because I don't know that you can have a devil may care attitude and be a Christian Mandeh this idea of a swagger, a style, a groundedness in yourself, a knowledge of who your people are. And you bring that forward into the world, and you upset the people that don't want you to have it. And so there's an aspect of being a man today that's very much like, no, this is who I am, and I'm going to embody who I am, and you're not going to like it. And I really don't care.

I think I'm inspired to go to Macy's tomorrow and start is, I don't know if maybe, maybe that's too, maybe I'm giving away that, that's too, like, low class or something. I don't know. But that's where I would go to get a nice suit or something. No, I'll connect you. You can talk with Tanner first, and. He'Ll talk with Tanner. Okay. Okay. I guess I need help. I guess that's brother. We all do. We all do. No learning.

So the shirt that I'm wearing right now, this shirt is by a maker called batch batchmen.com. and they just make these really nice button up shirts. And Tanner introduced me to them. And so now anyone who's watched my podcast basically for. Yeah, thank you. So it basically has seen me wearing batch shirts. Okay, so you want to see my shirt? Hold on. Harris is against Harris. Yeah, that's my shirt right now. I don't know. I'll give you some points for that one, I think. Thank you. Thank you.

That's pretty good. No relation to Kamala? No, no. She's. Maybe she's a crazy old aunt somewhere that I didn't know about. Pray? No. Pray? No. Yeah, I hope not. Well, John, this has been an outstanding conversation. I've really been grateful for the chance to get to know you and your work and all the documentary work that you've done in the podcast and the overview of the church. Like, I've gotten a lot of this conversation. Thank you so much. Yeah, likewise.

I appreciate it, Will. And, yeah, contact me anytime. Hopefully we can do this again, some point. Will do. Where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do? Well, I think 1607 project.com is number one to see that documentary, but for me, johnharrispodcast.com comma, you can find all my socials. 16 [email protected] dot thank you very much and God bless you. God bless you, sir. Thank you so much for the time you spent with a. God bless you, too, Will.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Renaissance of Men podcast. Visit us on the [email protected] or on your favorite social media platform at Ren of men. This is the renaissance of men. You are the Renaissance.