Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why Friends Don't Let Friends Read Glennon Doyle

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

NYT Bestseller https://untamedbook.com/ (Untamed) restyles the philosophy of an old, dead white dead in the chic new fashions of social justice and feminism. Like Jean Jaques Rousseau, Glennon Doyle preaches and lives out the gospel of self-expression as the way to happiness. She teaches her readers how to be Cheetahs: wild and set free from the cages of society. But does her advice lead to a life well lived? Did this life philosophy work out for Rousseau? Does it align with Jesus' path to the good life? Listen to https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Pastors Keith Simon) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick Miller) as they assess Doyle's advice and give their own. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/the-gospel-of-wellness-self-care-or-selfish-2-corinthians-4-16/ (The Gospel of Wellness: Self-Care or Selfish?) Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use https://twitter.com/hashtag/AskTMBT (#asktmbt) to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. In Ephesians, Paul describes Christians before they started walking with Jesus. And he says that you were once walking in the course of this world. I kind of imagine a track, a journey that you're going on. And Paul understood that every age has its own spirit, its own way of thinking about the world. If we want to walk with Jesus, we need to know what the world.

the course of the world is, what the spirit of the age is. Yeah, and every age can have a different spirit. So what would you say the spirit of our ages, Patrick? If I had to summarize it in a single phrase, it would be self-expressive individualism. So there's a good mouthful. I'm sure that's what everybody wanted. Yeah, so that brings us to the topic of today's conversation. We're going to talk about Untamed by Glennon Doyle. And I said to a friend the other day, if you want to know the spirit of our age today, read this book because I think Glennon Doyle does an excellent job of capturing and articulating in a well-written book what the spirit of our age is, this expressive, individualistic culture that we live in. So maybe rather than defining what I mean by self-expressive

individualism, let me share some statistics done by Barna recently. Barna says that 84% of Americans believe that their highest goal in life is to enjoy myself. Yeah, there's the spirit of the age, right? that I do what's best for me, and that is appreciated and celebrated by the culture. 86% of people believe that the way to do this is by doing whatever you desire most. So if I want to be happy all the time, how do I get there? Oh, I just do whatever I desire, whatever I want. And 91% of Americans say that we should look inside of ourselves to define a good life and what life is really about and how to make ourselves happy.

And these numbers are just as high inside the church. Christians drink the spirit of the age. We live in this culture, and in ways that we don't even quite realize, we imbibed this spirit. We live this spirit out. Another great distillation of the spirit of the age was what Stephen Colbert said in a commencement speech. Commencement speeches are the worst, aren't they? I love commencement speeches, only because you get these kinds of things that happen, where people actually, I don't even think Stephen Colbert believes this. I think he just wanted to say something that everybody would clap at in love. But this is what he said. He said, find the courage to decide for yourself what's right and what's wrong. That is so stupid. We're going

to define what's right and wrong. Why does that take courage, by the way? Yeah. Courage is kind of going against what would be the easiest path, I guess. But go ahead and finish it. It keeps going. He says, make the world. So he's telling this to college grads, make the world according to your standards. Yeah, no matter what others may think. So this is the spirit of the age. And again, like I said earlier, I think Glennon Doyle paints a beautiful picture of it. Now, I say beautiful in that it is a really well-written book. It was the most listened to audio book in 2020 on Audible. It's been on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year.

She has over a million followers. I mean, she is the hit of today. Brunee Brown says, when you listen to Glenn and Doyle, it's like you're going to church. I had a friend who pastor somewhere else, and he was preaching, and he mentioned Glenn and Doyle. He told me that when he said her name, he noticed a lot of people in the congregation all started stirring, nudging each other, giving themselves these happy, excited looks. Oh, he's going to say something great about Glennon, and then he drops the bomb, which is, I don't agree with anything that she has to say.

But it highlights the point. This book is having a massive influence on our society right now. Now, she writes memoirs. So she tells her own personal story, but it's not just about telling her personal story. They're didactic. They're meant to teach you a lesson that you can take into your own life. live out so that you can live your best life today. Yeah, I love memoirs. I love reading them, but they always have a point they're trying to make. They're not just a story of what happened, but of how the world should be. And that's definitely true in Doyle's book. So we've titled this episode, Why Friends Don't Let Friends Read Glenn and Doyle. In fact, I said... Wait, you let me read Glenn and Doyle. I said, well, that says something about us. I told somebody

the other day that if you see somebody that you care and know about reading Glenn and Doyle, you should intervene. And that's harsh. I don't mean it to be a jerk. I just mean it that it is so persuasive. And yet I think at the same time, it can do a lot of damage to a person. Yeah, we're not trying to be mean. In fact, I feel really weird saying what we just said, because I love books. And I find it very difficult to find books that I disagree with almost everything inside of them. I can usually find something good, something that I really like. This book has somehow proven to be the one exception to that rule. This is not the way I'm wider to read a book and say, oh, I don't like it. And here's all the reasons why. I tend to go on the other side and say, hey,

some good, useful things that we can take out of it. And there are a few, I'm sure, good and useful things out of this book. But overall, because it is a distillation of the spirit of the age, it is absolutely intoxicating. It's telling people what they want to believe and what everybody around them is believing. And the main message is this, that you are caged, that society cages you, and that you need to set yourself free. And not, just free to do anything, free to be true to yourself. Here's a great quote from Glennon Doyle that I think summarizes her heart in this book. She said, I had been deceived. The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me. I quit spending my life trying

to control myself and I began to trust myself. Self-love means that I have a relationship with myself built on trust and loyalty. I trust myself to have my own back so my allegiance is to the voice within. I'll abandon everybody else's expectations of me before I'll abandon myself. I'll disappoint everyone else before I disappoint myself. I'll forsake all others before I forsake myself, me and myself. We are till death due as part. She's taken the classic wedding vows that many of you probably said if you're married, and she's reapplied them.

She's married herself, and she's trusted herself, and she's given allegiance to herself, because doing that is the true path to happiness. Truthfulness and faithfulness to me is the way to a good life. Yeah, we're going to try to be very fair to Glenn and Doyle in this conversation today. And so we're going to read quotes of hers that I think you will enjoy hearing if you haven't read her book. And if you have read it, maybe these are some of the things that you have found yourself underlining. One of the things that she does is she redefines Christianity, redefines the Bible, redefines what sin is, who God is, and we'll be able to unpack that as we go throughout this conversation.

But here's one of the things that she does in the book that I think, like you said, gets to the point of her argument. And she redefines the garden and what happens with Adam and Eve. So you know the story. And essentially what we're supposed to do is trust God, not eat the fruit, but trust God with our life. And Glennon Doyle says this. She says, no, you should eat the fruit. trust yourself. Maybe Eve was never meant to be our warning. Maybe she was meant to be our model. Own your wanting. Eat the apple. So what really hold you back in life is when you listen to God

and withhold something from yourself you really want. Instead, the gospel of Glenn and Doyle says, no, own your wanting. Just be okay with it and eat the apple. Don't listen to God. Listen to your own desires. Well, maybe your own desire are God, according to Glenn and Doyle. And we'll continue to explore that. obviously we're just trying to set up who she is and what she's talking about it and what is self-expressive individualism but part of what interests me in glennon doyle is that i think she's offering something which is patently religious lee stein she's not a christian i don't think she's really religious by any such a great writer too she's great right read her novel self-care fabulous i read her stuff i think she's a really thoughtful person who's worth paying attention to

and i've seen her call herself faith curious so she has some interested in religion but she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about Glennon Doyle. And part of what motivated her was that she spent about three years as a feminist activist, and she burns out. And this is partly because, according to her, social media, was constantly keeping her enraged and outraged. And again, she burns out. And then after she burns out, she starts noticing that she's being marketed all of these wellness products and all of these messages from people like Glennon Doyle that promised to solve the rage and the outrage and the hurt that social media had caused. And she realizes that what Glennon Doyle is offering is really fundamentally religious.

I just want to read a quote from her. It's a bit of a long quote, but I think it's worth listening to and she's interesting. And this is Lee Stein in the New York Times. Yes, yeah. This is Lee Stein. She writes, many millennials. I'm a millennial. She's a millennial. I think that's the other reason why I like her, by the way. It's like I like reading smart millennials who are thoughtful. You millennials, you all hang out together. Love each other. Well, I read a lot of millennials who say things that are aren't worth listening to. So it goes both ways, I guess. She says, many millennials who have turned their backs on religious tradition, because it isn't sufficiently diverse or inclusive, have found an alternative scripture online. Our new belief system is a blend of left-wing political orthodoxy,

intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology, and dolly part of it. Come on, that's really good. It's so good. And it's so true. I mean, gosh, okay, let's keep going. And we've found a different kind of clergy, personal growth in. influencers. Women like Ms. Doyle, who offer nuns, and by the way, by none, she means people who don't assign themselves to a particular religious tradition. On the little checkboxes, they won't check Christian or Buddhist, they'll check none. Not a woman in a habit. Yes, not, who offered nuns permission, N-O-N-E-S. Okay, so women like Ms. Doyle who offer nuns like us permission, validation, and community on demand at a time when it's nearly impossible to share

communion in person. We don't even have to put our phones down. Left-wing secular millennials may follow politics devoutly, but the women we've chosen as our moral leaders aren't challenging us to ask the fundamental questions that leaders of faith have been wrestling with for thousands of years. Why are we here? Why do we suffer? What should we believe him beyond the limits of our own puny selfhood? The whole economy of Instagram is based on thinking about ourselves, posting about ourselves, working on ourselves. So what Lee Stein is doing is pushing back against this culture of individualistic self-expression. And she says, not us, but she says that Glennon Doyle is a perfect representative of it. So let's dive in. Let's try to understand Glennon Doyle, where did her

ideas come from, how do they play out in life, what does it look like, what does it tell us about our culture more broadly? And is this something we should base our life on? Can we trust these truths that she gives us to lead us to the good life. Yeah, and like he said, we're not trying to do a straw man. So we've organized this entire episode around Glenn and Doyle's own book. And I would hope that if she'd listen to it, she'd say, well, I disagree with those two guys, but gosh, they got me right. Let's hop in.

The first lesson that Glenn and Doyle wants to teach us is that society is a cage. She opens up the book with this story of her and her daughter at the zoo, and they're watching this show with a cheetah. And there's a truck. it's got a little pink bunny tied to the back of it. And what happens is they release the cheetah, and the cheetah runs, and it tries to catch this truck with the pink bunny. When it catches the pink bunny, it gets a little steak,

and then they let it off into its enclosure. Now, when the cheetah gets into the enclosure, her daughter notices that its entire demeanor changes. It goes from being this circus act to all of a sudden its shoulders are raising. Its head is getting higher. It becomes noble, and her daughter points it out. And Glennon Doyle has this amazing realization, they've caged a cheetah.

The cheetah could rip every person apart who's in there, but they've caged it, they've tamed it. And when it's let out into its enclosure, just a little bit, it's wild comes out. This new part of it is revealed. And this is a theme that comes throughout the book is that she tells people that they are a cheetah. Like, you know, you've got this inner wild animal inside of you,

but you're being constrained by the culture, by society, by rules, by religion, whatever it is. that what we really need to do is get back to our inner natural self, the real cheetah inside of you. Yeah, you need to let out your wild because right now you're being caged. What's caging you? Well, she has entire chapters exploring these, but it's all kinds of things. She talks about gender roles, for example, and she looks at soap bottles and points out that her son's soap bottle talks about being a warrior and ready for the fight, and that her daughter's soap bottles talk about being tender and soft and touchable. Throughout this book, it's pretty clear that Glennon Doyle resents how men and women are treated in society.

She thinks that women are given this responsibility to please men or given a responsibility to look a certain way. She calls it a golden look. And she talks about getting Botox in order to try to look a certain way, injecting poisons into her body to try to get a certain kind of appearance. And there's a deep resentment about some of the cultural standards that she thinks that women specifically are forced to live up to. Yeah, she also shares the story of a mom coming into the room and asking, is anyone hungry? And all the boys raise their hand and say, yeah, we're hungry. And the girls all kind of look at each other. Can we say that we're hungry? Can we admit that we, again, have this want, this hunger on the inside?

And of course, the answer is no. It needs to be repressed and suppressed. Yeah, later in the book, she says that girls aren't allowed to say they're hungry and boys aren't allowed to say they have feelings. Now, I don't know. I mean, obviously there's a little bit of truth in that, but I'm not sure that's as widespread as maybe she thinks. Just to be clear, what we're saying, society does treat men and women differently. And I don't think it's particularly good that women are encouraged to have to look a particular way or that they couldn't admit when they're hungry. We're actually in agreement with Glenn and Doyle on that. That's not an ideal.

That's not a good thing. But we're just trying to list, how are people caged? The other thing that cages you inside of the book are your responsibilities, or to put it more honestly, your relationships. She describes in depth how her marriage, how her parenting, how her relationship with her parents, how her relationship with friends, how these are all things that cage her in. Why? Because these people have expectations on her. They expect her to do something. So this fundamentally means that you have to look at all your relationships and ask, are these relationships that you've chosen? Are these relationships that you want? Are these relationships that you want? Because if the answer to that question is no, then that's a relationship that

cages you. So Glenn and Doyle tells the story about a friend of hers who doesn't want to get married but ends up getting married. And there's so much here. We'll talk some of it about later, but let's just get the quote out there. She said, now this is referring to her friend again, she said, I do while her inside said, I don't. So there you learned something about Glenn and Doyle is that your insides are what really tells you the truth, not what you might do the outside. And then she spent the next decade trying not to know what she knew, that she had betrayed herself and that her life would not really begin until she stopped betraying herself. The only way not to know was to get wasted and stay that way. So she started drinking heavily

during her honeymoon. The drunker she became the more distance she felt from the dragon and cider. After a while, the booze and the drugs became a problem, which was convenient because she didn't have to deal with the real problem anymore. So here you see that this, this is a this woman enters into a marriage, she doesn't feel like that it's something that she wants on the inside. And instead of trying to find joy in a relationship, find joy in serving another person, she instead turns things to numb her pain. So Glennon Doyle is trying to say, look, this is what marriage does. Marriage makes you unhappy because commitment and living for other people, that makes you unhappy. You've got to stay true to yourself.

Or at least marriages that you don't personally choose with your whole entire heart and being, which I hate to say it might be all marriages at some point, at least so far as I've seen people and known people. Yeah, that's fair to say. It's not that Glennon Doyle is against marriage. It's that Glennon Doyle is against anything that caused you to compromise what you, the inner you, really wants. And obviously, in the story of her friend, she says the real problem, again, is that, she didn't follow herself. She said, I do when she meant to say, I don't. And the net result of that was addiction in her life, drunkenness. And Glenn Doyle talks a lot about addiction, but this tells you how she thinks about addiction. Why do you have addiction in your life? Why are you addicted to alcohol,

to drugs, to pornography, to sex, to whatever it is. I think her answer to the question is you haven't been true to yourself. And so rather than dealing with the truth and changing that thing in your life that you weren't true about, you turn to the drugs, you turn to the alcohol. to numb that pain. And then that becomes another cage that you have to live inside. One of the things I really appreciated about the book is that she's really honest. Glennon, who is really honest about her own personal struggles with bulimia and alcohol addiction and how she overcame that when she got pregnant for the second time with her oldest child Chase. You have to really give props to somebody who is willing to put it all out there like she is.

I agree. When she talks about parenting, she's highly critical of parents who self-sacrifice. She says this. She says, when we call mom, Martyrdom Love. She's talking about parenting, by the way. When we call martyrdom love, we teach our children that when love begins, life ends. This is why Young suggested, there's no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent. And Young there is Carl Young, the psychologist. Now, you know, having four kids of my own, I'm a bit puzzled because a parent is called to sacrifice. A parent is called to lay aside his or her needs and focus instead on what the child needs. Now, I think that is what Jesus calls love as well and what Paul calls us to when he says to put

others' interests above our own. We can get more into that later, but for now, understand that what we're talking about is how Glennon Doyle sees life caging us. So it is marriage, living up to other people's expectations, addiction, parenting. Essentially, what cages you? It is anything that you did not choose for yourself. Society will cage you. Your relationships will cage you. This is why she writes this quote. She says, I looked hard at my faith, my friendships, my work, my sexuality, my entire life, and asked, here's her fundamental question, how much of this was my idea? Do I truly want any of this? Or is this what I was conditioned? to want. Which of my beliefs are my own creation and which were just programmed into me? How much of who I've become is inherent and how much was just inherited. How much of the way I look and speak and

behave is just how other people have trained me to look and speak and behave. How many of the things I've spent my life chasing are just dirty pink bunnies. Who was I before I became who the world told me to be? Over time, I walked away from my cages. I slowly built a new marriage, a new faith, a new worldview, a new purpose, a new family, a new identity by design instead of default. From my imagination, instead of indoctrination, from my wild, instead of from my training. She's a cheetah. She's a cheetah. That's all you age.

She's a cheater, right? She's not going to chase those dirty pink bunnies anymore. She's not going to be caged. She's going to do what she wants to do. Now, why we know this is the spirit of the age is because this kind of argument needs no defense. we're going to show. This is a bold claim, and there's lots of other ways to think about the world, but she can make this claim, and I'm guessing a lot of people hear this, and you think, okay, I think something's wrong here, but I actually really like it, and I'm kind of into it,

and that's exactly right. This is the spirit of the age. Ironically, dare I say, this is how we've been trained to think. Yeah, that's really good, Patrick, so that we're all trained to think a certain way, and Glenn and Doyle is trained to think about herself first and her own self-expression individualistic by the age that she lives in. And so it's not as if she's coming up with this all on her own. She's borrowing this from the spirit of the age. And there's a reason this book is on the New York Times bestseller list. I think number one for a number of weeks, maybe at number one the entire year. And it's because it resonates with something inside of each one of us. There's something about this that seems appealing and attractive to us at first blush.

Yeah, I can sit here on this podcast and say why I see problems with this. I would have to admit the truth, though. There's part of me that loves this. Absolutely. That reads that and thinks, gosh, maybe I'm saying the wrong thing here. Now, like Keith was saying, this is part of the spirit of the age, but all ideas have genealogies. They come from somewhere. And the philosophy that Glennon Doyle is now using to guide her life and is suggesting that you do the same, it comes from a place. And I would argue, while you could probably go many places. The place to start is someone you might remember from school years and years ago. His name is Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Oh, boys and girls. Private School of Patrick is getting ready to come out. We just went from Glennon Doyle to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. To Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I mean, because everybody's out there wondering, I wonder what French philosopher living in the 18th century most affected the New York Times bestselling office. Now, here's the deal. I doubt that Glennon Doyle has ever read John J.G Rousseau.

That's not what I'm trying to see. say right now. Most people listening to your voice have not. Most people listening to this have not read Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, in terms of practical impact, there is arguably no philosopher who's had a greater impact on today than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He wrote a memoir called The Confessions. And just like Glennon Doyle, he used his personal story to teach a point. So I just want to read a quote from him, and it sounds like I'm reading Glennon Doyle. Now, this guy, by the way, lived in the 1700s. So, you know, his language might be a little bit difficult for us to understand, but let's roll with it. I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator.

Well, sorry, Jean-Jacques, you didn't know Glennon Doyle was coming, but let's keep going. I want to show my fellow men a man on all the truth of nature, and this man is to be myself. The particular object of my confessions, and again, it's interesting, Glennon Doyle's been critiqued for being a confessional list, that it's a little bit like it's suffering porn. You know, she's laying at her life and her hurt and her pain. Again, Jean-Jacques Rousseau did something very similar. She puts all her insides, all her problems. She takes great relish in telling every detail, every moment of angst for the whole world to see.

And there's something about it that is engrossing. But on the other hand, you just kind of like, is this TMI? You know, do I need to know all this? And you have to wonder, is there a sense in which she over-dramatizes things to make it entertaining for the crowd who reads the book? I don't know. That's a harsh accusation, and I don't know. I'm just wondering. A cynical, Keith, asking his questions. I probably would be tempted to do it, so maybe I'm just projecting my own issues onto her. Well, it's interesting because Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the first, maybe the first person to share his sexual life in intimate detail back in the 1700s.

But let's keep going. The particular object of my confessions is to make known my inner self, exactly as it was in every circumstance of my life. It is the history of my soul that I promised, and to relate it faithfully, I require no memorandum. All I need do, as I have done up till now, is to look inside myself. Wow. It's eerie. All joking aside about the private school, Patrick Moment, I will say that the comparisons

with Rousseau, as we go on here and keep discussing this, are shocking. And I don't know if Glennon Doyle understands that she's full. following and tradition here, that she's been programmed to think a certain way, and that by trying to push away or push against or rebuff all the cages, she has placed herself in a cage, right? She's just caged herself in a different cage. She's pushed away from society's cages in one way, but not in another way. She's following right along with the Pied Piper, listening to the music and going wherever he wants to go. And the Pied Piper, here is Rousseau and his thoughts. So, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the early stories he tells, and this is going to sound funny, is about stealing asparagus.

it's a big turning point in his life. So he has a friend and the friend pressures him to go and steal some asparagus for the friend. Now here's what you need to know. Rousseau didn't do this out of greed. He didn't do it because he needed the asparagus or his friend needed the asparagus. He just did it because the friend pressured him. And as he reflected on this event in his life, he realized that this was true of more than just asparagus, that his inner self didn't want to steal the asparagus. His inner self wanted to do the right thing. But society, the friends of the world, they make you do the wrong thing. In other words, society puts you into a cage. Check out this quote from Rousseau. He says, the original impulse of nature is right. So on the inside, your natural self is right,

but the effect of a depraved culture is that we lose contact with it. What you want to do is right, but society wants to put you in cages. He goes on to describe how society puts on what he calls a vile and deceiving uniformity onto everyone. So again, remember Glenn and Doyle's cages? She looks at society, He says, look at how society makes men and women and people in their marriages, how it forces them all into these boxes that cage them in. Rousseau said the exact same thing. He says, it's constantly forcing one to follow customs, never one's own genius. One no longer dares to appear what one is and is under this perpetual constraint. So when Rousseau steals this asparagus that he really had no need to do, instead of looking within himself and saying, hey, there's a problem.

Why did I do that? What's going on inside of me? He instead blames the society and the structures that he lives in. He thinks the inner individual is pure, and it's the things that society does that corrupt the person. So the cure is, what's the cure? Well, to get back to the authentic, true self. Yeah, his goal is to become totally unencumbered. If your social institutions are corrupting that inner authentic self, you have to cast off the social institutions.

You have to get outside of the cage, and you have to be true. Now, he had a weird word for the cage. Are you really going to say this? I'm going to say it. You told me out to do it, but I'm going to do it. All right. He called it Amor propera, which in English is self-reliance, but there really is no good English translation for this French phrase. And so I'm just going to use Amor propera.

But basically, Amor proper. You're just laughing over there. Are we really doing this? We are. If it means self-reliance, why would you just say self-reliance? When you say that, you start thinking. it means something different. I'm just going to call it the cage, okay? We'll stick with the cage. All right. That makes more sense. You guys owe me for that. You can pay me later. The cage is

society's standards. This is what Glennon Doyle calls being golden. Being golden is perfectly following all of society's standards. And just like Glennon Doyle, Rousseau says, this is what, that cage is what makes you miserable. The cage is what, and this is what he says it makes you want to do. It makes you want to be the one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful, the most eloquent, that's what the cage is, which is exactly what Glennon Doyle says the cages. It's trying to be the best, according to the world or the society's rules. And what I find really interesting is that Rousseau goes on and he says that cage,

it eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. Let's take a second here and just pause, hit the breaks for just a second, and say, why are we talking about Roussel? We started out talking about a New York Times best-selling author, Glennon Doyle, and her wildly popular book, Untamed. How do we get, besides private school Patrick, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau? And I think this is really, really interesting. Remember, first of all we said, Glennon Doyle says that she pushes against the cage.

But what we're finding is all she's done is walked into another cage. And that cage is the thinking of an old white man. Now, here's why this is so interesting is because inside of Glennon Doyle's book, What she does is she couches all of her arguments kind of in this talk about feminism, social justice, anti-racism. But when you get back to the root, or as Patrick said earlier, the genealogical root of her idea, what you find is that she's just repackaging the philosophy of an old white dude with modern stories and contemporary language. There's nothing new or revolutionary at all about Glennon Doyle. There's nothing fundamentally feminine.

or anti-racist or social justice-oriented about Rousseau's thoughts. In fact, if you know anything about Rousseau's life, you would probably say, yeah, that's the case because he did not treat women or people of other races exceptionally well. The other reason why we want to talk about this is because this is nothing new, right? If you're going to gamble your life on Glennon Doyle's advice, you ought to ask, what are the consequences of living this way? So you could look at her life, and we'll do that later and say, hey, do I actually want to become this kind of person? We could also look at the past and say, hey, Jean-Jacques Rousseau did this, how did his life turn out? In fact, it wasn't just Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was the entirety of French culture. In the 1790s, during the French

Revolution, Rousseau's work was influential. And what's fascinating is that there's an author named Alexis de Tocqueville, he was another French guy, and he realized that democracy failed in France, but it succeeded in America. And he was asking the question, why did it fail in France? And the reason he said it failed was because French democracy was rooted in this kind of self-expressionistic individualism. People didn't work together, whereas American democracy was rooted in a different way of thinking about people. The net result, by the way, of the French Revolution, was the reign of terror, where 40,000 people were killed. I'm not saying Jean-Jacques Rousseau is to blame for that, but I do think his philosophy had a major part to play, because the people who were killed were those

who were identified as putting a cage on others. The French Revolution, if I understand right, Patrick, and you can help me here, was an anti-religious one, anti-clerical one. It was a revolution against the church because the church was seen as one of the primary people who put, or institutions that put a cage onto people. So it wasn't only against the church, but it was also anti-monarchal and anti-aristocracy, which was different than America, which was also anti-monarchal, but there weren't aristocrats in America. And the American Revolution, while not Christian by any stretch, wasn't anti-Christian by any

stretch either. It was much more friendly to faith in general. So the culture of individualistic self-expression is what leads to the French Revolution, and it is one of the darkest times in modern history. They did virtually anything to allow individuals to be able to express themselves, however they please, free of the strictures, not just of the church, but of society and its expectations as well. Which is why they pushed back against aristocracy and the monarch, in the church and anybody who tried to constrain them. Now, there was another philosopher at the time, and he had a different approach. His name's Edmund Burke.

And his approach was this, that we are all social animals, human beings are social animals, and that we live in little platoon. So think about your PTA as a platoon, and the Kiwanis Club is a platoon, and your rugby team as a platoon, you know, these little social networks where people work together and cooperate to help one another. and they sacrifice individually for the common good. And Edmund Burke's philosophy is what manifested itself in our country, at least at that point, that there was a desire to work together in small groups for the collective good, but it meant denying yourself, as opposed to Rousseau and the French Revolution, which was all about expressing yourself. Exactly.

So let me reframe this maybe a more clear way. Glennon Doyle says that we are cheetahs. what she doesn't seem to acknowledge is that cheetahs are violent, solitary carnivores. Wow. That's what they are. So you can be a cheetah, but it's not crazy that 40,000 people get killed during the reign of terror. Because cheetahs live on their own. They do their own thing.

They live on their own. They do their own thing. And the question is, is that animal, is that metaphor even the proper metaphor? Jonathan Haidt, who's done a lot of research in evolutionary psychology, makes a similar point. He says that humans are 90% chimp and 10% B. Now, let me try to unpack what that means. Chimps live in tribes. They live in smoggers of people.

So they're already different than cheetahs, right? They're closer to Edmund Burke. You've got little platoons of chimps. But there's something that chimps won't do. There was a guy who spent his entire life studying chimpanzees. And when someone said, well, you tell me the difference between chimpanzees and humans, his answer was this. You'll never see two chimps carry a log.

I love that. So what's the point there? They never cooperate. Yeah. Chimpanzees live in community. but they only do things by themselves. Yeah, they'll do things within the community. They struggle to cooperate towards a singular goal, right?

So the idea of sacrificing my personal interest for the collective good is incredibly difficult. Now, compare that to a different animal, or in this case, insect, a bee. An entire beehive is designed to achieve a singular goal, which is keep the queen alive and allow her to continue to have more baby bees. I've heard they call larva, maybe? I don't know. The point here is, though, when Jonathan Haidt says that we're 90% chimp, He's saying, we have a lot in common with chimpanzees.

We live in our little tribes, but we're also like bees. We are the only mammal that sacrifices its own interest for the collective good. We're the only mammal who knows how to cooperate. We aren't cheetahs. I wonder where we got the instinct to cooperate. I wonder where we got the instinct to lay aside what we might want to do at any given moment to work together. And if you think about it, that's what our society depends on, right? Like, think of a school teacher.

A school teacher may not feel like getting up and going to work that day, but he or she does because they have a responsibility to teach our children. They may not feel like they want to take extra time with your student or another student in class who needs to grow and work in math or some other skill, but they do that. They lay aside their responsibility. They lay aside their own personal desires to maybe go take a break and instead help your kid. That's what a mature adult does. A mature adult has to say no to their own personal whims and desires for a greater good.

And those constraints aren't just negative, right? If I want to learn how to play the piano like an expert, I have to spend time practicing my scales. Now, I played piano in the past. Practicing your scales is not much fun. It's probably why I actually quit playing. I thought of you as a violin guy. Okay, that's nice of you. In your private school uniform.

Yeah, that's good. I did not go to a private school, so let's just keep that one straight. reading herself. But the point is you have to practice your scales in order to learn how to play the piano well. To be free to play a masterpiece by Debussy or Bach or whoever it is that you want to play, you have to practice your scales. You have to constrain yourself for a time. And this is actually how society works. When we constrain ourselves for the greater good, something more beautiful, something more freeing comes about. When the teacher goes to work, when the teacher doesn't want to work, over time, that practice makes them into a deeper, more loving person than they would have been

otherwise. Yeah, so let's ask Anand Doyle's question, is society a cage? And I think the answer is, yeah, it for sure can be a cage. And the Bible has a way of talking about that cage society puts it in. It's in the verse that you mentioned when we opened up today. It is the course of this world or the values of this world. So the Bible doesn't ask us, are you being true to yourself? But it asks, are we being true to God? Are

we being true to the person that God created us to be. And that is a person who swears their allegiance to him and submits to his authority in our life. What you just said there was an incredibly important distinction. The Bible agrees. Society can cage us. There are things about society that can cage us. But the way you figure out what's caging you isn't by asking the question, am I being true to myself. That will give you no ruby. It will give you no idea where you're being caged. The only way you'll figure out how society is caging you is asking this question, am I being true to God? And if the answer to that question is no, not being true to God, instead I'm living for my material wealth, or instead I'm living for my sexual desires, or whatever it is, that's where society

is caging you, and you do need to get out of that cage. We'll just go all the way back to the garden, which we mentioned a little bit ago. There are Adam and Eve. Now, were they being caged when God told them to not eat the forbidden fruit? Glendon Doyle would say yes. That was caging them. Well, they ate it, and we have now a world full of sin. So God would say you weren't in a cage when you were following me and listening to my voice. But when you listen to the voice of Satan or the voice of this world or the voice that comes inside your own head and take your life into your own hands and do what you want to do, you have now just entered a cage, a cage of sin that never leads to the life you hope it will. Absolutely. I think adding to that, it's

we're saying that the Bible sees our shared responsibilities to one another, the mutuality that we all have in life, whether it's a husband and a wife, or parents and children, or the body of the church, it sees this as a fundamentally good thing. When Paul describes the church, he uses the metaphor of a body. He doesn't say, hey, each one of you out there, you're all solitary cheetahs. He says, you're all parts of a body, and a body is an integrated whole. A finger isn't a foot and a nose isn't a mouth. They're all different parts with different responsibilities. And there's going to be, ways that they're all going to have to sacrifice for the sake of each other so that they can achieve a common goal. But Paul sees this as being a fundamentally good thing. You're the best

kind of hand when you actually have a brain to guide you. You're the best kind of nose when you've got a mouth to eat food with. That's how life works best. So if life works best when we work with other people and aim at a common goal and say no to ourselves to reach that goal, then there is a real cost when you see dying to yourself as a cage. It will cost you happiness. Adam and Eve, when they listened to themselves and said it God, they became a lot less happy. Their relationship with God and each other, the world itself was all ruptured in that moment. They started to live for themselves. Not only does it cost you happiness, but it costs you deep relationships with other people. Because love, Jesus says, is laying down your life for your friends.

Love isn't asserting your rights and asserting yourself. It's giving up of yourself. It's more blessed to give than to receive. That doesn't just refer to finances. It refers to every area of our life. The sacrificial, humble, servant life, Jesus says, well, that's the one that's honored. It's the least who become the greatest. He was a servant.

He modeled servanthood for us. If Glennon Doyle says martyrdom kills you, Jesus says the opposite. Martyrdom's what brings you to life. The second lesson that Glenn and Doyle wants us to take away from her book is that we have to free ourselves from the cage. We just explored what is the cage and how that overlapped with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thinking, and how actually maybe these things aren't cages at all. But of course, if you're in a cage, Glenn and Doyle says you have to be freed. And the way you're going to free yourself is to unleash.

yourself. So let's let Glenn and Doyle speak for herself. Here she's talking about the kind of life she lived before she unleashed herself. She said, I began building the kind of life a woman is supposed to build. So here are the cages. I became a good wife, mother, daughter, Christian, citizen, writer, woman. But while I made school lunches, wrote memoirs, rushed through airports, made small talk with neighbors, carried on with my outer life, I felt an electric restlessness buzzing inside of me. I was afraid of what was inside of me. It felt powerful enough to destroy every bit of the lovely life I'd built, like how I never felt safe on a balcony because what if I jump? So you hear that she just hates her life because she is living up to what she sees as other people's expectations.

So she continues, I finally unlocked and unleashed her. I set free my beautiful, rowdy, true wild self. I was right about her power. It was too big for the life I was living, so I systematically dismantled every piece of it. Then I built a life of my own. I did it by resurrecting the very parts of myself. I was trained to mistrust, hide, and abandon in order to keep others comfortable. My emotions, my intuition, my imagination, my courage.

So you hear there that she is not going to live by the constraints other people put on her, but she is going to live the life that she wants to live. She is going to live a life that is built around her desires, her intuition, her imagination, her courage. Does that sound wise to you? I think that's a great question. And obviously, she's arguing that it's incredibly wise. She asks her readers, will we be brave enough to finally unlock ourselves? Will we be brave enough to set ourselves free?

Will we finally step out of our cages and say to ourselves to our people into the world, Here I am? what's it look like to free yourself according to Glenn and Doyle? Well, she begins by saying you have to follow your heart. You have to embrace your feelings and embrace what you experience on the inside. Now, she has this chapter about following her feelings where she talks a lot about pain and says that pain is magic. Pain is how you actually change. And the interesting thing for me, I don't know if you experienced this was when I first read the chapter, I thought, you know what, this is actually pretty good. The Bible says some really similar things about suffering leading to endurance and endurance leading to character and character producing hope. That pain can be a good thing in her life. But I decided to reread the chapter because I guess I thought, gosh, if I can't find anything here, I must have misunderstood it. And when I reread it, I realized I'd miss something critical. When she talks about pain, she has a taxonomy of pain. She has two different categories of pain. Pain, what she calls pain, is a good thing. But then there's a second thing, which is called suffering. And suffering is a bad thing. So according to Glenn and Doyle,

suffering is when you sacrifice your own self-interest and what you want for others. So you suffer whenever you sacrifice yourself. Pain is what happens when you're true to yourself and have to live with the consequences. Yeah, so this is how it applies to her life. When she fought for her marriage, which, by the way, that's the whole story of love warrior. I got into it so much. That's her first book. Well, yes. It predates untamed. I get a little confused about what order it all came in. But that's what that book is about is how her marriage fell apart and how she worked toward it. And it ends with her trying to rebuild this marriage, and it kind of starting to go fairly well. Now, in hindsight, and untamed, she calls that suffering. She was fighting for her marriage for the sake of her kids,

and that was wrong because she wasn't being true to herself. Pain is when she got the divorce. Pain is when she got the divorce because it hurt, but she's a lot happier now, and she's convinced that probably her kids will be happier too. But the main thing is that she's, is happier. So pain is what you get when you do what you really want, and there are some consequences to that. And sure, it can cause people a little bit of pain, but pain is good for people, and it is definitely not worth denying myself to keep people out of pain. What's fascinating is that her little categories of pain and suffering are the exact inverse of the Bibles. The Bible calls you to experience personal pain for the sake of denying yourself, right? So Jesus said this, if anyone

would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross. A cross was an instrument of torture and pain. He says, deny yourself and take up your cross and follow me. So Jesus said, yes, you're going to feel pain. But unlike Lenedoia says, you should feel it precisely because you're denying yourself, not because you're gratifying yourself. And then on the flip side, the Bible talks a lot about suffering, the suffering that we experience as a result of denying ourselves. And the Apostle Paul says that this light and momentary affliction prepares for us an eternal weight of glory that's beyond all comparison. So he says, yes, that's suffering. It's not tragic.

It's a good thing in the end because God will use it to prepare for us a glory which outstrips whatever pain we're experiencing right now. What I find really sad about this entire chapter is that she frames all the normal, beautiful, meaningful suffering in life. The suffering that every parent goes through when they deny themselves to put their child's interest first. every husband and wife goes through to put their spouse's interest first every friend goes through to put their friend's interest first she denies it all she calls it all tragic and then she pities herself that she did it in the past when i think about my life i've never been happiest when i've lived for myself when i put my needs first there's something about that's incredibly attractive on the front end but i've never been happiest when I put myself first. The times of my life where I've experienced the most real joy

come whenever I have done what Jesus called us to do, deny myself, and follow him. There's a joy that comes in serving others that you can never find in serving yourself. And so I agree that it is sad because appealing to the spirit of the age and appealing to that own inner desire we all have to do what we want to do and to be king or queen of her own life. She takes us away from the good life. Jesus, who told us to deny ourselves, also told us that when we follow him, we'll have the abundant life, the best life. So I think that she doesn't just divert some philosophical categories. She literally leads people away from the deep joy of following Jesus. The second way that she says you can unlock the cage that you're stuck in is what she calls knowing.

In fact, she capitalizes the word knowing throughout the entire book, which will probably make sense here in just a second. Yeah, I was reading the book and you were listening to it on Audible and you're talking, I think you finished it just a day ahead of me and you were talking about the knowing. I go, I know it. It's crazy that she capitalizes it. And you're like, she does? Because you don't know that right when you're listening to the Audible book. but it is so obvious what she is going to try to do here. So to free yourself, you need to come into contact with yourself. You need to know what you really feel. You need to know your deepest, truest intuition. And she guides people in how to do this.

And interestingly, she does it or she begins doing it by using a Bible verse. And she quotes it. It's a verse that says, be still and know. Well, that's where she ends. It's not how the verse really in. Yeah. So she says what the verse tells you to do is that you need to be still and then you just need to know. You need to sink into yourself and know yourself. Now, of course, the real verse says,

be still and know that I am God. So there's something to know. It just has nothing to do with something inside of you. Well, it's the exact opposite of what she takes to mean, because when you be still and know that I am God, then you are knowing that you are not God and that what you need is to listen to him and obey him and submit to him and surrender to him. He is your life. But what she does is be still and know, and then she takes that knowing inside of herself and makes that God. It's almost like she says, be still and know that you are God. That is 100% what she says, and we'll explore. I mean, she absolutely conflates her internal self with God. That is the voice of God inside of me. So let me just, again, read from her book directly. She says, be still and no. I'd read that verse many times before,

but it struck me freshly this time. It didn't say, pull your friends and no. I agree with that, by the way. It doesn't say that. Or read books by experts and no. Agree again. It doesn't say that. Scour the internet and no. Again, agree with that. It suggested a different approach. Just stop. Now, she goes on to describe what happens whenever she stops. She describes sinking down into herself and feeling a nudge. She calls it a liquid gold that fills her veins and it nudges her to do whatever she needs to do next. This is what she writes. She says, down here, when I pose a question about my life, in words and abstract images, I sense a nudge. The nudge guides me towards the next thing. And then, when I silently acknowledge the nudge,

it fills me. The knowing feels like warm liquid gold, filling my veins, and solidifying just enough to make me steady, certain. And remember again, this knowing is capitalized. The knowing is God. She says, what I learned, even though I'm afraid to say it, is that God lives in this deepness inside me. When I recognize God's presence and guidance, God celebrates by flooding me with warm liquid gold. So what she says is that we should trust ourselves because we are God, that this knowing inside of her is God. Now, it's interesting that the knowing never conflicts with her desires. So it's amazing that the knowing always wants what she wants. The knowing. The knowing never pushes back. It never corrects. It never causes her to check herself or her desires or to lay

those aside for another person. It's shocking how much the knowing always agrees with Glennon. Yeah, it's really important to be clear here. She's not describing meditating in order to connect with something outside of herself, being God. She's talking about meditating to connect with herself, to know what she truly desires deep down. And she says that she does this throughout her day. Anytime she needs to make a decision, when she's in conversations, she sinks down into this knowing place to allow it to guide her. Later on, she makes this crystal clear. She says, your source is God. You are your own source. To be clear, she's saying, God is your source, and where's God? You are your own source. She never outright says, you are God. I don't quite know why she doesn't have the brazenness to do it,

because she says it all over the place. Well, she says it at the end. Wait until I get there. We get to the end, she does say. But she's making a point. Can you trust yourself? Yes. You can. In fact, you are the only person you can trust. Remember her vows to herself. I will never be faithless to myself because inside of me is the only truth that matters. So can we really trust ourselves? I mean, I said earlier that I always find that I am happiest when I am surrendered and submitting to Jesus and putting others' interests of my own. Well, now let me ask, can I trust myself? I'm wrong all the time. There's all kinds of things that I think I know and I think I'm right on, and it turns out I was wrong on. So the idea that I'm

going to trust my own instincts, I mean, that is laughable. Maybe you just haven't lived enough life if you think you can trust yourself, and that's what is smart and best for you. But let me tell you, I know that the worst thing I can do is listen to my own instincts. I have instincts to do all kinds of horrible things. But I also want to make this point. You've never read Glennon Doyle. That's okay, because Glennon Doyle expresses the spirit of the age. So whether you've ever read her or not, you are influenced by the same kind of thinking that she's influenced by. Yeah, Jeremiah 179 says, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? Proverbs 3.5 says, trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. The

Bible is crystal clear. You are not God. Looking inside yourself is actually incredibly foolish because part of you is sick. Now, this stands in stark opposition to what Glennon Doyle says. And you know who else stands in stark opposition to? Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Oh, Barre, Privacy's Gold Patrick. I wish I had my trumpet. But Rousseau said the exact same thing. He said that your natural state, and he says this is a good thing. Your natural state is self-love. Your natural state is to trust your own intuition and to allow your intuition to be your moral guide. Now, he calls this intuition conscience. He's writing a long time ago, so that would have been the word that he used. But I just got to read this quote from him. You know what he says about conscience? This is it. Conscience. Divine instinct, immortal and celestial voice,

certain guide of a being that is ignorant and limited, but intelligent and free. Did you catch it? He calls his conscience that inner voice God. He says it's the divine voice inside of you that takes an ignorant person and actually sets them free. He approached life in the exact same way that Glennon Doyle said, trusting his intuition, trusting his own taste, trusting his own heart to be the guide for what he should do in life. Yeah, I think Rousseau was quite an egoist, so much so that he thought that his own feelings represented God, that to disagree with him was to disagree with God. Or I think what Glennon Doyle would say is to disagree with her wanting. is to disagree with God and how dare you do that. But you've got to have a pretty big ego to

equate your desires, your thinking, your conscience, your way of doing life as equivalent to God. I think maybe what she would say is, my truth is true truth. And again, the defense is, well, I've got God's voice inside of me. And I find it really interesting to compare Rousseau to St. Augustine. So Augustine wrote a book called The Confessions, and Rousseau was obviously playing on Augustine's book when he wrote his. Just a little context is that Augustine wrote long before Rousseau. His lifespan from 354 to 430. So Rousseau is aware of Augustine and probably, I would say, is trying to pick up some of

Augustine's theme and take him a whole different direction. Yeah, he never explicitly references Augustine in his confessions, but he has stories that have overlap. So remember, Rousseau stole asparagus. Why? Because society corrupted his business. beautiful, true inner self. Augustine also has a story about a theft. Augustine stole some pairs when he was younger, and it's almost identical to Rousseau's story. He did it because he was socially pressured.

He didn't do it because he was greedy or because he somehow needed the pairs. But when Augustine reflects on his theft, he doesn't come to the conclusion that society has corrupted him. Instead, he comes to a radically different conclusion. He concludes that he is corrupt, that him stealing the paris. He says, why did I do this? Well, the real reason is because deep down, my heart is sick. Yeah, so I think Augustine has a more biblical way of thinking, seeing the human being as corrupted by sin, whereas Rousseau thought the human being in nature by itself, apart from society, was pure. And so the goal of Rousseau is to get back to the inner voice, back to what you really are outside of your cage. And that's where Glenn and Doyle has taken us. Not that you are

corrupted by sin, and therefore you need to abandon trusting yourself and instead trust God. But no, you are uncorrupted by sin. Your inner life is the most pure. In fact, your inner life is God. Trusting yourself is a huge gamble. It's not a gamble. No, I disagree. Trusting myself is not a gamble. I have proven over and over and over time that if I bet on myself, I'm an idiot. Yeah, the house always wins. That's the point, right? Augustine got it right. And trusting yourself will lead you to a dark place. When we say friends, don't let friends read Glenn and Doyle, this is what we're getting at. Keith and I have known people who are following her advice, and it's not leading them to a good place in their life. It's not leading their life to become

more rich, more beautiful, all the things that Glenn and Doyle promises it will do. Instead, it's leading them into a place of darkness. And so Glennon Doyle's third lesson in the book is how to live free. And this is the longest section in the book, but I find it interesting because in this section of the book, she actually shows how these things play out in her life. And as I read it, personally, I thought, gosh, I don't want a life like yours at all. So let's look at the third part of her book. And maybe a good place to start is she has a few places where she summarizes her life philosophy very, very well. And I'll lead off with the first one. She says, I left my husband and I'm building a life with Abby. This is Abby Wambach, the U.S. soccer player, that now Glenn and Doyle is married to.

Yes, so she says, I left my husband and I'm building my life with Abby because I'm a grown-ass woman who does what the F, of course she doesn't use that term, who does what the F I want. I mean this with deep respect and love and with desire that you too will do what the F you want with your own singular precious life. This is Glennon Doyle's advice for your life. Do what the F you want because you're a grown-up. And that sounds modern, right? It sounds like, Wow, she's tough. She's thinking for herself. She's not going to live under society's false structures anymore. She's going to do what she wants. She's a cheetah. Except not so much. All she's doing is following the philosophy, a dead old white man.

Because listen to what Jean-Jacques Rousseau said. My idea of happiness is never to have to do anything I don't wish to do. Wow. All she's done is repackage Rousseau and put it in, you know, know, drop a few curse words in to make it sound cool. Yeah. His idea of a good life is not doing anything that he doesn't want to do. Which is appealing to certain extent. If that was Jesus' idea of a good life, if Jesus knows anything about the good life.

Yeah. We know for a fact he did something that he did not want to do. And had he not done that thing dying on a cross, we're all up a creek. If Jesus knows the path to the good life and again and again, he sacrifices his own self-interest for the sake of others, his life is an absolute opposition to Glennon Doyle's philosophy. We can't spend too much time on it right now, but I think you just put it right, is that if Jesus knows the path to the good life, now you have to figure out, do you think Jesus knows the path of good life?

I do, but if he does, then it is a life of being a servant, a life of sacrifice, a life of submission to the Father, a life of loving other people. That is the good life, not just for Jesus, but for you and me, too, as his followers. Okay, so here's another one of Glennon Doyle's mantras. She says, brave. So if you want to be brave, brave means living from the inside out. Brave means in every uncertain moment turning inward, feeling for the knowing, and speaking it out loud.

So I think Glennon Doyle's point here is, again, if you want to live a good life, you just live out whatever you feel on the inside. And do you want to guess who she sounds like? Well, let me guess. Is it our friend, our dead old white man, Jean-Jacques, Jean-Ga-Rouz. So this is what he said. He said, how sweet it would be to live among us if the outward countenance were always the image of the heart's dispositions. You know what the best gift I can give my children is sometimes? That I am not letting out what's happening inside of my heart.

I mean, it is a tremendous gift to them. It's a tremendous gift to my wife. Now, I'm ashamed to admit, and I'm not proud of those feelings on the inside, but I'm quite sure of this. It would not be sweet to live around me if I was always letting out whatever I was feeling on the inside. Yeah, so let's play this out. if those are Glennon's mantras, you know, what she's about, and we've shown how they are echoes of Rousseau, how does that play out in her life? Let's start with friendships. And so Glennon Doyle lets it be known in this book that she has friends with Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love, Fame. And I'm sure she's...

Which is very much of the exact same message in her book and Eat, Pray, Love. Yeah, so it's no shock that they are buddies. But one of the things that Glenn and Doyle says is that she is hard to be friends with, that she's the kind of person. Glenn and Doyle is saying about herself, not Liz Gilbert. Right, right. She's saying about herself that she's hard to be friends with. She's the kind of person that will come to you in an emergency and then never talk to you forever after that. That she's just more of a loner, a cheetah.

Exactly. She is a cheetah. So she meets Liz Gilbert for the first time. And she admits, I would like to be friends with Liz Gilbert, but she says, I won't even try. And this is what she writes. She says, attempting to be her friend would be like intentionally writing a bad check. I'm not a good friend. I've never been capable of or willing to commit myself to the maintenance that the rules of friendship dictate. I cannot remember birthdays. I don't want to meet for coffee. I will not host the baby shower. I won't text back because it's an eternal game of ping pong. Okay, I actually agree with her on this one that it can be ping pongy. But anyways, it never ends. I inevitably disappoint my friends. So after enough of that, I decided I would stop trying. I don't want to live in constant debt. This is okay. me. I have a sister and children and a dog. One cannot have it all. Now, is that the kind of life

you want a life in which you don't really have friendships? And the reason why you don't have friendships is because you refuse to sacrifice your own self-interest. I'm not going to throw you a baby shower. I'm not going to remember your birthday. I'm not going to meet you for coffee. I mean, these statements are patently ugly. I don't know how she frames them in this way that makes them look so nice and kind. But when you read them, it just makes me sad. It just makes me sad. I mean, again, it's not a life I want to live. But she is friends with Elizabeth Gilbert. How'd she do it? Well, it's because, according to Lening Doyle,

Elizabeth Gilbert is willing to meet her where she lives. So here's how she puts it. Liz offered a new friendship memo that for us there would be no arbitrary rules, obligations, or expectations. We would not owe each other anything other than admiration, respect, love, and that was all done already. Well, there you have it. She's got a perfect. person to be friends with, someone who will ask nothing of her. And again, you won't be surprised at this point to know that that is reflected in Rousseau's life. He had no friends. He was

incapable of having friends. The people that he began to have friendships with all rejected him because he had become so self-absorbed that there was no real way to have any kind of relationship with him. He was the kind of person who bounced from benefactor to a factor, living off of other people. Now, one of the reasons that we keep mentioning Rousseau, well, there's lots of reasons, but one of them is because we don't have to wait to see how Glennon Doyle's life turns out. We can look at Rousseau and see how his life turned out and say this same philosophy and approach is active in both. The best measure of a philosophy of life is a life well lived. If we're so followed these exact same principles and it ended his life in a dark

place. And now we're watching, even as Glennon Doyle admits that the same thing's happening to her, is that what we want to do? Do you want to be a friend who demands everybody else to meet your demands perfectly? And what kind of friend has Jesus been to you? I mean, just think about it for a second. Has Jesus ever met your needs? Has Jesus ever sacrificed for you? And then he called, us to love other people, love our neighbor, even our enemy, with that same kind of love. So again, she's taking us in an opposite direction of Jesus and doing it all kind of in the name of something she would refer to as Christianity, although completely redefined and out of step with the Bible. Let's talk about parenting for a second. So Glennon Doyle has several children, and to be perfectly

honest, I think by all account she really does love her kids. So we're not trying to say, that she doesn't love her children. But some of the advice she gives, I think could lead someone else who maybe doesn't love their kids as much into a dark place. One of her principles is that she says that you hurt your kids more in the long term by not following your heart, even if following your heart hurts your kids in the short term. Okay. So again, the example she gives is her divorce, but I'll just read this quote. She says, is the decision to continue abandoning yourself? In other words, abandoning your own interests, your own wants, your own desires, the wants that you're supposed to own. Eat the apple, right? She says, it's a decision to continue abandoning yourself what your

children really need from you. Which woman ever gets to live? And when does the death sentence begin? At the wedding altar in the delivery room? And again, I think you get at what she's saying. She's saying, you can't even live a real life. Why? Because when you got married or when you had your kid, you set aside your personal interest. And that kills you. Because meeting the needs of another person. Putting another person's interest above your own is what kills you, right? That's why it's the wedding altar. That's why it's the delivery room, because now you're committing yourself to another person, and you can't just do what you want all the time. She says, when we call martyrdom love, we teach our children that love begins when life ends. We already read this quote, but I'll keep

going. This is why Jung, Carl Jung, the psychologist, suggested there is no greater burden on a child than the unlived life of a parent. you that I are both standing here speechless right now. It's a hard quote for me to respond to because I find it completely heartbreaking because I know that there will be children whose moms, whose dads read this passage and they abandon them, they leave them behind, that they don't fulfill their responsibility. All in the name of loving their kid. And they will think, I'm doing the thing that my child really needs. For example, she's talking about her marriage. She says, I'm staying in this marriage for my little girl, but would I want this marriage for my

little girl? She's again making the point, what my little girl needs to see. is not her mom and dad in a relationship with each other. What she needs the most is her mom in a relationship that she actually likes. And of course, we all hope that we can be in marriages or in parenting child relationships that we enjoy. But what is it that brings joy, I think, is the question. And again and again, Glennon Doyle comes back to this idea that joy is found in doing what you want without any constraints from society or other people. And that runs absolutely counter to what the Bible calls us to of finding our joy in serving Jesus and in serving other people. I am not my happiest when I am doing what I want, but when I submit my needs to my wife's needs.

And in a good marriage, a healthy marriage, that is mutual. And so what you find is mutual joy through self-sacrifice. That's the model, whether it's in your office or your family life. for your friendships, the mutuality of self-sacrifice is the path to joy and happiness. Can I give a silly example of this? My daughter loves to tell me stories. Now, she's young, so her stories don't have great plots. They tend to meander a little bit.

And so, as you can imagine, because I'm a selfish person, I often find myself not wanting to listen to her story. Oh, really? I want to get onto my phone. I want to tell her I'm doing something else, or I want to change the subject. and sometimes I do that. And I honestly regret when I do it. But here's the funny thing. When I sacrifice my own self-interest and I listen, I slowly find over time that I've begun to delight more and more in my daughter's little stories. The more I tell myself no, the more in the future I'm actually

able to tell myself, yes, and it is aligning with my interest because all of a sudden I've learned through self-sacrifice how to love this part of my daughter that perhaps by nature I wasn't prepared to love. So Glenn and Doyle is talking about this divorce that she's trying to communicate it to her kids. And one night she's sitting with one of her daughters and the little girl says, will I ever lose you, mommy? You know, like I'm afraid that I'm going to lose you and you're going to be out of my life. And Glenn and Doyle looks at her daughter and says, you will never lose me. But she doesn't feel right about that. So she goes, no, hang on a second. That's not true. You will lose me. You'll never lose you. So let's just say for a second that she's right that this little girl will lose

her, that at some point, Glennon Doyle is going to pass away and the little girl is going to be without her mom here. But that's not really what the little girl's asking, right? The little girl is asking, mom, is your love safe? Is your love secure? Are you going to be here for me? Are you going to be in my life like you have been? And instead of saying, yes, I'm going to be here for you, I'm never going to leave you. You can always count on me. This is a safe, secure relationship. She doesn't want to say that to this little girl because she doesn't want to have to make that kind of commitment to her. So what she says to the little girl is, well, honey, you'll never lose you. Well, okay, but now mom leaves the room and the little girl goes to sleep and she's laying there thinking,

I'm all alone in this world apart from myself, but I'll never lose me. But is that supposed to bring comfort? Because I think what that brings is absolute fear. It brings isolation, brings loneliness. To be honest, the worst message I could imagine someone telling me is the message that Glenn and Doyle tells her every night. You will never lose you. I need more than me. I was made for more than me. We were made to be in relationship with each other. Life is more than just me by myself. You will never lose you is a really empty promise. Well, okay. It's an empty promise that it's hard to imagine a parent offering a child. But let's go back to Rousseau.

I hope you're not getting tired of this because it's pretty amazing connection. So Rousseau had a mistress, a woman that he spent a lot of his life with. And at one point, they have a child. And so what Rousseau does is he takes a little card and puts it in the infant's clothing and tells the midwife who had helped deliver the baby to drop off the child at a hospital. And that's it. He never has a relationship with him. In fact, he has four more babies with this woman, and they were kind of disposed of in the same way. None of his children were given names. He just dropped them off at a hospital, and the conditions of that hospital were brutal.

It is likely that none of his children lived very long. Now, why did he do that? Well, remember, he wants to do anything he wants to do. He thinks that happiness is following his own inner guide and making his inner life equivalent to his outer life. So Rousseau's philosophy causes him to abandon his children. If you want to be true to yourself, I'd just encourage you never to have children. And the simple reason is, at least in my own life, there's been no relationship that's required more sacrifice from me than my relationship with my kids.

Now, I find that incredibly rewarding. I think that there's a great beauty and depth to it. So I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I think it's a good thing. But if you think that denying yourself is the worst thing you can do to yourself, then don't have kids because there's no way that you're going to be able to love them. We're not trying to say, by the way, that Glenn and Doyle abandoned her children. Again, I don't think she has.

I think she has too much innate intuition and goodness that would probably prohibit her from doing that. And yet the advice that she's giving, the advice that she's giving would allow someone to do exactly what Jean-Jacques Rousseau did. And I have to imagine that she might tell that person, you know what, that was the right decision for you, because at the end of the day, you always have you. All right, so back to the big picture here. We're playing out in this last section of how Glennon Doyle's philosophy has played out in her life. And so let's switch from parenting to marriage and divorce. She got married to her husband, Craig, at a relatively young age. And what she found out after several years of marriage is that her husband,

husband had been cheating on her. A lot of one-night stands that started not too long after their wedding day. Now, by the time she finds this out, they already have kids together, and she is devastated, and rightly so. Neither of us would criticize her for being devastated by her husband's infidelity and adultery. I'm sure it was a terribly painful moment for her. But she talks about how she processed what she should do. And you can read more about this in Love Warrior if you want. But what she says is that you've got to learn, or at least she had to learn to trust her body. Now, this sounds weird, but I'm going to read a little section of it to you, is that she says what you've really got to do is trust the temperature of your body. Just follow me. Here's Glenn and Doyle.

Okay, now consider both decisions. All right. So the decision she's making is, do I stay with Craig? and worked through this pain and they had kind of started down that path and it was going decently well or do I leave him and go with this new woman, Abby Wambach, like we said, the U.S. soccer player that she had encountered and said was love at first sight. So, okay, now consider both decisions. Enhabit yourself and feel. Does saying goodbye to Abby feel warm to you? No, that feels cold actually. It feels icy. It makes me feel like I'll die of cold. Now consider being with Abby. How does that feel?

It feels warm, soft, spacious. Okay, Glennon, your body is nature and nature is pure. I know that's hard for you to accept because you have been at war with your body for so long. You think your body is bad, but it is not. It is wise. Your body will tell you things your mind will talk you out of. Your body is telling you what direction life is in. Try trusting it.

Turn away from what feels cold. go toward what feels warm. Okay, now, when you hear that, trust what feels warm and turn away from what feels cold. Do you have like flashbacks of middle school? Like, this is how you made decisions when you were a young kid, a preteen. You just kind of trusted your feelings and what felt good at the moment. And I just want to pose a question. Let's say someone else came along, another person.

Would she leave Abby if her body told her that, Abby was now cold and the new person was warm? I mean, at least the way she's laid it out here, I think you'd have to come to the conclusion that she, in fact, would that her commitments are about as deep as her body temperatures. Here's one of the problems. Again, I just want to be perfectly clear. I actually think that she had perfectly good grounds to divorce her husband. Absolutely. And so our critique here isn't so much that she got a divorce, I realize that might be the way that it's coming across. My critique here is that she's taking that advice. She had grounds to divorce her husband, and she's universalizing it to other people, people whose husbands haven't cheated on

them, or husbands whose wives haven't cheated on them, and saying, if you just feel in any way that that person is now cold and someone else is warm, you should go after them. But of course, marriage is more than that. Marriage is supposed to be a picture of Jesus' love for the church. It's supposed to be a picture of ongoing, steadfast, committed love. And I have to just ask myself the question, do I always make Jesus feel warm? Does everything I do make him feel warm fuzzies inside? I'm not so sure that's the case. Yeah, it's not so much that she got a divorce. Like you said, she had biblical grounds. I don't think anybody would begrudge her if that was what she thought was the wise move to do. It's the way she's giving people a paradigm for how you make decisions in life that seems so, gosh, I just

would say immature. That's not how you make a decision. Let's move on to one final topic, how Glenn and Doyle handles social justice. We won't spend a lot of time here, but Glennon Doyle seems on the one hand to say that she loves humanity. She talks a lot about anti-racism, about feminism, and there's some good concerns behind those concerns. What I find interesting is that even though she talks about loving humanity so much, when you read about her life, you begin to realize she just doesn't seem to love humans that much. She can't be friends with people. She kicks her mom out of her life because she doesn't perfectly agree with her. She goes through all of these relational problems. She says that she has a hard time being around people. She loves humanity. It just seems like, man, you don't. You don't.

don't love humans that much. Yeah, and all the places that she talks about social justice in this book, she never really gives any kind of a substantive argument for it. It's all personal sentiment. It's all personal taste. It's all what she feels is right. The problem, of course, is that there are other people who feel differently than her. And she doesn't have anything to ground her beliefs in outside of herself. And so there's no real case that she's making that would apply to all people. In other words, there's no case that she's making that, say, a race, that all people should be kind and loving and helpful to people regardless of their race. All she says is, this is what I feel like. Well, okay, but what do you say to the person who feels differently?

If you've universalized personal taste as the guide to decision making, who are you to argue? with someone else whose personal tastes are different than you? Who are you to argue with the racist who says, I personally have a distaste for people whose races are different than my own? There's actually no cogent way to argue against it. I want to end this with a few thoughts. First of all, is that you have to have enormous privilege to live the life of Glennon Doyle. You can be a Glennon Doyle in your life, but no one around you can be.

You don't have to sacrifice anything, but that can only be the case if you have others around you who can sacrifice. If you have money and the means to pay other people to do the things that your family or others would have done for you. David Brooks wrote an article recently at the Atlantic talking about the breakdown of the family, and he makes the point that all of this individualism, which Glennon Doyle is expressing, it works out great for people with money who can hire babysitters and therapists to do all the work that family and extended family used to do. But if you don't have money, it's hard to be a cheetah. It turns out you might need to be a bee.

Yeah, so I like how you said, Patrick, you can be a Glennon Doyle, but only you can be, because you will depend on other people to serve and meet your needs that aren't in line with what their wishes are. So this philosophy of life just finally doesn't work. Imagine if everybody in your family, everybody at your workplace, everybody in your community, all did whatever the heck they wanted to do and didn't care about anybody else. It would be utter chaos. It would be the French Revolution. It would be madness. Glennon Doyle concludes her book by going back to the book of Exodus when Israel asks, what's your name, God?

And God answers the question, I am, I am. God calls himself the I am. And then Glenn and Doyle, she asks her reader, she says, who are you? And she goes through all these questions, but she ends with this answer. You want to know who you are? You are, I am, I am. She's saying you, you are God. You are the I am.

Yeah, if you thought maybe we were maybe taking too much liberty when we said that Glenn and Doyle believed that the knowing inside of her, the capital K, knowing inside of her was God, that she is God. At the end of the book, she removes all doubt. She just comes out straight up and says, you are the I am. You are the one that God claimed to be. Lee Stein, who we started off with, said that Glennon Doyle is the modern equivalent of a televangelist, except she calls her an instavangelist because she uses Instagram as her platform instead of television. and the televangelists were peddling their own prosperity gospel.

Glennon Doyle, she's peddling something different. She has a God to offer, but the only God she has to offer is the person you look at in the mirror. I personally think that a happy life is found in something bigger than myself. I think a happy life is found by living for Jesus, for God. And that's not what Glenn and Doyle has on offer. So if you have a friend who is reading Glenn and Doyle, somebody you care about and love and want the best life for, I think you should intervene.

I think you should sit down and try to have a conversation and help them see that the gospel of Glennon Doyle does not play out well in their life. That it might sound attractive. It might sound appealing. It might reflect the spirit of the age, but it ends up in a dark place. If you have a friend reading Glennon Doyle, I would tell him this. The gospel of Jesus is far better. Follow him. Thanks for listening.

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