#246 | Building Unity Amid Polarization: Calling You Deeper Than Media Headlines with James Davison Hunter, Pt. 1

Welcome to those who Serve the Lord, a podcast for those at the front lines of ministry.

You've given your life to serve, but what happens when the well runs dry?

If you've felt the weight of leadership, the tension between tradition and change, or the challenge of staying faithful while engaging culture, you're not alone.

I'm Travis Michael Fleming, founder and executive director of Apollo's Watered, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

I've been at the front lines for over 25 years, leading churches to become thriving Testament testimonies of God's grace.

I've wrestled with the same questions you're facing, and I've seen how God brings renewal even in the hardest seasons.

Each week we have conversations with pastors, theologians, and cultural thinkers as we seek to equip you to lead well and stay rooted in Christ amid shifting cultural tides.

So grab your coffee and listen in, because your faith matters, your work is not in vain, and the Lord is still with you every step of the way.

Foreign.

Welcome to those who serve the Lord.

It's been a while.

It's been a while since we've had any interaction, and I am so grateful to have you tune in to our show today.

And there are so many things, things that are going on.

There have been so many changes that I want to let you know about.

So I'm going to take about five minutes here to just help you understand more about what God is doing, what he's led us to do.

And if you don't want to hear any of that, just skip to the conversation and you can hear my conversation with James Davidson Hunter.

But here's a few things on the horizon.

You've already heard about the name change.

We've gone from Apollo Water as a podcast to for those who serve the Lord to help better hone our mission and serve you better.

And the ministry name, as you heard before, is Apollo Watered, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

This simply comes because people were asking, what do you do?

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

They love the content, but they didn't know how to categorize it.

So we're helping you put those categories into place.

We're really doing cultural apologetics and how to be a disciple.

In the middle of this world.

We're going down deep, understanding what we call the deep structures of a culture and how they operate and actually influence us how we live today.

Because we know as a leader, as a person who's out there trying to do their best for the glory of God.

You don't have time think through all these things.

You don't have time to do deep dives in all this.

That's why we're here, because we want to help you so that you can fulfill the purpose that God has for you.

And one of the ways we do that, of course, is with the podcast.

But we have another resource that's available to you, and it's one that I'm very excited and proud of.

It's my book that just came out in January, and it's called Blueprint Kingdom Living in the Modern World.

And it's a small, but it's a very impactful book that actually unpacks how the Great Commission, the Great Commandment, and the Great Community are inseparably woven together.

You can't take one away from the other.

It's not just a call to believe.

It's a call to belong, to love, and to go.

So whether you're seeking clarity on your role in God's Kingdom or looking for fresh inspiration, know that Blueprint will help guide you in living out your faith with purpose and passion.

So I would encourage you to stay tuned for more on that that now on to today's conversation and allow me to give an introduction to this conversation, because this is one of the most favorite conversations I've ever had during and doing this show.

It is with James Davidson Hunter, a man that I had heard about for years, and I was just the opportunity to read his book, to have a conversation with him was really just one of the highlights of my time doing Apollo's Water and leading this organization.

But James Davidson Hunter is really the man for our time.

He is the E.F.

hutton of commercial of sociology.

You know, there was this commercial in the 80s that said when E.F.

hutton speaks, you know, everyone would stop and listen.

He's that way when it comes to sociology.

When he speaks, people stop all over and listen because really he is about understanding the deep divisions that we face today in our culture, whether that's politics, whether that's our social issues, cultural issues, and even within the church.

I, I I mean, why are so many Christians disagreeing with one another?

Like I, I have friends all throughout Christianity, in the United States and around the world.

And I am amazed at how each one of them are responding to the issues that we see going on in our culture.

And that leads me to a question.

How did we get here?

Is it just our personal preference?

Are we not understanding the word of God?

What are the cultural factors at work?

And as followers of Jesus, how do we foster a vision of community and solidarity when everything is so polarized right now.

And what does it mean to be salt and light in the middle of it all?

I mean, what does it mean?

So to help us address these questions, we're going to be speaking to the one of the most foremost and I mean just amazing thinkers on culture, politics and faith, and that is Dr.

James Davison Hunter.

Dr.

So after you get done with my book blueprint, you go out and get James Davidson Hunter's book.

And they are two very different books.

Mine's coming in, it's under 100 pages.

His is like 300 and some pages.

But it is phenomenal.

I love this book.

I was riding all over it.

His scholarship has profoundly shaped how we understand the intersection of faith and culture.

And his insights are more relevant than ever.

He serves as the Labross Levinson Distinguished professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory at the University of Virginia and is the founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture.

And for decades he's been a leading voice on cultural change and how the church can engage faithfully in a fractured society.

This newest book, Democracy in Solidarity, examines the fractures undermining our democracy right now, whether that's expressive individualism, the erosion of trust, the loss of a Cheryl shared moral framework.

Dr.

Hunter doesn't stop at simply diagnosing the issues that are out there.

He offers a compelling vision for renewal through cultivating solidarity and recovering shared purpose.

And today on the show, we will unpack key ideas from his book exploring the historical and cultural forces shaping our current moment and what it looks like for the church to be a redemptive presence in a divided world.

And I want you to pay attention to a few things, to some terms, the deep structures of culture.

Okay?

Get that in your mind because it's very important.

Later on, the hybrid enlightenment and how underlying beliefs of how the world works actually shapes whether we realize it or not, how we understand following Christ and our place in the world today.

So whatever you're dealing with, this might help you understand it a bit better.

So whether you're driving, you're going for a run right now, or you're relaxing with your favorite beverage, get ready for a thought provoking conversation.

And as always, don't forget to like, share and subscribe.

To those who serve the Lord.

Let's dive in this conversation with James Davidson Hunter was recorded several months ago.

While the discussion remains relevant, please keep that in mind as you listen.

Well, let's move into your book, Democracy and Solidarity.

What was the reason behind you wanting to write this book?

When I was in my early 30s, I published a book called Culture wars, the Struggle to Define America.

And I did not invent that term.

And it was the unification between the Catholic south and the Protestant North.

And it was genuinely a culture war.

A lot of it took place.

The church was very much involved and other institutions as well, not least the schools.

Vague parallels, but enough to see the power of these cultural dynamics as they bore on politics.

And I wrote Culture wars because through most of the 20th century, the main political divisions were divisions over political economy.

These were divisions between corporations and labor unions, between business interests and working class interests.

They were mainly social and economic issues, class divisions.

And it was along this divide that the left and the right defined themselves the last third to last quarter of the 20th century, when all of a sudden left and right were now defining themselves not according to corporate or in the interests of political economy, but according to certain kinds of cultural issues.

And what catalyzed this for me was this moment when I read a story in the New York Post about a protest at an abortion clinic in midtown Manhattan where a group had gathered to Planned Parenthood clinic, I believe.

A group of evangelical and fundamentalist pastors were there, a group of conservative Catholic priests, nuns, and Amon senior were there.

And interestingly, maybe even most interestingly, there was a small contingent of Orthodox Jews and Orthodox rabbis who were there.

Now, if you know anything about Western history and its implications in society and politics, you cannot miss the important divisions between Christians and Jews and Protestants and Catholics.

Much blood has been spilled over these divisions.

And yet here, for the first time I had ever seen, they are standing there protesting together, locked arm in arm, getting arrested together and taken off and booked for breaking the law together.

And it sounds like it's the beginning of a joke, you know?

Right.

But what it meant was that these historically divisive divisions between Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Jews, were somehow less important because of a certain kind of cultural issue, that it was in fact bringing them together in ways that were even more important than the divisions between progressive and conservatives in their own tradition.

So as it turns Out.

I was doing a survey at this time on religious elites, media elites, academic elites, and I found that in fact, progressive Catholics, conservative liberal Protestants, and reform and secular Jews had more in common with each other than they did those on the conservative side of their own traditions.

Well, this is a historical novelty, and what it pointed to was something deeper than their own traditions.

And for me, in that book, it was the issue of cultural authority.

What the conservative votaries of these various traditions had in common was the belief that authority, moral authority, the authority determine right from wrong, good from evil.

What a good society is from a.

A corrupt society can be determined from authority that transcends this world.

It may be Torah, it may be the magisterium, it may be a literal reading of Scripture, but these are authorities that are transcendent to human experience.

On the other side of the cultural divide, there is the belief that authority is inner worldly.

Either it comes from science or it comes from one's own subjectivity.

But this cleavage was in fact dividing these historic faiths in ways that were more important than the division between Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Jews.

And this is unprecedented, historically unprecedented.

And it was in fact, playing out not on every single issue, but on most issues, certainly on the issue of family values, sexuality, abortion, what is taught in school, and so on.

Just an extraordinary.

An extraordinary historic phenomenon.

And again, it was eclipsing any of the political and economic divisions that had divided America through most of the 20th century.

So I knew I was onto something and I was trying to make sense of that.

So for the last three decades, I've continued to delve deeply into this.

And this book basically is trying to address the same kind of issues, certainly the crisis of democracy, but from the other side of the coin.

The founders of the American Republic all anticipated.

They saw it themselves, but they anticipated faction, they anticipated the pluribus.

They knew that there was diversity, but they also, perhaps more aspirationally than in reality, but they at least aspirationally believed in an unum, that there was something that would bind them together, that would provide cohesion across the factions and in spite of them.

So this book looks at the roots of.

Of America's political crisis from the vantage point of the glue, the adhesive, the unum, the thing that is what has held us together for the last 250 years, or at least until the present.

And why it is that adhesive no longer seems to have traction anymore.

Why it is that in fact, the are factionalizing has now become a polarization that sees no end.

And where There just seems no hope of bridging those divides.

You know, just a very quick historical reference.

The culture war in Germany took place over the attempt to enforce, to create and enforce German unification.

It's about an unum.

What's going to bind it together.

And at that point, Protestantism was liberalizing very rapidly and secularizing.

So would Germany be Catholic and more conservative, or would it be Protestant and more progressive?

And again, issues of moral authority were at stake, religious authority, the authority invoked by governments to wield law.

So those kinds of things are similar to what's gone on today.

So I update the culture wars argument and other things that are going on and sort of lead try to trace where we've gone to the present, where I think we are in a genuine existential moment of American democracy.

What if I told you that the Christian life isn't just about what we believe, but about how we love, live and lead in the world?

Too often we separate our faith into categories.

There's loving God over here, making disciples, building community.

And we don't often see how they all fit together.

Well, that's why I wrote Kingdom Living in the Modern World to show how the Great Commandment, the Great Commission, and the Great Community are meant to be woven together into a single, powerful way of life.

This book is a roadmap for living out God's full vision, where loving God and neighbor fuels our mission.

Discipleship leads to deep community, and the church becomes the living picture of God's kingdom on earth.

If you're tired of fragmented faith and ready to live with clarity, purpose, and impact, grab your copy of Blueprint Kingdom Living in the the Modern World today.

It's time to stop compartmentalizing and start living the whole gospel.

Available now on Amazon.

And you mentioned the deep structures of culture, something that.

I use that terminology after reading your book and talking to others about it.

But I want to stop for a moment right there, because the deep structures are something that really does permeate everything that you talk about.

What are these deep structures of culture and why are they so important for our understanding today?

There are lots of scholars who have gestured toward the deep structures.

People like Peter Berger, my mentor, spoke about the taken for granted.

I mean, many, many scholars have gestured in these directions, but no one has expounded on it.

And I'm in the back burner.

I've got this theoretical work that will, I hope, expound on it, but I felt like I needed to get my hands dirty with an empirical to make sense of this.

So the story is this that most people, when they think of culture, think of culture in terms of its artifacts.

They think of it as music, art, food, clothing.

They think about architectural style.

These are artifacts of culture.

And, you know, when you read the New York Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times, there'll be the culture beat, you know, and it's about these artifacts of culture.

Now, one level down, people will see, will talk about culture as beliefs or ideas or values or ideals.

And those, too, are part of culture.

And they are, again, artifacts, because we can talk about them, we can extol them, we can destroy them, we can critique them, but they're manipulable, just like these other artifacts are.

But what about that part of culture that's invisible, that is latent or implicit?

You know, it's a overused metaphor.

But this picture of culture as an iceberg, people use the iceberg metaphor for other things.

But most of what people think of as culture is the tip of the iceberg, when in fact, most of what culture is is the 90% that's below the surface, that's not seen, that's not describable.

It just is.

It just.

It's there.

And it provides the infrastructure, provides the foundations for what you do see.

So I describe the deep structures of culture as the implicit order underneath the apparent order of things, the implicit order under the apparent order of things.

Another metaphor that I will use is the metaphor of weather and climate.

We talk about the weather in the Southeast.

Right now we are experiencing a heat wave.

Hopefully a week from now it will be cooler.

Today it's sunny, but tomorrow it may rain.

And we dress according to our reading of the weather.

Most of what culture is, though, is not the weather, it's the climate.

And obviously there's a relationship between the weather and the climate, but the climate is something that's not apparent.

You don't see it.

So you don't know what really to look for.

But most of what is interesting historically about our culture and certainly our cultural moment are the climatological things that are happening.

People say, well, you know, culture's changing all the time, and if we just do this, we do that, we can change the culture.

You know, this was, you know, in an earlier book I wrote to change the World.

This was the view of people like Chuck Colson and many others who just say, well, look, we just need to.

We just need to convert enough people or change their minds about politics, and we just need to get our people into the White House and the Supreme Court and all will Be well, they're talking about the weather, they're not looking at the climatological things, and as a consequence, they're not understanding these more profound currents.

This is why I would say, and again, just as just a quick example, everyone on the left is scared to death of Donald Trump.

But Donald Trump is a symptom.

Given the weather and climate and my view of the nature of the climate, if Donald Trump didn't exist, he would be invented because the climatological elements of our culture are such that they evoke someone like a Donald Trump.

So it's really important to understand that distinction.

And that distinction is again, in scholarship, it is gestured toward, but it's never unpacked.

So what do I mean by culture at that deeper level?

There's a lot one can say about it, that every institution, family, a church, a business, a government, a corporation, a philanthropy, a nation state, every institution contains within it an implicit.

That's a really important word, an implicit understanding of what's real, how we know what's real, who is a member of the community and worthy of its protections, how we treat other people and where our institution, our society, whatever it is, is going, our family, what is the direction.

In more academic terms, this is to say that every institution, every society, every civilization contains within it an implicit metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, ethics and teleology.

Even if we're not aware of it, and 99.999% of all human beings aren't aware of it.

It's all implicit.

But we all have that understanding.

What's real, how we know it's real, who is a person and worthy of the protections of the community, how we treat other people and where we're going as a collective.

That's the structure part.

So the deep part is the implicit part, the stuff that's invisible.

The structure part is the organization of our culture around those very fundamental proto philosophical questions.

And again, I can't emphasize enough.

Non intellectuals, non scholars, non college educated people operate with answers to those questions just as much as anyone else does.

On a construction site, those questions are answered.

How you treat people, who is part of the group, what's real, how you determine it, and where our project's going.

Everyone does this.

So to understand the deep structures of our political culture and of the culture war itself, one has to unpack those.

Things, which isn't easy to do, as you said, because they're implicit.

We don't know those rules until in some way someone violates them or challenges them.

That's exactly Right.

I was trying to illustrate a little bit on my lay level sociology to a Sunday school class.

And I said, culture.

I gave a very brief description.

I said, this is just how we do things.

We don't even think about it.

And I said, you don't know it.

I said, like going to a wedding and the mother of.

Or the groom's mother shows up wearing a white dress.

And all the women already know that there is an insult that has gone on right there and no one needed to say anything because it's all under the surface.

There's no written rule about it.

It's just how it is.

And in our culture today, we are seeing challenges to the deep structure, because you're seeing a challenge from a variety of different places.

Now, this is where I find your work.

Just.

I'm going to geek out for a little bit.

So those that are listening, just stay with me.

You talk about all these deep structures.

You talk about how they were formulated at the very beginning in this grand experiment with many of the Founding Fathers having a Judeo.

I mean, a Christian view of the world with a common destiny, a common view of progress.

There are all these commonalities that were there and that were shaped.

But you also call it.

I thought your term was very interesting because you carry it on throughout the book.

And I want you to define it.

The hybrid enlightenment.

Yes.

Right.

So discuss that for a moment because some people are like, I'm having a hard time following.

They want to know what all this means.

They're like, I have enough time with enlightenment.

Now you've added a descriptor to it.

What is the hybrid enlightenment?

And how has that really influenced us?

Or how is it influencing us right now?

So let me take a concrete example, just to begin with, and then I'll sort of work back.

And by the way, geek away.

You just threw gas on a fire, brother.

So, you know, even today you will hear people say, america is a Christian nation, especially out of the Christian community.

And then you will find many other people, secularists, who say, that's baloney.

America was a secular nation at its founding.

And back and forth, they go back and forth.

It's Christian.

No, it's not.

It's secular.

No, it's not back and forth.

And, you know, historians of the stature of a Mark Noll, you know, brilliant historians George Marsden and Harry Stout and others have written about this to try to make these things clear.

The answer is, well, it was both.

It's both.

It's not one or the other.

So now let me Step back.

We know that the great democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries were the offspring of this cultural and intellectual revolution called the Enlightenment.

Western Europe, North America went through this intellectual cultural revolution called the Enlightenment.

And the offspring of it, the political offspring of it, was this great democratic revolution throughout the nations of Western Europe and North America.

But the Enlightenment in France produced the guillotine.

It produced the Reign of Terror.

In England, there was warfare beforehand, but it was.

By the time democracy took shape, it was milder.

In Germany, there was the Colter Kampf, but in the United States, it was what historians would call a moderate Enlightenment.

Why was it moderate compared to France?

Now, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were very partial, and Benjamin Franklin very partial toward France, much more secular people.

But the reason why it was moderate was because it was syncretic.

Think of in the United States, our public culture is like a reservoir that had streams that fed it, and some of those streams.

One of those streams was classical Republicanism.

Another stream was Lockean individualism.

Another stream was Calvinism itself.

Jonathan Edwards was an Enlightenment figure, but also an orthodox Calvinist preacher.

But he was a man of his times, wrestling with the ideas of his age.

And of course, 90% of the population of the colonies at the time of the founding came from England and Scotland and Wales, but mainly England.

Certainly its leadership was English, and therefore.

And a lot of it was the dissenters who had descendants of the dissenters in New England.

They were the Congregationalists, you know, they were Presbyterians, they were Methodists.

Anglicans, of course, had a foothold in Virginia and some other.

Other states.

But that was all part of what blended into this kind of cultural stew.

It was a syncretic Enlightenment.

It was a hybrid of many different things.

During the Revolutionary War, the British feared the Calvinist ministers maybe more than anyone else, because they were preaching revolution from the pulpit.

The interesting thing about this hybrid Enlightenment was that it was opaque.

It was opaque.

So even a Thomas Paine, who is probably the most forceful of the kind of representatives of the French Enlightenment, in his pamphlet Common Sense, Common Sense was preached from the Calvinist pulpits all over the colonies, in part because Paine was drawing from biblical imagery, biblical stories, biblical language, biblical symbolism all over the place.

It resonated with.

They didn't need to know that that Paine himself was.

Was an atheist or a quasi atheist, because, again, the language resonated.

It was opaque enough that people could read their own traditions within it.

Jefferson, of course, created the Jefferson Bible, in which he, with a razor blade, cut out all the references to the supernatural elements of the Gospels and left the ethical Jefferson was aligned with the ethics of Christianity.

And oftentimes the more secular revolutionaries were just as puritanical in their ethics as the most Calvinist of Calvinist preachers in their ethics.

It's really quite remarkable.

It was a blend.

So it wasn't just a secular nation at its founding and it wasn't just a Christian.

It was a hybrid.

And part of the success was that people from various traditions could read their own commitments, their own convictions in it.

And that was the common culture.

It addressed the issues of what is real, how we know it's real through reason, who is a person, a citizen, a rights bearing citizen, right, the ethics of responsibility to the new republic and the teleology.

This is a place in which all things are new.

Novos ordo seclorum.

Right.

Where for the Calvinists, Timothy Dwight believed that Jesus would arrive, come back to earth in America.

And yet Franklin and others, they believed a kind of secular eschaton was happening, a kind of human perfection in America.

But, but, but both were infused with hope.

That was the common culture that united people across differences and in spite of differences and provided the grounds for, for nation building through the end of the 19th, 18th century into the 19th and spilling into the 20th century.

It was a belief in the American project, but rooted in that kind of latent cultural infrastructure.

It is interesting how you talk about how they created this infrastructure and yet there were challenges to it.

Native Americans, slaves, where they didn't live up to the ideals that they themselves professed.

I mean even you have Thomas Jefferson writing about all men are created equal.

And of course being a slave owner himself and all the different pieces that are there.

But I thought it was very interesting when you said these challenges.

And again, Native Americans, African Americans, Mormons, I'm trying to remember them all at the top of my head.

Roman Catholics, Jews.

Yeah, they all challenged this idea, which made them, I mean, and they had to be dealt with in many different ways.

And this is where it goes into some of the not so good history that people don't want to remember.

Like the Trail of Tears.

My mentor was the first white man to ever be trained to be a Native American medicine man.

And so he would talk often because he was so sympathetic.

He had grown up around Native Americans and he would tell the story of Trail of Tears, just how tragic it really was.

And of course we all know slavery and the history that are there, but those things were massive challenges where they had to redefine this Experiment, and in some respect, as you said, draining the cultural reservoir from where we could find nourishment to deal with issues.

If I get the terminology, I'm trying to remember it off top of my head.

But you're finding today where we don't have that ability to draw from that anymore.

Why is that?

Well, the central historical part of this argument is that built into the hybrid Enlightenment from its.

From the very beginning, were in where contradictions.

Actually, I'm going to back up just a little bit.

Sure.

So I talk about democracy not just as a set of political institutions, but as the ideals, values, beliefs, but also assumptions that make all of it possible to begin with, but contained within it were contradictions to itself.

The hybrid Enlightenment provided the sources for an ethical vision.

It's a really important notion, an ethical vision for the reconstitution of public life.

Remember, they had all come from monarchies in which power was concentrated in the church or it was concentrated in the monarchy, and ordinary people didn't have a say in the ordering of the society around them, their communities.

So democracy was first and foremost an ethical ideal for the reconstitution of public life in a way that would allow for the flourishing of more and more people.

And that flourishing included freedom, equality, toleration.

These are radical ideas.

But there were contradictions built into that ethical ideal from the outset.

The promise of freedom, but then the denial of freedom to large swaths of the population, the promise of equality, political equality, but the denial of that to large swaths of the population, the promise of toleration, and yet the denial of toleration to all sorts of religious beliefs and convictions and so on.

So American political history can be told, as I try to tell it here, from the vantage point of how the nation has worked through these contradictions repeatedly, generation after generation, in ways that expanded the boundaries of freedom, expanded the boundaries of equality and of tolerance to include more and more, so that it would become, in Lincoln's term, a more perfect union.

Right, Right.

Agreement.

It almost always happens through conflict.

And we're now at a place sort of jumping ahead, where Christians who played a very powerful role in nation building from the beginning through the 19th century and of course, into into the 20th century, now find themselves, or at least perceive themselves as being on the outside of those boundaries.

They are now, at least from their perception, excluded.

So these contradictions of declaring all people free and equal and tolerable and so on are now playing out in ways in which, again, many evangelical Christians believe that they are now outside of those boundaries.

So we're still working through this process, or at least have been until the present, where I think from everything I am seeing, we are giving up that process.

We are giving up that process of doing the hard work, of working through those contradictions we have now.

I would say that we are in a moment where the culture war has essentially given up the commitment to talk to the other side.

And I would describe the culture war now as essentially warring hegemonic projects that the only way forward is for one side or the other side to win.

So it is now about the competing will to power.

There is no interest whatsoever in trying to persuade the other side.

The other side is unpersuadable.

So why even try?

Very few people have the stomach for it now, and very few organizations have the stomach for it.

So that's.

That's the situation I think we're in right now.

This long historical process of working through our differences toward a more perfect union is, Is being abandoned, I believe, by all sides.

And I think there's a lot of historical evidence and empirical evidence that suggests that this is the case now.

Wow, this was an amazing conversation.

Really incredible.

Rarely do you get an opportunity to talk to someone like James Davison Hunter.

He is for sure going to make you think and to see things differently.

I mean, he really zooms in and helps you to see all of the different pieces that make up who we are today.

He gives a great deal of understanding and I'm extremely thankful for his life and really his ministry.

Even though he's in the.

The academic, university world, not of Christian education, but he comes at it as a Christian and his scholarship is just really unparalleled.

And I'm extremely grateful to him.

Also, I want to encourage you with this.

There are three takeaways from this conversation that I want you to really think through.

Because the question that we all have is, okay, now, what do we do with it?

What do we do with this cool stuff that we're learning?

Because I.

I don't want you just to learn cool stuff.

I want you to apply it to your life.

So first of all, it's this.

This provides a framework and gives you language to understand how things got to be.

And that's extremely important because if we don't have the right categories, if we don't have the right language and our categories are insufficient, then we're going to keep just going down political rabbit holes all the time.

We need to be able to name things as they are if we're going to understand people, especially the people that we're leading, we need to know where they're coming from.

We also need to understand why we see the world as we do.

And I'm not talking about between a secular and sacred.

I'm not.

I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about between Christians, because we are all coming at politics from one perspective or another.

And it's not just about what you see on the news or your perception.

I mean, there's a whole host of beliefs underneath the surface that actually influence what we see and what we believe and why.

So number two, here's the second thing that I want you to have as a takeaway.

This calls leaders to model faithful presence, demonstrating how Christ leadership can foster solidarity and divided communities.

In other words, it's this.

You don't have the option of not being unified.

You don't have the option to not try to bring unity.

As a Christ follower, we are to make every effort to maintain the bond of peace, even with people that we politically disagree with.

Because again, there's so much under the surface that causes people to see one way or another.

And when you see churches dividing over these different things, it just causes the devil to have a heyday.

Now, I'm not saying we don't have divisions in that we have to stand for truth.

The question then is what are we standing for?

Is it actually for truth or is it our preference, our candidate?

We.

We have to feel that we're loyal to them or are we actually dividing over truth itself?

What's actually true?

So make sure that you model that God doesn't give us the option not to.

Thirdly, we have to prioritize character formation.

Character formation is massive.

It's not about just about winning.

It's about who we are becoming as we're going about our Christian life.

Are we becoming more and more like Jesus?

That's the question.

And are the people around us becoming more and more like Jesus?

Because if you're not prioritizing character formation, which is through the Word of God, right, it's through the proclamation of the Word of God.

But you have to make sure that you are proclaiming the word of God and not your politics through the Word of God.

Extremely important to make sure that you are.

Are really making sure that you are teaching what the Word says and prioritizing character formation.

And that means deep down, discipleship.

And there's some great resources that are out there with Alan Kreider in his book the Patient Ferment of the Early Church that gives practice into that but if you're looking to do something with your family or your children, I would recommend the New City Catechism.

Just it's a question and answer.

It's really easy to do, but it's a great tool to get you started because when you're asking those questions and answers, it starts to form you over and over again.

But if this conversation has encouraged or challenged you, and I really hope that it has, would you take a moment to share it with someone who serves the Lord right now, who needs this encouragement, who needs this language, who needs this conversation?

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I mean, other ways we couldn't do it.

We need you to help us.

I would also encourage you.

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And don't miss the next part of our conversation as we continue exploring what it means to serve the Lord and the tensions between democracy and the kingdom of God.

To learn more about Apollos Water the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics, Visit us@Apolloswater.org Make sure you get your copy of Blueprint on Amazon.

You will be glad that you did.

Until next time, stay Watered and Keep Serving the Lord thank you for joining us on today's episode of those who Serve the Lord, a podcast of Apollo's Watered the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

We trust that what you've heard has inspired and encouraged you in your walk of faith.

Remember, serving the Lord isn't just about what we do.

It's about who we are becoming in Him.

Whether in the small moments or the grand gestures, each step of service brings us closer to his heart.

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Until next time, may you continue to serve the Lord with joy, humility, and a heart full of his love.

God bless you.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off.

Stay watered, everybody.