Andrew Isker: Building a Christian Refuge to Fight Wokeness, Transgenderism, and Paganism

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Speaker 4 Terms apply. So, Andrew, thank you for doing this.
So, you're so controversial.

Speaker 4 I love that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, married man with six kids who pays his taxes. You're so controversial.

Speaker 4 Very controversial would be not paying your credit card bill and putting the banks out of business, convincing other people to do the same, not paying your federal taxes, forcing the U.S.

Speaker 4 government to pay attention to its own citizens. You're doing none of that.

Speaker 4 So, as far as I'm concerned, you're a non-controversial law-abiding man, but you are doing one thing that's pretty wild, which is participating in the building of a new town.

Speaker 4 It sounds almost like a Christian utopian experiment in Tennessee, but I don't really know. Can you tell me what it is and why you're doing it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it's

Speaker 1 not quite that.

Speaker 4 It's not the Oneida community.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, we're not building some kind of Anabaptist community. Okay, you're not the Shakers.
No.

Speaker 1 No, really, it's,

Speaker 1 you know, it's a company, you know, Ridge Runner is purchasing land and sort of facilitating a lot of the things. Like you're familiar with the Big Sort,

Speaker 1 where people are leaving, you know, blue states to go to red states and things like that,

Speaker 1 where it it's it's along those lines where people are leaving. Like I left Minnesota, a very blue state.
Everyone's now familiar with our governor in that state, Tim Walls.

Speaker 4 Don't hire him to babysit.

Speaker 1 No, I would not. He would be the last person.

Speaker 4 Yes, I think so.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so we wanted to leave there. Many people want to leave places like that.

Speaker 1 My friend CJ left California, Gavin Newsom State to come to Tennessee. And so it's a platform to be able to draw all of your friends together.
It's like, well, we can kind of live anywhere.

Speaker 1 Why don't we all live in the same kind of place and bring our families, bring our businesses and build things together? So

Speaker 1 it's sort of a platform for...

Speaker 1 drawing people that are spread out all throughout the the country and and can leave these places that are they're not great you know living in living in large cities or or suburbs where you're just totally disconnected and

Speaker 1 really isolated, alienated from normal life. And you can have the American small town experience once again.

Speaker 4 So sad to hear you say that about Minnesota.

Speaker 4 As a Scandinavian, I always thought of it, was told, it's like where all the Swedes are, and it's kind of, you know, lots of saunas and, you know, red-cheeked children, and it's clean and reasonable.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Not the case uh anymore why did you leave there

Speaker 1 um you know for us it was uh are you from there i'm from there yeah uh born and raised in in wasika minnesota my my children were the sixth generation of our family that lived in that town oh gosh and in the town in that town yeah in the in the town of of wastecapes buried there uh yeah there's six generations that are buried there even uh one of my own my own children that that passed um

Speaker 1 that you know all they're like we lived you know a couple blocks away from the cemetery where all of all of my ancestors were buried oh gosh yeah oh that's very heavy to leave a place like that yes uh

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 it was you know after the 2022 election

Speaker 1 where uh the democrats took control of the

Speaker 1 um the state senate finally and tim walls could do whatever he wanted to do he um the first thing he passed was in the wake of the Dobbs decision,

Speaker 1 full abortion allowance, even up to birth. Like, you know, there were the stories during the election about even like post-birth abortions that took place in Minnesota.

Speaker 1 I went to the to the state capitol and spoke to the

Speaker 1 first committee when that bill was being heard. And I, I mean, maybe, maybe, you know, later you guys can pull up that video, but

Speaker 1 I just went there and said, like, hey, you, you think you won an election. You think you can do this and just murder children, but God is not mocked.
Like,

Speaker 1 he's going to come with vengeance about what you're doing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're like all these

Speaker 1 60-year-old liberal ladies, senators, you know, are looking at me, scoffing at me, and just staring daggers at me and hating what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 How dare he cut this

Speaker 1 Christian nationalist?

Speaker 4 Lots of luck to them.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and so that's the first bill that they passed. The second bill that they passed, and these are the first two legislative priorities that they had.
The second one was

Speaker 1 a trans rights bill, which allowed the state to take your child out of their custody or your parents' custody if you opposed a transition.

Speaker 1 And my oldest child is 12 years old. A minor child.
Minor child, yeah. My oldest son, he's 12 years old.
He has autism.

Speaker 1 We homeschool all the rest of our children, but we don't have the resources to be able to educate him with his autism. And so he goes to special ed.

Speaker 1 And I'm well aware, especially if you see the things that happened in 2020, 2021, all of the activism, trans stuff in the schools, all the libs of TikTok kind of stuff.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 1 That the majority of trans children are on the autism spectrum. These children are targeted.

Speaker 1 And I'm thinking, okay,

Speaker 1 he doesn't talk about school. He doesn't talk about home at school.
He categorizes all of his life. He just won't do it.
So I would have no way of knowing what is going on there.

Speaker 1 They could be putting him in a dress and calling him a girl name.

Speaker 1 And I would have no idea. And then when I find out and I oppose it, right, boom.
CPS comes, takes him out of our custody, and he's gone forever. And they can't.

Speaker 4 So that's when you go Randy Weaver at that point.

Speaker 4 Yeah, for sure. And you don't want to go Randy Weaver.
Like, it didn't end well for Randy Weaver. No.
It doesn't end well for anybody. No,

Speaker 1 I don't want to go down that road.

Speaker 4 No, no, nobody does. Nobody does.

Speaker 1 And so it's like, we need to get out of here, right? We cannot trust

Speaker 1 the whole system with our child.

Speaker 1 They could steal him from us, right? This could happen. I don't want to be the test case for that.
I don't want to go through the legal battles and do all those fights. I want my son.

Speaker 1 I don't want to live in a place where that's even conceivable that that could happen to you.

Speaker 1 It's insane. And so it was at that moment.
I'm like, we need to, we need to get out of this state. This is, it's not a place where I can raise my children.
And I'm thinking like long term, right?

Speaker 1 We, yeah, we've been in this place for six generations, but, and it's, it's a wonderful town, you know,

Speaker 1 amazing place. I mean, it's home.

Speaker 4 I love the people there. And, you know, many of them are going to be watching this.
And well, you must know all of them.

Speaker 1 From my youth.

Speaker 1 You know, you, you go to the store store and you see, my wife and children hated when I would go to the store because it would take an hour to get a thing of milk because I'd just stop and talk to people I've known my whole life.

Speaker 1 Oh, I love that. And it's a wonderful play.

Speaker 1 It's hard to leave that, right? Because you know it. You're familiar with everything and all of the people and just the way of life.

Speaker 4 Gosh, that's where your family is buried. Six generations.
That's just, I had no idea. That's so much to give up.
It must have been.

Speaker 1 But I can't.

Speaker 1 I can't stay in a place like that.

Speaker 1 There's no future for my children, for my family, in a place that's that far gone, right? That has been destroyed.

Speaker 1 And you see so many of these other states, California, Washington adopted all the same things that Walls's Minnesota did.

Speaker 4 I want to get back to the Ridge Runner and the town that's being built,

Speaker 4 which I assume is a fascist Christian theocracy.

Speaker 1 That's what the TV news in Nashville.

Speaker 1 Yes, Mr. Phil Williams, the journalist.

Speaker 4 Little Le Ran, except Christian. Right, okay.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 why do you think, so that the three, I mean, I have my own theories, but you've lived it much more personally than I have.

Speaker 4 So you tell me, why do you think states like Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, California have gone to a place that I think by any objective global standard, there's no country in the world that would nod and say that's okay, except maybe the UK.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 How did they get there?

Speaker 4 I think,

Speaker 1 I mean, for all of them, the political power was captured by the left, political and cultural power.

Speaker 1 I mean, I went to college in Minnesota in the early 2000s, and you could see the seeds of all of these things

Speaker 1 beginning to form.

Speaker 1 And so all of the institutions were captured. And especially culturally in Minnesota,

Speaker 1 people are very nice, right? It's not a myth. Minnesota nice is very real.
And

Speaker 1 the ethos is if you don't have anything nice to say,

Speaker 1 don't say anything at all, which I just swim completely against that tide.

Speaker 4 But it's true. I mean, not to point to genics, but it's real.
It's Germans, it's Scandinavians, Norwegians, Swedes, some Finns.

Speaker 4 It's like these are, these are gentle, non-confrontational people for the most part. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. They're, they're very, they're they're very kind, very, people that, that are to a fault,

Speaker 1 um, unwilling to give offense. Yes.
And very, very tolerant of, of other people. Yes, they are.
And that gets taken advantage of, right? So you can have.

Speaker 4 So they take our best qualities and subvert them against us. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 And you can see that in other places too, like on the West Coast as well, right?

Speaker 1 That

Speaker 1 and especially with like Christians,

Speaker 1 this is done all of the time.

Speaker 4 I know.

Speaker 1 Where you're told, well, we need to love other people and be kind and be Christ-like. And that ethos gets subverted and used to these ends, right? Where, well, how dare you talk about these things?

Speaker 1 How dare you talk about these things from the pulpit? These things going on. It offends a lot of people.

Speaker 4 No, it does. I mean, I come from a family like that, with some of them have strong views, but they would never impose their views on you under any circumstances.
just, it's just not in them.

Speaker 4 It's a very specific Northern European culture where they just don't want to

Speaker 4 get in your face. No, never.
But it leaves them defenseless a little bit, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And,

Speaker 1 you know, I, I mean, maybe I'm, maybe I'm unique. You know, maybe my personality type is, is such that I just, I can't do that.

Speaker 1 I can't see like evil stuff happening, taking place and not say something about it. Not say, this is, this is insane.

Speaker 1 Like, how, how could we, I mean, just think 100 years ago, and that's, that's sort of, you know, my book is, right, if you go back a hundred years and you think about your, your great, great-grandfather, and you told him, hey, they're going to take little kids and little boys and remove their genitals and turn them into girls, right?

Speaker 1 Are you okay with that? Do you think that's all right? Like, what would they do if that was even proposed? Like, they wouldn't be.

Speaker 4 I thought eunuchs were out with the Ming dynasty. That's right.

Speaker 4 We have that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're bringing that back.

Speaker 1 They would go insane.

Speaker 1 They would fight. They'd become violent if that were happening.
And we're like, well,

Speaker 1 you know, I really want to keep my job. So

Speaker 1 I'll put the pronouns in my email signature and on my LinkedIn.

Speaker 1 I'll just go along to get along.

Speaker 4 I have contempt for them. Yeah.
So

Speaker 4 my theory is that those are the most secular states. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And Maine is another one of the most secular states, unfortunately. And those trends are rising there as well famously.

Speaker 4 And there's something about that, you know, there are lots of left-wing ideas that, or liberal ideas or socialist ideas that like,

Speaker 4 well, I don't disagree with all of them, honestly, but some of them I did, a lot of them I really disagree with.

Speaker 4 But the transgender thing, the abortion thing, human sacrifice, and turning your children to eunuchs, those are so clearly expressions of cultish religion, of pagan religion

Speaker 4 that like I can't turn away. I'm like, the Canaanites did this.
I know what's going on here. This is not, you claim you're secular.
You're not secular at all. These are religious rituals.

Speaker 4 That's the way it feels to me.

Speaker 1 Yes, absolutely. It is,

Speaker 1 and that's part of it, too. I think the things that happen, like when I was in college in the early 2000s, you know, you had the new atheism and

Speaker 1 everyone was like, it was just cool to be an atheist. Like, oh, I'm agnostic.
I don't, I don't really believe in it.

Speaker 4 Who is that? There was like a really

Speaker 4 absurd person posing as like a genius who was one of the leaders there, probably a bunch of them, but who was the most famous one?

Speaker 1 Oh, like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett or Christopher Hitchens.

Speaker 4 I knew Hitchens well. He was a marvelous guy.

Speaker 4 Totally wrong on that. He was legit smart.

Speaker 4 No, there's another one, whatever, who's always running around.

Speaker 1 Like today, like James Lindsay is one of those types.

Speaker 4 Who's James Lindsay?

Speaker 1 He is

Speaker 1 this

Speaker 1 atheist guy that opposed wokeness and things like that, but

Speaker 1 wants just a free liberal society. Like it's 1995.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I'm all for a free liberal society.
It's just that there

Speaker 4 isn't one. Either you're moving quickly toward,

Speaker 4 I mean, I will never give up my views of.

Speaker 4 I will never stop being liberal on the most basic level, which is I actually don't want to control you or your beliefs because I don't think you're a slave.

Speaker 4 I think you're a human being because God made you. Absolutely.
That's my view. Yeah.
And so I don't want to

Speaker 4 break down people's doors to make sure they're adhering to what I believe at all. I hate that.
However,

Speaker 4 you're either moving toward order or you're moving toward chaos. You're moving toward

Speaker 4 a society rooted in some sort of transcendent belief or you're moving toward trannyism, which is another. Yeah.
Like transcendent belief. It's like you pick a religion.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 It's not whether, but which.

Speaker 1 There will be one. And that's part of it is like the new, like the new atheism, all those things that broke down,

Speaker 1 you know, Christian mores and, and, and, and Christian, you know, just cultural Christianity that was imbued all throughout the American public life. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Takes all of that down, but then there's a vacuum and that vacuum gets filled up. And what's it been filled up with? Insane stuff like this, child sacrifice, you know, all of it.

Speaker 1 Like it is, it is a new religion. It isn't.

Speaker 1 It isn't a question of like, well, we're just going to have pluralism. We're not going to have any dominant religion.

Speaker 4 It's, no, there will be one.

Speaker 1 There will be a God that you serve. And the one that we are serving now is some kind of demon.

Speaker 4 Well, I think that

Speaker 4 so much better put than

Speaker 4 I could have formulated that. But yes, exactly, perfectly put.
Exactly. You're going to worship something.
Yeah. And now we're worshiping something really, really dark as a society.

Speaker 4 But it's particularly pronounced in the states that have abandoned Christianity the most aggressively and just

Speaker 4 come up with this new pagan religion. So, okay, so this is going on in your state.
You're the six generations in one town. Boy, that's got to be pretty rare right now.

Speaker 4 You've got six children. You have a child buried in the cemetery along with all your ancestors.
And you leave all of that.

Speaker 4 What's going on in your church? Were you a churchgoer at the time?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was pastoring a church.

Speaker 4 Oh, God. Yeah.
Yes. You literally.
Okay. Yes.
So you're involved in church. Yes, I am.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it's a church with wonderful people.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, they're there because they

Speaker 1 more or less think like I do. They like hearing what I preach.

Speaker 1 They like all of these things. And

Speaker 1 so it's extremely difficult to leave them as well.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it was difficult because it was a very small church and the things that I'm preaching.

Speaker 1 take the pastorate there in 2021.

Speaker 1 So after the lockdowns, after all of these things, and there's an incredible amount of discontent among Christians because their church has been shut down, their leaders have failed them.

Speaker 1 And so we had many families join us after that.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 overall, the people

Speaker 1 in Minnesota,

Speaker 1 they're not used to

Speaker 1 the kind of preaching that I do, the kind of

Speaker 1 Christianity that I have where it's like, no, I believe the Bible, like, God is real, and he has spoken. He's revealed himself to us in the Bible.

Speaker 1 And therefore, I believe all of it, and I'm not embarrassed by any of it. I'm not going to tiptoe around the things that might be controversial.

Speaker 1 If anything, I'm going to lean into those things and I'm going to preach all of it. And

Speaker 1 that runs totally against the evangelical Christian ethos in America today.

Speaker 4 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's all about, ooh, you need to be nice. You need to

Speaker 1 make Jesus very inoffensive to people. And that's how you bring people into your church.

Speaker 4 So I'll say I'm not an evangelical. I've always liked the evangelicals.
I've always defended them. I'm very sympathetic as a non-evangelical.
I'm not even exactly sure what an evangelical is.

Speaker 4 It seems more like a cultural descriptor, but

Speaker 4 I'm completely opposed to abortion. So that has been, for me, the reason that I've always defended them.

Speaker 4 But I always thought that the evangelicals were really forthright about their faith, another thing that I liked. Yeah.
And

Speaker 4 were were way more on the kind of fire and brimstone side, which I'm for, by the way.

Speaker 4 Good, yeah. But you're saying that they're not.

Speaker 1 That was certainly, you look at like, you know, the 80s and even in the early 90s, like you have the moral majority where they very much were that kind of fire and brimstone, and they've, they've been vindicated by everything that has happened.

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Speaker 1 But throughout the 90s and early 2000s,

Speaker 1 they really changed course, right? As the cultural trajectory is changing,

Speaker 1 they adopted

Speaker 1 the very secret-sensitive movement where it's like, well, people...

Speaker 4 Sorry, what did you call it?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Seeker-sensitive movement is.

Speaker 1 Right, the big movement in evangelicalism in the 90s and early 2000s where

Speaker 1 we're going to make it as easy as possible for people to come into the church and believe in Jesus.

Speaker 1 And so we're not going to focus on things that might offend them. We're not going to focus on sin and repentance and things like that.

Speaker 1 We're just come on in and have a good time and know that you're welcome here, right? Come as you are. We'll meet you halfway.

Speaker 1 That was more or less the.

Speaker 4 Why do you think they did that?

Speaker 1 I think, you know, a friend of mine,

Speaker 1 I think I could call him a friend, Aaron Wren, he's written about this like neutral world or negative world, neutral world, positive world, where, you know, in the 70s and 80s, Christianity is generally understood culturally as a positive thing.

Speaker 1 Like if you said, oh, I go to church, I'm a Christian, I go to that church, people would think, oh, that's a good guy. He's an upstanding, decent person.

Speaker 1 But by the by the mid-90s,

Speaker 1 it was sort of neutral, right? It was sort of,

Speaker 1 oh, well, that's just a cool thing that you do, right? Just like collecting stamps or building model trains or being part of the Lions Club. But by the

Speaker 1 Obama years, by like 2015, you're in a negative world. Where if you're an evangelical Christian, you are suspect.
You're probably a Nazi. You're probably a bigot.
You're probably a white supremacist.

Speaker 1 That's the attitude that people have.

Speaker 4 I just ask you to pause just to state for the one millionth time, the Nazis were not Christians. No.

Speaker 4 So they were not Christians. They They love to throw those things around.

Speaker 4 Nazis are Christians? No.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 More Christians were killed by the Nazis than any other group, just a fact.

Speaker 4 So anyway, no, the Nazis were not Christians. I'm sorry.
Oh, yeah, yeah. I had to say that.

Speaker 1 Good to make, you know, because they'll clip this and they'll say, yeah, oh, Andrew Isker is saying that the Christians are Nazis.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 so that that

Speaker 1 period of time, like there's these widespread cultural shifts in the country. And so I think a lot of it is just in response to that, where you're in that neutral world.

Speaker 1 And so you had figures like Rick Warren or Tim Keller who sort of adapted these things. So Tim Keller is in New York City and

Speaker 1 he tries to adapt Christianity to

Speaker 1 your

Speaker 1 upper middle class.

Speaker 1 you know, striver people in New York City, or to make it easy for them to come to church.

Speaker 1 So he wouldn't ever, you know, talk about homosexuality or, or if he did, it would be, well, that's not so good for human flourishing, but we're not really going to talk about that too much.

Speaker 1 There's

Speaker 1 the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greer, you know, famously said in a sermon, well, the Bible just whispers about sexual sin, but it shouts about

Speaker 1 like financial sin or greed, right? So they want to downplay.

Speaker 4 It shouts about both of them.

Speaker 1 It does. And the two are connected, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 1 If you're greedy for money, you're also going to be lusting after the flesh. Like that, the two go hand in hand.

Speaker 1 And so, but it's to downplay things that the culture does not want to hear, right? Because you'll be branded as a bigot, as intolerant, as a bad person.

Speaker 1 If you're just like, well, this is what the Bible says. Like this, you know, fornicators, adulterers, sodomites, they will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Speaker 1 If you say, yes, I agree with that, well, you're a a bad person, right?

Speaker 1 You are outside of polite society if you say those things.

Speaker 4 And you can reject it. You can reject Christianity itself.
And you're certainly welcome to in this country and in all countries, actually.

Speaker 1 But it doesn't just say this parenthetically. No, it's like included in a sidebar.

Speaker 4 It says it again and again and again. And in the church I grew up in, they're like, whoa, there are only four times where,

Speaker 4 you know, in the scriptures where people,

Speaker 4 you know, where Christian, where homosexuality is attacked. And it's like, since no one ever read it in my church,

Speaker 4 no one knew, but like I finally read it. What the hell? Why not read it? And I did.
And

Speaker 4 I've never been anti-gay or anything like that. But by the end, I was like, oh, there's a really clear message

Speaker 4 from like the Hebrew scriptures all the way through the Christian to the New Testament.

Speaker 4 Like again and again and again. So, you know, again, you don't have to believe it, but if you're a believing Christian,

Speaker 4 it's not whispered at all. Yeah, you do doubt it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you do have to believe it if you're a Christian. They claim that you, that this is the Bible, that God spoke to you.

Speaker 1 And so they're very fearful of those kinds of things. But,

Speaker 1 I mean, the interesting thing now that we're in, you know, what Ren calls negative world

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 that young men

Speaker 4 who

Speaker 1 were raised, most of them like raised secular, right? They went through the whole new atheism thing.

Speaker 1 They never went to church. They never grew up.

Speaker 1 I mean, I talked to so many guys, so many young men, you know, I see, you know, connect with me on X and places like that, where they're like, hey, I was not part of the church at all.

Speaker 1 I was not a Christian.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 4 I see all of the evil everywhere, right?

Speaker 1 I see the things like you're talking about, like they, they are sacrificing babies.

Speaker 1 Like it's that they, they care about this more than anything else that the ability to murder a baby um they see things like the ukraine war where it's like um our rulers just decided to have a war

Speaker 4 and kill millions of people for absolutely no reason and our proxies have banned the majority christian faith yes banned the majority christian faith majority faith which is christian in ukraine and i just wonder just to go back to the atheists for a second um

Speaker 4 what do they make of this? Like, it just, I understand, certainly understand being agnostic. Like, I don't know, you know, I get it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I can see why someone would have that viewpoint.

Speaker 4 For sure. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I think that's a pretty normal, you know, place to be. I think it's wrong, but I don't think it's crazy.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 But to be an atheist, to have determined that there is no God, like, what do you make of the things you see around you? Have you never held someone's hand while he dies?

Speaker 4 Like, what do you think that is? Yeah. You've never felt anything that is clearly outside of what science describes? Like,

Speaker 4 how determined are you to ignore

Speaker 4 your life? Yeah. Yeah.
That you become an atheist. Like, what is that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it's funny because most of the people that you talk to are like, when they espouse kind of atheist ideas, right? They'll retreat.

Speaker 1 It's kind of a Mott and Bailey thing where they'll retreat to a... Well, I really am agnostic.
I don't really know for sure. Right.
So there's very few people, very few, especially now,

Speaker 1 that are like, no, I'm an an atheist. There definitely is no God.

Speaker 4 Okay, well, then why is murder wrong? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, because it is, because it is, well, okay, I think it's right.
Yeah. So how does that, how can you tell me it's wrong?

Speaker 4 By what authority? Yeah. Yeah.
Because you feel that way? That's your authority? Your emotions?

Speaker 1 And you would see this. I remember.

Speaker 4 So like the people you were saying who are atheists, like, are they ever, some of them are smart, I assume? Yeah. Yeah.
What do they say to that? I remember,

Speaker 1 I remember watching, you know, a previous guest of yours, actually, the man who trained me in ministry, Doug Wilson,

Speaker 1 debate.

Speaker 4 Wonderful man, Christopher Hitchens.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes.

Speaker 1 And they had that discussion. Right.
And

Speaker 1 it was shocking to watch Hitchens say, well, it's, you know, it's common human experience, you know,

Speaker 1 solidarity with mankind. That's why I think murder is wrong.
And of course, Doug says to him, well, you know, well, if you saw someone being like murdered on the street, you think that's bad, right?

Speaker 1 Well, why? And he goes into his whole spiel.

Speaker 1 And he's like, well,

Speaker 1 what if it's a pregnant woman and her baby is being murdered? Right. You would just say, well, no, no, you need to have a medical license for that to kill that person.
Right.

Speaker 4 And like, he got. What did Christopher say?

Speaker 1 He's like, oh, you're being flippant.

Speaker 1 You know, he wouldn't go down that road.

Speaker 4 What's so sad is I knew Christopher very well and always liked him enormously for his every edition,

Speaker 4 his ability to recite long passages of poetry, Philip Larkin and Orwell.

Speaker 4 And, you know, he was just a, you know, he's a reader, like a real dedicated, lifelong reader and a wonderful dinner and lunch companion.

Speaker 4 I had many, many highly drunken dinners with him before I quit drinking. And, uh,

Speaker 4 but he was such, and so I love Christopher, but he was a moralizer. Whoa.
Yeah. And I never, I was much younger, 25 years younger than I am now.

Speaker 4 And I never sort of put it together in my mind, like, how could an atheist be a moralizer? Yeah. It doesn't even make any sense, actually.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I agreed with him on some things and disagreed on others, but he was always like in the pulpit actually yeah yeah yeah and a lot of the atheists are yeah what is that

Speaker 1 well i i think so much of it is is atheism really is an atheist moralizer it's hilarious well it's it's a christian heresy like they want to they want to have all the things of christianity just without without god there right so they they want to be able to uh pursue all of these things right they they want to be able to say this is right and this is wrong but have no no authority to ground it on right Just by their say-so, right?

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 4 a conundrum. Yeah, yeah.
What? It's wrong.

Speaker 1 Well, and you could, you can see why.

Speaker 4 Okay, why?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can see why it's breaking down, though, today.

Speaker 4 Under the weight of its own silliness. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 It creates this vacuum and it's being replaced by something. So

Speaker 1 all of the moralistic energy is still there. And now it's gone to

Speaker 1 things like transgenderism, abortion,

Speaker 1 you know, Gaza, whatever. Like it goes, it goes to all of those routes.
It goes to, you know, BLM and rioting. Like,

Speaker 1 and so it's

Speaker 4 highly religious. It's in us.
Yeah. It's in us.
We can't get away from the conviction, the true conviction that some things are right and some things are wrong. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's, that's, it's fundamentally human.

Speaker 4 Absolutely. So, but an atheist would have to, by definition, be utterly non-judgmental about everything.
Like on this, you, you would think they should be, but

Speaker 1 they're the most judgmental people.

Speaker 4 It's unbelievable. I mean, Christopher at dinner was always lecturing about the Kurds.

Speaker 4 And I'm nothing against the Kurds. I don't know much about the Kurds.
I ran into them in Iraq. They were the most bloodthirsty people in Iraq.
I did notice that.

Speaker 4 But he was,

Speaker 4 again, I'm not against the Kurds. I'm not an expert in Kurdishness.
But

Speaker 4 he, man, he would like lay down his life for the Kurds.

Speaker 4 I remember thinking, what is this? And it was the need to sort of find a good guy and a bad guy and put yourself in the good guy's side.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
And that's, that's human.

Speaker 4 Like, it's human. We want that.

Speaker 4 That's totally true. So what did you say to your church when you left?

Speaker 4 That was

Speaker 1 one of the hardest days of my life. I believe it.
To tell them,

Speaker 1 I'm leaving. I'm going to Tennessee.
And

Speaker 1 it was

Speaker 1 difficult. I mean, I still have a connection with them, relationship with them.

Speaker 1 I'm still trying to find them a pastor to replace me.

Speaker 1 It's hard for me to do that because because like, well, you left, Andrew, why you can't need to go there now.

Speaker 1 But they, they need one. And, and they're wonderful, wonderful people

Speaker 1 who have, have blessed me immensely.

Speaker 1 And, and I, I just told them that, um, no, I,

Speaker 1 I have to leave Minnesota. Um, there is,

Speaker 1 um, there's a place for me there in Tennessee.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's, it's ultimately, you know, what is best for my family's future, right? There, there's a place where my children can grow up.

Speaker 1 Because part of it, too, is it isn't just the things that we're leaving, the political, cultural things that we're leaving in Minnesota, but it's also

Speaker 1 overall the things that have been done to the Midwest, to everywhere, where

Speaker 1 my children grow up. And if

Speaker 1 they want to have a career and a life and a family and a success of their own, there just isn't much for them in small-town Midwest.

Speaker 1 And so they'll all just fly the coop. I mean, this is what happened

Speaker 1 when I graduate from high school. Most of the people that I grew up with,

Speaker 1 they all left. They went to the Twin Cities.
They went to other cities for work and for careers.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so that same thing was likely going to happen with my children. And I look at it and I think, well, my family's been here for six generations.
And

Speaker 1 whether whether

Speaker 1 it's going to end here, right? And

Speaker 1 I want to be in a place where we can continue that, where we can be rooted, where my children have the ability to stay in a place. And so

Speaker 1 many friends are coming to Tennessee where we are. They're bringing businesses.

Speaker 1 And once you build things at scale, the more stuff you're able to do, the more businesses you're able to have, the more opportunity is for young people.

Speaker 1 And And so, right, if my children want to stay where we are and continue that on generation after generation, like we actually will be able to do that.

Speaker 1 It wasn't so much just, okay, we need to leave Minnesota, but it's also we're being drawn to a place for a particular reason.

Speaker 4 Tennessee dream.

Speaker 1 There's a future there.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 The hope of refugees from time immemorial. Yeah.

Speaker 4 What did the other churches in the state say as the state itself became a place that faithful Christians couldn't live?

Speaker 1 I mean, there are a handful of churches there that are very strong.

Speaker 1 There are Christians there that oppose these things, but they are so, so vastly outnumbered. Like

Speaker 1 when I went to the state capitol to

Speaker 1 oppose the abortion bill,

Speaker 1 there were lots of activists on both sides, pro-life activists and pro-ritual sacrifice activists.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 1 there were no other pastors there. I think one of the Catholic bishops did a Skype call, Zoom call.

Speaker 1 But beyond that, there were no other pastors. And I'm thinking, like, my church is like 30, 40 people.

Speaker 1 I do this, you know, it's, it's, I tend make. I do, I do a full-time job and then do this.
I, I, we're tiny. I, I'm, I'm small.
I'm insignificant.

Speaker 1 And, and there are churches with 15,000, 20,000 people, prominent men in

Speaker 1 the Twin Cities.

Speaker 1 And all I had to do was just send an email to the clerk of the committee, like, hey, can I have two minutes to speak?

Speaker 4 No one showed up, right?

Speaker 1 No one is there. And it's like, no, they're going to murder babies up to birth, like enshrine this in our law, try to make a constitutional amendment for it, all of these things.

Speaker 1 And no one is... is opposing it.
Like I'm the only one that came. I quoted the Bible

Speaker 1 and opposed it as a Christian.

Speaker 1 There's just so little fight there.

Speaker 4 Christians built your state. Yes.
And all of it, and every bit of it. And it's so telling when you go to the Twin Cities.
I think of them as Protestant and Catholic. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I think of them as Scandinavian in Minneapolis and Irish. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And others. And others in St.
Paul. Yeah.

Speaker 4 But both of them, especially St. Paul, just littered with churches and schools.
And it's just like the infrastructure of those cities was built by Christians.

Speaker 4 And so it's a little bit crazy that, first of all, it's been taken over by people who have made a point

Speaker 4 to

Speaker 4 stick a finger in the eye of Christians to make it impossible for them to live there. It's like you're being driven out of your own homeland six generations.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, this is what happened with my wife. My wife is from St.
Paul.

Speaker 4 Her

Speaker 1 father's side of the family is Polish Catholic.

Speaker 4 She went to St.

Speaker 1 Casmer's Church. Exactly.

Speaker 4 That's exactly in my mind what I think of.

Speaker 1 And the neighborhood that they they were in it was all all polish people um but now it's all it's all hmong right everywhere it's all hmong and and somali and everyone there just left over the last two or three years what did you went to their churches and parochial schools and um like well st casimir's church is there but it's it's largely empty right we went there for a funeral a couple years ago but there's i mean people still attended but it's not like it not like it was most of the most of the parishes there have shut down the church the church schools have have shut down and they've moved out to the suburbs.

Speaker 1 And so that, I mean, that was a Polish neighborhood. It was, it was, right, this ethnic enclave.

Speaker 4 If I can just say

Speaker 4 showing myself to be an ethnic nationalist,

Speaker 4 they're just like some of the greatest people

Speaker 4 I've ever met. I don't think I've ever met them.

Speaker 1 I have to say that I married one.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I just think they're great people. I don't know.
I've met many I don't like, but just salts of the earth, smart, hardworking, serious about faith and family. Yeah, great people.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 I doubt it was an improvement, the change to St. Paul.
In fact, it wasn't. I've been there.

Speaker 1 No, it's

Speaker 1 like when her parents finally moved, like the whole area is just run down, lots of crime.

Speaker 1 It's sad because it was

Speaker 1 beautiful. And you could see

Speaker 1 the remnants of what was.

Speaker 1 You drive through St. Paul, you see some of the old buildings and how beautiful they were, how much care people put in.
Unbelievable. These places.

Speaker 1 And now they're just falling apart, bars on windows everywhere.

Speaker 4 Factory workers, like basically tithing to build the infrastructure of churches and schools and their own homes.

Speaker 4 You know, people with no money giving the maximum amount to build all this stuff for their families. And then it's just some politician decides, oh, this is too white.
So we need to

Speaker 4 destroy it all and destroy all the people.

Speaker 4 It's a crime on a level that only historians will be able to assess clearly. But

Speaker 4 yeah, okay, sorry. So

Speaker 4 can we just, before you get into what's happening in Tennessee, I'm so discursive, it's my fault. But

Speaker 4 why aren't the fearsome evangelicals who I will still defend? I'm just saying. I'm just saying that.
The laity, absolutely defend them. Well, the laity, yeah, know a million of them.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I love them.

Speaker 4 In fact, there's some working here right now in this office. But

Speaker 4 the preachers,

Speaker 4 like, where were they during all of this?

Speaker 1 I mean, I think it's, it's, it's largely

Speaker 1 the, the contemporary evangelical mode of being is, is, I mean, so much of it, I look back to it

Speaker 1 being, you know, going all the way back to something like the Second Great Awakening, right? Where the purpose of

Speaker 1 the major change that took place there is

Speaker 1 it's all about conversionism, right?

Speaker 1 And, and it becomes a big show and marketing and all of that.

Speaker 4 And that's where you got the 10 revival. Yeah.
Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Charles Finney, those, those kinds of things. Well, that, that's kind of in the DNA, at least somewhat within evangelicalism.

Speaker 4 So to put a finer point on what you're saying, the point became the more souls we convert, the more people who profess faith, that's like the scorecard that we use.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's the metric that

Speaker 1 everyone follows. And so you look at it and you think, well, if we just if we just water it down a little bit more, make it more palatable to people, you know, just get more butts in the seats, right?

Speaker 1 Then that's the metric of success. Not

Speaker 1 the internal development, discipleship of people, not actual repentance and conversion, not

Speaker 1 fundamental life change and so forth

Speaker 1 that traditional Christianity always was.

Speaker 1 It's, oh, if we just get them here and, of course, if they put some money in the plate and

Speaker 1 they're attending, that's what matters. So you see churches where it's like, okay, we have amazing production values.
We have a great band and all of these things.

Speaker 1 And it's all of these entertainments to get people in or the sermon is

Speaker 1 sort of like a self-help talk. There isn't really Bible in it at all.
Or if it is, it's like tangentially related to something that the pastor wants to say.

Speaker 1 It's not, all right, we're going to go through a chapter of Leviticus today and explain what the sacrifices are about. Well, there's no, there's none of those things.

Speaker 1 And so you see you know, many evangelical people

Speaker 1 have not been taught really any Bible or theology at all. And you see this in like surveys, like the Barna group does surveys and what people believe about different things.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they haven't been taught any Bible. They don't know it.
And so then when

Speaker 1 the liberal says, well, the Bible condemns eating shellfish and pork. And in the same way, it condemns homosexuality.
So what do you have to say about that?

Speaker 1 And they have no idea how to to explain that, what that is about.

Speaker 1 And their faith is shaken.

Speaker 4 God didn't destroy two cities with sulfur and fire because people were eating pork. That's right.

Speaker 4 He destroyed them because they tried to

Speaker 4 commit gay rape on an angel. Yeah.
That's just.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And they'll also say that with, well, the sin of Sodom was inhospitality.

Speaker 4 No, it was.

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, I guess. It was gay rape.
Yeah. I mean, the least hospitable thing could be a good thing.
I mean, you can treat it if you want. It's like,

Speaker 4 it's pretty out there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like, well, yeah, the least hospitable thing you could do to a guest is to anally rape them. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So all the men of the town came out. They demanded.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we need to know these angels.

Speaker 4 To have sex with these angels. And then lots like, I've got some daughters in here.
Take them. Yeah.
Which kind of takes a lot off my Christmas card list for saying something like that. But whatever.

Speaker 4 He does that. It's in Genesis.
And then they're like, no, we want to rape the dudes.

Speaker 4 So it's like,

Speaker 4 these are not euphemisms.

Speaker 1 It's pretty straightforward. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I actually, I I just read Genesis 19 to my children and there were some questions from the kids.

Speaker 4 It was funny. I read that a couple of years ago for the first time.
I'll admit it.

Speaker 4 And my wife, who's a very serious and just wonderful person, but a serious Christian, we were on a walk and I was, I was, told her what I had read the night before. And she's like, what?

Speaker 4 What?

Speaker 4 You know, she's, I mean, she's just like,

Speaker 4 she's the model for me as a faithful person, but she was like, no, that's no way.

Speaker 1 And I was like, it's in there.

Speaker 4 That's what happened. Yes.
Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so I think about that. It's like, I mean, it's funny.
Like, even at my little, little church, I, I just preach through the Bible. Right.
So I'll just take a chapter and I'll talk about it.

Speaker 1 I'll explain what's going on, all of these things. And I mean, I have, I have some, you know, wonderful people there,

Speaker 1 older people that have been Christians, you know, their entire adult lives and they're in their 70s. And one of them said to me, you know, Andrew,

Speaker 1 that's the first time someone has ever preached from the book of Judges in a church service.

Speaker 1 I went through the entire book and then, well, let's do Ruth and then 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel. And

Speaker 4 it's like, whoa, there's so much there.

Speaker 1 So much there. I mean, I had friends come down that were sort of

Speaker 1 new and becoming Christians out of being secular secular their whole lives.

Speaker 4 And they're like, whoa, the Bible is extremely metal.

Speaker 1 This is wild. Like, there's so much political intrigue happening in

Speaker 1 1st and 2nd Samuel. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, yeah, and I'm explaining it sort of in like this mere-shimer-y, real-politique way.

Speaker 1 And they're just like at the edge of their seats, like, whoa, whoa, that's crazy that that happened. I know.
And, and, and so I love it. And

Speaker 4 I can see why I don't claim to to understand a lot of it, particularly the Old Testament.

Speaker 4 Starting to figure out the New Testament more, but just having read it cold a couple of times, just like a book, like you would read Anna Crennan or Moby Dick.

Speaker 4 It's like the wildest, coolest, most interesting, most profound. Like those are not overstatements at all.

Speaker 4 And I think everybody should, it's the basis of Western civilization. I don't know why people don't read it.
There's obviously a reason.

Speaker 4 But even if you're an atheist, how could you not read the Bible? Like everything we have is founded on the ideas in this

Speaker 1 and like you're basically illiterate if you haven't read it oh i know i mean you even you can see this it's it's it's so funny like when journalists uh write about the bible and

Speaker 1 they're like oh there's this weird uh illusion here that that and it's like he's talking about a a whale swallowing a man i don't really know what's going on and it's like that's the book of jonah how do you not how do you not know what that's about but they

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Speaker 4 Even Leviticus, which I read on a flight to Europe when I made myself, because, you know, yeah, I ate eight hours on a plane. And I texted my wife in the plane.

Speaker 4 I was like, this is excellent, actually. It's just excellent.
I thought it was going to be all like sacrificing doves because you have your period. That's in there.

Speaker 4 Yeah. But like 95% of it made sense to me.

Speaker 1 Well, and it's, and it's real. Like it's, it's, um, it's tangible, right?

Speaker 1 It's, you know, in theological terms, incarnational, like it's your, you're, the, the real tangible world that people interact with, right? That's there.

Speaker 1 And it, people always ask me, like, well, Andrew, what's your favorite book of the Bible? And I, and I love to, I mean, sometimes I love to get a rise out of people, but

Speaker 1 I tell them, well, Leviticus is.

Speaker 4 And they're like, what?

Speaker 1 Really? And I'm like, yeah, like, I mean, I'm a pastor. My calling is to, is to preach the gospel and to lead worship.
And that book right there,

Speaker 1 all of it is about how do sinful people draw near and approach the presence of a holy, just, righteous God that cannot bear sin at all. And there, it's laid out for us, all of it.

Speaker 1 And even like you look at

Speaker 1 Leviticus chapter 9,

Speaker 1 like you read that, maybe you remember reading it.

Speaker 1 I'm actually going through this with my church right now in Tennessee. But Leviticus chapter 9 is the entire liturgy of the church right there.
Each of the sacrifices.

Speaker 1 And all of the Western liturgy for 2,000 years basically follows it, right? You're called into the presence of God.

Speaker 1 confess your sins. I mean, you may probably like your Episcopalian upbringing, Book of Common Prayer, like you probably track with this, right?

Speaker 4 You can't. They never admitted that in our church.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 maybe they didn't have a confession of sin of yours, but there's a confession of sin, right? Then there's an ascension, right? The ascension offering in chapter one of Leviticus, right?

Speaker 1 The entire, the worshiper puts his hand on the animal, right, saying, like, this animal's me. And then the entire thing is consumed, is burned up, right?

Speaker 1 Ola, right, where the word Holocaust comes from.

Speaker 1 Consumed, burned up, goes up to God in smoke. And that's you, right?

Speaker 1 That's when, and then the New Testament, where it says, right, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.

Speaker 1 What's the sword of the priest that cuts the animal and puts it on the altar and burns it up? Well, that's what's happening when the church hears the Bible read and hears it preached, right?

Speaker 1 You're being cut up by the word of God and ascending up to God in smoke. And then the next part of the service is the peace offering.
Well, that's communion, right?

Speaker 1 You sit down and have a meal with God, and then you're sent out, right? The entire liturgy is right there, like our actual worship that we do now, right?

Speaker 1 After the death of Jesus and resurrection of Jesus, right? Sacrifice is done away with because he is that sacrifice.

Speaker 1 And we're going through all of that each time we worship and renew the covenant with God.

Speaker 1 And like you see that in Leviticus, and it's like, whoa, actually, there's so much to learn here in this book about what we are doing every Sunday when we worship God.

Speaker 1 So I'm like, yeah, this, of course, is my favorite book, right? Not just because I'm autistic and like lots of rules and regulations, right? It's like

Speaker 1 reading the instructions on the monopoly game, you know, like, no, it's, it's, it's it's it's there. Like so much is happening.
It's, it's, it's beautiful.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the prescriptions or the prohibitions, more precisely, are

Speaker 4 surprisingly like sensible. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And one of the challenges to atheism is to explain why the atheist would agree with the overwhelming majority of what's prohibited. Yeah.
Because it's in him. He knows that's wrong.

Speaker 4 Don't have sex with your sister. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 4 And most people, most atheists would be like, yeah, well, obviously. But of course, he has no grounds upon which to say that.

Speaker 4 There's literally no law he can appeal to to say that.

Speaker 1 He says that, obviously, because he grew up and was reared and absorbed by osmosis, like Christian Christian culture, where that's prohibited.

Speaker 4 I think that's right.

Speaker 4 But I also think in primitive cultures that have never had exposure to Christianity, I mean, I don't know that there are many cultures where most of the prohibitions in Leviticus would be considered crazy or esoteric or like, why would you ban that?

Speaker 4 It's like every one of them like, of course.

Speaker 1 Well, even like you, you think about this, there was,

Speaker 1 there's, um,

Speaker 1 a pastor, theologian, uh, brilliant guy, Peter Ledhart, who wrote a book, Delivered from the Elements of the World. And in that, he shows, I mean, there's tons of just amazing stuff in this book.

Speaker 1 But one of the things that he shows is that, right, God makes these restrictions for Israel in the old covenant

Speaker 1 that sets them apart as this holy people, as the priestly people.

Speaker 1 But elsewhere in the world, right, they all have something like that, right?

Speaker 1 All throughout the ancient world, right, their gods had something like a funhouse mirror version of Leviticus Leviticus, where it's like, okay, right, here's all these rules about sex and what makes you clean and unclean and food you can't eat and can't eat.

Speaker 1 Like the Egyptians had this, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, all of them have these kinds of

Speaker 1 Mayans, the Incas, the Aztecs, the Norse, like my ancestors, the Germanics, like they all had these rules.

Speaker 1 And it's, well, it's because in the ancient world, right, they're all under their own particular gods, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what Jesus does is he comes and he takes the world back from Satan and from all the demons that ruled over the ancient world.

Speaker 1 And now he's reigning over heaven. That's actually like the book of Revelation.

Speaker 1 That's actually like what's going on in that book.

Speaker 4 The much maligned book of Revelation.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like I know you had

Speaker 1 John Rich on last year and he's talking about dispensationalism and things like that. And I was like, oh, I'm going to be in Tennessee.
I need to meet him and talk to him about this. Did you?

Speaker 1 I haven't. No, I have no way of getting in touch with him.

Speaker 4 Maybe after this, if you watch it, he's a good man.

Speaker 1 Oh, I love, I mean, he was like the soundtrack of my youth of country music. Like, he wrote all those songs, right? So on that basis alone, right?

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 he's talking about like dispensationalism and what has happened in American Christianity for the last 130 years, how it's actually a novel, new thing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 for me,

Speaker 1 it was like, yeah, I looked at that. I mean, I remember you know, growing up and that's just everything like left behind and the rapture is coming and all of that.

Speaker 4 I missed all of that. Yeah, yeah.
I know what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's, it's a thing, like, like, especially,

Speaker 1 and of course, like, I'm very critical of it.

Speaker 1 But, like, these are the, these are the best people in America that believe it. Like, the people that have like six Trump flags on the back of their truck.

Speaker 4 Oh, I totally agree.

Speaker 1 Like, they, they also believe that, well, the rapture is coming tomorrow. We need to be ready for it.
And so anytime I'm critical of it, I'm like, okay, I'm not critical of the people.

Speaker 1 Like, there's not a moral defect that they believe these things.

Speaker 4 I totally, first of all, thank you for saying that. Second, I feel what you're saying, especially with evangelicals.
I look at these greaseball preachers who I honestly, I find disgusting.

Speaker 4 And then I see the people who go to their churches and I'm like, oh, I love you. You're exactly my kind of people.
You're the most decent.

Speaker 4 people in this country. You're trying your very hardest against headwinds that are so unfair.
And you're doing a great job anyway. And I just love that.
I really mean it. I love them.

Speaker 4 So I never want to criticize.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Right.
Because

Speaker 1 whenever I'm critical of that theology, I'm like, I have to make sure people know, like, I'm not criticizing you because you're great, awesome people.

Speaker 1 Like, even when I, when I first went to the, the town in Gainesboro before we decided to, you know, before we made our move, it was right after the hurricane, which it wasn't far from there.

Speaker 1 And, and this is a town that like, they don't have a whole lot. The median median income is not very high in this town, but I'm driving around and every gas station.

Speaker 4 Where is it?

Speaker 1 Gainsborough, Tennessee is in Jackson County. It's like north central Tennessee.
Okay.

Speaker 4 And yeah.

Speaker 1 So every gas station? Every gas station has like signs up like, hey,

Speaker 1 we're going to western North Carolina to go help out. And it's like.

Speaker 1 Like people that don't have a whole like they're taking their time and what little money they have to go help people.

Speaker 1 And meanwhile, you know, the Biden administration is sending billions more to Ukraine and

Speaker 1 Israel and everything. And they're taking their time.
It's like, these are wonderful people.

Speaker 4 They are. And I will say for Trump, whatever people think of Trump, I know Trump well enough to have talked to him about this kind of stuff and, you know, away from cameras.

Speaker 4 And his affection, love, gratitude toward those specific people is totally real. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And you can argue about whether, you know, which policies serve those people best or whatever, but it all leadership begins with love. And if you don't love the people you lead, you'll mistreat them.

Speaker 1 And you see it reciprocated. Right.

Speaker 4 But it's totally real. Yeah.
And completely real, and it's emotional. Yeah.
And

Speaker 4 he's like, I love those people. Yeah.
And he meets it. And he beats McDonald's in private.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 So that is, I just want to say that because I know that for a fact. You know, a lot of politics is obviously fake.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 But that part, that specific part of Trump, like loving people like that, oh, man.

Speaker 1 Well, and it's the people that are, you know, the most maligned in our country. Like, like the, if the only people you can make fun of are like rural southern Appalachian people, right?

Speaker 1 That's free game. You can criticize them all you want and mock them.
Like, you know, Jimmy Kimmel can make fun of them all day long on his show. Um, no other group of people can you do that for.

Speaker 1 And, and they're the people that have been, have been dispossessed of their country the most.

Speaker 1 And, and you, I, like, that's just a big reason why we moved to this place is these are the people that are hated.

Speaker 4 I want to go live with them.

Speaker 1 Yes. I, I want to be around these because they're great people with the disease

Speaker 4 and cheerful too. Yeah.
Wonderful people. Yeah.
I live in a place with a lot of people like that.

Speaker 4 And, you know, every third person has a child or grandson who's died of a drug OD and like there's no year-round work and there's just a lot of problems.

Speaker 4 And these are like, you can pull into their driveway on a Sunday and they will just, they'll have a six-pack and they'll give you two of them.

Speaker 4 I mean, they really are just the most generous, kind, hilarious, wise, just good people.

Speaker 4 The best, the best that this this country's ever produced, in my opinion. Yeah, absolutely.
And I'm not from those people at all. So I'm like coming at this like, wow, these people are incredible.

Speaker 4 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 And so I think about that, right? And I think about the theology that has been, that it, that has shaped, you know, their outlook.

Speaker 1 And it's understandable because like you're especially in the midst of like serious decline, it's like, well, actually,

Speaker 1 it's sort of attractive to have this eschatology where everything is coming to an end, right? You can understand why people would eat that up.

Speaker 1 But the people that actually built America, right? You know, the Puritans and all of the settlers of this country, you think of even like the founding generation, that theology did not exist yet.

Speaker 1 That wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that it came into being. They were actually optimistic, right? They viewed this continent as

Speaker 1 a place for Christians to build, to grow, to have a future.

Speaker 4 What an interesting point.

Speaker 4 I've never thought of that before. So dispensationalism, for those who haven't followed it, is normally criticized and defended because of its interpretation of what biblical Israel is now.

Speaker 4 So it's like, it's a super electric topic, both theologically and politically. Absolutely.
And people get utterly hysterical about it and start calling you names or whatever. So there's that.

Speaker 4 But you're saying that

Speaker 4 the deeper or a deeper problem with it is that it makes people pessimistic. Yeah.
Can you flush it out a little bit? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I think if, I mean, if you think, if you go your entire life believing that any minute

Speaker 1 the world is going to come to an end, that I'm going to float up into heaven and my clothes will be here and

Speaker 1 everything, everything, we're gone. It's done.
It's over.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 1 that takes a people that ordinarily are

Speaker 1 very low time preference,

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 build things for the future,

Speaker 1 that delay gratification, all of those kinds of things. And it flips it around.

Speaker 1 It makes them a very high time preference, where it's like, well, if the world's not going to be around tomorrow, why invest in anything

Speaker 1 for today? And you can even see this in terms of architecture.

Speaker 1 You think of the buildings that churches have, well, they're in strip malls or they're

Speaker 1 just

Speaker 4 kind of garbly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And you look at the buildings that

Speaker 4 former pet store. And this is

Speaker 1 the buildings that Christians had before this was the dominant theology, and they're gorgeous. They're beautiful.
And there were very poor people that made them, like you said earlier.

Speaker 4 I know.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's like that, that, that right there, like you see it tangibly that, and you think about that in terms of all of life. That is so smart.
And what was the phrase you used, low time preference?

Speaker 1 Yeah, low time preference. It's like an economic phrase right so right your your preference

Speaker 4 please respect my ignorance

Speaker 1 uh yes uh it just means that um you

Speaker 1 um you're going to wait longer for things it's it's sort of like the marshmallow test with little kids right where yeah where the one right like in five minutes you'll get two marshmallows or you can eat this one right now right well the the the child that says oh i'll wait i want two right well he's going to go on and have more success and and and so forth uh versus the one that has, that immediately grabs the one and eats it, right?

Speaker 1 Well, that's, that's low time preference. It's, yes, it's people that will delay gratification, who will save and invest and build things for the long term, for the future.

Speaker 4 And for future generations. Yes.
Yes. Did plant oak trees.
Yes. Who plants oak trees?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, I mean, we're going to in Tennessee.
We want to bring back the American chestnut in Tennessee.

Speaker 4 We want to bring that back. Are you putting in evergreens, please?

Speaker 1 Oh, I think everything. Yeah.
I mean, there's pines. Yeah.
There's.

Speaker 4 Please don't neglect the pine. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. I know it's a fast-growing tree, relatively speaking, but it's beautiful.
It's the answer. And cedars, if you can, if you have water.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know if we'll be able to. Okay, okay.

Speaker 4 So now we're going to get into it. Since you're a preacher, an Old Testament scholar, what was the inside of the temple clad with?

Speaker 1 Cedar. Yeah, from Lebanon.
Exactly.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 God himself said cedar. That's right.
An accident? He was pretty specific about it. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It smells great.

Speaker 4 Maybe there's a reason Mysana has cedar on the edge. That's right.
That's right.

Speaker 4 I used to tell my kids that. Just think of it like the temple.
It's my cedar church. That's right.
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Speaker 1 I'm sorry, I've gone so far. I feel like

Speaker 4 so your point is that dispensationalism not only has specious theological elements, which

Speaker 4 I think very obviously it does. Yeah.
By the way,

Speaker 4 the whole theology was like laid out in the end notes. It's not actually in the Bible.
No, it's like interpretation in the

Speaker 1 version of the Bible. John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Schofield.

Speaker 1 And there's, I mean, they'll claim that their antecedents from the early church were like, well, this guy believed in something like the rapture. And it's like, well,

Speaker 1 it's always very, like you said, specious. Yeah,

Speaker 4 that's my read as a non-theologian, but it does seem incredibly silly, but... But sincere.

Speaker 1 Yeah, people, yeah, exactly. People sincerely believe it.
So 100%

Speaker 4 a lot of people i really like and respect believe yes so i just want to say that but you're saying that the cost is even deeper because it changes your worldview and makes it very difficult for you to engage in the labor of like for example loving people around you and building something beautiful which are also christian imperatives is that you're saying yeah i think so and it it also

Speaker 1 yeah so it it it uh it forces you into into an immediacy right we got to do everything right now because there isn't going to be a future.

Speaker 1 There's not going to be, I mean, and I heard this all the time growing up. Well, you know, we're not going to be around.

Speaker 1 We're going to be raptured. So why plan for the future? Why build things for the future?

Speaker 4 Have you heard that growing up? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 This was just everywhere in evangelicalism.

Speaker 4 Did you grow up in that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I did.

Speaker 4 And I remember.

Speaker 1 I remember in college when I was first getting into more historical theology or thinking like, what did people believe before the 19th century about things?

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 for the first 1800 years? Yeah, what did they actually? Well,

Speaker 1 there are various different eschatological schools. Like there's all sorts of different views of how the end works.

Speaker 1 But when I first get into that, I'm thinking like, oh, I don't know if I actually believe in the rapture. And I remember being in college and in campus ministry and telling people this.

Speaker 4 I'm like, I don't know if I actually believe in that.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 it was like I just uttered the greatest heresy of all time. Like I could have said, I probably could have said, well, you know, just denied the Trinity or something.
Right.

Speaker 1 And they would have been like, oh, well, that's interesting.

Speaker 4 But saying, I don't think there's a rapture. What?

Speaker 1 Are you serious?

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 1 Like that is central doctrine to many Christians. And it has this deep

Speaker 1 emotional connection. Cause I mean, if you've been, if you've grown up your entire life hearing this, And it's just assumed by everybody, right?

Speaker 1 It's hard to break out of that, even though the everybody of the historic church of millions or billions of Christians, it's actually a tiny minority in the history of the church that has believed that.

Speaker 1 But presently, it's a majority of evangelicals.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it seems like that theology is dying. That's just my sense, but I'd be the last to really know.

Speaker 1 No, I think your instincts are correct.

Speaker 1 I think some of it is, I mean, some of it too, especially in the latter half of the 20th century, right, after

Speaker 1 Israel is formalized as a state in 1948. Well, that gives like big confirmation that, okay, things are happening.
Like, there's an Israel in Revelation and a temple in Revelation.

Speaker 1 So it's happening, guys. Uh, so we've got 40 years, right? 1988, that's the end.
Well, then that doesn't happen. And then people make all sorts of other guesses.

Speaker 4 I wasn't even aware of that. So the idea was 1988 saying

Speaker 1 40 years after 1948, right? That that's when the rapture is coming. That was a, you know, I think it was, there was a book like 88 Reasons Why Jesus is Coming Back in 1988, right?

Speaker 1 And I'm sure it sold a lot of of copies and then, of course,

Speaker 1 didn't happen.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 4 Mike Takakis lost. Yes, sure.

Speaker 4 No, I mean, that's not obviously the rapture, but, you know, whatever, we'll take it.

Speaker 1 For people in Massachusetts, maybe it was.

Speaker 1 But yeah,

Speaker 1 it's just so interesting because

Speaker 1 I look at it, like you look at Matthew 24, right? That's the big, you know, the big text that people point to.

Speaker 1 What does it say? Where Jesus says, well,

Speaker 1 there's going to be wars and rumors of wars and earthquakes in various places and plagues and things like that.

Speaker 1 But right before it, right, what Jesus is in the temple and he's fighting with the chief priests and he's telling them, you know, he's just, he's fighting with them at Passover.

Speaker 1 So thousands of people surrounding them. He's embarrassing them in the temple.

Speaker 4 And his boldness is really shocking to people who haven't read it before. Yes.
The rage rage that he displays at the leadership,

Speaker 4 the religious leadership is just like

Speaker 1 nothing else. It comes right off the page.
And which is so ironic because you see evangelicals who are like, you need to be more Christ-like, right?

Speaker 1 You need to be, which means like wimpy and weak and inoffensive.

Speaker 4 Sweeping into the temple and knocking over tables and driving people out with a whip.

Speaker 1 And then going into the temple and giving this parable.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 1 Where, of the vineyard, where he's like, first,

Speaker 1 I sent this servant, you beat him and stoned him, and then you killed another one. Well, I'll send my son.
They'll respect him.

Speaker 4 And then

Speaker 4 it's the heir, right?

Speaker 1 If we kill him, we could take the vineyard for ourselves.

Speaker 1 And he asked him, what's he going to do to these people? Well, he's going to come and he's going to destroy all of them. And

Speaker 1 it's like, and they knew, right? The hilarious thing, I think, like reading the Gospels, is, right, Jesus is giving parables and the point of the parables is actually to conceal what he's saying.

Speaker 1 And people are like, Whoa, what's that? Even his own disciples are like, What? What's that about? I don't really know. Like, it doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 1 But he's telling parables to the chief priests and the Pharisees and all the leaders of Israel. And they're like, Oh, that's about us.

Speaker 4 I think it says they understood it was about them, they knew, and they decided to kill him.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so they, the parables are like obscure to everybody else, but when it's about them, like, oh, he's talking about us, right?

Speaker 4 And and but but talk about speaking truth to power. I mean,

Speaker 4 like, yeah, I don't don't know how that Jesus was kept for me as a, you know, lifelong churchgoer. I have no idea.
Yeah. But you just read it.
I would recommend everyone read it, non-Christians alike.

Speaker 4 But he's there. He's right there.

Speaker 1 And especially the Gospel of Matthew. I love it because it is.
And Mark, too.

Speaker 4 Yeah. All four.

Speaker 1 I mean, obviously all four of them, but like Matthew in particular is so cool to me because like you read it and the way it's organized is Jesus is recapitulating the entire history of Israel. Right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 right in the very beginning, he goes out into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, right? Just like Israel's in the wilderness for 40 years, right? It's tempted by Satan.

Speaker 1 He comes, right, after he crosses the, or goes, is baptized in the Jordan, is like crossing the Red Sea, goes into the wilderness.

Speaker 4 Then after that, right,

Speaker 1 he's preaching a sermon on a mountain, expounding the law,

Speaker 1 which is Moses on Sinai, right? And after this, he's telling parables of the kingdom, like he's, he's David, or like he's Solomon, writing Proverbs, writing Psalms.

Speaker 1 And then he begins all of these excoriations of the high priesthood and the Pharisees and all the leaders of Israel. Well, what's that? Like, that's like the prophets, right?

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 1 he's reliving the whole history of Israel in his lifetime. What's Matthew doing there? What's the Holy Spirit doing there? It's showing that Jesus is Israel, right? He's the true Israel, right?

Speaker 1 He is the, as, as the Apostle Paul says, he's the chosen seed of Abraham, right? He's the one that carries out Israel's mission,

Speaker 1 which is, you know, just dovebill. I'm kind of doing the weave too, like, like,

Speaker 4 doing the weave.

Speaker 4 It's Trump, even. It is.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 People, I mean, when I'm preaching, people are like, Andrew, you're doing the weave, like President Trump.

Speaker 1 It's interesting. I try not to do the hand motions and things like him, too.
But we all have our own rhetorical style.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it's interesting because, right, like the whole dispensational thing where it's like, okay, right, the old covenant still somehow sort of exists and there's still this, you know, this distinction between Jew and Gentile out there.

Speaker 1 Well, like the whole New Testament talks about this, that no, right, those, that, that separation that existed in the old covenant, right, they're, they're brought together as one in Jesus, who is the true Israel, the true, the, the successful Israel, the Israel that's obedient and goes to the death and is vindicated by being resurrected, right?

Speaker 1 And that old covenant, it's done, it's over, right? Those distinctions between Jew and Gentile, they're gone.

Speaker 4 It says that only about a thousand times in every book of the New Testament. So to come to the opposite conclusion does make you sort of wonder, like, have you read it? Yeah.
And

Speaker 4 exactly. And whether you believe it or not, that's just not what it says at all.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so you think about that, and it's like, okay, these two are brought together. I mean, the whole book of Acts is about this, right? That

Speaker 1 the Holy Spirit not only goes to the apostles and the Jews in Jerusalem, but the Gentiles get it too. Like Peter goes to Cornelius and he believes.
And now here is this Roman, right, this Gentile.

Speaker 1 And the interesting thing about that, too, is there's this misconception

Speaker 1 that the only people in the Old Testament that believed in God were Jews. But it's like everywhere they go, there are these Gentile God fearers that believe in God.

Speaker 1 And Cornelius is one of them in the New Testament. Well,

Speaker 1 it's all through the New Testament.

Speaker 4 And in fact, Jesus calls out repeatedly

Speaker 4 Gentiles as the most faithful. Repeatedly.
Yes. The Roman officer.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes. Again, like, I mean, he says this

Speaker 1 in the Gospels. Like, he's talking about the

Speaker 1 faithless and adulterous generation. He's talking about Israel.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 he's saying.

Speaker 1 In the resurrection, right,

Speaker 1 Sodom and Gomorrah and Tyre and Sidon, they'll rise,

Speaker 1 right sodom destroyed for trying to rape angels uh they will rise up in judgment on this generation because if the things that i'm doing right if the son of god appeared to them and preached to them they would have repented right if

Speaker 1 and and and nineveh right this gentile city in the old testament of assyrians right brutal bloodthirsty people right noah shows up or um uh jonah shows up and

Speaker 4 he

Speaker 1 he preaches and his only message is, 40 days, Nineveh is going to be destroyed, right?

Speaker 1 He's gleeful about this.

Speaker 1 And the king hears about it. He repents.
He makes all the people in the city

Speaker 1 wear sackcloth and ashes. And it's like, well, I don't really know what's going to happen, but this looks serious.
We better repent.

Speaker 1 And I mean, we're going to go in the deep weeds here, if you let me.

Speaker 1 I'm not filibustering like President Putin did, but uh

Speaker 4 but uh um

Speaker 1 right you look at the book of jonah in particular um he is

Speaker 1 he he flees uh not because he's afraid of the assyrians right he like that's the what people think is like he's scared to go there no like you read the end of the book of jonah and he he's arguing with god at the end and he he's saying i knew that you would show mercy on these people right i knew you would show them mercy that's why i didn't want to go.

Speaker 1 He was trying to outwit God, like trick God into not being gracious to these Gentiles because he knows in

Speaker 1 the law, right, in Deuteronomy, right? One of the signs that Israel is about to be cursed is that he is going to call nations, right, the Gentiles, right, nations that do not know him to himself.

Speaker 1 He's going to go to the Gentiles and away from Israel. And that means judgment is going to come upon Israel.
So Jonah knows this. And he's like, I am going the opposite direction.

Speaker 1 I'm going to Tarshish, to Spain.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because I am not going to let God judge my people.

Speaker 1 That's why he's angry about this. And it gets even more interesting because Jesus talks about the sign of Jonah to Israel.

Speaker 1 And people think, oh, well, Jonah's, he's talking about the resurrection being in the ground for three days and three nights. And it's like,

Speaker 1 that's, I mean, that's, that's symbolic. That's typological.
He's drawing on that typology.

Speaker 1 But it's not about that. It's that what's going to happen? Gentiles are going to hear the gospel and not you.
Yeah. Right.
And that judgment is going to come on Israel. Right.

Speaker 1 Judgment is going to come on this generation. And that's what Jesus says at the beginning of Matthew 24 is

Speaker 1 these things are going to happen in this generation. Right.
He's walking with the disciples in the temple and they're, they're marveling at the building. And we would marvel too.

Speaker 1 I mean, beautiful, like the whole thing is clad in gold on the outside. It's gorgeous, beautiful.
Giant, I mean, massive stones that you, it boggles your mind how

Speaker 1 human beings could move these things and build this stuff without modern power tools. Right? They're marveling at the temple, and Jesus is like, What are you looking at?

Speaker 1 Uh, do you not know that not one stone is going to be left upon another very soon?

Speaker 1 And they're like, Oh boy,

Speaker 4 when's this going to happen? Well, 37 years later, actually, yeah, well, I think it's we could we could debate, you know, well, whenever, but the time 40 years later, but

Speaker 4 okay, 40 years later, but I mean, I'll be autistic on that point the second revolt yeah it's normally yeah said to be 70 i think the resurrection is in 30.

Speaker 1 i mean we're we're coming up on 2000 years of

Speaker 4 the point is the romans it's actually crazy the effort that they i mean i'm sure you've been there to the site i haven't i maybe one day oh you should go

Speaker 4 jerusalem is the most amazing city and they've anyway but um

Speaker 4 but they just went to such a great effort to yeah separate every stone destroy everything so how much they didn't just burn it and sack it. Okay, got it.

Speaker 4 But they actually dismantled it piece by piece. How many slaves did that take? How much money did that take? How much effort, human effort did it take? Why would you do that?

Speaker 4 Why would you bother to do that? Yeah.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 okay, I just want, and I'm so sorry for the discursions, but I want to get to your destination, which is Tennessee. Yeah.
Yeah. Can you be a lot more specific about what you're doing there?

Speaker 4 I know there have been attempts to paint this as some sort of white supremacist enclave or theocracy or whatever. What actually is it? Can you describe it? No, so

Speaker 1 really it's

Speaker 1 a

Speaker 1 real estate venture to

Speaker 1 build communities, to build,

Speaker 1 and I'm even hesitant to call it like subdivisions because it's not subdivisions. It'll be

Speaker 1 large properties, two, three, 10 acre lots where people

Speaker 4 has someone already bought the land? Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so Ridge Runners bought the parcels. It's being divided up and sold you know, as we speak.
And one of them, you know, my church is going to build a church right at the center.

Speaker 1 And so it's, so imagine, you know, so there's kind of two kinds of development that happen or really just one kind.

Speaker 1 It's just build massive cul-de-sac subdivisions, houses for BlackRock, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 like, that's not how America. was built.

Speaker 1 Like my town, you know, it's founded in the middle of the 19th century. And like the first thing that gets built, like everywhere else, were churches, right?

Speaker 4 And then schools.

Speaker 1 And that's not featured anywhere in any subdivisions or real estate developments at all.

Speaker 4 There's no place for people to congregate and have an actual community. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like you, you see all of these ones.

Speaker 1 I mean, I've seen some of the plans in like places around like the Dallas-Fort Worth area where it's like they have a lazy river and they have all these nice amenities like that.

Speaker 4 There's never like a church, right?

Speaker 1 There's never

Speaker 1 anything that the old America once had. And so, yeah, my church is going to build, it's building there.

Speaker 1 Families from all over the country, some of them, you know, know me. I've known them, and they've been dying to get out of their

Speaker 1 blue state city, you know, horrible existence,

Speaker 1 out of the traditional subdivision, into a place where they can have land, where they can

Speaker 1 have some chickens, maybe a cow, like live like Americans used to

Speaker 1 and be out in nature and

Speaker 1 enjoy beautiful things, right? To build something like that, because that's happening everywhere, like it's development, right? Especially in Tennessee.

Speaker 1 It's like here in Florida, just exploding, right? So many people moving there because they're trying to get out of these places.

Speaker 1 And so what gets built? right black rock style subdivisions and and just hideous buildings

Speaker 1 yeah and and very anti-human.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 1 And so this is development that is human scaled. It's built for people to enjoy actual life, right? For

Speaker 1 people to

Speaker 1 congregate in the same area where they hold similar values, right? You don't want

Speaker 1 You don't want to live in a place where everybody hates you and hates what you think and hates that you love Donald Trump, you love your country, you love your God. I've done that.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 You don't want that.

Speaker 1 And tons of people were like, oh, wouldn't it be great if I had neighbors that, you know, we pretty much agreed on everything.

Speaker 4 We

Speaker 1 agree on everything politically, culturally, all of that.

Speaker 1 And then you don't even have to talk about it. You just have

Speaker 1 normal life together, right? Your kids can play with their kids and grow up together.

Speaker 1 That's the kind of thing that's being built there in Tennessee. And so

Speaker 1 I'm so excited to be a part of it.

Speaker 4 The fact that there's a church at the center of it is a red flag for the authorities in most places, and certainly for the cultural commentators and

Speaker 4 the media. And if it was any other religious institution, of course, it would be great.
That would be your community.

Speaker 1 Other communities. They're praising the Muslim communities in Texas, for instance.
Right.

Speaker 4 Or the illegal alien communities in Texas or whatever. But a Christian church is...

Speaker 4 And I don't think any Christian should be surprised. I mean, the Bible says you're going to be persecuted for believing this.

Speaker 4 And they are. All right.
Prediction come true. But tell us the response to this, this dangerous venture of yours.

Speaker 1 Uh, well, you know, like locally, uh, the people in town are, and, and in the surrounding area, even despite like the news attacking us and things like that, uh, the people that I, that I, I've spoken to, the people I've met in the town are

Speaker 1 very, you know, they're, they're like, like,

Speaker 1 very enthusiastic, actually, that,

Speaker 1 especially when they see, you know, see the things that I do, see the podcast I do, or various things. Like, oh, like, you're not at all like the TV man said you are.

Speaker 1 And of course, these are people that, you know, that we've been describing. Like, they, they don't trust the media.
They don't trust journalists.

Speaker 1 So they're already, they're already distrusting of that. I'm like, oh, it just seems like you really like Donald Trump and the United States and Americans and the Constitution and our freedoms.
And

Speaker 1 you seem like a just normal, you know, conservative kind of guy and i'm like yeah i i am that's i'm an open open book like there's no

Speaker 1 you know what you see is what you get what i what i believe i earnestly believe um and so so people are very uh have been very very kind uh but the state legislature hasn't tried to no no mess with your zoning permits or anything like that no and and and and the the thing is it's like well the the company itself is not saying well this is a community like that would you know violate the fair housing act right to say this is a christian only community um it's just that my church is allowed to build a church there right um there's no law against that at all and um

Speaker 1 and i can i can call up friends and say hey you want to move here and be part of our thing then what do they got coming up like

Speaker 1 oh the cost of living is extremely low like there's no there's no income tax in tennessee uh just like like florida and and so it's it's especially compared to large cities,

Speaker 1 much, much cheaper place to live. So a lot of people are like, oh, wow, it's only going to cost me this much for a home.

Speaker 1 It would cost me two or three times that if I were to build something like this. And I get land to have.

Speaker 4 Are houses being built there?

Speaker 1 They're starting to be. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 My friend CJ actually is

Speaker 1 right in the beginning stages of building his

Speaker 1 dream house. He's going to be one of the first ones.

Speaker 4 That's quite a concept.

Speaker 1 Do you think that,

Speaker 4 and you've written a book about this called The Boniface Option, which

Speaker 4 was controversial, but also loved,

Speaker 4 like all good things.

Speaker 1 Maybe you're speaking self-referentially, but or.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, no, no, I'm not.

Speaker 4 No, I was just saying, like, you know, it's pistachio ice cream. You know, like, not everyone loves it, but the people who do really do.
Really do.

Speaker 4 So, um,

Speaker 4 but I think you suggest that, that, like, it's, it's time for

Speaker 4 sincere Christians to be in fellowship with each other, like physically.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, especially because

Speaker 1 you see, you know, sort of like online communities where, where people are like, oh, I, I, I like this pastor.

Speaker 1 I like the, you know, sermons that he preaches, or I, I, I, I agree with this theology and I'm being, you know, formed and shaped.

Speaker 1 And you kind of, you band into, into groups online where you, you sort of self-sort

Speaker 1 and there are these massive communities on on the internet. It's like, well, what if, what if we took that, this like digital community that exists, and what if we made it in real life?

Speaker 1 What would that be like?

Speaker 1 And that's kind of sort of what, at least for me,

Speaker 1 what I'm trying to do is

Speaker 1 what if we bring people together in real life? What kind of stuff can we do? Like, I'm trying to just make it on my own, right? Just eke out an existence.

Speaker 1 But what if we all did that together and multiplied

Speaker 1 our respective bandwidths,

Speaker 1 what kind of stuff would we be able to do?

Speaker 4 And you talk to businesses there too?

Speaker 1 Yeah, people are already moving their businesses there.

Speaker 1 And the exciting thing is, and it wouldn't be just like the people moving in, right? They're the only ones working at these businesses.

Speaker 1 It will help

Speaker 1 the people that are from there, the local community, which is

Speaker 1 throughout the,

Speaker 1 because of macroeconomic forces, geopolitical things,

Speaker 1 things that were done to our country, all the manufacturing and real good jobs that used to exist in a place like this, those are all mostly gone.

Speaker 1 And so what would it look like if we brought those things back?

Speaker 1 How would it bless the people in that area?

Speaker 4 That's a major part of it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 that's the exciting thing is, whoa,

Speaker 1 we come to a place like this. We bring our friends that have, you know, some of them have remote jobs and good incomes.

Speaker 1 They can,

Speaker 1 People will spend money locally and businesses will spring up because of that. People will bring businesses and need employees and

Speaker 1 the people in the area will flourish in a way that they haven't for quite a while.

Speaker 4 That's the pioneer spirit. For people who are interested, what's the name of this again? Ridge Runner.

Speaker 1 So the Highland Rim Project.

Speaker 4 Highland Rim Project.

Speaker 1 Highland Rim Project, yeah. So the website is ridgerunnerusa.com.

Speaker 4 Look at that USA. So I have one last question for you.

Speaker 4 Do you expect, I mean, what you described in your home state, in your hometown, it's basically the persecution of Christians, the people who have built the United States.

Speaker 4 And that is a trend. Do you expect, where do you expect that trend to go to the extent you can predict it?

Speaker 1 That's the most difficult thing, of course, always making produce.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I think it will go in two directions.

Speaker 1 So, you know, you have the left, I mean, you see this right now, just how violent they are. They're just itching to destroy things, destroy people.

Speaker 1 They're burning Teslas.

Speaker 1 They shot President Trump, right?

Speaker 1 They're very, very, very violent people. And of course, like the political apparatus on their side loves that, right? They never condemn it.

Speaker 4 They never say these things are bad. Of course.

Speaker 1 And we saw the same thing.

Speaker 4 They're youth brigades. Yeah, they positioned in 2020, right?

Speaker 1 The same exact thing. And so I think, you know, and there have been you know, instances of churches being, you know, shot at and burned down and bombed and things like this.

Speaker 1 I think those kind of things

Speaker 1 will continue to happen and continue to get worse,

Speaker 1 especially in blue states and blue cities where it's basically allowed. You know, George Soros just handpicks all the prosecutors and they're not going to enforce these laws.

Speaker 1 But on the flip side,

Speaker 1 there's still like tens of millions of Christians, very conservative evangelicals and the like.

Speaker 1 They just got President Trump elected, right?

Speaker 1 And political power is being wielded.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's always the thing.

Speaker 1 For so many years, we were told

Speaker 1 that, no, no, no, our enemies have all this political power, but we're going to restrain ourselves. We're going to follow the Constitution.

Speaker 1 And we're just going to expect them to disarm themselves for reasons.

Speaker 1 And that

Speaker 1 sort of way of thinking among conservatives is quickly being discarded, that

Speaker 1 the only thing you can do is confront power with power.

Speaker 1 And President Trump and Vice President Vance, they're wielding power, and that wielding of power is going to defend Christians in this country. Yes, it will.

Speaker 1 And so I think that conflict will continue to become more stark, right? The two visions for the country

Speaker 1 will become more black and white. It will become more obvious

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 Christians need to band together

Speaker 1 to leave places where they have no protection whatsoever, where people like Tim Walls or

Speaker 1 the next governor of Minnesota, probably Keith Ellison, who is an Antifa Muslim.

Speaker 1 I mean, that was a terrifying thing, too. It's like, this guy, maybe he knows who I am.
And what, what could that guy do to me? Right.

Speaker 1 To leave a place like that where you will very likely be persecuted, right?

Speaker 1 They want to have a foil. Like, though, the whole thing on Christian nationalism, I mean, this is why I wrote a book on that is in 2022, the media is just attacking.

Speaker 1 like normal, decent evangelical people that happen to like Donald Trump and have skepticism about the election, the vaccine, everything, and

Speaker 1 make them the boogeyman. And they would always say white Christian nationalism.
They always put those things together because they happen to be white.

Speaker 1 And even though they espouse no white nationalist tendencies at all, they have no race theology whatsoever.

Speaker 4 Whatsoever at all. Like they're, they're like, well, I'm totally colorblind.
They have a universalist theology. Absolutely.

Speaker 4 Unlike the fascists who run the U.S. media, who are like Nazi race mongers.

Speaker 4 Totally race. How many people of color? We're going to count you by race, which they literally do in this country.
Who's the Nazi?

Speaker 4 I know. that's their

Speaker 4 church. People come to your church, like, how many blacks do we have today? How many Hispanics? How many Pacific Islanders? No, you're like, we have Christians.

Speaker 1 Well, the evangelical leadership definitely does, right? They, uh, well, they've fallen for this stuff, yeah, of course.

Speaker 4 But you never forget how poisonous it is, absolutely, yeah, I think, yeah, it is.

Speaker 1 It's like, well, no, we just have Christians, right? Um, and so

Speaker 1 no, I think, I think those, those trends will continue, and

Speaker 1 but I'm hopeful, I'm optimistic, right? I'm espousing this optimistic eschatology. So, of course, I'm optimistic.
I'm always

Speaker 1 hoping for the very best.

Speaker 1 And I think that especially if the kind of evangelical Christianity, historic Christianity, the Christianity that built Christendom, that built the West, that built America, if that comes back,

Speaker 1 the kind of Christianity that sees Jesus in the gospels, like we were talking about earlier, and sees a man, right? A man that is on a mission and is totally courageous and and

Speaker 1 attacking god's enemies right to their face knowing it's going to get him killed right that kind of christianity that preaches like that that speaks like that that that sees a god that is real and is is is your god and he is he he loves you and he he loves what's true and good and right and there's justice and he is going to bring justice to all of of his enemies, right?

Speaker 1 To all of the people that hate him, all the people that do just monstrous evil, right? That kind of Christianity, that makes it come back in America. Well,

Speaker 1 that's an America that has a future.

Speaker 4 I have to say, I think that the hallmarks of courage among them

Speaker 4 are cheerfulness and optimism. I do think that.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 you have that. Oh, you know, for a dangerous theocratic fascist, you seem very optimistic and cheerful.
So thank you for spending all this time.

Speaker 1 I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.
It was great to meet you. Yeah, it's nice meeting you as well.
Thank you.

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