Are Young Men Coming Back To Church?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Thinking Fellows – Are Young Men Coming Back To Church?

Episode Date: July 1, 2026
Hosts: Caleb Keith, Scott Keith, Bruce Hillman
Length: ~55 minutes

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Overview

In this episode, the Thinking Fellows delve into recent claims and data suggesting a surge in young men (18–29) returning to church—particularly to traditional, liturgical denominations such as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and confessional Protestantism. The hosts analyze data from Gallup and Pew, explore possible cultural and societal factors, and critically assess the narrative that “tradition” alone is leading the revival. They also consider what this shift means for church practice, community life, gender dynamics, and faithful ministry.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Is There Really a Return?

• Host Skepticism: While media and some Christian groups tout a revival, the hosts are cautious. Data shows bumps but not a seismic shift.
• Scott Keith: “If young men are returning to church in droves, we should just be thankful that this is happening. ... But we should just be thankful that it's happening. Number one, if it is happening.” (03:42)
• Trend Analysis: It’s too early for sweeping claims; trends need to be tracked over years, not months, to be meaningful (05:29).

2. The Data Breakdown

• Gallup Poll Figures:
  • Until 2020, more young women than men valued religion in their life. Post-2020, young men overtook women in religious importance, although actual church attendance is about equal (09:06–12:27).
  • Both young men’s and women’s church attendance has dropped compared to previous decades; men’s has rebounded slightly, women’s much less so (12:57).
  • Caleb Keith: “No more young men are not going to church than in my lifetime, but way fewer women are.” (13:45)

3. Why Are Women Leaving?

• Higher Education & Career Shifts:
  • Women now outpace men in higher education and career advancement (14:08), delaying marriage and family.
  • Bruce Hillman: “Women are being disenfranchised in a way they're not used to because women are outpacing and outperforming them. ... It would make sense to me that they would be attracted to ... high church systems where men are in charge.” (14:12)
• Resulting Culture Shift:
  • Women busy with education/careers may retreat from optional commitments like church, following patterns once attributed only to men (20:56).

4. What’s Driving Young Men Back (If They Are)?

• Disenchantment with Progressive & Politicized Churches:
  • Young men may find historic churches stable, “above” culture wars, while mainline Protestant and evangelical churches are seen as politicized (07:39; 08:13).
• Masculinity & Gender Roles:
  • Churches with traditional male leadership appeal to men seeking cultural clarity (15:58–18:46).

5. Political & Cultural Angle

• Ideological Split:
  • Young men trending more conservative, young women more progressive—mirrored in church attendance patterns (23:49).
• Host Commentary:
  • Caleb Keith: “When they look at churches, they are not typically looking at ... progressive churches. They're looking at churches that share their conservative moral vision for the world and have some precedent for not changing that.” (23:52)
• Liturgical ≠ Conservative:
  • Highly liturgical churches can still be theologically or socially progressive (29:55).

6. Pitfalls of Seeker Sensitivity & Attendance Chasing

• Changing Practice for Trends:
  • The hosts warn against modifying church practice merely to attract a demographic (06:32; 27:32).
  • Scott Keith: “When you change your practice just to get somebody in the door, you're really leaning into the flip side of that ... and I think that’s a bad approach.” (03:42)

7. Community, Family, & Church Life

• The Need for Multigenerational Churches:
  • Focusing on one demographic (young men) neglects the needs of women, children, elders, and undermines the church’s function as a whole (29:41).
  • Scott Keith: “You need some old people to like give the offering. ... You want people who have had stable employment to help keep an institution open.” (31:56)
• Economic, Mentorship, and Social Support:
  • Churches should offer matchmaking, job assistance, and community support, recognizing the needs and struggles young men bring (53:19–54:41).

8. Theological Consistency over Market Trends

• Liturgical Practices Should Be Theologically Grounded:
  • Caleb Keith: “We don't argue from ‘give them what people want.’ ... We've always argued that the retaining of the liturgy ... was because it proclaims the gospel and administers the sacraments.” (33:30; 34:22)
• The Church’s Message Is Not a Civic Program:
  • The congregation’s mission: proclamation of law and gospel, sacraments, not mirroring political or cultural messaging (35:01; 36:05).

9. Broader Socio-Cultural Critique

• Rise of the “Elite Lifestyle”:
  • Broad comfort, focus on self-actualization, travel, career, and education (42:14–43:41).
  • Christianity historically calls for rejecting self-centered elite pursuits in favor of sacrificial community and (where appropriate) family (48:53).
• Memorable Moment:
  • Scott Keith: “The personal travel one is ridiculous ... the fact that that has, like, kind of itself up to the top of the priority list for young people is just bizarre to me.” (51:11)

10. Pastoral Application: What Should Churches Do?

• Be Thankful, Stay the Course:
  • “If this is really a thing ... what the church really needs to do is just thank God for bringing these people to the gospel.” (52:34)
• Support, Don’t Pander:
  • Provide genuine support: employment, matchmaking, financial help, but resist pandering to trends or turning church into a marketing machine (53:19–54:58).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Scott Keith: “If young men are returning to church in droves, we should just be thankful ... we should just be thankful that it's happening. Number one, if it is happening.” (03:42)
• Bruce Hillman: “It would make sense to me ... that they would be attracted to wooden sort of liturgical high church systems where men are in charge.” (14:12)
• Caleb Keith: “No more young men are not going to church than in my lifetime, but way fewer women are.” (13:45)
• Scott Keith: “Some of the most liberal churches on the planet are highly liturgical.” (29:55)
• Scott Keith: “We're not called to pander, we're called to preach.” (36:05)
• Caleb Keith: “If you’re going to have an influx of single young men 18 to 29, they're going to need help or appreciate help with work, with building a family, with all of those things.” (53:51)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 02:00 – Introduction of Gallup poll, framing the main question
• 03:42 – Why “reverse engineering” church for trends is problematic
• 08:47 – Gallup data breakdown on religious importance and attendance
• 13:45 – Noticing sharp drop in women’s attendance
• 14:08–18:46 – Education, career, and cultural shifts affecting gender ratios
• 20:56–23:41 – Changing career/family timelines and their effects
• 23:49–25:18 – Political/ideological splits and church preference
• 27:32–29:41 – Seeker sensitivity, why marketing to young men is shortsighted
• 33:12–36:05 – The argument for keeping tradition grounded in theology, not trends
• 42:14–43:41 – “Elite class” critique, the tension with the gospel
• 52:33–54:58 – Practical advice and outreach strategy for supporting young men

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Conclusion

The episode provides a nuanced, data-driven exploration of claims about young men returning to church, pushing back against simplistic narratives. The hosts stress that enduring church renewal cannot hinge on surface-level trend-chasing, marketing, or tailoring worship practices to demographics. Instead, churches should remain faithful to their confessional identity, provide practical support and community, and thank God for any genuine resurgence—while recognizing the complex cultural forces at play.

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Transcript

[Caleb Keith]

Hello and welcome to the Thinking Fellows Podcast. My name is Caleb Keith. Today I am joined by Scott Keith and Bruce Hillman. Adam is doing some important, important work. He's teaching somewhere.

[Scott Keith]

I'm sure he's in Lincoln, Nebraska, doing intensive. What do they call it? Continuing theological education for Concordia Seminary, Fort Wayne.

[Caleb Keith]

Okay.

[Scott Keith]

I'm sorry. Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne.

[Caleb Keith]

I don't want to miss that in Lincoln, though.

[Scott Keith]

Yeah, they do continuing theological education all over the place. Okay. Adam's one of their go to's for it.

[Caleb Keith]

Yes. Important with Fort Wayne that you don't just say Concordia Seminary. You gotta make sure the theological is there or you're gonna get letters.

[Scott Keith]

I corrected it.

[Caleb Keith]

Well, good for Adam. He makes this all look bad because half the shows recently we have to announce that he's teaching somewhere. Although you did the same thing. You were in Finland.

[Scott Keith]

Well, it's his birthday. I. Concordia University, Irvine. All week. Last week we didn't record that.

[Bruce Hillman]

Weren't you in Florida before they get the credit?

[Scott Keith]

Yeah, I was. Not for that, though.

[Caleb Keith]

I thought you were teaching, so everybody's busy teaching, but Bruce and I. Maybe Bruce is, and I just don't know.

[Bruce Hillman]

I was teaching last month, but not this month.

[Caleb Keith]

All right, well, I'm the only slacker, so.

[Scott Keith]

Well, you taught at Concordia last week.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah, I did for a day. That's true.

[Scott Keith]

For a day. You did full eight hours. There you go. That's not nothing.

[Caleb Keith]

That is not nothing.

[Scott Keith]

They gave me a break.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah, it was fun, too. It was good. I like teaching.

[Scott Keith]

We got all the jokes like, oh, we didn't know we were getting two keys for the price of one.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah. And they genuinely did.

[Scott Keith]

Yeah, they genuinely did.

[Caleb Keith]

They didn't have to pay me. Well, we're going to talk about young men coming back to church. Or are they? And I think that's the kind of the swing here. You see a lot of information going around based on a Gallup poll from last year about the return of young men to churches, specifically to kind of confessional or liturgical Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant churches. The Eastern Orthodox and the Catholics have, I would say, run away with this in a online apologetics kind of sense, trying to sort of slam dunk on everybody else saying, we did it, guys. There's been some response to this. I've seen some Lutherans responding to this as well. And the general consensus is, is that they're returning for the liturgy, they're returning for traditional historic worship. And then some of the suggestion has been if you want to get in on this if you want to get in on this American Spiritual Revival, what you got to do is double down on liturgical traditional worship. I'd like to just kind of flush both of those things out. I don't know how much you guys know about these statistics or not, but I've read up on them, listened to a couple of more reports on them going outside of Gallup. I've looked at the Gallup data as well and just want to talk about what, what this return means or if it is a return of young men to churches and then go from there and talk about the sort of idea that that would then prompt a return to liturgical worship or more traditional worship. So any immediate thoughts from the two of you?

[Scott Keith]

Well, I mean, mostly because we chatted about it a little bit yesterday. I think the danger with some of. Well, okay, so first of all, I think we should all say if young men are returning to church in droves, we should just be thankful that this is happening. That we should just. And nobody should really be bragging about it or how they did it or anything. This is obviously something that we're not controlling because it's not like Roman Catholic churches and Eastern Orthodox churches haven't been liturgical for the entire time. But if that's what's causing it, I guess great too. But we should just be thankful that it's happening. Number one, if it is happening. Number two, I'd say I'd kind of be careful. I mean, I was never a big fan or a fan at all of like the sink or sensitive movement. In other words, sort of do what the people want because that'll get the people here. I've never liked that. When this class last week, I explained that my contention has always been that Lutheranism should be lex credendi, lex orendi. Like our belief determines our practice, not our practice determining our belief. And it seems like when you change your practice just to get somebody in the door, you're really leaning into the flip side of that. The lexerendi lex credendi that let your practice sort of be and determine your belief. And I think that's a, that's a bad approach to things. So I don't know, I mean, to me it's interesting. This has to be a long term trend before you can actually track real. I don't know that much about data, but having written two books that deal with some data regarding the families and men in church and that type of thing, I know you need longer term trends to really suss out whether something's happening. You can't get a bump.

[Caleb Keith]

Absolutely.

[Scott Keith]

You know, bump from January of last year until, you know, June of that year. And go, look at this is amazing. This is happening and it's going to keep happening. It's just not how it works.

[Caleb Keith]

Yep. You have anything. And then I'll dive into the actual chart here a little bit.

[Bruce Hillman]

I don't know if, you know, I'd be curious to find this out. Like if this trend, I know it's been tracked for a while, but there was a big bump, like Scott said, is relatively new, at least from the Gallup poll. I'm curious to see if this is outside of. If this is happening outside of North America and the uk. Like, is this happening in continental Europe? Is this happening in other places? My suspicion, not knowing if any of that, being able to answer that question, is that it's likely not. And I think one of the reasons for this is a disenchantment with mainline and evangelical Protestantism because of its politics in North America and the West. So obviously there's a reason why young men are going there, back to church. Multiple reasons probably. But I think a big one is a disillusionment with the way that the church has become politicized on the left and the right in a way that you just don't see that much in Catholicism. And Catholicism and orthodoxy offer a rootedness that seems to transcend current culture wars. Now, of course, those denominations are involved in things too, like abortion and things like that, but they kind of pick a couple things and they've been pretty consistent on them in the long run. Where I think Protestantism on the whole in the last 20 years has just gotten more and more entrenched in the culture wars and in politics and has sort of made Christianity about being on the right side of issues instead of about the gospel in Jesus Christ, I would guess, and I, of course, I don't know this, that that's driving young men to find something that they feel is more stable and more transcendent.

[Scott Keith]

You know, it's interesting that you bring up Europe because I've heard this is anecdotal, that this is a real thing in the UK and that they do have a longer term set of statistics in place that have tracked this in the uk. I think I heard somebody tell me that it was. They have got some good data from the last five, six years there. The stuff that I've heard from America, I mean, to lean into the political stuff, the stuff I've heard from America was just right after Trump was elected, this Last time.

[Bruce Hillman]

So I'd be curious to see if it trends with Brexit over in the uk.

[Caleb Keith]

But anyway, yeah, that would be an interesting. So I'm kind of not surprised. I wouldn't be surprised to find out either is true in Europe that it's like not as true or it's just as true or more or more. Because at least from the Gallup thing here, what is really interesting is the gap between men and women on the importance of religion individually.

[Scott Keith]

That's another question I think too. Is this just mostly men not leaving at the same time?

[Bruce Hillman]

The graph here is just completely different.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah. So what happened is for decades, basically, as long as we've been asking this question, how important is religion in your own life? Okay, so this is a question they've been asking a Gallup's chart goes back pretty far for the sake of like their short report. It goes back.

[Scott Keith]

It's always been women, 2001.

[Caleb Keith]

Women have always had a nearly 10 point or larger lead on men on this question until 2020, which is really interesting. And that's when women dove below men for the first time on Gallup's reporting. They then kind of tied like doot, doot, doot, doot, until men in 2000, 23 ish to 2024 shot straight up to 42%. Religious. Religion is important in my own life. And women stayed low at 29%. And this is for the age, so we're sticking with young. So we're saying 18 to 29 years old is what they have now. There's this huge gap between men and women where it's almost reversed from the early 2000s where men have like a 13 point gap as saying it's more important than women, young men do. But then you go down and you look at the reported church attendance. So religious attendance by age among us men and women, men only lead women by 1%, which Gallup says on here the 1% they have is statistically the same. 39% of young women attend church service regularly. 40% of young men attend a church service regularly. Both of those up, both of those up dramatically from the 2000 and tens. And I think this one gives you a bigger picture because you don't see just like a dive to zero at 2020 and like this weird shift in data. It's a longer term trend where from the early 2000s, young women were over 50% and men were just under 50%. And it basically was stable until, you know, 2014. And in 2014, this is when we had all the rise of the religious nuns reporting all those Christianity Today articles, the big Pew and Gallup research things that were sort of throwing everybody into a panic, and the realization that if this continued with the death of baby boomers, the oldest generations, and the increase of, at the time, millennials, who would have made up the 18 to 29 segment in the early 2010s and the 20s, we would be looking at churches with like 2/3 fewer people in them in a very fast time. Now, that's kind of returned a little bit. And the questions that people have are why and why are men leading the charge and at least saying that it's important or leading the return? So that is all very interesting. I find it interesting that there's always such a big gap between like, so fewer women are saying religion is individually important to them, but they're all still going to church at the same rate as men are. More men say it's important to them, but they're going to church at the same rate that women are.

[Scott Keith]

Sort of. Personally, women would have gone to church at a higher rate than men. Yes.

[Caleb Keith]

10% higher rate. 10% higher rate. Ish.

[Scott Keith]

Well, 10% points on 100 scale. But isn't that like if you had. If it's 40 and 50, that's, you know, there's more than 10% more women if it's between 40 and 50.

[Caleb Keith]

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, That's. I was just looking at.

[Scott Keith]

I mean, don't.

[Caleb Keith]

I'm a theologian.

[Scott Keith]

Don't ask me to do math.

[Caleb Keith]

No, this is just 18.

[Scott Keith]

I'm pretty sure if I asked chat, it would say that's more than 10%.

[Caleb Keith]

Now listeners are going like, so what does this mean? I think what does this mean is we're still way below. We're still like five to seven points below even on men, where church attendance was in, like, let's say, 2008, the year Obama was elected. In 2008, we still had 10% higher church attendance and personal reporting that individual religion was important to them. Across men and women and women in particular, we had about 20 points more attendance of young women than we do today. So on the ground, what it means is. No, compared to, in my lifetime, no more young men are not going to church than in my lifetime, but way fewer women are.

[Scott Keith]

Yes.

[Caleb Keith]

So the question actually is, what happened to the girls? Yeah. What happened to the young women that's changed in our society? Probably that.

[Scott Keith]

No, it's college guaranteed.

[Bruce Hillman]

No, I actually just. I brought up those statistics from a recent Pew research. So females now earn 57% of all bachelor's degrees.

[Scott Keith]

There's women. There's 72% of all university attendance. Yeah.

[Bruce Hillman]

The women account for nearly twice as many master's degrees and earn about 40% more doctoral degrees than men. Women now outnumber men in U.S. college educated labor force. A female completely dominate in the fields of the health sciences, especially nursing and pharmacy, as well as psychology. Males still dominate in computer science, engineering and mathematics, but it's shrinking. And in biology, women are 60% of undergraduates. So I think what you are seeing is among many other things, but one factor is that men are being disenfranchised in a way they're not used to because women are outpacing and outperforming them. And it would make sense to me to just on a sort of a flat level that they would be attracted to wooden sort of liturgical high church systems where men are in charge. There's not going to be women pastors, there's not going to be women leading a lot of things. There's opportunities for men to lead in those situations without having to feel like they're competing with women. They're not going to be emasified by. Yeah, they're not going to be emasculated by losing to a woman. There's a lot of. Just on a flat surface level. I'm sure there's other stuff. There's a lot of things where you could say, okay, it makes sense why those traditions would be particularly attractive. If it is true that young men are feeling like they don't know what their place is anymore, it's very likely that women in the next 20 years are going to be earning more than a lot of these men too. And so the whole breadwinner thing is going to be switched. So this is a time of significant cultural transition. You can argue whether you like it or not, but it just is. And these young men are trying to figure out where they want to be and how they want to grow and how they can find their masculinity in this cultural climate.

[Scott Keith]

Can I bring up an anecdote? Yeah, this is an anecdote. This isn't related to going to church or anything. I was looking at a new prone paddle board yesterday in town called Costa Mesa. Now it's this one guy, he's like in 70, maybe 65, 70, who like makes the boards, runs the shop. It's pretty cool little place, but he. And he's a talker. And so I go in there and I'm looking at this thing after church Everybody and I'm looking at this thing and you know, he, he starts telling me, he's like, you know, my, his son in law leads like the, the group out on from Newport, Back Bay that goes out and trains and they're training for the Catalina crossing. Like where you go from, I think it's Huntington beach to Catalina. That's 32 miles on a prone paddleboard through the ocean. And he goes, you know, he's been doing this for 15 years. And he tells me now that we got to start making female, more, more women's paddle boards because his groups are like 70% women now. And this old guy is like, I don't understand what's going on. And I said this is, I just looked at him and go, well this is everywhere. This is like the workplace, this is colleges, this is recreation. Like if you go on or go on a run somewhere where there are a lot of like on a normal running trail type place where you'll see a lot of runners, it's going to be 70% female, 30% male, which I've been running my whole life, let me tell you. That's a switch. That's like, that's a full, that's a full swap. Like when I first started running in my teens, it would have been like 9010. Even in the early 2000s when we would do running groups, it was like at least like 60, 40 men to women at least. And to have that now, this is just. Men are just like removing themselves from society, including getting jobs in the whole nine yards. And it's, I mean I'll, I'll go on record that I think it's a bad thing. And this old guy, by no means a conservative if you know like the, the Costa Mesa surfer crowd, they are lean, socially liberal. And he goes, well, so what you're telling me is that men just aren't being men. And I'm like, that's what I'm telling you. And so I think you're right, Bruce, that if you're a man and you want to engage and you just are tired of fighting for your sort of piece of the pie, you probably are going to go somewhere where it looks like you're not going to have to fight to, to get that piece of pie. And if that's going to be like a ultra orthodox church that's got like six dudes with two foot beards up there leading the thing, you know, it's probably a good visual indicator that you're not going to have to really fight to to get your place there.

[Bruce Hillman]

So another thing too is another statistic that I think is important is in 1980, and this is from Pew as well, first time mother was 22.7 years old.

[Scott Keith]

Yeah, that's in my book. Yeah.

[Bruce Hillman]

But a first time mom from the millennials is 27. 27, with an increase of 35% of mom's first time at 40. So you also have this delayed family building time. Of course, birth rates are low anyway. But you also have this delayed time where women are building a career before they're willing to settle down. And that may mean they're not interested, they don't need a man, they're not interested in a man, providing they want to be independent and do their own thing, they want to build their own career before they want to settle down. And so some of these men who kind of had grown up thinking, well, I'm just going to go start a family, because that's what they were told. It's much harder to do. I think the women are committed to.

[Scott Keith]

And if you want to know more about that, you should buy a copy of Being Family. Passing down the Faith through the Generations. That is the first two chapters, by the way, deals with that.

[Caleb Keith]

So I think those two. There's two things that are, if you kind of look at outside impacts on this and you were to not like stop, stop investigating what's happening inside churches that might be leading people back for a second and look at outside factors that match with this data. Is there other things that sort of correlate? I think you guys got to workplace and education opportunities for women which then align us with sort of the historic lows of men's attendance compared to women's church attendance, which is if people who are busy and building careers and education tend to retreat from sort of opt in things like going to church. And historically that has always been true. It was true in the greatest generation, like really dramatically. It was true in the baby boomers, was true for Gen X that men who went to college and started a career, if they had been going to church their entire life, from the time they were born until they were 18, they took roughly a five to six year hiatus for the most part. Then their children would be born now

[Scott Keith]

the average age of 50. Yeah.

[Caleb Keith]

And then. And they're back in. And coincidentally they're probably married to a woman who never stopped going to church if she didn't start career building at that same period of time. Right. She just never stopped. You get married, you have kids and your life together in Maui Means that this thing that was really normal for you growing up is normal again. You didn't stop going to church because you hated church. Probably you stopped going because you were busy. And opting into that is difficult. I think what you have a lot today now is even people who get married or are in these long term dating relationships that are basically marriage because when you break up with somebody you've been dating for eight years, it's just as bad as getting divorced. And everybody who says that's not is just capping. That's just.

[Scott Keith]

I've never heard one person that. I mean, I can think of one primary example in my life. They always say it's. It was like getting a divorce.

[Caleb Keith]

Yep. So. But if you're both career building, avoiding marriage and actually I think the data would say I just saw some stuff that was interesting. I think the data would say that they're avoiding marriage because marriage means they'll have kids, by the way. Not because it doesn't mean they won't have a divorce of that relationship down the line, but because marriage is correlated to having children. If you get married, you'll have kids whether you kind of wanted to or not, interestingly enough. But means that you are both have that mindset of being busy. And so now women's attendance, and like you're opting into church, women's attendance has dropped to what men's has been in that six year period historically. So it's down to like that retreat of people. The other one is then when you look at a return of interest in religiosity of young men and more and more of them aren't getting married or they're retreating from education opportunities in this life building. So you have some of that now that men are enrolling in college at a lower rate and engaging in career building later in life. They stay in church longer from the time they're 18 to maybe 21. If you didn't immediately go off to college or you didn't immediately start building a career, you probably keep going to your childhood church in a lot of settings. The other one is the growing gap between the political affiliations of men and women. And I think that's what you see at this 20 teens 2020 reaction. Largely, I don't think it really has to do with the liturgicalness of these churches outside of that. Those historic churches are conservative, they're not progressive, they haven't changed. And so what you have is that a higher percentage of men compared to women consider themselves conservative. Over 60% of women have an ideology that is strongly progressive of young women 18 to 29.

[Scott Keith]

Sounds like a real catch

[Caleb Keith]

if you look at the attendance of progressives versus conservatives, that similarly matches up where church attendance is substantially more important, generally speaking, to conservatives than to progressives. That would also explain why men who are now on an uptick of being more conservative, even though they tend to be more balanced, they're closer to 50. Conservative, progressive, it's now heading upwards conservative, that same percentage is looking at church. And when they look at churches, they are not typically looking at what they perceive as changing churches, I.e. mainline Protestant churches or progressive churches. They're looking at churches that share their conservative moral vision for the world and have some precedent for not changing that. And so that's why I would say orthodox Roman Catholic. And to be honest with you, if you look at the data, conservative Protestant churches also have similar attendance rises.

[Scott Keith]

So I think probably accounts too for the perception in these churches that this is a massive movement because it's likely larger in those churches than it is in Christianity. On the whole, like, if it's. It could be a very large movement in, you know, orthodox Roman Catholic, conservative Protestant, and only bump the total tick, like 1%.

[Bruce Hillman]

Yeah, it probably helps too, that the Pope now is a native English speaker and an American, and that's going to create a connection before when.

[Scott Keith]

I don't think. I don't think he's appealing to these guys.

[Bruce Hillman]

I don't know. I think he. He's pretty publicly, like, neutral compared to, like, Francis, who was seen as a real progressive pope. And people are kind of unsure about this current Pope. They don't really. He's kind of just kind of stays in the middle.

[Caleb Keith]

I think a lot of the trad caths that I see, especially on the apologetic side, no, they. They totally, totally manipulate everything he says to totally be on their team. So, like, I did this video about the encyclical, and I had a lot of upset people that I said it was progressive in nature. I read it very thoroughly and, you know, I critiqued this, what I call the confusion between law and gospel, and also noted sort of his openness to world religions, using phrases like the great religious paths of the world or shared dialogue.

[Scott Keith]

Great religious paths of the world.

[Caleb Keith]

And what conservative Catholics responded with, to people who pointed this stuff out, is that human dignity is the greatest ethical issue of our time, and AI is bad. It displaces people. And so, yeah, this Pope is, you know, I saw memes like, this Pope is saying crusade against the machines. And then like, it's pictures of crusaders judging a thing.

[Scott Keith]

I mean, that's sort of inherently progressive.

[Caleb Keith]

So.

[Scott Keith]

Which is funny because it's regressive. But most of progressivism is regression.

[Caleb Keith]

But you can see there's a branding shift, right, where like the conservatives go, hey, let's make images, probably AI images of crusaders attacking servers, you know, and it's like the Pope has said, we have a new crusade, and.

[Scott Keith]

And they don't hire their graphic designer friend to do it for them.

[Caleb Keith]

So I think that's, you know, posts this on an AI driven social media platform with an algorithm, you know, like. But that's my read on this, is that. Yeah, that, you know, that the trads will always. They did this with Francis and he was even more direct about this. The trads will always make up a reason that this is actually really historic Catholicism, just, like, expressed in a way that you don't understand.

[Scott Keith]

And maybe that's a problem. Yeah, well, maybe they're right.

[Caleb Keith]

Maybe they are right. So from the seeker sensitive side of this, I would say there's a couple things a church just can't control for. And so changing everything you're doing for the sake of attendance chasing would be bad advice. You can't control for the progressive conservative gap that's happening between young men and women. And honestly, that's not good news either, because if you all of a sudden have a surge of young men and it's a surge, but it's not like 50% of young men are coming back. It's a couple percentage points.

[Scott Keith]

I guess what you just said is my problem with how I hear other Christians say this. They're like, young men are just coming back to church and they make it seem like every young man they're going to run across is all of a sudden coming back to church. I'm like, no, if something is happening, I guarantee you that's not what's happening. I wish it were, but it's not what's happening. And even if it is happening, if they're coming back without the women, you're going to have a larger problem on the whole because who are they going to find to marry to make more little young men?

[Caleb Keith]

So I think, I was just going

[Bruce Hillman]

to say, I think if churches have been looking for an excuse to pull back the sort of worst excesses of the seeker sensitive thing and have a justifying reason to become more grounded in a sort of traditional or liturgical style or even just take influence from a sort of liturgical grounding, I think that's a good thing. But I think if people are arguing that by marketing and changing yourself to attract young men as a sort of marketing strategy, well, first of all, that doesn't make any sense to me because the statistics with women aren't good. So you're essentially saying that what's attracting the men isn't attracting the women. So we're just going to skew everything this way and screw the women. I mean, like, what's the. It doesn't make any sense. Churches should always be or aim to be multi generational. I mean, that's a part of the body that Paul talks about. And young, young men and women, excuse me, need older saints to model for them and to speak into their lives. And older saints need the sort of excitement and faith and hard work of, of the younger people. So I don't like this whole idea of marketing to one group.

[Scott Keith]

So the church should be about the proclamation of the gospel and the right administration of the sacraments. Right. It should do its job. It should preach the gospel. And just for people out there that don't want to freak out in this, I am including the preaching of the condemning law as well. That would kill them. They'd be brought to life with the gospel. But I'm going to summarize this as the Oxford Confession does. To preach the gospel and give out the goods of the sacraments rightly should not be seeker sensitive on any side of this. I mean, the seeker sensitivity is to give them the goods that Christ has promised to give in the preaching of the Word and the administer of the sacraments. That's what the job is. Now, can you do things on the fringes to make sure that people are comfortable when they come? Yeah, absolutely. You should. But be careful about that. And there's not like a direct correlation between if they are coming for the conservative message. There's no more better message to conserve than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Number one and two, liturgical is not going to equal all things conservative all around the board. I mean, some of the most liberal churches on the planet are highly liturgical. Yeah, including Preach Brother, including most Roman Catholic churches that you would go to be highly liturgical and super liberal. I dare you to go to any Roman Catholic church anywhere in Europe and say, yeah, and go, wow, that's a beautiful liturgy. And go, man, that guy doesn't even believe in the resurrection. And so take that. And at the end of the day, you do need churches to be multi generational. Every time we have this kind, I mean, you can. You gave all of the very pious reasons, Bruce and I appreciate that. But Dan Price, when he was pastoring a church, you know, he was, it was a church of all young people. And you would talk to him and you know, he. And you'd be over here saying, man, I wish we could get some young people in our church. And he'd be like, I wish I could get some old people. And you go, why? He goes, because young people don't have any money. They don't have any money. You need some old people to like give the offering.

[Caleb Keith]

You can't pay the rent.

[Scott Keith]

You need some stable people to help you pay the pastor's salary and pay the rent and keep the lights on. Like there's something to that too. I mean, that's not the only reason you want old people there. But it is one reason.

[Caleb Keith]

No, it's true. You want people who have had stable employment to help keep an institution open.

[Scott Keith]

A bunch of 21 year olds, but also model get their first time job

[Bruce Hillman]

to financially support the church. That's also an important thing to model.

[Scott Keith]

Yeah, totally, totally true. Totally true. We don't have much of that anymore. We don't even have much of that at our church. And our church's pretty great.

[Caleb Keith]

The thing that has bothered me in Lutheranism about the reaction to this, because I do think it's a good thing to get more young men in. Statistically, even if you could get 10% more young men, it's only gonna balance out the women there, right? Because it's mostly women in attendance anyways, even in the older generations, typically across the board. For now. But the reaction I've had is my entire life and, you know, liturgical, liturgical, my entire life, team, team liturgy has been like, hey, from the church, growth, missional, large church side, you can't argue from this is what the people want. Because we have a historic confession and practice to uphold. This is what's historic in.

[Scott Keith]

And now the liturgy guys are like, this is what the people want. Give it to them.

[Caleb Keith]

And now I see the liturgy guys going like, you know, this is what the people want. And if, you know now the combo argument, they'll go, isn't it convenient that what the people want is our historic practice? Right?

[Scott Keith]

Yeah. But then they're like, give them what they want.

[Caleb Keith]

But then it's like, give them what they want. Now. You've been arguing against that logic for decades. My entire life. And I was, you know, and a bunch of us were like, yeah, we don't argue from give them what people want. In fact, in my last YouTube video, I think I Said something like, you know, Lutheranism is unbothered with optimizing the liturgy for human preferences. Like, it's like even current modern preferences, we don't go through every era and be like, what would be the best way for what people want right now? And we've always argued that the retaining of the liturgy that we've retained was because it proclaims the gospel and administers the sacraments, and that we didn't change. We weren't a radical reformation in the sense that we didn't remove everything, only those things which were in error, causing confusion.

[Scott Keith]

Made you look like people harming the enemy.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah. Made you look like the enemy or were attached to a practice that was harmful for one reason or another. It wasn't like, let's make a checklist of everything the church has ever done and purify it to the most optimal form of worship that we could imagine or something like that. And so now, which is what a lot of, I would say, churches, non denominational churches, often do, it's like, it's optimization for the technology and the preferences and the style that you think people will want. So I think chasing that goes against the spirit of a confessional church that is stable.

[Scott Keith]

Well, if there's anything that's against the spirit of the liturgy.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah, right. And so I think, yes, Lutheranism should, in one form or another, be liturgical and maintain the historic practices that have handed down the faith for us and that retain the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of sacraments, the open forgiveness of sins, the private and corporate confession, absolution, all of that. But those arguments are theological at the end of the day, and that if that so happens to align with the preferences of young men, you know, God be praised. But that's not the incentive to go to some of our churches that have maybe moved past that or relegated that to less importance and go look it. If you did this, you'd have improved attendance. We shouldn't really argue from attendance. You think, likewise. Likewise. Again, you can't. You don't want to be. The church's message is not part of the contributing factor of making people more politically conservative, thus aligning them with church attendance in the United States, if that makes sense. Right.

[Scott Keith]

You can't look at what's going on in politics and go, now we need to make the church like that because it'll look, yeah, you couldn't even look at, like, what's going on at TPUSA or something like that and go, hey, man, if we sort of mirror that message, people will come to church. Right now there could be, you could make an argument that an evangelistic effort, a missionary effort, that kind of, you know, you can go be a missionary to young men type thing in America. I think that's probably a possible thing, you know, where you sort of become all things to all people in that situation and sort of mirror some of that. I'm not saying give political message, but mirrored some of that mojo a little bit. Sure. But what happens in the church, like once you get them into the church and you're catechizing them and everything, that should not be reflected of that. And the goal of the church is not a political goal. It's not a social, political, civic goal. It's the goal of bringing people salvation in Jesus Christ through the proclamation of the gospel. And then as it's connected to the water, and then it's connected to the body and blood of Christ for the forgiveness of sins. That's the goal of the church. And what happens all too often with this kind of stuff is that gets all mixed up and jumbled in people's heads, in their reality, in sort of their practices and their preaching. And it becomes unfortunate because then you're just pandering. You're pandering not just with what you now are saying the liturgy can accomplish, but then you're pandering in the message too. And that's a bad thing. We're not called to pander, we're called to preach.

[Bruce Hillman]

I agree. And go even further. I think it's an idolatry because I think in America today, even among a lot of Christians, their politics is their functional civic religion. I mean, Christianity is something they add in to sort of help justify their political worldview. But for a lot of people, you know, they're not going to not go to Thanksgiving over a disagreement on law and gospel. But they definitely, some people won't go to Thanksgiving because you voted for Obama or Trump. It's just, you know, it's crazy.

[Scott Keith]

I was listening to something the other day. It was political, but the guy made the argument that, you know, before sort of the move that we've had in modern democracy in Europe and here in the states, that nobody spent like it was not a significant portion of anybody's life to think about politics all that much. Like, and it just, it didn't occupy in the past, even here, not, not, not too long ago, unless you were sort of like a political junkie, which was a weird thing, it didn't occupy that much of your mental time of your life. And it does now, like, for everybody or for a lot of people. And it does. And it. And it's crazy, and it's not healthy. Like, how much more of your life could be occupied with, you know, thinking and contemplating, you know, your faith and your family if it weren't so wrapped up like this? I was going to say one other thing, Caleb. There's a. There's a new term I've heard pop. You know, I always make fun of you millennials for making up new terms for just, like, normal stuff all the time. And it's kind of dorky and ridiculous, and I think it's funny when y' all think it's hip to say. It cracks. Cracks me up. But the new one I've heard, I'm sure originated with millennials is called the third space.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah, that's us. I mean, it existed before us, but we, you know, we toss it out casually.

[Scott Keith]

Yeah.

[Caleb Keith]

I actually was just talking about creating third spaces, like, last week.

[Scott Keith]

Yeah. Like, it's just been in our. It's been in our vernacular all this time to just call something the third. That's what millennials do. It's like, we've never used this before. And they're like, yeah, you know, the third space.

[Caleb Keith]

And you're like, yeah, it's a shibboleth. And make sure that people are reading the same things you are.

[Scott Keith]

I know the third space. I've heard of that. So. But this is, like, a thing. Now, I may or may not have received an email from my athletic club this morning that was talking about it as the third space. I went, boy, this is, like, the third time I've heard third space in a week. This has got to be a thing. So I would bet you people start speaking of, like, making churches.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah, that's.

[Scott Keith]

Well, their third space.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Scott Keith]

Am I behind the curve on this? That'd be shocking if I were.

[Caleb Keith]

No, but that's okay. You have found the thing, though, that people have tried to talk about. I think my last kind of thing, this ties into your everybody's obsessed with politics thing. Did. And I think this is true of some of the other stuff. The west, particularly the United States. What we could say is there's been a surge of almost everybody into what in the past would have been called, like, the elite class or mindset. Right. Like, the highly educated, financially comfortable. Now, this is true, I think, of even people who are, quote, financially disadvantaged and haven't bought their first home yet and don't think they have enough money to raise kids and Their job pays historically like 20% less than just for inflation than generations past and all that. But the reality is you have absolute abundance of comfort and of time and the Internet and you're probably more highly educated than most of those. And because of that you're involved in all of the thinkings and the patterns of the elite class which tend to be very kind of self centered experience, centered politics. And like, you know, think of yourself as part of the aristocrat aristocracy and the voting class and stuff like that. That in the past, like even if you go into. I'm reading a book on this, so I'll steal some of the ideas. But even if you go into ancient Rome, if you had looked at the elite class, those people were living lives like where they weren't raising their own children. They had wet nurses and pedagogues raising their children. Like we have daycares and schools raising children.

[Scott Keith]

The number of your friends that have nannies is shocking to me.

[Caleb Keith]

And who do that?

[Scott Keith]

Were that mom by Nanny Bruce.

[Bruce Hillman]

I was not, nor I was a stay at home mom.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah, who do that so that mom and dad can pursue elite lives. That is working outside of the home, achieving, climbing the ladder and whatever type of work they're doing to have more influence or value or whatever. And so like the average American's life now looks like an elite Roman's life or elite person from Europe, which is a nanny and a pedagogue, a school. Are raising your kids so that you can pursue self thing. I think they have lap dogs.

[Scott Keith]

The Christianity who have better lives than people did 100 years ago.

[Caleb Keith]

Yes. Yeah. Christianity is interesting, especially if we consider that that elite lifestyle also puts off having children. And every country that's achieved in the world globally that has achieved this kind of comfort of lifestyle and equity of pursuit of elite, what we would call elite pursuits of employment and education and stuff has all these declining birth rates. Christianity, you know, like in, in the early church especially emphasized sort of the rejection of that even if attainable. And there's an interesting kind of thing there with your being family and being dad, which is in order to have to prioritize children above those things you're already rejecting at some level. The elite lifestyle, the sort of self, the self aggrandizing of experience and success and challenge that comes with it. And so I think we do have

[Bruce Hillman]

to be careful though to just say that you, you know, Paul seems to. Paul. Paul does say don't have kids so that you can devote yourself to completely to the religious lifestyle. So There is a very early tradition that doesn't have to be. I agree with what you're saying, Caleb,

[Scott Keith]

but more accurately says if you don't have children, don't seek to have them.

[Bruce Hillman]

Yeah. And to the young ones.

[Scott Keith]

And he's talking specifically to those people. I think, I mean, Dan and I just not too long ago did a tough text on this, and I think he's speaking specifically to those people that are going to go off and be missionaries with him. I think you got to get real tight with that with Paul. I also, I mean, and I agree in a sense, like, there's a part of me that was like, yeah, if you're going to go off to a very dangerous corner of the world and go spread the gospel there, it's probably best if you don't like, leave a four camera home to go do that.

[Caleb Keith]

That's Bruce. I would also say that that rejection of Paul there too. Now, the average person at the time, even besides the elites at the time is having. It was like 13 children. Now only like four of them would usually survive into adulthood. And it was very deadly for women as well. But the reality is even that Paul is actually suggesting an even more radical rejection of the world. Like, if you're going to be doing that, the devotion to religion, not just not children, not work, not the Roman imperial lifestyle, not sex, not going on vacations and traveling the world.

[Scott Keith]

Most countercultural thing. He probably Greeks.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah, it was countercultural and counter. Personal experiences in all shapes. And I would say I'm not disagreeing

[Bruce Hillman]

with anything you're saying. I'm just saying that you can have an early Christian view of a sort of.

[Scott Keith]

I agree.

[Bruce Hillman]

Commitment without, without saying, oh, yes, I, I, yeah, yeah, I'm elite. But I think today I agree with you, in the cultural climate of most people, most people aren't saying I'm delaying having kids or I'm not having kids because I'm so committed to the work of the gospel. Most people are for the reasons you're saying.

[Scott Keith]

I've had, I've had to answer this question already teaching on being family. And I, you know, like parents will say, like, are you telling me that it's a sin when my kids, my kids don't get married? And I'm like, I'll just look at them straight dead in the face, a room of 120 people and go, how old are they? Or 33. And I'll say, are they celibate?

[Bruce Hillman]

Yeah.

[Caleb Keith]

Are they celibate?

[Scott Keith]

That's a good question. And when the answer Is like when there's no answer, I'm like, okay, next question. No, that's right, Paul, you know, Paul's advice there is if you want to be somebody that dedicates yourself to study and to the Lord and to spreading of the gospel and you think that you can do that without having a family, that okay, you know, that's what I. And he's basically saying, that's what I do. That's absolutely what I do. But he also says, but I'm gifted with this ability to not need to have sex. That's why he adds, you know, the better to marry than to burn aspect of that. And so when most people in a modern context are asking that question or are relating that to the fact that their 32 year old kids aren't married and don't really look like they're going to get married, they are not presuming that they're doing that for the Lord and that they're doing that while being celibate. And so I think you're absolutely right. I just think in our day and age, people will tell me all the time when I do this, you know, well, Paul wasn't married. And I'm like, yeah, And Paul also never had sex. Yeah. And they go, and they go, yeah, yeah. I'm like, yeah, come on guys, what are we talking about here? Christianity, like the Christian's Christian over here. He's not like saying you're, he's not like saying your kids can live their whole lives and have like 20 different sexual partners and that, that's what he's talking about.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah. I just think Christianity rejects this sort of elite lifestyle as the head pursuit. And that will result in like, done properly, that results in growths in both kinds and would statistically result in growth of families and children and stuff like that. Because that is so much of the reason that people give today. And so the church has to be careful about not aligning itself with the political right or the left. Because the political right, even when it aligns with us on moral issues, is very much concerned with the pursuit and expansion of the elite lifestyle. It is about the economy, it is about opportunity. It just as much supports and looks to subsidize the education of everybody into college and graduate degrees as much as the left on the institutional side. And so those things are fine and good. I mean the three of us all have multiple college degrees and things like that. But they're not necessary because we're elite. Yeah, they're not necessary. And at some point you have to you have to see that, like, the church comes before the elite pursuits, which means a rejection of the self and of certain desires and experiences that you could have. Right. That means that Sunday mornings aren't for you. They're not for relaxing, they're not for traveling.

[Scott Keith]

Well, I mean, they are for you though, in that the service serves you with word and sacrifice.

[Caleb Keith]

Absolutely.

[Scott Keith]

Like you can actually still hold that mentality in a real particular way. I'm going to go. I'm going to just preempt what Bruce is going to want to say after that though, too. But you also are there for other people in that same way when you go. This is why the family analogy works so well with this. There you go, Bruce. Gotcha.

[Bruce Hillman]

Thank you. You did, you did.

[Caleb Keith]

So the church is going to have to find also, like, what are the positive things? I mean, keep on keeping on. I would say have an identity. What can Lutherans do? Have an identity. Have a confessional identity. That doesn't mean you have to change things or make arguments about being seeker sensitive. But when you are asked questions about who you are, talk about being historically grounded, talking about your distinctives, don't make yourself sound like the church next door. Whether that's Roman Catholic or whether that's evangelical, non denominational. Right. Like making yourself seem like what you think is popular at the time, whether that's older liturgical movements or more modern movements, isn't the play. The play is to be able to express what is uniquely Lutheran.

[Scott Keith]

Yeah. And preach the gospel and administer the sacraments in accordance with God's word. I know it sounds boring. I know every time I say that, I can tell people, they're like, well, that's boring again. But yeah, that's what it is, though. That's what it is. That's the handing over the goods. That's why it exists. That's why. That's why there is a church for that purpose.

[Caleb Keith]

And then I guess second is a lot of these young people who left, both men and women or don't come back at the same rate that they went to church is still the target. Not to say give up on all the older generations. Certainly don't. But of the kids in your midst, I think it's important to put these values far ahead of what they're going to be told is the most important things that they get everywhere else and that you're probably anxious about as a parent too, like employment, college, sporting opportunities, travel, like, et cetera. You know, just know that when you're like, if they're Anything like millennials in this upcoming generation. Personal travel, finance, what degrees or jobs they have, the amount of time they get to spend recreating, either on a computer or outside are probably going to be the most important things to them. 100%.

[Scott Keith]

I'm just going to do. Give me 30 seconds. The personal travel one is ridiculous at the end of the day. And I travel, but at the end of the day, that one is just kind of. The fact that that has, like, kind of itself up to the top of the priority list for young people is a just bizarre to me.

[Caleb Keith]

I can't think of something more important in my generation than getting on a plane to Europe. That's got to be like, yeah, but they just can't.

[Scott Keith]

Like, the ability to. The ability. Like, if you tell them they're going to make some decisions in their life that will make that harder. It's a real thing for them. Like, what do you mean? I can't. I can't just pick up and go to Spain for two weeks if I want to. Yeah, but that's really not a big. It's really not a big deal that you can't pick up and go to Spain for two weeks.

[Caleb Keith]

It's like you can nobody in human history.

[Scott Keith]

Like, you're probably gonna survive it. You know, that one, that one's crazy to me. And again, and I travel and I somewhat. I enjoy traveling, so I get the desire, but I don't get the urgency. I've said if I can't go to Europe, in a way I want to go, and if that means I never go again, okay, America's pretty great. It's like, get in a car and go somewhere and there's a lot of it.

[Bruce Hillman]

I can promise you I will never randomly on a weekend go to Spain or probably anywhere else for that matter.

[Scott Keith]

I know I got to say one thing before we close out. Caleb.

[Caleb Keith]

Yes.

[Bruce Hillman]

Yes.

[Scott Keith]

It's what I said at the beginning. If this is really a thing and if this is really happening and if it seems like it's got legs and it lasts, what the church really needs to do is just thank God for bringing these people to the gospel. Because this is being monumental change in the history of how Christianity has been communicated and accepted throughout the generations. It's always been, as far as I've read, from the beginning of time, it's always been a movement that's been more female than male.

[Caleb Keith]

Can we add that? It would also mean that there's a certain type of. This is going to get long. But I do want to say this, that there's a certain type of care for these young men that'll be necessary for the church to help with. So things that they're disenfranchised from, like employment.

[Scott Keith]

Like, is your church.

[Caleb Keith]

Are the older men, Are there business owners who can help get these guys the employment that they have? Matchmaking. I mean, this is going to be a serious problem.

[Scott Keith]

Set them up with your daughters.

[Caleb Keith]

Most of these guys want to get married.

[Scott Keith]

I'm serious. Is the church.

[Caleb Keith]

Churches in a place to help facilitate young couples that are saying it's harder and harder to find somebody of value and worth and shared identity to marry? Are we prepared to actually, like, not just be like, well, I met my spouse at a bar, you know, like,

[Scott Keith]

yeah, this whole picking your own spouse seems highly overrated.

[Caleb Keith]

Like, are we gonna help provide matchmaking and courting experiences and stuff like that? I think if you're gonna have an influx of single young men 18 to 29, they're going to need help with. They're going to need help or appreciate help with work with building a family with all of those things. And if the church is a family and a supporting network, those are kinds of the things you have to be thinking about if we truly are.

[Scott Keith]

The occasional financial support when, like, making rent is hard for them as they get going, we can't have the attitude, like, why did it? Why can't they? Well, it's a different world, man. And they might need your help, and you're trying to keep them, you know, their eventual wives and their eventual family in the faith and in the church, and they might need some common support to do that. Now, I'm by no means communist, so don't even smack me with that one. But at the end of the day.

[Caleb Keith]

But we were reading acts this last month.

[Scott Keith]

But I do believe that this is how the help of the poor should work. It shouldn't be taken out of my salary by force. It should be that I do through my local congregation. Yeah, all right.

[Caleb Keith]

No, that's good. I just think if this is true, we will see great need for reaching out and being neighborly to these young men.

[Scott Keith]

All right, my elite puppy. And I need to.

[Caleb Keith]

You're elite puppy. Reject the elite lifestyle. Throw off the lap dog.

[Bruce Hillman]

You're bourgeois puppy.

[Caleb Keith]

Yeah, Your bourgeois puppy. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of the Thinking Fellows podcast. We hope you found it interesting or helpful or made you think. If you enjoyed this show, do not forget to subscribe to it in your favorite podcasting apps or platforms. And you can share it with family, friends, maybe somebody from church. A word of mouth is indeed the fastest way that podcasts grow. So if you really want to help us out, you can share this with a friend or family member. Thank you for listening. We will catch you next time. Bye.