#287 | We the Fallen People: Navigating Democracy & Virtue with Robert Tracy McKenzie

Today's episode is brought to you by the Duehning family. May the Lord our God increase your ministry opportunities exponentially.

Any speech that says what kind of person you are, what your greatest threat is, and where your hope lies is effectively a religious sermon. And the problem is, is that we just let that rhetoric wash over us and wash over us and wash over us.

And I think so many, so many Christians today are more being catechized and formed political rhetoric than they are about anything that comes from the Scripture.

Welcome back to Ministry Deep Dive. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and we here are exploring the people, ideas, and conversations that are shaping ministry in our generation.

I'm your host, and today I'm delighted to have as a special guest to welcome Dr. Robert Tracy McKenzie. We call him Tracy. Dr. MacKenzie is the Arthur F. Holmes Chair of Faith and Learning and professor of History at Wheaton College.

He is one of America's leading Christian historians and author of several influential books, including the First Thanksgiving, the American Evangelicals, and his latest work, we the Fallen People.

In his fascinating book, Dr. MacKenzie Takes Us on a historical journey from the Founding Fathers to Andrew Jackson, from the Cherokee Removal to Alexis de Tocqueville, asking an important question, what happens when a democracy begins to believe not only in the sovereignty of the people, but also in the virtue of the people?

Along the way, he challenges Christians to recover a biblical understanding of human nature, which we all need to really understand in today's world today and to think more faithfully about citizenship, politics, and hope. Traci, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive. It's a pleasure to have you.

Thank you, Travis. I've been looking forward to our conversation.

All right, well, let's jump right in. What first prompted to you to write this book, we the Fallen People?

Was there a particular historical question or contemporary concern that gave birth to this project?

Of the two, definitely Contemporary concern. I have felt for a long time a sense of calling before God to help Christians think Christianly about the past.

And I've tried to do that in a variety of ways.

And I have a burden for the survival and flourishing of American democracy, but I have a deeper burden for the testimony of the church in a very politically polarized time. And as a historian, it just made sense to me to approach that question historically.

So I wanted to write something from a historical perspective that would allow us to see our present moment, perhaps in a different light, and possibly just think more deeply, more consistently, more theologically about it.

I love the fact that you do take us back, because I do find, and this is, again, the whole C.S. Lewis argument, we're guilty of chronological snobbery.

We think that our own time is just this certain way, but when we read history, it kind of takes those blinders off so that we can see in a greater way. But thinking even about the title that you've chosen, you've deliberately chosen a title that echoes the Constitution's famous phrase, we the people.

What are you hoping readers hear differently when they encounter the words we the fallen people?

Well, the hope is that they see me sort of italicizing that fallen or drawing a heavy line underneath it, and realize that there is always an assumption about human nature when we talk about the people, when we talk about the sovereignty of the people, or when we just refer to that phrase from the preamble to the Constitution, we the people. You know, I start the book, or early on in the book, I introduce a reflection from C.S. Lewis that really stunned me the first time I read it.

Really got my attention. Lewis said that you boil it all down. There's basically two reasons why someone would want to support a democracy, to believe in majority rule.

He said that here are the two reasons. One would be because you have confidence in human nature. The other would be because you don't have confidence in humanity.

What that really underscored to me is that there's more than one reason to believe in democracy, and why we believe in it matters. That is to say, the assumptions about the human condition that we bring to a democracy matters.

And why I think history is so important here is that I really believe those assumptions so pervasive in the culture become so almost universal that we cease to be aware of them. They become sort of invisible to us.

And one of the things that I became convinced of is that Christians are being formed in the public square by rhetoric, by political messages that are often profoundly at war with what we believe. Scripture teaches about the human condition, and yet they are so ubiquitous.

They're found in red states and blue states, on the left of the aisle, on the right of the aisle. They're so ubiquitous, we don't think about them.

But I think one of the gifts of history is that you can go to a time and place where the values that are universal now would be considered new or strange or controversial. And it just has a kind of almost a magical effect. It makes something that was invisible to us become visible Again.

And that, I believe, is always a huge opportunity. You know, the Scripture calls us to take every thought captive to obedience to Christ. And I've. I always like to put it this way.

We cannot take captive thoughts we're not really conscious of having. It's only when we become aware of them that we can begin to do that hard work of thinking about them in the light of Scripture.

So that's a long answer to your question, but I really wanted to speak into the lives of American Christians in a politically polarized moment.

And it couldn't be more appropriate. This is something that hasn't gone away.

I am in total agreement that we are in a very perilous time, even for, I mean, for the testimony of our Christian witness. Put the statistics aside.

Just sitting in church on a Sunday morning and the rhetoric that I'm hearing come out or you see online is a huge cause of not just concern, but it should just alert us all to how far we've gone, really. It seems like the whole thing has changed, but at the same time, it hasn't.

Because when you bring up Andrew Jackson, I found myself going, he was not so different than today. Why did you really want to focus on Jackson's time?

Well, great question. I think Jackson's time is important because we think of it just sort of generally. We tend to remember his period.

In fact, we sometimes call it the Jacksonian era, Jacksonian age. We remember that as a time when the United States became significantly more democratic than it was at the time of the founding.

And there's a real sense in which that is true.

And so I wanted to go to that period, but I wanted us to sort of revisit it, not through rose colored glasses, but just to think really carefully about the political messages that were being sent.

And one of the ways to highlight those political messages, I thought, was just to compare them to the views that were expressed by framers of the Constitution.

And whereas those men made no apologies for saying that humans are basically selfish, they were easily corrupted by power, we're capable of doing morally admirable things, but that's not our default.

And then you come to the Jacksonian period, and to someone like Andrew Jackson, who's really the most public, most prominent public figure and he's telling Americans that they're naturally wise, they're naturally virtuous, that they're incorruptible, uncorrupted and incorruptible, he says, and that America will never go wrong as long as they are true to themselves. I like to tell folks, it's what I call the Hallmark Channel understanding of the human condition.

You know, just follow your heart and everything will be fine. There's an assumption there of innate human virtue that really Jackson brought to the conversation that was new.

And when we realize that, I think sometimes it helps us to step back and listen to rhetoric today.

One of the things I would be willing to bet the House on is you will not hear a public figure today who's seeking your vote, cautioning you about your tendency to selfishness and to place your own interest over the good of the whole, that you need to be really concerned about your propensity to be corrupted by power, that your heart must change before social problems can truly be addressed. I don't think you're hearing that. I think we're hearing something very, very different. And I just think Jackson really sort of set the template.

We talk a lot about populism today. And really, Jackson was the one who created that mold, at least in the American context.

Well, even reading some of the stuff about him, the more that I read. When you got into populism, when he talks about also, was it De Tocqueville? That's called it the tyranny of the majority?

Yes.

And then you get into the populist populism, but you. How did it say a populist can identify the enemy, they speak for the people, they defend the people, and then they define the people.

And really what they did was remove nuance. They made it into this dichotomy of this or that and didn't allow for nuance. It was like, this is for us and that's our enemy, that dichotomy.

And that's what we see going on today, Correct?

Absolutely. I mean, one of the ways to sort of highlight that.

There's a quote that I allude to briefly in the book that comes from this 20th century Russian Christian, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

And he famously says in one of his works that the line that separates good from evil does not run between nation states or between classes or between political parties. The line that separates good from evil runs right within every human heart.

And one of the things about that populist rhetoric, whether it does so explicitly or not, it is always at least Implicitly saying the problem does not have anything to do with the human heart. That line does not run within us individually, it separates us from them.

And I think you don't have to be on social media five minutes to know that we're bombarded with us versus them stories and basically whoever they are are a threat to us. And so that's what populism does. It's a basic sort of plot which says that those people are built on an agenda that's antithetical to our interests.

And the populist leader says, I can protect you, you can place your hope in me, and I will be your champion. That is something that the framers of the Constitution would have called a demagogue.

They would have said that a demagogue is the greatest threat probably to the flourishing of any republic. And now we've sort of elevated it into sort of a, the standard form for a vote seeking politician.

Let's get into a little bit more of the content of the book for a moment because you devote a significant amount of attention to the Cherokee removal. Why is that episode so central to the argument of the book?

And why did you want to highlight that so many are unaware of it and yet you make it a pretty central focus of the book.

I do. And you know, the point of that really is just to help us help the reader think about democracy, why we're for it and actually what it is.

You mentioned a moment ago a name that looms very large in the book later on, and that is this French visitor to the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville.

What he means by that is that democratic outcomes are not intrinsically, always morally defensible. In other words, rule by majority may lead to morally admirable things or very morally offensive things.

And so with that idea in mind, I turn to the removal of particularly the Cherokee Nation during Andrew Jackson's very tail end of his presidency on into his successor. And I approached it as a case study of One example of a democratic policy. Now, you have to really clarify.

I'm not saying that democratic rule intrinsically leads to some sort of injustice. I am saying it can. And when we look at Indian Removal, one of the things I really want to drive home is that it was very politically popular.

That is to say, there is no doubt that a majority of voters at the time favored the policy.

And so what I would say about Indian Removal is that whatever you believe about it, and I would say it was unjust, but whatever you believe about it, you have to say that it was democratic.

If you don't say that it was democratic, then you're beginning to develop a definition of democracy where the will of majority is not one of its defining characteristics. And you can say, oh, yes, the majority want that, but that's not democratic. So we play these sort of weird games.

We go into these intellectual gymnastics to define democracy as something other than rule by the will of the majority.

If we just acknowledge that a policy like Indian Removal could be democratic, could be approved by the majority of the people, that opens us up to thinking about democracy differently.

What it tells us is that, and I think, because I believe that human nature has fallen, that democratic outcomes may or may not be just, which tells us that it's not automatically the case that we follow our heart and just outcomes proceed really matters.

What our values are, what we're being trained to believe are right, what we're being trained to believe are ways that oblige us in our treatment of our neighbors, as opposed to being told, as our politicians tell us, that whatever we desire is sort of intrinsically authoritative if the majority agree on it.

One of the things that I thought was really interesting, as I was reading your book, I was going through it, and I was amazed that Jackson had captured the language.

I mean, he knew he brought in people to write, to communicate, and to kind of create a moral argument for it in some respect, or again, put it in those terminologies. Like, he knew how to spin it, and he knew, like, the spin game really, really well.

And even reading that, it was really, I mean, heartbreaking to see it.

And at the same time, I was encouraged because there were many Christians that spoke up, and yet there were many that went along kind of like what we see going on today in our country, that we see a lot of Christians that are divided, that Christians are justifying certain illegal, not illegalities, but unjust things or immoral things in order to get a greater result. It seems like it was the same there. Like, we need to get these people out. They're never going to be able to go with us.

They're never going to be able to adopt to our way of life. And we need to remove them from our land and send them off, no matter what the cost may be.

Because what's going to happen here is greater than what's going to happen to them. But it's really a black eye in American history, isn't that right?

Well, it is, it is.

I mean, one of the things that we remember remind ourselves is that, you know, sort of ethnocentrism, a kind of natural propensity to see our group as both different than, but also superior to other groups. That's as old as the human story.

So it's not that Americans invent that or white Americans invent that at all, but what we do see in that episode of Indian Removal is just the power of rationalization, the power to justify really what is basically a selfish, very self interested policy. So you'll see policymakers saying this is a kindness to the Native Americans that they'll never survive in close proximity to a superior race.

That only by removing them are we giving them a chance to survive. Insisting that this is something that they desire.

Entering into a treaty with a tiny minority of the Cherokee Nation and then saying the majority has spoken and we're just honoring the agreement. It's really riddled with indefensible kinds of policies.

But the thing that's sort of discouraging is that outside of there, there were some prominent missionaries, there were some prominent Christian voices raised against it, but very few from within the mainstream of American politics that wasn't basically politically motivated.

So the party that was not the Jackson party, the Whig Party, very critical of Indian Removal until Jackson leaves office, his successor leaves office, and a Whig president is now in the White House and a Whig majority is in Congress. And they're just aggressively pushing for Indian removal as anyone had before them.

So it's hard to find within sort of mainstream American politics a kind of principled voice. There were two or three, but they really stand out by being exceptions to the rule.

What amazes me is just our propensity as citizens to kind of fall for those arguments. Every politician promises everything that they think we want to hear.

And then yet when they get in office, as you just mentioned, they often do the very thing that they criticize their predecessor for.

I remember reading that of Thomas Jefferson, where he would just go after John Adams and all the different things that Adams was doing and then expanding the government and then he'd does. I mean, he does a ton of different things like that.

And there's more expansion under his time than there was before any other up until that time, of course.

So I look at that and I'm like, why is it that we are so quick to baptize those who seemingly speak for us, but are actually against what we're valuing?

So, not wanting to be too clever or whatever, I would say it's because we're fallen. That would be my very fast answer. Yeah. So Tocqueville spoke a little bit about this.

Tocqueville talked about our contemptible love of present pleasure. That's the actual quote. Our contemptible love of present pleasure.

And what he meant in context was just that we're quite willing to make what I would call a devil's bargain in the long run, if we believe in the immediate future, we stand to benefit.

So one of the ways you see this today, for example, I think most Christians in some sense that follow politics would say that too much concentration of power is a threat. But when our person in the White House is issuing executive orders and ignoring Congress left and right, we have no problem with that.

When the other party's person is in the White House, we discover sort of outrageous.

And what we need is some critical mass willing to support the principle, even to our own hurt, even when it perhaps postpones immediate benefit because we know in the long run it violates a principle that's important to the flourishing of our democratic system. That's what. I just don't see that anywhere, really, in America today.

We are supremely skeptical of the intentions of the other group, very trusting of our own. And, you know, one of the ways I've put this elsewhere, in the way that we talk politically today, it's as if we deny original sin in ourselves.

We know that our motives are always good, but we're quite happy to see that in the others. And I just, you know, there's just a blatant inconsistency to that.

But Tocquefo would have said, of course, because that's sort of the way we tend to act.

Why is it that we, though, as Americans, I mean, yes, we are fallen, but why is it that we have such a hard time suffering for what's right? How quickly are we sidetracked to go after what's wrong? But why is it that we're so susceptible to that?

Oh, Travis, that's a big question. I don't know. I don't know what the answer is there. Can I Put it back on you. Do you have a thought that I can.

Well, actually, no. I think there are a multitude of factors. I really do.

I think that we've had poor theology, especially in the understanding of the Old Testament and how it translates into the New. I think many people have seen America as a theocracy, and then there's been a civil religion that's there.

I think people also like their own comfort, and they believe their way is right. And when they can morally justify it, they will. But I think comfort plays a huge role. We don't like to feel like we're outsiders.

One of the things that we've done on this show and had a few episodes on is on neurotheology and how now we can actually map a lot of this stuff out on the brain. And we're so designed to belong.

And we don't like to feel, like, uncomfortable in any which way or feel like we're outsiders or that we don't have some type of morality. I mean, even those who have done horrible crimes will seek to justify themselves morally because they can't stand the separation in their own psyche.

So they have to try to change that.

But that's where, to me, it comes back to the Word again, is that how do we preach the Word, how do we teach in our churches, how do we help our pastors and ministry leaders see this? Because it goes beyond just left and right. It goes beyond some of the moral, cultural war issues. It gets down into deep formation.

And I would even say having a theology of suffering. And I think we've really lost that. I do in the church.

I think we have a huge theology of comfort, but a very low theology of what it means to suffer for the kingdom of God. We don't like that idea. And in many respects, we think if we're suffering, we're doing it wrong.

When the reality is that sometimes suffering means you're doing it right.

Yeah, I absolutely think that you're correct in that. I was listening to a sermon just this week on First Peter, Chapter 1.

The idea of his audience telling them that they're pilgrims and sojourners, and now if they may have to suffer for this moment, this time, and they shouldn't be surprised by that.

One of the things I play around a lot with in terms of metaphors is just the idea of exile or pilgrim, which is not a common way, I think, for American Christians typically to think about themselves. One of the reasons that I find the sort of emphasis of American founding as a Christian founding, America as A Christian nation.

One of the things that I find really troubling about that is that it immediately eliminates this idea of the Christian as a pilgrim or sojourner. But we think of ourselves as rightfully wielding powers, rightfully being part of the dominant group.

And I think that gets us in all kinds of trouble.

Well, I was actually just talking to the staff at church. I'm working at a church right now, and I was talking to the staff this morning about this very thing.

Because when you get into the understanding of the Old Testament and if you don't have a proper understanding of the Old Testament, you go all kinds of wrong, especially when you start incorporating yourself as this Christian nation and it really becomes like a syncretistic idea of really this generic Judeo Christian God who's opaque enough that anyone can read into whatever they want to, but they start seeing themselves as that Christian nation. And again, I go back to like, how do we understand the Old Testament and how do we understand the nation of Israel and where it's headed?

And then what's the purpose in the New Testament?

We had James Davison Hunter on, and he talked about how many of the Founding Fathers created this cultural reservoir and had such a Judeo Christian emphasis. Whether they were Christian or not was irrelevant. They were all schooled in that mindset.

And so they did believe in fallen human nature and the limitation of powers.

Until, of course, whatever person, as you said before, gets in power, then they want to minimize that because they see themselves as the ultimate good.

But one of the things that Hunter had said was, is when we created that cultural reservoir, it was opaque enough that anyone could read whatever they wanted to in it.

And he talked about that there were not border guards, but he talks about anyone who violated the cultural reservoir was met with violence that challenged it. And he talks about Native American indigenous peoples. He talks about African Americans and slaves. He talks about Roman Catholics and Mormons.

That if anybody has tried to challenge that cultural reservoir, it's been met with violence. And I think there is some truth to that. But again, I go back to. And this is where James plays such a huge role.

Don't presume to be a teacher because you're going to be judged more strictly.

I think we just don't realize the weight of what that means, because if we don't teach it correctly, then you have all kinds of errors, which I think many are seeing today come to the forefront when we see some of the justification that has been used politically under the umbrella of evangelicalism, let's say. But this is where I find your work so relevant, is that there's nothing new under the sun. History repeats itself.

So what were the lessons that we can learn from the Jacksonian period of time that it's relevant to today that we can kind of take and use?

Well, I think the first is just something we've touched upon a little bit already, is just to think anew about democracy. I talk in the book about democracy in two senses.

I say that there's a democratic gospel that we're exposed to, and that gospel is basically the good news, that we're basically good ourselves and that nothing has to be changed in our hearts. We don't have to be a certain kind of people for democracy to flourish as long as we have the majority vote.

So there's a democratic gospel that really is a false gospel.

The idea, I call it democratic faith, is the idea that when we agree on something as a majority, that that carries a kind of intrinsic moral authority along with it. To come back to Tocqueville, he just says, well, no, democratic outcomes can be wonderful. They can be really tyrannical. They can be oppressive.

In other words, to use the scholarly term, democracy can be liberal, meaning it can promote freedom and equality. It can be authoritarian.

And I think there's some reason to believe that we're willing to embrace an authoritarian form of democracy if we believe that I individually will benefit.

All kinds of surveys from the last decade or so, opinion polls that ask individuals, what do you think about a form of government characterized by a strong leader who is not accountable to Congress or regular elections? What do you think about that? Lots of different surveys.

The polls vary a little bit, but somewhere between a quarter and two fifths of respondents say, I think that could be a pretty good form of government. Well, the name for that is dictatorship, basically.

And it just suggests that we're forgetting what democracy is about, what makes democracy flourish, and we're willing to flirt with a kind of democracy that really becomes a form of oppression. One final takeaway that I think is also important for us all. I'd love for Christians to take this seriously. Every political.

Every political speech is a sermon. And that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one.

What I mean by that is, if you listen to the political rhetoric today, that person seeking your vote will tell you what kind of person you are. He or she will say, Basically, you know, you're hardworking, you're the real America. You're what this country was built upon.

This is why we're great, and so on. This is the kind of person you are. Then that vote taker will say, here's what you have to fear. This is the greatest threat to your well being.

And then you can guarantee it. That vote seeker will tell you, and here's how we will protect you, this party or this movement or this individual.

I think any speech that says what kind of person you are, what your greatest threat is, and where your hope lies is effectively a religious sermon. And the problem is that we just let that rhetoric wash over us and wash over us and wash over us.

And I think so many, so many Christians today are more being catechized and formed by political rhetoric than they are by anything that comes from the scripture.

I would give a wholehearted agreement, not just the political rhetoric, but just anything we see online.

Our kids are being catechized all the time into a certain view of life and even the places we live, the values that we have, even with UC with, of course, with the political climate, and I like to call them woke refugees, people that are fleeing blue states or red states, moving into places where they feel more comfortable in that, because that then reiterates what they already believe and see about the world. But political rhetoric seems to just be playing on it and throwing fire on it because it's used to justify their own actions.

And so many Christians are caught up in it. And yet at the same time, I'm seeing a lot of other Christians saying, no, they're starting to see through that.

I think that you're seeing many of the cultural Christians kind of fall off, but you're seeing those that are true Christ followers be hopefully reinvigorated. Although I would also say Christian nationalism is, you know, really invigorated people. And I would say that's a different gospel as well.

But do you see your book really as an opportunity to take a different lens from history and shine it on today's world, saying, this is what's happening to us just as it was happening to them?

I do think so. I mean, the analogy isn't perfect. There are some differences, but there are awful lot of, a lot of similarities.

And I was hoping that readers would see that. And I tried to make some of that explicit toward the end of the book.

Now, the book's been out for about five years now, and yet I still feel like it's extremely relevant, which is why we're having this conversation. What has been the response that you have received from the book?

You know, it's a great question, and I haven't had as much response as I wish I had.

One of the things that I personally love to do is to speak at churches, not to make a political speech, but to help people think about politics Christianly. And I've had quite a few invitations over the years.

But one of the things that strikes me is I'm pretty sure that the churches that have invited me like the message and knew that it would resonate with their congregation, as opposed to, here's a church that's really struggling with this. There's some tensions here, and here's someone that could help them address that.

I'm not sure I have ever given a public address to an audience that invited me that knew they were going to disagree with me, which just sort of reinforces the kind of echo chambers that we're sort of inhabiting these days.

How do you think then, that we can, as pastors and ministry leaders, help our people to see that their. Those in our congregation need to have their blinders expanded, if you will? How do we go about that?

You know, that's just such a great question, and I don't have any magic solution. I remember I spoke at a church some time ago, and before I was going to speak, one of the church members came up to me, elderly lady, very sweet.

And she said, I sure hope you're not going to make a political speech. Right. And I tried to reassure her that I wasn't going to give a political talk. And I thought later, I wish I hadn't.

I wish I told her, absolutely, I'm going to give a talk about politics. I'm not going to give a partisan talk.

And I think that's a distinction that gets lost today, that we need as Christians to recognize that there is a partisanship that can invade the pulpit, that doesn't belong there. Or that would be my opinion, that it's not the place for partisanship.

But if we're going to say that politics as a topic is off limits, then I think we're saying one of the most important features in American life today, one of the forces that's having the greatest impact on American churches and on the witness of American Christians, is something we'll never talk about from the pulpit. I think that's just. I understand it on one level, I think it's incredibly shortsighted. On the other side, the problem. I get it.

If I were a pastor, I know I'd want to tread very lightly because of how incredibly delicate these questions are today. But ignoring them is not the solution. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away. It may simply reinforce the kind of silos that we inhabit.

At Apollos Water, which is the part of ministry Deep dive, we started a thing called the Apollos Forum to handle those very questions. And at the Apollos Forum, we had our first meeting was is America a Christian nation? And we hit it head on. I mean, we didn't try to play around.

We didn't take, you know, this is it, this is it. It was a hybrid from the very beginning, was our contention.

But then we got into a bit of what we call the missionary mode and the crusader mode, which was drawing off Andrew Walls work. And it basically is Christianity is expanded in one of two ways.

There's the missionary mode, which seeks to demonstrate, to love, to entreat, and to pray and pursue. But at the end of the day, they don't have cultural power, so they have to really and only really rely on heavenly power.

Whereas the crusader mode does have cultural power. And they do everything the same. They use the same Bible, they use the same rhetoric, but at the end of the day, they'll compel and use force.

And the problem is, then you're instrumentalizing Christianity for a political means rather than allowing it to do what it's supposed to do, which is transformation of people. And so it was just fascinating to see people wrestle with this.

And we even came back and said after the next one, how then are we as Christians to be involved in politics today? Because it is such a key place, and if we don't define it, someone will.

And we have to be able to define it in the best way that we can, in a way that is honoring to Christ. That doesn't gloss over history, because history is there to teach us and show us the mistakes that have been made by those previous before us.

And we're going to make our own mistakes in our time.

But we need to be able to not hold on to the past so much as hold on to truth, because I think those are two different things I think you can hold on to. I think so many Christians want to hold on to the past and nostalgia and what they believe it is, rather than truth itself.

And I'm willing to sacrifice nostalgia if I can have truth. And that means, though dealing with some things historically that I may not like. However, I think we have to if we're going to move forward.

We can't just sit by and not deal with these issues. Don't you think so?

Oh, absolutely. You're preaching to the choir. I absolutely believe that.

And the more bound it is, the less it is blind. And I just love that idea.

It sort of decoupling the idea of only exalting something that we love, but being honest about loving it, knowing it, which is the great test of love, right? To love someone when we know them fully.

And I also think when we only emphasize those positive things and ignore the negative ones, we're teaching bad theology in so many words. We're misrepresenting the human condition. And I don't know what good comes from that. I'm very skeptical that any good does come from. From that.

I agree. Well, I know we've come to the end of our time. What's one concluding thought that you hope or you want to leave with the.

The pastors and ministry leaders that are. That are listening to this right now or watching us on YouTube?

What's a good hope that you can give them as a result of your book and reading your book?

Let me. Let me say two things really fast.

One, we haven't talked a whole lot about the framers of the Constitution, but you did mention, whatever their personal religious beliefs, they've created a framework that really, I think, honored the implications both of imago DEI and of original sin. And that is something to build on. That is something to be thankful for and to try to reclaim as best we can.

The other thing is a little bit more a word of warning. But when Tocqueville came to the United States, he immediately saw that the American culture seemed to be very religious.

But as he interviews people and he says, what explains the vitality of Christianity? It's been declining in Europe. Why is it so vibrant here in the United States?

And he says that pretty much every pastor he talked to had the same answer. They say it was the separation of church and state. And what they meant by that was that particular pastors kept political parties at arm's length.

They refused to become captive to a particular political movement. And I think that's an encouraging word, but also a kind of word of admonition, I guess, simultaneously.

Well, Traci, I'm really grateful to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us on Ministry Deep Dive. Your work does does remind us that history isn't merely understanding the past.

It's about cultivating wisdom for faithful living in the present. And we have the book, of course, we the Fallen People.

I would encourage you to get it online or wherever books are sold because it gives us a biblical understanding and the necessity of understanding human nature so that we might think more carefully about democracy and our citizenship and above all, to place our ultimate hope not in political systems or leaders, but in the reign of King Jesus. For those that are listening to Apollos Water, thank you for tuning into the show.

Please be sure to check out our resources on ApolloSWater.org they will surely help you where you're at in your ministries because we want to be able to equip you to minister in this period of time. Well, this is Travis Michael Fleming signing off for Ministry Deep Dive. Stay watered, everybody.