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Religion on the Mind
Skillet’s Demonic Cover, AI Gospel Music & Trendy Sobriety: Religion On the News with Mason Mennenga (#369)
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Ebay has millions of pre loved finds from hundreds of brands backed by authenticity guarantee. Ebay. Things people love. Welcome back everybody to another episode of Religion on the mind. I'm your Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist. Today is actually another one of these. I haven't decided on the preposition here yet. Religion on the news, which makes me think like it's on the television, or religion in the news which makes me think it's in the newspaper. And thus you see the problem in 2025. Because neither of those has an obvious claim as the as image or metaphor supremacy. Because we we don't consume news in either of those fashions anymore. Most of us. And so still undecided. These these episodes are a mix of serious and lighthearted stories. And again, joining me on this journey, he's so Midwest passive aggressive that he waited until the end of our 90 minute episode last time to tell me that I had mispronounced his last name. It is Mason Meninga.
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A
Nailed it. Nailed it. I feel so honored.
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B
Don't you think that that's evidence of some some Midwest passive aggressiveness?
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A
Oh, I in every Respect of Midwest stereotypes. I fit them all. I love hot dish. I'm passive aggressive as hell. I don't know how to do a zipper merge on the highway. I am just a Midwest. I like, I was the Midwest kid in college that would wear my shorts in the middle of January just because. Of course you do when you're a dumb 18 year old kid in the Midwest. So I just fit all the Midwest stereotypes through and through.
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B
Is is self awareness a Midwest trait? Because man, you really got a lot of that.
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Me having my own self awareness. I'm clearly not self aware enough to know that I'm not supposed to wear shorts in the middle of the winter. But other than that, maybe having some, I don't know, maybe I have some self awareness. I don't know. I'll let my therapist figure that one out.
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B
All right, so we, you know, as I said, we try and make these a mix of lighthearted and serious stories and an opportunity to kind of dig in to, you know, like psychological, theological, you know, religion and psychology angles on some current event stuff. And Mason, I love doing this with you. I really, really enjoyed last time. So we're recording this on Tuesday the 16th. I guess it won't be coming out until Monday the 22nd because of our release schedule, so it won't be quite as top of mind. Well, first of all, that's worth saying. If news happened since then, we don't know about it because we are stuck on December 16.
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But only God knows what's going to happen on the 22nd.
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God only knows. That's true if God knows. Which is a debated question amongst the type of theologians that we, that we are drawn to. Right. And you yourself being a theologian, I just want to mention the killing in Australia because it is religiously relevant now. The fact is, six days from now we will know more about this event than we know right now. What we know right now is that a father and son, you know, are alleged or almost definitely did this mass shooting together. They seem to have been motivated by Islamic State ideology. Police found two handmade ISIS flags amongst their explosive devices that they had packed to that. I guess they didn't use all of those or whatever when their place was raided or their vehicle or something like that. And they also, they both flew to a southern part of Philippines or Indonesia.
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Yeah, I think it's the Philippines, which.
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Which used to be kind of a hotbed of terrorist cells and support. Less so now, but maybe still there's a presence there. And they were also not on a watch list, but they had been interviewed around connections to other extremist individuals about six years ago. So probably sort of jihad motivated attack. And also worth noting though, that it was made considerably less deadly by a non jihadist Muslim man who during a reload session like basically went and not quite tackled the son, but disarmed him and ended up getting shot in the shoulder during this process. And at the moment he's recovering from surgery and whatnot. That's a, that's a cool little silver lining. I do, I do fear it's a drop in the ocean compared to the fact that the violence itself is connected to this radical Islam. So that's a real bummer. Australia, you know, I don't think it's too controversial to say Australia is going to handle the question of the guns better than the United States would be likely to handle that question. I think that's a complex question. There's a small part of me these days that is more grateful for the don't tread on me conservatives in the Trump 2.0 era. But, you know, I'm definitely more of a gun control guy and so that. So that'll also make a bunch of American liberals feel ashamed and hang our heads as we watch Australia take unsubscribe. Mid sentence. You unsubscribed from the podcast in the middle of the sentence because you're so committed to 2A. That's right, yeah. Have we talked about. I did this recently, so we don't have to do much here, but the Revolutionary War from a graphic design perspective. Have we talked about this, Mason? No, it's just, in my opinion, it is fucking incredible. The split up snake of the colonies that don't tread on me with the snake. I want that iconography. I want to be able to embrace it on the center left because it's like, it's like great tattoo type stuff, great flag stuff.
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A
Like any sort of illustrative type of design from like the Middle Ages, like medieval period to that Revolutionary War period, any sort of illustrative design is so cool to me. That's exactly the kind of like aesthetic tattoos I love.
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Okay. Do you. I know, obviously, Mason, you're a big music guy. Are you a Christmas music guy or holiday music?
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Not really. I will say I'm very much like a Christmas music purist, where I'll be open to people who are like post Thanksgiving listening to Christmas music, but I'm very much. Ideally, December 1 is when we start listening to Christmas music. I hate walking into a store in October and you Start hearing Christmas music. I'm like, what are we doing? Can we at least get to Halloween? But yeah, there's not much Christmas music. I'm really a big fan of some of, like, the old holiday classics from, like, the 50s, you know, that's kind of fun to listen to every now and then.
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Yeah.
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I will say I really love the. I always forget the Vince Gardley or.
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Whatever his name is. Garaldi. Charlie Brown Christmas, Giraldi.
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Yeah. The Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack is so good. Like, I wish it wasn't. So I wish it wasn't in my mind, just a Christmas thing. Because if you took it out of, like, the Christmas kind of ether, I think it just stands alone as incredible music. But I feel like it gets just obviously just gets sort of stereotyped into Christmas music. But I'm a huge fan of that soundtrack.
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It might be the only monoculture we have left is the Vince Guaraldi Charlie Brown Christmas album. Like, that might be the only thing basically, that everybody, like, continual generations still learn and pick up. I. I always notice around the holidays that on Apple tv, like, if it's Thanksgiving, Halloween or Christmas, like, the number one movie on that streaming service is always Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin. Charlie Brown Thanksgiving or Charlie Brown Christmas. Like, so obviously people do really fire these up. I have two Christmas albums that are unadulterated. Like, my one and two are totally easy. Number two is that Vince Guaraldi Charlie Brown Christmas. Number one for me is Phil Spector's Christmas gift to you.
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Oh, really?
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Have you heard that record?
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A little bit of it, yeah.
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Really? Oh, why? Okay, so is this. Are you. Do I pick up on some, like, Beach Boys, 60s pop dismissive, you know, millennial bullshit coming from you, Mason, what's going on here?
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I mean, it's just. It's like. I wouldn't say it's dismissive. It's just like it wasn't really what I grew up with as much, so I just have less of a connection to it.
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You're more of a Skillet fan.
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That's all it is.
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You're more of a skillet.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm. I'm a huge fan of oh Come. Oh Come Emanuel.
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So we do. We do have some music news to talk about. And Skillet. That was my little segue. Okay, so. So you. You sent me a story about the Christian rock band Skillet, which, by the way, in case people are. Are not up on this. What's this? What's the singer of Skillet's name again?
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John Cooper.
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John Cooper, who has fronted the Christian active rock band Skillet, for, like, I don't know.
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Okay, can. Can I just pause you for a second?
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Yeah.
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I love how you said active. I got very familiar with that term, too. I love that active rock is like the place, politically correct term for butt rock.
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I. Okay. I actually think butt rock has a kind of a time and place. Like, it's. It's Nickelback. Right? It's. It's that sort of. Yeah. I. I think of active rock as like. Well, Slipknot is active rock and they're not butt rock. Right.
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I don't know if I would say so.
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Active rock. Active rock technically is the radio format for the. Like, when I was growing up, it was not the alternative rock station. They would play Nirvana, you know, they would play some of those alternative bands, the heavier bands. But the active rock stations were the, like, mandatory Metallica stations. And they play a lot of AC dc, but they would play Static X and Breaking Benjamin and, like. Like, that's active. That's the active rock radio format. So you'd kind of like. Thousand Foot Crutch is an active rock band. But for sure, they got active rock radio play, which was a big deal for a Christian band at the time. So that I'm using it in that old sense of, like, having been in Sherwood and tried to get on the radio and which format. And we. We were kind of in between formats. We sort of tried to get aaa, which is the. Like, your friend's dad, lots of Tom Petty, rem. AAA is probably playing geese and. But also Sarah Barry Ellis. So Skillet is known now. John Cooper is known now as, like, this. I think of him as like, a cartoonish culture warrior who is like. You know, I just. He's. What. How would you describe. I'm trying to charitably describe his orientation to the world as I see it. And I'm struggling with the charity part.
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I think Culture Warrior is like, a perfect way to describe him at this point, who also happens to be in. Not just in one of the biggest Christian rock bands, but just in one of the biggest rock bands in the world, like Skillet. I think one of their songs just recently, like, within the last, like, couple weeks, just surpassed over a billion streams on Spotify. So they, like. They are massively, like. They are so big. They are so big. Like. Like, to a point where I'm like, how the hell are you so big? It makes no sense.
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They have 11 and a half million monthly Spotify listeners Which just to give you a sense, like Linkin park has 52 million and they are among the largest rock bands in the history of rock music. Or another band like, like, look at.
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Look up, look up Foo Fighters. I bet Foo Fighters is in that same vein of 11 million.
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30 seconds to Mars 8.7. So skillet is bigger than 30 seconds to Mars. They're about half Nickelback, but Nickelback, you know, everybody's got. How you remind me on some sort of playlist or whatever. So they're a huge band. I don't. I think Foo Fighters is probably going to be a little bigger, but maybe that's just my. Maybe that's just my.
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At least from like a streaming, I think Foo Fighters would be able to sell more tickets.
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Foo fighters are about 20 million. So they're so. But so Skillet, who started out as like a kind of low budget Christian alternative band. I owned their first self titled album, which had a cast iron skillet on the COVID I had that when I was in seventh grade or whatever. And now they are 60% as big as Foo Fighters. And he is a. And he's just culture war through and through. He wrote a book. It's all about liberal ideology and all this shit.
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Yeah, yeah. Just all the things like I like. Let's just put it this way, Dan. We're old enough to remember when John Cooper wore women's makeup.
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I honestly, I think he is still. Or is he wearing men's makeup? Is he not eyeliner anymore?
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These days you don't see the eyeliner as much anymore. And you certainly. He's definitely not dyeing his hair these. Well, he's dying it probably black, but he's definitely not dying it other.
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He's not dying it pink, but he's probably dyeing his hair and beard black anyway. So that's what he's known for. But this news, this story feels to me like a blast from 1995. Tell us about it.
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It's 100% that like it. Okay, so I have so many things I want to say about this story, one of which I think you're absolutely right. It feels like we're like on the edge of another satanic panic because it just, it feels like the same kind of era of were gonna freak out about like Christian rock bands sounding like Christian rock.
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Yeah. So they, they got criticized for like sounding demonic or whatever, which is like I could just. I could fill in this story from memory from being 14 years old.
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Right. So they, they cover. Oh come.
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Oh come.
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Emanuel and I Guess towards the end, like most of the. Most of the song is like pretty kind of piano driven, like pretty stripped down. But towards the end of the song he screams a little or does this like little guttural thing with his voice. And they have, you know, guitars playing and stuff. And it's like, you know, it sounds like Skillet, like all the Skillet songs towards the end of the song and the fact that it's Okamo come Emmanuel, people, I guess, freaked out. So. You're absolutely right. Like, this sounds exactly like a story from 1995 when, you know, all these, like, young Christian kids were really into Green Day, but their parents wouldn't let them listen to Green A because it had electronic, you know, guitars or whatever, or it had syncopated drums or whatever nonsense that they were making excuses for. And, you know, all these kids would just like sneak out of the house and play their, you know, learn their guitars, you know, their friend's house or whatever. And anyway, it just. It reminds me of that story where it's just like, are we like, this is. That's a story that should be like 30 years old and left to be 30 years old. Like, we shouldn't be making this up. Okay. With that said, though, I was reading the ReligionNews.com article about it. And so, you know, there's supposedly all of this controversy. All I hear, the only thing I ever hear is that there is controversy. I have not really found who are the people who are causing the controversy around this song, the religion news article. They have two sources of where the controversy comes from. One is, they say one Baptist pastor wrote on X in response to the band's cover of the ancient hymn American. Christianity's embrace of rock and its various cousins is a spiritual travesty. When you click on this supposed X tweet, it goes to this guy named Brennan Penn and he has 2,550 followers. Okay, so not exactly. And it only has 100 likes. So not exactly like a household name.
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Not exactly new. Is this not John Piper commenting on it or something like that?
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Yeah, this is not. Yeah, this is not John Piper farewelling John Cooper. Right. And then their other. The other account that they supposedly, you know, picks this up and decries. This cover is a. An anonymous End Times account that does have 47,000 followers, but it only got 178 likes. So it's not, again, like, not very far reaching.
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B
So also you got. You might wonder if 35 of those 45,000 followers are fake.
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Yeah, exactly. And it's like, one of those accounts that's probably, like, buying a bunch of followers. Right. So it's not. So here's what. Here's where the reason why I'm bringing this up, at least according to the Religion News Service. And you know, of course there probably are some other people, some randos on Facebook, commenting or whatever, but, like, this just feels so manufactured.
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Yeah.
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Like this. It just feels like John Cooper got, like, saw one account that, like, was.
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Oh, you think that Cooper is like, hey, nothing. No, all new. All. All press is good press, basically.
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A
Yeah. It's just like whether it's Cooper or somebody in the Skillet sphere is trying to basically manufacture the. Oh, look at how edgy we are. We've caused all this controversy and it's like your sources of the controversy are like, these two unknown people.
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Yeah.
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That tweeted about it. It's just. It like, makes no sense to me other than the fact that, like, they're just trying to get into the news and this was, like, the one way for them to, like, blast this song to, like, make it more popular than it could have been. And so anyway, that's. That is kind of like, been my whole take on this whole thing is the fact that, like, they're trying to manufacture this, like, weird divide between, like, conservative Christians like Cooper and then the ultra conservative Christians when there really isn't, like, that kind of controversy really didn't exist.
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It's not there yet.
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One thing if, like, it'd be one thing if, like, yeah, like a John Piper or some well known established evangelical figure was decrying this song. But that's just not what happened.
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If we're gonna try and police Skillet, you know, if I was really gonna put on my old evangelical high school junior high goggles and police them, then I would pull up the band's profile photo on Spotify and I would say, look, guys, I'm gonna tell you the truth. Jen Ledger, the drummer, her leather skirt ends more than 6 inches above the knee. Okay. That's what I would be focusing on if I were trying to police Skillets. Morality. Maybe this is a way to just distract from, you know, their. Their. Their slow cultural slide into, you know, sexuality, which is, you know, they're really caving into culture over there in Skillet. Yeah. Not to mention leather. You know, leather is associated with deviant sex, Mason.
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So, yeah, I mean, you'd know all about that. But that's a different podcast episode for a different time.
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I try to be fairly sex positive, but that's not I haven't gone down that road yet to myself.
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That's not one of them.
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That's not one of my roads.
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Well, even John's wife, Corey Cooper, who I think she might play bass or something, she's got clearly has dyed hair. And if I remember right, I definitely know somewhere in is it like first or Second Peter or something that there's something about like not dyeing your hair.
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Yeah, there's some biblical patterns. She's also got a lot of tattoos.
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Yeah, a lot of tattoos. We're definitely not supposed to get those. So anyway, this is a liberal band.
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If I've ever seen one, and these are the people we are entrusting our children's souls to.
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A
Has the league ever seen anything like this?
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Coverage begins at 7:30 Eastern with football's best party teeing up tonight. Presented by Verizon. Not a Prime member, Not a problem. Simply sign up for a 30 day free trial. It's the Broncos and Chiefs Christmas night at 7:30 Eastern. Only on Prime Video. Restrictions apply. See Amazon.com amazonprime for details. This is a real good story about.
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Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines customers.
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We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he.
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Wanted to see the flight flight deck.
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And meet Kathy and Andrew.
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I got to sit in the driver's seat.
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I grew up in an aviation family.
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And seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
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That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
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These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain.
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Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.
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That's how good leads the way.
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B
Hey, I'm accepting clients for my coaching and consultation practice right now. From anywhere in the world. Of course I do therapy, but that is only for clients in Washington State. And coaching and consultation differs from therapy in that there's no direct treatment of mental health symptoms. But that still leaves a lot of stuff that can be done that is still influenced by and informed by my psychological education and my therapeutic work. Most coaching clients meet with me every other week, and I generally assign homework in between sessions to keep progress going. And most of the coaching work ties in some way to religious issues. For instance, navigating personal faith change or faith change in a loved one can have impacts on things as wide ranging as self understanding, values, clarification, career consequences, marriage and family relationships, boundary setting, personal agency and self esteem, and determining whether or where to pursue spiritual community again. And you know, a lot of big questions that humans ask have kind of whole cloth answers in our religious systems. This is something Darrell Van Tongren talks about a lot. And when change happens in our faith, some of those questions go from settled to all of a sudden being live like meaning and purpose, like sex, friendship and community. Parenting. That's something that comes up with a lot of my clients. Other work that I do is less specifically tied to religion, like discernment around big life decisions or even what type of therapist to look for in your area. Sometimes that's just a single session where we're kind of clarifying what's at stake and what you're trying to do. If you're interested in potentially working together as a coaching and consultation client, there is a coaching page@religiononthemind.com that link is always in the show notes. You can also email me directly Dancok clients@gmail.com Coke is spelled K O C H. There is a kind of a more interesting long term historical theme though that this brings up. Like, I think that the Skillet story is bullshit, and I think you're right to sort of call it like it's trumped up in one way or another. But the history of like fundamentalist and conservative Christians criticizing various forms of popular music as like inherently sort of, you know, demonic or inherently evil by nature, not of the content of the lyrics, but of sort of the way that the Music actually sounds and moves.
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A
Yes.
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B
I mean, I think this is pretty interesting. Like, it goes all the way back to before rock and roll to, like, black jazz.
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A
Yeah, because jazz, like syncopated polyrhythms and stuff. And like, them associating that with like, black pagan gods and African Africans.
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B
Sensual quote, jungle rhythms. Now, obviously this is like the 40s, so a little bit of sort of like, you know, put on the old cultural goggles and stuff. But, like, it's interesting that there is a through line there that really does go through the 80s and 90s. And you think about like, 90s hip hop and all that stuff. And it's like, I've always thought of that maybe just because I am so plugged into music. So I'm a bit more aware of sort of specifically music arguments around faith and whatnot. But I've always found that to be pretty interesting, the idea that you could identify something that has absolutely no, like, cognitive idea content. There's no. We're not talking about words. Right, right. We are just talking about, like, aggression. It really, you know, part of my, like, ongoing theory, I have this kind of larger theory that hits on a few different areas that a lot of what ends up being conservative religious critique is just conservative critique. That it. It. It's better understood as people with conservative culture. They. They have a conservative temperament. They feel more comfortable in conservative spaces. They are more concerned. They are genuinely more concerned with losing good things than they are with finding new good things. They're just conservative. These are people who don't travel a ton. Like, a lot of it is just that. And then because of the way we use language, we sort of. If we're feeling really strongly about something, we will search for the strongest language we can. And if you're trying to make an argument from a religious group, then that's the strongest language. Like, that's the. That's the strongest argument you can make, is appealing to God or whatever. And so I always think of it as. That's basically how I interpret it.
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A
Yeah, I think you're spot on. It reminds me of Jonathan Haidt's argument, you know, of like, moral psychology. And I know you and I have talked about. And I've definitely have my kind of criticism of hate. However, I do think he's, like, onto something where, like, I remember his TED talk of, like, he showed this picture of the statue of David and he talks about. One person is like, sees the, you know, the private parts in the middle and. And are like, so embarrassed and ashamed that they're seeing this in public with other people, and then the other person is like, wow, the. The human form and its beauty and the fact that this was made into this art piece of. Out of this marble. And like, and then he like, asked like, which one of these people voted for George W. Bush and which person didn't like, and you're like, we all know exactly who he's talking about and how we would. Yeah, we know the answer just based on that. And so, like, I think he's right on, on that. And you know what's interesting is, like, we actually see this divide. At least where I grew up, we saw this divide around music in evangelical churches across the nation, especially in the 90s and 2000s. Like, I grew up in a church that had two services. One that was a traditional service that only sang hymns, and the other was the contemporary service. And to this day, we still have. We have churches all across the nation where the music, because simply how it sounds, there is a huge divide among people. And now I do think a lot of that is generational. Like, if you went to the age traditional service that I grew up with, like, you know, because most of the people who went to the traditional one, they grew up with those hymns, so that's what they want to listen to. But. And then, you know, their kids were the ones that listened to like U2 or whatever, and they were like, well, that's the kind of music I want to hear when I'm at church. And so that's the kind of music they're going to get in their contemporary worship service. So anyway, I just find it interesting, like we see that still to this day just simply by the way something sounds like. I grew up with my grandparents that often, I don't know if they would go as far to say that the contemporary music was demonic, but they would. They definitely were very. They thought it was maybe unbiblical.
- [31:57]
B
You could have a hundred people who are just not drawn to it. It doesn't make sense to them. It doesn't move them at all. It sounds like noise. You know, the way that. The way that I proud member of a third wave emo band think that fifth wave, like soundcloud, rap, emo mix up stuff is like, does not. Does not speak to me. Right. That's a deep cut. But let's, let's pivot to another Christian music story. So you alerted me to the fact, and maybe some people have also seen this pop up that an AI gospel artist, a black gospel artist. Now, of course, the AI Singing character is not himself black because he is he, quote unquote, is a computer. But the artist that created him and who writes the songs is a black man. And he created this kind of avatar. Vocalist and artist. And this artist. What's the name of the artist again? I don't have it written down here.
- [33:00]
A
It's Salman Ray. That's the artist's name. That is not the person who created it.
- [33:05]
B
So the artist Salman Ray, the AI artist, had a number one iTunes or Apple Music store or whatever number one gospel hit. Now, I don't know if that's a Billboard number one, but who cares? The point is it got very, very popular. A lot of radio play. If you're at that point and this is caused a stir, what are your thoughts on this, Mason? What. What is. Where does your mind go? I. I will also say I've got a take from Tyson Matzenbacher, friend of the pod that I will read that we can then respond to as well.
- [33:39]
A
Yeah, well, first off, I'll just say I'm not a fan of AI generated music. I just find it just abhorrent in lots of different ways. With that said, maybe my take on this is that I. I do think it was inevitable for the evangelical world to have this happen there. And what's interesting, I have seen a lot of evangelical people that do actually find this to be really troubling. And then I'm sure there are people. I haven't really seen them, but I'm sure there are people that think, well, this is just the way it's going to be. Like, we're going to move forward in human history and we're going to use generated art. AI generated art, including music. So the take that I have on this is I do think if there are evangelicals that think, well, you know, this is helping spread the gospel, and by any means necessary to spread the gospel, then that it doesn't matter the efficacy of. Of whether or not this is AI generated. And what's interesting is that does seem to be a value of evangelicalism for quite some time, especially around its use of technology. Evangelicals, especially in comparison to other, like, especially like mainline liberal Protestants, Evangelicals have always embraced technology.
- [34:59]
B
Early adopters.
- [35:00]
A
Early adopters.
- [35:02]
B
Radio, tv, Internet, et cetera. Yep. Music, live stream.
- [35:06]
A
And then they create their whole, entire industries around that. Right. Like there was the Christian music industry, There was a Christian movie industry. It had its own children's shows, Right. Like, yep. Evangelicalism has used technology, have been early adopters. Like, I remember. I remember when the pandemic first started and all of these mainline liberal Protestant churches started using Zoom for the first time to like live stream services. And I'm like a live stream service evangelical has been doing that for like 20 years, like. And so it's just one of those things where, you know, we're going to start seeing more and more AI generated music. And it just seems inevitable that that's a technology that evangelicalism will embrace to some degree.
- [35:44]
B
Yeah, that's interesting. I'm trying to do a couple things at once here. So there's, there's kind of the media literacy, media studies angle to this stuff, right? Marshall McLuhan's famous line that the medium is the message, which is a little bit overstated, but you know, you can do different things with radio or a podcast than you can do with a book, than you can do with a television show, than you can do with a sketch comedy show that, you know, like different than a song versus an album versus a choral performance or a play versus a movie. Right. So the, the, the medium of communication or artwork imposes its own limits, restrictions, and sort of also tends to have its own kind of way that it might flourish. Right. So there's sort of ways to flourish within the medium. You know, a film that pushes four hours in length is kind of not really doing anymore what a great film can do if it's under two and a half hours. That there's a kind of a, you know, there's like a storytelling container that a 10 part TV series can do things that a film can't do. Mostly I think that that is stuff that the Christians who have pushed each of these, and I'm thinking off the cuff here, but generally that's not been a big part of the internal conversations. It's more like you're saying about can we get the gospel message, which is seen as unchanged. It's this kernel, it's this little ball of ideas. And in its most simplistic form, it's a set of propositions that once somebody ascends to it, they are saved and they go to heaven instead of hell. That's kind of the dumbest version, but powerful, powerful imagery. And so that's mostly what. So why wouldn't we use radio? It'll get the gospel out. Why wouldn't we create our own TV shows? Why wouldn't we do our own parallel institutions of all these things? It'll get the gospel to people, right. And you could, you could talk about that as devaluing the quality of the art because the message is more important than the container. Right? So we could talk about that. But another way to talk about it is you could talk about it as it's just ignoring that the medium is the message. So a televangelist is just not able to do the same thing that a local pastor can do. Like literally the medium changes the congregants experience of the, of the sermon. If they know their pastor and can ask them for coffee this week. It's just different than if it's Benny Hinn on television. And this seems like you could also look at this story through that lens of like, it's almost like ignore the media studies stuff at your own peril. It will impact the product that you make. And you could either be aware of it or you could kind of close your eyes and plug your ears and pretend that that doesn't matter. Does that make sense?
- [38:43]
A
Yeah, I totally see that. And yeah, I think for the, let's say like the average person, the average Christian who's just listening to Caleb, whether they hear a song from Chris Tomlin come onto the radio that's actually created by a person named Chris Tomlin and it's an actual piece of art or this AI generated, like, if they don't know that this is AI generated, it might move them in the same way that a Chris Tomlin song will. And, you know, or you know, for the non Christian that, you know, this is trying to target or whatever, and we're trying to get this person to maybe be inspired to accept Jesus into their heart. Like, whether that's through a Chris Tomlin human created song or an AI generated song, it doesn't matter. And that has been the general ethos or ethics that I have seen from evangelicalism. And along those lines of sort of like, how much does the value of the art matter? I have hypothesized that a core part of the evangelical way of thinking on this is it doesn't actually, the quality of the art doesn't matter. Or at least it's, it's secondary. Uh, and that's why, you know, that's why we get the, the sort of stereotypes that like Christian music typically sucks is because the point of the art is actually not as important as what the art is trying to point you towards, which is obviously the gospel or how they understand the gospel, by the way.
- [40:11]
B
Same thing with like a bad, like liberal fever dream piece of art, you know, Like, I feel like the strongest examples are usually done as caricature, like a student play within a film or something. But you know, like just really heavy handed messaging about whatever. And then like the art also suffer. Like the art. Basically ideology is bad for art. Would maybe be a very compact way to say that.
- [40:39]
A
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I think you're.
- [40:41]
B
It's bad for the quality of the art for art's sake. That's not the only reason to make art. But if that's the thing you're trying to do, you're trying to make the best art.
- [40:48]
A
Exactly. There's been, there's been clearly there have been really good artists who have and even through their art expressed very strong ideologies. But if the ideology becomes the point in and of itself, it often means that the art is going to come secondary and it's going to create bad art.
- [41:07]
B
Yeah, I think that's a good way to say it. And that's actually a nice bridge into what Tyson sent me. So I was like, oh, I bet, I thought this morning, I bet Tyson's got a take on this. And I actually invited him to join us, but he wasn't able to. So he texted me a paragraph of his take and he is thinking of it more in terms of the creators than the consumers. And that's kind of. We've just sort of done a little bridge there. So I'll read his take and then we'll have you respond to it. Tyson says quote, basically, I think that the whole Old Testament is people getting tired of the work it takes to find God who is not predictable. Like Elijah going to the cave and God is not in the fire and he's not in the storm. If you remember that story, by the way. Do you remember that story?
- [41:54]
A
That's a deep cut of one. I'm surprised. I was like, dang, Tyson, you know.
- [41:58]
B
Your Bible or the pro. Okay quote or the prophets or the Golden Calf or whatever. And modern worship music makes people feel something and they think it's God, but really it's Coldplay. So people get really confused when something that is clearly a chemically inducing equation can be co opted by bad faith actors or computers. But worship music has been very cheap and very obvious manufacturing of what people think God should feel like for a very long time. So basically I don't care about computers making these songs because I don't think God was ever in them to begin with. I hope the computers come for country next. The computers are going to eat the unoriginal and I say more power to them. End quote. Tyson Matzenbacher, Mic drop.
- [42:46]
A
Yeah, and it's probably one of. And I'M sure he has, like, if continued there, he would say something along the lines, like, and then leave us real artists alone kind of thing. Like.
- [42:54]
B
Yeah, yeah, I think that's the implication. But. But. Or maybe he's just saying, like, there will always be, like, there have been versions of AI Slop all along. That's just the new version of it, right? Of like, crappy, quick to make. Oh, isn't this shocking? Isn't this a fun little trick I can do? That's interesting. Yeah. I wanted to give you a chance to respond first, so I'll shut up.
- [43:21]
A
Well, I think he's spot on there. And it's probably. Honestly, it's probably the take I would have from like an artist standpoint too, if I were an artist is. And again, I have strong criticisms of evangelical worship music. And I think he's spot on. I think that's a really great take. To think that to some degree, even the human created worship music has been essentially. It is meant to be like, for the masses. And therefore it has created a lot of slop. And that's essentially what's gonna be happening now. We're just having computers gonna generate it.
- [43:54]
B
Okay, so here's where my mind's going. It's again, it's medium message, but not in a negative way. So I think about corporate worship. Right. So John Van Dusen, an artist. I think you and I both pretty deeply respect Tyson as well. They're good friends. I love John. I love his. I love his art. He just put out a record. It took me a while till I was kind of ready to listen to it. It's called as Long As I'm in the Cage of this Body, I Will Make a Joyful Noise or Grave of this Body, something like that. And I think it's kind of his masterpiece. And I say that begrudgingly because I prefer his non worship records. I prefer his indie rock, kind of messy, gritted up power pop formula that he found, you know, in the Lonely Forest, his band, when he was in his 20s and that I think he's kind of perfected. But at the same time knowing that he's kind of waffled back and forth between regular pop rock album, indie rock album, and worship album. He's combined them on this one. And it's all the grit and noise and distortion and variety of genres, but the songs are basically. They're basically faith songs. It is devotional. It's devotional music. And some of them are sort of congregational. And what that typically means for people who don't know the difference there is. If you're writing for a congregation, you have very specific constraints. The medium is going to mess with the message here. It's going to constrain the product. It needs to be like, you don't want to sing more than an octave. Basically. You don't. If you start down here, then this is as high as you can go. You can't go up here. Certainly fucking not here. Because people aren't vocalists and they can't. They don't have a Mariah Carey range, which, by the way, I thought of earlier because there are reports that before auto tune, early digital, people were getting in and fixing Mariah Carey's like the really, really high stuff. Yes. Yeah.
- [46:08]
A
Like, supposedly she has like an 8 octave range.
- [46:11]
B
She does have a really huge range. But if you listen to like Emotions by Mariah Carey, it goes really, really, really high and it's like so perfect. And that was like two, three years before Autotune came out. Anyway, this is just what I've heard. I heard this. I. It's not confirmed. Okay. But like, people aren't Mariah Carey, so they. So you want to keep it within roughly an octave. It needs to be like, you want the melody to repeat exactly the same way from first verse to second verse. You don't want little variations like are, which are really nice in a pop song because people need to be able to hear it once and learn it so that the most people possible in a group can sing it together. Which, which provides this additional value. Right. Durkheim would call it collective effervescence, whatever you want to call it. Right. Like that, that's. That's an important part of the product is you are writing something that a bunch of people can sing together. And John does that sometimes and doesn't do it some other times. But like, he is. He. He can do both. I think it's interesting that he might choose to do both one thing one time, one thing another time. It doesn't make me think less of him as an artist in part because he's already given to me that he's a good artist. That's interesting. Like, it's like I. I give him more benefit of the doubt.
- [47:31]
A
Yes.
- [47:32]
B
What is. What. Okay, so what is this bringing up for you? These kind of topics I've thrown in there.
- [47:36]
A
That's. That's a good point. Yeah. So I, I think that last point is kind of where my mind was going, because there's a couple other examples I want to bring up that remind me of this where, yeah, I think when a person proves that they can actually do the art that they're trying to do, when they have these sort of constraints, like, I think there's something really interesting of like, let's say somebody's a really good, like long form writer. Like, let's say they're a really good novelist. For them to be able to then translate or to go into, let's say, making poetry, like really short word poetry. Like, it creates different constraints for them to work on. But if they can prove that they're a really good writer in one medium, then it's really interesting when they try to attempt a different medium that has different constraints.
- [48:17]
B
Right.
- [48:18]
A
And so I think that's kind of what you're alluding to here. There's a couple other artists that come to mind that have done this where they have maybe proven themselves as really good artists and they have, whether accidentally or purposefully, also been able to have a big hit in the worship music world. So one is Gungher. Like, Gunger had this kind of like, I'm not even trying, like at times kind of had this like Sufjan Stevens vibe of like a lot of different instrumentation going on that just wasn't conducive for corporate worship. However. Beautiful Things. I remember my freshman year of college, Beautiful Things was probably sung every single chapel. It was popping off at that time. And I think maybe accidentally, obviously Gunger had been sort of known in that worship world, but he wasn't to the point of like, you know, a Chris Tomlin or Phil Wickham or whoever. But Beautiful Things did ascend him into a stratosphere that he previously wasn't in.
- [49:18]
B
Probably still.
- [49:18]
A
Penny, isn't that.
- [49:20]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [49:21]
A
Still probably paying his mortgage. And what's interesting about Beautiful Things is it probably is maybe his most simplistic song. It is certainly a song. Yep. The most singable. It is also a song. And this is the other thing I was gonna maybe bring up is not only is the singability important for corporate worship, but also the. Just even from like the chord progression has to be simple enough where the average person who's the average guitar player can play it.
- [49:48]
B
Exactly. That's another constraint.
- [49:49]
A
Yep. So, yeah, just being able to have easy instrumentation is a part of that too. So. And then I think John Mark McMillan. I think. I know if I remember right, you.
- [49:57]
B
You just. On talking about how he's kind of quitting full time music work. Yeah.
- [50:02]
A
Right. And I think he's somebody who has proven himself, been able to do like some Indie rock, Americana, that Bruce Springsteen, 80s, like heartland rock kind of vibe.
- [50:11]
B
Yeah.
- [50:11]
A
And he's even like. I remember one of those, like the kind of.
- [50:16]
B
He gets into like, kind of cosmic soul kind of stuff too. Quite well on the Lee, I was.
- [50:20]
A
Going to say, like, kind of this, like. Like new. Like 80s, new wave kind of vibe too, at times. So he's like, clearly proven himself as an artist, but like, also that guy's probably paying his mortgage through how he loves probably his most simplistic song. And so it is interesting and I think you're right, and I think Van Dusen is one of those folks as well where like, they've proven themselves to be a really good artist and sometimes, either accidentally or purposefully, they. They create something that's more simplistic, that's able then to be done in corporate. And those are. Those are the songs that typically end up becoming the most popular.
- [50:52]
B
You know, it's making me think of Christmas music. Christmas music is kind of like a secular, ish version that comes around once a year, but that provides. You could look at these songs through a similar lens, right. Of like, what are the most enduring Christmas songs? They are kind of simple. They're repetitive. They are. They're not necessarily. Not like everyone gets around to sing them, you know, like, all I want for Christmas is you. But anybody could karaoke them, right? So there's like. There is some of that sense. I think what's weird about the AI thing is like, maybe the. Maybe the interesting question to me, and I don't know the answer to this is, is there something specifically about. And also this is a gospel worship song, so that's also got its own constraints that I don't know as well. Like if you told me, hey, Dan, you have an hour to write a passable ccm, you know, or a passable corporate worship song for like a primarily white church audience. I could probably write you four of them in an hour. Not that they would all be good, but I could do it very quickly. If you asked me to write a gospel song that would. I would not know what I'm doing. I would need to. I would need some time. I would. I would need to kind of look at the way that the chords. You know, like, there's different chord structures. And I mean, Frank, obviously, like, I. I'm more impressed. Maybe it's not obvious. I tend to be more impressed with the musicianship in that world. So there's something interesting about that. Like, it isn't a Hill Song type song that. Yeah, wasn't Maybe that's just chance that this guy's better at it than some white dude who has tried to do the same thing with Hillsong and that this guy beat him to it. I don't know. But there. You know, I wonder if it's, like, songs or products. Songs. Okay, here. Here's actually where I wanted to go. We talk sometimes when artists are morally problematic about separating the art from the artist. Right. So people talk about this with Woody Allen films. You can talk about this, you know, any number of musicians, filmmakers, authors, whatever. Should we also.
- [53:09]
A
I have to do that with you and Sherwood all the time.
- [53:13]
B
Why? Because if you didn't separate me, then you would. Then you would. Yeah, I just make you, like, hard to.
- [53:19]
A
Like, it's hard to listen to Sherwood and not just think that this is just a bunch of, like, Nancy Pelosi talking points.
- [53:27]
B
Wait, are we using Nancy Pelosi as. She's too far, right? Is that the joke here?
- [53:31]
A
Yeah, like, just the moderate. Typical. Yeah, the two. The neoliberal.
- [53:36]
B
Oh, my gosh. Okay, great. Well, hey, you know what? I think I'll take a Nancy Pelosi jab if I've got a. I think there's a lot worse people to be compared to. She's pretty effective. Okay, so the idea, though, that, like, if we're separating the art from the artist, and we. And if we tend to think, yeah, that's like, a legitimate move, then that means something about the piece of art, that it sort of stands alone and that we make the meaning out of it, in theory, quite separable from whatever meaning the artist made. And if a computer. If we are using a computer to help us just kind of maximize this product that people want, where does that fit in? Like, in some sense, that seems kind of clean. Yeah. Art artists separate them. This guy created this fake artist and these songs using AI he may have. Like, by the way, I couldn't tell from this piece. It sounds like he actually wrote the song himself and played the instrumentation and the voice is AI. Is that. Was that your understanding?
- [54:45]
A
Yeah, like. Well, he clearly had more of a hand in it than, like, I. Like, it's my sense.
- [54:49]
B
It's not a pure AI creation.
- [54:51]
A
Yeah. I don't think he went on, like, chat GBT and just said, like, make a gospel song.
- [54:55]
B
No, it wasn't like that. It wasn't just a text prompt. Like, he's a musician, and it sounds like he probably laid down the instrumentation and stuff like that. But he was like, well, this guy's a better this guy, quote unquote, is a better vocalist than me. So here's my chance to, like, maybe this guy's singing voice. He could never have a number one hit and now he can have a fake singer. This is. It's weird, man. It's weird to think about.
- [55:19]
A
Well, and the thing is, is, like, I think especially for popular forms of music, like worship music or in the secular world, like just mainstream top 40 kind of stuff. You know, we've been dealing with this for a while with autotune, right? Like, we have had digitally altered voices for some time. And to be honest, for the average consumer, they don't care. In fact, in some cases, it's so obvious that we actually really like it. Whether it's. Who's that one rapper that uses auto Tune?
- [55:47]
B
T Pain.
- [55:48]
A
Yeah, T Pain, like outlandishly, right? Like, it's to a point where we just don't care and we might actually really like it. And I just think, like, maybe. Yeah, this is maybe the next step where now we don't care that the voice is digitally altered. We're just gonna digitally alter the entire thing where it's digitally made. Like, I could just see for the average consumer of music, they just don't care as long as it just sounds catchy and it does something in them.
- [56:11]
B
Yeah. I wonder if it's kind of like trying to fight AI slop or fighting AI sort of lowest common denominator pop songs is sort of like trying to fight reality tv. Like, there just will always be a pretty sizable contingent of consumers that want kind of like very simple, requiring very little of them entertainment because that slots into their day better. And that might be for any number of reasons. Like, you know, that you. You can criticize them for being, you know, low intelligence or something. They might also just be tired because they work really hard and this is like their little break that they get. You know, it's like, I don't know, I have to fight some real kind of deeply baked in cultural snobbery in myself that I am always. That I is never too far from the surface. But anyway, okay, I want to do a quick little drive by story before we talk about one more substantive piece. In this one, I saw that this guy posted that the Bible applied. So the Holy Bible app, do you have this one? It's like, it just says Holy Bible on a red.
- [57:26]
A
I'm aware that it. I'm like, I know people who have it. I actually use the Bible Gateway app. I actually prefer Bible Gateway more. But that's neither here, nor there, but so this.
- [57:34]
B
So it's. Youversion is the, is the company that produces it. And apparently this guy Bobby Grunewald, who is the founder of YouVersion, has basically decided, like, probably a commercial version of this could make a billion dollars or many. It's been valued at like, maybe several billion dollars. And he has just said it's not for sale. It's free from the beginning. It's just free for everyone. And there are a handful of, you know, you have a choice of a few translations that have basically agreed to partner with him. I think that the NRSV is one and whatever. And you can just get this for free and anybody can have it. So I wanted to pinpoint, I wanted to point out two things about this story. Number one, that's fucking cool. Like, that's, that's some Robin Hood shit and I like it. The second thing, I'm going to text you this photo, Mason, so that you can look at it, because I would like your audible reaction as well as your visible reaction that Bobby Gruenwald looks like if you asked AI to create an image of, quote, the founder of a successful Bible app company.
- [58:49]
A
Doesn'T he?
- [58:50]
B
He.
- [58:51]
A
You are. Yeah, you're absolutely right. He looks, yeah, he, he looks like, like the next, like Dave Ramsey or like, he looks like he, he looks corporate Christian.
- [59:02]
B
If you told me this guy pastors a megachurch of 20,000 people, I would believe it in a second. Yes.
- [59:09]
A
Yeah, that. You, you, you're absolutely right. He totally has the look for it. But I do, which makes, which, honestly, just the way he looks almost makes it even more surprising that he's like, not a dude that's like, in it for the money.
- [59:22]
B
I. Yeah, he's not.
- [59:24]
A
So many people who look like him just are in it for the money.
- [59:26]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so last story, and we've been texting about this, there was a piece in the Atlantic about basically that drinking is on the downslope in American. It's about American vices and basically saying, you know, I don't know if people have heard this. It gets quoted a lot like, Gen Z is engaging in less like, vice behavior than any previous generation for which we have good data. You know, they're drinking less, they're having sex outside of marriage less often, they're getting pregnant less often, but they're also, like, dating less often and I think hanging out in groups less often. And, you know, this ties in with the Robert Putnam, Bowling alone kind of arguments that, that Jonathan Haidt and others have picked up on since the 90s of like the decline of bowling leagues and, and fraternal organizations like the Elks Lodge and all these like third spaces that are not home or work. A decline of church attendance. Right. Is a, is a part of this as well. And there is, there's some interesting, there's interesting questions that are raised in the piece about, you know. Here, let me pull this up. I wrote something down about this.
- [60:45]
A
Well and I think one of the sort of. I don't think it's the only take, but one of the takes or maybe the conclusions, if you will, of the piece that I found really interesting was maybe it's not actually a good thing that drinking is declining in America because of what that indicates for the loss of potential community that we're having. And I find that. Yeah. And I find that really interesting.
- [61:09]
B
Yeah, that's the idea is like there is at least an attendant cost. Right. So what happens when a society gives up an imperfect but shared vice without replacing the social functions that that imperfect, you know, set of activities provided? So you go to the bowling alley for the bowling league and maybe you do drink a pitcher of Keystone, which is not good for your body or your liver. But if that's your weekly four hour dose of other people that you see week in, week out, you build friendships with, they live in your town because they are also able to drive to the same bowling alley, you can start to sort of put together the tendrils there. And maybe later in the week when you're sober, you're getting lunch with that person or if you are in the hospital, they come visit you. Right. Like there are other consequences. Like we. I've actually been thinking about this with substances myself and trying to use alcohol and cannabis in a way that lines up more with my own values. And coming out of a season where frankly I think it's under. I think anybody who knows what the last six years of my life have been like would understand this. Especially during that final year of internship after moving to a new city, 45 hour a week job, two kids not in school yet. A little self medication has been going on, Mason, if you can believe it. And one thing I've been trying to think about is like using substances to enhance but not to escape. Right. So that's like a little current formulation I'm kind of playing around with. But I think it just, it funct like we had date light date night last night and we went out to dinner and I got a cocktail because I was like great, I want to let's this is fun. We're on date night. That's what this is for. But, you know, if I had gotten home and we're done hanging out and I'm just in a bad mood and I slam a couple more cocktails, now I'm escaping. I'm not enhancing anymore. And so it's like, we could say, oh, drinking is down. And it's like, well, that would mean that probably that home, those two cocktails that I didn't need to have, like, right before bed. Well, that's down. But so is the cocktail out at date night. If that's also down, what is that connected to? And what are like, can we replace whatever that would have been for date night with something else or the bowling league or whatever?
- [63:45]
A
Yeah, and I think you're exactly right. I find it really interesting where, yeah, there is probably a take on this where, you know, it's probably for Americans, especially given our health, probably epidemic, if you will, of how unhealthy Americans are, it's probably not bad that drinking is down, but again, like, at what cost? And it reminds me of. I don't know if you've seen this documentary on Netflix, but it's about the blue zones. Are you familiar with blue zones?
- [64:16]
B
No.
- [64:17]
A
So there's specific pockets or specific places in the world where the concentration of people who live to 100 or more is far greater than other places in the world.
- [64:31]
B
Okay. Yeah.
- [64:32]
A
And they call them the blue zones. There's like five of them or something like that. And there's this great Netflix documentary that explores, like, what factors contribute to why these zones exist, why these people in these small communities live at such greater. Live at such rates of living into 100 or whatever. So obviously, a lot of them are common sense, including good, healthy, balanced diet and regular exercise. But one of the keys, one of the key factors that is represented in all of these blue zones is incredibly strong social and communal life.
- [65:18]
B
Social connection. Communal life, absolutely.
- [65:21]
A
And I'm sure you've learned this in your own studies in psychology. But it's amazing how much healthier people are generally healthier, even with our physical health, how much healthier we are when we have strong social and communal bonds with people. It's just. And so, yeah, I do think it's really concerning that while, yeah, we're drinking less, which is probably better, I do find it concerning that that could mean that we're actually having less social bonds or even less tightly, like, less tightly formed social bonds. And that's just really concerning. And that might actually be more physically detrimental to our health as Americans than the fact that we might be drinking a little less.
- [66:08]
B
Yeah, there's like a few really interesting angles here. Let me throw out like three of them and you pick one additional ones to respond to. So one idea is that social lubrication of any substance, but especially alcohol, it sort of, you know, it loosens people's inhibitions, it loosens social friction. You know, we do struggle with anxiety, generally speaking, as a species. Social anxiety is extremely common. And so it sort of imperfectly and temporarily, you know, it often acts as a way to get people talking to each other. And then once they are, they find genuine reasons that don't necessarily rely on alcohol to like, continue a friendship. So there's, there's sort of like the social lubrication angle. A second angle is the difference between alcohol and weed. And I will say I, I know this. In my own body and life, I have largely switched my drinking to cannabis use. I also am, as I mentioned, trying to reduce it all overall. But like, in terms of like just percentage of, of substance imbibing. Right. I went from, you know, before weed was legal in the state of Washington. You know, let's just say if it was 100 alcohol, because I didn't, I never used like hard drugs or other drugs. I'm not a. I don't regular, I don't use psychedelics. I don't, I don't really do much of anything else. But if it was 100% alcohol, it's now like 80, 20 weed alcohol. I live in a city that is known for its breweries, so I mostly use beer as like an out and about in town socially and also to just. I like it, I appreciate it as a craft. But I've noticed that it affects me much more strongly. So I've kept track of sleep quality, I've kept track of mood the next day. I sort of looked at this stuff in myself and found, oh, it's like, it's just certainly better for me. If I'm gonna do something, it'd be better for me to do weed. Sort of a harm reduction approach. But there's a difference there because weed is fundamentally less social. It is more introspective. There are friends. If I'm with people I know well, then it doesn't matter. It doesn't affect my ability to do that. But alcohol always makes me more talkative, which maybe friends of mine are like, good thing you're drinking less, you know, but it has that. So there's like, you can compound Those effects at a population level. So what's that mean to. To go to a more introspective, you know, vice? Right. And then there's this other idea, which is related to the social inhibition, lubrication stuff. It kind of. If someone's a little drunk. Oh, they're a little. It's like, it normalizes a certain kind of, okay, someone has slightly broken the rules here, but we can point to this thing and that, you know, sometimes that doesn't help, and someone just descends into alcoholism, and you have to have an intervention and stuff. But in a lot of cases, a friend could be like, hey, dude, that was kind of messed up. I understand that you were drunk. It kind of gives us a way. It softens a difficult conversation with a friend to be able to point to the drinking or the substance. Be like, hey, do you think you kind of went a little hard there? Because this is what happened. And without that, it's like people might just kind of surveil themselves more. They might feel like they have to act more perfectly in a group because it's not normal that somebody would sometimes drink too much like that. If that's not a normal thing in your friend group, then where do you even feel the freedom to mess up, to kind of go too far? And this stuff is. This stuff is tough because, you know, mostly you don't want people doing that at all. But I like the idea that there is a realism here, that there will be these other costs. So you could pick any of those three to respond to.
- [70:15]
A
Yeah, I love. I love that last point where, you know, obviously we're talking about, like, drinking in moderation, where moderation in the sense of, like, we're not talking about, like, somebody who's having maybe real issues with their relationship with alcohol. We're talking about, like, you know, that time where you go out on a Friday and you realize, oh, boy, I had maybe, like, just one too many, and, yeah, one or two too many. No, it's another thing if that happens very consistently. But if that's just like, you know, this one. And then when you had one too many, you say a joke that maybe was maybe a little too offensive or too on the nose or maybe you did a thing or you brought up a thing about your mom at the family Thanksgiving table when you had one too many.
- [70:56]
B
And you're.
- [70:58]
A
But I think you're right where when those kind of moments happen, it forces us to reckon with how do we navigate conflict well, how do we navigate this substance in this person's life? Is this just a one time thing? But it forces us to actually have human connection and resolve human conflict. And if we are avoiding that, again, we're not talking about alcoholism or something, but if we're not creating real human moments with real human experiences where sometimes in real human experiences we're hurting each other or we say something that doesn't feel great, if we're totally avoiding those. And I think alcohol kind of engenders that a little bit more where we do kind of mess up a little bit when we're a little tipsy.
- [71:47]
B
But you take risks. Yeah, yeah, you might take risks. Yeah, you take risks because of that inhibition being lower.
- [71:52]
A
Yeah, yeah. And you know, it reminds me like, I've heard from people that like, like, like women, like single women hate the fact that like men just won't approach them in a bar anymore. And I think maybe part of that is like the fact or just generally in public. And maybe part of the fact is like, we're. There are a lot of men who are like, really worried about like, how, you know, if I'm a little tipsy and I want to like flirt with this girl that I just saw at the bar, like, how is that going to be taken? And there. So there's that.
- [72:22]
B
Am I gonna be engaging in toxic masculinity or something?
- [72:26]
A
Yeah, there's something like that. And so there's a risk involved with drinking and. But again, what. It does force us. And I think maybe what. When I hear like women say like, I just don't like how the fact that like men in a bar or whatever, like won't approach me. And I think a part of that is like, we, we have created, we've. We've tried to eliminate the risk because it could mean that like you now you got this shitty dude who's just being shitty to this woman. But now it totally eliminates the possibility of like a guy going up to you and wanting to flirt with you. And so, But a lot of that again comes back to the fact of like when we drink there's risk involved and sometimes like, it's okay for us to engage in slightly risky things.
- [73:09]
B
Yeah. Okay, so to wrap this up and wrap up the episode, I asked us each to think about adding in our own little angle, theologically and or psychologically, what effects should we expect from less alcohol and more weed? And that we could give a fake answer and a real answer. So I only really, I didn't do my homework as I think you did your homework better. So let's start with you what? Give us either a real or fake answer to that question.
- [73:43]
A
You know, I was struggling with this because for my fake answer, part of me was like, gosh, it's probably not good that there's less drinking because some of the best theology has come out of a little inebriation. But then I was thinking about, like, all the Calvinists that just love their IPAs, and I'm like, well, maybe not the best theology. Maybe the Methodists, maybe the sober Tom Ords in the world, maybe they have something going on for them about the fact that they're not drinking. So I feel like. I feel a little sort of ambivalent about the fact that there's less drinking because I'm like, well, in some respects it might make better theology in the world, and in some respects it might make worse. So who knows?
- [74:26]
B
My fake but maybe real answer, actually, theologically, is if you drop alcohol and increase weed, you should see an attendant increase in the Google search term data for cosmic Christmas.
- [74:43]
A
Well, even I was, yeah, that actually reminds me, like, if we're. If we're dropping drinking and, yeah, either replacing that with weed or psychedelics, like the process theology better jump on that because we're primed. We're primed for the weed and psychedelic users.
- [74:59]
B
Yeah, if you guys can't make a real dent in the next five, 10 years, it might be time to throw in the towel because this is maybe processed.
- [75:06]
A
The algae isn't real. If all of this less drinking and more weed smoking doesn't do anything, doesn't catch on.
- [75:13]
B
I mean, one real answer psychologically is that. And this is all. This all feels a little too inexact for me to be, like, really confident in this analysis, because it's just these are big, big systems with a lot of inputs and outputs, a lot of causation. But I do think there's a rough trend that matters psychologically that alcohol is like the. The worst uses of alcohol are solitary. But alcohol as a substance is more communal and social than cannabis is. Cannabis, at least as it is currently practiced. But I think, as I was saying earlier, something about the actual substance itself, it is more privatized, it's more individual. You might feel connected to the universe on psychedelics, and maybe you'd feel connected to your friend that you did an ayahuasca trip with because you had a parallel peak experience together. But two dudes on ayahuasca do are not, like, wrapping their arms around each other's necks as they throw up into buckets the way that two drunks are wrapping their arms around each other's necks and like singing Christmas carols together belligerently. Like there's. There is a more privatized element to it, I think. And again, this is all a bit vague, but I think it's. You could certainly make the argument that our recreational and online culture is moving much more in that individualized sort of like self therapeutic, self helpy kind of like direction, as opposed to moving in a communal direction. Although there are sort of counter movements that can gain steam because of people's being so fed up with being so atomized. But I think you could make a sort of a first draft argument at least that says moving from alcohol to weed and psychedelics is going to have downstream effects on people's togetherness. And then there's. There's also argument embedded in the article that I think is true, which is if people reduce a vice, like drinking by default, they don't just get healthier. Like, that's not enough by itself to solve whatever the alcohol was doing. So if someone is drinking to avoid negative emotions and they start drinking less, it's not like they automatically are just now better at dealing with their negative emotions. They are probably first gonna find a new way to avoid their negative emotions. And what they really need is therapy or the equivalent of therapy with friends and people in their lives to help them face those difficult emotions. And so simply, like removing a vice does not sort of bring healing necessarily. And so you can have these sort of attendant consequences on your way to maybe something that is ultimately more healthy. But it is worth talking about the kind of meantime.
- [78:22]
A
Yeah, again, to me, I just have so much concern around people moving more into isolation. We're already, it almost already. I would imagine, like as a psychologist, we're already seeing so many of the effects of the increased amount of isolation, especially among children and adolescents. And so I just have a lot of concern that increasingly, like, you know, I hear stories about college students like they just, like, they don't party. Like they don't really party anymore. They may drink as much or probably.
- [78:57]
B
No, they're drinking less. They're drinking less.
- [78:59]
A
They're certainly, yeah, drinking less. But yeah, they just don't party. They just aren't engaging in the kind of behaviors that clearly were. That are clearly. While there are obviously downsides to those behaviors, it also engages you in a social setting that is going to, you know, you mentioned the example of like, you know, a few guys having a few beers and, you know, singing, you know, Christmas songs drunkenly, you know, Around a piano, at a bar or whatever. And, like, there's something core about, like, those kind of memories. Like, when I think about, like, my best friend Cullen, when we hang out, a lot of times we, like, we reminisce about some of those drunken stories that we have together and we laugh about it. And there is something to be said about how, like, if we continue to move on in culture, like, less and less people will have less and less of those kind of stories that they have in connection with other human beings. And that there's something sad about that. And then, like, I would imagine from a psychological lens, like, it's just not healthy.
- [79:56]
B
And just a brief note on biology of these substances. So there are myths like, oh, weeds, not addictive. Alcohol is. That's, like, not really true. What's true is that alcohol is more biologically and chemically addictive. When we talk about that, we're really talking about withdrawal symptoms. So what happens if you stop using? You can die from alcohol withdrawal and you can die from opioid withdrawal. You can't die from cannabis withdrawal. So. But you can have cannabis withdrawal. And, you know, you could be irritable. You can have. There's other symptoms that people find, like if they take tolerance breaks and things like this. So that's just one thing. It is less chemically addictive to use cannabis than it is to use alcohol. And so, like, at the population level, like, that's good, right? There's a kind of a harm reduction element there. But people also can downplay that, like, gambling is addictive, and there's no chemical that you are imbibing when you go gambling. It is psychologically addictive. It uses your reward centers and dopamine and things like this. And weed can be psychologically addictive, just like gambling can be psychologically addictive. Alcohol can be psychologically addictive, just like it's chemically addictive. So I just think that's, like, worth mentioning because there's a lot of confusion sometimes around, like, these very simplistic things. Well, alcohol's addictive and weed isn't? Well, yes and no. I could see benefits there. Also, alcohol is poison, and cannabis is not as poisonous for your body. Like, you know, there are some healing elements and, you know, it's used in some medicines in a way that alcohol is basically just used to disinfect things. It's not really.
- [81:47]
A
Right.
- [81:48]
B
There's not really any benefit for putting alcohol into your body. And a lot of those stories, all those studies have been kind of debunked about Red wine and beer and heart health and that kind of stuff.
- [81:58]
A
Well, and it's. It's interesting. Like, you know, we're talking about this because, like, you and I are really connected to this community. That's the whole point is theology and drinking. Yeah, Right.
- [82:07]
B
Theology Beer Camp.
- [82:08]
A
So it's like homebrew Christianity and. Yeah, Theology Beer Camp. And there is something to be said about, you know, you get 600 people at this event where the two primary interests, for the most part, for most people, or at least the two most.
- [82:21]
B
Common interests, they're on the market for people. Yeah, yeah.
- [82:24]
A
Is. Is the fact that we like theology and we like beer and. Or other drinking. And, you know, obviously there are people who are sober that go to that and they, you know, they enjoy that time regardless. But it is interesting how. Yeah. Like, you can just get a group of people that are just interested in these two things and you're able to create this sense of community. And the amount of. I'm sure you've heard this. I've heard this too. The amount of people who come there by themselves to this event just because they're interested in those two things and end up leaving with lifelong friendships or the fact that somebody will come in and they're just going through the most difficult time in their life, and they come in there and they spend those three days at Theology Beer Camp, and they have a lot of. They have a lot of alcohol and they have really interesting conversations, and they leave that feeling a little bit more hope that's gonna at least get them through maybe the next few months in this most difficult time of their life. So I don't. There is something, again, to be said of. Obviously, I really wanna respect people who really care about sobriety. And I think that's really, obviously, really important. Obviously, we're both wanting to, like, make that claim. And also, I do think there is something to be said about having communities that have maybe something centered around alcohol, like the bar kind of cheers type of community. There's something to be said about how important that is for us in a society and. Yeah.
- [83:43]
B
Yeah, you're right. Well, thank you for another good episode, Mason. I'm enjoying doing these. Religion in the news, Religion on the news. I don't know what to call it yet. I guess we'll find out. I gotta pick one for the title. Do you have a. Do you have an opinion there?
- [83:56]
A
I have absolutely. I feel like the songwriter, the lyricist should be able to figure that one out.
- [84:04]
B
Okay, fine. I will reluctantly accept my responsibility to work on that myself.
- [84:11]
A
It is your podcast, after all.
- [84:12]
B
It's my podcast. Maybe I should just be taking. Yeah. Accepting my agency and taking responsibility for my choices and not trying to shirk that responsibility to you or read quotes from my friends online instead of coming up with my own ideas. Yeah. What if.
- [84:28]
A
Well, I always love hanging out with you.
- [84:29]
B
Me, too.
- [84:30]
A
I hope you enjoy your holidays.
- [84:32]
B
Yeah, dude. Have a happy, Merry Christmas. Have a fun holiday break. And. Yeah, man, we'll see you. See you in January. Or February, I guess.
- [84:40]
A
See you next year.
- [84:43]
B
Smell you next year, Mason. All right, Pete. Significant.