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Visit samsclub.com yes, and for details. Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist. And I am joined today by the good Dr. Jared Stacy, theologian and ethicist and former pastor of to evangelical churches in New Orleans and the D.C. area. And Jared, you've got a book coming out, Reality in How Conspiracy Theory Became an Evangelical Crisis. So the chances that I was not gonna have you on to talk about this have always been quite low. There was a side bet fair market going.
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A
I was gonna say, yeah, you should have told me. I would've been on Polymarket with that.
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B
Yeah, we could have done some insider trading and made a few quick crypto bucks. Okay, so I want some listeners who've been with me for a while from the you have permission days will be like, Dan, I do feel like I've seen this topic come up before and you're right, you have. Astute listener. I've covered conspiracy theories and with some connection to evangelicalism three times in the last seven years of doing this podcast, but I haven't done any in almost three, almost three years since August of 23. I will put links to those episodes. They're episodes 74, 100 and 207. 100 is the one I'd like to highlight. That's like a history of the topic with Sam Perry, who's a very respected scholar in that field. So we're not going to do like a deep dive of that history, but we will talk a little bit about it to sort of set up our conversation. Jared, and then the other thing I want to mention is that you were recently on the Bible for Normal People podcast, and I know that we share a lot of listeners with them, so we're going to attempt to sort of hit different topics. I think theirs will probably be released sooner, kind of closer to your book release date in mid March, so listeners can find that. And we're going to really try not to do too much double dipping there. And then people can get a nice broader sense of what you're doing up to. I love and appreciate Pete and Jared, so I'm sure that'll be a great conversation as well. So that's just a little throat clearing up top. Let's start here. Jared, briefly, what is a conspiracy theory? How is it different from an actual conspiracy?
- [04:02]
A
Yeah, so for listeners, I mean, right now we're. This, this will be released probably a little bit past, you know, where we're having this conversation. So sometimes a week feels like 10 years. So just for listeners, we are, we are having this conversation just about a week after the second drop of Epstein Files. And so the discourse right now is a lot of, hey, like the conspiracy theories were all true. And so I want to contextualize this answer. You know, I've given formal definitions before, and usually that formal definition sounds something like it's, it's a storytelling act, right. That contains and claims to reveal hidden truths, hidden fact claims. But those claims are always set in a story. That implies usually some sort of battle, some sort of struggle beyond just offering the interpretation of an event. And so when you look at the classic sort of conspiracy theories, jfk, we didn't land on the moon. You know, those are all tied to a particular event. You know, November 22, 1963. Was there someone on the grassy knoll? Yes or no. But the more that you sort of unpack that story, there's a lot of implications beyond just that day about how the world works, about good, about evil, and about how power is exercised. And so I start there. This is this sort of a formal definition? Yeah, it's, it's not just a collection of facts. It's a storytelling act that implies a struggle beyond itself. And you asked the question, though, like, what. What makes it different than, you know, an actual account of stuff going down? And. And that's the question that we're struggling with right now, because Epstein and a lot of the new evidence and facts that are coming out about his network of sex trafficking that involved an enormous amount of aggregate power. So to, you know, I'm going to define that word so that, you know, I want to look it up. I did before I got on here. I just want to make sure I'm using it right. You know, when we talk about aggregate power, we're talking about power that draws its sources from different streams. Right. Different ways of exercising power. And when you look at Epstein's network, yeah, it involved intelligence communities, it involved politicians, it involved the nation state, it involved finance, all of these things. So for those who are listening and looking at the revelations of these files, it may give us this sense of, well, hey, shoot. Conspiracy theories are actually true. And it's actually a perfect way to distinguish conspiracy theory from actual analytic accounts of material power. And the way that I would describe this difference is just by introducing this claim that conspiracy theories are way too simplistic, they're way too reductionistic. They're like a caricature of the very strange, weird, and also slow reality that we've found ourselves in. And so the rush to say, oh, you know, look at everything that Epstein was involved in, the conspiracy theories were right, really ignores the central part of QAnon. And a lot of the claims that initially arose to sort of interpret who Epstein was and what he was doing. And let's. So let's remember, and then we'll be able to distinguish this. The, the. The QAnon conspiracy theory not only claimed that there was a cabal of sex trafficking elites at the heart of the US Government, but that Donald Trump was the one who could. Who could save it and who could save them. And so that's a fundamental inversion of the reality that we're now coping with. And that that's. That's how conspiracy theory function. It takes things that we're vaguely aware of and also of no one that I'm aware of who's talking about sex trafficking denies that it's a material reality, but the way that. That got set into a story, and we're seeing the effects of the danger of conspiracism right now, because those who imbibed it in various ways through the MAGA movement are those who are willing to overlook or excuse the fact that Donald Trump was mentioned over 38,000 times in these files. And so that's the difference. And so rejecting conspiracy theory as a way to narrate our world doesn't mean we have to deny the way that power aggregates itself, the way that it consolidates, the way that it operates in secrecy. And here's, I think, the main sort of existential difference when we get to narrate that, when are we aware enough to be able to say for sure, hey, this is how things happen, this is what's gone down.
- [09:01]
B
So contrasting, like the, the end of a months long investigation by multiple credible, you know, law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies presenting their collected findings to the Senate is different than we get to make that claim because we watched a really convincing YouTuber, you know what I mean? Right. Like those are different levels of confidence about the claims. Right.
- [09:32]
A
And that's exactly it. I mean, for readers who want to acknowledge, and I think people are open to this now maybe more than ever, that our ability to kind of pierce the veil of history and kind of see how things really went down is always really difficult to do. And it's always by looking back where we're able to analyze and able to see more variables than perhaps were immediately available. And there's a psychological angle to this too, of why conspiracy theory is more immediately attractive. And this is where you sit. Is that the idea that conspiracy theorizing as a verb, the act of telling a conspiracy theory is very attractive to people who perceive themselves as persecuted or actually are persecuted. So, you know, this is looking specifically at even the book of revelation in the Bible as a sort of apocalyptic way of interpreting, like, we've been kicked out of our synagogue, we've been marginalized from participation in Roman society and the empire at large. How do we narrate this? How do we make sense of it? Right. There's a way that Christian faith has always attempted to narrate the world and its place in it a little bit differently than the world around it. And oftentimes that's uncritically embraced as a sort of license to embrace a conspiracy theory. And in the book I talk about how that sort of uncritical association gives a theological charge to conspiracy theories that sort of evacuates the ground to establish the material credibility of, of whatever theory you're spinning. It says, well, you know, I don't really have to do it because, well, I'm a Christian and I have the mind of Christ. Right. I've heard, I've heard that before and it's just very uncritical, but it's also very powerful because you, you kind of keep yourself from fact checking activisms, which can be problematic and can be biased, sure. But they're entirely set apart when the conspiracy theory kind of becomes a malformed extension of, of Christian theology and that act of narrating your time as a Christian. And so there's a lot that we could go in there, but we're still talking about distinguishing conspiracy theory from material reality and from things that happen that we can't explain, that aren't readily available. And just to give listeners maybe a foothold for this conversation as we keep going, I point people a lot of times and I talk about it in the book. You know, there is a world of shadow, there is a world of clandestine, conspiratorial, aggregate power that often defies our ability to narrate it because we, we, A, we just don't know about it, we're not in the room where it happens. And, and B, because we don't have all the variables. And a great, a great example of this, not just Epstein, but back in the 1940s during the Third Reich, there was a meeting called between a very small number of select German officials and it was called the Vonsi conference. And over maybe two hours in a room, these men plan the logistical architecture for the Holocaust. Right. And so that in some ways is a, an evidenced, very clear cut definition of a conspiracy. Right? Like that materially, that is a conspiracy. It's a group of people conspiring to commit a crime. And that's, that's that. But there's this debate ongoing about how we deal with a conspiracy theory. Right. Is it just an interpretation of an event that cites a conspiracy as the chief cause or is it something more? And I'm kind of on the side of saying it's something more because it's telling a broader story.
- [13:25]
B
It's also the malleability that you talked about with like Trump's involvement in Epstein, for instance. I think that that shows that for instance, QAnon, it's not a stable set of claims. Yeah, I mean, is that one way to distinguish a conspiracy theory from a theory about a conspiracy is that if I am like, for instance, there's, you know, this latest Epstein drop, it is unfortunate we're recording this like one week after and this is gonna come out like two months after or whatever. So there's gonna be a lot more known about the 3 million documents or whatever. But for instance, I saw that one of the principals at a law firm that did one of those high profile settlements with the Trump administration is mentioned in a bunch of these emails in pretty unflattering ways or whatever. So it's a reasonable question to say, huh? Given that Trump and his DOJ was in charge of whatever Epstein files there were at the time of that settlement, might that have been a motivator for this partner at this law firm? Right. And you could sort of say, I have a theory that it did or that it didn't. And there is a conspiratorial angle to that. Whether or not that's actually to cover up a crime that was committed that there is evidence of, again, hard to say. But, like the Trump thing, Trump QAnon thing is interesting because. Yeah, it's sort of like the conspiracy theory itself of QAnon could survive any number of specific setbacks of certain claims being disproven. Yeah. So, oh, well, Trump's the one who's gonna save it. Well, okay, maybe now Trump actually can't save it, and maybe some QAnon ers will stick with it and turn on Trump and others won't, but they'll retain certain aspects of it. Because I almost want to say it's not so much a theory, it's a lifestyle. Right. It becomes a part of your identity and your interpretive grid of seeing the world. And then one other thing while we're on that. While we're on QAnon that I wanted to mention was, you know, also, QAnon didn't just say that there are a handful of elites who are engaging in sex with minors coercively involving human trafficking, but it also made claims to its core believers that those people were sacrificing babies and that they were harvesting adrenochrome from children's veins to vampirically help them live longer or whatever. So if somebody says, wow, turns out that all the QAnonors were right, it's like, well, if what you mean is that they were right, that the most publicly narcissistic man in recent memory might want to use his power to cover up evidence of wrongdoing, and we have a lot of evidence of wrongdoing already in this person's life, then sure, they were right, but they weren't right. I don't think about the babies and the adrenochrome and Pizzagate. And so we also have to be like, what does this. You know, it just. It takes work. It takes sort of mental work, a little bit of Intellectual humility, a little bit of, you know, holding our horses and that. That will produce better results. But that is costly. One of the costs is it. It costs you whatever the benefit was of having the explanation be so simple.
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A
Right.
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B
Like, that's one of the real values.
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A
Yeah. And what you're talking about, another word for it, the simplicity that we're talking about survives several setbacks. I love how you frame that. And it. So it's. It is a fluid epistemology for listeners. You, you know, and you've experienced this when you're trying to argue data and facts. And the goalpost keeps moving, right? Like it just. It just can't be proven wrong. It just can't be disproven because it's always malleable, always molding itself to whatever vacuum, to whatever space it's allowed to continue to sustain itself. And it's always peering just beyond that as a way of saying, well, this is coming, whether it's a terminal event. And you talk about the stability, Dan. And I think that when we look back at 2020 and January 6th and 2021, you know, it was this sense that the election was stolen, right. A conspiracy theory that erupted into real material violence. And so that has always sort of been part of my critique of conspiracism is that as an ethicist, it doesn't actually provide us with the necessary grounds for moral action. So if we're looking back at like, the original sort of source and the etymology for our word ethos, where we get ethics or ethos from, it was a Greek term for stable. Right. Is where they kept their animals. And so it involved the sort of stability necessary for moral reasoning. Insofar as, like, stories have a huge part to play, I'm arguing not just facts, but a huge part to play stories in developing our moral imagination and our sense of responsibility to that. Conspiracy theories are a toxic, radioactive storytelling element. And so they fail on several fronts. And right here it's because they can be counted on to constantly move the goalposts. It never really pins anything down. And so again, convenient, inconvenient facts or convenient fictions, which is going to win out in that scenario. It's always going to be the convenient fiction that maybe one day will. Will have the semblance of fact to it. And that's. I think that's probably what the sparks really fly here at this tension point, because it's like, no. Qanon was. Was not right when it's. When it's rendered as a story. There may be certain claims that come to be representative imperfectly of material reality. But to say wholesale, oh my gosh, the conspiracy theorists were right. And maybe the last nail in the coffin to mention here is that while we can't say for certain from these files, there is a lot to suggest that QAnon itself was engineered. It wasn't just some organic meme joke that that took off. It wasn't. You know, it was, it may have been engineered in that sense, but again, the whole point is saying that we can't know. And so there's nothing that we can really do to base action off of, you know, analytical speculation that's, that's beyond us. And my work, especially in the book, is geared towards offering Christians particularly, but also gesturing towards, hey, I think if, if the church, if Christians can quote unquote, like adopt this posture and get this right, I actually think one of the outcomes of that is that we get a common world, that democracy and that kind of all may flow out of some of these things that I'm talking about that are kind of bound up in Christian faith. But that's not an exclusive claim either in the sense that we're all trying to answer these questions together and we're all trying to move forward together into a space where political action is possible. And I do think that that Christian faith, understood in that way, like asks a different set of questions that can be beneficial to the process of democracy, even if, you know, we're looking at each other. Well, I'm a non Christian. What stakes do I have in that? I'm trying to show in the book. Well, you do have stakes in this. Not necessarily stakes about whether or not you'll be a Christian, but stakes about if we're going to live together, then we do have a shared stake in this. Our common humanity begins from that point.
- [22:00]
B
I want to situate this in some stuff that I have been working on recently and doing episodes on, which is this existential psychology type stuff which I've been talking about ad nauseam. I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but it's such a nice tie in that I feel like I have to make it and then I'll be curious what you think and then we can move on. One of the ideas in the existential psychology and actually this comes from philosophy that I find really helpful. And there's an entire episode on this. I don't know which of these will come out first, so I won't repeat myself too much. But this idea of boundary situations, this is the concept from Carl Jaspers, who is an existentialist philosopher. And these are individual or collective times. And in this case it's the collective that matters when our ways of understanding the world can no longer do the kind of explanatory work that they used to do, which organically makes us feel anxious, unmoored, sort of floating. And there is empirical evidence that conspiratorial thinking increases during large scale events like this. This type of finding has been studied across like pandemics like Covid and Ebola, the aftermath of terrorist attacks, economic recessions, rapid political destabilization in certain countries, technological upheavals. Right, you get the idea. And I think that we are going through at least two or three ongoing boundary situations right now in 2026, you know, the last 10 years in America anyway, a lot of political, social, sort of norm upheavals. Like I thought we all agreed on this. I thought government wasn't allowed to do that. I thought whatever. I thought if I explained this to somebody who knew me, we could find common ground. But the way that media has fractured around sociopolitics and the way it's changed our way of sort of thinking and knowing has cut off access to people that we used to have access to. And I think that AI, the expansion of AI is an ongoing boundary situation. Okay, what makes a human unique and creative? How much is this going to destabilize the economy or my job? You could maybe count climate change, it's a little harder because it's so such a long time horizon. Covid was definitely a boundary situation for a year or two there. Millions of people dying globally in the first ever like proper global pandemic because of international travel. Right. So this stuff is going on and that naturally produces anxiety in us. Right. And that natural anxiety might for many people make a more simplistic, straightforward conspiracy theory type of thinking more appealing. And there's also been work on this. So for instance, there's like a big psychological review paper from 2017 called the Psychology of Conspiracy Theories. And this is a kind of a consensus type of a paper. And they argue that conspiracy beliefs are driven by needs for certainty and explanation. Okay, so imagine I used to have an explanation that's not there anymore, needing for a sense of control and security. I feel out of control. I feel like I don't have any security need for belonging and for positive identity. Oh, I'm on the side of the good people who are fighting this epic battle. Right. And by the way, people are, I'm sure Listeners are already drawing connections to, like, evangelicalism and various conservative religious ways of seeing the world.
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A
World.
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B
Right. But one thing I like about framing it that way is it's not victim blaming. In a sense. We have real agency. We make choices, we are responsible for our choices. But when it comes to things like Covid and political norms and all that stuff, we are also victims. We are victims of larger forces that we have no control over or extremely little control over, you know, in the massive aggregate. Like, you know, I guess my clicks will support CNN or Fox, but like, you know, not really responsible for what Rupert Murdoch has chosen. And so I do like that. That's sort of like saying, hey, here's an understandable, strongly felt natural need that people are going to have at some times more than others. And since we know it's sometimes more than others, we know it's not like just a stable personality trait. I do want to also talk about personality traits because I think that matters here. Cognitive closure, things like this, I think are relevant. Need for cognitive closure, need for things to sort of wrap up. But there's also a lot that's way beyond our control. And I do want to talk about how an existential therapist would apply that, like what to do about that. But I just wanted to throw that concept out there and get your take.
- [27:06]
A
Yeah, no, I'm. So I'm tracking with you for readers who kind of want to know the work behind this conversation. You know, I'm fine putting my cards on the table. I kind of came into existentialism through the theological backdoor, through Karl Barth and a lot of those who've worked with Kierkegaard and then Bonhoeffer. So there was this whole theological conversation in Europe in the 1930s and 40s and even, even prior to that where, you know, this, this theological reception of existentialism, critical in some points, constructive on others. And so that was. That was my way into this conversation and particularly picking up with Camus and his sort of existential, you know, offerings in modernity. And then I'll kind of put Jacques Galul as sort of the cherry on top with that. And he, to your point, Jacques Elul was a sociologist and also a lay theologian. And so he gave us a lot of the initial work on propaganda in mass societies. He sort of offered an analysis of what he would call technique. So we would just kind of call it civilization. But he depicted and described the ways that, you know, a spectacle of images and management and techniques that have all worked together to provide us with this semblance of what we've called order. And he talks about conspiracy theory as sort of a feature of mass society. And so I want to connect kind of where my work's living with this psychological seat at the table that you have, because I think there's a lot that happens in this sort of catalytic reaction, particularly here when we're talking about the idea of victim blaming, right? And I hear this a lot because my work does focus. I was raised in evangelical spaces, right? So like, when I'm talking about white evangelicals, I'm not really talking about a pinata. I'm talking about people I went to school with, people I went to church with, people who I still have relationships with. And I cannot destroy my past, right? So this is concrete. But people ask, you know, well, why, you know, why are you. Why are you beating this pinata? Why. Why are you just sort of like punching down at white evangelicals? And this is where I get to say maybe a couple things about conspiracy theories is at first, for all the reasons you've described and then some, conspiracy theory doesn't need to be understood primarily as a pathological or clinical condition. And that's often what a lot of frustration with conspiracy theory is sort of given in popular discourse. Oh, you know, oh, they're crazy. They're just crazy. And we feel that existentially, we feel that personally, but it's really not helpful. And the second thing is that really, when you look across the political history of the United States, conspiracy theories everywhere, there is no ideological headquarters for this is. Oh, like the right does it more. No, it's just that they, the right and the left, host their different versions of conspiratorial explanations of events based on their ideological commitments.
- [30:06]
B
Here is a story I surely have told. And I won't name the band, but we played some shows a little later. So I was in. Jared, I was in this emo band in my 20s, a lifetime ago now. And we did some.
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A
I'm gonna do a Google deep dive on this.
- [30:24]
B
I mean, yeah, we were a medium to good emo pop band in the 2000s called Shellywood. We played some shows. Later we broke up and we did a few rounds of shows and played with a bunch of bands. So I won't name which band this was, but there was like a. There were a couple members of this band that we played with about 10 years ago and we were chatting backstage and these were like very left wing kind of guys. These, you know, there's like, you know, punk, metal, hardcore, anarchy, adjacent, whatever, and they were. And they got into some, like, deep conspiracy theory stuff. And I was like, oh, that's right. Like, oh, I remember this from growing up on punk rock. Like, there is a kind of a naive, simplistic thinking on the left as well. It's not like, having its day right now, but in, like, the 80s, in the Reagan era, there was probably a lot more of that going on in that subculture. For instance, that if I had been alive and old enough to appreciate it, even from some of the bands that I love today, like, if I actually sat them down and asked them what they thought was going on and global geopolitics, I would not be convinced by their answers now in my 40s. So, yeah, it does exist across that spectrum.
- [31:49]
A
And so let's bring those together. And to your point, I just. One of my favorite things to do to kind of bring this up is just to remind people that in the not so distant past, the concept of a deep state originated on the American left. It did not originate on the American right. The American right was all, hey, Eisenhower is a great president and we don't need. Well, don't listen to him when he talks about the military industrial complex and the fusion of the intelligence community with the national security apparatus and the national security state. No, it's all great. We're going to win the Cold War and we're all one nation under God. It's great. And the American left was saying, no, that we have a deep state. We have a material military industrial complex that is enmeshing itself into government. That is not a conspiracy theory, but the way that it sort of trickles down into a reductionary, you know, very much captured by art and music, it can become that. It can become a referential point for a set of commitments that may represent material aspects, but when they actually come together to tell a story, they're. They're wildly distorting of what might really be going on or what we could really reasonably claim or say. And so to bring all these together as to, you know, okay, well, if it's. If it's. We're not to listen. We are not charting like a middle ground between ideologies here. We're not inviting. You know, in my work, though, I
- [33:14]
B
am regularly criticized as if that is my goal, is just to find the center.
- [33:21]
A
Yeah, right. Wouldn't that be nice? No, there's no such thing as that. And so what. But what we are doing is kind of getting to the heart of things. And we've danced around this for a while, and I think there's two big things to mention when it comes. Comes to, you know, taking this psychological existentialism and saying, hey, this is something that we're all imbibing. Well, why is that? And I'm gonna. I'm gonna make kind of two claims here, really big claims. And the first is that it's modernity, okay? So we, We. We are.
- [33:48]
B
It's modernity, stupid. That's what you mean.
- [33:52]
A
We conceive of ourselves as particular sorts of people because of the way that modernity has offered an account of causality. Right. And so deep within our American psyche is this notion that we're, well, we're individuals. Our Secretary of Defense, who wants to be known as the Secretary of War, and I will not give him that
- [34:11]
B
privilege, call him Jost, our Secretary of Defense.
- [34:14]
A
Yeah, yeah, there you go. You know, he might say, you know, that we are the nation who conquered the west, right? But also Cormac McCarthy might say, you need to revise that and go read Blood Meridian. But all of that to say we as Americans, in our psyche, as white Americans, tend to conceive of ourselves as individuals whose ability to conquer is fundamentally tied up in this very direct idea of causality that when I make a decision, when I make a choice, that it immediately does what it's supposed to do out in the world. We don't have a lot of room for complexity in that account of causality.
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B
It's naive, right? It's like a naive account in the psychological way, but also in the, like, literal sense. It imagines fewer variables.
- [35:02]
A
Exactly. And so I'm appealing here to the work of Timothy Melley, who has this great, great account of post war conspiracism in America. And what he essentially, he draws it out of modernity, what he calls conspiracism is an eruption of agency panic is how he talks about it. And I talk about this in the book a little bit because the way that he talks about conspiracism is not so much an ideological bent, but also he talks about it in the way that this is how modern people cope with an individualistic account of social worlds that is failing. They reimagine the world back in individualistic terms as a way to conserve their account of individual agency. We want to believe, deep down, because we're modern people, that the world works the way that we think it does. And causality is a huge, huge reality or a huge, huge account that fuels conspiracism. But the other one, from an economic, material angle is capitalism is the way that capitalist societies render individuals and also discuss and talk about, you know, and so the ways that an evangelicalism has sort of embraced and imbibed the freedom in a way that is rendered by capitalism in that way. There's a whole nother thing to be said for that. But when we're talking about the logic of how power operates, you know, conspiracy theories can be very much downriver a polluted river, but downriver of embrace of commitments to capitalism, at least in America.
- [36:44]
B
First of all, I gotta always ask this when people talk about capitalism and this becomes a bit of a bugaboo for me, especially in like left leaning, post evangelical spaces where, you know, now we're able to drink. But it's not just the alcohol and weed that are flowing freely. The Marxism is also flowing freely and sometimes not being inspected very closely. So when I talk about capitalism, I mean it in the way I learned it in high school in economic class. Capitalism is, this is a way of exchanging money and goods and services that allows the consumers and their demand for it to set the price as opposed to other systems of bartering systems of central planning systems where, yeah, like there's some other way of setting prices. But when I, when I talk to people like at theology beer camp or I listen to them, that doesn't seem to be what they're saying. When they say capitalism, what I think they mean is unrestrained 10, 10 global corporations, you know, like lubing up the world and fucking it however they please. But, but that's not, I would just say that's like unrestrained capitalism or, or, you know, laissez faire capitalism with, you know, or something like that. But you might be talking about the original form where it's like, how do we conceive of consumers on an Adam Smith capitalism basis? Or what, what are you, what are you talking about? And then make the connection.
- [38:17]
A
That's, that's really helpful. So I would probably go in two directions and the first one being, you know, that I would just refer people to a book I like. I really, I just hate, you know, like, do you want it? It's, it's Surveillance Capitalism and it's her account of kind of showing how capitalism has evolved into the digital space.
- [38:37]
B
Who's the author of that book? Sorry, Zubrov.
- [38:40]
A
Okay. It's an older book, 2015, 2014, and she offers an account of the rise of Google and how Google's own kind of business model sort of fell into the tracks laid by capitalism. So Dan, I really appreciate grounding this in sort of, hey, there's the. There's the theory of capitalism in an economic sense, but then I'm probably talking about it more in a material. This system has become, in our material relations, and, you know, the. So surveillance capitalism and as a way to kind of give an account for how corporations like Google, Palantir, how they see data. And then I'll come at it from the other angle, which is me sort of picking up tracks laid down by Brian Brock, a Christian ethicist working in Aberdeen. In full disclosure, I studied under Brian. So, like, I'm. I'm hopefully learning from, you know, the people I studied under and doing this sort of work that I am. And, and he. He talks about capitalism from the position of waste, which I think is. I think is a very interesting and novel place to start. So not starting from Marxist theory. And, you know, anytime you say something that seems like it, it could be Marxist in some way, right? The, The. The only question that seems to be asked is like, well, why do you hate capitalism? And that's not really a conversation that I'm interested in bringing up, which is why I'm looking at these two. And I think you're spot on in asking this question for clarity.
- [40:10]
B
I might, by the way, be just this very tiny little sliver of people who I am way interested in talking about capitalism. I'm not interested in talking about Marx because I think he was obviously wrong. And every time that his theories have been seriously tried, they really fail. So for me, I'm 42. I might live another 50 years. I'm done. I don't think in the next 50 years, enough is gonna happen that I'm gonna really reappraise Karl Marx. So I'm down for other, like, critiquing it from other perspectives. But actually, unlike a lot of my friends, when I can tell it's Marxist, I get profoundly uninterested in it. And it feels like, you know, I spent too many of my. Too many years of my life being raised evangelical just wasting time on shitty ideas. And that one I feel like I can just kind of set aside. I just pissed off some very loyal listeners. Hi, Bryant. I appreciate you guys. Okay, so.
- [41:13]
A
And I think this is where I think it's so helpful to kind of say that, like, talking about capitalism in the same way that, like, criticism. Very, very real, very, like, on the ground way that. That I don't. I don't need to criticize Obama in order to have my criticism of Trump heard. You know what I mean?
- [41:32]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, I totally Understood your. Your basic point. I just wanted to be silly.
- [41:37]
A
Yeah, yeah. And. And so the. I think both of those perspectives together about, like, the way that capitalism is sort of evolving in our material geopolitical situation to really create a boundary situation. Right. We're watching capitalism evolve in front of us and what's.
- [41:53]
B
And totally agree, totally agree with that
- [41:57]
A
because we're still talking about conspiracy theory and the way that modernity and its concept of individualism, but then also capitalism and its concept of freedom. So let me just make that point really clear. I think. I think especially in the west, our concept of freedom is certainly framed by capitalism. And so we don't need to necessarily get into Marxist theory as a point of commitment to be able to articulate, okay, like, what is this concept of freedom? And because the conspiracy theories that we often are dealing with are positing themselves as, hey, we want to be free, or we want to be free of something, we want to be free for something. And since that content often is generated by and furnished by capitalism, we need to offer an account for that and the way that things are trending and tracking. And I'm pulling from Quinn Slobodian's work where he talks about, you know, we are increasingly heading towards a world where, if you want to talk about aggregate power, where capitalism without democracy is sort of becoming in vogue.
- [42:59]
B
And.
- [43:00]
A
And so that. That sort of notion, I think, is really creating this boundary situation in a. In a material sense. But hopefully this conversation illustrates just how material, just how analytical, and just how slow this sort of thinking and work is compared to a YouTube algorithmic deep dive that suddenly we emerge from saying, oh, I've got it. This is exactly what's on, going, going on. And so I think we're all reckoning with the fact that, man, I love these conversations, like, this idea of exchange of ideas and discourse. This stuff takes time. And yet we are all of us bound up in this digital mediation of reality that is incentivizing not the exchange of ideas, but the flattening of all idea into what content. Yeah.
- [44:04]
B
Consume short YouTube shorts.
- [44:06]
A
Yeah. And so, you know, conspiracy theory just sort of goes with the territory.
- [44:12]
B
I really like that. I really like.
- [44:14]
A
Yeah, so we, you know, I appreciate your point of bringing up the existential. I think we've been able to come full circle on this enough to be able to say this. Let's not reduce this to a left issue or right issue, even though we could say one is having its day. And so to unravel it, we need to come from within that house. That's what my book and my work is about, is saying, look, nobody has been more successful in creating a political movement with power than white evangelicals in this country, in spite of the persecution complex that my people continue to carry and persist in. It's just evangelicalism has been wildly successful, if you're talking about it this way. But why is that? Is it because the hand of God is on this movement? Or is it because we're participating in a generational long story in which white retrenchment economically, socially, politically has always had a Christianity at hand to sanction itself as it becomes an accessory to terror? And that's essentially where my work is emerging, is from within that as a sort of subversive quality of saying, hey, the conspiracy theories that you're sharing inside this house are a window into theological beliefs that will only continue to justify you. Which means, as a Christian, that's not God. And so there's a God that we need to encounter. And a lot of my work is about ripping out the shelter that we've constructed for ourselves and sitting and standing in the uncertainty. And I say this as a Christian because I'm confident that in the midst of that uncertainty is where we encounter a wild, undomesticated God who has worked across history. I mean, that's a claim of faith, and I'm fine naming that for what it is, but there's so much analysis, and maybe I can reduce this into a very short sound bite here that summarizes the length of what we've been going through, is that there's a point in all my work where I really do take seriously the need to offer deep, material, constructive analysis of how we arrived at this moment. But then as a theologian, I'm saying, but what the world doesn't need from the church as analysts alone own, the church is actually given a witness. And so I'm very interested in bridging that gap right between offering helpful analysis for people who are Christian, were Christian, aren't Christian anymore as a way to gesture towards. We live in a common world, and I don't claim to have all the answers while at the same time standing in a church community that for. Is offering a different witness than to, you know, the, the story of Christ and him crucified. It's. It's more about the power to crucify. And the stories that are being sustained and told in that community are, are very clearly to that effect with the stories that, that enable us to take up the power of crucifixion. And, and enact that as a sense of coercion. And. And so I, I'm kind of gesturing towards maybe other horizons for the conversation in our time, but at least listeners will sort of hear where I'm located and situating myself doing this work. And I think that it all collides in the book in ways that I name. This is a very Christian point. Let me make it. And that doesn't have to be made in a coercive way. It's just. I'm doing this as a former evangelical. I'm doing this as someone who's Christianity has been renewed and destroyed multiple times. But how do we walk that path? How do we walk this pilgrimage? And at the end of the day, that's who I am. As much as that's what the work's about.
- [48:00]
B
It makes me mentally kind of go back to the existentialist framework here. And I think I can connect this. So we're talking about these boundary situations, these times that we are currently living in, where all of a sudden up is down, down is up in certain ways, and it's disorienting. What the existentialist though is gonna say is that that is actually what our whole life is always as human beings. And so it's not so much that those are. They are unique situations, but they're unique in that they reveal the fragility of the world, they reveal the human condition. And most of our lives, most of us have, we participate in fairly elaborate ways of pretending that that's not the case in part because it's just not really sustainable. And I think of that with compassion and also include myself in it. So it's not a judgment. Oh, these sheeple all can't handle the truth. That's the way the conspiracy theory theorist might frame that this is compassion. It's like, no, no, no, like deer don't do this because they don't know that they're going to die. And they can't. Like squirrels and trees were not like my father, raised in elementary school, doing nuclear bomb drills under their desk. So that just is going to fucking change you, right?
- [49:30]
A
Yep.
- [49:31]
B
So what they're saying is we take these boundary situations ideally as an opportunity. It is an opportunity to clarify who we really are, what we're about, what we can and can't know. We've been talking a lot about the sort of epistemic problems here, and it's an opportunity to use this natural organic anxiety that comes up that is not pathological. It is a natural response to world events. Ideally, we use that as an invitation to expand our world, to move forward. This often involves connecting with other people across shared values, helping meeting people's needs, and increasing our own sense of meaning in the world. This will be treated. If listeners want, they can listen to that Boundary Situations episode with Kristen where I'll do much more full treatment of this sort of therapeutically, but where it ties in to what you were saying earlier is this idea of agency panic. So there's these moments where we feel like our agency, we don't have as much as we thought. No, no, no, no. Really, we have a lot of agency. Right, right. And this is where I think, as an existentialist, I gotta be there's nuance because this movement is very into responsibility, but within realistic limits. So in some sense we have to rec. These situations help us recognize the small limits of our agency. Right. Like, oh, actually I can't do a whole lot. And rather than freak out and pretend that I can, I should just accept that I can't. There's very little that I can do about any number of things that I might want to change.
- [51:14]
A
Right.
- [51:15]
B
At the same time, I have full responsibility for the choices I make within my sphere of influence. So once I figure out what I can't do, that leaves me with what I can do and I should look at that honestly and not blame that on someone else or some big nefarious forces or whatever. I need to actually take responsibility for that. So there's a way in which that gets inverted around. Like I'm seeing this specifically from some evangelicals just cause those are the sort of conservatives that I have access to. So I'm sure there are others doing other things, but where it's like, well, yeah, for instance, Trump's tactics might be X and Y, but we are dealing with the survival of our civilization. This is an apocalyptic situation. And so we're gonna have to break some eggs to make an omelet. And there's a few questions there. Number one, is it a survival situation? You know, because I don't know if it is. And then number two, it does seem to be. That seems to be a denial of my responsibility. And this is where it really does get nuanced. So like imagine your uncle who posts on Facebook or whatever. He. It's true, he doesn't have agency over what the United States government does and what one vote for one candidate or the other is unlikely to do very much. In fact, it's not really gonna do shit. You know, what he has a responsibility to is his nieces and nephews. He has a responsibility to love the people in his life because we all have a responsibility as human beings to love the individuals in our lives. And if those individuals are coming to us and asking us to reconsider things and they're acting in good faith, even if we disagree with them, it is our responsibility as human beings to look that person in the eye, treat them as a thou, not an it, they are a person, and to attempt within reason to engage that, because that's what mature human beings are responsible for. In almost every theory of ethics, there are a few, you know, pure Nietzschean will to power. You're not responsible to do that, but most of us think we are responsible for, for that. Yeah. I mean, is that I, did I wrap that, did I wrap that around in a way that connected?
- [53:44]
A
And I think like I'm, I'm. It's, it's a great place to go because I think it, it perfectly intersects. I mean, like I said, my, my theological backdoor sort of into and from existentialism. And I think, you know, Bart and his sort of work in church dogmatics is, is kind of set up to make that exact claim from in the faith that the church practices, namely that anytime we think we have some sort of static place to stand that we've created for ourselves is an illusion and maybe even in a Christian sense is idolatry. And so the whole notion that
- [54:31]
B
we
- [54:32]
A
opt for these narratives in order to gain ourselves certainty. And then if the rejoinder to that is, hey, you've never actually had that certainty. Right. If we feel like we're living through this moment, this apocalyptic moment where things are being unveiled, the Christian story kind of enters that and says the revelation, the unveiling of who Jesus is happening from within this as well. And that is a very theological determined point, but it tracks with the sort of existential need to really get at the true nature of things, even if they're drawing and different conclusions about where responsibility is located or where it comes from. There's not one form of Christian ethics. There's many forms of ethics. And then within that umbrella, there's many forms of Christian ethics. Right? And I'm always drawn, really. And maybe this is just a place to locate this sort of conversation too. In the biblical story is the sort of paradigmatic story about idolatry is when, you know, Israel is liberated from Egypt and God calls Moses up into the mountain, there's fire and smoke, and he's been up there for a while. And what do people Do. Well, they do really what any reasonable person and people might do in that situation is to say, well, we need something more. Sure. And the story was always really told in my conservative evangelical church growing up as, you know, like, hey, this is bad. They made, they made God into a calf. And there was threads of, you know, like primitivism in that as like what, what, you know, like, you know, we're not like them, we're civilized. And. But when you realize in the ancient near east, like this was the most comprehensive way of articulating their survival, you know, by, by locating it in this golden calf, that imagery. And most importantly, one of the things that's left out of our telling of this story is just we forget that they named, they ascribed God's name to that calf. So it wasn't just they made a golden idol, it was that they called that golden idol the name that God had revealed himself to be. Which is what. It's a very existential name. I will be what I will be. And so anytime we sort of confine that living God and I say we and I'm referring to the church and to Christians like that, that story is really meant to in some ways serve as an apocalyptic reminder that anytime this, this, anytime we find ourselves in a sense of security or safety that does not come from, from basically a place of uncertainty of like we're held by God or we're held by nothing at all, then, then we have cause to expect an apocalypse to once again shake us, to remember who and who. And that's an entirely Christian way of framing it. But I suppose when I'm tying it to the book, the book has a very provocative and I hope attention grabbing title where people who are Christian or not Christian are going to be able to point and hear Reality and Ruins viscerally. I feel that in my bones. And whether or not you count yourself as a Christian is not really who the book is for, in the sense that I want Christians and non Christians to know this story, to wrestle with what it means to have a common world again. And so in that sense, Reality and Ruins is not just descriptive, but it's also carving out a space to say, yes, this is the world that we are in right now. There is no common way to do politics and we need to face that. And the existentialists and the sort of theological streams that I run in are just kind of saying, yeah, but it's always been this way. Any order has been a semblance of order. Any account of certainty is an illusion. And so Asking these questions of how do we become a people who can live amidst uncertainty? How do we tell the truth amidst so much untruth? And so that's also my attempt at the very end to sort of flip that on its head and say, you know, like, when is reality ever not in ruins? There's this great line from Emily St. John Mandel's book, A Sea of Tranquility, and she has this great line in it where she says, you know, when is the world never not ending? I love the use of that double negative. And she says, you know, what if it's always the end of the world? And I find that to be a very distinctly Christian insight. But it's one that is transferable and expandable and inclusive of the existence that I think we all find ourselves in right now. What if it's just not our time where the world is ending? What if. What if it really is always the end of the world? And for Christians, the intervention I'm trying to perform, at least inside the church, is to recover this notion that any certainty that we're trumpeting out in the political arena with under banners and causes and flags is blinding us to the sort of existential uncertainty that I think the Christian story itself actually cultivates as a form of faithfulness for us. And that need not issue in a sort of coercive call that unless you are like us, you cannot benefit from this way, this people making its way through history. It's a very inclusive call, not a coercive one at all. And so those are just some of the maybe gestures in the book towards people whose relationship with Christianity is not just confused, but people for whom I wouldn't walk in the door of the church because I'm a person of integrity and respecting that and saying, yeah, there's a whole history here that we need to lay bare that in many ways. Well, I don't think it's history's job to justify our decisions. It does offer an explanation for why you may feel that not going to church anymore is the way that you keep your integrity, not the way that you preserve it by walking in. So, yeah, we've gone a whole bunch of different ways with this, and I appreciate you gesturing that really towards, hey, like, what's the big existential picture here? How do existentialists deal with this? Because I think in some ways it helps us give a different perspective that actually in some ways reminds us of our agency again, you know, that people who lived in times that were harder or just as novel in some ways, that we're experiencing right now. We're also in many ways just trying to stumble through the dark. And I think it was St. John of the Cross who called faith a luminous darkness. That would not have made sense to me at my Bible college in my 20s. Right. I don't need a luminous darkness. What are you talking about? I got the light of the word of God, man. I know exactly what it is I'm going to do with my life. Maybe some of this is just getting older. Maybe some of this is just realizing that when conservative evangelicalism said that, you know, hey, you're going to go be a champion for God and change the world, that, that, that was probably some of the worst advice that you could ever give to 20 somethings whose notions of faithfulness were bound up in ideas of success. And I think we're all sort of living on the fumes of a very corrupted fuel for a faith that ultimately I don't think was, was in the God of Jesus Christ. It was in something else.
- [62:12]
B
One thing that I keep wondering, finding myself organically coming back to, is this question of like, whether or to what extent we can call this stuff the same religion.
- [62:26]
A
Yep.
- [62:27]
B
You know, like, obviously there are aesthetic similarities between sort of maga Protestantism and my Protestantism still within Protestantism we both talk about Jesus. But maybe this is the existentialism rubbing off on me where it's like, okay, let's look closer at this. What are the differences? What can I know? What do I think I can know? What do they think they can know? What are the sort of epistemological differences the. Which authorities are we appealing to, like, looking at? Because there's, there's some real. There are obviously just some massive differences. And they're not just, they're like. I think it's easy to think that the differences are political. It's like, oh, I find the ice tactics horrendous and you find them necessary, as in breaking eggs for an omelet or something. But is that what it is? I don't know. I don't like. It feels deeper. It feels. So I'm wondering if you have an answer to that based on the way that people construct reality. And if the sort of study of conspiracy theory has something to say to what are the differences? Where are these, where are these surface level differences stemming from further in.
- [63:57]
A
Yeah, I mean, if people have academic access to the databases, they are more than welcome to go read my dissertation, which is basically an answer to this question of the sort of dogmatic or theological touch points the underbelly of this conspiracism that lends it a sort of instantaneous credibility and authority because it goes on the tracks of. I'm using that analogy a lot, I guess, on this conversation, but goes on the tracks of a lot of the social narratives and the anxiety about social collapse. So give people an example of one of those things. I mean, the very Calvinistic sort of deterministic doctrine of election that is essentially held out as when Scripture talks about God electing people to salvation, that it kind of renders that as well. He says you're saved, and on the other side, he says you're not, and there's nothing you can do about it because I'm God and I decide that doctrine, the way that it was schematically put together, has a social and political history, too. And it's precisely why evangelicals justified slavery by appealing to that doctrine that, hey, you know, at least enslaved people are hearing the gospel, and if they hear the gospel and they've already. They've already been damned, they're justified because they've heard it so great. You know, it was a doctrine that was really fit. The scheme of it was really fit for colonialism and for the racism, the economic racism that went along with it. But I understand, like, it'd be really easy to listen to that and say, yeah, but we're in a different time. Well, Howard Thurman makes that same argument. He was the mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. He made that argument less than a century ago about the states. He wrote it in the fascist masquerade in 1946, and he was appealing to that particular configuration of the doctrine of election. So maybe it's just on me to say in this conversation, there's more than one way theologically to think about this doctrine of election and how God saves people. But very rarely in the speed of American evangelical church life is there time to discern that scheme. But also it's penalized. It's actively discouraged. We go to seminary in a lot of these cases as a sort of institutional rubber stamp. It doesn't mean that the gap between sometimes evangelical academics, people who are in touch with other streams of academia, and then the process of getting your degree and going out and working from a seminary are actually two different conversations, and we don't need to get into that point. But the ways that conspiracies sort of reflect and express some of these theological configurations. And I've given an example of one. But, you know, I. I would look at Ernest Caseman to answer Your question particularly of, like, well, what is this difference and how do we deal with it? You know, Yeah, I can. I can point towards here's. Here's theological configurations. But Caseman wrote he voted for Hitler as a German pastor, but later he realized his error and began to work against it. And later on, he wrote very simplistically, he just said. He summed it up by saying Christ must be greater than our Christianity. And another way of saying that, that I've picked up on and use in the book is just that Jesus delivers us from our Christianity, too. And if we're not willing to sort of put our configurations on the table to be interrogated all the time, then we've sort of hemmed in this process of conversion that if we're really Protestant, right, would say it's ongoing, it's all of life. And of course, evangelicals hear Martin Luther saying all of life is repentance. And while we've sort of reduced repentance to a transaction, to, like, saying something, all right, you know, boom, you know, but. But another way of looking at all of life is conversion. Well, that. That means something more holistic. That means something more expansive and comprehensive. And so I suppose it would be really easy to say, like, these are two different religions. And, and, and. Or it would be really easy to say, well, let's. Let's list out the beliefs and compare. But I do think that we need to be able to have these sort of conversations that engender the sort of crisis that these. These expressions of Christianity are having. I mean, I. I hear this frequently in responses to my work, you know, mainly coming from majority Christians in America for whom, you know, what does it matter to them materially what ICE is doing? It doesn't. It doesn't make a difference. And if I'm honest, if you or me are honest, you and me, just by looking at us, could pass as maga without a question. Right. And so by saying that, we are essentially saying that there's a. An aesthetic to this, that there. There is an opportunity, there's a choice to be made, to sort of make peace at the expense of the consequences that MAGA is unleashing in our country. And I hear it all the time. Why are you attacking Christians? Why are you causing so much disunity? And this is where I think the words of Jesus start to make sense again, right? Where he says, you know, I haven't come to bring peace, but a sword. Now, how do we interpret that, though? Well, we have to interpret it by the fact that Jesus also disarmed Peter, so he's not necessarily talking about. But what he is saying is that Jesus engenders a crisis. And the peacemaking that he talks about I don't think is easily reconciled apart from the truth. And so we're kind of at this point of asking ourselves, well, knowing that there's these maybe categorical differences and analytical differences to this movement and that movement and how they express it, there's also. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but there's also a very live evangelistic moment. And what I mean by that is it's a. It's a moment of confession. It's a moment of crisis where it doesn't matter what beliefs you possessed 10 years ago, what matters is the belief that you, you, you confess right now in this moment. And, and, and that's something that evangelicals in America are. We're not very. We're not good at all in thinking and theology in those terms. But there are others in, in the States who have thought. And I can't think of the name of this pastor who said it, but he was. He was harboring immigrants, undocumented people in his church in the 1980s. I think his name was Sloan. And what he said has stuck with me. He said, the German churches learned too late. It is not enough to resist with confession. We also must confess with resistance. And that really stuck with me. You know, we. We look back a lot to the 1930s as a sort of historical analogy to the present. And Jamar Tisby has been. Been banging this bell as loud as I can remember saying, you don't need to look to the 1930s Germany, you need to look to the 1870s in America that the black church has been articulating theological responses to encroaching fascism or state terror, however you want to materially name it. And I think he's right. I think he's right. And so that way of confessing with resistance and resisting with confession, you'll see those. I think we see those flashpoints all across American history. And so rather, you know, the road going down and saying, let's just say that, yeah, there is a huge difference between the sort of Jesus's versions of Jesus that are on offer. And there's a fundamentally, like. I think this is part of the criticism the Christian story makes is that, yeah, you can always, you can always put the name of God on something. You can always do that. And so the question will be, are we going to be the sort of people in whom. And for whom God is who he says he will be. And we've totally robbed the existential uncertainty from the first commandment that you will have no other God before me. I don't think we realize how perilous that commandment is. And I gestured towards earlier, but the.
- [72:37]
B
You mean because we all assume there's only one God, we're looking with 3,500 years or whatever of hindsight to when that concept roughly emerged within the Israelites eventually got to monotheism. From our perspective, that's like. We think, oh, yeah, well, it should be God and not money and sex and power or whatever. But for them, it was like, no, it's like Yahweh or other gods.
- [73:08]
A
Yeah. Yes. So exactly that. Like, for. For the thousands of years, if we reduce the first commandment to teaching monotheism, we've lost the radical subversive quality of the first commandment, which, which again, it. It. It assumes you still have no other gods before me. It actually assumes there's other gods on offer. And, and yeah, the prophets will pick that up later and, and articulate. These gods are not gods. Those who. Those who. Who fashion them become like them. And yeah, that's, That's. But that's. That's a little further on in the story. And so the assumption of the first commandment is. Yeah, that, that. That we can make God in our image and. And invert it and seize the knowledge of good and evil. And I hope, I think, Dan, by talking this way, I hope maybe that listeners sort of hear one of the major threads that's lying on the ground through my work is really this invitation to re. Enter and participate in the wholeness of the Christian story that is stretched across and draws from the story laid out in the Hebrew scriptures. And the wholeness of that. When ethical deliberation in churches becomes the matter of chapter verse. And you know what? It's not just in churches anymore. Did you see Colbert last night?
- [74:35]
B
I don't watch.
- [74:35]
A
Not that you're watching it regularly.
- [74:37]
B
Someone sent me a reel.
- [74:39]
A
Yeah, someone sent me a reel. And you know what it was? We have to acknowledge that stuff's not happening inside the church anymore. And so Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, put out this entire paper and also talked about it that the Pope is wrong on immigration and here's what the Bible really says. And my friend sent me this reel this morning. I literally watched Stephen Colbert offer a hermeneutical read of Romans 12 and 13 on the late Show. And I'm sitting there watching this and I'm like, this is surreal, but you talk about a moment in which readings of the Scripture are actively colliding and vying not just for our attention, but they're either being shattered and set into other stories, or the story that the scripture tells itself is allowed to give meaning to that. And just to quote Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer said, we no longer read the Bible against ourselves. We only read it for ourselves. That's the difference between Mike Johnson and Stephen Colbert articulating these things.
- [75:55]
B
Here's my last question for you, though. It's a question for you. It's a question for God. For myself, I keep asking as a number or as a percentage by now, after 10 years of this shit with Trump.
- [76:10]
A
Yeah.
- [76:11]
B
Who's left that is interested in that hermeneutical discussion that hasn't already, you know, like, exited? Like, Like, I'm. This is totally anecdotal, and I am not a perfect judge of character or intellect or moral whatever in my life. Everybody who was initially with Trump, that. That at the time was surprising to me. Like, wait, you're like a smart, good person. They're all. They're all done with it by now.
- [76:41]
A
Yeah.
- [76:41]
B
The only people who are left are, like, pretty severely compromised people, intellectually, morally, emotionally, whatever. I realize how judgmental that sounds. I'm uncomfortable with how judgmental that sounds. I would be willing to work with any of those individuals, like, in a therapeutic type context, not the actual ones, because that would be unethical. But not the people I actually know, but they're analog or whatever in therapy. But if someone's coming to therapy, that's because they've recognized that there's a problem. It's essentially a form of confession. Maybe not strictly in the same way, but it's an acknowledgement of. It's a type of repentance. It's a type of turning, saying, I've been doing it this way. I need to try another way. I'm getting to the point that I notice in myself, and I don't know that this is wise, but I'm just picking up on it where it's like, I'm down. I am totally down to talk to anybody about this stuff who wants to come from that repentant attitude, and I will meet them more than halfway. But what I'm noticing is a sort of refusal, and I'm just like, I don't know who's left. I don't know who's left. That a hermeneutic, a scriptural argument, any appeal to concepts of Christianity from anybody who's already been deemed an outsider. Like, is it 2% of evangelicals? Is it 5%? It can't be more than 10 who are legitimately even reachable unless something happens. And I mean, I don't know what, like, am I being. What are you. What's wrong with what I'm saying? Or feel free to disagree with any of that?
- [78:27]
A
Yeah, I mean, at first, I think it's. It's probably helpful for all of us to hear that because I think if we're honest, I mean, I vacillate with those thoughts as well. And it reminds me a lot of, like, Elijah. Right? It's just like, who's left? I mean, my mind immediately went to Bonhoeffer and he wrote this circular letter to his friends called after 10 years. And he wrote it in 1943. So again, like, that's 10 years after Hitler came to power. And there's actually a lot of quotable Bonhoeffer bits in this letter. It's where his famous stupidity is a greater danger to the good than malice. And so it's this really reflection on what hope do we have? What can we reasonably put our hope in or trust in when so many people, even around us, are no longer with us? So I've got it up here. And one of the things that he says, he says every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological, psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. But then. And then right off of that, he. He talks about the danger of this, is what he says. The danger of allowing ourselves to be driven to contempt for humanity is very real. We know very well that we have no right to let this happen and that it would lead us into the most unfruitful relation to human beings. So he. He really talks about, whoever despises another human being will never be able to make anything of him. Nothing of what we despise in another is itself foreign to us.
- [80:25]
B
I don't think I'm talking about despising, though. I think what I'm telling myself that I'm doing, which could be wrong, is accepting reality, trying to look reality in the face and say, the number of people in my life, like, one of them, I've told this story before. One of them was unvaccinated. A former Bible study leader, and now he's dead. And I heard later from a pastor of a couple guys, in my opinion, church congregation, who he spoke with, these former congregants. And they're like, you know what? This is just the way we're gonna play it. We've made our bed. We're gonna not get the vaccine. This is how we're gonna play it. And that just feels like that's what the people are saying, yeah, this is how we're gonna play it. And some people regretted their decision of supporting Hitler, and some people never did. Or I was just posting about the. I was watching a Civil War movie, Glory, the Matthew Broderick film, and thinking about the Lost Cause and Confederate flags. It's like some people after the Civil War said, oh, shit, we were wrong. We were trying to uphold slavery, and we were wrong. But, you know, what has kept going for 150 years is the Lost Cause narrative.
- [81:44]
A
And.
- [81:45]
B
And that is, in a lot of ways, just gonna be more powerful. And so I'm just trying to prepare myself mentally. I hope just being realistic. Evangelicalism is gonna have its own Lost Cause narrative. And when this is all over, once Trump is dead and whatever else has come out or whatever, when 95% of reasonable people will have concluded that that was a bad idea all along, roughly speaking, there will be. There'll just be another one. And it's sort of like. And that's kind of where I'm. What I don't know is like, where do I draw the lines relationally? Do I keep people out of my life based on this, or do I treat them like I treat teenagers, like, what is it? And these are open questions for me. These are open questions for a lot of my clients. How do I relate to adults in my life who have chosen their bed? And both the Christian and the existential therapist in me are 100% clear that the door ought to always remain open for that kind of confession and repentance, and that I be willing to meet them anywhere at any point. That, to me, is just like a deeply held value that aligns with everything within me. But I am starting to think, like, do I need to at least internally make clear what that bar is? Because, like, I'll have conversations where this happens so many times now. I'm in a conversation sometimes this is over text, where you sort of send longer texts. And, like, I will ask a question, and then they will not answer it and ask me three questions. I will answer all three questions, including, I will acknowledge where I differ with the Democratic Party, or I will say, well, I agreed about that, but I think this was a mistake. And then I will say could you answer this question? They will not answer the questions. They will just send me more questions. That to me that's like not a conversation. And I don't think I'm being self righteous. I think if we sent it to some, we took away the names and changed out all the proper names and the ideas and we just said, read this. Are both parties engaging in good faith? I think a neutral observer would say no. One party is engaging in good faith and the other is not. And so that is also a part of calling a spade a spade of acknowledging reality. And I, and I'm just noting sort of autobiographically in real time that that's where a lot of my struggle is, is like what is good faith engagement? What should be in my limited time on this earth, how much time should I spend on non good faith engagement? And how can I, and I truly have no answer to this. Like how can I like kindly offer that and then hold a boundary for myself? Like, like be genuinely open but not just waste my life?
- [84:57]
A
Yeah, you know what I mean. Yeah, I know, I know exactly what you mean. And I've been so. I understand what you're saying. It doesn't come from a place of contempt or despising it. For me, when I'm exhausted it certainly does.
- [85:08]
B
I'm sure when I'm exhausted it does too. I just mean even in my wise mind, sort of, you know, fully awake, not irritable version of myself, I still have these problems.
- [85:19]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, I'm, I think we're both in the same camp and walking down that same path. I think as I think about the work and sort of, okay, not wanting to waste my life right on the expectation that someone else says I was wrong, that a witness. So I'm going to answer this. I mean I think as a Christian that a witness to Jesus Christ is not dependent on the responses to that witness. And, and, and, and I think we can, we can trickle that down to even just our, our interactions. I, I realize that may not be the, the practical answer that people want, but I think it's important to kind of start with the grounds of like where, where does that sort of generosity
- [86:08]
B
come from and what I like that I would just tie it, you know, to make it non religious language like to values. So how do I instantiate the things that matter most to me? And for someone who is a committed Christian, what is my Christian witness? How do I think of that? How am I showing up as Jesus in the world? That's a one to one, right? That's a way that we do that.
- [86:32]
A
And maybe the question we need to start asking that is geared, because that's where Bonhoeffer ends his essay is talking about these are the sorts of people that we're going to need for the future. And he was not kind of positioning himself or his community as like, hey, we're the ones who are. Right? Like, we saw how bad this was all the way through. He actually says, we're worn down. Like, we, this, this time has forced some really difficult decisions on us and we have learned the art of pretense. We have learned, like, and, and he's talking about how it's, it's made them too. It's, it's corroded and corrupted them. And he, then, he gestures towards the future and says, hey, this is the kind of people that we're going to need to be straightforward, simple, honest human beings. And that's compelling to me. But then when I think about the kind of work that I'm doing, the kind of work that you're engaged in, and I think the sort of responsible living, that it's why people are listening to your show. I'm increasingly interested in both asking and answering the question, what sort of work, what sort of life is going to walk into the future that doesn't depend on being vindicated by other people saying that they were wrong? Right? Like, yeah, I don't want to work that basically says, I need evangelicals to continue being wrong about Trump. Right. And by wrong about Trump, I really mean the whole, like, the theological underbelly, all of it.
- [87:57]
B
Like, well, plus, to quote Jesus, you have all that you need. You need evangelicals to continue. They are, they have continued to be. What you're actually, what you're actually saying is you need them to tell you that. Right? Like, you, you actually, like dear listener, you do know they are wrong about Trump. Like, you have all that you need. If that's what you need, you've got it. Let me tell you what I think you're, what I think we mean when we say that is I need the visceral experience of them telling me they've been wrong about Trump, and that's very different. Then I need to know that they're wrong. Yeah, they're fucking obviously wrong about him. Like, come on, this is the simplest lesson of my 42 years on this earth in terms of geopolitics. Was Macron a good prime minister of France? Maybe, maybe not. Is Trump the right person for this moment? No, it's the simplest answer. So that doesn't mean he hasn't done anything good or that nothing good has come from it. I think that's. That would be silly too. I just. But like. Okay, come on. Like, there's a. There's a. There's an elemental version of this question that has been asked and answered. But I think that that shows that it's actually more of a felt. It's. It's a need of an experience that we are feeling. Not. It's not about the truth or falsity. Right.
- [89:19]
A
And. And yeah, and really, I think to that point it's. It's this. These very live questions of relational boundaries and how we relate. I think it sort of draws into focus the need for new or fresh institutions. Right. Like new communities of belonging. And I think in some ways, if I could wrap up with it, the book was really designed as that sort of space creator, right? That, like, hey, this title, Reality in Ruins. Like this experience of pain that we've. We've endured and gone through, and it's changed us as well. The people that the future is going to need are going to be people who are coming together at this point and kind of saying, what do we need to do? How do we discern this? Because whether it's the Lost cause in the 1870s or, you know, one of. One of. I studied under someone who came of age in the 1960s and studied under some of Bonhoeffer's own colleagues. And Germany had a reckoning too, of, oh, all of our college professors were involved in.
- [90:29]
B
The book came up in this boundary situations episode which we've already recorded, as we are recording this, but I don't know when they're coming out. It did happen. And Carl Jaspers, who coined boundary situations, was at the forefront of that. He released a book in 1948 sort of charting things. But do you know, what really happened is mostly ignored for 20 years. And it was their kids in the 60s, sort of some of that global 60s youth movement fervor that actually prompted a more significant German reconciliation. And I think there's a lesson for us in that it took 25 fucking years. And yeah, and that was the Holocaust. That was like literally smokestacks of bodies burning. And that took 25 years to be taken seriously. So let's maybe adjust our expectations, I think.
- [91:18]
A
And so if we're practice, if we're making this practical, I think we're also saying, like, we need to lengthen our horizons. You know, you and me remember a time before Trump. But there are so many who are just now becoming politically active, who do not.
- [91:31]
B
That's a great point.
- [91:32]
A
And so we do, like. I think what we are discovering is that this is the work of our life. And that's a very weird place to, like, actually say that, but because we grew up on nine, 11, right. The war on terror, that was such a focal point and a flashpoint. But we are in so many ways reaping what we sowed in those years. But at the same time, this is something that we're going to have to work with and reckon with for the rest of our lives. And so to your point, I don't know how much we're ever served from a Christian standpoint, that table Jesus shared bread with Judas. And I'm not naming anyone but Judas anyone is Judas but myself. And so I'm kind of sitting here saying, If I, at 20, heard half the things I've shared in this podcast with you, I'd have a whole host of names for myself. And so the reserving the right to disagree with ourselves, especially in the past. And I think one of the things that I'm really concerned with is the way that putting our views out on digital spaces makes it really hard for us to change our minds, because we feel like we need to keep some consistency with what we said 10 years ago.
- [92:45]
B
Very solid psychological research that supports that view, that a publicly held view is much harder to change than a privately held view. And that's what. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fifteen years. Yeah, that's. So that's. That's. That's tough. Yeah, that's not helping. The entrenchment and calcification and polarization stuff. Yeah.
- [93:06]
A
So we can be those people to do it. We can. I'll just say we can be those people who just boldly say, like, I'm going to disagree with what I said in this video. I mean, I. It'd be really cool to see Stitch videos of us doing that to ourselves rather than other people. I mean, this is getting hypothetical, but my whole point, if I can gesture this to the listeners.
- [93:22]
B
Stitch incoming. But it's only old versions of you. Dude, that's a great idea. That reminds me of a podcast I'll never make, but that. I think it's one of my funnier ideas to do a podcast called yes, Regrets. And actually, but the artwork. I know I've said this before because the artwork would be like. If you've ever seen a photo, it's pre AI. This must be real. Somebody got a tattoo at one point that said no regrets. But it was spelled no regerts. Yeah, I've seen that. So that would be the artwork of yes, regrets. And you would just say, yeah, yeah, I have regrets. These are them. And what did I learn from it? Maybe I'll do some version of it someday. I think it's clever and would be really interesting of people talking about how they change their minds on things. But yeah, that's a really funny idea to do a stitch. Incoming. But it's only you or like people you were friends with and agreed with. You know, it's like just self deprecating and it's about growth. Dude. That's a good idea, Jared.
- [94:19]
A
Well, we verbally process that now I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board and be like, man, like I know that there's some like Facebook memories way back where I was articulating theological views that I no longer hold. And that would be really interesting.
- [94:33]
B
Well, dude, thank you for your time. This is. We went long. Thanks for being willing to go long. I want to just mention for listeners we don't have time for it, but I realized as we were in these last few minutes, like I do have a method that I do with clients and that we are going to. Currently I'm planning to do a whole episode on it with Kristen in this Kind of Anxious Times series that I've been referencing. The Boundary Situation episode is in that same little mini series that I call this Photo Negative Approach, which is it is a way of actually figuring out how to orient your life in a meaningful way that directly addresses the stuff that is distressing. So I realize that that applies, but I don't have time to explain it right now. If that sounds interesting, then seek out either from shortly before this or shortly after this episode in the timeline. It'll probably be called Photonegative Approach will be somewhere in the title or early description and people can look that up anyway. Reality and Ruins. I did also want to say I really appreciated what you said about the title and that that names just this lived reality that we are in right now. I totally agree and I appreciate you naming it that way. And I had meant to include just again, autobiographically that that is actually what I find is one of the most distressing, if not the most distressing personally aspect of all of this. This disconnection from Loved Ones is that we truly can't even agree on reality. And that is like, that's just really, really. I think it hits me most in part because I'm philosophically inclined. I'm epistemologically inclined. I like abstract stuff. And actually I think I've built a lot of my friendships on being able to find that common ground, agreement or disagreement that that is for me a genuine way of engaging with people. And to have that ground gone, it's sort of like handicaps relationship for someone like me, maybe especially strong where it's like, oh, if I can't agree with you on reality, like, I actually don't really have much I want to talk with you about, and therefore I'm not going to be close with you at all. Like, we could share some other human things and we can have nice moments and our kids can play together or whatever, but like, there's such a ceiling on friendship and closeness for me without that shared some shared basic reality. And actually there can be a very deep sense of friendship with people where there is some shared reality, but then a bunch of other disagreement. And if you can navigate that, that's like real friendship. But there is a level below which I think sort of not like the kind of thick and robust relationships that I'm interested in are not possible below a certain level of shared reality. And so anyway, I appreciate the title. It's kind of helped giving me some words.
- [97:33]
A
Yeah, of course. No, I'm glad. I'm glad. Yeah. I mean, and just to that point, I would just add up and sum up that the book is not ignorant of that pain begins with it and the sense of alienation that we all experience from that. And like, I love what you said, like the ceiling on friendship. There's a. There's a sort of trepidation now in even making introductions where you just don't know what to say or how far you know that you can legitimately sort of express who you are for fear of sort of entering into an upside down sort of situation where. Oh, well, you know. And I think this is where there's a deep running expectation or hope that at least in my work, that it's also mourning. Like the church has not been this place of sustain, sustaining a sort of reality where these sorts of conversations about difference can be hosted. It's become something else. And so all that to say thank you for having me on the book is trying to do something very modest. And I hope people find a little bit of their story as I share my own and find something encouraging and also something meaningful that can make a difference in how we have these conversations.
- [98:48]
B
Thanks so much, Jared Stacy, for your time. Reality in Ruins in bookstores now. I think by the time this comes out. All right. Peace, man.
- [98:58]
A
So, yeah, it'll be out March 17th or March 17th. Yeah.
- [99:01]
B
Yeah. All right.