And we are live, episode 29 of To The Unknown Pod.
My name is Jordan Bush.
I'm the executive director of TGFB Media.
We exist to help Christians understand and use Bitcoin for the glory of God and the good
of people everywhere.
Today, I'm joined by the normal, usual cast and crew here, Jim McAndrew, Tim Fox, Oshawa
Hawthorne.
Go ahead and introduce yourselves.
i'm tim fox executive director of the magnolia foundation
also a presbyterian minister helping with magnolia helping orange build the church
i'm jim i work with tim at magnolia as tech support i also run a company called drone link
do you use the drones for your ministry could that'd be cool so i'm ashiel hawthorne i'm the
executive director and founder of Brilliance Labs. And I was on a long road trip and vacation
for a month. So I'm happy to be back with you guys. Yeah, we are. We're happy to have you back,
Ash. Today's episode is, again, going to be a little bit more of a somber one, probably the
most somber one we've done up to this point. It's called The Death of Charlie Kirk and the
consequences of subsidized injustice. We're going to just, obviously there's so much that we,
that we could say that has been said. This episode was initially designed to just be about
the, this latter half of the topic, the consequences of subsidized injustice. And we were going to talk
about the stabbing that happened for this young Ukrainian lady in Charlotte. We had everything
set up and ready to go. And then we're all horrified yesterday to hear the news about
Charlie being shot and all the stuff that went with that. So we just wanted to take the opportunity
to talk through some of the issues that maybe haven't been discussed as much. And so we'll see
kind of where this leads. The first thing that I want us to discuss is something that we don't
even have tweets for. It's kind of, it's meta in that way. Just basically, the question that we all
kind of were talking about was, should we even watch these videos? Obviously, in the case of
the young Ukrainian woman, there's very just graphic video displaying her final moments and
what that looked like. There were some people who watched them and were sharing them widely on
social media and, you know, felt justified in doing so. And then there's plenty of other people
who just said, I'm not going to watch that or I can't watch that. And so I want to just maybe
start there. Is this something that Christians should consume? I'll leave the floor open to
anybody who wants to kind of lead off the discussion. I'll try to give the straw man
or the steel man for both sides. So if you want to do that, maybe we'll go that route.
Yeah, well, I'll start just with the decision that I made.
And I don't want to impose it on anyone else, but I'll give my thought process.
So, like Twitter, I noticed after Elon Musk took over,
I got an influx of violent videos showing up in my feed.
They changed something with the algorithm and they would feed you accounts you don't already follow
so that you would find new content or whatever.
And there would just be these like enraged porn kind of,
hey, look, this person was beat up by this other person.
Often it's racially charged.
And I just started blocking and muting every single account
that in my feed I got an unasked for,
just look at this video, be angry.
and it took me about a week to just clean my feed
to make sure that didn't happen.
So as a person, that's not what I'm going to X or Twitter for.
I'm not interested in that.
It's not good for my soul.
It's not what I'm looking for.
And so with these, the two videos,
I didn't go looking for them.
I did when I just was trying to figure out
what happened with the Kirk.
video i saw of a long distance zoom in shot of the the hit and and he slumps over and there's
like a spot of red in his neck and and for me that was enough i i understood what happened
and then i had to process it um it i don't feel like it it does i don't gain anything more um
watching a close-up uh video of that or this other this other video um and then even the other video
i i you see the images on the on the train of the woman slumped over and i saw that um but i didn't
need to see that that the moment of of violence yeah i mean a lot of these platforms just have
auto-playing videos when you scroll through your feed right so you do have to be really careful i
I think I don't, I mean, Tim can weigh in on whether or not our conscientious consciences
should be bound on something here.
I'm intentionally trying to not see the videos.
I intentionally didn't seek out like the beheading videos, um, from decades past.
I also intentionally have not ever watched any abortion content.
I'm already pretty incensed by all of it
so I don't really need to get any more enraged
I feel like I'm as enraged as I can be
and I have a photographic memory
and that stuff just sticks with me
I think it sticks with anybody
but I can just
my mind can just replay it
so I don't know
that's kind of where I'm at
but I also have watched John Wick
so I mean
I don't know you know it's like when I know
it's movie and fake
it's just there's
a different quality to it
in terms of just my mind so I don't
know Tim what do you think
I think
it may be one of these
first Corinthians all things are
lawful but not all things are beneficial
is it
necessarily wrong to watch
it no but I think for a lot of people
it's not, at best, it's not helpful.
And it's probably harmful.
I did watch the Charlotte
Kirk close-up one. I regret watching it.
I did not watch
the Charlotte one. But, yeah,
I don't know. I think,
yeah, I mean, I grew up playing very violent
video games, Grand Theft Auto
and all that stuff, and really enjoyed it.
But as a dad now, I'm like,
you know, I don't think this is
probably a good idea, especially
for my kids. And there's
some things that are
not wise you're not ready for it there's a line somewhere in uh corrie ten boom's book
uh the hiding place where her she's like riding a train and her i think she's starting to ask her
dad about what's going on with the jews and the nazis in amsterdam or amcam in uh wherever she was
harlem in the netherlands and her dad says well kind of like a suitcase on a train that is too big
for you to lift up above you onto the rack. There's some things that you're not ready yet
to carry. It's my job to carry them for you. So yeah, I don't know. I think, is it necessarily
wrong? Not necessarily, but I think we probably need to be careful about assuming I'm someone
that can handle this and I need to see it. And yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'm being inconsistent.
I've seen different things about this over the years. I'm generally more comfortable with seeing
violence, especially in movies, than I am with sexual stuff. And I would feel more comfortable
with my kids seeing violence in movies and sexual things like i've never watched game of thrones
even though people really like it because it's just like i don't think this is a good idea
certainly wouldn't honor my wife even if i can completely keep myself from ever lusting about it
is that inconsistent maybe a part of me thinks sexual stuff may be more
potent and destruction destructive than violent stuff but the violent stuff is not nothing
i mean the sexual stuff is in a lot of instances like actually happening to the actors
and actresses um you know versus not so i think there could be some distinction there between like
is something actually happening versus not um but then also i feel like our society is just
very much sanitized and sterilized and there's no i mean 200 years ago people would have seen
dead bodies and things like that and we don't have that anymore and so there's there's something
there that we are not as decent as desensitized in a lot of ways that a lot of people would have
firsthand experienced and seen a lot of pretty horrific things not that that's like something
that we should find out or something yeah yeah yeah so again there i would separate because i
would kind of i guess for this both in real life and for the sake of this argument i would kind of
be on the other side of things where again there i do think i mean again
we don't want to, what we don't want to do is try to bury ourselves in a hole and like get away from
reality. Okay. So this is, and I'm not saying you guys are doing this. I'm saying this is one,
this is one ditch you can fall into is just basically we're going to plug our ears. We're
going to run away from evil. We're never, you know, we're like, we don't want to know anything
about it. Um, and I'm sure there's people listening to this who that would be your,
your pushback. It'd be like something of like grow up guys, you know, like that would be like
you're you're grown men you know the the difference between tim the situation from
cory ten boom you know that you mentioned would be yes this is a father trying to keep his daughter
from some of this stuff that makes sense um and so you know the father is bearing this on behalf of
his daughter um i i do think there is an element to which that is a helpful framework to think about
this of we're not like this this is first of all if you're if your motivation for watching some of
this stuff is to, you know, enrage yourself or just, I want to watch this over and over again.
So it burns into my mind so that I'm, you know, I never forget this. I think there can be damage
there. You know, I think, and it takes wisdom to know your, know yourself and your own spirit
and soul just to figure out like how, how helpful is this? I do think that's a very valuable
concern. I will say the, the, the beheading videos, if you guys are just kind of coming
and cold. You're like, what in the world are they talking about? So there were, it was one of the
first examples of this. I remember it was, I was in high school, uh, when there were, uh,
jihadist guys who were taking captive, they weren't necessarily Christians, but there were
plenty of Christians who were beheaded. They would post videos of, of them beheading these
Christians or just, uh, Americans. And I remember going back and forth about whether I should watch
them, I was in high school and I ended up watching a couple of them and remember either immediately
or very shortly thereafter thinking as a Christian, just thinking that's all that they can do to me.
You know, like that, that's, that's, that's all they have. And then it's over and I'm with the
Lord. And so I do think there, there, you could at least make the argument that due to the fact
as Ashwa mentioned, how desensitized we are from death. We don't think about death. We're able to
sanitize and we don't, a lot of people don't do open caskets. We'll never encounter death. We try
to go our whole life without encountering death. There can be something helpful on a limited basis,
like in a situation like this, that I could see, you know, I could see the effect of having seen it
to be being a, I would say a healthy one, not to say at all, this is something we should make a
regular diet of we should go seeking out regularly or anything like that but um i do think the
argument is there you know that for for that to be the case um well yeah so i think it's just what
what would be what's tragic is if somebody that's intentionally not wanting to see it goes onto an
auto playing video feed right and then you get served it or you know or if your kid's looking
over your shoulder when it happened like something like that i can i can definitely argue with i mean
The other example that came to mind as we were talking about this before we got on the air was Emmett Till.
Emmett Till was a young boy who was lynched, dragged behind a truck by some racist guys.
And he just looks disgusting.
He's just absolutely beaten to a pulp.
and his mom chose to do an open casket,
just basically to convey the idea of like,
you're not going to get away from seeing what you did to me.
In society more broadly, you're not going to get away from seeing
the reality of what was going on.
Because I think part of what can happen is the,
again, I'm not saying this is a perfect comparison,
but you have the Apostle Paul talks about like,
we don't in 2 Corinthians, we don't want you to be unaware
of the affliction that we suffered in Asia, right? He basically is saying, hey,
ignorance actually can work against you. It can produce a lack of, you know, fury or lack of
caring that really ought to be there. And so I think that that is something we ought to be aware
of. And this is what part of what motivated Emmett Till's mother, you know, was she's like,
I want you to see the full range of the badness of this situation, not as a regular diet,
but because this was uniquely heinous, I want you to uniquely recognize how heinous this
is so that you do something about it.
And I think that would be something to keep in mind as well, is if you have, whether you've
seen the videos or not, what you're seeing or your lack of seeing ought to do, that's
something you ought to consider is what should I, what do I do now?
to quote Francis Schaeffer how should we then live what what do I do with what I've seen
or what I've heard about and so I think that's a broader lesson that we can uh that we can discuss
and we ought to talk about like what should we do what should be the response to this and what
we've seen uh because there's the full gamut of of responses at least verbalized if not acted out
Yeah, I mean, I think
I was just thinking this morning about the full sweep of psalms that the Lord gives us emotionally And I was at a retreat one time and the guy was talking about how he was talking about the psalms and kind of giving a bunch of talks on them
And he said, you know, a lot of kind of contemporary, especially evangelical Christians tend to fixate on the psalms of joy.
He said, there's three kinds of psalms.
He said, there's psalms of joy, there's psalms of anger, and there's psalms of sadness.
And interestingly, he said that people in his hip congregation in Brooklyn found the Psalms of joy to be phony and inauthentic and that kind of language in church.
And they gravitated towards the Psalms of sadness and kind of angst and frustration and being burned on things.
And so he was not saying, you know, one is better than the other, but saying that these are all important.
And, you know, Ash, you were just telling us before we started recording, you know, just the sadness you felt.
Like I've mostly just felt really sad.
And I see people online, you know, mostly kind of really mad.
And this certainly should evoke a lot of anger.
But mostly I've felt very sad about it.
And I'm encouraged to remember that God has given us a full sweep of worship language and prayers to go to him with,
full of anger towards the wicked and asking for God to judge them and punish them.
but also with that and oftentimes mixed up in it are psalms of deep sadness over sin and evil and
wickedness. This is something we see Christ talking about. He's lamenting Israel and says,
you know, Oh, how, Oh Israel, Oh Israel, how like a mother, let's get a mother chicken. I wanted to
draw you near and you were unwilling. And so it is this mixture of, of sadness and anger that was
going on that colored a lot of Jesus' interactions with the Pharisees. And I absolutely think that
there is no excuse to try to be mealy-mouthed about the evil of what's going on or to try to
do third-wayism, whataboutism, to try to draw false equivalences between other things that
have happened. I just think there's great danger and unbiblical, that's an unbiblical reflex.
somebody uh i believe it was joe rigney talked to me evaluated someone one of these kind of tweets
that somebody sent and accused basically said this is what life is like this is what it's like
to live life under the progressive gaze and i do think that there are there is a segment of
christendom that very much operates and thinks about how to respond with one group of people
in mind and
very much to not appear
to try to appear a certain way to one
group and they're
not so much worried about the other group and there's
interesting dynamics there between
people who have more of an evangelistic
bent versus people who
have more of a I would say
inward shaped in terms
of like church focused bent
I think there's some of the dynamics
that can manifest themselves
in different ways
um
I mean, one thing I would say is I do think the, so, you know, you see people kind of, I think sometimes pretty over the top in the last 24 hours expressing outrage over Christians and Christian institutions kind of trying to do the like, well, this, but that.
And it's kind of like all these other evil atrocities and it happens on both sides.
And I mean, like you said, I think they have a point.
And I don't think this is the time to kind of have to qualify it before, like, you know, our friend James Wood keeps tweeting about, you don't have to qualify that you didn't agree with everything you had to say to just grieve the wickedness of it.
However, I have been thinking too about the way that I think social media in particular seems geared towards stoking anger more than anything else, more than joy and more than sadness.
and that I am concerned, profoundly concerned about people getting whipped up into a kind of anger at other people,
at the left, at their pastor because he's not saying or doing or praying or preaching the right things
because, you know, the talking head or the tweeting head on Twitter told them, you know, and got them all riled up and angry.
and I just I don't know I was telling Jim earlier there's a part of me that is getting kind of
flashbacks of September 11th I mean today is September 11th but of the September 11th when
I was in high school and then the Iraq Afghanistan wars you know a few years later of just this kind
of total black and white there's only one right way to think about this and you're either with
us or you're against us I have been reading lately for some of our homeschool stuff on the run-up to
World War I and some of the stuff that was kind of used in the run up to that to kind of whip
everybody up into this fervor of, you know, those people are completely wicked and evil. There's
only one way to think about this. It's just that plus my own kind of early war on terror stuff as
a young man who did get totally sucked into all of this and sucked into kind of the propaganda of
it all. There is a part of me that is like, I do want to be a little bit careful about how we let
people get kind of pushed into especially extreme things or kind of black and white things or
apocalyptic things, if that makes any sense. Not to say that everything's the same or there's good
and evil, you know, all over the place. Some ideologies are clearly much more wicked than
others. But if you start to think that certain kind of person over there is by definition wicked
and evil because of what they think or the ideas they have, you have become the communists of the
20th century who are executing people because they wear glasses and they are therefore professors
who are killing everybody and destroying everybody or the kulaks who, you know, their bellies are a
little bit bigger and therefore they're wicked. They're killing everybody. So I don't know. I just,
I am outraged and I'm sad and I'm angry about what happened yesterday. But at the same time,
I'm trying to keep an eye on my own heart and want to help other people not to get sucked into
something really dark. Exactly. Because that, that is, there is a very, there is a very true reality
of that, that there, there are people who have bad, bad intentions who, who would love for certain
responses to happen. Um, I do think to, even though that's the case that that shouldn't ultimately
drive what we do or don't do, right? Like there, there, we should have higher, higher things
motivating what we do. Um, and again, it does take wisdom to know the difference. One of the
things that Pastor Doug Wilson talked about a lot in the last, after Trump was shot, and even in the
lead up to that, he basically kept repeating, don't take the bait. Like, don't take the bait.
Like, this is so easy to take the bait and then to justify, like, if there's certain people that
respond a certain way, it can be used to justify certain types of responses, especially at that
point. And again, by and large, incredibly in a country of 350, 380 million people, nobody took
the bait. And, and so I think that again, the, it's a similar type thing is he, and not to mention
him all the time, but he, one of the things he does, he's got these, this, he does react videos,
what are commonly understood to be react videos. And in the intro, they always put up Doug reacts
and then they cross it out and they replace it with respond, like Doug responds.
And I think it's just, that's a very, it's a small grammatical difference,
but it really is, it makes a lot of difference between,
like it's just, is the way that we're responding the way that we should respond?
Is this the way that's actually going to produce the greatest outcome
for the cause of Christ, for our own selves?
I do think that it's something we do need to weigh and think carefully about.
We don't want to just fly off the handle and react without thinking through the consequences of our actions.
So I think that's all really helpful.
And I tend to be the nuanced guy.
and let's try to not let go of one thing
while grabbing onto the other.
But at the same time,
I sense that this really is an Overton window shift.
I sense that the safety of not committing politically
and not picking sides,
that zone where you can do that is shrinking.
Like the ice is melting around somehow like, oh, I just don't, I'm not calling anything or I'm somehow trying to either I'm pretend, I'm actually on one side and I pretend to be neutral or I'm genuinely trying to be neutral and I'm equivocating and doing all these things.
I feel like the place to do that is rapidly diminishing
And I think both sides
And it's easy to say, oh, it's just the radicals on both sides
But I think it's just the normal faithful Christians
That are self-described conservatives
are seeing that and calling that out as disingenuine.
And I think that's a good thing.
I think it's really good that it's no longer easy
to just to not connect our theology and our politics
and just to say, well, I fall down here theologically.
yeah yeah and like so like uh you could say like well keep your religion private right it shouldn't
belong in the in the public sphere i think the church too often has said yeah you can be public
about your theology but keep your politics private and trump's assassination where all
of a sudden people were now bold of like okay forget it i'm just gonna be like open and yes
I support Trump.
And that shifted.
You saw that in Silicon Valley with a lot of tech leaders.
You saw it in different spheres among Christians.
I feel like this is another step where it's like, okay, forget it.
If he could lose his life over these issues, I'm willing to come out of the closet and
be a conservative in social media, in my circles, or from the pulpit.
That's what I view.
And I think it's a good thing.
yeah insofar insofar as christians are people who value truth the way that many people have lived
for way too long like many christians have lived which is again you're always one of the one of
the problems that we have is in the temptations for all of us is to to make decisions by the lowest
common denominator so like we move from exceptions to the rules and we we can like be tempted to like
deny rules because there are exceptions. And, and so it's like, we, people feel bad.
There's a lot of Christians who feel bad about saying, uh, you know, the, the left is bad
or something like the, the left is worse or something like the left is worse than the right.
And it's just like, I mean, you're getting, this is, I completely agree with you. You're getting
to the place where there are many ways in which you you cannot even compare the two like you you
just can't in good faith and i i feel justified in saying that i'll share this one uh one article
that was written uh by somebody who i frequently disagree with uh his name is samuel james
writes for uh that's not it yeah i hear this yeah uh he's got he wrote a book called digital
liturgies that talks about how technology is shaping us. He is somebody who is far more
center left than that's even being charitable in my mind. But Christian, he frequently,
frequent critic of Donald Trump, frequently, frequent critic of a lot of the discussions
about nationalism. I'm trying to find this exact quote here. He comes down and he says this right
here in this moment, I see myself in Charlie Kirk, not because our views were identical,
but because I too sense the spiritual and social evil that Kirk gave his life trying to identify
and reader, I have to confess, I don't think that this kind of evil exists equally on both sides.
And so this is, to risk being dad jokey here, this is a turning point for Samuel James,
at least in his public rhetoric. This is someplace that he, and I think this, as you mentioned,
And this was representative for a lot of people.
And I hope that his, do we want to call it courage to speak this way, will breed more
courage in people who've been, I would argue, cowards up to this point and drawing force
in people who, Christians who've, Christian leaders who've drawn false equivalency between
different things.
So again, I just was very encouraged to see this because again, when you look at some
of the things that are happening, like they're not happening equally.
And it's simply lying to argue that these things are happening equally, in equal numbers, or even anything close to equal numbers from people on both sides of the political spectrum.
It's just not. It's just not.
Again, we can talk about the reasons why and all that kind of stuff, but just the plain fact of this is not happening equally is something that Christians, by virtue of their ethic,
their ethic that the command that Christ has given us to tell the truth we can't just keep
lying about this like it's it's not serving anybody well I think the issue in view here is
inciting people to violence correct yeah I mean there's there's a bunch of issues but it's
inciting people to violence yeah it happens all the time on the left yeah I'm not saying it
doesn't ever happen on the right but it's not even close yeah and so the question really boils
down to here how is the right going to respond and if we respond by inciting to violence
yep you know but but that's the problem right like we we're not going to fight violence with
violence because we have morals yeah because we fear god and because yeah how do how do we actually
respond here like how do we how do we get the government to wield the power of the sword the
way that they should.
Yeah.
And this is something we talked about a lot is it one of the tragedies and the injustices one of the greatest again the injustice that been subsidized is the government has taken on every responsibility except for the one that they
were given to do, right? They don't want to exercise the sword. They don't want it there.
I mean, in the case of this guy, I mean, staggering, the guy who killed the young lady
in the immigrant, the immigrant who'd fled war-torn Ukraine, the guy who killed her in
Charlotte, this guy had been arrested 14 times and was set free by somebody who wasn't even a judge.
I don't know if you guys even have seen that, but this lady, it was a woman, she was not even a
judge. She didn't go to law school, didn't go anything. She was just appointed by somebody in
Charlotte to make judgments on whether or not people should go to jail and she let this guy go
and so just the the staggering level of injustice and obvious idiocy that led to something like that
happen happening is something that I just think a lot of people are waking up to and they're just
they they're realizing this isn't these aren't bad people who are being attacked this is just
random random acts of violence you hear the guy in that case say i got the white girl two times
in the video uh charlie kirk renowned for literally peacefully showing up on campuses
and debating people literally using reason and i think for a lot of people my wife said this to me
she said this is the first time where i i felt like i was potentially somebody like a stand in
for me was being attacked and my wife was like she's not interested in politics all this kind
of stuff and so for her to express feeling like that it just was kind of again i i do hope it is
a turning point i do hope this is people are recognizing that this is unsustainable um you
know i i want to be clear too like i i'm pretty disappointed right now with you know trump's
administration and the right and how they're handling the epstein files they are totally
mishandling the power of the sword in that case correct yeah there's no justice yeah and the fact
that we don't know who i mean the other thing we the whole thing with how the shooting went down
where there's a shooting that happens somebody immediately in the vicinity of of the shooting
claims that he was the shooter and then they take him off then there's somebody else who again had
head guns and then it because of the confusion because they thought they had the guy the real
guy gets away like there's just a bunch of just really weird feel like i have any closure from
trump's assassination attempt yeah yeah and it's like trump trump is the president like
you would think he would want that looked into yeah i i did think about that yesterday
i mean it really is sagra we still don't know we still don't know what motivated the guy
I mean his house
the Trump assassin guy
his house had been
professionally scrubbed
like there's all kinds of things
where you're just like
this just doesn't happen
like this is
the point I'm trying to make is
I'm not just like
going to blindly
just say
oh I'm following
the government
the right
Trump administration
I'm as horrified
about that
as I am about
radical leftist
random people
that are inciting people
to violence on Twitter
Yeah, and I think it's important to, you have to have a distinction between your political philosophy and your country and what it means to be patriotic or love your country or your kinsmen or your culture.
And then the state and the actual government and the actual people in that government.
and you need to be able to hold a strong biblical political philosophy and a public theology
and then you need to be able to say, and I can love my neighbors,
I can be proud of my cultural or ethnic identity,
and I can still agree and disagree with specific politicians,
with a specific government and the decisions they're making
and have nuanced views of all these things.
And obviously, like, social media
and certainly the mainstream media
doesn't promote any of those distinctions.
I don't even need, like, nuance.
Like, let's all equivocate and try to,
well, yeah, I like this, but don't like...
Let's actually just be unwavering
with our biblical, like, political philosophy.
um i i just heard um so on the all-in summit i i listened to those guys a lot i aspire to to be
a more popular podcast than them they keep saying they're the number one podcast but we're
we're gonna work our way up uh but they did the summit right and they had tucker carlson on
just this last week and and uh they were talking about this question of of israel and and the need
to be able to say, hey, we can, like, you can have issue with the governmental decisions
of the state of Israel and not be an anti-Semite and not be racist, right?
So can you, like, love individuals and even love people as a group and still call out a
specific nation state?
You need to be able to.
Yeah.
So in this, I think one of the things that I, again, because this is ostensibly a Bitcoin podcast,
one of the things that I would like to talk about is, again, just the subsidized injustice side of
this. Like so much of what's happened, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. This happens because,
and people are content to do this because they keep, because they're enabled to get away with it.
I think that's the, when you see this guy's been, he's been arrested 14 times,
nothing's happened. He keeps getting dumped out. What does he take from that?
well people don't really care and so what is so what does that tell you it tells you that people
don't value justice and so if you don't if you don't subsidize justice then you're going to get
and you do subsidize injustice you're going to get more of what you subsidize
and so this is this is again totally predictable we talk about on this podcast a lot the relationship
between sowing and reaping like if you continue to sow seeds and everybody just goes oh i don't
want to die on that hill, right? This is another thing we've talked about is there's people who say,
I don't want to die on that hill because they actually have identified hills that they do want
to die on. And there's other people who just, they say, I don't want to die on the hill because
they don't want to die in any hills. They love their lives and they don't want to be inconvenienced
or have their reputation inconvenienced. They don't want to become the guy or the girl who is
associated with talking about politics, like that's costly and people don't want to pay that
cost. As a Christian though, my, what my pushback would be, and I fight this too, as somebody who's
got like a, again, a podcast that's about Bitcoin, I like fight back and forth of like, okay, how,
how, where should I talk about biblical things? Where should I talk about, you know, just
particularly Bitcoin related things. And at the end of the day, you know, like, yeah,
You're going to have to make decisions that aren't motivated by self-preservation.
We can't make just our decisions based on, I just want to protect myself.
I want to protect my reputation.
At the end of the day, we have to have convictions that are just more rooted in, I want to honor God and align myself with reality by telling the truth and telling what I actually think about situations.
in order to subsidize a world where other people feel strengthened and encouraged to do the same
kind of thing. Yeah. I also think it's incumbent upon us to not have this ideal of moving out to
the cabin in the woods and becoming a yeoman farmer and we're just going to raise all of our
own stuff and we're going to check out of society. You know, it's like we got to, we do need to
assert ourselves.
Yes.
That doesn't mean
it has to be violently.
Yes.
We can assert ourselves
economically and socially
and religiously
and, you know,
in all these ways,
right,
to have influence
on our culture
and we can't just expect
daddy government
to do everything for us.
Yep.
Yeah, that's a more,
what you just described, Jim,
is a more respectable
form of cowardice, right?
Like that,
or at least it can be.
Again, I'm not saying
that anybody who moves
outside of a city,
like Jesus fled
from being killed
multiple times.
the apostles fled numerous times in the scriptures. And so we do, we do want to have wisdom and we
don't want to just be willy nilly. And I'm not saying you're doing this, Jim. Like we, we do
want to like just identify there are, there is a time, there's a season for everything. And there
are times to run away. There are times, there are times to stand and, and not, not run away.
And so I think that takes wisdom as well to figure out what to do. And so that requires,
again being giving each other grace even just being willing to put yourself out there on a
podcast and have your name on it you know it's uh obviously we're not that popular and famous or
whatever but we're still out there in the public space and people know what we think and there's a
non-zero chance of risk because of what we're doing as opposed to just going totally opsect up
and anon everything and VPN, all this and all that.
It's just like you have to make a choice.
And at the end of the day,
you can't influence people if you're anon.
Yep.
Yeah.
So over the, going back a bit to the Charlie Kirk response,
that just these videos, what's going on,
the voices and the kind of the main Christian thinkers
that I think have responded well,
have said, okay, Jesus calls us to forgive.
He calls us to be angry and yet do not sin in our anger.
But then they ask the question, but what are you going to do?
Okay, now live it out.
How are you living differently in a post-Charlie Kirk assassination
slash martyrdom world?
So one of the answers, I'll start with mine,
And I'd love to hear you guys or if people are in the chat or listening, I'd love to hear your guys' response.
So Charlie talked about how he wanted to stop there from being a revolution, like the union falls apart because of disunity.
And he said, we're going to help people to get back to church, get married, have kids and invest in their communities.
So that's like the theme that we just keep hammering on.
We were just talking about the atomization of our culture with Ryan on Tuesday.
So have kids, invest in your family, be in your church, be present and connected and build that bit of the kingdom around you.
Now beyond that, I do want to step out more in public ways
I'm in Portland, Oregon
So the general kind of political view within the church
Is without a doubt center-left
Right? I mean, we're more center, more conservative than the main culture
But for sure, we drink some of the water in this city
and so
yeah I would like
now I'm not a pastor so
I don't have that same need to
to be sensitive there
and I think there's a good
argument and discussion and maybe if Tim is
here next time to talk about the role of the pastor
and the pulpit in these topics
but yeah
I want to be more bold I want to be more
explicit about
the immorality
I see in the secular
left
and wokeism and all of that.
I mean, I agree.
I'm not going to become less public
and less vocal because of this.
I'm going to become more public
and more vocal.
Yeah, one of the things,
I mean, Oshawa,
one of the things that comes to mind
is the quote,
the C.S. Lewis quote
that you quoted.
You quoted at the
Bitcoin for Everyone conference.
which talked about, it's basically C.S. Lewis talking about, it's difficult for him to imagine
people with a freeborn mind being able to live free if they don't have a certain level of
economic independence. And Michael Foster shared a tweet today where the fourth point that he shared
basically echoed those sentiments. And so I do think that this is something where it raises,
it just reemphasizes the importance of something like Bitcoin. There's a lot of people who,
for whom the reason why they have a hesitancy or the hesitance to speak up is because they're
afraid of losing jobs or they have a mortgage, they've got other kinds of debts. And if something
were to happen to their job because they spoke up publicly or made any kind of political statement,
they would be afraid of losing those things. And so I do think it's a good point, a good time to
to reflect on and do a good accounting or, you know, just taking a look at your life and just,
you know, accounting of you personally, and then also an actual accounting of,
you know, where, where do I have, where do I have weaknesses that can be exploited that I could get
rid of? And so if you have high amounts of debt, like how can I get rid of these? So I'm not so
beholden. So I'm not tempting myself to, to be a coward and to be unfaithful. I think that that's
an honest question that people should ask themselves. Um, and even if that, I mean,
if you're somebody who has a meaningful amount of Bitcoin and you really are content to accumulate
debts because you're like, Hey, I don't want to sell my Bitcoin. Like, I think that's, it's
something you should be willing to consider at the very, as well. Um, if you've got a lot of
Bitcoin, then, you know, maybe you're not as vulnerable as some other people, but, um, you
For some people this might look like again with this audience it probably largely Bitcoiners But if you somebody who doesn have Bitcoin I think this is one reason that you should consider and that Christians and churches more broadly should consider Bitcoin
You know, it's a money that's held up outside of the existing monetary system.
And so you don't need to ask permission or worry about losing permission in the case of somebody like the Canadian truckers.
I think that's a very, an underappreciated attack surface.
I don't think still, at least up to this point, many people take seriously that that's a real risk. And to even begin looking for alternatives that would include Bitcoin, I think it is something that more and more ministries and churches should take seriously, though. And hopefully we can play some small role in helping facilitate that conversation.
I mean in the long run
Bitcoin may make you a target
though as well
especially getting in this early
so I do think
you should care about
OPSEC but not
to the point where you just have to completely check out
a society and live in your bunker
I do think one other
takeaway from this is
that we're going to die
like you're going to die we don't know when it is and you know and there there is there is truth
and you know like there's a needed truth and just the fact that you know this is why like this is
yes jesus knew it was this bad like this is why he was willing to come and die it was because
things are this grave people i mean just are there are people who are committed to evil and injustice
and they don't care about the cost. They're willing to pay the cost in somebody else's blood
all day long. And so I do think that it is something that if you're a Christian,
you should think about that. And if you're not a Christian, I think I would encourage you to think
about that as well. It's just, that's a reality. And this is a problem that part of the value
proposition to use monetary, to use economic terminology, part of the value proposition of
Jesus is that he came to pay for sins, to be able to fix the world in, you know, authentic,
sustainable ways and to remove the fear of death. And Charlie was somebody, yeah,
Charlie was somebody who embodied that. The mask really came off during COVID on that one.
Yeah. That whole thing was preying upon people's fear of death and lack of assurance of salvation.
even within the church
but obviously amongst non-Christians as well
you see people wearing masks by themselves
and cars
I mean
yeah at the end of the day you really got to ask yourself
what are you really trusting in
and is everything
that you're doing all about
ensuring that you're alive tomorrow
or doing the right thing
and serving the Lord
again
I'm not saying you should go out and like
just take unnecessary risks.
And we're also all in different situations.
We have wives and children,
people that depend upon us,
and we have to be prudent.
But at the same time,
we do have to be bold.
Yep.
So what role does the local church have in this?
I mean, there's different perspectives
on how political you get
and how much you talk about these hot-button issues.
what do what do you guys think i think there's even beyond i would say even before you get to
the level of the church i think the the you have to have a commitment to real unity which is rooted
in truth and actually being honest about who you are and i think there's a lot of people
and again we're all tempted to this i'm tempted to this all the time like you're tempted to
foster this type of false unity, this fake unity, that's really, we're not going to really talk
about what we actually believe. Uh, we're going to kind of just, you know, just kind of keep things
below the surface. Uh, just try to keep the peace and that kind of stuff that that's not real peace.
Like that, that's, that's not real. It's not reality. That doesn't require any kind of,
uh, courage on the part of the person telling it or, uh, spiritual maturity on the part of
the person who's hearing you say what you actually believe.
That's just something I think churches, I guess, do have a responsibility to foster environments
where people can tell the truth about who they are, what they believe, and the reality
of Christian love and Christian commitment to the kingdom of God manifesting itself in
not just leaving a church because there's people there who don't think the way that
you do about every issue.
Some of the people who I respect the most and who I respect the most, their faith and
or just their maturity at some, at the very least,
are people who I don't agree with on a lot of things.
And yet I still love them.
And again, we can have respectful disagreements.
We can joke with each other about, you know,
things that they believe that I disagree with
and they can joke with me about things.
And I just think this requires a level of maturity
that we think we possess, but many people do not possess.
i mean i think the church should be absolutely the moral authority on this they need to come out
and condemn it they should not ignore it they should speak out against it and say it's absolutely
heinous and wrong and then they need to remind people that god is sovereign and then they need
to embolden people to go out there and fulfill the great commission in the face of evil
that's good so something i learned uh as a a pastor when i was a planning a church and then
more recently here in portland is that if you avoid a topic that are on people's minds
and and a question they're trying to answer and you don't answer it for them they're gonna go
elsewhere to get their answers. And you, you see this in the whole manosphere type of thing where,
where churches is effeminate and, um, and so they're going to go and they want to find dudes,
dudes and, and, and it's, they're going to end up finding bad influences online and radical
influences that like connect with their urge for masculinity, but then it, it goes overboard and
it objectifies women or here they have anger over this issue. And, and so, uh, but you as the pastor
aren't talking about it. And so now they're going to, they're going to find some militia group or
something, or like, there's, there's ways that, that people like water will keep going like
osmosis. It's going to go to the place that's lowest and that, uh, where there's a vacuum and
And the church historically, I mean, the pastor was the most educated person in the town.
And they went to the pastor for things.
Now, certainly, I think some pastors go off and they try to be the expert in everything.
And if you're not, don't act like the expert.
But find the experts, come to conclusions and biblical educated opinions and share them.
If they should be open-handed issues
Don't bind people's consciences to them
But don't be afraid of offending people
And sometimes you gotta say things
That are gonna make people walk away
And stop tithing to your church
And that being silent is actually gonna
Like, uh, is gonna cause more harm in the end
Um, and it's also, I mean
Like, during COVID and BLM, right?
the pendulum saying was, oh, here's some outrage. You have to say something and silence is violence.
So you don't want to fall into that. And at the same time, if you are silent, they're looking for
something. So you don't need to posture politically and put the flag in the profile. You don't need
to buy into that while still not leaving a theological and political vacuum within your
church. Yeah, this, somebody, I can't remember who said this, it might have been Michael Foster,
it might have been somebody else, but authority flows to responsibility. Like, authority flows
to people who take responsibility. So, again, there's people who don't hold office in their
towns, but who effectively do effectively have a ton of influence and, and, you know, authority
because they take responsibility. They, you know, they make themselves known, they care for people.
And so this is, this is something that at the various, and there's something called sphere
sovereignty, which is something, if you, if you don't know what that is, go look it up.
But it's just basically like you have, God has given you authority over certain, you know,
in certain capacities, depending on what stage of life you're in. And so you have authority,
in your home, if you're a dad, you're a mom, if you have, you have authority in your family,
if you're a brother or a sister. And so just taking responsibility and caring,
you know, caring for people in those ways, by you taking responsibility for things,
you like authority will naturally flow to you. And so I think there's a lot of people who want,
and the temptation is for guys to want to look for official authority and to look for, you know,
to rely on position to give them authority rather than,
than just basically going out and taking it, just going out and, you know,
caring for people and then people coming to identify you as an authority in a,
in a different, in a certain realm. Uh, and so I think this is,
there's a happy medium there, right?
You don't want to be just trying to accumulate authority and then have,
again, have no, nothing, uh, meaningful to say.
You can lead people into, you know, you could look at somebody like, uh,
I mean, Andrew Tate or somebody like these guys, they have humongous followings, but have, you know, are repeating and saying foolish things in many occasions.
And so, again, there's a happy medium there, but you don't just want to wait till you're perfect.
There's a lot of people, unfortunately, there's a lot of people who should be more vocal and take more responsibility.
And yet they are more naturally bent towards not saying anything.
and then there's people who are more bent to say something
and to want to be the guy up front or the girl up front.
And they actually should be the ones who sit down more
and are willing to learn.
It's the whole angels or fools rush in
where angels fear to tread, that dynamic.
And so I think that churches shouldn't be looking
to close that circle.
Churches shouldn't just be waiting
and trying to encourage, especially men,
to never say anything unless it's perfect.
We talked about this before we got on,
but Jesus called the sons of thunder and they were anything but finished products.
Like they were anything, but these, you know, these nice, uh, polished, perfect people.
They had all kinds of things.
Jesus called his best friend, Satan, because this guy wanted to do something that wasn't,
that wasn't in line with what God wanted him to do.
Jesus, there were guys who wanted to call down fire from heaven because people didn't
respond the way that they should have responded.
And so I think that there's a lot of churches, especially in America, who put this pressure on guys to be perfect, perfect, polished, you know, basically women with slightly more testosterone. And I just don't, I think that's, that's another example. We get what we subsidize.
uh you know we we there's we want men we see the importance of of courageous men in situations like
this and yet the question is are we producing or is the are the actions and the cultures that we're
creating are they subsidizing and producing that type of men and i think that there's a lot of
parts of american christendom where the answer is no and so if that's the case then we need to
like reconsider, well, what are we missing? Um, I think that would be wise to do. Um,
you guys have anything else to add? We're going to close the pod here.
I mean, I would just say that our culture seems to be allergic to grieving and being mournful.
and mourning is totally a legitimate state of mind and heart to be in in the bible sometimes
you sing a dirge and sometimes you don't uh so i think it's totally appropriate to feel some
sadness and some heaviness and to not shy away from that especially it doesn't make you any less
masculine to feel that way. Yeah. This, this isn't the end. That would be the other thing
would just be, it was a Brian Savé song. I think it was Psalm 47 or something. I shared it
yesterday. And it's just, it's a great message. Just don't, don't fret for evil men,
fret not yourself for evil men. Like these things, this isn't the end there. The Lord is
working, you can trust him and what that trust looks like is going to require different things.
And so I think we should all be doing, again, having some introspective moments here of like
what should change, what needs to change as Asha was talking about in me and the things that I'm
doing with my family, my church. I think the people should take seriously. This is one last
final thing. I think that people need to take seriously the threats of violence and to be
preparing themselves in any one of them, any one of a number of different ways for that reality,
both not, not just to protect yourself, but to be able to protect other people. I think that that's
something that, uh, one thing that we should, we should take from this. So again, a lot,
lot more that we could say, but we are grateful for you. Um, again, if you have benefited from
this, please like subscribe, uh, share with friends, um, leave reviews on, um, on Apple
Podcasts and Spotify. Those are the two most meaningful places. Comment on Facebook. We're
grateful for the people who've done that in the chat. And we will be back on Tuesday with another
episode, Lord willing, of the To The Unknown Podcast.