American Thought Leaders - Over 75 Pediatric Gender Clinics Across America?–Jay Richards

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

“We’re in this moment in which the culture is on the edge of a precipice. And people from all walks of life and different metaphysical views are all seeing part of that picture and seeing where we’re going, and trying to figure out: okay, what do we do here? We’ve all been on this train going 120 miles an hour, we see it’s about to go off a ravine. We’re all getting off on this last train station, and we’re all very different and trying to figure out how to work together.”In this episode, I sit down with Jay Richards, an author, philosopher, and professor. He is the director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family and the William E. Simon senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is the co-author of “Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War.”“To queer something is to destabilize and de-center it. So, the point of queer theory is to destabilize and decenter our categories of sexual reality, which include—of course—male and female. But they also include, by the way, adult and child. Those are contested in queer theory,” says Mr. Richards.We dive into the dangers of gender ideology and comprehensive sex education.“For most of us, our minds are not adapted to the speed in which information can be transmitted now in 2024,” says Mr. Richards.We also reflect on the separation of church and state, and the various definitions of the popular phrase “Christian nationalism.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

We're in this moment in which the culture is on the edge of a precipice and people from all walks of life and different metaphysical views are all seeing part of that picture and seeing where we're going and trying to figure out, okay, what do we do here? We've all been on this train going 120 miles an hour. We see it's about to go off a ravine. We're all getting off on this last train station and trying to figure out how to work together. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Jay Richards, a philosopher, professor, and senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is the co-author of Fight the Good Fight, How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War.

To queer something is to destabilize the decenterate. So the point of queer theory is to destabilize our categories of sexual reality, which include, of course, male and female, but they also include adult and child. Those are contested in queer theory. We dive into the dangers of gender ideology and comprehensive sex education. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Jay Richard, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

It's great to be with you. Well, it's high time, I think. Yes. And so it's also very fitting that we met at an event that you organized, which was a coalition of folks very basically targeting gender ideology as a huge problem. Yeah. And so now these new WPATH files have come out. Yep.

And some of these same people have been involved in basically explaining what we're seeing in there. So why don't you tell me what's in there? Absolutely. So WPATH files, as we talked, they've just been released by the organization that Michael Schellenberger is a part of called Environmental Progress. These are documents, emails, correspondence of people and physicians and activists affiliated with WPATH, which is the international organization basically to promote gender ideology and gender transition medicine worldwide. These are correspondence

between doctors talking about the techniques, you know, payment schedules, how much it costs to do different surgical techniques, the ages of kids in which they perform different surgeries and the complications. And here's why they're significant, because other organizations, American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, American Psychological Association, have essentially appealed to WPATH standards, to their guidelines for gender medicine, as if they're some kind of science-based, objective standards of care that you would use in medicine, when in fact, they're highly ideologically driven. And if you take the time just to read some of the

correspondence, it becomes very obvious very quickly that what you have is a bunch of ideologues, essentially it's like the medical wild west, experimenting, trying things that are not based on long-term studies of the success of these procedures or the benefits to the patients. It's an ideologically driven campaign that has the appearance of science in medicine. And that's why this long report, the report itself is about 90 pages long, is so important because it finally unmasks what those of us that have been fighting this crazy ideology has suspected it in some sense known all along. I think one of the early interviews I did on this topic was with Dr. Miriam Grossman. We actually covered how WPATH had basically taken on the veneer of being a standards of

care association or something like that. And yet there really was no evidence base at all for what they were advocating for in the first place. So how is it possible? I mean, how is it possible that so many professional organizations took on these, you know, assertions as standards of care? Well, I don't think you can explain it without the role of ideology. I mean, some people will say, well, this is all financially driven.

They're just wanting to make money. The financial motives have something to do with this. I don't think that that's what got this thing started. The reality is that there is this pervasive ideology. I mean, Germans have this great word, zeitgeist, this spirit of the age that just takes people's minds over. I don't know how else to describe it except you can compare it to history. A century ago, it was the eugenics craze. It was supposedly based upon scientific evidence and the scientific

research, this idea that it was right social policy and medical policy to forcibly sterilize undesirables, you can imagine what that means, against their will. This was something that in many ways was invented in the U.S. and then exported elsewhere. We might still be dealing with eugenics, except that the Nazis destroyed the brand in the 1940s. But in this same situation in which you have medical organizations, scientific research labs, even the Supreme Court of the United States, all on board immediately, not based on, you know, 40 years of research. And that's what we have again now in 2024, almost a century later. I think this is the 21st century's equivalent of the eugenics craze. And that's really what it is. And the sort of evidence for that is precisely that there was

no sort of lead time. We don't have long-term studies and data, for instance, about the effects of cross-sex hormones on children going out 30 years. We have none of that data. And yet that's what we're doing with kids in the United States right now. That's a sign of a kind of intellectual social contagion. And when we're talking about these medical organizations, it's a misconception to think of, say, the American Academy of Pediatrics as if it's a science organization. It's a membership organization intended to represent the interests of pediatricians. In some ways, it's a sort of a lobbying organization. And so it's fairly easy to be captured.

So it's not like the Academy of Pediatrics polled all their members. What they did is they set up a committee who issued some guidelines drawing heavily on the WPATH guidelines. And so you go to WPATH and look at that. It's not a scientific organization. You don't have to be a physician or a scientist to be affiliated. It started as an organization to push gender ideology in medicine worldwide. That's just what it is. And a very small number of people with very extreme views have this incredibly outsized effect on we're supposed to believe even. You're not allowed to question it. That's right. Yeah. That itself is a sign

that we're dealing with an intellectual orthodoxy and not an honest scientific debate. This ideology that claims that people can be born in the wrong body and if you feel discordant with your sex body, the way to fix that is not by adjusting your thinking to your body, it's adjusting your body to your thinking. That's gender ideology as applied to medicine. They have been very good at institutional capture, whether you're talking about UNESCO at the UN, whether you're talking about UNESCO at the UN, whether you're talking about the medical associations in the United States. They've been very good at capturing

these institutions that people generally trust. And so if there's a case for, say, a state law trying to restrict these ghoulish practices against kids, the justices and the judges don't have time to study these organizations. So they're just going to sort of implicitly trust organizations that claim to be speaking for science and doctors. And so strategically, it's very clever to capture organizations like this. But it's also, I think, that they have a limited time because other national health organizations, places like Finland and Sweden and the UK, have done their own systematic reviews of the evidence. And so I think the clock is ticking on these other organizations who at the moment are doubling down and insisting that the so-called affirmative approach is good science and good medicine. I think 10 or 15 years from now, it will be obvious to virtually everyone that this

was a ghoulish experiment, and no one will want to admit that they were on the wrong side of this. Well, except, you know, every day there's more people being harmed. This country is still going full steam ahead. And with this imprimatur of all sorts of organizations, which have these, you know, very important sounding names and have this outsized influence. They do. Yeah. And I mean, the U.S. has, last count,

79 pediatric gender clinics around the country dedicated specifically to these medical interventions, cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and surgeries for adolescents, in effect. And then you have to add the 600 or so Planned Parenthood clinics, which are dispensing now puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. This is an unbelievable, uncontrolled experiment on American children. Parenthood clinics, which are dispensing now puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. This is an unbelievable, uncontrolled experiment on American children. And from a policy perspective, I'm a policy guy. I just feel like, okay, our job is to try to limit the damage as much as we possibly can. But ultimately, I think that these clinics, I think they are ultimately dealt with through the civil courts, through lawsuits brought by detransitioners, kids and young people who themselves were harmed by these clinics, ultimately suing them into oblivion. I think that's how the story ends with those clinics. But of course, that's one battle in the larger war against this insanity. So I already understood that what WPath had done is sort of invent so-called standards,

right? Yes. But what is it that these files really show? What they show is how much the people that are in the middle of this are just shooting from the hip. They present the facade that they know what they're doing, that this is evidence-based medical care, they know the effects, they know the benefits, and always have a kind of sunny, glittery sort

of presentation about how wonderful this is going to be for people, when in fact, it's very often catastrophic. Even in the best case, Many of these surgical interventions are not one and done surgical interventions. They're multi-step procedures with all sorts of risks. It doesn't take a lot of imagination. If you're thinking especially about trying to, first of all, remove the natural genitalia of a person and then create a sort of facsimile of the other sex's genitalia, which of course aren't real. You can't literally create a penis from parts, for instance. And so you're creating

these sort of facsimiles from other body parts, from skin off the arm or the thigh or whatever. These are, even in the kind of best estimate, very unusual experimental procedures that are extremely high risk. And so at the very least, you'd want to make sure that the benefits for these were overwhelmingly positive before you'd consider doing anything like this. Whereas we know that in most cases, just this watchful waiting approach to gender confusion, right, is resolved in the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of the cases. That's right. At least that was the case prior to this recent social contagion. In fact, the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual said this, that for most cases, earlier it was essentially prepubescent boys and adult men. But for the young boys, if allowed to go through puberty, the vast majority had these symptoms resolved.

So in other words, puberty itself seems to fix this in many cases. Now, though, if you put kids on the transition pathway, say start with the social transitioning, changing their names, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones. People will say puberty blockers, for instance, is a pause button. In fact, it's a fast-forward button. It fast-tracks kids. So the kids that start these interventions are much more likely to continue through with them than we saw before. So the intervention itself ends up sort of fast-tracking kids to the outcome that I think the ideologues desire. And when I grasp this, sometimes it takes a little while to kind of figure out what's really going on. It certainly took me a while, right? But when you use these puberty blockers, you're basically, you know, wiping out a part of that child's life. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. Even if it were in

some physical sense reversible, if you put a child on that would go through natural puberty on puberty blockers, that child is always going to be out of sync with his or her peers by definition. So unless you can reverse time, that part's not reversible. And then of course, we are starting to realize that there are in fact, significant physical effects of these drugs, which initially were approved in the case of Lupron, for instance, for older men with metastatic prostate cancer, now giving this to young boys and girls as an aid to gender transition. It's just absolutely extraordinary. Well, or in some cases, right? I forget which drug this is, but used for chemical castration. That's right. In some cases used off-label for chemical castration too, because

it basically just flattens out whatever your normal sex hormone profile would be. So I can't help but think about your book, Fight the Good Fight, because it's very much targeted towards Catholics and Christians, from what I can tell. But at the same time, what you're really advocating for is kind of what you did at this meeting where you got to know each other, is bring all sorts of people together from all sorts of viewpoints that actually agree that there's a huge problem in our society. I mean, in this case, it was around gender ideology and this sort of ideological push in medicine around this specific area. But this actually applies in many, many disciplines. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's our argument in the book. That's

why the subtitle is How an Alliance of Faith and reason can win the culture war. And part of this is my own experience fighting gender ideology that I realized the culture itself, the background culture changes over time. And so for a long time, the kind of, let's say the kind of secularist claim of the public square was that everything that was being done was based on reason and objectivity whereas I think we're passing into a time in which the most influential and elite institutions of our culture are positively anti-rational, anti-common sense and you could think of it as a shift from a kind of modernist to a postmodern framework. But this is, in a sense, what's happening with gender ideology.

So whereas before, for instance, say a conservative Christian and an atheist evolutionary biologist might find themselves on the opposite side of some cultural battle, all of a sudden they find themselves working together. Now, why is that? Well, it's because there's a kind of fundamental denial of reality on the part of these leading institutions now. So that whereas before somebody might have been pushing the principles of the sexual revolution but they still recognize that there were sexes. They recognize that there are males and females, right?

We've moved past that now so that the idea that sex is something we discover and observe out there in the world, that's contrary to the position of the gender ideologue. The gender ideologue says, no, this internal sense of gender called gender identity, that's who you really are. Your sex is something that's assigned to you by the doctors at birth, but it's not really something that attends to who you really are. That is a profoundly radical and anti-rational position. We've moved beyond just the most basic thing

that every human being at every time and place is recognized, namely that there's males and females and they're not the same thing, and that we know scientifically and understand scientifically. And so I think that's one of a number of examples in which we need to create a space for building a new coalition of the willing.

And it doesn't mean liberals have to become conservatives or vice versa, but that we have some mutually shared territory that we should defend and protect and advance and then reserve time later to have a deeper conversation about the things in which we disagree. I can't help but think right now about queer theory. Yeah. And the reason I mentioned this and actually I think James Lindsay has a new book, The American Child, that just came out about this. But essentially this approach to the world is about normalizing everything that is not normal. Absolutely. It's almost like it's become this catch-all for all these critical, all the critical theories because ultimately whatever is left

that's not normal must be normalized. Queer theory for people that don't know it, it sounds pejorative but of course that's it's an actual sort of subset of the critical theories and queer in this sense is understood as a verb. To queer something is to destabilize and de-center it. So the point of queer theory is to destabilize and de-center our categories of sexual reality, which include, of course, male and female, but they also include, by the way, adult and child. Those are contested in queer theory. And if you look at any of these things,

at queer theory, at what I call gender ideology, which is related to it, critical race theory, these things don't hold together as tight philosophical worldviews. They fall apart very quickly. But I think that misses the point. They're not sort of intended for that purpose. What they are is really, they're cultural wrecking balls. They're designed to confuse and destabilize and de-center and

disorient us and our culture and our thinking and destroy the present order. And then the folks pushing this stuff, they presumably have some utopian vision of what they imagine is going to come from the ashes, apparently, of the present order that they're attacking. But that is ultimately, I think, what these are about. So as a philosopher, I'm tempted to sort of analyze these things and say, gosh, this idea of gender identity, it's not even really intelligible. But maybe that's part of the point. It's designed to confuse. This is all kind of come out of this discipline called comprehensive sex education, or maybe has been adjacent to this discipline of comprehensive sex education, which has been around for a while.

Yeah, absolutely, for decades. And so what happens is that the boundaries, if you just sort of work your way back through a few decades, the boundaries change. And so there's always one that's just outside the bounds of public respectability. And so what the activists on the other side do is they just push the envelope, they release trial balloons. That's the stage where we are now with respect to the campaign to dissolve the age of consent. The fundamental difference that most of us know is there between children and adults, whatever we might allow or countenance between consenting adults. Universally, most of us realize, okay, children should not be sexualized. We're at the trial

balloon and envelope pushing stage of that part of the campaign. But if you look at the origins of so-called comprehensive sexuality education, CSE, long story short, it started in an organization founded by a woman named Mary Calderon in 1964. She was an official in Planned Parenthood Federation. And it was supposedly designed to educate and inform kids on sexuality and help them understand sex. And so if you're looking at it from a distance, you think, okay, it's to help kids learn the birds and the bees or something like that. It's not what it's about now. And so even that organization called SIECUS, S-I-E-C-U-S, which was originally an acronym,

is now just the name. If you go to the website, it's SIECUSECAS colon sex ed for social change. And they're quite explicit that it is about fundamental change of society. And so sex ed is designed, according to the most recent kind of CSE guidelines and curricula, for social revolution. They don't even hide this. And so that's what's extraordinary, that this stuff finds its way into American public schools. It finds its way into UNESCO and other agencies of the United Nations to be pushed on unsuspecting countries that would hate this stuff if they knew what it was. And it's not even hiding in plain sight. It's just a Google search away. I mean, they're not hiding what they're doing. Many parents have heard this term, comprehensive sex education, because it's been used in their school.

But how does it actually work, right? Yeah, so it essentially works the way it's developed, and you're going to see different manifestations of it. But most of us have this idea that there's sort of age-appropriate content, right? And so the sort of thing we think might be okay for a kid in the 10th grade would be very strange to introduce to a 5-year-old. And so normally they'll have the same kind of guidelines. Okay, here's what we do from age 1 to 5. Here's what we do from 5 to 10 and so forth.

But if you look at the details, it's a constant violation of any kind of normal intuitions about what would be age appropriate. And so rather than maybe helping kids learn something about their body parts or the difference between boys and girls, it's about thinking of themselves as fully realized sexual beings in which they think of the pleasures of sex, introduction of sex acts and topics that would normally be completely off limits. And I would think even the most left-wing secular parent, if they understood that this is what was happening

to their kids, do you want your five-year-old to learn about anal sex? Do you want your five-year-old to know about oral sex and how to perform these things? Does that make sense to you? I can tell you, I've asked liberal parents who seem to be advocating this stuff what they think, and they don't say, yes, that's good. They say, no, that's not happening. So even folks on the other side generally recognize, okay, that would be bad if we were telling kindergartners about how to perform oral sex. That would be bad,

but that's not happening. Well, that's a disagreement about what's actually happening, and it doesn't take a lot of work to discover that this is precisely what's happening in many schools in this country. You're making me think of this progression that happens. The first stage is it's not happening. Yes. The second stage is... It's very rare. One of it's not happening. Yes. The second stage is... It's very rare. One of it's not happening. Okay, it may be happening, but it's very rare. You're darn right it's happening, and it's a good thing.

Right. Yeah, we're in that kind of between two and three, I think, at the moment. It's almost like with every area of inquiry, there's this same progression. Absolutely. Is that actually like part of a plan that's written up somewhere? I mean, the way in which social change takes place is fairly obvious if you look historically, that people, you know, I mean, we would never have imagined a situation where officials in the government could tell people that they can't go to church and they can't go to work. They can't drive to the grocery store. And yet we almost without any

sort of effort complied with this because we were told it was for our own good and for the good of other people. With the help of a lot of propaganda. Absolutely. Like massive propaganda. Massive propaganda, which is now in some ways I would say this ability to transform the thinking of a culture as a whole, it can happen almost instantaneously. In the 1930s, people didn't have access at the speed of light to high-definition, real-time video. But of course, in 2020, one video clip of an elderly man in China falling over on the street corner

could be on everyone's social media within a few minutes. And so just all it needed was the interpretation. This is what COVID will do to you, so stay inside. In some ways, I think it's the same with gender ideology. People say, why did this happen so quickly now? Well, in part, the ideologues had been infiltrating institutions for a couple of decades, but it also required a kind of disease vector. And in this case,

I think the disease vector is social media. So that for good or for ill, social media allows ideas to spread everywhere around the planet almost simultaneously. And honestly, I don't think that for most of us, our minds are not adapted to the speed in which information can be transmitted now in 2024. I just want to touch on this sort of propaganda piece as well, right? From what I understand, like this idea that if you do the wrong thing, you'll kill grandma. I can't remember the exact formulation,

but that was actually something that was tested in focus groups to figure out what would be the most manipulative method to achieve the desired outcome. And notice the power of that. So what they didn't tell us, stay inside for your own good. I honestly think if they had said that, if they'd say, you know, stay inside because you might get sick, Americans would have, we would have much more naturally, come on, I can decide for myself, right? That triggered triggered that. But instead, we had our compassion and our altruism weaponized against us so that, OK, you might be fine, but you might be, you know, an asymptomatic carrier that's going to kill your grandma or someone else's grandma.

Well, it's the very odd person that's willing to kind of resist that sort of appeal. Even if you don't believe it, you generally don't want to appear callous to that sort of prospect. And so that's where we are, though. And that's where we are with almost all these topics. I mean, this is how lots of well-meaning people, I think, accepted the claims of gender ideology for as long as they have, is that they assume this is about caring compassion for a rare child that simply doesn't fit into gender stereotypes and a desire to be compassionate and help kids like that. It has nothing to do with that. In fact, if you look at the kids that are preyed upon by the gender ideologues, they're precisely very often the awkward kids that we

were told we're trying to help. And so to be discerning in this moment, we have to both not allow our compassion to be weaponized against us, but also not to sear it, not to sear our conscience. We need to be able to channel our proper concern for other people, but to see through the kind of cant that houses supporting things that are genuinely harmful. We've been observing this weaponization of empathy, probably the most powerful weapon. Yes. I'd be thinking about it right now. There's many. Right. Oh, yeah. I mean, socialism is the same thing.

The appeal of socialism always appeals to people's concern for the poor, for instance. Yeah. It's utterly pervasive. And it only works on a population that is generally decent. See if people didn't have empathy for others it would be useless. I presume for instance that appealing to Hitler's empathy or to Stalin's empathy would have gotten you nowhere right? But for ordinary people generally either genuinely care about others or at least want to appear to care about others. This stuff works in a society where people are genuinely concerned about being improper towards minorities, for example, because they care. That's right.

They genuinely care. So it's like it's almost like in order to apply this weapon in a society, that society has to be actually the opposite of what's claimed. That's right. The opposite of what's claimed. Or at least somewhat. Yeah, that's right. So that their compassion can be weaponized against them. This is the danger though, is that as this happens more and more, some subset of our population might say,

okay, well, the way to avoid this is of course, is not to care. And you see this, I hate to say it, sometimes on the online right. So almost a desire to be an edgelord and to just simply deny basic compassion for the weak and the downtrodden. That's the wrong way to do it. We don't want our compassion to be weaponized against us. We don't want to give up compassion properly applied. Well, and the problem, right, what you're describing, right, is that it actually creates the exact circumstances which are the goal of these ideologies, which you describe very

aptly as a cultural wrecking ball. It's very difficult to defend against. Yeah, and James Lindsay is so good on this, our friend James Lindsay, because these are dialectical methods. I mean, all of these things have at least, these critical theories have at least partial origins in Marxism sort of refracted through a kind of cultural analysis, which is dialectical. And so in other words, there's a desire in the actions of the revolution or the revolutionary to give rise to the opposite because it's destabilizing. And so, for instance, they might accuse us of being a racist.

What they want is for some crazy person to sort of lash out in a racist way precisely to confirm their claims because they're not interested in kind of increasing the boundaries of compassion. They're interested, again, in destroying the present order. And the best way to do that is to create conflict between these warring parties. And so in responding, we have to avoid taking the dialectical debate of the revolutionaries, but we also have to respond in a way that can defeat the program. Well, and so I guess we're getting back to this coalition of faith and reason that you describe in your book. How do you envision this happening? Because, I mean, we definitely see there's kind

of a movement mounting to counter all of this slowly. That's right. We've seen changes to legislation. We've seen all sorts of you know moms for liberty yes huge action on the school boards happens at a local level that's right happening so all these types of things are happening at the same time there is this the exact kind of backlash that you're seeing and you can kind of understand it at some level absolutely right but it's not gonna get us to the solution as you're suggesting. It's not.

Right? Yeah. So what do we do? And I mean, you actually deal with this. Yes. Exactly. And that's honestly the reason

that James Robinson and I did this book because I wanted to model what, first of all, what this would look like but also what are the arguments that we think conservatives ought to make

in this new moment because it's one thing to say, okay, I need the rhetorical strategy to build up the base of people that are exactly like me. It's another thing to say, okay, we need the people that are in the base that are like me to be able to argue and defend these things in a way that helps build this larger coalition of people that may disagree with us on a lot of things. I mean, but again, Michael Schellenberger is a perfect example of this. He's a California progressive environmental journalist and activist, but he broke with some of the kind of radical catastrophism that you see in the environmental movement, not because he ceased being concerned about the environment,

because either they're misrepresenting what the science said or they were anti-human. He said, look, any good environmentalism should be concerned with humans as a part of the natural environment. And so that's why Michael now, you know, I've heard him refer to himself as a left-fugee. He doesn't say, I've become a conservative. That's all right. But he is on the front lines doing some of the most amazing stuff. And if it was a fellow conservative doing it, great. But this is something I think we're seeing that's honestly different from 10 years ago. And I was writing on this, say, in 2012, another presidential election year.

There wasn't really anything like this. It was much more of a kind of traditional left-right way of understanding these things. And now I think there's a growing recognition that there's just a complete denial of reality. I mean, frankly, as a Catholic philosopher, I think of this in terms of the natural law, that even if you're not religious and don't have sectarian religious beliefs, you have access to certain moral truths, just as you have access to your sight and your hearing, simply by virtue of being human. And so even if you're an atheist, you know it's wrong to torture children for the fun of it, for instance, right? And religious conservatives are not used to arguing in that way.

How do you develop an argument for a particular position? Let's say your position on unborn human life or on marriage or on the role of religion in the public square. How would you frame that if you were trying to persuade someone that's with you on some really, really important issues, but is still kind of suspicious about conservatives? I mean, honestly, I've said several times, I'm interested in making friends with people that 18 months ago thought I was a bigot. They were wrong, but I think now I have an opportunity to model and to show them that in fact you misunderstood my motives for my views. When it comes to Christians in general, making Christian ideology, Christian faith look somehow

weird or wrong or a problem. That's right. And the media is doing their very best job to do this now with this phrase, Christian nationalism, right? This idea that... So tell me about this Christian nationalism. First of all, it doesn't have a stable meaning, but the media has spent years, again, weaponizing the term. And I'm just saying, it's not just the media.

No, that's right. This is being used extensively. Everywhere. No, that's right. It's used very widely, but I'd say a large segment of the media uses it as a pejorative in a very imprecise way. And it ends up meaning something like a person who thinks Christianity played some important role, maybe in American history, and that we should be able to defend broadly Christian moral views in the public square. Something like that. That ends up being Christian nationalism when all that is is that's just kind of standard American practice through the 1990s probably. I mean, Barack Obama, prior to becoming president, gave a famous

speech where he said it's absurd that religious people should have to leave their faith. Except when I hear now, and perhaps I've already been brainwashed, when I hear the term Christian nationalism, I imagine people who want to impose Christian rule on America. Exactly. And that is the meaning that's intended when it's being used as a pejorative. Now, on the other hand, there are some Christians that I think imprudently said, oh, well, fine then, I'll just embrace the term. Stephen Wolfe has a book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, in which he makes very particular, I'd say kind of eccentric argument for his version of Calvinism as a kind of, you know, I think he does picture something like he would like the United States to be something like

Calvin's Geneva or something. Now, look, it's imprudent to argue that. At the same time, there's two ways to kind of take the bait on this. Either you say, I'm not a Christian nationalist, and then you deny things that you should perfectly well be able to defend, or you spend all your time attacking so-called Christian nationalists when it's like five or ten people with very little cultural power that are actually arguing it. Notice the kind of dialectic either way. The question is, okay, my view is that the American founding had this basically right. There's not going to be an established national church,

but the free exercise of religion means the free exercise of religion. So it means that we can bring our arguments and our perspectives into the public square and use persuasion rather than coercion. And so sometimes that means, like Martin Luther King, he appealed to specifically theological premises. Sometimes it means making arguments that are based on science or just on the natural law or something like that. That's not Christian nationalism. And it's not Christian nationalism or at least anything insidious or un-American.

But not an attempt to impose sectarian religious beliefs on people that don't believe it. That would be contrary, I think, to the American founding and a generally bad thing. But that's not what the average Southern Baptist, for instance, is at all interested in doing. So you have actually something interesting in your book that I just thought of. You discuss kind of the origins of this idea of the separation of church and state. Yeah. Because it's something that you constantly hear referenced as if it's like, you know, canon. This Politico reporter that has gotten involved in this controversy over Christian nationalism

very recently said something about the separation of church and state being a constitutional idea. Well, first of all, it's not in the Constitution. It's not in the Bill of Rights. It was in a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Church Association, who was being persecuted at the time by another Christian group.

And so he invoked this metaphor, which he'd gotten from someone else, of this wall of separation between church and state. So it's not a constitutional idea. The First Amendment, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That's what the Constitution says. So no national church established, and the national church shall not restrict the free exercise of religion. That's a wonderful kind of balance in which you could have a kind of broadly religious culture

with shared, what I would say, kind of Christian-inflected theistic consensus is how I would describe the public culture of the United States of America for most of its history, but also a limited government that doesn't make claims or have jurisdiction over doctrinal distinctives between different religious people. And that was how the courts understood it. This is how the federal government and the states understood this relationship. Yes, you can have an institutional separation, even a wall if you want it, between the institution of the church and the state. That's not a wall between politics and public life and religious ideas.

That's a completely different thing. What is the role of the church in governance? Yeah, I'm guessing that, say, Protestants, I'm Catholic, so Protestants and Catholics might sometimes have a sort of different answer to this. I think that Jesus himself established the general principle of different jurisdictions. You know, he was challenged in the Gospels, are we supposed to pay taxes to Caesar? And so what did he do? He said, okay, bring me a coin whose image is inscribed on the coin. It was Caesar. And he says, render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's. So he implied that there is this principle of different jurisdictions so that the church has a legitimate, real jurisdiction and the state does too. So in thinking about the First Amendment, people often think that it's designed to limit

the church. If anything, it's designed to limit the jurisdiction of the state because the existence of a vibrant church, an institutional church outside the state, limits the state in the same way that individual rights and the existence of families as pre-political institutions, all those things limit the jurisdiction of the state. So I would say that the proper role, when the church is doing what it's supposed to do, is it's tending to the things that are within its jurisdiction. And part of that will profoundly and positively influence questions of politics, even though the Capitol here in Washington, D.C. is not the same as the National Basilica. Those are separate institutions and separate buildings. That's just fine.

In America right now, there's a great many faiths, a great many Christian denominations, and a great many other faiths. Yeah. Right. So same principle. Yeah, it is. And in some ways, I think that's why the American experiment worked so well, is that the different colonies, in fact, at the time of the founding, actually,

some of them still had established churches, which in this case was Protestant denominations. But James Madison sort of made this point that, look, maybe the Congregationalists and the Anglicans, they would like to have an established church, but the Baptists will challenge them. And so what will they come together around? Will they come together around the principles of the natural law that they share in common rather than their sectarian doctrinal distinctives? That's something that I think we've lost so that we understand the public square, not as this realm of moral argument and disputation around shared moral principles, but rather just this place where we just fight for power and control.

That's the view of Marx and everyone that followed him and all of these critical theories, that these are just power relationships and it's just an exertion. And that's all it is. And notice, if that's true, if there's literally no moral principles or principles of reason that we can appeal to, that justifies your own use of arbitrary power. And so it's self-justifying. It's also utterly toxic. I think you're doing some really remarkable work at bringing together people. Let's call it around these principles of natural law. Absolutely. Yeah, that is exactly how I think about this. And sometimes the natural law is literally like laws of physics and biology, right? And other times it's these sort of broadly shared moral principles, because our reason is not just this

narrow thing that can only look at telescopes and microscopes, right? It also has the capacity to know moral truths. And even people who deny that generally presuppose it. I say even the professor who teaches you moral relativism acts with moral indignation if one of his students slashes the tires on his car. And so at some level, we all sort of know that's true. We're in this moment in which the culture is on the edge of a precipice and people from all walks of life and different metaphysical views are all seeing part of that picture and seeing where we're going and trying to figure out, okay, what do we do here? We've all been on this train going 120 miles an hour. We see it's about to go off a ravine. We're all getting off on this

last train station and we're all very different and trying to figure out how to work together. That's the task that I think we have before us, but it's something that inspires me. Gender surgery and boys competing against girls and males going in to women's prisons, that was the sort of triggering point. That's the station where a lot of people got off. Well, how did we get to that point? How did we get to a point where denying basic biology and the biology and the binary of male and female, that didn't drop out of the sky from Alpha Centauri. That's the result of a set of historical ideas and practices that have been happening for a few generations. And so we're going to have to have a conversation at some point about the rest of the train ride and how to get back in the other direction.

But at the moment, I say let's fight and let's enjoy a couple of victories together and stopping this attempt by ideologues to go after our children's bodies and minds. And when we see that victory can be had there, I think we'll be in a much better position to have a longer conversation about other issues on which we disagree later. Well, Jay Richards, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. So great to be with you. Thank you all for joining Jay Richards and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.