which way Christian man? What are the two options that are presented in front of Christians? Is our only options on the one hand a hardened state-funded establishmentarianism or on the other hand a support of mosques, false houses of worship, pagan statues being erected in our public square, etc., etc. Are these the only two options available to the Christian? Is there a third way via media that we may strike and where and can we rely on our Protestant history for guidance on these things? Always good to be on. So this is kind of a waiting in to a topic that James, you have, I think you have written on this sort of realm before. I've been told by friends that you may have some sort of background in political theology. I haven't I've not seen anything from you about that. This is part of your subject subject matter expertise. Grateful to walk into this and I think it's a worthy topic. We're going to interact with some people, at least one of whom that we both have a mutual respect for. And yet at the same time, this is the way this picture is quite often painted. It is, again, my mind always goes to because I'm a child at heart, my mind goes to memes in a way that memes do speak to art and to our modern state and ways that I think a lot of people downplay. But the meme is the Christian man standing in the middle and you have the two paths in front of you when you're asked which of these paths, which way Christian man, which way Western man. There is a there's a false dichotomy that's often imposed in these sort of conversations. And I say false dichotomy because the dichotomy comes down to, oh, if you resist this, you must want this. And quite frequently, that's not true. Quite frequently also, I'm not appealing to some sort of third way or via media. I'm also just saying there may be 17 options out there and not necessarily in a continuum, like it's a scale. There may be sort of more of a circular pattern. The point is when we come to these conversations, the way it's often presented to Christians is that if you oppose, for example, a 70-foot statue of Buddha being erected right in front of my house on our public park, if you oppose that, you must be a hardcore Christian nationalist, established, material, theonomic, you know, throw in all of the buzzwords. You must want state-funded churches. You must want churches packed with people who are required to go to church and who are actually unregenerate in their hearts. That must be the approach that you're taking. It doesn't move the conversation along. It's also not fair to the argument. But this is sort of where we find ourselves. So I don't know if you want to say anything on that as we wade in. I know we want to jump into the article. Yeah, no, I mean, let's jump in. So Casey McCall wrote an article, excuse me, arguing against the classic idea. He's called it the Magisterial Reformed idea of a Christian Prince. I responded to that. I believe that video will go up soon. Then Andrew Walker wrote a response to McCall, trying to do a via media kind of a third way between let's say established materialism and absolute, what you might call absolute religious freedom. Now I enjoy Andrew. He and I have spent some time together. I think it does a lot of good work. But I think his article is also a good jumping off point to talk about some of these issues. And we'll offer some critiques, hopefully, with appreciation and respect for what Walker has done. Right. So this article, and we'll try to link to it. This is a article that Andrew Walker, who I don't know personally, but I do appreciate him. And I follow him. And I find points to disagree with from time to time. But in general, I think Andrew's on the side of the angels. And I'm grateful for that. Anyway, this is a this is a Twitter article. And the title was Disestablishment Without Moral Neutrality. We'll try to link to it. And the show notes that we have from here. But he's addressing again, as you said, this article from McCall, McCall, it was picked up by Stephen Wolf. I think primarily because he used the language of Christian prints. We've interacted with this before. Christian prints, whether you find the term useful or helpful, I myself don't employ the term very much, but you could at least recognize that it has been used by our forebears in the Protestant tradition at various points. This is something though that I think an hour day, just to say Christian prints is to almost axiomatically associated with with Stephen Wolf because of because of his book, The Case for Christian nationalism. So again, that's where some of the interaction comes in. But James, you want to walk us into a little bit of because I'm I'm I'm less concerned with maybe McCall's article. Well, let's jump in with McCall's article. Give me a capstone of McCall's article and what he's aiming at here. And and part of his critique against this Christian prints. What's he getting at? So his core argument is that the magisterial idea of a Christian prints does not take into account fully the doctrine of total depravity and original sin, which is I point out in my video that should make you very suspicious because who are the idea the guys that came out with the idea of a Christian prints? It was John Calvin, Francis, good's Junius, you know, the people that we get our doctrine of total depravity from. So first and foremost, if someone says, hey, the guy who helped us develop this Calvinistic doctrine didn't fully take into account Calvinistic doctrine, that should make you pause and say, do we really understand what's actually going on here? Yeah. Yeah, it it is interesting the speed with which, especially those of us who try to labor within reform circles, it's interesting the speed with which and the comfort with which we dismiss so quickly, those in the magisterial tradition. And it's interesting, this is probably a rabbit trail, but we've seen this in conversations that we've recently had where someone will be citing Calvin, they'll be called to account on what Calvin actually said, and then they will very freely admit, yes, Calvin, Calvin was completely wrong on this, this take. That's okay. You know, these, these are men and the magisterial tradition is not scripture nor would it claim to be by those who adhere to it or than those who promulgated it. And yet at the same time, if you find yourself within a tradition and you were trying to advocate what you find to be the historically consistent, biblically grounded position of that tradition, you should not anathematize your forebears. It should come within the flow of that tradition. Again, probably a rabbit trail, but nonetheless. Especially on a doctrine as central to Calvinism as original sin. Yes. So I think the walker picks up this quote, which is I think the most vivid from McCall, this is the McCall quote, while we may dream of bulldozing mosques and gay bars, few consider what they will do when the bulldozer turns toward first Baptist and second Presbyterian. I think that should be first Presbyterian and second Baptist, but what happens when the hypothetical Christian prince has theological convictions about secondary matters? What happens when the authority at the top leverages government in pursuit of his own selfish aim? I want to note a few things. I think we should spend most of our time talking about Walker's piece, but I want to note a few things about this argument. First of all, it falls into a logical fallacy that I like to call questions as argument. So notice McCall doesn't make an argument here. He just asks questions. And what this does rhetorically is you can only do that when you believe that the priors of your audience agree with your priors. That you and your audience have the same assumption, and therefore, when you ask the question, the answer is obvious. So it's what you do in absence of an argument. You are pulling on the prior commitments of your audience to make it seem obvious. But in fact, this argument isn't this approach, isn't obvious. And one way that you can evaluate an argument is to you can see whether or not the argument is a good one by seeing if it proves too much. If the argument proves too much, it's not a good argument. Here's what I mean. Let's take that same structure that McCall offers. But take out bulldozing mosques and gay bars and put in there making abortion illegal. So while many may dream of making abortion illegal, if you consider what they'll do when the government turns toward Christians and you could say something, they do the opposite. Someone else gets in charge and they start doing China's one child policy. Right. Right. So we shouldn't stop abortion because if we give the government power to control people's reproductive abilities, they could turn that around and use it in the opposite direction. This argument proves too much. If it proves the point it's trying to make here, it would also say we shouldn't make abortion illegal, right? Or have restrictions on it, right? Whatever that prudentially may be the right thing to do there. So that should immediately make us think, this is not a good way to approach the question because anyone can say, hey, if we let the government do this thing, this good thing, I'm not saying we bulldoze mosques, but you get the idea, if we let the government do this good thing, then the government might do this bad thing. Well, that's always the case. Government may do good or bad, which is why we ought to vote for good people. Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to think of a great way to frame. So you know, you brought up questions as statements or positions. We could call it bareds fallacy, but then that would sound like I was accusing you of a fallacy. Yeah, it's a good one to point out though. And to me, there's also number one, obviously, framing things as questions as you pointed out problematic. There's also just the good old fashioned slippery slope fallacy. So not every slippery slope is necessarily a fallacy, but there isn't in fact something that is a slippery slope fallacy. And I think this is endemic just a speaking of a magistrate who wields the sword to punish the evil doer. So if you confront Romans 13 for speed or two and you say, okay, there is a magistrate in some form or fashion. However, much power he may have or restrictions that are put on him, whatever, there's a magistrate. He's given a sword and he's done that to terrify and to restrain the evil doer and the evil that evil doer is promulgating. The slippery slope can immediately come into play. Well, if he's got a sword, he might get elsewhere. I mean, I have kids. I know how they might handle a sword. They'll do good for a minute. They'll get bored and they'll hit their brother. Like you can start to do this sort of slippery slope thing. You can hear some of that. And this is again, endemic to Christian slash Protestant slash, especially evangelical conversations. This comes up again and again and again. This came up within the Donomination that I was licensed and ordained into ministry. Which although I've moved out of that and into Presbyterianism, I still hold gratitude and brotherhood with many of those that are there. But this is an argument that comes up quite frequently at their national meetings that we cannot do this thing because if we give the magistrate that sword, what if what if they turn that sword then on Christians? What if what if in our efforts to give the government any sort of power or any sort of legislative ability, they then turn that against Christians? And this is kind of at the heart of that that article from a call. That's exactly right. And I do think that what ends up happening, I think Walker's falling into this. I really believe McCall's falling into this is they are looking at the arguments of a bunch of Twitter and on's and assuming that those are the arguments of the magisterial tradition. Yeah. Okay. Maybe McCall's article would hold true if he said online a non, you know, Christian Prince, right? But he doesn't. He says magisterial. Okay. Well, that means you need to deal with the best arguments, not the worst ones. Right. And we need to make a few qualifications. Okay, which I think will really help people. Stephen Wolf makes these. So this, this is not, let's say me being overly charitable. And he does it because the tradition does it. Okay. When we say Christian Prince, what we mean is the rule, this is how Witherspoon puts it, the ruling part of any society. In other words, you're talking about the executive function of government. That could be, let's say, the executive branch of the United States of America. Okay. If you have a monarch, it would be the monarch, right? But Christian Prince does not mean absolute monarchy. It's just not what it means. Okay. Nor does it mean Christian Hitler. If I can say that without us getting scanned out of YouTube, I know. Definitely doesn't mean Christian Hitler. I don't think there is such a thing as Christian Hitler agreed or Protestant Hitler agreed. Anyway, no, it doesn't mean that Calvin talks about a Christian prince and his commentary on Psalm 101. He talks about it in his preface to his commentary on Isaiah, talking about Isaiah 4923. And yet which form of government that Calvin prefer aristocracy? Okay. So Christian Prince does not entail absolute monarchy at all. Okay. It is a function of government, whatever form of government you may pick. Of course, there's questions about how government could do that in a democracy, but pretty much anytime you talk about a function of government, it's oftentimes hard to see how it could get done in a pure democracy, right? Not a mixed Republican democracy like ours. So that's first thing. The second thing is the tradition and even wolf as well. What they'll do is they will talk about powers that the magistrate has in principle. Okay. Which means this is a permissible thing that the magistrate may do. However, that does not mean it is something every magistrate ought to do. And it does not mean that in your form of government, in your constitution, you can't provide guardrails around that. Okay. So if we say the magistrate may punish all wicked people, okay. What you didn't just say is that President Trump or President Biden gets to personally determine people he thinks that are wicked and go kill them. Correct. Because that duty to bear the sword against the wicked is then contextualized within your legal and constitutional system. Okay. So whenever you say Christian prince must kill the wicked. Okay. What you're not doing is saying, oh, we deny original sin. You know, because we think the Christian prince is a great guy. He's going to make all the right choices. No, you can factor in original sin and have separation of powers or checks and balances or legal constraints, things like that. So this is just a straw man against the idea of the Christian prince. It does not entail absolute monarchy or unrestrained government. Agreed. And sorry, almost walked on top of you there. But it also doesn't imply it's to me, this is where the dichotomy does come in. If that is where your mind goes, you know, listener who is who is hearing this, you're uncomfortable with maybe the term Christian prince, which I can kind of sympathize with that to an extent. And yet just the concept, you find yourself uncomfortable with the it's not a false dichotomy to say, well, then what is the other option? Because if you have a magistrate who wields the sword against evil, unless you're saying that every magistrate must be regenerately Christian and adhering to old New Testament without exception, like I'm not sure what conception in which you could think of us having functional magistrates who do in fact wield a sword as Romans 13 calls them to do, commands them to do, as a deacon of God, as a servant of God. And yet nonetheless, tells them to wield this with the expectation. I don't think anybody would accuse Paul and Romans of having a misconception of original sin. He's made that quite clear. And yet he sees no contradiction. And in fact, I would say the spirit of God riding through Paul would have no contradiction in saying yes, original sin, yes, the sinfulness of man, yes, our own precludes to air. And yet there should be a magistrate who does in fact wield the sword. And he should do that against evil. I was about to say it's actually therefore, right? And it is the doctrine of original sin that leads the mat, the magistereal reformers to care so much that you have a magistrate who's going to to punish it. I'm not a monarchist. All right. However, I want to steal man the case and go from the doctrine of original sin. Let's say that original sin is kind of your first principle. I think it's a bad first principle for your political theology, but let's just take it as our first principle. Okay. Because of the doctrine of original sin, which one is more likely that you will have a people who are virtuous enough to rule themselves or that you can find one guy. Mob rule, mob rule did work quite well in the Old Testament. I can recall many such examples. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So right, this is the point of judges. Right. Everyone does what's right in their own eyes. Right. Okay. So if you're going to take original sin as your first principle, that would lead you to monarchy. Right. Not a kind of representative democratically elected government like we have now. And it also leads to the expectation that the leader can be and should be corrected according to the word of God. So when, when whatever, you know, you brought up judges, whenever whatever, errant judge comes along, Samson comes along and he delves into sin, the expectation there, the scriptural admonition there is not, ah, the judges were actually a huge mistake we need to do away with this whole thing. It was no Samson, you are airing and you must be called to account and correct yourself according to the dictates of God. That's right. That's right. All right. That enough about McCall. Let's talk about we jump in into Andrew Walker before we do. 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So visit rockwallbibles.com, grateful to partner with those brothers. Um, lead us into Andrew Walker, James. So the first thing is Walker affirms, uh, McCalls argument, uh, against Christian nationalism. Um, in an interesting way. So what he says, I find this very interesting. McCall and Walker seem to think that Christian nationalism entails establishmentarianism. Yep. Okay. Established church. Now, and a strong hard establishment. There's a lot of different forms of establishmentarianism. Right. But a strong, you might say, intolerant establishment. I'm just not aware of that, that's certainly not the only option out there. And it's not the primary one, right? We keep, I keep referring to Stephen Wolf, just because he wrote the book that everyone talks about. Well, certainly does not argue for an established church. Okay. I've written a book that some people have called Christian nationalists. I think it's just a Christian government. So what I'm arguing for I do, I, I'm not for establishment. I don't argue for establishmentarianism. So again, this feels a little straw manny. Okay. Um, the Twitter nonz would love to have an intolerant establishment, but they'd like to have it a lot of other, uh, unsavory things as well. So let's just go ahead and acknowledge that. Yeah. I would, I would agree with what you're saying. And I would also just, I can't overstate my agreement with what you're saying as far as there's a lot of Christian leaders who are engaging almost, almost solely with small and non-accounts that are quite boisterous on, on X. And it's just not helpful. I, it just as a plea to Christian fellowship and moving the conversation forward, please, please stop doing that. That's, it's just not helpful. So in any case, and I'm not talking about Andrew Walker, by the way, there I'm thinking of, of a couple of other ones. But to get back to Andrew Walker's article, several things to look at in here that I thought were interesting. One of the main ones comes up in the first paragraph and I'm just going to read this small little part. Um, Andrew Walker says this and he's, he's kind of critiquing Christian nationalism as, um, he uses, he uses the terms, uh, utopian, Higalyan. I understand, I understand the critique. Um, and again, I say this as somebody who doesn't claim the label of Christian nationalist, but the things he's identifying, I, I, I see a lot of, a lot of, uh, agreement with those positions that he is critiquing. So here's what he says, quote, once the state becomes entangled in doctrinal disputes, bloody conflicts are rarely far behind states that absorb them into themselves matters as precious as religion are rarely eager to relinquish that power, especially when confronted with viewpoints that challenge the legitimacy of that synthesis. I think McCalls, he continues. I think McCalls analysis is right to view with suspicion and political ideology that promises a present day hegemon and I personally would identify it as a right wing manifestation of quote, he says quote, immanent, immanentizing the eschaton end quote and in his quote. I thought this was interesting because this is part of the way that that Andrew Walker is framing this. I have huge red flags when I hear the phrase immanentizing the eschaton. I think frequently that is used as a way of appealing to, and I'm, I'm trying to be careful here because I don't want to treat Andrew Walker unfairly nor his article unfairly. So I'm not thinking particularly of him. I am thinking of my seminary training in which immanentizing the eschaton is sort of reformed shorthand for it smells like early 1900s Protestant liberalism. It's trying to bring about some sort of utopian manifestation of the kingdom here on earth. It must be rejected because immanentizing the eschaton is essentially trying to usher in things that only belong to the consummate final state. We're looking to what God is going to do and yet we're trying to buy man's own hand rush those things into the present in a way that actually does damage to the church into the kingdom. I don't know that that's a really fair way to frame this. He's framing this again as a synthesizing of government with religion. Again, I think this is where that bifurcation unfair bifurcation comes in that either you want to completely synthesize church and state bringing in all the things of religion under the bear of the state or you go this other way. And in essence sort of acquiesce to a sort of religious pluralism in our society which again, I don't think Adrian Walker is aiming for that but this is the bifurcation that immanentizing the eschaton often introduces into these conversations. Do you think that's fair and what are your thoughts on this James? No, I think that's exactly fair. We're not trying to bring we're trying to bring heaven on earth in the sense of the second petition of the Lord's Prayer. Yeah. Right? We want to see his kingdom come. Yeah. What we're not trying to do is create an ever-lasting kingdom. Okay? There's a big difference between having a manifestation, a temporal manifestation of Christ's kingdom on earth and trying to bring about the eschaton. Okay? In the fullness that will not happen until Jesus returns. Yeah. The next thing that I noticed in the very next paragraph is it seems that Walker is saddling what he hasn't viewed as Christian nationalism with saying that they have a claim to infallibility. Okay? I don't know exactly what he means there because no serious person who's thinking about historic Protestant political theology would say that. What we would say is that because humans are fallible and because humans are affected by sin it is all the more important to invest in the institutions that God created to restrain it. Yeah. Okay? So for example, for example, whenever you say a father has the authority to discipline rebellious teenagers. Okay? Is that now saying that we believe the father is infallible? No. Of course not. We know he's fallible. We know he's sinful. But we also know God designed institutions to work in this way because you know who's more fallible and more sinful. The teenager says. Right. Right? So we're just trying to understand what's the historic biblical Protestant way to understand these institutions and we're not returning let's say the state into the new papal seat of infallibility. I can't point out to on that point James, this plays back into something I was going to say earlier when we were talking about or when I was bringing up kind of the slippery slope fallacy. This is so I ran into this lately. I've been doing a little bit of work on the Christian family and the Christian household and there's some quotes, especially from Kuiper for example, that would make a lot of modern Christians a lot of especially modern reform Christians very uncomfortable where he talks about the father of serving as a priest within his home and he talks about the home as a little church immediately red flags go up and people start thinking of these very aberrant unnatural family setups wherein they just remove themselves from any sort of church participation or discipline and the dad, you know, they don't go to church on Sunday mornings he reads to them. It becomes something something that Kuiper is not aiming at there. Kuiper is not suggesting that you remove yourself from the church. That's a slippery slope. So what we've what we've wound up doing is we've said, okay, if the father functions as a priest within his home and if the family is in fact as a little church, if that can actually slide into this weird aberration, we should actually kind of pendulum swing the other way and really not focus on any sort of, you know, family should pray together. That's good. I think a few Christians would object to that but we lose sight of the spiritual import of the covenant household in the Christian home. That to me is part of that slippery slope that leads away. It happens at the level of the father now as you and James, you and I both have that friend in Althusias who would say as it happens within the home so too in the state, it's paradigmatic. So what you see in the home, father leading is priest within his home, not sliding into an aberration and yet not falling into the slippery slope fallacy. That paradigm, it applies to the state as well. We shouldn't apply that slippery slope fallacy there either because it's paradigmatic. Yep, I think that's exactly right. Walker then brings up a point of jurisprudence which I think is so critical for us to, I would say correct and clarify, he says this, there's zero political will to repeal the first amendment or to advance proposals within its machinations. One can dislike a Hindu statue in Texas as I do and protest about it, a better protest should target the responsible up surges and immigrations that make the desire for such statues but unless laws are changed and changed in ways that do not backfire on Christians, those statues will get built because of the First Amendment. Few points that I want to make about this. There is zero political will to repeal the First Amendment, including amongst those who I think would call themselves Christian nationalists unless you're non-linear and non-okay. I'll put it this way, speak to myself, I don't want to repeal the First Amendment, I like the First Amendment. What I want to repeal is Everson vs Board of Education, which incorporated the First Amendment into the States. You see originally the First Amendment was designed only to restrict the federal government and it gave the powers to establish religion and to restrict the free exercise of other religions to the States. Correct, right now, under the standing interpretation of the First Amendment, a township can't say we don't want a Hindu statue downtown, okay? That would be considered breaking the First Amendment. But that's only because of that 1947 Everson vs Board of Education case. So the question is not if there is appetite or political will to repeal the First Amendment, but is there appetite and political will to repeal Everson vs Board of Education? And there is. Clarence Thomas has signaled he would be interested in that. You have Jewish people and Christians both arguing in like the Harvard Law Review that this was Badger's prudence and it should be overturned. So what I want to do is I want a Christian localism, right? I want my town, my county, counties across the US that are Christian, to be able to have civil laws that reflect their common Christian faith, okay? And to have the freedom to follow God's law as a polity, right? Right. Right now, these towns don't have the freedom to act as a people, a self-governing people in a Christian fashion. Now, he then says in a way that won't back fire on Christians, I do think one critique of Walker is that too often he falls into what I'll call proceduralism, that we need to have rules that now Walker goes back and forth on this. So I understand, but I read him as being of two minds. The mind of Walker that I'm critiquing right now is oftentimes procedural. This concept that if we just make the right rules, then we can do the right thing even without a thick conception of the public good, okay? What do I mean by that? What I'm saying is that you're never going to create laws that will work in a godly way unless they are motivated by the fear of the Lord, okay? Here's what I mean. You're not going to have a procedure, legal procedure that Christians and Hindus agree upon, that will be both godly and won't back fire on Christians. It's just not going to happen. People has to have a common religion in order, and even if not everyone agrees with it, that religion is the predominant structuring element, principle element, that organizes their national life. So I would acknowledge, correct, if you repeal that 1947 case, it could quote unquote, backfire on Christians. But I also think that our current legal structure is backfireing on Christians. In other words, our problem isn't a procedural one. It is whether or not people have a shared conception of the public good. That's the actual issue, not the procedure, but the target they're trying to shoot at. And maybe you can help me understand this. Not that I'm asking you to be a Andrew Walker scholar, but you have more interaction with him than I do. I'm curious about the way he frames this, which by the way, we didn't do this at the beginning, but Andrew Walker is certainly free to come on here. We'd love to chat with him. Yeah. Andrew is a great guy. Yeah. So we would love to hear his viewpoint, his clarifications, even his pushback. That would be that would be most welcome. Because this is this conversational and not given with any animosity. However, he does, he does say something that I think is interesting. So number one, Andrew does number one, he doesn't fall into the trap of thinking that the government can be just some sort of irreligious secular institution, which is devoid of more like he doesn't fall into that trap, which praise God. Like you said, it seems to me in the article, his concern is with how we get there more than just the end road of where we get, which again, I'm sympathetic in theory to that. He brings up the fear from McCall's article, Andrew Walker brings this up in his critique of McCall's article. And it's specifically in Demick to Baptist circles, wherein many Baptist and he critiques this because they view themselves as sort of an incendiary movement that was always under a governmental persecution. They were the outside minority that was kind of felt the brunt of governmental enforcement of religious mores and norms. Because of that, they were frequently apt to say the government ought not do anything or already sort of local or state codes ought to do nothing to impinge upon religious freedoms, even if those are the religious freedoms of the pagan because those then could be turned against Baptist. So he brings this up in his article. He does point out that he thinks there's an error that is lurking within that. And he describes that his Baptist sort of digging a pit for themselves. Again, Andrew Walker is coming from within the Baptist tradition, speaking to those with whom he labors. And he says, this is sort of a pluralism because we dig ourselves into this pit. We wind up advocating for some sort of pluralism. Now here's where I don't understand what Andrew Walker is getting at. He said, the way we must do this, he doesn't exactly make the argument that we don't need to change laws. We just need to change hearts. That's not exactly the way he frames it. He's a better thinker than that. But it's not far off from what from from that argument, right? It seems to me at the reading of this article to be closer to that argument because what Andrew Walker advocates is we need to convince people, and especially those with then governance and authority or even those down the road from us, we need to convince society and those who govern over us that it is a moral harm and it is actually detrimental to society for us to have, for example, a Hindu temple, that the promulgation of that temple and everything that it represents that could actually be regarded as a moral harm. We need to convince them the people and the governance of that. That way that God's appointed means will be carried out and God's laws will be reflected. It's almost as if he's trying to say, and again, I'm asking for your clarification on this or from whatever you're reading from within this James. It seems like he's saying we don't need a law that prohibits that. We need changed hearts and minds that recognize that it is a moral detriment to society. And I bring that up and this is, I'll let you respond, but the two things I see in there, number one, I see, number one, I see we should all agree that we want hearts and minds changed. I don't think, again, radical voices aside, most of us are agreeing, of course, we want people to see these things. We don't want a heavy hand that just forces people into behavior and their hearts remain unchanged in their minds. We don't want that. So I agree with him on that to a certain extent. But the number two thing that I'm seeing there is the fact that if the government wields a sword, the magistrate wields a sword in all of its laws and all of its governance, and it enforces the law by restricting and punishing evil, doesn't that mean at certain points the government does in fact hold back evil even though the hearts and the minds have not yet been changed? And is that some sort of established materialism or neo-utopianism or hagelianism for us to say the government could very well say no Hindu statues in public even before the populace has 100% been converted to that way of thinking. Am I over reading him on this or are you seeing this as well? No, no, I think so too. And the one thing I don't want to acknowledge is this is a preennial political problem. Okay, so it's not an issue we're going to get away from. I mean think about Constantine, for example, what most modern scholars read now as an insincere conversion, I read as a wise political ruler. So oftentimes I think Roman Empire is what 10, 15% Christian, most of them are pagan, especially amongst the elite, right? And so what he'll do is he'll kind of slowly he just legalizes Christianity. He doesn't make it the official religion. And he'll try and talk in such a way that what he's saying is agreeable to Christians and to the pagans, because he's slowly recognizing that if he just overnight says, hey, Christianity is the official religion, all of you who are pagan are totally wrong. What's he going to have on his hands? A political rebellion. Okay, so you have to be smart and wise about how you do these things. So in that sense, there is a huge factor, maybe the most important factor in a ruler is winning hearts and minds. Okay, so your first project is convincing enough of the public that this is in fact in their favor. It's good for them. Okay, and part of my book, at least in one footnote, I present an argument where I say, hey, even if you're an atheist, you'd rather live in a Christian society than an atheist, a coin. Okay, you know, so I think there's totally a place for this argument. It is absolutely a step that the government cannot skip when it's trying to do this. Okay, the thing that you're picking up on is that Andrew Walker envisions a public square where there is always a contest between differing views. Okay, and that contesting conceptions of the public good are important to keep in the market's place of ideas. Whereas what I want to say is no, our goal is actually to get us to quit contesting which God is the true God. Okay, very cool. Which definition of marriage is the right definition of marriage, right? And that's where I think that there is a variability in Walker's viewpoint. Why say, let's keep contesting, let's say, which God's the true God in the public square, but let's not continue to contest whether or not a man who's born a man must always stay a man. Can I, can I kind of point out just in case anybody's maybe thinking you're overstepping, this is a quote that I think exhibits what you're talking about right there, James. And I say this is somebody I'm a natural law respecter. I'm not a hard core breeze up as a journalist. There's a little bit to that argument though that I think bears in here. Here's what Andrew Walker says quote, he said, if certain Islamic practices involve child marriage, polygamy, the imposition of Sharia law, or other threats to public safety, as seen in cases like the grooming scandals in the UK, then the state can restrict those practices on the basis of public order and safety. End quote. This is what I think exemplifies what you were just bringing up. And again, this may be something on which Andrew Walker has more to say, and he kind of goes back and forth a little bit on this. But just at face value, the argument being made there on what basis, for example, is polygamy wrong and detrimental to the public good. You can make natural law arguments and yet at the same time, can we come to a place in which the state, based on Christian virtue and prudence in their governance, simply says that child marriage is not up for debate. We're not going to have a public square debate on child marriage and try to convince the populace of how it's detrimental to society and how it is some sort of threat to public safety. We can simply say it's wrong and that's going to stay wrong. And then we seek to win hearts and minds. That to me is the part that just doesn't connect exactly. Yeah, I do think this I do think this is a mistake that Walker makes, but he's not the only one. This is a very popular mistake to make. And that's how you understand natural law. So typically in the natural law discourse now, natural law is that thing which all Christians and non Christians should agree upon. Okay. In principle, that's true. And that it can be known by nature without scripture in principle. That is true. However, what Christians have historically acknowledged since forever is that scripture are, you know, Calvin says this, they're the spectacles that you use to see nature rightly. So think of someone like Robert Dabney. Now I disagree with Dabney on a lot of topics. Even he is someone who would disagree with my book. But what he believes is the state must enforce natural religion, not supernatural religion. Okay. So what's an implication of that? He says we have to have Sabbath laws. Well, now this is interesting, isn't it? Because he says it's a principle of natural law and natural religion that we have Sabbath laws. Okay. Well, how do we know that we take off Sunday? How do we know that it's one in seven? Well, the scriptures clarify what natural law teaches us about the season. Right. So it is always going to be natural law as clarified through the scriptures. All right. Natural law teaches that you ought not worship more than one God. Okay. Well, that means all these polytheistic religions are unnatural. Okay. How do we know that's what natural law teaches? The scriptures clarify the first commandment, right? So natural law needs to be interpreted through scripture. And we do need to rule according to natural law. But it's a Christian conception of natural law, which doesn't super naturalize natural law. It clarifies as the nature of what nature teaches. Right. Which is why I find that the language that he uses here in the article just just confusing to me when he talks about it as a dual horizon. So he says he says, look, this is not to ignore this imposition of natural or appealed in natural law is not some sort of denial of supernatural revelation. In other words, he's not throwing scripture out. He's clear on that here. First do it as dual horizons. He says this dual horizon of general revelation and this dual horizon of special revelation and the two. That sounds confusing because it sounds like you're talking about two different things. Whereas what you're talking about. And maybe this is what it means by dual horizons. You know, there's that old hermeneutical principle of, you know, seeing one mountain that's a bit closer than seeing the further mountain. Well, if that's the conception that I agree, it just wouldn't make a whole lot of sense as an illustration to what he'd said in the previous paragraph. Because what it seems that he's saying is there's kind of two separated books, although he says they're not separate, two separated books we read. As opposed to, as you said, John Calvin's use of the glasses of special revelation, which clarify what is to us foggy. It's endemic to our nature, but it's foggy and natural revelation because of sending the effects of the fall. There's no way to fix it. I'll make last one last point then it's probably time to wrap up. I am all, you know, your terms are acceptable. Let's run the government according to natural law. Well, natural law teaches government ought to promote true religion. This is accepted by every culture except America here or the West here last a little bit. James, could you say that the true religion is a benefit to public safety and to public welfare looking at words from the article? Yeah, absolutely. After all, one thing we want to convince people of is that false religion is harmful to the most important part of you, your soul. Yeah. Good word. Okay, we do need to wrap up. I know you've got an appointment to get to thoughts, questions on this. Please reach out to us. Escodalajima.org. One at gmail.com. Reach out to us through the comments on here. Touch base with us. Again, invitation. If anybody is having coffee with Andrew Walker and I'm sure he's got far more on his plate than than I do, but if he has time to chat, we'd be welcome to that and would invite him on. We're appreciative of his work. But James, always good talking to you and appreciate it. You too. See you brother.