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Them Before Us Podcast
Them Before Us #093 | A Journey from Orphanage to Advocacy | Promoting Healthy Citizens in Indiana
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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Them Before Us podcast. I'm Jen Friesen, the training director for Them Before Us and your host. And today we are going to have a great conversation that I think you will really enjoy. We are interviewing Bergen Crispin, and he is the deputy director of the Good Citizen Project, where he equips students to understand what it means to be a godly citizen in public life. With a deep passion for reaching the next generation, Berjan brings a unique perspective, shaped by his personal story and a diverse background in government, the private sector, and leadership development. And, Berjan, you are a Hoosier, is that right?
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That is correct. I'm a transplant Hoosier. So I grew up in Illinois and then moved to Indiana, and they've been gracious enough to welcome me with open arms.
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And that's the famous. There's like a famous movie, Pistol Pete. Is. Is he from Indiana?
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That's exactly right. Yep. The movie Hoosiers. Exactly right.
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Awesome. Well, Berjan, I'd love it if you just start by introducing yourself to our audience. Tell us a little bit about your origin story. One of the ways I was introduced to you is that you talked about how you were an orphan and now you have become passionate about advocating for strong families, especially in Indiana, but in your work. And we'll talk a little bit more about how you want young people to be good citizens. Yeah, just start off by, you know, where did it all begin for you?
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Yeah. Well, thank you for having me on, Jennifer. I'm a fan of what you and your organization does, so it's a pleasure to be with you today. So I was born in Bulgaria in 1998. Bulgaria country struggling to rise out of the post communist era, part of the black curtain and struggling to identify themselves as a nation. And so part of that came. They didn't have a lot of resources, and so orphanages like I were like I was in struggled with abuse, neglect, malnutrition, all of those things. That was my upbringing, and that was my trajectory moving forward. And so it was pretty dire. If it had not been for the grace of God and the providential hand of God, I don't know where I would end up today. And so I was adopted in 2000. I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois. And just understanding where I come from, knowing that not everyone had the chance to start over at life, so to speak, I want to be able to use the gifts and the resources that I have to be able to share my story with others and to be a light in a dark world. And so I'm passionate about child and family policy to make sure that we are advocating for strong conservative, pro family values that can uplift communities across our nation. So that's what gets me out of bed every day. I'm really excited to continue that work moving forward. There's a lot of work to do in that space, but one I look forward to continue to work on.
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Can you tell us a little bit about the family that adopted you, your parents, and maybe just some experiences that you had as a child of adoption?
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Yeah. So I grew up in a Christian conservative household in Wheaton, Illinois, affectionately known as the Wheaton Bubble. Everyone goes to church three, four days a week. The church is open, people are there. Culture has slowly started to shift away from that, but that's the culture in which I grew up. Wonderful family. I have one younger sister who's also adopted. She's one year younger than me. And so kind of growing up in that space gave me a unique identity into what the larger picture of the gospel is. You know, being adopted into the family of God and grew up just like, you know, every other kid, played sports, music, all of those good things, but, you know, really caught a fire for. For this cause and for this arena of kind of tail end of high school, going into college that tell us.
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A little bit about how you. It makes sense that you would be passionate about wanting there to be strong families. But how do you get, you know, from. You're an adopted kid that's just growing up, pretty traditional kind of conservative Christian life. How do you get into the family policy work that you ended up doing?
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So it's a long and winding road, but I went to Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and while I was there, I had the opportunity to be part of the Heritage Foundation's leadership Fellowship. And it was there I wrote a dissertation and a paper on the transgenerational issue of poverty and behavioral poverty and the behavioral economics of poverty and why that exists and how do we address it through a Christian conservative lens. So one of the many things as a root cause and how do we address it moving forward is the breakdown of the nuclear family. And so if we don't value the nuclear family anymore, and importance isn't placed upon that, it's not a priority in communities anymore. Communities struggle because communities are made up of families. So if the family breaks down, the community breaks down over time. And so as I began to kind of peel back the covers of the importance of this issue, I saw that, you know, this is an area that's often overlooked. We like to look at some of the hot button cultural issues of the day, and those are all good and fine and have their own right and respectful place in our advocacy. But in terms of, you know, fighting for the next generation and making sure that families and students and young people are well equipped, they're often overlooked. And so I knew this is a space I wanted to be in. Some people are great in math and science. That's not me. I love digging on the front lines of culture, speaking to different groups and organizations and kind of rolling up my sleeves and working hard with the team. See how do we address some of these long issues moving forward? And so I just kind of naturally fell into that groove after college. I worked in corporate finance for a while, but still kind of had the itch of public policy. And then when I moved to Indiana, I served for two legislative sessions in the Indiana House of Representatives. And that's kind of where I, you know, fell in love with kind of the deep policy arena and that world. And then when my term ended there, I moved to Indiana Family Institute and the Good Citizen Project, where they focus a lot on some of these core conservative Christian family values, help connect something for us.
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B
I think a lot of people who trend toward conservatism or Christianity sometimes look at people who are in poverty or poor people, or you hear the stories and there is kind of a mentality of the pick yourself up by your bootstraps is kind of the phrase that a lot of people use and that there's an idea of like, you know, if you could just work hard enough. The American dream is accessible to everybody. And I'm not disagreeing with some of those notions. I think, of course, people who work really hard are going to do better than the people who don't work very hard. People who don't want to live on government assistance their whole life are going to do better than the people who are, fine, I'm just staying here.
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I don't care.
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But I think you're making a great point that when family has been destroyed, a family has been broken apart and you don't have those supports, and then you see that over multiple generations. Where do people learn how to work hard? Where do they get the values of, I am going to stay in school even when it's harder? I mean, I'm going to go into a trade or to go get a good education, to go pursue the things I want to do. You know, how do we, especially for conservatives, how do we connect some of those dots? And you know, we can make that shift into what, what are the policies that we should agree with? But, you know, is it just people's fault that they're poor? Or, you know, are there more things to blame? And how do we, how do we, like, shift our mindset so we can have compassion for people who are struggling, but then still turn that into practical things like you're saying in the public policy. Okay, here's the things we should support then.
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So, Jennifer, I would say this is a couple of different angles. You can go first, is that there are absolutely, you know, people have been born in different situations. You know, we're all, you know, not. We're all born equal. Of course, born in the. Born with the dignity of God has created each and every one of us. But we all have different struggles and some communities struggle more than others. And so to say that that doesn't exist would be, I think, ignorant and would be derelict of our responsibilities to care for others. In the same breath, I think the church, the body of believers, has abdicated its responsibility in terms of caring for our neighbors and caring for the least of these. It's really easy to look at a large picture and say, someone else will take care of that. That's not my problem. As long as my family's taken care of, I'm okay. And I think that exactly contrary to what we're called to do as believers and care for those in our environments who struggle and we have to count our blessings that we're in different circumstances. And I think this is where some of the work of the Good Citizen Project and the Church Ambassador Network with Indiana Family Institute focuses on is saying instead of government being in control and having big government, how do we shrink the size of government and empower our churches and our local faith organizations to be boots on the ground in these struggling communities, come alongside them, because you can't fix this in a day. But what you can do is over a period of time, over many years, is just walk alongside people in life and show them that maybe there is a different way than relying on government assistance. Maybe there is a different way to then have this victim mentality. You know, maybe we can show that work is a good thing, it was instilled by God so we can provide for our families. It is a God given gift of work. And how do we steward that well? How do we steward our finances well? And all of these things that I think the church has gotten a little bit lazy on and has taken a backseat on. And so I think the church needs to get engaged. The body of believers needs to get engaged, work with our local communities and I think over time we can start to see generations improve. But this, this is going to be a long term fix. And so we're not a long term fix culture. We don't have the appetite for it. But I think we need to take a step back, look at the big picture and say what are our key goals and our key initiatives and how do we take the long view on this and work with people where they are and meeting them where they are and serving them and understanding that they, just like us, have been created for a plan and a purpose by God and how do we come alongside them and shepherd them well. And so those are some of the things again that could be a long conversation in of itself, but these are some of the things that I think conservatives, Republicans and Bible believing individuals need to wrap their heads around in terms of how do we fix these issues.
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In your work at the Indiana Family Institute, what are some of the policies that you're most passionate about? Specifically around protecting children, restoring and protecting the family.
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So one of the big things that we just accomplished, it was a team effort, took about four years. We passed Senate Bill 143 in the state of Indiana and that is a parental rights bill, parental rights legislation. And essentially it says that if you as a parent or as a guardian don't affirm your child or children's desire to transition or live out in some lifestyle that doesn't count as abuse and neglect. And oftentimes you would have the Department of Child Services come into a home and say that you are not affirming your child's lifestyle, therefore that is abuse, neglect and we're going to take your child out of your home. And that's happened numerous times. There's a famous case called the Cox case. It was appealed all the way up to the United States Supreme Court where a child was physically removed from a home because the parents are not approved of their transition. And so these are some of the real things that are going on in even conservative states like Indiana. And it's even worse for states like California, Illinois and New York that these are real, these are real issues that need to be addressed. So we passed Senate Bill 143. We're working on other parental rights legislation, making sure that parents are in charge of their kids education, parents are in charge of their kids direction until they turn 18. And we want to do what we can to empower the family there and again limit the scope of government and what the armed government can do and making sure that we're empowering our community. So that's a big one. Again, working with our federal officials as well in Indiana to take that model legislation on the state level and apply it to the federal level and clearly define abuse, neglect, and some of these things and making sure that we're empowering people nationally as well. So that's a big one. Also, last year we put a ban and a restriction on the ability to access explicit material online. You have to input your driver's license and your personal identification. And all of a sudden when you want people to do. When you ask people to do that, they don't want to do it anymore. And so we're making sure that we're taking care of our kids and families and making sure that we're protecting kids for as long as they can and help them to focus on growing and who God called them to be instead of being having their eyes open to a lot of sinful things.
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That's great. That's amazing. We cam not campaigned, lobbied at some level in support of. I think it was Texas's age verification law that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. We wrote a brief for that at least. And I think the Supreme Court voted in favor of protecting Texas's ability to. Yeah, protect. It is interesting. One of the guys that we've had on who wrote our pro child politics chapter on pornography said we would not allow someone to stand on the street corner selling explicit material to children. But then on the Internet, it's been kind of fine. And people just wring their hands and say, well, I don't like it, but there's nothing we can do because it's free speech. And he's like, that's not free speech and we don't allow it in any other way. So we're not going to allow. On the Internet. So that's great that Indiana has worked on that. And I didn't ask. I didn't ask you this ahead of time. So it's totally fine if you don't know this off the top of your head, But I'm just curious if you have any knowledge about Indiana's current state of affairs when it comes to things like IVF or surrogacy legislation or, you know, is. I haven't heard anything. So I'd assume Indiana might be pretty on par with sort of other states. Like, they allow most of those things.
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For now they do. But the state of Indiana is not immune to the pull of the rest of the country. And so as issues rise to the surface, we have to deal with some of these issues. And how do we clearly and articulately and biblically explain our positions? And how do we think about what's best holistically for Hoosiers? And so it's something that we're definitely working on, something we're wrestling with. And what kind of legislation can we create or change to make sure that we're always putting who's your families top of our priority list.
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Them before us is actually working on a project to rank every state by their basically how much they are protecting or violating the rights of children. So it's great to hear. I mean, what Indiana has been working on already is going to definitely bump you a little higher than the state I currently live in, which is Washington. So a little bit of a struggle there. I'm curious to, you know, Indiana is more of a. You're a red state that's purplish red or blue. I'm curious, you know, but you, like you said, you're not immune to the cultural things going on. And I'm sure you know, within those urban centers, the big cities are probably trend more blue than more of the rural areas. That's also true in Washington state. I'm curious how and maybe you can even just talk about this when you're interacting with people in your personal life. How do you try to advocate for policies that you know are good for people, good for families, good for children in a way that is less partisan because, you know, especially them. For us, we're trying to say this isn't really a Democrat Republican thing. The problem is we only really get to have conversations with the more political right because they are more in line with the things that we're trying to talk about. And even then we get a lot of pushback with IVF and surrogacy. When you try to talk to the political left, so many of the things that they're advocating for are so far outside what mo the average person wants when it comes to like pornography, trans, trans ideology, things like that. So we just don't have a really a lot of common ground and so it can come off very partisan. I'm just curious, how do you navigate trying to advocate for good policies and still reaching out to people that are on the more political center or maybe they lean left. Helping them understand these things would be good for the things they think are important too.
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So it is a person by person, community by community approach. Instead of where I think the Republican party has gone wrong is shouting from the mountaintops or demonizing the other side. And that is never going to solve any significant, substantial issue. And so it's involved having community events, having town halls, talking to people as another person that you're talking to and not someone who's on the left or the right. And as soon as you start bringing up those terms, people get encamped one way or the other, and then no good conversation is had and no actual work gets done. And so the approach of Indiana Family Institute, the Good Citizen Project, and those of us that are on the political right, the responsibility is to have win some arguments and conversations to one person at a time and talk about and try and appeal to the humanity of the issue. Because we can all get behind, you know, wanting our families to succeed and flourish, and we can all get behind wanting the best for our kids. These are not right and left issues. These are, but they become right and left issues when we start painting each other in a negative light. So I would say we want the same things, generally speaking. Now, some are far on the right, some are far on the left, but we want most of the same issues. But the debate comes into how do you get there? What sort of playbook is best for conservatives and Democrats have their own different playbooks. But I think let's look at the goal and then making sure that we're talking to the person as individuals and appealing to what actually matters. And also I think we need to listen better, and I think we don't listen anymore to each other as a country. If you look at the example and the model to me of Charlie Kirk was he would talk to people, he would listen to people that would disagree with them. He would debate well, actually talk to them about substantive issues. And that's something that I try and model. That's something we try and model at Indiana Family Institute and as Hoosiers is having positive dialogue and making sure that we're talking to each other as individuals. And I think if you do that over time, again, it's not going to be an overnight solve. But if you do that over time, you can convince people that these are good family policy ideas. But you have to strip the partisanship of it, otherwise. Otherwise nothing's going to get accomplished.
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Yeah, when you were speaking, I thought of Charlie Kirk as well. And what's interesting is he would give maybe a speech to a larger group, but he really thrived. And it was really important to him that he do those one on one kind of Q and A back and forth. And what was cool about that is he would be engaging with that individual person and trying to connect with them at a personal level and strip down the argument and present alternative thoughts. But then he was also doing that part in front of another thousand kind of people. And what's so beautiful about that is when there is more of a public platform for an exchange of ideas and you invite a bunch of people, you know, the debate is very rarely for the two people talking, generally they're kind of set where, where they're going. But for the people who maybe are not decided to hear a presentation of the arguments and a back and forth offers them something, well, you know how I'm going to think about that differently now? Or oh, that person made a better argument or they presented it in a better way. That's more appealing to me. And I think, yeah, you're right, we can change a lot of hearts and minds that way. That's them before us thing as well. We're passionate about wanting to change the hearts and mind, but we also want to change the laws. And I think there's some chicken and egg situations there. Right. With the. When we talk about slavery and such, there's a lot of people that were not their hearts had not been changed to outlaw slavery yet. But, and some people argue maybe it should have gone, been done a different way. But at the end of the day it's, it's a both. It's a both. And you need cultural change and you need loss to change. I'd love it in our last few minutes if you just wanted to share about what the Good Citizen Project is and is that primarily with young people and yeah, just tell us anything we need to know about that.
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Sure. So the Good Citizen Project is an auxiliary of Indian Family Institute, as is the Church Ambassador Network. I enjoy taking part in both of those. And the goal, the Good Citizen Project is to provide strong legal support for Christian schools and churches across the nation. It's a nationwide initiative to give them a good legal founding and foundation from which to do ministry. And a lot of these smaller churches and schools aren't equipped well enough to be able to handle what culture throws at them. Churches across the nation are struggling with religious liberty issues, are struggling with how do we take Supreme Court decisions and apply them to what's going on in our ministry, how do we deal with hot button cultural issues? And so that's something that the Good Citizen Project comes alongside with them. And we have numerous clients, whether they're small Christian schools, big Christian schools, small churches, bigger churches, and we come alongside them and give them support and help them understand some of these hot button issues. We come alongside them and help them write their bylaws and the articles of incorporation, we do their policy review, all of these different things to be able to better prepare the ministry so they can keep the main thing, the main thing which is reaching hearts and minds for the cause of Christ. And so we want to help them get over some of those hindering issues. And so that's what we like to do with the Good Citizen Project. We also do national speaking engagements as well. So we'll come into churches, we'll come into schools and do chapels and talk about what does it mean to be a gospel citizen in today's culture. Paul explained this well in the book of Romans talking about, you know, I am a citizen of heaven first and foremost, but also I need to render under Caesar's what is Caesar's? I'm a citizen of my current present day environment. And I think Christians need to learn from his example and understand that we need to respect those who are in authority. It's been ordained by God, but also live with heaven in mind. And so we come in and we talk about some of those issues. We DO Q&As with students and churches across the nation as well. Then the church ambassador network on the other side or can has a lot of or mirrors other groups like that across the country, Iowa, Florida or some of the other strong church ambassador network states. And what it means is we help pastors engage with their elected officials to be on the ground or boots on the ground movements in their communities. And it's a really good thing to combine pastors that know what's going on the ground in their communities and elected officials. We come alongside with them, we pray with them, we let them know that we're here for them. We don't just want things all the time, but we're here to provide spiritual support for them. And that goes a long way. In the state of Indiana, we connected with 90% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats. So we're reaching legislators across both sides of the aisle. We made over 12,000 connections last year between pastors and elected officials. So this is something we're leading in in the nation. We want to see the rest of the nation take up because just like we have responsibility to care for those in our midst, we have responsibility to care for our legislators and our elected officials. And oftentimes we don't do that because we tend to shy away from some of these things and they need help, maybe even More so than, you know, just, you know, the guy down the street who goes to church. And that's great. But we often leave some of these key elected officials and public servants out of the fold. And we need to bring them into the fold and care for them as individuals as they go through making these tough decisions that affect hundreds of thousands of people. So Church Ambassador Network and the Good Citizen Project, really good initiatives. You can just go to GoodCitizen US for more information and go that way or go through Indiana Family Institute website. I would be happy to connect with you, come to your church, come to your school, those kind of things and talk more about some of these key important issues and how we can best support you.
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B
That's great. Yeah, we'll make sure we put your links in our description, for sure. What would you say to folks who want to think about getting involved in some of these things? But it feels pretty scary. I think that's another. There's been kind of the negative and the positive side of what happened to Charlie Kirk, where a lot of people I think, have been very emboldened to want to get involved in different ways and say, hey, I do want to run for local office or I do want to contact my local family policy center and do tabling or do signatures. Like right now I've seen on Twitter quite a bit in Washington State, signature gatherers are getting attacked. Like people are coming and crossing out their things or ripping up their stuff. And so that used to be I. I've helped do that and that did not feel too scary to me. So there's both a, like, increase in motivation and there does seem to be an uptick tick in the opposition to that. And there can be fear around that. What would be your advice to folks who want to get involved but feel any kind of trepidation about that?
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Yeah, well, Jesus says have no fear for I've overcome the world. And so we know how the story ends. And so it's our job, whatever the risk, to be good stewards of what we've been given and to step out in faith and to get engaged and get involved. It's our responsibility. If, if not us, then who? And if we're not discipling the world and if we're not being engaged, something else is going to fill that place. And so we want to make sure that we're being faithful and being engaged as much as we can and understand that each and every person that we interact with is an eternal being one way or the other. And so we interact with people and understand that they're eternal beings. The, the encouragement and the passion for which we engage with them elevates and is at an all time high. And so I think people are modeling what Charlie did in their own communities and they're wanting to be engaged and those are great. But don't tire with that, don't stop. Keep one foot after the other, keep the foot on the gas and understand that this is an eternal thing that we're engaging in. And so if we can look at it from that perspective, it makes the perfectly temporal day to day struggles not as bad. It's still, you know, it's still difficult sometimes it's still stressful, sometimes it can be painful. But when we know what Christ went through for us, it should embolden us to live for other people and to know that we're not our own, we've been bought with a price and it's our responsibilities to shepherd and steward our communities.
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B
That's a good word. Well, where can people find you? Berjean, I know you mentioned the kind of the two projects that people could look up, but do you have kind of a social media presence or other ways that people can get involved?
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A
Yeah, goodcitizen Us would be a good one as well as my Instagram and we can go in and link that down for people to go look at. I'd love to engage with people there as well and then the Indiana Family Institute website as well. But we're going to throw my social down there for people to engage with and I'd love to connect with your audience and walk alongside them and show that, you know, we're in this for the long haul. This isn't just an Indiana thing, this is a national thing. We're just showing that, you know, Indiana can be the model for the nation is how we do ministry, how we care for the least of these and how we engage our communities. That's something I'm really excited for.
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B
That's awesome. It's so neat to see how God has used your story. Like you said, becoming coming from being an orphan and coming into a family that loved you and offered you that picture of what God does for the rest of us and how you're using that to support and build up families in Indiana. And that is really neat that. I love that the policy centers are sort of, we want to inspire a healthy sense of competition to like which family policy center is going to get stuff done to protect families, you know, the best and the soonest. So it's awesome that you guys are modeling some of that legislation. So thanks, Berjean, for being here and for all your work.
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A
Thank you, Jennifer.