Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Pill Pod 157 - Progressive v. Reactionary Christianity ft. John Hamer

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Pill Pod 157 - Progressive v. Reactionary Christianity ft. John Hamer · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:09
  It gets us. All right, everyone, welcome, You're on the pill
• 0:14
  pod and it's one p. Fifty seven. If you've listened to our last
• 0:17
  couple, you know that we are in the midst of the end of history,
• 0:22
  or at least there's some people that would like you to think so.
• 0:25
  So if this is the case, there are basically three responses, or three
• 0:30
  families of theses that we can, you know, use to sort situate ourselves
• 0:37
  in terms of our reaction to this event. The first is our favorite,
• 0:41
  of course, conservatism, and if you take the term literal, believe the
• 0:44
  meaning is to conserve something of the past and to protect it from ending.
• 0:51
  The second is progressivism, which again in its literal meaning, means there's some
• 0:57
  progress to be made. Sometimes that's big revolutiontionary steps, sometimes just a few
• 1:02
  tweaks here and there. And then somewhere between those two is just whatever we
• 1:06
  got. It's working fine enough, Let's keep going with it because it ain't
• 1:11
  so bad. So we spent a little bit of time exploring some of the
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  loudest of the conservative brand of this, and they tend to be weird Catholic
• 1:22
  Christo fascists, the right wing of the flock that loves Jesus and some of
• 1:27
  you are flock our patrons. They shouts out to Ben and secret Asian Dan.
• 1:36
  They said that we should talk to a specific member of the progressive side
• 1:40
  of the Christian flock who also has a flair for history. So today we're
• 1:45
  welcoming John Hamer here. Hopefully he can help us figure out what he thinks
• 1:52
  history is still for. You can find him on YouTube. That's where I
• 1:56
  assume our people found him center Play, which I'm not sure, John,
• 2:01
  can you is this a church? Is this a place that we could actually
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  just hop on the subway and get to on Sunday morning if we're converted by
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  the end of this conversation. Yeah, well you do have a physical location.
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  I'm in it right here in Toronto Center Place as we call it.
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  And this is our church building that's in Old Town. So the congregation was
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  first organized here back in eighteen thirty six, and so this is the oldest
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  part of the city. And yeah, we if you wanted to come here
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  on Sunday, we will be here church service at noon. John. I
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  was looking to see if you had done any podcasts so I could prep on
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  this. And there is a John Hamer I found, although he's a conspiracy
• 2:43
  theorist who's particularly concerned with the sinking of the Titanic. So is that you
• 2:49
  no, Okay, So that is another John Hamer is a surprisingly common name
• 2:55
  because when I was a kid, I didn't think Hamer was very you know,
• 2:59
  normally people doom hammer, right, and then in fact, you know
• 3:01
  it would be the most common name. But yeah, there are a couple.
• 3:05
  So there's a a journalist in Washington State. There's an athlete, and
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  then there's also a conspiracy kind of a Titanic conspiracy theros kind of guy.
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  So he goes on he goes on these podcasts with names like the THHC Hour.
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  So if if a pastor was going on the THHC Hour, you know,
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  cool, it's just not the first thing I'd think of. Yeah,
• 3:27
  it's a different one though. You do have a pretty mixed bio cool bio
• 3:31
  pastor, Yeah, Matt Maker, which is pretty dope, and a lecture
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  lecture history of Christianity slash Christianity YouTube channel. And I didn't watch any full
• 3:46
  videos because they're they're extensive, but let's say they're long. Let's say it's
• 3:52
  a little bit different from the Christian intellectuals we've been covering the last few weeks.
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  So yes, as you know, we covered some of your conservative counterparts,
• 4:03
  but as non sacramental individuals ourselves, we couldn't. We could figure out
• 4:10
  what they think history is for in the in the Christian religion, but we
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  didn't want to. We didn't want to take this one position as the only
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  position. So that would be like, let's take over all of the world's
• 4:21
  political systems, which makes sense to me as a goal. But browsing their
• 4:27
  content makes me think that you might have a different idea of Christianity. Yes,
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  absolutely, we have a very, very different idea. So it's a
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  broad movement that has, if anything, in the last since the Enlightenment,
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  fractured into some pretty diverse paths. And so the conservative branches of Christianity,
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  which by far and away are the loudest and best known branches to think to
• 4:53
  most people, have been a reaction against let's say, academic findings against science.
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  Often they have tripled down on trying to read Biblical texts literalistically, and
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  it's not a way that the texts were actually ever understood historically. Because as
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  you are aware and when you're living in modern times. You are not living
• 5:21
  as a medieval person. You aren't existing within the medieval worldview anymore. You're
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  existing in the modern worldview with all of the new data and now in order
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  to maintain that position, you're reacting against it and creating something new. And
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  so whereas they call it conservativism or preservation, in fact it's a reactionary movement,
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  and fundamentalism in general in all religions is modern movement, not a medieval
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  or an ancient movement. And so progressive Christianity, and know, as you
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  were kind of defining where we are in history, whether we want to conserve
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  or maybe regress, go back. Progressives, I guess are hoping for improvement.
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  So and that's certainly the aim of my denomination and what I'm what I'm
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  involved in here. So to ask, I guess this is this might be
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  simplistic, but just so we can get it out of the way. Did
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  history end in thirty a d And if not, then like, what's the
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  purpose of this lull between christ dying and coming back? What do we what
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  are you guys trying to get done in the meantime? So, I guess
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  a lot of Christianity and certainly as Christianity developed. It was developed before modern
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  academic disciplines like history. So there was an ancient understanding of history, the
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  ancient Hellenistic historians, thucidities and so on. But they're tools that they had
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  lacked capacity to really make vary sophisticated judgments about history. And so largely people
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  read texts and understand them, and they presumed that sort of thing happened.
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  They didn't have a great way to do what we do now with history,
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  which we're where we are able to say what is the likelihood of this scenarios
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  history. Lets us read the different sources that we have, and we read
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  them against the rest of the archaeological record and so on in order to tease
• 7:17
  out what what the most likely scenario is and so and so. Now we
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  have all kinds of tools. The academic discipline of literary criticism. Criticism was
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  largely developed in order to study the Bible, you know, and so we
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  have centuries now of tools that allow us to understand those things. And so
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  in terms of your like the lull between thirty and you know, a literalistic
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  second coming that is almost for for I would say, within my tradition is
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  an irrelevant question, so, you know, because because we are not,
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  uh, we're not imagining a literal second coming of Jesus where history will will
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  end in the whole world will be destroyed or anything like that. Rather,
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  we understand the alternates more spiritual understanding that also dates back to the first century,
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  which is that the kingdom that Jesus is talking about, that overturns empire,
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  that overturns unjust systems in the world, that that society is already here
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  among us, or that new spiritual age of Christ having returned is here among
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  us, but we have to build towards it, and we do that by
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  challenging unjust systems, by making the world more equitable and so on. So
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  that sounds great to me. Yeah, I'm curious how would you situate your
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  like that kind of account and as someone who doesn't know that much about like
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  theology, but like in comparison to what some of the conservative Christian views,
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  like I don't know, and maybe you know it's okay if you're I don't
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  know, how much you've time you spend kind of surveying like what what these
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  rival you know, are, like more conservative Christians so you mentioned literalist interpretations,
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  I suppose, so, like, would you say, like, that's
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  one of the major differences between a more conservative oriented are there are there other
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  major disagreements. There are lots of other major disagreements. And before, maybe
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  before you answer that, because we all of us did read for today one
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  of my new favorite guys. Uh yeah, a fucking ironically favorite a psychopath
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  Cornelius Adrian Comstock vermual who wants what have these names, eh, very like
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  nobility. He wants the Catholic Church to take over again, like I guess.
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  And he's a Harvard law professor. So yeah, they're they're roughly in
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  the Catholic integoist or maybe post liberal tradition. If you're talking about their sort
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  of more political goals, you talk about them as like post liberal Adrian Vermules
• 9:58
  A. He's a legal scholar, constitutional scholar at Harvard, so I mean,
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  pretty big name university there, and they're having quite the influence on politics
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  and the court system. Well, yeah, these people have a certain I
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  shouldn't say, like, people like Vermule and Deneen, who we've been reading
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  lately, have a certain perspective on American politics grounded in Catholicism and in a
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  kind of conservative, right wing interpretation of Catholicism. That's what I mean,
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  just to remind our audience and everyone what we've been sort of thinking about in
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  the past couple episodes. But is he a literalist in terms of interpretation,
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  John, You're probably the best to answer that. I don't know that he
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  cares that much about the Bible so much just and by the way, this
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  guy's not even born Catholic. The terrifying parties like we need to return to
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  the traditions that we are born into, and he just he just crossed over
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  from some other movement appealed to him. It's such a strange perspective all around,
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  because you know, the United States has never been you know, majority
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  Catholic. And indeed, when when we're talking about like a time period that
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  was less pluralistic, when when there was more of a hand in hand with
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  churches, maybe even than the president in the US politics it was it was
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  definitely pro Protestant, and there was a lot of persecution, you know,
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  against Catholic institutions where you know, here in Canada we have because of the
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  large French Catholic population, there was always a little bit more connection between the
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  government and having the Catholic church. It was. It was never that way
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  in the United States. The you know, my religion's perspective on what the
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  freedom of religion is, you know, for example, is defined in the
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  US Constitution. It is in fact the separation of church and state. Because
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  if you had a a state religion in the South in the US, which
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  is I guess the place where they wanted the most, that's going to be
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  the Southern Baptist Convention. And so every one of the little churches or certainly
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  then Jews and Muslims and everybody else, you know, that is not going
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  to be you know, you're you're going to be persecuted. And that would
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  have always been true in the past anyway for Catholics. And so the idea
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  that you could have any kind of a a Catholic fascist government in the United
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  States is it's it seems so crazy to me. So, I mean,
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  I see where that movement has come out of places like you know, like
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  Brazil or Spain, someplace where, out of Franco's Spain, they think maybe
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  they could they could bring you know, this from a personal dictatorship to instead
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  maybe being a religious dictatorship, you know, or something like that. But
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  obviously Spain went a different way after Franco's fall, you know, yeah,
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  for sure, Pills. I remember on that episode that we did on the
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  kind of what was it called Imaginative Christians that website that we were looking at,
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  and I don't know if John ended up looking at them or as familiar
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  with them, but I remember like we ended up getting a bunch of angry,
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  you know, comments, and you know that they were like, oh,
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  these guys aren't even talk atually taught. They should actually talk to a
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  Christian, you know, they should actually And I forgot what were some of
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  the things that they were complaining about, because like, I don't know,
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  I mean maybe before we get into the article, I just kind of just
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  thought of this, Now I should have maybe gone and looked at some of
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  the comments. But you know, I wonder if there's some things that they
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  said in the comment, then now we could run by John just be like,
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  you know, here's an actual Christian, you know, and who's who's
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  thoughtful, you know, intellectual? Dare I say, I don't know if
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  you I don't know if you self identify as an intellectual. But sure,
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  I think they just said, you guys need to read the Bible, because
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  then we then we just we'd know, you know. Yeah, with all
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  your YouTube lectures, John, did you ever pay attention to the comments?
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  Yeah, because I was. I was thinking that if we got the sort
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  of backlash that we did for just barely even dipping their toes in the water,
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  what is the worst comment you have ever got from a fundamentalist Christian?
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  Oh? Well, okay, I don't pay a lot of attention to those
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  comments. I get so many positive comments, but yeah, I mean they're
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  by the way, you're you're the Antichrist. You're gonna burn in hell,
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  you know. I mean there's a medalists, you know, they're all over
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  the place with that kind of they're ready to go. Yeah, I'm looking
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  forward to seeing what the comments section of this conversation is going to be.
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  I don't know if we'll have some of the same ones, because I know
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  some of the ones who left comments in our first episode were definitely with that
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  weird right wing variety. No, I mean I would I would love to
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  be the Antichrist. That's like a big deal, right. Oh, yeah,
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  they don't mean I'm the Antichrist. You're you are Antichrist. So it's
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  just as a as a soldier of the antichrists anathema. Well, one of
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  one of the through lines I've noticed when we read The Imaginative Conservative, when
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  we looked at Dneen, and when we looked at Vermule, one of the
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  big through lines I've noticed is that, well, they are alf identified conservatives.
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  They have their political perspective, they want to be on the Republican side,
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  but they also think that the Republican Party has kind of fallen prey to
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  liberalism, a generally liberal outlook. So, I mean what John was saying
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  earlier about them being not conservative in the sense of keeping to a keeping a
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  tradition alive, but more so reactionary. They're reacting against something. I mean,
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  they're reacting against enlightenment liberalism, and so they are kind of conserving that
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  tradition of being on the far right side of parliament in their political outlook,
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  saying, you know, liberalism is corrupting not just the left, but the
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  right, the party the side of the aisle we want to be on,
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  and we need to somehow get back to a more conservative conservatism. And this
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  are sort of postliberalism. That's well, that's why it's called postliberal because they
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  want to get away from liberal principles altogether. So again what John was saying
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  about, say, pluralism, they kind of don't want that sort of thing.
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  Pluralism is maybe to liberal or maybe they want a certain kind of pluralism
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  that fits more with their perspective. I'm not sure how they would frame that,
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  but yeah, that seems to be a through line is being opposed to
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  liberalism, whether it's on the right or the left, and rebuilding civilization because
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  it's been so corrupted by these Enlightenment and French Revolution principles. Yeah, that's
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  a good point. It's a good point in that they appear to be looking
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  backwards, but the nostalgia is very selective such that it's it's actually productive in
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  the sense that they want to move forward with this piecemealed artificial portrait of history.
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  Like Vermeil says that liberalism is fine with a tame version of Christianity or
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  Catholicism, but not with this militant state seizure version of Catholicism that he's hoping
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  for, which I think is you know, it's true, but John,
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  I'm wondering. I know there's there are as many views on this as there
• 17:15
  are denominations at least, but what place does power or worldly power, political
• 17:22
  power have within Christianity? Because what I know about what Jesus said, it
• 17:29
  seems to be pretty often, you know, you let them do their thing,
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  rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's But we're not about the way the world's
• 17:38
  doing stuff. We're about this other alternative future. So how do you how
• 17:44
  do you reconcile that tension? Yeah, well, I think that perhaps anyway,
• 17:48
  the reason why, like you're saying, some of these people in this
• 17:53
  kind of right wing intellectual movement actually convert to Catholicism is not because of a
• 18:02
  sense of trying to get back at back to the original teachings of Christ,
• 18:06
  but maybe because of the thinking about a time period when we used to call
• 18:11
  the West Christendom, you know, so thinking back to the Middle Ages,
• 18:17
  when you know, out of the the Gregorian reform movement of the papacy,
• 18:22
  when the kind of the recovery of Roman law in the West, you know,
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  the creation of things like the law school of the First University of Bologna,
• 18:32
  so that there was suddenly you know, like a system that theorized,
• 18:37
  you know, like a right reign on earth where the pope is the vicar
• 18:41
  of God on earth. And so it's like almost even in the Middle Ages,
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  though a totally theoretical thing, it's very the if you go to the
• 18:48
  actual history, hopes never got a hold of that kind of power, no
• 18:51
  matter which they might might have wanted it, even the even the the most
• 18:56
  the closest guy who got there innocent, the third you know, really you
• 19:00
  know, it more or less unraveled in front of him, and so and
• 19:03
  so it was never It's always kind of even a theoretical a thing to imagine.
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  But in the modern times it's it's I mean that it's it's so contrary
• 19:12
  to the entire trend of history and everywhere we are that's nothing's going back in
• 19:17
  that direction. I mean, I was thinking about it in the in the
• 19:19
  Canadian experience. I'm able to serve as one of the two observer members on
• 19:26
  the Canadian Council of Churches for my denomination, and I was in Quebec City
• 19:30
  for the semi annual meeting, and they're they're dealing with the secularism law and
• 19:38
  how the church there which you know as recently as a half century ago.
• 19:44
  As of the nineteen fifties and six early sixties, the church had been almost
• 19:48
  like the state. But the trend even here in North America, in the
• 19:51
  most stateli like part of you know, church state relations Quebec, it is
• 19:56
  that evaporated and has gone. And so now the church is struggling to even
• 20:00
  think, well, now that we are a much reduced church, the Catholic
• 20:03
  Church in Quebec, how are we, how are we being a church?
• 20:04
  What is our identity? Given the huge trend of secularization in even Quebec society,
• 20:12
  you know, so much less the United States is going to be.
• 20:15
  I mean, all of these you know, right wing religious evangelical conservatives who
• 20:19
  are not Catholics, they're evangelicals. Even them, the church attendance has actually
• 20:25
  collapsed. They are identity voters. You know, they call themselves Christian nationalists
• 20:30
  or whatever, but they but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with you
• 20:33
  know, church or Christianity or church control over anything. It's a identity movement,
• 20:38
  that's interest. That's an interesting way of putting in. And by the
• 20:41
  way, for listeners who might not be aware, you know who are non
• 20:42
  Canadian. But in Quebec they passed this Build twenty one. Very controversial.
• 20:48
  You know, people argue that it's targeted towards Muslims because the whole idea is
• 20:52
  like, if you're a public servant, if you work in any public institution,
• 20:55
  I think that includes government departments or like teachers, because those are I
• 20:57
  think public employees, right, wouldn't be allowed to wear any over religious symbols.
• 21:02
  So that would include you know, a kipa if you're if you're Jewish,
• 21:04
  or and obviously like a hit job or or a burka, right,
• 21:07
  so that wouldn't be allowed. And obviously the reason it, you know,
• 21:11
  I think it may have emerged in a time when Quebec's society was sort of
• 21:15
  reacting or as this particular brand of Quebec conservatives were, you know, had
• 21:21
  fears about Islam, Islamic fundamentalism. I think that might have been like the
• 21:25
  starting point, right, and then it's like, well, let's pass these
• 21:27
  laws. And you know, to be honest, they're pretty popular as far
• 21:30
  as I know, within among Quebec voters, I think it's probably over sixty
• 21:33
  percent support it. But and so I actually spent quite a lot of time
• 21:37
  talking about this with some of my students because last semester is teaching a low
• 21:40
  justice and rights class and you know, we had to teach them about how
• 21:42
  in Canada, well or like doesn't that violate the Charter? I'm like,
• 21:45
  yeah, but they can do it anyway because we have the notwithstanding clause.
• 21:48
  But that's a whole other conversation for about about like Canadian jurisprudence. But yeah,
• 21:53
  just the point is it's it's a law, and I guess it does
• 21:56
  raise questions just about like what role. So I'm curious actually of that conversation
• 22:00
  that you had there, John with with people in Quebec because and churches in
• 22:03
  Quebec, because I don't know, did you feel like most of them were
• 22:07
  supportive of this law or most of them were worried about it because it's just
• 22:10
  further marginalizing the role of church right in society. No, no, it
• 22:15
  was they were not supportive it, but not because they were worried it was
• 22:17
  marginalizing I think the role of church that there was at the concern I think
• 22:22
  I was. I I don't always agree, you know, with bishops and
• 22:26
  the Catholic Church on a lot of things. You know, I represent a
• 22:29
  further you know, left tradition. I think than than than a lot of
• 22:33
  times we're although I'm really impressed with Catholic leaders in Canada often so. But
• 22:37
  but the the archbishop there said they wanted to carve out an exception because the
• 22:45
  Quebec legislature has always had a big cross, like on the back of the
• 22:49
  you know, in the back of the chamber. And and and they're like,
• 22:52
  oh, yeah, but we're gonna we're going to make it so you
• 22:55
  can't have any religious symbols, but we're going to keep our big cross.
• 22:57
  Yeah. It's like it's like said, a crazy symbol of of oh yeah,
• 23:02
  we're really we're not only doing this is a general thing. We're doing
• 23:04
  it for you know, against for secularism and religious freedom for everybody. But
• 23:08
  actually we're really only doing this against Muslims. You know. It's almost what
• 23:11
  that's saying. The Quebec flag. The Church said no, we if this,
• 23:15
  and because they're saying, oh, this is a yeah, the flag
• 23:18
  too, and so this is they're saying, well, no, this is
• 23:21
  just part of our heritage, it's not part of our religion. And so
• 23:22
  the church was really spoke up and said, well, take we want you
• 23:26
  to take it down because if you for you, if it's just a heritage
• 23:30
  thing and part of your nationalism or whatever, it has nothing to do with
• 23:33
  religions, then we actually don't want you using it, you know, and
• 23:37
  so and so. No, I think that they were very opposed to anyway
• 23:41
  some of what's happening because of concern that it's a discrimination against Muslims and other
• 23:47
  religious minorities. I like the way that you described to the fact that some
• 23:51
  you know, a lot of these voters who are on the right, who
• 23:52
  identify as concerns, they're really identity voters. Like I think that's kind of
• 23:56
  an interesting way of putting it, that like most of them maybe aren't even
• 23:59
  really thinking of about like gospel or or or like the actual concrete practice of
• 24:03
  religion and more just thinking about like, well, I don't want that some
• 24:07
  going to identifies this thing. But yeah, I think the Quebec law was
• 24:10
  interesting because there was there seemed to be maybe a bit of an alliance of
• 24:12
  you know, I guess I don't know what you call them, but like
• 24:15
  secular atheists who are like and just kind of I don't know, there's I
• 24:18
  feel like there's a bit of like this French cultural thing because in France they
• 24:22
  did something similar. There's just this sort of this sort of French ideal of
• 24:25
  I think they call it lass or something or late. Yeah, so there's
• 24:29
  that, and like that is actually in some ways, like in a long
• 24:33
  tradition of just being like against church power, right or like against anything.
• 24:37
  But then obviously there's maybe the right wing kind of like Islamophobic identity voters.
• 24:41
  So yeah, it's interesting in the public sphere because they've been in the deeply
• 24:45
  Catholic country as well, but they have a certain they have a certain interpretation
• 24:48
  of the public sphere and what is kosher there and what isn't. So I
• 24:53
  got a question. I don't want to call it a hardball, but it's
• 24:56
  not exactly a softball. It's amid a mid ball. John. If you're
• 25:02
  looking at these guys, especially the American Catholics, which is I think funnier
• 25:07
  than they realize. If you're saying that this institution of the Church as the
• 25:14
  state on earth is a pipe dream, yes, but then for us non
• 25:19
  sacramental individuals, I won't even say non religious, but non sacramental individuals we're
• 25:25
  staunchly realistic, and we know that the collapse of communism is imminent and the
• 25:30
  markets revolution is right around the corner. We look at Christians saying we're going
• 25:37
  to build the Kingdom of God on earth, and we think that's a pipe
• 25:40
  dream. So I wanted to know politely how you'd respond to that kind of
• 25:47
  thing. When we're looking at secularism, church attendance decline, people picking up
• 25:52
  you know, supermarket religion and buying magic rocks and believing in all this stuff,
• 26:00
  how is the Kingdom of God supposed to survive in a climate like that?
• 26:03
  Yeah, yeah, Well so we're very tiny denomination, right, So
• 26:10
  there's fifty three congregations here in Canada. We are in sixty different countries,
• 26:15
  but the whole total membership of my church is two hundred and fifty thousand.
• 26:18
  So, you know, we have the One of the ways that we maybe
• 26:22
  look at this is the you know, this parable of the hummingbird. And
• 26:26
  so there's a forest fire and all of the animals are panicking and running around
• 26:30
  and things like that, and they noticed that the hummingbird is going to the
• 26:33
  river and bringing back a little you know, hummingbird's worth of water to kind
• 26:36
  of put out the fire, and the ann elephants or whatever, asking you
• 26:40
  know what the name all it is holy? Are you doing? And hummingbird
• 26:44
  says, I'm doing my part, you know. And so even though you
• 26:48
  know, my congregation is very tiny and much dwindled from where we would have
• 26:53
  been even in the nineteen fifties in terms of members, one of our major
• 26:59
  focuses that we've had here in Toronto for building up the Kingdom of God on
• 27:03
  Earth is that, you know, I'm right here downtown, there is a
• 27:07
  major social justice issue in terms of housing justice and being under housed. And
• 27:17
  so compared to the little tiny stamp postage stamp of real estate that is the
• 27:21
  church, we also own three social housing projects, you know, a tower
• 27:27
  and two other apartment buildings, and we're breaking ground on a fourth one where
• 27:33
  we are working to do our part to take people who would otherwise be in
• 27:38
  danger of homelessness and allow them to be able to have that dignity of being
• 27:45
  housed, you know. And that's just one of the ways that we are
• 27:48
  trying to bring that about. Another program that my little church did is we
• 27:52
  thought, well, this is a really diverse city. It's this about in
• 27:56
  the nineties and it was becoming so polarali and religiously diverse, and we were
• 28:00
  seeing, well, there's so many, so much bigotry that is coming from
• 28:03
  ignorance, you know, like in nine to eleven because of the immediate backlash
• 28:11
  apparently there were these Americans who attacked Sekh Americans, you know, in Arizona
• 28:18
  because they were wearing turbans. Obviously, if there's anything more offensive than racism,
• 28:22
  it's ignorant racism. And so obviously we don't want to educate people to
• 28:27
  know that, don't attack them, attack somebody else. I mean that it's
• 28:30
  not the point of the education, but the point of it is how little
• 28:33
  education that they have that they actually, you know, in their fury of
• 28:37
  anti Islamophobia, that they attack Seekhs. You know, this is not anyway.
• 28:41
  So there is there is peace that could be made through education. So
• 28:45
  we created what we call the Encounter World Religion Center. We hired a religious
• 28:48
  studies professor. We teach courses where you go and you meet learn all the
• 28:55
  academic studies about all these faces. Then you go meet them in their own
• 28:57
  in their own place of worship. So you go to the Secretuara you go
• 29:02
  to the mosque, and we also have programs where you take kids from the
• 29:06
  Islamic schools and we take them to the synagogue and vice versa. You know,
• 29:08
  so that so that we can do our little part for peace. And
• 29:11
  so that's how we're busily unwrapped, you know, laying out the Kingdom of
• 29:15
  God here on earth without you guys even noticing, because we're too tiny to
• 29:19
  pay attention to. But that's we're working at it. Pretty good answer.
• 29:25
  Oh that's amazing. It was too good of an answer. It's like teacher's
• 29:29
  pet, putting everyone else to shame. Yeah, well you just housed thousands
• 29:33
  of people in downtown Toronto, No, biggie, there's some practice. Yeah.
• 29:38
  But my follow up back to a previous conversation we had, we got
• 29:44
  stuck on this issue of like why do Christians do anything? And I think
• 29:48
  Eric's answer was something like, oh, it's got to be a pathology because
• 29:53
  they have to like work out their salvation on earth. And I'm wondering because
• 29:57
  we've read probably of us have read like Luther and the Sola feed Day,
• 30:03
  just the faith thing, so you don't have to do the good material good
• 30:07
  works that you're doing or do you I'm not in Lutheranism, and Lutheranism good
• 30:15
  people will do good works. You don't need to do good works to be
• 30:19
  a good person. It's kind of the other way around. And it's even
• 30:23
  even more in Calvinism, right, what is Calvinism? You just you just
• 30:26
  do it anyway and hope that you like sneak you sneak in at the end
• 30:30
  predestination, baby, you hope you sneak in. You go where you go,
• 30:37
  You go where you go, or you're already there in eternity. So
• 30:41
  I guess John, the teiological question, the salvific question, this is why
• 30:48
  do you do the stuff that you do? And so what what's the point?
• 30:52
  Yeah, But so it depends on it depends on the Christian type.
• 30:55
  Right, So, like you've mentioned out some of the some of the focuses
• 30:57
  there, you know in you know, in in all the different traditions,
• 31:03
  so like in in Catholic Catholicism, there is an emphasis on works, right,
• 31:07
  But but in all of these cases you're not you're not punished for yet,
• 31:14
  you're not punished for doing terrible things or or rewarded. You don't get
• 31:18
  to go to heaven because of good works you do, because the theological understanding
• 31:23
  is that you know, heaven is so amazing that no one is worthy of
• 31:27
  it, and so and so it is by grace that you're you're given given
• 31:32
  salvation in that way, it's a gift. And so it isn't really shouldn't
• 31:36
  be that shouldn't be the focus. Uh, I guess no matter who's who's
• 31:38
  talking about it. My tradition in particular, we really we don't emphasize afterlife.
• 31:45
  We're not focused on on after life. We're focused on this life.
• 31:48
  And we're trying to bring about, you know, the City of God here
• 31:52
  on earth, you know, and make make heaven on earth as opposed to
• 31:56
  that. So from my perspective to whatever afterlife would be like, it would
• 32:01
  be such a such a different experience or non experience from temporal existence on earth.
• 32:07
  That is not not something that we would be able to grasp and have
• 32:10
  to worry about. So I'm curious, John, did you like I don't
• 32:14
  know. If you don't, you don't have to answer personal questions if you
• 32:15
  don't want to. But I'll be curious what your background is and how you
• 32:20
  came to the church, and did you grow up in a religious family.
• 32:22
  Was your family already like a member of this denomination or was this something you
• 32:25
  came into on your own. So my little denomination here is called Community of
• 32:30
  Christ. And so Community of Christ is a branch of the Restoration movement,
• 32:35
  a branch of the and then from the Restoration Movement the Latter day Saint movement.
• 32:38
  And so in the second grade Awakening in North America in the early nineteenth
• 32:44
  century, several churches like the Disciples of Christ and the Adventists, and then
• 32:51
  especially most famously from Us anyway, the Mormons grew out of that. And
• 32:55
  so in the original my churches, one of the two original Mormon churches,
• 33:02
  we don't use the word Mormon to describe ourselves, but anyway, it is
• 33:06
  one of them. And so when the founding prophet was killed, the church
• 33:10
  split apart, so in the same way that Islam split apart after the death
• 33:15
  of Muhammad. So some people followed the companions of Muhammad, some people followed
• 33:19
  the family. So the people followed the companions of the of the prophet moved
• 33:23
  to Utah, where they changed a lot of you know, not changed,
• 33:28
  but they've followed the later doctrines and were specifically focused on polygamy. We were
• 33:32
  the group that opposed polygamy, and so and so we stayed in the Midwest,
• 33:37
  we stayed here in Canada, and and and while the Utah LDS Church,
• 33:43
  you know, they eventually they gave up polygamy, but they have they're
• 33:46
  a fairly I would call them a fundamentalist church in terms of being literalists.
• 33:51
  They have a kind of an interesting nontrinitarian theology that they have, so they've
• 33:59
  kind of they've rejected traditional monotheism and was what I would say. Our church
• 34:06
  is hewn more towards a very progressive Christianity. Uh, that makes us more
• 34:13
  theologically. We're not that far away, or at least socially, we're not
• 34:15
  that far away from a church like the United Church in Canada or or or
• 34:20
  one of the other progressive churches. Yeah. I don't blame you for moving
• 34:23
  away from the Mormon just because of some of the associations with that term,
• 34:28
  with the polygamy. Yeah. And I'm not sure if the Work of Mormon,
• 34:32
  if the Book of Mormon, is a very good pr for either that.
• 34:37
  They're back in town. They're doing that the show, the show,
• 34:42
  And I didn't I didn't know you. I didn't know that there were Mormons
• 34:47
  like you. I got to say, you're doing some great pr here,
• 34:51
  because everything I know about Mormonism comes from South Park. Well, I mean,
• 34:55
  there's there's something to the one South Park show where there's talking about Joseph
• 34:59
  Smith and Martin Harris and Lucy Harris and so forth on the translation that story.
• 35:02
  Isn't that you know, like at the end of the at the end
• 35:05
  of the story where the Kyle or whatever says, wait a second, you
• 35:09
  believe this? You do? You tell this story and you believe this,
• 35:13
  And he says, yeah, the story proves it. He's like, no,
• 35:15
  don't you understand the story, says I dud dumb. Yeah, yeah,
• 35:20
  that actually makes a pretty good point. But yeah, I know what
• 35:24
  I'll say. You see, you're asking about me personally. So yes,
• 35:27
  my ancestors joined seven generations ago in eighteen thirty two. Oh wow. And
• 35:32
  indeed, at the end in Navo, when Joseph Smith did start to abuse
• 35:38
  his authority by marrying other men's wives, by marrying girls, you know,
• 35:45
  having secret a secret polygamy thing that he's doing, he asked my great great
• 35:51
  great great grandparents if they wouldn't give their fifteen year old daughter to him to
• 35:54
  be a wife, and they said, yes, so bad bad, bad
• 36:00
  grandparents. But anyway, so it is a horrible abuse of of the founder's
• 36:05
  authority where he's you know, this is the kind of thing that happens a
• 36:07
  lot in these personality you know, little tiny personality religions, and so there's
• 36:12
  a lot of you know, errors of the bad things that are back in
• 36:16
  our beginning that we've you know, worked through and processed as a as a
• 36:21
  people subsequently. So it sounds like, just to clarify to it, sounds
• 36:23
  like, I guess you were saying that you your family was like in Utah.
• 36:27
  I guess like, and then you just kind of found oh no,
• 36:29
  we grew up in that church. The church is in the church world.
• 36:32
  There are there are Utah Mormons here in Canada. Of course, I forgot
• 36:36
  it. Like the LDS is the main, the big one right there.
• 36:39
  Yeah, there are millions of members the LDS church, and then there's another,
• 36:43
  what's this super fucked up one, the Fundamental FLDS. The FLDS church
• 36:49
  is one of the most famous because of their profit that is in jail right
• 36:52
  now for committing some horrible atrocities of his own, and I've been to their
• 37:00
  their headquarters in southern Utah. Part of the work that I do in my
• 37:06
  ministry as a Christian in the Latter day Saint pastor is go to Utah to
• 37:10
  help people who are you know, processing all of this. And so for
• 37:14
  example, even the main LDS church has been very very anti anti gay,
• 37:19
  anti LGBTQ, and so that causes Utah to have the highest gay teen suicide
• 37:28
  grade in the whole United States. And so I usually go there to maybe
• 37:30
  one or two times a year as just to try to One of the things
• 37:35
  that helps prevent suicide is to simply say, hey, there's an alternative.
• 37:37
  You know, if there's anybody, if you, if if anybody who thinks
• 37:42
  that they think that they're at the end and there's no possible alternative, hey
• 37:45
  here's You don't have to have given up every single thing, your worldview,
• 37:49
  your faith, and all of these things just because your church is telling you
• 37:51
  your your your personhood doesn't exist. And so I definitely have gone both to
• 37:55
  Utah generally to the Salt to Salt Lake and Provo to the it X Mormons
• 38:00
  of the were struggling Mormons but also to the x FLDS headquarters there in Colorado
• 38:07
  City where when when their profit uh was arrested and you know, the trust
• 38:15
  got put into the control of the state because of various reasons and so and
• 38:19
  so I was helping some of the the new x FLDS leaders, you know,
• 38:24
  to kind of put their community back together. I mean I didn't do
• 38:28
  it very much, but I did what a kid. So, so this
• 38:30
  is is the fld These these are the they pop off on like reality TV
• 38:37
  when they have like the twenty Kids shows. Is that the FLDS. That's
• 38:42
  usually the au B so so the bigger, the biggest plulgidness church now is
• 38:47
  the Apostolic United Brethren, and they are less fringy than than the FLDS.
• 38:53
  So the FLDS. If you see him wearing pioneer clothes, yeah yeah,
• 38:57
  yeah, yeah. These people are popping off on TikTok too because it's part
• 39:00
  of the whole return to tradition and there's like some mainstream buy into at least
• 39:06
  the fashion aspect. Yeah, I love it. They go hard too.
• 39:08
  They're like in the pioneer clothes like churning boughter and needing tow a lot of
• 39:14
  people like this. So like the one that is like the My Five Wives
• 39:16
  or whatever, you know, like that's a reality show, that's the AUB.
• 39:21
  If they're wearing Pioneer clothes, that's FLDS. So okay, Well,
• 39:23
  yeah, I was actually in Arizona not that long ago, and I remember
• 39:25
  there's a big there's a big LDS presence there. And there I remember there's
• 39:30
  a my buddy drove me by the list like enormous church. Like I guess
• 39:34
  I don't know if they call it a cathedral with whatever the parlance is,
• 39:36
  but yeah, it's simple temple, temple, got it. Yeah, yeah,
• 39:39
  it was quite an impressive building, I will say, but wow,
• 39:45
  uh, John, the next question, we kind of we we very much.
• 39:49
  I think probably vibe with what you're saying in terms of, you know,
• 39:52
  let's do counseling. Was bringing this like very corporeal working on real issues,
• 39:58
  you could say, yeah, very corporeal aspect to like housing and teen
• 40:02
  suicide and stuff like this. So I mean it sounds like what I know
• 40:07
  of the United Church of Canada especially is like come here, we don't care
• 40:13
  about your identity. We don't have to you don't have to sign stuff.
• 40:17
  You don't have to like prick your finger with blood or whatever else it is.
• 40:21
  So I want to ask, on behalf of myself, but on the
• 40:23
  behalf of a generally leftist audience. All this material stuff great, Then how
• 40:32
  is it that all the religious woo woo stuff fits into it? Because it
• 40:37
  might be a false dichotomy, you know, religious life versus the rest of
• 40:42
  life. But to me, when I hear like you just said, like
• 40:45
  a religious person saying, you know, we don't really care about the afterlife,
• 40:49
  that's not our concern, then I go, well, what's the what's
• 40:52
  the religion bit? Then that's what I thought it was non corporeal. Well,
• 40:57
  I mean, the the question even what is religion is not easily a
• 41:01
  definable thing. We have since the Enlightenment. We have in the West drawn
• 41:07
  a little cordoned off box around what we call religion, and then everything that's
• 41:12
  not religion and that doesn't it is actually not particularly relevant outside of our modern
• 41:19
  Western context. If you go to other societies. As European colonial imperials and
• 41:24
  colonial colonists went around and they looked at what was going on in India,
• 41:30
  it was very hard, for example, to draw the same box around it
• 41:32
  and say, well, here, when you have a holy text, that
• 41:35
  means that's a religion. When you have a shrine or something, that's a
• 41:37
  religion. But so many other things that people were doing in just their daily
• 41:42
  lives, well that's not religion, because that's what in our place we consider
• 41:45
  that secular. You know, sports or watching TV or something. All those
• 41:49
  things all came out of religion, but we drew like a boundary lines around
• 41:53
  it. And that would include then doing social housing or doing gation, you
• 42:00
  know. I mean those have been part of you know, religion, and
• 42:02
  I certainly think that that's a core focus of our religion. When I'm doing
• 42:07
  those things, I'm not I'm not separating our history lecture or even reading history
• 42:13
  books and things like that front or do or doing the various charity work from
• 42:17
  any other component of the religion. That's religion too. So for us,
• 42:22
  it is not simply something that would be like rituals or or like a I
• 42:29
  don't know what you're thinking, religion is so anyway or you're praying all time
• 42:31
  or something like that. You know, but there are there are components to
• 42:36
  why what spiritual practices are. For two and those would be, you know,
• 42:38
  those would be the components that part of it. I think maybe you're
• 42:43
  asking about so like a I mean a component would be so what's the purpose
• 42:46
  of prayer might be a question. So so there's a couple of different ways
• 42:52
  you could you can can look at that. So for some people, prayer
• 42:57
  is a daily spiritual practice where they wake up and it's almost like having a
• 43:01
  morning meditation where you ground yourself. You take a little bit of stepping back
• 43:07
  from the rest of what's going on the day. You are doing some self
• 43:10
  discernment, some contemplation, and you aren't just immediately getting on the internet and
• 43:17
  you know, getting to whatever has been thrown up on your social media or
• 43:22
  YouTube video that's feeding you, and instead you were thinking, what am I
• 43:25
  intending to accomplish this day? What are my hopes for this day are?
• 43:30
  How is that fitting into a longer term perspective. So when we are stepping
• 43:35
  back and thinking with a bigger perspective, the eternal, that's the biggest perspective,
• 43:39
  you know, then that is a utilitarian argument for a spiritual practice like
• 43:46
  that, and that would be a personal practice of it, and then there
• 43:50
  would also be a community practice where one of the time when you are getting
• 43:54
  together for some occasion, say it's a I mean, we do these a
• 44:01
  lot still, even even if you become secular, you often do them as
• 44:05
  a as a religious like ceremony like a marriage or something. You know.
• 44:09
  My part of having a shared community prayer is trying to you know, bring
• 44:19
  everybody together and speak for the community what our hopes for this occasion and maybe
• 44:24
  our broader hopes are and maybe an acknowledgment of our struggles uh and suffering,
• 44:30
  and so those would be examples of what that spiritual practice could be for That's
• 44:36
  that's really refreshing to hear. I feel I feel like we spend too much
• 44:39
  time reading the conservative religions and we maybe we do the Nietzsche thing and we
• 44:47
  start to become the monster a little bit ourselves, and we forget that religion
• 44:52
  is a concept that's very difficult to define. And yeah, in the West
• 44:58
  has a certain idea of relig and spirituality and what's the difference between you know,
• 45:04
  the material world and the spirit, mind and body. We tend to
• 45:07
  maybe draw those distinctions a little too clumsily and simplistically, and it's it's not
• 45:15
  really that you know, one of the one of the things I teach that
• 45:17
  always kind of inspires me is teaching Loyola's spiritual exercises where he's just talking about
• 45:27
  you know, it's almost you can almost perform it as like a retreat,
• 45:30
  or you can just do it as almost like a quick meditation on your You
• 45:34
  don't have to do it as a full retreat, but you just kind of
• 45:37
  it's about getting back to basics, just getting in touch with yourself and your
• 45:44
  and it does have a lot of overt you know, religiously themed Catholic Catholic
• 45:49
  themed things about God, but it's really almost like a self help meditation,
• 45:55
  you know, quiet getting in touch with yourself and inner peace, and and
• 46:01
  yeah, it really appeals to me, even though I'm not kind of I'm
• 46:06
  considering myself atheistic or not religious, but I sure, I mean, I
• 46:09
  enjoyed that sort of thing. Not to horseshoe theory, but I'm gonna horseshoe
• 46:15
  theory because a lot of what John just described, and it kind of eric
• 46:17
  even what you just described. These are the complaints that the militant Christo fascist
• 46:24
  Catholics have also with what is missing in liberal society. It's the family connections,
• 46:32
  the gathering, the rights, the speaking on behalf of the community.
• 46:38
  Maybe even some internal reflection thrown in there, maybe a couple of creeds at
• 46:45
  the center of the community that we can create values in organizers, we're we're
• 46:50
  non creedal, but yeah, so we do not have a creed, but
• 46:53
  we definitely well so we do have though, like a shared principles that are
• 46:58
  social justice oriented. But it sounds like you are also solving the problem that
• 47:04
  they are pointing out with liberalism, which is all we have today is markets.
• 47:08
  Values are wishy washy. Yeah, there's a tension markets, there's buying
• 47:15
  and selling, and everyone's so caught up in this that they're not paying attention
• 47:17
  to the family, the community, the close stuff. So even though your
• 47:22
  your outcomes are completely different, theirs is like, let's take over the state
• 47:25
  so that we can implement the church as the state, like Catholic Iran.
• 47:31
  Maybe, but it sounds like it sounds like the solution of religion is the
• 47:37
  same on both sides. Is that fair to say? Or am I off
• 47:40
  there? Well, we're definitely not trying to take over the state, So
• 47:45
  that's a big that's a big difference, So I'll just pull pull hold that
• 47:49
  one aside. But I I do think that there is a I do think
• 47:54
  that there's something to a deconstruction that we've had in my lifetime last half century
• 48:04
  of local institutions where we are we have taken ourselves down to being an individual
• 48:13
  or a very nuclear unit, just you and your couple and maybe a couple,
• 48:15
  nuclear family, whatever. And and you have your workplace association, and
• 48:23
  you have that, and then and then and then. One of the reasons
• 48:27
  why I think that there is a disenfranchisement from the rest is that you were
• 48:34
  you were dealing with with corporately, you're dealing with Amazon or or something like
• 48:37
  that, or and then and then politically, you're just thinking on the national
• 48:42
  level, and all you're thinking about you're not thinking anymore about your school district,
• 48:46
  or your or your award, your precinct here instead thinking only in terms
• 48:51
  of who's prime minister, who's the president of the United States, and everything
• 48:53
  becomes down to your tribe and the president of the United States. As opposed
• 48:59
  to I think it's still a liberal value to have local control and I mean
• 49:04
  or to have local institutions. And so I think that there had been all
• 49:07
  kinds of these. They could have been secular institutions that I'm not saying that
• 49:12
  I don't want to go back to times because I know that these were institutions
• 49:15
  that discriminated, right, so, but we could still have an institution that
• 49:17
  doesn't discriminate. So so like things like though you know, the the you
• 49:22
  know, the different confraternities, the men's clubs. No, there's no such
• 49:24
  thing as Miss Mason's anymore hardly, you know, and all those kind of
• 49:28
  thing things where you could get together and have sort of a local place where
• 49:31
  you could share share ideas and maybe all get together and like the Shriners and
• 49:37
  and do something good for your community. Now those are those are all largely
• 49:40
  dismantled. All entertainment is happening for you at a you know, at the
• 49:45
  super cultural level, so that it's just something that you're being fed. And
• 49:50
  so I do think that there's something too. I'm not trying to you know,
• 49:55
  go say, oh, let's go be let uts and go live in
• 49:58
  some previous time where we didn't have all these screens, but rather, is
• 50:01
  there a possibility where a small group of people can get together with some like
• 50:07
  you say, some shared values, without a without an authoritarian creed that you're
• 50:13
  forced into that maybe together you can accomplish something more than you could individually.
• 50:19
  And so I mean, I just go back to the what we're doing.
• 50:22
  I'm very concerned about the social housing issue as an immigrant to Canada, as
• 50:25
  somebody who you know, I mean, we just moved in. I couldnt
• 50:30
  be the president of a social housing charity where we're we're laying the ground for,
• 50:34
  you know, a sixty million dollar social housing project. You know that's
• 50:38
  also going to be all green, you know, and all the other kinds
• 50:42
  of good things. I mean, I could, I could contribute towards it
• 50:45
  in my little way, but we're actually I'm actually able to help in a
• 50:46
  very significant way, pass way past my personal impact with that would be.
• 50:52
  So yeah, no, that's a good answer. I mean, I think,
• 50:54
  you know, to kind of piggyback onto what Pills was saying, and
• 50:58
  I think it's it's maybe what he meant, like, well, it sounds
• 51:00
  like from what you're saying that in a way you would agree with maybe like
• 51:04
  the societal diagnosis of some of these you know, more conservative and in fact,
• 51:07
  one of the things we talked about on when we when we covered Patrick
• 51:10
  Denan, was that like some of the things that he says is like similar
• 51:14
  what someone like left wing theorists say about like capitalism's effect on on you know,
• 51:17
  on social ties and you know, all these things. So maybe there's
• 51:20
  an agreement on the on the symptoms or but but not the solution, right.
• 51:24
  Uh. Well, and I would say the systems, but I would
• 51:27
  say the symptoms very broadly, because things that they're worried about are are are
• 51:30
  things that should not be worried about at all. So they're very worried about
• 51:32
  policing people's sex lives and stuff like that, you know, or or or
• 51:37
  you know saying this is an affirm this is a gender identity, and all
• 51:40
  this kind of you know, and you can't have that, you know.
• 51:43
  So they they're they're these are rooted and the symptoms that they're looking at are
• 51:45
  rooted in all kinds of bigotry. And so so I've said a bazillion times
• 51:51
  churches should not be in the sex business, you know, that we should
• 51:53
  not be condemning and policing other people's lives in that way that has nothing to
• 51:58
  do with anything, you know. So yeah, for sure, and I
• 52:00
  feel like they would probably say something because I was kind of thinking when you
• 52:04
  were talking, it's like maybe I need to try to channel like not at
• 52:06
  all that I agree. You know, channel some Deni and channel some Vermule
• 52:08
  and be like, you know, what are they actually? I'm even channeling
• 52:12
  like a friend of mine who certainly doesn't have like really bigoted views, but
• 52:16
  it's kind of someone who lost his Catholicism but still has like an admiration for
• 52:21
  Catholicism and ended up becoming like really into philosophy, as doing his pH d
• 52:23
  in philosophy now, and it's kind of worried about grounding meaning and something objective
• 52:28
  and is like worried about the loss of that sort of and and you know,
• 52:30
  we have these arguments because he's so worried about these things and I'm kind
• 52:35
  of like, well, these things don't matter. But the kinds of things
• 52:36
  that he says is, well, when you you know, when you start
• 52:38
  to la have a society where you just sort of like allow you know,
• 52:42
  there's not really any moral guidance, right, there's like it's like okay,
• 52:45
  like everything is allowed, then then you know his worries just like, well,
• 52:47
  then how do I know, you know, or well, part of
• 52:51
  it I don't know. I want I want to try to do justice to
• 52:52
  his view, because it's more complex than just like, oh, I like
• 52:55
  everyone needs to do the same thing for there to be meaning. But but
• 52:58
  but it's a version of that. But then the other part of it I
• 53:01
  think is more like well, you know, and maybe this even goes all
• 53:07
  the way back to the Greeks or something that that there's like kind of how
• 53:09
  do you develop moral moral virtue or moral value? And it's like through effort
• 53:15
  and through strenuousness, and like I think that's sort of where the strictness,
• 53:20
  yeah, like where where some of the more intellectual, like like sort of
• 53:22
  right wing motivated is like, well, you need some kind of societal strictness,
• 53:27
  right in order for people to be able to develop moral strength and moral
• 53:30
  virtue. And it's like and we look at society and we think about,
• 53:32
  okay, like now in this liberal environment where everyone's allowed to do whatever they
• 53:37
  want kind of right, and then they you know, they're just glued to
• 53:39
  their screens and Instagram all these messages of beauty and then they're like, oh,
• 53:44
  maybe I can be other genders Obviously I'm just I'm channeling them right now,
• 53:46
  just for yeah, right, like you know, I think like that
• 53:49
  like that there concerned would just be like, well, there's no guidance,
• 53:52
  right, It's like, how do I develop moral virtue? How do I
• 53:53
  develop any of these things when just like everyone's allowed like maybe and they might
• 53:58
  even say to you, you know, just like I think you, like
• 54:00
  I agree with you, like you know, working on these social housing like
• 54:02
  that's a you know, a very cool like you know, consistent with Christianity.
• 54:07
  But on the other hand, it's like that's just going to be a
• 54:09
  drop in the bucket of you know, the decay, the moral decay of
• 54:13
  That's actually that's why we actually need to seize politics, right, that's why
• 54:15
  because the real action decline of civilization. Yeah, so I don't know,
• 54:20
  like what do you think about that? Well, your your your Iran example
• 54:22
  is a good counter example to the why we need to seize control, so
• 54:27
  you know what I mean. So, yeah, they were all saying that,
• 54:29
  and guess what. The Mullahs took over and so suddenly you have a
• 54:32
  theocracy. It's been going on for fifty years or whatever, and look at
• 54:37
  what's happened, right, so if anything has beat the religion out of the
• 54:39
  people, you know, they now don't want it. They don't want this
• 54:43
  at all anymore, I think, in large numbers, more so than a
• 54:45
  lot of other places in the in the Middle East, where where they had
• 54:47
  instead secular dictatorships that were oppressing people and they only had the religion as a
• 54:54
  as a as their only outshoot to have any kind of personal say, and
• 54:58
  that's why they became more religious in the other places, I think in Iran,
• 55:01
  and the opposite has happened, and they've done a terrible job, you
• 55:05
  know. So I don't mean so it's not it's not gonna You might think
• 55:08
  that you can have some kind of a theocracy that is some kind of command
• 55:13
  I don't know what it is, a command economy, a commands society.
• 55:15
  It isn't gonna that. The chances of that being very effective, I think
• 55:20
  is nil from any kind of example we've seen. I don't see that as
• 55:22
  theoretically possible. And so all I can say is, yeah, this is
• 55:25
  my is my little is a little part that we're doing, uh, just
• 55:30
  a drop in the bucket, and it's against the entire torrent and tied maybe
• 55:32
  so that what am I supposed to do? You know what I mean,
• 55:36
  this is the this is the part that I can do, and this is
• 55:37
  the part and I and you know, like you because I think that one
• 55:40
  of the points when you were you're bringing up, Victor, in terms of
• 55:43
  the you're kept on you included like all or whatever everybody like we all have
• 55:46
  to do it. We definitely that's not the case for our perspectives. So
• 55:51
  we're very happy to have all of these partners who are both in all of
• 55:58
  the other faith traditions and people who are fully secular and full you know,
• 56:00
  partners who are atheists in order to accomplish these ends. And we're not saying
• 56:05
  that, uh, you know, you can't be Muslim and have a right
• 56:08
  relationship or be doing something meaningful with your life. Of course you can,
• 56:14
  you know, and so and so we are not. So my perspective is
• 56:16
  that the pluralism is actually perfectly perfectly adapted to working together so that we can
• 56:24
  actually have an outcome that we want to all achieve. Yeah, Victor,
• 56:30
  this conservative political I mean, you did a you did a really good job
• 56:34
  of channeling your buddy there. But like what what I hear? What I
• 56:37
  hear in. That is these two words that you kept saying, the we,
• 56:42
  the we, the society, and then the word allow, like we
• 56:45
  can't allow everyone to do what they want because they they'll do the wrong thing.
• 56:49
  And that's the kernel of this disagreement, isn't it, Like we can't
• 56:53
  let all these people run around and do whatever they want. But what's really
• 56:58
  being said there is is I am not okay with being allowed to do whatever
• 57:02
  I want. I need the other, I need the authority, I need
• 57:07
  Daddy to tell me what to do. So for all this rhetoric about liberalism
• 57:14
  being too tolerant, too feminine, too girly, it's a conservative the conservative
• 57:19
  bros talking about rootedness, like you're the pussies. If you're so rugged and
• 57:24
  committed to this idea of self flourishing that you've made up, then go commit.
• 57:29
  You could read all the Greek virtues all day and work out all night,
• 57:32
  and you would if you had the balls, because no one's standing in
• 57:37
  your way. But they can't, you know, they can't stand doing it
• 57:40
  on their own because if someone else is on TikTok too much or changing the
• 57:45
  gender does what the hell does that have to do with your deep pursuit of
• 57:49
  meaning No, it's cause they need the other telling everyone else also to do
• 57:54
  it too, from the top down for it to matter. So yeah,
• 58:00
  man up yourself, hit And I think there's that, but I think there's
• 58:05
  also uh, there's that, But then I feel like there's also this like
• 58:07
  nostalgia for you know, this time when oh, like all your neighbors were
• 58:12
  going to church, right, and like at least when there was an expectation,
• 58:15
  right, And I think, I don't know, do we talk about
• 58:16
  this when we were doing covering Danean last week, but I was kind of
• 58:19
  saying I was kind of trying to say, like, what does he want?
• 58:22
  Right cause we were talking about how he wants this like kind of localism
• 58:23
  maybe like because Danean's like less crazy than Vermule but still like kind of crazy.
• 58:28
  But he's more of like, oh, we need local communities. And
• 58:30
  it's like, you know, he doesn't want like a coercive authority, but
• 58:32
  he wants there to be room for cultures that make people feel ashamed for things
• 58:37
  that don't fit in or something right. So it's not like core, but
• 58:40
  it's like the loss. It's like because those community values where everyone felt the
• 58:44
  social pressure kind of like the social imperative, Well, they have to go
• 58:46
  to church, and if you're not going to church, like, that's weird,
• 58:49
  right, Like that surely existed sometime maybe in the next sixtiars or forties
• 58:52
  or who knows. But then it's like and then now that that's lost,
• 58:54
  it's like, well, there's no incentive, So it's not exactly like some
• 58:58
  of them like are not the not as crazy for bermul will be like,
• 59:00
  well, I don't want the state to necessarily force people, but it's more
• 59:04
  that I want to somehow precipitate a cultural return where there is the pressure now
• 59:08
  because there's no social pressure anymore, there should be more social pressure for people
• 59:13
  to like, you know, engage in these kinds of forms of association,
• 59:16
  religious association. Be the Nietzschean man, put the burden on yourself. You
• 59:22
  know, you don't need you don't need your dad to tell you what to
• 59:24
  do all the time. The nostalgia misreads why that culture was operating that way.
• 59:30
  So this congregation was at its absolute height in the nineteen fifties. We
• 59:34
  had a church that you know, seated hundreds and we had hundreds of active
• 59:39
  members and they, you know, would come on on Sunday. And one
• 59:43
  of the reasons why they came on Sunday maybe three times, I think we
• 59:45
  had three meetings a Sunday because it was illegal to do anything else on Sunday.
• 59:50
  There was there was no there was no TV to watch it. Essentially,
• 59:52
  there was nothing else to do, you know, and so and so
• 59:55
  churches you know, were able. We had actually even hurt earlier in the
• 1:00:01
  in the nineteen teens and twenties. We would rent out, you know,
• 1:00:06
  the biggest theaters in the city on the on the Sunday evenings and people would
• 1:00:09
  come. We'd fill seven thousand people would come to it because it was illegal
• 1:00:12
  to do anything else. This congregation, you just bore them into it.
• 1:00:17
  Now that everybody was bored. And so what I'm saying, it's like a
• 1:00:22
  It's like a country where you have an you like, let's say you had
• 1:00:27
  this protection tariff wall that has been propping up an incredibly inefficient steel industry,
• 1:00:32
  and then suddenly you go to free markets and you and you break that down
• 1:00:37
  and steel is now able to be imported in your country for twenty cents on
• 1:00:39
  the dollar that it takes you to produce it and then and then nope,
• 1:00:44
  So then your entire steel industry is gone and wiped out because it can't compete.
• 1:00:47
  What my answer to all of these guys is, you know, if
• 1:00:50
  you, if you want people to come to your church, make it worthwhile
• 1:00:53
  to go to it. Make people want to go, you know. I
• 1:00:55
  mean, so what my church and now we're growing like crazy, see because
• 1:01:00
  people, uh, you know want to come to our online services because we
• 1:01:05
  have made them worth going to. So so my my, my answer to
• 1:01:09
  always to people is if if you don't don't come to church out of an
• 1:01:13
  obligation or something like that, because you feel guilty or something like that,
• 1:01:15
  you should be coming because you want to. And if the church isn't doing
• 1:01:19
  such a thing that you would actually want to go, why why are you
• 1:01:21
  going to it? You know? And so but all of these guys they
• 1:01:23
  want to make you go because they don't want to make their church. They
• 1:01:25
  want to make it horrible still, they don't want to make it interesting.
• 1:01:30
  Yeah, yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense. It appears
• 1:01:34
  from your from your YouTube that the way that you're making church valuable in people's
• 1:01:38
  lives is through education and also through public, free education, and you cover
• 1:01:46
  everything. We got like we got gnosticism on here, we got the Crusades,
• 1:01:52
  we got what are angels? And I was just wondering, in terms
• 1:01:55
  of your community and the congregation, do you feel like that intellectual bent is
• 1:02:02
  something that's really like a draw because I mean, if you want to study
• 1:02:07
  these things, you kind of have to either read a lot by yourself or
• 1:02:13
  go to university and and pay three thousand dollars per course for it. And
• 1:02:19
  is that something that you've noticed people are I guess hungry for. Is that
• 1:02:23
  that way to put it? Well, yeah, so there's sometimes people go
• 1:02:28
  to university and then they're able. Unfortunately, the university is churning out way
• 1:02:35
  more people with graduate degrees than there is a need for actual professors anymore.
• 1:02:39
  Right, and in a way a problem John, that's and there's some that's
• 1:02:47
  true. We are very aware of that. And it's not and it's and
• 1:02:52
  it's not because and I am I'm actually upset with the all of the universities
• 1:02:57
  that are saying, oh, well, now we're not going to even have
• 1:03:00
  what a liberal university education even was. We're going to eliminate history departments and
• 1:03:04
  classics departments. We're no longer going to teach all these things because because we're
• 1:03:07
  going to somehow make this about jobs or something. But you know, it
• 1:03:10
  has not been what the point of this was. So I think that the
• 1:03:13
  fact that we have, uh, we're in a place now in all of
• 1:03:17
  world history where we have more higher percentage of the population than ever in all
• 1:03:22
  of human history that have been exposed to critical thinking that are able to engage
• 1:03:27
  on these ideas that would have just been for the very top leisure class or
• 1:03:31
  the scholarly class in all of history before. That doesn't mean so so what
• 1:03:37
  where you were? Where again? You want to have an association with that,
• 1:03:42
  So you're going to sit I mean I could sit around in my room
• 1:03:45
  and just you know, read my Plato Bible, you know, all day
• 1:03:47
  long. You know, I've got the book, you know, But I
• 1:03:51
  want to be able to engage with a community with these ideas. And so
• 1:03:53
  part of the whole point of having the church is that you have a community
• 1:04:00
  of people who want to engage with ideas, and you can share ideas and
• 1:04:02
  like I say, we're not creedal, so we we can do that in
• 1:04:05
  a pretty free form way. And so we don't only focus on our own
• 1:04:12
  little quirky history that comes through Protestantism and Mormonism and all that kind of thing,
• 1:04:16
  but we go all the way back into our our whole Western cive roots
• 1:04:23
  and we think about what what was Plato saying and what you know? And
• 1:04:28
  what are we drawing from all of these other all of these other sources.
• 1:04:30
  What does that mean to our lives now or what meaning can we find in
• 1:04:33
  with that? So just having a place to engage with people and so yeah,
• 1:04:39
  in our particular church, we have one of one of our one of
• 1:04:43
  our five pillars of mission is essentially continually learn and grow, so constantly going
• 1:04:47
  back and you know, some people go to college and then they never read
• 1:04:53
  a book again. Our goal is to continue to have that experience even once
• 1:04:57
  you're out of college. It's a lot of work you could just go to
• 1:05:00
  You could just get Poliev to place somebody on the on the Supreme Court of
• 1:05:05
  Canada and make changes that way. Comment. Well, the thing that I
• 1:05:11
  noticed about the article was that was funny to me was just that I felt
• 1:05:14
  like the whole structure of it was like sounded like a tanky like except a
• 1:05:17
  right wing Tanky, because the whole article is just him complaining if you don't
• 1:05:20
  know what that is, John, that's like a Tanky is like a really
• 1:05:23
  hardcore Marxist who like supports like tanks coming into the It's it's from that when
• 1:05:28
  the tanks entered Prague. I think back in the factory in the Soviet Union
• 1:05:32
  in the sense that you know, he's it's just like he's basically just calling
• 1:05:38
  out all the other like fake conservatives, right. It's kind of sounds like
• 1:05:40
  a Marxist calling out all the other fake leftists, right, who are like
• 1:05:43
  not really left. And then it's like, my real version, you know,
• 1:05:45
  is going to be hardcore, right, you know what we're He was
• 1:05:48
  really weirdly backing into it, right, He's like, you guys are not
• 1:05:51
  you're not real, You're not real. That's not real conservatives the only thing
• 1:05:55
  who could possibly be a real conservative. And then he and then he lists
• 1:05:58
  out his exactly Catholic fascists. Yeah, his integralist craziness. And I don't
• 1:06:03
  know if either of you guys picked up on this too, like just also
• 1:06:05
  calling back to the Danean episode. Yeah, I felt like he was calling
• 1:06:10
  out Danean specifically for not being serious enough, right, because he talks about
• 1:06:14
  like localism all you like localist conservatives, like yeah, no, you know,
• 1:06:17
  with no teeth, So I don't know, that's just like localist free
• 1:06:21
  marketers cheerleaders of martyrdom. It's also so divorced. I mean, it's obviously
• 1:06:27
  divorced from the Gospels, like goes without saying. But it's a very materialist
• 1:06:31
  argument that he's making. It's nothing to do with Creedle, nothing to do
• 1:06:35
  with like the actual church and the church's purpose. It's just this is functionally
• 1:06:41
  useful, and we can get this done. Obviously they won't ever get it
• 1:06:44
  done, but it's very much a Christianity without Christ type of commutator what did
• 1:06:50
  we call it last time, communitarianism, Yeah, kind of like a hardcore
• 1:06:55
  communitarianism without any Yeah. Yeah, but I mean I think that again,
• 1:06:58
  it's like this, this structure, and this is the whole reason why they're
• 1:07:00
  attracted to wanting it to be Catholic, as the idea is creating an org
• 1:07:04
  chart where they think that you can somehow stick God at the top and create
• 1:07:08
  an authoritarian structure, you know, God, Pope, and it's all going
• 1:07:12
  to you know, come top down that way. But the problem is that
• 1:07:16
  God doesn't speak to humans in a way that you can you know, with
• 1:07:19
  human words, so it's not like that, you know, so that's not
• 1:07:23
  going to work out org chart wide. So you end up having at the
• 1:07:25
  top, you know, a dictatorship you know, of a human so you
• 1:07:30
  don't need even need God at the top. I don't think he's very interested
• 1:07:32
  in God. It's more God's giving it the legitimacy. That's why the church
• 1:07:35
  has right, right right exactly. He lays it out pretty clearly here too.
• 1:07:40
  He says they want to order the nation according to and according to natural
• 1:07:45
  and divine law. So that's a little bit of a red flag, right
• 1:07:48
  Their natural law is the way they used to talk about, you know,
• 1:07:51
  natural right, natural law, so that's how they sort of that's how they
• 1:07:57
  derive what humans are, like law and then divine law. I guess it
• 1:08:01
  would mean that would mean more like what they derive from from scripture and those
• 1:08:08
  two. The state has to be in accordance with those things, right,
• 1:08:12
  So natural law, I don't know that could that could be an anti gay
• 1:08:15
  thing where those kinds of Catholics and divine law would be whatever they say,
• 1:08:20
  whatever their interpretation of the Bible is, that's how the state has to So
• 1:08:25
  it seems like he wants to unified the church and the state under an authoritarian
• 1:08:32
  kind of yeah, and have a priesthood of the of the law. Seems
• 1:08:38
  like it. Anyway, it was great to talk to a non psychotic Christian.
• 1:08:46
  Well, you know, and I've said up before and that the you
• 1:08:49
  you can study the history of religion and you can see it going both ways
• 1:08:54
  in the sense that you know, religion has been used to justify authoritarian rule,
• 1:08:59
  and religion has been used as a source of criticism for authoritarian and unfair
• 1:09:05
  kinds of rule as well. And a lot of it depends on how you
• 1:09:09
  use it. And that's where my pathological comment comes from, that some people
• 1:09:15
  just seem crazy and they just want to use religion and whatever tools are at
• 1:09:18
  their disposal to self aggrandize and get what they want and convince people to follow
• 1:09:25
  them down on their crazy road to psychotic whatever their goals are. That's why
• 1:09:30
  I think it interacts with people's psychology in a strange way. But when you're
• 1:09:36
  a nice, well adjusted person, then sky's the limit on the good you
• 1:09:42
  can do. Yeah, with all human ideas and institutions and so on,
• 1:09:47
  you can generally use all things for good or ale. And then certainly,
• 1:09:51
  if you grew up in North Korea, you would be excused for believing that
• 1:09:57
  government is all bad and always bad. But they might be able to be
• 1:10:00
  in a different if you're in a different society, different perspective, you might
• 1:10:03
  find well, some governments could potentially do some good things, you know,
• 1:10:06
  over and above that and same thing. You know, you could be growing
• 1:10:11
  up in a in a really terrible fundamentalist Christianity that denied your identity, that
• 1:10:17
  caused just very serious harm, and and and you'd be very justified in feeling
• 1:10:24
  that all religion is bad. And that's fine, And I don't and you
• 1:10:27
  don't have to not think that in my view, that's fine, you know
• 1:10:29
  what I mean, don't because that's you can you live your life and without
• 1:10:31
  worrying about it. And I'm sorry that you were damaged in that way from
• 1:10:36
  the from that experience, and hopefully you will also transcend it. I'm not
• 1:10:40
  talking about any of you. I'm talking about this spotical person and uh and
• 1:10:44
  and so, but all I can say is that hopefully then Uh, some
• 1:10:48
  of us who are engaged in in this can also provide an alternative that that
• 1:10:55
  is not doing that, and that in fact, for people who you don't
• 1:10:58
  have the luxury to you know, get you know, get to study philosophy
• 1:11:03
  and and come to all of these conclusions and things themselves. They just want
• 1:11:08
  to raise kids and maybe take them to a church, and because they have
• 1:11:12
  the sense that that might be a good thing, they have an alternative where
• 1:11:15
  people aren't being you know, kind of force fed reactionary, destructive and harmful
• 1:11:24
  nonsense, but instead or working towards doing at least what they think locally is
• 1:11:30
  good, you know, for their community. That's hopefully what we're trying to
• 1:11:33
  do. Well said, yeah, all right. The channel is center place,
• 1:11:38
  but it's spelled the correct way, which is ore at the the Canadian
• 1:11:45
  Place. You can go there to find a bunch of I don't even know
• 1:11:49
  how to category. It's centuries of stuff and it's not all to do with
• 1:11:56
  Christianity either, So I recommend you check that out. And guys, are
• 1:12:00
  are we converted? Do you wanna? I want to head down there on
• 1:12:02
  a Sunday? We can go there on a Sunday, sure, or church
• 1:12:05
  or or or or what's the word sermon? No, these are these are
• 1:12:11
  pretty academic lectures. Churches on Sunday. Lectures are on Tuesday. Okay,
• 1:12:15
  there you maybe maybe we'll awesome. We'll start with the the lectures. So
• 1:12:20
  the lectures we haven't done in person since since the pandemic. But any guys
• 1:12:26
  and if any you ever wanted to come, and we will tell me ahead
• 1:12:29
  of time, and and uh it'd be fun. Right sounds good? All
• 1:12:32
  right, John, thank you, Thank you so much for the breath of
• 1:12:38
  sanity, honestly for a refreshing perspective. Thank all of you. And if
• 1:12:43
  you do, you know, want to go down any rabbit holes anytime in
• 1:12:46
  the future about the trinity or predestination or all those things, I'm always happy
• 1:12:51
  to talk about any of those topics as well. Great, hope to get
• 1:12:56
  back to it soon. Well, if we do a podcast on predestination.
• 1:13:00
  We've actually are already done the podcast on predestination, we just haven't experienced it.
• 1:13:05
  So if that happens, it's happened. But I'd also like to talk
• 1:13:09
  to you about narcissism, nastisism. Sure, absolutely, we had run Catholic
• 1:13:14
  who thinks that all of Nazism, liberalism, humanism, and communism are all
• 1:13:21
  narcissism. That doesn't make any sense the things, all right, guys,
• 1:13:34
  thanks very much, Thanks everyone for listening, and we'll catch you next week,
• 1:13:38
  all right, Bye bye,