Theology in the Raw - #729 - A Conversation with Paul Vander Klay

Episode Date: March 11, 2019

On episode #729 of Theology in the Raw Preston has a conversation with Paul Vander Klay. Paul is a pastor of a small church in Sacramento, he has been a missionary and a pastor for many years. Follow Paul Vander Klay on Twitter. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, Theology and Raw listeners. Thank you so much for joining me on this show. I am super excited about this episode, which I'll talk about in a second. But first, I would like to let you know about a couple things. First of all, this is a listener-supported podcast. If you want to support the show, you can go to patreon.com forward slash Theology and the Raw and support the show for as little as five bucks a month. And if you support the show, you get access to premium content,

and you get to sleep well at night knowing that you have given to a good cause. If you don't think that Theology in the Raw is a good cause, then I encourage you not to give. Or if you have the option between giving to Theology in the Raw or giving to somebody who is poor, like actually poor, like if you don't help them out, they might starve or they might not make it in life, then I would highly encourage you to give to the poor. Giving to the poor is a biblical mandate.

Giving to Theology in the Raw is not. But if you can do both, that'd be awesome. So you can go to Theology in the Raw, sorry, patreon.com forward slash Theology on the Raw and support the show. If this show has been beneficial for you and your spiritual walk on some level, I would encourage you to give your support. But most of all, make sure you're giving to the poor. I also have a bunch of speaking engagements coming up. Probably the most significant one is the Justin Lee Dialogue on March 10th in South Bay, San Francisco.

It's called The Scripture, Sexuality, and the Soul of Christianity. I think that's the title of the event. Scripture, Sexuality, and the Soul of Christianity. That's on March 10th. Put on by Spark Church. If you're a Patreon supporter, you get free admission. And if you are a Patreon supporter and want your free admission, you can go to my Patreon page,

and I've given you the code there that you can punch in and get free admission. If you are planning on going, you need to sign up ASAP because it's really filling up. And there is a cap. The room can only hold, what is it, 960 people. And I think that's going to be maxed out given the trajectory of how sales are going. So if you're a Patreon supporter and want to go to the show for free, go to the show. Go to the event. It's not going to be a show. It's going to be a dialogue. I would highly encourage you to take

advantage of that free offer at ASAP. If you're not a patron supporter and you still want to go, I would also encourage you to sign up, uh, sooner than later because it's probably going to fill up. So that's the Justin Lee dialogue, South Bay, San Francisco, March 10th. You can go to Preston Sprinkle, Preston Sprinkle.com and see the, uh, and go to the events page and you can see, um, how to sign up for that event. I'll be in Seattle on March 12th, Salem, Oregon, March 14th, Anthem Church in Thousand Oaks on March 17th and Cleveland, Ohio on April 23rd. Talking about lots of different things, mostly sexuality and gender related, uh, Anthem Church. I'm preaching a sermon, well, three sermons, one sermon three times, and then doing a sexuality

conversation that evening on March 17th. So I would love to meet you guys, seriously. And I love it. When I go to various events, I love it. I love it when you guys come up to me and say, hey, I'm a listener to your podcast. I listen to your podcast. Thanks for what you're doing. Or, hey, I'm a Patreon supporter.

Just want to let you know. I love it when you guys tell me that it's just so encouraging. Or if you say, you know what, I listened to your podcast and I absolutely hate it. I think you're a heretic and I wish you would go to hell. That's awesome too. Um, just if you're a listener, whether you like it or not, then come introduce yourself and I would love to have a conversation with you. Okay. My guest for today. I am so excited about this conversation. Um, I'm excited about every conversation I have, but I have to admit this one I've been really eager to, um, engage in. I have on the show today, uh, Paul Vanderclay. Now, some of you might've been

expecting me to say something like Francis Chan or Andy Stanley or Beth Moore or somebody. Many of you may not even know who Paul VanderKley is. Paul VanderKley is a pastor of a small church in Sacramento. He's a graduate of Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary. He's been a missionary and a pastor for many years. Most of all, he's just an incredibly good thinker. He's widely read. He's very pastoral. He has a lot of diverse pastoral experiences. And more recently, he has become more well-known because he is a,

if I can say like an arm chair expert on Jordan Peterson. Like he has listened to and read pretty much everything Jordan Peterson has put out. And he has digested it, analyzed it, thought through it. And he, in particular, he likes to think through the cultural impact or the missiological significance of Jordan Peterson. And so I asked him to come on the show and unpack for us, what is this Jordan Peterson guy all about? I couldn't get Jordan Peterson on the podcast. I've actually reached out to him on Twitter, but when you have a million followers on Twitter, you're probably not going to get a response. So Paul VanderKley, though, I think is a super important voice in the church today.

I really mean that. Paul might be bashful at me saying that. He might be like, who am I? I'm just some pastor of a really tiny church who has a YouTube channel, you know. But he is an exceptional thinker, and I so enjoyed this conversation. Please give it up for Pastor Paul Vanderfeet. Welcome back to Theology in a Row.

I am here, I'm just going to say, with my new friend, Paul Vander Clay. And we were kind of joking around off air earlier that Paul has been in my ear the last few weeks. I don't know if people know this, but I have a massive problem sleeping. And probably it's because of the work that I do but I typically if I wake up in the middle of night which happens several times my mind will keep going my body will be exhausted I like to sleep so I actually go to sleep listening to a podcast and I keep it in a loop in my ear I only have I'm deaf in my left ear so I have one earbud in and it'll typically play all night and I'll wake up and I'll listen about five minutes I'll go to sleep in it if I don't have that my mind will go I'll

wake up and I won't be able to sleep so a mutual friend of ours Luke Thompson turned turned me on your stuff and I got really intrigued by your podcast. And so I've been falling asleep at night to either it's Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, or Paul VanderKley. Intellectual dark web. Yeah, right. And I try to listen to left, center center and right equally um you guys see that's healthy but anyway so let me hear i'm going somewhere here so the one podcast so luke sent it sent it to me he says hey i think you enjoy this podcast it was the one you did on woke religion gordon peterson a couple weeks ago man that was amazing i it was so helpful and i just yeah i just kept listening to it and repeat

repeat i have so i'm going to begin just real quick practically did you do a lot of preparation for that were you scripted um or was this just it just just comes inside because that one felt like it was like this one felt like you've been thinking about this for like six months. It was so well organized and thoughtful. Or was that just comes, comes from within? I don't know. I usually do a PowerPoint outline, but it's not scripted at all. And in fact, I almost didn't publish that one because I got to the end of it and I thought, Oh, I'm meandering so badly. This is, this is total.

Even for my channel, this is gonna, this is gonna be the death of it so i almost didn't post it but then it's like i've talked for two hours you can't not post it so whatever no so good so why don't we why don't we go why don't we begin with the whole jordan peterson thing that's where your name first came up is um luke thompson and i have been wrestling with jordan peterson the phenomenon the, the ideas and everything for a while. And he said, you know, he said, oh, you got to listen to Paul. He is one of the best at unpacking who Jordan Peterson is. So pretend like somebody doesn't even know the name Jordan Peterson.

Give us the five to seven minute kind of overview of who this guy is, why he's such an important cultural phenomenon right now, maybe some key components of his beliefs, his ideas, and we'll go from there. Okay. Well, I first found Jordan Peterson when he was, let me tell the story of his rise in the public, his status rocket, as I call it. He's about my age. He's a year older than I am. And when he was young, we both grew up in the middle of the Cold War. And it occurred to him at some point, why are these two civilizations putting the entire world at risk over what?

And from the position of a materialist, you might ask, you know, if everybody has stuff, why would we threaten to end the human race as we know it? There must be something to these ideas that we hold precious, and these things must be consequential in a way that if you're a secular materialist, you probably shouldn't suspect. And so that put him on a path to writing his first book, which was published in 1999 called Maps of Meaning, because he wanted to find out what is really with us with respect to the software. And so he did a deep dive into many of the major Western thinkers, including Carl Jung, Fried Frederick Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, and as well as a whole bunch of psychologists.

He first got, he's got his first degree, his undergraduate degree in political science, and then he got his graduate degree in psychology, where he learned Jean Piaget and a number of other influencers. And so he, what he was doing then then, he taught at Harvard for a while, and then he got a tenured position at University of Toronto. And he taught this weird course that became kind of a cult favorite among many students called Maps of Meaning, where he would map out this world and try to describe why the world was meaningful. map out this world and try to describe why the world was meaningful. Because if you're a materialist saying that basically consciousness is derivative of the brain, matter is foundational,

and consciousness is derivative, why is consciousness so important? And why are these ideas that we hold so important? And why will people live, why will people die for their religions? And not only their religions, but their politics and their ideologies. That's a weird thing if matter is foundational and consciousness is merely derivative. So he wanted to figure that out. So he taught this course, Maps of Meaning, where he walks through this rather esoteric line of argumentation about it's, we cannot live without this software of religion and ideology and politics and the way we frame our world in terms of consciousness and thought. That is so foundational to us, we would rather die than give it up. And that's important. And at the same time, there's this meaning crisis which is going on. So he has this crazy course maps of meaning. And he's a favorite at the

university. Kids really love his course. I talked to one guy who, he had him as an underground, it's like a conversion experience. And so on a tiny little scale, he was a cult figure, but not a lot of people knew him and he was popular. Well, in Canada, they had a piece of legislation called Bill C-16 that basically made it a, you could get in trouble with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal if you would misgender someone by use of a pronoun. And because for Peterson, he had studied totalitarian systems like the Soviet Union and like Nazi Germany, he studied both of them. And one of the things that he noticed is that when civilizations start to encroach on free speech, they get into trouble

because basically what it means is you have an entire civilization built on lies. And when that happens, the civilization cannot stand. And so actually his wife, he had been posting his videos on YouTube and people had been watching them, but not a lot of subs and didn't really go big. And his book, Maps of Meaning, didn't sell a lot of copies. Tim Blackman, who's a friend of mine, he's the chaplain at Wheaton. I asked him about it because Tim reads everything and he says, the book is inscrutable. You can't understand that book. So then his wife is away one night and he can't sleep. And so he'd usually get up and write because that would kind of settle his mind down so he could go to sleep. But he sits down and he's been playing around with YouTube. So basically what he does, he turns on the camera, he just basically does a screed about C-16. And he had been on Ontario Public Television, and he had basically done a report

to the C-16 committee in Parliament. But he basically made a screed about how this is horrible. This is the death of Western civilization. You know, this is a horrible decision. So he, okay, makes his YouTube post it, goes to bed. A few days later, there's a protest at the university. Yeah, there's a protest at the university. Well, who are they protesting? They're protesting you. They're protesting me. He goes out and the people are filming it for YouTube. And how do you feel that there are Nazis at your rally? And he's like, I hate Nazis, you know? And they just keep screaming at him and he's calm and he's arguing with the students, but he's respecting

them. And that video goes viral. And then, you know, he, and that's when I saw, I saw that video and I said, he's going into universities and people are just lighting their hair on fire, hating on him, but he's remaining calm in these situations. And I thought, there's something very, there's something that reminds me of, you know, the civil rights movement and the nonviolent civil rights protesters. And there's something really Jesus-like about what's happening here. So I started paying attention. And then he goes on Joe Rogan, of course, millions of people hear him on Joe Rogan, and it's like a light comes on. And he has this interview with this BBC news reporter, Kathy Newman, and she's just trying to straw man him and back him into a corner in all the usual ways. And he just won't be. And if you haven't

watched the interview, see, just Google Jordan be and if you haven't watched the interview see just just you know google jordan peterson kathy newman and you'll see the interview and so of course he just at the same time he has this book which is ready to go which is just perfect timing and whoosh he grows exponentially but so i was interested in some of the drama around woke religion and the podcast that you would listen to. the left, of which I had always considered myself a part, seemed increasingly to be displaying what I looked at as signs of another religion, perhaps a Christian heresy. But this was looking, this wasn't typical Christianity. This was different. And so in 2013, 2014, I began to think about that and think, so I gave it a name because I needed to give it, so I called it progressive liberationism, because it was the idea that we must continually be liberated from all of these things that restrict us. And one of the things that were restricted people was their sexuality that they had been born with biologically, their biological identity.

And so I noticed among high school age kids around me that more and more kids were changing their pronouns, they were changing their name, they're identifying as other things. And I was watching this and I was thinking, you know, yeah, gender dysphoria, that's been around for a long time, but not at these rates. This is new. And so I began to watch all of this stuff unfold. I was also very interested in the question of cosmology. Why, how is it that we go to church and we read Genesis 1, read it in the King James Version, and you basically have an idea of a flat earth with a dome on top of it, and that's the firmament, and there's waters above the firmament, and the sun and the moon and the stars are beneath the firmament.

And so that's the cosmology of Genesis 1. But at the same time, we're all kind of in the world, imagining that there's a big ball of gas called the sun, and we're on another ball going around it. And so I was fascinated in that because, you know, these are some of the other things I'm interested in. And what I saw with Jordan Peterson, that was all these issues were coming together. And I realized he is trying to reunite the world from a lot of the splits that have been happening throughout the centuries, and especially in the modern period.

have been happening throughout the centuries and especially in the modern period. And he was, he was then, so then he, I watched all of his maps and meaning stuff. I watched all of his personalities, of course, and he was doing this biblical lecture. And I thought, so the guy's protesting C-16 and he's, he's renting a studio and, or renting a concert hall in Toronto and he's filling it up. And people are coming from all around the world to go and listen to this guy ramble about the Bible. And when I start reading comment sections, I start seeing people say, I started listening to Jordan Peterson, and I was a big Sam Harris fan. I was a hardcore atheist. And now I want to read the Bible. I want to learn about the Bible. And I'm thinking about going to church.

I'm watching all of this and I'm saying, something big is happening. And this could potentially be one of the most important Christian movements of my lifetime. And so then I start digging into all of this. And I thought, well, maybe he's some closet evangelical who somehow got into U of T. And I listened to him. No, that ain't it. Because it's Darwin and it's Jung. And it's like, hmm, how can I figure out what's going on here?

And part of it was just as a Christian pastor. For many of us, we've seen that once people kind of go down the Sam Harris road to hardcore atheism, they're not coming back. And once they kind of go down the new age road, and I'm giving up church, but I think Buddhists are really cool, and I want to meditate, and I want to do that. Once I saw people go down that road, they wouldn't come back. And what I was seeing as a consequence of everything that Jordan Peterson was doing and all of its kind of crazy majesty, people were coming back towards the Bible and Christianity that had gone down those roads before. And I said, that's something new. And I need to, number one, know what's happening, why he's having this effect,

because I dare bet even he doesn't know why he's having this effect. So I need to figure that out. And so then I'd been blogging about it because I'd always had a blog that nobody read, but I blogged basically to think through things myself. And then I decided, well, there's something about this YouTube thing with Jordan Peterson. So I'm going to just start talking at the camera and making YouTube videos and so I made a YouTube video that basically said a pastor you know three reasons why this pastor thinks Jordan Peterson is important and I had 15 subscribers on my YouTube channel because I'd been doing a little show on my channel called the Freddie and Paul show with a member of my

congregation who said he he wanted to do a TV program with me. So I said, well, let's just do a little YouTube show. So we did a YouTube show. So I had 15 subscribers and I posted that. And two days later, I had a hundred subscribers. And a week later, I had 500 subscribers. And about a month later, I had a thousand subscribers. And then I was freaking out because it's like, hey, wait a minute. I was just looking to figure this out and have a few interesting conversation partners. I wasn't looking to change my life. But people kept coming. And people started showing up at my church. A guy shows up at my church the next Sunday, gives me this little poster. And so then it's like the church. So then a friend of mine says, you got to hold a meetup.

So it's like, I'm a dramatically, I'm a dramatically, I'm a failure as a pastor in many ways. My church is small. It's dying. It's elderly. It's insignificant. And you know, all the, all the ways that most pastors are failing right now. And we had done VBS and we've done all these kind of things before. So I went on to meetup.com, got a little thing, put a Jordan Peterson meetup, Living Stones Church, Sacramento, a dozen people show up. And I thought, okay, we'll meet for two hours. We'll see. I'll just do an introduction. Then we'll see what happens.

We meet for two hours and nobody wants to leave. So I said, well, it's been two hours. Anybody wants to go, goes and a few people left. I didn't have the sense then to say what time we would leave. It's 1.30 in the morning and the phone rings at church and it's my wife and she's like, are you okay? Are you still alive? Who are these strange people you're meeting with? And from there, I learned, okay, I have to start kicking people out at 11 o'clock. But what is going on where, you know, you do VBS and you do community fair, you do all these evangelical things to try and bring people into the church. Well, they'll come and eat your donuts and they'll send their kids somewhere for

some free babysitting and so on and so forth. They're not going to join your church. And now I've got a dozen mostly young men who will stay all night to talk about this Canadian psychologist and the things around him. I said, this is something I cannot ignore. And so I kept making videos and I keep doing meetups. And now I help other people organize meetups in California and get things going because I've got a video channel and people watch my video. If I show up at least five or six or 10 or 12 people show up and we'll talk about George Peterson.

And then they'll come back a few weeks later to talk about it again. And so I look at this and say, this is some of the most fruitful Christian ministry I've ever done. And this via a Canadian psychologist, if you ask him, he believes in God, he'll start to squirm and say, depends what you mean by God and depends what you mean by believe. And so that's been my weird journey for the last year. And the last year, this has been a year. And if I can word it this way the missiological

i mean more than that but but as a pastor the missiological significance of peterson because i mean is it would that be a good way of saying or how would you word it no that's exactly how i say it because i mean and i've listened to some of his biblical lectures and so i i followed him from a distance really before i guess well right around the Bill C-16 thing. I never saw that original video. I did see the other one that the protests. So maybe it was Rogan. I don't know.

It was early on that I started listening to him before he became, for example, I think I looked at him on Twitter. He had like 70,000 followers when I first, and now he's got over a million, I think. So, and I've kind of off and on listened to him. He's more, I'm more of a, and Luke and I talk about this, you know, I'm not wired philosophically, the kind of conceptual maps of meaning stuff. Like I've never been wired that way.

I've always been kind of a historian my phd's in like concrete text you know so when i listen to a man i only understand about a third of what he's saying he's dealing with these really large concepts and if you don't know he'll string together in one sentence you know three words and if you don't understand exactly what he's saying you're kind of gone right kind of almost i struggle reading c.s lewis sometimes because i'm like i have to read him really slow um because he is dealing you're kind of gone, right? I struggle reading C.S. Lewis sometimes because I'm like, I have to read him really slow because he is dealing in that kind of world. So I probably listen to, I don't know, maybe 10 to 15 hours worth of Jordan Peterson.

I've read part of his book, but haven't at all digested to the extent of what you're saying. But I've got a point where i'm going here um the biblical lecture series i listened to a couple of those the one the flood and i think the one i can't enable and this i have the same question that you have he's filling a room giving a two two and a half hour highly intellectual lecture on a small, small biblical passage. And he's filling the room.

Any person who tries to do that will destroy a church. That's right. What does that mean? And it's not. So what, what my hunch, here's my hunch. And I want to know,

but I want to hear from you, but I want to say it just so, just in case you use it, say the same thing. I'm not just repeating what you said. I've been, ever since Mark Knowles, the scandal of the evangelical mind, and I've been a deeply intellectual, academically wired person. And so I get kind of, I've never felt at home in the church.

You know, I just don't, I don't know. I'm just not impressed with like three point sermons that are just about spiritual living, which i like spiritual living okay but i mean that aren't like profoundly intellectual and like culturally relevant like when there's two shootings during the week and we just go back to preaching on you know how to love your spouse on sunday almost tone deaf to the fact that there are deep questions that people have that aren't being addressed in the pulpit. It just bothers me. So my hunch is that I think that people, even Christians, are hungering for a more in-depth, dialogical, intellectual engagement with

meaningful things in life that they're wrestling with Monday through Saturday. meaningful things in life that they're wrestling with Monday through Saturday. And I think that if we did that more from the pulpit, I think people would be really attracted to that. I think there's a deep intellectual itch that's not being scratched, for the most part, by the church. Or when intellects try to do it, they do it in such a weird, kind of outdated Christian way, that i just wonder if he's showing that look people are want to engage in long deep conversations about important things in life um

so that's my hunch i couldn't verify that but what are your thoughts what is going on what does this mean for the church and culture in 2019 that he can fill a room lecturing on the flood two and a half hours and the church has a hard time doing that well you're exactly right and so I have friends who have I have friends who are wonderful preachers in uh in Toronto and their churches have plenty of empty seats and why is it this guy who you know know, he's getting his biblical, he's getting his Bible ideas from BibleHub. You know, BibleHub on the internet. And, you know, nothing against BibleHub, but you and I, I mean, you studied New Testament. I mean, I don't have a PhD, but I have an MDiv.

You know, I got all these commentaries behind me. Yeah, BibleHub? You know, come on. you know yeah bible hub you know come on but at the same time he was saying things in his biblical lectures that i thought huh i'd never thought of it that way before and and what he what he is what he has done is connected in a different way the the biblical story to how people feel about meaning in their lives. And he's done that better than I do, obviously. You know, my church isn't busting out. Even still now after, you know, before Sunday morning, a thousand people will have seen my rough draft for my sermon and 50 people will see it in church. You know, that's, you know, he gets, you know, 25 people will show up for his 12 rules for life tour in Sacramento and 50 people will be at my church. What does that say about me?

All right. So I clearly have something to learn from the man. He, and there's another Canadian, another Canadian teacher at university of Toronto, John Vervaeke. I've been working on his videos more lately. They talk about the meaning crisis and they're onto something that something has happened in the Western world where people have, people are sensing a nihilism. They're sensing an emptiness.

And this has been around for a long time when we, you know, churches have talked about this for a long time. But they're sensing an emptiness, and we don't know why. And the answers about why are very deep and very broad and not exactly obvious. And so what he has managed to do with the Bible is say, there's something in this book where you can find answers for your meaning. Well, how am I going to find it? Well, it's, see, and right away, we have certain patterns that we imagine. Well, I'll give you, and this is always the problem that probably you and I get frustrated with evangelicalism. Well, here's the answer. Just memorize it. Memorize it. Well, here's the answer. Just memorize it.

Memorize it. Here's a couple of those. People don't work that way. And so it, okay, so here's the thing. So let's give, let's be fair to the church. The church has actually managed to, many more people be in church on Sunday than go listen to Jordan Peterson.

Okay, that's just true. So the church has actually managed to deliver meaning to regular people in a very consistent way over hundreds and hundreds of years successfully. So let's give the church its due. Thing is, we don't know why. We don't know what we're doing. And we have gotten to a place now where the church seems irrelevant, just like you've said, where pastors can take the wine of the Bible and turn it into water. And this is what

we're doing. And so, well, here's something else that's happening with this guy. And a lot of people are coming around him and they're saying, well, I listened to those lectures. So one of the things that also started on my channel, I spent a fair amount of my channel just talking with quote unquote regular people who, and these people find me and they want to talk to me. And I was doing a lot of these conversations privately and I'd noticed repetition in them. And so with some of the braver ones, I said, would you mind if I posted our conversation? And they'd say, sure. And so then I'd post the conversation and then they get a lot of usually positive and supportive and encouraging comments from the comment section, which on YouTube is very

unusual. And so like there's a guy in the Netherlands named Job, who people always say, who would name their kid Job? But Job, and Job was, you know, he gave up, and this is the standard story of people I talked to, gave up Christianity in his early teens, because this is just garbage. You know, you can't fit all those animals on the ark. This is just made up stories. It's all a bunch of hooey. So, and then they went over to atheism and guys like, they'd listen to Sam Harris. Sam Harris kicks Christian's butts all day long.

And, but then they listened to Jordan Peterson and they said, I'm not so sure about Sam Harris. Jordan Peterson is kicking Sam Harris's butt. And I was depressed. And I started listening. Jordan Peterson is kicking Sam Harris's butt. And I was depressed. And I started listening to Jordan Peterson. And suddenly, I feel better. I'm not depressed. I'm not anxious. I'm excited about life. And I want to clean up my room. And I want to pick up my cross. And he's made me curious about the Bible and, and the church. And, but then I went to a church and it was all weird and it wasn't like listening to a Jordan Peterson thing. So, and so I, I,

I began to watch this and hear this. And I said, who's going to help these people? Who's going to talk to these people? And so I just started talking to them and then they'd start finding me. And on my channel, you can find all kinds of interviews with a guy like Job and a guy like Dennis who, their lives lacked meaning. They were depressed. They didn't have much motivation. They listened to Jordan Peterson and now they've got a vision for improving their lives. And a big part of that has been, is there a God?

Is there something more to life than all of the stuff that our culture says is important? Now, you'll hear this stuff in churches all the time. But for some reason, we're not connecting. I think, and this is a generalization, and just obviously we're speaking in generalities. There's exceptions to this but the stuff in church just seems it just seems it relies on kind of christianese language that hasn't been reflected on as deeply because peterson is not coming from a christian tradition where he sort of just absorbed the christianese He's coming from the completely other side of the equation. He comes from a psychologist looking at human nature and saying,

you know, he won't use the phrase total depravity, but that's basically what he says. Like, yeah, we're all screwed up. We're all a blend of good and evil. And it's like, wait, that's just straight out of the Bible. He didn't get it from the Bible. He got it from just looking at human nature and studying. it from the Bible. He got it from just looking at human nature and studying. So he's not relying on kind of the worn out, cliche kind of verbiage that you often hear in the church. And I think

when you just rely on that, people nod their head and say, oh, that's a great sermon. And then, you know, and I'll ask him like, what was good about it? Like, what did he say? I'm like, oh, you know, I can't remember. But it was so good so good you know the story you told is funny and it was biblical and I feel so blessed by it and and you know they'll regurgitate some of these cliches and then come Tuesday it's like their life looks exactly the same and and I just wonder I don't know like I let me ask you a question and this is kind of well not off the topic but when I look at Peterson's question and this is kind of well not off the topic but when i look at peterson's quote-unquote theology he seems like he's got a very augustinian anthropology and a hyper pelagian soteriology or view of redemption like like and this isn't a critique it's just it is what it is, like Christ, or even just a Christ figure outside of yourself,

a redeemer is almost irrelevant for sanctification or redemption. It is hyper-Pelagian, I would say, without even using those terms. But his anthropology is incredibly Augustinian and biblical, I would say. His anthropology is incredibly Augustinian and biblical, I would say. And even his vision for the flourishing life would resonate very much with a Christian view. He doesn't have the need for, his framework doesn't need a divine power or atoning work, however you want to frame it, to get there. And yet it's still, this is what's so almost frustrating and challenging. It's working. Paul would say that doesn't work, but why? So why is it working? Like what's challenged when I read Romans eight, you know,

he who doesn't have the spirit lives in the flesh, can't do another, can't please God, all that stuff. I'm like, well, it's working for Peterson. It seems to be working. I mean, maybe he'll fly. And I'm not saying this is a, you know, salvation by like, well, it's working for Peterson. It seems to be working. I'm not saying this is a salvation by works or whatever, but it's like, it just kind of thrown my framework for a loop. You know, I don't know. Have you thought through that? How would you, is that

be accurate, the Augustinian Pelagian? That's exactly right. I think he would also argue that the Augustinian anthropology has actually been built into our culture. And that we inherit, and that's part of why he reacted so much to the new woke religions and the new radical left, because it's a departure from the Augustinian anthropology.

So he would say, yes, that Augustinian anthropology is correct, and it's built into our culture, and it's the reason why Western culture has, in fact, been able to deliver the goods for the West in a way that it hasn't, that the rest of the world hasn't even yet caught up in. He would make that argument. And you're exactly correct about his Pelagian soteriology. And that would be, so he would say, you pick up your heavy cross,

and you pull it uphill, and that gives you meaning. And so what he, see, my argument about him is what he's been doing is essentially natural theology. He's been attempting, even though he's using the Bible, he's in a sense using the Bible to give orientation to his science so that he's pointing in the right direction. Because for him, the Bible essentially was the accumulation of our correct dreams over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and tens of thousands of years of culture, so that the Bible has correct answers built in, they're time-tested, they've passed Darwinian trials, and so what he's able to do is use contemporary science, align it up with what's essentially the ancient wisdom that's encapsulated in the Bible, and by virtue of that, get anthropology correct.

Interesting. And that's half of your formula. Now, where he differs from someone like Sam Harris is that Sam Harris is a closed atheist. And Peterson, at this point, is highly debatable. My best description of him is an open agnostic. He won't say that Jesus didn't rise from the dead in the flesh, but he can't say, he's not willing to say

I believe, I believe he did. He's not willing to say that. He identifies as a Christian though, right? Not clearly. It's ambiguous. Sometimes he will, sometimes he won't and he's got good reasons for that and i some people claim that he's playing a playing a game with that i don't think so i think he is being very honest with us about exactly what he believes at this point and if you understand all the different aspects of belief, this pragmatism, what he's saying is exactly true in terms of who he is. He doesn't go to church. He doesn't identify with any particular Christian tradition.

do you believe in God? I act as if God exists. Well, if you're a pragmatist, your most basic level of belief is your action. So he's sort of saying yes, but he also sees, he sort of sees religion as a game that has gone off the rails. And then one of his early, when he's asked why he doesn't go to church, it's because pastors lie. Now, because pastors are lying all the time and their sermons are full of lies. Now, if you just take the colloquial understanding of lie, you won't understand what he's saying. And this is an issue with Peterson. Just like you said earlier, he's rather esoteric. And when he uses certain words, he often means something a little bit different. What he means by pastors are lying, what he means is exactly what you just said a few minutes ago. Pastors tend to be playing a manipulative game whereby we have a particular

audience that has been culturally conditioned to accept a number of phrases and ideas, and as long as the pastor continues to throw those same phrases and ideas at people, they will say yes, and they will give their offerings, and the game will continue. But it's a corrupt game. And pastors are not telling the truth. Well, telling what truth? Well, pastors are hedging the truth in order to make sure that the game of running their church still goes well. And every pastor knows these tensions. So you've been playing around with the same-sex marriage, the same-sex marriage debate.

Okay, so here you've got this lesbian couple, and they seem to be getting along. They seem to be managing okay. Their kids are going to school, and they have backpacks and clothing and and then you have this hetero couple over here that's an absolute mess and you say which is a better home for those kids to grow up in and you ask a pastor yeah and you want and the pastor will say well you know it's got to be the heteros he's saying but wait a minute all the evidence says that these lesbians are doing well and and the true answer is i'm not sure let me think about this deeper rather than reacting out of fear of like i need to have a black and white binary

response without any evidence right it's just i know i need to respond this way or that way without realizing the kind of complexity of it where he just, I don't think, I mean, Peterson doesn't go to church. Where would he go? Like where would he go in a way that's like, oh yes, this is, you know, like maybe if N.T. Wright was the priest or, you know, and there's, you know, there are, especially in maybe more Eastern or Catholic traditions that have, has a more high view of the intellect and intellectual engagement.

And there's like, I know, I know like even kind of low church pastors who are incredibly thoughtful. So again, I mean, just off the top of my head, people like, I don't know if you know, like a John Mark Comer, Josh Butler or. Yeah. Love Josh Butler's work. A.J. Swoboda, I think, and that's a very low church. It's four square, and hardly anybody maybe knows that name. He's one of my favorite Christian writers because he's first a writer

who happens to be a Christian, but he's like, and he writes about the underbelly of the faith. Have you read his stuff, you know, A.J.? No, no, no. Yeah, he writes about the dark side of christianity he writes about doubt and and how wandering is healthy for your family just stuff that nobody's talking about he's got a phd does written book on creation care it's a load sure it's like but i think maybe in an environment like that i think he still would think the

christian culture is just kind of weird like i think halfway through the think he still would think the Christian culture is just kind of weird. Like, I think halfway through the sermon, he'd probably will say, hey, I got a bunch of questions and people will be thrown off. But I personally, I long, I don't know, we're getting off the rails here a little bit, but I... No, we're not. We're not actually. Because one of the things that I noticed very quickly was a lot of people were interested in the Orthodox Church, listening to Peterson. Part of that is because of Jonathan Pajot and the alignment between Jonathan Pajot, who's an Eastern Orthodox icon, Carver, who also has a YouTube and is a personal friend of Peterson's before his rise, because he had listened to Peterson on an Ontario public

television station, and Pajot began to notice what's going on because underneath all of this. So when I came back to North America and was doing ministry in the late 90s, the seeker movement was still in its heyday. And I visited Willow Creek and, you know, a safe place to hear a dangerous idea, you know, all this kind of stuff. And then out in California, not a few years later, all of these churches that we had planted as seeker churches were now transitioning towards much more liturgical sacramental churches. And so when we plant a church here in Sacramento,

California now, they tend to have weekly communion. They tend to have higher liturgy. You'll have the baptismal fount with water in it and we're not re-baptizing people we're remembering our communion and people will dip in the water and they might even make a sign of the cross before they receive the sacrament and these are reformed churches really interesting something's going on and it has everything to do with peterson and verveke and meaning and the disconnected world, because what sacraments do is basically link us between two worlds. symptom of the corruption of the linkage between the worlds. And that's why Luther and Calvin and the other reformers, and Zwingli in particular, who in a sense destroyed sacraments, well, this is only a symbol. Well, what do you mean by symbol? And Calvin tried to have the real presence,

and Luther also tried to maintain it. What was at the heart of the Protestant Reformation was a protest against the corruption of the church that said, here this institution is dispensing God's grace, even though everyone knew the lies of the institution in terms of the corruption of the priesthood and all of those things that you'll read in any Protestant treatment of the Protestant Reformation. This is all connected up with Peterson. And the reason the people listening to Peterson are most often looking for a very sacramental church is because, for all the same reasons that our church planters are doing weekly communion, because somehow people out there have a sense of, if God is going to be real, I need to somehow touch him with more than my brain. I need to taste him. I need to take him into my mouth. But that's weird, because it's bread. Yeah, it's bread. But, well, what does it mean by this is my body?

So all of the issues of the Reformation are actually deeply within this Jordan Peterson movement. But Peterson, and that's actually what I've done a lot of my videos on, especially if you go with the videos I started doing about a year, nine, ten months ago. I very quickly saw that, yeah, your question, where would Peterson go? So he visits an Orthodox church, can't sit still. He grew up in a mainline church. That was boring. You know, evangelicals and Protestants play so many games in terms of, you know, manipulative lying, because evangelicalism really is much more of a market than it is a church thing. Because pastors listening are going to be offended at that.

The pastors are doing manipulative. You see why I have such a small church. I say stuff. And you kind of did before, but just unpack that a little bit. Cause I think some people could maybe think you're saying something else that you're, that you're not.

Unpack which part? What does manipulative line look like when pastors are doing that um and you're not talking about people embezzling money out of the no no no no no it's it's essentially if you look at his 12 rules for life say what's expedient not what's meaningful you know and and we all pastors do it all the time i i got you know someone after church comes up and they oh pastor i really want to share this with you and they hand you a book and it's like oh gosh not only don't i want not only won't i read this book i'd be tempted to burn it because this book says things that i can't stand but what do you do to that that lovely kind christian

person that gave you the book you look at at them and you say, thank you. And that's exactly what you should do. Because the issue isn't the book. The issue is the relationship. But as pastors, we're always working those kinds of angles all the time. And Peterson picks that up on. And Peterson is the kind of guy who, you know, he's from northern Alberta. I've got a brother-in-law from Canada from a similar area. And I know these people, if you push them, they

push back. And the more you prod them, the more they'll push back. And that's been Jordan Peterson. But we pastors, we're trying to keep the flock together. So someone gives you a book or says something to you. Happens all the time, what you just said too. Pastor, what you said in the sermon really touched me. Oh, really? What really touched you? And then they'll tell me something. And I think, not only didn't I say that, I wouldn't have said it. You heard it yourself. And something I said prompted it. But what am I going to say? And I'm not going to say, I didn't say that. And I would never say that. I'd say, thank you. These are the kinds of things we do, the kinds of compromises we make. And it's not a bad thing, but you have to understand

that there's a spectrum there and you can go too far and obviously there are pastors that would immediately correct them in the moment and that happens and pastors who never stand up to anything they're quivering masses of availability and as pastors you always negotiate those transactions but that's what peterson is talking and i yeah and there's various degrees here, but it seems like it's almost inevitable, whether you're a seeker church or not, that some underlying motivation in the church service, your sermon, whatever, whether it's 10%, 99%, is, is this going to attract and keep the people? That's right. I mean, and I know, I know tons of pastor friends who process that. They don't like it. I mean, deep down, they would say that still is a factor because like, and Peterson just doesn't have that. He, he, I don't think, I don't think he's, he has a goal at all to keep or attract the crowd. He is walking on stage, and the telos of what he's trying to do is simply,

I want to dig deeper into the meaning of life and get closer to the truth. Whether there's one person there or a thousand people there, I don't think, I mean, there's the energy of just being on stage with it, but I think he doesn't have a goal. His main goal is, I want to find the meaning of life and get closer to the truth. That's how I see it. Whereas a pastor, as much as you say, oh, yeah want to find the meaning of life and get closer to the truth. That's how I see it. Whereas a pastor, as much as you say, oh, yeah, that's the goal, something would happen if you kept preaching and people kept leaving and leaving and leaving

because you would miss a paycheck. You would have to let people go. You would start to think, I'm not doing something right here because I'm not attracting or keeping the people. So even the most noble pastor, I still feel like that has to be an underlying thing. But once you have that factored in, and I'm speaking to a pastor, right? So you can push back. Oh, that's right. That's right. Once you have an underlying, once you have that somewhere in your motivation, consciously or unconsciously, that it just kind of tweaks things a little bit, right? I mean, it kind of. it just kind of tweaks things a little bit, right? I mean, it kind of...

Yes, it does. But you always keep an eye on it as a pastor, and you find the lines you will not cross. And so you can take this in Petersonian terms and say, basically, you set up a hierarchy of ideas, and you figure out which ideas I will not betray. So I'm a pastor of a confessional denomination, which means I subscribe to certain doctrines. Many pastors have that. And so there are lines I will not cross. But over time, you figure out which lines are hard and which lines are more fuzzy. And you figure those things out. And these things are really important. But even Peterson has these because he's gotten into trouble a few times. For example, with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, a lot of the people that began to listen to Peterson tended to be on the right wing politically. And they saw Peterson standing up about, again, social justice warriors and all of this. And so the right started to identify with him peterson is a moderate canadian politically

which means he's kind of left of center in terms of the american spectrum so then during the brett kavanaugh business one of the things that he tweeted out was because he was having a conversation with another member of the idw and he said of the intellectual dark web this is this group of people that that you're listening to and and he said well maybe if kavanaugh is sustained by the u.s senate he should step down and he peterson tweeted that and it was like whoosh and yeah and so then suddenly he had to qualify and equivocate and a bunch of people, including a comedian named Owen Benjamin, at that point began to say, you know, he's a liar. And they're using lie in the same way that he had been using lie of pastors, which means he will not say what he thinks is true. He will qualify

something in order to gain something else from his audience. And that's his main protest. So these are really difficult things. And again, pastors manage this stuff all the time, but so do spouses. You know, you're sitting down with your wife and you're watching something and your wife asks your opinion of something and you think, hmm, am I really going to say or am I going to, oh, that's nice, dear. Or, you know, it's unanswerable questions like, does this dress make me look fat? I don't know what you're talking about, Paul. You use the phrase a couple times now woke religion and i've heard you use that and i when i first heard you use that phrase i thought you meant

kind of a leftist ideology that is within christianity because you do have progressive christians i can name names i don't love the name names unless I'm really going to dialogue about them. But where, man, their ideological reflection just is almost a mirror of the kind of cultural leftist ideology. It just kind of has some Christianity sprinkle on it. But I don't think, but hearing you talk more, are you talking about kind of that leftist ideology as a religion, as the components of a religion? Is that where, I should ask you, you're here.

What do you mean when you say woke religion? Unpack that. That was one of the most fascinating part of your podcast that I listened to. It's reflecting a religion. So I've had people not come to my church because their idea of the church is the Republican Party at prayer. And so during the Cold War, there was a civil religion that grew up that in order to fight the godless Soviets, we put in God we trust on the coins, we put one nation under God in the pledge. You know, we did all of these things in order to enlist God

to help us fight the Cold War. And that's what we did. And so religious attendance reached its peak in the United States during the Cold War. There's something really important about that, and there are reasons for that. And so when I was growing up, I was more on the left of the CRC. My father had a racial reconciliation church in Patterson, New Jersey, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was my hero, and there was a cost to being in favor of, in those days, integration rather than segregation. Those were hot topics in the 70s, okay? So, and then in the 1980s, you had the rise of the religious right, and you had that whole movement. And so, there are a lot of evangelical churches that are, almost everyone will vote Republican in those

churches. And the whole Hillary Trump, no way they were going to vote for Hillary. Boy, they held, some of them held their nose hard when they voted for Donald Trump, but they did because, you know, for all of those reasons. And so that was the landscape we were used to. But now we're seeing the other side

where certain kinds of churches are the Democratic Party at prayer. And we begin to say, what's going on with this? And then you see churches, and you know this well with your work with same-sex marriage and all of those, the LGBT issues, churches are like, okay, they're flying the rainbow flag. And they're thinking, well, this ought to bring them in. Now, everyone in Blue State, California will applaud you. Not everyone, many people will applaud you flying the rainbow flag, but they're not necessarily going to come to your church

or attend your services. And in fact, I won't name names either, but a friend of mine who left this Christian Reformed Church because he could no longer agree with the doctrinal standards of the church and the ethical standards of the church, began preaching in a mainline church. I followed his sermons because I was really curious. Okay, once you're no longer talking about misery, deliverance, gratitude, and sin, and all these classical biblical concepts, reformed concepts, what are you going to talk about? And I noticed it was all moral application. Now, that's funny, because in the 1970s, moral application was what the right was all about. And the left was like, don't judge me. Now the left is all moral applications, and the right is free speech. Well, this is interesting.

What's going on? And so, again, what I began to discern was that this Augustinian anthropology that Peterson gets, that we have inherited through Western culture, the reason our system of government has all these checks and balances is because we have a pessimistic understanding of human beings that we are easily corrupted. And so we set up systems in order to try to limit the power of each individual human being. But now there's this new religion that says each of us has a secret, sacred self. David Brooks writes about this beautifully in his book, The Road to Character.

And he maps this change after World War II, that we have a secret sacred self. And this, it's a very Gnostic self, if you understand theological categories. And what my goal in life is to really do is to express this self. And Robert Bella talks about this in his book, Habits of the Heart, which was something that was popular when I went to seminary. And so the goal is to express the secret, sacred self. And the job, my personal mission is to realize that the secret, sacred self as much as I can. And the job of society is to reflect back to me this secret, sacred self. And that is really the heart of this woke religion. Now it's progressive because we're always looking over new frontiers. So for example, I was just, my wife and I were watching the new Netflix,

So, for example, I was just, my wife and I were watching the new Netflix, the Umbrella Academy, which is just out on Netflix. Fascinating show. And, of course, so you're watching, okay, one of these people is going to be gay. I thought, ah, yeah. See, the progressivism means that the boundary has to keep moving. So now it's safe in a TV 14 show to have two gay men kissing, but the adopted brother and sister, you're feeling the sexual tension. Okay, well, they're not biologically related, so we're not worried about, you know, birth defects, but how do we feel about adopted brother and sister getting romantically involved? Well, progressive is all about realizing the next frontier and crossing it, and so then the adopted brother and sister that fall in love, well, there's a romantic frontier that we have to cross. And, well, at some point, I saw this great podcast for Akira the Don,

who's been making music out of Jordan Peterson clips, and he basically said, you know, he basically looked at this and said, how much more naked can Madonna get? And so the new frontier is wholesomeness. There's nothing more radical than to marry someone when you're young and stick in with that relationship and build a family with them.

That's the new radical. Is that, I mean, and I don't, I haven't seen the stats on this, but I've heard, and I get it. I's the new radical. Is that what... I mean, and I haven't seen the stats on this, but I've heard, and I get a sense that with the Gen Z, you know, people born after 1995, not millennials, people think millennials are all younger people. Millennials and Gen Z are very

different. With Gen Z, there's almost like this attractiveness to conservative values. Not across the board, and maybe it's not even a majority, but it's more than you would think. almost like this attractiveness to conservative values, not across the board, and maybe it's not even a majority, but it's more than you would think. Even the sort of protest on the pro-life side, there's a surprisingly higher percentage of younger people represented here.

Is this what you're getting at? That when you come full circle, now traditional conservative values might be seen as kind of the new frontier, the thing that makes you unique and different and woke, if you will. Yeah, well, that's, and I think part of what's going on with Peterson

is that he's speaking the truth. Well, what is the truth? What's the truth about human beings? And so the children of the hippies, oh yeah, mom and dad, well, you know, they didn't stay together and they did a lot of drugs and we slept here and then we slept there. You live in that chaos long enough and doggone it, what do you want? Well, I want, you know, I want a mom and a dad who stay together and I want a bed and and and I want there always to be food in the refrigerator

yeah and then the kids who grow up with boring mom and dad and always food in the refrigerator what do they want well I want a little bit more a little more chaos for my order and so these things do these things do go back and forth but but i began to realize that you know so when tony campolo flipped on the lgbt thing i remember that i remember reading a lot of others on the other side who basically said ah too late sorry tony um you should have flipped on this years ago so you So we're not accepting you. When you're retired and past your prime, it doesn't cost you anything. And your wife's been farming for a number of years, and you're probably sick of having those fights late at night.

So then you have this competition. How woke can you be? How progressive can you be? And it just goes off into chaos at some point and people figure that out and they began to say huh well what what if i always listen to my desires where will that lead me well oh i used to have there used to be a homeless man who i don't know the church is 60 feet long here he always slept right in front of my door. I mean, he could have slept two feet down and I could have been able to get in my office without literally having to step over him. But for six years, I couldn't get rid of him. And so I'd feed him and people would be like, live in the moment. And it's like, all this dude does is live in the moment. You want to see

what that looks like? Here, I'll show you. And so then I, you know, for a while, I couldn't figure out why on earth does he sleep in front of my door? He always makes me, I have to wake him up to move him so I can actually get in my office. Well, why? And then later when he got arrested because he attacked a member of my church, I went to jail. He said, I want to go home. I said, where's home? He says, you know. I said, what? He says, every day, every day you would look at me and say, good morning. That's why I slept in front of my door. And okay, so that's living in the moment. So he was, he was a, he was raised a Mormon. He was a terrible alcoholic. He was a terrible drug user. He was bipolar. I used bipolar. I used to listen to him cuss himself

every night just outside my door because it just traveled through the doors. Okay, so what is shalom? What is wholeness? What is truth about human beings? His secret, sacred self is that he wants to do drugs all the time. He'd go into the hospital for just enough time to make sure it didn't jeopardize his disability check he'd come out all balanced again and that evening he'd say yeah i got a woman in that mattress over there and i have a joint here and a bottle of beer here life couldn't be better here we go again cycle around and round and round so this is um are you read are you familiar with camille paglia she She endorsed Peterson's book.

She's a, yeah. A little bit, yeah. Great thinker, great. I mean, and she would be a, what'd she call herself, a second wave feminist or a classic feminist. She's lesbian, you know, atheist, whatever. But she, I would say 75% of what she says and believes would reflect the Christian worldview. She's a lot like Peterson in many ways, explicitly not religious.

But she said, I wish I, I wish she could back it up. I wish I had more evidence, but she's so brilliant that I know it's thoughtful. She just kind of said it in passing, but then like um every time civilization keeps progressing progressing progressing more libertine more libertine it just kind of cannibalizes itself deconstructs we have a reboot and we start over it happened to rome it happened to other civilizations and she says we're on the cusp of that right now and she even said i look feminist lesbian non-christian whatever um that once you start unraveling what it means to be human in terms of being male and female once you start um throwing just the the

really basic biological structure of human nature once you throw that out the window and replace it with this ambiguous thing of gender identity which keeps getting you know more ambiguous more subjective more individualistic um more unscientific she says that that's the first sign of we're about ready to kind of you know collapse in on ourselves reboot we'll start over but they can't you can't keep going down that route and think that it's going to end well it's just going to end in the chaos kind of imploding in itself like a black hole now again i'm not saying i can sociologically or even historically verify that whatever but it's like man i can see that just endless progression endless extent extending the boundaries right i mean it seems like of course it's going to lead to

sleeping on someone's doorstep because you just start collapsing it on yourself yeah well one of the one of the interesting things that i've noticed so i have two daughters who are in college one of the really popular things are korean korean dramas korean soap operas and so my wife and i have started watching some korean soap operas and here's the crazy thing. So you've got, if you watch American love stories, well, you know, your eyes meet, you fall in love, you sleep together. And then the whole story is these two people trying to figure out if they're going to maintain this relationship after they've slept together or if they're really compatible. or if they're really compatible. Well, the Korean soap operas, they're like, there's all of this tension, all of this sexual tension, and really a high point, and it's episodes in is the first touch. Really?

The first kiss. Oh, yeah. And it's the complete opposite of what American romantic dramas have done. And so why are college age girls, you know, you know, in the fandoms of these, of these South Korean dramas? And, and there, there's plenty of them on Netflix. You can find them. And I'll tell you my favorite ones, but you know, it's, it's, and so my wife and I are watching this,

and my wife's like, well, of course. It's, you know, it's romance. What woman doesn't want this? And, you know, and then the men are learning. And, of course, if you're in the church, you're kind of like, well, yeah, this is what we – and we have our own issues and things. you kind of like, well, yeah, this is what we, and we have our own issues and things, but this stuff isn't,

this stuff isn't, you can figure this stuff out. It's out there. What's funny. I mean, even with the Gen Z, Generation Z or iGen, some people call it, you know, their teenage pregnancy rates are way down. Sexual encounters are way down. Drunkenness and alcohol are way down sexual encounters are way down drunkenness and alcohol consumption way down everything's going the opposite direction than you thought now part of it's because of porn and social media people don't aren't getting together as much because they just you know they'd rather be on social media and there's i mean there's it's not it's

i don't think they're healthier it's just but in terms of the traditional kind of conservative versus more libertine values gen z is definitely reflecting more quote-unquote conservative values and and a lot of it has to do there's a great book by jean twinge a sociologist from uh university of san diego i believe where she says that the number one concern is this idea of harm and chaos like people don't you, why are they having sex less? Well, that's harmful. You have STDs and pregnancies and all this stuff. And, and there's, there's a great concern for safety. Now that has spilled over. And Jonathan Haidt talks about this and, and, and Jordan Peterson and, and oh, Talib, Talib, the anti-fragile guy. i think there's a there's a there's an actual weird harm

that comes with an over concern of safetyism but all that to say it is interesting that there's this unforeseen maybe swing back to um a disdain for chaos and a longing for more order in a way that i don't think people would have predicted. Well, and this is, again, what Peterson got right. I mean, because when you listen to Peterson, he will tell these young men, okay, well, what are you saying when you're living together without being married? I like you enough to have sex with you. Oh, yeah, that's a high bar for most guys. You know, I like you enough to have sex with you, but that's a high bar for most guys you know I like you enough to have sex with you but not enough to make a commitment to you to be there when things aren't good who wants to hear that and and women put up with it because they're they're scared to death

of you know one of the things that I've noticed in doing the meetups is that most of the people who come to my meetups are guys between in their 20s or 30s. And most of them are single. And it's a disaster out there. I mean, I think we are getting to the place where the only people who are going to be married are going to be the people who grow up in a religious context that actually have social cohesion that move the kids towards it. And the very wealthy who have assets to protect. Because it's, you know, and Peterson talks about this stuff. And he's telling the truth about this stuff. And people are listening. They don't know what to do about it yet because the issues are very hard. But, you know, Tinder wasn't the answer. And hookup culture isn't the answer. And so, well, here's really hard. And it involves sacrifice. And you don't just

create the capacity to sacrifice by wanting to have that capacity. Then you go back to Dallas Willard and John Ortberg. You know, it's training versus trying. But the key is that a really healthy culture is a culture that delivers the right things to young people that they wouldn't have the amount of wisdom that their age would give them. Okay? So you need a certain healthy culture gives to an 18-year-old a package that says, this is what the good life is. That you resist your desires. That you learn self-discipline, that you delay gratification, that you work for the betterment of the people around you ahead of the betterment of yourself.

And see, Jordan Peterson looks at this and says, where on earth could we find such wisdom? It's in the Bible. You might have learned it in church if you had paid attention, but the church was so busy thinking, gosh, we need to get all these kids in here to actually forget. No, this is what it means. And the church says, oh, we've got to preach all these values more than now we've got to live these values. And then how do we in the church live these values and be able to figure out what to do when we ourselves don't live up to the values, to be able to say, I messed up. You know, that gets into the whole transparency vulnerability thing that we've seen within the evangelical conversation. We love both a perfect pastor

and a transparent pastor. Well, there's a natural tension between those two ideas. Which one are you? Oh, I'm transparent, baby. Look at my church. I'm a disaster. My office is a mess. I'm going to have to go, and I know you've got to go. I'm curious, as a pastor, given this whole deep dive into Jordan Peterson and

kind of reorienting the missiological significance of him, has it reshaped how you do pastoral ministry? I mean, is your two years ago compared to today, does your church look different? Or you said your church has a lot of like older members. doesn't I don't know yeah anyway I'll let you answer the question what has your church changed over the last couple years my well the church hasn't changed that much my church had an advantage in that we're in an area of town that has a lot of group homes and when I got to this church almost every single family of this church had a child or an adult who had some disability. That was because a few pastors ago, that pastor lived that out. He would adopt disabled children and all kinds of other things. And so when I got to this church, everyone at this church

understood this. Everyone at this church understood that life was hard and messy, and we're not going to jump too quickly for pat and easy answers. And that's what has allowed this church to do things like every Sunday you'll see untreated schizophrenics milling around in this church. They're here for a cup of coffee and they'll sleep during the sermon, but they'll be here. And so it's a church that would probably like to try and look more perfect, but really just can't pull it off. And so given where I grew up, pull it off. And, and so given where I grew up, which was a very similar thing, that fits me. Yeah. And the church can be honest about it. You know, back a number of years ago,

oh gosh, you know, the church is dying. We got to figure out to do something. So I had a friend of mine come and do some consulting. And so you, you try and distill the church into three little words. And I looked at this whole map board that we had the whole church on. I said, oh, you know what our church is? Dumpy, Campy, Homey. That's our church. Who wants to have a church that's Dumpy, Campy, Homey? So I told the church that. Everybody was a little grumpy at me.

No, we're not Dumpy, Campy. Yeah, we are Dumpy, Campy, Homey. Look at the place. The building's a disaster. Y'all are getting old. You know how you go to grandma's house and you look at the, say there's still stuff on the silverware and mom says, shh, don't embarrass grandma. That's my church. But the Gordon Peterson people coming in, that's perfect. Because nobody's playing. Even the way we try to play games is so ridiculous.

We're not fooling anybody. Maybe only ourselves a little bit. You live in two different worlds. It's kind of like, yeah, just raw, kind of missional, whatever. Like maybe I'm going to assume maybe lower intellectual what desire for engagement on a in a church context and then you have this whole youtube podcast thing going on and your own personal just study and you feel like you're kind of living in two different worlds and or well well actually part of the reason

the church has made it financially is because there are some people at this church who have good jobs and are very intelligent and that they're in this, there's always been PhDs and illiterate people. Oh, wow. Okay. There's always been Democrats and Republicans. I love that. There's always been everything in a tiny little church. And so, again, and so for me,

I didn't have to shift gears to talk to Jordan Peterson people because they were ready to say, yeah, you know, I look at too much porn and I do drugs and I waste my life playing video games. Oh, okay. So you're normal. Or some people who I've got a good job, I can make a whole lot of money, but deep inside, I know that there are aspects of my life that I just can't fix. Oh, you're normal. Well, Jesus died for you. What do you mean he died for me? And you're going to have to unpack that, but that's the, here we are. And so here is his body. Here is his blood. You're, we're Augustinian here. You're a, you're a sinner.

So every one of my sermons is the Heidelberg Catechism it's misery deliverance gratitude misery you're a mess okay you're a mess I'm a you're a victim I'm a victim we're all a mess okay we can play games if you want to the degree that you play games you're just telling me that you're a mess deliverance out of out of absolutely no obligation the son of God gave his life for people who are a mess while they were yet sinners. What evangelical doesn't know that? Now, gratitude. Well, what is the Christian life?

It's all gratitude. We don't earn our way up there because we're still a mess. So it's all gratitude. So we pour our life out and we follow Jesus and we live like him, not because it's earning us anything, but because he's beautiful. And we want to somehow inhabit that beauty. And that's how someone who is on disability or is an addict can do something beautiful for someone else because even in the midst of all their Augustinian crud, that generosity, Christ shines in it. And so a little hapless church like mine

is the perfect place for this. And so I don't find myself split when this happened so some of my friends i tell them what's happened and they're like oh well you're just doing what you've always done you just do it on youtube and it's true speaking of which where paul thanks so much for being on the show where can people find you what's your youtube chat channel there's paul vanderclay i mean if you google paul vanderclay or you go to youtube and you type in Paul Vander Clay, I'll come up and same thing. Just type in Paul Vander Clay. Yeah, I'm on iTunes and Podbean. So I started with the YouTube and then people are like because I go for a couple hours sometimes and people like you have an audio only version.

So I started the audio only version, too i i got started on youtube so website or blog or you said leadingchurch.com but that's people go to that and they get confused because whenever i see an article for whatever reason interests me i throw it up there so people will be like well there's like everyday feminism articles up there yep or there's like, you know, gospel coalition articles. Yep. There's the Atlantic. There's the national review. There's, you know, so you'll find everything, but if I'm interested in it, I'll throw it up there so I can find it. Love it. Thanks so much for being on the show, Paul. And yeah, maybe, maybe we can switch it around in the future and I can, I can come on your show if I can.

Yeah, let's do that. I'd love that. That'd be fun. So thanks for being on the show, man. Appreciate it. All right, Preston. All right. Take care. you