Truth Unites - Climate Change is REAL: Christian Response

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

In this video I offer a Christian response to climate change, offering  five thoughts in the hopes of generating more attention on this  important issue.    Here is the book I reference toward the end of video: https://www.amazon.com/What-Know-about-Climate-Change/dp/0262535912/ Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

My YouTube channel is mainly focused on apologetics and theology and things like that. But in this video, I want to talk about the issue of climate change. There's always a little bit of challenge in speaking to issues that touch into the realm of politics and culture, especially with how polarized our culture is, especially for me as an evangelical pastor. So I wrestle with, as I'm studying various other issues, when is it helpful to speak to something and when isn't it? I really want to retain the distinctive focus of truth unites, which I see is trying to be a reconstructive kind of voice. You know, people are questioning things. I'm trying to do apologetics, also trying to do Protestant apologetics, but trying to be kind of a consolidating voice, a voice of

hope, kind of a regathering voice, I hope. I want that that's the main goal is amidst all the disintegration, trying to help people, you know, come back to basics and rebuild and so forth. On the other hand, I also think it's important not to avoid issues just because they're controversial. I'm not very good at that anyway, and this issue is so important to me. I think about it every day. It's very much on my heart, and I study it, and I'm really interested in it. And I just feel that we can't avoid things. We have to learn how to have conversations about difficult topics.

In fact, I think part of how we can commend the gospel, those of us, who are Christians is by having conversations about issues where we may disagree and doing so in a respectful, charitable way, because that is so countercultural right now. And so I'm just going to speak to this because I care about it so much. I think we can't not talk about it. It's just too important. And I want to be true to my convictions and kind of, I don't know, there's something freeing about just saying, you know, I don't have to be right and I don't have to be perfect, but I have to do my best to follow my convictions and not let the perceived consequences be the most important thing. So I want to talk about climate change.

And I have five things to say from a Christian perspective, particularly I'm not an expert. So this is not like a scientist talking. But for that very reason, I think sometimes it's helpful to talk about these things, because that's one of the things that motivates this video. So often we just don't have these conversations. So, let me say, let me go through these one at a time. Number one, Christians should care about environmental issues like climate change. And I would even say that of all different people, Christians should especially care. So if you take a Christian and an atheist, both of them

have reasons to care about climate change, but the Christian has maybe slightly more reason, because the particular beliefs of Christianity, the particular worldview that is inculcated by the Christian gospel, is one that should naturally incline us to care about issues of stewardship and sustainability and responsible usage of resources and things like that. It's right there in our recreational mandate. It's so significant that when God makes human beings, there is that phrase. it's not just that we're made in God's image. The immediate follow-through is let them have dominion. Now, we can debate what that means, but there's this clear charge of stewardship over creation.

Second of all, the basic principle of love your neighbor. That applies to how we think about our children, our grandchildren, future generations. And then there's just basic principles that all Christians believe in that play into an issue like climate change, wisdom in planning for the future. opposition to greed, contentment, and valuing simplicity and modesty of lifestyle.

You think of Proverbs 38, which says, give me neither poverty nor riches. I know these things are all kind of basic, but the truth is, what I'm trying to say here is there's nothing in our theology that would discourage us from being in principle open to these kinds of issues. Even throughout the scripture, you think about one of the things that's so interesting. I wrote a blog post about this one time. Just how much the scripture teaches that God cares about animals. You know, the Noahic covenant, God covenants with animals.

Psalm 104, God is meticulously caring for animals, providing for animals. The cattle of Nineveh in Jonah 411. God has compassion on the cattle as well as the people. I like the way. So what I'm trying to say is our overall posture before we get into the evidence, But just our orienting posture towards issues like climate change should not be closed off. My friend Jack Collins puts it well in his book Genesis 1 through 4. He says, the world God made is a beautiful place.

Christians ought to enjoy that beauty without embarrassment, but they ought as well to protect that beauty from human greed and carelessness. Thus, the fully Christian stance toward culture is not one of retreat but of capture. And I like that word capture. This is, I think, theologically, how we should think about how Christians should relate to the environment. There's a sort of active role. We're not to just be passive and careless.

Now, so what I want to propose is that the particular reason why American evangelicals, so Christians in my context, I'm an evangelical pastor, I live in the United States in Southern California, people in my circles tend to be very, skeptical or apathetic or cautious about an issue like climate change. And what I'm trying to do here at the start is say, I don't think that's anything endemic to our theology. I think it's more cultural, political, and social factors. And there's lots there that we could mention. But I think the main thing is just in the United States, in recent decades, though not back in earlier times. issues of environmental stewardship and particularly climate change have been associated with political liberalism

and evangelicals have tended to be politically conservative. And I think that is the biggest single factor for why more Christians aren't more active in kind of leading the charge on something like climate change. I don't think there's anything theologically that would discourage us from caring about an issue like this. I know there's an initial shock value when people hear when evangelicals hear you talking about climate change, but when you get into it, you kind of realize like, well, yeah, it actually, and as well, we're going to, I'm going to say next, I think the basic idea of it makes a lot of sense. But it just, there's nothing that should make us not open to considering this. And I guess to get to the point here on this first point, I'm just deeply burdened that many people come to this super strong opinion about climate change. just as they do on other social and cultural issues without having studied it. Not based on the evidence, but based on the sociopolitical associations of the issue.

I think that is a massive problem. And we've got to avoid that. If we are called to be people of truth, that means we shouldn't make up our minds in advance on an issue. We should study the issue. We should read books about the issue. I'll give some book recommendations at the end. Now, that none of that all means absolutely someone has to have some opinion out of the gate. All I'm trying to say here is at the beginning is to make an appeal that there's nothing that in principle should make us close-minded about this.

On the contrary, our theology should make us eager to steward well over the environment. And I just want to make an appeal to my evangelical friends to give this issue an open mind. because as I've done that over the last 15 years now, gosh, I'm getting older. I've been struck by the impressiveness of the evidence and the importance of the issue. That's my second point. The basic science behind climate change makes a lot of sense. Now, let's define some terms here and get into this a little bit. So people sometimes use the words climate change and global warming interchangeably.

climate change, as I understand it, is the broader term. Global warming simply refers to is sort of one symptom of climate change and what causes a lot of the side effects that are included when people talk about climate change. Global warming simply refers to the increase in average global surface temperatures on our planet over recent decades, especially since the 1970s. So the word global is really important there. One of the things that is really unhelpful as people experience or observe local weather patterns, not getting warmer and think that's a problem because actually one of the things that scientists expect is that there'll be both warmer and colder local temperatures, but we're talking about the average global temperatures. Now, it is true,

as people often point out, that climate change is extremely common and kind of severe throughout Earth's history. So you can go back to times, I think it was like around 50 million years ago. There's basically no ice anywhere. And you've got, you know, islands near the North Pole with huge trees and the annual mean temperature at the North Pole 50 million years ago is 60 degrees Fahrenheit. And then you can find other times where there's ice ages and it's really, really cold. So the temperature does vary naturally. However, today when we talk about climate change, we're talking about an extremely rapid change caused by human activity, not natural causes. This is not the natural rhythm.

Now, that's the whole point, and that's the thing that people tend to dispute. But I'll say a couple things about that, and we'll talk about this a little bit. Number one, it's just good to observe, first of all, that there is pretty much a scientific consensus or very close to a scientific consensus on human-caused climate change as a very real problem. And this is again the appeal and just the burden I have when people are dismissive towards this. If you're going to go against a near consensus in the scientific community, don't just shoot from the hip. You know, study it and make sure that that's a wise thing to do because I see a lot of people reacting instinctively rather than really hitting the books. And I don't think that that's a responsible posture for Christians to take.

Whatever conviction we come to, we should come to it by thorough study. among other things. And basically the appeal that I would make here, and this is what I have been impressed by as I've grown more and more concerned about this issue and thought about it more and more. It's kind of fun to make a video about it because I think about it so much,

but I never really have the chance to talk about it as much. So I'll be really curious what you have to say in the comments and we can interact about this. But what I would say is the basic idea of climate change is not only extremely well-supported in the scientific community, it's also very intuitive and commonsensical and basic. Just think of it like this. First of all, you've got a lot more people alive today.

This is not the main point, but it's worth saying. Then you have had throughout the vast majority of human history. For most of human history, the human population was relatively tiny. I'll put up a graph and you can see how exponential the growth of the global population is. We're almost at 8 billion people alive today. I'm recording this on March 1st, 2022, amazingly. Amazingly, in the sense, time is going by so fast. So you didn't even hit $1 billion until 1800.

So in a little over 200 years, we're just spiking up from $1 billion to almost 8 billion people. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I think it's a wonderful thing. And from my understanding of the science on that, that actually itself is not the problem. We are capable of housing a lot of human beings on this planet, and I take the view that every single human being is a priceless addition because you've got an eternal soul and an image bearer of God coming into the world, and that's a wonderful thing to be welcomed and celebrated. But going back to the principles of just basic wisdom and planning, we have to think about how do we do that? How do we manage that?

Where might that put a strain on resources and so forth? And here's the main problem. It's not the number of human beings, that that can contribute to what is the main problem, and that's the technological advances since the Industrial Revolution have dramatically altered how we relate to the environment. And to put it really simply, we have forms of technology that consume huge amounts of what are called fossil fuels. So sources of energy like coal, natural gas, petroleum, things like this.

And we use these to power our cars and our homes and our airplanes and so forth. And in so doing, they emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. Okay. And then there's a bunch of other factors as well. But this is the main one, is huge increases in emissions of greenhouse gases. The reason that's a problem is because, first of all, greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere forever, practically. but basically they trap more heat energy from the sun. So it's like putting more blankets on at night.

You're just trapping more heat energy from the sun, the more you pump out there. And this is a basic, the reason I say, I use words like intuitive and commonsensical is because you can observe the greenhouse effect at the local level. Very easy.

It's not in dispute as such. And so it seems kind of reasonable that if you start, if you dramatically increase the amount of greenhouse gases you're putting out into the atmosphere, it would have a global effect as well. It makes a lot of sense. Just in any area of life, you know, in the last 200 years, there's been dramatic changes to how we relate as human beings to our environment. In any area of life, it's not shocking that when there's dramatic changes, there's going to be consequences to

that. And when I listen to the skeptics about climate change, I am not. impressed. I know I'll offend some people with this who are instinctively skeptical, but I really just have to say there's basically three responses people can make. One is to deny that the planet is warming up. Now that is really hard and almost nobody does that because it's just so evident. I'll put up a picture of the average surface air temperatures from 2011 to 2022 compared to the 1956 to 1976 average. And you can see it's pretty clear the planet is heating up. That's usually not where people dispute it. You can also just see the effects in terms of snow cap receding and glaciers receding and sea level rising and so forth. It's pretty hard to deny that the planet

is heating up. The more common response is number one to say, okay, yes, that's happening, but it's a natural cycle, not human caused. Or to say, probably the most reasonable line of defense is, okay, that's happening, but our contribution is relatively small. It's mainly a natural cycle. And as I've thought about that and gone back to that and tried to consider that, I just don't buy it. I really don't. It's worth reiterating that you have pretty much... The thing is, so you have the intergovernmental panel on climate change called the IPCC. It's a group of leading scientists from all over the world assigned to study this issue, and they've been advocating for human-caused global warming

is a serious problem for many for a long time. But all these other, in fact, I think when I first studied this, if I'm remembering this correctly, from 2007 on, every other scientific body of national or international standing agrees that human-caused global warming is a serious problem. So the level of conspiracy and hoax it would be if somehow all of these different,

People think that scientists are all together. People have this distrust of science. Science is an inherently conservative process. And these people are not all in cahoots with each other, you know. If somebody could disprove this, there'd be much incentive to do that. And yet you have so much agreement in the scientific community. And I'm just deeply concerned that there is an anti-science mentality that evangelicals often have. So that's the first thing to say.

Beyond that, you say, okay, what else could be causing such a rapid? Because climate change throughout Earth's history is usually much more slow scale. What else could be causing such a rapid change to average global surface temperatures over the last several decades? And you listen to the skeptics, and there's not just one idea. There's all these different ideas. There's no agreed upon alternative hypothesis. Okay? And then you can just, you know, you can measure, like, we can measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by drilling into ice core samples.

And so what you can do is measure the increases in a greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide with the increases in average global surface temperatures. And they're proportionate to each other as they increase. And, you know, the other thing, the last thing I thought of about this that is worth saying is why if it is just, a natural cycle. It's not human cost. And I'm about to move on if you're getting bored. Why is it so commonly originating in the United States? Wouldn't you expect it to be a little broader? I was just reading in a book the other week about, you know, different, how the United States was one of the very few nations that was opposed at various points to the Kyoto Protocol, which is trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and so forth. And one of the observations is

the word conservative in the United States means something different than most other places. You have in Europe, for example, there's all these arch-conservative groups, but they don't question climate change. It's not a, it's not really a global. It spreads from the U.S. elsewhere, and you can find it a little bit,

but it's mainly in the United States. And that's kind of interesting to think about it, and it's another one of those things that says, you just have to, at a certain point, You get to a point where you say, look, I'm not trying to come across as an expert, and I'm not trying to claim knowledge I don't have. But at every level I look at this, it seems very intuitive and very reasonable to say, no, this is real. This is a real problem. It just makes so much sense.

It explains so much. So that leads me to my third comment, and this is the depressing one. So if you've made it this far in the video, at least keep going until you get to comment number four, because that's when hope begins. Okay. My third comment is that climate change is a really big deal. The consequences are very severe. Okay. This is what I discovered that really impressed me and made me kind of depressed for a little bit when I first encountered this and began to dig into it. Because initially you might just think, well, okay, this is a bad thing, but we can manage with it, you know. It'll be hard on low-lying places. You know, don't move to Miami. Don't move to Lower Manhattan or the Netherlands. lens or these look because sea level rise that's one of the things you initially think of is the oceans will

rise um but we can get through this you know it's not going to be the end of the world um what i began to see the more i studied this is how interconnected and fragile everything in our environment is so that if you make a change in one place it has ripple effects that go out some of which you probably can't anticipate, many of which you can at least to some extent see, oh, that's going to be a big problem. So, you know, some of the things are obvious. Like you think of sea level rise. Other things you may not think of right away, but even just sea level rise is a big deal. 11 out of the 15 largest cities in the world are on coastal estuaries. Estuaries are where, you know, near where the freshwater and the saltwater meet.

so you can see this happening already. It's not like a distant hypothesis. You see it happening in places like New Orleans or Venice. So sea level rises itself a big problem. It causes all kinds of problems you wouldn't think of. Like coral reef ecosystems getting totally decimated because not enough sunlight gets down to them and all kinds of things. But a lot of the things that you might not think of is just the increase in extreme

local weather events. And these are some of the things that are, and I'm not trying to scare people. with this. That's not the motive, but it's just trying to be accurate, and we need to understand what a big deal this is. If you increase, if you have more and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and you increase average global temperatures, what happens is you get less frequent rainfall, but more concentrated and heavier rainfall when it does rain. So it leads to droughts in some places and flooding in other places. It also leads to land erosion and all kinds of problems. There's this

disruption to the natural cycles of rainfall, and that's a really big problem. You also have more intense hurricanes because they are fueled by the warmer waters in the summer. You have more wildfires, which I live in Southern California. I can tell you how devastating those are, partly because of drought, but also because of drier air. The oceans become more acidic as ice melts and other forms of pollution. So the oceans have all already become 30% more acidic since the Industrial Revolution. There's health hazards. The loss of biodiversity and deforestation and the strain that's created on farms

and people living closer together causes greater spread of infectious diseases. You also have insects moving into different regions and that causes problems with that. Again, it's all these unintended ripple effects that you don't think about. the effect upon farming and agriculture is huge. Just think about it. If you're a farmer and you're depending upon the snow cap to water your crops, and that's what you rely upon every single year. And let's say it's the year 2025,

and let's say it's an even hotter year than 2020 or 2016, the two hottest years on record so far, roughly tied, let's say you don't have any snow cap or you don't have enough and all your crops die. And the thing that that is so troubling is the consequences will often be the most dire for the poorest countries in the world that are thereby least equipped to respond. And so, you know, richer countries like the United States, which we consume so much per capita, it's embarrassing how much we consume. But we won't face the direct effects as much, probably, as other places in the world. and so issues of climate and issues of poverty are linked. This is why the climate affects everything.

You can't just isolate this and say, oh, that's not as important. If you care about anything else, if you are pro-life, you should care about climate change. Because when there is a drought or a famine in a poor country, people die. When there's flooding and wildfires, people die. And the scary thing is, you know, seeing the ripple level. effects and wondering about how all that goes out, you know, famine and things like that, that causes political problems. That can lead to war, you know. Some of the negative effects are reinforcing. So you get, you know, as the polar caps melt, less sunlight is reflected and is in fact absorbed. And so

people talk about this reinforcing dynamic, whereas the planet gets hotter, that causes it to get even hotter like that. And people talk about runaway global warming and all kinds of scary things like that. Now, let me just say this. I don't know exactly what's going to happen. Okay, I'm not a scientist. I'm just doing my best. I don't know. I'm not trying to scare people. I'm not trying to be a doomsday person and paint this apocalyptic thing. I'm just trying to say it's important enough to take this issue seriously. This really matters. In other words, I'm just trying to deflect that feeling of people saying, well, but that's not that important. You know, yeah, yeah, you know, we should get to it and we have time, but there's more urgent things that we have to address.

No, this really matters. And the more I've studied it, the more I've become convinced it is really important to take seriously. So that leads to my fourth comment, and that's fight against despair. Now, this is something I think about a great deal, partly because I've felt, I don't know, it's weird, the effect that this issue has on me, but you can feel at times, and I've seen this with so many people, they go straight from skepticism to despair, you know. it's like you go from not thinking about it to just giving up. And I just don't think that we need to do that, that that is helpful in any way.

I don't think despair helps anything. Even if the situation was hopeless or seemingly hopeless, I still don't think despair is the right answer. And this issue of climate change, there's so many like PR-type issues we have with it. One of them is, if I may say so, scientists don't. always communicate clearly. They're not always good generalizers and popularizers. And so sometimes you ask a scientist a question and you're trying to understand it. You know, I think of Michael Scott in the office when he asks Oscar, like explain it to me like I'm six. And then after that answer, he says, okay, now explain it to me like I'm four or something like that. I think I'm getting the ages wrong.

But, you know, it's like, you've got to break it down. You can't just, scientists often think in very mechanical and technical ways. And sometimes it's hard to understand and appreciate the issue because of how it's being communicated. That's not always true, but sometimes that's true. Another thing is this issue for some reason is such a judgmental one. So many people just feel condemned. So many people feel alienated by the way others talk about it.

And they walk away feeling like someone has just pointed a finger right in their face and made them feel really bad. and even if you think that people should feel really bad, the point is that's not effective. It doesn't work. It doesn't influence people. So have you seen the movie Don't Look Up on Netflix? I watched it a few weeks ago.

Fascinating movie. It's a satire about climate change. And incredible cast. I mean, some of the actors look so different. It was like five minutes into seeing them. I'm like, oh, that's so-and-so, you know? but all-star cast. Incredibly well done and clever, really clever movie.

And I was surprised. You always expect something like that is going to get great reviews because our culture is so interested in climate change right now. And it's addressing that. But it got mediocre reviews. Why did it get mediocre reviews? I was reading a lot of them because I was curious. The adjectives I kept hearing for why it wasn't a great movie are where things like, blunt, shrill.

One review said it was self-conscious and unrelaxed. I thought that's kind of interesting. And one of the things I was thinking about is when people try to address the issue of climate change, and it comes across as shrill like that, it comes across as condemning, we just, we can't do that. The tone that we use to address something matters if we actually want to influence people. This is one of the things I've learned in pastoral ministry is you have to, human beings are really complicated. You have to give people hope.

You have to leave people with dignity. Shaming people, scaring people, that never works. That never helps anything, you know? And so there's a fine line here between we want to strike the appropriate note of urgency, but then at the same time, we want to have the kind of touch that will be winsome to actually mobilize real action. And I'm not naive about how much opposition there is to this issue. Again, I'm aware of all the backlash I'll get for talking about it.

But I just think, here's what gives me hope. And why I say, don't despair is what if there was a way where in the midst of all the polarization happening in our world and all the hatred and outrage. And this is the pocket, you've got fundamentalism and then the far left and they're just like escalating upwards and upwards. And what if we began to see this issue as we go forward throughout the 21st century as something that we can unite around because who doesn't stand to benefit from a cleaner and more stable planet, an environment? Anybody can get on board with that. So we've got to get through these PR-type issues we have

and learn how to talk about this and learn how to have conversation about this. So that leads to my final comment in terms of what's a practical takeaway of what to do. I want to say something that is exceedingly simple and modest. And that's my fifth comment. Let's talk about this more. Let's talk about climate change more. That's the only goal for this video. This video is not intended to resolve everything. It's intended to encourage more attention on this topic. Because I think that for, gosh, we just don't talk about this enough.

I think part of it is it doesn't feel as urgent. There's such low incentive for taking actions that are painful in the moment and uncomfortable to talk about for benefits that are decades out into the future, you know? But in other areas of life, we have to do that. We have to save, for example. We have to, again, those principles of planning for the future. So I just think that a big part of how we're going to make progress is spreading more knowledge and making this more of just something that's out on the table that we're thinking about that we're aware of. Now, I'm aware that that's not all we need to do, of course. In fact, that's one tiny thing compared to everything we need to do. My personal belief is that the solution to climate change is likely to be

very complicated, multi-pronged, and long-term, and it's, you know, this is going to be tough. To put some categories out there, I think it's going to involve kind of an all of the above approach of reducing consumption, you know, personal actions, governmental actions, adjusting and adapting to new circumstances. And then the big thing that I put, this is where I put most of my focus and hope, to be honest, is technological breakthroughs into new forms of clean energy. And then you read about all these interesting kind of, they sound like sci-fi ideas, but all these forms of geoengineering that people are talking about where people have all these theories about, you know, injecting sulfur into the stratosphere. And that can offset some of the greenhouse gases and

things like this. And I don't know what to make of all that. But what I know is this is a major problem, but if it seems impossible to address, there's been lots of things that would have seemed impossible before they're done. If you are born in the year 1900 and you fight, you're, you have some role in World War I and you're living at that time, you'd never dream that within your lifetime. You'd see someone walk on the moon. Human beings are capable of, are, excuse me, are capable of incredible accomplishments when there's sufficient motivation. And that's what kind of leads me to my strategy point of here, just all my, my tiny role of just, you know, what I try to do is just encourage more energy on this topic, talking about it, reading books about it, thinking about it,

coming to an opinion about it. If people would just, you know, do some research about it and then have an opinion, that alone is, because all change starts in the hearts and minds. kinds of people. And if enough hearts and minds get focused upon something, it starts to generate force and energy. And then the larger scale things that are really tough that we have to do become more possible. So that is something that I really believe in. And it does take courage to talk about it. Because there's a stigma attached with issues. What I've found is that if people hear you talking about climate change, they assume you're going liberal or something like that. Or they somehow, sometimes people have in this sense that if you care, like I mentioned the pro-life issue.

Okay, I'm pro-life. A lot of times people assume if you care about climate change, you must not also care about this other issue, or you must not also care about spiritual things. You know, it's like we can just care about multiple things at the same time. We can care about climate change even while we care about the condition of the souls of people. It doesn't need to be one or the other. But there is this kind of instinctive balance.

backlash to an issue like this. And so one of my personal goals for my channel is number one, that is never shy away from things out of the motive of fear, to address things in a tone that is respectful and non-angry and tries to create freedom and space for conversations to be had. And then encourages people back toward my, I name my channel, Truth Unites. What I'm mostly interested in is the truth. And as I study this issue, I'm convinced that there's some truth to the science behind it. And so I would encourage people to read. This is the book I read most recently.

It's by a professor at MIT. It's really short. It's like 60 pages. I'll put it in the video description. It's called What We Know About Climate Change. I've got some other books here that are older. That'd be the one I guess I'd just recommend to start with. But my basic appeal on this is, can we talk about this more?

It just seems like it's one of those issues. that should be way high on the level of urgency, and yet you can understand in the midst of so many other things going on in our world, it gets put on the back burner. And this is something we need to think about. This is something we need to talk about. And Christians should not be sitting on the sidelines in a conversation like this. Of anybody, we should be diving in. Remember Jack Collins' word, capture? We should be leaning into an issue like this. So that's my appeal. Thanks for watching this video. I appreciate it. If you have a different opinion about this, fine. Let's just argue about it respectfully rather than just attack each other. And so let me know

what you think in the comments. Tell me your opinion on this and we'll work at it together. Hey, thanks for watching this video. God bless you.