Modern evangelicalism sometimes incorporates pieces of different ideas. Things that are in the air. Social messages. Political stances. But has evangelicalism been enchanted by libertarianism?
In this episode, we cover a brief history of libertarianism. What is it and who are some of the main thinkers? We discuss Murry Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and Robert Nozick.
What do libertarians believe?
What is a libertarian? Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi define libertarianism by six characteristics. Libertarians are defined by a love of private property, they are skeptical of authority, and they like free markets, spontaneous order, individualism, and negative liberty. We will define each of these throughout the episode.
Our special guest for this episode is Andrew Koppelman, law professor at Northwestern University. He’s the author of the book Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.
Sources
Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed. by Andrew Koppelman
The Individualists by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi
NPR story about law enforcement throwing protestors in unmarked vans
Listen America! by Jerry Falwell
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (I could only stomach maybe 1/4 of it. I promised myself if she wrote “Rearden Steel” one more time that I would stop reading. She did. So I did.)
Discussion Questions
What is libertarianism?
How have you seen libertarianism crossing over into evangelicalism?
Does libertarianism counter the story from Matthew 25?
What is the impact of Ayn Rand? Have you read her books?
Why did Atlas Shrugged suddenly become the “it” book among Republicans in 2020?
Is there any place for selfishness in the Christian walk?
Transcript (note: this was generated by AI and may not be correct)
Chris Staron: [00:00:00] This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s. To do that story, I also have to cover how Republicans changed in that era. Because the Republican Party of Eisenhower is not the same as the Republican Party of Reagan, which is not the Republican Party of today.
This episode can stand on its own, but when you’re done, feel free to go back and start at the beginning of Season 6. This is How Libertarianism Shaped the Republican Party. In Matthew 25, there’s an image of Jesus arriving with the angels and sitting on his throne. There are people on his right and on his left.
The sheep and the goats. He has really nice things to say about the people on the right. They’re going to inherit the kingdom. That guy you saw who was naked, what did you do?
Nick Staron: Here, take this jacket.
Chris Staron: You clothed me. When you saw me hungry, I just made soup. You fed [00:01:00] me. When you saw that I was thirsty, have some of my water.
You gave me something to drink. And the people in this story are like, wait a second, when did we see you naked or hungry or thirsty? What you do for the least of these brothers and sisters, you do to me. What you do for the poor, for the needy, you do for Jesus. These are the people who inherit the kingdom of God, the sheep we talked about earlier.
The goats on the other hand, they didn’t do this stuff. Get out of here, you bum! And they, well, things don’t go well for them. These will go away into eternal punishment. Eternal punishment. It’s a heavy story. But, that is God’s standard for us. We are to take care of the less fortunate. But how? For a long time, we [00:02:00] humans have been looking for ways to bend that standard.
We’re also torn between accomplishing these goals alone, or as a society, or both. These are huge questions. So to lighten it up, I decided to take these puzzles into the real world. Okay. Oh, wow. Look at all of those .
Well, we are here looking at Henry’s Fork in Idaho at the Harriman State Park. We’ve got this beautiful river here and we’ve pulled over.
We’re on a guy’s trip weekend. We were supposed to go biking in Yellowstone. Didn’t get to make that happen. So we thought we’d pull over Look at this beautiful view and talk about libertarianism.
Nick Staron: Is that the cold chill I just got or the snow we’re standing on?
Chris Staron: That’s right. You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian church.
We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Starrin with my [00:03:00] friends and this is Truce.
Okay, so, word of warning. We will not be able to cover every libertarian. Instead, we’re going to talk about just a few. Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand. Four people in, hopefully, less than an hour. And thankfully, I’m not alone in this exercise.
Andrew Koppelman: I’m Andrew Koppelman. I teach at Northwestern School of Law.
Chris Staron: His most recent book is Burning Down the House. I used multiple sources for this episode, and his is by far the best introduction to this topic. Friedrich Hayek. He’s also written about the litigation over Obamacare and defending religious liberty in the Supreme Court. Okay, so what is Libertarianism?
Andrew Koppelman: Libertarianism is the idea that human liberty can [00:04:00] be maximized by shrinking government. The weaker and smaller government is, the freer we are. That’s the basic idea of Libertarianism.
Chris Staron: According to historians and also Libertarians, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, There are six defining characteristics of libertarianism.
Number one,
Announcer: private property.
Chris Staron: That one’s pretty easy. But for some libertarians, that also means not just your 40 acres and a mule, but also your body and your labor. Your body is your labor. Your property as is the work you do. Number
Announcer: two,
skepticism of authority.
Chris Staron: Does the government have power to do things like run a post office, build roads, compete with private businesses?
Maybe? No. Maybe yes. Or maybe, maybe, depending on who you ask.
Announcer: Number [00:05:00] three,
Chris Staron: free markets. Can I trade without barriers? Like let’s say that I made a bunch of cookies and I want to swap them for a plant that you own. Libertarians generally think that the government should stay out of that. I should be able to sell you a cookie.
Mm, and even go beyond that. If I wanna sell cookies to Japan or Brazil, I should be able to do that without taxation. Or tariffs, and there’s wiggle room here depending on which kind of libertarian you are. Like if my cookie factory is poisoning a river, some think that the government should intervene, others don’t.
Number four, spontaneous order. It’s less complicated than it sounds. Essentially, if there needs to be a system in place, it’ll happen on its own. We don’t need a government puppeteering or rationing. For example, rather than a government telling us how much corn or [00:06:00] bananas to grow, the market will sort itself out.
Farmers will adjust to demand and prices without government telling them how much of which crop to grow and how much to charge. Number
Announcer: 5.
Individualism.
Chris Staron: As Zwolinski and Tomasai put it, each of us is morally significant with our own life to live. We all have the same value. You can’t sacrifice one person for the greater good because we all have the same value.
This gets into tricky territory though. Some libertarians take this to mean that There are no protected groups. In their logic, Black people are not discriminated against. Maybe individual Black people are, though. Or maybe a less charged example would be, Congress doesn’t make laws, but individual lawmakers do.
Libertarians may not like protected groups. 6. Negative [00:07:00] Liberty This is actually an interesting distinction. Libertarian thought is about wanting to be free from. That’s the negative part of negative liberty. They want to be free from government. Taxes, tariffs, police, etc. This is different from freedom to.
Freedom to own a gun, do drugs, or drink unpasteurized milk. Though, because nothing is easy. Some libertarians have argued for those things. To recap, and I know this is a lot of stuff. Libertarians are defined by a love of property. They are skeptical of authority. They like free markets, spontaneous order, individualism, and negative liberty.
According to Zwolinski and Tomasi, libertarians see these six things as moral absolutes. Okay, so we could pretty much stop there. Because we’ve covered a lot of stuff in just a few minutes. But we’ve got a long way to go. [00:08:00] Let’s turn the clock back a few hundred years and see where this all started.
Andrew Koppelman: Libertarians tend to reach back to John Locke, a philosopher who did his most important work in the 1680s.
Chris Staron: John Locke, a name you may remember from high school history class. Okay, so I’m aware that you know who that is, and I know who that is, but Just in case someone else doesn’t remember,
Andrew Koppelman: John Locke wrote in the 1680s in order to justify resistance to the King of England.
He was British,
Chris Staron: and people in England were upset about the policies of the King.
Andrew Koppelman: The dissent against the King eventually led to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which oosted the King and put a new regime in place. Locke’s task was to show. that there were limits to the power of government. There had to be limits to the power of government, otherwise the divine right of kings meant that the king could do anything that he [00:09:00] wanted.
Chris Staron: We Americans owe a lot to John Locke for inspiring our founding fathers and our Constitution. For arguing that we, no matter how lowly, Have rights. And when Locke refers to property, it isn’t just, you know, your 40 acres, or in my case, my little apartment. It’s deeper than that.
Andrew Koppelman: Locke thought that if we imagine ourselves in a state of nature, a primitive condition where there is no government.
Chris Staron: Okay, so this is where a show with a larger budget would play a song by John Lennon. You may say I’m a dreamer, but that’s not gonna happen here. No government, no property divisions. In this imaginary world, so. We’re basically in the Garden of Eden.
Andrew Koppelman: Let’s just say that I see apples growing on a tree. And I pick a bunch of the apples and take them back to my home.
Well, those apples are now not like any other apples. The way that Locke puts it is, I’ve mixed my [00:10:00] labor with those apples. And so, if somebody else tries to take the apples away from me after I’ve picked them. pick them, he is trying to get the benefit of my pains, which he hasn’t got any right to. Let him go and pick his own apples.
Chris Staron: In his book, Andrew distills Locke’s ideas down to two main points. One, people are entitled to be rewarded for their work. If I pick those apples, I should be able to eat them, or sell them, or trade them. And two, the institution of property, even though it produces inequalities, is generally good for everyone.
Andrew Koppelman: And Locke thinks that the reason why we form governments is because if we have disputes over property, If we have any kind of disputes, we’ve got to have some higher authority to adjudicate those disputes. Life in the state of nature is dangerous and inconvenient, and so in order to get along with each other, we’ve got to have government in order [00:11:00] to secure the rights that we already have, such as the right to property.
Chris Staron: Like, if someone is going to steal my apples, we need someone to decide what to do with that.
Andrew Koppelman: At a minimum, a police force and judges to adjudicate decisions. And so, some libertarians think that this means that that’s the only thing that government can legitimately do.
Chris Staron: By the way, Locke was not a libertarian.
Because such a thing didn’t exist back then, and he wouldn’t have fit our six points from a few minutes ago. But his ideas became the basis for modern libertarianism. In music terms, it’d be like the backbeat that somebody samples and then turns into their own thing. No longer should people believe that the king and queen can do whatever they want.
We have rights to our property, including our bodies, and our labor. And get this, John Locke was a Christian.
Andrew Koppelman: But even absent the [00:12:00] Christian framework, you could say, even if we’re just in a state of nature trying to arrive at terms of cooperation with one another, we are not going to arrive at terms of cooperation that require us to starve to death.
We must be able to agree to allow one another to take bits of the world.
Chris Staron: In our apple scenario, that idealized petri dish of a world that we were imagining, this is key. We’re imagining that there is plenty to go around.
Andrew Koppelman: But if that’s the purpose, if the purpose is that we get to have property because we need it in order to preserve ourselves, then that is key.
already parts company with the libertarians, because it means that the social contract cannot be such that people are going to be deprived of what they need to stay alive.
Chris Staron: John Locke would not have been cool with me hoarding all the apples in all the trees for hundreds of miles [00:13:00] around. Leaving you with nothing to eat.
Andrew Koppelman: Locke thought that you could justify appropriating things in nature as long as you left as much and as good for other people. If I pick the apple, but there’s plenty of other apples on the tree, nobody else gets to complain. But, if you end up with a state of affairs where all the property is taken and people are starving, You have thwarted the whole purpose of having property in the first place.
So, fundamental divide between Locke and the Libertarians, number one, is that the purpose of property for Locke is in order to enable comfortable self preservation. And so that means that if the political system doesn’t deliver, The means of self preservation, it is not doing its job.
Chris Staron: Let’s try this from a different angle.
Let’s go back to my friends out there near a frozen river in eastern Idaho. There’s this example in [00:14:00] libertarian philosophy of an oasis in a desert. Let’s say I own this oasis in the desert and then you guys come out of, I don’t know, that forest out there and you’re thirsty and you want some water. John Locke, who was writing in the 1600s, would argue that there must be as much and as good for everyone.
So in an ideal world, We’d all have access to water. So he seems like a decent guy, right?
Nick Staron: Yeah, yeah, if I was definitely thirsty at this point, I would appreciate his philosophy. Yeah, you’d
Chris Staron: want to come across John Locke.
Nick Staron: Yeah, that’d be nice. Yeah.
Chris Staron: John Locke is a friend to thirsty hikers, and his philosophy became a major inspiration for libertarian thought.
But ideas don’t stay the same. Put. They get repurposed, stretched, twisted, and become new things. When we return from the ads, we’ll see just how far Locke’s ideas were taken, to the point where some philosophers think, maybe you should be [00:15:00] willing to die to defend my right to hoard apples for myself, or my frozen river.
And we’ll return to Henry’s Fork to see how these ideas play out. Stay tuned. If you like the show, take this time to share it on social media.
Welcome back. This is the Truce Podcast. Did you have a good break? How you feeling, Andrew?
Andrew Koppelman: Yeah, yeah, I’m very comfortable.
Chris Staron: Great. Now that we’ve touched on John Locke, let’s jump forward a few years to the 1800s, when Locke’s ideas about property and labor were taken to greater lengths, used as the backbone for a new thing.
Libertarianism.
Andrew Koppelman: Libertarianism really begins simultaneously in Europe and the United States in the 1800s.
Chris Staron: And at this stage, it looks very different over the pond than it does in the United States. In Europe, it had two adversaries. The first was [00:16:00] feudalism.
Andrew Koppelman: The old privileges that the aristocracy has. In England, there is a huge struggle against
Chris Staron: Which uses tariffs to prevent cheaper grain from being imported.
Which is not great for the consumer because that allows local grain producers to jack up the price.
Andrew Koppelman: Which is great news for the aristocracy who own a A lot of land because it maintains the price of the wheat that their land produces and keeps them rich, but keeps laborers poor because food is very expensive.
Chris Staron: Free trade between England and other nations would likely have made this cheaper. It would have introduced competition. European libertarian enemy number one, a lack of free trade. Then there’s the second adversary, socialism. Central economic planning where the government controls the means of production, and the people keep the profit.
For example, if I’m the government, and we’re organizing things centrally, [00:17:00] I as the government need to plan how much of everything gets made. Let’s say that today I’m looking at dog toys. Last year there were, I don’t know, 10, 000 squeaky toys sold in my country. I’m gonna order the factory to make 10, 000 dog toys for next year.
But then There’s a puppy craze that I didn’t expect. Nobody expected it. Next year, a lot of dogs are going to go without toys. Because no matter how good I am at centrally planning all the items in the economy, these guys argue I’ll never have enough information to get it all right. So Bandit and Patches and Dog the Biscuit Hunter are going without toys next year.
European libertarians did not like central control.
Andrew Koppelman: The best intellectual response to that in Europe is the Austrian economists, people like Ludwig von Mises or his student Friedrich Hayek, [00:18:00] who show quite elegantly that the only way to coordinate production, the only way to figure out efficiently how to invest productive resources is a market.
Chris Staron: Remember the six things that define most libertarians? One of them was free markets. Free markets. Instead of centrally planning things or setting tariffs, we’ll let the market figure it out.
Andrew Koppelman: Because markets give signals to everybody in the economy very quickly about what commodities are wanted and how urgently they are wanted.
The price system is really terrific. for that.
Chris Staron: That’s roughly what happens in Europe in the 1800s and early 1900s. Libertarians oppose feudalism and socialism. In the US, early libertarians were focused on opposing something else, slavery. Remember what Locke was all about, protection of property and labor.
And property could mean your own body. [00:19:00] And slaves were not seeing the fruits of their labor or controlling their own bodies. Those ideas didn’t stop there.
Andrew Koppelman: And that idea of freedom is what leads the Supreme Court to then, on the basis of the Civil War amendments, strike down slavery. Maximum hours laws, wage laws, laws that prohibit employers from firing people who join unions, things like that.
Chris Staron: Again, protecting your property, in this case your body, and your labor. Both the European and American versions came out of Liberalism. I know that sounds confusing.
Andrew Koppelman: Liberalism is used in contemporary political discourse to describe ideas associated with the Democratic Party. But in political philosophy, it stands for a much bigger idea.
Liberalism is the novel idea that what we should be aiming at is individual liberty, giving people the freedom to live as they like. Libertarianism [00:20:00] is the claim that this freedom of people to live as they like will be achieved by shrinking government.
Chris Staron: Doing away with things like regulation, workplace safety, food standards, pollution laws, that kind of thing.
And something we haven’t talked about yet. Redistribution. Taking money via things like taxes from the middle and upper class, and funding things for those in need, or the country in general.
Andrew Koppelman: Things like social security, the earned income tax credit, but actually even free government. public schools for children whose parents are too poor to pay for the education themselves.
On a libertarian account, all of that has to go because government should only be protecting persons and property and nothing else.
Chris Staron: Let’s meet our first notable libertarian. Friedrich Hayek. Hayek was of the Austrian school we talked about a moment ago, from Europe, so he was concerned about socialism.
One of his biggest [00:21:00] contributions was his book The Road to Serfdom, which was published by, can you guess? The University of Chicago. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, This podcast could literally just be about the impact of the University of Chicago. Leopold and Loeb went there. It was the hub of modernist theology.
It was funded by the Rockefellers. And soon we’ll cover how it was the home of Milton Friedman. Something to look forward to. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974. And both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan carried out his ideas. And there’s another interesting connection. Hayek got some of his funding from the Volcker Fund, the libertarian think tank where R.
J. Rashtuni worked. The Christian Reconstruction guy, the father of modern homeschooling in the U. S. Remember him? I got red string and pushpins all over my walls, baby! Okay, so back to his book. It was so popular, especially with big businesses. that it was reworked into a comic strip and distributed to employees of General Motors.
Andrew Koppelman: The [00:22:00] road to serfdom is really a response to the program of the British Labor Party in World War II. The book is published in 1944. The British Labor Party has proposed to nationalize the means of production.
Chris Staron: Hayek’s response is essentially, It’s fine to do central planning while the war is going on, when the government needs to ration things like steel so it can build bombs and planes, or cloth to make uniforms and blankets.
But in peacetimes, you don’t want all that central control, otherwise you end up with the dog toy problem from earlier, because no system of central control is going to be efficient enough to anticipate everyone’s needs and adapt. If we go with central control, some dogs will go without.
Andrew Koppelman: And so government shouldn’t direct the economy.
Government should step back and allow the market to operate. And individual consumers will tell you what they want [00:23:00] by sending price signals. If some new product arises that the consumers want, let’s say, The television set, or dog toys, they will buy it, and producers will then respond to these incentives by producing more of these things, and competition among these producers will cause the product to become cheaper, and it will also produce increases in quality, which is exactly what happened.
Chris Staron: To oversimplify Hayek, free markets work better than central control.
Andrew Koppelman: Now, all of this is a response to the program of the British Labor Party. Hayek was a huge hit in the United States because there had been a lot of people business people who had been opposed to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Chris Staron: It is entirely possible that by the end of this season, you’ll be sick of hearing about the New Deal. But in the U. S., it was a real turning [00:24:00] point.
Andrew Koppelman: The problem with using Hayek in order to beat up on Franklin Roosevelt is that Roosevelt’s program was nothing at all like the British Labor Party. He tried out something like this.
central direction of the economy in his first couple of years in office in 1933 and 1934 and was thwarted by the Supreme Court in his early efforts.
Chris Staron: As the U. S. was burdened by both the Depression and the Dust Bowl. which destroyed a lot of crops due to bad farming practices. In the 1930s, the federal government literally told farmers how much of each crop they could grow and would penalize people for going over those limits, which they felt was necessary in order to get prices under control.
And guess what? It worked.
Andrew Koppelman: But he very quickly pivoted away from that. Toward more redistributionist programs like social security and so there was this category mistake right [00:25:00] from the beginning that When libertarians talk about the New Deal and a philosophy of government that is reconciled to New Deal programs, they talk about it as if we were talking about communism.
And I would say if you cannot tell the difference between Joseph Stalin and Dwight Eisenhower, you need new glasses.
Chris Staron: Hayek is not on the extreme end of libertarianism. He thought there was a role for government. Hayek, unlike others, could look at someone who was not thriving in life and understand that it might not be laziness that got them there.
Some libertarians swing that way. It could be that industry left, or they got sick or injured, or dumb luck like a hurricane that destroyed their business. To quote
Andrew Koppelman: Andrew’s book, Hayek’s view did not entail minimal government. It rather imposed strict conditions on intervention in the economy.
Chris Staron: Hayek didn’t [00:26:00] like stuff like social security, but he was okay with things that the private sector is not going to be able or willing to carry out.
Things like roads, police, courts, education, social services, and basic scientific research. In his mind, let the market do it. That is Hayek in a nutshell. Let’s take what we’ve learned and return to the Henry’s Fork River. To see how these ideas play out in our Oasis scenario. We’re looking at this cold river and we’re very cold.
We’re going back to that example of a desert and a body of water. And I haven’t owned the rights to all of this water in this example. Friedrich Hayek would argue that property ownership at that point is stretched pretty far. I have a monopoly on the water and you guys are about to die of thirst because I own all the water.
And therefore, there should be some kind of body that would give you rights to access that water. Andrew said this better than I could.
Andrew Koppelman: Hayek would say [00:27:00] the whole point of having a free market economy is because it makes everybody better off, and if you haven’t done that, then you haven’t done what free market economies are for.
Chris Staron: That means that, in terms of our example with the water, Friedrich Hayek wouldn’t want you guys to die. In order to respect my property rights. So does that sound fair?
Dave: Yeah.
Chris Staron: As one of the people who would be dying in this situation?
Dave: Yeah. I’d appreciate that water.
Chris Staron: Even though he was a libertarian and he believed in property rights, there was an extreme limit to that.
He wasn’t going to push it to the point where you guys would die of thirst.
Nick Staron: Very thoughtful.
Chris Staron: Thank you,
Nick Staron: Friedrich.
Chris Staron: So far, both examples, Locke and Hayek, are pretty generous. If there’s not enough to go around, something has to give. That is not the philosophy of every libertarian thinker. Bringing us to the third figure of our episode, Murray Rothbard.
Andrew Koppelman: Rothbard [00:28:00] was a writer. It gets started in the 1920s. 50s. He works for libertarian think tanks and he is trained as an economist and he is essentially an anarchist.
Chris Staron: Anarchism is also a broad term that means a lot of different things. In the 1800s, groups of anarchists were responsible for a number of dynamite bombings in the United States.
President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. Leaving his Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt, to say this at his first address to Congress as President.
Teddy Roosevelt: President McKinley was killed by an utterly depraved criminal belonging to that body of criminals who object to all governments, good and bad alike, who are against any form of Popular liberty if it is guaranteed.
Even the most just and liberal laws who are [00:29:00] as hostile are to the operat exponent of a free people’s sober will As to the tyrannical and irresponsible, desperate.
Chris Staron: Not every anarchist was a murderer. This is yet another big umbrella. Murray Rothbard, as best I can tell, didn’t carry over the same murderous spirit.
Andrew Koppelman: Anarcho capitalism, the idea that’s associated with him, supposes that no governments are legitimate.
Chris Staron: In Rothbard’s ideal vision, Instead of governments as we know them,
Andrew Koppelman: In the state of nature, people would form mutual protective associations, and the mutual protective associations, if there weren’t a state, would enter into consensual arrangements with one another.
Because it’s in nobody’s interest for there to be warfare, and so systems of cooperation, and even courts, would arise [00:30:00] just out of consensual transactions. And so he imagines a civilized world in which there are these multiple centers of armed power in the same geographical area.
Chris Staron: Again, not government sponsored, and Not relying on mandatory taxes.
Andrew Koppelman: That live peacefully with one another.
Chris Staron: So far, this is kind of optimistic, right? Trusting people without compulsion? To live at peace and avoid war? It sounds nice in that petri dish imaginary world just after the Garden of Eden. But, it isn’t practical when it gets into the real world.
Andrew Koppelman: Now this is already ridiculous, because we actually have seen places in the world where there are multiple centers of armed power in the same geographical area.
We call them warlords, and they have trouble getting along with one another, and we see what happens in failed states.
Chris Staron: According to Andrew, the closest example we’ve seen in modern times This is
Andrew Koppelman: [00:31:00] organized crime in the United States in the 20th century, where the, the Mafia Commission organized a number of large quasi monopolistic gangsters, uh, and tried to adjudicate disputes between them because there were enormous gains to be had if they would just avoid violence with one another.
Chris Staron: The same is true for drug cartels in South and Central America that cooperated for a number of years. Until they didn’t. These are non governmental organizations who offered protections without charging direct taxes.
Andrew Koppelman: This actually worked sometimes for years, but this equilibrium was punctuated periodically by wars and assassinations if the balance of power shifted.
I imagine many of the people listening to this have seen The Godfather, which is just a story about what happens when the peace is temporarily broken and [00:32:00] eventually a new equilibrium is reached. But on the way to the new equilibrium, There are a lot of people killed, so this is not as happy a story as Rothbard imagines.
Chris Staron: There are a lot of downsides to Rothbard’s vision, because it leaves the little guy exposed, totally reliant on the powerful to take care of them and stick to their word. In a democratic republic, we can vote people out of office if they misbehave. In a loose confederation with warlords, there’s none of that.
It also overlooks the reality that even if the United States was to shut down the government and go to this freewheeling system, the rest of the world is not likely to follow, leaving a disorganized landmass surrounded by governments that can finance and coordinate a military. It’s simply not practical to maintain the rights of citizens this way.
According to Andrew, it will ultimately [00:33:00] degenerate into feudalism, where a series of elites controls the rest of civilization. Rothbard stuff seems kind of fringy, right?
Andrew Koppelman: But Rothbard is enormously influential, you know, when the Libertarian Party forms in the early 1970s, the Libertarian Party forms because people have less respect for government than they had in the past, largely owing to the Vietnam War, and Rothbard first becomes a prominent public intellectual in the 1970s.
These are the central ideas that the party organizes around.
Chris Staron: Though there is still disagreement in the Libertarian Party. Not everyone is pro Rothbard.
Andrew Koppelman: Some of them believe in an absolutely minimal state, and some of them believe in no government at all. And they remain divided on that question. The other ways in which Murray Rothbard influenced contemporary thinking is, for anybody who took a political [00:34:00] philosophy class in college, you may have read Robert Nozick’s book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
Nozick was a protege of Rothbard. Rothbard. Anarchy, State, and Utopia imagines Rothbard’s state of nature and tries to figure out how a state could legitimately emerge from Rothbard’s system of mutual protective associations and he ends up concluding that you would end up with a minimal state, but nothing more than a minimal state that protected persons and property.
Chris Staron: Even Rothbard’s students, like Nozick, don’t agree on his work. There is a lot at play here. Before we get too deep into the legacy of Murray Rothbard, Let’s return one more time to my road trip with my friends. To see how his ideas would play out in our Oasis scenario. Together, Andrew and I are going to walk you through what Rothbard would argue.
Andrew Koppelman: So, you’ll recall I began with the crude libertarian story based on a reading of Locke that everybody’s just got a right in the state of nature to appropriate property. [00:35:00] It’s an absolute right. Doesn’t depend on whether there’s as much and as good left for others. Back
Chris Staron: at Henry’s Fork, we’re looking at this ice cold water.
Murray Rothbard would argue that you guys coming out of that distant forest, you’re thirsty and you need some water. And I have a monopoly on the water.
Andrew Koppelman: It’s mine. If I decide that I am going to make it into a sacred shrine and not let anybody drink from it and only drink the bare minimum from it myself, I’ve got a right to it.
Chris Staron: And that could be by force. It could be with my own private, Army, keeping you out of my water. He would also say that you guys would respect my property rights so much that you’d be willing to die out there in the woods in order to respect my property boundaries.
Dave: Oh, wow.
Chris Staron: That’s pretty unreasonable. Yeah.
No, thank you. We live in a finite world, not an endless Garden of Eden. There’s only so much land, so much water, so much soil to go around, [00:36:00] which would eventually, under Rothbard, lead to monopolies, like my control over Henry’s Fork, and my three friends who desperately want a drink of water, would be out of luck.
Now he also has this idea that if we were to enter into a contract, About this water that you guys can have so much water, but maybe I don’t tell you that this water is contaminated with something he would argue that I would have the right to enter into contract fraud because buyer beware, a contract is something that you only agree to.
If you completely understand all of the elements. And if you guys sign up for something that is harmful for you, or it doesn’t work out, then you’re Buyer beware. Again, this is an extreme vision of libertarianism, but also an influential one, as we’ll see in just a few minutes. If I, I’ve got jugs of water that I’m gonna give you guys who are thirsty, and I know that that water is laced with mercury or, or some kind of [00:37:00] bacteria, you, it would be up to you guys to have done the research to know that that water was poisoned.
Nick Staron: Which is a pretty miserable way to live considering how many products and things you interact with in a day to assume that you had the knowledge of every manufacturing process of every little thing you consumed, forget it. Like, you know, every time you pulled up to a gas station to fill up your car, you’d have to know that that gas station was safe.
Chris Staron: Yeah, and the argument of, uh, that sort of extreme vision of libertarianism would, would say that, oh, the market will inform people. They’re, they’re, the word will get out that if a pharmaceutical company is selling drugs that will kill you, that as a society will come up with ways to know that that, that is poisonous medication and you shouldn’t buy it.
Nick Staron: Except there’s just so many things in this world that could kill you that everybody would just be wiped out by the time we all figured out what was doing it.
Chris Staron: In reality, we can’t always know what’s in a product. This goes back to the food purity movement at the beginning of the 20th century, where food manufacturers were putting sawdust in bread and formaldehyde or [00:38:00] chalk in milk to thin it out.
Somebody who really likes Rothbard would argue that word would get out about these bad practices and we’d simply stop buying their products. Eventually, we stopped buying them. They’ll go out of business. The problem is that that approach leaves a lot of people poisoned before we figure this stuff out, and we’d have to do it for every single product and manufacturer.
Andrew Koppelman: While under the English common law going back to the middle ages, this would have counted as fraud. And the courts would have voided this transaction because I defrauded you. For a libertarian, it’s a contract you entered into. You decided to enter into it. And so, all sorts of things that government now protects us from, workplace safety regulation and consumer product safety, really could be understood as different ways of policing fraud.
That when I buy the products, I don’t know that this particular toy was a choking hazard to my child. [00:39:00] Or in my workplace, I wasn’t, you know, the worker didn’t know that this workplace was dangerous in these various ways.
Chris Staron: Then, too bad! You should have known. This requires all people to be educated on a tremendous number of subjects and to have ready access to good, qualified expert advice about everything.
Not everyone is capable of getting that kind of expert opinion, or even has the time, but that kind of protection you. requires a government.
Andrew Koppelman: But the libertarians, at least the most extreme ones, like Murray Rothbard, want to rethink the role of government from the bottom up and end up with something quite minimal.
Chris Staron: Or in Rothbard’s case, non existent. But his followers might argue, That’s okay, because he has this theory of non aggression.
Andrew Koppelman: So in Locke, the primary commitment was people’s obligation to preserve themselves. Because God wants [00:40:00] us to preserve ourselves. Murray Rothbard’s primary idea As you can see, we’ve got an obligation not to aggress or disrespect one another’s persons and property.
He didn’t have a very good account for why we should have this, but he thought that there was this basic obligation to respect one another’s property. That’s why if somebody’s got the only Oasis in the desert and my family is dying of thirst, I still have an obligation to stay away from his Oasis to respect his property because that non aggression obligation, that obligation to respect his property overrides my obligation to my family.
It overrides everything. Absolutely everything and we can legitimately form mutual protective associations in order to protect ourselves. What we’ve got a right [00:41:00] to. So if the guy who owns the oasis in the desert Surrounds it with armed guards with machine guns He’s just doing what he’s got a right to do.
If I try to slip past The armed guards in order to get some water for my dying children. I am doing wrong I am aggressing against his property and he’s legitimately defending himself and And so If he catches me trying to take some of his water, he is entitled to whatever aggression is necessary in order to defend his person and property.
Chris Staron: Even with the principle of non aggression, you can see how this still kinda leads to aggression. But aggression that favors the property owner over those who might need that property. Sometimes when we talk about philosophy or economics, there are some of us who say, So what? Nobody’s actually going to do this.
It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s quite [00:42:00] another to enact that idea in the real world. Well, Rothbard has had significant influence with powerful people.
Andrew Koppelman: He persuaded a wealthy industrialist named Charles Koch to start a variety of libertarian organizations to promote libertarian ideas. It’s likely that we would not be talking about libertarianism today if Koch, who is not fabulously rich, had not spent millions and millions of dollars on institutions like the Cato Institute to promote libertarian ideas.
Chris Staron: Charles Koch, also known as one of the Koch brothers. The family will come up again in this episode, and in a few episodes, and then later this season. His money comes from oil. Fred Koch, his father, was a founding member of the conspiracy theory spreading group the John Birch Society, which we’ll cover in the next episode.
Where the left has its billionaires in the form of George Soros or Mark [00:43:00] Cuban, the far right has the Koch family. It makes sense that someone like Charles aligns with Rothbard. As a very wealthy man, he can afford the protection of a private police force. Not to mention, he would save a lot of dough if there was no tax on his money.
Though, as I’ve noted in a previous episode, the ultra wealthy don’t actually pay that much in tax in the first place. Among other things, Koch funds the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Enterprise Institute. He also has ties to Tim LaHaye’s Council for National Policy, which we’ll cover later this season, that ties evangelicalism to the far right.
Though he is not, as far as I can tell, a member, he did get an award from them. Koch is not the only Rothbardian. He’s just one example of a notable funder on the far right who aligns with his ideas. So far we’ve met John Locke, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, and Murray Rothbard. All of them influential. In the [00:44:00] midst of all these dudes, we need to talk about a woman.
One who brought so many people around to libertarianism in the United States. In fact, you might already know her name, Ayn Rand. Her books, including Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, are massive. Not particularly well written, they’re ranty and steamy, and have achieved remarkable notoriety. Her books don’t fall in line with any of the guys we’ve already covered.
For starters, she’s not like Rothbard, in that she advocates for a government, Albeit a small one. Something limited to courts, police, and the military, but she was not okay with the social safety nets of Hayek. Ayn Rand grew up in Russia. She
Andrew Koppelman: lived through the Russian Revolution, and then she escaped from Russia in the 1920s.
What she saw. In the Russian Revolution and its aftermath was horrendous oppression and incompetence. And when she came to the United [00:45:00] States and she saw what Roosevelt was doing with the New Deal, she thought that she was seeing the same thing operating. And so she becomes more and more afraid that what the liberals are trying to do is going to bring us to Stalinist Russia.
And she never really gets over this. In the 1960 election, she says that if John F. Kennedy wins the presidency, there may never be an election again. So, you know, very silly stuff. And in her novels and then later in her prose writings, she advances the idea that it is only the wealthiest capitalists who produce wealth with their genius and all of the rest of us are dependent on them and government intervention that interferes with the activity of the capitalists is pure parasitism that tries to enslave the most [00:46:00] productive people for the benefit of the weak and useless.
Chris Staron: Atlas Shrug lifts up wealthy capitalists as the people who make the world work. And as Andrew said, it depicts others as trying to pull them down. Because if you’re not rich, you’re probably lazy. These books were all the rage in the GOP in the lead up to the 2020 election, despite Rand’s avid atheism.
Actually, that’s too soft a term. She really hated religion.
Andrew Koppelman: Among the libertarian writers, she sells more copies than anybody else.
Chris Staron: Atlas Shrugged has sold more than 10 million copies, and sales surge every few years. Rand’s influence on libertarian thought in the U. S. Almost can’t be overstated.
Andrew Koppelman: The capitalist vision, and the idea that unregulated capitalism is justice, is more starkly presented in Atlas Shrugged.
The idea that there are [00:47:00] The productive people. And on the other hand, there are the moochers and looters and parasites who want to use government to take away from the productive people.
Chris Staron: This is no small idea. And I’ve heard the same kind of fear a bunch over the years, even from Christians, that if you’re not rich, it must be because you’re lazy.
Speaking of how our ideas have bled over into the evangelical world, In 1991, the Library of Congress released the results of a survey asking Americans which books had the most influence on their lives. Number one was the Bible. Number two was Atlas Shrugged.
Libertarianism is not necessarily Republican or Democrat. And it’s certainly hard to call it biblical when you run it through the literal test of episode one. So, let’s just be honest, the Bible doesn’t advocate for [00:48:00] libertarianism. And for that matter, it also doesn’t advocate for socialism, capitalism, or communism.
So why talk about libertarianism in a season about evangelicals and the Republican Party? Because this philosophy continues to make inroads in both.
Andrew Koppelman: It has become predominant in the Republican Party because the Republican Party since the 1930s has been the opponent of big government, has been the party that is opposed to regulation and redistribution.
It is now somewhat in eclipse in the age of Trump. Shoving peaceful protesters into unmarked vans isn’t quite libertarian.
Chris Staron: As well as increased policing.
Andrew Koppelman: And high tariffs, which libertarians don’t like.
Chris Staron: Because Tariffs get in the way of free trade.
Andrew Koppelman: On the other hand, uh, Trump is quite opposed to regulation.
Trump proposes to dismantle modern [00:49:00] regulatory state, which libertarians want to do, about dismantling or revising Obamacare. The only programs that are out there to reduce the size of, which are politically possible to reduce, are programs that
Chris Staron: benefit the poorest people. That’s not to say that Republicans are the only ones influenced by libertarianism.
Democrats have been acting in Hayekian ways for decades. One
Andrew Koppelman: of Hayek’s ideas that I think became increasingly influential in the Democratic Party is the idea of the great thing about a free market economy. Is that there are gains from trade. It makes everybody richer. And so the party of Clinton and Obama was quite strongly in favor of free trade.
Clinton shepherded the North American free trade agreement because he thought it’s going to make Mexico richer. It’s going to make. [00:50:00]
Chris Staron: Something that was embraced at the time by Democrats and Republicans, though there were fights over how to prepare Americans for the loss of factory jobs that would go to Mexico.
That is just one way that Hayek’s free markets impacted recent history. Another.
Andrew Koppelman: I don’t think that anybody noticed, I didn’t even notice until I started closely reading Hayek, that the basic idea of Obamacare was devised by Friedrich Hayek in 1960. Hayek wrote a book called The Constitution of Liberty in 1960.
Hayek had taught at the London School of Economics for many years, and so he’s quite focused on developments in Britain. Britain had the National Health Service, where you had doctors on the government payroll, and if you get sick in Britain, you go to a doctor that’s on the government payroll. This is something the United States has in one niche of our economy.
The veterans department works [00:51:00] that way, and veterans hospitals work that way. But in general we rely on other means. Hayek said, again with reference to Britain, you really would provide health care better if you just gave people vouchers, if they couldn’t afford adequate health insurance themselves, to buy health insurance on the private market.
Now, of course, you would have to require the insurers to cover everybody, even people who were sick, and you’d have to subsidize for pre existing conditions. You’d have to require everybody to have health insurance, so that they didn’t wait until they were sick in order to buy insurance, because money has to be in the insurance pool.
Everything that I’ve just described is important. is, in fact, how Obamacare works.
Chris Staron: Again, a government program that was proposed by Democrats, following Hayek’s lead. Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, wasn’t loved by some when it was proposed because it wasn’t fully funded health care. It was [00:52:00] also opposed by the Moroth Bardian crowd, including Charles Koch, for getting the government involved at all, or using taxes to subsidize it.
Which Rothbard would have seen as an act of aggression.
Andrew Koppelman: The libertarian objection to Obamacare, which was essentially that we were raising taxes in order to provide medical care for people who needed it, the taxes were being imposed on people who hadn’t done anything wrong and so that was wrong, is just a fundamental misunderstanding of Lockean social contract theory, which purportedly is the basis of libertarianism.
Chris Staron: Even though the program follows the plans of a libertarian, Hayek, not all Libertarians may be on board with it. That’s how wildly diverse Libertarian thought is. Bringing us back to Charles Koch, that wealthy oil magnate.
Andrew Koppelman: He organized the opposition to Obamacare largely by disseminating misinformation.
and misleading people about what [00:53:00] the consequences would be. Various libertarian tropes got used. This is distributing to the unworthy, this is distributing to the moochers, this is a government takeover of a big part of the economy. Koch was opposed to it because Koch is broadly Rothschildian. Bardian in his orientation, and he is opposed to any expansion of government at all.
And Obamacare was a massive new redistributive program. That’s fundamentally what it was doing. It was providing health care to people who the economy was not providing health care to. The other big political intervention of Charles Koch, with world historical implications, is his opposition to any government action at all to deal with climate change.
Chris Staron: From healthcare to the environment, libertarians may not agree. But the effect of the libertarians on [00:54:00] republicanism and on evangelicalism is everywhere. If you’re looking for it, from climate denial to fear about health care, worries about wearing an N95 mask if the government tells you to. In a future episode, I’ll demonstrate how people like Jerry Falwell quoted libertarian Milton Friedman in their books as if it was gospel.
Soon, we’ll also discuss two critical pieces of what drove some evangelicals to follow the Republican Party. No surprise, it has to do with taxes, In the 1970s and early 80s, evangelicals with large followings like Falwell, Tim LaHaye, Patton Robertson, and others pushed back against government involvement in the lives of Americans.
That would manifest in things like fighting the teaching of sex ed in public schools. They were also upset that the federal government would force integration of those schools instead of leaving the decision to parents. And when the Carter administration threatened to take away their tax exempt status, they revolted.
I guess you could say that they thought the Carter administration was using taxation as [00:55:00] aggression. Even if they didn’t have the words for it, and they did, judging by their writings, they justified their opposition to the government with libertarianism. Even as they hosted rallies about how they loved the United States, They spread fear about the U.
S. and what it would do to their families. As we covered last season, Christians at the turn of the 20th century were involved in creating a bigger government, one that restricted alcohol consumption, taught required curriculum in schools, honored workers rights, progressive taxes, and so on. Mandatory food purity, and much more.
But three quarters of the way through the century, they switched, wishing for a smaller government. Less taxation. Less involvement in the affairs of their children. They became more libertarian, vacillating between Hayek, Rothbard, and Rand. We’ll continue to see that. As the season continues.
Andrew Koppelman: As American politics has become more tribal, ideas [00:56:00] cluster together as part of the identity of a tribe that really have nothing to do with one another.
If you tell me what you think about abortion, I will tell you what you think of tax cuts. Ideas that have nothing at all to do with one another. You know, in the age of Trump, Christianity has become. Very strange. You see a variety of Christianity in the United States that basically is inclined to regard the Sermon on the Mount as the creed of wimps and losers.
And that is highly ideologically compatible. With an Ayn Rand vision of the world that sees the producers trying to fight off the moochers and looters.
Chris Staron: Bringing us back to where we started today with Matthew 25, where Jesus rewards those who gave a cup of water or clothes to the least of these and [00:57:00] punishes those who don’t.
Some evangelicals today take the Rothbardian approach. Protect your land. Get what’s yours. Or the Randian approach, where God rewards the winners and the less fortunate must be lazy. Some libertarians would argue that they’re okay with helping others. They just want the option to do it on their terms.
rather than have the government do it for them. And some go as far as saying that instead of the government being in charge of taking care of the least of these, it should be churches. Despite the reality that, according to maybe every ministry leader I’ve ever met, churches are generally overwhelmed as it is.
Regardless of the method, it’s worth noting that this warning is very clear in the Bible. If a thirsty person comes onto our property looking for water, Jesus clearly wants us to give him a drink. Not to send in our private police force or expect a thirsty person to die, rather than encroach on our property rights.
The Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of [00:58:00] Jesus are not the beliefs of losers. We call it that to our own detriment. Instead, these teachings are Christianity, they’re a huge part of loving the Lord and loving your neighbor. We’ll end on this big question. Is the Bible still number one in our hearts?
Or has Atlas Shrugged taken its place?
Special thanks to Andrew Koppelman. He was so well spoken and friendly and patient with me, even when we had technical difficulties. His book is Burning Down the House. I used several resources in researching this episode, and his was by far the easiest to read. If you’d like a more thorough exploration of the history of libertarianism, I recommend The Individualists, Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasai.
There is a lot [00:59:00] of content that I had to cut out of this episode. Patrons of the show can hear plenty more with Andrew and also the closing thoughts from my group of friends at Henry’s Fork. Visit trucepodcast. com slash donate for more information. Truce is listener supported and is a for profit company.
That is partially because I could not do episodes like this where I’m critiquing the ultra wealthy like Charles Koch if I relied on big donors. Instead, I want to run this show through small donors like you. who statistically likely wouldn’t benefit from a tax write off anyway. The vast majority of Americans don’t.
That way, if one person threatens to withdraw their contribution, they can’t hold me hostage. I want we the people to support this show. If you want to join us, visit trucepodcast. com slash donate. As always, I’m indebted to my friends who gave their voices for this episode, including Chris Sloan, Bob Stevenson, and Jackie Hart.
Truce is a production of Truce Media, LLC. God willing, we’ll talk again [01:00:00] soon. I’m Chris Starin, and this is Truce.
How can Christians Respond to the Election At Their Christmas Gatherings?
Well, we survived the 2024 US presidential election! But many people still feel anxiety as we head into the Christmas and New Year holidays. How can Christians prepare for a holiday season when politics will likely arise?
A round table discussion about Romans 14
Chris Staron is joined by Karl Klemmer, Nick Staron, and Ray McDaniel at First Baptist Church in Jackson, WY to discuss these issues and more. Plus Chris talks about his own anger as a pedestrian as drivers have come close to hitting him. How do Christians respond when they are wronged? We also spend a lot of time talking about Romans 14 which encourages believers to love their brothers and sisters who struggle in their faith or who have convictions different than our own. Can verses about food sacrificed to idols teach us something about dealing with loved ones who are different than us?
Sources:
Romans 12-15 (mixed translations)
Discussion Questions:
Why is it important to come to a complete stop at stop signs?
Has anyone ever wronged you on the road? How did that feel? How did you react?
Do you get upset about things you can’t change? What are some examples?
How can you adjust to not beat yourself up over things you can’t change?
What are other examples of non-mission critical things we can give grace on (like food sacrificed to idols)?
Are there political issues that are mission-critical? Which ones are not? What are some that you can let slide in a conversation?
How do you prepare yourself to enter a stressful environment?
Jesse Eisinger on why the ultra-wealthy barely pay any tax at all
How do ultra-wealthy people avoid paying taxes? It seems like a strange subject to bring up when discussing why some evangelicals are drawn to the Republican Party. But many of the ties between evangelicals and the GOP have to do with money. So, let’s take a little side trip and explore the tax loopholes of today. More importantly, let’s try to understand why so many Americans are tax-averse. Could it possibly be because we, deep down, know that someone else is getting a better deal than us?
Buy, Borrow, Die
One tactic used by the ultra-wealthy is “buy, borrow, die”. They avoid “income”, instead opting for assets like stock and real estate they can borrow against. Borrowed money is not taxed. Then they either pay back those loans with other loans (often with interest rates that are much lower than their tax rates would be) or they fail to pay back the loans. Then… they die.
Jesse Eisinger is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with Pro Publica. Chris first heard about him from his book (pardon the language) The Chickenshit Club and met him when he appeared at a live event in Jackson, WY hosted by the Teton County Library, the Center for the Arts, and the Jackson Hole News and Guide.
Paige Patterson’s plan to make the SBC more fundamentalist
It all started with a meeting over fancy donuts. Paige Patterson and a friend met together to plot the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Before that time, the SBC had been more theologically diverse (though, not necessarily racially diverse due to its founding as a group that desired slavery). But if this group of fundamentalists was going to get a whole denomination to turn their way, they’d have to be clever. It would take time.
Use the system against itself
Their scheme involved getting fundies elected into high office who could then turn committees and sub-committees to their side. It’s a story of a minority group gaining control of a large organization, and steering it toward their vision of what it means to be a Christian.
Sources
The Fundamentalist Takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention – by Rob James, Gary Leazer
The Evangelicals by Frances Fitzgerald
Christianity Today article about Paige Patterson’s allegations
Certified Pastry Aficianatroarticle about beignets
Discussion Questions
The episode starts with a discussion of accusations about Paige Patterson. What was your reaction to that story and why?
Is it possible for a spouse to be a part of the salvation of their husband or wife? Where are the lines?
When were you baptized? Did you do it as an adult, child, or both? Why?
What do you think is the “right” way to baptize someone? Why?
What are your thoughts on inerrancy?
Transcript: (note: may not completely match the final edited version)
This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party. It can stand on its own, but when you’re done go back and start at the beginning of season 6. In the first few minutes of this show, we’re going to bring up the subject of abuse. It won’t be graphic, but it may not be appropriate for all audiences. You can skip the first 3-4 minutes if you want to get around it. This is The Fundamentalist Takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.
In 2018, over 2,000 women in the Southern Baptist Convention signed a letter written to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary The letter included this passage:
LETTER: “The Southern Baptist Convention cannot allow the biblical view of leadership to be misused in such a way that a leader with an unbiblical view of authority, womanhood, and sexuality be allowed to continue in leadership.”2
It was written in response to an audio clip from 2000, where, during what appears to be a question and answer segment, Paige Patterson, former president of the SBC, gave advice for women facing abuse. This is where the story gets a bit graphic. He offers an example of advice he gave in a church where he once served.
[get down]
The woman followed his advice. Then, on Sunday she came up to him with two black eyes. Obviously, her husband had beaten her again. She said to Patterson, “I hope you’re happy.”
[did to her]
It’s an ugly story. Paige Patterson seems fixated on the husband’s salvation. What he glosses over is the abuse. What that woman endured. There is a lack of reporting to the authorities, confrontation of the abuser, or the option of a safe place to stay. If you want to save a guy’s soul, why not go to him instead of letting him beat his wife first? By the way, interesting tie-in, Patterson delivered the opening speech at the Pro-Family, Pro-Life Rally in Houston, TX in 1977. The rally that stood in opposition to the National Women’s Conference. Remember that? Sadly, it makes one reconsider that event in new light. Patterson preaching against feminism, while across town women gathered to argue for their rights. Only for him to be brought down decades later by an issue that disproportionately affects women.
In 2018, the media was replete with stories of women who came forward. People and organizations of all kinds were called to reckon with the history of abuse in the United States. But there was more. According to Christianity Today:
CT: “Paige Patterson lied to the board of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary about a rape allegation that came before him at another seminary, withheld documents from his previous presidency, and referenced attempting to “break down” the victim of a more recent rape incident.”
Some charges were dismissed. But the story had particular resonance. Patterson was more than just the head of a seminary. A national figure. He, along with others, was an architect of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. A move that drowned out moderate voices and boosted fundamentalists into power. No small thing for the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
This is an important story for us to cover as we catalog how some evangelicals in the US tied themselves to the Republican Party. It wasn’t just the SBC. Rather than go denomination by denomination, I thought it best to focus on just one. This move was part of a national trend as theology shifted toward the conservative, often incorporating political ideologies. It started in 1979 and brought with it some lasting changes just one year before the election of Ronald Reagan. What began with Patterson and another man grew into an institutional takeover, and, some might say, left a black eye on the Southern Baptist Convention.
You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
It’s rare to find a funny line in the history books I use for this show. As an improv comedian, I appreciate one when I read it. There is a small book I purchased, thanks to patrons, called The Fundamentalist Takeover in the Southern Baptist Convention. The introduction starts with a brief rundown of the condition of the SBC before it was taken over by fundamentalists in the late 1970s. It was moderate. Then the fundies made this claim: that the seminaries and denominational agencies were being overrun with liberals. 5
Not like… you know, we want national healthcare liberals, theological liberals. It’s the whole reason fundamentalism became a thing in the early 1900s. Because there were people who were saying, “the miraculous parts of the Bible aren’t real” or “we believe Jesus was a good man, but not God,” or even “there are more ways to God than just through Jesus.”6 We covered this in-depth last season. I called them by another name: modernists.
When the fundies ramped things up in the 1970s, they trotted out that old chestnut: that modernists are coming. This is where the book features its sick burn.
SBC: “If a lion that ate liberals was set loose in Southern Baptist institutions prior to the fundamentalist takeover, he would have soon starved to death.”
It’s funny, right? There really wasn’t a problem with modernist theology in the SBC. But their concerns were enough of a boogeyman to open the gates and allow the fundamentalists to take over. Before we get there… a little history lesson. First… some music.
(old timey music)
King James the I of England. His reign was after the Protestant Reformation, there have already been wars over religion. And James championed this idea that was already fashionable among rulers: that they get their power not from the people, but from God.8 Some people protested, and for their efforts, died in prison, or were hanged, drawn and quartered… nasty stuff.9
These people were called “separatists”, which will be confusing later because the term came to mean something else. Religious liberty was the key issue. When the movement spread to the colonies on North America, one liberty they sought was to baptize adults.
Adult baptism. It’s something we take for granted here because it’s totally legal here and normal in a lot of churches. Here is me baptizing a young man in my church last year…
(clip)
Can you tell I was emotional? What gave it away?
Some churches baptize people when they are babies. (baby crying). It’s how they did it in King James’ time, sometimes as a way to declare the church’s power over a person from birth. Some Christians, though, argued that baptism was meant for people who made a personal commitment to Christ. Like my friend did. Babies can’t do that. This idea, though, was considered in some places in the colonies, to be blasphemous. A capital offense. So, yeah, life wasn’t much better for Baptists in the colonies than it had been for their separatist elders back in England.
This persecution brings us to one of the most famous letter exchanges of the post-Revolution era. That of Thomas Jefferson and the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. Now we need some different music. (Music) What is that? A flute or a fife? I could never tell.
The First Amendment had already been added, limiting the power of the government to respect one national religion. But some states like Connecticut and Massachusetts dug in with the Congregational denomination. They didn’t force people to attend, but they enjoyed taxpayer money, and the muckety mucks often favored it.
The Danbury Baptists sent new president Thomas Jefferson a letter asking him to encourage laws. He was president, not a legislator, but he did send a response, including this famous passage:
JEFFERSON: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between a man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature would “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
The origins of separation predate the letter and are an example of Jefferson being influenced by… the Enlightenment. Despite what Frances Schaeffer claimed. The phrase “building a wall of separation between Church and State” is all Jefferson. And who wanted it??? Baptists. Why? Because they had long been persecuted for their beliefs.
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded on similar principles. They didn’t want to force everyone to believe the exact same thing, Summarizing what one historian said about those early days, they weren’t about theological uniformity. Their goal was missions.
And… well, this was the early 1800s in the South. It was also about slavery. Saw that coming, didn’t you? Along with southern Methodists and Presbyterians, they pushed the mythology of the Lost Cause, or, as another historian put it:
FITZGERALD: “…the cult of fallen heroes and the idealization of antebellum white culture as chivalrous, decent, and pure.”
Southern preachers boosted the idea that the South was the most spiritual part of the country and that the war wasn’t a judgment on slavery. But God’s punishment for their lack of spiritual fervor. Yeah, that stuff was in the SBC.
But… they didn’t pick sides on battles over Calvinism and Arminianism, or pre and post-millennialism. They doubled down on their fight against evolution shortly after the Scopes trial of 192517. In the Progressive Era, the SBC fought against things like alcohol and gambling. They sometimes framed WWII as a global struggle for Christianity. Afterward, the SBC established monies for world relief, supported the United Nations (the United Nations!), and stepped up efforts of world evangelism.
The SBC even went so far as to back the integration of schools with Brown v Board of Education, despite protests. No, I don’t think all members were on board, but as an institution, that’s pretty good. After WWII when church attendance in the US boomed, the SBC outpaced other denominations from five million members in 1941 to 10 million in 1961. They did, however, refuse to join the National Association of Evangelicals21. Like any large group of people, they made some good decisions and some poor. They weren’t always unified, especially on things like race. And they zigzagged in ways that might surprise us.
As they did in their 1971 convention. There, they worked to liberalize laws around abortion to permit it in rape, incest, and fetal deformity… but also…
SBC: “…in the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
That sentiment wasn’t long-lived. But it was echoed by others, even those with fundamentalist backgrounds like the NAE, though with some caveats.
To say someone was a Southern Baptist didn’t mean they agreed on all points. As morals changed in secular society in the 1960s, along with protests over war, and the rights of women, homosexuals, and people of diverse races, some people felt uneasy. Especially conservatives, even those who voted to renounce segregation like WA Criswell. Criswell was, in the early 70s, the president of the SBC.24
He and his followers took the anxiety in the country as proof that people had turned their back on the Bible. Maybe they hadn’t heard of Vietnam and Watergate. They grew fearful that the denomination spent too much time on progressive causes and not enough on missions.
So they formed The Southern Baptist Journal. Hoping for what one historian called:
FITZGERALD: “…an uncompromising stand on biblical inerrancy and belief in a literal creation.
Inerrancy became their key issue.
Inerrancy sounds complicated but is pretty simple. If the Bible says it happened, it really happened. There was a literal creation… an actual big fish to swallow Jonah… and that Jesus really was virgin born. There are various flavors of inerrancy, though. Like, was the Prodigal Son a real person or an illustration Jesus used to make a point?
This conservative faction of the SBC was big on inerrancy. They started their own schools, the Criswell Bible Studies Center in Dallas and the Mid-American Baptist Seminary in Memphis27. But in the mid-70s, they were still just a faction. With their own schools, their own conferences, network, and seminaries. Not quite in control. But they were hardly outsiders. Speakers at the 1977 conference included those like Criswell who preached on the need to double down on inerrancy.
In the mid-1970s, the SBC was run by moderate conservatives, bent on maintaining unity. But that was about to change. As the country witnessed a sudden conservative resurgence, the SBC was soon swept up. The largest denomination in the United States was about to be taken over.
I’ll continue the story after these messages. But while you listen to the ads, why not leave a 5-star review on your favorite podcasting app? Thanks
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back.
In 1967, two men met at Cafe du Monde in the French Quarter of New Orleans. They’re famous for their beignets and, in researching this episode, I realized I had been there shortly after Hurricane Katrina while I was producing my first audio story. This is the sound of me trying my first one. A beignet, by the way, is basically a donut in a different shape.
These two guys met there to discuss what they perceived as the liberal drift of the SBC. One of them was Paige Patterson, the guy from the top of the episode who was ousted for mishandling sexual abuse. At the time he was a student.
The other was Paul Pressler, a state appeals court judge in Houston. Twelve years later, for the 1979 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, the two formed the Pressler-Patterson coalition. Their goal: a conservative takeover of the denomination.31
To do so, they just needed to play the system. Pressler had the idea, and he called it “going for the jugular”.
Here’s how it worked. First… elect a president who is sympathetic to their goals. They get a one-year term.
PRESIDENT: (boisterous) I stand behind the inerrancy of scripture!
The president had a lot of power. Almost at the end of their term, they nominated people for the committee on committees.
COMMITTEE: (boisterous)I nominate people who think exactly like me.
That committee got to choose people for the one nomination. This happened a full year later. All of these bits are staggered.
COMMITTEE: (proclaiming!) We too stand with the inerrancy of scripture!
COMMITTEE: (proclaiming!) We too stand with the inerrancy of scripture!
COMMITTEE: (proclaiming!) We too stand with the inerrancy of scripture!
Then this group nominated trustees and directors to SBC agencies and institutions. Like schools and missions boards. Those people then got to hire staff.
COMMITTEE: I see here on your resume that you think the country is in the toilet. When can you start?
Simple as that. If they got the seat at the top, they could get their kind of people hired everywhere else. Use weaknesses in the system to gain control of the system itself. The process took years. Two years from the election of the president to that of the trustees. But trustees weren’t all elected at once. From beginning to end, the takeover was really a ten-year process. It all started with that first presidential election.
Pressler and Patterson crisscrossed the nation before the 1979 convention to build their coalition, conducting a 15-state get-out-the-vote campaign.
At the pastor’s conference, James Robison, one of the fundamentalists, told those in the audience that…
ROBISON: “My friends, I wouldn’t tolerate a rattlesnake in my house… I wouldn’t tolerate a cancer in my body. I want you to know that anyone who casts doubt on the Word of God is worse than cancer and worse than snakes.”
Therefore, he argued, southern Baptists needed a president…
ROBISON: “…who is totally committed to removing from this denomination anyone who does not believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of the living God.”
Their man for the job was Adrian Rogers. You may have heard his sermons on the radio or read his books. He was pastor of the Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis. Despite their being several other conservative candidates, he won with 50% of the votes because the fundamentalists voted as a bloc.
By the way, there is a bit of a twist here. In the period between last season and now, I’ve been referring to fundamentalists as people who are separatists. Not like the separatists who vexed King James from earlier. Instead, these are people who largely stay out of issues of the world because they’ve got their own subculture. For a long time, the way to tell the difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists was whether or not they were engaged in the culture. But thanks to people like Frances Shaeffer, the New Right, Jerry Falwell, Criswell, Phyllis Schlafly, and others, fundies were getting in on the game. Thus creating a new thing: fundamentalists who engage the culture. A new species! What historian George Marsden deemed “fundamentalist evangelicals”.
Fundamentalist candidates won the convention presidency for decades, including Paige Patterson himself. 43 Within ten years, nearly all of the boards that govern the operations of the SBC were stocked with people from the takeover. Schools, publishing, missions. It took a long time for things to change, though. Remember that it was two years from a fundamentalist president to fundamentalist trustees. That is likely why, in 1979 the denomination seems similar to the way it had been. Even to the point of reaffirming their previous stance on abortion. They had this little gem adding it:
SBC: “…we also affirm our conviction about the limited role of government in dealing with matters relating to abortion…” 44
Largely, in 1979… business as usual. Spending time affirming and reaffirming previous decisions. And… then came 1980…
SBC: “Be it further resolved, That opposition be expressed toward all policies that allow “abortion on demand,” and be it further resolved, That we abhor the use of tax money or public, tax-supported medical facilities for selfish, non-therapeutic abortion, and be it finally resolved, That we favor appropriate legislation and/or a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother.”
See that change? They went in 1979 from affirming several kinds of abortion to only allowing it when the mother’s life was in danger. Allow me to point out something else that will be important in a few episodes… the concern over tax money being used. Even in 79, there is a libertarian desire to keep the government out of this practice.
The same year, 1980, the year the country voted in Ronald Reagan, they issued strong statements against pornography, homosexuality, and the Equal Rights amendment, and called for a reversal of Roe v. Wade.
At first, the old guard of the denomination seemed to regard the takeover as a momentary conservative nudge. Just the pendulum of public opinion swinging in another direction.
Remember, the SBC had long made room for a variety of beliefs, avoiding things like creeds. But the fundamentalists didn’t share that desire. Theirs was a mission of conformity.47 In 1987 a report was created that offered recommendations of what “most” Southern Baptists believe…
CREED: “One: They believe in direct creation and therefore they believe Adam and Eve were real persons. TWO: they believe the named authors did indeed write the biblical books attributed to them by those books…”
Which sounds, you know… like a creed. And it was used in the North American Missions Board as a guideline for hiring new staff.49
Then there is a curious 1988 resolution. Since the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, there has been a strong emphasis on individual Christians having direct access to God. No need for a priest or bishop to go between us and God. Every believer is equal. But then in 1988, there was a resolution passed that took a curious swipe at this idea…
1988 RESOLUTION (faded out): “Whereas, The high profile emphasis on the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer in Southern Baptist life is a recent historical development; and Whereas, the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer has been used to justify wrongly the attitude that a Christian may believe whatever he so chooses and still be considered a loyal Southern Baptist; and Whereas, the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer can been used to justify the undermining of pastoral authority in the local church…”
It’s a little hard to grasp all of that, so I’ll summarize. Essentially it calls the priesthood of the believers a new theological development.
Says that it wrongly gives permission to some to believe whatever they like. That it has been used to question leadership. You know, people calling out pastors like those at the top of the show who called out Paige Patterson. It also does a weird about-face and re-affirms the idea of the priesthood of believers. It pokes holes in it… and then says, “Yeah, we’re still cool with it.” without providing reasons. This may seem like a small thing, but some fundamentalist leaders like WA Criswell, who we’ve already mentioned, really liked their power. This is a quote from him:
CRISWELL: “Lay leadership of the church is unbiblical when it weakens the pastor’s authority as ruler of the church… A laity-led, deacon-led church will be a weak church anywhere on God’s earth. The pastor is the ruler of the church. There is no other thing than that in the Bible.”51
This belief, if twisted the right way, could allow preachers to have unchecked power. Not something every pastor sought, but it was there if they wanted it.
Fundamentalists also took over the SBC colleges and seminaries. Pressler and Patterson stirred fear that they were being infiltrated by “liberalism” and that many professors didn’t believe the Bible. Nothing motivates like fear, right? Fundamentalist students, equipped with tape recorders, recorded professors and took notes on them. At least one professor was targeted for something he claimed he never said, but that a student reported. Others resigned.
Dr. Richard Land became director of the Christian Life Commission. You remember him, right? He’s the one who railroaded me years ago at the Southern Baptist Convention. I made an episode about it at the end of season 3.
(CLIP)
That guy. He was a strong anti-abortionist, approved of capital punishment, was all about inerrancy, and other key pieces of the fundamentalist agenda and steered them to become more involved in national politics.
Fundamentalists took over the Foreign Missions Board. Started their own publications, and flexed their muscles in the SBC’s Lifeway Christian Resources. Virtually every nook and cranny of the SBC.
The temptation is to say that the fundamentalist push was just to elect Ronald Reagan. But maybe you noticed that some of this happened even after he was out of office. You can hear the echos of Frances Schaeffer’s worldview fundamentalism. It’s all there.
And the fundamentalists, excuse me, fundamentalist evangelicals, pulled their denomination deeper into politics and culture wars. A denomination born out of fears of religious homogenization, came full circle and demanded homogenization.
(music shift)
In June of 1990, a group of men gathered together again at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans. Imagine them there, drinking their coffee and eating expensive donuts. Beignets. Perhaps the birds were chirping. Or maybe they heard people partying on boats nearby. It must have felt like visiting Graceland. This is where their whole movement started! This is where Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler hatched their plan. And it had worked! Like a reveler in an old-time movie, one climbed onto a table. He yelled, “Victory in Jesus!”. Why? The Southern Baptist Convention had been taken over by the fundamentalists.
This episode involved a lot of different sources. Visit trucepodcast.com for a full list. Major help came from the short book The Fundamentalist Takeover in the Southern Baptist Convention by Rob James, Gary Leazer, and James Shoopman. I’m also indebted to Frances Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals.
Truce… takes so so long to produce. When I typed these words I was sitting in the rotunda of the Star Valley High School in Afton, Wyoming. A group of teenage girls shouted a song in the distance. Parents cheered at a wrestling tournament I’d driven our local team to. I do this show while juggling so many things. Listening to audiobooks while washing busses, recording scripts in my church basement, and editing while I volunteer at the library to try to increase my chances of getting an affordable house someday. This show not only takes work but sacrifice. There is no big organization backing me. It’s just us. You and I and listeners like you. If you want to be a part of making this my full-time job, visit trucepodcast.com/donate. There you can learn about supporting Truce on Venmo, Paypal, Patreon, or by old-fashioned check. That would mean more episodes for you, and I’d have to dodge fewer footballs being tossed around by hoards of little kids playing around my table. Seriously, I should have moved. Those kids are not careful around computers.
Thanks to everyone who gave their voices for this episode…
Truce is a production of Truce Media LLC.
God willing, we’ll talk again soon.
I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
Okay… the difference between a beignet and a donut, according to the Internet: Beignets are made with a single rise, making for a chewy texture. They have a longer rise, and they are often covered in powdered sugar.57
What are the warning signs that a church leader will become a tyrant? How do we prevent church hurt from becoming our identity? What are ideologies and how do they become the overall focus of some ministries?
Mike Cosper is the co-host of Christianity Today’s The Bulletin podcast, the producer and host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, and now the author of The Church in Dark Times.
Discussion Questions:
How does Mike define “Ideology”? What does it mean to have a strong ideology? Do you have any? How does this differ from having a simple belief?
Why do you think so many people today struggle with anxiety? How can ideologies protect us from our anxiety? Why might that be a poor crutch?
Mike recommends worship as a way to fend off anxiety. Why could that help?
Is it wrong for churches and organizations to have a missions statement or goals?
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE :
Note: AI-generated this transcript and it has not been proofread.
Chris Staron: [00:00:00] This is a special bonus episode of the Truce Podcast. It won’t sound like a normal episode with all my usual editing, music, and sound effects, but I think it’s appropriate for this moment in history. Patrons of the show can actually see this conversation by visiting patreon. com slash truce podcast, just in case you’d rather watch and listen instead of just listening.
This is Mike Cosper, The Church in Dark Times.
I probably don’t need to tell you this, but here in the United States, we’re coming up on the 2024 U. S. presidential election. It’s a time where a lot of us are dealing with anxiety. What’s going to happen to the economy, to the rule of law, or what will be the legacy of the Capital C Church after all this is over?
Some of us deal with that stress by hiding behind a hard and vast ideology. A magic bullet answer through which we can view basically everything. If we just did this then the economy would be great, or if so and so were our leader then they’d take care of all our [00:01:00] problems. That desire to hide behind ideologies creates new issues of its own.
My guest today on this bonus episode is going to walk us through a discussion of ideologies. What they are, why they feel good at the time, and how they can ultimately cause new problems. You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better.
I’m Chris Staron, and this is Truce. Today on the podcast, I have a very special guest who I’ve been trying to get a hold of for a long time, and he is finally speaking to me. This is awesome. It’s Mike Cosper. Some of you know him as the producer and host of the rise and fall of Mars Hill, but he’s also coming out with a new book, the church in dark times.
And I think it fits well with this sort of just barely pre election moment we’re in, and maybe it will give us some context in this moment. Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Cosper: Hey, I’m really [00:02:00] glad to be here. I followed your work for a while and it’s, it’s an honor to be here.
Chris Staron: That is a gigantic thrill. The audience can’t see, but I am super blushing.
So, so you’ve written this book, the church in dark times. It’s coming out November 19th. Uh, why write a book that’s about ideology and why do it now?
Mike Cosper: The question that I got as, as often as any, maybe more than any during the Production of the rise and fall of Mars Hill, there, there were a few different versions of the question and it essentially boiled down to how do people who, who have good common sense, who are good Christian leaders, how do they get drawn into a church where.
At the heart of it, there’s, there’s issues that if you have a little distance from it, they’re very, they’re very easy to see. They’re very obvious to see. And there was a moment in the production process. Um, uh, there was a conversation that I had actually with somebody where they were describing this moment where governance changed in the [00:03:00] church.
And it, it rang a bell for me because I had been in a church that had been through some, you know, difficult seasons of its own, but I had also heard stories of another church. Megachurch, and I won’t name names for the sake of this conversation, but I’d also heard the story of another megachurch, influential pastor, bully domineering type pastor, who there came a point in the life of the church where he wanted to move them from Congregational polity where everybody in the church sort of votes on everything to elder rule where the elders decide kind of everything that matters.
And, and it was a power move. It was a, it was unquestionably a power move because it, the elders were kind of his guys anyway. And he exerted a lot of authority over them. Many of them were on staff and reported directly to them. There’s a lot of reasons why a move like that, the way it was done was, was, was poor, but one of the things that I remember in, in the midst of all of this, It was said about Mars.
It was said at my church. It was said by this guy [00:04:00] was the mission is so important that we can’t slow down to move everybody with us. We can’t do it these other ways because people’s lives and souls are on the line. And in fact, this Shall not be named megachurch guy. He said, uh, we’re, we’re going to vote to never vote again.
That was the line. Anyways, as, as I was revisiting the story when I was producing Mars, that line stuck out to me, like I remember I had a memory of it and it stuck out to me. And what it reminded me of was how in dictatorships. So, so part of my background in college, I spent a lot of my college years studying social and political theory and in dictatorships, there’s always this breakthrough moment where the great leader at some point has to declare a state of emergency and kind of suspend the normal rules of governance for the country because we’re, we’re in an emergency situation.
The normal mechanisms of democracy, they don’t quite work when you’re at [00:05:00] war and when there’s a, you know, a giant problem. So we’re going to suspend those things and we promise we’ll restore order again. Once the, once the crisis has moved along and I realized it’s kind of the same thing, like what has happened in many of our mega churches is you, you frame the mission in such a way where we say souls are on the line, we got to reach the city.
It’s so important. It’s so urgent that we can’t slow down. To keep people healthy and moving forward with us, or to keep the congregation fully informed or to develop leaders in the ways that we used to, or that we promised we would, or any of that, we needed to sort of suspend all those rules and really focus on the most important thing, which is the mission, which is often this loosely defined way of actually talking about getting, making the church bigger and bigger and bigger.
Chris Staron: Well, it seems like some of these missions start out as a really positive impulse, right?
Mike Cosper: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it’s not to say that there aren’t real crises at times that, that, you know, the totalitarian governments, uh, [00:06:00] are responding to the point being that when, when I made that connection, it brought me back to the social theorist, her name’s Hannah Arendt that has been a massive influence on my thinking kind of throughout my life, especially about politics, but I’d never really associated her work with the life inside the church.
And the minute I did. It was like, it was like somebody flipped the lights on in a dark room. Like, how do these things happen? Well, a rent’s whole work was looking at how did her, her, even her inner circle of friends in Germany hurt the intellectuals that she was friends with lovers with all the rest.
How did they, between 1929 and 1939, all become Nazis. That perennial question of how do good people do horrible, evil. terrible things. Once I saw the connection, I couldn’t unsee it. And, and I think it’s implications for the church, for politics, for all these different things are, are enormous.
Chris Staron: Oh, absolutely.
I, yeah, we, we kind of have a leadership culture in the church. It’s, it’s one of our [00:07:00] big focuses, but that also kind of makes us susceptible to Goals and just like we, this is a good goal. Reaching a lot of people is a good goal, but then we get caught up in it. And we’re willing to trash some of our standards along the way, which is no good.
And in fact, what were some of those ideologies that you saw in Mars Hill? The things that may have sounded like really positive, but then got twisted.
Mike Cosper: Yeah. So, so the, the word ideology just for listeners, like it can get confusing sometimes cause it gets thrown around. So I always try to say to people, Hey, when I’m, when I’m talking about ideology this way, think of it as like, it’s always got a capital I, and it’s referring to something that’s very specific, which I think was Miroslav Volf, who once said defined it, defined it.
This way. And I, it’s my favorite definition. Ideology is, is the little idea that will change the world. It’s the little idea that explains everything as another way to put it. And so when we think about the church and the mission of the church, I mean, especially since the emergence of neo [00:08:00] evangelicalism and the church growth movement and all that, like the church is very focused on world changing and rightly.
So there are good reasons to do it. So just to sort of give a couple parallels. So in. Nazi Germany, the, the little idea that was going to change the world was the whole idea of Aryan supremacy, which had this flip side of Jewish inferiority and Jews as essentially leeches and vermin on society. They were the problem.
If you could solve the Jewish problem, you could heal the, you could essentially set up the, the German people to take their rightful place in the world. Stalin had a similar idea, except the problem was the. Bourgeoisie, the, it was the middle class. They were the ones that were keeping down the proletarian, the Marxist, you know, utopia was on the other side of clearing the decks.
And by the way, it just so happened that most of the bourgeoisie and the capitalists that needed to be, uh, liquidated were all also Jews for, for him as well. Um, how convenient, I guess. Yeah, exactly. In the church, it, it looks very different. The church is not a totalitarian state. These are not [00:09:00] totalitarian dictators.
However, you have a set of mechanics around ideas that work in a similar way, which is a guy like a Mark Driscoll comes forward and he says, the problem in the church is young men. The problem is that the church doesn’t reach young men. If you reach young men, everything else comes together. And so. The reason that’s an ideology is because it creates a logic, this little circular logic that the entire church bends itself around.
We have to do ministry in a way that’s attractive to young men. That shapes the way we do music. It shapes the way we talk about sex. It shapes the way we talk about women. It shapes the ethos of the church and the ethos of the culture. It also provides you a framework in which you can now dismiss any critique that comes your way.
So somebody comes, it comes at you and says, you know, comes at the pastor and they say, Hey, it seems like this is kind of a misogynistic culture. It’s like, Oh, well, you don’t understand young men or the importance of young men or what often happened inside Mars Hill. If you came [00:10:00] with a critique like that.
You were effeminate, you were a closeted homosexual. I mean, it was, it was pretty brutal the way that the way that criticism was treated, ideology gives you this perfect kind of logical circle through which you can sort of bend every idea in a certain direction and crush all of the criticism in a certain direction.
And the, the idea ultimately says, if we achieve. This, this goal, if we fully realize this little idea that can change the world, then we’re going to change the world. We’re going to reach the city. We’re going to reach the country. We’re going to reach the globe. The, the power of ideology for evangelicals, I think, is that when you marry that, When you marry these little ideas with the gospel, it’s a corruption of the gospel.
It creates this whole other fuel for, for the motivations, because it’s not just a matter of building a great organization or a big country or whatever. It’s no, no, we [00:11:00] actually are saving souls. We’re rescuing people from the pits of hell. And so you can understand then where when you have this little idea that can change the world and the gospel behind it saying this is life or death, this is, this is a cosmic battle between good and evil.
This is eternity in heaven or eternity in hell. Then when a problem emerges of a corrupt leader. Of abuse of any of these things, you find ways to chew that up inside the system rather than address it directly because, because the idea is so important because the world changing is so important because the mission is so important.
Chris Staron: You write ideology, universalizes the local church, making it success of cosmic importance. Uh, can you expand on that for me? Because, uh, it’s, it’s not just like, Oh, you know, our little church is going to. Try to have a food bank to help people, but it becomes in a lot of the ways we talk about things, we’re going to feed the world instead of, Oh no, our local [00:12:00] church is going to feed, or we’re going to start a youth group because we want to reach the local high school.
No, no, we’re going to reach the whole world. Can you expand on why that can be problematic and how that can kind of set us up for failure?
Mike Cosper: I think it’s tricky and I try to acknowledge this in the book. The gospel has Big ambition, you know, it’s an audacious, it’s an audacious set of goals. We’re sent out to the four corners of the earth.
And I think that that’s serious. I think that’s something we should take, we should take seriously. Part of what I think happens in contemporary evangelicalism is there becomes such a focus on the personalities and the autonomy of the. Of the local, of the individual church that we lose sight of the church as being part of a story that’s larger than itself.
And, and this is where, like, this is where the church growth movement, I think there’s some real incipient narcissism in the way we think about our, our churches, [00:13:00] because we’re Americans. We love entrepreneurs. We love leaders. We love big ideas. Like we get excited about all that kind of stuff. We want to be part of that world changing story.
And because of the way I think we’re conditioned by our culture a bit, there’s an itch that gets scratched by being part of a big ambitious church that says our food bank is going to feed all of Africa next year. That’s way less exciting than saying we’re going to be part of this little Methodist parish that contributes what it can, serves the poor in our neighborhood, marries and berries.
and tries to live out the gospel together in community. The universalizing thing is about the ambitions of the, of what the individual and what the church itself can accomplish and should accomplish. Should we accomplish that alone? Should we think that it’s a great thing that You know, one church has a plan to, to make sure that the gospel is preached to all four corners of the [00:14:00] earth in the next 25 years so that Jesus can come back, which is, frankly, there’s a number of mega churches around the world that have missionary ambitions like that.
Is it a good thing that churches are doing that alone? Not in concert with one another? Like, I, I don’t know. I, I, I, I worry about it. I worry about a church where they, They build their whole mission around a little idea that’s really the key to everything that the church should be about. I think we need a theology that has a deeper humility and a deeper sense of mystery and a deeper sense that the church is Part of an organic whole that we don’t even fully comprehend.
It’s almost like we’ve adopted that version of eternal life in the Christian life. When we think about fame and celebrity, it’s like, I want to be Billy Graham. I want people to be telling my stories in 150 years. And it’s like, okay, but is that better than sitting at a table [00:15:00] with, you know, at the supper of the lamb in a thousand years?
Like, I don’t think it is, but our culture has certainly, you know, Our culture has certainly celebrated one over the other in a significant way, including evangelical culture.
Chris Staron: Right. Well, I wonder, I mean, from a leadership perspective, that’s such a great idea to remember that death is coming for us all.
But then from the sort of parishioner standpoint, I think a lot of times we tie our faith to somebody else. Or to some movement and we forget that they’re going to die. Like I used to volunteer with teenagers, uh, with a campus life group. And one of the kids said, you know, I, I’m a believer because my grandmother’s a believer in my, and I don’t know what, what I’m going to do when she dies.
Chris Staron: Like your faith can’t be broken. Based on as long as God keeps my grandmother alive, then I’m going to be a Christian because we all know she’s going to die. We get tied up in that where it’s like, as long as the Truce podcast stays on the air, I’m going to be a believer, as long as Rise and [00:16:00] Fall of Mars Hill is doing the thing.
Our hope is in a person or in a ministry. We forget those things are going to go away someday. And our faith can’t be tied to them. I’ll have more with Mike Cosper after these messages. While you listen to these ads, why not leave a comment on your favorite podcasting app? It really helps people find the show, okay?
Here we go.
Welcome back to the Truce Podcast. Let’s get back to my conversation with Mike Cosper. I don’t want to sound crass when I say this, so forgive me if it sounds crass, but you’ve become sort of the, uh, the, the figurehead of a movement about church hurt. And, uh, one of my interesting questions that’s been battered around in my head a lot is, how do we stop Church hurt and some of the, this movement, the, uh, of trying to reconcile with that from becoming an ideology and self or, or sprouting capitalized ideologies.
Mike Cosper: Oh man, that is such a big question. And it’s such an important [00:17:00] question. It really is. It’s such an important question. I mean, Well, because we, we as
Chris Staron: people tend to define ourselves by something and some of us will be like, I was hurt by this person, this place, this thing. And I’m going to, it’s going to define my life.
And, and that’s just kind of just a part of who we are and how we operate.
Mike Cosper: Yeah.
Chris Staron: But that can then spur its own counter movements, its own counter reformation or maybe, you know, um, so I guess sort of just, it’s fun to think about like what What are some of those temptations to create ideologies and what would those ideologies look like?
And then how can we combat that?
Mike Cosper: Yeah, you know it was it was only a few weeks into Releasing episodes of this thing that the blowback started and the blowback started There was, you know, there was some blowback from, you know, celebrity Christian world. I mean, I think Craig Grishel preached a couple sermons against what we were doing and, you know, there were a few things like [00:18:00] that where people were bold enough to kind of come at us.
And that was fine and to be expected. And then of course, Driscoll, you know, trolled us on social media, which was also to be expected. The, the blowback that was the harshest came from, came from the left. And it came from two elements of the left. One was just kind of a progressive left that, that thought what you’re doing is scapegoating.
Mark, in order to justify your abusive and horrible and terrible evangelical theology, which I think was kind of a silly, a silly critique. But then the other critique that came at us was from kind of certain corners of the church hurt world. And it was from people who, you know, who genuinely thought that the way we had approached the story.
We weren’t centering victims enough. We were focused too much on people who were, you know, we were including voices that were perpetrators as well as people who were [00:19:00] victims. And, you know, people can make their own judgment about why we did what we did. I don’t, I don’t feel the need to defend it, um, too much here, except to say that was the element that the.
Surprised me because I, I thought, I thought a lot of what we were about. I thought we were making clear kind of from the beginning, I want to understand how this happened and in order to understand how it happened, you actually have to center on the people who were in the room, the people who were making the decisions.
And some of those people are, are, you know, I think some of those people were villains at the time and are still villains. Still kind of villainous. And I didn’t, I didn’t comment on that. Right. Like I didn’t put these people out there and say, here’s what you should think about this person. I just put their voices in the mix.
Sure. And so, and, and cause I trust the listener. The listeners got the maturity to. To kind of go, huh, well, he’s saying [00:20:00] these things now, but he was part of this thing then, you know, whatever, like, and, and I, I just, I trusted the listener to make a lot of those calls for themselves. But I think from, from the church hurt side, I mean, it was like, there were certain, there were certain things that you just heard over and over and over again.
One of them being, you should only be, you should only be hearing victims, right? You should only be centering. The victims. And that was an interesting one for me because I, I actually, I remember talking to my producer about it at one point, I’m like, well, which, which victims count and which ones don’t anyway, point being to your actual question that you asked point point being, I do, I think that’s an example of one of these, one of these things where in a reactionary way, we can create a different kind of ethic that becomes as.
Absolute an iron as, you know, as the ethics of a, of an unhealthy organization. I mean, [00:21:00] is that an ideology is that destructive? It certainly can be. And I don’t, you know, I, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it become as, as fierce and, and, and horrible as it, as it has been inside some of these abusive churches, I, I say all that to say, I totally get the temptation because I think to me, In the absence, like when you’ve been part of a community like that, you’ve had such a powerful sense of purpose.
You’ve had such an intimate sense of belonging with other people. In the absence of it, you want to recreate that. Vibe. You want to create that, recreate that energy. And, and certainly an ideological movement that says, well, here’s the idea that will actually, you know, save the world and in particular, it’s going to save the world from those people you don’t like anymore, who are part of that other movement.
So why don’t you give yourself to that? Absolutely as well. I think that can be very, very damaging. [00:22:00]
Chris Staron: Yeah, that’s good insight. It’s, it’s, I mean, it’s obviously a giant question of where do these things go, but I’m, I’m, I’m always fascinated by sort of counter movements. You’d see the books on behind me. I’ve got a bunch on Napoleon because it’s a favorite subject of mine and he’s all counter movement.
He was the fulfillment of the French revolution. So when I see, you know, people who are hurt by a terrible situation, I’m always like, how can we avoid it. Yeah. We’re creating a new problem here to overcompensate because we love to build up a wall to protect ourselves from whatever just happened. But then it sometimes can prevent us from doing actual ministry or being open to whatever the Holy Spirit has us to do.
Um, so anyway. Right before this episode drops, uh, my listeners will have just heard an episode about Francis Schaeffer. And one of the things that Francis Schaeffer pushed against was the enlightenment and, uh, the changes that it made in the way that we thought about leadership in the church and, and these big questions.
So it was fascinating to me to see it come [00:23:00] up. It really fit well with the theme of the season that it would come up in your book. And here we are talking about it. First of all, what, what is the enlightenment and which is a giant question, another giant, I’m going to give you a softball here soon, I promise.
But, uh, what, what do you mean by the enlightenment? What is it that makes some. Evangelicals see this as sort of the beginning of an uneasy time.
Mike Cosper: Yeah. Oh, so yeah. Oof. The enlightenment. Where do you start? Okay. We’ll
Chris Staron: switch to a softball. Do you like to fish? Uh. I do like to fish.
Mike Cosper: Uh, I prefer saltwater fishing to freshwater fishing and, uh, I prefer fishing the flats or tarpon fishing to deep water fishing.
So. Are you a
Chris Staron: bobber man? Do you like fly fishing? What is it? Um, okay. So anyway, back to the enlightenment.
Mike Cosper: No. Yeah. So, I mean, so the enlightenment, um, uh, well, we talk, I talk about this a bit in the book because, because the enlightenment really, the way I’ve often talked about it since working on this [00:24:00] project is that you’re really talking about two great big ideas that remade the world.
One is the dignity and rights of man, which I don’t deal with as much in this book. And that’s the part of the Enlightenment that I think, you know, I think isn’t defended as much as it should be these days. What I get into, though, are some of the overreach of the Enlightenment that came as a part of the scientific revolution and a part of the industrial revolution.
What it resulted in was, was, well, Arendt, who’s this, this thinker that I’m engaging with throughout the book, there’s a point in her book, The Human Condition, where she says something to this effect. This isn’t an exact quote, but she, she essentially says, you know, the telescope gave us the illusion that we have mastery over the stars and the microscope gave us the illusion that we have mastery over the atom.
And that basically the role of the human being in a post enlightenment world [00:25:00] was to Was to, to, to sort of scientifically unpack and categorize everything that we could encounter to define it, to manage it, to perfect it, you know, and, and to perfect it for the sake of human flourishing or, or whatever, whatever purpose it, it might be.
And there’s a, there’s a ton of illusions in that. I mean, our part of what a rents project was that I think is so extraordinarily helpful is to say. The idea of progress is always an illusion. It’s like industrialization was great and mass transportation was great right up until the point where somebody said, Hey, let’s use the tools of industrialization and factory farms and mass transportation and make death camps and be able to, you know, be able to achieve evil at a, at a level and a scale that had never been imaginable before in human history.
That’s where the critiques of the Enlightenment, as though it was an unalloyed good, are critiques worth [00:26:00] hearing and critiques worth making. In, in the months since writing this book, I’ve, I’ve done some reporting on, you know, some of the stuff that’s going on in college campuses. There’s been a lot of energy, a lot of reporting about like the, uh, the post October 7th protests and things that have happened at the campuses.
But one of the phenomenon that I discovered in, um, In that is this kind of new right that’s emerging on campus, some of it among like the, the Catholic integralist crowd. Um, and it’s this big anti enlightenment push that, that comes from kind of a new Christian nationalist, uh, Catholic integralist crew.
And what you hear in those circles is an anti enlightenment spirit. That’s not, Hey, the problem is the hubris of the scientific revolution. It’s, you know, universal literacy was a mistake. Like half these people really should be out there picking potatoes. I’m all in to have like a critical conversation about the enlightenment, but.
But I have [00:27:00] my limits. Of course. I just feel like I have to mention that now. Because I think based on what I’ve seen, I think that’s coming, and I think it’s getting, I think that’s going to get worse. I mean, you’ve seen a little of it on Twitter and these far right Christian nationalist trolls, but I think it’s, I think there’s more of it and worse of it.
Coming from, from, from the intellectual heights.
Chris Staron: One of the things I wrestled with in reporting on Francis Schaeffer was his pushback against it, because there were so many good things that came about because of the Enlightenment, and then it makes me think, wait a second, do you miss the The dark ages.
Is that what you’re advocating for?
Mike Cosper: Well, part of what’s part of what’s funny about all of this is that people think an aristocratic society where there was a, an educated elite and they were empowered to make decisions and, you know, they ruled over other people. That’s a really fanciful thing to imagine.
So long as you imagine that you were born into the aristocracy, right? But that’s like one in a hundred. Yeah. You know, at, at best 90, [00:28:00] 91, you’re out there picking potatoes and, and you die at 35 because you got a, you know, an, uh, a cut on your toe that got infected and killed you. So yeah, it’s, it’s easy to romanticize the middle ages.
It’s easy to romanticize these kinds of pre enlightenment, pre liberal society worlds, so long as you’re. Imagining yourself in the, in the positions of power. But I always come back through that great, great line from midnight in Paris, where Owen Wilson says, you know, he’s gone back in time into the belly poke and this, this girl that he’s kind of fallen in love with is wanting to stay there and, and he’s like, Talking to her about how like, nostalgia doesn’t really work.
You don’t really want to stay here. And then he just goes, I mean, these people don’t have antibiotics, you know? Yeah. The enlightenment was a good thing. And we, you know, so we have our limits for how much we, we critique this stuff, but yeah.
Chris Staron: Where it’s coming to vogue and where it fits into your [00:29:00] book, uh, to kind of bring it back around.
Some people point to the enlightenment as this, uh, time when it introduces a lot more anxiety into the world, uh, where we, we’re now at a place where you can choose who you marry, depending on which culture you’re in, you know, what job you’re going to have again, depending on what culture you’re in. The number of choices we have as modern humans can be overwhelming and that it can cause anxiety.
Mike Cosper: And I
Chris Staron: think where you take it in the book is that, uh, we sometimes adopt capitalized ideologies as a way to deal with. Right. That, that number of choices. Am I getting that right?
Mike Cosper: Yeah. Yeah. So part of what I talk about is I say, look, if you were born 500 years ago, where you live, what you do for a living, who you marry, what religion you’re a part of, those aren’t decisions that you make pre reformation.
You really lived in a time where even the thought of not doing one of these things that you were born into wouldn’t have made sense to you at all. One at a time, these innovations of the modern [00:30:00] age. Strip those things away. So, Hey, now you can live wherever you want and love whoever you want and do whatever you want for a living and so on and so forth, worship, whatever God.
And as each of those innovations comes along, we tend to sort of greet all of those as, as goods without recognizing. It creates a certain amount of anxiety because it’s now a decision you have to make and decisions are stressful. Part of life in the modern age is that you live with the anxiety of, of asking yourself, did I make the right decisions?
Not only do you have the anxiety of deciding all of these things, you also lack the roots and the connectedness and the story and the meaning that comes with the institutions that informed Your identity in a previous era, ideology comes along and it says, I got a story for you and it’s forward pointing and it’s big and it’s much bigger than you.
And it’s easy to get caught up in, you know, [00:31:00] what I think the church growth movement, particularly the, the, the failures and the collapses inside the church growth movement, what they have proven again and again, is that. That story, that purpose, because it lacks those institutional roots, because it lacks any real connection to a church outside of itself, it, it sort of destines the person to, to reach a place of loneliness and collapse in the long run.
Chris Staron: I think the, I’ve heard that from you in the Holy Post put out a video recently about something very similar. Where Francis Schaeffer, I think, was really perplexed me was that he made it almost sound like there was no anxiety before the Reformation. And it was like, uh, no, people died at 40. Infant mortality was very high back then, but So pining for that era just makes no sense.
There was a lot of anxiety before the Reformation and during the Reformation and the Counter Reformation. It was just different. So anyway, [00:32:00] good. Thank you for clarifying that for me. You do have Yeah, no, let me just say
Mike Cosper: one thing about that because I think, I think this is where Chesterton is a really helpful corrective to Schaefer because, because one of Chesterton’s big ideas when he would talk about what is conservatism, part of what he would always say is Like part of the most fundamental values of conservatism is recognizing that everything is a trade off and, and so when society evolves, yeah, you gain something, but you lose something the same thing’s true.
If you go backwards though, there’s, and I think where Schaefer’s thinking was limited on this is that he, he seemed to sort of look backward in a way that was like, well, he looked backward with nostalgic. He imagined something utopian. In, in the past, which is a failure to imagine, well, what were the trade offs?
What do we lose by bundling identity once again? And I would argue that one of the things that we lose is a whole heck of a lot of gospel opportunity. I mean, the [00:33:00] Reformation is an enlightenment project. It’s core to the enlightenment project. It’s core to all, all the problems of identity that come later.
I mean, this is Charles Taylor’s whole thing. If, if you want to understand why we have anxiety of identity, it starts with the Reformation, but that doesn’t mean the Reformation was bad. It just means that there are trade offs in a, in a culture that has, that has been through the Reformation. And so let’s be honest about what those trade offs are.
Chris Staron: Amen. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. So I do want to end on more, a more positive note here. We are coming up into the presidential election 2024 in the United States has a lot of, I’m sorry, did you
Mike Cosper: say you wanted to end on a positive note and you brought up the election because that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all month?
I love it. Let’s go.
Chris Staron: But there, there are things we can do is what I’m trying to say is there, there, there are things we can do in order to try to build a better. Church, big C church, a little bit at a [00:34:00] time, little things. And you outline some of them in the end of your book, some of the things that we can be doing to better the church and to kind of work through some of these ideologies and the desire to hide behind them, uh, in, in order to explain a complex world, what are, what are some of the ways that we can do that, that we can take some simple steps to, to try to improve?
Mike Cosper: Yeah. I mean, in, in the book, there’s, there’s a number of things I point to, I am talking a lot about worship. As, as kind of a key thing that the church needs to, needs to reconsider in a moment like this. If, if ideology is telling a story about here’s, here’s how the world changes. And it’s this little tiny thing that if we just get this right, we can get everybody in alignment and all this.
What worship says is worship says, hey, there’s a really, really big story. And you don’t, you don’t know where this is going. And in fact, you don’t really know where this has come from. I mean, there’s a reason why in the, in the great liturgies of the, of the, not just the Catholic church, but like almost [00:35:00] all liturgical traditions, there’s a reason why when they serve, The Eucharist, they say, therefore we proclaim the mystery of our faith.
Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. Evangelicals often think we know what that means. There’s no mystery there. And that’s nonsense. There’s total mystery there. That’s a profound and beautiful mystery. And, and it’s, it’s a mystery that we’re invited to be To be caught up in, and by the way, I don’t think you have to become Catholic to be caught up in the mystery of the, you know, the, the, the death and resurrection of Christ.
So the reason I think worship is so important and, and I know I sound like James K. A. Smith when I say this, and I have no shame about that whatsoever, but the reason I think it’s so important is because it gives us a story that, that will always be bigger than our ambitions, whether there are political ambitions, whether there are, The ambitions of our ministries or our churches or our local organizations, or we’ve seen so [00:36:00] much devastation from narcissistic world changing leaders that are starting companies like Theranos or Uber or whatever we work or whatever you you’ve seen the same pattern of we’re going to change the world ambition led by narcissistic personality.
That just absolutely crushes people in the long run. And I think the gospel has a great way of humbling that because it reminds you of your death. It reminds you of the hope of the resurrection, and it places you inside a story that’s so much bigger than your day to day that you can wake up tomorrow morning and the quote unquote wrong candidate will be elected president and.
You can say, and yet I will praise him because I recognize that in Christ, the best is yet to come, not the best is yet to come in that like our economy is going to be better and our weather is going to heal and all the rest of it. But no, the restoration of all things is guaranteed in Christ. And I. I [00:37:00] ultimately find my hope and comfort in that because I live inside that larger story.
Chris Staron: Amen. Well, Mike Cosper, thank you for joining me on the Truce Podcast. Again, the book is The Church in Dark Times. It’ll be out in November. I’m sure you can pre order it online. Thank you, Mike. Hey, thanks for having me. It’s a great conversation.
His book, The Church in Dark Times releases November 19th, 2024. Special thanks to everyone who helped me talk through the questions with Mike before I got them on the line. I especially owe a debt of gratitude to my brother Nick Staron, who’s a great sounding board. Truce is a listener supported show, and as you may have heard me say over and over again, I’m now doing Truce full time, which means I’m working super hard on the show, but also there’s not much of a safety net for me.
I’m earning just enough money to pay my basic bills, not much else. If you’d like to be a part of making Truce a sustainable show, visit trucepodcast. com slash donate. There you can give via credit card, check, [00:38:00] paypal, patreon, venmo, there are so many ways to give. Another way you can help is by sharing the show with your friends on social media.
It would mean a lot if you would just take a moment and leave a comment there or leave a rating on your podcasting app. Truce is a production of Truce Media LLC. God willing, we’ll talk again soon. I’m Chris Staron, and this is Truce.
