[SPEAKER_06]: The majority of my shooters are white men.
[SPEAKER_06]: The group that is most likely to die by suicide is also white men.
[SPEAKER_06]: Telling young boys and men don't be empathetic, don't be emotional, don't be vulnerable, your role is to be provider, your role is to be warrior.
[SPEAKER_06]: American culture is no longer set up for this outdated version of masculinity.
[SPEAKER_06]: So you're setting up these boys and men for failure, and then you're giving them guns.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the end result is suicide in homicide.
[SPEAKER_04]: Ain't nobody safe In the Bible Holy Oh, in the Bible Holy
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Preach Boys Podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host, Eric Squizinski.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a former fundamentalist who now sheds light on the dark side of the church and the pulpits to the pews.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, I'm joined by Reverend Angela Denker to talk about her new book, Disciples of White Jesus, the radicalization of American boyhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Disciples of White Jesus is a comprehensive look at the rise in radicalization among young white men in America.
[SPEAKER_00]: especially focused on the role of right-wing Christianity and the increase of religious-based hatred and violence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dancer goes deep into the online rabbit holes of right-wing Christian influencers and conservative Christian ideology to understand how the preaching of traditional gender roles and submission of women has led to anger, outrage, loneliness, depression, and limiting identities for young white Christian men across America.
[SPEAKER_00]: Casting her journalist eye across the US, she retraces the steps of a racist South Carolina mass shooter and a phoenix skin head turned evangelical pastors and she interviews middle school teachers and coaches in the Midwest and introduces us to young men across the country who will both confirm and can found our ideas about American boyhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stories about boys and men who are forging new identities grounded in kindness, grace, respect and even joy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reverend Angela Dinker is an award-winning author, ELCA Lutheran pastor, and veteran journalist.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her first book, Red State Christians, was the 2019 Silver Forward Indies Award winner for Political and Social Sciences, and her second book, Dishypus Avoid Jesus, came out on March 25, 2025.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's a former colonist for the Minnesota Star Tribune and has written for many publications, including Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post, Fortune Magazine, has appeared on CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR to share her research on politics and Christian nationalism.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so happy to have her joining me here on the show today.
[SPEAKER_00]: So without further ado, here's my conversation with Reverend Angela Dinker.
[SPEAKER_00]: First and foremost, one of the things that stood out to me as I was working through my notes,
[SPEAKER_00]: the radicalization of American boyhood on September 10th at 10 o'clock and four hours and 19 minutes later Charlie Kirk's assassination took place and what we've seen
[SPEAKER_00]: in that event and in the weeks after that have made everything we're about to talk about so much more relevant.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just want to start there in the present, you know, how have the last couple weeks landed for you as someone who's been studying and researching and speaking on this topic for almost a decade now?
[SPEAKER_06]: We could talk about this question for the whole hour.
[SPEAKER_06]: We'll try to move into some more hopeful pieces, but um,
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, on August 27th was the Annunciation School Shooting, which took place less than two miles from my house.
[SPEAKER_06]: So we had, you know, friends of my kids who were in that mass, we had very close family friends in their, you know, grandparents who were also in that mass, we have direct connections to the two kids Harper and Flutter who were killed.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so for our community, we were,
[SPEAKER_06]: already reeling and certainly reeling also here in Minneapolis after the assassination of Melissa and Mark Hartman and the attempted assassination of our other Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Evett and I don't know if you've talked about that on your podcast but that shooter was deeply entrenched in Christianity unfortunately and very much there was a
[SPEAKER_06]: And he had a huge kill list of other Minnesota state legislators was related to this sense that he was on a holy mission.
[SPEAKER_06]: So already like that's the context in which I received the news about Charlie Kirk's killing.
[SPEAKER_06]: And when you know, I don't necessarily wanted to talk about the assassination or his killing because.
[SPEAKER_06]: explicitly as apparent as a human being for so many people to watch somebody killed on video like that is traumatizing and terrible and speaks to the violent in some ways apathetic nihilistic culture that we live in.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I do want to talk about, especially for this podcast and for this audience, the response because one thing that's reminded me of
[SPEAKER_06]: It was when I first started writing columns for our Minneapolis paper, which is another story, because I was, I was fired for not towing the company line on the hegeography of Charlie Kirk.
[SPEAKER_06]: But, I, and one of the first columns I wrote was about the pain and trauma caused by make it churches, and especially in the wake of abuse in the church, and the cover up of abuse in
[SPEAKER_06]: And so I started that column writing about what it feels like when you're sitting in a funeral or a memorial service and you're listening to people talk about this person.
[SPEAKER_06]: Maybe it was your relative.
[SPEAKER_06]: It was a loved one and they're talking about this person and you know their faith and their goodness and their kindness and you're sitting there hearing these words as someone maybe somebody who was abused by that person maybe somebody who was deeply hurt by that person
[SPEAKER_06]: and that feeling that disconnect does deep spiritual damage, because it's happening in a church, it's happening in a context of God, and it's refuting the real damage that was done to you.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so I think for abuse survivors, especially those who have been spiritually traumatized
[SPEAKER_06]: watching the ways in which Charlie Kirk's words about black people, about women, about gay people, were white-washed in the wake of his horrific death.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think about that feeling.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because as a pastor, that's the last thing you want to do in a funeral is traumatize people more.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I just, I, there's a real connection there and it's really painful.
[SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned you were fired for
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, are you open to talking about that a little bit and what that looked like?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, so the papers, they recently changed the name.
[SPEAKER_06]: It was long, the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
[SPEAKER_06]: They changed it to the Minnesota Star Tribune, like many media outlets for the last number of years.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's been owned by a Republican billionaire in the state of Minnesota.
[SPEAKER_06]: He was formerly the state minority leader in the Minnesota State Senate as a Republican.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's supposedly been fairly hands off, but a couple of years ago brought in a new CEO from a tech company and infused a bunch of personal cash, kind of cleaned house of the opinion department.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tail is all this time, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so for folks who don't know, I am a listen pastor today.
[SPEAKER_06]: I've been ordained for 13 years, but I began my career in journalism.
[SPEAKER_06]: and was educated in this strong tradition of the Missouri School of Journalism where I was taught, you know, you're, you're to be a truth teller first.
[SPEAKER_06]: A lot of people don't see the media that, that way anymore, which I get, that's what we were taught.
[SPEAKER_06]: We were taught to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
[SPEAKER_06]: So yes, there is that impetus of, when you feel like you're starting to be silenced.
[SPEAKER_06]: So, um, I had,
[SPEAKER_06]: As this new CEO came in, one of the initiatives, supposedly, and again, this is an illustration of the ways in which the messaging of this movement is very gas-lighty, and it's, it says they're doing one thing, but it's really doing something else.
[SPEAKER_06]: So they've had this initiative, we're going to bring in some new diverse columnist voices.
[SPEAKER_06]: So they brought me in, now I had formally interned for the sports department and done sports work with them years ago before it became a pastor.
[SPEAKER_06]: but this was the first time I was brought in under this new opinion staff.
[SPEAKER_06]: I was brought in with a slate of contributing colonists.
[SPEAKER_06]: We were brought in under contract.
[SPEAKER_06]: So what I've come to learn since then is part of the reason they brought us in was to undermine the union newsroom.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because we were not union employees, we were paid very, very, very low rates.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I was uncomfortable
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm a pastor, speaking at a time when Christianity has really been weaponized in America, and so I had this opportunity to speak to that.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so despite being very torn, I did write columns there for over a year.
[SPEAKER_06]: Many of my columns were the number one.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, clicked on story in the newspaper whenever they ran, they were widely shared.
[SPEAKER_06]: This is, by the way, the largest, the 13th largest media outlet, like newspaper circulation wise in the country.
[SPEAKER_06]: So we're talking about a pretty big entity.
[SPEAKER_06]: Um, anyway.
[SPEAKER_06]: I had just written pieces about an association about the death of an elderly woman in my congregation and her position on the rollback of women's rights.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I was also facing a lot of threats locally to which the newspaper was like pretty unmoved.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I'm already in this place, but when Charlie Kirk was killed, I, again, I didn't want
[SPEAKER_06]: All we can do as Christians and as human beings is say violent killing is wrong, full stop.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I did want to talk about the reaction to his death specifically by Christian leaders and the ways in which they were attempting to make him a martyr.
[SPEAKER_06]: Um, so wrote a piece on that and that column was killed at the last minute by the opinion editor and then the opinion page that they went with that day was three articles explicitly casting Charlie Kirk as a Christian martyr as someone, you know, one of them was titled the bravery of Charlie Kirk.
[SPEAKER_06]: And then there was no other opposing any kind of different opinion about Christianity and its relationship to Charlie Kirk in the newspaper for several days.
[SPEAKER_06]: So then I happened to be speaking at a conference with some really brilliant and brave journalists, one of them Eugene Robinson, who left the Washington Post in protest for Jeff Bezos, and some of the presence of these folks and sharing with them what's happening to me.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I felt like I need to go public.
[SPEAKER_06]: I need to let people know that this column that I wrote was killed.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I did that.
[SPEAKER_06]: And then a week later I was notified that my contract had been canceled.
[SPEAKER_06]: And then a few days after that I was told that it was because I exercised poor editorial judgment in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's, you know, fortunately I have a large local
[SPEAKER_06]: groundswell of support from clergy from churches from the Christian community which has been wonderful.
[SPEAKER_06]: I have a sub stack that people have been able to read my columns there.
[SPEAKER_06]: But yeah, it's been a very sad and um
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, ironically, this billionaire who owns the Minneapolis newspaper, his daughter is also CEO over Minnesota Public Radio.
[SPEAKER_06]: So there's a monopoly locally that makes it very difficult to speak about Christian nationalism and about, you know, abuse in the church to be frank.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is one of the things that's really per...
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I don't even want to say it perplex me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a weird thing, because there's all these things that like are inconsistencies.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a better way to put it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're so glaring that bother me so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I mean, for...
[SPEAKER_00]: labeling as a martyr when with the little that we do know and that's the most important part to note is that with the little that we do know even by the time the subset releases we might know more.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't look like it was a religiously motivated killing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Potentially politically motivated, based on like the very, again, sliver of information we have.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the Martyr label feels very consistent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I saw people within hours of that happening, including a pastor of a large church and Southern California saying, Charlie Kirk is a Martyr, make the mistake.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then you have people harrelding that their favorite thing about him is that he championed freedom of speech and free discussion.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then these conglomerates and organizations are, I mean, I mean, I just talked to Lindsey Boyland, who is a whistleblower in the Andrew Cuomo story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of her friends at the New York Times lost a high profile position there after many years.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is widespread censorship.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Jimmy Kimmel, like down down the list of things
[SPEAKER_00]: And I guess my question is, I'm looking at everything that's happened and I go, there's such a thinly veiled grasp for as much power as possible, leveraging the death of Charlie Kirk being a martyr as the thing that makes them untouchable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, we're doing this for Charlie.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're doing this because we are Charlie Kirk.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of the cry here.
[SPEAKER_00]: How can this be so thinly veiled and millions of people still not see through it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And how do you even engage with that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And people are just refusing to see what's actually happening, like, how do you engage with that as a pastor, journalist, author, like, where do you even start unpacking that?
[SPEAKER_06]: And this has been painful for me to discover over the last number of years when I've been researching the movement of Christian nationalism and the movement of mega in America.
[SPEAKER_06]: But what this movement is capitalizing on is deeply entrenched, racist, and sexist prejudices that are very present in a majority of white Christianity.
[SPEAKER_06]: And because this movement attaches onto those deeply held, very varied impulses in our culture,
[SPEAKER_06]: It's really, really hard to disentangle it.
[SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, these impulses have been fostered by popular media, but also by churches, you know, so.
[SPEAKER_06]: For people who did not grow up and their churches hearing that, which is something I heard from pastors on big stages over and over again is that was researching Redsick Christians.
[SPEAKER_06]: I heard pastors say, I feel bad for anyone in this room who was born after 1965.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the reason he was saying that it was because the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.
[SPEAKER_06]: Um, and I think that out of a sense of maybe good will or an unwillingness to engage in conflict, um,
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, mainline Christians all say like the faith that I have grown up in, or, you know, many well-meaning Christians have excused these exercises of racism or sexism or homophobia as differences of opinion.
[SPEAKER_06]: So, you know, we have this whole movement of complementarianism, which is the movement that says theologically one of the timeless truth of the Bible is that women are necessarily underneath men.
[SPEAKER_06]: fully opposed to the teaching of Jesus to say that there is a hierarchy of human beings and some are about others.
[SPEAKER_06]: But we have for a long time just said, well, that's just differences of opinion.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's differences of interpretation.
[SPEAKER_06]: And by excusing those just blatant appeals to a human hierarchy that puts some people above other people.
[SPEAKER_06]: We have created this environment where it's acceptable and commonplace in churches for those messages to spread and to grow.
[SPEAKER_06]: But there are old ancient messages that have been around for hundreds and thousands of years of human beings attempting to put themselves above other human beings.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, it's the Tower of Babel.
[SPEAKER_06]: So, um, I think we're in a tough spot, but the groundwork has been laid for a long time in churches.
[SPEAKER_06]: Again, in media.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in a lot of ways I feel like I'm catching up on like the church at large, you know, and I see that across denominational lines like tracing what the common messaging has been because I grew up in an independent federal Baptist where everyone was wrong but us and everyone was liberal but us, including the Southern Baptist, you know, which it's funny as I zoom out how similar all of those are, they just had slightly better music.
[SPEAKER_00]: But
[SPEAKER_00]: It is interesting seeing, you know, even in the last couple of years, the rhetoric that we used to use was extremely comparatively.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rhetoric we used about gay people, the rhetoric we used about.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, I mean, even I used to think there wasn't a lot of racism, but now I look back at some of the common things that were said and the statements that were made and there certainly was.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's odd now in the MAGA movement.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm seeing all of that same vocabulary used and now embraced by denominations that I always looked at as being more progressive.
[SPEAKER_00]: and being more, you know, a less fundamentalist than our group was.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you had to look at Christianity in America at large, do you feel like it's allowed my naughty, that's embraces?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, this other map is convention, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or do you think it's a majority have, and there's a few quiet strongholds of like, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: we want a faith that is inclusive and that is caring and that is trying to better our country.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, what do you see the breakup being there?
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, I think when you look at the reaction by Christian leaders to Charlie Kirksteth, there's a reason why the most prominent sermons that were courageous in talking about why it was a dangerous to call him a murder came from the black church.
[SPEAKER_06]: Um, and so I think that even though I fully believe as a Lutheran, I think the Lutheran theology of the tone meant in contrast to this the dominant American understanding of the tone meant theory, um,
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, regardless, really if people have gone to church or not, they're still a dominant, strong cultural sense of what Christianity is and it's dominated by conservatives, even virgin and fundamentalist interpretations of Jesus' death.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's this teaching that Jesus' death was an individualistic atonement that is a straightforward sacrifice that says,
[SPEAKER_06]: okay because Jesus died now your sins are forgiven.
[SPEAKER_06]: And what I was also taught in seminary and in the Lutheran Paces is that we have to understand the atonement much more broadly.
[SPEAKER_06]: We have to understand it in according to one framework used as Christ's Victor.
[SPEAKER_06]: This sense that Jesus death and resurrection offers resurrection to hope new life to all of creation.
[SPEAKER_06]: that it's not some kind of arithmetic proposition.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not something that we can control as human beings by accepting Jesus into our heart or praying a prayer.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think even if we look at something like baptism, the popularity of adult baptism speaks to this sense in which the dominant American view of Christianity is that it's something human beings do in order to be saved.
[SPEAKER_06]: Um, so that is one reason why I like infant baptism is because it's very clear.
[SPEAKER_06]: Look, this baby has done nothing to earn their salvation.
[SPEAKER_06]: Um, but I also want to make a connection to, you know, in my research for red state Christians, one of the things that really troubled me.
[SPEAKER_06]: Was the use of military American military imagery and interspersing that with images of Jesus' death on the cross?
[SPEAKER_06]: And the purpose for that was to say and conflate American military sacrifice with Jesus' sacrifice in the cross.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I remember sitting at Prestonwood on July 4th weekend, and their plant anglic song will never forget your sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_06]: The way you live, the way you died, will never forget your sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it was saying that to die for America was the same thing as to die for God.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, that Jesus' death was the same kind of death as a military death.
[SPEAKER_06]: And what that does obviously, it sets up a America as an idol.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's a big part of the movement that's happening right now is idolatry.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so,
[SPEAKER_06]: this idea of sacrifice the way it connects to Charlie Kirk and the reason it makes me really sad is that Charlie Kirk also in this murdering loses his humanity.
[SPEAKER_06]: We don't hear his unique story.
[SPEAKER_06]: We didn't hear at the memorial service stories about what Charlie was like as a little boy.
[SPEAKER_06]: We didn't hear about him as a human being.
[SPEAKER_06]: He becomes a symbol.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's what made me so frustrated the way that military deaths were treated in this movement is soldiers become a symbol.
[SPEAKER_06]: They lose their individual humanity, their stories, and they become more valuable dead than alive.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's one of the tragedies that I saw with Charlie Kirk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, what it's interesting you mentioned, you know, the black church, because I think sometimes when we say Christianity, like the default picture we have is pressed and wood, you know, it is largely white evangelical spaces and it is often the churches that are filled with historically marginalized communities that tend to spot, you know, the canary and the coal mine way before everybody else and David Gashi mentioned that in relation to the original election, what Trump.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, a lot of African-American friends, scholars, stuff, they were saying, oh, he's going to win.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, they saw something not everybody, but some of these friends in the field.
[SPEAKER_03]: They saw something about about this country more clearly than I did, and then a lot of us did.
[SPEAKER_03]: That he would become the major party candidate for president, and they would have a chance to win,
[SPEAKER_03]: to actually be able to see that in advance, indicated a level of pessimism about who this country is and who its Christians are that I wasn't quite able to muster before 2016.
[SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned militarism and, you know, this is obviously a big piece of your book, but again, I think of the Memorial Service itself, this came front and center in a way that was like, indisputable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's right there, I think of Benny Johnson's speech talking about wielding the sword.
[SPEAKER_00]: the Secretary of War who is also covered in crusade related tattoos.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you just can't get more on the nose than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the audience right now, there are rulers of our land represented right here is the State Department, the Department of War, the Department of Justice, the chief executive
[SPEAKER_01]: power over our nation and our land rulers wield the sword for the protection of good men and for the terror of evil men.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do you think there is such a draw to this Christian militarism, particularly like this seem to stir a lot of Gen Z, Gen Alpha Young men, which are exactly the demographic you're talking about within your book.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the appeal there?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, well first of all, there's a lot of money being made here.
[SPEAKER_06]: Um, and there's a lot of money being made by tech platforms, I know there's a couple of books coming out soon that are making explicit the links between what's happening in Silicon Valley and the rise of mega Christianity and the name of those by chance.
[SPEAKER_06]: So there's furious minds the making of the mega new right.
[SPEAKER_06]: Um, and then I know Brad O'Neill, she is mentioning this in his new book too.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not sure if his new title is out yet, but Brad's such a great scholar.
[SPEAKER_06]: And then I, he's, this is like the focus of the first half of his new book.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, awesome.
[SPEAKER_06]: So how do tech companies make money by keeping people on their own apps all the time?
[SPEAKER_06]: So what keeps, especially young people on those apps all the time, fear, anger, isolation?
[SPEAKER_06]: So we're going to drive and flood their messages with things that bring fear, anger, isolation, but also be longing.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think what I'm feeling this morning as I sort of
[SPEAKER_06]: watch this movement continue to coalesce.
[SPEAKER_06]: And as I also, you know, we're sitting here talking in the wake of multiple mass shootings over this past weekend, you know, at an LDS church in Role, Michigan, at a restaurant in North Carolina.
[SPEAKER_06]: And
[SPEAKER_06]: There's this drive of violent isolation, specifically among young white men, that like, look, I'm the mom of two white boys.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm married to a white guy.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't want to be sitting here and saying, oh my gosh, we've a uniquely violent profile of men specifically men and people who were raised as boys in right-leaning conservative Christian households.
[SPEAKER_06]: that glorified guns, like that is very clearly our profile here and there's such an unwillingness to grapple with that because of racism, because of the ways that we have put American Christianity into, as you mentioned, this white box, but that's the profile.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so there's this extreme amount for me of sadness because the outcomes for young boys and men who are drawn into these movements are not good.
[SPEAKER_06]: It, you know, I saw it expressed by, there's a journalism professor and writer, Stacey Patton, who's a professor at Howard University.
[SPEAKER_06]: And she talked about these latest mass shootings as suicide directed outward.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I find that very compelling, based on the research that I did in disciples of what Jesus as well, that what this movement has done in bringing young boys and men together.
[SPEAKER_06]: And sadly, what some of these churches have done in telling young boys and men, don't be empathetic, don't be emotional, don't be vulnerable, your role is to be provider,
[SPEAKER_06]: American culture is not set up for single parent provider households anymore.
[SPEAKER_06]: American culture is no longer set up for this outdated version of masculinity.
[SPEAKER_06]: So you're setting up these boys and men for failure and then you're giving them guns.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the end result is suicide and homicide.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think another layer of that that I was curious to get your take on is, we also are seeing violence like never before, in a way where, you know, I was talking to someone recently, I'm 30, and so I grew up with smartphones, internet, every device that we had had some internet connectivity from the time that we entered junior high.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was talking to someone who is in their 40s and explaining the difference in that childhood experience and saying, I mean, yeah, we all talk about things like pornography access and things like that, like that's that's been talked about length.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I was telling them I said, you have to understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was growing up where there were websites like, you know, gore websites.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was, you know, cartel videos that were shared.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I remember the bud doyer, suicide video, making the rounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, things that we were never meant to see as human beings in general were like this endurance test in junior high of like, let me show you the most shocking horrible thing that you can see.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I think now even with this Charlie Kirk assassination, on the one hand where I watched that video, which was not hard to stumble across in the immediate aftermath of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Part of me went, none of us should be saying this.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not good to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other part of it goes, how is this going to impact this young generation that's gonna be passing this video around?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what does this do?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it can either do one of two things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It either one,
[SPEAKER_00]: pushes the narrative of like what we need more good guys to stop bad things like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other piece is that just de-sensitizes to where violence feels more and more acceptable the more we see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what do you think of just the proliferation of violent images in general?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like what do you think the ramification of that's going to be for the actual couple of years?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I think there's been a lot of misreading of the 2024 election as, like, some kind of war and or some kind of embrace of Donald Trump broadly, specifically by young men.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think the much more accurate read of that election, especially when it comes to young men, is this was the nihilism election.
[SPEAKER_06]: This was the election of everything's meaningless.
[SPEAKER_06]: You can't trust anyone, you know, clearly, um,
[SPEAKER_06]: Joe Biden betrayed a lot of Americans trust and that was revealed in the debate he had with Donald Trump.
[SPEAKER_06]: And for young people who were raised again in this atmosphere that you're talking about.
[SPEAKER_06]: And also, you know, you were 25 right during COVID when COVID first broke out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, yeah, I exposed so.
[SPEAKER_06]: That is, that is a rough time to experience a global pandemic youth.
[SPEAKER_06]: you're just coming into young adulthood.
[SPEAKER_06]: This is a time when you should be socializing and be out in the world and you're forced to hunger down and isolate.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I think all those factors lead to a deeply disillusioned disenchanted.
[SPEAKER_06]: And let's bring in to, hey, the failures of institutions, the collapse of the institutional church.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, this dream that many of us were sold that there is this pure moral religion you can follow and then scandal after scandal after scandal and collapse after collapse after collapse and the blurring of the line between political rallies and church services again you have an electorate and a
[SPEAKER_06]: a group that is deeply disenchanted and then also let's throw in, you know, the, like I was involved with evangelical youth groups in high school and college and the message to the boys was, hey, go out, you know, support your wife and your family and again, that's harder and harder to do with rising house cost rising food costs, um, just unrealistic.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so, and young men who feel like failures, because they can't do what they were told that they were designed by God to do.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so, it is a recipe for nihilism, and I think those images that violence creates ennemness.
[SPEAKER_06]: It creates, again,
[SPEAKER_06]: a fertile ground for nihilism to grow, and Trump is the perfect candidate for nihilist.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, he says, you can't trust anyone, everybody's lying to you, may as well go with me because maybe I'll protect you while I destroy everybody else.
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean, I think that is the pitch.
[SPEAKER_06]: that was sold to a lot of young Trump voters.
[SPEAKER_00]: In your gearing up all these young men to be, you know, you mentioned your book in Milton masculinity forces men to abandon softer emotions like compassion, empathy, or sadness, and it encourages them to buy guns, get bigger muscles, and abuse, and diminish women.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're creating soldiers, essentially, in these groups, and there's no real way for them to get that violent nature you're giving them out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you're telling them to prepare for war and they're never going to, you know, unless they join the military, but even then, I mean, that's a whole no other conversation of the effects of that.
[SPEAKER_06]: But, you know, we have them there sitting behind a computer sending drones overseas.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, you're telling them like men are violent, men are warriors, you know, men are this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you're sending them to a nine to five and trying to let them parent and be a husband.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a pretty dangerous recipe and like the violence is gonna come out somewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you mentioned you're married to a white man, you're a mother of two, you know, white men.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you outlining your book, it's in the first flap of the book that, you know, white men are dangerous and white men are in trouble.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just that, I could picture someone in a Barnes and Noble opening it and going, okay, I don't need to read this, you know, white men are dangerous.
[SPEAKER_00]: What are you trying to say?
[SPEAKER_00]: But clearly you are writing from a place of compassion and love for this demographic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I clearly myself, you know, I'm talking about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you flesh out those two points and what that means to you as you're writing or as you're thinking about these topics?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, and you can't address one without the other, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: And really, this is, so I've been doing a lot of speaking events around different churches, universities around the Midwest and the country and night.
[SPEAKER_06]: Ever since anunciation, I have started beginning each of those events with this quote from Martin Luther King Jr.
[SPEAKER_06]: And you have to meet this danger with love, but you also have to meet compassion with truth, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: So when I was researching this book and writing this book, I would see messages predominantly from more progressive spaces that we're saying that white men were the problem.
[SPEAKER_06]: And like, listen, that is factual.
[SPEAKER_06]: are white men.
[SPEAKER_06]: But also here's the other stat, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: The group that is most likely to die by suicide is also white men.
[SPEAKER_06]: So this cannot be an external fix.
[SPEAKER_06]: It has to be an internal fix from white moms like me, from white churches.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, we, I think what I often see too, you know,
[SPEAKER_06]: We ask leaders of color to lead us out of racism and we ask, we think we're going to outsource justice, prophetic ministry to people who aren't white instead of like looking in the mirror and saying, well, what's happening in our families and our communities?
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's where I think a lot of the reporting on right-wing Christian fundamentalism falls flat because it makes it into
[SPEAKER_06]: I create this outrageous article for a lot of, you know, maybe coastal readers to read and say, like, wow, look at those crazy Christians.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's so nuts.
[SPEAKER_06]: And what that also allows everyday American white Americans to do is to say, well, this isn't my community.
[SPEAKER_06]: This is somebody else.
[SPEAKER_06]: We're not doing, we're not using the N-word.
[SPEAKER_06]: We're not calling down Hellfire.
[SPEAKER_06]: We're not awaiting
[SPEAKER_06]: proper and whatever political side that falls on the reality is both elections of Donald Trump were driven by white Americans and specifically by white men but also by women.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so you know if we want to address the rising problem of fascism and of violence in this country it's got to
[SPEAKER_00]: some of these individuals in demographics, I know people that are 18, that are deep in this rabbit hole of, like, gripped by this fundamentalist message of what manhood is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It means bigger muscles.
[SPEAKER_00]: It means acquiring as many guns as possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: It means leading your home with an iron fist.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not going to pick up this book, and they're not going to listen to my podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I look at my demographics and go, I'm one of you.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're not listening to me, I don't know who you're going to listen to.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you even start having the conversation with people that don't see the problem?
[SPEAKER_00]: like that's the endless circle and I feel like I'm like okay well once this election I thought well once he starts actually doing project 25 stuff that everyone's saying is a hoax right now like then they'll go oh it really is that but they're just following along on the journey so like where do you start that conversation with these young men well I think the painful revelation
[SPEAKER_06]: over the past few weeks has been this undeniable evidence that people who've been trying so hard to convince us and say, like, well, no, we don't really think it's this.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's why we support him.
[SPEAKER_06]: Here's the reality.
[SPEAKER_06]: They know it's this and they support it.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's what they want.
[SPEAKER_06]: They want in a authoritarian government.
[SPEAKER_06]: That is deeply racist and deeply sexist.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so I think that
[SPEAKER_06]: It's denial, and it's not worth engaging with.
[SPEAKER_06]: But what I do think is really important.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, I do a lot of events in the role Midwest as well.
[SPEAKER_06]: I do a lot of events in places that people would say, well, that's, you know, Trump country or whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: that's really important to me like that's where my roots are is is the role areas that's important to me.
[SPEAKER_06]: I have met, yeah, I served three years in a role company irrigation during COVID, George Floyd, January 6th.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I learned a lot there, and I have great respect for rural Americans.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that the way that rural America is depicted in media is often totally inaccurate in patronizing and condescending, as I understand some of the disconnect that folks have.
[SPEAKER_06]: But what I see when I do event in those spaces and what I often point to is
[SPEAKER_06]: There's a lot.
[SPEAKER_06]: A, there's like a lot of dad to come.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's a lot of white men who come.
[SPEAKER_06]: And there's also a lot of just people who come who have relationships of trust with people that you're talking about who are in that space.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I think it's,
[SPEAKER_06]: It's going in through existing relationships.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not coming in from the outside of the saying, like we have this national movement that we're going to reach people with.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think it really is, it's got to be a local grassroots driven alternative.
[SPEAKER_06]: And one of the main messages I like to share with people like yourself and also older boomer white men as well is if there are millions and millions of American men,
[SPEAKER_06]: Many of whom are deeply strong, sort of like who we might consider alpha in this traditional sense of what masculinity is like, you know, again, I started my current sport training and spent a lot of time around and I feel players around professional athletes.
[SPEAKER_06]: who fit that stereotype, but do not align ideologically.
[SPEAKER_06]: In any way, with what this message is saying that you have to do to be that strong man.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so I think one of the most powerful tools that we have to refute this messaging is again, on a local level, men who do not agree with this depiction of masculinity, being confident to share their stories about what being a man needs to you, what masculinity is to you.
[SPEAKER_06]: Part of that is for some of these men to embrace like you are who God created you to be as a man, as a caring man, as a vulnerable man, as a dad, as someone who values women, as friends, as colleagues, and the more men themselves can share those stories with younger men and create an alternative depiction of what successful thriving masculinity looks like.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that is the path forward, creating this very real viable depiction of what healthy masculinity looks like in contrast to this facade, that even it's quote-unquote most successful progenitors, these are men who have trails behind them of broken marriages, broken relationships with their kids, problems with addiction, it's not a rosy picture and so we need to tell
[SPEAKER_06]: of healthy, thriving masculinity that is not grounded in keeping other people down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's a, that's been a big piece of conversation when I'm talking to, you know, and I have conservative, one of my closest friends is, is very conservative leaning and is,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I think thinks about things, but see things in a different perspective and we have a lot of conversations about these topics.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, one of the things whenever the masculinity conversation comes up, you know, he used someone who will go like, if you say toxic masculinity, he'll be like, well, masculinity isn't toxic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're like, well, yes, you're right, but also define masculinity.
[SPEAKER_00]: like because I feel like in the conversation, that's where I feel like it's always spinning wheels and all these discussions.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not a clear like, well this is masculinity and you're straying from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a caricature of what this like person looks like.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, and that picture, whether it's explicitly said or not, that's the picture that comes to mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's Joe, it's Joe Rogan.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's that aesthetic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, and that picture of it is where, you know, I've been labeled a feminine my whole life, you know, and, and it's, and it's, I told some of that recently like, what?
[SPEAKER_00]: like, why?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just kind of, because I have emotions, I guess, outside of just like anger, you know, like maybe that's, maybe that's why.
[SPEAKER_00]: But with I think that's a big piece.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's just pushing back when someone says a label like masculinity or manhood like ask what that means.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the answer to that is super revealing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do want to go to the broader culture and I definitely appreciate the perspective on the church considering you're a pastor.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've got some insight there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you also, I threw my hands up in the air when I read in the book and I was so excited because you mentioned briefly
[SPEAKER_00]: mail comedians.
[SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned mail influencers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think this is a piece that a lot of people slept on.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think as much as Charlie Kirk is responsible for a Trump presidency.
[SPEAKER_00]: So is the Theovon and a Joe Rogan and down the list of comedians here.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think of just these kind of social influencers and the world that they play there?
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like whenever they do a Vulcan and kind of social change they go, I'm just a comedian, I'm just saying stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is clearly, I mean, I'd say they have more power than some pastors in some of these kids' lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you make of that?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we address that?
[SPEAKER_00]: you know what should we be thinking about this this topic in terms of like hey this really funny person might be really funny but they might be the best person yet policy information from like you know how do we how do we engage with that?
[SPEAKER_06]: I mean I was saying so like I said I'm I'm 40 my husband's 42 I was saying to him the other day like
[SPEAKER_06]: if you would have told both of us back in like the early 2000s that the guy from fear factor and the guy from the apprentice were like running our country could be shocking but it does speak to the power of reality TV that to drive our conversations it speaks to the power of media which I always think is
[SPEAKER_06]: you know, so ironic that Trump has spent so much of his political career railing against the media that made him.
[SPEAKER_06]: He is a creation of the fake news media.
[SPEAKER_06]: But when it comes to these comedians, it actually, again, I find myself really sad.
[SPEAKER_06]: I keep saying, I'm sad this morning, which is too bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, what are the context to meet someone and should both be sad together for an
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, but I guess I do think too, you know, the inability for Americans to express grief and sadness is what keeps us stuck in these repeating cycles of violence.
[SPEAKER_06]: So maybe it's good.
[SPEAKER_06]: I remember after, you know, Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air and I was, everyone was kind of waiting for Joe Rogan to weigh in.
[SPEAKER_06]: And he ultimately weighs in with, I believe the first thing he did was share a video from Andrew Schultz.
[SPEAKER_06]: Um, who's not somebody, you know, for me, I'll just say, I love like Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David.
[SPEAKER_06]: Like I like a very dry, you know, comedy.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't really like like a gross, you know, rude comedy.
[SPEAKER_06]: But so listen, I watched the video that Joe work and shared and Andrew Schultz, um,
[SPEAKER_06]: To me, honestly, it was hard to relate to because the way that he talked about transgender people and just the, it's like such a cheap appeal for laughs.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, there's like comedians have to be really smart.
[SPEAKER_06]: They have to be great writers.
[SPEAKER_06]: They have like comedy, satire, is a huge importance in guardian guarding our democracy.
[SPEAKER_06]: And what I see from like,
[SPEAKER_06]: Rogan and Andrew Schulton, people like that, is that it's just, it's an appeal to a very base level laugh.
[SPEAKER_06]: Like, okay, I'm going to call somebody a trainee and I'm going to talk about, you know, how they have sex and that's going to be funny.
[SPEAKER_06]: And ultimately, Andrew Schulton got around at the point like, well, we probably shouldn't be policing what comedian say, which I'm like, yes, I'm here for that.
[SPEAKER_06]: I agree.
[SPEAKER_06]: Um, but I think it speaks to the thing that you're talking about of decensitization of violence, um, of that we're teaching boys to laugh.
[SPEAKER_06]: or to be angry instead of getting at deeper emotions.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think, you know, we could have a whole podcast talking about transgender people and why that has been such a target of this movement in these early days.
[SPEAKER_06]: But one of the things that I was thinking about with this and talking to a religious leading statistician and sociologist, Ryan Burge, is that,
[SPEAKER_06]: Because socially, you know, when I was growing up, it wasn't a bad thing to be a tomboy.
[SPEAKER_06]: Like it's socially beneficial generally for girls and women to have masculine traits.
[SPEAKER_06]: But as you speak to, we do the other thing to boys.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's socially a detriment to have feminine traits.
[SPEAKER_06]: So A that speaks to the fact that we do very much have a hierarchy of men above women in this country.
[SPEAKER_06]: But the other thing it does is it makes transgenderism uniquely dangerous for men and for boys because if they're seeing
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, these are men who are saying that they are women in purchasing feminine traits, this is dangerous because they've been taught it's dangerous.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's weak to have feminine traits.
[SPEAKER_06]: I've gotten way of base from the comedians, but I just think that like.
[SPEAKER_06]: Honestly, I don't necessarily get it.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think they're funny.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think they're smart.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think it speaks to the dumbing down of America that these guys are really popular.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sorry.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, I think there's, I think there's truth to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, I mean, I don't know if you watched Mark Meron's take on any of this,
[SPEAKER_02]: Appearers, you know, people in my business who were single issue Republican voters and their issue was, you know, twofold.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, they were anti-woke, you know, against any policy or language that could help the vulnerable get a leg up and God knows that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, but they also were very worried about their free speech and they want their free speech to be infringed upon, which it never was.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, they'd say things and they'd be cultural
[SPEAKER_02]: Ultimately, all they really wanted was to be able to save the R word with impunity.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was why they voted.
[SPEAKER_02]: But along with that, you know, comes the collapse of the federal government, the destabilization of the global economy, tens of thousands of people being deported to places.
[SPEAKER_02]: They might not have even come from the actual suppression of speech and rights of LGBTQ people and women.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the rise of authoritarianism, and sometimes I feel like asking, was it worth it, you fucking retard?
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess something that would be like, yeah, was, because now on our podcast, we can bravely speak power to truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the truth can no longer defend itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounds like a total like dumbing down of what actually happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you really look at it, the nostalgia for being able to say slurs, that is so prevalent.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, even in people that I know that are like, oh, we can say the R word again, or we can say the T slur again.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, okay, why do you need to say that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what you just mentioned and this reason I bring it up is,
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it is a longing for a time where you didn't have to engage with ideas that were complicated and you could just be like, oh, you're gay and weird, you know, like, or oh, you're a feminine, or oh, you're whatever, whatever horrible word that we used to throw out all the time in junior high, it was easier than seeing there and trying to understand the role gender has in close society.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'm reading a book right now about just, um, it's also about masculinity.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's mind-bedding and I have to like reevaluate a lot of things and I'm thinking through things and it would be easier to just shut that off and go, well, the thing I thought at 13, I'm going to just hold on to.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's the appeal of some of these comedians and I think that's why they diminish like, again, the trans-experience to like, and I know the industry should let's clip your talking about, I won't quote him, but like, it all goes back to the whole thing is,
[SPEAKER_00]: This is gross and weird, you know, like that was kind of the take, which is just unfortunate, you know, to put it lightly and it's, I don't know, I know you just said you're sad and I want to end on a low note of like, well, how do you even engage with that?
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess here to close out on a beam of optimism.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you feel positive about?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I will say I'm seeing a lot of really bad things happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm also seeing more and more conversations like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that this book exists and wouldn't have existed back in 2020 is great.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you see right now that gives you the most hope?
[SPEAKER_00]: To totally veer and you turn into like optimism and joy as we close out.
[SPEAKER_00]: What gives you some hope right now?
[SPEAKER_06]: Well, I mean, ultimately
[SPEAKER_06]: people who do not have hope don't become parents.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I'm raising these boys and I'm watching them with their friends.
[SPEAKER_06]: And we have this lovely neighborhood connection and in the wake of the tragedy of the school shooting at Annunciation, the sunlight that peeks through is the real bonds and reliance that we have
[SPEAKER_06]: one another as neighbors and fellow parents and sports parents together and this shared conviction that
[SPEAKER_06]: that we're going to ground together in love.
[SPEAKER_06]: So that gives me a lot of hope.
[SPEAKER_06]: It gives me hope that my boys and their friends are wanting to have conversations about what's going on and that my middle schooler and his basketball teammate participated in a walkout for protesting gun violence and held up signs, you know, it's not an easy thing to do as a middle school boy.
[SPEAKER_06]: the fact that male athletes are sort of leading this charge and being visible in present, I think it's powerful.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's why they're so determined to tear down folks like Colin Kaepernick or LeBron James.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think that's why their messages are important.
[SPEAKER_06]: The other thing that gives me hope, truly, and this is the conundrum that I think people and your audience understand,
[SPEAKER_06]: Is that the church has done so much damage in the name of religion and yet I still see hope in the local church and we have these little communities.
[SPEAKER_06]: that are, you know, I wrote in such deck recently about I keep getting drawn back to these churches where like the carpet is freeing and they can't make the budget and we're just kind of plotting along, but the reality isn't this is why I think we all have to look to the black church.
[SPEAKER_06]: that this is what Jesus called us into.
[SPEAKER_06]: Jesus didn't call us to the mega church, Jesus didn't call us to a church that is aligned with empire.
[SPEAKER_06]: Jesus called us to a persecuted, rejected, you know, Jesus himself convicted of capital punishment.
[SPEAKER_06]: This is the role of the church is to be a witness, not to be a capitalist success.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so for me as a pastor, the fact that
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm getting more and more invitations to come to churches, to share with them what the Bible really says about Christian nationalism, what the Bible says about masculinity, to share with them the theology of the cross, in contrast to the theology of glory.
[SPEAKER_06]: That gives me a lot of hope, you know, a church that I presented at this past weekend, pretty large congregation that has committed itself to being more vocal on social justice, even though
[SPEAKER_06]: as a white effluent community, that's not historically where they've been, they had we had a huge crowd, the pastor at the end, prayed a prayer of blessing over me in this work.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that is ultimately the gospel story remains the source of hope to those of us who are being persecuted.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I'm not like overstating that I'm being persecuted in the way that people have been persecuted in the past,
[SPEAKER_06]: that we have to return to the truth of the story of Jesus and not be sold this lie of Him as some kind of white American businessman who brings in 50,000 baptizees every year.
[SPEAKER_00]: He brought it back to white Jesus, which is such a great way to bring it around.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, and truly, I mean, I talked to people like yourself, you know, I talked to Bethausmbar, you know, there's been a long list of incredible Christian leaders I've gotten to talk to in the past five years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would say right now, I lean relatively agnostic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every time I have one in this conversation so I always go, there's something compelling about this faith, which I, you know, I maybe is high praise for any past you talk to, but it is something where I read your book and I go, this faith is beautiful and this faith is meaningful and this faith is a lot more complex than just a certain power and, you know, I,
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of times I have people that critique me like I like you know you seem like angry with Christians and I'm like why have great Christians on my show all the time who have a beautiful version of faith and the verse I just always go back to and I swear I'll land this plane in like two seconds but like the verse I was go back to is you know growing up I always heard about like the people that tickle the ears of their listeners
[SPEAKER_00]: and I think there's nothing that tickles the ears of listeners like a promise of power and I think a more complex and beautiful gospel message finds itself in the types of churches you described in the type of like complex tensions that people find themselves in in 2025.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, as much as I don't agree with everything and don't know where I find myself, I appreciate that you are in that tension and for writing books like this, and just sparking good conversations that I wish existed when I was growing up in the church.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, thank you so much for doing this and for sharing so much on this episode, I appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's been awesome to be here.
[SPEAKER_06]: Thanks for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've been listening to the Prejubois podcast hosted by Eric Swizinski.
[SPEAKER_00]: The intro music, Bible Belt, was performed by Lou Rithley.
[SPEAKER_04]: Come on, we are gathered here today To praise the Holy Father, fill the glory of His name Anyone can worship here so long as you act straight Pay your ties and follow rules even the ones God didn't make any Bible