← Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey
Ep 1360 | ‘Yesteryear’ & the Hollywood Plot to Demonize Christian Women
00:58:02
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- [00:01]
Ally
Is the bestseller yesteryear a valid critique of trad wife influencer culture? Or is it a malicious attempt to completely discredit conservative Christianity? We've got that plus voicemails at the end of today's episode. Hey, y'.
- [00:25]
Caller
All.
- [00:25]
Ally
Welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and that you're having a great Sunday start to your week.
- [00:32]
Caller
Guess what?
- [00:33]
Ally
Guess what. God's eternal plan of redemption is going off without a hitch. Can you believe that? I can believe it because instead of looking at the news or looking at social media to tell me what's up, I can look at the word of God. I can look to Jesus. Hebrews 13:8 says that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Yes, and amen. He does not change. His love for you does not wax or wane. God's approval of you does not wax or wane because it's not dependent upon your performance. It's not dependent upon what you earn or how you're able to clean yourself up. It doesn't work like that. It is dependent upon Jesus, who is perfect forever and who shed his blood for you on the cross. And if by grace, through faith, you believe in him, you are justified and your slate has been wiped clean. And you can stand before the holy God of the universe fully confident that is really good news. No matter what else is going on in your life, like that is a good enough piece of news to rejoice in. And even when it seems like things are falling apart in your life, even when it seems like things are falling apart in the world, when things are getting worse and worse, things are crazy in the media, things are crazy in politics, things are crazy in geopolitics. Nothing surprises God, nothing takes him aback, nothing throws him off. He is calling his sheep to himself. And the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church. Yes, and amen. And so I just wanted to start you off, as we do every single week, every single Monday, with that good news, and preach yourself. Preach that to yourself every single day, especially on the days when anxiety just threatens to consume you. God's eternal plan of redemption is going off without a hitch. He sees you, he hears you, and he really does care. That's good news. All things are working together for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose, that is Romans 8:28. All right, let's get into today's subject, which is topical, but we tie in theology, as we always do on Mondays. We try to talk about something that is going on something that is trending? It could be an idea, it could be a video. Or like today, it could be a book. And then talk about all right, what does God's word actually say about this versus what the world is calling trendy? What the world is calling popular and good and true. Let's stack it up against God's word and see how it holds up. Today we're talking about yesteryear. This is the bestseller from Carol Clare Burke. This is the debut novel of Burke. It was published in April of this year. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list shortly after publication. New York Times Best Book of the Year so far appeared among the most popular books on Apple Books, topped the Publisher's Weekly Hardcover fiction bestseller list. Good Morning America Book Club pick from for April 2026. And not only that, but it is also being made into a movie with Anne Hathaway. Here's the ad for that salt one. My name was Natalie Heller Mills and I was perfect at being alive. Can't wait to see you at yesteryear. Okay, a little strange. Now y' all tell me if this is normal. I just find it odd that this book came out in April of this year. But that video with Anna Hathaway by the said it was an ad. It wasn't really, I guess an ad for the movie, but just Anne Hathaway promoting the book and I guess teasing the fact that she's going to be playing Natalie in the movie that was published in December of last year. I just don't know of many books that get that popular and that much traction before they're actually published. So obviously this was very well orchestrated. That means that this book is conveying a message that Hollywood wants us to hear. Hollywood wants us to believe that that the media wants us to believe. And that is why so much has been ginned up around this. Because it is echoing a sentiment that is not only very popular already among a lot of liberal women, the progressive intelligentsia and Hollywood, but it is also trying to convince us of something. It is also trying to scare us away from something. So let's look at what that something is and the message that I believe it's trying to convey. And by the way, I listened to this book. I typically like to read my fiction in, you know, it's paper form. But this time I needed to read it quickly because I was writing an article about it and so I listened to it and I will just tell you it is gripping. The premise of the novel is extremely unique and I found it very listenable. So the idea is that there's this influencer, trad wife, woman named Natalie, okay? And so she is monetizing her life. She lives in this homestead. She's made a lot of money as an entrepreneur. She's a doting wife. Her husband is a part of this political dynasty, but also he's secretly cheating on her. And she is pretending to her Instagram followers to be a farmer, to be a stay at home mom, but really she's outsourcing all of these responsibilities to other people, but making money off of this fake Persona. She's described as a Christian, kind of loosely, but it's obvious that she's supposed to be very religious in a Christian way. But her inner monologue is characterized by spite and by bitterness, hatred of her husband, resentment in her life, constant comparison and critique of other people, judgmentalism. And so you see right away that we're supposed to see hypocrisy in this woman, which kind of resonates with a lot of what many of us feel about influencer culture. We've seen some of these people. Ruby Frank. There is a wellness influencer named Bella. I forget her last name. It was revealed that Ruby Frank didn't really have this happy mom, got it all together life that she was conveying on YouTube. She was abusing her children. This Bella wellness influencer said that she had healed herself of brain cancer through nutrition. And it ended up that the entire story was just a money making scheme and it was fake. And so right away, this idea of an influencer not being who she is portraying herself to be for money, like we understand it, it resonates with us. And you already, from the beginning, want this character to get her comeuppance. Like, put your politics to the side, whether or not you like trad wife culture right away. This character is very unlikable. And so when this character. And by the way, there are spoilers. There are spoilers here. She's Transported back to 1855 and basically forced to live the life that she is monetizing without the amenities that make that kind of home setting life luxurious. You're like, yes, she is getting exactly what she deserves, but it is also extremely dark and extremely crass. So she goes back to 1855. She doesn't have electricity. She's got a primitive existence. She sees on the wall a calendar that says that they're in the 19th century, they're in 1855. She doesn't have all of her children there. They all kind of look like versions of her children, but they're not the same names as her children. They're not nice to her. And then you she sees her husband, what looks like her husband, but he is really mean to her. He's abusive to her. There are sexually graphic abuse scenes. It's just really disturbing and dark. And so at least for me, you go from thinking, okay, this hypocritical woman needs to be exposed, exposed for the fraud she is to seeing, wow, this is like a really harsh, intense punishment to me. Like, you can see Burke's intense hatred and resentment towards like the trad wife world and the trad life influencer trend that this almost seems like a personal punitive narrative, like against women who promote this kind of lifestyle with how extremely graphic and violent it gets against this main character. Natalie, we'll get into the rest of this story. Again, there will be spoilers. So if you want to fast forward and get to my analysis of things, you can in just a second. But let me pause. Let me tell you about my first sponsor for the day. Here is a company that actually loves women and honors women and believes that our bodies are dwelling places for the holy spirits as Christians, that we are made in God's image and therefore how we treat our bodies really matters. We the supplements, the vitamins that we put in our body really matters because not all vitamins are created equal. Some of them, unfortunately come with all these kinds of fake ingredients. You need ingredients that come in the most bioavailable form so that your body can actually take in and use that vitamin C, vitamin D, that iron. And that is why I exclusively use WE hard nutrition. And I have felt so much better since I started using them at the beginning of 2024. Magnesium, prenatals, all that good stuff. Especially while I'm pregnant. I want to make sure that my prenatals are really working to make me feel good. And these do go to We Heart Nutrition.com use code ALLY. You'll get an extra 20% off We Heart Nutrition.com code ALLY. All right, so this book alternates after she's transported back to 1855, which happens like, pretty early in the in the book. It kind of goes back and forth. And so we're seeing what her life is like in 1855, having to go through just all of these horrible things. Like she gets this horrible deep cut in her ankle and she has to get it sewn together at home without any kind of pain medication. I mean, it's really just terrible and probably similar to how life actually was in 1855. But then we also see her going to college and what that was like and basically how she became the influencer that she did. But here's the kicker, okay, here's the kicker is that actually we find at the end of the book that Natalie wasn't actually transported back to the past because you don't actually know how or why she's transported back. It's not like a time machine novel, we're never told. Some witch came out of the forest and cast a spell, fell on her and she was sent back to the 19th century. It's just she wakes up one day and her house is the same but different. And so then it's revealed that she never actually time traveled after her social media entrepreneurial empire fell. In real Life in the 2020s, she and Caleb isolated themselves in a pioneer style existence and her deteriorating mental state led her to construct this 1855 fantasy. And so her children, many of her children, because at the beginning she has lots of children. And then when she's Transported back to 1855, she only has four children. They had gone, no contact with her, they don't want to be with her anymore. And then her husband Caleb really did become abusive toward her. And so then we see that years later, Natalie is serving a 30 year prison sentence for child abuse when she returns to the ranch for an interview about her daughter's memoir. Her daughter in this book ended up writing a memoir about how terrible her life is and how terrible her mother was. So like, it's a very sad and dark story. There are some humorous points in it certainly, and there's some light heartedness. And again, there's certainly some parts of it that will resonate with you. We all are familiar with the dangerous pitfall of influencer culture, which is deception. You want to see that kind of reprisal toward bad actors, towards villains. And you never really start to like Natalie and all of this. But again, you can see that, okay, there is, there is almost a malice behind this story and how it is written and the punishment that is doled out. That seems to me ideological. It seems to me personal. You can see this kind of sentiment echoed, or at least the unlikability of the main character by Harper's Bazaar, a decidedly unlikable protagonist. In my article, I called her an antagonistic protagonist. That's what she is. The New Yorker criticized the characterization more broadly, arguing that Natalie comes across as more of a caricature than a real person, making it harder for the novel to succeed fully. And that is true. We'll get to more of that in a second. Natalie is relentlessly self absorbed and unlikable, which made it tough to stay invested in her journey. And I've seen the author talk about this. She wanted this person to become unlikable. I think she wanted her to become a caricature. Because I believe to this author that Natalie represents conservative Christian women and she does not want the reader to have empathy for the different facets of conservative Christian women. She did not want to present Natalie as kind of struggling morally or ethically with some of her choices. She didn't want to present her as someone who is actually virtuous underneath, but is a victim of her own circumstances or ideology or anything. She wanted her to be so, so hate inducing so that when you see that kind of person represented in real life, you will also feel hatred toward her. That is, that's my thought behind that. I do agree with a lot of this criticism that a book is more successful and really does transport you out of this present moment when the characters are tough, like when you don't know whether to like them or to hate them. I think about Tony Soprano like this is the, I think the best example of this. Obviously he's a mobster, he's a terrible person, he's murdered people, he cheats on his wife, he's abusive, he has all these terrible things. And yet you find yourself feeling badly for him. You find yourself kind of trusting him. You find yourself thinking, I think that I would go into business with Tony Soprano. That is the, that is the brilliance of the writers, I think, of shows like that to show you even, okay, more light hearted. Someone like Michael Scott. Michael Scott. You just want to be angry with him all the time. He's so immature. He says the dumbest stuff. But then he has these really redemptive moments where you're like, gosh, that was so insightful and so wise. And then you're like, no, I think he should continue to be the manager of Dunder Mifflin. And so it's that kind of complication, that nuance that reflects real life in so many ways and makes, I think, makes books like this more gripping. But the author didn't want to do that because the author explicitly says, this is a critique of America. This is a critique of America as a Christian nationalist nation. Which means to me that not only is she criticizing trad life, trad wife culture, which, by the way, so have I. I have criticized the conflation of trad wife with biblical wife or biblical woman because they're not the same things. A biblical woman can be lived out biblical womanhood Proverbs 31 woman can be lived out in Manhattan. It can be lived out in a studio apartment. It can be lived out as a single woman who is serving her church and working hard where God has called her. It can be lived out on a homestead in Oklahoma. It can be lived out in underground churches in China. Christianity and Christian womanhood is not an aesthetic. It is a standard that is set forth in Scripture. So as long as we are living up to God's standards of what it means to be a godly woman, a godly wife, and a godly mom, it doesn't really matter how it looks on Instagram, whether you dress your kids in polyester paw patrol shirts or in linen dresses and slacks. So that has been my critique, is that there's nothing wrong with tradition, nothing wrong with sourdough and homeschool and all of those things, but it is not synonymous with Christianity. And I think that that's really important for us to realize. The problem to me with yesteryear is actually that this author makes the exact same mistake, is that she conflates Christianity and really all conservative Christians with hypocritical trad life influencing. She basically says that those things are interchangeable. And that to me is why I see such an ideological malicious bent here. She said to the New York Times, I feel like I've spent the last decade watching people in power try on and take off elements of religious strategy to see what we're expecting. Past that sentence alone, I think is true in a lot of ways. But she said, I became obsessed with the idea that fundamentalism is pretty consistent for women across not just every thread of Christianity but every religion. There is so much more in common between fundamentalists than separating them. She also goes on to say that this main character is a fundamentalist Christian, and this is really, to me, where her source material shines through. She said that she got a lot of her inspiration from Reddit. Now Reddit I believe to be a cesspool of the worst of progressivism and anti Christian hostility. She said Reddit was an incredible resource. Ex Mormon Reddit, ex Evangelical Reddit, ex Jehovah's Witness. These women who leave these communities are more aware of gender than probably any other women I know. They're so aware of what that performance is. Now I can't dispel or disprove every single testimony on Reddit, and I don't want to. There are bad people who use religion Certainly as a way to perform and then to mask hypocrisy. All of that is true. But Reddit is not the place to go for these testimonies or for an objective rendering of what these world views are like. Carol or not Carol, whatever her name is, Caro Burke, she claims to have been raised Catholic, but it sounds like she was raised mostly in a secular home. She said that her parents didn't quote push God on her. She also expressed in the same New York Times interview that she was surprised at how many of her readers asked if the main character is Catholic. And she was like, yeah, most people think she's evangelical, but some people say she's Catholic. And I'm like, well that is because I don't even know if she realizes the confusing links language that she had woven into this book. There is a part in the beginning of the book, I believe, if I'm remembering because I listened to it, where she talks about confirmation that she was confirmed in the church. But then she also uses language like she was born again and baptized as a high schooler. Natalie, the main character. And I'm like, well those two things don't really go together. Confirmation is something that's happened in the Catholic, that happens in the Catholic Church. Being born again and baptism by immersion when you're in high school is something that happens in the evangelical church. I don't even think it's something that happens in the Mormon church. So I don't know if that's just confusion on her part. Theological confusion I.e. reddit tier misrepresentation of theology though. So that doesn't surprise me. The hostility towards not just hypocrisy of trad influencers but all kinds of conservative Christianity which she lumps in as so called fundamentalist. I think that is just the spirit that you see throughout. Throughout this book on Reddit. Everyone who is outside of Progressivism is called a fundamentalist. There really are fundamentalist Baptists or fundamentalist denominations. And you can see that the women aren't allowed to wear pants, they're not allowed to cut their hair. Very, very strict rules on all kinds of behavior and dress, but especially for women. And you really just break down and minimize what that word really means when you call people like me, which Reddit does, or anyone outside of Progressivism who is a Christian, a fundamentalist. When you conflate those two things, what you're saying is that anyone who doesn't agree with you, who doesn't affirm lgbtq, who doesn't believe abortion through all Nine months is great. They're all fundamentalists. And you know, C. S Lewis in the Screwtape letters he talks about this and he talks about, you know, screwtape, the demonic perspective is talking to his nephew and he says, you know, I'm paraphrasing but putting a stigma with the word puritan has won thousands of souls to hell. And he is saying that what the demons want to do is, is to conflate self righteous legalism with actual Christian virtue. If you call actual Christian virtues like chastity for example, or like generosity, oh that's puritan or oh that's fundamentalist, that sure I can believe some things about Christianity but that that kind of stuff is just too far. Then you can scare people away from Christian virtue altogether. And that is certainly what has happened with fundamentalism. So it doesn't surprise me that Caro Burke has these feelings when she is consulting Reddit in her descriptions of what a Christian conservative woman is. Okay, let me pause, let me tell you about our next sponsor and that is crowd health. It might be time for you to just opt out of health insurance altogether. That's what my husband and I have done. We decided that crowd health is a better alternative for us because it puts us back in control. Like we really care about freedom. We don't want the restriction restrictive doctor's networks. We want it to be as easy as possible to be able to pay our medical bills without the high premiums and deductibles and all of that. And that's why we've opted for crowd health. So far the crowd has saved over $56 million for its community. This is how it works. They give you personal care advocates prescription discounts, huge database to help you find great doctors and the freedom to choose any provider. No restrictive networks members crowdfund eligible bills with a 99.9% success rate usually in about seven days. If you join crowd health right now with my code, you will be able to join for $99 a month for your first three months using code ALI go to join Crowd Health.com use code ALI$99 a month for your first three Months. That's join CrowdHealth.com code ALI Crowd Health is not insurance. Opt out. Take your power back. Join CrowdHealth.com code Ali. So she blatantly says that yesteryear, her book is a critique of America. It's a critique of America as a Christian nationalist nation. This is a Christian nationalist country right now. That's what she told the New York Times. Well, like fundamentalist Christian nationalist is used to describe any Christian who is conservative. Any Christian who's not on board with lgbtq. Any Christian who believes, like every other person of every belief system does, by the way, that we should be able to live out the fullness of our worldview and that it shouldn't be isolated to our homes, that we should be able to vote according to our belief system, we should be able to speak according to our belief system. We should be able to conduct our business in accordance with our belief system. Christian nationalist to these people. It doesn't, they don't, it doesn't really have any meaning. And if you read this book about Natalie, like, there is nothing even remotely that is quote unquote, Christian nationalist about her. And this author actually says that, you know, Natalie doesn't even have like enough knowledge of her own theology or enough wisdom about what she actually believes to understand her doctrines or to understand her real belief system. And yet she's a fundamentalist Christian nationalist. This is just a combination of all these different feelings of hostility that people have towards conservative Christians. It's the same thing that happens with the Handmaid's Tale. You know, outside of every conservative conference, you get a bunch of women who, they have too much time on their hands, they need a hobby, they need a job, they need something, I mean, preferably like a family to take care of, and yet they are spending all of their free time donning these red robes. But if you read the Handmaid's Tale, it's real parallel is the surrogacy industry, which really does pay women to subject their bodies to be incubators for men that they're not related to and that they don't love. And so it has nothing to do with conservatism or Christianity at all. In the same way that yesteryear and the critique of trad wife influencer culture has nothing to do with Christianity and really has nothing to do with conservatism and doesn't have any real reflection in conservative Christianity. She also says yestergear just shows the dangers of traditionalism in general.
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Guest
I find it absurd. I find the conversations that we're having right now to be patently absurd. It's pat. I mean, we're trying to roll back no fault divorce laws in order to get women to have more babies. It's so obviously gruesome and I think that the fact that we are still having calm arguments about this on news channels is absurd to me. It's, it's silly, it's ridiculous and so, so much of yesteryear was just trying to lean into the absurdity and the hyper bully of it all. Of being like it's, it's all ridiculous. And every character in this book and all of their beliefs are up to the volume level of 11. But that's also what this conversation feels like to me in modern day. It feels unbelievably satirical to me that we are talking sincerely. We are watching politicians sincerely talk about the need to have 16 year olds give birth more.
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Ally
I haven't seen a single politician sincerely say we need more teen moms. Please show me the politician who has that as their platform. I mean you go from no fault divorce to like the glorification of teen moms. I haven't seen that. I really like. I don't want more 16 year olds having babies. I definitely don't want anyone having babies and having sex outside of wedlock at the same time. All babies are made in the image of God and I want them to be born and I want them to be cared for. That's not radical. The conversation about no fault divorce is actually a very good one. For a very long time we did not have no fault divorce. No fault divorce made it really easy for people to get a divorce based on irreconcilable differences, vague reasons. Well, that's not good for families. It's not good for children. Children's are the victims of divorce. There are biblical grounds for divorce, by the way. I'm not saying that there aren't, but irreconcilable differences at one of differences is not one of them. And the willy nilly way that we go about divorce in this country is not good. And the law shouldn't make it as easy as possible for people to get a divorce just because they've grown out of love or they have decided that they like that's it. Just, that's not good. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to stay together. People are debating no fault divorce so we can have more teen moms. And so she's talking about. Oh, I'm, I. We have such a hyperbolic conversation. You are hyperbolizing the conversation. You are the one doing the hyperbole. I don't see anyone actually representing what you're talking about. Now just to show you like what kind of person she is. She also mocks Erica Kirk. Okay, so she mocked Erica Kirk for saying that we need to be watchful for kids being radicalized by online content after Charlie was murdered. That's 100 true. I guess that Burke thinks that's funny. Here's that clip.
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Guest
It's so housewife coded. It's so Erica Kirk from her $5 million mansion coded. But, like, also, can I? Can I, Can I blame her when that's exactly the type of perspective I would expect from her? Hard to say.
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Ally
Yeah, I can blame her. I'll blame her. You don't have to.
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Caller
I will.
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Ally
Okay.
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Guest
Onward. Do you want your kid to be
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Ally
a thought leader or an assassin? That's where we're at. Bars. No, in between. So, you know, I see this so much with progressive women, is that they'll point to someone like Erica Kirk or someone else and say, oh, those people are so mean. They're so awful. We need to have more empathy. But then they'll be cruel. I mean, they're the meanest girls on the block. They're the girls that sit around with their friends and talk about everyone else and how weird they are and how just silly they are and how dumb they are. I mean, that's exactly what she's doing. This is toxic femininity right there. But it's all justified. This is also the problem with empathy being your guidepost and empathy actually being the gauge of your morality. I see this kind of thing a lot. The people that preach the most about empathy have the least amount of empathy for the people that they disagree with, because the people they disagree with are not just people they disagree with in the progressive mind. They're enemies. They're the oppressors. And you shouldn't have empathy for the oppressors in their mind. You shouldn't have empathy for the people that are, you know, pressing down the minority or the woman or whatever. She certainly didn't want us to have empathy for Natalie. And in her mind, I think Erica Kirk and Natalie are basically the same. That's why virtue and objective goodness. And of course, as a Christian, biblical standards have to be your guidepost. Empathy, when in submission to biblical standards, can be great, but when it's the only thing guiding you, you are going to make your moral decisions and your decisions about kindness based on how you're able to relate to someone or whether you're not able to relate to someone. I saw someone, for example, say the other day that we don't need to have empathy for babies inside the womb because they don't have experiences like we have experiences. First of all, you're misunderstanding the whole exercise. We have experienced what they've experienced. Every single one of us is grown ups. I'm kind of going off the trail now, but as grownups have experienced what a baby inside the womb has experienced. But because you can't remember that that is why you're saying we shouldn't have empathy or give rights to babies inside the womb. That is the danger of empathy being your guidepost. I guarantee you. This author prides herself on being a very empathetic person. And here she is mocking someone like Erica Kirk, because Erica Kirk is on the wrong side. She told the New York Times that all women were sold a false bill of goods, both liberal and conservative. She said, we're all sold a bill of false goods. And that's true for conservative women, and it's true for liberal women. The point of the book is that is not that one wins. And Natalie's mind, it's like the alternative doesn't look good. She doesn't want to work in an office and be miserable and poor. And so to pretend that it's like, why didn't you leave your husband to get a job at a marketing firm in downtown Manhattan and be broke and have a kid? It's like, that sounds awful in some ways. Okay, I kind of appreciate her attempt at nuance there. I do think that it's not like she makes the progressive characters in the book seem amazing, and so I will kind of give her some points for that. A really big critique that people have. Something that people are pointing out is that Natalie was actually inspired by a real life person, that Natalie was inspired by someone named Hannah Nealman of Ballerina Farm. I mean, it is really, really close if you know who Ballerina Farm is. She is. She's. I won't call her a trad wife because she's actually said before that she's not like, she doesn't don that moniker. She has said that she's a business owner, that she's an entrepreneur, that she's a beauty pageant queen, and that she doesn't take on that. That trad wife trend or take on that trad wife name. And I appreciate that. I actually don't follow Ballerina Farm myself. I just, you know, it's not the kind of content that I follow. However, I. If I were her, I might be looking at my legal options when it comes to yesteryear because the comparisons are so close. The same thing with eight or nine kids. Her husband comes from money, I think. JetBlue money, I think his dad might have, is CEO or owner of JetBlue or something. Um, and that's the same with Natalie in the book. I mean, the entire esthetic that is Described in the book is very similar to Neilman's homestead. I believe that she is in Montana, if I remember correctly. She also has a thriving business. She's also setting up a tripod to, you know, make her make her stuff. And her kids are in her videos. And obviously she's monetizing all of this. And I don't know her, you know, I don't know what her life is really like. We can go through some of these covers. She's also a ballerina. She's very beautiful, and she does make this life just. It looks glamorous and it looks fun, and she makes things look easy. I don't know anything about what things are like for her personally, but I have no reason to think that yesteryear is a reflection of who she is or what her family is like at all. I mean, social media is not real life, so I don't know who she is. She seems really sweet, though. Like, she seems to just love to cook and love to homemake and to love to make things from scratch and to love to farm. She seems to love to have babies. Like, that's something that comes easily for her as she's got a lot of cute kids. And so to so obviously use her as a caricature, like a really demonic caricature, I just think is evil and wrong now, like it. This is not someone that I just personally feel the need to advocate for because I don't know that we have a whole lot of commonalities. She's lds. I'm not a. I'm not a homesteader. I just think it's wrong to assume the very worst of her and people like her. Even if I don't want to conflate the trad life with biblical Christianity, I can also say with someone like Ballerina, Farm and Girl, you are successful and you make it look easy and your family is beautiful and you're successful, and that's great. Like, I just don't feel the need for her to be a target of my ire, and I think it's really unfortunate and wrong. Again, mega mean girl. Mega mean Girl vibes. For you to take, like, the beautiful, popular ballerina and for you to so obviously twist what you think her life is to make a bunch of money of fostering grievance towards conservative women. All right, we've got more on this in just a second. Let me pause and tell you about our next sponsor, and it's Alliance Defending Freedom. So thankful for Alliance Defending Freedom. I'm always following their lawsuits and what they're doing and the people that they are defending right now, they are in Colorado. Colorado keeps them very busy. Colorado does not like the first Amendment, religious liberty or free speech. And Alliance Defending freedom is always in Colorado trying to defend Christians rights to operate their businesses like Jack Phillips and also to be able to speak what is true without being punished by the law. Right now there is a pronoun law on the books that says you have to use someone's preferred pronoun even if it doesn't align with their biology. And Christians are saying no. So they need our support. ADF always needs Christians like us to be behind them to donate, to make sure they can keep going. Because all of their wins aren't just ones for their clients, they're wins for us too. Go to joinadf.com make your donation today. Every dollar you give today will be doubled by a $1 million matching grant. Only while funds last. Go to joinadf.come ally make your donation today. Joinadf.com alli. Another claim that Burke makes is that all fundamentalists have almost everything in common, that a fundamentalist Muslim is very, very similar to a quote unquote, fundamentalist Christian. Now, fundamentalist Christian, remember, she's talking about you and me. She's talking about people who take the Bible seriously, about sexuality and marriage and children and abortion and all of those things. And so now a fundamentalist Muslim would be someone who joins ISIS and would be someone who is, you know, part of Hamas committing terror. And fundamentalist Christian would be people who just read the Bible and say, yeah, I think this is true and I should apply it to my life and killing babies is bad. But she says, and this is very popular, I've heard this sentiment a lot, that fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalists in all religion have much more in common than they do with anyone else who also claims to share their faith. Um, let me read you the disparate ideas that Christianity and Islam has about women and marriage. So Ephesians 5, 25, 30 husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word, so that he might present the church to himself, and so splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife, loves himself, for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it. Just as Christ has the church because we are members of his body. Wow. So much there the gospel is reflected. The marriage between Christ and his church, which is true in eternity, is represented in earthly marriage only between one man and one woman. And husbands are to love their wives so much that they are willing to lay themselves down for her. That is a high calling that women aren't called to. That women aren't called to. The exact same love and sacrifice for our husbands that our husbands are called for. For. Called to for us. And another part of this passage, wives are to submit to our husbands as to the Lord. The much harder job in this passage, it definitely falls on the husbands. We're to submit to our husbands as we submit to the Lord's Lord. And then husbands are to be willing to die for their wives. Like that's really big. And also to present them to God without blemish. And so also to help her be sanctified in Christ. Huge, huge responsibility. The radical thing there was not what modern feminists think that wives are to submit to their husbands. The radical thing at the time would have been that husbands are to be sacrificially loving their wives. That they are to be this kind of like self denying. And the self denying role in marriage that would have been completely radical in a time when women weren't even seen as full people. Now contrast that with Islam. Men have authority over women and are told if they feel a woman is rebellious they should banish them to another bed and then beat them. And I just want to highlight men have authority over women, not just husbands have authority over their wives. That is a key distinction. And then also how these women are treated in the Quran 4:34 men are in charge of women because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other and because they spend of their property for the support of women. So good women are the obedient guardian in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart and scourge them. Men are also allowed to marry multiple women. That is not allowed in Christianity. We just read that in Ephesians 5 Quran 4:3. And if you fear that you will not deal justly with the orphan girls, then marry those that please you of other women. 2 or 3 or 4. Also men are allowed sexual relations with female captives and slaves. Their great prophet Muhammad, he married a six year old allegedly consummated that when she was nine years old. And contrasting that to Christianity we see that the first people who were created on earth were one man and one woman. Woman, not one boy and one girl. One man and one woman. And we're told to be fruitful and multiply, which is only possible post puberty. So from the beginning to the end, we see that it is one man and one woman that is the only holy definition of marriage in Christianity. It is inherently anti child sexual abuse. It is inherently anti pedophilia. That cannot be said for many other religions and ideologies out there. Not to say that people haven't done evil things who profess to be Christians, but Christianity as it is biblically practiced is anti that kind of exploitation, fundamentalist or not. So she's just incorrect again, Reddit tier understanding of theology, but so popular in the progressive world. I would love to have this person on and we could have more detailed conversation about what Christian theology actually is. Now, are any of these critiques valid in her book? I think we've already probably gone over that. I think that influencer culture is ripe for valid critique. I think that there is, as I've already explained, an issue with conflating Christianity with being a quote unquote trad wife. But I actually think that Burke makes that same mistake in her own kind of malicious way. Is it a good. Is it a good book? It depends on what you mean by good. Is it entertaining? Yeah, it's entertaining. But it gets harder and harder as the book goes on to separate the clear malice in the book from the entertainment. Julia Yost at Compact Magazine wrote this. Now, I didn't notice this when I was listening to it, but it's kind of funny to read. So Julia Yoss at Compact Magazine says Burke can't write, at least not in English. When Natalie rejects minimalism, she defines it as a house absent of stuff. She worries that her hopeful visions sniffed of greed. She lies in bed shoring up energy during that rapey sex scene. The whites of her eyes travel around the room. Okay, that one. Reading that part made me laugh because what does that even mean? You're. The whites of your eyes travel in the room. Okay. Elsewhere, Nanny's described as, quote, looking up at us with a cool, unblinking stare, like a cat blinking lazily out from their sunlit perch. Unblinking, like a cat blinking. So there are always going to be critiques of how fiction writers write. Again, listening to it, I thought it was very, very listenable. In conclusion, when it comes to social media and performance, one thing I will say, and that we've talked about a lot. Is that what you project on social media should be who you are in real life. And obviously you should never be lying, period. Certainly you shouldn't be lying for followers or lying for profit. That part is actually true. Is this representation or this critique of deception and influencer culture indicative of all, quote, unquote, trad influencers? I don't know. But are trad influencers synonymous with conservative Christians who love being moms and make their own sourdough? Absolutely not. I don't think that Burke understands the nuances and the reality of Christianity. And that, to me, is why this book wasn't as effective as she thinks it is. I know she said that it's supposed to be hyperbole, but it is only hyperbole because her beliefs about what conservatives believe, what Republicans believe, what Christians believe, are also hyperbole and incorrect. If she had a real understanding of the theology and the belief systems and the culture that is at work within evangelicals, even within lds or within, you know, traditional Catholics, then I think she actually would have been able to write a better, more resonant and more relatable book. But, you know, this is catnip for people who love the Handmaid's Tale. Like this is catnip for progressives. It confirms all of their assumptions that everyone who takes the Bible seriously is basically, you know, the same as a radical Muslim and that we're trying to take the country back and that we're trying to bring everyone into our backward ideology. So if you believe that, then you are going to love this book because it confirms your faulty assumptions. But if you are not someone who wants to be kind of like, sucked into the darkness of this caricature, then I just, I wouldn't recommend it. It's not entertaining enough to put that to the side. Um, all right, let us. You know what, we're going to go ahead and answer some voicemails. We were going to talk about this whole trend on Etsy and witchcraft and things like that. We've talked about that some. We'll table that because I do think it's interesting. There are some developments there and we'll talk about that soon. But let's go ahead and move on to voicemails and I'll answer some of the questions that you guys have. Let me go ahead and pause. Let me tell you about our next sponsor, and that is Patriot Mobile. So, so many brands today claim to stand for American values, but what does that even mean? Are there. Are they putting their money where their mouth is? Do they really care that is not the case with Patriot Mobile and that you never have to wonder if it's genuine. They really care about the first and second amendment, the sanctity of life and they are donating to causes that advance these missions. So many times we're giving money to companies that are actively fighting against the things we believe in. That won't happen if you switch to Patriot Mobile. They will make sure that the switching is easy and that you get great coverage. They've got premium priority nationwide service on any of the three major US networks. They've got a 100% US based customer support team. Go to patriot mobile.com/ali. You'll get a free month of service when you use my link patriotmobile.com Alli. All right, let's play voicemail1
- [48:20]
Caller
hi. So my husband is about to be deployed for the first time with two little boys. We have two little boys, three and 10 months and he's gonna be gone for 11 months. And I'm just looking for some encouragement for me how to encourage him and how to keep myself grounded while I'm running around with two little boys. But I want to grow and I want to go be a good mom and it just feels really overwhelming. And I would love to just hear some of your scripture recommendations. Thank you.
- [49:06]
Ally
Thank you so much for sending this voicemail and just thank you to your husband for his sacrifice. And you are also making your own sacrifice because you know, no one wants to be parenting on their own. Not only are you parenting on your own and managing all of those responsibilities and trying to juggle all of the million things that you've got going on, get enough sleep, take care of yourself, not only feed your kids, but entertain them. I know that they've got a lot of energy and also be a good church member and a good neighbor and a good friend and all of these things. And so it is impossible to do everything perf perfectly. So just know that, that you are not held to a standard of perfection. Your job every single day, just like all of us is to do the next right thing in faith, with excellence and for the glory of God. And that doesn't look the same as me or your neighbor or someone else. Do the next right thing in faith, with excellence and for the glory of God. Just focus on that. You can't focus on, okay, what is it going to look like in 11 months? What is it going to look like six months from now? How am I going to make Christmas special? What are we going to do for Halloween? How Am I going to handle all of this? All of the things that you might be thinking about, that's not yours to carry right now. That is not your burden. Jesus says, tomorrow will worry about itself. Sufficient for today is its own. Its own trouble. And really, I would say, like, sufficient for its moment is its own trouble. And so just do the next right thing. That's changing a diaper, that's making those sandwiches, that's listening to the Bible when you can't sit down for an hour by yourself and read it, that's saying a prayer when maybe you didn't have time to journal that morning. And then I would say something that came to mind. I remember before I even met my husband, I had a journal that, you know, I wrote prayers for him and I wrote thoughts that I had about, like, what he could be doing and what I wanted the Lord to be doing in his heart and doing in his life. And that was a way of me kind of redeeming the time that I didn't get to spend with him, that I didn't know him, and building up the anticipation for meeting him one day. And it's really cool to be able to look back and to look at those journals and say, wow, like, the Lord was really working through those, even though I didn't know what was going on. And I'm not trying to put another thing on your plate, on your list, list of tasks, but I just wonder if you could write down a sentence, a paragraph, maybe a page every day in prayer for your husband, a letter to your husband. I know you can't talk to him every day. You don't always know what to pray for. But I think that is a way of counting down the days and of doing something useful with that time that you're not able to interact with them. Also, if you are not part of a local church, be a part of a local church and ask for help. Like, I guarantee you, there are women, older women, single women, you know, aunts, uncle, uncles, grandmothers who are in your church who would love to come over and help, who would love to watch your kids. So you can go on a walk or you can, you know, go get coffee or something like that. You do need that time and rely on your friends, rely on family, rely on fellow church members for help, because you do need that. We were not made to do anything alone, especially motherhood. And your boys are going to remember that you were present, that you made life fun and sweet and nourishing for them even when their dad was gone. Our kids don't hold us to a standard of perfection and neither does the perfect God of the universe. So you're good. And again, thank you for your sacrifice and especially for everything that your husband is laying down on the line. Just appreciate y' all so much. Um, all right, I want to get into this question about children's ministry and the recent change in the Southern Baptist Convention and what it means for that. I do have one more sponsor, so let me read that before we get to our last voicemail. And that is Good Ranchers. All right, great Father's Day gift for your dad. Get them a box of Good Ranchers meat. Whatever kind of steak, beef, chicken, seafood, bacon, hot dogs they like. Go ahead and get it for your husband or your dad or your father in law or the father figure in your life. Make sure they have a box of all Good Ranchers meat. This is such a unique gift, a gift that they'll actually use. It'll show up on dry ice to their front door and they can put what they don't use in the freezer. And everyone likes a freezer full of all American meat. 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- [54:10]
Caller
Hi Ally, this is Abriel. I listened to your message on the SBC and Al Muller and I just wondered because you were talking about women pastors, which I pretty much align. I think I align with your point of view on that completely. I just am curious what you think about people or women be called pastors over like a children's ministry because like my church has women women's pastors, but they're just a children ministry. And that to me seems a little more like maybe lenient, I don't know. But just curious your thoughts on that. Thanks, bye.
- [55:04]
Ally
Yes, I, I don't think that it's an accurate title for people in that role. Pastor is shepherd leader of the church. And even in that role of being the head of a women's ministry or head of the children's ministry, I still see the pastor of the church as the, the shepherd of that flock and. But I'm not saying that functionally that church is out of step with the Southern Baptist Convention. If those women are not exercising authority over a man in the local church, then I'm not as concerned about the title. I just think the title doesn't exactly fit with the function of those roles to me. To me. Now maybe some people agree, disagree with me. I don't think that's a reason to leave the church. I really think it matters what those positions are, what they are doing, how they are functioning, what authority is being exercised. Women having authority and teaching authority over other women and over children within the church, of course, still under submission to the head pastor. And his leadership, I think is totally in alignment with scripture. So yeah, I'd be interested to understand the why. Like my church doesn't call the women and children's or women's and women's ministry pastors. And so I'd be curious to kind of know the why, the thought behind that. But again, I don't think that's enough to be a deal breaker unless you are seeing some kind of exercise authority of authority by these women that don't seem to be in alignment with scripture. All right, I hope that's helpful. I hope that's that adds some clarity. Let me know what you thought about yesteryear if you read it. If you're planning on going to see the movie, spoiler I'm probably not. I'm probably not going to see the movie, just FYI. We'll see. All right, that's all we got time for today. We will be back here on Wednesday.