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This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
0:51
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:53
Let's get into it.
0:54
Our guys today, we got a return guest on the podcast.
0:55
Her name is Elisa Childers.
0:57
She is a former contemporary Christian music recording artist turned Christian apologist.
1:01
So if you want to get a little bit more as to that story, go back to episode 318 of
1:04
this podcast.
1:05
That's episode 318.
1:06
It will be in the show notes.
1:07
She was also part of an all female Christian pop music group called Zoe girl back in the
1:11
day.
1:12
So if you were a Christian gal back in like the late 90s, early 2000s, you're probably
1:15
familiar with her.
1:16
But after her music career, she found her way into the world of Christian apologetics.
1:20
She is an outspoken opponent of what you could, I guess, colloquially call progressive Christianity.
1:25
She's the author of the book, Another Gospel, a lifelong Christian seeks truth in response
1:29
to progressive Christianity.
1:30
That was the main focus of her previous appearance on the show.
1:33
We really dug deep into that book, but today we spend most of our time talking about her
1:36
new book, which guys, if you're listening to this on time, it is out right now.
1:39
It is in the show notes.
1:40
It's called live your truth and other lies, exposing popular deceptions that make us anxious,
1:45
exhausted and self-obsessed.
1:47
So anytime I get a longer period than 45 minutes to an hour, I know we're going to be able
1:51
to just follow wherever things go. So we took a major detour about 45 to 50 minutes inside
1:57
of this interview. We talked about the drama with Matt Chandler. We talked about the stuff
2:01
with Robbie Zacharias, whether or not those people should be deleted from ministry and
2:05
all the things that they've contributed to ministry and all that.
2:08
But we talked a lot in this podcast about the deceptions that the lies that were given from
2:12
culture and what they do to us when they tell us, Hey, just be your authentic self.
2:16
Like, Hey, let's just be tolerant. Hey, let's just, you know, take the advice of these influencers
2:20
who have really not spent any time digging into data or theology and all that. Let's just
2:24
kind of follow wherever they go. But then we spend a lot of time talking about this idea
2:29
that the Bible is about us somehow that people are telling us, Hey, you are enough when we
2:34
all really know that that's not really the case. But then we talk about happiness. Like
2:38
what is this, this overwhelming sense that we have to be happy and how God is only about
2:43
our happiness and those types of things. But then towards the end, we talked about a couple
2:47
of very interesting things. You know, Jesus being portrayed as a super tolerant hippie,
2:51
but also how that could potentially affect her and how things are going. Guys, we went
2:55
so many different places. I almost don't want to tee it up anymore, but you're definitely
2:58
not going to want to skip this one before we get to that. I do want to make sure that
3:01
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We love what they're doing. We love everything that they've got going on. But guys, this
4:11
is a tremendous interview with Elisa Childers. If you're not following her Instagram, if you're
4:15
not following her YouTube channel, you need to make sure you can do that. That will be
4:17
in the show notes as well. But guys, without further ado, let's get into it.
4:21
Elisa Childers welcome back to indaunted life of man's podcast. Great to be here. Thanks
4:25
for having me back. Now I got to tell you, after your first appearance on the show, there
4:30
was one word that most of the guys that sent me messages about the interview used to describe
4:34
you. And it's a word that I think you're not terribly comfortable with, but it's gangster.
4:39
And I told you before the first interview that that is my one standard that if we're
4:43
going to talk to a lady on the show, she's got to be a gangster. So I guess why are you
4:46
so uncomfortable being so gangsterish, huh? I don't know. Am I? Yeah. Yeah. Like you
4:52
because I know you're real straight lace and you know, you do things all women proper,
4:55
but you got kind of an edge and it certainly came out in the new book as well. Well, I think
5:00
I think, you know, maybe it depends on how you define the word gangster. I think I think
5:05
that everybody, no matter what their demeanor or no matter how they might engage with other
5:10
people, if they just know what they think and stick to it. And I mean, of course, having
5:15
an open mind to change your mind if you're wrong, but, but I mean, not backing down,
5:19
you can do that with any kind of demeanor. So, you know, I'll accept it. I'll accept it.
5:24
It's like a, it's like a polite gangster. It's like a guy that will like steal your car,
5:28
but then say I'm so sorry as he's driving away. Like that kind of thing. That's kind of what
5:31
it feels like. Polite gangster. I like that. Yeah, polite gangster. You should sell t-shirts.
5:35
I'll just take a small cut. But I will say the funny thing about that is you were on
5:40
my show and then I came on your show and I thought for sure I was going to get you canceled.
5:44
At least get your strike on your YouTube channel or something like that. And it didn't work.
5:48
So, so I guess, are you going to try to like one up me on this show? Is that kind of how
5:51
it's going to work?
5:52
I know I got to be honest, when you came on my show, I kind of, I was, I was bracing
5:56
for pushback. I was bracing for a bunch of pushback. But actually, Kyle, that I got so
6:01
much amazing feedback on that episode. People just loved it. So yeah, it was great.
6:06
At the risk of seeming self-serving, I get a little nervous about that as well whenever
6:10
I go on other people's shows because that's when I kind of let my hair down as it were
6:13
and then just kind of like, I'll just go wherever it goes. But for your audience, I was a little
6:17
nervous. It is 50, 50 split male female. But again, they're following you and you don't
6:23
really go so hard. Like as I do, you kind of have your own style. So why do you think that
6:28
resonated with your audience? Because I mean, again, I got another one star review on my
6:31
show yesterday just because people are like, why does he act like he knows everything?
6:34
It's like, because it's not interesting to listen to somebody that doesn't have a defined
6:38
opinion on something and I just happen to do it with, you know, through this face.
6:42
I think the because is because people who tend to follow me and people who tend to follow
6:47
you and others, it's almost like because our culture is getting so polarized, there's really
6:52
not a lot of middle ground anymore. So I think that the people who even follow people like
6:57
you and people who might have a more aggressive style are naturally going to be drawn to the
7:01
things that I'm talking about because we're really all talking about the same things.
7:04
We might be doing it with a different style or a different type of approach. But I think
7:09
because of the polarization, there's just really like everything now is just like there's
7:14
just two options. It's just truth or it's just this mushy kind of oatmeal fluid kind
7:19
of deal that I don't understand why that is attractive to people because like you, you
7:23
know, you mentioned, I want to listen to people who have an opinion, you know what they think
7:26
and I prefer to learn that way. Even when I'm studying theology, I like to learn from people
7:31
who are trying to convince me of a particular position so that I can say, okay, that's the
7:36
strongest, you know, presentation for that position and then I can go listen to somebody
7:39
else and make up my mind. But yeah, I don't know. I think it's just the polarization and
7:44
just how I think also Christians are becoming more and more sick and tired of the way things
7:51
are in our culture right now. And I think that's probably when somebody comes along,
7:56
he's just really forthright. It's refreshing.
7:58
Well, that's why these kind of mealy mouth pastors that will kind of hop into a hot button
8:03
topic and then hop right back out or something like that. Like I think and I've talked about
8:07
this for a long time, but there are so many people in the flock that are getting confused.
8:11
They don't know how to push back against the darkness and culture. And then they go to
8:14
church and their pastor just refuses to talk about cultural topics, except maybe just mentioning
8:18
things here or there. But you know, we can spend all day talking about that. But I want
8:21
to spend the majority of our time today talking about your brand new book, which guys, if you're
8:24
listening this on time, it is available. It is in the show notes. It's called live your
8:28
truth and other lies exposing popular deceptions that make us anxious, exhausted and self obsessed.
8:34
Now I already told you on the last interview, you you freak me out there for half a second
8:38
because you tricked me when he said live your truth because I didn't really read the subtitle
8:42
and other lies. But I always like to get the author to describe their book in brief, you
8:46
know, kind of 30,000 foot view. What is this book about? What do you want readers to get
8:50
out of it?
8:51
So this book really was born out of a talk I was giving at conferences, primarily women's
8:56
conferences. And it was a talk called Pretty Little Lies. And it was sort of addressing
9:00
a lot of the slogans that are more aimed at women. But as you mentioned earlier, because
9:05
of my audience being so split, male and female, my publisher thought, well, let's not do a
9:10
women's book. Let's just try to make this applicable to everyone. So we expanded it out.
9:14
We talked about more slogans, things that can apply to everybody. Of course, I am a woman,
9:17
so that's going to be naturally the perspective I write from. But I really do think that a
9:22
lot of the slogans that we talk about in the book affect both men and women. And it's basically
9:27
Kyle, just all of the lies that flow out of this idea that humans are inherently good.
9:34
I think our culture has bought into this. It might express itself in different ways.
9:39
But basically, I think people are being taught today that you're inherently good. So what
9:43
you need to do is just do more introspection, more self care, love yourself better. And
9:47
as you do those things, you're going to find the goodness inside of you that you can live
9:51
authentically in, you know, to the world. And so that would be one aspect. But also this
9:57
book was largely, in my mind, a response to influencers like Glennon Doyle, Jen Hatmaker,
10:03
and Rachel Hollis, who have been primarily influential among women, but a lot of men
10:08
follow them as well. And so these are where these lies are kind of coming from. So we
10:12
engage with those authors and influencers in the book as well.
10:15
And we're going to spend a lot of time with different quotes and kind of work our way
10:18
through the book without giving away all the good little tidbits and secrets. But there
10:21
was something that we were talking about off air. And I'm like, let's go ahead and start
10:24
recording. But you talked about how, you know, we're kind of taught about our genuine goodness,
10:28
like basically from from the womb, like we're basically good. But where I feel it's different
10:34
right now, at least right now in culture, Elisa is a little boys are told the exact opposite.
10:38
It's like you're rotten. Your energy is not good for the classroom. Your energy is not
10:42
good for church. You're you're too loud. You're too rambunctious. You're too this you're
10:45
too that. And then as they get older, then they start learning about toxic masculinity
10:50
and microaggressions. And you know, when you hear these stats that are bogus, but it's
10:54
like one in five women on a college campus is going to be sexually assaulted. You're
10:58
sitting there with four your friends playing video games and you're like, Whoa, which one
11:01
of us is the rapist? And like, that's a crazy place for a young man to be, especially your,
11:06
you know, your years and years away from your brain being fully developed and being able
11:08
to work your way through that. I don't want to spend a lot of time on that because there's
11:11
a lot of really great stuff from the book. And this wasn't really part of the book. But
11:14
what's your thought on that? Because I mean, you have sons like you've dealt with men in
11:18
your life and those types of things to where that's kind of what's given to our young men
11:21
as their script for how they should act.
11:24
Yeah, that's true. I that's it was interesting when you brought that up off air because I
11:27
was like, yeah, that's really true. Because of course, Christine, a half summers book,
11:31
the war, I think it's called the war on boys and just talking about how really just being
11:34
a boy is viewed as a negative thing. And then the toxic masculinity causing men, I think,
11:40
to overcompensate in the other direction and become just just these kind of passive female-ish
11:47
type of presences in their homes and things like that. And then of course, as feminism
11:52
sort of deems, it's weird because feminism kind of makes men the standard for good, but
11:58
also really inherently evil. Isn't that interesting? It's like to be I was just watching
12:04
something with my daughter last night, just this animated series that she wanted to watch.
12:08
And the lead character is this really strong female who can take a punch, you know, she
12:12
can beat up all the boys. And she's just so this or that. And it's like, I just stopped
12:18
it. I'm paused. I said, you know, we can enjoy this as entertainment or whatever, but I just
12:22
need you to understand that there's not this is not realistic. I'm not saying women can't
12:27
be physically strong or that there couldn't be an exception of a woman who could, you
12:31
know, lift what most women couldn't lift or something like that. But the average woman
12:37
is not as physically strong as the average man. And if it's presented like there, this
12:43
is a fair fight and the good and the measure of being a good woman is to, you know, how
12:47
well you can take a punch. That's really making what males do and are as the standard of good.
12:54
So it's really like a war on masculinity, but it's a war on femininity at the same time,
12:59
but expressed through the same means. It's very interesting how our culture is doing that,
13:04
isn't it?
13:05
Well, it's also interesting which side tends to use the strong man and which side tends
13:08
to use the steel man. And so like that side will put someone up like an Amanda Nunes,
13:13
the greatest female fighter of all time, a woman that could beat up a lot of men in this
13:16
world and they will put her up as this paragon of athletic performance to say see men and
13:21
women are the same. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, like we don't use the exception
13:25
as the rule on this side. We try to steal man things. So I'm going to put up the overwhelming
13:30
majority of women and compare that to the average untrained man. You know, we talked
13:34
a lot about that on your show. But one thing about about the book that I found very interesting
13:38
to me is it was obvious that you spent a lot of time reading and scanning kind of progressive
13:45
Christian books and blogs and things like that. And our mutual friend, John Cooper is
13:48
doing that right now because he's working on a book. And I know you have to do that to
13:53
get a great accounting. If you're going to steal man an argument and then knock it down,
13:58
you have to be able to do those things. But my goodness, that had to have been just absolutely
14:02
unnerving to just read this mush, this nonsense over and over. So take me through that a little
14:08
bit because it's like, that's hard for a lot of people. And that's why most people avoid
14:12
reading things or listening to things or watching things that come from a perspective they don't
14:15
hold is because they can't mentally get through it.
14:18
Yeah. Well, it's, it's very depressing. Honestly, like I would even send out emails to have
14:23
people praying for me when I was real deep in several different books at the same time.
14:26
Now, for several years now, I try to always be reading at least one progressive book at
14:31
a time. I'm not reading as many all at the same time as intensely, but it is interesting,
14:38
you know, going reading these progressive books is really depressing because you know
14:42
that they're not true and they sound good. So in one sense, there'll be moments, especially
14:47
if the author is extremely persuasive or you can tell they're very sincere and very earnest
14:52
or they've been through some sort of legitimately difficult church experience or something like
14:57
that. It's, it's difficult because you can see how this hits people. You can actually
15:03
feel their pain, you can feel their emotion and, and what they're, what they've experienced
15:09
maybe in the church or in their spiritual lives or even in their struggles with their sexuality
15:12
or whatever it might be. And then, you know, that, that invokes a genuine compassion, but
15:17
it's so hard to read because you see that the answers that they're giving and the solutions
15:22
that they're giving for a lot of those things are so destructive. And ultimately, I guess
15:26
for me, it's, it's so hard to see these sort of rabbit trails be gone down because you
15:33
see that this is really ending in spiritual devastation and with eternal consequences
15:37
for people. And so it's hard. And the mockery, I mean, that's, that's why, you know, you
15:42
mentioned my styles a little, a little different. I've, I've really tried over the past few
15:47
years to really tamper sarcasm, mockery. Now, I'm not, I'm, I have friends who do great
15:52
satire. I have friends who have podcasts that are, you know, they, they are rhetorical.
15:57
And I'm not saying those things are inherently wrong or bad. I think there's a place for
16:02
all of that. But for me, I've really tried to just keep my tone very even because of
16:09
how assault, I don't know if assaultive is a word, but when you're reading these progressive
16:13
books and they're just harping on the church and bashing the church and mocking the church
16:17
and mocking pastors, mocking Christian culture, it's, it feels like you just keep getting
16:22
kicked in the gut. And so I've even tried to just like, let's let the arguments stand
16:27
or fall on their own. And you know, because I know it feels like to be the recipient of
16:31
all that.
16:32
Right. And I think that goes back to personal style because one thing that I've changed
16:36
here recently, even in my own mindset, because obviously I'm more aggressive, you know, sarcastic
16:39
and I use those things as weapons. But Seth Dylan, the CEO of the Babylon B was talking
16:44
about this. It may have been on Joe Rogan or with Ben Shapiro or something like that.
16:47
But he was basically talking about a lot of these ideals are propagated because people
16:53
aren't mocking them. And so like it's we should be pointing at these things. We should be
16:57
mocking them and we should be doing it publicly because, you know, they released a video called
17:01
Christianity light and it's like, you know, you get all the good stuff with Christianity,
17:05
but you don't have to deal with all the sin guilt. And so it's like, you can have Christianity
17:08
and your sin too. Like, that's kind of their thing. And you even had an A.W. Tozer book
17:12
or A.W. Tozer quote from your first chapter. That kind of talked about that. They're using
17:16
the phrases and mottos of culture to basically push back against it. But I do want to read
17:21
this one quote from from chapter one, because I really think that this kind of kicked off
17:25
a lot of your arguments. And I will say this as well, just as a side note, very early on
17:29
in your book, this book felt very, very different than another gospel. I felt like that the edge
17:35
on your sword was sharper on this one. I felt like you were you were going at this a little
17:39
bit more aggressively, which I appreciate it. But let's read this quote from chapter one.
17:43
Today, we have authors, influencers and life coach gurus peddling their personal transformation
17:47
stories as models for others to follow. Their advice is frequently based on very recent life
17:52
altering decisions that seem to make them happy in the moment, but not stood the test of time.
17:57
So let's talk a little bit about that, because we are very attracted to influencers. I say,
18:01
we as people, we're attracted to these people, like we're very attracted to this idea of like,
18:05
okay, I was really, really, really fat. And then I've only been disciplined for the last three
18:09
months of my life. But now everybody should listen to me for my advice. And I'd tell people before,
18:13
don't take financial advice from broke people, don't take workout and diet advice from people
18:17
that are severely overweight, do not take relationship advice from people that have been divorced three
18:20
times. But here we are, we're buying these things hook line and sinker. And it's typically coming
18:25
from these people that just recently came out as ex-vangelical. And yet we don't look at them and say,
18:31
okay, well, this is going to be a major issue for your later. It's the same thing when you talk
18:34
about a 13 year old girl that wants to have her breasts removed. And then they ask her two months
18:38
later, how does she feel? And she doesn't regret it yet. And they look at that as, oh, it's a positive,
18:42
this is a positive affirmation. It's like, can we talk to her in five years? How about the woman
18:46
that decided to chase her career into her mid 40s and never thought about settling down,
18:51
having a husband, having children? Can we talk to her when she's 60? And she looks around, and it's
18:56
just her girlfriends that are all winos. And it's not, you know, anybody that she can like pass on her
19:00
legacy, but talk to me a little bit about just like our attractive, you know, our ability to just
19:04
be so attracted to these influencers. Well, that's the main thing. Like if we take the three I mentioned,
19:09
Glenn and Doyle, Jen Hatmaker, and Rachel Hollis, all three of those influencers have millions of
19:15
followers. And their entire brand is built around telling you how you should live, telling you the
19:22
best way to live, the best way to pursue things like love and justice and all of these things.
19:26
And every single one of them, and they just represent many, many more, they're not the only ones,
19:31
but all of them have had major life circumstances happen that I mean, certainly, I'm not judging
19:38
the fact that they've had life circumstances. We all do, we all go through difficult times where
19:42
we have some kind of major life change happen from time to time. But that, but the context of
19:48
their life changes, like for Glenn and Doyle, it was coming out of the closet, leaving her husband
19:51
and marrying another woman, Jen Hatmaker going, you know, she literally writes a book called Fierce
19:57
Free and Full of Fire, talking about how free her life is, how wonderful it is, how great it is,
20:01
she's figured it all out. And in the midst of that book, releasing sadly, and I feel terrible for her,
20:06
because we don't know the circumstances, but she was in a divorce. And again, I don't, we don't
20:11
know the details that was never as far as I know released or talked about. So I'm not going to say,
20:15
you know, that was her fault or his fault. I don't know. But that's not the time to be taking
20:20
major life advice from somebody who's not getting their information from scripture or from time
20:27
tested truths that stand the test of time that match up with reality. And I think that was the
20:32
main point that I was trying to make is people can go through difficult things in their lives
20:37
and give advice. But they better be going to an objective standard for that advice and showing
20:42
you how they're trying to implement that in their life. Maybe that could become inspiring to see
20:47
that happen. But if you're, if you're in the middle of a divorce and you're telling people how to
20:51
have great relationships, I mean, maybe it's time to, I think in the book, I say, let's hit the pause
20:55
button on that hot mess and see how it all pans out after 10 years, because these are not time
20:59
tested truths. These are things that feel very good. Like you said, you asked the girl who had
21:04
maybe transitioned surgery two weeks later, she doesn't regret it. Well, what about when she's 30,
21:10
and you know, and whatever the ramifications are, are hitting her in her life then, especially
21:15
with statistics showing that I think it's something like 70% of kids outgrow their gender dysphoria
21:22
by the time they're 18. And so, you know, we have lost that in our culture. I think the sense of
21:28
waiting and being patient because of social media, because of just our instant gratification culture,
21:34
we're just so used to getting the end result right away. Yeah, we can't just say, Hey, let's see how
21:39
this pans out because I think the stat may be even closer to like 90% of these tomboy girls,
21:45
they grow up to be beautiful young ladies that are very attracted to men. And it's just like,
21:49
that's almost 100% of the cases. But there was one thing in this maybe splitting hairs a little bit,
21:54
but it did catch me as funny from chapter two of the book, because this goes into kind of what
21:57
you're talking about. Well, I'll just read the quote here. Although social media can certainly do a
22:01
lot of good, the phenomenon has also given birth to a myriad of self made Bible teachers and bloggers
22:07
who shepherd millions of followers. Many of these personalities have drifted into progressive
22:11
Christianity and are now leading their flocks away from the historic gospel. So here's what caught me
22:15
odd about that. The first part of that statement is you and I, yeah, made Bible teachers and bloggers
22:20
that shepherd followers and those types of things. But we're just not the latter, you know, where
22:24
it's like where we've drifted into progressive Christianity and all those different things.
22:27
So talk to me a little bit about that, because I don't think your point with that message was,
22:32
Hey, you know, you need to go to Bible school. If you're going to talk about the Bible on social
22:35
media, obviously, I don't think that's really your message. But is the message more so about
22:40
the size of these audiences that these people that obviously are not grounding their ethics and
22:45
their advice in a Judeo-Christian ethic or in a biblical reality? Is that kind of the point you
22:50
were making with that? Well, I think the main point I'm trying to make there is that social media is,
22:55
I mean, in and of itself, it's morally neutral, right? It's sort of something that you can use for
23:01
good or you can use for evil. And there's certainly nothing wrong with if somebody hands you a
23:06
microphone to use the microphone to preach the gospel or to tell people about Jesus. And we are
23:11
called as Christians to make disciples, right? That's the main thing. So there's different ways
23:15
we can do that, whether that's online or in person or in our families. And so yeah, I think the main
23:21
critique of that statement there was that a lot of these influencers have drifted into
23:27
progressive Christianity. They've rejected biblical authority. They've rejected the
23:31
historic Christian sexual ethic. They've rejected a lot of things that have really been core to
23:36
historic Christianity from the beginning. And because they're funny, because they're really
23:43
engaged with their audiences. And I really think this is maybe, I mean, I don't know, because I'm
23:48
a woman, I might think it's more pertains to women. That could be wrong about that. But
23:52
I just know, like when I had my first child, it's an incredibly isolating time for a woman. You're
23:58
by yourself all the time with this little baby human who can't talk back to you, can't give you
24:04
any sort of intellectual stimulation. I can't really even love you back, you know, for a long time.
24:10
And you're all alone. You're exhausted. This, you know, and of course, my babies were not
24:15
easy babies. So, you know, you got the physical exhaustion, the mental exhaustion. And it can be
24:21
like, even back when I had my babies, social media was kind of becoming a thing, but it wasn't like
24:27
it is now. Whereas now you can find yourself in that phase of life when you're isolated and you
24:32
want to talk to other people and you just hop online for such and such as, you know, Monday
24:36
live stream and you feel like you're part of a community. And so it can be very seductive in
24:41
that sense, because a lot of people, I think, come to these social media communities out of loneliness,
24:46
they're looking for friendship, they're looking for community. And then they don't realize that
24:51
this whole community together is drifting far away from truth. And they may not even realize it's
24:56
happening. Well, and also you go to these groups that have no standards. They have no restrictions.
25:02
And that seems really, really uplifting. Now, I'm not, you know, wired as an artist, obviously,
25:07
you work as your background in music. But every time an art because artists constantly will say
25:12
things like, I don't want to limit myself. And I want to do all these different things. Well,
25:15
the moment you pick it, you pick an artistic medium, you've limited yourself, because there's only so
25:21
many, you know, sounds you can make with a drum, there's only so much you can put on a canvas
25:28
that is about yay big. And so the moment you pick your canvas or your medium, you have limited
25:32
yourself in a certain way. And a lot of these people don't realize it's like, you want limitations.
25:37
You don't want this free for all, especially in your spiritual life, you want those guardrails
25:42
there. I do want to move on to chapter three, because there were two very, very rude things
25:47
about this chapter. Okay, the first thing is a chapter is called leprechauns. And as a ginger,
25:52
I'm very triggered by that. I don't appreciate it. I feel like you had me in mind whenever you
25:55
picked out the name of that chapter. So I don't, I don't like that at all. The second thing micro
25:59
oppression or something. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. And I felt it. I felt it macro.
26:03
But the last line of the chapter was so rude, Alisa, it said this, okay, time to rip off the bandaid.
26:09
Reader, I'm here to tell you, you are not enough. So how dare you tell me and everybody else that
26:15
reads this book that we are not enough because culturally, so I don't know if you know this
26:19
breaking news, we are enough. And I've seen plenty of pastors with their really cool shoes and their
26:25
really nice duds. Tell me, gosh, you are enough. And then in the back of my head, I'm like, well,
26:29
then why did Jesus need to die if I was enough? But tell me why that we shouldn't live by that,
26:34
that we are not enough. Well, first of all, because it's not biblical, but let's start even just with
26:39
the practical implications of it. Think about, you know, I get when you hear something like you
26:45
are enough and maybe your kid comes to you or somebody you love comes to you and they're real
26:48
down on themselves and they're, you see this beautiful person in front of you and they're like,
26:52
oh, I'm so ugly or I'm so this. And you know, you want to say something like you are enough,
26:58
you know, you're perfect just as you are. That's, it can be really tempting to want to say that.
27:03
But the problem is that when we say that to somebody, we are essentially putting a burden on them by
27:09
saying you actually have to solve all of your own problems, whatever you need to fix what you
27:15
actually broke is already inside of you and you just need to find it. And I think that that is a
27:21
message of bondage because like I tell the story in the book and not to go back to being a young
27:26
mom, but when I had my first baby and she was just really not a happy baby, I've talked with her
27:32
about this, she was not happy. And I was blowing it. I just, I knew there was nothing I could do
27:38
to make her happy, to make her stop crying. I remember like kind of punching a wall. I was just so
27:44
tired and exhausted and all these things. And if somebody would have said, you are enough,
27:48
I would have just, I would have wanted to punch them because I knew that I wasn't. I knew that
27:54
I needed something outside of myself to catch the overflowing cup, you know, that that I was at that
28:00
time. And so I think that's the first point. And then the second point is biblically, and I think
28:05
this in our culture, we kind of started with this. But you mentioned that boys are kind of this
28:10
implicit message that who they are is wrong or bad. But at the same time, it's interesting though
28:17
that a lot of the self-helpish kind of books that are written, even two men, are trying to correct
28:22
that in a weird way by saying you're perfect just as you are. Of course, you know, don't be all these
28:28
things that you actually innately have in you, but you know, that's beside the point. But I mean,
28:33
if we think about even how that springboards out, this idea that you are perfect just as you are,
28:39
you are enough for yourself, all but you know, it's nothing outside of yourself you need to
28:42
complete you to heal you to redeem you to reconcile you to God or anything else. It's all already
28:48
inside of you. Think about the implications of that for morality, because if you think about you
28:54
have this, you know, according to culture, you have this innately good, you're kind of born
29:00
either neutral or innocent, right? You have this goodness in you that you need to recapture or
29:05
reclaim. Well, if your desires are in conflict with what people say you should or shouldn't do,
29:12
then according to culture, the should or shouldn't of society, I mean, that's fluid, right? That's
29:18
going to be that's not set in objective reality according to culture. So your desires being
29:25
inherently good, you know, you have this goodness inside of you, you should go with your desires
29:28
over the should or shouldn't and listen to your desires. Whereas the Bible tells the completely
29:32
opposite story. We do have a conflict between should and shouldn't and our desires, but we're
29:37
told to die to ourselves. We're told to be conformed into the image of Christ, to be transformed,
29:43
renew our minds, put off the old man. There's all this language in the Bible talking about how we
29:49
actually have to do a massive course correct throughout our lives. I mean, this is the process
29:55
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30:25
When I think that gets into a discussion about authenticity, which you talk about in your book,
30:29
I think it's chapter five, and you get into these people that are like, I just want to be my authentic
30:33
self. But if you were to ask them to define what that even is, they wouldn't be able to do it because
30:39
they're on a journey of self-discovery and yet they're trying to tell you and society that they're
30:44
just living their authentic life. Like, oh, why wouldn't you want somebody to be able to be who
30:49
they are? So I can talk to me a little bit about people trying to live as quote unquote their authentic
30:53
self as it were. Yeah, I think that's a big one. And that was actually, for me, the hardest chapter
31:00
to write because I think that there's a lot of, I mean, I almost hate the word nuance now because
31:05
anytime somebody doesn't like what you say, they just say you don't have nuance. And honestly,
31:10
sometimes I think they just think you're being too clear. And that's really what you mean by
31:14
freezing too much nuance. I've said this before, nuance is the word that dumb people use to sound
31:19
smart. Like it's the one really, really hard word. They're like, oh, it's just nuance. It's like, no,
31:23
it's not you're just dumb. But go ahead. Yeah, well, I had, you know, so I felt like I had to bring in
31:27
some nuance on this because there is a sense in which to find properly, we should be living authentic
31:31
as Christians. And what that means is being genuine. You know, don't fake it when you go to
31:36
church and pretend that you're living victoriously and everything's great. If you've tried a really
31:39
bad day, I mean, we need to be there for each other. We need to confront each other in our sin,
31:43
walk with each other in our struggles and pray for each other in our sorrows and our pain and all
31:48
of that. So in that sense, I think the church could use a good dose of authenticity. However,
31:55
that's not what culture means when they say live authentically. Because remember, the cultural grid
32:00
is built on this idea that humans are inherently good, that your desires are always right. And so
32:06
if you think about the way culture would define authenticity, it would really be more like
32:11
following your desires. That's how you live truly authentically is to not push down or try to kill
32:18
or change the things about you that might be in conflict with what people think you should or
32:24
shouldn't do. And so it's sort of like authenticity becomes a license to sin. It becomes a license to
32:31
sort of do whatever you want, like the free for all you mentioned earlier. And that has devastating
32:36
effects. I mean, just one of the authors that I deal with a lot in that chapter is Glennon Doyle,
32:41
who wrote her book Untamed, which is largely an apologetic for her leaving her husband and marrying
32:48
another woman. And in the book, and I put this, I can't remember which chapter of my book, I put this
32:53
in, but her whole justification for the trigger that finally made her say, okay, I'm going to leave
32:59
him and I'm going to marry her was her being a mother. And she quotes a Swiss psychiatrist Carl
33:04
Jung and basically he's saying, you know, there's nothing worse you can do for your kids than let
33:09
them see your life be unfulfilled. That's a paraphrase because I don't have it in front of me. But
33:13
she said, so I would leave him and I would marry her because I'm a mother and I have responsibilities.
33:19
Good Lord. And it's just, you know, I remember reading that and just like even having to put
33:23
the book down for a second and just being like, oh my gosh, just oh my gosh. And I can see if I put
33:29
myself in the position of like a 25 year old young married mom. Oh man, I could, that's like,
33:35
that's like candy. That's like Turkish delight and, you know, Chronicles of Narnia right there.
33:40
That's just that sweet little candy that tastes so good and it feels so good. But man, what devastating
33:47
consequences I have since is just even in the last year, I've met two families who read Glenn
33:54
and Doyle's book untamed. And then one of the spouses decided to go live their truth, leave their
33:59
family and just blew up the lives of everybody around them. And they're still acting like they're,
34:04
they're the ones who are living the most authentically. They're the ones who are doing the most good
34:09
in the world. And these, you know, they're a pressed family who won't support their life
34:13
decisions. They're just, you know, stuck in toxic religion and all these oppressive systems. And
34:18
it's like, it is just the most well crafted lie. And social media just, just exacerbates it.
34:25
When as a kid, you don't, because, you know, I can say this because I was a kid once,
34:30
I didn't care that my parents looked fulfilled. I was selfish. Why? Because I was a kid. So like,
34:35
I want to see parents that are like literally wringing out themselves so that I can be happy
34:40
and comfortable because I'm a stupid kid, right? And it's not until you become an adult where you're
34:44
like, you start not thinking about yourself and your own survival and your own happiness.
34:48
You start thinking about the happiness of other people where you're just like,
34:50
Oh my gosh, like this is, this is so crazy. Like my dad just retired after working 43 years
34:56
in a factory to provide for my family. Like in a lot of times it was very thankless. And it wasn't
35:01
until I got older that I was like, man, this is a major sacrifice to do something that you hate.
35:06
But he was, he was ringing himself out for the benefit of his family. But whenever you hear
35:10
people say like, live your truth and live authentically, how about we say like, live responsibly,
35:15
live reliably, like live like somebody that everybody else could depend on as opposed to,
35:20
Hey, let's be as selfish as we possibly can be. Because how can you create a virtue out of a woman
35:26
that left her family to go pursue regardless of the fact that it was a lesbian relationship,
35:31
she pursued a relationship outside the home. I remember a guy that I used to be in ministry with
35:36
years and years and years ago, he left his wife and three boys with the secretary at his job.
35:42
And before they would have sex, you know, off and do their little thing, him and the secretary,
35:46
they would sit down and they would pray for his wife and his boys, right? This level of
35:51
depravity that you can't even imagine. But like this was 10 years ago where that was like seen,
35:56
you know, universally as dude, that's really, really crappy behavior. But now he could point to 10
36:01
different philosophers. I would tell him what he's doing is okay. Right. Yeah. Well, and it's
36:06
it's kind of like in the book, I talk about one of the lies being you should put yourself first.
36:11
And I think that's really at the core of maybe this whole authentic living authentically thing,
36:16
is our society has sort of switched. Like you mentioned, like my grandfather had three jobs,
36:21
like digging ditches and doing plumbing work. I mean, nobody, nobody's like wakes up every morning
36:27
like, Oh, I really want to go dig a ditch today. Right. But he did it because he loved my grandmother
36:31
and his big, his biggest life dream was to leave her a paid off house when he died. And he did it.
36:37
He left her a house fully paid off. And but he worked three jobs my mom's whole life. And I mean,
36:43
that used to be considered virtuous that used to be considered something. But I think one of the
36:49
reasons for that is because long ago, it used to be that the family, your family was what it was
36:55
all about, right? That was what your life was about. So if you had to go out and work a job,
36:59
you didn't like, that's all right. We'll get through it. We'll just we'll work through it because
37:03
I'm doing this for my family. But our society now has flipped to where it's personal fulfillment
37:09
is the highest virtue. And if you can fit a family into that, you know, that's fine. That's
37:13
great. Some people can do that or whatever. But really, it's about personal fulfillment. I mean,
37:17
I've been kind of alarmed to see a trend of women who just don't want to have kids, you know,
37:24
and I don't know. I think that that's not natural. And I think that that is unbiblical.
37:31
It's kind of like C.S. Lewis, you know, talking about how the devil wants to abolish humans.
37:36
And any way he can do that, you know, abortion, whatever, he's going to try to do that. But even
37:41
this trend of like, I just don't think I want to have kids and, and you know, I'm not saying that
37:46
it's maybe sinful for somebody to never have the desire to have children. But it's a trend. It's
37:51
something that's catching on to where almost you look at young women today. And you wouldn't assume
37:56
that they ever want to have kids. It's just, you know, it's almost kind of an anomaly to say, yeah,
38:01
I want to have a lot of kids. In fact, my friends who have more than three or four kids get treated
38:07
very oddly and culture like people kind of act like they're being selfish for having so many
38:12
kids or something like this. And it's just, I think everything's just flipped on its head today.
38:16
Well, the reasons that a lot of these women give for why they don't want to have kids are so
38:20
vapid. It's literally like if they were, if you were to pour a true serum in them, it's,
38:25
they want to look good in a bathing suit for as long as possible because they made an idol
38:29
out of spring break. They made an idol out of pool time, right? And they know that they don't
38:33
want strep, but stretch marks. They don't want to have trouble losing the saddlebags whenever they
38:36
whenever they get back trying to get back in shape. It's that it's, I'm trying to go after this
38:41
career because they've been convinced by the second and third and fourth wave feminist lie
38:44
that they can be fulfilled once they get the corner office, right? And so like, again, that
38:49
goes into a whole, a whole different area that I'd love to talk about with you later.
38:53
But I do want to kind of come back to something in the book because we're talking about authenticity,
38:57
we're talking about focus on self. And so all that leads to a word that people don't realize
39:03
doesn't mean what they think it means. And that's happiness. Okay. So you spend all of chapter eight
39:07
talking about happiness, but you set up chapter eight with the very, very last quote from chapter
39:12
seven. And it's this, I hate to be the one to say it, but God's ultimate goal for you isn't your
39:17
happiness. You monster, Alisa, because I've been convinced by modern Christendom and by my own
39:25
theology, right? First Kyle to four says, God wants me to be as happy as possible. Why are you
39:31
trying to ruin my day, Alisa? Why are you trying to take my happiness away from me?
39:34
Well, it's interesting in the book, because we say, you know, the lie that we're engaging with
39:40
is that God just wants me to be happy. And this is something that I think our culture has really
39:45
brought into even people who aren't a part of Christian culture. In fact, there was, I referenced
39:50
this study in the book in 2005, where I think it was Barna. I can't remember exactly who it was,
39:56
but they interviewed a bunch of American teenagers. Now these weren't necessarily Christian teenagers,
40:01
just the average American teenager. And this is where the term moralistic therapeutic deism
40:06
was coined, because it was discovered that the average American teenager believed that God just
40:12
wanted them to be happy and good, you know, just wants you to be nice to each other. And he's going
40:17
to, you know, he's not going to tell you who you can sleep with or what you should or shouldn't do
40:21
with stuff like that. But you know, if you need something, he'll help you out, he'll be there,
40:25
but otherwise he's going to kind of stay out of your business and just let you live for your life.
40:28
And you just, you know, you should try to be happy and be good. And so that was where that term
40:33
moralistic therapeutic deism came from. And I think that now fast forward all these years later,
40:39
those teenagers are adults now. And I think that our culture has largely bought into this idea that
40:45
the point of life is to be happy and to avoid suffering. And if anything causes you discomfort
40:51
or causes you to suffer, you should avoid that thing. And that's the thing that's wrong. You're
40:56
not wrong. That's exactly like get that part of your life fixed so that that's not in your life.
41:02
Anything that challenges your presuppositions, anything that would challenge you to change
41:06
something about yourself, you know, though that discomfort should be put aside. Recently, I was
41:12
talking in a Facebook group with a woman who is a college teacher, a professor, and she said that
41:18
one, and she's a Christian woman, and she said one of the most difficult things that she has to
41:23
engage with is that most of her students really, they've had their feelings validated for so long
41:30
that they literally just can't engage with any sort of opposition or difficulty at her particular
41:37
college. If they don't want to take a test or they feel anxious about a test, they can actually
41:42
go to a safe room and not have to take the test. And so they've never, here's the thing though,
41:49
and this is what really stood out to me about what she was saying. She said they truly are fragile.
41:55
You know, we have these derogatory terms like snowflakes or whatever, but she said, but they
42:00
really are fragile because they've never had to engage with something that has challenged their
42:07
feelings. Their feelings are just constantly validated. And so what that has produced is a
42:12
generation of people that can't engage with suffering. And so in a lot of the progressive
42:16
Christian literature, you'll even hear, I even quoted one in the book where they'll say, you know,
42:21
these Christians talking about the benefit of suffering or talking about the deep lessons
42:27
you can learn in suffering, you know, that's just, that's evil and wicked. We need to put that aside
42:31
and pursue happiness. God wants you to be happy. God doesn't want you to have to go through
42:36
suffering. And when you say that God led you into a time of suffering, you're really making him
42:41
into an immoral, you know, deity that would do something like that. And so there's this whole
42:46
twist on it. Whereas if you look at time-tested truths, this is where I bring up people like
42:52
Elizabeth Elliot and Corey Tenboom and Johnny Erickson Tada, who have experienced legitimate
42:59
deep sufferings in their life. I start the whole chapter out talking about my friend,
43:03
Nadine, who's actually the wife of Bible scholar Craig Keener, Nadine Keener, spent 18 months,
43:08
she's from Congo and she spent 18 months as a refugee in her native land. And it's a harrowing
43:14
story of what she went through. But when you read her book, her and Craig's book, you see that there's
43:19
this beautiful, deep abiding joy. And there's a beautiful, deep abiding joy about her when you're
43:26
just around her. There's something about her that is different than a lot of other people. There's a
43:33
depth there that a lot of people don't have. And that is directly a result of the suffering she
43:38
went to, having to cling to the Lord, her son almost dying, just having to rely on God for absolutely
43:45
everything at every moment. And I think that in our Western culture, we have become so affluent,
43:53
so kind of, you know, fat and happy, I guess you could say, that we want to shun all suffering.
43:59
And you can tell like this is the one that gets under my skin a lot because I have,
44:05
there is such benefit to suffering. Biblically, there's benefit to suffering. You interview anybody
44:10
who's walked with Christ through deep times of suffering, the loss of a child. These are the people
44:16
that have deep wisdom to share. They have a joy that goes so deep that a lot of Christians don't
44:23
have because they haven't gone to the depths of those sorrows. And so I think that it's such a lie
44:29
to tell people that God just wants you to be happy because then you miss out on the opportunity
44:36
of walking through something where really all you have is God. And you know, I don't even know
44:42
what that's like to say that truly that all I have is God. I've never, Kyle, had a day where I didn't
44:49
get food. I didn't, I've never gone a day without water. So I don't truly know the depths of those
44:54
sufferings, but I've been through things that were challenging for me. And I know that those were
44:58
the times when I was closest to the Lord. Those were the times when I produced probably the most
45:03
fruits of the spirit. And it's a mystery. I don't know how it works or why it works that way,
45:07
but it certainly does. Well, you and I have never had to pray, give us a stay our daily bread. But
45:13
people that have had to pray that, like these are people that smile ear to ear constantly,
45:18
because they've seen God provide over and over and over. I mean, you spent all a chapter talking
45:24
about the fact that we got fat and rich and like how life becomes so easy. But the thing that's so
45:29
interesting about that, about people that get fat and rich, they still to a degree almost urine
45:35
suffering, urine for suffering. And yet, progressives, leftists, people like that, they try to make the
45:41
pursuit of grit or of resilience, the sinful thing. That's somehow a sinful desire. Why would you
45:47
go the harder path? God has a much easier path for you. It's like, how can you read the Bible
45:53
and think to yourself, man, if I just, you know, follow some of these dictates and some of these
45:57
red letters in here and pretend as if those are somehow more important than the rest of the Bible,
46:01
because if God's part, if Jesus is part of the triune, God, they're all red letters, but that's
46:05
for another day. But like, how could you read the Bible, read the stories of the Bible and
46:08
think to yourself, God just wants things to be easy and nice for me. Like, who had a really nice
46:13
ending to their life, especially, you know, after Jesus passed away? Like, these weren't people that
46:17
just like ease their way, you know, through milk and honey land on the way to the grave. And so I do
46:23
find it to be very, very hard. I know in the book, The Coddling of the American Mind, there's a lot
46:27
of discussion about that, you know, going back to what you're talking about about the fragility of
46:31
these children. And that's one thing that if you do grow up in an affluent area, if you have done
46:35
well for yourself, when you have children, because I think about this all the time with a two-year-old
46:39
and a six-month-old, oh, man, those boys are going to be rough and they're going to be tough. And I'm
46:43
going to do everything I can to make sure that they realize that the house they're living in, the
46:47
cars they get to ride around town. And that's not normal. That came from blessings, that came from
46:52
hard work. And they're not going to start out there, right? They're they're not going to start out
46:55
from there and then build off of that. It's going to be much, much different. So I could tell that
47:00
that was a very, very hinge point for your book. I guess that's kind of why you put it there in the
47:04
middle. But as we start getting into the latter half of the book, you start hitting a lot of, you've
47:09
been taking out sacred cows left and right. You're just lightsaber and all these, these sacred cows.
47:13
But then in chapter 10, this is perhaps my favorite section of the entire book. And I'm not going to
47:17
read this entire quote. I just want to read the first part of it, because this is the thing that
47:21
is the biggest bugaboo in the world for me. So I'll just read the beginning of this quote here.
47:24
So guys, you'll have to go get the rest of the book to find out what else she says. But it says,
47:27
friends, if you are a Jesus follower, he is in charge. Jesus is the boss of you. And he says the Bible is
47:34
also the boss of you. Not only that, but the Bible isn't about you. Okay, so this goes all the way
47:40
back to a sermon that I saw Matt Chandler deliver. I know we're not allowed to say his name anymore,
47:45
but Matt Chandler delivered a sermon years ago at Stephen Furtick's church. What Stephen Furtick
47:50
was doing, thinking it would go well for him to have Matt Chandler come in there. But Matt Chandler
47:55
came in and he woke up that morning and he chose violence because he yelled at these people and
47:59
basically said, the Bible is not about you. You are not David in the story of David and Goliath,
48:05
but Alisa, we think we are. We think we're David in the story of David and Goliath. We think we're
48:12
the hero. We think we're Peter at his best and not Peter at his worst. We think we're Paul after
48:18
the Damascus road and certainly not before. And it goes back to this idea of when people look back
48:23
on history, when they look back on the thing, the atrocities that were happening in the 20th century
48:28
in Cambodia, in Germany, in the Soviet Union, all these places. And we love to look back with this
48:32
reverse chronological snobbery to use the CS Lewis quote and think we would have been the ones
48:37
trying to protect the Jews. We would have been the ones that would have been saving people from
48:41
the killing fields. We would have been the ones that would have been giving our last bit of bread
48:44
to somebody in the medieval times I was dying of plague. But it's just not the case. But it's all
48:49
wrapped up in this modern milieu about the Bible is clearly about us. So is it about us? At least
48:55
like is the Bible about us and our happiness and everything else? Well, I like to go to the scene
49:01
where Jesus after his resurrection, he's on the road to Emmaus and he comes across those two
49:05
disciples who don't recognize him. And the scriptures say that he began to read to them from the
49:12
scriptures showing all the scriptures revealed about him. And so Jesus is essentially saying there
49:18
that the scriptures are all about him and they really are. It's like that's the hinge point, right?
49:22
We have the Old Testament looking to the cross and then the New Testament looking back from the
49:27
perspective of the, you know, it's like the cross is the hinge there. And can we talk about Matt
49:32
Chandler for a second? Yeah, go for it. Because I, you know, there have been some things he said
49:38
that I've disagreed with certainly. But this last, you know, thing that came out where his,
49:43
his board and working together, honestly, I've never seen in my opinion, a more beautiful,
49:50
biblical handling of a situation where it, I mean, his board had his back. They're protecting
49:57
his ministry, giving him time to, I mean, it's like everybody wants to whine and complain about
50:02
all of these scandals. And then you have something that's handled early and really well. And then
50:09
everybody just wants to trash him like he's, you know, like, like he's superhuman or something. And
50:15
anyway, I don't know, I was just, I was impressed with the way that that was handled by him and his
50:19
board and all the people involved, even from the women, you know, for people who aren't familiar
50:23
with the story, even that first woman kind of going directly to him as the Bible would have her do.
50:28
So I don't know, I thought, I don't know what you think about it, but I thought that was handled
50:32
well, pretty well. Well, let's talk about that a little bit. And I'm okay with, with getting off
50:36
on different tangents or something like that. So obviously, I've been a Matt Chandler fan for
50:39
the, for the longest period of time, but I call balls and strikes on people. Like, I give people
50:43
one, one, one strike. That's it. Like, I, if you show me that I can't trust you once, it's like,
50:47
dude, there's seven billion people on the planet that I can probably trust over you next time.
50:51
The thing that was odd to me about this story is the narrative that came from Matt Chandler
50:58
did not include the word sin. He never once said, he never once said sin. And I was like,
51:04
that's odd. Because was there sin involved or was there not? I think he said,
51:09
unhealth at one point, there's some unhealthy me. And I'm like, that's a weird way of saying
51:13
sin, sir. But then the other thing is the, the narrative that we were given was that both,
51:19
so again, for anyone that didn't know, like there were some DMs between him and this woman,
51:23
apparently, Matt's wife was aware of the DMs the entire time this woman's husband was aware of the
51:28
DMs the entire time. And apparently the DMs were comedic in nature, right? They were, they were not
51:33
sexual in nature. They were not relational in nature. But it was the frequency that was bothersome
51:38
to people. So I guess where I sit on it is if that's the, if that's actually what happened,
51:43
which I have my doubts entirely. If that's what happened, you tell the girl that complained about
51:49
to go pound sand, there's no there there is kind of where I was coming from it. Because I feel like
51:54
to not become the next Mark Driscoll, or to not become the next Carl Lynch or something like that,
51:59
that they went over their skis way out over their skis and created something out of thin air.
52:05
Because regardless of how we feel about it, this is going to follow him for the rest of his career.
52:10
Like, oh, remember that one time when you were forced into three months to go, you know,
52:14
basically sit in the corner and think about what you were doing? And a lot of people would say,
52:18
publicly, you only apologize for what everybody knows. You don't apologize for the stuff that
52:23
nobody knows. And so for me, I think there's way more here than what meets the eye. This,
52:28
to me, the situation stinks the high heaven. So I don't know how, what do you feel about that?
52:32
Well, I thought that he had said that it went into where in Ephesians, it talks about root and
52:39
course joking. So maybe there, I kind of took away from that, that maybe there was maybe a sexual,
52:44
not that they were being sexual with each other, but maybe that the joking had some like sexual
52:49
overtones that went over the line. That was kind of what I read from it. But you know, that's,
52:53
I mean, that's valid. They're probably not going to tell the public everything about everything.
52:58
But from the appearances, taking everybody at face value, it seemed like it was handled in a way
53:05
that was biblical, you know, and maybe I certainly hope so. I think obviously, I'm the pessimist,
53:11
you're the optimist, you know, whenever we meet, we can be friends, because I think it's always,
53:15
the sky's always falling. But yeah, I, I want to take this on a tangent there. You can delete that
53:20
if you want to. No, I actually love this because I want to talk about this stuff because I want to
53:25
hit these hot button issues because I'm the same person that will say that just because you've made
53:29
a mistake, it doesn't mean you get your ministry back. But it also doesn't mean you're necessarily
53:34
unable to do ministry for forever because there are people right now that are just,
53:37
they literally wake up every single day mad that Mark Driscoll has a church that he's leading.
53:41
And they're not listening to his sermons from today. They're not talking to him personally.
53:45
They've never met him personally. And yet they're, they're trying to tell him that he is now disqualified
53:49
from, from, you know, doing anything ever again, because of some of the nonsense that he did
53:53
whenever he was running Mars Hill. And so yeah, I would probably say that, yeah, I agree with you
53:59
that not every sin disqualifies you from future ministry. But I think when, you know, this is where
54:06
we might disagree is like, when the, the sin is so abusive in nature like his was without any actual
54:14
repentance expressed publicly, I think that's what people struggle. That's what I struggle with,
54:18
honestly, with Mark Driscoll is it just, there's no evidence that there was any true repentance and
54:23
submitting to any kind of an oversight to make sure that people are protected so it doesn't happen
54:29
again. That would probably be the way I would approach that one. Do you mind if I blow up our
54:33
interview even further and go further into this tangent? Okay, when I, when I had you on the first
54:38
time, I blew up the interview in the first five minutes. So we made it like 50 minutes in. Okay,
54:42
so let's talk about one of the most egregious examples. And that's Robbie Zacharias. Obviously,
54:46
for those of you that don't know, Robbie Zacharias International Ministries, this guy basically used
54:51
ministry funds to take advantage of women sexually. He had all these massage parlors all over the
54:56
world where he would make these women, you know, please him sexually and all these different things.
55:00
And then he would use spiritual abuse on them basically saying you helping me release is serving
55:04
God like that kind of stuff. Like it's next level nefarious. The only worst stuff I've heard of is
55:08
when Catholic priests were literally washing out the little boy's mouths after they mount rape them
55:13
with holy water. That's like the worst thing I've ever heard in my entire life. And using a crucifix
55:17
to, to, you know, rape rape a child. So it gets worse. But let's talk about Robbie Zacharias.
55:21
So I feel like Christians are split exactly down the middle on this. And I'm very, very much so
55:27
on one side of this. So I want to know where you end up here. So Robbie Zacharias has taught me so
55:32
much through his books, through his speeches, through his podcasts. Whenever I talk about every
55:37
worldview, having the answer for things, origin, meaning, morality, destiny, where do you think I
55:41
got that from? That was repackaged age old wisdom in a very short form that Robbie Zacharias brought
55:47
to the world. And people have been led to Christ by Robbie Zacharias, by all the things that he's
55:52
produced, by all the things that Robbie Zach and Arise International Ministries produce.
55:56
There are a lot of Christians today that think we have to delete Robbie from the collective memory
56:00
of Christianity that, you know, the fruit of the tree is rotten, but even though it looks good
56:06
because the roots of the tree are rotten. Whereas I'm like, I'm going to continue saying origin,
56:12
meaning morality and destiny. Do you know why? Because it's true, because it's capital T true.
56:18
I don't care where I learned it from, because if we're going to start playing that game,
56:21
then guess what? No one's ever going to be able to listen to another song or watch another movie
56:26
because a level of depravity of some of your favorite artists and some of your favorite
56:29
directors and actors is something that you could not even fathom. So if we start going down that road,
56:35
we have to delete everything. So where do you kind of land with these people to be like,
56:39
can we not get anything from Mark Driscoll's old sermons? Can we not get anything from what we
56:43
can't get anything from Carl Lynch? Because he was basically, you know, he was empty the entire time.
56:48
But from these people that have been canceled, as it were, like that we can't value them anymore,
56:51
where do you land on that? Oh, yeah, no, I think you can. And especially the true things they said,
56:55
I know there were a lot of things that Mark Driscoll said that I loved. I was like, yeah, man,
57:02
he's literally saying some great stuff and that's still great stuff because it's true stuff.
57:05
I think, you know, with the Robbie thing, that might be in a different category for me. And I'll
57:11
give you two reasons. So our friend Frank Turic had one of his books, Robbie had written the
57:16
forward to, and Frank made the decision to remove the forward in the subsequent printings of the
57:22
book. And in a podcast, he said the reason that he did that was because of the nature of Robbie,
57:28
of Robbie's sins being predatory as they were. Frank said, he even said in this podcast,
57:34
there's nothing that I would change. I mean, everything Robbie said was true. He said true
57:39
things. And those things still stand. But the reason I'm taking his forward out of my book is
57:44
because I don't want any of his victims to ever have to read his name when they're just opening
57:49
a book. And so I think there's a valid viewpoint there just considering the people who have been
57:55
really hurt. But I'll tell you another thing, Kyle, with Robbie's books were very story-driven.
58:01
There were a lot of stories in his books. And after what happened, it made me question,
58:07
honestly, the truthfulness of a lot of the stories that he told the anecdotes that he came up with.
58:12
And so in a lot of ways, I thought, I don't know if I want to recommend those books
58:17
because I don't know that those stories are even true. It kind of brought the whole thing into
58:22
question. Whereas if he had written, for example, a systematic theology, I'd keep that on my shelf.
58:29
I would recommend it if it was good, even despite what happened. But I think because of the nature
58:36
of the way he wrote and communicated, it just called it all into question for me. Now, the things that
58:41
he said that were true are still true, certainly. And in another gospel, I write about the fact that
58:50
when my faith was in utter crisis, the first voice that I heard that was speaking truth was
58:56
Robbie's. And that is true. And that's still a true part of my story. In fact, when people ask me,
59:02
who was the voice on the radio that you talk about in your book? I say it was Robbie Zacharias.
59:06
I have no hesitation. When I was reading that book, I wrote Robbie in the margins because I was like,
59:10
"It's got to be Robbie." Yeah, it was. And so God used that in my life. I can't deny that.
59:17
But yeah, I think with Robbie, it was sort of a different category because of the story-driven
59:22
nature of it. And then, of course, just the amount of people that were abused by him and
59:28
used by him. And so I think each one would have to be sort of analyzed on its own, probably.
59:35
Well, I'm probably analyzed by each individual person because here's some egg on my face moment.
59:40
As you were talking, I realized that I did kind of a self-censorship thing. So I have a
59:44
book list on my website, The 100 Books Every Modern Christian Man should Read List. And I had,
59:49
I think it was Jesus among other gods was on the book list and the Christian section.
59:53
And after all this came out, I did remove the book from the list. And the reason why I did
59:58
was because not because I didn't feel like what he wrote in there was true anymore. It was because
1:00:03
I was like, "Well, that's needlessly problematic. And I've got enough problems that I create on my own."
1:00:08
And I've done that with several people. I just removed Eric Gritans is a guy that wrote a book.
1:00:13
He was former Navy SEAL, was a Navy SEAL for like five minutes. But then he wrote this great book
1:00:17
about resilience. I recently took it off because some of the things that he's done as he's ran for
1:00:21
different offices have been just very, very strange. And it's like the inclusion of that book
1:00:26
is almost more damaging. But I also have books by Machiavelli on there. I have the 48 Laws of Power,
1:00:31
which has some of the most anti-biblical stuff that you could possibly have because there are
1:00:35
truths to be gleaned from things that don't come from a Judeo-Christian worldview. So is there
1:00:40
anything else you want to say on the big pastors? Because I did want to talk to you about that on
1:00:45
the last interview. I don't know if we ever got to it. But I think there is some things to talk
1:00:49
about because that is a thing that carries some heft. But well, actually, I'm going to blow it
1:00:52
up even further. Let's talk about church hurt. I think you talked about it earlier in this interview.
1:00:58
Church hurt. So sometimes church hurt comes in the form of a person, of a man that is wronged you,
1:01:03
a man that is abused you in some way, shape or form. Sometimes it's something else that happened
1:01:08
with someone that you knew there. But sometimes church hurt is just the church saying no,
1:01:12
you're not allowed to do that because it's sinful. That's right. And so when we say something like
1:01:17
church hurt, everybody hears something different because the woman that was raped by her pastor,
1:01:22
that has a very specific meaning. But to the person where they're like, no, you can't have a
1:01:26
homosexual relationship and still be in good standing at this church and no, you can't marry
1:01:31
your boyfriend, dude, at this church. That's not going to happen. So talk about church hurt a
1:01:36
little bit. So I can't remember if you actually talked about it in the book, because I know I've
1:01:39
heard you talk about it before, but go ahead and flow them out a little bit.
1:01:41
Well, I don't think I got too into it in this book. And the book I'm working on right now,
1:01:45
which is a book on deconstruction, we're having to talk about it a lot.
1:01:48
So yeah, no, I mean, you, I think what you just said is exactly right. It's in the progressive
1:01:54
Christian movement, you'll hear spiritual abuse thrown around all over the place.
1:01:59
And that could literally mean anything from, like you mentioned, a young girl being raped by
1:02:05
her youth pastor, all the way to being told that Jesus died on the cross for your sins
1:02:10
is abusive. So you have to analyze where, you know, because there are lots of cases of legitimate
1:02:18
spiritual abuse. I've walked through it myself with friends. I was just even thinking about
1:02:24
yesterday. I mean, there are legitimately abusive situations where environments are created,
1:02:31
where it's all propped up around one guy, and he's got all the power. And I don't know why,
1:02:37
but so often these types of guys can be very, very much like bullies, and just very self-focused,
1:02:45
very narcissistic. And that can, that can really cause so much genuine damage to people. I was
1:02:52
just talking with a guy maybe a couple months ago, and his wife had deconstructed. Now, he's a strong
1:02:57
Christian. And he was just kind of just this broken, like, I just want to love my wife. I don't know how
1:03:02
to bring her back into the faith, but she's deconstructed. But then he started to share like three,
1:03:07
the three church experiences that they had as a married couple, every church like went downhill.
1:03:12
There was some kind of scandal. And then they ended up at the, I forget, is it Harvest Bible
1:03:17
Chapel, that big one that kind of came down. And she just doesn't know who to trust. She doesn't
1:03:22
know where to turn. And like, I have so much compassion for that. But on the other hand,
1:03:27
you'll hear stories of people saying, well, I was told as a child that hell was a real place.
1:03:32
And that traumatized me and psychologically damaged me. Now I need counseling and years of
1:03:38
recovery from toxic religion and the abuse of that doctrine. And so you got to go, okay,
1:03:44
these are two very different things. And so, yeah, I actually think church hurt is a better
1:03:50
phrase than spiritual abuse, because spiritual abuse, the claim of spiritual abuse isn't always
1:03:57
legitimate. Whereas somebody can say, I was hurt by the church, whether the reason for that was
1:04:02
legitimate or not. But that does, in deconstruction, that seems to be the primary trigger. But like
1:04:10
you mentioned, it's all tied up in these other things. Maybe somebody being told, no, you can't
1:04:16
live together before you get married. Or it's healthy to wait and biblical to wait until you
1:04:22
get married to have sex for the first time. These are perceived as abusive and oppressive
1:04:28
doctrines that people apparently in the deconstruction movement need to psychologically heal from.
1:04:34
And I just don't buy that. And so I think that there's a really fine line. That's why we really
1:04:41
want to blow this thing up more. Talk about the, we're there. The whole trauma-informed
1:04:48
abuse and trauma-informed world. There's a whole social media phenomenon of this. And
1:04:55
almost always, what that means is that they have bought into the idea that anything that you have
1:05:02
felt harmed by is genuinely harmful and therefore abusive. And there's no questioning of what actually
1:05:09
happened or what it may be. And I just think that's really dangerous. As far as I understand,
1:05:15
I could be wrong about this. But in the SBC report that came out, or maybe it was at the
1:05:21
the annual meeting where they passed a, and I could be wrong about this. So people double-check
1:05:28
me, make sure I'm not making this up. But they passed a bill where any sort of sexual contact
1:05:35
between a pastor and a parishioner is deemed automatically abusive because of the power
1:05:39
differential. Well, here's the problem. You have a 35-year-old woman seduce a 27-year-old young
1:05:48
pastor who's unmarried. And she's a victim and he's going to jail. They're criminalizing these
1:05:54
things. And I think that's dangerous because you're assuming that because there's a technical
1:06:01
power def-rentrial that that's going to necessarily mean it's an abusive interaction in nature when
1:06:07
it could just be a moral feeling, not just a moral feeling, but it could be in the category of a
1:06:12
moral feeling. And that needs to be dealt with a certain way. But not every moral feeling is an
1:06:17
abusive situation. Well, even that category, Elisa, comes from a postmodern rubric worldview where it
1:06:23
talks about perceived power, because here's the thing that's interesting. I don't know if you know
1:06:26
this breaking news. If you look around, if you go looking for microaggressions, you will 100% find
1:06:32
them. And so that's the thing is like, when you have all these people going back to what you're
1:06:36
talking about earlier that are very sensitive, that are very snowflakey and all these different
1:06:39
things, they are going to find opportunities to be hurt. So what if I won't use Matt Chandler as
1:06:46
the example again, but in that scenario that you just brought up, what if the man, when they took
1:06:50
a picture, like they were taking a picture in a line, put his arm around her shoulder or put his
1:06:54
arm around her waist, you know, just to take the picture, could she have perceived that as a sexual
1:06:58
advance? Right. Because even a sexual advance is like rape to somebody that thinks that like if
1:07:04
somebody says, Hey, where are you from? That is somebody giving you a racist microaggression,
1:07:10
because they assume that you're not like them. So it's the worldview comes from this postmodern
1:07:14
witches brew of nonsense. So the fact that the SBC would even in again, we'll check and make
1:07:19
sure that, you know, that was kind of what it was. But man, that's they don't realize where this is
1:07:24
pleasant. Like you're you're kind of weaving this into everything you're doing already.
1:07:28
Yeah, and I go to an SBC church. So I'm not against the SBC. I didn't, you know, I wasn't saying that
1:07:32
at all to be like their trash or anything like that. But yeah, I see those as dangerous moves.
1:07:38
And the whole microaggression thing, I can't remember if we talked about this on your podcast
1:07:42
last time, but as a woman, I think it's this whole talk about microaggressions is very dangerous
1:07:49
what we're the positions we're putting women in, because I'm told that if I'm jogging, let's say
1:07:54
I'm jogging at night, and a man is jogging toward me. And I'm if I go to the other side of the street,
1:08:02
it's a microaggression if the man is a minority. But if it's not, then it's not a microaggression.
1:08:08
I'm sorry. I don't care who it is. I'm a woman jogging at night. And I see a big man coming at
1:08:14
me. I don't care what color he is, what ethnicity is. I'm probably just gonna avoid
1:08:18
any sort of interaction and go to the other side of the street for my own safety, not at all because
1:08:25
of any sort of an ethnic category, anything like that. And so I think that's where it's dangerous
1:08:30
is women are being told, no matter what, like it could be perceived as a microaggression if you do,
1:08:35
if you, you know, protect yourself in a situation where it's you're not making the decision based
1:08:40
on ethnicity, but just the fact that it's a male, you know, I'm probably just gonna avoid that
1:08:44
interaction. Well, part of it comes from how do you perceive that person and how do you perceive
1:08:49
their motives from the beginning? For me, I look at most people as a threat. I've seen enough things
1:08:54
and I've been a part of enough situations where these people were taken advantage of because they
1:08:59
looked at everybody in their, in their orbit as somebody that they could trust. And that that is
1:09:04
strangers that are walking along. And then all of a sudden, you know, they're buried in their phone
1:09:08
and then they have a gun in their face because they weren't walking with confidence. They weren't
1:09:11
walking as if, you know, hey, I could take care of myself if something were to go down. But it also
1:09:16
comes from the scripting that you have inside of you to look at a certain group of people or a certain
1:09:21
person in a certain way. So I do want to kind of bring this back to the book because you brought
1:09:25
up something that I thought was very interesting. I highlighted this in the book because I was like,
1:09:29
there's something more here than I think you even put in the book. So this is chapter 12 of the book
1:09:33
and you begin with a quote from Elizabeth Elliot. This is in her work. Let me be a woman. And so
1:09:38
let me read this quote here. What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the serpent's
1:09:43
offer and had said to him instead, let me not be like God, let me be what I was made to be.
1:09:49
Let me be a woman. And now I will say it took me a second or two to recover from laughing so
1:09:56
unbelievably hard by literally one of the dumbest sentences that I've ever read in my entire life
1:10:01
that Eve should have just said, let me be a woman. And somehow the entire, you know, span of humanity
1:10:06
would be different. But almost immediately after that, Lisa, you start describing how you
1:10:12
had this very sizable uncomfortability, you know, competition, negative feelings, maybe even a
1:10:19
little bit of hatred towards men in general. And I thought that that was very striking to me because
1:10:25
I haven't really gotten that sense in our interactions on our shows or elsewhere that you kind of had
1:10:30
this. And I know that there are women like that. And I know some very, very personally that just
1:10:35
they almost have this negativity and they don't know where it comes from. Maybe it's because they
1:10:40
watched a grandmother be taken advantage of by their grandfather and they're like, never going to
1:10:44
let that happen to me or maybe they they, you know, bought into some second or third wave feminist
1:10:49
lie. So talk to me a little bit about that because you're talking to a mainly male audience.
1:10:53
And men can feel this men aren't the most astute people when it comes to recognizing their emotions.
1:10:58
Sometimes they do need the chart where they can point at the color that, you know, best describes
1:11:02
their emotion. But talk to me a little bit more about that because I was, I was frankly a little
1:11:06
shocking to know that you had these super negative feelings towards men.
1:11:10
Yeah, I did. And I talk about the chapters called chips because I had this chip on my shoulder
1:11:15
up until I was about, I don't know, maybe 20 something like that. I can't remember exactly how old I was.
1:11:20
But I don't, it started with just feelings of competition with men. I was not a super girly
1:11:27
girl. You know, I was one of those, maybe what you might call a tomboy. And so I felt competitive
1:11:33
with men. I felt, I don't know where it was coming from because the men in my life had pretty,
1:11:39
pretty much been awesome. My grandpa was amazing. My dad was probably way more of a feminist than
1:11:45
I'll ever be. I had just good men in my life, good pastors. And yet I wanted to outdo guys.
1:11:55
I remember even as a child going over to my best friend's house and having push up
1:12:00
contests with her big brother and trying to like do more sit ups and push ups than he could do.
1:12:04
And even like, we would have him put us in headlocks and try to fight our way out. And
1:12:09
you know, I always felt like if I could fight my way out of the headlock, I was, you know,
1:12:13
I was doing great and I could beat the guy, you know, and that was kind of, I guess, where it started.
1:12:17
I don't know. But it grew and grew and it even affected how I read the Bible. So I would read
1:12:22
stories like Deborah. And I mean, I think in the book, I said, I would read it with venom,
1:12:28
you know, when Barack comes to her and says, you know, I'm not going to go into battle unless
1:12:32
you go with me. And I'm, you know, of course, I didn't understand a lot of the context. And I'm
1:12:35
just thinking, oh, he's scared. So he needs her to go with him. And yeah, Deborah, you go show
1:12:39
him how it's done. And it was just really unholy, this, this sort of chip that had grown on my shoulder.
1:12:44
And it was just one of those, and I tell the story in the book, it was just one of those things where
1:12:50
the Holy Spirit just shined the light on it. And I was at a, I don't know if it was a worship
1:12:56
team rehearsal or something, some kind of a church situation. And I asked a friend to pray for me.
1:13:01
And I just said, I really, I want to confess this, that the Lord has really convicted me of this.
1:13:06
And we prayed. And it was just one of those gifts that you don't always get. You know, God
1:13:11
doesn't always just answer your prayers like that and just totally remove something. But He really did.
1:13:15
It was just like this fruit got yanked out of my heart. And I'm so thankful because I really
1:13:22
can, I can say truly and honestly, I love men. I love what men are. I love what God created them
1:13:30
to be. I love having sons. I love, I, I don't feel competitive with men anymore. And I think
1:13:38
that might even be what Elizabeth Elliott was talking about with Let Me Be A Woman is she's,
1:13:43
you know, if you read the whole book, you'd probably like it because she was saying basically like,
1:13:47
for Eve, she was trying, it was like she was trying to be something she wasn't. And she,
1:13:51
if she would have just understood what God had made her to be, you know, maybe she wouldn't
1:13:55
eat in the apple. Although I kind of think that there's, there's a reason the serpent went for Eve
1:14:00
first because I think God creating women as mothers, I mean, our bodies attest to the fact that we were
1:14:06
created to bear children. And that is going to come with an emotional intelligence and IQ for what
1:14:15
an individual might be feeling that might be more fine tune on average than the average guy,
1:14:19
who's going to be wired more for community, more for the larger group to, to, you know,
1:14:24
help with that. And both of those things together are very beautiful, but I think both come with
1:14:29
vulnerabilities. And I think for women, I'm not getting a lot of trouble saying this,
1:14:33
but it's just my opinions, what I think. I think this is what the Bible teaches, but I think women
1:14:37
are, brace yourselves, more deceivable than men. And the reason I think that is because we're more
1:14:44
intuitively in tune with people's emotions. But that's a good thing. That's what makes us good
1:14:50
mothers. That's what makes us good managers of our homes. That's what I think that's God put us
1:14:57
in charge of all the new humans and specifically all the men that are going to come out, you know,
1:15:01
in the next generation. And we have to have that finely tuned thing, but that is going to make us
1:15:06
probably have more of an empathy, more of a compassion naturally toward an individual,
1:15:10
which is going to be we're going to be more easily manipulated, more easily deceived on certain
1:15:14
things. And I think there's a reason that this serpent went after Eve.
1:15:17
You're so bigoted. No, but like in that mindset, I think it's important when I was reading Owen
1:15:22
Strand's book Christianity and Wokeness, he said something, it was kind of a throwaway line that
1:15:27
shifted my viewpoint on even the apple. And it wasn't that Eve, at the apple. It's that
1:15:34
Adam didn't protect her from the serpent. Because what the hell was Adam doing, right? Like, you
1:15:41
know, like, what was he doing? Where was he? Because he should have been doing his role.
1:15:45
He was right there. He was the Bible says he was right standing right there.
1:15:48
Right. And so it's like, where was he mentally? Like, what was he doing? Like, he was just kind of,
1:15:52
yeah, I guess, you know, take a bite and tell me how it is. And then give me some like it goes
1:15:56
back to this thing that I hate, which is where the guy is always, you know, al Bundy or, you know,
1:16:01
the, you know, Phil from Modern Family or something like that. It's always the dope. It's always the
1:16:05
guy waiting around for something to happen. It's never the guy that's leading. And so I may be drawing
1:16:09
a line of connection here that isn't there. So don't just play into it if I didn't. But that what
1:16:13
we just talked about in chapter 12 and kind of this competitiveness with men reminded me about
1:16:18
something back in chapter 11, because you actually have a section title in chapter 11 called Super
1:16:24
Tolerant, Hippie, Jesus. And I say you a picture of this because I literally wrote vomit and like
1:16:28
right next to the title, because like, I know that I know that there are a lot of people that think
1:16:32
Jesus is this really good looking soft feature Danish guy that just loves them no matter what.
1:16:36
And the thing about it is, is I wonder, Alisa, if some of your viewpoints on manhood was because
1:16:42
you got a cultural mouthful of masculinity and what masculinity is in American Western culture,
1:16:49
four wheel drive trucks, big muscles, chasing women, inappropriate jokes, beef jerky, that kind
1:16:54
of stuff. And you never saw Jesus as not just lame of God, but also lion of Judah. Because I say
1:17:01
this all the time, if I were to walk into some random coffee shop or church or something, maybe
1:17:04
not church, because you know, they're they're primed for it. But just ask them, Hey, who are the
1:17:08
manliest men that you can think of? Like from from your family, from your friend group, from,
1:17:13
you know, history. And so you're gonna get guys that are gonna say George Washington or Teddy
1:17:16
Roosevelt or or authors like Ernest Hemingway or Jack London. Maybe they're gonna say like
1:17:20
Tim Kennedy or Jocko Willing. I bet you none of these guys would say Jesus of Nazareth,
1:17:25
because he's been presented in this a feminized way. So is it possible that growing up in the
1:17:30
church like you did growing up in the denomination that you did where Jesus wasn't presented as this
1:17:35
perfectly masculine man? And maybe that kind of led to a little bit of your feelings.
1:17:39
It could be I'm as you're talking, I'm thinking back. I know we talked about this on my podcast
1:17:45
that one of my the things that really formed, at least how I would envision Jesus was that old
1:17:51
six part movie series, Jesus of Nazareth, which, you know, had a lot of great stuff in there,
1:17:56
certainly. But you know, Jesus was real skinny. He was just, you know, real effeminate and he had
1:18:02
these like bright eyes. And so, you know, certainly we're all formed by stuff, whether we realize
1:18:08
it or not. So yeah, I mean, I think that that's a possibility for sure. I think that, I mean,
1:18:16
this is an interesting thing too, as I study the deconstruction movement, a lot of the people who
1:18:20
are, I mean, it's hard to say there's even leaders of the deconstruction movement because you can
1:18:25
literally just like throw a dart at TikTok and you're gonna hit a deconstruction platform with
1:18:29
hundreds of thousands of followers. I mean, there'd be no possible way to even say who the leaders are.
1:18:34
But you know, the ones who are writing books like Jen Hatmaker, it's interesting, Jen Hatmaker, Derek
1:18:38
Webb, Glennon Doyle, we're, we are all about the same age. So I'm just looking like, what the
1:18:43
heck happened to us in the 90s that everybody's like deconstructing from. So there were certainly
1:18:49
some things in the air, I think, in church culture in the 80s and 90s that were a little wacky that
1:18:54
probably contributed to a lot of false ideas about who God is and what the church is and all sorts of
1:18:59
stuff. So with that in mind, I want everybody to realize something because I'm sure you probably
1:19:04
thought about this as well. If you talk about TikTok, obviously that is owned by the Chinese
1:19:08
Communist Party. And so the TikTok in China is different. So in America, it's, you know, kids doing
1:19:14
really, really dangerous things, these, these dorky dances and all these other different
1:19:17
whatever things it's comedy. But the TikTok that's in China are people doing like breakthroughs in
1:19:23
science or mathematics or engineering or something like that. So they're, they're kind of giving
1:19:27
scripts to the different cultures. But wouldn't it be interesting if we were to realize that a
1:19:32
atheistic regime that wants to rot away the United States from the inside would give us this
1:19:37
app that is not only highly addicting, but that they would elevate via the algorithm,
1:19:44
the voices that are deconstructing. So you might say, why does this deconstruction
1:19:49
turd that has literally never read a book? How do they have hundreds of thousands of followers?
1:19:53
But this person that is like, theologically adept and deep and all that, they have hundreds of
1:19:58
followers. It's part of a design. The same thing here with the people that are here in Silicon
1:20:03
Valley. Why are some of these, these people that spread the love of Jesus and spread the gospel?
1:20:08
Why aren't their messages getting out there? But magically, when they start deconstructing
1:20:12
or becoming like a leftist Christian, or they're the Christian that's actually pro-abortion,
1:20:16
their, their page just explodes. Isn't that so unbelievably interesting?
1:20:20
Yeah, that's something for people to think about that. The Silicon Valley folks,
1:20:25
they come from a leftist worldviews that goes back to Karl Marx and those types of ideals,
1:20:30
which means that our system is rotten to the core and needs to be destroyed. And China obviously
1:20:34
is down with that. And so they're dropping these little seeds of discord into our culture. So
1:20:39
there's your conspiracy theory rant for the day, guys. But just that's something for you to think
1:20:43
about. But to kind of maybe put a bow on the new book, and again, guys, it is in the show notes.
1:20:47
It's fantastic. It's well worth your time. It's not just another woman author writing for all these
1:20:51
squishy women, Christians like no, this is for everybody listening to this right now. I want to
1:20:55
read this quote because I found it very interesting. Consider the way Jesus invited people to follow
1:20:59
him. Rather than coasting them with soft music and emotional appeals, he often seemed to be trying
1:21:04
to talk them out of it. He certainly never held back from telling people the truth. He wasn't
1:21:08
exactly worried about his message being seeker friendly. Now, this is unfair because I know we're
1:21:13
wrapping up in time to bring up this big topic. But I become very, very wary. And you know, I'm
1:21:20
going to talk about this here pretty soon with a lot of different interviews about these mega
1:21:24
churches that play these dramatic songs towards the end of the sermon right before the prayer.
1:21:29
And you have these people making this dramatic appeal to raise their hand. You come from the
1:21:33
world of worship. So you know how to develop a song and I don't really know anything about music,
1:21:37
but to do the song in a way to where it builds and creates this crescendo of emotion. And then
1:21:43
people will raise their hand and then they'll do the prayer. They'll make eye contact with the pastor
1:21:48
and then they'll leave and there's no heart transformation. There's no fruit of discipleship in
1:21:53
their life. They raise their hand to an emotional appeal. And so I'm asking, we have so many modern
1:21:59
churches that are very, very concerned about the problematic teachings of Jesus. So they stick
1:22:05
with the easy stuff and then they slap the label of seeker sensitive on it. So talk to me a little
1:22:09
bit about that because man, I'm terrified for some of these people that go to these enormous
1:22:13
churches that raise their hand. And they're literally not a Christian. They just had an emotional
1:22:18
experience. Oh man, I don't even know where to start with this one because it's something I've
1:22:22
been thinking a lot about and just the model itself. Certainly it's not wrong or sinful for a church
1:22:28
to be large, right? So that's not the problem. The problem is the motivation. You have churches
1:22:34
that are not focused on making disciples. They're not focused on teaching the Bible. They're not
1:22:40
focused on helping to guide Christians in a culture that has lost its mind. What you have are
1:22:47
churches who are hiring strategic growth experts to tell them how to appeal to a certain demographic
1:22:53
because they've decided, oh, we want this particular kind of person to, you know, we're going to focus
1:22:58
on this particular kind of person. And then they'll give that person a name much like you do in
1:23:03
marketing. You know, and we talked about Becky, I think, you know, about in Christian music how
1:23:07
they'll, you have to write songs for Becky. But it's like they'll do the same thing where they'll
1:23:12
name the person something and then they hire these strategic growth experts where you've got,
1:23:16
I've been in churches where there's a whiteboard in the waiting room where they're going to say,
1:23:20
okay, this is how many people we had attend and this is how many our goal is for next week. And
1:23:25
this is, and it's just like, man, if there was a table, Jesus would overturn, it would be that one
1:23:30
because it's the, it's the, when the motivation is butts in seats and not making disciples,
1:23:36
we've lost the plot and we're not actually making disciples, which is why I think now this is my
1:23:41
opinion. I don't have data for this. But I would suspect that part of the fallout, part of this
1:23:48
deconstruction movement is that it's a lot of people who went to churches and maybe they had
1:23:54
an emotional experience, maybe they raised their hand, but they were not disciples. They were not
1:24:01
truly people who know and have trusted in Christ. Now, I'm not certainly not painting with such a
1:24:07
broad brush that I would say that anybody who might say they're in deconstruction is not really
1:24:11
Christian. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, is a large part of this movement,
1:24:15
what you see people deconstructing from something they never had constructed in the first place.
1:24:19
And so you have, they're deconstructing a culture or they're deconstructing whatever their experience
1:24:25
was, but it's so often you listen to the stories and you can't find the one time in their story
1:24:31
where they say, I realized I was convicted by the Holy Spirit that I was a sinner. I cried out to
1:24:36
Jesus to save me. You don't hear that in deconstruction stories. You hear like, well, I loved Jesus.
1:24:41
I knew Jesus. I followed you, but there's, but that's real vague, like their conversion. You don't hear
1:24:47
that, that narrative of like, I was a sinner and I cried out to Jesus to save me from my sins.
1:24:52
And, and I think it's because in our churches, that's not the goal. The goal has become in
1:24:57
so many places, just getting the numbers. And that is a dangerous game.
1:25:01
Well, and, and I always, I've made this shift and I'll talk about that on some future episodes about,
1:25:07
you know, being careful whenever I talk about these, these things as homogenous groups. Obviously,
1:25:11
there are enormous churches that could be put in the mega category that are vehemently about
1:25:16
discipleship making and making sure that people's salvation is real. And so I was very dismissive
1:25:21
in how I talked about it for a very long time. And so I've, I kind of made that shift. But yeah,
1:25:25
if your goal is butts and seats, and you're looking at it as some sort of a thing that will
1:25:30
help you with your, I guess, annual report at the end of the year saying you had this many butts
1:25:34
in the seats and how that, you know, kind of leads to all these different things. I think,
1:25:38
I think that becomes a systematized approach. And a lot of these churches, they require so little
1:25:43
of the people. And I'm not saying you should make the barriers to entry into the kingdom of God,
1:25:48
high. But I am saying whenever you bring them into church, the acceptance of the gospel
1:25:54
is the highest, most anti self thing you could possibly do. And so why do we describe it as if
1:26:01
it's this like, huh, it's just another decision that I made. Sorry, Calvinist, but it's like,
1:26:05
it's just another decision that I made in a myriad of other decisions. People will labor
1:26:09
over the decision of where to go to college or what city they want to live in post college,
1:26:13
then they will about deciding whether or not they want to be a disciple of Jesus. And so
1:26:17
I have some problems with people like making it seem like it's this easy thing like, no, no,
1:26:21
this requires everything of you. Look back at the first and second and third century church,
1:26:25
it requires everything if you're going to follow this way of thinking, but we'll go and wrap up
1:26:29
the book, live your truth and other lies. Fantastic read guys, you got to go and pick it up. We'll
1:26:32
make this last question in the day. I know you got stuff cooking for the future. You mentioned
1:26:36
some more books you're working on. Maybe there's some conferences, some classes. I saw they I
1:26:40
think you maybe turned another gospel into like a like a video study type thing. So let's talk
1:26:45
about the stuff that you've got coming out here in the near future and what does the farther away
1:26:49
future look like for a Lisa Childers. Yeah, well, we did just release a six week study curriculum
1:26:54
based on the book and other gospel. So it's there's a participants guide and then a DVD series.
1:26:58
And the DVDs are really, I'm really excited about them. They're beautiful. Tindale, my publisher,
1:27:05
they rented out a coffee shop for three days and just filmed all these beautiful scenes with
1:27:08
Jay Werner Wallace and myself and John McCray from the What Do You Mean YouTube channel.
1:27:13
And we just talked through some of these issues. And then the participant guide will walk your
1:27:17
small group through the claims of progressive Christianity, what the Bible has to say, how we
1:27:21
can be thinking lots of discussion and application kind of things. And so you can get that on tindale
1:27:27
or on amazon.com that's available. And then right now, I'm co-writing a book on deconstruction with
1:27:33
Tim Barnett of Red Pen Logic. He's got the TikTok in the in the YouTube channel. And we have been
1:27:40
hip-deep in deconstruction for about a year writing this book and we're landing the plane
1:27:46
on the book. It's been a gnarly beast to write because people mean so many different things when
1:27:51
they use the word. And so we've kind of come up with a definition, we're going to defend and then
1:27:56
talk about the movement. And so I mean, our main thesis is deconstruction is bad. That would be the
1:28:02
the most simple version, which is very controversial because there's a lot of Christians trying to
1:28:06
paint it like it's a good thing. But at any rate, so that's going to be coming out in about a year.
1:28:11
And we don't have a title for that yet. But that's kind of what I've been working on. And then I
1:28:15
guess after that, I just don't want to write a book for a long time. I want like, I don't want
1:28:21
anybody to ask me about a book for like a year and a half at least. And then maybe I'll think about
1:28:25
it. Okay, so is there anything that you haven't mentioned on any other show that has a bonus to
1:28:30
the guys that have stuck around for us? Like, what's what's kind of clinking around in the back of
1:28:34
that big old brain of yours? Like, give us something special. Oh, man, that like that, that you put
1:28:39
me on such a spot to think of something special to give. If there's not anything special, just
1:28:43
tell me to go say something. Okay, I'll give you something that I haven't talked about with anybody.
1:28:47
So, and this might be relevant to your audience too. So I like to read just different things that
1:28:53
have nothing to do with anything that I do for ministry. And so right now I'm reading the memoir
1:28:59
of Bob Odenkirk, who's the actor from Better Call Saul. And it's just all him coming up through
1:29:03
the comedy scene in LA. And you know, it's an interesting book. It's kind of fascinating
1:29:07
some of the people he talks about. But there's this really interesting scene where he's talking
1:29:11
about Chris Farley. And of course, I think Chris Farley died of a drug overdose. Is that right? Or
1:29:16
something like that. And so he, Odenkirk is talking about how everybody could kind of see it coming
1:29:22
because Chris Farley was spinning out of control. It was just getting worse and worse. And so there
1:29:28
was this one scene where Odenkirk is in a hotel room with Farley and Farley is just spinning out
1:29:33
and he's talking crazy. He's doing comedy bits and he's high and he's drunk and all these things.
1:29:38
And then he gets real serious and he starts crying. And he says, he calls him Odie. He says,
1:29:45
Odie, do you think Balushi's in heaven? And he gets real serious and crying. And he knows,
1:29:51
you know, that he's spiraling. He knows his life's probably not going to be very long.
1:29:55
And Odenkirk is an atheist. So he's, you know, he's like, well, I didn't want to break it to him,
1:30:00
you know, in his mind that, you know, God doesn't exist and there is no heaven or whatever. So he
1:30:04
kind of just said, oh, yeah, probably whatever. But I just thought that was really interesting
1:30:08
because it just goes to show it's, it's when people are at the end of themselves, these are the
1:30:15
transcend, transcendent questions that they're asking, even Chris Farley. Like you could tell
1:30:21
that at the end of his life, this was something he was thinking about is heaven real. Does God
1:30:25
exist or all these things true? And I think that brings us back around to the worldview questions.
1:30:29
And just, I think there's such a push out there from people who are atheists or people who have
1:30:35
outgrown religion and, you know, kind of make this thing about it. But really, these are the
1:30:41
questions that everybody's asking. This is why everybody has an atheist uncle who they couldn't
1:30:44
bring up the gospel to until the uncles on the deathbed and then they, then they're open to hearing
1:30:49
about it. And I don't know, maybe that would just encourage us to keep in mind like we're not crazy.
1:30:54
There are, there, there, these are the transcendent questions that people are asking and everybody's
1:31:00
asking them, especially when they're at the end of themselves. And I just thought that was a really
1:31:05
powerful scene in the book there. So. All right, great place to leave it. Well, that's all for me.
1:31:09
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest? That's it. All right, Lisa Childers,
1:31:13
thank you for coming back on on Don't the Life of Man's podcast. Thanks, Kyle.
1:31:17
There you go, guys. I hope you enjoyed the return appearance of Lisa Childers on the podcast.
1:31:21
But before I let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost at Undaunted Life,
1:31:24
our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that for just spiritual,
1:31:27
mental and physical resilience. So before we get to the notes for today,
1:31:30
don't forget to support the sponsor of today's show, Casey Cattle Company. Go to kc cattle company
1:31:35
dot com. That's kc cattle company dot com. Use the promo code Kyle to get 15% off your order.
1:31:40
Again, that promo code is just my first name, Kyle. That's kyle for 15% off your order at kc cattle
1:31:45
company dot com. But let's go ahead and go into the links for today. I've got a link to the book
1:31:49
that we talked about today. Live your truth and other lies. Also a link to another gospel.
1:31:52
We've got a link to her website, her YouTube channel, her Instagram, her Facebook, her previous
1:31:56
appearance on this show, and also my appearance on her show. So she's gotten a lot of positive
1:31:59
feedback about that. So you can check that out there as well. All right, guys. Thanks so much
1:32:02
for listening to the show. We do appreciate it. Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe,
1:32:05
rate and leave us a positive five star review. If you want me to come speak live at your event
1:32:09
or on your podcast, shoot me an email to info@undaunted.life. That's i n f o at undaunted.life.
1:32:15
Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and check out our website for everything else,
1:32:18
including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way. Just go to www.undaunted.life.
1:32:23
And as always, we want to thank the band August Burns Red for allowing us to use their music for
1:32:27
our content. The music on this podcast is our song, cutting the tides, which is off their 10th
1:32:31
anniversary re recording of their album leveler. The links are in the description. I'm your host,
1:32:36
Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental and physical
1:32:42
resilience. Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
1:33:12
[Music]