Ep. 58 / Patriotism Without Idolatry: Discernment and Democracy with Tim Milosch (Part 1)

What if your faith shaped your politics without becoming your politics? In this episode we sit down with political scientist Dr. Tim Milosch to chart a wiser path through polarization, party identity, and the tug-of-war over what Christian engagement should look like in a democracy. 

Dr. Milosch maps the real reasons many believers cast their ballots—from personal affinity to single-issue tactics to full platform alignment—and shows how this clarity defuses stereotypes and opens space for honest debate. 

Over the course of the conversation we examine the label “Christian nationalism,” separating a narrow philosophical minority from the way some activists stretch the term to sideline mainstream pro-life advocacy and religious liberty. 

Tim also points to C.S. Lewis, who helps us draw the line between healthy patriotism and idolatry: a love of place can train us to love our neighbours, but this love can curdle when we sanctify the state or deny its faults. We apply such wisdom to hot-button issues like immigration, showing why proof-texts aren’t enough and why Christians need shrewdness as well as innocence. 

If fear has been your operating system in recent years, this conversation offers a reset: engage with charity, think with depth, and keep your political identity under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

If you'd like to learn more from Dr. Tim Milosch you can go to his website, listen to his podcast or follow him on social media. 

And please don't forget to share this episode and join the conversation on YouTube! 

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Transcript

Framing Faith And Politics

Brian Stiller 0:10

Hello and welcome to Evangelical 360. I'm your host, Brian Stiller. A major battle is raging today in the United States as to whether and how the country should retain a firm, profound link to the Christian faith. My guest today has an insightful perspective on this issue. He says that America will lose its sole purpose and moral legitimacy and egalitarian ethos if it sets aside the influence of the work and the words of Jesus on matters related to leadership. Or to put it more simply. He claims that the leadership model of Jesus the Nazarene is what makes liberal political systems possible. My guest today is Tim Milosch, a political scientist at Iola University in California. His teaching and research focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, political philosophy, and public life. Tim helps students and churches think about how to do Christian political engagement in a polarized culture. And thanks to you for joining me for this inspiring conversation.

Guest Introduction And Focus

Brian Stiller 1:25

A couple of things I'd like you to consider. First, would you share this episode with a friend? Also make sure you hit the subscribe button if you aren't already a subscriber. And then join me on YouTube. Suggest other people you'd like me to invite into conversation or ideas you have on other topics we might cover as we think about faith in our global world.

Tim Milosch 1:58

Thanks, Brian. It's great to be here.

Three Buckets Of Evangelical Trump Voters

Brian Stiller 2:28

And so far from what we think leadership should do in expression of the gospel? Can you help us on that?

Tim Milosch 2:37

Yeah, so I think one of the challenges for any Christian of any uh tradition is having to navigate being both a citizen of the kingdom of God and a citizen of their respective political system. Uh and particularly for Christian voters in liberal democracies, that means that you're often faced with uh having to weigh, um, having to weigh choices of who to vote for or not to vote for. You might not have very good choices either way. And so you kind of find yourself holding your nose and voting one way or the other. And so it raises an interesting question of uh how do we vote? How do we measure someone uh and compare uh how they vote? So where it comes to evangelicals uh voting for uh President Trump in the last couple of election cycles, I think it's important to bear in mind that they don't all vote for Trump for the same reason. I think that's one of the biggest misunderstandings about evangelical voters in America, that there's some monolith that is hungry for uh political power or to recapture some political prominence that they had in some uh bygone decade. And I think when you talk to um evangelical voters in America, especially those who vote for Trump, you're gonna find a lot of different reasons for why they vote uh for Trump. There, uh, and so there's I've kind of put it my for myself and for explaining this, is I try to put it into several buckets. There's what I call the Trump supporters, like they actually are personally drawn to Trump for a variety of reasons. Again, no one set of reasons. Um, there's the second bucket of voters who I would call tactical Trump voters. So they might have voted for Trump for uh a specific cause, uh, maybe a specific uh, and this is be particularly true of pro-life evangelicals who um have looked to President Trump in his prior administration's uh support for the pro-life cause and appointing um Supreme Court justices who helped to overturn Roe v. Wade. I think when you look at that, there's a very clear choice for uh evangelical voters who care very deeply about pro-life issues. They have one political party. In that case, they're not voting for Trump because he's Trump. They're voting for Trump because he's uh at the head of a Republican Party that supports pro-life issues when the other political party does not, emphatically does not. And so there's a very clear value distinction there. And so you vote for Trump tactically. Uh, and then there's a third group of voters who vote for Trump not because he's Trump, not necessarily because there's any one issue. Maybe there's multiple issues they're in favor of, but they're voting for political party, or as I put it, like they vote for a team. They look at in American politics, you don't just vote for somebody for president in particular because you think they're gonna make all the necessary changes and they're gonna do all a bunch of different things. You're also voting for a plat, a party platform they represent, and you're voting for a team of people that they're gonna put in positions of authority and decision making. And that case, when you look at President Trump's team, he's actually appointed a lot of faithful Christians uh in both administrations to do different things, and they've carried out their jobs, I would say, with a high degree of integrity, not without failures along the way, because we're all falling beans. But so I think um it's kind of a longer answer, but I think you when you look at evangelical voters in America trying to weigh whether or not to vote for uh Trump, you have to kind of look at in those three buckets. Am I talking to someone who is voting for Trump because he's Trump? Am I are they voting for uh Trump because uh he's on he's on the right side of a, or what they view as the right side of a particular issue, or are they voting for Trump because they are voting for the platform and team he represents in power? And I think that's a

Party Identity Versus Christian Allegiance

Tim Milosch 6:32

more nuanced and helpful way of looking at it because love him or hate him, uh, the word I've used to describe President Trump is he's an outrageous political figure. I mean, um, people who love him will say he's outrageous and that's why they love him. People who hate him say he's outrageous and that's why they hate him. Um, he is a unique political actor, um, but he is also only one actor. And as I tell my political science students at Biola University, where I teach uh quite a bit, the president might be the of the United States, might be the most powerful person in the world. They are not the most powerful person in American politics all the time. And I think that's important to bear in mind when you're contemplating evangelical support for Trump.

Brian Stiller 7:12

But there are some who say to be a Christian, to be an evangelical Christian, you must be Republican. So the the alignment of one's walk with Christ is locked up in a political ideology and a membership that sees no contradiction in Christ's call to make Christ supreme by making party dominant.

Tim Milosch 7:45

So at this point, and this is uh a very interesting point we've reached in American politics, yeah, in that I've actually um the argument is flowing the other way as well. There's the argument that you could make that says uh, you know, the Democrat Party is so antithetical to uh uh Christians and gospel values, especially specifically citing issues around pro-life, that um a Christian can't in good faith vote for Democrats. And so ergo they should vote for Republican. That's more or less the argument you just articulated. Uh, but then on the other side, you you have um you have progressive Christians, uh progressive evangelicals who will say uh something along the lines of the Republican Party is uh has prosecuted a global war on terror. Uh they have they're over-militarized, they've engaged in inhumane immigration enforcement policies like a Christian cannot in good conscience vote for, uh, vote for the Republicans or uh Trump who leads them, and so they must vote Democrats. So it we're in a strange state in America where uh it seems that the point you just made about Christian identity being wrapped up or made subservient to political party identity, uh has its advocates on both sides of the political aisle in a in a very unhelpful uh way. In this case, I think my criticism of those voices, particularly when they're uh individuals claiming um to be Christian and claiming to speak for a Christian perspective, is that um if your conclusion is that uh that there's only one right way to vote for the Christian, then you really should consider whether or not your uh party alignment or your ideological priors are um are outside the lordship of Christ in your life? Um the the effort every Christian voter needs to make, and the question every Christian voter needs to ask themselves when approaching an election, but even as they just navigate um political life, is is my political ideology, is my political identity, regardless of party affiliation, is it under the lordship of Christ or is it not? That's a challenge. It's a challenge that uh we're having to navigate, I think, um broadly in our churches. Um and it's uh yeah, I'll I'll kind of just pause it right there and just acknowledge that this is a hard challenge. It is a real thing. It is a bipartisan challenge in the sense that you know you can find the voices and advocates making that same argument just for different parties. And it's deeply troubling. So the way I frame it to my students every some every fall semester in my world politics class is we talk about ideology and the different classes of political ideologies. And I'll tell them, hey, look, ideology isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. It's okay for Christians to have political ideologies, but you must, as a faithful Christian, hold your ideology with an open hand, meaning it must be subservient to the authority

Ordering Convictions With Concentric Circles

Tim Milosch 10:56

of Scripture, it must be subservient to the Lordship of Christ in your life. And if it's not, you got that's that's something that you need to work on as part of your discipleship.

Brian Stiller 11:06

And so how do you discern your loyalty? Uh we have various sectors and layers of loyalty, people that we are loyal to, ideas, economic ideas, social political ideas, and then we have layers of politicians, of uh friendships, and so forth. So uh the reason I asked that question, I uh I'm here in Canada, and just the last few days of there's a few of us that get together on a regular basis for a spiritual retreat. And I found in that conversation some deep divisions, even among us who don't who who are Canadian and don't vote American. And I was thinking, if that happens to us, can you imagine what's going on around a Thanksgiving table where you have family of tight and and and and white or of uncles and aunts and so forth. And when this subject comes up, it must just rip families and churches and communities apart.

Tim Milosch 12:12

Yeah, I think um actually my encouragement to people has been to actually engage the discussion and and um and stay in that discussion because I think there's a a belief that because there's a risk of rifts, uh say for around the Thanksgiving table, that you just avoid the conversation. You avoid uh any discussion of values or politics or anything like that. And I that's not that's no way to uh that's no way to live, uh I would argue. Um that's no way to live in community with other people. That's actually not loving your neighbor, uh, to actually represent yourself faithfully and truthfully. Um, and and so I think now obviously how you represent yourself as a faithful believer needs to be done with with charity and needs to be done uh wisely. Uh you don't need to be abrasive, you know, you need to um actually seek to be patient and gentle and humble in those interactions, but that doesn't mean you don't say, this is what I believe to be true. And then if there's a disagreement over, you know, what the scripture teaches or something like that, there's a need to actually step into that conversation and explore, um, explore the ideas behind that, explore where that's coming from. You asked earlier, so how do you order those things? And one of my uh one of the elders at my church, uh, and actually one of my former professors, Bible professors at Biola, um, has a helpful way of doing it. I'm not going to quote him directly. I'm gonna paraphrase it because I might uh miss a layer here. The way he phrases it is to say, like, hey, at the center of you know our commitments uh that we must be unmovable and unshakable on are the revealed truths of scripture, the things we absolutely know to be true that God is calling us to do, what scripture speaks is explicitly on. The next layer out from that, so if we're thinking in concentric circles, out from that, you think about um you might think about values in terms of, okay, what are the traditions and values that our, you know, denomination, um, our uh community hold, that there might be some room for discussion, flex, and even good faith disagreement among Christians on. Uh, so you know, you can, and that, you know, that's why in the certainly in the Protestant tradition, there's a multiplicity of denominations. It's because of some of those value distinctives, but that doesn't necessarily mean the scriptural authoritative scriptural center is unmoved. So then there's a next rung out from that that, or a next set circle out from that where we talk about our um uh might be uh, I think he had four circles. I'm kind of breaking it down to three, but for sake of brevity. But, you know, scriptural authority, what's clear and explicit in scripture, values and traditions that might be defined denominationally or even civically. And maybe the third circle out are civic commitments, civic values. And then the fourth layer out is mere opinion, uh, just what we have. And his comment was that uh we're getting caught up, and this is a particular danger to Christians right now because it is so prevalent in American culture in particular, is that uh we're getting very caught up in making disagreements at the opinion level existential conflicts. And that's a problem. The existential conflict for a Christian is at that scriptural center. Uh that's where that conflict is. Um, but that means that we can have plenty of good

Rebuilding Shared Moral Cores

Tim Milosch 15:48

faith disagreements at the other levels, and we need to be able to distinguish between those.

Brian Stiller 15:52

So, do you suggest that in in conversation you actually laid out that grid so that people have a sense when they are interposing an outer layer as an inner layer?

Tim Milosch 16:06

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But um, so the the challenge is, of course, that um there aren't a lot of I'm not gonna say there's none, because I do believe there are, in fact. Um, the challenge is that one of the strains that's being felt in, I think, in American political culture, but even in American Christian culture at some level, is a sense of, well, what do we share with people in terms of values and moral commitments anymore? Um, certainly in a what people have referred to as the post-Christian uh West or post-Christian America, that sense of a mere core that's built on scripture certainly is not something that's held in common across a broad swath of America. Uh, and that that core, then, it is at disagreement. And so there is a real disagreement there between large uh chunks of of the American populace. Um, but among Christians, I think in a moment of disagreement as we're discussing, there need like before you get caught up in the opinion disagreement, you might want to like come back and like reaffirm that, hey, we actually still agree on the moral core here. And let's be clear about what moral core we're aiming for and what moral core we're about, and then we'll work our way back out to the um uh opinion disagreement. And and I do think though that sometimes the reason opinions, as you say, get kind of like projected back into the into the core is simply because some of those heuristics and rubrics um just aren't really taught. Like those types of helpful heuristics and rubrics aren't um aren't always part of um Christian teaching in the pulpit on Sunday morning. They're not um they're not something that's modeled in discussion between Christians uh and Christian thought leaders. And so Christian churchgoers, people in the pews, uh don't like they have no other model but what they see splashed across their screens on social media, and that's a incredibly unhealthy model.

Defining And Debating Christian Nationalism

Brian Stiller 18:18

Tim, let's let's take it to a a bit of a different level here. Uh there are names bandied about Christian nationalism being one. Which uh suggests by some interpretation that uh the Christian community, and I would say here, speaking more of the the evangelical Protestant and your conservative Catholic community are looking to use the levers of political power to insist that the values of Christianity become what are instilled in the policies and the and the governmental plans by using the levers of power, insist that in fact those become what America believes and does. Uh is this a fair reading of of that movement and is that a significant movement?

Tim Milosch 19:17

Yes, I think it's a fair reading of what could be called Christian nationalism. Um however, I think there are subdivisions within that. Uh, as you said, evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, etc. The political theology of Catholicism is so different from the political theology of Protestantism that I think that it would be hard to group those two together, those two wings of Christianity together, and say that's Christian nationalism. There's a tendency to do that in the American discourse. But my colleague at uh Regent University, Mark David Hall, he wrote wrote a fantastic book, which I highly commend um, Who's Afraid of Christian Nationalism? I've had him on My podcast. We've discussed this. I've discussed his work on other podcasts. He's done some really good work sifting through the different uh discussions and assessments of Christian nationalism in America. And his conclusion is that Christian nationalism as a category, as an idea, is overrepresented, you might say overhyped in the American discourse as a movement, that those who would actually ascribe to a philosophical Christian nationalism are actually a vanishingly small minority within evangelical politics. And that what we're actually seeing, especially among um uh opponents to Christian nationalism, especially in the um activism world, not just the academic world, but the activism world, is a desire to actually um it Christian nationalism has become a label to smear any conservative Christian engagement in politics. So to give an example here, some um some uh opponents of Christian nationalism, self-de-prescribed, self-proclaimed opponents of Christian nationalism have defined Christian nationalism as being any advocacy for um pro-life uh positions, any protections for the unborn, uh, any advocacy for religious liberty protections, like these are these are just, especially in the case of religious liberty, this is just advocating for First Amendment rights. This is very mainstream conservative positions in American politics. And yet they're trying to broaden the definition of Christian nationalism to suggest it that the percentage of Christians, especially evangelicals who were could be defined under this broad heading as Christian nationalists, uh, was like was the majority of evangelicals in America. And I think most evangelicals in America would hear that and be like, wait, what? I'm not a Christian nationalist because they don't see themselves that way. And it's an overbroad definition. So, yes, for those who are trying to actually work out a philosophy of Christian nationalism, there is that component, but it is a minority position in evangelical politics and Christian politics uh uh in America. I would say it's a small minority position. Uh, it the it's not a mainstream position. And I think we have to be careful, especially in the intra-Christian discussion, to not just accept whatever label and definition the proponents of that label um in the secular press and the secular academy are trying to prescribe because there's a definitional creep of the term that is essentially trying to force out any Christian advocacy in the public square. And I would argue that's uh that's not to the public good.

Brian Stiller 22:55

It's evident in the countries that I travel to that most countries, most Christians would like their country to be more Christian. Uh they would like the the virtues and the values of the gospel to ripple its way through the way people live, the way policies are made, the way government exercises its uh unique kind of powers. I guess the the the danger that

Patriotism, Idolatry, And C.S. Lewis

Brian Stiller 23:21

that we see in coupling our Christian faith uh with our nation is that we become uh we come to see our nation as the means by which God exercises his will in the lives of people, and that kind of nationalism becomes then a is exercised and brought in place by the legalization of one thing or another by its courts, by its governments, by its civic by its civic policies. And there's a challenge that people in other countries face as they live in societies that are different than the U.S., where you don't have a significant sizable minority who are evangelicals. They live in the face of other religious majorities or even Orthodox or Catholic majorities. And so they don't have this kind of political, kind of magisterial uh critical mass to muster up in the face of others what they believe as and and affirm that that in fact is the way their country should should operate.

Tim Milosch 24:39

Let me actually um uh suggest that that the idea that um I think there's because I think there's an error in a lot of Christian thought. It's in America, um and part of the discourse here in the US, but I hope it's a helpful discourse for our brothers and sisters in other countries, is let me suggest that the tension between seeking the good of whatever corporate entity that you're a part of, be it a nation, be it a city, be it a be it a ethnic community, be it a um, be it a a business entity, uh, you know, whatever, uh, if you are seeking the good of a corporate entity, and as a faithful believer, you believe that seeking that good runs through enacting and living out your faith, there's going to be corporate communal effects of living out your faith as a faithful believer. And along with that, though, become comes the tension, even the temptation to focus on that to kind of like merge the good of your community or your whatever corporate entity you're attached to. Merge the good of that entity with the quality of your Christian faith. Uh, and we call that idolatry. We call that uh we we warn believers away from that in the Christian tradition. Um, so I don't think this is a unique problem just at the political level. It is a temptation for Christians at every level of engagement in a society around them. And I think, and so I think we need to just be uh that's a tension we need to be aware of. It's a temptation we need to be aware of. What I don't think that means, though, is that somehow it would be better to just uh adopt uh adopt a um a distancing posture towards our political uh community.

Brian Stiller 26:56

Could you use an example, Tim?

Tim Milosch 26:58

I'll use this example uh from C.S. Lewis in his book,

Fear, Polarization, And Christian Wisdom

Tim Milosch 27:02

The Four Loves. He actually talks about patriotism in the opening chapters of the Four Loves, and he talks about the love of country as being uh something that can be a reflection of one's Christian faith, but can move to idolatry, or you know, in Lewis's uh view, a demoniac version of nationalism. And so he establishes this spectrum of nationalism uh in terms of how we love uh a political community. And his basic argument is that when it comes to lit loving the place you live for all the reasons that you love it, you love the people that you live with, you love the traditions that are that come with that place, uh, you love the the the physical space, the climate, the the uh the the towns, the home, the house you grew up in. Uh his are you know, his point is like that's kind of where a real, actual, embodied love of neighbor starts. You can't love your neighbor if you don't love the community you are existing in with them, uh, and seeking that good of that community. And I think Jeremiah uh speaks to that when he writes to Exilic Israel in Babylon in Jeremiah chapter 29, talks about seeking the good of the city where you are. Um, so I think Lewis is channeling uh Jeremiah here, but what that looks and sounds suspiciously like uh to some, uh especially um more anti-Christian secular perspectives in America in particular, is like, well, that's Christian nationalism, that's patriotism, because you're you're loving a particular community. And Lewis would say, yeah, that is a brand of patriotism, but that's a good form of patriotism because it enables, it's a means to an end of loving neighbor. It's a means to a Christian end. Where it becomes idolatrous or demoniac to use um Lewis's term, is when you love in you abstract that love of nation, that love of community to such a degree that you lose sight of the actual human individuals who make that up. When you love your country because it is the embodiment of heaven on earth, when you look when you love your country to the extent of it is the defender of democracy and must be like is the paragon of democracy, and you're unable to see the uh faults of your nation, and you believe every country must be made in your country's image. Well, now you're gonna become an imperialist expansive power that abuses other countries and other people. And and um to Lewis's point, like that's a that's a demoniac form of patriotism that is actually destructive. A healthy, godly form of patriotism, you might say, is gonna actually see that um believers can love their countries in uh in all their diversity and multiplicity of all the, you know, of all the nations.

Brian Stiller 30:00

But what you see at the at the ground level, uh at least from my observation, is that fear becomes a driving factor in both identifying the other person as being or the other group as being evil, and therefore what they're going to do to do to us is be destructive. So uh identifying another as evil or others as evil and using fear as the driving uh wedge that moves people to move from one side to the other in election or in admonition. What that becomes the the uh the operating system, and it just seems to me it's so far from the gospel as as um as to keep me as a Christian from even participating.

Tim Milosch 30:50

Yeah, I think that is a real concern. Um, and I think this is where uh, well, there's two things that um that come to mind as I hear you describe that um ground-level uh consideration. One is I think what you've just described is you know it's a reality in a lot of political communities. It's a challenge that a

Shrewd As Serpents, Innocent As Doves

Tim Milosch 31:10

lot of uh Christians uh face, especially when they're in liberal democracies and are called upon to vote on uh for leaders and parties and policies. Um because of that, I think that's a call for cultivating Christian wisdom in politics. Um that is a practice that is not well developed in a lot of evangelical thought and in a lot of evangelical churches. And if I um I and let me, I should probably give a little biographical background here. Um I grew up Catholic. Um, I spent my entire um youth in uh Catholicism, uh, only event only exiting and moving into Protestant evangelicalism in my uh early adult years, in my college years. Um, and so in as a transplant to evangelical Protestantism, um there are element there are there are things I look at uh in the evangelical tradition that uh surprise me. That I kind of um, you know, for example, for all the love of scripture and for the emphasis on the authority and inerrancy of scripture uh that evangelicals traditionally place on uh scripture and the desire to think biblically about issues, it surprises me sometimes at the shallowness of thinking through theologically and biblically, or thinking uh the yeah, the shallowness with which scripture is applied to politics, uh, such that we end up with a pretty shallow political theology in evangelical Protestantism in the U.S. When there's a rich, rich and tradition of political theology drawing. I'm sorry, what?

Brian Stiller 33:00

And we we grape pick, we pick what's suitable for the conversation.

Tim Milosch 33:04

And and that, and that actually doesn't help us. Uh so for example, um, in the US, uh, the immigration debate is a really good example of this. Um, you talk about immigration, you talk about uh, you know, what should what would a uh biblical Christian immigration policy look like? And almost invariably, uh advocates for a more uh liberal um uh immigration policy will just immediately default to the uh parable of the Good Samaritan, while advocates for a more restrictive uh immigration policy uh almost immediately default to uh think to looking at, say, Old Testament Israel and just, hey, there's a distinctiveness to nations that scripture treats as good. As like, okay, hold up, let's actually uh think about how people moved across borders. Let's actually think about all the ways in which borders in the Bible are very different from borders in the modern world. Let's think about just the uh the laws and traditions that governed movement across those borders in the biblical world versus today. Let's first understand that we're dealing with very different worlds. And so we can't just cleanly map scripture onto the contemporary world. That doesn't mean we can't apply scripture, that doesn't mean scripture shouldn't inform our thinking about immigration, but it's not a one-to-one. And so that means that we have to develop something other than just good exegesis. We have to actually uh think uh be able to take that exegesis of scripture and actually think in a um in a nuanced and you know practically minded way. And that requires that I mean, I think at that point we're talking about wisdom. Uh, we have to actually develop a uh uh mind and um perspective of wisdom. So so my first point there was I the thing that routinely surprises me is some of the shallowness in evangelical thought, which does need to be addressed because that can often create a lot of angst around voting uh or voting for particular parties or people that I think is often misplaced uh and is unhelpful. The second thing um I was going to note on um uh on this issue of you know, how do we kind of navigate uh or how do we avoid some of the pitfalls connected with um connected with you know seeking the good of a political community um is you know, develop the develop that practice of wisdom. But I also think there's a need to recognize that there is moral evil in the world. And there are many um you know evil actors who do not seek the good of a city, do not seek the good of a community, and do not seek the good particularly of the body of Christ. To the degree that Christians have the opportunity to peacefully and legally oppose those movements, they should. They should avail themselves of that opportunity to the degree that they can't, and they need to adopt a more,

Closing And Listener Invitations

Tim Milosch 36:15

uh, a more distancing uh strategy, they should. But again, that kind of brings us back to the point of wisdom. There's no one method, given the multiplicity of political systems around the world and the many points at which uh evangelicals inhabit the political world and many different levels. That's where we come back to wisdom and say, okay, we need to think wisely to use Jesus' words. We need to be shrewd as serpents, as innocent as doves. I think there's a tendency in evangelical thought to emphasize the innocent as doves and forget to be shrewd as serpents. And we need to actually wrestle with that piece.

Brian Stiller 36:50

Tim, thanks so much for joining us in Evangelical 360.

Tim Milosch 36:54

Thank you, Brian. It's really been a pleasure.

Brian Stiller 36:56

Thanks for being a part of this podcast. And be sure to share the episode and join the conversation on YouTube. And please feel free to suggest other guests or topics we might include in this global conversation on faith, belief, and the civic public square. If you'd like to learn more about today's guest, check the show notes for links and info. And if you haven't already received my free ebook and newsletter, just go to Brianstiller.com. Thanks again. Until next time.