Theology in the Raw - Culture, Politics, Technology, and Disagreement about Basic Facts: Jake Meador

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy and author of multiple books. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, the Dispatch, Comment, Christianity Today, and elsewhere. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and family. Our conversation is wide ranging, from culture, to history, to politics, to technology. I found Jake to be both delightful and thoughtful, especially when it comes to his analysis of culture and technology.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends. Welcome back to another episode of theology. And Ron, my guest today is the one and only Jake meter, who is the editor in chief of mere orthodoxy and the author of multiple books. His writing has appeared in many different places like the Atlantic common wheel. First things, the dispatch comment, Christianity today and elsewhere. Jake lives with his family, his wife and four kids in Lincoln, Nebraska. Our conversation is wide ranging. Okay. This is one of those really free flowing conversations. I invited Jake to come on and he's kind of a Renaissance night man. And he like just knows lots of stuff about lots of different things. And so I told him ahead of time, I said, Hey, I just want to come on and have a conversation.

Let's just see where the conversation goes. And it goes in many different directions. And I learned a ton. So we talk about culture, history, politics, technology, how all those relate and many other things. And I found Jake to be both delightful and thoughtful, especially when it comes to his like analysis of culture and technology. So really excited about the conversation. Please welcome to the show, the one and only Jake Meader. All right, Jake Meader, welcome to Theology in the Raw.

All right, Jake Meader, welcome to Theology in Ra. How are you doing this morning? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. You look very colorful. What did you say that was that you're wearing? It's called a dashiki. It's a shirt that originated in Western Africa. And then in the years after African countries started moving into independence, the colonizing powers there always wanted the members of parliament in these new governments to come dressed in suits and ties. And all the kind of first gen freedom, like revolutionary types just refused on principle because it was not the Europeans country, it was their country. So the Tshiki kind of became the Europeans country. It was their country.

So the Tshiki kind of became the default for what they were to parliament. And so the first one I got was gifted to me by some Zambian friends in 2007 when I was in Lusaka for a few months. And so I've just been wearing them ever since. Very cool. Very cool. Well, from an audience that doesn't know who Jake Meader is, who is Jake Meader? you don't need to spend an hour giving your, you know, I was born at a young age, but yeah. We'll have to help them understand like what, what is it that you do now and how did you fall into? What is it that you do?

So I live in Lincoln, Nebraska, which is my hometown. I've lived here my whole life, except for one year right after college. I moved to the Twin Cities up in Minnesota. I live here with my wife and we have four kids, a girl and then three boys. By the time this goes live it'll be 11, 9, 7 and 4. We have a birthday tomorrow so we're getting ready for that. I run a media nonprofit called Mere Orthodoxy. We are passionate about creating media for Christian and cultural renewal. And so I've been doing that since 2015, although only getting paid for doing it since 2022. So there was a ramping up process and 10 years of marketing, freelance marketing, copywriting, freelancing, all the things to just get by and have been able, remarkably, I'm amazed by it sometimes to be able to do this full time for a few years now. Soterios Johnson Is that mere orthodoxy? Was that started by

like Andrew Wilson, Matthew Leanderson, those guys? Matt Jones It was started by Matt in 2005. He was a graduate of the Biola honors program, Tori honors program there. He and a few friends started it basically as a way to keep talking about the things they talked about in their honors program. Then within a few years, Matt emerged as the lead writer and he did it until 2015. By then he was doing a defill and his advisor at Oxford told him, you can keep doing your defill or you can keep doing your online stuff, but you can't do both.

So that's when he handed it off to me and I've been doing it now for almost as long as he was doing it. So. Was Andrew Wilson, was he just part of the podcast? He's just part of the podcast as he's able, which is sporadic. Yeah. And mere fidelity started, I want to say around 2014 or 2015, it was around the same time I started doing the site. Originally, it was actually called Casting Across the Pond because we didn't know what to call it.

It was two Brits and two Americans. I think it was Jordan Baller, who's a Reformation scholar, listener came to the rescue with Mere Fidelity. That's what it's been ever since. So wait, Mere Fidelity is the podcast of Mere Orthodoxy? They're associated, it's been, for a long time, it was the only Mero thing that got done that I didn't have to do. And so it was a very like, yeah, I'm happy to let you like,

whatever you guys want to do. So they have their own website, um, have their own kind of platform, but it's always been associated with Miro and obviously the branding is very similar. So, yeah. So you strike me as somebody who is like, loves the intersection between like culture and theology and politics and peeling back the curtain. If I can word it like that on kind of what's going on beneath the cultural current, I'm kind of just making this up as I go. Like the language, is that, is that

large roughly accurate and B would love to know what are some, what's, what's, when you wake up in the morning and go to bed, like what's, like, what are you thinking about? What are you passionate about? What are you processing and writing about these days? Like, yeah, maybe just kind of, there's a testimony angle here probably because I grew up in a very fundamentalist kind of church, somewhere to the right of John MacArthur. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And I saw a lot of ugliness. There was a pastor who spent 10 years in prison because he was assaulting boys in his office.

Another pastor was defrocked because he was not faithful to his wife. And there's some pretty serious allegations around him that are not, like the unfaithfulness is nailed down, definitely happened. There's some others where I have suspicions, but it's just hard to say. And so when I was, so I came to faith in eighth grade and kind of had this experience of,

long story short, my parents caught me discovering online porn. This was in 2001, so it was starting to be a thing. Oh, wow. Yeah. And that was the first time I remember feeling a deep sense of guilt. Like, oh, the gospel is actually for me. Oh, I actually need to be forgiven. I'm not just this golden child who keeps everyone happy. I retain information well. and if you're a people pleaser who retains information well as a kid in a fundamentalist church, you're golden. And so it was kind of the first time I realized like, oh wow, like the cross is for me. I

need that. And so that was my conversion. And then I just started devouring whatever books I could get my hands on. So I remember reading, I just came across a copy of Francis Schaeffer in the church lending library. And the things he was saying were really at odds with what we did at church. And I didn't know how to square that because as far as I could tell, I was like, he's just doing Bible. Like this is just, he's saying, hey guys, I think Jesus meant what he said in John 13 and John 17 about Christian love. And I don't see that in my church that says it's all about the Bible. And so that created a real kind of crisis of faith for me. And Schaefer and C.S. Lewis were kind of my guides during those years.

And Schaeffer would talk all the time about the problem of reality. And by that he meant, like, if the things that we profess to believe don't translate into our lives in the way that Jesus says they should, what are we doing? Like there's something wrong with Christianity, or there's something wrong with Christianity or there's something wrong with us or there's something wrong with the church, but there's a breakdown happening somewhere. I think because that was my life all through high school of wrestling with that problem of reality and just because of the things I saw during those years, it's just kind of created those interests and passions in me on a really deep level. When I think about corruption in the church,

I'm not thinking about abstractions. I'm thinking about the boys I know who were victimized by a predatory pastor. And so it's very existential. And what we do at Miro kind of flows out of that shaping experience I had from an early age. I mean, that experience you've had would cause a lot of people to just fully deconstruct and say, well, I can't trust Christian leaders, period. I can't trust a church, period. It sounds like you might have gone through a season of that at least. Or, yeah, absolutely. So the kind of crisis point for me probably ran from like 2004 to 2009 or so. And that was also like the hay day of the emergent stuff. It was early days

of younger formed. So I have vivid memories. If I would go on these long walks after school, because I was just deeply depressed, and I had a CD Walkman, because technology of the day, and I would burn sermons on the CDs from, my lineup was Rob Bell, John Piper, Mark Driscoll. And then sometimes there'd be like Doug Padgett or Tony Jones or Brian McLaren in there as well. That's an interesting spread.

Yeah. Okay. I was just trying to figure things out and figure out what I believed and why. And then amidst that, in 05 actually, my parents told me, so the deal we had had, my parents are wonderful people and take Jesus seriously, take scripture seriously. And the deal we had had since I had started to struggle in church was, we'd like you to be in church with us on Sunday until you graduate, and after that, whatever you do, you will still have a place in our home. You'll always be welcome.

And you can't take that for granted in that kind of world. Shunning is a thing that happens there. And so that had been the deal. And then by my senior year, my parents had kind of concluded, no, he's never going to go into church again if we stick to this plan. So they actually told me, we still want you in a church on Sunday, but you are not allowed to go to our church anymore. And so I was able to see other types of communities. And then I also spent two summers at the Rochester branch of Lebrie Fellowship

during that time. And so through those experiences, that created a very different sort of context for doing a kind of mid-2000s version of deconstructing. And I would even say, I don't love the term because of the connotations anymore, but I think there is some sense in which I had to deconstruct the fundamentalist stuff I grew up with. And what was reconstructed afterwards was still like Orthodox Christianity.

Like I'm a member in the Presbyterian Church in America, I affirm a 400 year old theological confession. It's not anything crazy, but it's also obviously different from what I experienced or what I was taught growing up. Yeah. I know the term deconstruction has taken on a life of its own, but I never, I don't know. I always think every Christian should deconstruct if, if, and re and re reconstruct, you know, with a stronger foundation. Cause we're all raised in environments that are getting some things right. Something's wrong. So as the weed out, let's deconstruct from the wrong things and construct around the right things. You know? So, so I don't know. I just never,

if you just take the word for what it actually means, not the connotations it's taken on to me, it's just never been a bad word. I don't know if we use this term, way back in my Bible college days, teaching Bible college back in the late 2000s, that was almost our goals. When we get freshmen that come in, we think they know everything, our goal was to deconstruct.

We want to strip them down so that we can build them back up on the foundation of what the, of actual scripture, not, you know, all the traditions they absorbed from before. And again, maybe they'll end up re-embracing those traditions, but we just want to put a solid biblical foundation under it. Yeah. No, I get that. I remember having conversations with folks along those lines. I think the thing I've come across more recently that I really liked was the thing Brad East wrote about kind of his experience in the classroom. And what

his experience is these days is he said, I feel like my students actually don't come in knowing much of anything. And so I'm trying to help them build from kind of the ground up, which I think would fit like there's a story that just dropped in the Atlantic today about reading habits for college students that would kind of fit with that, I think. Reading habits that there aren't many of? That there aren't any, correct. So yeah, I mean, I think there's some most,

because I mean, one of the big things here is that I was doing all of this before smartphones and before social media. So I had people locally to talk to, but I didn't have the option of creating a Twitter or a Substack. And so that whole process for me happened privately. It happened amongst people I trusted. And it happened without, I mean,

I can't say without any because you're like an 18-year-old kid. So there's always a performance element to what you're doing as you're figuring things out. But much less of a performance element, I think, in that kind of experience than you get when you're active on social media, you're maintaining some kind of email list or sub stack. I think that it becomes something that's almost less about internally trying to work through the questions you have, and it's more about platform building by seeming.

Maybe that's too cynical, I don't know. I have strong takes about technology, but yeah, you, you, you recently, did you recently not, you're still on Twitter, but you had like, you have an account, but you're not active on anymore. Was that K what led to that besides Twitter being an absolute sassful field of trolls and bots. I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like,

I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, my marriage was about to end because I was going to transition and my wife was going to leave me. That was another one. Like that was stuff that was popping up in my feed. What, based on like, what did you say something to, like I changed my car transmission. Oh, you must know. No, no, no, no. There were some incidents between me and various people in a kind of like Christian fascist insurgent scene. At one point, they formed a commercial partnership with a guy who at least online presents non-ironically as some kind of internet Nazi and also publishes a magazine that's contained porn in it, and I documented those ties in fairly exhausting detail and things went south from there. So, yeah, it got to the point where my mentions were just a disaster every day. Of course, what that does to you then is it affects your mood and how you're feeling day

to day. The people that are then on the end of that are your family and your kids, not your friends, your people at your church. So it just became this really stupid thing where after a while I was like, why am I doing this? Like, it's miserable. And yeah, like it just, the reward was so minimal for the amount of just unpleasantness and stress and yeah, like it just was not a good place to be. So the handle is still up and I'll use it sometimes to link to my personal

newsletter that I run off button down. And I've kept the thread alive just so anybody that needs information regarding that crew and that scene can easily access it. Because the thread got viewed over a million times, I think, if I recall correctly, and got amplified by lots. Well, because the network that I was exposing, the guy who runs it has a ton of money. They're very closely tied to Claremont. The guy actually was at the time on the board of a fairly prominent reformed Catholic nonprofit ministry and he's not anymore. Are you allowed to say what it is? I mean, it's all public, right? Can you say that?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was the new founding network, an American reformer. They're connected to Claremont. Yeah, it was, I mean, it's all on my feed. Like anybody who's curious can go look at it. But yeah, like after that, probably a week or so after that, I was just talking with some friends and was like, it's, it's not worth it. Like, yeah, I want the information to be out there for people who don't know who are not as high information about some of these things. But that doesn't mean I need to be like posting on there regularly and participating in all that. What is this kind of cesspool part of humanity on, on social media in particular to, I think Twitter is probably the worst. Um, what is that? Like, is it, is that, um, revealing

what is already there among us humans? Is it exacerbating our fallenness? Is it a symptom of cause? Is it a tiny percentage of people that actual people don't actually act like this, but there are a tiny fringe of, oh yeah. I mean, statistically very few people are on Twitter and amongst those who are on Twitter, the overwhelming majority of tweets come from a very small portion. So yeah, in that sense, it's not representative, which was another reason that I kind of realized why am I doing this? Because the way I kind of justified it was kind of the platform building media producer thing. But I mean, even for like mere orthodoxy, our biggest traffic drivers

actually direct traffic. It's not even social media. Social media is our third or fourth main traffic driver, depending on the month. So I was like, it's not even that big a chunk of our traffic. And I've talked to book publishers who say, yeah, Twitter doesn't sell books. We don't know exactly what does sell books. Well, they know daytime television shows still sell books, but there's very few daytime TV slots. And also the people that buy books they see on daytime TV are almost certainly older and aging out.

So no one knows what sells books, but Twitter doesn't sell books. And so it just got to be over. It was like, I don't even know what I'm doing here. I do think one of the things that happens with online, and I can't take credit for this, this is a Mark Sayers insight from the Rebuilders podcast. But Sayers made the point one time, he said, if you think about a local community that you're part of, even if it's just like a coffee shop that you frequent, there's a real hard cap on how many people that institution can plausibly sell to or

include or if it's a nonprofit, solicit for funds, whatever it might be. Because there's a hard cap, there's a certain incentive that creates toward bridge-building, more ironic forms of engagement. Because if you alienate half of the people that you could plausibly work with in some form, that half that remains might not be enough to sustain the endeavor, whatever it is. And so there's a kind of natural incentive toward not starting unnecessary fights when you have that real world institution that has a geographic boundary that kind of defines it. What happens on the internet is that any kind of online community, their potential membership is anyone with a smartphone and internet access. So you don't have to worry like

well there's only 5,000 people that could plausibly be involved in our thing and if we alienate 3,000 of them we have 2,000 left and we're done. Like you can alienate tons of people and still have millions of potential members. And so Sayers argued I think correctly that what that does is it creates a kind of ratcheting effect within online networks where there's this constant pressure to stand out by being the most devoted, the most committed, the most extreme. Because that's actually how you stand out in these online networks. Because you don't need to be ironic.

You don't need to build bridges. Because there's always more people you can add. And so if there's always more people you can add, how do you stand out? Well, you stand out by being the most, like positively stated, the most devoted, negatively stated, the most extreme. But what then happens is one person escalates it to seven, and the next person says, well, okay, I can go to nine, and it just keeps intensifying. And I think you can see that in lots of different types of online networks across a lot of different

niche groups in society. And what then ends up happening in local churches, this was Sayer's other point as he said, you've got a local church, now you maybe have 200 people in your church on Sunday and all of them that are online, even if it's only like half that are really online, they're operating in different information ecosystems, being shaped by different networks. And all of that is basically invisible to the pastor, even invisible to the other church members, because they don't know what media they're consuming.

They don't know what they're doing on their phone. And yet, it's shaping you all the time. So this is where a lot of my anti-social media and kind of like Neil Postman, Ivan Illich type critique of tech comes from, because it's this invisible shaping thing that by its very nature is going to incentivize extremism that then reverberates in our local communities. There was an episode at the New York Times podcast The Daily did where they talked to pastors who had resigned from their churches over political issues

in the last several years in the US. I remember one of the pastors, there were kind of three incidents that happened. The first two, as I was listening, I was like, I can 100% see the problem coming and I can also totally see how you would have missed it at the time because we just hadn't polarized to the same degree yet. But the third thing, and the one that really broke it for him, is he was preaching and he was trying to come up with an illustration of somebody who is very successful, has done very well in life, but still kind of has, at least publicly, has a certain degree of

humility and kind of everyman quality about them. Doesn't flaunt their wealth or their success. And the guy thought of Tom Hanks. And so in his sermon, he made this illustration and cited Tom Hanks. And then during the week, he got a bunch of calls and emails from congregants that were mad that he was citing a man involved in child trafficking rings, positively in his sermon. And it turned out that he was citing a man involved in child trafficking rings, positively in a sermon. And it turned out that there was this online theory involving Wayfair and Tom Hanks alleging that they were both involved in a child trafficking scheme. And this poor pastor had no idea about any of that because how would he?

Yeah. Like he's busy pastoring. He's not trolling around on these various social media platforms absorbing this information. But he had a bunch of congregants who were, and it had shaped them and it had broken down trust and made any kind of rapprochement almost impossible because they were living in fundamentally different information ecosystems and couldn't even agree on what was true. He ended up resigning from his pastorate not long after that because he's like, I don't know how to pastor this church in this setting.

This is why I mean we do a print product with the magazine. We have a very minimal social media presence. And we really, like in the past, we've had jokes about, we defend nuance and word counts on the internet. Like, I think we have a coffee mug that we sent to Kickstarter backers that said defending nuance on the internet since 2005. And so that's why we're trying to do that,

but it's also why we engage different platforms in the way that we do. Because we really want to be trying to honor complexity, have a certain level of sophistication in our analysis, not because we're trying to be like snobby or ivory tower or whatever. But because people are actually complicated, the world is complicated, and yet we're also called to love people and called to love the world, which presupposes that the world is worth loving in some sense. And so attempting to do that in this environment is really complicated. And for us at least, and for me, it's meant trying to engage in certain ways and opt out of other

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The siloing of information. I, I still trying to wrap my head around what that means for society and discourse and what that will lead to in the future. First of all, I just recently heard about the Tom Hanks thing that he had some like personal cell on Epstein's Island or something and it's going to come out when all the fights. So is this, is this, or do we even know, is it a conspiracy theory or is it totally true? We just don't know. Right. Right. I mean, so part of the angle here, that's really, really bad and really hard, John Asconas, he's a prophet, Catholic UNDC. He has a series of essays in the New Atlantis. And the first one is called, I think, Reality is a Game Now or something like that.

But it's an argument about basically the collapse of consensus reality and the fact that it's really hard to even just relate in healthy ways to neighbors because we exist in these kind of gamified social networks and information ecosystems that incentivize and encourage certain habits of thought that are really corrosive. I don't remember if John goes there or not in the piece. Probably, he almost certainly does. I just haven't read them in about a year. But actually really corrosive of democratic life, because if you think about how democratic life is supposed to work, it's a process of making claims to our neighbors and hearing our neighbors claims and adjudicating those

together to try and arrive at an agreeable shared life that we hold in common. And that's really hard to do in this technological environment. Yeah. It's I, I, I, I, I'm trying to make sense of it all. I mean, you can just mention two, two examples, you know, COVID, what was real? What wasn't, what was, how were we lied to on either side or whatever? What worked? What did I mean? I, that, that you can start a fight within seconds. Even right now, people are mad by me even mentioning COVID and probably for very different reasons or like Israel, Palestine, you'll talk to people and just get two completely different stories of the history, the background, what's

going on and what's true. What's not who killed who, you know, it's, it's a, and that's just I'm trying to like, that does make genuine good faith curious dialogue extremely difficult when two people are heavily steeped in two different, I like your phrase was information ecosystems. It's, it's not just, I don't think it's reduced to, I don't think it's reduced to, I don't think it's reduced to, I don't think it's reduced to, I don't think it's even bigger than that because it does come down to books that are written and people you're talking to. And, um, is this B is this simply, has it been exacerbated or last couple of years? I let's just say in a post COVID kind of world. I think COVID really threw a lot of the blame on the internet. I mean, I think it's a big part of the internet. I think it's a big part of the internet. I think it's a big part of the internet. I think it's a big part of the internet. I think it's a big part of the internet. I think it's a big part of the internet. I think it's a big And, um, is this B is this simply, has it been exacerbated over the last couple of years?

I let's just say in a post COVID kind of world. I think COVID really threw a, I think a lot of people just kind of like given the, the very different perspectives on, on so many things all the way down to mask efficacy and all these things, it seems like it could lead to like an implosion of society. If I'm getting, if I want to get dark and twisted. Yeah. So it's, it's a three-part story. I think the first is the rise of smartphones. This is like the Jonathan Haidt argument in his work that I think is persuasive. It tracks very, I mean, the thing is I'm almost done with Neil Postman's Technopoly right now, which I mean people more know Postman's Technopoly right now, which I mean, people more know Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

But he has another book called Technopoly that I would recommend. And he wrote that in the early 90s, I think. So he was writing this pre-internet even, let alone pre-smartphone. And yet so much of the critique he's getting at there, you just need to intensify it for what we have now. So I think the tech angle is really important. The second thing I think is that you had in kind of 2015 and 16, a lot of turmoil around politics and the erosion of norms in political discourse. And that's not just in the US, because Brexit was also at that time and was a huge shock

and kind of anticipated what would happen with Trump in many ways. Although even there you could go back and say, like, I have a few friends that will run counterfactuals where like, if Huckabee won the GOP nomination in 08 or Santorum won it in 12, Trump never happens. Because they were trying to channel that kind of, and Trump isn't even this anymore, but like social conservative economic populist thing that Trump ran as in 16, even though he isn't running as it in 24. So I think there's a political shift and then yeah, COVID was devastating for trust, I think.

My friend, Brad Littlejohn, he has an essay actually coming in the next print issue of the magazine where he distinguishes between, trying to remember the terms he uses, I think it's political authority and epistemic authority. And what he means by that is, political authority is the cop pulls you over for speeding and writes you a ticket. It's an authority that's defined by office. Epistemic authority is the authority of a parent teaching their child to ride a bike.

And I know how to do this. I've done it before. We have a relationship and you trust me. And what Brad's piece is arguing is basically there's been such an erosion of epistemic authority that it makes political authority less effective because it's not trusted. And so all you really have left is the threat of coercion to back political authority, which again is heavily erosive of democratic life. And again, it also erodes any sense of consensus shared reality between people. And so there's any number of like you could drop any number of names that would be perceived

as an epistemic authority by one side and would absolutely trigger the other side the moment the name even came up. And when your sense of epistemic authority has collapsed in that way, everything gets a lot harder. Fauci, Collins, I mean. Oh yeah, totally gets a lot harder. Fauci, Collins, I mean. Oh yeah, totally. Totally.

Right, exactly. Not to keep riding the COVID horse. That's correct. Or, I mean, there was stuff in the aftermath of George Floyd. I think Radley Balco kind of debunked a lot of it, but there were for a short time, some relatively mainstream sources that were trying to debunk a lot of the claims around the murder of George Floyd. Then Radley Balco wrote a pretty exhaustive kind of three anguished three-part series on his sub stack, ripping through all of that.

But yeah, I mean, there's- What's his name? Real quick? Radley Balco, I think he there's- What's his name? Radley Balco. I think he's a kind of a libertarian. He's done a lot of work on police militarization. And so he was a good one to take that on because he knows the claims that were being made concerned the type of restraint that was used on Floyd by the officer and how normal that restraint was.

The claim that was being made is that it was actually very common and it was being used correctly and the officer was not at fault. Balco was able just through very meticulous reporting on training standards to show that, no, that wasn't the case. Going off memory now, it's been like six months since I read all this. But yeah, you can find that on a sub stack. But it's a good example of there's not facts that can be taken for granted in large groups,

I think is maybe a simple way of putting it. And when that happens, you can try, and I think it's worth doing, to reason back toward commonly held ideas and then try to build out from there. But it's complicated, it's hard, it's exhausting. It requires a certain kind of demeanor, I think, that social media tends to not encourage. Social media tends to shape us in ways that make that work of democratic

deliberation much harder. How do you, I mean, facts that can't be taken for granted. Is this a, are we at a, is this a unique time in history? I mean, history often repeats itself. You know, people say we're in the most divisive time ever or whatever. It's like, well, we did have a civil war, you know, other than a revolution, you know, like history is pretty, pretty brutal. So I don't know if, but then on the flip side, in a post-internet age, we actually are in a category, a very different period in history that is unlike any period before. So is this a, are we to say that facts can't be taken for

granted? Is that really unique to our cultural moment? And if so, how do we even, what does that mean for a democratic society when facts can't be taken for granted? So one of the essays that John wrote for the new Atlantis is a history of the fact. And so I would recommend people read that because right of the fact. Right. Because even the idea of speaking of something in that way is actually a historically contingent thing that is not universal in human history. And so John's piece kind of lays all that out. So I think that's some helpful context to have. I do think the technological angle changes things in fundamental ways. The problems that creates with information, the problem it creates with incentivizing really anti-social, anti-communal behaviors that make just coexisting around a Thanksgiving table really hard. I do think

it's not exactly the same because the tech is not nearly as powerful, but there probably are some interesting parallels to be made with the disruptions of the printing press and some of the uncertainties that that created for people and the upheaval that that caused. For some reason, this passage is always lingered with me. There's a passage in Hunchback of Notre Dame by Hugo where the priest in this story, this is around the time of the, oh, God, it's been so long since I've read it. I don't remember if it's printing press or it's just as literacy is becoming more established in Europe. But he points at a book and says, this will destroy that, and points at the cathedral. And what he means is that the spread of

literacy will make the very ornate, beautiful architecture of a cathedral unnecessary, because that architecture had a function to teach people through image the truths of the faith. And when they can just get it from a book, that becomes unnecessary. And that was a huge shift that we just take for granted now, but 500 years ago didn't feel that way. And 500 years ago, there were misinformation questions, like one of the things that's interesting. If you look at Reformation history, initially John Calvin did not want his sermons published anywhere because he felt that my Bible commentaries are for the church all over, but my sermons are for the church here in Geneva. And it would be wrong for someone in Bern or Zurich to read my sermons and think that

that's exactly what I would say if I were in Bern or Zurich. But what happened is you had lots of very unscrupulous publishers, people that just own movable type printing presses presses that knew Calvin was popular. They would just gather any bundle of sermons they could get their hands on, slap Calvin's name on it, and it would sell. It sounds so recent. Yeah, right. This is the origin of copyright laws and the idea of intellectual property. What ended up happening finally is Calvin got word of this and was horrified at the ideas that were being attributed to him. And he said, okay, I guess we need somebody to transcribe my sermons as I preach them, and they will be published as like the official

record. And so that's why we have the sermons of Calvin today, because Calvin didn't want us to be able to read his sermons. He didn't want people in Zurich to be able to read his sermons, let alone people 500 years later. But we have them because of these disputes around intellectual property, basically, and dishonest publishers 500 years ago. There's things we can learn from it. I had a prof who I had in college that would talk about all this stuff. And somebody put together that Calvin, when he was preaching, was working from a Hebrew or Greek text, depending on the passage he was preaching. And he was translating it into French on the fly as he read the text to the congregation. Because they looked at the text of like the French text of the

Bible verses he was reading as it was in the sermon manuscript and they were like, I don't think there's a French Bible translation from that time that matches this. And so their best explanation of it was that this freakish man was like reading Hebrew, translating it into French as he read and reading it to the congregation. We know really interesting things because of that, but he didn't want those sermons out, but he needed to because of the way the tech was changing how people accessed information. I think that there's part of me that finds that hopeful because humans are innovative and creative and we're good at solving problems. And did we like solve intellectual property? No.

But did they figure out a way to make that particular problem less of a thing? They did. And so I think when I look at things like phones now, or schools now banning phones, like having a locker that students have to put their phones in, that makes me hopeful. Are they doing that? Is that happening? Yeah, yeah.

It's happening more. You're getting schools that go phone free. And so there's some kind of locker or pouch that students have to put their phone in when they get to school. And then they get it back at the end of the day. And consistently the thing that comes out in the stories about this is the students will say, we hated the idea at first. And then a year later, they're like, oh, we love it. It's so great.

So I think there are things that can happen that will be good. And maybe these are just the kind of growing pains that you have with new tech coming online. And it just is much more intense here because of precisely how powerful the tech is. But I mean, I go back and forth like we haven't even really tapped into what AI can do yet or what a product like Vision Pro could do. What's Vision Pro?

Vision Pro is the headset device that Apple makes. And so it's ostensibly intended to be like an augmented reality thing where you could like have a digital display that you're like be like a computer screen but you're just wearing it and typing and then swipe it away. But it's going to be used for virtual reality too. Like that's just inevitable. And so when I think about where like what happens when you have a bunch of men and women who have politically polarized, who have low trust, who are frustrated with dating, have given up on marriage, and you introduce AI that can generate movies from text prompts, and extremely realistic headsets that you can wear.

It's not a wild thing to think that that could be absolutely destructive of like romantic life even more so than it's already happened. So it's hard for me to be super optimistic about these things because I think that the tech that's on its way it's gonna be worse than social media. But I also do think like humans create new technologies and there's tons of unintended consequences when those come out. And often there are corrections made over time, not to take you back to what it was like before that tech, but that at least try to kind of ameliorate some of the damages that get done.

I don't know. Yeah. I'm probably right where you are. We can't catastrophize things with the unknown, the fear. At the same time, humans, if you believe in total depravity, our depravity is not going away. And as tech keeps getting more and more complex and innovative and, um, do we put faith in humanity to put necessary restraints and guard rails around things like AI or different advancements, you know, or, you know, I read a while back that the one, you know, well, I mean, not, not to take a violent turn here, but I mean, um, that, you know, the prediction that by 2050, more people will be having sex with robots than with other humans, unless technology

doesn't advance and which will bring the cost down. And unless people's sexual impulses don't stay the same, they'd go, they, they kind of diminish. Well, the native, those things are going to happen. I mean, we are, we are, it's going to say the same and technology is going to keep advancing. And anyway, but that, that's kind of, but then I don't know that is overly catastrophizing. Is there more faith in humanity? You know that? Yeah. Well, and this is what part of what I, I just was at covenant seminary last weekend doing some talks there. And so one of the things that I brought up

in the second talk, largely just working from some pieces we've published at the magazine by a writer named Stephen Peter. So Stephen's argument in the pieces that I was working from, as he said, if you think about the way culture is meant to function, Culture functions invisibly by kind of orienting us towards certain norms and practices that we just take for granted. So if I walk up to someone on the street and extend my hand to them, they're not going to flinch and think I'm going to punch them. They're going to know that I'm like intending to shake their hand as we're being introduced. So that's the work that culture does. It kind of just organically, imperceptibly, slowly, invisibly over time, teaches you a certain way of life and it teaches you that

certain things are just normal, just what we do. And Stephen's argument is that the culture basically doesn't exist anymore. That there's not anything creating those kind of norms and passing them on to people. And so his argument is that a lot of the debates that Christians have about cultural engagement just completely miss the point of where we are, because you don't really need to talk about transforming the culture or purity from the culture or whatever it might be in our context because there is no culture. His argument is we need to be thinking in terms of repair the culture. The idea is being a church that says, hey, you don't know how to relate to the opposite

sex. We can show you. You don't know how to be married or how to parent or how to manage your job or your money or like these kind of basic things we can show you. And we aren't perfect. We're not going to like fix your life. But what we have is yours. Here it is. And I think there's something really powerful in that because I think the flip side to a lot of this inhumanity, whether it's on social media as we started off talking about or the potentialities you're talking about around sexuality is that I think people are actually made for reality. They're

made for relationship. Ultimately, they're made to know God. And so there will be deep, deep, deep longings that people have that can't be ignored or just medicated away through technological amusements. Maybe for a little while they can, but not permanently. And so, I mean, I even, I talked to somebody this weekend who told me that his 14 year old daughter told him last week, I hate the culture that I live in. And she's not talking about like stuffy conservative Christian, like evangelical subcultures like what I grew up in in the 90s. That's not what's on her mind at all. What's on her mind is like, I guess I, I'm presupposing here based on profiles, because he didn't get into all the details, but I'm assuming it's smartphones, it's social media, it's not knowing how to have a conversation. That's the stuff. And so I think like, as a Libri person, like for me, like that is how I came back to faith, was like showing up at Libri and feeling welcomed, feeling like I belong, even though everyone there is a stranger to me. And most of us were all strangers to each other because we were all students staying there for a few weeks or a month. But we got there and the helpers and the workers at the community were interested

in us. They wanted to know what was on our minds. How did you end up here? Why are you here? And they didn't want to fix everything overnight, but they just wanted to be in relationship. And I mean, so my wife spent over a year at the Swiss Libre, and her tutor that she had there, so when you come to the Libre, half of your day is work just around the community and half is spent in study on whatever is bothering you or you're thinking about. And her tutor actually told her, for your study time for your first term here, I just want you to go on walks in the mountains and think about the fact that God loves you and God loves the world. And that was what she needed. She didn't need a bunch of books. She didn't need a bunch of arguments about the historicity

of the resurrection. And I'm not saying those things don't matter because they're in the creed or we don't have the faith without them. But with where she was in her life at that time, she needed to be able to like look outside and say, that's really beautiful. I'm so glad that there's a God who made that and loves it and delights in that beauty. Like being able to just have that thought was really nothing else was going to happen until she got there. And I think I was not in exactly the same place, because we have different stories, but I was in not a totally different place myself. And I think that's where a lot of folks are. And so in some sense, that creates a really exciting opportunity for

the church to be able to be a place that is healthy and safe and functions, where people learn how to live in common with other people. And so, that's the stuff that I get excited about. Well, the church has a wide open, in light of everything we're saying, the church has a wide open door to be that. Oh yeah. That embodiment of the reality that humans deep down actually are longing for,

to know and be known in an embodied communal environment. On the flip side though, there's all these other enslaving cultural artifacts that are, are enslaving, you know, the cell phone is a perfect example. I've, I've seen that. I've, I've, what you said about kids at first resisting and not wanting to give up their cell phone. And then when they do, when they're free from it, they realize, Oh, this is better. But then the second they get it, they go right back to being enslaved to it. You know, that's what in my more pessimistic moments, it's like, I want to hope that humans will find and pursue actual embodied reality and say no to these enslaving properties, but

we're addicted to our enslaving properties. I don't know. So I, so many people quit social media and then he jumped back on night. I'm not predicting that, you know, but like, you know, like I've deleted my Twitter account several times and then, you know, I want to see what's going on. You know, at this point I've tweeted probably 12 times in the last year. So I feel like the, that habit has been broken. There's other habits around my tech use that I would like to change. Going back to this, you know, facts that can't be agreed upon as, as kind of a dangerous place to be, or at least a destructive place to be in society. Let's apply that to politics.

And we're in this really volatile political season right now. And I, I see a lot of just crossover there. I'll see really smart people say the exact opposite thing about different presidential candidates. You know, it's almost like word for word, the same thing only about the exact opposite person, you know, like not telling the truth or immoral or well, you know, like five questions that came in my mind. Let, let's just, the word broadly, how are you processing our political moment? Are you, with their immoral or well, you know, like five questions that came to my mind. Let's just, the word broadly, how are you processing our political moment? Are you, are you encouraged discouraged? How would you help the church navigate this political, this kind of strange

political moment we're in? Yeah. Or who are you voting for? Jake, maybe somebody asked me, somebody asked me that I was at a conference and during the Q and a, I gave a talk on politics. It was not like a biblical theology and political identity. And the first question, so pressing, who are you voting for? Like, I laughed. He's like, like, Oh, you're serious. You want me to answer that? I mean, I think part of the thing here, Jonah Goldberg had a really good piece about this maybe about a month ago in the dispatch where he said, we should make a distinction between like voting for somebody, like promoting them, supporting them or endorsing them or whatever it might be. And to a large degree, I'm not that concerned

about who a person votes for. I might be concerned, well, I am concerned about the reasons a person might vote for someone. And I can imagine lots of really bad reasons to cast a vote for someone. But I mean, like the way I'm looking at this is But I mean, like the way I'm looking at this is you can look at Trump and the cruelty of the immigration policies, January 6th. You can look at the fact that Vance doesn't seem to have any moral compass besides his own ambition. Like that makes me really, really nervous,

like about basic rule of law stuff. And now you add on the fact that the GOP is basically a pro-choice party. What am I doing? At the same time, like I'm very concerned about Harris's record on life issues in California. I'm very concerned about Walz's record on family and sexuality issues in Minnesota. And so I can look at both of those and then I can say I can understand trying to think charitably and sympathetically about my neighbors. I can understand the person who looks at the abortion stuff with Harris in California, particularly around our handling of the journalist who documented the Planned Parenthood thing where they were selling fetal remains. I can look at someone who sees Harris and Walz's

record on these kinds of things and say, I'm so appalled and scandalized by this that I'm very reluctantly and unenthusiastically voting for Trump. By the same token, I can understand why somebody who would look at Trump and Vance's stuff and say, I'm very reluctantly and unenthusiastically voting for Harris. And I don't want to make that a test of Christian fellowship or like Christian belief because I think we have really bad options, and I think we should be able...I mean, I just...maybe this is just going back to the start, but like, Jesus says in John 13 that the world will know that you are mine by how you love each other. In John 17, he actually cranks it up, and he says, by this, he's praying to the Father

on the night before his crucifixion, and says something to the effect of, the world will know that you sent me, that by their oneness that mirrors our oneness. And so, the way Schaeffer talked about that is, he said, you know, there's some sense in which Jesus is looking at the world and saying, I'm giving you a litmus test. You can look at the church and if they don't love each other, you are authorized by me to say that I didn't come from God. That's crazy. Which is a really sobering thing. And yeah, I think that is a very plain reading of what

Jesus says in his high priestly prayer in John 17. And so if that's what is said there about Christian love, I want to be really careful about how I judge a brother or sister based purely on a vote. Now, public behavior, endorsements, the manner of your support, those are all different. And so if your response to someone raising concerns about January 6th is to just ridicule them and mock them and completely invalidate all those fears while ignoring everything in the congressional reports that we have, that's a problem. And that's something we need to talk about. Or if your response to someone who's worried about family integrity in light of some of the stuff

that Walls has done in Minnesota around sex and gender is to completely dismiss that, I think that's also a problem that we need to talk about. So I think we can critique the way that someone supports a candidate, the way that they speak in public about their candidate or the candidate they don't like more often. I think all of that is fair because all of those things are the 10 commandments don't get thrown out the window when we start talking about politics.

The fruit of the spirit, there's not some cordoned off area of our life where the fruit of the spirit doesn't apply. Now, there are folks who try to say that. I've had many fights with them over the last few years because they want to say that the crisis of our political moment is such that we just need to win and crush our enemies. That's not how Paul talked about Nero. Nero seems pretty bad. Yeah, I don't see any reason to say that we get a cordon off parts of our life from the demands that scripture places on Christian believers. And if that's true, then I think it's important to be modest about certain things, but it's also important to

reckon with a lot of really bad behaviors that shouldn't be tolerated in Christian leaders or in churches. And how that gets translated in practice, I think, is really complicated and case by case and depends on tons of factors that you can't really pontificate on from afar. But I do think, I mean, even there, if the church can be a community where we actually do that well, where maybe someone can say, the way you said that was wrong, and it's wrong for these reasons,

and brother or sister, you need to repent. If we're in a type of community where someone can hear that and respond well, and the relationship is preserved, that in itself makes us wildly unique in this current moment. So I think even there, there's real opportunity, but there's got to be a way to have the patience and the hope for our neighbors to be able to engage in that kind of thing. I got something on, I do some work with a magazine called Plow that's published by a radical Anabaptist community that lives from a common purse. So no one has private property.

Things are held in common. They joke that when people ask them what's the best and worst thing about that kind of life, it's the same answer. It's the people. The best things are the people that you get to share life with and you get to care for and they get to care for you and you get to see them grow and change and share all these things in common. And the worst part is the people that you are stuck with who infuriate you in the same ways over and over, and you have the same fights with. And I think that's not just true for groups like the

Bruderhof. I think that's probably the Church. I didn't realize the Plough was a radical Anabaptist publication. Oh, yeah. It actually started before the Bruderhof and it started in Germany in the late 1910s right after World War I by a couple, Eberhard and Emmy Arnold. Eberhard had been a pastor and had also been involved in a Christian socialist movement in Germany and had gotten swept up in World War I era nationalism. Then as the war was winding down, kind of pulled back and looked at everything that had been lost, not just in Germany, but in France, and Russia, and the UK,

and Austria, and Southern Europe. Just was horrified at the fact that he had bought into certain political narratives about what was happening when really it was just mass carnage and human suffering and a generation being wiped out to some degree. It made him pause and want to step away from what he was doing and try to start fresh. Plough grew out of that and that's also how the Bruderhof got started. Interesting. fresh. And so, Plough grew out of that, and that's also how the Bruderhof got started. Those people trying to figure out how do we follow Jesus well in this time of kind of we're living in the wreckage of World War I and reckoning with the ways that we ourselves

were kind of complicit in a lot of what happened. And so it was born of this very simple, I mean, it's funny because the Buddha of Gate profiled in books that are like about utopian communities. And yet it is like the least utopian kind of thing I've ever been around. Because there's a profound awareness of fallibility and sin and failings. And they're trying to follow Jesus in the midst of that. So, it's not a revolutionary thing at all. We're reading the Bible and we're trying to

figure out how to do what it says. And in their case, they read Acts 4 and were just like, great, we're just going to do that exact thing in the most extreme way we can think. And they've been doing it for over 100 years now. So, yeah. Politically, are you Anabaptist leaning? So, in terms of policies, I'd basically be a Christian social democrat. So, the question you asked earlier, I don't recall if the American solidarity party candidate is on the ballot in Nebraska or not, but that would be my American solidarity party. Yeah. What's there? I've somebody I don't know. I'm not totally, totally

familiar with that. I mean, basically like Christian social Democrat, which is going to be like pro-life. They're gonna be, it's just, I don't remember what the latest policy thing is regarding gay marriage and LGBT issues, but it would certainly be like recognized as socially conservative by most folks on those things. But then also we'll have things like, we want a really generous, like, child tax credit or allowance of some

kind, births should be free, very pro-worker rights. So, like, if you spend time, like, reading Catholic social doctrine from kind of Leo the 13th onward, it would be broadly representative of what you'd find there. The very, very shorthand for it would be broadly representative of what you'd find there. The very, very shorthand for it would be kind of like social right, economic left, but that almost kind of obscures more than it says, I think. But yeah, I mean, I would be fairly well aligned with that, which is not Anabaptist because of how it views government, but it's also very much not either of the parties we have in the US right now. Although it's been interesting because I feel like in the last 10

years there's been these short little moments where it seemed like there were things that were more like that starting to bubble up and then they just always fizzle out. So part of what I'm even trying to figure out now is I'm about to be 37. So I'm not early career anymore. I'm not in my 20s anymore, closer to 40 than 30. And so you hit that point where you're like, okay, what are the things that I need to learn from what I've seen to this point that's going to shape how I... Because also this is a phase in life where you are moving into different roles professionally and having different kinds of opportunities, which comes with more power and a lot more pressure and the stakes are higher.

So you want to have a certain sobriety about how you look at the past and what you learn from it, what you learn from your own experiences. I think we'll go back to the siloed information. I think that's what makes cross-party political discourse, people who are either very strongly on the left or very strongly on the right. And within the church, obviously, there's way more people on the right than the left. But they're just, the silo and information all the way down to the algorithms and the stuff they're watching. And it just does make conversations sometimes seemingly impossible going back to when we were saying earlier about just a whole different set of facts. And I just don't know how to,

those can be really hard conversations to have when you can't have an agreed upon set of facts. And as somebody who I do lead more and a Baptist, so I'm, I'm looking at kind of both sides of just two sides of the empire, but I'm almost like I'd make it, I'd make a good referee because I can, I can like sort of, I can like shape shift and turn into a, you know, I, I can understand why somebody, like if I wasn't a Christian, you know, I would probably be more committed to one side or the other. But I feel like I can, I can, I can both critique and resonate with each side and their concerns, you know, but I don't see that ability very common with people who are, who are actually on one of those. Like I, when I hear my progressive friends be just absolutely bewildered and

appalled that anybody who says they're Christian could even vote for Trump. And then I hear them describe what they think a Trump supporter is. I'm like, you don't understand. You don't understand. You haven't taken the time to actually talk to and listen to, you know, a Trump supporter or the whole like, you know, 80% of white evangelicals vote over Trump in 2016. I'm like, first of all, that stat is it's 80% of people who voted, voted for Trump, but then you don't even curiously ask why you might, you might get 17 different reasons. Why? What about the other option? I mean, I mean, Hillary is basically a female version of Trump with all the power and domination

and lies and to see deceit and power. And we all know she killed Epstein and she went to the islands all the time. You know, like, it's like, what, like, doesn't that like, I think your point I'm kind of trying to get to your point about the reasons for why somebody might vote slash support, slash endorse a certain candidate or that that's huge. Like that, that, that actually, it might be the main question when we're trying to dissect has your political leanings turned into an idolatry, you know, um, what kind of underlying hope are you putting behind this vote and support? Um, I kind of didn't, yeah, land that plane, but yeah, just expressing the kind of like, I

do get discouraged when the church, which should be unified across political differences is divided and to address that division, it just seems sometimes next to impossible because of the very, very different siloed information from which people are even getting their political discipleship from. Well, maybe if there's another idea to bring in here that can kind of help with some of that. This is another Mark Sayers thing. I came across from Sayers anyway, but he's picking up on it from a psychologist

named Edwin Friedman. I just know Sayers' work. Sayers' most recent, I think it's still his most recent book. It's called A Non-Anxious Presence. One of the things that he talks about in there is that, and again, I'm kind of paraphrasing after probably 18 months since I read the book, how long it's been, but yeah, that sounds right. Like, if you go into conversations about these things, feeling defensive, fearful, kind of jittery, that comes across as you're talking to somebody and now you're not even really having a conversation anymore. You're just kind of like shouting your anxieties at each other without naming it that way. And so if you can, and so much, it's basic Christianity in some sense and it's

one of those things that's simple but not easy. If it's true, I remember having this conversation with youth workers in the high school, when I was in high school at the church I grew up in, because they were really, really, really spooked. I mean, they were spooked that I was reading C.S. Lewis, because they told me C.S. Lewis wasn't saved. But they were also spooked that I was reading Albert Camus, because I came across his name

in Schaeffer, and I was curious, and and I was bookish and that's what I did. And they were so freaked out that I was reading this French agnostic novelist and philosopher and I was kind of a mouthy, very frustrated high schooler. And so one day I asked one of them, I'm like, I want, I'm going to give you this book, whatever Camus it was I was reading, and I want you to like find the page number where like Christianity isn't going to be true anymore. And just mark that and I'll just read up to there. Is that okay? You were a mouthy teenager. I love that.

Yeah, that didn't get a great response as you can imagine. But I mean, then I went to Libri and Libri wasn't afraid about me reading Camus. They actually had people there who had read him too and appreciated him. He's actually a really interesting thinker who has very strange overlaps with Christianity in ways that you wouldn't expect. I've heard that. Yeah. So just being, so me like doing weird 2000s pre-digital version of deconstructing, talking to youth worker who's like scandalized that I'm reading Camus.

What I'm learning in that conversation, the most important things I'm learning in that conversation isn't even about what's being said. It's about the atmosphere. It's the feel of the conversation. There is something about this that scares them. There's something about this that causes them to feel very fearful and worried, ostensibly for me, but maybe for other reasons that I can't know. What is that? Why are they afraid? And now I'm off to the races. Whereas when I'm talking to somebody at Libre about the exact same thing, they're like, Oh, yeah, like I've read

these other books by cameo, you should check them out when you get a chance. The thing that I find really interesting is X. And now we're just having a conversation about this book that we're reading. And there at least I mean, I wasn't there at the time, but they were working from this sense of like, yeah, I believe Christianity is a true account of the world. And if it's true, it will still be true after we've finished reading this Camus book. And we can talk about that. We don't have to be threatened by it. And so much of what needs to be able to happen in these hard conversations is we need to be able to have a calm, non-anxious conversation about the issue, not because the issue is unimportant, but precisely because it is.

Right. And if in trying to talk about it, we make the thing our own fears and anxieties, then we're not going to be dealing with the issue. To deal with the issue, we actually have to be calm and sober and patient enough to be able to deal with whatever the issue is. Like, I have a pastor friend who, he gets criticized sometimes by his church. He's in a pretty established, very conservative denomination. And he affirms everything that that denomination's confessional standards teach, but he gets questioned sometimes about how he doesn't address culture war issues from the pulpit. We were talking about it, and he said, well,

hey, I don't know that that's true because there are lots of issues that are implicated in the culture war that are also addressed in Scripture and when they come up in Scripture I talk about them. But he said, what I think those people want me to do is they want me to be really angry about it and talk about it all the time and talk about how horrible it all is. And he said I'm not gonna do that. And then he shared a story. He said the reason I'm not not going to do that is because he's a rural pastor, solo pastor church and he also does youth ministry because he's the only pastor. And in their tradition, the youth ministry is basically like catechesis.

So we're just going over our denomination's kind of preferred catechism. And during COVID, he actually was doing video calls with the kids in his youth group to talk about the catechism and whatever else was going on in their life. And there was a conversation where some things around sexuality came up and he didn't freak out. He didn't go through the roof. He didn't start, like, anxiously scolding this high school kid. He just listened to what they were saying. All the while knowing that he knew what he thought about it. He knew what scripture taught. He knows what their confessions say. But he just let them talk. And then after the conversation was

over, he reached out to the mom and was like, Hey, I had this conversation with your kid. Is there anything else that you're talking to them about that would be good for me to know? And had a great conversation with the mom and then was able to pastor and love this child and his youth ministry. That's awesome. And I mean, the kid, to my knowledge, is still a high schooler, so I don't know where their story is going to end up. But minimally, I think they're going to feel like they can trust their pastor to listen and as a safe person they can talk to. And that seems better

to me than a lot of the alternatives that are out there. Right, man. That's so good. Jake, you're how many books do you read a week? I just, whatever I tune into what you're doing, it just like this guy must be like five bucks a week or something and retains it all. Is that, is that, I mean, are you a speed reader? Do you have a photographic memory or how do you do it? Retain so much. That's a wide variety. I've wondered if there's some kind of foot. Cause I found very quickly when I first started trying to read on Kindle that I didn't like it because I couldn't find passages that I wanted to go back and cite.

I'm the same way, yeah. I could picture where it was on the page, and then I just had to thumb through and locate, because I was like, I know it's this bottom left part of this page, so I'm just looking at that part of each page to find it. So maybe, I don't know if that's photographic memory or not, I don't think I have it the way most people describe it.

It's my job to read because I run a magazine. It's also something I enjoy doing and I've also been really blessed with lots of good friends who also read a lot. And so there's some sense in which I feel like there are books that I've kind of read vicariously through them. So I don't know. I, it, yeah. Do you have a top five favorite most impactful books? Readers hate that question. I know. But any, any of, anyone's to stand out that you would say, man, if you haven't read X,

Y, and Z, you should go check it out. Yeah. The, the ones that come, I mean the, the books that I've spent the most time with is Lord of the Rings, and that's an easy one. I listen to it on audiobook once or twice a year, probably, and I've read it probably 10 times, just reading. Oh my God, the whole series. Yeah, yeah. Tolkien's just in my head at this point. I'll joke sometimes about the shoulder angels that we have, like the Emperor's

New Groove scene where he has the angel and the demon kind of telling it, Krog telling him what to do. I'm like, who those shoulder angels are for you is actually really important. Tolkien is definitely one of mine at this point because he's just kind of in me. A lot of people have read that though, but I would say that the books are, like Peter Jackson is a great filmmaker who doesn't really understand Tolkien's moral imagination very well. And so I do encourage people to read the books if they haven't. But aside from that, the ones that come to mind would be The Supper of the Lamb by Capone. He's this delightful 1960s era New York Episcopalian, who was kind of the home chef extraordinaire, and he's just hilarious.

Supper of the Lamb? The Supper of the Lamb. It's basically like imagine Walker Percy writing, like make Walker Percy a New York Episcopalian and have him write a cookbook and you're kind of in the ballpark. That'd be one. Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vonakin would be another. The thing people miss about that is everyone thinks it's a love story and it kind of is, but it's even more so a conversion story.

Their conversion story is really interesting because they go from this kind of hedonistic, intellectual paganism to Christianity, largely via C.S. Lewis, who they knew because they were doing this at Oxford in the 1950s. And so as they were reading these books, they could write a note to C.S. Lewis and meet him at the pub and talk about it. Which is really delightful because Lewis just seems beyond his greatness as a writer,

just seems to have been a genuinely kind, delightful human being. You pick up on that more in stories like that. There's a letter that Sheldon includes because part of the story is that Sheldon's wife, Davy, dies unexpectedly very young from this mysterious illness. You get to read the letter that C.S. Lewis wrote to Sheldon after that happened, and you just get a sense of the person. Those should be two. I think this is actually, maybe it's conversion narratives that I just love. Jabber Crowe by Wendell Berry is another that's really dear to me. I just reread that earlier this year, actually. That's another story of how this person, he comes to a kind of faith and ultimately it's like the way the narrator

written by Berry describes it is learning what it means to live with love in one's heart. It's kind of at the heart, at the center of the book. And it's a really, it's really a beautiful story. Those are the ones that come immediately to mind. I think Marilyn Robinson's novels are marvelous. This would be a more obscure one. She was a member of the Bruderhof. She's a poet named Jane Tyson Clement. She was part of the Bruderhof her whole life and wrote poetry and was basically just circulated within the community. And then after they died, after she died, they published it. And some of it's really wonderful.

Those would be the ones that just come to mind off the top of my head. Did you name your kid after Wendell Berry? So our daughter is Davy Joy named for Davy Vonakin and Joy Lewis, Joy Gresham. She has Lewis's wife. And then yeah, our son is Robert Wendell. So Robert is my dad and then Wendell is for Barry. We actually in 2019, I got to go speak at a conference in Louisville 2019, I got to go speak at a conference in Louisville that Barry was at. And so R. Wendell got to meet Wendell Barry. We got a picture.

But it was funny at one point, we were talking to the woman at the Barry Center book table who turned out to be Wendell and Tanya's granddaughter. And she heard me because Wendell, R. Wendell was four at the time. No, he had just turned five. And he was being a very energetic, rambunctious five-year-old boy in this conference hall with lots of people, many of whom were elderly,

and I was terrified of my Wendell slamming into some old Kentuckian who had known Wendell Berry for 50 years and injuring them. So I'm trying to get the kid to calm down. And she kind of smiles when she hears me say his name. And she's like, is that for my grandfather? I said, yeah. And then I made something fun about he is the most energetic and contrary child I have ever seen. And Virginia looks at me and goes, you know, you guys did that to yourselves, right? She told us they would have old timers who had known Barry as a little boy come into the bookstore sometimes and she'd be like, Oh, tell me stories about what my grandpa was like when he was little. And they're always like, Oh, we can't tell you any of those stories.

Oh, that's classical. Jake, thanks so much, for the conversation. Where can people find you and your work? Where do you want to direct people to? Mere orthodoxy. And then I have a sporadic, I tried to do it weekly, but I've been failing lately email newsletter on button down. So it's kind of like Substack, just a different product. So yeah, button down. I think it's just button down.com slash, or about down.email slash shake meter or on mere orthodoxy. Awesome, man. Thanks for coming on the show, man. Yeah, thank you. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Greetings and God bless.

This is Tyler Burns. And this is Dr. Jamar Tisby. And we want to invite you to check out our podcast, Pass the Mic, Dynamic Voices for a Diverse Church. Pass the Mic has been speaking directly to the core concerns of black Christians for over a decade. On our show, we've got interviews from theologians, historians, actors, activists, and so much more.

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