Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1116: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West: Dr. Andrew Wilson

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

Andrew is Teaching Pastor at King’s Church London, and has degrees in history and theology from Cambridge (MA) and King’s College London (PhD). He is a columnist for Christianity Today, and has written several award-winning books, most recently Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, which forms the backrop for our conversation. Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in a Round. My guest is Andrew Wilson, who is a teaching pastor at King's Church London and a columnist for Christianity Today. He has degrees in history and theology from Cambridge University and King's College in London. He's the author of several books, including this most recent one called Remaking the World, How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. And this forms the topic for our conversation together. And I really, really enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will too. So please welcome back to the show, the one and only Dr. Andrew Wilson. Andrew, was it in 2016 when I was in Eastbourne when we recorded, when you were on the podcast last, or have you been on since then?

Do you remember? Oh, no, I have been on the podcast. I think we spoke about spiritual gifts in the church, charismatic gifts, and we had a decent conversation about race and diversity in the church as well but i don't know if that was the same conversation maybe we've spoken once or twice so maybe once since then but um i i i think i've told this story before but my first time uh coming across your work was in that probably a lot of people say this right that that debate you had with rob bell gosh 12 years ago um and it kind of, I don't, it didn't go

viral might be a little too strong, but I feel like a lot of people saw that video. Yeah. It's probably the thing I've done. Most people have seen. Yeah. Okay. And I remember he, he, he did, he was not on his game and I, I, I was like, who's this Andrew Wilson guy? He's really sharp. And anyway, we've connected and been friends ever since. So, um, your, your new book caught me by surprise, Remaking the World, How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Now, I already have so many questions. One is, what's a biblical scholar doing writing on what I thought was American history? And then number two, I love the audacity of you writing on 1776.

And then in the first few pages saying this book actually has very little to do with, uh, the founding of the United States. I mean, it's part of it, but it's not, you know,

an English guy. Um, so the first question, why have you, I know you have history as kind of part of your degrees but i always think of you as just like a biblical scholar where did this where did your where did you want to write on history come from so i'll say primarily i'm i think of myself as a pastor so i which is not just an out like i know academically i've done i did a phd in theology

my undergrad degree was history and theology but really I come to it as a pastor and as a preacher in a way, thinking I do, I have to do cultural apologetics, or that's the language I would often use now to describe it all the time. And so I think I'm coming to this much more as I'm trying to understand the culture we're in, and I've found that history can be a really good way of introducing it to people. And it can be, I hope, a really compelling story to help people get their, you know, categories, which would sound a little bit dull if you said, well, we believe the following seven things are all work at once. You tell people the story, it makes it more arresting, I hope.

But for me, the genesis of this project was just, was a collision really between two different things that I came across in my just wider reading being interested. One was I just didn't know that the steam engine was invented the day before the Wealth of Nations was written or published. And that that happened in the same year as the Declaration of Independence. No one ever taught me any of those things. And so when I read those, there was one book I read, and I suddenly thought, oh, wow, this is a really significant year in terms of its economic and its industrial and its political ramifications. I'd like to learn more about that as a subject of interest. And that just began as a sort of, oh, maybe one day I could write something explaining this story just for fun.

But along the same time, I then read, I was coming across the work of John Height, who I know you've come across as well, and Joseph Henrich and others about this sort of the way that the Western world is the acronym WEIRD, you know, Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic. And I don't remember quite how it happened. But there was a moment where I put the two together, I think it was in the shower. And I just thought thought hang on a second I might be able to explain how our culture became like this using this acronym drawing on this one year in which so many of these changes were sort of fermented and really took off and then I've just found that with that that was an interesting story to, and I began to think it might work.

And so I've very much done this as a sort of apologist, preacher, pastor person, rather than, I'm not a historian by training, although I've read a bunch of history and theology, but that wasn't really what was motivating it. I think it's an attempt to say, this is why the culture you're in feels and thinks and behaves the way it does. And this is a way of telling that story rooted in one year that hopefully particularly america will be interesting you make a great pastoral argument for why understanding history matters for one you have that cool quote

or that quote that famous quote i forget who it's by you know if you control the past you control the future you control the present who is it yeah so this is all wells yeah if the people who control the present control the past right the people who control the past control the future so so that works i mean that on the flip side if you understand the past it helps you understand the present and future and get you get your kind of bearings about where we're at as a society um yeah i yeah i i had no clue how many things happened in 1776. You go down this list of things in this one year alone. I mean, things are unrelated, seemingly unrelated to each other, right? Yeah. I think they are.

In many cases, they are genuinely unrelated. So I think there's, you know, so I mentioned the steam engine, the wealth of nations, Edward Gibbon's history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon's history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, all the events in America that obviously would be more well known to, I guess, most of your listeners, but those who aren't American, you know, the Declaration of Independence, the Battle of Brooklyn, Washington's Crossing, Common Sense, Thomas Paine's book, and even things like the Virginia Declaration, which ends up sort of encoding things like religious liberty and freedom of the press. I mean, just so many things in the American scene. But in Europe, the Enlightenment is, you know, it's high noon of the Enlightenment, really. It's a sort of dramatic period in the development of what we now think of

as post-Christianity or the move towards a secular public square. Immanuel Kant is drafted in the Critique of Pure Reason. David Hume writes his dialogues and then dies. Captain Cook sailing around the world and encountering all sorts of Polynesian peoples, which has massive implications for the history of the Pacific Islands and subcontinents and so on. And that's not even all of it. Romanticism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Sturm und Drang in Germany. I mean, it's just a remarkable year where you'd look at nearly every feature of modern life and say, well, in some way,

that is connected to events that took place in this year. And it's just a really great story, I think. Whether I've told it well is another matter, but as in the story as a whole is really compelling because these things are, as you say, they're kind of independent. It's not like the American Revolution happens and suddenly people go,

we must write stories about the self. Like that's, they are obviously connected at a looser level, but they aren't causally related in part because news takes three months to travel from one side of the Atlantic to the other. And so these things are not all directly related to one another in sort of cause and effect.

It's just, there is something going on and not just out in the world, actually in the church as well. You know, the Amazing Grace and the Olney Hymns and Rock of Ages and religious freedom and abolitionism in Britain and so many moves like that that are all happening at once. It's just a very exciting period. But like you said early on in the book, this isn't come out of nowhere. Like there's various things leading up to it. What would you say are some of those things leading up to just 1776 being this cataclysmic upheaval of so many things going on, for good or for ill? I mean, obviously, the printing press, I mean, a few hundred years before that, 1776 wouldn't have happened without the printing press.

But what are some other things that were going on that kind of gave some of the momentum to some of these massive changes? Yes. I mean, I think in some ways the Protestant Reformation would be, not just as an event, but as a sort of a 50-year process in the 16th century for its impact in Northern Europe in particular, you know, obviously Britain, well it wasn't Britain at the time, but Britain and the Netherlands, and probably setting a slightly different path into what effectively obviously fragments Christendom in the end, which I think is a significant part of the story, but also a huge significant rise in literacy which is then very significant in the exchange of knowledge which is taking place at the time um i think it's also in a way does

contribute to the competition between european nations for empires and that was already starting obviously before the reformation but and that's a big part of this story for for good but also much for ill as we know um i think probably the shape of something like uh abolitionism wouldn't have taken the form it did without that being a protestant offshoot as well at least in the in its incarnation in britain and i think that the developments in technology which are really beginning to accelerate are are also as i try and make this case in the book are really beginning to accelerate are also, as I try and make this case in the book, they are connected to Protestantism as well in certain ways and very much a product of English-speaking nations, which is a fascinating story as to why that is.

So I think there's a lot of things that probably have roots somewhere in that combination you mentioned between the printing press and Protestantism. And I think in many others, some of it is political changes beginning. Some of it is just a sort of almost accelerating of history that you begin to reach a tipping point where changes and innovations get baked in rather than going along in a flurry of new developments and then running out of steam and cannibalizing themselves.

It does seem that in the mid-18th century, maybe it's just the trajectory of society as a whole, but a lot of these developments begin to get baked in and reinforce one another. And one idea sparks another idea. And so although, as I said, these things are not causally connected, someone like your own Benjamin Franklin is involved anecdotally or in a sort of very observant kind of way with many of these things. So he pops up in the cafes of the Enlightenment, and he's also friends with all of the lunar men developing industrial technology. And he's also a founding father, and he's also a diplomat in France. And so you could live, like David Hume

did, a life where you're connected to a lot of these changes. And some of that is society's beginning to reach a level of education, literacy, and affluence that change begins to accelerate. And so some of it is that. But a lot of that, I think, has to do with Protestantism as well. Okay. You mentioned as one of these many significant events, Benjamin Franklin's diplomatic journey to France. What was significant? I think you maybe go back to that later on the book, which I haven't got to yet. What was significant about that specific?

Yeah, I think I was having trouble. But basically because the French won the war rather than the Americans. That's a harsh way of saying it. It's implicated. That's a very overstated version. But I think that line in Hamilton is that you cheat with the French now I'm fighting with France and with Spain.

But obviously, I think that the contribution of the involvement of the French in the American-British war. So the real superpowers in the world at the time are Britain and France and originally England and France. And they'd been fighting for, well, I'd say a thousand years in a way from 1066 to present day. You could trace the story. And we had had a huge, which would be known as the French-Indian War in America, but in much of the rest of the world,

it's just known as the Seven Years' War. And that conflict, which obviously then Ben Franklin goes to Paris and tries to get the French to join in. And effectively, the French say, well, maybe, but then eventually battles start turning the Americans' way. And the French say, great, we'll pile in. But that has two huge implications because it obviously means that the Americans in the end win. So, you know, Yorktown and all that is not least because the French Navy and the French Army. But also it has cataclysmic impacts in france so it's often said that britain loses the war but wins the peace and france is the other

way around so france wins the war against britain with america is almost like a proxy from a french perspective but the result is they spend so much and are committed so much and end up in their conflict with britain economically suffering so much that they become a bit of an economic mess in the 1780s and that ends up leading to revolution and so the french revolution is in some ways an unintended consequence many ways an unintended consequence of the french supporting the americans in the war against britain so britain obviously lose but 30 years later britain is trading merrily with america and is actually roughly doing okay um on a trade point of view and the french have gone into revolution and then that's turned into

thermidor and then eventually napoleon so it's its impact in western europe and north america is very large that diplomatic connection that was made in in 1776. Oh, that's fascinating. I never, so I, my, you know more about my history than I do, certainly. But whenever I go to the UK, though, I feel like people in the UK know more about American history than a lot of Americans.

It's so funny. Well, that is not, I tell you what, when I say this book is about 76, most English people say, what on earth happened then? It's just not a number that is meaningful to them. Oh, really? Okay.

Well, you probably had a fairly unusual sample size if you studied a PhD at a British university. Maybe they're more aware than the average Brit, I would think. Well, I'm thinking more maybe more contemporary, like definitely American politics. I feel like within seconds of talking to anybody in the UK, when they find out I'm American, they want to talk about American politics. I feel like within seconds of talking to anybody in the UK, um, that they want to talk when they find out an American,

they want to talk about, you know, American politics, but that, um, that might just be because they know I'm American. So that's where they want to go as well. But, um,

yeah, what is it? Well, I, with the French revolution, I, I didn't prep you ahead of time. So I apologize if,

if, um, no, I prefer conversations like this. Oh, good, good, good.

I do too. I rarely give questions at a you. No, I prefer conversations like this. Oh, good, good, good. I do too. I rarely give questions at a time. So since the American Revolution and the French Revolution were so close to each other, and like you just said, they weren't completely distinct. Like they were related in many ways. What are some similarities and differences between the French Revolution and the American Revolution? Have you thought about that? Is that like something that's well and i do actually get into that a bit in in the chapter on um on democracy because i think the

puzzle for you know one's an objective historian but the puzzle for a neutralist historian is why why didn't the surprise is the american revolution why did the american revolution survive because i think the french revolution does what most revolutions do which is you know why didn't, the surprise is the American Revolution. Why did the American Revolution survive? Because I think the French Revolution does what most revolutions do, which is, in a way, it collapses under its own weight. You end up, you know, the animal farm phenomenon, to be honest, in Orwell's terms, or the Russian Revolution, where, you know, we'll get rid of the big guys, but then we'll become the big guys,

and then we'll get taken down, and eventually the whole thing implodes until a strong man comes along and says, guys, we've got to pack it in, which is what Napoleon eventually does. So France is a slightly, almost a paradigmatic example of what happens when revolutions run amok. The surprise in a way is why that doesn't happen in America. And I think the difference is because, in my framing of things anyway, Because in my framing of things, anyway, the American Revolution has got two parents ideologically. And I think one is sort of British wiggery. So people who are quite concerned about this and the glorious revolution in England. And then sort of people who would say, we must make sure that we preserve, you know, we don't really mind monarchs.

We think they're fine. We just don't like them taxing us too much without representation. But we want stability. We want a separation of powers. We want solid institutions. We definitely don't want the mob running the shop. So you've got that impulse represented in the American Revolution by people like George Washington and John Adams and many others who would be familiar names. But in America, you've got that sort of whiggish, you know, we must make sure we have solid institutions, mingled with this sort of very zealous, idealistic, all people are created, all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with these supreme. And you've got this sort of very rhetorically bombastic,

zealous, more French influence, the sort of radicalism, all human beings, of course, they didn't live this way, most of them, but in theory, all human beings are equal. And that's not them in so many ways. I mean, so Alexander Hamilton and John Adams and George Washington are concerned by different problems. They've got different objections to what might be happening in the revolution than Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, because they're almost looking at opposite problems. Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, because they're almost looking at opposite problems. And so your Whig guys, who much form the Federalist group, are effectively saying,

we're concerned that the mob might take over. But whereas the people who become the Democratic Republicans, the sort of Jefferson Paine tranche of the movement, are saying, we're concerned that almost the people won't have enough power, and we're going to still be run by a monarch John Adams seems to want George Washington to be called your majesty although they're terrified of it's almost too much like the British model and so effectively you have a British thread and a French thread which in the American revolution come together and the American revolution just survived like in the 1790s I think you could say it very nearly didn't. It descended into such acrimony, mudslinging. It could very easily have imploded. But it didn't. Somehow it survived. And I think, you know, some of this is why a lot of the book is tracing deep historical causes and saying people don't really make the difference we think but on an occasion and in this one i really think a handful of remarkable individuals really did do things and say things that meant a nation was able to cohere in spite of those tensions and george washington i do think is one of those just a remarkable person and had he not handed over power the way he did you america probably would

have fragmented and imploded like in a different way like france did But it's really the tension between, say, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, or John Adams and Thomas Paine, that those two perspectives that came together that meant America was radical enough to be compelling, but it was also conservative enough to survive. And it still is. And that gets fought out every election, which is probably why your friends want to talk to you about American politics all all the time because there's more at stake in those debates than there are in britain or even france did i tell you the time when i my first summer in uh aberdeen scotland

and my little family my wife and my one kid at that time and and some american friends were getting together for a fourth fourth of july celebration and i remember inviting one of my new my newly minted British friends to the party. And he's like, yeah, we usually don't celebrate the times when one of our colonies broke off from us. This is how jaded Americans can be though. Like I literally, here I am, somehow got accepted into a PhD program. I'm in my late twenties, already fairly well educated. And it didn't really dawn on me. I was like, oh yeah, huh. Haven't thought about it like that before. Like never had just like broader picture of what, you know, the founding of, of the founding, the

establishment of however you want to word it. There's so many politically incorrect ways of putting it, but, but the these British colonies broke off from the mothership. Do you talk about the question of whether – the whole America was founded as a Christian nation. That's become, I think, it's always kind of a talked about thing here. It's a matter of debate and especially with the whether it's a rise in christian nationalism or at least christian nationalism is becoming a topic that's more talked about i feel like the whole is america was america ever a christian nation that's come up more and more from a historical standpoint what is the answer to that question what you know what was

america founded as a christian nation that is that's um that's great it's just the english guys throw him under the bus um yeah i so i have this i you probably haven't got to this bit yet but i i talk a bit in a i make quite a lot of the story in which the declaration of independence is edited have you come across this bit yet where ben franklin jefferson sends him a draft of the declaration in late june you mentioned it you mentioned it early on but yeah you haven't got i haven't yeah so jefferson sends franklin a draft and says we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable and franklin crosses it out and writes self-evident and i use it as a metaphor

really for the post-christian west which is we take things that ultimately are Christian sacred truths and then say these are now just obvious to everybody so we can put them down to results of reason and see that that's in some ways quite a good, I hope the beginnings of a good answer to that question. So to what extent is it a Christian nation? I think it's enormously, it's very much a Christian nation if what you mean is it is founded on a logic and an anthropology and a belief in the orderedness of history and rights, which could never have emerged outside of a Christian milieu. That's definitely true. But in that sense, Britain is a Christian nation, and so is France, and so is Spain, and so is pretty much anywhere that descends from Christendom.

But I think usually people in your country in the debate today mean more than that it is a Christian nation. I mean, there's something in the founding charter that doesn't hold up if the nation is not confessionally Christian or majority Christian. And in that sense, I don't think it is. And what I slightly facetiously do towards the end of that chapter is i say that in many ways i talk about protestant paganism i say that i think the post-christian world is a fusion of protestantism and paganism and that's my explanation of why the world is post-christian to the extent that it is and i say in many ways the best statement of protestant paganism out there is the Declaration of Independence, because it is a fusion of sectarian Protestants and Unitarians, deists, and the like. And it's a collision between the two, that you end up with both statements, even in the opening paragraph, which are inconceivable

without a Christian view of providence and anthropology, and even theology, endowed by our Creator. Most people in human history haven't believed in one creator anyway. So that's a very Christian statement. And yet the focus and the trajectory of the document takes Christian principles and kind of universalizes and slightly somewhat secularizes them through the influence of people like Franklin and Jefferson and other to varying degree deistic thinkers. And as a result becomes much more, much more pagan.

I don't mean pagan in a pejorative sense. I mean, in a technical sense, like people who believe that the sacred is located within the world, not beyond it. And I think the declaration is, is a great example of that phenomenon. And I then I show how it's also true in Gibbon and Hume and many other thinkers at the time,

Voltaire, but in in the context of the declaration i think so i'm thinking that sense america is simultaneously protestant and pagan which is what so surprised tokeville when he visited later saying these guys are always going on about how much they love god but it's hard to imagine a society in which people are more devoted to the present pursuit of pleasure than americans so what's the story there they they seem so religious yet they seem my terms, very pagan as well. And I think, yeah, that's the collision that is represented in many ways, even within the

Declaration itself. That makes a lot of sense. So I don't know if Jamie Smith and others have talked about the craters of the gospel that have been left on many Western nations to where the impact of a Christian worldview has become embedded in just societal assumptions. You know, the goods of liberal democracy and religious freedom and these kind of things, like maybe, yeah, I don't know, religious freedom would be the right one. But like there's an impact, the imprint that the gospel has had on society. But that's different than saying it's a Christian nation in the sense that here's a bunch of zealous, sold-out Christ followers trying to establish a nation under the lordship of Jesus Christ. Rather, it's saying that Christianity has had such an impact on society that people take for granted certain aspects of a Christian worldview as just self-evident.

That's interesting. So the edit, he was editing it away from, he was trying to tweak the language. So it was less religious and more secular for lack of a better term. Yeah. So, I mean,

yeah, that, that would, I expect Franklin would probably see that as a slightly anachronistic. And he, I think he's trying to, he would see himself as trying to universalize something. He's saying this does not require sacred convictions to be able to ground.

He would say it's grounded in reason, not religion, probably, rather than saying it. I don't think he would see himself as secularizing, but he's probably more just universalizing. But I think the point is that you could only say that, that this is self-evident, because of christian assumptions about human beings and creation you the the whole paragraph drips with explicitly judeo-christian assumptions about human beings and creation and providence and so on and it's only self-evident it was the funny thing is obviously wasn't self-evident like the reason they had to write this thing down was because a lot of people didn't believe it and several of

the founding fathers themselves hadn't believed it 10 years earlier and most people in the world today still don't believe that it is a god-given right for you to overthrow the government you want replacing someone else if they're charging you too many taxes or it's not so it clearly is not self-evident like and that's why they say we hold these truths to be self-evident as in we believe they are but of course jefferson originally written they're sacred and if you trace the pre-history as i as i do in that chapter you can see that jefferson's getting his language from john lock which many people know as they read john lock but you then go to lock and look up where he got it and he got it from richard hooker and then you go to richard hooker and see

that he was basically taking it straight out of matthew's gospel and the Code of Justinian. So even that famous paragraph has a genealogy that is very explicitly Christian and couldn't be said even in Islamic contexts, let alone in a Confucian or an atheist or an animist context. It's a very Christian-influenced statement that couldn't really have been made anywhere outside of a sort of christendom a country that was leaving christendom at the time that that makes a lot of sense actually um i mean to use two more anachronistic categories you know they're trying to push it more towards like general revelation rather than special revelation rather than making this a distinctly christian thing saying this is yeah universalizing it um in 1776 how could you write something like all men are created equal

while slavery was still while owning some of the founding fathers right were slave owners like yeah do you get into that or what like how could you write that was it was this what we're aspiring to do was was there a kind of an anti-slavery sentiment that was inexistent? There was a flickering light at that time? Yeah, you need to get Tommy Kidd on to talk about this, really, because he's so good on it. And it's just fast on Jefferson specifically, who is probably the most interesting example. I think that lots of the founding fathers are varying degrees of hypocritical on this issue. But Jefferson is the most interesting, I think, because obviously he wrote the famous words.

And yet, just such an example of somebody who didn't live them out. Even by the end of his, even as he's near death, best part of 50 years later, of course, yeah, he does die 50 years later, is still saying this is not how the world has been made, but he still doesn't emancipate the slaves. So he lives with that conflict and he's a complicated man. And I think many of them lived with almost an awareness of an inconsistency, which is this is something that should not be.

It is. If we raise it too much now, we will split this nation. All the kind of defences that people usually make of the founding fathers have truth to them, but obviously they don't excuse it either in the slightest. And I think usually reflect just a fundamental moral inconsistency that in some ways, when I read it, I think, oh, wow, what am I, do I have inconsistencies like that in my own thought? They're things which I profess to believe that I actually don't because of the way I've lived them out.

And I think sometimes it's just as simple as this would have been enormously complicated and expensive for me. Or it would have been, I think sometimes a more high-minded version would be, America is a beautiful idea and we'll lose it if we push this point too hard. But in the end, what they're really saying is, yeah, the equality of black Americans is not as important to me as the unity of white americans and that must be what they in some somewhere in them there must be some triage taking place like that between different goods so i don't attempt to excuse it at all obviously it's it's not my yeah i don't have a dog in that fight in the slightest and i i think as i'm

watching reading them thinking wow how on earth could you guys not see this but you kind of have to at least attempt to understand how people saw the world themselves but yeah you should honestly you should interview tom kidd because he's really interesting on this whole thing and it's got a very it's a fascinating take on religion and the founding fathers he knows far more about it than i do but that's the that's the best i've got at the moment i think they just lived with an inconsistency that they did genuinely believe two irreconcilable things and believed one of them more strongly than the other and therefore lived accordingly. So when they wrote those words, you're saying there's, again, we can't climb inside their minds or hearts, but they probably recognized the tension. It was like

they were just oblivious to writing something that was just directly being not lived out. I think some of them did. i think you do you do have some of them who obviously are i don't mean jefferson um but i think you actually have a spectrum you have people who are already becoming quite emphatically pros like saying i'm going to defend this as a moral good that most of that doesn't kick in for another 30 or 40 years and that's for economic reasons really but in the 70s you have people who would say this you might have a few people who say this is good you have some people who say no it's not really but actually we can just live with it and at the end particularly in the south

this is just the way our economy works then you have people who say this is a problem and we need to change it but we for now we need to compromise in order to hold the nation together which is more like where you end up with sort of Hamilton Adams. And then you get people who are more full on abolitionists, which obviously a lot of leading African-Americans are. And I talk a lot in the book about Lemuel Haynes, who's the first sort of African-American preacher who comes out on this. And he literally writes almost immediately after the declaration using the declaration's language. Here you go. This is an argument for abolitionism. But you do have, and particularly in Britain,

you have a lot of people slamming the Americans for their revolution, saying, how are you talking about freedom? And here you've got own slaves. What on earth are you doing? Like Samuel Johnson, all these guys. So you have plenty of people saying that as well. But I think most of the founding fathers

are in the middle two camps, and there's plenty of conflict between them, obviously. I wonder if it'd be similar to, this is to make a i don't like making one this isn't a one-to-one analogy obviously but like when when preachers might stand up and preach against luxury and comfort and and our addiction to material things and it's like you transport anybody from like you know a non-western country or a place where you know poverty is pretty rampant and put them in an American church. And they're looking around saying, wait, you guys are saying

this, but you're not like, you have a long way to go before you're coming close to living out. And even if you ask me, I'm like, yeah, what do you do? Like I, I, I drive a car and I live in a house with air conditioning and heat. And like, I, you know, if I want food, I just go to the refrigerator and get it. If I don't want food in my refrigerator, I go down to the store and buy it. Like, it's just, it's, we're just sort of swimming in luxury and comfort. And yet that would be the first one to say like this, this, this, this kind of, yeah, this, this isn't good for my faith. This goes against kind of, you know, several streams of scriptural thought, you know? So I don't know.

Maybe it's something like that. I think you have to allow yourself to be challenged by the same question, don't you? I do think it's still different, though, in that I think most pastors who preach against greed, you would think they may be being greedy, but they probably don't believe they are whereas i don't think jefferson didn't think he owned slaves if you're sure to mean like there is so i think there is a difference where this is this isn't so much this is would be like me saying we mustn't be greedy and i am being greedy and i still think that's morally acceptable which i don't think is maybe a thing but it's i don't know that's common now. Whereas I think what Jefferson's doing is more odd

and requires more sort of digging into how did a person get there? Because he is genuinely saying, this ought not to be the case and I still do it. And not just Jefferson, obviously, there are many others as well. But as I say, I think there'd be many who, this is such a huge question in the literature,

many who've read and know far more about it than me. So I wouldn't want to deviate too far. But that's my, I think you're right, though, that you have to apply, when you ask that question of someone else, you have to go, where is the equivalent of that now? And you're right, I think material possessions are probably the most obvious place to look. I think it was Robert George. I'm going to butcher this. I thought, I think I heard it about Robert George. I think I know what you're going to say.

Is this the thread about you would have opposed slavery? Yes. I know you wouldn't. Is that a Princeton professor? And he, you know, he asks his class, how many of you would have opposed slavery 200 years ago? And everybody raised their hand, right? Like, of course I would, you know, and then his next question is, so what are you doing now? you know, and then his next question is, so what are you doing now that, that basically gets you ostracized from your own social tribe? Like what injustices are you, not against the

other side about those people out there about Republicans or whatever, you know, but like, how are you being ostracized from your own tribal allegiances by pointing stuff out? You know, not tweeting about that. Yeah. Yeah. It's and that, of course, is the difference between our two nations on the response in the sense that Britain moves to abolitionism quicker, partly because you just got less of an economic stake in it by that point. And so it's not because British people are more moral or more able to see what the Bible teaches is It's because, you know, what's that lovely line from Upton Sinclair? It's very hard to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it. And I think that's a big factor on both sides of the Atlantic in this one.

That is one of my favorite quotes in the history of humanity. It's so good. This episode is sponsored by The Pour Over Podcast. Oh, my word. I love The Pour Over Podcast. Oh, my word. I love The Pour Over Podcast. It is a trustworthy news resource guiding people toward eternal hope. It's not Republican. It's not Democrat.

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Again, centerforfaith.com. What about like, I mean, you have jonathan edwards yeah christian leaders who it's one thing for somebody who's like part of this economics you know they're at the political level whatever they're having to navigate many things what about what do you do with and i i don't know maybe we don't need to go if if you're like this isn't my main area i have to wuss out a bit on edwards i mean i i have exactly the same question. How on earth did they think that? But I don't know any more about Jonathan Edwards than the next man, really,

because he died about 20 or 30 years before I start. I mentioned him in passing because of his relationship to Aaron Burr. And lots of people who know a lot have gone deep into Edwards and gone, this is obviously, this is reprehensible. This is how he got there. I think he maybe did it this way, maybe did it that way, maybe did it the other, but I just haven't read enough of it to speak with any useful knowledge

on that really. Okay, let's, different question here. This will tap into your expertise as a biblical scholar. Was the American Revolution, in your opinion, a violation of Romans 13? My goodness. This is in a book that's not mostly about America. It's like, let's just talk about American politics. I know.

How much trouble can we cause you in this space? We have to. Also, you and I, in fact, we might have bonded over our pacifism or nonviolence before anything else. I don't remember actually. I think we spoke about that way back when your book Fight came out. And so I think an awful lot of things are violations of biblical teaching on violence, resistance, and so on that many other Christians wouldn't. So I think I would say it was, but I would say so was the British

and so was the french revolution and so an awful lot of things in part because of the way that they take up arms and use like like any kind of violent any kind of violent revolution would be a violation of exactly what paul's and probably you would but an awful lot of i think perhaps a more a harder version of the same question is yes but let's say you didn't hold to assumptions about pacifism and non-violence that you do would you still think it was wrong even under the just war defense and to be if i'm honest i just haven't really thought about that because that's not it's a bit of a hypothetical i've just never partly it's 250 years ago but partly it also predicates something that i don't believe um and then says what would you think if you did

so i what do you think i don't even think you need to be committed to non-violence really i mean um because you know what are you going to say like yeah but you know uh the british empire was really oppressive at this time like paul's writing under rome under the hero okay so we're not talking about some lesser evil of an empire or something. And they're like, yeah, but the taxes were really oppressive and it was unjust. Paul talks

about taxes in the same way. He goes right into paying taxes. Again, taxation under the Roman regime was... Without doing a thorough comparison of the two, I'm going to guess is probably way more oppressive and unjust and funding all kinds of stuff. So I don't know what argument, like if Paul can write what he did in Romans 13, which I think, well, yeah,

I mean, there's different, different thoughts that kind of what his main point was there. Um, but it seems to be clearly against at the very least some kind of violent overthrow kind of kind of a yeah a violent overthrow of oppressive regimes ruling over you because ultimately god's in control and and so on and so forth so i mean i think yeah i don't i don't know i haven't i haven't seen people make a good argument on the contrary that no like like in this case romans 13 would not really apply. You can probably make the argument that the, that the British are a lot worse,

which is, I imagine where a lot of Americans would go with it. And no doubt it's true. Cause I think Romans 13 for me, at least Romans 13 would condemn both sides as, as would a number of other, you know, biblical passages,

but yeah, but it's obviously, I don't really have a reason to try and defend that position from that critique. But I don't, I guess I would be more concerned, somebody that would be so reluctant to say it was a violation. Like why, what are we trying to, yeah,

they violated Genesis 127, that all people are created equal, you know, like with slavery. I mean, I don't know why we would even need to feel the need to kind of like whitewash our history. Like to me, the desire to want to whitewash it is like, what, what, what are the deeper things going on here? Like, are we, do we feel a need to have a more sanitized version of American history or a

more Christianized version? Like, let's talk about that. Like to me, that that would be the greater problem. Yeah, and similarly with the expropriation of land from Native Americans, which is, you know, so you've got those three, haven't you? Well, you've got three actors, three people in whom, with whom the American, the early American state is in dialogue or conflict, right?

You have African Americans, you have Native Americans, you have the Brits, and then indirectly the French. in all three cases i just think in some ways the case for did you get it wrong with the brits is probably the weakest of the three as in you can say you can clearly say or morally that's totally unacceptable with with the first two but maybe with all three but then of course it sounds like now get an english guy on a podcast and he'll say the american state is foundationally illegitimate and should never have started which is i'm still hoping to be welcomed through the border next time i come but um yeah let's okay so let's get let's get off uh our american high horses here my my yeah um the actor let's go back to the acronym

weird and use a weirder i think is a more because you want... What are the other two? What's E and R? Ex-Christian and Romantic. Ex-Christian and Romantic. Can you go through all, I guess, seven? Is it seven? Can you go through all of them again and then maybe pick out one or two that you think are... that you'd want to talk about?

Something that's really significant, maybe something that we haven't really thought about? Yeah, great. So W stands for Western, which I guess is the trend of globalization at least as that's what's going on in 1776 e stands for educated which i tell the story of the enlightenment i stands for industrialization or industrialized which is the industrial revolution r stands for rich um which basically if you look at a

sort of chart of GDP, world GDP over human history you'll notice it just runs along flatline and then turns a corner of the hockey stick in the mid 1770s and shoots up and hasn't stopped increasing since. So that's a very important development. Then the D stands for democracy

which is obviously the American Revolution we've been talking about. Then the next E stands for ex-Christian. And then finally romantic, which refer to the journeys of beginning to leave Christianity behind, as we've touched on. And then the romantic movement and so on, which doesn't really begin in earnest until the 1790s, but all of its seeds are there in the 1770s.

And your main point, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that it's hard to understand the way we think, the things we take for granted, the things we assume are goods in society like democracy. It's impossible to really unpack who we are today without understanding these kind of seven major shifts. These weren't a thing prior to 1776 no they were all they were you know some of them are closer to the surface than others but absolutely and and i think particularly you can group them into two there are um so several of those developments are primarily things to do with matter geography like where you know ships inventions lands where, you know, ships, inventions, lands, minerals, maps, you know, in some cases, literally how a continent is wide versus tall, or where navigable rivers are all those sorts of things. And actually, a bunch of what makes Western or weirder people,

the kind of people that they and we are, is what looks like quite material contingencies, you'd under the providence of god you'd say obviously god's in charge of it all but you would you would say these things look like they're quite deep historical factors and they're to do with things that have the advantages or whatever you call them that have existed for western people that are based on where coal is and where iron is and where the rivers are and what crops grow where what animals are native to which country and so you have a number of those factors which relate to industrialization technology globalization and enrichment and then you have a group of other factors in a separate group which

are to do with the realm of ideas and the things that people think so you know it's maps and chaps right or you know so what's where matter and then what ideas what are people thinking saying writing and one of the things i want to do in the book is to try and tell a story of the of the west and also really of apologetics of the church of how we engage with the world we're in that gives due credit to both of those types of course so i think there are not many in my circles but there's plenty of more marxist leaning historians who would say these are this is almost all a result of deep causes that the individuals who get selected

who writes which book that's not really the issue what what really matters is pretty deep it's deep down in the ocean that are pulling a culture one way or another and ideas are not that interesting and then you have obviously in our circles i expect most people you and i would talk to on podcast or shows would be much much more interested in ideas than in things like, you know, minerals and money and those sorts of things. But I think in apologetics and in just Christian thoughts, we are, evangelicals certainly, are inclined to place much, much more emphasis, dramatically more emphasis on the ideas, who said what when and who wrote what and how influential it was and how well written it was and who it then influenced and in this book

i'm trying to bring together both of those causes so several of the chapters are about literally about yeah inventions and about some of them to the point of being about maps and coasts and mountains to try and tell the story about how the west came to be what it is, mingled with the ideas, which are also incredibly important. And so Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and leaving Christianity behind, or trying to, and not succeeding, are very ideological. And they, of course, feed into each other. And they're both, you know, they affect one another and are shaped by each other. But I think that's a really interesting, I would say that, but I think that's a really interesting story. So those are probably the two main groups of causes

that I'm trying to bring together. And you can see them playing together even in things like why did the Industrial Revolution happen when it did and where it did. And you can say, well, some of that is to do with very boring arguments about what's on the map, and some of that is to do with very boring arguments about what's on the map. And some of it is to do with ideas like Protestantism or literacy or experimentation, novelty, which might be grounded in Christianity. And the combination of the two is what made the world such that you and I are able to be 5,000 miles away right now having a chat. It comes from both material and ideal causes.

having a chat. It comes from both material and ideal causes. I guess we should shift gears because your ultimate goal, like you said, I love it, is you're writing as a pastor, helping Christians understand where they're situated in society. And again, these kind of assumptions that we take for granted. What are some successes you would want to see somebody who reads this book and walks away? As a pastor like what do you want this book and the ideas in here to do in people's hearts and minds those who read it that's really good um so this morning our the senior pastor who's who i work with on our team here in our church came he was just talking to the staff about it because he'd read it on his holiday and was just he's been very kind and commending it. So I think what he said, really, which was that I think in reading, he said, I was regularly seeing connections between things in the world today that make sense of why people think and do and say the things that they think, do and say.

And how as Christians, we can serve and love people better if we understand those things. But also in the book, I want to point towards some ways in which the church, even at the time these changes are taking place, were responding to the issues in the world around them and how we can learn from them. So I think I want to explain, to give people just a sense of context, a sense of, sometimes even like people get a little a degree of power over something when they feel like they can name it or articulate it i don't mean like therefore it's no longer um a problem for them but often people are very in our in the last 10 15 years been very confused at the speed of change and sometimes being able to say look here are some here are

some things that have been going on for 200 years that are why that is happening now, rather than, gosh, this has just come out of nowhere. People often get frightened and don't react well, and they become more tribal when they think this is just yet another complete shock out of nowhere. And I think it can help people to see a longer story to make sense of what's going on and to serve their friends and neighbors who are obviously living in that world too, who don't believe in Jesus and to help them make sense of it as well. So that's one aim is just to sort of explain so that people can go, I see it. I've got some degree of agency now because I can understand this story and it doesn't shock me all the time. The other thing I wanted to do was to, as I say, to draw on what the church did at the time and say, I think there are some

lessons here. So I pick out particularly the issues of grace or the christian response of grace freedom and truth and talk about people that the hymn writers at the time and then how suddenly and how dramatically they begin to describe the personal experience of grace and say how in them in a weirder world in a post-christian world grace becomes even more important to show people, because so much of the world is powered by works in a way that it wouldn't be perhaps in an agrarian, pre-industrial society. So grace almost goes up, strangely, in its importance in a post-industrial, post-Christian kind of world for all sorts of reasons. I talk about freedom and the response of abolitionism, but also of reasons. I talk about freedom and the

response of abolitionism, but also religious freedom, and talk about how both of those things should colour our vision of freedom today, and how obviously that affects clearly in something, an issue like race, or even fighting modern-day slavery, but also how we understand freedom in a holistic way, such that it's not just freedom from oppression outside, but freedom from within as well, freedom from sin, freedom from our own fleshly desires. And then talk about truth through the work. Probably my favourite person I met while writing the book is Johann Georg Harman, is a German philosopher nearly nobody has heard of,

who's just one of the most brilliant minds ever. And this very unknown Christian Lutheran guy who guy who just you know savages brilliantly can't and many other but he's just a sort of genius thinker but basically manages to take the enlightenment on on its own grounds and say actually pursuing even truth is incredibly important for us as well so i have some guidelines as i think some ways in which i think the church then can help the church now live in the weirder world. So those are probably my two goals. Explain the world and then help people think about how Christians should respond to it. Well, and you mentioned early on how the last several years, we can even say maybe a decade

or eight to 10 years, have seemed extra cataclysmic and disorienting. disorienting and people feel maybe an extra amount of fear of, of, um, anxiety. Um, do you come back to, I'm curious if you come back to that in the book or is, would you, is, is in the back of your mind, are you trying to help people navigate, navigate really? Obviously people were reading a book, they live now, but I mean, there, there is kind of seemingly a unique kind of cultural moment we're in. Would it help to understand kind of last 200 years, 1776, to even understand some of the unique changes and shifts and those seven developments is an attempt to answer that question which is really how do we get here and how are the different changes that we're experiencing some of which we like and some of which we don't connected to and symbiotic with

each other so you what we want to do is say well i'd really like the increase in living standards i'd like the increase in technological availability i like the connectedness of the world but i don't like christianity being pushed to the margins i don't like the increasing secularization of the public square i don't like what the idealization of the self or even the sexual revolution and its current consequences all that sort of stuff and in a way in telling the story the way i have i'm trying to say look those things are those things are connected in these ways and actually some of the things that we think of as just being as relative bad ideas are themselves a result of industrial technology, and that that's for good and evil.

And some of it's meant we eat better and live healthier and are less likely to die in childbirth and all that sort of stuff. But it also means that our communities are likely to be hollowed out, and people are less likely to go to church, and people are more likely to idealize the self and more likely to make selfish political sexual material choices and those things are reconnected actually byproducts of the same kind of development so when you see a sudden rush of social change as we did between say 2014 and 2017 the consequences of which are still being felt now, it doesn't make those things go away, but it puts them in a context of a story that goes, okay, so this development is actually bound up with something I really like. It's not just,

that's a bad thing. It's also a product of something that's also produced some good things. And being able to read the story that way, I hope, helps people not kind of panic or overreact, at the same time as not being naive about how dangerous it can be, but just say we are in part also complicit in some of these things. And some of the choices I make, for good reasons, are connected to consequences or factors that might actually make Christianity harder for people, including myself. Smartphones are an obvious an obvious this kind of technology is one like you know it's i

generally think the goods outweigh the bads but some of it's bad in some of what it diminishes it means i spend more time with some american friends like you than i do with some people in my own street and that's not probably a good thing for human flourishing overall but i still i still do it and i still think it's probably the goods out that way the bads but and it's that kind of thing writ large with developments in society as a whole that i'm trying to do so i hope i do answer that question in the book in quite a lot of detail but the reader will tell me if i have so so i mean would you say encouraging us to be a little more self-reflected kind of like going back to the whole slavery slash all people are created equal, the declaration of independence. Like we were like, we wish they would have been a little more self-reflected and it's

easy on this side, you know, hindsight's 2020 and, and it's easy on this side of history to be, you know, very judgy on, on things in the past as if going back again, would we have done anything different if we were actually living in that situation? So, yeah, so I could, I could sense even from the little i've already read that it's as i'm reading it's encouraging me to be more self-reflective of how am i how are people in 200 years writing our history going to point out these major like how did you not see this kind of thing yeah well i do i think that i think when you read about the past in any detail of any sort you you've got to have some encounter like that, because it's that famous line, the past is a different country, another country that do things differently. You read it and go, wow, we are, it's like traveling. You just go, wow, these things that I take as self-evident are not. They're very different in different cultures. different cultures but i i wanted i also i think want to i'm quite an optimistic you know upbeat kind of person um as you are i guess and um and i actually want to see that some of the things that

are i want to kind of push back a little bit against the this development snuck in and poisoned the well and made everything bad because i think i want to say that a lot of the things that are responsible and they are responsible for things that make Christianity harder today, are themselves products of Christian impact and influence in years and generations past. And so, as Peter Berger said famously, Christianity historically has been its own grave digger. I use the language of being hoisted by our own petard. So Christianity, Protestantism is a good example that it introduces things into a culture that in the end make it harder to be a Christian.

Christianity itself does that. It ends up spreading through the empire. It ends up converting the empire, which then ends up doing all sorts of things that in the end will make Christianity more difficult. Christianity makes, in the long run, I've been persuaded this, leads to developments that make societies more affluent. But in the end, that affluence makes families smaller and makes people more privatized, and in the end makes

people go to church less, which in the end leads to lower religious observance. And so in a way, Christianity produces things that then make Christianity harder. And to therefore say this is not only boo-hiss to these guys and yay-yay to these guys, but to say some of these morally complicated things that we are wrestling with now and seeing the fruit of in current social life have grown out of things that would not be where they are without Christianity. And that's not to say that we should therefore say, oh, no problem then. It just means that the way we respond to them and engage with them in the public square or with friends and neighbors needs to be a bit more subtle than this is just a bad thing that came out. So that's some of it. I never thought about it like that. How do you process that?

How do you make sense of that, that Christian values, Christian principles lead to a certain level of flourishing in society that ends up kind of hurting us in the long run? Like what – I never thought of it like that, but I mean just as my mind goes various places, it's like, yeah, we became – you think about this, the massive growth of the early church, largely because it valued women. It treated – It kind of attacked classism to some extent. It had this really radical economic. And so people were really attracted to that. And so many people, more and more, were attracted to it. Until you get to the turn of the 300s or whatever, when Constantine's looking out saying, oh my gosh, it would politically be very expedient if I was a little more chummy with these Christians, because they're kind of taking over the empire.

And then that leads to so many things in a post-Constantinian world that ended up not helping the church. I mean, just like you said. So I don't know how to make sense of that. So the positive impact that Christianity can have on society can often lead to negative impacts on society? Is that a right way to process it yeah i i i think i think so so that's a that you're the one you give you've mentioned is obviously i mentioned as well as is a i think a really good example of that but but more recently i think you would say um so if we if we take this period the the role of christianity in

industrialization and in economic growth i think there's a very clear link there in all sorts of ways which are trying to trace in several chapters in the book but that in the end that has made communities fragment and individuals more retreat in behind their into their initially their nuclear families and then finally as individuals which has made church attendance go down which has made it harder to pass on christianity and to and to evangelize so that and then even if you look even in today and sort of in your field of sexual ethics, you think actually most of the impulses to try and push hard against Christian sexual ethics in our culture originate in Christian impulses somewhere.

As in, we are trying to disaggregate with homosexuality. We're trying to disaggregate people's people what people want to do people's temptations or people's desires from their natures or we are with trans we are we're trying to make sure that we protect the most vulnerable people and these people are very vulnerable and marginalized people so we want to make sure we make life that that's a christian impulse which is it's just become i mean one of the epigraphs to my book is chesterton when chesterton says the modern world is full of the old christian virtues gone mad but what happens is people with that's a christian impulse that when untethered when untethered from other christian impulses leads to social changes that most christians now

find very difficult but they've grown out of christian assumptions about human beings and the care for the weak and the poor and the marginalized and so on, which are actually good assumptions. They've just got slightly out of balance in certain cases. And it's led to some changes that are, I find, you find, challenging and that we spend a lot of our lives trying to help people handle. But a lot of them have Christian roots. And I just think talking through those things, again, is not to say, no problem here, guys. Of course, you've still got to live in this world and but i think it does help us love our neighbors better i think it helps us understand why they think the way they do and even to see some of it as being an outgrowth of things that we cherish very dearly and they might in places see more clearly than we

do and i think that's uh so yes in that sense it's self-reflection but not just about what have i got wrong but what have what has the world got right? Or why does the world think the way it does? It may well be having grown out of things that are very dear to me. All right. Final question. I always love to ask people outside of the US context this question. It's funny. I think my podcast is more popular in the UK than in the US. I think because you ask all of these questions about why the American Revolution disobeyed Romans 13. Where I was going with that is, I won't say for our American audience, but I'm like, no, actually my audience is,

I mean, the numbers are definitely higher because population size, but percentage-wise, or I think per capita, my podcast is higher ranked in your homeland than mine. But as somebody outside the US context, can you help pastor us as you look on from the outside to American Christianity? I know it's a huge, huge concept, huge movement filled with tons of diversity, and you can take it any direction you want to go. But if you were like on your, on your dying, on your pastoral bed and American Christians were like, can you give us some words of wisdom as we are navigating, you know, an upcoming election season and, and just the, the integration of politics and Christianity is, is not totally unique to the

U S context, but it has a uniqueness that, that I think sometimes us fish swimming in water can't really understand what water looks like. Anywhere you want to go with that is our final thoughts here on this conversation. It's a generous question. I get asked this quite a lot because of lots of friends in America and traveling there. I feel less confident answering it every time I get asked it because I'm aware of how deep some of the differences are between America and not just Britain

and many other post-Christian countries. I think something I think is true, which can help, I think is that you guys are, or the American church is experiencing a loss of prestige and adherence that in about seven years that took about 70 in Western Europe. So you are experiencing something that has happened elsewhere in the world, you're just experiencing it much more quickly. And that is more painful in a strange way, which is in some ways good, because it means that there is something precious is being lost, which in Europe, people just gradually went, you know,

that famous line, I no longer, you know, it's just the long melancholy withdrawing roar of Christianity, way back in the 19th century, people were saying that. And whereas in America, it's like, no, there's a proper apocalypse about it in a lot of circles. But I do think that to see them as being analogous, but the one on just happening much faster can help people because they say, firstly, there is a future for a church that is much more marginal in the society than it was. and the the fact that christian values not being held in this in the in the public square and obviously we've given lots of examples by the way when they never have been on you know race and slavery many others so let's take that for red but even now that if you see christ certain christian convictions being pushed to the margins of the public square that doesn't necessarily mean that the church doesn't have a future being able to shine as a light. I mean, there are some benefits to it because there can be a winnowing, I guess, a purifying of the church. I don't mean the church in Britain is more pure than it is in America.

I'm not saying that, but I think that certainly you're much less. It's true in the States already. Let's say that you are much less likely to go to church if you don't believe a word of it. If you live in San Francisco than you are if you live in montgomery or whatever like lots of examples like that and in britain that's obviously writ large and in europe it is and that there can be some system the encouragement is there can be some benefits of that but i think the you know obviously the challenge is that it is also painful and it's happening at a rate which makes people feel discombobulated, which is partly what I'm trying to help with this book.

But also just a real sense of, it can tip into, as it often does, anger and resentment. And I think that's where pastoral, we just have to help the people of God. Providence, the big 18th century themes, God is in charge over all things. He knew this was going to happen. It has happened to countries before. Countries who were profoundly Christian, it would seem, from top to bottom, particularly in the rise of Islam, left and that and the church has survived and the church has bedded in and winter has turned to spring and will once again turn to summer but that is that that long view of what happens in other nations can be an encouragement to us but that doesn't take away from the pain of it and a lot of the time I just don't I don't think I know what I would do where I pastor in America because I actually think now as opposed to 20 years ago I thought it's easier to be a pastor in America than in Britain. But now I definitely don't think

that. I think it's harder because the issues people in the church are facing are more complex and demanding than they are in my church, I think. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I think this is true. I mean, I'll throw it out there and people can kind of chew on it. But losing cultural, I'll throw it out there and people can kind of chew on it. But, you know, losing cultural, as Christians, when we lose cultural power, we should not equate that to losing gospel influence. In fact, I would probably say that when we had cultural power, that actually stunted our actual gospel witness. I don't think Christianity was designed to have cultural power. The entire

Bible was written by people and for people that did not have cultural power. And I know that even the word power we need to define and so on. But yeah. I think that scene at the end of John 6, when the disciples are the only ones left and they've all gone, they've all been offended by what Jesus said. And he said, are you leaving too? And they're like, where else are we going to go? You've got the words of life. I think something of that has been happening to the Western church over 100 years. But I think it's probably happening quite quickly in the States.

And I agree with you. I think it can be for the good of the church. I've never thought about it in those terms that what many other Christians have experienced in their country, it just happened more slowly. For whatever reason, it's happened so quickly here and it has caused a kind of disorienting among Christians. I just, you know, yeah, so many. I'll just open up more questions in my mind, but I've taken you over an hour, Andrew. Man, I'm excited to continue to read this book. It's, again, very well written. I mean, you're a good writer, so that shouldn't be surprising.

It's just when you pull together just so much from history in a way that – and you make it exciting and easy to read and hard to put down and also very relevant. So anyway, I'm super excited to continue reading this book. So appreciate you, man. Oh, that's really kind of you. No,

it's great talking about it. I so appreciate the time. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.