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- [00:00]
A
Hey, get your hands off my uterus.
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B
Exactly. Hello everyone and welcome to the Sky Pod, brought to you by Holy Post Media and the Nakatomi Corporation. I'm Sky Jutani. Joining me this week is my co host and friend, Caitlin Chess. Hi, Caitlin.
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A
Hi. What is the. What's up?
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B
It's those who know know.
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A
Okay, okay, got me there.
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B
A couple of announcements before we jump into today's topic. One is I'm gonna be doing a Holy Post live event in California in Los Angeles on November 15th with Holy Post pundit and Old Testament professor Carmen Imes.
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A
Oh, I love her.
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B
She has a new book out about the church and I'm sure we'll make that a topic of conversation. But if you're in Southern California and you wanna join us for that gathering, it'd be a great time to meet holy posters. You'll be able to meet me and Carmen, but also one another if you're in the Southern California area. Tickets are available@holeypost.com events. We just did an event here in Chicago last weekend.
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A
It was so fun.
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B
It was tons of fun. So if you've not been to a Holy Post live event, unfortunately, Caitlin will not be at the Los Angeles gathering.
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A
Yeah. Why aren't you taking me to Los Angeles for this?
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B
Well, I'm there anyway because I'm speaking that weekend.
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A
Okay, fine.
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B
In Los Angeles. So it just kind of worked out. Second announcement related to what Carmen's book is about. We are doing a series right now in with God Daily, my daily devotional for people who hate daily devotionals on the church. So if you are wondering about, you know, what does scripture actually say about the church? What is not there? Why do we do church the way we do it? What is problematic about the way we do church? What is rooted in scripture? All the things. Like it's going to be a couple of months worth of devotionals probably now and at least through the end of the year. Come join the fun Holy Post. No, it's not@holypost.com it's at withgodddaily.com at least for now. And you can sign up and not only get access to that devotional five days a week, which is both written and audio, but you would get access to our archives, which has thousands of devotionals going all the way back to 2014.
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A
Wow. All the cool kids are writing about the church right now, are they? I think so.
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B
Well, join the club.
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A
I am.
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B
So you're one of the cool kids? Yeah.
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A
What I really meant was I'm cool.
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B
Okay, well, we're not talk the church this morning. It's the morning.
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A
At least not explicitly.
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B
We don't normally record in the morning, but we are today. We're talking about. Okay, so let me give you some background, everybody, why Caitlin's here and what we're talking about. So from time to time, words are used on one of our shows that lots of words. I think sometimes we are naive in assuming that our audience is on the same page we are with some of these concepts and ideas. And then we get messages like, hey, you guys say X, Y and Z. And I don't quite understand what that means. Or I thought it meant this, but it seems like you guys were using it that way.
- [03:01]
A
Right. Or criticism that we're like, oh, I think you think we meant something different than what we meant by that word.
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B
That's right. And so this comes up in all kinds of different areas. And so I've been keeping a list. And so is Mike, our producer of some of those words. And from time to time, we thought, let's record episodes about what we mean by these words, both as a way of clarifying our thinking on it, but to bring you, our audience, up to speed on what these concepts are and why they're important for our conversations about faith and life in 21st century America. You and I did an episode a little while ago about both sideism. So we got into all that this week. We're talking about liberalism because we've talked about liberalism, illiberalism, post liberalism, lots of liberalisms. And this is a tricky one because liberal or liberalism is a word that is been popularly thrown around a lot in our culture to get us into this. I want to. I'll tell you where I think I probably bumped into the use of this word most when I was a pastor in the early 2000s during my lunch break, or even when I was working at CT in the early 2000s, during my lunch break, I used to listen to the Rush Limbaugh radio show.
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A
Why?
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B
Why this is important. It's not because I love Rush Limbaugh. I found a lot of his stuff entertaining, but a lot of it was kind of gross. I did it because I realized a ton of people in my church listened to him. And I was doing it sort of for reconnaissance. I wanted to hear what they were hearing.
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A
Yeah, smart.
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B
And their view of America and politics. And sometimes he got into faith issues or at least cultural issues. So that's why. And he. I think it was a three hour show, but I only listened for like 2025 minutes to kind of get a little bit of insight into it. And of course, he used the word liberal all the time, but he used it as a pejorative, as a catch all to describe Democrats, people with progressive either cultural or political ideologies. And so I think not just because of Limbaugh, but a lot of because of Limbaugh. The word liberal is almost universally associated in American culture as speaking of the political left.
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A
Right.
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B
It's you are a conservative or you're a liberal. If you are a liberal, you're woke, you're a Democrat, you, you know all the things. And so when we then talk about liberalism on our show, people think that's what we're talking about.
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A
Right? Right. And sometimes when we say liberal, maybe without thinking, I try to avoid using that word to describe the political left, but it's so in the atmosphere that there probably are times on the show where we've said liberal and we meant left leaning. And then all of a sudden we're also talking about liberalism and clearly mean something else. So it. That. That would be confusing.
- [05:53]
B
Yes. And you, you also hear it used with like cry liberal tears or sticking it to the libs. To the libs, or there's all kinds of other pejorative, sometimes really grotesque language used around libs or liberals or whatever. That's not what we're talking about. Okay, so do you want to start with just a definition?
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A
Yeah. So one important thing to say about liberalism. Well, a few things that are important to say. One is liberalism is a political philosophy, which means it has both a set of philosophical ideas that give it shape and make sense of it, and that it can work itself out in a political system. So this will. I would love to talk more about this later, but there is a difference, when at least I'm thinking about liberalism, between liberalism as it exists as a political system that we live in and encounter, and a philosophy that tells us like, these are good ways for us to, to put that system together. And then the kind of philosophy, storytelling, anthropology that underlies that political philosophy. Another important thing to say about it is that it has shaped all of American history and politics, right and left. So when we say liberalism or critique liberalism for the rest of this episode, very often I'm thinking of things that have been very true of the right as much as of the left. And in fact, liberalism as a philosophy so has dominated American culture. A lot of historians and philosophers will say this is a philosophy that comes out of Western history that has dominated a lot of Western countries. For centuries now. But many of them will say that America, because of when it was founded, is kind of like the prototypical, like the paradigmatic example of a liberal country. And all of that is just like to say again, it doesn't mean it doesn't fit in the political box that you think it fits in. So really, generally, I would say liberalism is a political philosophy that prioritizes and focuses on the individual as the basis for what is politics and what is a political problem. Like every political ideology is trying to address a problem. Liberalism sees the central problem as securing the liberty of the individual and finds ways to do that.
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B
Okay, there's a couple things here that are really important to highlight. Hopefully people are hearing there's a linguistic link between liberalism, liberty and liberty. And liberty is not a. It doesn't code right or left.
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A
Right. It depends on the issue that's talking about liberty. Right.
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B
You can go back and read the Founders and the American Revolution talked about liberty, liberty, liberty all the time. We have a Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Right. Liberty is the foundation of liberalism.
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A
Very important.
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And liberty can be synonymous with freedom. But the other connection that's important to highlight here is the liberty or freedom of the individual.
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A
Individual is key.
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B
Okay, so I actually pulled up a dictionary definition.
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A
Great.
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Of liberalism, which I think fits nicely with what you said. Here's what the dictionary says. Liberalism is a political or social philosophy advocating the freedom of the individual, parliamentary systems of government, non violent modification of political, social or economic institutions to assure unrestricted development in all spheres of human endeavor, and governmental guarantees of individual rights and civil liberties. That's a mouthful.
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A
It's a lot.
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B
But again, key things advocating freedom of the individual, essentially a democratic form of government that advocates nonviolent political changes or social change or economic change, unrestricted development in all spheres of human life. So when you think of unrestricted, again, freedom. I am not constrained by the government to pursue what I feel called to pursue in all spheres of human life. And it's the pursuit of individual rights and civil liberties. So again, anything there that's not Democrat, Republican, it's not blue or red. This is what the American Republic was founded on.
- [09:58]
A
Right. Most people probably hear that and go, yeah, of course. Like, that's just sort of the water we've been swimming in. But even in that definition, you can see a few of the things that are philosophically important that might, because they're just. The water we're swimming in, might go unnoticed by us. One of those is unrestrained. I think the definition said or unconstricted or something like that.
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B
Unrestricted development, Unrestricted in all spheres of human endeavor.
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A
So really central to liberalism in terms of its philosophical underpinnings is this particular definition of liberty. So we've said liberty and liberalism connected. Liberalism cares a lot about individual liberty, emphasis on the individual, but also emphasis on the particular definition of liberty. Historically, the concepts of liberty or freedom, if you're talking about kind of ancient ideas or even medieval ideas that didn't mean freedom from things, it typically meant freedom for things. In the ancient conception, liberty was self mastery, self discipline, and it required virtues to be able to exercise it. In liberalism, freedom, liberty means no one constrains me, at least unless it is absolutely necessary. So the whole kind of political system of liberalism is what are the bare necessity constraints to keep you from harming other people, to keep the system running. But anything that is not absolutely necessary to constrain you as an individual in doing whatever you choose, whatever you want to do, is we're trying to get rid of any of that. And that's important not just because that's the kind of focus of the political project, is getting rid of any of those restraints or obstacles, but also that it comes with a certain idea of what freedom or liberty is that might not be what freedom or liberty is.
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B
Okay, let's go down this thing a little bit, because just based on that, it sounds awfully politically conservative. Right. A lot of the Republican Party in the conservative movement has been about deregulation.
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A
Get your hands off my guns. Money.
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B
Exactly. The government should be as small as possible. And to maximize human liberty and individual freedom. There are examples of this on the political left, totally. Which is saying, hey, get your hands off my uterus. Exactly right. So there's another form of liberty. I've been reading a book by Jeffrey Rosen called the Pursuit of Happiness, which is examining what did Thomas Jefferson and the other founders mean in the Declaration of Independence when he speaks about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What we mean by happiness is usually feeling good, emotional, you know, euphoria, whatever. That's not what Jefferson or the other founders meant. In the context of 18th century philosophical thought, happiness meant the pursuit of virtue. And so life, liberty, and the pursuit of virtue means that a people should be free to pursue what is good and righteous and virtuous, not just free to do whatever the heck they wanted. Which is why some people modify when they speak about liberalism. They will add the modifier of classic liberalism, because modern liberalism tends to simply be, let me do whatever I want to Do.
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Yeah.
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B
Whereas classical liberalism was I should be free to do whatever I want within the bounds of virtue.
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Right.
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And that's really what the Founders meant. And that changes over the course of American history from just freedom to pursue virtue to freedom to pursue whatever I want, even if you consider it unvirtuous.
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A
Right. This is Alexis de Tocqueville, when he was writing about the founding of America, basically said, like, there's more virtue here than their system seems to think is necessary. Like, he was praising Americans to say, like, they have the virtue necessary to exercise this, but they seem to be actually kind of aggressively against the idea that that's necessary because this is this really exaggerated form of liberalism that says, like, it's up to you. Your choice is what is ultimate. And that's where some of the failures. And we can talk more about criticisms people have made of liberalism, but this is where it comes in, is while there does have the. Well, there is this history of saying, let's make sure there are as little constraints as possible for the good exercise of this good sense of freedom that is constrained by virtue and constrained by tradition and family and all those kinds of things. There's a move from that to just do whatever you want to do. That move comes with some pitfalls, and we might not even realize that that history is there. Many of us just, again, we've been swimming in this water. So we think at base, politically, and again, right or left, the goal is not just do whatever you want to do, but another real feature that comes in that definition of liberalism is the idea of rights. And this is one of those things we've talked before on the show about. Like, there are certain things that are the heritage of Christianity but are also of a particular, like, Western reception of Christianity that we think are just how humans have always talked about things or believed or treated each other. And that's not true. Rights language is one of those things. Like, we just sort of assume that's how you would think about what it means to protect what is good in a human life is to say, well, that person has rights. That philosophically is a new idea to say that. I mean, there's been tons of ideas about protecting the value of a human life or securing the right conditions for a person to live a flourishing life. But the idea that the way you would conceive of doing that is through saying an individual is a possessor of their own rights, and you can enumerate whatever those rights are. But that idea is both new and has some pitfalls to it. Most of our political language in America isn't nourished by the idea of responsibility or a virtue, or even of a common good mentality. Most of it is, I have rights that come into conflict with your rights, and I'm trying to secure my rights against your rights. And we're trying to just negotiate procedurally how everyone gets to keep the most amount of rights. Even that idea that, like the basis is me, it's about my rights versus someone else's rights, is a new idea in human history. It used to be more about what's my responsibility to the community that I belong to. And to your point, a more classic form of liberalism has language for this. But a lot of scholars, there's a very famous book a few years ago called Rights Talk that got into this, have said our political language is malnourished, like we have no resources other than this language of rights. And I think a failing or corrupted version of liberalism, or maybe even liberalism itself, taken to its logical conclusion, ends up in that kind of place where we don't have language for anything other than securing my rights against your rights.
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B
We're going to get into kind of the critique of liberalism and post it.
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A
I'm already there.
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B
I know, post it. I don't want to get there quite yet because I want to give people a really firm foundation of what we mean. So the critique is important. But let me flesh out and we can flesh out how these liberal ideas have been instituted in American life and American law and the Constitution, things like that, so that people understand when we talk about the liberal order or liberal values, what exactly we mean. So maybe the most vivid example of this is the First Amendment to the Constitution, for those of you who don't know. So the First Amendment talks about speaking of rights, the individual right of free speech, that you, the individual, should be able to express yourself and say what you want. That is liberalism, the right of free assembly that you can associate with people and groups and organize without coercion or the government stepping in and saying, you can't do that. Freedom of religion, you can believe what you want, worship as you want. There's no state church telling you that this is the right way to do it. All these are marks of liberalism that are central to the American way of life, democracy itself, this idea that the individual votes and that our vote collectively is how we change things, whether it's changing our leaders, amending the Constitution. In some states, it's voting for referendum on specific things. But change comes through the peaceful exercise of your views, rather than violence or might makes right. Or, you know, we have the army on our side, therefore we get to.
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Do what we want.
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So it's nonviolent political change. You see how this gets even expressed in our capitalism in free markets, this idea that I should be able to start a business, I should be able to compete with other people in making a product and pricing that product. And obviously there is some government regulation on markets to avoid monopolies and abuses and things like that. But for the most part, the United States has been an advocate of free and open markets, which is why capitalism often goes with democracy, because they're both finding the same source in liberalism. These. Ooh, what?
- [18:43]
A
I would object strongly to that.
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B
Really?
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A
Yeah.
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B
Why?
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A
I think we conflate democracy and liberalism, and there have been plenty of at least hypothetical attempts to think about an alternative to capitalism that's based in a democratic ideal. Sure. So I think that's the water we're swimming in that sort of says democracy, liberalism, liberalism, capitalism, all sort of go together. But I think actually, what a lot of our conflicts in the American political context for the last fifty hundred years have been a real conflict between democracy and liberalism. Democracy that prioritizes, like, we're working out the various interests, desires, you know, views of a common life between different people negotiating those things. And liberalism that says, let's leave out all those bigger questions. Let's just focus on, like, the bare securing of your rights, the naked public square. In a lot of ways, their anthropologies, their sense of what it means to live in a community together, Democracy and liberalism are opposites.
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B
Hold on a second. I agree with you, but my point is, let's go back to the first amendment idea of, say, freedom of speech or freedom of religion. The first amendment is actually undemocratic. And what I mean by what I mean by that is if a majority of Americans got together and decided, you know what? We are going to ban the practice of Islam in this country. I don't know. If you get 90% of Americans say we want to ban Islam, their democracy.
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A
Would say, great right.
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Democracy would say, no more Islam. That's it. Because the majority says we're going to be a Christian nation. Well, the First Amendment comes in and says, you can't do that because we're going to protect the individual rights of minorities against the will of the majority. And you see that working out even economically, where you can say, well, in a totally capitalist system of free markets, I should be able to buy all the other makers of widgets and have A monopoly on that and be able to charge whatever I want. Well, no, the government steps in and.
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Says, you can't do that or discriminate in who you sell things to or in.
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B
Exactly. So there are limits on democracy because of liberalism. Liberalism says that the individual's rights supersede the majority rights in certain cases.
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A
Yes, totally. Which is why I think liberalism and capitalism totally make sense together. But democracy and capitalism have some real points and democracy and liberalism have some real points of conflict.
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B
Right. So pure democracy would be majority rule on everything. When you add liberalism in, it says, hold on, there's limits on the majority rule because we care about individual liberties and freedoms.
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A
Yeah. And even again, similar to liberalism as a political philosophy and liberalism as like the underpinning view of a human life, democracy is similar, like bare democracy in the sense of just like majority rule is different than a democratic ethos or a democratic philosophy that would maybe sometimes inherently have some of those kinds of limitations. They wouldn't be exactly the same limitations of liberalism because it's not seeking after the same kind of good. But both, you could just like with liberalism, you could say, I'm okay with the system of liberalism, but I have some real critiques of the philosophy underpinning it. Similarly, you could say, I'm not down with bare democracy as a system, but I'm very down with the ethos, the philosophy that undergirds it. Like, both have to be taken as like two different levels of a similar thing.
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B
Okay. My point in all of this is when you think about the 250 years of this republic, these ideas have been celebrated and affirmed and enculturated, legislated from the beginning. And it's been an expansion of who do we include in these liberties? Obviously women getting the vote, equal rights for black Americans and all the other stuff. So it's never been perfect. But this is what we mean by the American liberal system. Okay, going to De Tocqueville and some of the stuff you mentioned earlier, at the same time that the government advocated these liberal policies and viewpoints, it was always understood, sometimes explicitly, that America would also be made up of a lot of illiberal or non liberal institutions.
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A
Yep.
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B
So the two we've mentioned on previous episodes are churches or religious organizations and families. Families are not liberal.
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A
Right.
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B
And most churches are not liberal.
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A
Right. Like there's, you wouldn't want to go to a church that said, like, do whatever you want. And we just have some bare rules that help us, like go together on a Sunday morning. You would want to Say like, if I'm going to show up here, I want to believe there's like a robust idea of what matters in the world and what kind of creature a human is and, and some things that we can disagree on, but plenty of things that are just like you're in on this or you're not and you like that's kind of what binds the community together.
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B
And Alexis de Tocqueville comes from France to the US kind of studying how does this whole thing work because it was such a weird experimental kind of society. And he recognized that on the high altitude governmental level there's all these freedoms and there's all this liberty and there's all these democratic ideals. But when you look at how people are actually living in their communities, in their towns, villages, states, whatever, he realizes, oh okay, it's in their religious communities and in their households and in their families and in their towns that they are actually inculcating the virtues in non liberal institutions that give them the ability to live virtuous lives so that they can have these liberties at the higher altitudes. So it isn't that America doesn't believe in restraint or virtue or mutual responsibilities. It's that those things are happening at a lower altitude level so they don't have to be driven from the top down by the government.
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A
Right. Which is how it, which is great. If that was what happened at the time, I think even truly or continues to happen today. One other thing I think is important to both the definition and to some of the like critiques, back and forth stuff is that you really can't separate liberalism and its origins from the idea of a social contract. And this is a new way of thinking about the basis of political authority. Like it's really helpful I think to back to the liberalism democracy thing. I think democracy is trying to figure out what is the proper source of authority in politics and says it's the will of the people, of the majority. And liberalism is trying to say what is the proper scope, what can be debated, what can be restrained, what can be. And the social contract theory is answering both of those scope and source of authority questions and was a new idea in the kind of modern era that was a counter to not just the divine right of kings, that like God says you are the king and then your son is the king, but in general a theological account of the basis of authority that says whether it's a monarchy or something else, God gives authority to a small group of people or to one person or to some sort of system. But it is God that legitimates human authority. And as increasingly political philosophers and activists and you know, generally we wanted to separate those ideas and they needed to come up with an alternative. And many theorists described it as a social contract. And what really matters about that is not only that this relates to all the stuff we said earlier about rights and kind of non interference from government, but it also explains the kind of story that undergirds a lot of this. And the story is one that not every social contract theorist this is true of, but many of them it is true of a story that says at the basis of human life and community is conflict and scarcity and violence. I mean, there are some social contract theorists that have a slightly rosier, slightly like Edenic biblical view of the state of nature. But for the most part, the stereotype, right is it's Hobbes who says, like, the life is, you know, short, brutish, and what is the, what does he say? There's this famous line from Hobbes that's like, oh, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. That's the life of man prior to the social contract. And his idea is prior to us contracting with a sovereign and saying we will give up some of our rights in order to stay safe and secure, in order to have a central authority that steps in and keeps my neighbor from killing me when he wants my, you know, land or my crops or whatever. In order to do that, your life has to be pretty awful to give up some of those rights. So life is full of scarcity and conflict, and that is the basis of then contracting for a sovereign to step in the problem. I mean, again, I'm jumping the gun into the criticisms, but like that, that understanding of a human life is not only based in scarcity and violence and conflict. It also says, this is Rousseau, his line, also social contract theorist, is man is born free and yet everywhere he is in chains. The idea is like, you start alone and you start in conflict with other people. And then we have to come up with a story for how we ended up in the position of having obligations to each other. We used to do that through a theological lens of like, God gave authority to the sovereign, whoever that is. And God put you in this family, and God put you in this tradition and you. And there is a downside to this, right? Like you have to be happy with your lot in life, whatever caste or whatever class or whatever social position you are in, you deal with it. But there was a sense of God ordaining the social order that you were in and the Authority of the sovereign. And the alternative story that nourishes a lot of liberalism is you start alone and your life is really hard and full of conflict. And so that's why you contract into the larger system that you are. In which I say that just to say, if you go back to even some of the American founders, you'll find all of this language about a social contract and all of this language that I think is profoundly unchristian about how a human life starts. And I say that to say, again, there is a difference between the system that we might really value. And I want to emphasize before I get into some criticisms, like, the goods that liberalism has secured are wonderful and we should not treat them flippantly at all. And yet somehow we have to find a way to do that while going. The story that has animated a lot of this, that has nourished a lot of this, I think has given us a really thin and poor idea of what a human is and what a human community is.
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B
Okay, I, I think you and I are. I think I'm more positive on liberalism than you are. I know, but, but, but it's. Let me give you an example. And this is a little bit less than, you know, your neighbor's going to murder you for your land kind of thing. But the question is, who should. Who is the appropriate authority to enforce virtue? I'll give you this example. Sabbath laws. So in the old world, in Europe, for example, Sabbath laws not working on the Sabbath was imposed by the state. Right. The monarch, the authority, said, we are shutting down everything on Sunday so that everyone can go worship. Great. Okay, fine. In the American system, the argument is, well, the government shouldn't be establishing religious laws.
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Yeah.
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B
Okay, so does that mean that everyone should just work on the Sabbath? Not necessarily. Because the, the emphasis would be your local community, your family, your church might still say, hey, work on the Sabbath is a bad idea. And if you choose to open your hardware store on the Sabbath, or if you choose to work on Sabbath, you're going to be shunned by your community. You're going to be under church discipline for that. And therefore, it's going to. It's an illiberal system on that level. But the federal government is not gonna pass a law saying you can't open your store on Sunday.
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A
Right. I'm confused so far where you think I'm in conflict with this.
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B
Well, all I'm saying is I think having a liberal posture towards government only really works if you have an illiberal.
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A
Yeah, totally.
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B
Set of institutions below it like churches and families.
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A
That's what had happened.
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B
I know when we start getting into the criticism, critique of it, I think what's happened is those liberal ideals of the American founding that are established in the government have seeped into these other institutions and have eroded us. Now the problem is the reaction to that has not just been hey, we need to re establish the authority of the family and we need to re establish the authority of the church in people's lives and institutions. The response has been we need to dismantle liberalism at the governmental level by some people. By some people. And we need Christian laws coming from Washington D.C. and that's where I am finding. Hold your horses guys. Liberalism on the, that's why I said.
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A
Has given us great goods that we should not treat flippantly.
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B
And so, and I just want to defend that.
- [31:43]
A
Yeah, totally.
- [31:44]
B
I'm not in favor of liberal ideals all the way down, right through all of life. I think we thrive in non liberal obligations to one another and family and community and stuff like that. I just disagree that there is something fundamentally ungodly and wrong about the ideals that founded the American Republic.
- [32:05]
A
This is where I would disagree in that. I'm not saying we shouldn't have them all the way down. I'm saying we have to find a way to value the political system without also swallowing the story about what it means to be human. So it's not just what level do you have liberalism, it's also is it possible to appreciate the goods of and to protect the goods of a limited form of political liberalism without believing that story about human creatures and human communities? And that's really hard. I mean part of the story of liberalism is not oh, it encroached into church and family. It's well, in order to justify the political system. You told a story about what kind of creatures humans are and how they best live in community and, and that story doesn't stay a story that you just apply to your politics.
- [32:56]
B
So isn't that in a way a critique of the church's failure to disciple people in its own story of humanness?
- [33:03]
A
Oh, totally.
- [33:04]
B
So this is where I find, let's move into the kind of post liberal critique now why some folks, including Christian nationalists, really don't like liberalism, including me. I just, I feel like rather than pointing the critique where it belongs, which is the failure of the church to disciple people in the way of Jesus, they're pointing their critique at government or society or the liberal foundations of American democracy, as that's the problem because we haven't been able to stop it from seeping into our community's values and understanding of humanness.
- [33:43]
A
Yes and no on one hand. On one hand, I don't think people always realize for many, many years the Christian critique of liberalism was not of the Christian nationalist variety. It was not of what we now call post liberalism in the sense of saying like I actually don't want a liberal system in government at all. For many, many years, the Christian critique academically in the church was a was a self critique of liberalism as it has shaped all of humanity.
- [34:09]
B
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