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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist and occasional, occasional researcher in the psychology of religion. Just, just here and there, a smattering of research. And I am excited because returning guest, I would say pretty good friend of the pod. Definitely. Some of your episodes, Bonnie, are some of the most popular, especially in the you have permission early days. Your first time back since the name change.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You're a journalist and author and you are now deputy editor at Christianity Today. Bonnie Christian, I'm so glad to have you back.
- [00:47]
B
Yeah, thank you. I'm happy to be back.
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A
We got a few things to get to today. You've been deep in book writing land. I actually reached out to you back in September, so I've had to wait. I've been a very good patient boy, but I've got a few things on deck. So after we talk about James Dobson and Charlie Kirk, we're going to talk about a piece you wrote about spiritual warfare, language. And then I'd like to get into some Peter Thiel antichrist lecture stuff and another piece about evangelicals that you wrote a while back. But we'll see what time allows for. Let's start with James Dobson. So he passed since we've last spoken, you know, his death, not a big news event the way Charlie Kirk's death was. But his legacy, I would argue looms much larger in evangelicalism than Charlie Kirk. I have sort of contended on earlier episodes of this show that in terms of the lived day to day culture and psychology of what it is like to be evangelical in America. I would put Dobson like below Billy Graham, but not below very many other people, mainly because of his ability to reach into the home. Right. And to influence parenting, which then just has a sort of a multiplication effect on influence. I've just been curious like since that happened, I've been wanting to hear, like, what's your take on Dobson? You know, you're obviously more comfortable in this world these days than I am. But I also know that you are nothing if nothing your own person with your own mind. And so I wanted to hear what you had to say.
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B
Yeah, I think that's a fair account of his influence, that it is really significant at the movement level. You know, many people around our age, I think, who grew up evangelical grew up listening to Focus on the Family programs, you know, Adventures and Odyssey that Dobson's organization put out. I didn't listen to a ton of them. And that was significantly just the idiosyncratic experience of, I think my mom is always listening to music in her head, and so we didn't have that radio on, so I would hear them occasionally, like, you know, in a friend's mom's car. But it was not a huge formative part of my childhood on my radar, but not a big deal. I think that sort of greater sense of distance from Dobson has been true in recent years, you know, as he got older and he was naturally doing less. Less in the public eye and becoming more known for his later years of political activity as opposed to his earlier years of parenting activity. And so, yeah, as you said, I was. Given the timing of his death, I was pretty focused on my book project by then. Of course, the book is about evangelicalism, so not wholly unrelated, when I think about his legacy and his import, two things come to mind for me. One is an experience that I had earlier this year. I was out to dinner with two other families. My kids were there and their kids were there. And I think all together we had 10 kids, and, you know, so quite a large group of children. And we had seated all the children at a separate table because we wanted to be able to have a conversation. And this is, I think, every child under 10 or younger. As we were getting up to leave, an elderly couple spoke to a friend of mine and was, like, complimenting the children's behavior. And the older couple asked if they were raised on Dr. Dobson's teeth.
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A
Things as if they, like, recognized the signature in their behavior. That's interesting. Yeah.
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B
The good behavior. Yeah. The fascinating thing was that this older couple told my friend that they were Jewish, but apparently they used Dobson's teachings.
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A
Well, I mean, that does go to show, like, just how far that influence reached, Right?
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B
Yes. And she said, you know, no, not really. But we, as the parents were. And we decided to do things a little bit differently. There were good things about it, and we all turned out well. We didn't go in exactly the same direction, though. And I think that that's probably a pretty common evangelical experience for people our age.
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A
Yeah.
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B
When I think back to sort of Dobson's parenting heyday, though, the other thing that comes to mind for me was there was an article that the historian John Fia wrote for the Atlantic a couple years ago, I think, and it was about evangelicalism, and it was in conversation with books like Christian Cobies, Dumas, Jesus and John Wayne. And basically he said, like, look, you know, I'm a historian. I've recommended these books. But my experience. And he's of an older generation, his experience was that his father Converted to Christianity sometime during his childhood. Old enough that he has a clear memory of before and after the father got into Dobson, and it made him a much gentler and gracious father. Like, it was an enormous and noticeable and memorable shift that really changed their whole family. And so for Fia, you know, he is fully aware of the history and like, that critique of like, oh, he's promoting patriarchy, he's promoting, you know, control. But for him, for his family, it was a question of like, compared to what?
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A
Right.
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B
And compared to where his dad was before, this was an enormous step toward, like, gentleness and grace and love. And so I think that that kind of context where these days you get a lot more critical assessments of Dobson and, you know, like I said, you know, we didn't. We're not raising our kids with Dobson's dare to discipline at hand. Not that there's nothing there to critique, but again, like, compared to what I think there is a swath of people that, you know, it was an improvement to follow Dobson compared to what they were doing before.
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A
Yeah, I would like to. Yes, and. Or perhaps like a yes, but it's more of a yes, but I want to give an enthusiastic yes. You know, if I think about. You think about like the silent generation, right? You think about the kind of fathers that served in World War I or two, you know, or lived through the Depression and then like, you know, what was sort of standard parenting practice, let's say in the 50s, you know, 40s and 50s. Well, whatever Dobson's going to be bringing to the table is probably going to be an improvement, especially if you just get a little bit of what Dobson. It's almost like the deeper you go into his psychological theories, it gets a little messier. You know, like the breaking the will idea is like, you can explicate that view that like a child is like a horse that needs to be broken. That's like an empirical claim that's not true. And that ended up doing a lot of damage. But I think what John Faye and what you're alluding to, like, with, you know, with his parents is like, but not everybody got all the way to that part. Like, that's sort of the dark kernel at the middle of it. But there's also like a bunch of like, more just generic Christianity and lovingness and, you know, whatever. And like, probably Dobson compared to. Yeah, just like a standard, you know, post war vet dad is going to be on the whole an improvement. Right. Where I've been interested in. And I did a little episode on this, and I think you would have something to add here because of your understanding of the way that evangelicalism works and has worked, is kind of in line with the idea of parallel institutions. You know, we've got Christian music, we've got Christian movies, Christian books, we have our own stores for all of this stuff. You know, you don't really need to engage with the secular world. Along that model, Dobson did something extremely shrewd, which was to say, hey guys, I am the full real deal. I am a licensed psychology. I have the highest form of licensure for the discipline of psychology in the United States. And I'm here to tell you most of those guys are wrong. And that is very rhetorically powerful. I mean, that is like, basically, if you know how to spin that, you can become famous in like any field by doing that. If you communicate it clearly to people, there will always be people who are like, I knew it. And then they will follow you. And as someone who has recently completed a doctorate and is studying toward my full licensure as a psychologist, I'm very uncomfortable. It feels to me a little bit like stolen valor. It's like I don't actually have to live by the rules of this profession. I don't need to hold myself to, you know, like, I will critique things within the practice. Like I think there are right now, there are way too many women compared to men. There is way too much sort of progressive orthodoxy compared to small c conservative ideas. Like, we need viewpoint diversity within the field. But I'm not going to say that something with 100 evidence based trials behind it is bullshit because people don't have the light of Christ in their hearts to be able to discern truth. You know, like, I'm not. I wouldn't go that far. That would be kind of like not just biting the hand that feeds. It would be sort of undermining even like, why did I even become a psychologist if I'm that? You know, I just feel like he kind of had his cake and ate it too.
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B
Right, well, or I mean, you could, you could do your own evidence based trials, right?
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A
Yeah, I mean, I could do my own. Yeah, exactly. And Dobson did not.
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B
And it could be born of that conviction, right? Yes, you have this hunch and you're going to investigate it. But that would be.
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A
There's something unique about evangelicalism. There's enough of a sort of a consumer base to like make a lot of these parallel things possible. I wanted to kind of get your take on that and your response to that kind of Core concern of mine that just happens to line up with my own life.
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B
Yeah. I mean, I think on the question of the parallel institutions in the consumer base, in recent years it has become more common to describe that not only as often corny and, like, maybe not very well done. And, you know, we're all familiar with, like, badly made Christian movies. Right. You know, it's knockoffs.
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A
Right.
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B
That critique has been around for a long time. Like, I remember people saying that, you know, when I was like, in youth group. Right. The more recent thing, at least that's new to me. Maybe not to others, but to me is the line of, oh, you know, it's not just the problem, isn't just that it's bad or it's cringe or that it's tacky, but that it's described as like, sort of sinister or a power play of like. I've even read people describing it as like a sinister thing that Christian authors, like, blurb each other's books and say which books are good and which books are bad. And it's like, okay, I mean, you know, we're. We're allowed to participate in the marketplace and it's.
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A
That's an overreach for sure. Yeah.
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B
I don't put up wall memes in my house. Like, you're not going to find live laugh love on my walls.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Or like with a Bible verse slapped on. But it's not, like, immoral to do that. Right. And to sell that stuff and to want to buy it, like, that's just normal stuff. So I have a little bit of, like, you know, let people live about this kind of thing.
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A
Yeah.
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B
In terms of like, Dobson's doing the work to get those credentials and then leveraging that for authority in the marketplace of ideas. I do have some pause about sort of not abiding by anyone who would not abide by kind of the professional standards. And you commonly see this, I think, in politics where isn't it the Goldwater rule? Right. You're not supposed to diagnose people from afar. And like, someone who's not your patient and is a public figure and people will be like, no, no, no, he's got bipolar disorder. It's. I don't know. You don't know him. I know he's famous, but so like, that kind of thing is something that irks me in political context. And I suppose I should have the same objection to other violations of considered industry norms aside from those specifics. And it is unique and different when we're talking about a kind of medical expertise that concerns personal mental health. But I think generalizing it out to someone acquiring like elite credentials and then using that to speak from a position of authority, you know, not that that can't. Model can't be abused, but that is relatively common as well.
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A
Right? Yeah, I guess. I think if I think about spanking specifically when he starts his career, there's not very much careful evidence that has been collected at all about this. So it's, it's kind of theory based. You know, everyone sort of has a theory, but, but then like throughout the 50 years of his, like, you know, massive influential, long career.
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B
Very long, yeah.
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A
By the late 90s, by the early 2000s, like the data's kind of in, like it's not. And it's not just theory, it's like the data about like in these big trials. And looking through all this, you know, careful study also lines up with emerging consensus around, oh, this is how fear works. This is how, you know, fight flight freeze works. Fight flight freeze is not progressive orthodoxy. It's like everybody agrees, like he was really like adamant, like, no, none of this disproves the Bible that spare the rod spoils the child. And that's where it's like anybody 30 years younger than him, even with like hold everything else constant, just as conservative, let's say born and bred in Colorado Springs, whatever, like, you know, works at Dave Ramsey, like that person today would go, yeah, spanking is, we're really, we're concerned about that because that one really doesn't seem to work. And he wasn't able to do that. And it's not sinister in the sense of conspiratorial. It's not like plotting. But there is a. The parallel institutions create an epistemological problem. They create a problem for the people who grow up in that world about knowing what's true and knowing when is a good time to sort of shift our view on something. And he sort of set a lot of people up for failure because he basically said, well, you can't trust the rest of that information. It's like the worst version of it is Trump, I alone can save you. Like, that's obviously not what Dobson said, but there, I do think there's like a theme of that when you set yourself up, as I will interpret for you, my entire discipline with a bunch of, let's just say 100 other well regarded people with the same credentials. No, no, no, they don't have God. I've got God. I'm with you. I got you.
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B
You know, Yeah, I mean, I absolutely see a real risk there. I think that there is truth to that. But I also would go back to, like. I mean, again, like, these two of the families I was out with. We're all still practicing evangelicals. We're all still probably pretty close to Dobson theologically in the grand scheme of things. None of us are reading Dobson and practicing what he does as, you know, a couple decades later. And I don't think I know anyone currently parenting who reads Dobson anymore. So, like, yes, there is enormous authority, and there's a lag maybe before people begin, you know, when you have a strong big subculture like that, there might be a lag before you start asking questions that maybe people with other perspectives already got to. But I do think, generally speaking, people get there. I mean, it's not. We're not Amish.
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A
Right.
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B
It's not nearly so. So isolated.
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A
Yeah, totally. Right. Yeah, you're right. I think it is a kind of a me thing. I'm so close to this license thing, and I'm thinking a lot about in what ways should I use my authority, how do I use it? Well, because I do have authority now. I'm doctor. Yeah, I've got it. You know, so it's more for me about a model of how to be in the world and less about the continued effect of actually James Dobson. You know what I mean?
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B
Right. Yeah. No, I mean, it's an interesting position where to be publicly commenting, I think, maybe even uniquely on this issue in ways that. Yeah. Like, I think even if it were like a, you know, a general practitioner, medical doctor, and they were commenting, you know, people, I think, find it easier to say, like, well, but that's not like, my experience with my body. Right. Whereas with mental health, it's a little bit different. I think there's a.
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A
There's a different dynamic, especially children, because children are kind of black boxes to adults. Even though we were children, we don't remember really what it was like, you know, like, if your kid has OCD versus your adult sibling has ocd, the. That's a different experience. It's like. It's more mystifying. And not just because it's your kid and you care about them, but the kid's brain, the kid's mind is more mystical, you know, mysterious, rather to an adult, you know, so the stakes are high with child rearing. And so, you know, if you are claiming that authority, people desperately want to find that, you know, so there's ickiness there. But again, it's more for me, about a model than it is about the current effect. So. But let's move to something more current. So let's talk about Charlie Kirk. I think we can save a few minutes by saying, I'm sure you and I both agree political violence in this way is something that we have roundly condemned. We're not gonna have that conversation. Let's assume that.
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B
Yes.
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A
What else is interesting about this situation to you? And we will get into the sort of aftermath and the funeral and the spiritual warfare language, but I wanted to ask you about him in general and the killing kind of, before we get into that piece of yours.
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B
Yeah. I mean him in general. My first couple jobs out of college, I worked in the Washington, D.C. area at some youth political activism organizations. And the one I worked at for the greatest period of time. We were not in the same ideological space as Kirk, but he started Turning Point USA during the time that I worked there. I never knew him personally. I know my boss did. And we were all a few years older than him. He was tapping into sort of that populist space even before Trump came along.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Whereas we were libertarians. But he wasn't as far into the populist stuff then. And so he was more fiscally conservative, I think, than the right tends to be now. And with libertarians, you know, you get some overlap there on the fiscal conservative question. And we regarded him as kind of like this annoying upstart because, for one thing, he was very successful from the start and we were probably a little bit jealous. But for another thing, my recollection is that he copied some of our activism ideas, and these were, you know, works of great original brilliance. Like, what if you made a really big sign of the national debt amount and you put it on the quad and talk to people about it? Like, you know, genius stuff that, you know, we could have copyrighted. Yeah.
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A
Nobody else could have thought of.
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B
No. No one could have thought of it.
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A
You are. But you are basically taking me back to my Warped Tour days where all the other bands performances and merch tents are in view of yours. And you're constantly comparing yourself to other bands and, you know, wondering who stole whose ideas. It's funny.
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B
Yeah. So I was aware of the career back in, like, this would have been like 2011 or something, and just was like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe he stole our debt clock idea. Like, what a terrible person. Needless to say, I didn't stay in that activism world, Moved into journalism, and he kind of fell off my radar until, you Know, he sort of came on everyone's radar a few years ago when Turning Point really hit it big in the Trump years. And so, yeah, that's been interesting to see. Obviously he had an undeniable political genius and organizing capacity. Not my thing, both in terms of not having the same politics, which is not to say there's no overlap, but not having the same politics in general. And also I just think I'm a little bit too old for sort of the audience that he was trying to appeal to. But yeah, I mean, obviously talent there and obviously, you know, not something he shouldn't be murdered for.
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A
Yeah. So one way that people have justified or kind of soft justified his assassination is through, I think the kind of less interesting one is just like pulling his most egregious quotes, which, you know, are egregious and are absolutely hateful and, and like nobody should say them. But also he's on recorded mic for, you know, like thousands of hours or something. So you are going to find, you know, you're going to find stuff.
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B
Yeah.
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A
In that I think the more interesting but ultimately I also think incorrect approach is like, well, look at all this spiritual warfare language that he used. And there are some times where he, you know, I don't know, like, if I really wanted to parse all the quotes. And it's also been a few months now since I was thinking about it a lot. There's some things in there that are slightly more concerning, but most of most of his language around sort of spiritual warfare stuff as well as most of the language used at his highly publicized sort of like suspiciously well organized funeral, which I don't, I don't. I'm not again, also not conspiratorial about that, but just like, wow, some people with really big resources and know how we're ready to pounce is how I would say it without, I mean, Turning.
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B
Point's done really big conferences for years, so that, that part doesn't really surprise me.
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A
So. Yeah, yeah, the, the, the logistics there in terms of running a big event are, are doable.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
But like people freaking out about, oh, see, really these guys are saying he and others and the people in the wake of his death are calling for sort of actual conflict that's being read into language of putting on the full armor of God. And, and you wrote this really great helpful piece where you're like, look, this ver. Let's start here. You're like this language here that, that is in this speech that is being blurbed and all these op. Eds and stuff. Here's Pope Francis using it the same way, like five years ago, like, so let's. Everybody chill. Like, what was. Let's start there. What was. What were the details around that passage or whatever.
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B
Yeah, so it's, you know, it's chiefly the passage from Ephesians 6, pretty famous Bible verse. It's the, you know, put on the full armor of God, talking about forces of evil in the high places.
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A
Our war is not against flesh and blood, but powers and principalities. That was the phrase. Yeah.
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B
Flesh and blood. Yes, that's the line. And the passage goes on to sort of like, list specific weapons, but they're all tied to. They're like a. Tied to a spiritual thing, you know.
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A
Like, that's the sword of truth, the.
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B
Breastplate of righteousness, the sword of the spirit, the helmet of salvation. Right. So it.
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A
Is it the. Which one is true truth? The belt of truth. One of them is the fanny pack. The belt of truth.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, it is very warlike language. It's naming specific weapons and, you know, pieces of armor. That's all true. And it is very widely quoted. It showed up a lot in the funeral and in the aftermath. And, yeah, like you said, a number of journalists and mainstream media outlets were like, oh, no, they're gearing up for war. And, you know, with the full caveat that many of these, you know, I mean, one of the people who quoted it was the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. Excuse me, Secretary of war, as he now is supposed to be called. Right. And so I get, like, why people are making that connection and why they are receiving this language as a worrisome thing. And I think that Christians using it sometimes fail to realize just how dramatically sort of general knowledge of Christianity has decreased. And maybe, maybe the fact of what a robust evangelical subculture we have makes it easier to miss that. Right. Like, if everyone you're hanging out with totally knows Ephesians 6, you're going to just say it and not. And, you know, expect everyone to understand. Only now you're saying it on national television, and a lot of folks don't understand anymore in the way that they and I say anymore. Because, you know, maybe if it were 1980, you could have assumed that. That generally they would have understood, or there would have at least been someone else in the newsroom who would have been like, no, hey, this is what it means. Like, it's okay, chill out. And, you know, as for what it means, I mean, this is a passage that is very explicitly Saying, you know, your enemies are not. Our struggle is not against flesh and blood. Our enemies are not human. They're spiritual. Like, it is so far from being a call to violence, it is explicitly saying like, no, you don't need to go fight.
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A
Right.
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B
Fight anybody. We're dealing with spiritual matters here.
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A
Yeah, that was the point that was especially powerful to me in reading it and maybe having the Pope Francis quote made that easier to understand. I would like I could hold two ideas at once. I think it's perfectly plausible that Pete Hegseth doesn't give a shit about the idea that the enemies are not people, that the enemies are sort of like evil itself or the types of ideas and, and movements that sweep people up and lead to human suffering. I might have a healthy doubt that he could explicate that or would be interested in that at all.
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B
I think that's true. But I also think he could have turned to other Bible verses if he wanted to just do a generic rousing call to fight against evil.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Without making that distinction.
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A
I think that that's true too. I guess maybe with someone like Pete Hegseth and most of the major figures in the Trump 2.0 administration, I don't think it prudent to sort of assume that they've really thought a lot of this stuff out from a place of conviction.
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B
Yes.
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A
That whole the apparatus there appears to be to field test phrases to maximize one's power and see what is connecting with people. And it doesn't really matter if you're consistent day to day, week to week, whatever. So sure, let's just say Pete Kegseth, he actually sat and thought about which Bible passage he wanted to quote and he chose that one. And in that case, I think you're right. But that's a big if in my mind.
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B
Yeah, sure.
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A
At the same time, Pope Francis using it is just easier for me to recognize. Cause Pope Francis worldview was much more in line with a historic 2000 year Christian understanding of the use of force and compassion and mercy. I mean, he has a fairly straightforward perspective on these questions. You could speak a lot more to that because of your journalism around war and you know, you're part of defense priorities, initiative and stuff like that. So that's kind of your wheelhouse. But just psychologically speaking, I thought it was interesting that like this is actually a really central idea in Christianity that, you know, I think like for instance, historian Tom Holland, who recently published that book Dominion, would probably agree and argue that this concept that like, no, like you actually the thing you're really fighting is not the person. It's like the idea and the, and all these forces that people get caught up in. And honestly, like Freud would agree with, like, this is not even. This is like a really central concept to Western civilization that like, yeah, you, you don't just solve problems by killing people. You have to like deal with the root cause. And there is a pacifistic, sort of an anti violent element to that, right. That like just killing the other person, but that doesn't solve it. They kill your friend, like. And so I guess maybe what I'm interested in there is both that insight that you had in the piece, but also connecting it to what you said about people not being literate with this stuff anymore, not culturally literate in the same way. We also, like, I mean, you could make a critique of the current progressive left saying that they too have like lost the plot on this idea. And like, in some ways they would say, well, it's language, it's words, it's concepts, it's, you know, you should be anti racist. But so often that does lead into like, so, yeah, punch a Nazi. And at its worst, you know, it was okay for Kirk to be assassinated because he said these things, it espoused these things that led to real harm. Right. So there's, I don't know, there's a few ways that this connects and now I've tangented myself into a corner.
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B
Yeah, no, that's okay. I'll say a couple things, I think. One, on the one hand, I do see sort of the decline that you're describing, right. Like both at the level of loss of explicit understanding or recognition of like the intended meaning of a famous verse like this, but also explicit understanding of like, you know, the Christian Bible is where this kind of idea came from and why we sort of think this way and talk this way as a culture. Right. But also at the level of, you know, I think that there can be some ahistorical pearl clutching about our loss of civility. Right. Like, you know, the things people were saying about each other in the 1800s in presidential races would like put Twitter discourse to shame. Right. This is not the only rude era in history. But yeah, it's certainly true that compared to like the mid century, mid 20th century consensus period, we are ruder than we used to be and people weren't talking about punching each other back then. Right. You know, I think that's worse. Like it was better to be more civil. But at the same time, I think your mention of Tom Holland is right. I've not read the entirety of Dominion. I've read some of it from my book research and hope to go back to it in full. But his basic point, that's also the.
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A
Exact same reason that I haven't finished it. Thank you for reminding me that it was. I just, I'm still in the middle of my research.
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B
Yeah. I can see it right over there across the room. It's a very sick book, though. I haven't had time yet.
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A
It is. I'm enjoying it, but it might take me a while.
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B
Yeah, yeah. But one of his really basic points is the huge and unnoticed extent to which Christianity changed what we consider worthwhile and valuable and who we consider valuable. And I think he would say if you have a comparable situation to the Kirk assassination in pre Christian Rome, the funeral is not going to be talking about, you know, we wrestle not against flesh and blood. It's going to be like, all right, we're invading tomorrow, please go get your swords. It is just enormously different. And the fact that we have the luxury of parsing like, oh, was their language too strong? Is self evidence of like how much Christianity has transformed our culture and even with the problems of civility and the losses of knowledge that we have today, like we are so, so much better than the pre Christian world. It's not even a comparison.
- [30:40]
A
I wanted to maybe see if we could make that kind of practical. So could we turn this into almost like an axiom or a rule of thumb as media consumers? I'm always thinking about how easy it is to sort of, you know, in our era. Yeah. Without overstating how evil and uncivil things have become. We do have a real problem. You wrote a whole book about the epistemological and the knowledge crisis of our current day and had you on to talk about that. We could put a link in the show notes. We both have more access to information and therefore in theory truth than ever. And we have sort of some really unique and kind of modern problems with getting to it because of the way that our psychology has been weaponized as too strong, but let's just say utilized by, you know, private equity funded companies with virtually unlimited resources to sort of mine every little crevice and have the algorithms like self learning and like, you know, we're really teaching it how to keep us fed on slop. And I think there's a way to sort of take this stuff around the coverage of language. Like you're closer to this than I like, do you have kind of principled or Principle type language for like how to spot these kinds of arguments and discount them. Like, how would you sort of put it in that language?
- [32:03]
B
Are you familiar with the. I don't know how to pronounce this right. But the concept of gel man or gel man amnesia. I don't know if it's a hard or softly.
- [32:10]
A
No, no.
- [32:11]
B
Okay, so it's not a literal amnesia. This is a concept. I have it open because I was going to maybe write about it. Introduced by Michael Crichton, who I believe is the Jurassic park guy.
- [32:21]
A
He is. Oh yeah. Let's not forget Congo and Andromeda strain. Okay.
- [32:27]
B
Named but named for a Nobel Prize winning physicist named Murray. I think it's Gelman. G, E, L L, hyphen, M A N N. And the idea is basically that, you know, you open the newspaper, he's saying this in the 90s or the 2000, early 2000s, you open the newspaper, 90s, yeah. You read something that you know about and you're like, oh, this is terrible. Like this journalist does not know what he's talking about. Like what a garbage story. Causation is backwards, everything is wrong. And then you turn the page in the newspaper and you read a story where you don't know anything about the subject matter and you're like, oh, yeah, I guess that's true.
- [33:06]
A
Yeah, that's interesting.
- [33:08]
B
That's interesting. That's the amnesia. And I think we do that. Sometimes a story may be so bad that you would write off, you know, the writer or the author forever. And sometimes to be fair, really smart and well informed people will just happen to be wrong on one subject. Like that is possible. I think there's a nuance here.
- [33:24]
A
Yeah.
- [33:24]
B
But I think it is true that we are good at recognizing things that people get wrong when we know about the subject matter and really, really bad at remembering our own ignorance when we don't know about the subject matter. And so this is why, and I wrote about this in Untrustworthy. And I'm always recommending to people, do not try to follow all of the news. Just try to follow a few stories that you actually know really well and build up cumulative knowledge there. And I think this just only becomes more important, especially with the introduction of AI Slob. That was not a thing when I was writing Untrustworthy. But that really only intensifies it. You have to have that deep knowledge base to be able to evaluate it. And then ideally you also, when you're, you know, inevitably, sometimes you're going to be reading more broadly. Ideally you Try to not have that amnesia and remember, like, okay, I'm operating in the space where I don't know so much. So maybe I need to hold things with a lighter hand here.
- [34:19]
A
So that feels like a pretty perfect bridge to your piece about Peter Thiel and his Antichrist lectures. This is something that you know probably a lot more about than many people reading these pieces. There's been a lot. I just imagine, like, editors and headline writers were jumping up and down for the fact that they got to put Peter Thiel and Antichrist in a headline. They knew they were going to get fucking bonzo clicks on these stories. It's too good. But it's also seems like a ripe example of the. Of exactly the kind of thing you're talking about for a bunch of sort of like, maybe overly gullible or like forgetting that when we do know an issue. Well, we find lots of problems in reporting and we call it very nuanced. But now we're going to be dealing with something that is maybe even kind of scary, which might increase our trust and reduce our credulity. Right. If we feel like, oh, we're worried. These are the people with kind of the keys of the kingdom. These are the people with the war chest, what the fuck is going to happen here that's going to raise our threat and probably actually. Yeah. Reduce our ability to critically think about it. So what was that piece about? Your Peter Thiel piece?
- [35:31]
B
Yeah. So it's actually a little bit more relevant to this conversation than even, you know, which is that originally I wrote this piece commissioned for another outlet, and they decided to kill it, partly to pivot to Charlie Kirk coverage. That was the timing of it, but partly because it went into way more detail than they wanted and they were looking for something more basic. And I thought that the detail was actually quite important given, you know, the level of other coverage that was out there. And I listened to. I don't know if you've ever heard.
- [35:59]
A
Peter Thiel talk just a little bit from the Ross Douthat interview more recently, but I didn't even listen to that whole thing. No.
- [36:06]
B
Yeah. I highly recommend reading a transcript of him if you can, rather than listening to him. I'm just trying to express like this extent to which I suffered for this article because he speaks so haltingly. And I think it's because he's like processing and thinking through things in real time.
- [36:23]
A
And so he'll just like have like five second silences. Yeah.
- [36:26]
B
And then he gets like. There's just like a long Side it was a long pause and then like, well, you know. Yeah, I listened to so many hours of this for this article. So Peter Thiel, it was sort of presented when he started talking about the Antichrist as like oh, this novel thing like Peter Thiel's suddenly into Christianity and he was often grouped with, you know, there'd been this spate of other prominent like suddenly Christian curious or prominent conversions. He was sort of grouped in with that. That's not actually accurate. Teal's been on the record as a Christian for two decades in public, very well established now. There's not a lot of information out there about sort of like the basics of his Christianity. Like does he sign on to like the Nicene Creed? I don't know, like that kind of basic level information. Not really out there. He doesn't really speak to that.
- [37:11]
A
And then just the fact that he's openly gay.
- [37:14]
B
Yes.
- [37:14]
A
And he's more aligned with conservative Christianity than like liberal mainline Protestantism which is where you get all the gay affirming denominations. So that, that's a little bit tricky too and probably raises eyebrows or at least question marks for people like what's going on there?
- [37:28]
B
Yeah, he said that he's a church going Lutheran but different branches of Lutheranism. Hard to say what exactly is going on. Yeah, but so he started talking about this Antichrist stuff and I think, you know, like you said, get put Antichrist in the headline. It's very exciting. But really when you listen to what he is saying specifically, it's a lot more mundane than it sounds. He is chiefly using Antichrist and Armageddon language kind of as a metaphor for threats to just sort of like basic normie, classical liberal democracy, peace, order, this kind of stuff. And he seems to think that this kind of very exciting language is going to urge people to action and to kind of preserving the good things about kind of like our normal politics that we have now. Basically he believes that the choice in our future is going to have like one world government or just chaos and anarchy unless we do something about it. And so he uses the Antichrist as the stand in for the one world government which he believes will be totalitarian and oppressive or Armageddon. That's sort of like the chaos and war and breakdown scenario. And he wants us to choose a third way to actively work toward it and understand that we do still have agency to make that happen. And this is the way that he's.
- [38:45]
A
Chosen to make that case for more left leaning listeners. Is it sort of like he's got his own updated Silicon Valley Tech VC guy version of, like, Orwell's 1984. Is it. Is that like, he just is trying to offer kind of his Orwellian view? Is that like, a way to understand it?
- [39:06]
B
Yeah, possibly. You know, in the sense of, like, he's giving people a very vivid picture. Right. And trying to steer them off a path that he thinks is dangerous. I think he believes that our conversation is dominated by people hyping fears of, like, the Armageddon scenario and saying, like, look, you've only got two choices. If you don't want global breakdown and misery, you have to shift towards ever larger, more powerful and more unified government. And he doesn't think that either of those are good. And so he wants to say, like, hey, let's stop scaring each other with these Armageddon stories because we want to avoid the Antichrist, which if anything, maybe he finds slightly scarier. I think he would say he does want both, but, you know, certainly the Antichrist is the one he's emphasizing and the one that he thinks that everyone else is not sufficiently understanding the risk of. Right. So that's the risk that he's talking up.
- [39:57]
A
Yeah. I think it's. As someone, you know, so focused on psychology, it creates. It's a little bit of a pickle because he's just literally using the exact same scare tactic.
- [40:09]
B
Yeah.
- [40:10]
A
That he is simultaneously decrying. And it's kind of hard. Like, that's like, so obvious to me, but I'm. That's kind of my world and the way I look at things, you know, so I might have a little leg up in terms of. But you. I mean, you laughed. You saw that immediately too. So there's like a silly way to talk about it, and then I have maybe a bit more substantive critique, but just like, on the face of it, like, what do you make of that?
- [40:33]
B
Yeah. Like, does he, like, does he know that he's.
- [40:36]
A
Do you think he. He's like, everybody is scaring everybody else with apocalyptic declarations. Here's my apocalyptic. You know, like, what the hell? I mean, that. That's.
- [40:47]
B
Yeah, yeah. I don't know if he knows there. If you. I'm sure you. You said you listened to or. Or read the. The Ross Dal, the interview with him.
- [40:55]
A
Yeah, parts of it.
- [40:56]
B
Yeah. Yeah. And there's that moment where Daudit is talking to him about, you know, wouldn't the Antichrist, like this all powerful leader, want to avail himself of, like, some of the tech that you're making and, like, especially, like, the military tech that you're making. And aren't you maybe enabling him like.
- [41:13]
A
Through via Palantir and other companies?
- [41:15]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't, you know, I think his answer is something to the effect of like, well, I hope not. Based on the length of his pause. It does seem to strike him maybe for the first time, time in that moment. Like his manner does not suggest to me acting, I guess is what I'll say. And so does he recognize that he is also doing scare tactics? I don't know. It's hard to judge. I would be inclined to say he's got to have some awareness of it. He's obviously a smart guy. I think he thinks he's, you know, doing good and important work, warning people.
- [41:49]
A
Well, in that way I think of him kind of like I would think about a well meaning but unintentionally spiritually abusive pastor, you know, and this is really, again, this is personal. I know that my own story is a part of this, but my history with spiritual abuse is from a well meaning but spiritually abusive adult in my Christian 6th grade context who gave me a book that told me that the world was ending in the fall and it was spring and so Jesus was going to come back, which meant that my 11 year old life would be over shortly after turning 12. And that is like insanely, psychologically irresponsible, developmentally irresponsible. And yet that's a mainstay of Christian teaching. It's either when you die naturally or through an accident or something, you might go to hell. But then what preachers found out, especially after 19. I mean, I'm sure there are different eras of this, but more recently after 1970, with the success of late great Planet Earth, which eventually leads to sort of the Left behind series, you know, they figure out that like, oh, if we focus on the Rapture, that is a way to get people interested who don't think they're dying anytime soon, right? It's like, yeah, people know about heaven and hell, but most people think they got another, they got till their 80s or something like that. But if the rapture's any minute, well then that ups the clock. And psychologically speaking, that ups the stakes dramatically. To the extent that you buy that idea, the stakes are like way, way higher. And that gets butts in seats. It produces responses from congregations. There's all these kind of superficial, you get this superficial feedback of like, wow, pastor. Like wow, Peter, you know, you're really like speaking truth to power, you know. But like from my Perspective as someone who works in this field, it's like, this is really dangerous too, because it's essentially, I always am talking about writing checks you can't cash. It's like, you know, I guess a leading VC military funder type guy does have, you know, the chops or whatever to speak about where things like military technology and surveillance technology, like, I'd love to hear his thoughts on where things are going in the world. That's his domain. Wonderful. But bringing in that kind of heft of the Antichrist lore, it adds this psychological dread layer that feels like, I don't know, it's sort of like based on what is his vision preferable? And then I think he's getting. He can't really substantiate that. I feel like I'm getting a little garbled up.
- [44:29]
B
Yeah, no, I understand what you're saying. I would say so. I'm not like a Peter Thiel fan. I didn't know a huge amount about him before I began looking into this. I know the basics. But the thing that surprised me most in the research for this article was how unspiritually he actually seemed to be using the terms. Right. My read on it was, it almost seems like he found these terms in the Bible and he was like. Almost like it was that headline driven motivation. He was like, this is a interesting thing and an interesting way to talk about it in a way that will get attention for this political concern that I have. I don't actually think he means like the biblical Antichrist. I think he is using it metaphorically.
- [45:12]
A
Right, right.
- [45:12]
B
Do people get that? I don't know. You know, I think he's very much benefiting from the excitement of it all. But, yeah, I mean, he explains it as. He thinks that this is like a hopeful thing to do, a way to, you know, spur people to action, spur people to do something good, to kind of seek to preserve a stable, you know, liberal democratic government. To not go down one of these two roads that he thinks are our choices if we don't consciously choose a third way. And I don't know, this would not be my technique of persuasion to that end, which, you know, I also hope that we retain stable liberal democratic government. And so I. Yeah, I don't know that I understand why he went this route, aside from the attention, but he seems to think that this is a good approach. It's interesting, you know, your comparison of using the Rapture as a way to motivate people to convert. You know, there is like the very cynical read on that. Right. There's also the people are, you know, you're sincerely trying to save someone from hell. Is it maybe the hard sell? Yes. But you're trying to save them from hell. Right. So maybe the hard sell is justified. And I would guess that if pressed, Teal would probably have a similar angle on this.
- [46:24]
A
Yeah. And, yeah, that just gets into sticky water. And, you know, I have my. Yeah, I recognize that there are even edge cases where, like a good edge case, that sort of pushes me on my sort of maximally safe approach to religious life to reduce harm. Right. And that is that, like, people who are suicidal very routinely report religious beliefs against suicide as a major short term reason that they do not end their own lives. That is something that everybody who's been trained as a therapist to work with crisis clients knows. It's like a box you can check. It's like a question you can ask. So we can't deny that. On the one hand, we have to recognize that some of the things that we definitely want for people will be undertaken for reasons that we don't love or that we don't think are ultimately, like, gonna hold up in the long run. But I think the suicide prevention point is helpful there because it's not always about the long run. Sometimes it's about the short run and you fix the crisis and then in the long run you take the longer steps. But there is a real tension because if that's the only reason somebody has and then their faith changes, then that's not going to be a very good reason anymore. And we'd maybe rather they have a reason. Like, I have close connections with friends and family, people who will really be in pain if I'm gone. Like, that is if you can maintain those relationships with people that might be more stable than like an abstract belief that could change, you know, if your faith changes or something like that. So it is tricky. But as a general rule, I have a hard time arguing against myself when I most of the time think, let's just not tell people things as true that we can't adequately back up. Like, that seems like a good rule of thumb.
- [48:32]
B
Yeah. I mean, I don't know though, if you strip the Antichrist and Armageddon language from it and you just take it down to his sort of like, normie political message of it is bad if we descend into disorder, and it is bad if we move towards totalitarian government that is far from the people being governed and they have no meaningful say over it, and it forces you to do terrible things. Right. That message that both of those are bad and we could actively work to not end up in either of those places. I'm good with that. And I'm good with someone who is very wealthy and very powerful and involved in surveillance technology that I probably hate having a pretty robust critique of totalitarian government. Like, I'm happy that that's his politics and not something insane.
- [49:19]
A
Right, Agreed. Agreed.
- [49:20]
B
And so, yeah, I mean, it's not my favorite rhetorical strategy to do the Antichrist and Armageddon stuff. I think it mixes things up in a weird way. I think it sheds probably more. Is probably more heat than light. But it's not the worst scenario. Right. Like, David French tells a story about. I believe it's someone he knew in law school, and this is like, in the Ivy League. She was in law school also, and she had converted to Christianity because of a street preacher, like the yelling on campus type street preacher. And I don't think like an angry one, but a yelling on the street corner. And that's just, like, unfathomable to me. Right. And he tells it because it was unfathomable to him, too. But it worked for her and it changed her life. And so, I don't know. I think about that kind of thing and that kind of difference in appeal for audiences and journalism a lot as well, you know, because sometimes I'll have a writer write something and I'm like, oh, I don't. I don't know about this one. But, like, you're one of our regular writers and, like, I trust you, so, like, okay, let's do it. And sometimes, like, that article's a hit.
- [50:25]
A
Yeah.
- [50:26]
B
And so just trying to. I don't want to be too utilitarian about it. Right. And say, like, as long as your politics or my politics are close enough, like, say whatever you want.
- [50:35]
A
Yeah.
- [50:35]
B
But I'm willing to have some. Like to withhold some judgment, you know.
- [50:38]
A
No, you're helping me clarify that. Really, at this point, I'm talking less about Peter Thiel, I'm talking more about pastors. Because I would distinguish between the world of the mundane surveillance technology and how it's used and how democratic our society is. That's different than sort of appealing on spiritual forces for your argument. So it's just Peter Thiel saying, for instance, if he was like, here's my prediction. And then he gives it. Great, awesome. Then you can take it or not. If he's like, God is saying this. Well, now, that's a different statement. And that's really. That's where it becomes spiritual abuse. Right. Is to some extent, you are either explicitly or implicitly putting God's character behind your statement, your policy, your whatever the play you're writing. And you're giving it like God's stamp of approval, which is, like, you could argue, taking the Lord's name in vain, you know, like much more than saying God damn is or something like that. So that's really where it's. That's where it's different. But I also think I would respectfully disagree with David French, at least on the takeaway of that, because even from. If you just want to say psychologically, how many people are made more likely to become Christians versus how many people are made less likely to become Christians from those street preachers, at least today, maybe not in the 1850s, I don't know when people's information gathering and, you know, public square speaking was more common. And okay, maybe back then today, as 30,000 people file past this guy to a baseball game. Yeah, like, occasionally one of them becomes a Christian. But, like, it seems to me to be sort of the height of foolishness to assume that that doesn't have an overall detrimental effect for the stated goal, which is to get people to consider Christianity as an option in their life.
- [52:41]
B
Maybe. I don't know. I think I would have been much more likely to say that before if I made you a callback. Charlie Kirk, I mean, he was doing kind of a street preacher model, right. Like, his whole debate me bro thing. He went to campus and he's not yelling. Right. But he wants random people to walk up and have an argument with him.
- [53:00]
A
I would. Okay. I would delineate, though. I think that. I think it's possible that there was a street preacher who's just like, has a booth that says, talk to me about the Gospel.
- [53:09]
B
Sure. Like, the model matters a lot.
- [53:11]
A
Yeah, that's way different. I'm talking about the sign with the all these people will burn in hell. You know, homosexuals lie. You know, like, I'm talking about the standard model that you find out in a major city at a big event or something. So that's a good delineation. I'm not talking about. Yeah, okay, fine. Debate me bro can be a mix of real conversation and performative stuff. And that's much closer to actually just kind of how we all are. Our whole lives are a mix of performative stuff and real conversation. So, yeah, I'm thinking of the sort of the prototypical big sign megaphone person.
- [53:49]
B
Yeah, I think that's true. I Do wonder though, if we will see partly because of Kirk, but partly because of just sort of the broader shift toward. Away from text again. Right. That we will see a return to that kind of. I mean, people have to go outside and touch grass for this to happen, but that kind of. Which is maybe a major impediment to this idea. That kind of public debate and argument in a way that was more common in more oral cultures past.
- [54:17]
A
Well, and Charlie Kirk, you know, his work, not talking about his death, but just talking about the way. It's kind of depressing to think of it this way, the way that like his social media team, you know, utilized clips and whatever. Like, that's kind of like a way of engaging with a street preacher from the comfort of your home. Like, and that the algorithm can help sort out the type of person who isn't just going to be immediately turned off by this or hated or something. And there might be something interesting there, like as our information technology changes and our media landscape changes. So, yeah, that's something to kind of keep an eye on. Well, Bonnie, thank you for a robust exchange of ideas. I love having you on because I think that you are really brilliant and you are certainly to my right, but in a trustworthy way. So I like to kind of get your pushback and give you a chance to throw that out there. And then people can kind of find themselves in between and around our conversation. So again, you hit that out of the park like you always do. And so thank you.
- [55:22]
B
Well, thank you. Yeah. And thank you for, you know, having an audience that likes that.
- [55:26]
A
We should thank the audience. They are great.
- [55:28]
B
Thank you, guys.
- [55:30]
A
You're just. You're wrapping up a book, but it's not gonna be out for a while. Right. We don't need to start the.
- [55:34]
B
It's gonna be out in. We don't have an exact date yet, but probably early September.
- [55:37]
A
Okay. And just, just so people can be thinking about it. What's it. What's it about? Or is there a title? Is there that kind of thing yet?
- [55:42]
B
There is a title that I think is pretty locked in. Like they're working on cover design, so I think it's pretty locked in. The title is in defense of a response to its culture despisers.
- [55:53]
A
Wow, you are bring. Okay, so I get the Schleiermacher reference here. No, you don't have to.
- [56:00]
B
Yes, I don't think you have to get it to like, for it to work, but yes, it is in there.
- [56:04]
A
Okay, so that's a little, tiny little dagger into my side because I'm a Schleiermacher guy. And he. Yeah, so he did this defense of Christianity in his day, but he was more of a liberal Christian giving a. So it's a different.
- [56:19]
B
Yeah, it's a different mode. And I, you know, I don't know him well, certainly not as well as you do. I do resonate with the way that he sort of starts. It was like, now, I didn't want to do this, but you guys are making me.
- [56:31]
A
Yeah.
- [56:34]
B
I do resonate with that. That sense of, like, look, you know, this is not necessarily, you know, the likeliest book that I could be writing, but, like, at a certain point, I feel like something needs to be said.
- [56:46]
A
Honestly, when after you've passed and someone puts together the Bonnie Christian reader retrospective of your writing life, the title of that retrospective could be, you know, I didn't want to write this, but you guys kind of made me a life in letters.
- [57:04]
B
Okay, I will. I'll make a note of that in my. My papers for. For the future generations to find.
- [57:10]
A
Okay, thanks, Bonnie, so much.