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0:40
This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:50
Let's get into it. All right, guys. We've got a special guest on the podcast today.
0:53
His name is Ryan Burge, so he is a podcast alum. He was just back on episode 264. That will be
0:58
in the show notes, so you can check that out. But if you missed that episode, he is a pastor,
1:02
writer, and PhD in political science, and he's also a professor. So kind of a unique bird in all
1:07
those types of things. He's a pastor of a small Baptist church, and he's also the assistant professor
1:11
of political science at Eastern Illinois University. And on the last podcast, we talked about a book
1:15
that he released called The Nuns, where they came from, who they are, and where they are going.
1:20
So this book does a really deep statistical dive into the increasing number of Americans
1:24
that have no religious affiliation, but then he did a follow-up book. And I just finished reading
1:28
this follow-up book. This book is out now. If you're listening to this podcast, it's called 20 Miss
1:32
About Religion and Politics in America. So as you're reading through this, and we talk about
1:36
this in the show, we get into individual myths and they just don't seem like they would be right,
1:40
but then he gives you a statistical reason as to why these things are missed. And each one of these
1:45
myths are they're all standalone myths. You don't have to read them, you know, kind of in one line
1:49
or something like that. But guys, I got to tell you, the first episode that we did together,
1:53
I really enjoyed it. But I could tell that he was trying to just lean on the statistics a lot.
1:57
He wasn't letting me kind of pull him in to the world of opinion. But on this one, we got well
2:01
into that. And we had a few dustups in a positive way. But guys, you're definitely going to listen
2:05
that and towards the end, we got in a pretty significant dustup about some things that we
2:09
definitely disagree on. And I'll just kind of leave it there. So you're going to make sure
2:12
that you listen to the end. But it was such a productive conversation, a good conversation.
2:15
He and I had a good chat even after we were done. And it's another one of those examples.
2:18
You can vehemently disagree with somebody and not hate them afterwards. Again, this modern
2:22
context where you have to hate the person is just absolutely ridiculous. But guys,
2:25
I don't want to keep them from you any longer. So without further ado, let's get into it.
2:29
Ryan Burge, welcome back to Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.
2:33
Thanks so much, Kyle. I appreciate it.
2:35
Hey, I think this is maybe the second closest time period from someone's first appearance to
2:40
their second appearance. So I don't know if that just means you like us like a whole lot,
2:44
or you're just not that scared of the questions that I'm going to ask you.
2:46
I bring it. I'm ready for anything. Let's go.
2:49
Okay. All right. Now I will say you've been on this podcast before. You're on episode 264.
2:53
That is in the show notes guys. You can go check it out. That's what I talked about in the intro.
2:57
But at the beginning of that episode, we talked about the fact that you were both a pastor
3:02
and a political science professor and a statistician, I guess.
3:05
So to any of our new listeners, which were so thankful for you or any of the folks that missed
3:09
episode 264 briefly give us an idea of how in the world someone can be both a pastor and a
3:14
poli sci professor. Yeah, it's just I don't know any. It's like how do you ask a fish what water
3:18
feels like, right? Like it's all I know. I've literally done this since I was 23 years old.
3:23
So I started as a pastor. I was a youth pastor as an undergraduate. And then when I went to grad
3:28
school, I needed a job to be completely frank with you. And I knew that I had a background in
3:33
ministry and always church that are looking for pastors. And so I got hooked up with a little
3:37
church or close to where I was going to grad school. And then, you know, I actually quit that job
3:42
because I had a graduate assistantship at my graduate program at that point.
3:45
So I didn't think I had time. And another church called me and said, would you, would you be our
3:49
pastor? And I said, yeah, and 15 years later, I'm still the pastor. So there wasn't a lot of
3:54
intention, I guess on my side in terms of like, I want to be a pastor and a political scientist.
3:58
That was never my, my goal in life. But it just seems like I just said yes to a lot of things.
4:03
And it puts me in this really weird situation where now I do both things professionally.
4:07
And I actually think it actually makes me a better pastor. And I think it makes me a better social
4:11
scientist at the same time. Right. Well, I asked you this on the last show. And so guys, you can
4:15
compare his answer now to see if he was full of crap then or full of crap now. But the world of
4:19
faith and the world of academia don't seem to align in a lot of ways. Now, for me personally,
4:24
I feel like you don't get academia with without a God based faith without a biblical based faith.
4:30
We don't really have, you know, academies, we don't really have universities. But from your
4:33
perspective, since you've kind of lived in these two worlds, you know, how do these two things coalesce
4:39
the world of faith and the world of academia? Yeah, you know, I think they're not as antagonistic
4:43
as people think they are. Honestly, like I'm in a department where I think most of our faculty are
4:48
our church going folk, you know, but we're, we're, you know, a regional institution in rural Illinois.
4:52
I think it's different like in certain parts of America, just like it's different everywhere.
4:56
In California, it's different. Whether in the academy or on the street, it's a different
5:00
environment. Most, I think most academics when it comes to faith are they're, they're not antagonistic
5:05
towards it. I think there's a small, a small portion who are very vocally antagonistic towards faith.
5:10
But I think, you know, a good chunk are religious people. And then the kind of the middle is kind
5:13
of how America is, which is like, I could take it or leave it. Like I'm not, I'm not angry at
5:17
religion, but I also don't embrace religion. And so, you know, for me, there's this really
5:22
interesting question when I was applying for jobs, whether I should put when I was applying for
5:25
academic jobs, should I put my work as a pastor on my CV? And if I asked five different academics
5:31
what I should do, it was really interesting because half of them said do it and half of them said,
5:35
absolutely do not do it. Because it might turn some people off. But also, the other side is like,
5:40
saying, listen, I've led meetings, you know, I've, I've, you know, I can preach, I can talk to a
5:45
congregation, I can organize a group. I'm used to doing service, you know, whether it be academic
5:49
service or, you know, church service. So, you know, it was a really interesting, and actually,
5:53
it's not on my CV anymore, but it's all over my website. Now that I got my foothold in, I'm much
5:58
more comfortable saying I'm both things, but I do think there's enough people on a committee
6:02
who are anti-religion would say, we can't have this guy because he was a pastor that I left it
6:07
off at that point. It probably was a good idea then, but now it actually, I think, is my greatest
6:12
benefit that I do both at the same time. So, you kind of get in the door with, with one perception,
6:18
and then you once you get there, then you change yourself a little bit. I don't think I'm dramatically
6:22
different than I was 10 years ago, but I'm just a little bit more open about, you know, my faith
6:25
in my life. And the other thing is, I tell people this all the time, I think to understand human
6:30
nature is to understand the one that created all of us, you know, to understand how we act in groups,
6:35
to understand how we vote, to understand, you know, how we engage in church life,
6:39
tell us us about how we are as human beings and who we are as human beings. Is our nature good or bad?
6:44
Are we willing to cooperate? Are we not willing to cooperate? You know, can we compromise or can
6:48
we not compromise? I think in trying to understand those things, is trying to understand how God
6:52
made us. So, I really see what I do is kind of revealing God's truth in a social science world,
6:58
you know, just as much as a pastor does from a pulpit on a Sunday morning.
7:01
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you getting into all that detail there. But really, what we need
7:05
to do is something that you teed up in our last interview is we need to talk about your brand
7:08
new book. So, guys, if you're listening to this, that means this book is out there. It is for
7:12
your consumption. It's called 20 Miss About Religion and Politics in America. And normally,
7:17
I like to hold up the book so the viewers can see it, but you only got your book yesterday. So,
7:21
you're going to have to hold up the book. There it is. It is in the flesh, in hardback. It's all
7:26
squared away. But here's the deal. I always like to give the author and the time period in the space
7:31
to basically describe the book and their own words. So, in your own words, what is this book about?
7:36
And in a way, is this book is 20 Miss, which is how I'm going to refer to it.
7:41
A follow up book to your first book, which we talked a lot about on the last podcast,
7:45
which is called The Nuns. In some ways, yeah. I mean, it's the same style, right? Which is a
7:49
lot of graphs and a lot less words. But in some ways, it's different because it gets out of that,
7:54
just talking about The Nuns specifically and talks about religion. Actually, this talks about
7:57
politics more than the previous book, which is something that I think my editor wanted me to do
8:02
more of. I think the general public wanted me to do more of because they don't see a lot of this
8:06
kind of discussion from someone like me instead of like a talking head on CNN or Fox or whatever.
8:11
So, really, the genesis of the book is being on social media a lot and seeing people say
8:14
stuff about religion so confidently, like they're sure this thing exists this way.
8:18
And me knowing, if you look at the data, that that's not true at all. And some things are like
8:22
counterintuitive to what people believe about the world. If you look at the data every day,
8:26
it kind of it breeze out. Over time, you start seeing things and there's more layers and you
8:31
peel more layers back and you get asked more questions and you start learning more things.
8:34
And I realized, I could turn these into a series of blog posts, but no one reads blogs. No one's
8:39
going to read a 58,000 word blog post because that's how long the book is. But what I wanted to do,
8:45
each of those 20 myths are self-contained. So, you can read myth seven, then myth three,
8:49
then myth 20, then myth five, and you don't miss anything. So, you can pick this book up and read
8:54
one or two myths and then put it down and come back a week later or a month later and read two
8:57
or three more and not lose anything. I liked that whole segmentedness just from a practical
9:03
standpoint because I didn't have to think in a big arc. Instead, I had to think in little 20
9:07
little chunks. So, my goal each week was write one or two of these each week. So,
9:12
and the goal was really kind of a practical one as much as it was anything else.
9:16
But I also wanted to get down in prints and say, listen, I'm putting a marker down and saying,
9:21
this is not true. You believe this to be true, but it's not. And so, kind of the theme of the
9:26
whole book is let's debunk some things that a lot of people believe or a lot of people just
9:30
haven't thought this much about this stuff as I have. Thank God for that. So, I can write books
9:35
like this and so give them a way to think about the world in a more empirically rigorous way
9:40
and hopefully a more objective way about how religion works, how politics works, and how those
9:44
two things kind of work together. Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you going into that detail. And that's
9:48
exactly how the book reads because I'm a very directional person to where it's like, I have to
9:53
start in chapter one in the move on. Whereas other people read books like they're just, they'll go
9:57
through the table of contents. They'll be like, yeah, I don't really want to do that. And then
9:59
they'll kind of move through because I'm assuming there's a nugget in each one of those myths and
10:03
each one of those chapters. That is something that I can walk away with and apply in my everyday life.
10:07
But you mentioned this just a second ago, you kind of alluded to it. This book, as well as the
10:10
nuns features a ton of graphs and data. Much of that data comes from surveys. And here's the thing,
10:16
and I was just talking about this with one of our big supporters yesterday because he sent me this
10:20
survey or this data. And the headline was 40% or 30% of Gen Z Christians consider themselves to be
10:28
LGBTQ, right? And he's like, what? And then he clicked on the link and he looked at it and it was
10:33
like 600 respondents. They had 17 minutes and they answered 79 questions, right? So they didn't
10:40
have a whole lot of time to answer. And so he kind of dug in just barely. But but here's the
10:44
thing that we go into and you're gonna have to explain this because I'm not a political scientist.
10:47
I don't really dig into data all the time. It's really, really hard for me to perceive that you
10:52
can get an accurate representation of any population when you're talking to so few of them because,
10:57
you know, you're talking to a few hundred people or maybe a few thousand people and how in the world
11:02
can that be indicative? Even at my my church, our Sunday school would probably respond to a survey
11:07
very, very different than the Sunday school that shares a wall with us, right? And yet if you talk
11:11
to mine as opposed to them, you're going to get these ideas about the church that I go to. And
11:15
there's problems with self reporting. There's all these issues. And so that's always in the back of
11:19
my head when I'm reading any data, which is how do they get this data? Were these people even smart
11:24
enough to read the questions and respond correctly? Did they did they talk to the right people like
11:28
help me understand? I'm dumb. Help me understand. Okay, these there's a lot to unpack. I know he's
11:33
talking all of it. Let's go unpack all of it. Okay, first and foremost, I'll say this, is polling
11:36
perfect? No, absolutely not. Is it good? Sometimes, you know, like it's, I think we were always, and
11:42
there's actually an entire organization called AAPOR, American Academy of Public Opinion Researchers.
11:47
So there's people literally spend their entire life trying to get better at this. There's no
11:51
benefit to them for being worse at this. So they're really trying to get better. And what I'll say
11:54
is this, is life better with polling or without polling? I can't believe the life we better if
12:00
we got rid of polls. Okay, I just I just cannot conceive of a world where like, do we defeat Truman
12:05
would be every single election? We'd always be surprised like by what happens. Okay, so we are
12:10
better with polling even when it's not great. And it's not been great. The last five or six years
12:14
has actually gotten worse for a bunch of interesting nuanced reasons that are actually really hard to
12:19
fix. And primarily, that comes back to Trump. Trump voters are non response voters. Now they
12:23
don't respond to polls because I think they're all biased, which Trump kind of plan to see in their
12:28
mind that they are biased and actually kind of creates this weird feedback loop. So the way we
12:32
overcome that is two things. One, randomness. Okay, so we try to be as random as we possibly can,
12:37
in that we, you know, we you can't just talk to one like 600 people is not enough people. Okay,
12:42
so randomness, we try to go to a general population and say, we want 50% men, 50% women. If America's
12:48
60% white, we want our sample to be 60% wide. If America's 30% of Americans are under age of 40,
12:53
our samples, we 30% of Americans under the age of 40. If we do that in a random way,
12:58
then theoretically, our poll is accurate. Think about this. When you get a blood test,
13:03
how much blood do they take? They take it all now. There's mom out, right? Like less than one
13:08
percent of your blood. And yet we go, well, got high blood pressure, or my cholesterol is all
13:12
messed up because that point 2% of my blood tells me that because your blood is randomly mixed
13:17
throughout your body. When we pull it out, we get a random sample of your blood. Same thing with
13:21
polling, right? We randomly sample people. The other thing is that we're dealing now with polls
13:25
are incredibly large, not 600 people. I have a poll right now that has 477,000 respondents.
13:33
And when you get to that level, you know, there are a lot of the problems you face with polling
13:37
sort of go away. You know, I know, I know the stat you're talking about the way Jordan Peterson
13:41
tweeted it out yesterday about, you know, 40% of people are LGBT. That's actually really, really
13:45
high. The answer is it really breaks down by gender. A third of college age women say they're
13:50
not heterosexual. And 20% of college age men say they're not heterosexual. But then it
13:56
drops precipitously as you go up an age. By the time you get to 30, it's like 15% of each gender.
14:01
So I think the right answer is in the general population, what percentage of Americans are
14:05
not straight. It's probably 10%. I would guess overall, but it's it's a huge age gradient there.
14:11
And by the way, 600 people is not enough people to do a poll with. So that's what makes it hard,
14:16
by the way, to create a headline. It's enough to create that headline, though. You know what I mean?
14:19
Yes. And that's the problem is you got to think when you look at a poll, what was the purpose of
14:23
the poll? Was it get a good headline or was it to do good science and the kind of work I do?
14:28
Yeah, exactly. My job is to do good science, not get good headlines. And sometimes they do both,
14:32
right? I'll fully admit I want to get a good headline. But the science for me is more important
14:36
than the headline. Yeah, absolutely. And so I think that's helpful for people to understand
14:40
is like there are people that are trying to get to bedrock and try to get to truth. And there
14:43
are other people that are like, Oh my gosh, I could sell this to CNN and I'll get like 20 more
14:48
followers on Twitter, it will be amazing. But let's go and dig into the contents of 20 miss
14:52
because the intro of the book literally begins with this sentence. And I'm going to give you a
14:56
little bit of crap for this. Okay, this is the first sentence. Good. I was doing what I knew
15:00
was a mistake. I got into an argument with someone on social media. Ryan, what the heck were you
15:06
doing years ago? I mean, I'm talking I'm not some sort of like, you know, the most wisdom-filled
15:10
Solomon ever. But years ago, I'm like, I'm not reading the comments anymore. I'm not engaging
15:15
with morons. I don't even know if this is a real person. This could be an Iranian bot or a Russian
15:21
bot or some troll that literally gets paid all day long to sit here and troll people. I'm not
15:26
interested. I'm not doing it. What were you doing? Arguing with somebody on social media. And let me
15:30
guess I you didn't change their mind, I'm assuming. No, no one changes anyone's mind on social media
15:35
for goodness sakes. I think it's like you're like, you're like, you're like, your mongrel mind,
15:39
your heathen mind kicks in. It's like, I can do it this time. You know, like you get a like a jolt of
15:45
optimism about the human nature. You're like, today's the day. I'm going to change someone's mind on
15:49
social media. But you know, that's I think you're exactly right. Like, as I've gotten, so I'm so
15:54
terrible as we've gotten a bigger platform. I've gotten a lot more followers on social media, right?
15:57
Which means you get a lot. There's a lot of good things that come out of that. But there's also a
16:00
real dark side of that, right? I had a tweet that went viral like last week and it got like 500
16:04
retweets and like 500,500,500 impressions and even 0.1% of respondents that are mean. That's a
16:11
lot of meanness. You know, I mean, that's a lot of darkness. And so I've had to really kind of
16:15
change the way I deal with social media now and that I on my on YouTube, especially, I don't read
16:20
anything I've ever any comments on any video I've ever done because it's just a troll farm. It's
16:24
just the hatefulness. It's like 99% of those people will not say the thing. And by the way,
16:28
there's social science about this. You know, the kind of people who are trolls online are actually
16:31
bullies in person. Yeah, I know. So but but it's worse online because there's no you don't get
16:37
punched in the face exactly in Facebook comments. So that's the problem is these people that there's
16:42
no and here's the other thing I hate about Twitter, especially. There's an information asymmetry
16:47
because I'm me on social media. My name is Ryan Burch. I've got all the links to all my products,
16:51
all my books, all my stuff right there. You know who I am. Some idiots can come on there and have
16:57
a random name. You know, they made up but they're completely anonymous and just throw and hurl insults
17:02
at me and face absolutely no repercussions for that at all personally, professionally or otherwise.
17:07
Well, if I say one thing that's slightly out of step with what the majority wants, I will get
17:11
pillared and they will never buy my books ever again. So, you know, that's to me is so incredibly
17:16
frustrating. And so I don't engage with anonymous accounts anymore because there's just there's
17:19
nothing for me to gain and everything for me to lose by doing that. Right. Even if I can determine
17:24
that the person's probably real and every and I can feel it. I can feel that anger, that ginger
17:31
Irish anger just rising up inside of my being. And then I go, nope. And I just put my phone down
17:36
and I move away because it's like, because the thing is, is you craft this wonderful,
17:41
you know, spelled correctly correct punctuation response and it's perfectly crafted. And then
17:48
this idiot just goes, well, I don't believe in that. And then they just they don't spell
17:51
half the words right. And then it's just like, Oh my gosh, I'm the one that started this.
17:55
They threw the first grenade, but I picked it up and ate it instead of just throwing it back
17:59
at them for whatever reason. So I totally get that. But here's the thing. Yeah, so many good
18:03
things in the intro. So I want to go into another thing just in the intro. You say this, a growing
18:07
segment of the population is completely unwilling to even entertain facts that may contradict the
18:13
way they think about politics, culture and society. Now, here's the issue about quote unquote facts
18:20
for any of you not watching this. You're just listening to this. I use major big time air quotes,
18:25
especially in the area of in the era of COVID, in the era of modern politics,
18:30
facts change constantly, right? So a lot of people want to appeal to authority, right? You know,
18:37
they'll appeal to the CDC or they'll appeal to this person or appeal to that person.
18:41
But the appeal to authority falls apart. If your authority figures are full of crap
18:45
or willing to lie for a political or power gain, you know, Allah, Dr. Fauci, he's had every single
18:50
position you could possibly have just on COVID. This is not a podcast about COVID. I'm just using
18:54
that as the most pertinent example that everybody can understand. So this idea, like you want people
18:59
to just believe the facts. It's like people saying believe the science, capital T, capital S, the
19:04
science. There's an issue with that, right? In our modern era, or am I just crazy?
19:08
Well, the issue is we had to do science in the public eye immediately. And people wanted to
19:12
immediate answers to COVID mitigation protocols tomorrow. And science doesn't work that way.
19:17
You know, like, there's stuff that we publish, there's stuff that I've published that I'm actually
19:22
not, I wouldn't say ashamed of, but no, that's not true now because we've had new data come out
19:25
recently that said that what I thought I believe five years ago is different now because the new
19:29
data is collected in a better way and kind of contradicts what I, you know, what I had five
19:33
or seven years ago. I have the luxury of doing that because no one's like, no one's watching what
19:38
I do and like basing their entire life of what Ryan Berg's tweets about for good thing. Please
19:43
no one do that. Problem with like Fauci in the CDC was people were literally basing their entire
19:48
behavior off of what the CDC was trying to tell us. And honest to God, they didn't have much to go
19:53
on in the beginning. You know, they were kind of guessing as much as anyone else, but they wouldn't
19:57
admit it. That's, that's like part of the problem. It's like, Oh, no, you have to do this because
20:00
we're smarter than you. The problem is though, if you say we don't know what we're talking about,
20:04
then from that point forward, it goes, well, we're never going to listen to you ever again either.
20:07
Right. So it puts you in a terrible situation, right? As a scientist, because no matter what you say,
20:12
there's a good chance you're going to be contradicted by your own data, three, six,
20:16
12 months down the line. And, but I will say this, I think we live in an age right now,
20:21
where there are people who are the people who say trust the science. I mean, like, I have a friend
20:27
who's like, we were at a thing outside, he had a mask on. I was like, dude, I'm not wearing a mask
20:30
outside. I've been double vaccine boosted. I'm cool. I don't need to wear a mask. It's outside,
20:34
COVID case, they're low. And he goes, yeah, but I don't want to think everyone think I'm a Republican.
20:37
I'm like, dude, like, I mean, if that's why we're wearing a mask, like, you got problems. But on the
20:44
other side of the aisle are people who are, you know, loud and proud about like, I'll never wear a
20:48
mask. I don't care, you know, and I think that was, that's dangerous too, right? Posturing is dangerous.
20:54
And I do think there is some value to COVID mitigation, although I'm not doing it anymore,
20:57
because I don't really think it's six months ago is a valuable. And by the way, I follow the data,
21:01
just like you all follow the data, except I look at the data every day on COVID too, by the way,
21:05
like in our county and things like that. But I also understand there needs to be a give and take
21:08
between politics. This is what this is how the CDC really messed up. They don't understand that
21:12
human beings are human. They didn't get enough social scientists on the crew who want, you know,
21:16
who could say to people like, you know, you can do masking for a while, but who get tired of masking.
21:20
So you better do it when it really, really matters. And then say, okay, let's take them off when
21:24
it's going down. We didn't do that. And so now when Omicron hit, everyone was tired of masking.
21:29
If we would have said, okay, let's stop masking, you know, a year ago, after the big wave in last
21:33
December, January, then we would have been a lot better off because people were like, okay, I'm
21:36
willing to put a mask on for another six weeks to get through the Omicron surge. That's where we
21:40
messed up is because we don't realize science and social science sometimes can flick with each
21:44
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22:13
Own the dream. Right. And obviously the gaslighting has been horrible as well. So I don't, you know,
22:18
know when you guys will, if this will still be in the news, but they're just now, you know,
22:22
the Biden administration is asking for hospitals to almost rejigger their numbers on people that
22:28
were hospitalized because of COVID or hospitalized with COVID. Things that if you said that on social
22:34
media a year ago, you would get banned or branded as some sort of conspiracy theorists. And so again,
22:39
this is not a COVID podcast. This is not a COVID podcast. We are just going to descend from the
22:44
COVID platform. Can you give me 15 seconds on that though quick? Yeah, go for it. Yeah.
22:48
Measurements hard. Okay. I don't think people fully write. So let's say my dad got COVID
22:54
was driving to the hospital, had a heart attack and, you know, had a car crash and died. Was that
22:58
a COVID death? Maybe. Right. If COVID cost is, is, is system to be overloaded and his heart gave up
23:05
and he crashed his car. Is that a COVID death? You or I or no one else can answer that question
23:10
definitively. So, right. Well, just so we can [inaudible] off everybody on this podcast, you know,
23:15
George Floyd, St. George Floyd, he had COVID when he died. He was counted as COVID death, right? So,
23:20
sorry, everyone's mad now. So let's just kind of keep going into the podcast now.
23:25
COVID good. Yeah, no more COVID. One more thing about the intro again. I said the intro was
23:29
shock full of great stuff. So this is the last thing because I thought that this quote was really
23:32
poignant for our moment. Yeah. The founders of the United States knew that spirited debate followed
23:36
by painful compromise was the only way their system of democracy could work. Yeah. Here's the
23:42
thing. Obviously I keyed in on that short phrase, painful compromise. In my opinion, painful
23:48
compromise does not exist anymore in our federal political moment because if you even sort of
23:55
acquiesce to the other side in your Republican, you're called a rhino. If you do that on the
24:00
Democratic side, it's like, wait, do you hate gay people? Do you want all black people to die?
24:04
It's a stupid, stupid moment we live in. Do am I correct in saying that I feel like painful
24:09
compromise is no longer a standard that we look for. Oh, I think the problem is that we've elevated
24:16
the hardliners and we've sidelined the compromises in our system is literally not set up to deal
24:22
with hardliners on both sides. Like the structure of American democracy does not deal with people
24:27
say, this is where I stand and I'm never moving from this position. If both sides take that position,
24:32
we literally get nothing done as a country. I don't think people fully realize that.
24:36
And here's the thing about compromise. If you go buy a car, a good outcome is the dealer feels
24:41
like you got a bad deal and you feel like you got a bad deal too. Everyone leaves a compromise
24:45
feeling like they got the raw end of the deal. And that's a good compromise. Unfortunately,
24:50
and this is really the tragedy of American politics is the loudest people are the craziest
24:55
people, right? I had a friend who did a focus group with a bunch of like middle of the road
25:00
people and they go, they ask them, do you go to marches and protests and rallies? They go,
25:03
no, we don't know. And someone goes, well, why? They go, because moderates don't march.
25:08
And I was like, that's the problem right there is, and actually there's social science on this,
25:13
by the way, they find that they ask staff members of people, a congressman and women
25:18
where what positions are of their constituents on things like guns and abortion and things like
25:22
that. They always think they're more extreme than they actually are because the mail they get
25:27
is the extreme people sitting in the tweets in the Facebook messages in the in the postal mail
25:32
and all those things. They don't realize that the silent majority is actually fairly moderate
25:36
on things like guns and abortion and homosexuality and these type of things. It's the crazy people
25:41
who are loud on both sides. And unfortunately, I think only social media has magnified the crazy
25:46
and given a megaphone. You know, Monica Lenzky, God love her said this. She goes, everyone in
25:51
America deserves a voice, but not everyone in America deserves a megaphone. And I think that's
25:56
the problem is social media has given a megaphone to the crazy people who wouldn't have had one
26:00
10 or 15 or 20 years ago. And those people, unfortunately, are drawing more followers than the moderate
26:04
people in the middle. And this is where we end up with no compromise. I mean, yesterday, we all
26:09
jumped up and down because they passed a bill to reform the postal service, which we all knew was
26:13
in bad shape for the last 15 or 20 years. And it took, you know, 15 years to figure out a simple
26:17
compromise for them to not go bankrupt. And we all jump up and down. It's like, we should be doing
26:21
this kind of stuff every single day in America. Yet everyone wants to score a win and say we beat
26:25
the Democrats or we beat the Republicans, look how stupid they are. That's not how we we govern.
26:30
We govern by compromise. And we've always done it that way. Unfortunately, there's no incentive
26:33
to do that right now. Yeah, there's certainly no incentive. Social media is not helping with that.
26:38
You know, modern media is not really helping with that. Even, you know, the other media establishments
26:44
aren't helping with that. And I guess the thing that comes to mind is there are issues that I
26:47
don't think there should be compromise on. But whenever you won't compromise on any issue across
26:52
the board, it's just like, okay, if you're always yelling, if you're always yelling, then I super
26:58
can't hear you. And so I think this kind of dovetails into the myth. So I do want to get in to some of
27:02
the misguys. We can't get into all 20 on this podcast. We're not going to do a 10 hour long
27:05
podcast. You've got to go out and buy the book. It is in the show notes. Check it out. It is worth
27:09
your time. But I want to start with myth three. And this kind of goes back to certain things that I
27:13
don't think we should really compromise on. Myth three is most Americans have strong views about
27:16
abortion, but are willing to change their minds about it. So I want to read a quick, quick section,
27:21
and then we'll kind of see if we can figure out what a good question would be. So here's a quick
27:25
section from that. Consider this. This was mind blowing, Ryan. Consider this a weekly church goer
27:30
in the United States is more likely to support access to abortion without restriction than they
27:35
are to favor making abortion always illegal. Only when we focus solely on those who attend
27:39
church more than once a week, do we see that the pro life position clearly surpasses the pro choice
27:44
option? But there are two important things to note about this category of highest church attendance.
27:49
First, among respondents who attended a religious service multiple times a week, a majority still
27:54
do not believe abortion should be made completely illegal in the United States. That's something
27:58
worth repeating. Even among the most religiously devout support for an outright ban on abortion
28:04
is mixed. And we're not going to get into the second thing because I didn't really care about
28:06
whatever the second thing was. Here's the main issue. Yeah. Here's the main issue that I see.
28:10
It should follow that the more you attend church, the more closely you align with a biblical ethic,
28:16
especially around the subject of life. But the gap should be enormous, not not close, right?
28:21
The second thing is, I think this is my personal opinion. I've been banging this drum for a very,
28:25
very long time. I think pastors do a horrific job discussing the issue of abortion in a way that
28:31
honors the sanctity of human life. Passers either don't want to touch it. They're scared of [inaudible]
28:36
off some of the people in the congregation that have had abortions or paid for abortions or sat by
28:40
and allowed abortions to take place. So I feel like there's a lot of things in that section that
28:45
I thought were shocking. But I can't really, I couldn't even think of a question to this segment
28:50
because I was just so shocked. So help me, Ryan. I didn't even ask you a question. Just start talking,
28:55
please. Yeah, people are not like hardline on abortion, by the way, on either side. And actually,
29:00
in the book, I kind of say, like, if you look at abortion opinion, it actually, people think it's
29:04
bi-modal, right? So a lot of people are on the far left and a lot of people are on the far right.
29:08
Reality is it looks almost like a normal distribution, which is that most people are sort of in the
29:12
middle of the distribution, which is like, yeah, I don't love abortion, but I don't want to make it
29:16
completely illegal, but I also don't want to pay for it. You know, let's say it's like this weird,
29:20
sort of like, out of sight, out of mind thing. Like if you want to get into, I think this is the
29:24
modal position in America. If you want to get into abortion, that's your business. I don't want to
29:29
pay for it and I don't want to know about it. That's where we really struggle is that both parties,
29:33
both parties are pulling towards ends on abortion. I think that no one really wants, you know, like
29:39
for instance, in Texas that, you know, they have the heartbeat bill, which basically bans abortion,
29:42
almost completely. Only a third of white evangelicals would support that, like from a policy perspective.
29:48
So it's like, who are you, who are you governing for? But in the New York, we have a bill that
29:52
basically says you can have an abortion like even after birth, which no one, no one wants that either.
29:58
You know, I think the reality is abortion, and this is why abortions are really hard topic,
30:01
because people feel very passionately about it on the edges of the discussion and drive the
30:06
discussion. But you, I don't think you Kyle or AOC or anyone else on the left can convince anyone,
30:13
large numbers of people to go to their, their, their edge of the spectrum, right? I think no
30:16
matter how much you say that abortion is murder and that's a human life and all that kind of stuff,
30:20
people go, yeah, I kind of agree, but I still think it should be legal in certain circumstances.
30:25
It's just something that people cannot jump all the way on board with far left or far right.
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31:00
I feel like if anybody were able to be swayed in a large way, it is to the side of life as opposed
31:06
to the side of abortion. And the reason why I say that is because a lot, I'll use my own Sunday
31:11
school as an example. Okay. So we're in a, in a super duper white area in a super duper white
31:17
state, everything's red. Everybody loves everything red. Okay. So that that's where we are. And we're
31:21
in church after all. And even in my own Sunday school, somebody brought up the idea of, you know,
31:27
we should have abortion just in case the mother was raped and was impregnated that way or, you know,
31:32
a victim of incest and impregnated that way. And a lot of people in my Sunday school were like,
31:37
yeah, that follows that makes sense. And then I was the weirdo that kind of raised my hand and said,
31:41
in what other aspect of human life do we give the child the death penalty for something that
31:46
their father did? And just me asking that question caused all these people to be like, huh,
31:52
I've never really thought about that way. Most people that are squishy pro life, they've never
31:57
really dealt with the pro abortion arguments. So when people make them, they fall to pieces.
32:03
And there are great organizations out there like live action that will just go to the street and
32:06
ask people, Hey, what are your thoughts on abortion? They're kind of like what you described. They're
32:09
kind of, you know, squishy in the middle. They're not big right or big left on the issue. They're
32:13
just kind of squishy in the middle. And then they'll show them a cartoon rendering of what an
32:16
abortion actually is. And they're like, I had no idea that's what's happening. Like, that's
32:21
what an abortion is. Because they've, they've just in their head, they've just made it this nice,
32:25
clean, easy issue. And that's again, why I'm so angry at pastors, it's like, you don't have to
32:30
just sit there and show, you know, an hour long, you know, time or pictures, scrolling pictures of
32:35
aborted fetuses, but give your flock an idea of how to respond to these things. Because
32:39
this is one of those places where it's like, it's either a human life where it's not,
32:43
it's either worthy of protection or not, there's not gradations there. You know what I mean?
32:48
Can I make a really bad analogy that people are going to yell at me for, but I'll make anyone.
32:51
We've already made everyone so mad 20 minutes in. Let's just keep going.
32:54
I don't want to see a slaughterhouse, but I love cheeseburgers.
32:56
You know what I mean? Yeah, I know. I know. I don't want to see how a cow was killed because
33:02
I'm sure it's inhumane. It makes me sad, right? Like, I mean, you know, I believe that creatures
33:06
matter to God, like we shouldn't treat them. I love hamburgers though. You know what I mean? So
33:10
it's like, we, and I think a lot of people live in that tension that I'm describing when it comes
33:14
to abortion too, it's like, I don't want to see it because then I have to think about it,
33:18
like in a concrete, black and white way. And I don't want to do that. I'd rather live in the
33:22
ignorance of where I live at and just go, eh, let other people deal with that and other women,
33:26
you know, deal with their conscience of that. If they want to go down that road,
33:30
I don't want to personally do that. So I think that's where most of most Americans fall in that.
33:35
I don't want to see how the cheeseburgers are made. I just want to eat them in McDonald's.
33:38
Yeah, I understand that in which that goes straight to the, you know, the hunting thing,
33:42
there are a lot of people that don't like hunting that eat meat, which is like, help me, like even
33:46
Jimmy Carter thought that that was a stupid idea, like of all the people on the planet,
33:50
but we're not here to bang on Jimmy Carter. We've got other things that we got to get into
33:53
that are going to potentially make people mad. So let's move on to myth six. I thought this was
33:57
an interesting myth. Non-denominational Christians are rare. Again, this is a myth, guys. So non-denominational
34:02
Christians are rare. Let me read a short quote from the section. But there's a slow and steady shift
34:07
occurring in Protestant Christianity that many people who don't pay close attention to American
34:11
religion might miss. Denominations are rapidly fading in importance and are being replaced by
34:16
thousands of non-denominational churches all across the United States. So for me personally,
34:21
I did not grow up in any type of a tradition, right? We didn't go to a particular church. My
34:25
mom drug me to a church Christ church, which they considered themselves non-denominational,
34:29
which is hilarious. But then at the same time, I started going to a Baptist church on my own,
34:33
but I never really got the SBC connection. So I was like, whatever. And then I went to a typical
34:38
mega church for over 10 years here in the state of Oklahoma. And then now I go to a non-denominational
34:43
Bible church that does expositional biblical teaching. So I've kind of been in both worlds,
34:48
but really more in the non-denominational side. But here's the thing as you're describing this,
34:52
I'm like, yeah, that makes perfect sense. How could this even be considered a myth?
34:56
Because the rise of mega churches, right, led by CEO pastors that have no theological training.
35:03
And you mentioned that in the book, like, like no grounding to a lot of things that they say,
35:07
they're just TED talk people. And then they sprinkle a few Bible verses on type.
35:11
They're incredibly engaging. They're entertaining, but they're almost completely devoid of anything
35:16
that resembles sound doctrine or theology. And no, I don't mean, you know, SBC doctrine,
35:22
or, you know, this, whatever group doctrine. I just mean biblical foundations. These are
35:26
business leaders, right? These are fluffy leadership book writers that just decided they wanted to
35:32
create a church instead and take advantage of the tax exempt status. I see this as an issue for a
35:38
lot of people because they're going to these churches where they're getting spiritual skittles.
35:42
It's exciting and the band's good and the guy's really engaging and funny,
35:46
but then it doesn't make any type of substantive spiritual change in their life. Am I being fair
35:50
in my read of that, in your opinion? I think non-denominationals are the venture capital of
35:55
American Christianity right now. Like all these church planters, they're startup guys, right?
35:59
They're like, let's go to Arc or Acts 29 or, you know, send network to the Southern Baptist,
36:04
right? And say, give us a little bit of seed money so we can build a runway. Our church will grow
36:09
rapidly. We'll get to the point we don't need your seed money anymore. Then we'll give a portion of
36:12
what we bring in back to the network that then goes back out to new church planters to start.
36:18
So it's like it's almost like a venture capital situation, but you're right, a lot of these
36:23
planters and this is what a lot of people don't realize. All these planters have absolutely no
36:26
theological education at all. They were school teachers, real estate agents, insurance brokers,
36:32
and I don't want to bag on any of those people. By the way, I don't have any, I have very little
36:35
theological education myself and I'm a pastor, but I also pastor a church of 15 people who are not
36:39
growing rapidly, you know? So, but these people are like, like Joel Osteen, let's just call him out.
36:44
Joel Osteen has no college education at all, especially a theological education. And that
36:49
guy has more impact on the theology of more Americans than any other pastor in America today,
36:54
period full stop, no discussion about that. And he has no theological education.
36:58
Here's what I think about it. So churches have to decide how tall their walls are going to be,
37:03
because they have to decide how hard it is to get in, right? Like what is the barrier to entry
37:09
for most non-denominationals? There basically is no barrier to entry. I mean, some of them don't
37:13
even have membership for goodness sakes. You know, it's just like, y'all come. We don't even know
37:17
if you're here or not, to be completely honest with you. You know, so we make the walls as short
37:21
as humanly possible. But you know, what happens when you do that, it's really easy to get in,
37:25
but it's really easy to get out at the same time. And so if you look at the data, there's more churn
37:31
in a non-denominational church than any other church tradition in America, right? Whether it
37:36
be Baptist or Methodist or Episcopalian or Catholic, because, you know, for instance,
37:40
like in the Catholic church, they build some pretty tall walls in the Catholic church. You
37:43
got to go through, you know, you got to go through Catechism. You got to go reconciliation. You got
37:45
to go through First Communion to get in so you don't leave because it's hard to get in. But for
37:50
non-denums, they say, well, you know what, well, actually, you know, here's what I think they do.
37:53
They think, well, we're going to have churn, but the inflows are going to exceed the outflows.
37:58
So we're still growing despite the fact we have so much volatility in our congregation.
38:02
Yeah, it's a business proposition, right? But I mean, it does follow when I was on the student
38:06
programming board and college, and we brought in movies for people to watch. Whenever we said,
38:11
hey, just come, the movie's free, we wouldn't have that many people show up. And then when we started
38:15
selling tickets for a dollar, we created a $1 barrier to entry. All of a sudden, people are like,
38:20
I've got this ticket. And I paid my hard earned dollars for this dollar for this. And now I got
38:25
to go. And then we packed the place out just because there was something keeping them there.
38:29
But even like, I left, you know, this big mega church in Oklahoma because it's like, I'm getting
38:34
Skittles every week. This isn't, you know, I'm not a growing spiritually. They wouldn't even notice
38:39
if I wasn't here. And I'm a leader technically, I volunteer. But then I went to another church that
38:44
didn't do very well with follow up. And they were like the church that we have church scrolls,
38:48
and we really want people to be there. And I went up in front of the entire congregation,
38:52
because it was at like this town hall type thing. And I looked at the pastors and I said,
38:55
which one of you will be at my wife's house the night I die in a car accident?
39:00
Because none of y'all know my name. None of you say you're, you're really,
39:05
you think this is really important, but you don't respond to emails, you don't respond to phone calls,
39:08
you don't respond to, you know, requests to interview. And I feel like in a way, Ryan,
39:13
and I don't want to get off on a huge tangent because there's other myths I want to get into,
39:16
we're leaning on our modern business wisdom and just ignoring biblical wisdom, especially
39:23
with the CEO pastors, because it's like, they don't have like they're the CEO of the church,
39:27
they're the teaching pastor, and guess what? They're the chairman of the board, right? So
39:31
they can't be kicked out of their own church, right? They can't even be like, you know,
39:34
the creator of Apple, he got kicked out of his own company, right? There's no way for these
39:39
churches to do that. And then you see these mega church pastors or these para church pastors like
39:42
a Ravi Zacharice, they do these horrific, terrible things and people are like, where was the organization?
39:47
It's like, what are you talking about? He was the main guy, his name was on the masthead. Like,
39:51
they couldn't kick him out. Do you feel like this is going to be worse and worse for Western
39:56
Christianity? The less, you know, biblically based stuff that we have, or seeing what churches is,
40:02
then we're seeing hollowing out of the middle, the middle size church, like the medium size
40:07
church, like let's say like 250 to 700, you know, kind of like where you're big, but not huge,
40:12
you know, you're definitely not a mega church, but you're not like a little church like 75 people.
40:16
The churches are growing in America are the ends. So below 75 is doing just fine, although they're
40:21
going to not be able to handle it eventually because of budget and things like that. And then above
40:25
a thousand is growing really, really well. So we're actually seeing like economy, twos in economics
40:29
or economies of scale are kicking in, right? And people are realizing the medium size church is
40:34
actually a really poor economics, you know, from a, you got to have so many pastors and so many
40:38
janitors and somebody, you know, like the overhead is really high at a medium size church, but the
40:42
revenue is not that high. When you go to a mega church, now it becomes easier to hire staff and
40:46
you have to have fewer janitors because you have one building instead of two buildings, you know,
40:49
so what we're seeing is we're going to see fewer churches in America in 30 years, but the average
40:55
size is going to be much larger than it is today because people are gravitating away from those
41:00
medium size churches. And what's actually fascinating is if you read any of the church like planting
41:04
literature or any like church growth literature, they say that like the ideal size church is
41:08
probably about 300 people, you know, because you can still know everyone, you can still have good
41:12
relationships and connections with everyone in the congregation from 80 to, you know, eight months old.
41:17
When you get bigger than that, you lose those connections, but these guys, you know, how do
41:21
startups continue by growing? That's their reason to be you have to grow. Why is Facebook in
41:26
trouble right now? First quarter ever, it did not grow its user base. You got to grow and guess
41:31
what a lot of these pastors, that's all they think about is grow, grow, grow, grow, no matter what
41:35
the costs are, it does not matter because growing is the reason that your church is doing so well
41:40
is because we can all rally around growth. That's a good thing. And then you know what the bad part
41:45
of this? You hit the plateau and you go, Oh, no, who are we? You know, what do you necessarily think?
41:51
I think Mark Zucks having like a big moment right now in his head where he's like, what is meta?
41:55
What is Facebook? Who are we? What am I? Because for 17 years, we've grown and now we're not. So
42:00
who are we? There's pastors all over America today, having that exact same internal dialogue
42:05
with themselves of if we're not growing, then what are we as a church? And are we too big?
42:09
Can we, how do we fix that? How many pastors do I need? I think these are questions that the 20,
42:14
like in the next 10 years, these are questions the pastors are going to face much more than what
42:18
they've been facing the last 20 years. Yeah, and you see very few examples of guys getting out of
42:22
that rat race. So Matt Chandler, you know, you mentioned X 29, but Matt Chandler of the Village
42:27
Church, they had multi site in the Dallas area. So all these different Dallas suburbs and everything
42:32
like that. But years ago, they decided that they weren't going to do that anymore. They were going
42:36
to, you know, break off all those churches to be autonomous churches. And they didn't do it
42:40
immediately. They did it over time so that the churches could, you know, build up and thrive
42:44
and all those different things. And then he basically said, we're not doing the multi church
42:47
thing. You know, this is going to be the village. And that's going to be its own church. And that's
42:50
going to be its own church. And I've got had some issues with some things Chandler has done
42:53
recently. But I thought that that was fantastic because it's like, look, those relationships are
42:56
going to mean something. You're not, you're not just watching your pastor on the television screen.
42:59
And he doesn't know your name and he would never come to your, to your bedside if something else
43:03
happens. So I, I think that's actually a good thing. And one thing that you mentioned there, Ryan,
43:06
I'm going to skip ahead a little bit in terms of what I wanted to ask you about, because I want to
43:09
get into myth 16. Miss 16 was America is much less religious today than a few decades ago.
43:15
Okay, so that's a myth. And I'll read this quick section here. In essence, what American society has
43:20
seen is that while smaller shares of Americans claim a religious affiliation, those who still
43:25
choose to attach themselves to religion are the true believers puts succinctly, American religion
43:30
has become smaller, but more potent. Okay, so you've talked about mainline, especially in the
43:36
nuns, you've talked about people kind of falling away from that. And I kind of made the thing,
43:39
it's like, okay, when you get squishy, this is the area of life, people don't want squishy. They
43:43
don't want to, you know, they don't want the squishy idea of whether or not they're going to end up in
43:47
heaven. Like that doesn't really work for a lot of Western Christians. But from your perspective,
43:52
why are we seeing this happening now? What are the other things that it's attaching to
43:57
now in our current moment where the fringes isn't a fair assessment of kind of what these places are,
44:02
but you know, the people that are the true believers, why is that getting so much stronger,
44:07
whereas all the squishy people are kind of falling away?
44:09
Yeah, because we're drawn to we are drawn to the extremes. You know, I think on both sides,
44:13
here's the statistic that like kind of illustrates this. In 1988, 55% of Americans said they were
44:19
not nuns, okay, but we're also not born again. So in sort of the, I'll call born again, like the
44:25
other edge of religion, although it's not, but you get what I mean, it's like the more conservative
44:28
view of faith. 55% of people were not nuns, but not born again. In 2018, it was 35% of Americans
44:34
were not nuns and not born again. And by the way, that's not just because the nuns have risen,
44:39
because they have, but also the share of Americans who said they have a born again experience has
44:43
gone from 35% to 41% over the last 30 years. So we're seeing both sides grow in the middle of
44:50
American religion. I think what we've had to do in American society over the last 10 or 15 years
44:54
is pick a side much more so than in any point, really in all of our history. We've been forced
45:00
to pick a side because now the parties are moved so far to the edge on both sides and religion,
45:06
unfortunately, and actually the next book I write is going to be called the death of polite religion
45:11
in the future of America, where like the middle of American religion has basically been hollowed out
45:16
because unfortunately, if you're white, especially to be religious is to be conservative politically
45:22
and theologically, there's not room for a Christian, there's not room for white Christian Democrats
45:26
in America. And I'm not being, you know, I'm not being overly selling this point, but in my town of
45:32
or my county of 40,000 people, there are four total mainline churches left, you know, there are over
45:37
100 evangelical churches and of the four mainline, three of the four have less than 30 people and
45:43
attendance on an average Sunday. So probably the next 10 or 15 years, there's going to be one
45:47
mainline church in the county of 40,000 people and probably 100, if not more evangelical churches.
45:52
So to be, you know, to be religious, especially in rural America, you have to be conservative,
45:57
theologically and politically now. In 1988, 40% of evangelicals are Democrats and 40% were
46:03
Republicans, 40% of mainline were Democrats, 40% Republicans, 40% of Catholics were Republicans,
46:08
40% were Democrats. We were evenly divided in 1988. And from that point forward, everything just kind
46:12
of went boom, right? Everything split off in the nuns now are super liberal and to be religious
46:18
is to be super conservative. And so now people feel like they have to align their religious beliefs
46:23
with their, their political affiliation. So we're not seeing liberal evangelicals, right? We're not
46:28
seeing, by the way, we're also not seeing conservative atheists either. There's not a lot of like Donald
46:33
Trump loving atheists out there because you want to align your life where everything kind of falls
46:38
behind this central idea to be a contrition, to be a Christian, to be a conservative, to be
46:42
atheists, to be a liberal. I can't play against type. We call that cross pressuring, by the way,
46:46
like a good example is like a guy who's like an NRA member and a union member at the same time,
46:51
because it's like, ah, you're like, what am I? People don't like that. They don't like cognitive
46:56
dissonance. So what they've been doing over the last 20 years is getting rid of that cognitive
47:00
dissonance and sorting ourselves out in ways we've never seen before, which by the way, I think is
47:05
actually really bad for American democracy from an objective standpoint. Churches were better when
47:11
Democrats and Republicans sat side by side on Sunday morning. I really truly believe that because
47:15
then you build bridges to the other side. You don't, you don't look at the worst version of the
47:19
Democrats. You look at my buddy Bob's Democrat. He says next to me in church, he's a good dude. I
47:23
like Bob. Therefore Democrats aren't crazy. What we do instead is create the worst version. You know,
47:28
all Republicans are racist, right? Or all, all liberals are communist. Neither of those things
47:34
are true. But unfortunately, if you don't have any friends from the other side, you, you create the
47:38
worst version of the other side in your head. And it's easy to hate the worst version of the other
47:43
side. Churches used to be a place we built bridges. And now they're so politically homogenous that
47:48
we don't do that anymore. Well, Ryan, I just got to tell you all liberals are communist. So I did
47:53
want to just set the record straight on that. But the funny thing about that is as you're talking
47:56
through that, Ryan, is we're so busy in our modern moment, right? I might be bringing too many
48:01
entrails into the same thing or too many trails in the same area. But we're so busy. We want cheat
48:06
codes for how we're supposed to do things. Okay. And so if we can categorize ourselves or our families
48:11
or our community, it makes it easier when we have to choose things going back to Mark Zuckerberg.
48:15
One thing that he does is he wears the same clothes every day and people are going to hate
48:18
on me thinking I'm doing a Zuckerberg because I always wear a black V neck. But when it's podcast
48:22
time, and I've got every other thing I need to worry about, this is my cheat code. I just throw
48:26
on my black V neck and I come up here. I don't have to worry about, well, I'm talking about this
48:29
subject. So do I want to wear my red shirt because I don't want people to think I'm angry. Like,
48:32
no, I don't have to do that. I wear the same thing every time. So we like these cheat codes.
48:36
So doesn't it follow that if you are a biblically based Christian that conservative values that
48:42
come from a Judeo Christian ethic would align you with a party that at least portrays those ethics,
48:48
which would be the Republican Party because there are things in the Republican Party platform that
48:52
are very anti biblical, right? But the Republican Party has never claimed that they do public policy
48:57
based on the Bible. You never hear a prominent conservative Ted Cruz or Dan Crenshaw or any of
49:03
these other people stand up and say, well, while I was reading the Bible, I thought about this thing
49:08
that happened in the gospels. And that led me to make this decision on whether or not we should,
49:12
you know, put any sanctions on Russia, right? That never happens. These are people that are
49:17
just operating out of a worldview. But it should follow that if you're following a biblical ethic,
49:21
it would lead you to conservatism, which only happens on one side of the aisle. No.
49:26
What about black Protestants, though? I mean, they're theologically conservative,
49:30
right? They're anti there. By the way, their view on gay marriages in the book, I talk about
49:34
this, like myth, 19 is Protestants are liberals. They're not liberals. I think the best description
49:38
of their moderates, they're economically liberal, but on social policy, they're very middle of the
49:42
road, maybe even to the right of center for a lot of people. You know, the thing is like this current
49:47
alignment has only existed for the last 30 or 40 years. Like, you know, the myth is we've always,
49:52
you know, conservative religious people have always been Republicans. That's not true.
49:56
Only 40% of white weekly churchgoers were, were, were Republicans in 1975. So, you know,
50:02
what's happened over the last 40 years where we created this connection between being, you know,
50:07
religious and being conservative, it's not always been that way in our black and brown brothers and
50:11
sisters still don't see the world that way. I just don't see how we can say like, and listen,
50:16
there are some issues that I think we can say the Democrats are clearly anti-Christian on and
50:20
there's no doubt about that. But there's also some issues, Republicans are clearly anti-Christian on.
50:24
The problem is when we sort ourselves out so much that we cannot critique our own party,
50:29
that's where we are. And that's the part that really scares me is like, the fact that like 60,
50:33
over 60% of white evangelicals want to cut legal immigration to America by 50%
50:37
is anti-biblical to me. And my understanding of scripture is it says, welcome to stranger,
50:43
more times the Old Testament, hundreds of times the Old Testament, right? We should welcome the
50:46
stranger. I'm not in favor of illegal immigration. I don't think anyone, well, maybe some AOC folks
50:51
are. I'm not in favor of illegal immigration. I'm in favor of if we, if we close that door,
50:56
which we should, we should open the windows wide open and create a very good streamline process
51:00
to get people here who can work, who can do good and build community here. Unfortunately,
51:04
the Republican party day says we want to close the door and the window and nail them both shut.
51:09
You know, during the Trump administration, the number of refugee visas hit an all-time low. And
51:13
you know, those people are, they're people from China who are being persecuted by the government
51:15
because they're Christians. We allowed fewer of those people in in 2008 than in any, 2018 than at
51:20
any point in the last 20 years. That is anti-Christian. Unfortunately, Christian leaders can't stand up
51:26
and say Trump was wrong on this because the congregation could go, you know, they're going
51:30
to yell at them, right? That's, that's the issue is I don't think either party represents Christian
51:34
values completely. But if one party does, there's still times they don't yet. We can't criticize that
51:42
from the pulpit. Yeah, I'm a huge advocate of calling balls and strikes when it comes to
51:47
political leaders, when it comes to political parties, because if you align with anything 100%
51:51
of the time, like you could be a big sports fan. Like I'm a huge St. Louis Cardinals fan,
51:54
but I'm not a huge fan of everybody on the team of every single person that they've signed. I
51:58
don't agree with, you know, the person being at that place in the lineup. Like, if you agree at all
52:04
points, you're a zealot at that point, right? You're, you're like, you're, you're not a thinking
52:08
operating human being. But I think for a lot of people, it's like they're given the binary,
52:12
they're given Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. And they're like, well, goodness gracious. I guess if
52:16
I got to pick one of them, I'd rather Donald Trump, you know, put the people up for the Supreme
52:19
Court, not Hillary Clinton. And so they, they check the box and move on with their life. But I don't
52:23
want to go too much farther down that rabbit hole. I do want to back up with that was just myth 16.
52:26
I want to talk about myth 15, because I thought this was interesting. The myth is the growth of the
52:31
nuns is largely from people leaving church, which seems to make sense. But in light of this next
52:36
quote, perhaps it doesn't. The data is clear on this. Much larger shares of younger generations
52:41
enter adulthood with no religious affiliation than ever before. They didn't leave religion.
52:46
They had no faith tradition to jettison, which I feel like an idiot when I read that sentence,
52:52
because I'm like, duh, that makes perfect sense. Like if they weren't raised in a Christian household,
52:56
they can't leave the church when they go to college. It's just not been a part of who they were.
53:00
Like imagine growing up in a family that did animal sacrifices your entire life. And then
53:05
all of a sudden you get to college and they're like, bro, bro, bro, what are you doing to that cat?
53:08
Like there's not that weird moment. It's just like you grow up how you grow up. So you're not
53:13
leaving something that you never visited in the first place. But that's one thing that I find
53:17
that's interesting for churches that are evangelical, that do want to spread the gospel, that do want
53:22
to be fishers and men that do want to, you know, do what Jesus told us to do. Is this fertile ground
53:28
for us? Because, you know, we're going after these people that help no religious tradition whatsoever
53:33
of any religion so that we can convince them that Christianity is a thing. Or is this a bad
53:37
thing? Because they have nothing that we could, you know, align with or go to, you know what I mean?
53:42
No, I think it's I think it's actually a good it's good. That's stupid. This is good news for the
53:46
church. I think in a lot of ways because when people leave, they're often angry, right? They
53:51
have reasons to leave. So you have to overcome those reasons to get them back in the door.
53:55
If they never had anything to begin with, they're really starting from, you know, tabula rasa
53:59
to use the Jean-Jacques Rousseau quote, right? They have nothing. They're starting from zero.
54:03
So you have to, here's the other thing. The churches are not very well equipped. We've always
54:07
lived in a generically Christian country. So we always assume people understand like the good
54:12
Samaritan and the prodigal son and what the cross and the sacrifice and the atonement and all those
54:17
things. Huge chunks of young people have no idea what any of that stuff means, which means you cannot
54:23
assume like I'm her was a youth pastor. I was talking to this girl who's really smart, good,
54:26
you know, good academic student, but grew up in a household with no religion. I was like,
54:30
well, that's like the prodigal son story. And she looked at me like, what are you talking about?
54:33
I've never heard of the prodigal son before. You know, so it but that changes the way that
54:38
Christians have to try to evangelize because they cannot assume anything about the person they're
54:43
trying to talk to about. Do they know the Bible? Do they know Jesus? Do they understand Old Testament,
54:47
New Testament or any of the covenants or anything like that? Because these people and by the way,
54:51
don't think that a lot of these people are being raised atheist or agnostic. That's probably less
54:55
than 5% of young people are raised in a household where it's entirely atheist or agnostic. The vast
55:00
majority of them are being raised in a household. When we talk about religion, it's just a shrug,
55:03
right? It's not anti religion. It's not pro religion. There's a huge difference. And we're kind of
55:08
talking about this more in the literature now. There's a huge industry being secular and being
55:12
non-religious. All right, secular people are atheist agnostics. They don't like religion. Actually,
55:17
for many of them, they think religion is a negative for American society. But that's a small portion
55:21
of America. For only 40% of the nuns are secular. 60% of the nuns are non-religious. They just don't
55:27
care either way. And as I talk about the nuns, they're actually super persuadable. 25% of them
55:32
come back to religion over a four year period of time amongst nothing in particulars. It's only 5%
55:37
of atheist agnostics. So huge, I mean, there's a huge fertile ground here. It's just the tools we
55:43
use and the approach that we take has to be different facing that group versus what we talked
55:47
about evangelism 20, 30, 40 years ago when everyone was generically Christian and left church at some
55:52
point. Yeah, I think that's an interesting thing for people to talk about. And the way that I see
55:57
it is like, I think that it is fertile ground for people that want to reach out to these people.
56:00
Because when you listen to people that do overseas evangelism, they may be there in India, right?
56:06
So we have somebody affiliate with our Sunday school that's over in India. And a lot of these
56:09
people like they're very familiar with some spiritual life because don't they have like 10,000 deities
56:14
or something like that, that they're like, oh, yeah, sure, let's just add Jesus to our pantheon of
56:18
deities. Like it was back in ancient Rome, right? Let's just go ahead and accept it's no big deal.
56:22
But it's the exclusivity of the gospel. That is the thing that you need to show these people.
56:26
And that's the thing that really blows their mind. So I do think that that's interesting.
56:29
The last myth that we're going to go over again, guys, we can't go over all 20, but we are going to
56:32
do number 19. It is young evangelicals are more politically moderate than older evangelicals. So
56:38
here's the longest code I got. So let's see if I can read out loud. But I think it's very important.
56:42
So here we go. Political polarization makes governing by consensus much more difficult.
56:47
But the future of the American form of government seems downright untenable when considering the
56:51
distance between these two groups of young people. Democracy relies on compromise, which becomes
56:56
impossible if one side sees the other as the enemy. Winning people over to their faith is a crucial
57:01
part of evangelical or evangelical religious identity. Though evangelicals also often pride
57:07
themselves on behaving differently from the rest of society. However, winning people for Christ
57:11
become severely impaired and behaving differently may become at a large cost if there's little
57:17
commonality between young evangelicals and other people. Even young people who are interested in
57:22
Christianity may be turned off by the fact that the loudest voices preaching the gospel in their
57:26
generation are those from the most conservative tradition in American Protestantism. And here's
57:30
the big part that I keyed in on here at the end. Some who may have been open to hearing the message
57:35
of Jesus Christ will not be if it is entangled with what they see as a set of homophobic and xenophobic
57:41
political positions. This polarization imperils the future of American politics, society,
57:47
and religion. So if as much as I could be triggered by reading words on a page.
57:53
We're not. I think that we're going to end up on the same side of this, to be honest.
57:58
That last part was shocking to me, but I get it. I understand. If you've been fed as a secular
58:04
person or as an on religious person, your entire life, that, you know, Christians are homophobic
58:10
and xenophobic. Because look, all the Christians that we know of are Republican. They're all
58:15
conservatives, right? They're wearing MAGA hats or they at least voted for the most horrible orange
58:19
racist to ever to exist, right? It would follow that you would say that, okay, I guess this Jesus
58:24
Christ guy who's the center point of their religion, you know, Trump is the center point
58:28
of Republicanism. So the center point of their religion is Jesus Christ. And he said these things
58:32
that I consider to be homophobic and xenophobic. I don't want to opt into that, right? But I guess
58:37
what would your advice be to people like me that are, you lay Christians, we don't get paid to be
58:43
professionally Christian, right? We're, we're not pastors of any kind. Because when I share the
58:47
gospel with people, I don't hide the stuff that is problem, you know, problematic for people.
58:53
Like when people say Jesus Christ never talked about homosexuality, that's completely not true,
58:57
completely 100% not true. He, he discussed sexual immorality. Everybody knew when he was talking
59:02
about that, he was talking about everything that could be considered a sexual sin at that time.
59:06
The xenophobic thing I don't really get in terms of how it aligns with the gospel. But what is your
59:10
message to us as we do share this message? Because I'm not going to hide who Jesus was. I'm not going
59:14
to run away from it. You know what I mean? I think, I think evangelicalism is at a crossroads
59:19
on the issue of gay marriage. Because if you look at the data, young people, like 75% of people
59:23
under the age of 35 are totally cool with gay marriage, like no problem at all. And actually,
59:27
I think for a lot of them, they're just like, I don't even think about it anymore. It's just a
59:30
given. Like, you know, it's just a generic part of American life now that like same-sex marriage is
59:34
a thing and people do it and it's fine. And you know, my aunt Nancy is married to Aunt Linda and
59:39
she's, you know, it's totally cool, right? That's, there's actually this really interesting.
59:43
This is, this is something in political science. They talk about like, when you know someone who's
59:48
different than you, you become more tolerant to that thing, right? So if you know someone who's
59:52
LGBT, you become more tolerant to LGBT. If you know someone who's Muslim, you're more tolerant
59:56
towards Islam, right? Because now you, you personalize it. It's not depersonalized in your mind.
1:00:01
The problem with evangelicals is their position, which, you know, evangelicals are held, held,
1:00:06
held forever, which is that, you know, marriage between one man and one woman. Society is moving
1:00:11
further and further away from that position every single day. Like it wasn't, it wasn't even,
1:00:16
by the way, even 15 years ago, it was not caustic. There were 13 ballot initiatives in 2004,
1:00:21
making marriage between one man and one woman constitutional in 13 states. It passed in all 13
1:00:25
states, including the state of Oregon, by the way, by 10 points, which tells you like how fast we've
1:00:30
moved on gay marriage in the last 15 years. Like, and it's insane from a public opinion standpoint,
1:00:35
it would move that far. The problem is though, you have to stand apart from the culture,
1:00:40
but still try to win the culture at the same time. And I think those two things are at odds
1:00:45
with one another and are only going to grow in odds with one another. And what you see, and I think
1:00:50
you're seeing this like in non denominational churches a lot, because they don't have that like
1:00:54
Baptist faith and message thing kind of hanging over them is they're sort of like, you know what
1:00:58
our approach to same sex marriages, we're not going to talk about it. You know, that is the
1:01:03
approach that a lot of them are going with, because they realize that it's really a losing,
1:01:08
if they speak out, either way, they're losing, right? They're going to lose either the hardliners
1:01:13
on the left or the hardliners on the right are going to leave if they speak out. But that's
1:01:17
the problem with religion, right, is how much fidelity do you want to have to historical tenants
1:01:22
in your faith? But also, how do you want to grow? And remember, let's tie it all back to the
1:01:25
non denominational conversation we just had about what are those church planters want to do?
1:01:29
They want to grow. And they, and for a lot of them, they can't keep doing their job unless they grow
1:01:33
and get, you know, the ties go up and the offerings go up and the plates get heavier so they can pay
1:01:37
their salary. And you know, a good way to turn people off, make hard decisions and hard positions
1:01:41
on things like same sex marriage. So actually, the incentives are aligned against being very
1:01:46
declarative about what you believe, because you're actually going to turn people off.
1:01:50
The problem is, evangelicalism has always been based on declarative, being based on clear black
1:01:54
and white right and wrong. It's an inevitable conflict that every church is going to have to
1:01:58
navigate on its own. But if you look at the data, by the way, we ask people, do you know, how would
1:02:02
your church feel about a homosexual, you know, being a member of your church? Five years ago,
1:02:07
70% of people said we wouldn't be okay with it. And then last year, it was 55% of people said
1:02:11
their church wouldn't be okay with it. So it's maybe not coming from the pulpit, but by the fact of
1:02:15
the silence is teaching people something, which is our pastors not going to put his foot down
1:02:19
on this issue is going to allow it to slide in to tweak it just a little bit to women leadership.
1:02:25
And they got another issue where evangelicalism is really kind of under attack right now by the
1:02:30
culture, which says women should have access to all levels of power in all institutions.
1:02:34
What we're seeing is like non-denominational is doing this really interesting subtle thing.
1:02:38
Like on Mother's Day, the pastor will be up there in a chair and his wife will be in a chair next
1:02:42
to him and they'll talk about parenting together, right? So it's kind of like a we're going to like
1:02:46
dip our toe in women preaching, but they're not really preaching because she's not standing up
1:02:50
by herself and she's sitting in a chair with me. So what we're seeing is these non-denominationals
1:02:54
are trying to find a way to have have it both ways, I think. Yeah, because they want to grow.
1:03:00
And that's really, as you think about, if you think about that's the worldview they have. I
1:03:03
want to grow that everything makes sense from that worldview. Right, the incentive structure,
1:03:08
that that's the one thing I keyed in on what you're saying. Like obviously, the incentive
1:03:11
structure is to keep growing. So obviously, they would be incentivized to keep doing the life
1:03:16
coaching and not doing the pastoral work or the ministerial work. And the thing about it is is,
1:03:21
I feel like when the church tries to live downstream from culture that they will lose
1:03:27
themselves and they will lose the culture. Because with culture shifting as quickly as it does,
1:03:32
right, as you just mentioned, you use an example in gay marriage. I think the reason why most
1:03:35
even conservatives and Christians don't think about gay marriage as that big a deal is because
1:03:39
it seems like it's a settled issue now. Oberg failed where they just rammed it through,
1:03:43
right? And made law at a whole cloth. They're just like, well, I guess we can't really fight
1:03:46
against that anymore. But it's interesting. People don't care nearly about as much about that. But
1:03:51
here we are, the Roe v Wade happened in the 70s. And we're still fighting to this day to undo that
1:03:57
unbelievable injustice and that horrible jurisprudence from from that type of a thing. But I feel like
1:04:02
I don't want churches to be looking at culture. I'm okay. If you wear culture, relevant clothes,
1:04:09
you're wearing your bomber jacket as opposed to, you know, your button down, sure, I don't give a
1:04:13
crap. Like if you want to be relevant and have great graphics and have good stuff on social media,
1:04:17
I'm all for that. But when you try to be culture, you stop becoming salt and light because salt
1:04:22
is a preservative, right? Or a conservative, right? If you want to talk about that way,
1:04:26
but you can't preserve anything if you're not salty. And so I guess that's my message to the
1:04:31
church because, you know, again, we were kind of running short on time here, but that would be my
1:04:35
message is like, stand bold on the truth of the gospel, worry more about truth, as opposed to
1:04:41
being culturally relevant. Do you have anything else that you want to kind of sum up there? Because
1:04:44
I saw you maybe had a few thoughts. I think God love pastors. I love you. I'm a pastor. I feel it.
1:04:50
But man, you're in impossible position. And I think with COVID, especially, like, I think we
1:04:54
all should really sit back and if you if you're in a church, go to your pastor this weekend and
1:04:58
shake their hand and say, thank you for what you've done the last two years. Just surviving,
1:05:02
not just COVID, but also all the discussion about transgender and LGBT and abortion and
1:05:06
politics and everything else. There's really no winning in this job. And listen, none of us are
1:05:09
getting, well, not none of us, but like 99.9% of us are not getting rich doing this gig. It's
1:05:14
incredibly difficult. And without pastors, by the way, churches go away, you know, you have to have
1:05:20
salesman for your product and you want the best salesman possible. And unfortunately, I think a
1:05:23
lot of sales are not going into this line of work because they realize how difficult this line of
1:05:27
work is for a bunch of reasons, practical reasons, but also theological reasons and all the things
1:05:33
we've been talking about. I worry about a crisis of having fewer pastors in the future. How many
1:05:38
people are going to be willing to sign up to be an assistant pastor, you know, or pastor for sure
1:05:41
to 75 people. That's, there's no glamour in that. There's no good, you're not just writing books
1:05:45
out of that position and making money. That's just not happening. So God love pastors. I love
1:05:50
you guys. We need more of you, you know, and I'm praying for you as I please pray for me too,
1:05:55
because we go through this moment together. It's just tough. Yeah, it's it's a tough job. I don't
1:06:00
envy it. That's why I'm not one. So it makes it easy. But I appreciate you letting us dig into 20
1:06:03
myths so much. But I did want to kind of bring something up because, you know, and I may have not
1:06:07
even really noticed this, except we did both of these interviews and fairly close succession. So I
1:06:11
feel like I read a lot of your work over here in the last couple of months. But I kind of have an
1:06:17
issue with the way that you frame some things. And I think it gives away something. Yeah. Yeah,
1:06:23
we're going. Okay, let's dig in. You do it from a couple of the books. It was like the quote is,
1:06:29
those who fail to believe in climate change, as opposed to people who question that it's all man
1:06:34
made in reference to Trump's second impeachment, you said for inciting an insurrection. It was
1:06:39
even been charged with insurance. The 10 people were charged two weeks ago with sedition,
1:06:44
which is basically insurrection. Okay, but if you're going to have an insurrection,
1:06:48
aren't you going to at least bring a potato gun, right? That we still haven't even found
1:06:51
anyone that had a gun that day, but we're not going to, we're not going to really dig too far to the
1:06:55
mat. I'm flexible and everything. What happened January 6 was an attack on American democracy,
1:07:00
and it should never happen again. Period. I'm not going to minimize what happened on that day.
1:07:04
But when Trump says, do this peacefully, and then people go and do it non peacefully. Again,
1:07:10
I don't think it's Bernie Sanders's fault that someone shot up the congressional baseball game.
1:07:13
I don't think it's Barack Obama's fault that some BLM guy killed officers in Dallas. Okay,
1:07:18
but I have other things on my list. Okay, so let's figure out what you need to be most mad about.
1:07:22
January 6 was not legitimate political discourse. Period, full stop. R&C is wrong.
1:07:26
Moving on. Anyway, because no one was talking. Shut up, Ryan. It's my turn. All right. My
1:07:30
pleasure. I will talk now. Oh, yeah. You know, you use the leftist euphemism, a woman's right to
1:07:36
choose. Yes. Yes. You talked about the Muslim travel ban, even though all those laws included
1:07:41
non-Muslim majority countries like North Korea and Venezuela. You talked about anti-immigration,
1:07:45
but you also talked about that in this interview. It's anti illegal immigration. That is a very,
1:07:49
very important distinction, like the most important distinction, you know, Trump's policy on family
1:07:54
separation at the border, even though that policy was in place before he took office,
1:07:57
he just made it zero tolerance. You said Christians that support women in church leadership positions
1:08:02
were thoughtful Christians. Those are your words. And here's the thing. All of those things seem to
1:08:09
coalesce into me thinking that you're bringing a lot of your own personal bias into this data
1:08:13
collection. And then that data collection leads to certain conclusion drawing, right? So if I were
1:08:19
to guess, if I were to guess, and oh, I got it, you're chomping at the bed. I love it. If I were to
1:08:24
guess, I would assume that you are a registered Democrat just by virtue of the way that you frame
1:08:31
certain things because they're not framed in kind of the normal Republican way. If it is
1:08:36
Republican, it's heterodox in that sense. So again, I want to be fair to you. This isn't about throwing
1:08:41
thrown flames. And I know that we're sparring a little bit, and this is fun. And we're both going
1:08:45
to leave this conversation loving on one another. But help me understand, am I wrong?
1:08:49
I am to the left of the average Christian America, but I'm to the right of the average academic in
1:08:56
America. So what? What do that means? Yeah. Right. So if there's a political center,
1:09:01
which there's technically not we've talked about that, there's the blue side and the red side.
1:09:06
Where are you voting? I vote for Trump. I'm not voting for Trump. I'm not voting for a MAGA
1:09:11
Trump, or I don't do that. I would vote for if Mitt Romney ran for president and got the nomination,
1:09:15
I would vote for him. I think he's a conscious conservative who makes good points. You know,
1:09:19
he wants to work with the Democrats on child tax credit, which I think is a great policy. He
1:09:23
wants to increase more babies born in America, which I think is a good thing. But I also
1:09:27
oppose the Democratic Party on certain things like the equality act, which I think is absolutely
1:09:30
atrocious because it puts the government above the church. You know, if you can tell the Catholic
1:09:34
church, they can't fire someone for being gay. You basically said the church has no power in America
1:09:37
anymore, which is an absolute abomination in my world. But I also think that Trump's rhetoric
1:09:41
did inside violence. I mean, I just don't see it any other way. And I do think that he also
1:09:45
inside this idea that the election was stolen, which is factually inaccurate, right? He couldn't
1:09:50
prove it in court. He could not be not a single person. I said this in the book. Not a single person
1:09:53
would say what they said at a microphone in a court of law under oath, because they knew what
1:09:57
they were saying was a lie. And that's the problem that I have is if you will say something on a
1:10:01
microphone on CNN or Fox or whoever, but you will not say it under oath, then you should not be
1:10:05
saying it anywhere at all. And this comes back to caramel balls and strikes because I'm with you
1:10:09
because I was like, Oh my gosh, it seems like the election was stolen. Then it was like all the
1:10:12
court cases are thrown out because they had no evidence. I was like, Okay, well, you're gonna
1:10:16
have to come up with something else because the narrative isn't enough for me. Like narrative
1:10:19
with data is something that I could support. The thing is, is there's so a year from now,
1:10:24
I want to have this conversation with you again, whether we do it on the show or not,
1:10:27
because every month, seemingly, we get more information about what happened about the FBI
1:10:31
potentially being involved about, you know, the police officers letting people into certain areas.
1:10:35
The DC mayor removing a lot of the security from the area, like the week of the event, like,
1:10:40
it was shocking the number of things. But yeah, I can't give Trump a pass with some of the things
1:10:44
that he said. But on the day of the event, he certainly did not directly incite them to do
1:10:48
those things. I think we have to be fair. But but again, I don't care about that as much I care
1:10:52
about. So for you, do you personally, and I know you don't like getting into your personal
1:10:56
feelings, you're a data guy, but I'm forcing you to this is bullying. Yeah, do you feel like a man
1:11:00
without without a without a team? Because there's so many people that feel like the political moment,
1:11:06
the the die, your diametric political moment has left them behind. Do you feel that way? Because it
1:11:12
sounds like you could vote for a moderate Democrat, which, you know, Joe Biden is not he's whatever
1:11:17
the center of the Democratic Party is the Democratic Party is just super left now. So he's just the
1:11:21
center of that when he's not falling asleep in his oatmeal. But it seems like you could vote for
1:11:25
a D or an R if they end up in this sphere of the middle, but that doesn't really exist anymore. So
1:11:31
do you feel like you have a team? Do you have a squad? Yeah, no, I don't I don't have a squad. And I
1:11:35
really I know everyone says like I'm a moderate, I vote for the person, not the party. I generally
1:11:40
tend to vote for the Democrat by default, because I think where I live, especially it's all mega
1:11:44
Trumpers, like people who are part of the three, like our rep is is a guy who, you know, who got
1:11:49
who tried. He passed out in the general assembly, Illinois general assembly, because he fasted for
1:11:54
two days beforehand, and he had nothing to eat. So he passed out. And he also was a guy who was
1:11:58
like anti mass from the very beginning, which to me is like a nutty position. Like I'm not I'm not
1:12:02
in favor of nutty on either side. I'm a guy who's sort of like, there's there's reasonable there's
1:12:06
reasonable middle ground. And unfortunately, where I live, the Republican Party's become nuts. Like
1:12:11
honestly, like scary for American democracy, Mary Miller, who's where I use where I teach,
1:12:16
her husband's a three percenter, which which I mean, that's that's a pretty scary organization,
1:12:20
because they're willing to take up arms to do whatever they think is right. I'm not in favor of
1:12:23
that stuff. Right. So where I am is I would totally if the choice was between like AOC
1:12:29
and like who like Mitt Romney's only I can think of right now is Mitt Romney. I would vote for
1:12:34
Mitt Romney. I would vote for Joe's dorks that you pick. Can you pick someone else other than
1:12:37
that? No, I like Mitt Romney. I don't think he's a moto's dork. I think he's actually a
1:12:41
principled man. By the way, if you watch his documentary, Mitt, you actually see a different
1:12:45
side of him that makes him realize he's weight. If he was like that on the campaign trail, he'd
1:12:48
be a lot more successful because he's like, listen, my dad got me to hear and I just got to hear,
1:12:52
you know, like he made he did all the work and I just pushed a little bit. I'm like,
1:12:55
that's the kind of rhetoric we need in America from rich people, right? Saying like, listen,
1:12:59
I was born on third base. I got home on my own, but admitting that I got to third base because
1:13:03
where I was born, that's the kind of rhetoric I want more of in America, not less of. And I think
1:13:07
politicians are just, but what's happened with the Republican Party with Trump is to me is
1:13:12
anti-democratic. And I'll go to the listen, all this voter registration stuff, we talk about all
1:13:18
the voter, you know, they're talking about voter suppression laws and things like this,
1:13:20
you know what political science says the impact is on the vote? It actually has no impact on the
1:13:24
vote at all. Well, yeah, there's no measurable impact on turnout, right? So it doesn't actually
1:13:29
suppress votes in the way they say it does. But my question is, and this is actually,
1:13:33
I think something that I really, really disagree fundamentally with the Republican Party about is,
1:13:37
I don't think voter fraud is a problem in this country. And I don't think that because the data
1:13:41
says that it doesn't exist at a scale that makes any sense at all, right? There might be one or two
1:13:46
or four cases in an election of 120 million votes cast. I'm willing to deal with that much
1:13:50
fraud to allow people to have a little bit easier access to the vote. What they, what the Republican
1:13:54
Party did was create a myth, which the myth is that the voter fraud is a huge problem in this country,
1:13:59
and then created a solution to a problem that does not exist. And that's the problem that I have,
1:14:03
even though it doesn't actually have any tangible impact on the vote, I don't think it's just why
1:14:07
are we passing laws making it hard to vote in this country? I just don't understand that. And that's
1:14:11
one of the reasons I cannot be a Republican in the 21st century, because they're, they're basically
1:14:14
creating crisis, not the Democrats don't do this, but they're creating crises and creating solutions
1:14:19
that actually, I think, disadvantaged people. So the thing that's idea that they're making it
1:14:23
more difficult to vote by any realistic measure, I think is a false narrative because some of the
1:14:29
stuff that's happening like in Georgia, for instance, like they're saying all these laws are like Jim
1:14:33
Crow. In my opinion, I think we should have, you know, the people that can't make it to the polls
1:14:38
should be the people that can vote early, or you vote on poll day. Like that makes the most sense
1:14:42
we've done that for hundreds of years in this country. But at the same time, you have these people
1:14:46
that are pretending, well, I guess this is how I would frame it. And I don't want to get into a big
1:14:50
discussion about about that super, super structured topic. But I guess let's say it's not a massive
1:14:55
issue, right? And I would tend to say that the evidence would agree with that position,
1:15:01
which is your position. If it's a small issue now, why wouldn't we try to nip it in the bud before it
1:15:06
does become a big issue? Because there are houses, because so right now the House of Representatives
1:15:11
until the midterm elections, which will be a blowout, the House is very, very narrow. It's a very,
1:15:15
very narrow split. And there were small House of Representatives races that were decided by less
1:15:21
than a couple of dozen votes. And so in that county, it makes a huge difference. And let's say
1:15:26
that that would win you the majority in the House, that one county going red or going blue.
1:15:32
For me, if it's showing up and showing someone your ID and then looking at your face and saying,
1:15:37
Yep, that looks like you. Here's your ballot. That is not a that's not obstruction. That's not
1:15:42
keeping anyone from voting in this narrative, which I know you don't agree with. I would never paint
1:15:45
you this way that black people somehow can't find the DMV, right, to show their ID, even though they
1:15:51
can walk into a liquor store and show their ID, get on an airplane, get a library book. That's the
1:15:55
thing that I think it's being blown up by both sides. Right now, it's not this big issue that's
1:15:59
probably swaying national elections. You're probably right. But why not nip it in the bud now,
1:16:04
create these laws that are absolutely fair that say, Hey, you have to show up and show your ID,
1:16:08
get over it. But Utah's been doing mail-in voting for 10 years. And now no one cared
1:16:12
until the last three years. Why is that? Because Mitt Romney lives there. No one cares about Utah,
1:16:17
right? That's a Republican state. That's a red state. I would get my point like no one thought
1:16:21
mail-in voting was nefarious until Trump said it was nefarious. Oh, I don't agree with that at all.
1:16:26
Because even before them, when you would have people in California, which is the easiest punching
1:16:29
bag whatsoever at California, but when you had these people that were ballot harvesting,
1:16:33
they were going out and getting people's ballots and saying, Hey, I've got your ballot here. You
1:16:37
want me to go ahead and turn it in for you. Great. And then they would look and see,
1:16:40
like we have evidence all over the place, they would look and see who the person voted for,
1:16:43
they would either toss it out or put it in the go pile. And again, California is weird.
1:16:47
North Carolina did the same thing, by the way, and there was an entire election that had to be
1:16:49
overturned. Absolutely. And I think that's absolutely fair. And it was Republicans that were responsible
1:16:54
for that. It is all sides. So why not nip it in the bud? So neither side can do it. Because
1:16:59
I tend to think Democrats are the most evil things possible because they're all communists. But at
1:17:02
the same time, like, why wouldn't we just get rid of the ability for that to happen, which is not
1:17:06
an argument for nationalizing this? But if if a local state or municipality wants to make it
1:17:11
harder for people to cheat, shouldn't we before that? We need to make IDs free, though. Can I just
1:17:16
say that fine with that? Like I pay for a whole bunch of other crap. Why not make IDs for you?
1:17:20
But if you don't make them free and you say you have to have an ID to vote, you've created a poll
1:17:24
tax, which is in violation of the Constitution. Yeah, except that we're not paying tens of thousands
1:17:29
of dollars for these identifications. And again, you have to have an ID to operate in modern society.
1:17:35
There is a laundry list of things that you cannot do without an ID. So this idea that people are so
1:17:40
people with iPhones and cars are so unbelievably downtrodden that they can't spend a few bucks on
1:17:45
an ID. That's that's absurd. Well, let's give him a free ID. And let's take that whole thing
1:17:50
out of the equation, which is going to cost marginal. So I'm with you. If people want to say it's a
1:17:55
poll tax poll tax, that's absurd. But if you want to make them free, and all you have to do is show
1:17:59
it. But here's the thing, then people are going to have to show up to a particular place, get their
1:18:03
picture taken so that they can get their free ID. That will be turned around by people that are
1:18:08
on that side, the Democratic side of the aisle is like, well, do you expect these people to have
1:18:12
cars? Do you expect them to ride on buses? How dare you? Do you hate people that aren't able
1:18:17
bodied? Again, the narrative is going to keep moving around. Let's just make the elections even
1:18:21
tighter in all states red and blue. Can we agree on that? I think we should have free and fair
1:18:26
elections, which we've had in this country. Well, there were times when we did not have free and
1:18:30
fair elections with it, when it comes to like, if you watched like gangs in New York, and you
1:18:33
watched like the immigrants would come and like, they'd have a beard in vote, you know, and they'd
1:18:37
shade their beard off and vote in the afternoon. Like, we did not have free elect, you know, like,
1:18:41
we're not fair elections in those days. I think we have a very good electoral system in this country.
1:18:46
I mean, we did. I think that, again, voter fraud is not rampant. Like, like, find me, find me 100
1:18:53
cases of voter fraud in 2020. Legitimate, like, prosecuted levels of voter fraud. You can't find
1:18:58
them. They don't exist. I can literally send you a podcast where somebody their company found
1:19:04
over 100 Justin Michigan. Yeah, boy, they prosecuted. They went to addresses that didn't exist where
1:19:11
people were casting ballots, right? There was an under an overpass. And that was somehow the person
1:19:17
that that cast out if it's a crime, then prosecute these people. But a podcast host isn't going to
1:19:22
prosecute someone that doesn't exist. That's the point. Yeah, but give it to the DA and say here,
1:19:27
here's evidence of voter fraud. Go prosecute this this for this voter fraud.
1:19:30
The Democrat DA in Michigan, who all the votes were cast for one candidate Joe Biden.
1:19:36
Ryan. Okay, we don't need to throw any more stuff because here's the thing. I got one more
1:19:42
segment left for you. And I think you're going to love it. Okay, here we go. Yeah. No, no, no,
1:19:46
this one's this one's fun. We got all the hard stuff out of the way because you escaped the
1:19:50
wrath of the segment in our last podcast, because we ran out of time. But I like to do a segment at
1:19:54
the end of my show called, what would you say to someone that said? Okay, and I'm going to fill in
1:19:59
the blank. And regardless of the topic, this is lightning round. You have a maximum of 30 seconds
1:20:04
to give me your answer on this, whatever the topic is. So what would you say to someone that said
1:20:09
blank? Yeah, for it. Let's do it. Okay, first one. What would you say to someone that said,
1:20:14
you can't be Christian and Democrat? I would say, what about Martin Luther King,
1:20:19
Jr. for goodness sakes? I mean, the black Protestant movement in America is overwhelmingly Democrat.
1:20:24
And I would please no one white Christian go to black people go, you're wrong. You can't be a
1:20:29
Christian and be a Democrat. They've been Democrats for, you know, 75 years now they've over the
1:20:33
Democrats. I think that's what God wants them to do. Just like Republicans, you know, white
1:20:36
Christians wrote for Republican thing. That was what God wants them to do. Listen, it's not as easy
1:20:40
as you think it is. You know, like people make it way more simple than it actually is. Politics is
1:20:44
a lot more nuanced. Well, since I'm in somewhat equal opportunity offender, here's the next
1:20:49
one. What would you say to someone that said, you can't be a Christian and a Republican?
1:20:54
Oh my goodness. I mean, you can be a Christian and be a green party person far as I can tell.
1:20:58
I mean, if you look back at the Catholic Church, liberation theology was basically socialism,
1:21:02
you know, and that's what the Catholic Church taught in Central and South America for 50 years.
1:21:05
And actually, by the way, led to the disposition of a lot of tyrants in Central and South America,
1:21:10
because people thought that God wanted them to be free. So I don't think that, you know, God
1:21:13
and theology is bound up with any political party or any political movement. And by the way,
1:21:17
you can use the Bible to justify all kinds of things, good, bad, or indifferent based on your
1:21:21
perception. You're doing just fine. Let's keep this lightning round going. What would you say to
1:21:25
someone that said, almost all presentations of statistics are biased and untrustworthy?
1:21:30
I would say bias absolutely 100%. But just because I cannot draw a perfect circle
1:21:35
does not mean I should keep not try to draw a perfect circle. Right. I am biased. You are biased.
1:21:39
We all are biased. All right. We all, but the thing is we need to admit our bias. And I'm always
1:21:44
thinking about my bias and trying to fight against the bias. If you actually look at 20 myths,
1:21:48
I think some of them make people like Kyle feel very good. And then some make Kyle feel probably
1:21:53
less good. And I think that's good. Right. Like, and for me personally, there's things in there
1:21:56
I wrote in there that I don't love that don't make me feel good, but they need to be out there.
1:22:00
Right. So just because your bias does not mean you cannot fight that bias and be, you know,
1:22:04
try to be as accurate as you possibly can.
1:22:05
Deconance is not always a bad thing. What would you say to someone that said,
1:22:09
America's experiment in self-government is destined to fail.
1:22:13
Oh, gosh. I mean, I think we've done a better job than any other country in the history world
1:22:17
of making democracy work. I mean, Thomas Jefferson thought that every 20 years we'd have a revolution
1:22:21
and rewrite the Constitution. So we've actually beat his expectations by 10-fold. But I do think,
1:22:26
you know, we have to constantly fight for it. And there's that old quote Benjamin Franklin was
1:22:30
the Constitution Convention and a woman comes to ask him, what do we have? A monarchy or a republic
1:22:34
and he goes, a republic if we can keep it. And I think we constantly have to fight the urge to
1:22:38
go towards despotism or tyranny or whatever it is, we have to fight for democracy because
1:22:43
honest to God, it is worth fighting for. Right. Next one here. What would you say to someone that
1:22:47
said, there's no such thing as capital T truth. Truth is in the eye of the beholder.
1:22:52
Oh, I think I grew up in a church that would say absolutely true, which is, you know, but then,
1:22:59
but then I live in a world where I in the 1990s, I was told Bill Clinton could not be president
1:23:03
because of personal immorality. And then I saw a lot of those same people turn around and vote
1:23:06
for Donald Trump, although he's been divorced twice, he's on his wife and is in the casino business.
1:23:10
So I have a really hard time with the word truth right now. What I believe is that the
1:23:14
the creed, the apostles creed is my baseline of faith. It's my dogma. It's what I have to
1:23:18
believe to be a Christian. I think that everything above that is all doctrine and we can fight about
1:23:22
that all you want. But as long as you affirm the creed, like I do, then we play for the same team.
1:23:26
And that's my capital T truth. Brian, when's your birthday for April 30th?
1:23:31
Okay, I'm going to send you a MAGA hat for your birthday since it's coming up. All right. Next one
1:23:34
here. What would you say to someone that said, Western Christendom will eventually be a thing
1:23:38
of the past? Oh, it'll definitely take a smaller portion of what Christendom is because we're seeing
1:23:44
rapid growth in Christianity in places like Sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South America.
1:23:49
And even Southeast Asian out of China would actually let people poll about religion in China
1:23:53
because they're not doing it at this point. What we're going to see is that white Christianity,
1:23:56
Western Christianity is going to have a much smaller voice in the international conversation
1:24:00
about religion because it's going to grow as a smaller portion of the voice of what American
1:24:05
religion is, right? So I think that's actually a good thing because, you know, we're all brothers
1:24:09
and sisters, whether you're born in Sudan or South Carolina, God cares about you just the same.
1:24:14
And those people should have a voice just like Americans in South Carolina should have a voice.
1:24:17
All right, just a couple more left. Here we go. What would you say to someone that said,
1:24:21
I hate Professor Burgess classes? They're probably right. I hate my classes too,
1:24:26
to be honest with you. Like I get so sick of myself. I get so bored with myself. And I get it,
1:24:31
you know, like sometimes like I, I poke and prod and I pull people in directions they don't want
1:24:34
to go because I feel like my job as a professor is to take your position and my job is to take
1:24:38
the other position. And I know people don't like to be challenged. I don't like to be challenged,
1:24:42
but I think that is where education happens is in the challenging and like, let's, I think
1:24:46
part of my job actually in an, in academia is to give like a principal smart religious response
1:24:51
to a lot of things because a lot of my students never hear that. And for a lot of them makes them
1:24:55
mad, but good. I mean, that's what my, my goal is to not make you feel good is to make you be
1:25:00
educated and see the other side. College is not a day care. Last question of the day, Ryan,
1:25:05
what would you say to someone that said it's impossible to be a good pastor and a good political
1:25:10
scientist? Oh, I think I'm bad at both. I mean, to be completely honest with you, I'm,
1:25:15
I'm not great at either because I feel like I'm always being pulled in two directions at once,
1:25:18
but I also think that, you know, this is where I'm supposed to be. Like this is where I find my
1:25:22
peace and my joy and I feel like this is if, if God called me to both and I have to stay in both
1:25:26
for as long as that calling exists on my life. And I do think, could I be a better pastor if I did
1:25:30
less with this kind of stuff that I'm doing right now? Probably could. Could I be a better
1:25:34
political scientist? If I didn't have to worry about, you know, people in my church and things
1:25:36
like that, absolutely true. But I also think I need to benefit as many people as I possibly can.
1:25:41
And I think by doing both, I'm doing that right now. I don't know if it's going to exist forever,
1:25:45
but for right now in this season of my life, it makes the most sense to me.
1:25:48
I appreciate that. Ryan, I liked our last conversation, but dare I say, I love this one. I think this
1:25:53
one went really, really well. But hey, we talked about a lot of stuff. We covered a lot of ground
1:25:56
here today, but that is all for me. Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:25:59
Follow me on Twitter at Ryan Burge. You can buy both books, the nuns and 20 myths on, you know,
1:26:05
wherever fine books are sold. My website is Ryan Burge dot net. And I appreciate all the support
1:26:10
I got for book number one, please buy book number two. So I can write book number three.
1:26:14
That's right. Fellas that will all be in the show notes. Ryan Burge, thank you for coming back on
1:26:18
undaunted life of man's podcast. Thanks. I appreciate it. There you go, guys. I hope you enjoyed Ryan
1:26:23
Burge's return appearance to the show. But before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience
1:26:26
boost and an altered life. Our mission is equipping men to pushback darkness with content that for
1:26:30
the spiritual, mental and physical resilience. So here are the links today. I've got a link to
1:26:33
the new book, 20 myths about religion and politics in America, a link to the old book, the nuns,
1:26:37
and then also a link to Ryan's website, his Twitter and his previous appearance on undaunted life
1:26:41
of man's podcast. All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to the show. We do appreciate it.
1:26:44
Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive five-star review.
1:26:48
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1:26:52
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1:27:00
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1:27:04
also thank the man August Burns read for allowing us to use their music for our content. The music
1:27:08
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1:27:12
of their album leveler. The links are in the description. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
1:27:18
Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual mental and physical resilience,
1:27:24
keep seeking the Lion of Judah.
1:27:42
Revive!