The Left and Right of Religion with The Nerdy Christian

In our Season 1 finale, Katie and Sheyi are joined by Christopher Haylett AKA The Nerdy Christian for a conversation about faith, partisan politics, and refusing to pick a side. 

We discuss a biblical critique of Donald Trump, abortion debates making headlines online, and conversations about disability. It's a thoughtful discussion that pushes beyond the usual left-versus-right divides.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome everybody to Blessed and Stressed, the podcast where we talk about faith and politics on both sides of the Pomond. This is our last episode before we break for summer. It's our eighth episode, and we're really honored to have an amazing guest with us today, Christopher Halett, who is known as the Nerdy Christian. Many of you follow him online already or listen to his videos and his teachings on faith. And we're really excited to be in conversation with him. So welcome, Christopher. Welcome, Shay. Excited to get into it with you both.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

Yeah, thank you for being here, Christopher. I just want to start with tell us a little bit about yourself and how how did you basically your social media kick off with all of this faith stuff? Because I'm sure that wasn't necessarily the intention, but it just all snowballed, right?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Yeah, man. Okay. I'll I'll try to give the concise version. Um, so yeah, I'm Christopher Halett. I have a bachelor's in global development study and master of international business, but I'm also a big theology nerd. And um the nerdy Christian kind of came about from the interplay of all of those things. I actually one day was just browsing Instagram, and um, you know, I follow different like stats and maps and geography and reporting and like theology and just all these different pages, and I was just like, man, it would be really cool if there was a page that just had a little bit of all of this. And then I I realized I was like, I have the background, I think I could do that. And uh I was like, it could be called the nerdy Christian. So I looked up the handle at the nerdy Christian and it wasn't taken. I was like, all right, I'm doing it, I'm running with it. And uh, yeah, it's one of those things where it's just kind of it's definitely like a God thing in terms of even my background. My background is weird. Uh I grew up, my dad was in the Air Force, so born in Germany, lived in four states and three foreign countries by the age of 15, and so like got a lot of different exposure to different cultures, different ways of thinking, different groups, um, and uh part part-time homeschool, part-time public school, so a little bit of foot in both camps there with just independent learning and also just uh more traditional education, and um yeah, and then too, like my educational background is just kind of wild to where I wanted to go on emissions initially, and so I studied global development at a private Christian university. Um so some theology classes, some like nonprofit management, social enterprise, so uh geopolitics and political science, all of that, and then master of international business, which was uh a uh shift in direction from initially I wanted to go in the State Department and plan on getting a Master of International Relations. Uh, got accepted to Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy for their Master of Law and Diplomacy. Um, but it I got waitlisted, so I barely got accepted because it's like ranked third in the country or something like that for IR. And um barely got accepted and got no financial aid offer whatsoever because I barely got accepted. And then this other school was like, hey, if you want to do international business instead, we'll give you a pretty solid, solid uh scholarship. So ended up going that route, and that was in 2016 with the kickoff of Trump 1.0 and being like, Do I really want to start my career in the State Department in that? So so yeah, so here I am now. Just uh I do marketing by day for an international software development company and run the nerdy Christian outside of that.

SPEAKER_03 3:50

So you're very well qualified, which I I love. Um, so let me the reason why I was super attracted to your page is because um I often find in my life I'm constantly in the middle. I describe myself as a centrist, and I have a lot of friends who are on the center left, a lot of friends on the centre right. So it was amazing to me to find an account, basically a Christian account, that I felt was trying to straddle exactly the same very tight rope walking line. Um, and so I just wanted to talk to you about that first. That because I feel I see on your page that there are people on the Christian right who are not happy with you. There are people on the Christian left who are not happy with you, and you maintain, I think, a really good, respectable middle way, which doesn't upset, well, it's not really not intended to upset anyone, but it's just a very pragmatic, I think, often very wise position. So I just wanted to know, is that intentional, that middle way, or you just sort of ended up being there, or how did that how do you work with that?

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Yeah, so yeah, coming from a military background and um then even in high school, going to a uh high school in a small town, uh, come from a pretty conservative background. Um, but in APGov in high school, I started we we I'm learning about these things about like just prison systems and racial inequality and and kind of enforcement, like hey, similar rates of drug use, unequal rates of incarceration, just these different things. And I'm like not even thinking in terms of like where does this align me politically, but just like okay, this seems like it should go this way, this this way. And my teacher started talk calling me um his liberal Republican because I like identified kind of right of center, but sometimes, yeah, was was liberal for that, and um, ever since then, just as I've learned more about politics, my politics just have not mapped cleanly onto US political dichotomy. And I I just think if anyone's being honest, they shouldn't. Like, I hate that we even label ourselves like so many people label themselves as I'm a liberal or I'm a uh conservative, because then you're like buying into this bucket of all of these different things that for each of those issues you should have independently considered the merits of that one topic, and it's very unlikely that any one grouping is gonna get every political issue right, right? And so I just think if we're being intellectually honest, we're not going to fall cleanly into any camp if we're yeah, being sincere in our efforts.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

One of the really big differences between the two countries, between the UK and the US, is that in the UK, when you look at the spread of evangelicals and political party, there is a spread. They are not attached to one single party. And same for mainline Protestants, whereas in the US, it's a very different story. There's this tight alignment between white evangelicalism and the Republican Party. And I was in London last week doing a book event, and a woman stood up in the audience and she said, I'm a Christian and I'm a British Christian, and I do not understand how the women in your book, how their faith leads them to own to only one party. And I think she was speaking of sort of that plurality that happens in the UK context, which is very different in the US. Uh, so it sounds like you have more of the UK mindset in that regard.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:18

Yes. And we yeah, we do have that. And I think that's because actually traditionally and historically, we've had a lot of sort of a lot of people have understood their Christianity in very much in terms of helping the poor. And that has often been aligned in the UK with left-wing politics, as in, you know, workers' rights and things like that. So there's a lot of Christians on that side, and then there's also a lot of Christians on the other side. So it's a bit more, it is a bit more proliferated. Um, and so the other thing I really wanted to talk to you, Christopher, about is about talking of the right and the left and how they often disagree with you. So I wanted to start with the right because I was very I'm super interested in your specifically biblical problem with MAGA. So I have seen you have this conversate have a sort of conversation with Ali Beth Stucky, and we've had an episode on her actually, and so I'm particularly interested in her. As in, what is your actual biblical theol theological issue with MAGA?

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Yeah, so I mean uh first and foremost, I think it just comes down to the uh kind of desecration of character that we see come from the top. Like for me, character is what everything else flows from. It it determines the culture of your nation, it determines what you say is or is not acceptable. Uh policy is an outflow of culture, not uh an inflow result of it, um, and and of character. Uh so I think that's kind of what it comes down to is in 2016 when Donald Trump starts running, there's not a whole lot of character there. Um and that in and of itself to to me was easy enough to say, like, I'm not gonna accept that. I'm not gonna align myself to that. I don't think Christians should. I don't think we should align ourselves to someone who not only is Caesar, but proud is is proudly so, you know? Like just absolutely depraved and unashamed about it. Like, at least act like you're ashamed about it to me, you know. Um and so from the beginning, being just the uh message that you know goes around the right of like, uh, it's he's not your pastor, it's about policy, not person, the person and stuff. I'm just like, that's a cop-out. Like it's it is about the person because your kids, when they look up to the president of the United States and they determine what their value systems are and what is or isn't okay, it's not about the policies he makes, it's about the words that they hear him say, and that you give your approval or disapproval to. And so I think that's what it's ultimately like policies come and go, presidents come and go every four years. Culture is permanent, culture, culture shifts very slowly, but it can also be changed very suddenly um when you make right or rather incorrect compromises. And I think that's something we've seen happen pretty significantly in our country. Just look at the the rise in hate crimes since like 2016, look at the social divisions, look at the way we've begun to talk about immigrants, like some of the things that we say about immigrants now would in 2015's Republican Party just would not have been like you couldn't even imagine someone in politics would use some of the dehumanizing language, or you wouldn't even imagine that maybe uh as happened in Minneapolis, uh ICE an ICE agent shot someone inside his door uh and then lies about it, and from the top of the federal government they cover it up until later it kind of gets exposed w without any kind of uh ability to cover it up further, and that guy's now being prosecuted. Um and so yeah, I think that's that's kind of what it comes down to is ultimately character matters. Yeah, and that's I'm gonna want someone who to the most possible extent aligns with Christian character.

SPEAKER_03 11:20

Yeah, which I totally agree. I mean, from a British perspective, we're just baffled most of the time by our president. And then to balance out from the left, what is the main sort of criticism that you get on the left on your Instagram? Because I've seen them come up as well, that you're not, you know, some criticism about you're not sort of uh empathetic enough, or this is challenging. What are the main challenges that come from the left and why theologically do you find them a bit problematic as well?

SPEAKER_01 11:50

So there's the social politics side, and then there's the utopic idealism versus realism side, which is more political, I guess. So I in terms of like political system, what I most identify is with uh Christian realism. Um, it was coined and kind of developed by Reinald Nieber in the mid-20th century, and it's basically this idea of like humans have two natures of sorts, and some some more reformed folk might not even like this take, but we have uh, you know, the flawed human nature, the the fall uh our flesh in its fallen state, and we are still created in the image of God. And while that image of God has been obscured or damaged or harmed, depending on your different theological view, um, it's still there, right? And so humans have some kind of inherent understanding, some common grace knowledge of goodness, right? And so we we can see when things are not how they should be, all humans can in some ways, um, and and and we can see something of how they should be. You know, it's kind of blurred, we we maybe are grasping towards it, but we have this sense, and that that sense just gets obscured and marred by the flesh. Now, what Nieber talks about is he talks about how, like, in person at low-level personal relationships or like face-to-face interactions, that's where that Imago Day impulse is strongest because we have to look someone in the eyes, we have to deal with the ramifications of what we do to them, all that, right? When you start to add degrees of separation to that, uh human nature takes root more so because you don't have culpability. Like, hey, you didn't say you run a corporation and you just choose, hey, we've got this much for salaries this year, so we're not gonna give anyone any kind of raise to keep up with inflation, they just gotta deal with it, right? That's just like you're you're the human the human element is kind of decaying in terms of your thought process, and it's giving more giving way to a more mechanical, uh like survival of the fittest kind of natural impulse. And so in politics, he talks about Reinald Nieber specifically in his time, was talking about this with liberalism, meaning not left leftism, but like freedom, the the ideas of freedom of of uh the individual versus utopic idealism of like the communists, specifically in his context. And he says, What the communists get wrong is they're not they're they're like idealizing something that human nature can never possibly reach. We're always going there's a reason communism always devolves into autocracy, because when you give people that kind of power and you turn you you get into big machines of systems, the humanity of people is going to be neglected. Similarly, though, he looks at just uh liberalism and the limits of it in like not striving for some kind of better world where where it's just pure like survival of the fittest and and uh uh this uh minim minimization of the potential for the Mago Day within us. And so he he taught he speaks to that tension there. So you might you might be hearing two in that, like why I fall in this kind of third way a little bit. So all that to say, uh when it comes to liberals in the U in the US in particular, I think there's a little bit of that utopic idealism, and I think too though, there is an a little bit of unrootedness, and there is more increasingly a little bit of unrootedness in the the right. Um, but uh a lot of these ideas have no roots to them, or very, very recent roots. Um, but there's no big moral system, there's no definitions. So like the abortion conversation has been a big one over the last week with like Down syndrome, the the family who decided to abort their baby, uh diagnosed with Down syndrome, and um the what has kind of come to the fore in a lot of the conversations I've seen among the left is they have no concept of uh per when personhood may or may not begin that makes this wrong. Like there's there's people just saying, like, it's a woman's right to choose at any point. It's not like one person commented on a post of mine, it's not a baby until it's delivered. And it's like really like if you're at 39 weeks and it's not delivered yet, you're telling me that's just a quote unquote fetus, like and you know, it it's just unmoored because there's no system of theology or philosophy, even that they're reaching to as a route for when life may begin, or what authority humans even have to say when life begins. It's just kind of every man for themselves.

SPEAKER_03 16:49

Let me talk to you about this case. There's a YouTuber called Jesse Ridgway and his wife who filmed learning their unborn baby had Down syndrome, and then they announced that they terminated the pregnancy. And the way that they talked about why they had terminated the pregnancy has basically kicked off a huge row online because they used lots of language that a lot of people found very problematic. Um, they said that essentially the Down syndrome baby would have no quality of life. Uh, they said that a disabled life is, you know, essentially a lesser life and they didn't want to put their child through that. Um, and this obviously sparked a big debate because there were lots of people who are parents of Down syndrome children who are living very, very good, fulfilling lives as far as they're concerned, and the use of language that was used here really, really upset them. This then led to more of a pushback towards these two people who now say that they've received sort of death threats as a result of doing this, and the whole thing has really erupted. So um, I personally have found the debate fascinating because for people on the left, there is a real dichotomy here because they've got the pro-choice thing on one side, but they've also got ableism on the other side, which I've seen a lot of people really do, a lot of people on the left, especially do a lot of work on to say that those with disabilities are just as valuable, and there's a lot of ableism in society that should not be promoted. So there's a real clash here between which bit do we go with, and I've seen a real crossover of people who are actually very socially conservative agreeing with people who are very, very normally left-wing who have children with Down syndrome, and this is their lived experience, and they're saying, no, don't talk about our children like this. This is very, very wrong, and essentially you should have done your research before you you definitely talked about it like this. The other issue here, I would say the third issue here is that when you put your entire life on YouTube, this may be one of the consequences of doing that. Because they apparently they detailed their entire pregnancy, they documented the whole thing, you know, with pictures, the whole stage, they did the whole thing only for it to end like this, and then they sort of documented it in the ro in the same way, which was just, I mean, it was it was difficult to watch. So, um, yeah, so I wanted to ask Christopher about this case because what have you seen on your social media about this?

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of it's been kind of similar to what you said. A lot of people, um, I mean, the the pro-life camp has kind of gone the way you may expect uh on on that. Um, but I think it is spurring maybe some conversations. Like, I I made a post just uh what yesterday where I was like, hey, like to clarify, the Christian perspective, like when I mentioned like rootedness, a lot of people think this is a modern issue. Um, abortion is not a modern issue. The Didique from like the first century, like it's estimated to have been written between 70 to 120 AD. Um, it is a collection, it's supposedly a collection of basically the the apostles' teachings. It said, like, hey, don't procure an abortion or kill a uh a born child through exposure. That was a practice done in ancient Rome. So, like the church has been talking about this for 2,000 years and it's not a new issue. Um, in the hundreds of years following, even the conversation was when does ensolment happen? Like, when does a baby become a person? Um, in the the theological sense, and and then they kind of arrived at we don't really know, so we'll call it maybe like manslaughter, and like Augustine was like, Hey, it's man manslaughter up to a certain point, and then after that, we can say like it it's murder from the church's perspective. So, like that's kind of like even even for me, I'm like, I think we can just settle with like we don't know, and let's not maybe commit manslaughter like on an accident. That's that's kind of where I'm at, um, based on not my own thinkings as some modern, but like the rootedness of hunt like of great many wise people for thousands of years before me. So, anyways, the pro-life, uh, so I shared about that like the rootedness of the Christian perspective in the pro-life issue, but added, like, hey, I think we should say healthcare is free, gonna be free for these women and their children. And surprisingly, a lot of people on the right were like, you know what, let's do it. Like, all about it, cool, uh, in terms of like who follows me. And I was like, okay, could could we like start to do some coalition building politically, maybe culturally, in that direction over time? And so it started this conversation where you have people on the right starting to say, like, they're they're so struck by I think. Think people were really struck by not just it being about abortion, but the scary questions this opens up because we're getting to a point scientifically where you can choose, like say someone people just decided. I mean, China did this, they had a one-child policy, right? And so tons and tons and tons of female babies were aborted in China across the 20th century because people said, Well, if I can only have one child, I want it to be a boy who's gonna grow up and provide for the family, right? And so this question of like if you find out your baby has Down syndrome and that's your reason that you abort, and at a pretty uh kind of late, almost half halfway through kind of period, what are what else can you abort for that you're just saying, like, hey, I I want to wait until we have the perfect baby, right? Um, if we had a way to like I posed a question to someone, if we had a way to measure for IQ, can could you just say like, hey, I only want to have a baby over like a hundred minimum IQ range? And if they're if they have like the genetic qualifiers that are likely to be lower, then I don't want it. Like, is that really the kind of society we want to move towards? And I think a lot of people on the left are having to grapple with that dimension of things of like I'm pro-choice, but like also I think some choices aren't morally valid. Um some some reasonings of choice aren't morally valid.

SPEAKER_03 23:30

So just to come back on your um the the thing that you said where I saw in your video where you said I actually would offer free healthcare. So that got me thinking. So I assumed I went and did some research. So I assumed that in the UK, because obviously we have the NHS, I assumed that terminations of children with Down syndrome would be lower because obviously the state pays for you to have the child, and there is, you know, uh government-funded help for those with Down syndrome. And I have to say, I was really shocked to learn that the UK terminates 90% of prenatally diagnosed down pregnancies. And actually in the US it's 67%. And I assumed on my moral high ground that those of us with free healthcare would simply be doing better than you guys, and I really did have to get knocked down a pedestal or two. The data was not following what I assumed. But then I did a little bit more delving, and it does, and I also found some research that said for over the course of that child's life, a US family would be much more out of pocket in terms of the the care for that child than a UK one would, because you would get the help all throughout the child's life and overall financially be okay. But but it was really quite a big thing for me because then I realized that, yeah, actually, this is a much deeper conversation about what we value as a life worth living. And there is a lot of um information about that, which I think has come through in the comments from doctors, especially talking about the quality of life that a child with Down syndrome can have, which does frankly scare a lot of parents. Um, and they don't, you know, they don't think that they can cope. And I think funny enough for us, and I was thinking about when we got our you know, sort of booklet when we had our daughter, and it went through Edwards syndrome, Patel syndrome, it went through Downs. And yes, we're a Christian couple, so for us, we were like, look, whatever it is, you know, we're pretty much gonna go through with it unless they tell me that I'm gonna die, essentially. That's the only cut-off point for us where we're probably gonna go through with it, partly because I was just like, I actually just want to grieve the baby. I'd rather have two days with my baby than than nothing else. But I do remember the booklet being really scary, I have to say. It laid it all out and it basically went, You will not be able to cope with this. This is a disaster. Um, and so I do feel I do have a level of empathy and sympathy for this couple because if that is the way that it was presented, unless, and it's going back to what you said about rootedness, it really is my rootedness in my faith that would make me question it and go, I need to spend some time with those Down syndrome families and really work. I think apart from the fact that the whole rootedness makes me uncomfortable, but it would force me to go to those down syndrome families, and I probably would come out of it going, you know what, these kids are fine. I I I can do this, I I think I can do it. But then added to that, the extra layer is that I would have the support from this government to do that. So there would be there is a financial bedrock in the UK that would make it automatically less scary for me, which you do not have in America, which I can only imagine is extremely tricky if you don't have a certain job with certain access to healthcare funding. It's just a non-starter for some people, I think. Um, and also I wanted to ask actually both of you on this topic. One thing that British people find very baffling is that we very much separate abortion from miscarriage. Okay, so uh the drugs the drugs that are used for abortion and miscarriage are often very similar. Um, and you're you're given the same thing. And so we're very separate about that in this country. We don't count ectopic pregnancies or anything to do with that. Any miscarriages are very separate. You will get your help, they are dealt with as medical like emergencies. We do not put them under the bracket of abortion, and I've seen many conversations in America where these two things seem to be fused, or you get people thinking that an ectopic pregnancy is viable, which is not, because if it stays there, it will kill you. So I just like to ask both of you how how have those two things become merged in your country? Because I don't British people do not understand this at all. We need help understanding this.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Um you have to understand that the the notion of abortion is a much more expansive category for Christians on the right here. So even having an IUD, for an example, even a copper IUD, which would prohibit a sperm fertilizing an egg, could be considered a form of abortion to some folks. And in fact, it has been in several lawsuits and cases to try to keep that form of contraception out of medical insurance for employees working for large companies such as Hobby Lobby, for example. So the the I the category of abortion or um killing an unborn child is a much more expansive one for a lot of people over here than it is. Interestingly, I was just speaking to a friend in in South America who used the word aborto, and she meant miscarriage for herself, but she used the word abortion. So the word's the same for spontaneous abortion versus a planned abortion. Um, and so I do think it it's it's worth noting the different contexts and how that concept is understood, how expansive or how narrow. You know, there it's debated right now in the Southern Baptist Convention in the US whether IVF could be within the realm of um abortion and killing unused embryos by discarding them or not using them. And I know we have talked about this before, Shay, and our different views on it. So these are very live issues. And I think what I came back to, especially when Christopher was talking as well, is how with advances in technology and reproductive technology in particular, these conversations are growing more complex. They're they're not simple, and I think it's really misleading to think that you're just one side or the other in a very simplistic way. Um but they have to be grappled with. And the more technologies we introduce, the more drugs that we have available, the less healthcare we have available, all this conversation has to be fluid and and and and nuanced. And I think that's what's important about what's coming out here, and that I didn't see a lot in my research, to be honest. A lot of women were like full stop and hard no, no circumstance, you know, unwilling to engage with complexity. And, you know, I've had some really serious health issues um related to pregnancy. And so it's changed my view. I've always been pro-choice, but that has added another level. And then my husband and I recently um did have a scare with our with our new child, and we had to come, you know, to think about really seriously uh whether we would keep the child. And so, anyways, I just think nuance and complexity is really important to hold. And you know, even if you think you're always on one side, it might change over the lifetime, and and being open to that is is important. And I think that's what where you're coming from, Christopher, from what I've seen of your work.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

Yeah, and you know, the problem we have, I think this is a uh problem specific to the US, is ambiguity politically benefits certain people. So, like, on both sides, which is incredibly frustrating. Like, like, you know, people will always bring up, okay, like you can't be pro-life, because what about rape incest one? If you respond with, okay, so what about outlawing elective abortions and only having abortion allowed for those? And suddenly it's like, well, well, no. And you know, I I understand the um the complexity, the level of complexity there of like, well, like there might be instances where it's hard to confirm that it's it's rape or these different things. So I do understand that, but um the ambiguity, like, for example, people medically are saying, okay, the problem for uh these abortion laws is they might allow or they might prosecute allow the prosecution of doctors who perform like a medically required surgery, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Or to clear a miscarriage to get back to Shake's point.

SPEAKER_01 32:12

To clear a miscarriage, right? And so theoretically, it should be entirely possible and plausible to use specificity and language in the laws we write to rectify that possibility, at least to a large degree. But I think people on the right, it's not for a lot of them, it's not politically advantageous to do so and and move you know move in that way because they're not getting that pressure from their side, they're getting that pressure from the other side. And then people on the left, I think it they they can't be seen as working with people on these these laws, right? Um, and and I just think we get into this weird situation where the ambiguity in a weird way benefits both parties because as long as the law remains ambiguous in a concerning, dangerous way, the left can harp on that and say, hey, that law is ambiguous. And if that ever gets taken away, that actually takes away a talking point from them. Um, Donald Miller once, I saw a video of his he spoke to about gun control, and he said the left had it, it was at a time in which the left had a majority in, they had the presidency, they had a majority in um the House and the Senate, I believe. But he talked about how they had even if it wasn't a majority, they had a bill on um gun laws that they had enough buy-in to get passed, theoretically. Uh, and he said though, they started to put together the things to like get it moving, and it got shut down from within because they said, Well, we we just need this to be an issue still that we can speak to for the next election cycle, and then we can then we can pass it, and they lost and they they the opportunity faded. And that's just like this annoying thing about American politics where people are more interested in election cycles than good legislation, yeah. And yeah, and that's a bigger problem than even any one topic.

SPEAKER_03 34:13

Ironically, in the UK, we allow free votes on abortion, right? So the prime minister is actually not a he actually allows whenever we have a vote about euthanasia or abortion or these social issues, it's oh everyone gets to vote with their conscience. We call them votes of conscience, they are totally not party specific. You don't get whipped in any way, you basically vote with what you feel is the right thing to do. We go around in exactly the same cycle in the UK. Every 10 years, someone says, Well, I think we should lower the abortion limit. We have a debate about it, we we go back and forth, we end up in sort of the same place, and then we pass it and we move on and we go, but we just literally go back in that, and it's just not a it's just not really an issue for us in the same way because we put all the other, we are very, very specific, funnily enough. We don't have any ambiguity when it comes to miscarriage because we can it's completely separate. So we are able to say no, all of that is on one side. And if you ask most Brits, when you say the word abortion, they mean people who have got pregnant, yeah, you know, the the old school way, and they've decided that they don't want that pregnancy anymore, that it's a decision made by them, and that baby is totally healthy, and that's the reason that is what 99% of Brits will tell you is what they think by abortion. They're not including anything else. So it's quite a it's uh it's an interesting dichotomy you have over there.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

Entirely reasonable. It's entirely reasonable.

SPEAKER_03 35:49

We're quite we're not bad on that. We're not and um lastly, just before we wrap up, I want to talk to you about one of your phrase what a phrase that you mentioned, which I think is really uh fascinating about called chronological snobbery, which I really, really like as a concept. Can you just explain to our listeners what do you mean by that? What does it mean?

SPEAKER_01 36:07

Yeah, yeah. So chronological snobbery is kind of this idea that we moderns, um, we of this current generation and age are in some sense the end of time. Um, we know more than people before us knew. So we don't we we can think for ourselves, we don't have to worry, we don't have to be too concerned with what our predecessors thought because they were you know living in ignorance in their own ways with their own inputs. And I think it's just uh uh it's very easy to fall into. Um, so I've been thinking about this a lot after reading Ronald Nieber, uh, some of his notes, um his notes of a cynic, of a tame cynic. Um, he was a pastor, and he writes about his challenge in one of these personal notes, his challenge as a modern man in the spiritualization of the sacraments. And he's like, ah, it's so hard for me to leave room for the supernatural. I like intellectually, I kind of think it's hogwash. Um, but I still feel something in the sacraments. I still think I know there's something there, there's something to it, and there's something to this whole thing with Jesus and all of it. I I know there's a supernatural reality, but everything within me as a modern man says, like, this is no, it's not observable, it's not provable, testable, all of this, right? And I just read that and I was like, it's from like 1922 about this entry. I'm like, that's a hundred years ago, and like us moderns look at people from the 1920s when like eugenics was a pretty formal school in the US and Europe, um, school of thought, and just these different things, and you can see this, you can see this kind of um chronological in retrospect, this chronological snobbery of their own time that kind of led to a lot of the ideas that fed into fascism and Nazi Germany and the rise of these these superpowers and the Ubermansch and this idea of survival of the fittest applied, and it's all of this, uh all this stuff, right? And um it's kind of funny because we look back at that and we're like, oh, we'd never do that again, and and kind of on the a similar note, this thing that I've been thinking of is the cartoonization of evil as like well, they you know, this thing that those people did back then, like obviously it was evil, but how we kind of don't understand the the accessibility of that evil within us ourselves. Um I saw someone recently say something. He said, if he listens to this, he'll know I'm talking about about it, but oh well. Um he posted a thread that said we have to talk about the Muslim problem. And I commented on that thread, and I wasn't trying to come at him in like a hot way or anything, but I was like, I said his name, I said, I want you to really consider that this is a essentially a rephrasing of the Jewish question. I was like, you you you're not, I don't think you're intending that, but these are the questions this line of questioning, this phrasing, this this packaging is not too different from what people were saying in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany. And I know your intentions aren't there, but the outcomes are like the outcomes will lead there, inevitably. We've seen we've seen it, we know it, we we know we have to be careful with our rhetoric and the words we use. There was some offense taken, and we had the conversation offline. Um but what I tried to convey to him was after in conversation afterwards was evil is not so insidious, it's not the joker, you know. We've grown up on comic book characters and villains and all these things who just want to destroy the world, and that's not what real evil is. Evil is within you, it's within me, and it is accessible and very easily easily manipulable, especially with base instincts of fear and uh self-interest and things like that, right? So, um all of that to say that there's I think this idea of chronological snobbery that has revealed its head a lot in the midst of MAGA and in the mid and in an inability to um have a sense of reflection on uh the we've we aren't the first ones to ask these questions. We aren't the first ones to have these conclusions from these questions. Um and the people who lived before us weren't just more evil than we are, they were normal people too, who had their their families' interests in mind, who want, who love their country, who wanted, who had a lot of legitimate pains and gripes. The German people after World War I got totally shafted, totally screwed. And and they had legitimate gripes with the way that they were being treated, but the way they took those gripes was not legitimate, right? Um, and I think that's something for the right and the left to remember is that we have so much history of people before us who were not dumb. Um, Plato, when he writes about uh the man in the cave, are you are you familiar with this? Um he writes about a man chained in a cave, and all he sees are dancing shadows on the wall, and there's other people chained in this cave, and all he can see are the the shadows on the wall, and they come to see that as their um reality, and like that's what is real to them is shadows. They have they know nothing of the real things that those shadows are coming even from, and then he talks about that there's a whole lot to it. It's a it's like I took courses on this in undergrad all through multiple weeks. Um, but he is freed and escapes and comes to know of the objects that the shadows come from, and then he hit it's his mission then to go kind of emancipate others to tell them of the things that they don't know. And he talks about this as like this is what knowledge is it's like you you don't know, you just see f figures of things, um, and then you come to know and you want to share that with others, and there's there can be some hostility when people like no, it's the it's the shadows, dude. What are you talking about? anyways, Plato 2,000 years ago is saying things that kind of ended up in Christian thought in terms of like even how we think of evangelism and how we think of sharing truths and just all sorts of things, right? And so I think that's what's really important for people to understand is there have been wise people throughout all of history who didn't know certain facts and figures we do, um, like things about the solar system or quantum mechanics or you know, whatever the heck. But when it comes down to just like human reasoning and understanding of self, even there's some things that I think we just don't get because we're too busy and occupied to really think and think through different things that we're just scrolling all day, don't have the time to think about these things, right? And so yeah, I think um chronological snobbery is something I've been thinking about a lot myself and trying to spur conversation in others towards, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 43:44

I like it a lot. I like it. Thank you so much, Christopher. This has been amazing. My brain, my brain feels like it's exploded in a good way, in a good way.

SPEAKER_00 43:54

It's been exercised. I think also, you know, what I always say is this moment in US politics is singular and unique and unprecedented, and it's also not. And that sounds incredibly simplistic, but that sums up my my feelings on the chronology of where we are politically and in terms of faith.

SPEAKER_03 44:12

So my West African, yeah, my West African mother always used to always used to say to me, There's nothing new under the sun today. We've seen it all before. It's always she's probably does she still say it now.

SPEAKER_00 44:23

Is she still saying it now?

SPEAKER_03 44:24

She is, but she's a bit she's quite horrified by quite a few things.

SPEAKER_00 44:28

But but she is still saying it.

SPEAKER_04 44:31

She's still saying it but going, but this didn't happen in my day, Sheen. I don't know what's gonna be. We might need her to get her on the podcast in the fall.

SPEAKER_03 44:40

We will, we will.

SPEAKER_04 44:43

Amazing, so nice to have you.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

Yeah, thank you, Christopher, for being with us. Thank you to our listeners. We really appreciated all your comments over this season, especially on the recent Tradwife episode. We loved engaging with you online about that. So have a wonderful summer, everyone, and we will be back in the fall to pick up for the US midterm election season.