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This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
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I'm your host Kyle Thompson, let's get into it.
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All right, guys.
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You've got a special return guest on the show today.
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His name is Doug Wilson.
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He is a conservative, reformed evangelical theologian and pastor at Christ Church in
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Moscow, Idaho.
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And he's written a bunch of different books, like mere Christendom, future men, reforming
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marriage, rules for reformers when the man comes around and more.
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And today we are talking about his newest book.
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It's this book right here.
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Keep your kids how to raise strong kids in an age of therapeutic sentimentalism.
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And this guy, he's always fun to talk about, talk to and I guess talk about as well.
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He's been on episodes 495 and 569 of this podcast 495.
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We basically talked about mere Christendom the entire time in 569.
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We talked about one of the best books, especially for raising young men, and that's called future
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men.
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Now, in this particular interview, I started out by asking him if he feels like we are
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on the verge of an awakening, a capital A awakening of sorts, you've heard me pose this
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question to several different people that have been on the show here recently, because
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I just feels like we're in that place for a lot of different reasons.
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I really liked some of his delineating points.
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And then we started to get into the specific book, why this book, why there is an issue
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with this move towards sentimentalism, how, you know, stop me if you've heard this before,
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how focusing on gray areas and nuances, probably a bit problematic, and then specifically what
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parents can do if, you know, they're not in a situation where they've got a strong church
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community or if they have their kids in private school, private Christian school or homeschool,
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how are they to kind of navigate some of these areas?
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But also the responsibility we do have as a congregation to the raising and rearing of
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these children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
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And he kind of talks about what they do at his church, but specifically like for those
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families that you're closest with and kind of your small group, home group type community,
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what is your responsibility to making sure those kids don't grow up to be Neanderthals?
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And so we really, really get into that.
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Then there's a very important discussion that we have about the separation between empathy
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and sympathy and how people just use those as synonymous words in our modern vernacular,
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and how there is definitely a delineating point between the two.
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And then we ended by talking about emotionalism and guys, I mean, I got to less than half
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of the questions I wanted to, but we were on short time today.
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So every time we get a chance to have Doug on the show, I absolutely love taking advantage
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of it.
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So I'm not going to keep him from you any longer.
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So without further ado, let's get into it.
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Doug Wilson, this is your third appearance on the show.
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We're working through that punch card, but I just got to tell you the first two appearances.
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I really tried to shake things up.
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I really tried to get some negative emails and negative feedback, and I just didn't get
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very much.
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And so what do we have to do to make sure that we can make the right people angry this time?
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Let me see if what I can do to help.
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Okay.
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Well, let's start off with something simple.
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This probably won't tee you too much up towards that end.
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But there's something that seems to be happening and you seem to have your thumb on the pulse
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of these things a lot of times.
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But obviously we've got the change over from the Biden administration to the Trump administration.
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We've got Wes Huff, a legitimate Christian apologist going on the Joe Rogan experience.
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We have public intellectuals like Ion Hershey Ali and Russell Brand coming out as Christians.
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And again, they're kind of baby Christians.
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So not everything they say is something that we should take as a super informative.
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But you've got people even saying that they're culturally Christian now.
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There's exploding sails in Bibles.
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Young men are coming back to the church in certain ways.
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Young men are flocking to Orthodox.
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There's a lot of different things happening.
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And there was the asbury quote unquote revival that happened a couple of years ago.
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It felt like just an artificially long worship service to me.
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It just seemed like it just kept going.
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But you know, who knows?
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I don't want to judge.
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But as opposed to revival, the word awakening is it's kind of running through my mind quite
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a bit.
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And I don't know if we're at the beginning of it, if we're in the middle of it or if this
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is just kind of all, you know, just hitting our brains because here we are doing the social
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media thing.
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But what are your thoughts on that?
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Yeah, one of the things I'd want to do, looking at history, is I'd want to distinguish renewal
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movements from reformations, okay, renewal.
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So what you had, for example, in the ancient church and through the medieval period, there
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would periodically be renewal movements.
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Many of the monastic orders were founded that way because what would happen is someone would
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start a monastic order dedicating themselves to love and good works and poverty and a life
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of dedication and prayer and everything.
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And it started out as let's get serious about this, guys, let's and the people, the people
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who founded such things were frequently charismatic and a lot of people flocked to it.
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But then one of the first things that happened to these monastic orders is they got rich.
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Because of the theology of the day, people would die and leave their holdings to the monastery
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and the monastery would grow rich and then would grow more abundant and there'd be a
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need for another renewal movement.
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So then along, so you had preaching orders like the Dominicans and Franciscans with
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the life of simplicity and the Benedictine order.
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These were all renewal movements which they had their moment in the sun, sort of like
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promise keepers and they did their thing.
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But then their spiritual authority waned because a lot of the energy there was just simply,
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it was not sinful or wrong but it was simply an earthly energy.
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We've got to step it up, guys.
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And after a period of just a miasmic or despairing or depressed era, people are oftentimes ready
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for a change.
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Now, we're right in the middle of that kind of a change.
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That's what I would describe the vibe shift as being.
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The vibe shift is turning away from the older way of doing things that just wasn't working
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and people are excited about it and energized and ready to go and so forth.
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And I think a lot of it is good and decent and valuable but I think it's still earthly.
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I would put the Reformation in a different category because they didn't just challenge
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the bad practices of the medieval church.
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They went root and branch and attacked the doctrines, the formal teachings of the church
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that set everything up for it going the way it did.
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So the Reformation had much more of an impact.
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And I think Christians in this era and oftentimes, vibeshift renewals and Reformation would happen
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at the same time and Christians ought to be inviting citizens everywhere to take the
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claims of Christ seriously and to do it in a root and branch way where you don't just
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bring Jesus in and put him on the God Shelf.
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The difference between renewal and Reformation would be in Reformation, it's a Copernican
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revolution.
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I would do the same thing with personal conversion as with cultural conversions.
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Sometimes people, they live their egocentric lives and they are the sun and they've got
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different planets that revolve around the sun.
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Their job, their family, their wife, their hobbies, they've got all these different planets.
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And then when they become a Christian, what they do is they added Jesus' planet and the
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Jesus' planet circles around them and their needs but it's still fundamentally geocentric.
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It's still fundamentally me, what needs to happen in an actual conversion is it has to
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be a Copernican revolution where Christ is the center and everything swims into orbit
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around him and his kingdom and the things that he taught and we have to submit ourselves
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to him.
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Well, the same thing goes with cultures.
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Cultures can be tempted to add a Jesus' planet also.
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So Fox News feels free to say Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.
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Look, two planets, we're going to do the religion thing, we're going to be favorable
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toward people of faith and it doesn't matter what that faith is.
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That shows you that you're adding faith planets instead of proclaiming the lordship of Jesus
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Christ.
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If he's not the Lord of all, he's not the Lord at all.
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So I think over the next two to ten years, I think that we have a real opportunity in
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the middle of this vibe shift to preach the gospel, plant churches, start Christian schools
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and we need to be doing it with Christ at the center of everything.
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As we say here in Moscow, all of Christ for all of life.
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Okay.
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That's great.
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And so let's get even more granular in that two to ten year period.
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So obviously share the gospel, plant churches, launch Christian schools, more Christian content,
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legitimately Christian content, better theology, better doctrine, all those things.
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For the individual Christian, because this is a 95% male audience.
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So a lot of dads, a lot of people with kids still in the house, a lot of lean forward,
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rough action oriented dudes on the individualized level, not really the structural level, what
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can individual men do to kind of aid in what we're seeing with this vibe shift?
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I would say individual men, number one, should get their families to worship weekly.
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Worship God.
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Okay.
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Worship God and take your family with you to worship God.
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Secondly, read your Bible.
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And when you're done, read it again.
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When you're done, read it again, just over and over and over.
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Be a man of the book.
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Give yourself to the reading of God's word.
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Third, this would already apply to some of them, but third, I would tell men to get their
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kids out of the government school.
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Do what it takes to get them out.
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You wouldn't send your kid to a vacation Bible school run by the Jehovah's Witnesses.
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So why on earth are you sending them to a school to be catechized by secularists?
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So I would say you need to find a church to worship in.
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You need to give yourself to the reading of God's word and sharing that with your family,
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reading the word to your family, and then get your kids away from those things which would
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disciple them in an alien religion.
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So I want to kind of put a finer point on the school thing, because I've said before,
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in terms of education, it's either vetted private Christian school, just because, you
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know, I say vetted because just because there's a cross and lobby doesn't mean they're, you
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know, a good Christian school or not, or home school.
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And then there are some, there are some like schools that are not in the public school
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system, some charter schools, some things like that that I would co-sign.
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But there are people, Doug, that and again, can't is a rough thing because you can do
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just about anything if you set your mind to it.
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But both mom and dad work, both mom and dad are career oriented, maybe neither one of
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them are really oriented for the home school type of thing.
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Maybe there's not a great co-op in their area, maybe they live out in rural areas, something
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like that.
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And you have these people that it's like, okay, they can't afford the private Christian
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school that's vetted, right?
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Or they can't get their kids in, which is another thing that I've heard.
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Or their lifestyle is just such that they're in a healthy rhythm.
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The only thing that is unhealthy is just the significance of where their kids are at for
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six, seven, eight hours during that day.
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What would be your practical advice to those people that for one reason or another have
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said, okay, they're going to be in Caesar's school system.
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We understand the problems.
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We're just going to need to have some more conversations with them.
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What would you tell those guys in terms of how they can traverse that?
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Okay.
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So first, just so that I am clear on this, there's a saying that difficult cases make
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bad law.
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So I can envision a mother with three kids and the husband's a quadriplegic from a car
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accident.
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She's got to work two jobs just to keep everybody fed.
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And basically, she can't move.
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The church that she goes to is no position to help.
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She has no options.
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That's just a sad case.
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So I don't want to come along and kick someone like that in the head.
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But if both spouses have to work because otherwise, how could we pay for our lake cabin?
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Right.
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Right.
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At the end of the day, you're going to have a lake cabin that none of your kids want to
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come to, because your daughter transitioned three years ago.
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And basically, you don't want to be penny wise and pound foolish.
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So I would say review your circumstances very carefully.
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I do believe that there are hard cases where you just don't have an option.
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I agree.
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It was a messy divorce five years ago and a secular judge prohibited the kids going to
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a Christian school.
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Right.
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All right, there you are.
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But most of the time, you can make a way.
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And so I would encourage people in that situation, if there's an 8 out of 10 chance that there
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is a way that could be made, then you try to find that basically your relationship to
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your kids is one of the most important earthly things that you do.
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The most important earthly thing you do is worshiping God on the Lord's Day.
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But loving your wife is number two and loving and keeping your kids is number three.
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Very good way.
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I appreciate the practical advice on that.
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Let's go and shift gears to your newest book, which is a reason that you're on today.
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That's this book right here.
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Keep your kids.
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It's a very, very quick read guide.
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You can check it out in the show notes.
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Keep your kids how to raise strong kids in an age of therapeutic sentimentalism and all
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those words have meeting.
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I want to read a quick quote from the introduction here.
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The book of Hebrews says that all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant.
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That's the ESV version of Hebrews 1211.
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And that includes the discipline involved in child rearing the spankings, the late night
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counseling sessions, the mealtime battles over asparagus.
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Parenting has always been hard work.
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But these days, it's particularly hard.
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So Doug, why is it particularly hard?
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Why this book?
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Why now?
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Why you?
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Yeah.
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I was the genesis of this book came when I was going through a fine book by Abigail Schreier
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called Bad Therapy, a very good book.
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And she's not a Christian, but she's pinpointing some problems in the therapy world.
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And it dawned on me that I've written a number of family books, reforming marriage and standing
16:24
on the promises and a number of books.
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But it occurred to me that I wrote them like 20 years ago.
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I wrote them half of a full generation ago.
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And when I wrote them, the world was basically right-side up.
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So parents, Christian parents, had to deal with worldly standards and a false sense of
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sophistication and that you had to deal with the cool kids back then.
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But everybody knew what a boy was, everybody knew what a girl was, everybody knew what
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was up and down.
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The things were still right-side up.
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And the beginnings of the therapeutic problem that is now metastatized and is now, we are
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now in a world governed by toxic empathy.
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That had not taken deep root yet.
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And so I realized that parents today, young married, someone got married when they were
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21, three years ago, and they've got a couple of kids, they are bringing up their kids in
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a world that is utterly unlike the world that their parents brought them up in.
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The principles stay the same.
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Read the word, love your kids, those principles stay the same.
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But the temptations are different.
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The temptations are different.
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We are living in a day now where the world teaches us that each individual set of feelings
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- every person's feelings - are absolutely sovereign.
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And in the old school, in the old world, you taught your child how to navigate a world
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that was unforgiving.
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The world was the way it was, and you had to adapt, adapt or die, sink or swim, okay?
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And there were parents who didn't do their job and the kids was sink and drown.
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But everybody basically understood the task was to equip your child to adapt to the world
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as it is.
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But today, the root assumption is the world must adapt to your child as he is, okay?
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And it has gotten to absurd lengths such that if a child feels like a girl, everybody has
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to cater to that.
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And not only if he's confused and he thinks he's a girl, the mandate has gone out that
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everybody else in the world has to pretend right along with him.
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And if the parents don't pretend along with him, that child can be removed depending on
19:18
the jurisdiction, from the home, depending on the jurisdiction, depending on what's going
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on, if there's a divorce, it enters into custody issues and all of that.
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So when Justice Jackson was being going up before the Senate, before her confirmation
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to the Supreme Court, what is a woman?
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She said, "I don't know, I'm not a biologist," okay?
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That question did not get her laughed, that question and answer did not get her laughed
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out of Washington, D.C., which it would have 20 years ago, all right?
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That would have been all over if she said, "I don't know, I'm not a biologist."
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But she now sits in one of the highest seats in the land, and that tells you that this
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world of therapeutic sentimentalism referred to in the subtitle, that's what I'm referring
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to, sentimentalism caters to the child's feelings, the child's feelings are sovereign,
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and your child will be told that in television commercials, in songs that they hear, on their
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Spotify playlist, their friends that don't have parents watching over them as diligently
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as you're trying to watch over your kids, they're going to get the message, "I should
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be able to do and be what I feel like," and you have to instill in your child an instinctive
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bone level awareness that that's a lie.
20:56
Hey guys, real quick, a consistent question that I am asked is, Kyle, what is your diet?
21:01
People want to know if I'm tracking macros or if I'm doing keto or something like that,
21:04
but I track one thing, I try to get one gram of high quality protein for every pound of
21:09
body weight.
21:10
So for me, I eat red meat every single day.
21:14
Pretty much for lunch, I eat a pound of red meat every single day to get over 100 grams
21:18
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22:40
I mean, it goes, what is the most famous kid song of the last probably 20 years?
22:43
Let it go.
22:44
Let it go.
22:45
Can't hold me back anymore.
22:46
And I mean, this is something that becomes an anthem for young kids and it becomes a
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way that it's a foundational thing for them.
22:53
And part of it gets into something that you talk about in chapter one, I want to kind
22:56
of get even further into the sentimentalism points.
22:57
I'll read this quote here, "Christian parents must turn away from the pretense of sentimentalism
23:01
because it always results in savagery.
23:04
It destroys the lives of children.
23:06
The catches that the people caught up in this pretense will be bewildered that they think
23:10
they're savage.
23:11
In fact, they'll think we're savage.
23:14
You cannot split this kind of difference.
23:16
There is no way to bridge this gap by negotiation, by discussion, by trying to be winsome.
23:22
You can't.
23:23
You can't apologize your way into a good relationship with people who are on the other side of this
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chasm.
23:28
And it really, that's a further, I guess, explanation of something you talked about
23:31
in the introduction where you talked about the sailors at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese
23:36
zeros are flying over and say, "Okay, I guess the time for nuance is past."
23:40
And I've got like a new battle with the word nuance and with gray areas and all the stuff.
23:43
And everybody wants to put everything into the gray and I'm like, "Some things are gray,
23:48
but a lot more things are not that you think than you think."
23:51
Right?
23:52
So there are things that are black and white.
23:53
There are things that are simply moral or immoral.
23:55
They're either godly or of Satan.
23:57
And so in these types of situations, how are good parents trying to do this, able to...
24:03
Or what would you suggest to them in terms of them trying to navigate this kind of milieu
24:08
of sentimentalism?
24:09
Yeah.
24:10
So something that I learned from my dad that I consider invaluable is that hard teaching
24:18
creates soft hearts.
24:21
Soft teaching creates hard hearts.
24:24
Okay.
24:25
Right?
24:26
Yeah.
24:27
So if you have a church or family and ideally a family and a church doing the same thing,
24:34
where the minister gets up in the pulpit and he says, "These are the words of God."
24:40
And then he preaches a message that would have been true had he never been born, right?
24:46
This message would have been true had all of the people in that congregation never been
24:52
born.
24:53
This is God's truth, it's objective, it's unyielding, it's hard, thus say it the Lord.
24:59
So if there's a lot more of thus say it the Lord in the pulpit and a lot less of, it seems
25:06
to me that, okay.
25:09
That hard teaching, that hard line teaching is a jackhammer.
25:14
And our hearts are concrete that need to be jack hammered up.
25:20
God takes away the heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh.
25:23
Hard teaching, the jackhammer of the word, Jeremiah says, this is my word not like a hammer that
25:30
breaks the rock in pieces.
25:32
So hard words delivered in accordance with the word of God, jackhammer up our hearts.
25:40
But if a minister gets up in front of a congregation and he preaches like a feather duster, right?
25:47
And all the hard hearts are just going to get harder.
25:52
The concrete is just going to bake further.
25:54
And then you're going to, you're going to have a congregation full of pornography, abortions,
26:01
betrayals, adulteries, because soft teaching gets you hard hearts.
26:08
Hard teaching gets you soft hearts.
26:11
Now I want to put one proviso on it's got to be the kind of hard hardness in the teaching
26:17
that we find in scripture.
26:19
It's the hardness of objective truth.
26:23
It's Ben Shapiro's math doesn't care about your feelings.
26:28
It's that sort of thing.
26:29
I'm not talking about fathers being harsh and bitter.
26:34
I'm not talking about that kind of hardness.
26:37
There's a type of counterfeit hardness that just creates more hardness and bitterness and
26:42
so forth.
26:43
So I'm not urging that.
26:44
But I am, I am talking about bringing up kids in a world where there's an objective center.
26:54
God is the same.
26:55
Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.
26:58
That's the kind of hardness I'm talking about.
27:00
Well, and the objective center is facts.
27:02
And so that's where Ben Shapiro gets the facts don't care about your feelings because in
27:06
these types of situations, your feelings are not for nothing, right?
27:09
But your feelings don't dictate terms is kind of what you're talking about earlier.
27:13
Like there are some, I guess, very difficult situations, some hard cases.
27:18
But if you base law for the totality of humanity on the individualized hard cases, that is
27:23
not going to be good once you spread it out to the innumerable number of cases that you
27:28
could consider.
27:30
But also there is a there's a group component to this that you start bringing into the book
27:34
in chapter two, where you discuss basically the congregation or the ecclesia, the small
27:40
group, kind of your, your community of believers.
27:44
They all have a role in the rearing of your child as well.
27:48
And some of that is kind of the old school thing of like, Hey, if you were four streets
27:52
over from your house, and someone saw you acting up like they could grab you by your
27:56
ear and give you a swat and send you home to your mama.
27:59
And no one was going to be calling the police.
28:01
But also there's this idea of as parents, we need to be humble enough to ask for feedback
28:06
on our parenting, and for those people to give us sometimes pointed, but honest feedback
28:13
without being needlessly harsh, but then also us being able to receive that feedback humbly
28:18
and to kind of put it into our matrix of decision making as we parent.
28:22
So talk a little bit more about kind of the group approach to this parenting, even though
28:26
obviously mom and dad are the ones that are ultimately responsible.
28:29
Yes, not to not I'm just going to bring this up, not to introduce another doctoral issue,
28:36
but because I don't know the makeup of your audience on this doctrine, but I'm a Presbyterian
28:43
pastor and we practice infant baptism.
28:46
And when we have a baptism of a child, the parents take vows to bring the child up in
28:54
the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
28:56
And then at the conclusion of those questions, I turn to the congregation.
29:00
If I'm doing the baptism and I say to you as a congregation, undertake to help these parents
29:06
in the Christian nurture of this child, if so signify by saying amen.
29:10
And the whole congregation says amen.
29:13
So we are doing child rearing in a covenantal context that extends beyond the immediate
29:20
family.
29:21
Obviously mom and dad have the primary responsibility, but you can't brush your hands off and say
29:27
that child has nothing to do with me.
29:29
We're in this together.
29:31
Now, where does that come in?
29:33
Well, let's say it's after the service sometime and you see a bunch of boys teary hooting
29:42
around and one of them trips and just bites it, just bam.
29:49
And he gets up, does himself off, looks around, doesn't see either of his folks and then runs
29:54
off to find his mom.
29:56
He's just normal.
29:58
And then as soon as he sees her, as soon as she comes into his line of sight, he starts
30:03
wailing and runs up to her wailing because he bit it.
30:09
Now you might not know that kid's name, right?
30:16
But you know something about him that mom doesn't know, right?
30:21
He's working mom and he's going out, out, out and I'm so hurt and I need your comfort
30:29
and I need to get something from you.
30:32
And so let's say you have a discussion at some point.
30:36
You as a couple, visit with them as a couple and you suggest maybe you're molly coddling
30:42
your son a bit because this is something I saw.
30:46
Now one of the things I say in the book there is that if we've all taken these vows when
30:52
our children are baptized, when someone comes to you with an insight or a criticism or an
30:59
observation like this, the fact that we've taken vows together doesn't mean that the
31:06
criticism is right.
31:08
Okay, the person, you might be misunderstanding the situation entirely, budget for that.
31:18
But if you are the parents on the receiving end, then the one thing you must not be is
31:24
defensive, right?
31:27
You can, at the end of the day, you should say something like thank you for bringing this
31:31
to our attention, we will discuss it, we will pray about it, we'll talk the Lord, we'll observe
31:37
our son closely, thank you very much, we really appreciate it, we take it on board.
31:42
Now after three days of praying about it and talking about it and watching your kid carefully,
31:47
you might conclude that the criticism was misguided or you might conclude that it was
31:52
on point.
31:54
Either way, you have no right to be defensive when someone comes because they took a vow,
32:01
right, to help these parents in the Christian nurture of this child, and also you alluded
32:07
to this, one of the things that parents I think should do from time to time is ask their
32:13
friends, if you're like other families, you're in a little social group where your friends
32:24
usually have kids the same age as yours and pick out a family whose management of their
32:32
home you respect and say listen, if you ever see anything in our relationship to our kids,
32:40
please say something and if you have anything that you've seen that you'd like to suggest
32:45
to me now, I'm all ears.
32:47
Now you might be surprised at what comes out, you think you're too strict and they think
32:52
you're too soft or they think you're too soft and you think you're too strict, it could
32:57
be any number of things and again, you don't have to agree but you do have to be open to
33:02
the discussion and part of the reason for this is that in standards are not just family
33:13
rules, it's not just house rules, it's cultural standards, so your child is going to have to
33:22
navigate life in a community and you want to equip them for that, right, that means you've
33:33
got to get feedback from this and there are families and this is another important aspect
33:40
of this, I was born in 1953, I and my three siblings went through the government schools,
33:48
there was no real private school movement to speak of then, and we were in the south,
33:56
we were in Maryland in Annapolis which was a segregated city and I went to the white
34:03
elementary school and the black element two miles away and the white elementary school
34:08
was just down the block and then the Supreme Court decision came down and a bunch of families
34:14
participated in what was called white flight, so the private schools got energized by whites
34:24
fleeing the integration of the public schools, my dad didn't want to have anything to do
34:31
with that and so there was no real option for them and they hadn't thought it through,
34:38
it was, all of this stuff was new, so I went through the government school system, speaking
34:45
for me, I was the oldest, whenever I encountered something, a contradiction between what the
34:52
school was saying and what my parents taught, I always went with my parents, they were a
34:59
wonderful Christian couple, they had a strong, we had a very tight family, very strong family
35:07
and Christ was the center and that was just the way it was, right?
35:13
Now I was fortunate in that way because my folks sort of created that environment for
35:20
me to grow up in, sort of all by themselves, they were it, there are numerous Christian
35:29
families that don't have that kind of horsepower, they can generate, if they're the only ones,
35:38
they cannot generate enough gravitational pull to keep their kids, but if you put that
35:44
family in the midst of a thriving Christian community and the kids look around and it's
35:50
not just what mom and dad say, it's what mom and dad and Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith and
35:56
Mr. Murphy, all of them say this, then what that does is it gives the parents reinforcements,
36:03
okay?
36:05
So there are some really tough-minded great families, you know, it's the grace of God
36:13
and they can be in a situation where they're isolated and still keep their kids, but that's
36:19
not the standard, that's not the norm.
36:22
And I think it's very important for you, you know, deputize your friends, say, hey, if
36:26
you see my kid acting up, you're more than welcome to correct them verbally, you know,
36:32
every family can have their own discussion about, you know, I guess corporal punishment
36:35
and things like that.
36:36
But I remember there was a time where, you know, in our church, like it's a good-sized
36:41
church, but we have a lot of, you know, connections, so that makes it a lot smaller.
36:45
There is a guy who's got three kids and it was his middle son and I heard of a few daughters
36:50
of some of the other guys in our church and I overheard their daughters saying things
36:55
that were not so nice about this guy's middle child, about him kind of being a little bit
36:59
of a knucklehead and making some of the girls uncomfortable.
37:02
And so I just like swallowed hard and took a deep breath and went to the dad, who's a
37:06
very, who's a great guy, incredibly gracious and incredibly humble.
37:10
I said, hey, man, I'm putting some chips in the center of the table here, but I know
37:13
if I was in your position, I would want someone to tell me, here are some things that I heard,
37:18
and I overheard about your son that you may or may not be aware of.
37:22
And I don't know what he did with that information, but he was very gracious and very thankful.
37:26
Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
37:27
Yes, I've noticed some of these things in his personality was not really aware that it
37:32
was affecting some of the other similar aged girls in the congregation.
37:36
And there was nothing like super inappropriate.
37:39
It was just like, you know, knucklehead, stupid little kid, little boy stuff, right?
37:42
You know, we've talked about that in previous conversations.
37:45
We got time for a couple more questions here, but one of them, I want to get into emotional
37:50
ism.
37:51
We'll get into that here in just a second.
37:53
But in chapter three, you draw a stark delineation between the words empathy and sympathy, and
37:58
you kind of make the argument that in modernity, that stark delineation has basically been removed.
38:03
So if you would for us talk to us a little bit about the differences between empathy
38:07
and sympathy.
38:08
Okay.
38:09
Great.
38:10
First thing I'll say is that for a number of people, man in the street level, there are
38:16
a number of people who just use empathy and sympathy as synonyms.
38:20
Right.
38:21
You know, a man, I've, I empathize with him and I sympathize with him would have done
38:27
just as well.
38:28
It means exactly the same thing.
38:30
But sympathy is an ancient word.
38:34
It's in the New Testament.
38:35
We have a high priest who can sympathize with us in our weakness.
38:41
Okay.
38:42
So sympathy is good.
38:44
It's attested in Scripture.
38:45
Jesus has sympathy for us.
38:48
Okay.
38:49
Empathy is a word of recent coinage, and it comes out of the world of psychology.
38:55
And the people who are pushing it in the therapeutic world are wanting to, they have
39:00
a very specific definition that is contrary to the biblical definition of sympathy.
39:08
And what they want is their definition to creep out into ordinary use.
39:13
And the definition is this, the pathos has to do with feeling.
39:21
So sim is together and pathos feeling.
39:24
So sympathy is feeling together with someone, you weep with those who weep, you rejoice
39:31
with those who rejoice.
39:33
That's sympathy.
39:35
Okay.
39:36
Empathy is sort of an all-in affair.
39:39
So in the way I illustrate it is let's say someone is struggling with their feelings and
39:46
they're drowning in their feelings.
39:49
The river is flowing by and they're drowning in that river.
39:53
And sympathy does, gets a good purchase on the bank, holds the tree with one hand, and
40:01
throws them a rope with the other.
40:03
Okay.
40:04
So your heart goes out to them, you want to save them, you want to help them, you want
40:09
them to get out of the river.
40:11
And so you help them get out of the river, perhaps at great risk to yourself.
40:15
Okay.
40:16
That's sympathy.
40:17
What empathy does is it takes a header into the river together with the person.
40:23
And this is the key.
40:26
When you suffer together with the person who's whatever it is, there is absolutely no judgment.
40:35
Okay.
40:36
Absolutely no judgment.
40:39
I don't know if you've seen that very, very funny video.
40:42
It's not about the nail.
40:45
No.
40:47
If you look it up, it's not about the nail, it's a discussion between a husband and a
40:53
wife.
40:54
And she's talking about this achy feeling that she has in her head.
40:58
And as they're talking, there's a nail sticking out of her forehead.
41:03
And the husband says, you know, I think if we got that nail, and she says, it's not about
41:09
the nail, why do you keep trying?
41:11
Why do you keep trying to fix it?
41:12
Yeah.
41:13
I'm not going to fix it.
41:14
I just think if you get the nail out, anyway, if your viewers look that up, they will find
41:20
it very edifying.
41:22
And that video illustrates the difference between sympathy and empathy, okay?
41:28
He is offering sympathy.
41:30
I think we could help you out by getting the nail out.
41:35
There's an objective problem that I think you're not aware of.
41:38
And if we got the nail out, I think we've solved the problem.
41:42
She's demanding empathy, all right?
41:44
I just want you to suffer together with me in my affliction, and I want you to pass
41:51
no judgment.
41:52
I don't want you to offer solutions.
41:54
I don't want you.
41:55
So if you're dealing with someone, if you're counseling someone who is miserable and coming
42:02
apart in your office as the end result of a long series of bad choices, empathy must
42:10
not bring up any of those bad choices.
42:13
Okay.
42:14
Okay.
42:15
It's you feel with them without any judgment, whatever.
42:21
Sympathy wants to offer objective help.
42:25
And sympathy says, "Man, I feel for you.
42:27
My heart goes out to you.
42:28
It must be terrible.
42:29
But I really think you should stop drinking yourself blind every weekend."
42:34
Okay.
42:36
That might have something to do with the state of your liver and the state of your marriage.
42:39
And the reason you just got fired from another job.
42:43
So sympathy tries to help with actual problems.
42:48
Empathy wants to say that the only thing, the only responsibility that the therapist
42:53
has is to identify, identify, identify, and offer no solutions.
42:59
And so consequently, if you have a, if you're bringing up a child in a culture that's dominated
43:06
by that empathetic imperative, people are going to say, "Don't correct your children.
43:13
You're a child."
43:14
Right?
43:15
Right.
43:16
What are you correcting?
43:17
You need to empathize with a child.
43:19
It's tough to be three.
43:21
It's tough to be six.
43:23
It's tough to be 15 and having gotten a girl pregnant.
43:26
That's tough.
43:27
You just need to know.
43:29
Well, and that's how we get in the position we're at now, where we're downstream of this
43:33
moral therapeutic deism revolution to where, and again, in a lot of these therapy contexts,
43:39
they don't want you to become well.
43:40
And there's two reasons.
43:41
One, they don't know how to and number two, they would lose a client.
43:44
And so they have to kind of keep the churn going, as it were.
43:47
So I've got a whole bunch more questions, but we only have time for one more.
43:50
So I'm going to read my favorite quote from the book and get you to talk about it here.
43:54
I believe it's a quote from what chapter, chapter three, "Many times Christians just
43:57
attach Bible verses to their various sinful feelings, but the feelings are still in charge.
44:02
Say a child is the most emotional one there at the praise and worship time in your Christian
44:06
school's chapel services.
44:08
During the extended cut worship course, gray line, eyes are closed and the hands are in
44:13
the air.
44:14
Everybody thinks he is worshiping Jesus, but he is actually worshiping a set of feelings
44:19
that the music generates.
44:21
And then when the same child goes off to be a freshman at Leviathan State University,
44:26
everyone is astonished at how rapidly he loses his faith.
44:29
Within three months, he begins to feel like he should be a girl and you think, man, that
44:33
was fast.
44:34
It only took three months, but this was not a three month job.
44:37
It took 15 years, maybe he only recently started feeling like he should be a girl, but his
44:41
foundational faith actually hasn't changed.
44:44
He has been obeying his emotions for a long, long time.
44:47
Now he's just sipping or sniping off the Bible verses.
44:51
So here's the thing.
44:52
Obviously, you're not saying that if a kid is very, very worshipful and emotional during
44:56
worship, that he's going to eventually come out as trans.
44:58
That's not what you're saying.
44:59
But the point is, like I've been reliably informed, Doug, that since I don't enjoy the
45:03
sound of most contemporary Christian music, that I'm not saved.
45:07
I've also been told that I am violating biblical mandates by not raising my hands and falling
45:12
out in the aisle during the artificially long worship song where it's like, course, course,
45:17
course, bridge, course, bridge in another key course, course.
45:20
And then we get to the third verse and then we hit the course another 17 times.
45:23
And so for, I guess, talk to our, our audience a little bit about the point you were trying
45:27
to make with emotionalism because you're not saying if you show emotion that that's bad,
45:31
but if that's the basis of your morality or the basis of your worldview, it does become
45:36
problematic.
45:37
Yeah, that's a, that's a perfect setup to this illustration.
45:42
And this illustration applies to individual, the individual child who needs to grow up
45:47
understanding this.
45:48
It applies to marriages.
45:50
It applies to your relationship to God.
45:52
And that is the relationship to of your emotions to objective truth.
45:57
Now, this, I'm not saying you should have one, I'm not saying you should have truth and
46:02
no emotions.
46:03
Right?
46:04
Mm hmm.
46:05
I am saying that they need to be ordered in a particular way.
46:08
They need to be ordered in a particular way.
46:10
And the way you need to think of it is if you go down to the basement of your house,
46:15
the chances are pretty good.
46:17
If you can find your way to, to, to the foundation wall, you're going to find a straight line
46:25
wall made up of cold, uncaring concrete.
46:30
Hmm.
46:31
Okay.
46:32
Yep.
46:33
It's not, it's not huggable.
46:35
It's not approachable.
46:37
It's just there.
46:38
Okay.
46:40
And Jesus talks about this principle incidentally at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount.
46:44
The difference between the house built on sand and the house built on a, on a foundation.
46:51
Conclusions are objective and cold, just like concrete.
46:57
Okay.
46:58
So there's a Puritan who said, first a man chooses his love and then he loves his choice.
47:04
Okay.
47:05
He, and what he does that, he does that as the consequence of a covenant ceremony.
47:09
It's the same thing with your individual emotions.
47:13
So you have the marriage covenant or you've got your covenant with God in your baptism.
47:18
That's just objectively there.
47:20
Okay.
47:21
So on top of that, you build the stud walls and let's just use marriage as the illustration
47:28
of this principle, but it applies across the board.
47:31
You build your house, the rooms where you live, setting them on that foundation.
47:38
I want the foundation to be straight, cold, rigid, unyielding.
47:44
I don't, I don't want it to be adaptable.
47:47
Right.
47:48
I don't want my foundation to be adaptable at all, but I build the stud walls on the
47:52
foundation and then we sheet rocket and then the wife comes in and all of a sudden you're
47:58
dealing with soft sofas and cushions and curtains and throw rugs and throw pillows.
48:08
The things that make the room habitable are soft, comfortable, easy.
48:15
Those are your emotions.
48:19
If you took all the emotions, rolled up the rug, tore down the curtains, made a pile
48:25
out of the throw pillows and tried to build a stud wall on top of that.
48:30
The whole thing is to do nothing but wobble.
48:33
So basically if you have truth here and you put your emotions here, okay, your emotions
48:40
go up and down.
48:42
Truth stays here.
48:44
If you pitch, if you have your emotions as the foundation and you put your understanding
48:48
of truth on top of that, your emotions go up and down.
48:52
That means everything goes up and down.
48:54
Everything is, everything's in turmoil.
48:56
And so consequently, you, one of the central tasks that parents have is teaching kids to
49:03
discipline their emotions, okay, not, not stuff their emotions, not to squelch their
49:11
emotions, not pretend that they don't have emotions, but simply discipline them, okay?
49:17
So your emotions learn that they have to behave just like the rest of you does, right?
49:24
So and I've seen this with my kids taking care of my grandkids, let's say a kid bites
49:30
it, hurts himself and he runs to mom.
49:33
Well, let's say it was a genuine hurt, not a fake hurt and he's crying.
49:39
Mom receives him, comforts him for 15, 20 seconds.
49:43
And then she says, okay, now blow it out, okay?
49:49
What happens when you get hurt in a game, you smile and keep on playing, okay?
49:54
So what you do is you come alongside the kid, that's sympathy, right?
49:58
It's sympathy.
49:59
And then you help them walk into a blow it out, I'm going to blow it out.
50:04
And what this does over time is it teaches them to discipline their emotions, which tells
50:09
them, oh, it's possible to say no to myself.
50:13
You know, if I have a surge of emotion that wants to do something or grab something or
50:19
have something or I can say no, I can, I can talk to myself and not just listen to myself.
50:27
Great points, great delineation.
50:28
I wish we had more time, but we are out of it again, guys.
50:30
The name of the book is keep your kids, Doug, that's all for me.
50:33
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
50:35
No, very good.
50:36
Good interview.
50:37
Thank you.
50:38
Always a pleasure.
50:39
Let's keep, you keep writing books and we'll keep filling up that punch card.
50:42
Okay.
50:43
All right.
50:44
All right.
50:45
Thanks.
50:46
There you go, guys.
50:47
I hope you enjoyed the third appearance of Doug Wilson on the show, but before I let you
50:48
go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost.
50:50
Adam Daunson life or mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that
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for just spiritual mental and physical resilience.
50:55
The only link I've got for you today is linked to where you can buy your copy of Keep Your
50:58
Kids.
50:59
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51:21
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51:25
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51:31
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51:32
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
51:34
Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.
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Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
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