A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar

Deconstructing the Culture Wars with Laurie Johnson

• Randy Knie & Kyle Whitaker • Season 5 • Episode 23

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What happens when political labels lose their meaning? Dr. Laurie Johnson, political philosopher and president of the Maurin Academy, joins us to unpack the tangled roots of America's culture wars and explore pathways toward overcoming our divisions. We discuss her book The Gap in God's Country: A Longer View on Our Culture Wars.

The conversation begins with a clarification of political terminology. Laurie explains how American understandings of "liberal" and "conservative" have drifted far from historical and global meanings, with both Democrats and Republicans representing different flavors of liberalism while "true" conservatism remains rare in American politics. This terminological confusion reflects a deeper problem: an increasingly narrow political imagination that limits our ability to envision alternatives.

In Laurie's view, at the heart of our cultural divisions lies capitalism's continuous transformation of communities and human connections. She describes how economic changes have hollowed out rural areas, separated families, and created profound insecurity. When people feel economically adrift, they become susceptible to scapegoating others rather than recognizing systemic problems. This resentment fuels the political extremism we see today.

We also explore potential remedies. Laurie suggests churches could play a crucial role in rebuilding community if they moved beyond superficial fellowship toward genuine cooperation. By creating structures that provide mutual benefit, such as shared childcare, elder support, or time banks, people might rediscover how community offers security that money can't buy.

Though unflinching in her assessment of our challenges, Laurie maintains a tempered hope. Perhaps only through experiencing genuine hardship will we rediscover the value of community and cooperation. Her work offers an invitation to attempt this rediscovery before crisis forces our hand.

*Note: This episode was recorded before the appalling assassination of Charlie Kirk.

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Cheers!

Randy:

I'm Randy, the pastor, half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle is a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology and spirituality.

Kyle:

We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air, around the proverbial table with a good drink in the back corner of a dark pub.

Randy:

Thanks for joining us and welcome to A Pastor and a Philosopher. Walk into a Bar. There's this guy that was a part of our church, really active part of our church, volunteered for all the things really wonderful guy. Guy covid happened and I hadn't seen him for months and, uh, he said we wanted to get together so we had coffee outside. Of course, this is, like you know, mid to late 2020 and he started out the conversation by going I don't know about you, but I've gotten a lot more political since covid happened and I just was like whoa let's buckle up.

Randy:

This is going to be a fun one. I haven't seen him since, but that conversation and that statement even I don't know about you, but I've gotten a lot more political since. Covid kind of reminds me of all of us in many ways where we've doubled down, tripled down on our kind of extreme beliefs and gone more to the extremes and separated from one another and it just seems like there's this the culture war is no longer something that academics get to talk about and hypothesize and think about. It's something that we're like right in the middle of, and the conversation that we're about to share with our listeners today is really kind of about that.

Kyle:

Yeah, that's fascinating. It's almost like a paradigm shift, in the sense of it's a non-optional thing for all of us For your friend. Maybe it was intentional or whatever. It was something that they chose, but it reminds me. It's very philosophical. But there's a guy named Charles Taylor who might come up in this book.

Randy:

You've mentioned him many times.

Kyle:

Yeah, and he has a very famous book called the Secular Age, and he defines secularism as a thing that is non-optional. It's like it's a situation we're in whether we want to be or not, and there are certain conceptual facts about it that are presented to us just because of the way that society is structured now, things we take for granted, things that are optional for us, that wouldn't have been optional for our forebears and vice versa, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Kyle:

And maybe COVID did another similar thing like that right. It forced us all into this interiority. This probably really unhealthy thing in lots of ways, and I don't want to be more political, but I probably am.

Randy:

It's probably not up to me, right. Right, so we're talking with Dr Lori Johnson. She is a political philosopher at Kansas State University. She wrote a book called the Gap in God's Country A Longer View on Our Culture Wars. Our friend of the show, brian Zond, connected us with Lori, and I know you in particular really found this book fascinating.

Kyle:

Yeah, there's a lot. I mean it's a big book, it's academic. I'm not going to pretend it's not. It's an academic's attempt to write an academic book.

Laurie:

And good on her right.

Kyle:

She did great. There's a lot in there. It's thick, it's heavy, it's dense in some ways, but also fascinating in some ways, and I think a lot of that comes out in thesis. Simply, it's about cultural wars, it's about politics. It's about how we define our politics us versus them, who the us is, who the them is how the way that we set that up now is really weird and parochial historically, like it has almost no historical antecedents, like he's going to describe what those terms have meant historically versus what they mean now, and you'll see some of that.

Kyle:

But it's also an attempt at a proposal for how to get out of it. It's a deep critique of capitalism. Um, if that sounds marxist to you, it's because it very intentionally, overtly is, but it's also just as equally intentionally and overtly conservative. And if that seems impossible to you, keep listening Exactly and maybe pick up the book. So I mean she's an interesting person and I'm glad I read it.

Randy:

I enjoyed her from the moment of her introduction and talking about herself, where she's a professor at a large university doing great for herself, and she talks about the projects that she's passionate about first, which is a Catholic organization that she's the head of, and a garden in Kansas City that she helps cultivate and leads to organize the community around community and around sustainability. She talks about the things that she's passionate over and above. Oh yeah, and also I'm a professor of political philosophy. That's compelling to me, that's fun. A professor of political philosophy that's compelling to me, that's fun. That's a person who wants to show up in the world, not just talk about the world, but show up in the world in a substantive way.

Kyle:

Yeah, totally, and in an unusual way, given the value structures that we currently inhabit. Correct, like a lot of what she brings is going to be hard for some listeners to even make sense of as something they ought to want. Yeah, yeah, and I say that as someone in that position. Reading this book, some of the proposals, I'm like, ah, I can see the goodness in that, but also, the world is what it is and I don't think I would actually choose that. Yes, yes, that's a weird place to be, yep, so. So I'm thankful to Brian Zahn for pointing her out to us. It was a really great conversation.

Randy:

Hope you enjoy. Dr Laura Johnson, thank you for joining us on A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar. Welcome.

Laurie:

Well, thank you very much. Which one of you is the pastor and which one of you is the?

Kyle:

philosopher.

Laurie:

Let's guess. I mean, who do you think it is? I think Randy might be the pastor. Bruce City Church.

Randy:

I'm wearing my church's t-shirt for listeners who aren't watching on YouTube, so it's a bit of a dead giveaway, but whatever, we won't waste anyone's time talking about what that really means. Laura, can you just tell our listeners about yourself, what you do, why we're talking to you?

Laurie:

the author of the Gap in God's Country, a Longer View on Our Culture Wars. I'm the president of something called the Morin Academy, which is a nonprofit. That kind of circles around Peter Morin's three categories cult, culture and cultivation and Peter Morin was one of the co -founders of the Catholic Worker Movement.

Laurie:

I don't know if you guys can see, but I have my Dorothy Day t-shirt on here, because Dorothy Day is the more famous of the two, but Peter Morin and her came together in the Great Depression to start the Catholic Worker Movement to help all the people who were victimized in the Great Depression and start houses of hospitality.

Laurie:

So cult, religion, culture, philosophy and economics, cultivation, agriculture and environment, and the Morin Academy tries to bring all three of those topics together into conversation with each other to bring, you know, bring different ideas to bear on our current problems, whether they're environmental, which is a huge concern of ours, or whether it's the political divisions or the economic problems that we have and how religion kind of can help or further some of the problems that we're dealing with. So I'm the president of that, I'm also a supporter and more than a volunteer, but I don't live at a Catholic worker farm. So I've contributed quite a bit of my time and my resources to the John Paul II Catholic worker farm in Kansas City, missouri, and it's on the in the northeast quadrant of Kansas City, where we practice regenerative agriculture and we are in the process of developing a worker scholar internship program for people who want to come and visit and kind of learn how to do that work and also learn the various ideas that we study, including our Communio weekends where we learn about Communio theology. So you know, those two things are very important to me.

Laurie:

I'm a professor of political philosophy. I've been doing that for an awful lot of my life. I am a mom, and my dad, who's 98 years old, lives right next door to me and we garden together. I'm an avid gardener as well, so I've got various things going on, I guess.

Randy:

Well, this is fun and super challenging because a lot of the things that you hold in esteem in the book you're living out. Obviously, and a lot of the book makes more sense now.

Kyle:

I think about Peter Morin, and hearing that little bit about you ties together yeah. Yeah.

Laurie:

Yeah Well, you know I didn't know about the Catholic Worker Movement until about seven years ago or so.

Laurie:

You know I didn't know about the Catholic Worker Movement until about seven years ago or so. Spencer Hess and I were co-hosts of the Dust Bowl Diatrips podcast and sort of co-founders of the Morin Academy, along with Jacob Honshu, and we were trying to figure out like sort of the scene in Kansas City and also who would be vibing with what we already were thinking right. And so there was a Catholic worker house about a half a mile from where Spencer was currently is living now too, and so I'm like you know these people, that's kind of interesting. I never heard of them before. You should go, like knock on their door, so he goes. He had to knock several times, but anyway he found out you know what they were about, started to volunteer there, and then the more we learned about the Catholic worker movement, the more it kind of resonated with us, because we're a lot about Catholic social teaching and just, you know, trying to find, I guess, solidarity with people from all walks of life right so.

Laurie:

Catholic workers try to like get in there and work side by side with people from all walks of life.

Randy:

Love it, Awesome, Thank you. So your book that we're primarily talking about tonight is called, like you said, the Gap in God's Country A Longer View on Our Culture Wars. Now I'm kind of fascinated and horrified by the culture war reality that we find ourselves living in. Can you just tell our listeners about your book, where it came from, why you wrote it, and tell us about your book?

Laurie:

Yeah, sure. So this is the first non-academic, or only partly academic book I've written. I've done a string of books, all for academic presses, um, having to do with a critique of liberal theory, which just means classical liberal theory, the theory that the country was founded on, so to speak and so can you just, in like two to three sentences, say what liberal theory besides just what our country was founded on?

Laurie:

Yeah, sure, it has to do with individualism, individual rights, the primacy of the right to private property, the idea that most of our, our values are just our personal choices and don't have to be or aren't really necessarily rational choices, or you know, true? Um, I don't know if you guys have heard of the term emotivism, but you know there's a tendency in liberal society to just say you know, I believe this, you can believe whatever you want, but you know one of the fruits. So I've done that. But this book, more than any that I've written is, is about what I, what I really care about, which is I'm trying to come up with solutions, right? So I spend a lot of the book like telling people why I think we've gotten to the point we are. So I go back into history and we can talk about that if you want to.

Laurie:

But the last part of the book has a lot to do with what I think, in particular, christians responsibility is in this situation, right? So and it's the first time I've really made positive recommendations you might say especially or really said anything about what Christians should do, because as an academic, we're not supposed to really talk about that. You know, that's supposed to keep that separate, right, but, but. But I've been a Christian my whole life, of one kind or another. It's important to me. I'm pretty disappointed with a lot of American Christianity, and so I really wanted to bring my knowledge to bear on that question.

Kyle:

Thank you. So I'm going to turn us back. We're going to eventually get to your recommendations and positive proposals, but let's start at the beginning of the book. Okay, sort of terminological question. But before I do that, even I want to ask what you think about the new Pope, if you have any ideas, because, as I was, he was elected as I was reading your book and took a name that is significant for some of the things it's in all throughout the book. Yeah, I was curious any thoughts about him.

Laurie:

Oh yeah, when I heard his name as soon as they said Leo, I was like oh my gosh.

Randy:

I bet yeah.

Laurie:

Oh my gosh.

Laurie:

This is very promising Because Leo XIII, of course, wrote the first Catholic encyclical on the problems of the working class and the problems with capitalism, and it was very conciliatory to capitalism, but it still pointed out the fact that we were in a deep crisis.

Laurie:

This was back in the late 19th century and he wrote it in a tone that was like we are facing a very deep crisis here and we'd better figure out what to do about it. And he made his own recommendations. And part of the purpose in Leo's mind was to avoid socialism Okay, and I think that you know in hindsight, maybe that, you know, was a little too conciliatory but avoiding socialism, because at that time he would have thought, and many people still do think, that socialism is inherently atheistic and therefore, therefore, we just couldn't go there. But you know he starts this conversation which gets picked up by other popes down the line what are the problems with capitalism? You know what kind of problems do working class people face? You know how can we help them to organize, you know, in effect, unionize, how can we, you know, and try to make their lives better and inform people who have property to not abuse it, to not use it in a way that basically enslaves people and minimalizes them and degrades them people and minimalizes them and degrades them.

Laurie:

So far, I mean honestly that project has obviously not been successful right Now, you know, but this is what you would expect the church to do. Right is to at least lead by saying this is wrong, this situation is a problem. It's going to lead to more political problems down the road. Christians should do better, you know, and here's what your duties and responsibilities are towards people. You don't prey on them or take advantage of them, or pay them the lowest wage possible or criminalize unionization right.

Laurie:

But the problem with Catholic social teaching not that you wanted to know, but to the people sitting in the pews, and so I mean one of the things that I want to do with the rest of my career is to inform more Catholics and other Christians of what it says, because people do not want to hear it, so it doesn't get taught and therefore it stays up there in the realm of ideas, you know, where it doesn't do a whole lot of good, right? So when Leo came along Leo the 14th, you know, came along I thought, well, maybe he's the guy who will actually bring this forward, and now that we're in a new age with TV and radio and social media, maybe he can bring it forward and make it more a part of the consciousness of Catholics and Christians more generally.

Randy:

As you're talking and saying how the you know Christians in general are very good at taking our teaching seriously and living it out. It makes me think of another Catholic, richard Rohr, who said something to the effect of the best critique of the bad is the practice of the good, basically just embodying what we want to be about, which reminds me a lot of you know. You introduced yourself and you talked about the things that you're doing in your community, the things you're doing in the city of Kansas City, the things that you're doing at these public gardens, even before you're a professor and a political scientist or philosopher. So well done on embodying the better way, laurie. It's fun to hear and be talking with a person who doesn't just think big thoughts but actually embraces and lives them out in a pretty prophetic way.

Laurie:

Well, thank you. Those things are more important to me. That's what I'm going to be doing after I retire. For sure Even more. I keep thinking about retiring too. I've got another four years. If I can make it, I don't really retire.

Kyle:

That's amazing that you're even considering that. People in my department I don't even know how old they are, they're just still trucking along. You're like politicians, huh. Part of me wants to talk about my alma mater a little bit, because it's a Jesuit institution that could learn a lot about the emphasis on unions that's actively resisting the attempt to unionize. So, anyway, that's a whole separate thing. It's Marquette, if anybody cares. So let's get into the book. I want to take us into the beginning and define some terms, because these are terms that are probably going to come up in other parts of the conversation and they're terms that are hot button terms that different listeners are going to have different ideas of, and you use them in somewhat non-standard ways. They're probably not non-standard for the academic context, but for our listeners they're definitely non-standard. So I want you to define a few things, because I read your first chapter as basically an attempt to kind of wake us up to the narrowness of our current political distinctions.

Kyle:

We have this kind of myopia about what these terms mean and you're kind of introducing us to actually real distinctions like really more different things and waking us up to the fact that these words used to mean different things and they can still mean different things. So three terms I definitely want you to define is liberal, conservative and Marxist, and how you're using those in the book and how they differ from those in the book and how they differ from the average. You know guy on the street idea of what those terms might mean Because, for example, you use phrases like right liberal, left liberal, right conservative, classical conservative.

Laurie:

So give me those important distinctions.

Laurie:

Yeah, well, in America for sure, when most people hear the word liberal, they think what I would call progressive or Democrat right, and they are people who believe in. You know popular government. You know by and for the people I said it was. You know the ideas behind the American Revolution. When they did that, they were claiming the right to create their own government and that government needed to embrace individual rights and freedoms. And you know popular control. Definitely you know the idea that we could form a social contract to protect our rights and our freedoms, particularly our right to private property.

Laurie:

Liberalism is inherently capitalistic. Right. Capitalism was part of the. It comes from the Enlightenment period right, and then from the liberal, the Enlightenment liberalism. You get different types of liberalism and that's where you have now right and left liberalism, I guess you might say right. Our conservatives here in America used to be. They're changing now, so things are a little complicated. But a Reagan conservative is a classical liberal, very close to a libertarian. Very much about you know, don't tread on me, my rights, my property, guns. You know self-defense, things like that. Ok. And then we have left liberals. I would call that, you know a Democrat, a sort of left leaning or moderate liberal who may want a little bit more social welfare but basically agrees that you know, this is what the country is about. Right and capitalism is fine. I mean, nancy Pelosi, for instance, said capitalism, I'm a capitalist. Right, she is okay. And so it kind of like tickles me when people say, oh, you know, democrats are radical, radical leftists. They do not know what they're talking about. Right, like they are like Republicans.

Randy:

Don't beat around the bush so much, Lori.

Laurie:

I would say they're like Nixon. You know, like. Nixon was a seemed to be kind of a I don't know far right guy in the 70s, but if you look at what Nixon did, he's very much like most Democrats now. As far as like what kind of tax structure he wanted, all right. So anyway, like so there's the liberals, and whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you're a liberal. And in Europe that's what liberal means. In Canada that's what liberal means. It's only in America that we call a right-leaning liberal a conservative. So what's a true conservative? In Europe, where this originated, in opposition to the Enlightenment liberalism that fomented the American Revolution and the French Revolution, you had a type of conservatism that came out in opposition to it. Edmund Burke was kind of considered the father of this conservatism. It embraced traditionalism, right Like. The idea was these revolutionaries are moving too fast. They're throwing out all of our traditions, they're throwing out our faith.

Laurie:

They just believe in reason, you know, yeah, yeah, right. Hide your kids, hide your wife, right. So you know, Edmund Burke was all about just, you know, slowing things down, preserving what worked and changing gradually. And he saw liberals basically just trying to throw out all tradition, belief and move very quickly, all right. So that's what a conservative is.

Laurie:

We've hardly had any in America. Russell Kirk would be an example of an American conservative. Wendell Berry, I believe, is a type of American conservative of sorts, but there aren't very many and Americans just don't vibe with that right. But that's what I would call a conservative and I think that we have things to learn from that perspective. For instance, with the current administration, we see like extremely rapid change. It's not changing the liberal direction in all cases, right, it's going off into a new kind of nationalistic direction, but it's rapid, radical change.

Laurie:

A real conservative would be absolutely gobsmacked by that and would say, oh my gosh, this is radical, it is revolutionary, it's destructive. We're losing our brain trust, we're losing our institutional memory. You know what little patterns that we had developed we're losing. We're losing our international power structure. Why are we doing all this? You know we need to slow down. So and this, you know, what's happening here is actually very, very American. We always try to do things in a very cookie cutter, rapid, you know, and fairly destructive manner, because somebody just thinks oh, I've got a great idea, I just think I'll implement that, you know with, with complete abandon, because it's a genius idea.

Laurie:

So now, infused with the tech, bro, move fast and break things yeah exactly Right that that's considered really cool, right, but it's actually when you think about it as a mature human being, and conservatism kind of of the type I'm talking about represents intellectual and emotional maturity, move fast and break things as a childish way to think, it's a little boy way to think, and so you know, obviously this is where we're at now as a society, but hopefully it will change and then Marxism is maybe a little more straightforward. The reason why most Americans, I think, don't know what Marxism is is because they're told that people like Nancy Pelosi are somehow Marxist or learn about, maybe, capital. What he said in Capital, you know, is economic analysis that they don't like, but they don't really understand Marxism.

Laurie:

Marxism is a critique of capitalism and a proposal for what to do. Mainly, what I pull from Marxism is an understanding of the dynamics of capitalism and a critique of it. I don't necessarily agree with Marx's solutions myself, but I think there's a contribution that that theory gives us as far as our understanding of capitalism. So anyway, there's a lot of confusion in America about these terms and I'm glad that you asked me to clarify them.

Kyle:

Yeah, and that was super helpful. Thank you. Quick follow up, we don't have to dwell on it, just a thought that I had as I was reading through your book, a thing that I've noticed when both and this is I hate the both sides isn't thing, but I'm about to do it. So when conservatives define conservatism what it really means, and when liberals define liberalism what it really means, it almost always in my experience it comes out as something that is like a universal rational principle. It's like it really just boils down to what any reasonable, good person would do or think or choose, which kind of seems to make the terms meaningless. Now, your, your historical survey there and sort of geographical contextualization is really helpful.

Kyle:

It makes me want to go read Burke, finally. So there's like historical underpinnings for these terms which I really appreciate. But, like in this context, it seems like many times even trying to define the terms is pointless. Like I read somebody like David Brooks, for example, who styles himself a true conservative and when he tries to define conservatism it's just humility, it's just intellectual humility and being careful.

Kyle:

And like every liberal I know that I respect is that. So it's like hard to give a definition that is distinctive, that actually makes a significant difference between the two things. But I appreciate the historical context that you get because I can see the difference between Marxism like a true leftism, the kind of liberalism we're talking about, that's like enlightenment rationalism based, and then a kind of Burkean. That one is honestly still a little more amorphous to me, which is why I want to read that. But I can definitely see the difference from Marxism right when it actually becomes more than just I'm following like justifiable moral principles. That's where.

Kyle:

I quite see the distinction, I guess.

Laurie:

The problem with classical conservatism is, unlike the other two. It's not a set of principles or precepts. It really is kind of an attitude and you know an approach is kind of an attitude and you know an approach. Michael Oakeshott's essay on being conservative is really good for understanding this type of conservatism. It is maybe from modernized, a little bit relativistic conservatism is because it speaks to preserving tradition regardless of the tradition, with the idea that it must be preserving something that's at least partially valuable, even if some of it needs to be changed.

Laurie:

For instance, edmund Burke defended in Parliament the Indian culture against the predations of I think it was Hastings, the governor of India, his troops' mistreatment of the Indian people, in particular Indian women, and he did it on the basis of respecting Indian religion and cultural practices. Why? Because by preserving those things within Indian culture you would be assuring that the nation could still operate as it had, and the assumption was that these traditions did embody something useful that worked for that people. So you don't want to pull that out and just say nope, that doesn't make sense, that's not rational. We have a more rational way of governing and living our lives. Don't wear that veil or whatever it may be.

Laurie:

So there's a certain amount of Americans would find it hard to take the lack of universal principles in that type of conservatism, but I still think it's really useful, because a lot of our problems are caused by assuming that we just know what's right. And there's these 10 principles, or whatever, that we need to impose upon everybody right, everybody needs to be equal, everybody needs to, you know, have the same rights as Americans. Well, you know, if we do this, if we impose this in the wrong way, as we did, I think, during the Bush years right in the Middle East, you know we had this dream of sort of transplanting democracies everywhere and spreading American capitalism. And you know, if you don't do it with respect or you don't do it in dialogue, and it's not their idea, it's your idea, guess what it? It doesn't, it doesn't work. So I think there's some, there's some real wisdom there. Um so, but it is.

Kyle:

It is a slippery concept thanks, I appreciate that, yeah, oh, I also just wanted to know that, for any listeners who might think that marxists are rampant in academia, they're not not, not at all. And they're actually. Their percentage is among the lowest in the humanities and like very low in certain branches of the humanities. So like there are Marxists, in the same sense that I'm a Thomist, which means I've read Thomas Squash's side of his ideas compelling, but like yeah, that's just not a thing.

Laurie:

So it's really not. I mean, I try to explain this to people and it just doesn't compute. Just because we may talk about something or teach it because people need to know about it doesn't make, doesn't make us believers in it. And I would say what you see in academia is over professionalization, like everybody's a professional to the point where they don't even really care about what they're talking about. Right is, is published, is published, right, right, that's what you need to do. So I mean, we're very far from having a bunch of like people running around trying to revolutionize the country, right?

Kyle:

what was it park said? The point is to change. I'm falling asleep over here. All right, much philosophy expression okay, um, so you'll.

Randy:

You'll get used to this lori we got. You're going to get academic questions from the side of the screen and normal dude dumb questions on the side of the screen.

Randy:

Just bear with those normal dude dumb questions, um in the beginning of your book, as I was reading through it, you articulated this kind of political realignment that we're finding in America as we speak really. I mean, when I was growing up and coming of age it was kind of just well known that the Republicans are the party of the wealthy and the elite and the Democrats are the party of the common man, of the working man. You know now there's going to be some people who scoff at both of those, but that's just kind of the common understanding. Now I would say that's flip-flopped and I think I read you agreeing with that that really the Democrats have become the party of the elites and the Republicans have become the party of the working class. And you point to identity politics as having a large part in that. Would you agree with that?

Laurie:

Yeah.

Randy:

Yeah. So I've got a question and then like a speculative question that maybe you'll entertain for me because I'm interested, but here's the inarticulate question Do you think it's possible to care for the most marginalized people in our society? Do you think it's possible to care for the most marginalized people in our society, which is, I think, where a lot of the identity politics came from? We want to give rights to queer people, to trans people, just kind of. If you're going to try to enact policy and order and structure our society in a way that cares about the most marginalized, is it just inevitably going to seep into and be culled and be defined as identity politics, or is there a different way to go about it?

Laurie:

Well, that's a tough question. I think there could have been a different way to approach it. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a certain amount of what we call identity politics, in the sense of appreciating differences, learning to appreciate them. I think there's a certain almost a Christian impulse in trying to appreciate and embrace people of different walks of life, right and different, different identities. But the way that maybe we could have gone is, I mean, I'm going to go back to kind of the message I got when I was a kid, right, and that was really drilled into my head that in order for you to have freedom yourself and for you to be respected in society and have your rights, everybody else had to have them too, and so the message was toleration. Right it was.

Laurie:

You know, you may not like the fact that these people, some of whom are repugnant, like you know. I remember learning about the Nazi march through Skokie, illinois, and the fact that the Supreme Court said they had a right to do that, and of course it's repugnant. But by preserving, even repugnant, the right of people to speak, even if it is repugnant, allows me also to have my rights. I think at some point our message, the balance of our messaging towards people flipped in our education system and maybe in our popular culture, maybe too much towards appreciating and celebrating and for a lot of people I think there's only so far they can do that. Some people can do that a lot more than other people and to ask them to do that is maybe asking a bit too much.

Randy:

That being, can you say what that is again?

Laurie:

To ask them to like celebrate differences.

Randy:

Yes, right, thank you.

Laurie:

And to embrace them might be asking too much right, whereas asking them to tolerate them in a kind and maybe even Christian fashion for the sake of preserving their own rights. I think that might have been a stronger message that drew more people in. As we went down that road, though, I think an awful lot of people were very excited that American culture was really changing rapidly right, like starting in the 60s and 70s, you know, and then moving forward. It was, you know, in our popular culture. All sorts of groups were starting to get recognition Right, and for a lot of people that was super exciting, it was liberating and really it goes along totally with American freedom. This is a country that was founded on the idea of individual freedom.

Laurie:

OK which means you should be able to live the life that you want to live without you know anybody else, like stopping you Right, but it sits side by side with a more kind of older, old fashioned, enduring kind of human nature.

Laurie:

The attitude of I can only change so fast, and so I think there are also a large segment of society that was having trouble with that. I'm not saying whether that's right or wrong, but I think that clearly you're seeing kind of a rebellion of this, and I think part of it is based on they also don't understand why their identities are not celebrated now, why they have been sort of depicted as the bad guys I'm talking about. You know, white males, you know, who wonder why and I'm not justifying this again, I'm not saying this one way or the other, but like they wonder why they are the bad guys right and they don't want to engage in a conversation about why either. So there's that anger I think has come to the surface, and I believe a lot of it has to do with their feeling like they're economically being left behind. Now there's some truth to that, but I think it's partial. I mean, we can talk about more of that, about that, if you want to.

Randy:

Well, I just got a real quick follow up. Pretend I'm a powerful person in the Democratic Party and I'm trying to figure out how to get my party back in line and popular, in power whatever. And I say I still care about all those things. But how do we? How do we move out of getting stuck in the mud of identity politics in a way that normal Americans are going to understand?

Laurie:

Can I?

Randy:

ask you that, professor Johnson.

Laurie:

I'll, I'll try to. So I've given some thought to advice to Democrats, because I've had Democrats approach me and I've given talks to Democrats. I think that the message that I just articulated is one thing that you could start with. But in addition to that, I think actually, for instance, going and talking to Christians and respecting their religion, even if you don't agree with it. Right, because for a long time, I think Christians in the Midwest and the South and places where they're more conservative in nature have felt like Democrats just have rejected them, that they're unworthy.

Laurie:

I remember, you know, the big like reaction to Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters the basket of deplorables, kind of summed it up, you know. So I, you know I told some Democrats here I said you know, maybe you could go out and you could talk to these people, and I got laughed in the face like literally laughed at you know, and the you know. The response was well, we can't do that. I mean, we can just try to get out the existing Democratic vote, but these people we cannot talk to them. They've got to get over. Oh, yeah, like it was.

Laurie:

First they got angry and then they laughed at me. It was not fun. Yeah, yeah, so you know. But but what are you doing in politics, honestly, if you can't talk to everybody Right? And if you can't, at least you know, treat them with, you know at least minimal respect. So I think, learning more about Christianity, learning more about the Christian positions, being willing to talk to them, and then another thing I suggested is actually support things that improve their lives right In a real concrete way, like here in Kansas. Democrats aren't going to win out in Western Kansas, probably for like decades, I don't know. But but if you were going to try to to like carve out some votes support harvesters going out to you know, a town that currently the harvesters doesn't go to, you know, get behind some service they don't have and literally make it happen for them.

Laurie:

And and then talk to them. You know, talk to them about what do you actually need? What are you lacking? What would you like? Let's see what we can do for you Not vote for us and we'll see if we can do something for you, but let's see if we can do something for you right now to show our goodwill, okay, with our quite massive resources. Yep, I think that that would actually start to shake things up a little bit.

Laurie:

I have friends who are Trump supporters. Of course, you know there are people who are unreasonable, that you just can't talk to, but some of them they do want to have conversations and as long as you come at them from the point of I'm going to listen to you and I'm going to try to, like grasp the kernel that's actually, you know, quite valid, that I can kind of get behind and sympathize with, and then let's have a conversation about it, you know like that's, that is not, that, that's not that hard, and you end up being able to see the other person as a, as a human being, somebody that you can be a friend with, and they see you as somebody who's not their arch enemy at that point, which is destabilizing and opens up a crevice for new thinking.

Randy:

Thank you. Thank you, Laurie. Can I ask?

Kyle:

a real quick follow-up? Yeah, yeah, so that all sounds reasonable to me and I think this gets to a bigger thing going on in your book. Lori, can I ask a real quick follow-up? Yeah, yeah, so that all sounds reasonable to me and I think this is like gets to a bigger thing going on in your book too. Like a lot of the solutions for lack of a better word a lot of your recommendations involve slowing way the hell down, which I'm, like in general, a big fan of. But I can kind of see the reason.

Kyle:

I can understand the perspective of those Democrats you were just referencing, because we're in like a five alarm fire and we don't have the time to go form relationships with those folks and like, especially when, if I do that thing you said about the harvesters, some Fox news host is going to say that Trump did it and they're going to believe them and all of my time will have been wasted I might get like five people to convince you know that I actually was able to talk to but like, what is the point, given the situation, that we're in no-transcript and so I don't?

Laurie:

I don't think it's ever too late to start actually trying to form relationships and talk to people. I do. I do understand like people are very suspicious to people. I do understand like people are very suspicious. They're getting a lot of bad information, but I'm not sure you know what else would we do in this situation. I mean, I know what happens if society breaks down. We can talk about that, but like then you're not going to be talking anymore, right, yeah?

Randy:

Recently, laurie, I heard a guy by the name of Oren Cass who's a conservative economist, who is also the head of a conservative think tank called the American Compass. He was one of the more compelling conservatives I've heard in a long time. This was on the Jon Stewart show. I was pretty fascinated. But he said that basically the free market and the conservative arguments for the free market and the dedication to the free market at all costs, from conservatism I'm using that in the american way from republicans um in the last 50 years, let's say, um has basically hurt our economy and changed our way of life for the worse.

Randy:

I was shocked to hear him saying this, and it also kind of had to do with some of the tariff policy that we have going on right now, and he was kind of justifying some of it by saying look, free market capitalism has not served us well all the way through to the end. I'm not used to hearing a conservative or a Republican say we should limit the free market. It shouldn't be quite so free and capitalism shouldn't be so unfettered. Can you speak to thoughts on how capitalism and the free market have transformed our actual lives and contributed even to the culture wars that we find ourselves in the midst of?

Laurie:

Right, Well, yeah, I spend a lot of time in the book two whole chapters Unsettling 1 and 2, just trying to deal with the ways in which capitalism have eroded our family structures, our communities, right? So I use Wendell Berry. I don't know how many of your listeners know Wendell Berry, okay, yeah, so yeah, author of Unsettling of America, among many other books, and he talks about how, you know, the American settlers came in and they, you know, swept away the Indian cultures and drove them off their lands and and changed everybody's way of life and, you know, settled and became farmers. And then then, you know, settled and became farmers. And then industrialization swept in and industrialized agriculture and production and it swept away that way of life. And then, as that has changed to even now we're in a post-industrial era capitalism has just continued to transform and change and change and change the way people work and the way people live more and more rapidly and with each change that happens, patterns and practices and human ties of community, traditions and values get fractured and we become more and more isolated, more and more, kind of I don't know thinking that we have to kind of do everything for ourselves and somehow survive this onslaught of constant change. You know, not that long ago a person could actually think about you know, when I graduate from high school I will get this job. Maybe I'll stay with this company for the rest of my life. Or I can get that farm, or I can inherit my parents' farm and I can be a farmer and I can make a living on that.

Laurie:

I tell the story of the industrialization of agriculture, as you know, a prime example of this whole thing that has basically decimated rural areas to where you know. Many, many towns are just limping along or they've disappeared right. Their economic activity has dried up and their kids, the kids, have had to go. And you know, I remember, I remember talking to a student several years ago I think I put this in the book who was in tears in my office.

Laurie:

She was from a farm family around here and she was in grain science and I'm like well, and she was taking my environmental, political, political thought class where I deal with the agricultural transformation, and she says I finally understand why it is I cannot go back to my parents farm only one kid can go back because that's all that they can afford on this huge farm, because the margins are so tight and there's so few people needed. Okay, so I have to go into cereal production and work for a company, but all I want to do is go back to the farm, the place where I grew up. So that represents to me that constant loss, and I don't think there's a student I have who thinks that they're going to be doing. You know, working for one company or you know basically practicing one profession for their entire life.

Randy:

Now, Even if they wanted to right.

Laurie:

Yeah, and they're going to have to go wherever the job is, away from their parents, away from their. You know the people they grew up with. I don't even remember most of the people I went to high school with, you know. So this is, this is unnatural, and it leaves me, leaves people, isolated. We don't have like the social fabric to make us strong. So we're weak, and the weaker we get, the more we have to rely on ourselves as just individuals, without those ties and without those structures that we used to have, the more susceptible we are to the manipulation of politicians and advertising, social media and all of these things that are telling us we'll give you the solutions, we'll give you. You know the answers, we'll give you meaning, and you know this is partly why we're in the mess we're in.

Laurie:

So capitalism is a very culturally socially destructive force, and I use Christopher Lash in this book quite a bit as a. He's a combination of conservative and radical socialist thinker, but you know he basically says this. Wendell Berry says this, right. So, mr Cass, I haven't heard him talk, talk, actually, or if I had, I hadn't put the name together with him, but I think he's expressing a more classical conservative position and I think he's absolutely right that the that the type of of capitalism we have been pursuing and idolizing, where margaret that said there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals, there's only profit. That has wrecked us right. But the problem is we can't just go back now, and I think that's the impulse people have in supporting the current administration. Is they just kind of want to try to, you know, backfill and somehow re-industrialize? Yes.

Laurie:

I don't think that's going to work. I think we need to find a new way now.

Randy:

Yeah, I just want to know what that new way might be.

Kyle:

Oh, okay, yeah, we're going to get to that. So can you pin down a little more tightly the specifically capitalist part of that critique? Because I'm trying to think of, like, what if things had been different? What if there was some alternative economic arrangement? Let's say, the people owned the means of production? Right, it seems like some of that could just be advancement. Like maybe your students still wouldn't be able to go back and work on our farm because we still have industrialization, because we're still trying to feed all the people and this is a much more uh convenient and uh efficient way to do it and safe and healthy, and we have lots of damn people and only so much food and we gotta, we gotta feed them. Science is going to continue progressing in this thought experiment the same way that it has. So, like, what is the specifically capitalist piece that is causing so much damage that wouldn't have been caused by a different system? Does that make sense?

Laurie:

Yeah, so there's specialization and automation, right. So just to take our agricultural system right, america has specialized in producing commodity crops for animal feed production. So we actually do not produce in this vast, abundant country of ours the fruits and vegetables that we need to feed our own people. If we cut off international trade in those items at this point, many of our people would be malnourished. So we actually don't produce all the food that we need. We produce a lot of corn and other grains and a lot of those go into cows and other animals. So we're very good at producing meat and some of them go into making non-food items like ethanol, gasoline and plastics.

Laurie:

So it's not rational, right, in the sense of what we would need to actually feed ourselves. We do not feed the world by any means. The world, to a certain extent, feeds us, so and we've created a globalized system in which different countries specialize, you know, in different items and then they have to be shipped all over the place and you know we use a lot of fossil fuels to do that. So there's that Specialization when it comes to things like that is not necessarily rational, it doesn't necessarily help national security and make people more secure, and then automation is just, you know, fundamentally something that it's sort of like capitalism bites its own tail, because capitalism operates to the extent that people have money to spend and can buy items, but we are continually automating. Why? Because in competition, we have to automate in order to lower our prices, to be more efficient, to get there ahead of the competition right. So we oftentimes destroy our machinery or, you know, downgrade it to get the new stuff, which is kind of expensive. But we're competing with other companies, so we have to do that. But, you know, automation ultimately puts a lot of people out of work, fewer customers.

Laurie:

Eventually, this, you know, I mean this is what produces those down cycles, those recessions, and eventually I don't know how capitalism can even survive that unless we reprioritize and rejigger it. It doesn't mean that we have to completely abandon capitalism, although we could and maybe that would be better. But we are accelerating the tendencies of capitalism right now, and one of the tendencies, through automation and specialization, is monopolizing, and our government hasn't done anything to break up monopolies in a long time. So we got these very huge corporations and these moguls like Elon Musk and, you know, jeff Bezos, who have the net worth of some countries and have like tremendous political influence.

Laurie:

We should have never let that happen. Government is supposed to stop that from happening. So you know, I think we have choices to make and we still could make them about. You know how to regulate the capitalist economy if we want to keep it, or you know how much we want to transform it right towards some kind of socialism. Many countries have a certain amount of socialism but still retain capitalism as well, you know. So I mean, we have options. I'm not sure which would be the right one, but we can't probably keep going down this road without experiencing more resentment and anxiety and political turmoil.

Kyle:

Yeah, so it's that resentment and anxiety bit that I want you to comment on next. So I want to read a quote from your book. This is you quoting someone else who has, incidentally, also been on our podcast. So this is Stanley Hauerwas. He says the profound sense of unease that many Americans have about their lives often takes the form of resentment, and that resentment is against elites. It's even more troubling, he says it funds the prejudice against minority groups as well as immigrants. Resentment is another word for the unease that seems to grip many good middle class, mostly white people. These are people who have worked hard all their lives yet find they are no better off than where they started. They deeply resent what they interpret as the special treatment that some receive in an effort to right the wrongs of the past. Do you think he's right about that? How would you contextualize that?

Laurie:

Yeah, no, I do think he's right about that. There's, you know, baked into our psychology as human beings, I think, is the tendency to scapegoat. I mean it's a religious tendency and I do try to bring that out in the book. It comes out in religions, but it can come out in other ways as well, and I think it's pretty strong. And so, you know, when you're feeling like I can't get ahead, I'm not going to be able to pay off my loans, I'm in debt, you know, I may not be able to keep my job, or it's not paying enough for me to feel any degree of security, or maybe my kids can't get a job that's equal to the degree that I paid 100 grand for, or whatever, then unfortunately there's a tendency to believe that somebody else is to blame, right, that some other group in society. It's really easy to convince people of this. It's much harder to get them to see that the entire system is kind of moving in this direction or creating this problem. That's harder to do.

Laurie:

And, of course, politicians and pastors some pastors, you know prey on that tendency, right, and tell people the easy, easy solution that you know Mexicans are people of color or women. I mean, it was women for quite a while. Now you know they're so integrated in the economy it's. You know you can't really, you can't really propose to remove women from the economy. People would be worse off than they were.

Laurie:

But I do remember a time when when women were blamed for this right. But? But everybody involved in this economy is doing pretty much what they have to do, right, and and so it's an unfortunate tendency and I think we have to somehow fight it on a variety of fronts are being targeted right now. Right, but many of them are able to stay, and the result of being targeted by this tendency is that they're even more afraid and so they can be even more exploited, working more cheaply than ever before, and I do think that's part of the reason why they are being targeted. Right, but most people don't know that and they don't know all the different things that they do or why they do them within our economy. Without them, we wouldn't be able to produce a lot of the agricultural production we do have yeah I don't think most other Americans want those jobs.

Kyle:

No, I want to put this gently because it's more of a question than a critique. Really it's a. It's a question about do you, are you concerned about this kind of critique of the problems? But it reminds me in some ways of some other thinkers I've read who ended up who had like a very powerful insight, and that insight, at the end of the day, ended up being a little monocausal, a little grand explanation, too easy kind of thing.

Kyle:

And I just wonder if there's any bit of that going on in your critique of capitalism. And maybe it's just because that was the focus of this book and that's the audience. You know you were pointing it out or whatever. But like it reminds me of, well, marx, like the, all the problems of human life are, uh, economic problems, and for nietzsche it's it's power and for uh freud it's sex right. So like these brilliant, truly brilliant people who saw pervasively and broadly, had at the the end of the day, diagnoses that couldn't stand up to the evidence, because the evidence is complex and complicated. So are you at all concerned about falling into that?

Laurie:

trap more causal elements than a lot of other people do by looking at religion. Human psychology is a major theme as well as economics, and I think the reason why I focus as much as I do on economics is that's where it's harder for Americans to go. Don't want to critique the economy, but it's also the thing that we could actually do something concrete about. We can't immediately erase people's prejudices or their tendency to scapegoat. We could maybe fix some of their insecurity by making them feel more financially or economically secure. So I think that if we changed people's knowledge base and their understanding of capitalism and made it more possible for people to not worship it, not think of it as something that cannot be changed or it's just natural and like gravity, we can't do anything about it. I think there's some hope that we could stop some of these, um, these other tendencies, but I hope I'm not falling into that, into that trap. Um, I am not a Marxist, uh, for what it's worth. Um, you know cause I I I am not aiming at a Marxist for what it's worth, you know, because I am not aiming at a Marxist solution.

Laurie:

But I do think we have uncritically accepted the idea that capitalism is a force of its own that we can't really do anything about, and that's patently false. Other countries do things right. Other countries have, like, successfully to a certain point, blunted the edges of capitalism and changed how it operates, and and they could do more Right, but it's not this immovable thing. Either it's in charge or we're in charge. I prefer to think we're in charge. In charge or we're in charge. I prefer to think we're in charge. So if we could do that, I think it would make it easier for us to move away from some of our attitudes. So I'm fairly comfortable with it. I don't think that most people have considered it, because we're so like living in that identity politics world, and I do believe that world is pretty superficial and doesn't really offer us any actual solutions. Right, we aren't going to have a kumbaya moment at this point.

Randy:

Unfortunately, as we finish this conversation, let's get into some of your potential remedies, your potential ideas for how we could actually get ourselves out of this culture wars that we find ourselves in, and just the political reality. It seems like a lot of your answer to a lot of our problems is basically to cultivate community. Right, and I love that idea. I think actually, if we just talk to our neighbors a little bit more and a little bit less to our little echo chamber online and on social media, we might actually start to understand each other a little bit better and start to build that community.

Randy:

But, especially in the post-pandemic world that we live in, our world is rapidly, like light speed, rapidly becoming more and more isolated. We're living on Zoom. You and the two of us are having a conversation. You know it's incredible that we can do this, but this is what our world is looking like more and more. How do you cultivate community in a world that is just completely where we see community eroding? Real community, neighborly community, people working together and having a common project together, whatever you want to say, how does that look in a world that is just completely going the opposite direction, laurie?

Laurie:

Right, yeah, well, I do advocate, I guess, even though I'm not like I don't think it's going to it would be the solution to all of our problems. But I do advocate for at least some entertaining of moving towards democratic socialism, even though I think that, because I think it's going to be very difficult in America, but I think it might create a context where this lower level community building is a little bit more possible. But, that being said, the other thing that I look at is leadership of churches, right? So there's quite a bit of stuff in that conclusion and the two chapters prior to it that have to do with, you know, where American churches have kind of fallen down in their leadership, either becoming hyper politicized or just being like super individualistic and all about just pretty pretty much collapsing into the American political culture, whereas you know what we really need, whether it's from Protestant or Catholic, various denominations, is true leadership from pastors and people in churches who want to actually create community within their church.

Laurie:

Churches are already like structures of some community, but it's weak, it's thin in a lot of cases, right, people aren't really helping each other, they're not really cooperating. They're coming together to talk and listen and fellowship to a certain extent, but for the most part we haven't really thought about using the church to build up, to build community in a stronger sense. The Black church is a little bit of an example in some cases of doing that. I think that the Black church does a better job in American society if you look at the history of it in doing that, where your life kind of can revolve around the church and the cooperation and friendships form in the church that extend beyond the church and it even can inform to a certain extent your political and social action can extend out from the church. So I would like to see that. I really remain pretty disappointed with the lack of leadership of most churches. I feel like most pastors tail their people if that makes sense, rather than leading them.

Laurie:

And so just like they're. You know, in capitalism we give people what they want. They're giving them the product that they want, which, you know, I, just when I go to church I mean, if it's one of those churches, I'm sorry, I don't even know what they're talking about you walk out and you're like what did I just hear? I don't know, which is why I'm at Pastor Zahn's church.

Randy:

I mean he's saying something anyway.

Laurie:

So I really think we should start there right that, yes, you, you know it's good to have to try to step out and talk to your neighbors, but it's not going to be a societal solution because it relies too much on our individual efforts and that falls, that we fall down all the time, and there's only so many of us who will do that. What we need is leadership.

Laurie:

We're not going to get that from our politicians, but here we have this incredible institution that's lasted all these centuries really, you know. That's still a form of organization for people and gives them meaning. That's where we should start, at least as Christians.

Randy:

So I love that idea and I love that answer because, as a church leader, I love the idea of the church being a source of redemption and renewal in our nation and the culture that we find ourselves in. However and man Lori, I'm not usually a pessimist like this.

Kyle:

This is my role.

Randy:

Yeah.

Laurie:

I know Seriously.

Randy:

But my lived experience as a pastor and a church leader in these last five years in particular and not to say you know the 15 years before that but church attendance is going down, like we all know, that pick from of a smaller church attendance it seems like and not it seems like I can tell you in my experience and the experience of many of my peers that I talk to, the people who are showing up sometimes on Sundays are really willing to give you just that, just that Sunday morning, and then our lives are so full of other stuff that it's almost impossible to engage in real community stuff like you're talking about.

Randy:

Let me just put myself in my church as an example. We'll give opportunities for people to engage, for people to gather, for people to come around to cause and get very, very little engagement. We'll have to cancel more activities and engagements than we actually have happen, and so we've kind of scaled back what we offer because we're sick of kind of doing a bunch of work and then nobody signs up for it. So what I'm trying to say is our culture feels like people are less willing to, and have less time to, engage in some of these communal-based ways of living that you're talking about, including in the church, and that doesn't mean that we haven't taught about it very much. I mean, like you can only shame people so much until you realize I'm shaming somebody into trying to do the things that I want them to do this is.

Randy:

This is the what it feels like to be a pastor right now, trying to hit people over that. This sounds terrible and I'm going to lose all the people who are listening. Right, but the reality is it's really hard to get people to engage outside of Sunday mornings, and even it's hard to get people to engage in Sunday mornings sometimes. So how do we do that?

Laurie:

I know that, yeah, so I mean my instinct, which may seem kind, of I don't know, crass or whatever is, but whatever is that, it needs to be something that benefits them. Okay, in churches we're used to saying come, volunteer, you know help somebody, right, like we'll come and volunteer and we'll help people, and you know handing out food, or we'll collect things and we'll give them, and you know, or we'll or come and we'll talk, you know, but you know, or we'll or come and we'll talk, you know. But. But what about? You know, can we start up a cooperative daycare center where you won't have to pay a thousand dollars a month for your kid to be, you know? Or maybe your parent can stay out of a nursing home which costs tens of thousand dollars a year, at least for a few more years, if we can cooperate in visiting and being in their homes, enough, sharing that responsibility, that they don't have to right that, maybe that would catch people's attention in a sort of visceral way, in a way that we are trained to think in terms of self-interest and we usually think, well, I can only get those things if I have enough money, right? So like retraining people to think maybe I don't need money, if I have friends, right, like if I actually have people I can cooperate with and I can provide them and they can provide, and I know that's that's still hard to organize.

Laurie:

Right before the pandemic we had something called a time bank here, which was a sort of capitalistic oriented, or at least it was framed in that way, because you had to, like you had to put in certain hours, then you could take certain hours out and so on. But you know, I would do a service for people with something that I knew and then I could look for somebody who could fix my wiring problem and I could use that their time and we were trading time back and forth. But about like six months into that the pandemic hit, everything shut down and it never came back. But if we were going to try to get people's attention right now, I think it would have to be in something that they actually directly benefited from and then giving them the experience, even a little bit, of like stepping outside of their comfort zone in a real way, right, which you would definitely do if you were actually like providing cooperation with other people rather than money or time, just kind of time listening it. You know, all I can say is like it is kind of a life changer, so it will be exciting.

Laurie:

Like most people who are, you know, in America, have something like anxiety or depression going on, it seems like right now, and you know they're spending a lot of money and time on that. I'm not saying this will go away, you know. If you do this, but in an actual, serious way, right, maybe you feel more secure and a little less anxious. I mean, we're dealing with a population where half the people are divorced, right? They've had the most, supposedly most significant person in their life disappear, right? So, without you know, now that 50% is no longer there to even help me out again, I'm on my own Right. So so I think it. It would mean a lot to people to be thought, to think of themselves not as being asked to be just a benefactor, but to be a recipient as well. That's my gut, my gut, like response to your question.

Kyle:

Thank you, Appreciate it. It's so interesting to me. I know we're like running long here, but you kind of defaulted back to this. I'm going to call it a capitalist form of reasoning. Those monocausal explanations I was referencing. Another one is like Hobbes and contract theory like rational self-interest, is like the basis of all human motivation, right?

Laurie:

Well, that's where we're at right now.

Kyle:

It's so fascinating to me that when the rubber meets the road, it seemed like, well, if that's what you got to appeal to, I mean, are we just getting the argument away at that point? Are they right about that?

Laurie:

No, I mean, it's not about the argument, it's about getting things done, so it doesn't matter it takes getting things done is to appeal to people's rational, or even irrational self-interest.

Laurie:

I think at first you might have to. You know, I mean, it's probably not going to work to appeal to. You know, you have to change your entire, your entire mindset and your identity completely and and I do think that this, the type of cooperation that I'm envisioning, is different from what they normally experience, which is, just, do I have the money to pay for this? Right now I'm relying on another person, so I have to develop a relationship. But yeah, I'm not worried about being completely consistent in this regard. I think that you do have to think kind of tactically if you want to change things. So it's probably more likely to be received than an appeal to just saying you have to transform yourself right now.

Kyle:

I appreciate that I sensed almost kind of an ambivalence in your book, and it's an ambivalence that I share. Like you have these real thick ideas about what could be different, what could have been different, what might be different in the future, what's possible, but also a real sense of realism I feel, like about we are where we are and people are going to receive what they're going to receive and they're not going to. And honestly, I ended the book with wondering you have these proposals, but do you actually hope? Are you hopeful? Like do you think any of these are realistic? Like do you, if you had to put your money on the table, this can and maybe will happen? Where are you? Because I'm extremely in the pessimistic on this whole thing if I had to put my money on the table.

Laurie:

So I, I do these things and, you know, write this book on a motivation of kind of duty that is. That is, you know, like I'm sure, why you're doing this podcast too, in a way, right is because this is the right thing to do, right, and you do the best that you can, and then you can at least say I've done what I can. I suspect that the only A good, a good half of me or more thinks that the only way people are going to rediscover community and cooperation and something more valuable than their current way of life is through deprivation. And I think that you know we haven't solved we're not even remotely trying to solve a climate crisis. We are not tackling the effects of artificial intelligence and automation generally on our economy. We're just blowing up any hope of I mean, we never had much hope but of, like, international harmony or Concord, so, like you know. But what you do see is when people are really hard pressed, like they were during the Depression right which is what created the Catholic worker movement you get people willing to try and entertain new ideas, and they have to. They basically have to rediscover cooperation.

Laurie:

So that's kind of where I hang out as far as my betting self goes. I hate to say it but I'm willing to. I'm very concerned about our country. If my 401k tanks, I'm willing for it to tank Okay, like we need to wake up and rethink what we value and who we admire and why we do things, and it may take our economy kind of tanking or more for people to get any of that back. But I hope that's not true and I would rather it not be true, just like I'd rather we solve our environmental problems without, you know, reaching temperatures that people can't live with.

Randy:

Yeah, well, let's end on that quote and that thought. Sorry, no, no, I think it's, it's real. The book is the Gap in God's Country, a Longer View on Our Culture Wars. Dr Laurie Johnson, thank you so much for joining us. It's been really wonderful to talk to you.

Laurie:

Thanks to both of you. It was really fun and, yeah, I'll be listening to your podcast now. I've been listening to the last few months since Pastor Zahn told me about you and it's great, so thank you so much for doing it.

Randy:

Well, tell Brian hi, for us too, please.

Laurie:

Yeah, will do, thank you.

Randy:

Thanks for listening to a pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar. We hope you're enjoying these conversations. Help us continue to create compelling content and reach a wider audience by supporting us at patreoncom. Slash apastorandaphilosopher, where you can get bonus content, extra perks and a general feeling of being a good person.

Kyle:

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Randy:

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Kyle:

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Kyle Whitaker

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Randy Knie

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