#243 | The Spirit of Our Politics with Michael Wear, Pt. 2

Politics becomes an all sort of consuming map for people's sense of reality. But Christians have a different map of reality. We have a different map of what is real.

And if we're not willing to bring that into all of life, then we are going to find significant parts of ourselves. And because ourselves are not divided, we're going to find ourselves to be undiscipled.

It's watering time, everybody. It's time for Apollos Watered, a podcast.

To saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate.

Your world with the good news of Jesus Christ.

My name is Travis Michael Fleming and.

I am your host.

And today on our show, we're having.

Another one of our deep conversations.

Last time I began a conversation with Michael Wear, founder, president and CEO of the center for Christianity and Public Life. He has been an advisor at high levels of government and politics.

And his latest book is the Spirit of Our Politics, which offers a way of thinking about our involvement in politics that is rooted in Jesus teaching and Dallas Willard's approach to spiritual formation. Today we continue our conversation dealing with everything from former guest Al Mohler to abortion and our attachments. No controversy there at all.

It is an important conversation, one that we believe will help you as you navigate the often thorny and ever present world of politics. Happy listening.

As I talk with people and I interact with Christians. We've done several episodes as we've delved into politics. We've had different voices that have been very polarizing in different positions.

You actually referenced one in the book. We had Albert Mueller on the show.

We talked a bit about politics and I had Pete Wehner, who worked like you in the White House, and they had very different views. Yes. While both promote human flourishing.

Yeah.

And even Russell Moore, too. We've all talked about human flourishing and I've talked about this.

I can't even begin to tell you how many times I feel like it's just been ad nauseam.

Yeah.

The question, though is if everyone is coming at it from a Christian perspective. And I believe that all of these individuals love Jesus.

Yes.

And they want us.

Right. Yeah. How do you then differentiate between them in making a determination on these issues?

Because while it is about who we are becoming, there are issues that seem to be or way more heavily on the moral framework which we have. I know you talk about that a bit.

Yep.

How you elaborate.

Yeah.

Not to skip over it. I don't think we need to do. But we need to fill that in.

So.

So how do we fill that in? Like how do we develop a moral ecology.

Yeah.

That is. Or a political moral ecology that enables us to promote the flourishing of society at the very foundation of society?

And I, I don't want to give like a pyramid tier of those things, but. Yes, but I mean, we have human life.

Yes.

We have the, the family we have taken care of the poor, the destitute, the widow, the orphan. All of these different pieces are involved within this formula.

And it breaks my heart to see them separated, because I don't think they need to be counterclaimed by one party or the other.

How, though, do we do this framework and we resist the outrage culture that we have to develop a biblically informed, socially responsible political moral ecology?

Yeah. So you're asking a much more nuanced question, but I just want to.

What some people might be hearing is how do we determine who has the right political positions and how do we push outside of the boundaries of Christianity those who don't have the right political positions? At the center of my book is to say that that is asking the wrong questions. That is a misunderstanding both of Christianity and of politics. C.S.

lewis writes this essay, Meditations on the Third Commandment. And in this essay, he's considering the creation of a Christian political party in Britain.

Like at the time, and to this day, there were across Europe.

And he says, the problem is, let's say that you found the party on what you take to be the most unassailable Christian position that you possibly could, hypothetically, let's say abolition of slavery. There are even problems there. And the problem there is a political party doesn't just have a position against slavery.

Generally, they need to pursue an actual. Set a policy instrument or set of policy instruments, an actual instrumental way to advance that value.

Well, anyone who knows the history of abolitionist movement knows that abolitionists disagreed with one another about the best way to pursue abolition.

And so right off the bat, even though you've chosen to base your party on what you take to be the most unassailable Christian position, you have to choose a specific path.

Well, what does the fact that you chose a specific path to pursue abolition say about the other Christian abolitionists who disagree with the path you took? So that's problem one. Problem two is this.

When you're operating as a political party, when you're operating in politics, you can't just talk about the issue that you're. That is your reason for existence. You're going to be taking votes on property taxes and zoning regulations.

And so you've created this mantle of authority we're the Christian political party.

But you end up having to use that authority on a whole range of issues that you may or may not think the Christian faith offers the kind of specific direct guidance on those issues that you do. Abolition. But you, you've created that mantle. And so what C.S.

lewis says is, look, the temptation when you combine faith and politics is to proclaim God hath said when he hasn't spoken. It's to use God's name in vain. We need to understand that when we step into politics, we are at best translators of God's will, not stenographers.

Politics is, that is the realm, is the area of the prudential, of the penultimate. And anyone who has paid any attention to the history of public policy, and I'm not talking about, you could look 100 years back, 200 years.

I'm saying read the newspaper for three months and you will find that the history of public policy is, is a history of unintended consequences, of people who were even certain about the rightness of their intentions coming to learn that the instruments they chose to advance those intentions didn't have the effect they intended, sometimes even had the exact opposite effect of what they were intending. Or they come to learn, hey, I, I thought for sure that God's will was that I intended this thing.

But now I understand that I was supposed to intend this. And there were reasons why that intention was not the right, the right way to move forward.

So there's a real danger when as Christians, we take the authority of the gospel and of these ultimate principles which are transcendent. The dignity of the human person is a transcendent ultimate principle that we could stand on.

But when we equate those transcendent ultimate principles to a particular policy instrument, when we say that to love your neighbor equals this policy agenda, not only are we using God's name in vain, we are also setting ourselves up to undermine the authority that we have to preach the gospel. This is a problem like pastors run into, which is you need to address politics and the social.

But I advise really significant caution, the more specific you get in terms of policy debates and current issues. Proclaiming your views from the pulpit on Sunday morning because you're leaving your congregations really in two places.

They could either take your proclamation of the gospel really seriously and say, well, pastors political views must carry that same authority. Or they say, well, I don't think the pastor's political views are right. Maybe they're wrong about the gospel too.

The easiest thing to do when you step into Politics is to just say if you're, if you're.

And if you're trying to appeal in the midst of a campaign, and we're going to hear a lot of this in the coming months, if you are a real Christian, you'll vote for my candidate. If you're not a real Christian, sure, yeah. You'll probably vote for the other. The other guy.

And we just need to recognize that for the moral and religious bullying that it is, we need to actually tell people. Where do you have the authority to say that? Where do you get that from? C.S.

lewis, in the opening of Mere Christianity, says, Christianity does not offer a particular political program. It's to be the scripture. It's to be applied by Christians in their time and place. And what accountability do you have for that?

What accountability do you have for Neil Gorsuch writing the decision in Bostock that has set the precedent for all of the. For the Title 9 ruling that you are now so fired up about, which I think is a good thing to be concerned about.

But if supporting the right side, if this is the measure of faithfulness, having the right political answers, doesn't there have to be, by that logic, some accountability for getting it wrong?

Of course, as you said before, these are complicated questions and answers as we try to navigate the minefield of politics. And talking with Russell Moore, who has suffered politically, I mean, to being in some respect, he leaves his denomination behind, the sbc.

Some say good riddance to that, you know, and others are saying, I applaud him for being faithful to his convictions and refusing to be a part of, of that type of. I mean, if it was a variety of issues, of course, his reactions to many different things. Yeah.

And of course, he is one of the endorsers of your book, but in his book, he mentions what happened in Ireland among Catholics when it came to the abuse by Roman Catholic priests and how people rallied because they said, hey, this didn't happen, this couldn't happen. And then to the point where children were even having to apologize to the priest that molested them. Then of course, it did come out.

And then people went the other way. Yeah, I brought, I brought that up without molar.

Yeah.

And he, he did not like that. He said, I'm tired of this argument. It wasn't just in be fairness to him. It wasn't just to Moeller.

Yeah, yeah.

I was citing Wehner and who are we becoming in the middle of all this? And he said, if you have the opportunity, he goes, I'm tired of this argument. If you have the opportunity to do good, you do it.

And in his mind, that at the very foundation of human life, you do it.

Yeah.

How do you respond to that? At the. At the very basics of humanity, we're talking about the flourishing of society. We're talking about the dignity of the person.

But if a person can't even be born.

Yes.

How do we. How do we help people to see, again, to unravel the complexity, to see this in a greater moral framework? Because it.

While on one end, you would say the end justifies the means, and I'd say, wait a minute, what are we becoming in the middle of this? What are the ramifications? While we do want to see life, we do want to be able to help other people.

And what are we becoming in the middle of all this? When we know.

And again, this is Wehner's argument, that when we have someone who is more of a Democrat, abortions actually go down, and when we have Republicans, abortions go up. And again, I don't know the stats on that. You probably know better than I do, but I believe that's true.

How do we respond to all these different complicated issues? And what do we need, again, as this moral ecology and framework to be able to think through these?

Because that becomes the lowest common denominator for almost everyone.

Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with that.

So that's. That's the first thing. I think the second thing is I'd say you can be wrong politically and faithful. It is.

I find this interesting, and I'm still sort of like, wrestling with this, and I could very well be wrong here, but I find that culturally we have. We have a much easier time telling people that they're evil than just saying that they're wrong. I find that to be very interesting.

The third thing I'd say is I think the way to respond, in my view, I'm pro life. I think that human beings are made in the image of God. That includes the unborn child.

I think the way to not sort of respond to this sort of question is to downplay the issue or to say, to sort of turn the volume down on the seriousness of the issue. I think it's a very serious issue. What I will say is, actually, let me make one more point.

I think it is a justifiable issue for someone to say, my life experience the passions that God has laid on my heart, I prioritize abortion in my vote. I think that's a fine thing for people to say. I want people to be praying about their political priorities.

I want people to be consulting with other Christians. I want people to be attentive to the needs of their community.

But if all of this is done in earnest and an individual's assessment is this, this issue because of the state of things, because of what might be able to be done, what might not get done, I'm prioritizing this issue. I think it's important not to say because you prioritize it. I ignore everything else. I think it's important to hold tension there.

So I think it's to say, look, I think abortion decides my vote, or abortion factors heavily into my vote, but I do that not in the absence of discernment, but that is itself an act of discernment.

In other words, it does require moral energy because I am making sure that even as I prioritize the issue of abortion, I know that our politics is contingent and prudential and it affects a whole range of issues. So I am doing the best, best I can to sort of add, add these things up and determine my vote. So all of those, all of those things exist.

On the issue of abortion specifically, it is very possible, and there's very good evidence to suggest that Dobbs, which is the ruling, the overturned Roe, which has been the north star of the pro life movement, that Dobbs and its aftermath could result in the. I think there's evidence already that this is what the short term aftermath has been.

But I think I'm also concerned about the medium term and the long term, that Dobbs could result in more abortions than existed before Dobbs, if that is even within the realm of possibility, doesn't there have to be some reflection among those who for decades told Christians ending Roe is the only thing you can vote on, it's the only thing that matters. If there's an election between someone who opposes Roe and someone who supports it, your decision is made for you.

If there's even a chance that a post Roe world is less conducive to human life and to unborn children than a pre Roe world, that should be provoking a crisis.

And the abortion data that we have shows abortion spiking in the first year post Dobbs, I think it is likely that in the next three to ten years we end up with a more liberal.

Federally speaking, we already see this in states like New York, California, Massachusetts, but federally speaking, we end up with a more Liberal abortion regime post Roe than we had, legal regime post Roe than we had before Roe. And so I want to be absolutely clear. What I'm not saying is, well, abortion is going to happen anyways. You can't do anything about it.

What I am saying is exactly what I said in our more theoretical discussion, which is we need to be really careful about equating these ultimate principles to particular policy instruments and political strategies.

Because if you're going to use the authority of God to sort of baptize your prudential political opinions, and your prudential political opinions don't pan out quite the way that you thought they would, that they would have to, not only is that causing harm to our politics and our culture, so you look at public surveys, those who identify as pro choice all time high. So culturally speaking, the American people think abortion is more necessary now than they ever have before, ever.

So the cultural sort of fight is not in a good, not in a good place. And sure, we could have arguments. Well, a step back was necessary to take two steps for. Okay, but are we clear on the prudentiality of all this?

Are we, are we clear on the fact that you don't quite exactly know how your strategies are going to pan out?

And then maybe we should not wield our political opinions as though they have the force of weight of deciding who's faithful and who's not and who what's God's will and what's not. We need to wield that very, very gently.

So to elaborate, you said this more than once, and I think people are starting to grasp what you're saying because you've referred to this term prudentiality more than once. You talk about the kind of people we are. You talk about politics is prudential, politics is contingent. And then you elaborate on each one of these.

Politics is important, but not ultimate. Politics is for advancing justice and affirming human dignity as relates to self government.

Politics is an essential forum for loving your neighbor, for, for willing or intending their good.

Much political action, especially voting, is mediated by structures in the community, not simply a pure expression of one's personal desires or preferences.

And then you immediately go into formation, which I thought was very interesting, especially spiritual formation, but in that list that let's, let's go to the prudentiality one, and you say it rarely if ever allows for the direct implementation of indisputable principles, but rather has to do with an imperfect choosing between competing values and goals. And then you say it's contingent.

The propriety of A political decision relies in part on the particular circumstances of the moment in which it is made. A wise political decision in one time and set of circumstances will likely be foolish in another.

Both of those terms you've used repeatedly in the last few minutes. Elaborate further on what you mean because I could tell you very passionate about this issue and. Well, no, you should.

I mean you're in politics and it's. Politics awakens everyone's fervor because we're all trying to understand, we're all trying to get the. What we believe is best.

And I think as Christians, we want to see the glory of God. We want to see the, the, the restraining of evil. We want to see the flourishing of good in a society.

But as you said before, sometimes that these issues are rather complex because they have unintended consequences by which we refer to them. So they are contingent on a variety of different issues. And you said before, I mean, I, I don't think very. And, and this is the.

Yeah.

How do we go about that? So, so how do we navigate the complexity of this and, and, and embrace those concepts that you're embrace?

Yeah.

I think this will sound maybe to some as sort of ridiculously subtle if we moved from saying instead of I am a Christian, therefore I support Kenda A policy A to because of my Christian faith, I'm led by to support candidate A policy A. I think what that does is it begins to move to the center our role as translator that we are, that we are seeking to see through a glass darkly.

We are seeking to make sense of decisions which have implications and have factors involved that it's hard for public policy experts. I mean, not just hard. I think I could categorically say people who spend their lives focused on very narrow policy questions.

How wide should a street be to maximize public safety as well as ease of communication and the movement of goods? Right. Already that's one public policy question. And you already have competing interests.

You already have people's lives at stakeholders in multiple directions. And so you just go, wow, this is complicated.

I am seeking to use the resources available to me, make decisions that are oriented towards the good of my neighbors that are willing the good of the public, knowing that I very likely could be wrong. I very likely could be, could be missing something I. I probably am. I probably am missing something.

And so humility is just absolutely essential for a Christian in life and in politics. A gentleness is absolutely essential for Christians in politics because we have a. We have a. We have a sense of real.

Because we don't take our political opinions as gospel. We're really. We're wary of advancing those political positions in a spirit of.

As an act of imposition, but because we will the good for our neighbors, we offer what we have in a spirit of loving service. There's just a fundamentally different. Different posture that. That we bring. And so, so, yeah, posture is such.

An important thing, and gentleness and politics seems like. Almost like a misnomer or an oxymoron, like military intelligence.

But talking with Pete Wehner, and he actually said he was talking to someone where they were. They. He was challenging them on their stance and their. Their posture.

Yeah.

And they said, we felt good doesn't work anymore. Good doesn't work anymore. That's the. That's the mindset that we're facing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And how do we. And this is a. A bigger question with several different parts to it. Number one, how do we be able to speak truth and love? Gentleness.

Yeah.

And respect.

Yeah.

Two, it's hard not to go into enemy mode.

Yes.

As Jim Wilder mentions, there's even different kinds of enemy mode. And how we dehumanize the person around us.

And you even mentioned just a few moments ago, where rather than just simply disagreeing, we call something evil. However, biblically, there are things that are evil. How do we.

How do we navigate this minefield where we want to be gentle, we won't want to dehumanize, and we have to beware of those who call evil good.

Yes.

How do we go about that?

Yeah. So. So. So right. Just on that last part, I think what I said was we're more. More willing to call people evil.

So not things that people do evil, but people evil, than to say that they're wrong. And so I just want to. I think that's important. I do think that there's context in which might be necessary to refer to human beings as evil.

Like, I'm open to that, but I think that is what we need to be especially cautious about. Not about calling things or. Or circumstances or things that transpire evil.

Well, I was saying, how do we navigate the minefield?

How do you. Truth in love. Yeah. How do you speak.

You answered the question about evil, and I'm actually very glad that you put that nuance where you Said, because I have heard people say, oh, you know, their actions are evil, but they're not evil. No, biblically, that's not true. Because there are certain parts where Jesus goes, lie.

I mean, liars, fornicators, they are considered inseparable from the action that they commit. But that requires a very nuanced view and not the dehumanization in the process.

Again, you're loving them, calling them to account in the middle of this, how do I become something? I gotta be careful of who I'm becoming in this process. And how do you, though, remain gentle and not go into enemy mode?

It's a good question. You know, I think what is astounding to me, though, I think that there are. There are reasons for it.

If we can't figure out how to do this in politics, I don't know how we're. How we're figuring it out in other areas of life.

I have a chapter in my book on gentleness, and I talk about some of the reasons why people think gentleness in politics is not viable. And I spent a lot of time talking about anger.

And this has perhaps been the most surprising, striking thing about the reaction to the book, which is people really do think they need anger, particularly in politics. They are worried about what they would do without anger and without particularly the cultivation of anger.

There is very significant teaching in scripture and church fathers and just history about particularly the cultivation of anger. And I have found it's one thing.

I had the opportunity to speak on Capitol Hill to over 100 congressional staffers, and I knew this was going to be difficult for them because they're. They're thinking, they're hearing me talk about our overestimation of what we think we could do with anger.

And they're going, okay, but I'm going to go back to the office and my boss is going to ask where the press release is. And my boss has a very particular sense of what makes for a good press release. And that's a pastoral issue.

I want to, like, want to walk people through that. That is not surprising to me.

What's been surprising to me are people that don't have political jobs, whose political responsibility primarily consists of being a citizen who push back very strongly against this notion. They'll say to me things like, how am I supposed to get anything done in politics without anger?

And I'll ask them, could you give me a specific example of what you are seeking to get done in politics, that you think anger will help you achieve it? And usually the conversation peters out. I I'm, I genuinely want to learn more and, and get more to the root of this.

Like it's, it's one of the threads. And when you write a book, you think, I'll never write another book again. I've said everything I have to say.

But then you talk about the new book and there are all these threads and you go, yeah, maybe, maybe that this is one of those threads. I very genuinely want to, want to hear from individuals who don't have a political job. I understand those dynamics.

There is a sort of anger can help you raise money, all that. But for the individual Christian in particular, what is it?

What do you think you are accomplishing with anger that you couldn't accomplish without it?

A big part of why we can't speak the truth in love in politics, why we feel like we need to use means that are not consistent with the faith, is because we do think politics is sort of cordoned off from God. We think that faithfulness is what you do in your personal life. But when I go to my workplace, look, there's a bottom line.

And when I go to politics, really the way this is Willard's primary, this is Willard's primary concern about political life, which is that politics sets up a kind of pseudo reality that is not determined by morality but by the will of the people. And so if the will of the people is such that it runs counter to moral knowledge, and if you are not very thoughtful about the fact that you're.

That politics is not a primary reality, then it really messes with people's epistemological sort of sense of what's real or not.

And so you'll see this, you'll see when laws change, I mean, just to use an example, on same sex marriage, when the laws on same sex marriage changed, I mean, it was like night and day.

You watch Maryland, for instance, when Maryland passed same sex marriage, you pull same sex marriage three months, six months before, Maryland passed a law legalizing same sex marriage. And then you look at the poll six months after, and drastic changes. Well, did anything change about the moral questions involved?

Did anything change about. No, no. What changes? That.

The, the, the, the, the, the sort of philosophical force of the law sort of led a lot of people to say, well, this is reality now. Like, this is what my, this is what my faith or my convictions. And of course, people were coming at the question from a whole range of sources.

A lot of them weren't thinking theologically at all. But, you know, and so it is very hard to speak truth in love. In politics, if you are concerned that every utterance.

I actually was just doing an event last week and someone said, well, look, I'm concerned if I, and of course I'm paraphrasing, but not too strongly here.

Someone said, well, look, I'm concerned if I grant, if I grant that my uncle who has bad political opinions has a point, isn't that going to help the other side? And I just said, help me understand. You're talking about a conversation in your home with your uncle. This isn't on cable news.

Your uncle's not a sitting United States senator. And they're like, yeah, yeah. And I go, just maybe your primary moral obligation in that exchange.

It's not how in some like vast metaphysical, like political universe, how you granting your uncle with, with the political opinions you disagree with, how he has a point might play into the, the broader national political struggle. But, but people just, Politics becomes an all sort of consuming map for people's sense of reality.

But, but Christians have a different map of reality. We have a different map of what is real.

And if we're not willing to bring that into all of life, then we are going to find significant parts of ourselves. And because ourselves are not divided, we're going to find ourselves to be undiscipled.

We are going to find that we have not taken off the old self with its practices.

But because we have said there are areas life in which the Lord is not Lord, in which Jesus's way does not necessarily hold up, that is going to have profound effects for our soul. Let me just say one more thing. And we probably don't have time to sort of get into it.

There are things that you might decide for your household that you would not decide in a particular kind of society. And politics like ours, this is the contingent nature of our politics. That does not mean that you don't think that Jesus's way holds up in politics.

That means that you just recognize that politics is its own. You're applying Jesus's way and a discernment of scripture in the political realm.

So I don't want folks to hear me say, well, that, you know, if, if we, if we are believing that Jesus way holds up in all of life, that means that we have the same answer on, on what we do for our, in our own lives, in our households, in our families, at our workplaces, as we would for politics. No, now, now we're getting into sort of political theology questions.

And, but so I just, I just wanted to state that so that there's no sort of no sort of confusion. Confusion there.

Well, when you're talking about different spheres and I, I subscribe to God's made a variety of different spheres theologically and I think each one has their own rules of operation that when they're operating in, in a certain way that they enable the flourishing of the gospel in society within that. And, and that gets into a lot of different other theological questions. Exactly.

I'm sorry to open up the can.

Of sort of can of worms, but.

Yeah, yeah.

Which, I mean, with Kuyper, I think he was, I think he was right, but I don't necessarily think how it' he's been applied and I think people are trying to figure that out. I mean, how do we go about that? What does that look like?

I do know one thing, and as I've talked to so many different people that, and you hit really this right at the very beginning when you said that there is no such thing as a moral vacuum. Everyone has a moral ecology and everyone has some type of character.

And I see that being brought out and people are starting to see now that you can't just do the job without some type of moral formation or moral, as David Brooks has said, the moral ecology. He also mentioned that in the Road to Character as you're going through that. Who, who are we becoming in the middle of this?

And it's not a zero sum game.

And what is very interesting is that as Christians have vied for some of these major issues, and I can't, I can't say this definitively across the board because it's much more of an armchair assertion, but they haven't become very pretty people in the midst of that.

And, and I think this is why you're seeing people that are, they're, they're being removed from church because they haven't seen the necessity of church as a formative aspect of.

But they retained some of their beliefs and in some respects they've traded church for the political arena in which that moral formation might be worked out. These are all rather complex issues and I'm grateful for your voice to contribute to the conversation. We don't lack nuance very well.

And of course, someone who's in politics and has made a career of that, there's a lot of different nuances you bring to the table that our audience is very unfamiliar with and is very foreign to. And it does, as, as you mentioned, the exhausted majority, another thing to have to think through.

And, and it's like, well, how many things do I have to think through? I have enough Time just going to the grocery store and figuring out what I'm going to purchase, you know, for a frozen pizza.

It's like, I got a million choices right here. And. And I know that sounds silly, but.

No, no, no. I think it's real.

Yeah, it is real. Because I do think that we. We are looking to.

I don't want to say punt our moral responsibility, but it sure seems like that to those who are the more confident and assertive and outraged personalities that already agree with moral frameworks that we already have rather than the Scripture itself.

And this is why I think works where we have to say, well, how has not only the Scripture formed us, but how have we formed the Scripture and how we understand it? And I think how we frame the Scripture, how we have seen it formed over time. And theological movements have consequences.

Andrew Lynn wrote in his book Saving the Protestant Ethic, which came out with Oxford, how different theological positions actually have an effect on economics and then. And that greater involvement of society and actually affects the political realm.

And I know that these are heavy subjects for our people and our audience that are out there, but they are very smart people and they are. They are people that take this stuff very seriously. They wrestle through this. I do know that your time is really limited.

I am so grateful for the conversation. I feel like we have only. We have had a sprinkling. I mean, we. We're very. I hate to say we are very Presbyterian in the discussion, not Baptist.

A little bit of sprinkling. Not too much Duncan in this. But it would be great to continue this conversation.

I'd like to have you on again to help us is we're all trying to navigate the complexity of this. And we didn't even talk about attachments, which I think was actually a key thing that came out with Willard later. How much are attachments?

And the greater the attachment actually affects our understanding of these issues and actually influences the direction of them, quite honestly, rather than just it being out of nowhere.

I know that Wilder had actually talked to Willard near in the last year of his life, and he talked about, really, our attachments dictate so much of how we view and what we see. And the stronger the attachment, the greater the influence. So people don't always come at truth in a vacuum.

We all need to know how to categorize it and relate it to something as well as what it opposes. But I'm grateful for this conversation. And while it may not be, all of our political problems and positions are not solved by this conversation.

So we didn't knock anything out of the park. But I do hope that we got on base. So if we got on base with this political conversation and some we help someone else say, hey, I might have walked.

I got four balls out of this conversation. Well, at least you got on base.

Well, yeah, I mean, I'd say that we do ourselves some real favors by not swinging for the fences in politics every time we go up to bat. I would say that's, that's part of the problem.

Yeah, yeah, we are swinging for the fences and we make every election the most important election.

Most, the most.

And I laugh. My grandmother used to have a collection of buttons and she loved political buttons.

She had this whole wall filled and every one of them, you know, it was just. This is the biggest one. This is the biggest one. This is the biggest one. And not, not to downplay it, they do have a role in it.

And we don't know exactly the ramifications.

We don't know what's come to happen in the future, as you've already mentioned, with Bush, you know, to being domestic and then he's dealing with all this foreign policy which came out of nowhere. We have no idea what issues face us.

But we do know that even though we are talking about politics, that our God is bigger and that he is going to accomplish his will. And it's messing on this side of eternity.

We do our best humbly, trusting in him, going to the word of God, continuing to pray, continuing to dialogue, continuing to love even our enemies, and hoping that we, we live in such a way as to be a light where we are so that the glory of God might be with us. But one final thought vers from you. We often like to ask our our guests to conclude with a one concluding thought that we call a water bottle.

We are Apollos watered. So we want to give people one concluding thought they might be able to sip on within this this week.

What would you say that would be for our audience?

Yeah, I think the Christian faith has a great deal to offer our politics in terms of what our politics should do, should be.

But I've become convinced that in this moment, the greatest gifts Christianity might have to offer to our politics is, is in reminding our politics what it is not. And so the encouragement that I'd, I'd offer is especially for pastors these next six to eight months.

You may need to do triage, but they are really and truly the worst possible time that you could be seeking to form a political theology among the people you serve. And so do the triage as necessary.

The medium and long term effort, similar to the faith and work movement and the aims of that movement are over time, how do we help Christians place politics not as outside or above the life they're living with Jesus, but as within that stream. And it is when we do that that we will have healthier churches. Christians will be living more integrated lives.

And I believe, because I believe spiritual formation is central to civic renewal, that we'll have a healthier politics and public life and healthier communities because of it.

Well, Michael, thank you for that concluding thought. Thank you for the conversation and the contribution of the book to the conversation. I thoroughly appreciated it.

I would recommend it to people to help you really walk through and try to navigate this. He breaks it down in different categories.

From someone who's not outside of politics, who's been intimately involved in it at various levels, even very high levels of society, to be able to see it and to walk through it. We need this type of help to help us categorize, to understand how we can be faithful in our engagement.

And it's not always as quick and easy as we think. So it's, it's. And it's worth the effort to be able to engage in it. But again, Michael, thank you for coming on. Apollos watered. Thank you.

Great to be with you.

Perhaps the greatest gift that Christianity can offer our politics today is to simply remind it of what it's not. It doesn't save, it doesn't transform. It's a tool. And that's an important thought to keep a hold of.

And it's a thought, honestly, that is loaded with implications, implications for the church and for society as a whole. For so many, politics has become everything because they have essentially jettisoned God from their worlds.

Honestly, for the secular person, that makes sense on a certain level because they.

Don'T have anything else.

But not for the Christian. Because as a Christian were to dig down deep to get to know people, to love them, to sacrifice, to serve, and even to suffer in order to win.

For most of us, if we're very honest, though, we prefer not to do any of those things and simply let our politics do it for us.

And when we do that, we actually become guilty of idolatry because we put something important, even good, into a position that it should not have to function, a role in a role and in a way that it shouldn't function.

And we wonder why anger and underhanded tactics become the norm, because we have forgotten that we are formed in big and small ways by the things we elevate to the most important things in our lives, to the things we worship. Christians are supposed to be formed by Jesus, to look like him in our daily lives, to proclaim his message and to live by his ways.

We don't always get it right, but that's what we're supposed to be striving for. Michael's book is attempting to do just that. And full disclosure, there are policy issues in which I disagree with Michael.

There are places where, where I agree with Al Mohler, even though I have disagreements with him too. And that's kind of the point. Christ must come first. But the way that we do, our political calculus may not always align perfectly.

And as Christians, we have to challenge one another, to be sure. But we also have to offer grace and work to understand why a person makes the decisions that they do.

More importantly than our political policy positions, we need to show the world around us a better way. And that's the way of Jesus.

We need to ask ourselves, seriously, do we actually believe that he is the Lord of all, or are we keeping our politics separate? Because if it's the latter, where is right? We will smuggle that way of thinking into lots of other areas.

And we can't be surprised when the world around us doesn't believe us about Jesus. I would encourage you to read the book.

It will challenge you, it will make you think, and hopefully you will finish it and be a bit more formed in the way of Jesus for having done so.

We long for the church in America to be renewed, and that requires rethinking what we're doing and why, reimagining it and light of today's cultural challenges and then redeploying, knowing that the gates of hell cannot withstand Christchurch moving forward. But we can't do this without you. We can't do this without your prayers. We can't do this alone. We need God to be a part of every single part of this.

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People are saying, this is awesome. Why haven't I ever heard this before? This is what I've been looking for. This is exactly what we need right now.

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And may the Lord our God bless you for being obedient to him. I want to thank our Apollos water team for helping us to water the world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Water.

Stay watered everybody.