Theology in the Raw - Why Is there an Epidemic of Loneliness? Dan White Jr.

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

Dan White Jr. is the Co-founder of The Kineo Center, a ministry that serves weary and wounded leaders. Dan is also the author of Love Over Fearand co-author of Church as Movement. Register for the Exiles and Babylon conference: theologyintheraw.com -- If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe to my channel! Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw Or you can support me directly through Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Visit my personal website: https://www.prestonsprinkle.com For questions about faith, sexuality & gender: https://www.centerforfaith.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, the XS conference is just a couple days away. If you're listening to this, the day of release on the 31st of March, the conference starts this Thursday, March 3rd. And I'm guessing if you don't live in the Minneapolis area, you're probably not going to run out and buy a plane ticket and fly to Minneapolis. Therefore, if you're not, if you're not already registered live to attend live, you probably will not be able to accept if you do live in the Minneapolis area would highly encourage you to check it out. But we do have a live streaming option. So just go to theologianrod.com and you can see how you can live stream the conference from your living room. My guest today is Dan White Jr. Who's a co-founder of the Keneo Center, which is an intentional place for renewal and healing for weary and burned out ministry leaders

located in Puerto Rico. If that fits your description, if you feel weary and burned out ministry leaders located in Puerto Rico. If that fits your description, if you feel weary and burned out, I would highly recommend checking out the Caneo Center. The information is in the show notes. And also we do talk about what Dan does through the Caneo Center during this podcast. Dan is also the author of several books,

including Love Over Fear and the co-author of Church as Movement. I always find Dan to be so insightful and wise and humble Dan is also the author of several books, including Love Over Fear and the co-author of Church as Movement. I always find Dan to be so insightful and wise and humble when it comes to questions surrounding the intersection of culture, politics and the church. He's been on the podcast before, so please welcome back to the show, the wonder only Dan White Jr. Yeah. Dan white jr. This is long overdue, man. We were, we were talking for a while offline and I was like, dude, I, I think we need to hit record at some point. So real

quick, who are you? What do you do? And then let's jump into our conversation. Dan White Jr., obviously. I live in Puerto Rico. I helped start with my wife a healing and discipleship and development center on the East Coast of Puerto Rico. So we help nonprofit leaders as well as ministry leaders walk through a one week experience in facing their pain, their exhaustion, their ego, and move towards healing, renewal practices. It's really a deep kind of immersive deconstruction and reconstruction when it comes to your personhood and who you think you are in the world. So we've been doing that for about four years. And we've had a little over 500 men and women come through from 14 different denominations. So I don't know if that's just

a testament to us, but I think there's a groundswell of people who are on the brink or borderline in a place of burnout and trying to figure out how do I still follow Jesus? How do I deal with these wounds and this shame and anger and fear that I'm feeling without it killing me? And so it's been really fun to be on the front lines of that in the last five years. Prior to that, and I still do some of this work, but I just help people start new communities outside of traditional models of church, some call it missional church, but it's really just helping to help planters as well as existing churches rethink discipleship, community, neighborhood, leadership, so that it is less top-down and more decentralized and movementals.

So I do that with the V3 movement and that's kind of a passion project for me the last 15 years or so. And then I've been married 26 years and two little fellas, one's not so little, he's 20 and then I have a six year old, eight year old, Sorry, not six, eight year old. He's running around. Did you, did you coin the phrase the church industrial complex? You're the first one I heard it from. Did you get that from somebody else? I, I stole it off of, off of Eisenhower. He didn't, um, you know, present Eisenhower, the military industrial complex. And, and as as

Jr Woodward and I were starting to build training, there was always the question, like, what is what, what are we talking about just the church? And I'm like, No, it's not the church. It's an industrialized version of the church that is always consolidating more resources, more power, more attention. It's just, it's an industrial complex and so that's where the term came from, just kind of trying to imagine what it is we were wrestling with. So church industrial complex is where that came and since then I've seen it. Yeah, I've used it in all kinds of spaces now. You were in that complex for over a decade, right? Or a couple decades?

Yeah, yeah, I was leading and teaching and doing ministry in specifically a mega church, but prior to that, even a kind of a mid-level church. And it wasn't necessarily about size. It was the way that we embodied ministry was really come and consume our great preaching, our great worship, our great programs. And if you partake in these things, you will be changed. And I think I got pretty good at mastering that way of doing ministry. My first book, Subterranean, which is now almost 15 years old, is like my memoir of struggling with being in that environment, but as well as my own ego that actually enjoyed that environment. I had to go through a bit of a detox of who I was if I wasn't

going to be leading from that position of power and influence. So I mean, last time you're on, I don't know what two, two, three years ago maybe? We talked all about that. So I'll try to go back and find an episode if someone wants to go listen to that. Cause it's tempting. I want to, every time you talk about it, I'm like, oh, let's, let's talk about that. But I brought you on this time to talk about,

well, I originally reached out cause, you know what it was, you reached out to me and you said, man, you should do a podcast on the epidemic of loneliness. And I said, sure. You want to be the one to come on and talk about it? But then also, I just, we're talking offline, you just have such a, I think, healthy view of some of the problems of falling into this just high, this political polarization. Like, I hate to say, there's like few people, I think, that I resonate with in terms of how they view the political scene. You're one of them. Every time I read your tweets and everything, I'm like, oh my gosh, I hate to say, there's like few people I think that I resonate with in terms of how they view the political scene.

You're one of them. Every time I read your tweets and everything, I'm like, oh my gosh, I could not have said this any better, you know? So we're talking offline just so people know. Like, I'm like, I want to talk about both these, but I'm like, I think they're kind of related a little bit too. Why don't we start with the epidemic of loneliness? Let's start there. Let's start there. And I'm sure the other stuff will arise,

rise to the surface too. Are we going through an epic epidemic of loneliness? Is this unique? And if so, why? What's causing it? Right. Yeah. So the loneliness being leading at Kanao Center

and helping to facilitate transformation at people's most painful moments in life. We've seen this consistent pattern, consistent like kind of outcry that happens where even if it was another crisis or a failure or betrayal or something that sparked them coming here, what often comes forth at some point is how utterly lonely they are.

And I'd have to say that's not what I expected or what I thought was at the core of why people are struggling, but we consistently hear how isolated, how lonely, how unattended, how little community, how few friendships, just this condition of just not having anyone really. And if they're married, maybe their spouse,

but even then, there's lots of situations where there's not even genuine companionship and togetherness there. And so this kind of, like, actually, like my polarization work, it came out of suddenly seeing this and thinking, I don't know if I'm equipped to know what's going on here, what's underneath this, or how do we move forward? So I just pushed us to start researching and exploring why there's so much loneliness. I do think that we are in an epidemic of loneliness.

I think there's a multiple factors that are contributing to why we're there and specifically why men and then women are experiencing willingness in different ways. But I do think it's a crescendo of a few unique 21st century factors that are colliding. Right now, we're under the water. We're not even sure how to like, they're so new that I don't know if we are have were prepared for what it was going to create in us. And so some of it is our I don't want to say it's all 21st century dynamics, but we've always the I mean, the human condition is always to move towards isolation and loneliness. When our environment

is complex or difficult. We don't know how to deal with it. So the best thing to do is to retreat into yourself. So that's always been there, but I just do think there's some technological factors, some things happening politically that start to contribute to making this become an epidemic. So that's where it comes from,

is just hearing it over and over again. Did you read the book Bullying Alone? I feel like that was 2000, that was right on the eve of the internet and he was capturing that, but he was going off of the move from the television, suburban flight, other things. He was really, I mean, massive book, but man, Robert, Robert Putnam, I think it was sociologists. I just, I just reread that Preston because I read it so long ago that I didn't, I don't think I really absorbed it and understood what he was really talking about. And I think

possibly he was ahead of the curve. So yeah. So this isn't just like an internet. I feel like that was like a major, like we've been moving in a direction for the last 70 years. But I think, I mean, with the internet, social media, political polarization, all kinds of factors have just compounded it, right? In the last 20 years, 25 years. Absolutely. Yeah, the breakdown of whether this is good or bad,

which is the institution of the church. Some people are celebrating that, some people are trying to protect that, but there's fewer places of belonging in real time, in proximity, there's fewer and few places like that. And so that's contributing as well. Well, we can talk through some of the things that I think are contributing to it.

Yeah. So what are you seeing at loneliness growing? It's five, last five to 10 years. Is that statistically like not even really up for grabs? I mean, well, there's a great institute that's doing some research around loneliness. It's called the Loneliness Project. You can Google it and check it out. But they've been cataloging loneliness for the last, I think last 10 years. But then they look at geography and social dynamics, race, gender. They've been tracking this with surveys and research.

And whether they're authoritative or not, there is a spike happening in the last five years actually, people responding. I think 67% of men say, I have no friends, where just prior to that, it was more like 42%, which is still even high, right? But there is more people saying, yes, I don't really have any close companions or friendship or community. So they've been tracking that. And that's helped me kind of realize this is not anecdotal.

So loneliness is actually going up in all the demographics. Men have the highest surge and there's some research around why men are feeling more lonely. It's not even just feeling. Some of the research is they're literally lonely. There's nobody near them. It's not just a feeling. You can measure this objectively by just looking at the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When's the last time you had a conversation with someone in person for 30 minutes or more in the last week? You know, and when that hasn't happened or the last month or the last year, I mean, it's amazing how very few people are having intimate conversations outside of online. And this is actually some of what is messing

with our neurological pathways of like whether we're connected or not is, in there's something that happens interpersonally when I'm able to be myself with someone else and talk about my current condition in life and be heard that is going the way of the buffalo. It's just less and less people have that. And they're finding it in other places

that are not meeting that loneliness. So if you're familiar with Sherry Turkle's work at all, but she says you can spend, she's not saying she, she's actually researched this. You spend three hours of time on social media. They did brain scans that prior to that, and then post to spending those three hours on social media, your brain starts to cocoon. If you've heard of that term, it's the

prefrontal cortex. It starts to show signs of cocooning, which is closing, closing in on itself, which is ultimately what happens when they do lobotomies on people who have committed suicide, is that their prefrontal cortex is completely cocooned, closed. So this research is showing that your community connection that you think you have with three hours of time online is actually, your prefrontal cortex is actually showing signs of deeper depression, deeper closing in. That's what isolation, disconnectedness from your body. And I think that's a significant contributor.

So when you ask most men or even women, like who are their influencers or who are they learning from? It's hardly ever someone that's in their active local life. That feels empowering, but I think that the dark side of that is actually disconnection. There's just more and more ways that what is forming us is not in proximity to where we are. It's outside.

And I think that's having, I really do, I think that's having an effect of anxiety and isolation and cocooning as Sherry Turkle would say. Jonathan Haidt has done some work on this, mostly if you're familiar with his, mostly on adolescents and children. The work hasn't been done yet on adults. Sherry Turkle is just starting to address it, but what is this detached or disembodied way of interacting? How is it changing our body and changing our mind? And the loneliness seems to be like the best, at least the most simplistic or readily available

term we have right now. I'm thinking, I mean, as you're talking, it makes me think of an analogy and I don't know analogy is perfect, but like if somebody just got all of their food and nutrition off of candy bars and soda, there's that temporary feeling of like, I feel satiated, I feel good, I enjoy this, I want more of it. I'm not just dropping over dead right away, but over time your health is just deteriorating, right? I mean, is that kind of similar to? Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's a feeling of fullness. Maybe that's what your, that metaphor is. There's a feeling of fullness or there's an emotional return or there's a dopamine.

There's something you're receiving that's, seems to be getting you by, but is decaying you on the inside. And I don't, I don't hear, I mean, my frustration with this sometimes is I don't know, And I don't, I don't hear, I mean, my frustration with this sometimes is I don't know, I don't hear a lot of discernment around this drug that we call, you know, the internet. So typically, you know, conservative fundamentalists, you know, firebrand would just say, it's all bad. You know, stop watching movies, you movies, just this reaction to it. And then you have, I think in many ways, you just have a baptizing that, what can be wrong with it when it can push forward a good message?

So we're not really, I just don't know if there's a lot of discipleship and development around how to engage these addictive things that are eroding us from the inside out. And every week, every week, Preston, every single week, we have multiple people that come to the Conejo Center for deep work. Every single week, someone confesses when they're in a safe space. We're talking about 30, 40, 50-year-olds,

confesses their addiction to social media. Really? And the shame and the guilt they feel, that it's disconnecting them from their kids, it's having impact on their marriage, it's making them angrier, it's giving them anxiety, they can't really, and they don't know how to, and it's the first time they're sharing that. And I think it's because there's not a lot of spaces for addressing our dependency on this thing. Soterios Johnson When you say addiction to social media, are you talking specifically about things like political outrage porn or is it just following influencers on TikTok that are just talking

about like whatever? I mean, is it, cause as you're talking, I just, my, my mind just goes to the political outrage stuff. It seems like that's what's sucking people in, but are you talking more broadly about like social media? Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's, it's broader than that. Um, Sherry Turkle, when she, her, her work,

especially in reclaiming conversation, but I took a class with her and she kind of unpacked some research, it really is about volume. So it could be it could be three hours of consuming cat videos that begins to slowly close down your pre frontal cortex. It's really what it's doing is your head is somewhere else than your body is, if you can think about it as like it's,

and the effects of that over time. And so obviously it gets worse the more that you're consuming things that are like anger inducing, anxious, voyeurism, you know, things that are like, certainly exposing your being to more visceral things, it gets worse, but it's really not just about political things. It's really just scrolling or consuming in volume, the things that you're detached from. And your body is not, I think this is testament to the way God has designed us, our imago

de. We're embodied beings with mind, soul, and heart, and body. We're not intended to live divorced from that or disconnected from that. You know, ironically, the three hours a day that she researched, the average person spends six to eight hours a day. So she was just researching the minimal. But most people are spending a quarter to 30% of their day somewhere else, other than where their body is. And that just starts to erode.

I think this is, you know, it's hard to critique this because it seems like it's accelerated connection, it's accelerated, it's knitting us together, we're meeting people we've never met, it's bringing people who lived in different places together. I mean, it seems like it's offered a lot of possibility, but I'm not sure we've explored the shadow side of that. What's strong tool? What's the answer? I mean, is it just, all right, stop it. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's my, I think it's moderation. Um, I think that's one aspect is moderation, a, a discipline and moderate. I mean, I, I love a good Woodford reserve. I love to sit there. I did too. Good whiskey. Um,

Delta Delta serves serves Woodford other flights. Oh man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I fly Delta. Yeah. I am a sucker for Woodford, but I just know that I am a sucker for Woodford, but I just know that I cannot drink. I need to hydrate. So if I drink that after every meal, I'm just a mess. I'm sick. I'm a mess. So it's a pretty basic concept, moderation. We know this in other areas of our life. When it comes to this, we just have a hard time with it. I think, so moderation is one. I also think it's a sense of, I think that our delusions around what we think we're accomplishing with that medium,

we need some humility there. So I wrote about this in Level of Fear a little bit, but we really do think that we're changing people's opinion or being informed by more consumption. Yeah. This, that has become a truth in our society. If you're not informed, you need to Google it, scroll, find the news that no one else is finding like this.

That's just become a truth. I mean, try, try, try debating that with somebody and they're gonna, they just, it's just been, it's just rooting so much in us. As well as the second app is delusion is that we think we are changing people by crafting pontifications online. Like this, this, this power to change

has become delusional. And so, and so that those two things actually change our relationship and our being with them. I don't see a lot of like, and I'm not anti because I'm I have social media feed and I, you know, I'll look at the news online. I don't know if there's a lot of discernment about our, yeah, about what we think, what capacities, what our locust of control is with these things that we have. Well, I mean, Wendell Berry has been talking, you know, talking about this before the internet ever came around, just about how our technologies form us more than we form them. And so some of that's at play a little bit as how neutral we think the technology is.

If I put good messages out there, then I'm engaging the technology well. But the technology itself is male-forming. It forms me for thinking that my community is someone who's not in proximity with me. That the more that we believe that, because of our technologies telling us that, the more that we enter into loneliness. It's got all these backhanded or shadow sides that need to be discerned.

For men specifically, some of the research around that and some of what we're noticing is that the more men spend time, and this is not a pot shot of you, Preston, but consuming media, you know, all their influences are podcasts, all their learning is YouTube, they've attached to three or four influencers

that they really look up to, a lot of their social engagement starts to happen on social media and their nourishment is scrolling. When you put all this stuff together, you have the ability to emotionally connect starts to plummet. What I mean by that is that neuron, think about it as if you have a neuron that you stop using, it starts to close up. This is what we know about neuroplasticity. It starts to actually

get smaller, right? And if we work this other neuron, which is all connection, all consumption, all sense of learning is happening. We build this four-lane highway neuron and all our cars just effortlessly go down there. Anxiety starts to kick in when we have to use this other neuron. Do you know what I mean by that? It feels very unfamiliar. It feels anxiety inducing.

I don't know how to connect and bond and attach. I don't know how to be vulnerable. So we're finding a lot of men are losing, and maybe they never had it, but the ability to be emotionally attentive to the people around them. That's really difficult. It's almost like they're regret, well, Carl Jung would say they're regressing. They're going backwards emotionally into adolescence and childhood. A lot of it is just because they have stopped

developing in that area of being able to be a listener and being able to ask curious questions. All the things that are required to have an emotional attachment, we're regressing in and I see this a lot with men. Would it be fair to say there's a whole, there's a spectrum of super dangerous and toxic to mostly helpful with some danger. And this is not a justification of my podcast.

I let me pre-up that right now. I don't know, I'm constantly asking, is this even good? I often think of it like how podcasts can sometimes replace like the church in a sense, you know? People not finding meaning at their church. Maybe their church is just kind of like, just kind of boring and dry, and then they can go on a podcast and get a really engaging, honest conversation. And I don't know what to do with that. But I mean, on the one end of the spectrum, you know, just scrolling cat videos or even worse, maybe porn or little less, maybe you're

informed, you're watching the news, but you're just watching the news. You're just constantly clicking and scrolling and just getting more anxious, more angry because you're just being spoonfed a certain perspective designed to make you angry and suck you in and purchase stuff from their ads. So the whole industrial complex there is its own thing. All the way to what if you listen to a long form, honest, non-anxiety producing, you know, two to three hour long form podcast conversation that's actually giving you healthy doses and information challenge. Like that to me seems like that could still be problematic, but that's way more healthy

than the stuff on the other end of the spectrum. Is that fair to say? Yeah. So you're wondering if there's a spectrum of really, really unhealthy engagements with it to more healthy. Yeah. That's why I say moderation is that it's not an evil, it doesn't fit in the binary category of this is evil, this is good. It fits into the category of wisdom for me. And so I'm careful myself, I'm careful with how much consumption I have, even around good things, but it's not either or.

So I mean, I've got a preacher I listen to, but I'm also, I temper that because I can actually start to trick myself into believing I am what I consume. The information that I take in means I'm changing. That's what creates that disembodiment. I'm just careful about consumption. I have a couple of podcasts I listen to, but I actually have a couple podcasts I listen to, but I have a, I actually have a little tool on my phone about how much I can eat. So, you know, the same way right now, my wife is like, Hey, how many, how many Woodford reserves have you had this week?

You're like, you know, are you having a whiskey every night? Is that your new pattern? Cause that if you know, that creates more inflammation and then night? Is that your new pattern? Because that creates more inflammation, and then you start complaining that your knee aches. I know that I can easily get into a pattern of just thinking, it's all right to drink every night. No judgment on people who think they can. But my body can't take that. I can do it in moderation.

So yeah, I think there's some healthy things to consume, but I also think, I just think we have to discern how much we can imbibe and take in. I talk a lot, I like to talk about the new hypocrisy. I don't know if you heard me talk about that, but. Yeah. You know, hypocrisy in conservative fundamentalism would be preaching about something and not doing it, you know,

preaching against adultery while the preacher is actually sleeping with the secretary. Like, this obvious hypocrisy between teaching and practice. And my understanding of hypocrisy is that whenever we have a platform that's disconnected from our actual life. That is the sliver of where hypocrisy can start to fester and grow. And so I can start to believe that because I'm consuming information, I am that what I consume. Rene Descartes talks about, I think therefore I am.

I think the new is I am that what I'm consuming. And so I start to think, oh, yeah, I am holier or I am more loving. I am more because I'm consuming loving things that talk about love. Now truth is important. I think information is essential to formation. But what's happening because of the acceleration over technology is we're not getting to the incarnation part. We're like stopping short at information consumption.

And so I think there has to be some questioning of like, where does hypocrisy grow? It's not just in these grotesque factors. It's wherever we're not embodying that what we're consuming. How does that sound? And also, I wonder how it affects or plays against doing patient, deep work, more long-term thinking. Because people that just consume all their information from headlines or online stuff,

it's so sound biting, quick and brief. And it's just, it's, people don't do the deep work of actually thinking something. And this plays into the mind virus that's affected our political landscape on all sides. And I do wanna get into this because I think it's a our political landscape on all sides. And I do want to get into this, because I think it's a huge problem. But for example, let me give an example.

At the time of this recording, this will probably come out a few weeks after we record it. But at the time of the recording, a few days ago, there was just a meeting that President Trump had with President Zelensky. Did you see the clips of this online? I didn't see the clips, but I've seen the reaction. It's pretty pervasive. Reactions.

Yeah, pretty pervasive. And depending on what side you're on, that determines how you interpret it. If you're pro-Trump, you interpret it very positively. If you're anti-Trump, you interpret it very negatively. But here's to my point, all you see online for the most part is this four-minute, very heated exchange, JD Vance jumping in, cutting off Zelensky, and then Zelensky's cutting off. They're all kind of cutting off each other. It's very heated. One of the more Lindsey's cutting off, like they're all kind of cutting off each other. It's very heated. One of the more angry, frustrated times I've ever seen Trump, usually because he's pretty much a narcissist and likes to control the situation and he typically gives an air of being in control. This time, he kind of almost lost it at the end and people lost their minds all across the spectrum.

Most people don't even know that that meeting was a 49 minute meeting. It's all recorded. And for the first 44 minutes, I didn't know JD Vance was there. I wasn't even like, he was just sitting, didn't say a word. Nobody did. It was very cordial. It was very, very gracious.

Yes. All that to say, like, I don't even like the sound bite, the quick, the clip, the four minute clip, this, that, fed to you from one side of the aisle that to say, like, I don't even like the sound bite, the quick, the clip, the four minute clip, this, that, fed to you from one side of the aisle that's saying, see, look how horrible, see, look how, and it's like, but few people I think even know it was a 49 minute meeting that was, for the most part, very unlike the last few minutes.

I think that, I don't know, when we're just pre-programmed to latch on to the thing that confirms what we already feel and it just sends us down this spiral of anxiety, anger and tribalism and on and on it goes. It's just, rather than saying, you know what? I'm gonna spend the next four weeks at the library I'm going to spend the next four weeks at the library researching from historians and experts in foreign policy the layers and layers and layers that lie the history behind US-Ukraine relations and who is Zelensky and who is Trump.

You know, like it just, I don't know. It fosters that shallow thinking. It does. Yeah. Well that's because there's a, there's such, there's such a quickness between the consumption of that information and then our response. It's just so the, the, the speed is so short. So when you see something that pisses you off, it does, I mean, it's like milliseconds and you can express that opinion quickly. You don't, there's no mechanism for slowing down,

for moving out of lizard brain, moving out of us versus them and actually crockpotting instead of microwaving. That's what I was saying earlier is the technology malforms us because we all have opinions and we all see something on the news, but it's moved to microwave. It's cooked fast. That's why I'm often disappointed even in some of my own friends, close friends who have an irate opinion in milliseconds about something that just

was posted, you know, two hours earlier. I'm like, you know, how would you become an expert on foreign policy already? Like, yeah. And that doesn't mean you can't have an opinion, but the And that doesn't mean you can't have an opinion, but the zealotry of that response is the react, you know, we're reactive rather than reflective. And that's what you're talking about is going to the library, kind of like just a reflect, still a more, yeah, a more marinating posture in discerning what we're learning and what we're seeing and what the history of something is, rather than within quickly can get a dopamine hit. And I know people hearing this are probably gonna automatically say, well, that's because you're on the conservative side or this side. This condition is not partisan.

It's moved beyond party lines just in the way that we're fiercely reactive and then move towards hubris and arrogance with our opinion. I think that's why it's getting harder and harder to, this is back to loneliness, is have you heard of this term called political siloing? Yeah. Yeah, but I'm pocket for us. Yeah.

There's been a couple times in history where this has happened, but yeah, I'm pocket for us. Yeah. Um, there's been a couple of times in history where this has happened, but it's happening right now, uh, is that you, we political siloing is, is the psychological belief that I can only be safe with people who think just like me politically. So I can only instill we're seeing this in church, like political siloing in church. I got to go to a church that's conservative, progressive is going to be with progressives. The purpling is intolerable for most people and it's really because we're being shaped so much by the visceral reaction, I call it the verbal grenade tossing that's happening back

and forth. We can't relax with people who think and feel differently than we do. We literally cannot enjoy the company of someone who believes differently about something politically. And so political siloing is really just this siloing isolation that's happening. Now, when you think about it, if I can't find someone who believes that the border should be dealt with exactly the way that I think it should be dealt with, then I've got nobody around me I can hang out with. Like, I just, I don't. And this is happening practically, it's just this splitting away from one another and people leaving churches and communities and YMCA groups and like any place where they felt

belonging they're separating because of these nuanced understandings of not always what they believe but the how of their belief of how something should be done. Sure, we've got a national deficit, but this is the way it should be addressed to how I can't I can't enjoy company with Preston. If you think differently than I do, I feel unsafe next to you. Yeah. And so therefore I lost a friend. I lost a friend, you know. And that's one less friend in my life. And, and so that's why people are moving more towards online community, what they're calling community or connection, because you can self-select and curate and

piece together your own likeness online. And the downside again of that is depression and isolation. And you see this on both sides. This isn't, this is what I love about you. Like you, you, you, oh, we've been talking offline. I've heard you say this before both sides. This is what I love about you. We've been talking offline. I've heard you say this before. How do you say it? Fundamentalism is an attitude? It's not what you believe.

It's how you hold your beliefs. And you see it on both sides of this political attitude. I think we were talking about this a little bit earlier, but like some people don't enjoy his work, but Carl Jung, you know, State College Carl Jung, who's kind of got a popular interpretation, but some of his deep work was talking about polarization and early on, you know, back in the forties and fifties, he was talking about our, when we have the polarized mind and we think we start moving towards a tribal condition with each other that I am against you and you are against me. And that's very primal. And it happens, it happens

so quickly and so effortlessly, just, I start to define myself over and against you. And he said, ultimately, that's what fundamentalism is. He was exploring that fundamentalism wasn't a new phenomenon of, you know, what we know in evangelical fundamentalism. It's actually a way you start holding the things you believe and they become these weapons of injury and arrogance and judgment and shaming. So that's why you can look at both progressives and conservatives and see the tactics of shaming and policing and outcasting and name calling.

I mean, they just really look the same. That doesn't mean there's an equivalence in the same equivalence in their belief systems. But in the way they hold their beliefs, they are almost identical. That's where we are right now. I don't know a lot of people that are discerning the way that we're mirroring the very things that we hate. This is a little bit of René Girard, if you're familiar with René Girard and just that imitative quality.

Well, Carl Jung says this, the more that we behold that which we hate, we become what we hate. The more that we're consumed by it and that if he knew that we would have a social media feed that would just like we could drink from that fire hose all day long, it actually makes us, it controls us and we become the fundamentalist as well. Do you feel like you have kind of freed yourself from that? And if so, and obviously nobody has done it perfectly, but I think you've done it well. How are you able to not be sucked

into these political tribes? Yeah, that's a difficult question. Wait, was there ever a time when you'd work? Oh yeah, oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I can see especially early on, like probably 16, 17 years ago where I was coming out of, I was going through a deconstruction, if that would have been a term. I don't know if that's the correct term, but like a more of a decluttering. I was getting rid of some, I was getting rid of some stuff, but I really wanted to hold on to some other stuff.

And so I was in that space and my pendulum swing was to, to turn my anger and bitterness and contempt and redirect it back towards that, what, that, which I was leaving behind. And so- Like from a conservative, your swing was from a conservative environment to a- To a more progressive- And like really anti kind of concern. Yeah. I see that a lot.

I see that a lot where people, yeah, yeah, where their critique of the right might be legit, but then they just are so consumed with that, that they're defining who they are as the foundation is, I'm not conservative. Whatever the conservatives do, I'm not that. And it becomes this really unhealthy foundation, I think. Yeah, there is no foundation there. That's what... Well, that was what happened for me, was like I became anti.

That's how I defined myself. I am anti. I am against, this is what I'm against. I was defining myself, you know, emphatically, which is I'm defined by the negative. And I drew, honestly, Preston, I drew people around that negativity. I formed community and connection around what we hated together.

And so that was, you know, that's very real for me, just that the journey from moving away from something that you feel hurt you or wasn't healthy. And in some ways, you know, I got some moments of abuse that are in there for me. And my pendulum swing was to become like that, which I hated. And so I use the same tools. I know how to judge people. I know how to be arrogant, intellectually arrogant.

I know how to think I'm more enlightened than they are. I mean, all the same things that were used from the stage, I was using now from a different platform. And ultimately what it did was just hollowed us out. I mean, we cannibalized each other because we didn't really have anything. Although we would say we were all about Jesus, the genuine temperature was that we were all about hatred and anger. So there was a bit of, there's a delusion there. And so I see that online every day. And I think I wonder too is that if that's part of the,

that is part of the journey that when you are leaving something behind to kind of over correct or overcompensate, if you're in a one ditch, you are, you're afraid of hitting the ditch on the left, you crank your car and move hard to the ditch on the right. And now you find yourself in another ditch. Now this isn't like, to me, this is an advocacy for being a moderate or a centrist. I don't know. I don't like that either. Yeah. I don't think people think that's a holy people think that's what I advocate for. Like a centrist. I'm

like, no, I'm not, you know, it's almost like, are you on this side of the football field or this side of the football field? Oh, you're just on the 50 yard line. You can't just... I'm like, no, I'm playing baseball. I'm not even playing... Yeah, we run too. We throw a ball too. We go to the gym too, but it's just a completely different playing field when you're a Christian whose membership is in the multi-ethnic global kingdom of God, which has an oppositional character built into it. The part that was most shocking for me as someone who really wanted to follow Jesus was that for a good three to four years, I started to use Jesus for my political agenda.

So I took the name of Jesus and started to filter Jesus through my political agenda rather than the other way around. And I thought I was better than the far right that did that pretty obviously and egregiously in some ways, you know, the religious right. I mean, they just, they flew that banner without any embarrassment. And so I thought I was better than them. But really what I was doing was I was doing the same thing. And I get this a lot, I don't know if you've heard this, but like, when when I hear someone say, Jesus is on the side of righteousness, I often think, Oh, you must be, you must have conservative

politics, right? Like, I know, I know what that I know code for that. And then when I hear people say, Jesus takes sides, I know what you mean by that. I know the code is, he's taking my progressive policy sides. We're caught in this. There's only two options for engaging the brokenness in the world, and it's their side or my side. And so, and obviously, Jesus is on my side. So, I don't know if I'm above it now. I'm more attuned to the powers and principalities than I was before of how tribal or us versus them or simplistic demonizing is actually a demonic tactic to pit me against others so that I know I, what's the scripture talks about this clearly,

we don't fight flesh and blood, but that's what's happening is like, that's what the powers of principalities want from us is for us to hate and to rock up as Matthew would say, rock up, murder each other, right? And speaking that way about one another. And so I think the way to this isn't like being so above the tree line that you just, you know, you're transcendent and you don't feel the things other people feel. But I do think you have to discern the work of the powers and principalities to pit you,

pit us against the other, whoever the other is. That's what's happening in Romans, and that's what Paul is talking about. You're fighting each other, but it's not actually where the fight is. Is the polarization getting worse? And why is that? Is it, or is this, does this go back to what we were talking about earlier about just being more and more, uh, living an online life and the online life is designed to make you tribalistic and angry and disembodied and just, does it seem like it's getting worse and worse? I think it's, I think it's worse. Are you familiar with VUCA? Have you heard of the term VUCA? VUCA is, you know, kind of an abbreviation for what some sociologists have discerned are like periods of time in history that are exceptionally precarious. So VUCA, V is volatility, U is uncertainty, K, C is chaos, and A is ambiguity.

When these four forces come together, we begin to move towards self-preservation, which is what fear is, right? We move into an extreme place of fear. And that's what polarization thrives on fear. I mean, there's no, there's, it is the primary emotion of why Donald Trump would say, you know, back at, when is it, when he first ran, that streets are running amok with rapists and thieves. And Hillary Clinton said, they're coming for your bodies they

want it they want to take your bodies like she was talking about you know abortion and both of them using the language of fear to kind of catalyze their base when we're not in fear we don't polarize okay as intensely we're not preserved we're not we're not feeling like we have to preserve either our way of life or something that we think is going to be taken from us. So there's a few times in history, World War II, where you can see VUCA and we're there right now. I mean, it's that's why. And then when you let add in a layer of technology that accelerates that

VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, chaos, ambiguity, you know, you've got a cocktail of rage. I think discernment is not if you asked earlier, like, am I above it? I think it's more not, for my wife and I talk about this all the time is I don't wanna be ensnared by that. And so discerning where you might be getting ensnared in the idolatry and the tricks of us versus them. So yeah, I mean, it's at a fever pitch right now. Absolutely.

I wonder if your social location, I mean, you've been in Puerto Rico for a few years now. Has that helped you? When I was living in the UK, this is years ago, but I mean, and this is, the internet was barely taken off at that time, but it just, I did remember moving back to the States and just, golly, it just helped me

to see. It's like when you're not in an environment for a while and you go back to it, like, oh my word, you can see it so much more clearly. Because like in the UK, you just don't, you don't have a two-party system. You just, the brand of evangelicalism in the UK is just, the brand of evangelicalism in the UK is just different, I would say much healthier. It's not so intertwined with politics. It's way more great because the evangelical church of the UK lacks the political power or potential political power. It's much easier to separate your Christian citizenship from kind of everything else. And if you meet another person of another denomination, they can be egalitarian, complementarian, they can vote this direction, whatever. It's just all that's just very secondary. It's like, oh, you believe in the gospel too. Awesome. Let's do

ministry together. And that sort of unity and identity, primary identity in the church. And I'm not saying it's perfect at all. I don't want to. But it's just, see, it was just way more and identity, primary identity in the church. And I'm not saying it's perfect at all. I don't want to, but it's just, it's just seeing, it was just way more healthier than I got, came back here. I'm like, oh yeah, we fight over everything here and divide over everything. And that was back in, I came back in 2007.

So this is like, this is pre social media and everything. And it was, it was, it was a shock to the system then and now it's just like Yeah, but so do you feel like? Living outside of the US context has been healthier for you spiritually. Oh Absolutely, yeah, I mean, I don't know I probably have a level of embarrassment that That detachment has been so helpful for my soul. Some would think it's privilege to be outside of the context of war,

culture wars specifically, but yeah, I mean, the Puerto Rico is not infused with the steroids of us against them. It's just not that really they're very, very hyper local. Like to a point of like, it's surprising how much of their sense of self-definition, who they are, is really defined by how they know their neighbors, how this, how they know their neighbors, how we are together. And so there's a real familial orientation that I think, well, Tony and I both really longed for, we were working for for years in the States,

which is counter-cultural in many ways. And here it's actually kind of part of the culture. So a lot of what's happening on the political, if you would say, not even political, what's happening on the executive level around who gets power, who gets to legislate, who doesn't get to legislate, they're not all that emotionally riled up by that.

It's just not, it's secondary. And you know, there's something beautiful to that. That's how we've kind of entered into that flow here. It probably wouldn't be unless I had, you know, if I did no social media, I probably wouldn't even be aware of what happened between Trump and the Ukrainian president. So there's a level of, and this, I guess maybe this gets at a little bit of like, is there

a place for some level of healthy detachment? I do think that there's a lot of anxiety that we cannot unplug. We cannot detach from it. It's intolerable to not be in the know. You know, and I see a lot of that like drama online of people just not feeling like they're entitled to unplug, detach, put that in a container where it's not the center of their life. That doesn't mean I'm not political, right?

To me, political is what, is how you're engaging the kingdom of God in public. And you know, Jesus was, Jesus was wildly political, but it's actually quite surprising if you do a lot of first century research of how almost scant communication Jesus did about what was happening on a geopolitical level. Well, and they tried to suck him into the political tribalism of the day. I mean, Sadducees and Pharisees, they weren't just religious movements. They were intertwined with political stuff. I would compare it to kind of a right-wing Christianity, left-wing Christianity that is religious, but it's also very deeply partisan. And they

try to suck him into it and he just try, he kept pulling them out of that mindset. It's a wonderful analogy, actually. How do you respond to the critique that only those who are privileged, who like me, you know, a middle-class white person living in Boise, Idaho, which has no crime or somebody in Puerto Rico who, good for you, you can remove yourself from this. But there's people whose lives are at stake, who there are people who will be harmed if and since Trump is in office or there will be people who will be harmed if Kamala gets into office. Like that, you know, they draw on that kind of height.

Like people will die in the streets if you don't care a little more. So yeah, you need to be looking at the news. You need to be doing this. You need to be tweeting and Facebooking and being an advocate because the lives of real people are at stake. How do you respond to that?

How do you respond to that, Preston? I think it's, I mean, honestly, the people who, well, I don't know. I think there is a measure, there's a glimpse of truth there. I think, I just think it's not, you will be a very ineffective activist if you over consume all of the problems in the world. I also do think that people who make this argument have bought into some of the propaganda on whatever

side they're fighting for or against? Because that's the message, right? If Trump gets into office, we're going to have people in death camps and we're going to have all this horrible thing that's going to happen. And then they may even point out, look at the immigrant. You have these families being ripped apart and people being sent, you know, back to their countries and people are being harmed. And he took away all the USAID money. And now, you know, they're starving kids in the streets and everything. And then on the other side, it's like, no, because Trump's in office, we have all this

corruption that this money was serving, you know, is actually going away and being addressed. And you could just say, it depends on what narrative you're gonna choose to buy in. And every narrative is gonna draw on truth. It's just like, but if all you do is hands like this, hands like this, hands like this, and leave this out, you can build a really compelling narrative on each side. I mean, if I were to bring a film crew to Puerto Rico

and I just followed you around and only captured all of the really wicked things you have done and said, I could create Hitler out of Dan White Jr. without lying. Without lying. And then another film crew could follow you around and they could create a saint, like a Jesus-like person, because they just highlight all the good things you did. And that's what I see is going on on both sides of the kind of political tribalism.

So when people buy into that narrative and they only follow that one side of the narrative, of course they're going to be like screaming and yelling and, you know, for the sake of justice, we need to like do something here. But I just think there's a bit of propaganda that they're buying into. So there is, I don't know. Yeah. I've been getting, I don't know how many people are like, Hey man, or like, how dare you. Yeah.

I'm always careful with my response to that because it's not, it's not simplest. It's not simplistic. It's not, if this person gets in power, all bad things are gonna happen, or if that person gets in power. We know that it is way more nuanced and complicated than what is being sold to us on our feeds. I mean, you could just, one simple exploration into this

is to look at, this cannot be a little touchy, but like, I think Trump has done some horrible things around immigration. But when you look at the record of Obama, there's been some horrible things he did around immigration. Oh, for sure. That's not the MO, You don't get those stats. That's not the talking points.

But in his stay, there is record of some really, I think, hurtful things he did with immigration that look just like what Trump did. So are they both bad? No. It's complicated. It's not one or the other. My ultimate response is that I think we've lost a significant sense of our agency in our local life. And I read a book about this, that's a big part of our sense of power over things that we don't live in is why I really

think that we, you know, you ask your average person if they know the names of their neighbors and they don't. We're just, we are not living politically, locally. I just had a statement from my last book that came out last week that people were quite upset about. It's like, you're, you're trying to change the world online, but you're not engaged with your neighbor. To me, that's a massive, massive, uh, the teachers of the law, the Pharisees did this. And so I'm, I'm, I, the way that I deal with that is like, well, I'm engaging the actual

common good where I live and I don't feel like I have enough understanding to fix the common good somewhere else where I don't live. Yeah, that's good. And so there's a little bit of like embracing your limits, but also embracing the power of your local roots. So I don't know, I told this, I don't know if I told this story last time, this is real quick, I don't have a good time, but I was in the middle of my first book, it's really it's all about the neighborhood and I was meeting up with another author and I was in town for a neighborhood. I was meeting up with another author,

and I was in town for a conference, and I was meeting up with them. They happened to live in town where the conference was, and so I wanted some feedback on my book, and we were going to get together, and they were going to give me some feedback. So they invited me to go to their house, and we were going to sit down and have a cup of coffee at

their house. As we were walking, this person had written three fairly bestselling books on significant social justice issues, advocating for some some real change. And as we were walking up to their apartment on the second floor, I said, Hey, what's it like living here? Do you know your neighbors? And their response was, Oh, it's great. I don't know them. They don't know me. We don't even bother each other. And then I thought, how is that not the opposite of what you're writing about? Like, and that's because that that chasm that gap between our activism or how we think we're going to

change the world and our local life, the ties are not there any longer. You can advocate for a policy change, but literally believe it's a great thing that you don't know your neighbors, they don't know you, and you don't talk to each other is somehow good. And it was just my first encounter with like that uprooted way of engaging with change in the world. And I don't think I do it perfectly, but yeah, those disparities. I don't know if that- Yeah, no, yeah, I resonate with that. It made me think of a brilliant title of Eugene Peterson's book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. If you just spend your justice online, going

from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing to thing to thing, you will do way more good in the world if you pick a cause, two causes, and invest in those in an embodied holistic way over a long period of time. Maybe, maybe you'll, maybe you'll affect three or four people, 10 people, 20 people, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe the net results don't look big. Maybe you go on and tweet something angry about Trump and it gets retweeted and it feels good. Look how this impact I'm making. I'm just gonna say that's like eating candy bars and soda. It may feel good in the moment. You may think you're doing something,

but if you just invest into something in an embodied long-term way, I think that's way more effective. I do think the principalities and powers have, if you think otherwise, I think they're distracting you and they're pulling your heart toward this cesspool of fake justice online and it's stealing your heart away to where you don't even know the people around you.

And I'll be the first one to say I'm not immune to it, dude. It's compelling. It's super compelling to get online and do stuff that seems like you're changing the world. You know? Yeah. But yeah, I just do that. I mean, Eugene Peterson was living in a different world, but I mean, here's a guy who was absolutely brilliant, could have been a superstar, and he obviously, you

know, wrote a Bible, wrote lots of books and stuff. But I mean, he invested in a relatively smallish congregation, few hundred people for years and years. And yeah, I just think if we had more of that, we'd be doing a much better job. I do have to close this out, man. We're just getting started, but I got another interview here coming up in a couple of minutes. So real quick, where can people find out more

about your ministry? Because it's awesome. We've sent people there. We've sent several Theology of the Raw people there. Apparently, I didn't know that. You told me that after last time you were on, you had some people that said, hey, I heard about you from Theology of the Raw. So yeah, tell us where they can find more about your ministry. ThekeneoCenter.com is the place to go, and that will take you into all kinds of pathways of renewal, healing, recovery, rest.

No matter if you're working with people, you've probably got injuries and accumulated shame, anger, and fear. That needs some healing. And so, yeah, there's the place to go, kenealscenter.com. Dan, thanks so much for being the guest on The Al Jarrah again, man. Many blessings on you, the family, and the ministry. I look forward to the next time. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.