Democracy, Christian Ethics, and LGBTQ Rights with David Gushee

In the wake of rising authoritarianism and social unrest, Christian ethicist David P. Gushee returns to discuss how Christians should respond to the erosion of democracy and the assault on marginalized groups in America. With record-low approval ratings from outside the Republican base, Donald Trump’s return to power has raised alarm bells across university campuses, LGBTQ advocacy circles, and immigrant communities.
In this episode, Gushee—one of the most respected voices in Christian moral theology—joins hosts Will Wright and Josh Burtram to unpack how Christian ethics should inform public life. From LGBTQ dignity to democratic values, Gushee urges Christians to reject fear-based politics and embrace foundational biblical norms: love, justice, dignity, and truth. He also explains how Christians can ethically engage without sacrificing their values—or their compassion.

👤 Guest Bio:
David P. Gushee is a Christian ethicist and Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University. He’s the author of over 25 books, including Changing Our Mind, After Evangelicalism, and The Moral Teachings of Jesus. He is known for his work on democracy, LGBTQ inclusion, and moral leadership in the public square.

📚 Resources & Links:

• David Gushee’s Website
• David Gushee on Substack
• The Moral Teachings of Jesus by David Gushee 
• Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies
• Will Wright’s article in Christian Ethics Today

Transcript

0:17

Well, hi there, Faithful Politics listeners. If you're joining us on our podcast stream, thanks for joining in with us and our viewers. Thanks for jumping on our YouTube and checking this out. Make sure you like and subscribe so we can keep getting this great content out to you guys. I'm Josh Bertram. I am your Faithful Host here on the Faithful Politics Podcast. And I have, as always, our political host, Will. Will, how are you? I am doing wonderful. I hesitated only for a second because every time we start, you always ask me how I'm doing. And I made a list of responses and I forgot to pull them up. So I'm just stuck with my normal, like I'm doing okay. Yeah, there you go. That's fine. That works. And today we have the pleasure of having again, a repeat guest, Dr. David P. Gushy. He is a prominent Christian ethicist, author and distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. And he's known for his work on Christian ethics, human rights and human dignity, LGBTQ plus inclusion, and Christianity, moral leadership, environmental ethics, war and peace issues, and bioethics. And we have him on the show to... kind of talk about a bunch of boring stuff, because he's not gonna have anything to talk about with everything going on right now. Now, of course that's not true. And we're just glad to have you on again. Thanks for jumping on with us, David. Glad to be with you in conversation again. I appreciate it. Yeah, well, we appreciate it a lot. So we'll just jump right into it. How have you been feeling since, when did he take office? Well, January 20th, is it 21st or 20th? At noon, how have you been feeling since January 20th at noon? How has your heart rate been, your blood pressure, all that? You doing okay? Uh, I do monitor my heart rate and blood pressure. Um, uh, I'm actually doing everything that I can to stay healthy. Uh, I'm at the gym every day and, um, I think self care is, is important, um, all the time, but especially in a time like this. Um, uh, I think I heard, um, that there's like a 4 % approval rating for Trump among like non Republicans or something and made it just been among Democrats. But I'm in I'm in the not 4 % category. Right. I would say it has it has been worse than I thought in some ways. And After the election, the results came in in November, I mainly felt... Shattered is not too strong a word. Distressed that the democracy argument didn't get enough traction. That preserving the rules of the system, preserving a democratic politics is just like one issue among many and not especially salient for a lot of people. Hmm. I find that staggering, really. And that many Christian people would be in the category of those who are implicitly or explicitly willing to trade democracy for some other good that they think is coming. So I felt, to be perfectly transparent, I felt repudiated. I felt repudiated. Like 30 years of work. in the last book, the one we talked about in 2023 on my democracy book, that it just didn't have, it didn't matter. It didn't prevail, that's for sure. I do think I'm learning something can matter and you can still lose, right? We can't judge everything by results. So anyway, there's some deeper things there. But how have I been doing? It's been very distressing. And I try not to think about it every minute. I teach my classes and I try to divert myself and I hang out with my grandkids and I go to the gym and listen to sports talk radio and do things that normal people do, right? And so those are things that I do to try to stay healthy. But the political environment is dark. Yeah, it's distressing no matter, I think, where you are. Like, I'm probably a little bit more in the middle than you are, but it feels distressing, absolutely. I'm curious, what do your students think about this? Do you get any feedback from your students? What's the general sense among the students at Mercer University or in any of the places that you're teaching and interacting with them? I think that I couldn't name one student who is enthusiastic about the new regime. And a number of them are, I mean, they're all appalled. It's just kind of how do you respond and what are you going to do about it? How focused are people on it? And they're thinking about various options. That's it, Mercer. I teach seminary students. Mercer's profile of seminary students tends to be progressive, Protestant, Baptist, non-denominational, about 50-50, white and non-white. And so different people processing things in different ways, but we're in that part of the Christian subculture that is not enthused and actually quite worried. And different people are in different locations. Like I have a student who goes to church with a large number of undocumented immigrants, right? So they have specific concerns. I have students who are pastoring predominantly poor, predominantly African-American churches. They're, you might say, they're always less surprised by white people doing wrong things, you know? But it's still... The anti-DEI and the possible breakdown of public services as well as rises in unemployment and cuts in government jobs affect some of these communities especially. I still travel a lot in LGBTQ plus advocacy circles. and especially trans people are already traumatized with more to come. So, and then in the university sector, there's genuine concern about the crushing of dissent on university campuses, beginning but maybe not ending with green card holders and the Palestine issue. And we all know if anybody who ever read the NEMOL or quote, first they came for the communists, first they came for the trade unionists. We all know that just because one's own group is not especially targeted at the time doesn't mean that autocracy will not come eventually for other groups as well. So that's a lesson well learned. so, I also have European students, PhD students and the Europeans UK. Netherlands. I mean, they're very clear. They're in many ways more clear than we are. They study our news very closely. the country is politically, our international profile is turned upside down. And also the fact that there have been awful incidents of international travelers getting stuck in our customs and immigration thing, getting stuck even for days. I read this week that the Dutch, and my university is in the Netherlands, the Dutch have put a travel advisory on for traveling to the U.S. Wow. You know, so lot of reasons for a lot of my students to be quite concerned and upset. You know, since the last time that we spoke, I found myself published in Christian Ethics today based off a substack I wrote about how like 10 things to do to enjoy politics. And I definitely had a chance to kind of like feel good about myself, about being published in there. because I've never really been published anywhere. And the fact that it was Christian ethics today really kind of meant a lot just because like, I I spent more of my life as an atheist than a Christian. So like, here I am, like, you know, but there was one question that kind of surrounded the publishing of the Substack and that's, don't really know what Christian ethics is. And I thought that maybe I should find out. here, so what is... What is Christian ethics and what can Christian ethics do for us in kind of the time that we're in today? Well first of all, congrats for getting published in Christian Ethics today. That's a Baptist, know, moderate Baptist magazine of long standing and I've been published in there several times. So welcome aboard. You already are an ethicist because hey, you got published in Christian Ethics today, right? So, well basically, Christian Ethics is the academic discipline that is charged with Attending to the moral formation and moral behavior of Christians. Moral formation, moral behavior, and moral witness. Let's say that. That's pretty good. I should write that down somewhere. So Christian ethics focuses on how we are to live if we are followers of Christ. How we shape character. How... what we teach about right and wrong and what we say to the world. some Christian ethics is more kind of personal focus, like personal character, personal morality. My tradition of Christian ethics has that, but it has also tended to be more social focus, like what do we say to the government, to the society, to culture. That's sometimes called Christian social ethics. And that's the name of my chair in Amsterdam. Christian social ethics. So yeah, so that's what Christian ethics is. Long discipline, would say Christian ethics has been around ever since they've been Christians, but as an academic discipline, it goes back to the late 19th century. And how can we apply, view, what types of opinions do you have about the way Christians are acting in this moment in history? Here's where the different dimensions of Christian ethics are in interesting conversation with each other. Christians speak into the public arena based on what they believe is going on and what they believe should happen in the world. But Christians in America are divided. I'm not most significantly. along the old denomination lines. This is not Presbyterian versus Methodist versus Catholic. That doesn't matter at all. Christians are divided along left-right lines. And now I would say more acutely, Christians are divided along authoritarian versus liberal democracy parameters. And. In my book, I showed that there is a long history, both of Christians being attracted to authoritarian politics for various reasons, especially authoritarian Christian politics, Christian being in quote there. And also Christians have played a key role in pioneering modern democracy. so the initial, to be quite direct, the initial concern that many of us had about Christian support for Trump was that he was like a morally bad person, you know, and like how could you support a morally bad person, right? That was, you know, you go through the litany of the things he had said and the things he had done that were objectionable. This was not George W. Bush. This was not Mitt Romney. This was a different, a different kind of cat, you might say. Now, and then, and then once he became president, there were the various policy things and so on. and personal corruption and all that. Now, the most decisive concern is the preservation of the democratic system itself in the country. And so what my book was about was, you know, and what I'm being asked to talk about a lot still is that concern, which goes beyond personal morality and it goes beyond, you know, things you might find objectionable about the character of a person or the language of a person or whatever, or even the policies. It's about does this person really believe in constitutional democracy? And are Christians really committed to constitutional democracy? And I think we're finding that you have a vanguard of theoreticians who are drifting away from constitutional or liberal democracy. But you also have lots of regular people who may not know that that's exactly what's at stake. who are aiding and abetting it. Man, so I mean, when I hear this, obviously it's very disturbing for me, because you just kind of think you're, you know, I grew up in America and you just think democracy is a given. It's something that's going to be here. It's something that has enduring power. You hear all the time that it is, the best government that there is. Like again, in my context, like there is no other government that's brought so many people out of poverty and brought so much wealth and a good life or quality of life, raise a quality of life for this number of people than democracy. And I guess it's kissing cousin capitalism. I don't know exactly how that works, right? But I hear that all the time. And yet now it just feels like all of it's under threat. And yet in my normal life, I mean, I paid more for stuff, but I don't know whose fault it's that. It's a really complicated question. I haven't necessarily been affected personally, although I know people. that are concerned and I know people in the LGBTQ community that are very concerned, some people that I love and my friends and I'm definitely get concerned about that. I get concerned about my immigrant friends and how they're feeling. And I guess my question is, like if someone's listening in and they're like, yeah, I don't know, I just don't feel it that much. I mean, is it really like, are we taking this? Is this really a big deal? Like for the people who are still sitting on the fence and they're like, is it really a big deal? I would love for you to kind of map out. You don't have to go through again your whole book or anything like that, but map out like what are the most poignant areas where you feel like democracy is under threat right now in America and how like essentially how is it under threat? Kind of make that case like, hey guys, this is why you should be concerned. Whether you're conservative, or liberal, because the argument is, that's just the liberals freaking out. I literally put something on Trump looking for a third term and just asked, hey, what do you guys think about a third term for Trump? Put it in the comments. There are different ideas. Most of them were like, no, but a lot of them was like, that's just the liberal media going nuts. They're just being crazy. So you get that kind of idea that it's almost like people in conservative circles are still like, I don't know. Is he really serious? Is that really, you know, I just think he's kidding around. Like I hear that he's joking. He's kidding around. What? So again, that's just a specific example. We don't have to harp on that although you can. But what is it? What's concerning about our moment specifically? And yeah, kind of make that case for someone who's sitting on the fence right now. Well, in a democracy, The thing that was striking to me as I did my research is democracy means the rule of law, not the arbitrary will of one person. And it means that everybody is accountable to the law and that everybody has the protections of the law. and that there are checks and balances in case anybody should get out of hand. So Christians should have a value for that because we know that human beings are sinners. And if you give anybody too much power, they're likely to let it go to their head and abuse it. This is why everybody is accountable to somebody else. Like, you know, the mechanic is accountable to the head of the shop and the teacher is accountable to the principal and principal is accountable to the school superintendent who's accountable to the school board. In a well-functioning liberal democratic state, we have accountability structures and we have the protection of individual rights. We also have a robust legal system with lawyers whose professional ethic is that they protect the rights of the accused. and a judiciary of independent judges who follow the law and follow the facts. So if you just start there, also we have a Bill of Rights that begins with freedom of speech, right? Freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech. So I would ask people who don't really think this is affecting them, How do you feel about the fact that some of the people who are being arrested, like by ICE, there are no charges, there is limited access to legal counsel, and it turns out though, a lot of these folks, well, they're green card holders, and so they have a legal right to be in the United States. They have academic visas and a legal right to be in the United States. And what, what, they're being accused of is in some cases social media posts that say things that are pro-Palestinian. Does that concern you? It concerns me. Freedom of speech, legal representation, and some of them are being taken away and not being told, nobody's being told where they're being taken. Some people have been shipped overseas. like those accused of being part of a Venezuelan gang have been shipped to a very worrisome prison in El Salvador. And the way autocracy works is autocrats, they don't do the rule of law anymore. They do the rule of the one, the rule of the leader. And the leader turns out to be above the law and people can fall below the law if they attract the negative attention of the leader. If El Salvador, El Salvador's authoritarian president, is willing to accept anybody we send, who would be next? Could it be people charged with political crimes? Could it be Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney? Could it be professors whose writings are not appreciated by the administration? as a professor, I'm aware also of the pressure of being put on the universities. So there's also this thing that might seem like inside baseball, but the way that Elon Musk's team has been free to go into government agencies and gut them, it essentially means that Congressionally appropriated funds are being blocked by the executive branch from being used. Job protections that most of us would take for granted our jobs are being overridden. And services are going to be harmed. In fact, I'm keeping my eye on Social Security right now. I tried to go on the Social Security website this weekend and it wasn't working at all. It was down. One thing that gives me hope is if If the chainsaw method of dealing with government services continues, many, many, people from all over the country who rely on functioning websites and being able to get a passport and being able to get your Social Security check and being able to get your Medicaid and Medicare to work, if regular people find that all of that has been gutted by this, that they will protest. So, It's the gutting of government services at that basic level. That's just kind of basic people's self-interest. But it's the suppression of rights guaranteed in our Constitution, the attempt to intimidate universities and law firms and other media to suppress their freedom of action and freedom of speech and freedom of profession, their vocational responsibilities. And then the mistreatment of populations such that the whole world is watching the way that our immigration and custom enforcement people are treating green card holders and people at the border. I think reasonable people should be concerned about that. I do too. yeah, the law firms one is kind of like one of the ones that are sliding under the radar because it's very complex, right? So like you got, you know, Perkins and Coie and all these other sort of high end law firms that are being targeted by the president because they represented somebody the president didn't like. That's the rule of that's the rule of the tyrant not the rule of law that means right there And we didn't even talk about the Trump trying to annex his own Crimea, our northern neighbor, which should just get a ton of people really, really upset. I want to kind of focus on one particular group, because I think that in this newest Trump administration, nobody's safe. But I would say you're especially not safe if you are a member of one of two different groups. Immigrants is one group and the other are like the trans groups or LGBTQ kind of more broadly. And, you know, I have a friend who has a trans child who was talking about getting them on a flight to go to Poland. They've got some family there or something like that, you know, and, and I remember telling them like under normal circumstances, I would say, yeah, that that might be an overreaction. But this time I was like, I endorse it. think that's a good that's a smart move. Yeah, yeah. To leave the country for a while, because, you know, since since he was sworn in, there have been at least like two to 300 different pieces of legislation that targets, you know, the LGBTQ community. And and I I sympathize somewhat with my Christian brothers and sisters because they don't want to necessarily come out and say, hey, we're dehumanizing people. And that's not what Christ would want. Because then they're going to be viewed as, you're pro LGBTQ or whatever like that. It seems like there's a problem separating humanity with... your biblically based viewpoint or whatever. So help us kind of figure out how can Christians become more active, kind of make the argument for, Christ wants us to treat people with dignity and respect. And that should be a completely separate issue than how you personally feel about this topic or something. And I would think that most middle of the road Christians have over decades gradually gotten to the place where they understand that. Let's take somebody who has not changed their mind on LGBT inclusion biblically. Okay, that's millions of people. I wish they would, I've argued for it, but let's say they haven't, But then they have a gay coworker or a nephew or... Whatever and they say I don't know if I fully understand it But I'm certainly going to treat this person like every person with basic dignity and respect in the workplace at the Kroger At the baseball field or at the family reunion, right? I mean, that's just what you do. That's what decent people do, right? The society Under law gradually came to the conclusion that part of treating people justly and with dignity and respect is to grant LGBTQ people the exact same rights as other people. And so that, for example, that included the right to employment, the right to marriage, the right to have children, to adopt children, to rent an apartment or buy a house together. to designate each other as next of kin, all the things that people do, right? It also came around to saying, to accepting that there is a small number of transgender people who feel the need to change their gender identification based on their psychological experience of themselves. And whether this is done surgically or hormonally or non-surgically, non-hormonally, some people transition gender identity from male to female and female to male. And some people are in a kind of a non-binary place. This is, think, more complicated than lesbian, gay, and bisexual. It's also a little bit more challenging under the law, I think. But the law, up until now, has been willing to accommodate people's transitions so that they can go to a, I guess it's the Social Security office or wherever you can change your identity, change your name, change the designation male to female or female to male on a driver's license or legal paperwork. And many, many, I don't know how many, but many hundreds of thousands or millions of people have done that. They've made their life plans based on what the, not just what they have felt psychologically necessary to do, but also what changes they have made in their lives. And these plans have been accepted by the governments so that their driver's license and passport and so on reflects who they are. The chaos that is being created or will be created if this effort is delegitimized, it's really, it's pretty scary. What if a transgender person presents at a immigration and customs outpost coming in or out of the country and is told that their passport is illegitimate or their driver's license doesn't count? This is not even to mention like bans from employment like in the military or in other environments. In other words, what talking about is a rollback of legal recognition and rights. This should be, if it should even be discussed, it should be discussed calmly, soberly in congressional hearings with with evidence given on both sides and all of that. It should not just be done by executive order fiat. Yeah, I was gonna, I don't mean interrupt, I was gonna ask you, have you ever seen a congressional hearing before? I've been I've seen here some hearings. I know they've gotten worse and worse. But but at least the idea that we're going to hear testimony and evidence will be received and all of that, that at least is the people's representatives having a conversation. As opposed to the president writes an executive order and then it's done. By the way, the overuse of executive orders is part of the problem. It's rule by decree. Right. So I think that the. You know, it's easy to fixate on like bathroom issues and transgender women in sports issues. And one reason those are the issues that are fixated on is because it's politically convenient. But fixate more on how about employment rights and identity recognition in legal, like in passports and driver's license offices and so on. And think of the mischief and harassment that can be done and the reversal of rights that people built their lives on being able to expect. And there ought to be some sympathy. And none of that has anything to do with whether a Christian has moral objections based on a passage in the Bible about what people wear or and that, course, has nothing to do. I that's not about sexual orientation at all. That's about gender. Right. So. You know, I think we're training a generation under the impact of MAGA Christianity. We're training a generation of Christians to delegitimize empathy and to embrace a hardline kind of politics of exclusion, which I think is alien to the Christian faith. Man, I really think that's really well said, especially that last line. That's a notable quotable right there, Seriously, I'm in that camp of the millions that have a traditional view of marriage and sexuality and all of that. I've actually got your book on changing our minds that I'm going to work through, so thanks for writing that. We're interviewing Matthew Vines, god and the gay Christian, in a couple days here. And so I'm listening to his material because I'm trying to take the approach of steel manning the other argument as opposed to straw manning. Isn't that a cool phrase? I think it's a great phrase because I think in our current context, yes, steel manning. Yeah, you're right. Sorry. So steel manning is essentially straw man would be... hey, I'm taking their argument and I'm actually reducing it, making it less, like I'm leaving evidence out, I'm leaving propositions out, I'm leaving key claims and considerations out so that I can make it weaker than it actually is so that can defeat it easier. Steel man is the exact opposite of that. Instead of straw manning them, you're actually trying to even make the argument better than theirs is. And man, what a, what a, what an amazing. idea for people to do, which they're not, right? And I'm trying to do that for myself and I'm not trying to toot my horn or anything. This has been a very difficult thing for me to get to the place of even being able to do that. So I have an appreciation for the kind of cognitive dissonance that is there in someone's heart when they're trying to work through these issues and even to even begin to become open to what the other side might say, to even become open. That's a major step. That's a major step to actually even say, hey, I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. I feel like that's more than half the battle, to be honest, because those things are so deeply ingrained in us to keep the status quo. But when I'm thinking about this issue, go ahead, David. I'm just going to say that one of the hallmarks of classical liberalism is precisely a valuing of reasoned argumentation. The freedom to make a good argument or a bad argument to have it to deliberate together. Now, I'll steel man the conservative side here to say And I think there is truth to this, that they have been saying that the liberal establishment has actually been undercutting that kind of liberalism as the free exchange of ideas by canceling people who have unwanted or unaccepted views, right? So for example, I mean, I know folks who... Like as soon as you said, not, I hold the traditional view at this point, somebody would say, well, I can't have a conversation with you, I'm canceling you, right? So that kind of reflexive illiberal liberalism has discredited the left. Yeah. But what I think is now, the right is playing the same game. You know, we're going to cancel this, you're not allowed to teach that, and you can't say that about Israel-Palestine, and you can't say that. And that is how, that's kind of how liberal democracy dies, if you can't, I mean, it's just like, we win, you lose, we're not gonna entertain your arguments anymore, and we're just gonna crush you. And that is bad. It's really bad. It's really bad. if there's anything in my, I feel like a mission developing in my life is to re-invigorate argumentation in some way, to be able to listen to other people. And that's why we do this show and so many different aspects of it. But when I'm thinking about someone who is like me and like friends that I have that are sitting here and we're not the target, yet. I you know, I say yet because, you know, I mean, I'm not a Trump fan and I've said I didn't vote for him and I've been public about that, right? I mean, I've legitimately had concerns of like, man, is something going to happen where like, we're going to come under the ire of the Trump administration, like faithful politics. And I've legitimately thought about that. And I'm hoping that that doesn't happen. And Trump, dude, you know, come on the show, talk to us, you know, we'd love to have you. Well, maybe I'd love to have you, I don't know. But all I'm saying is, you know, just trying to work through this current moment is really tough. And I would love for you to dig into a little bit of like, how do we think ethically right now in this moment? Like, for instance, like people are gonna, you're gonna get a lot of arguments. right, from all sorts of different sides and the people are going to shortcut things. They're not going to steel man you. They're going to straw man. They're going to try to make you feel dumb, you know, on both sides of this because these are tactics, right, that people have to try to win rhetorically, but that doesn't get us closer to the truth. And I would love for you to like, what, what is a, what does a well-reasoned, structured, systematic ethic look like? Like, what do we, what do we do as Christians? Like, where do we start? How do we work through this issue? LGBTQ is one. You've done in-depth study on this. Environmental justice is one. Some of these things where there's just so much stuff just thrown around, and every side just says you're an idiot if you don't believe in us. And it's like, well, that's not really helping me at all. How does someone have a reasoned ethic about any issue? pertaining to Christianity. You can choose one, you can work through if you want, or just kind of in general kind of give some insights. But I'd love to hear from a professional ethicist and professor, like how do we work through these issues in a reasoned, systematic way? Where at the end we can say, I have a pretty good idea that I'm not saying that I'm 100 % right or certain, but I'm good enough to keep going. Well, let me refer you to a book that I wrote that's called Introducing Christian Ethics. Maybe you can put it in your show notes. It came out in 2022 and it's my best and maybe last effort to try to introduce the whole field to an audience that is not necessarily a specialist audience. What we're talking about The reason that your question seems like just about impossible to answer in a short form is because we're talking about a 2000 year old conversation, or even 150 if you just start with the modern discipline of Christian ethics. So things that I do in the book, like I say, Christian ethics is a is a tradition that is centered around Jesus, his teachings, his ministry, his way of being in the world. And so a good solid Christian ethics begins with very close study of Jesus. Most Christians don't do that anymore, so that's a problem. And then Jesus didn't come out of nowhere, he came out of the Jewish tradition. So a really good Christian Ethic takes very seriously the entire Hebrew Bible tradition, especially the law and the prophets. But the wisdom writings have a lot of ethics in them too, right? And then the Christian tradition, the moral tradition goes out into the Greco-Roman world and develops over centuries. And so there's many brilliant writings. You could go to Paul and then out beyond the New Testament. So we have a body of literature that needs to be gradually learned. And Also, there's a discussion of if you're dealing with any specific issue, where do you go for good insight? Most of us would say, well, you start with the Bible. But for example, if you're talking about environmental stewardship, you got to study the environment. You know, I you have to have basic relevant information from the relevant sciences. A lot of what goes wrong in modern conversation is people don't trust the sciences at all or they don't know who to trust. And so it's just people throwing around not very well informed opinions, right? So one voice in the tradition, the Wesleyan tradition said, on all issues, just consider at least four sources, scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Yeah, the Wesleyan quadrilateral. So whether it's abortion or marriage or sexuality or environment or economics, there's a whole... a lot to consult in all of those areas. And really the moral theologians or ethicists are the ones whose main job is to keep those sources alive and in front of us and to sift through them and to say, here's what I think this says to us today. Christian ethics brings the resources of the Bible and of a grand tradition to bear on this moment. And so we're like, we're like stewards of a great tradition. And our job is to is to keep it alive, to pass it forward to the next generation and to help inform the church and Christian people about their moral thinking about things. I also emphasize in that book that there are some core norms that ethicists have come to understand never go away, like dignity, love, and justice. Also, in the book, I talk about truthfulness. So, You might see these as a kind of a north, south, east and west on all issues ask, is my position in keeping with human dignity, with love of neighbor, with justice and with truth. And so if you're just doing propaganda that dehumanizes people, you know, they're sending us their rapists, right? I mean, that sentence right there is bad data. Right. It's unfair. It's dehumanizing. It violates truth. justice and dignity. That's all you need. I mean, it's not rocket science there, right? But that people would be sucked into that is an example of the fact that this moral tradition, however grand it is, competes with other things that go on, like ideology and politics and charismatic politicians. So a lot of the way I look at our current moment is significant chunk of the Christian church has lost its bearings because it has been seduced by a charismatic politician. Yeah, you know, I'm curious, David, if you can maybe help me with an issue. So I'm progressive. I'm very pro LGBTQ. But I will be the first to say that I could not make a biblical argument one way or another about, you know, whether it's okay or not okay. I come from the standpoint of like, hey, they're humans. I treat them. I think God loves them. You know, they can be Christians if they want. So I posted something like that on social media recently from on Facebook, which like faithful politics is everywhere. But on Facebook, Facebook is kind of like my friends and community. So like, if you've tried to add me on Facebook audience and I didn't accept it, like it's, it's not a personal attacker and then like that. So, so I posted this thing on Facebook, got a lot of fellow Christians that were very sad. and upset that I would be very pro LGBTQ. They thought I was bad theology. They were lecturing me about what kind of Christian I am, blah, blah, blah. My default response has always been, I don't think Christianity should be this hard. If I gave somebody the Bible and told them to pick out what they think they need to do to become a Christian, one of them would not be denounced LGBTQ. I said, you know, my, my, my, my point was like, Hey, Jesus wants us to love, treat everybody the same, blah, blah. people that are against that are like, no, we can still love them, but we need to make sure we point out, you know, that, that they are living in sin or something like that. So I'm like, help me, help me kind of understand, like, like, should Christianity be this difficult? Like, do I need to be a theologian to determine who, who's going to hell or who's not going to hell or who can be a Christian? I think we're, first of all, categorically taught by Jesus not to try to make such judgments when he said, do not judge lest you be judged. Right. And I might actually have a book that came out last year called the moral teachings of Jesus that you might look at. That can also maybe be in your show notes. But I think Jesus explicitly taught us not to put ourselves in the position of God and judging other people's eternal destiny or even where they stand in relationship to God. He also in that same teaching, he also said, why do you point out the speck in your brother's eye and miss the big log coming out of your eye? Right. Jesus taught us to be rigorous in our evaluation of ourselves and generous in our evaluation of others. That'll preach. OK. huh. But you can put that in your in your quotables for today. Right. My notable corkles, that's good. quotable, rigorous in our evaluation of ourselves, generous in our evaluation of others. So I think a basic posture of humility is a good, and generosity is a good starting place. A basic posture of listening. Those of us who are straight, cisgender, never wrestled with sexuality or gender identity have very little idea what it's like to be in the LGBTQ family. And so listening is absolutely essential. And when you listen, you learn an awful lot. It's actually very humbling and sad because you realize how much people have suffered because of the negative judgments of the kinds of Christians who were coming at you. Right. By the way, those comments that you were reporting, those comments, that's like the exact same conversation from like 100 or 80 or 60 or 40 years ago, as if they've not learned anything, have not been, have not read anything. I've not listened to anybody. I think it's astonishing. That's one reason I don't do these debates on Facebook, right? In fact, in the fall, I got off all social media because I thought it was not a good use of my time anymore. And also because I thought social media would be easy trawling ground for authoritarians and actually it's turning out to be the case. Did you see that brief little note when Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, indicated that AI is being used to check people's social media accounts. Did you see that? That had to do with like the people they're going after on the green card immigrant front, Cross tab green card holders and Palestinian comments and do an AI search. And I think that is what is leading to the people who they're picking to try to deport. So anyway, should it be this hard? Well, at one level, Love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself is not hard conceptually. Due to others as you would have them due to you is not hard conceptually. It's harder to practice than it is to understand. Honor the dignity of all people. It's not hard to understand, harder to practice. Your instinct that I don't need to have a Greek and Hebrew spitting contest related to Leviticus 18 or whatever a Romans want to know that I think I'm called to treat everybody the same and everybody with dignity, that's not bad Christian ethics. That's actually pretty good Christian ethics. One thing that preachers do and good teachers of the church is they take these big complex concepts and they make them simple and accessible. I mean. Maybe one notable quotable today is test everything according to love, justice, dignity and truth. Right. So, you know, you guys running down LGBTQ people, you know, you say it doesn't fit with love, justice, dignity or truth. And so I'm against it. I'm for the other. You know, you can write books that say all of that in 500 pages or you can also just say I'm gonna treat people with love, justice, dignity, and truth. I mean, I think that's worth the pause because it's like, no, seriously, I, that is so important right now to highlight seeing other people as people and giving them the dignity that's inherent within them as being made in the image of God. I mean, I think that anyone at a minimum, like any Christian, who is dealing with the LGBTQ issues, right? And it's one of, guess, I don't know, maybe three major issues in our time. think the other one being race within the church, the church has been dealing with. And then I'm not sure what the third would be at this point. Well, I guess Christian nationalism, to be quite honest with you, like the political power. like, and they're all kind of, you know, entangled. But it's like, if you can just take a step back and say, well, this person is a person. So yeah, I don't agree with what they're doing. But in one sense, why should that matter if I don't agree with what they're doing? Like, yeah. what somebody's doing, but their behavior does not determine my basic moral obligation. Right. And so I guess, and this is kind of like, I would love to get your thoughts on this. Like help me understand harm, the idea of harm from a ethical point of view. And I guess what I'm thinking is like, I've been trying to understand moral reasoning. I got a buddy of mine, great, great friend, goes to the church. He's basically an amateur philosopher. He's pretty awesome when it comes to that stuff. And he's really interested in ethics, right, and moral philosophy and trying to understand. And I was talking to him the other day, had this conversation about grounding. And I'm like, well, kind of like that youth afro dilemma where it's like, are things good because God commanded them or did God command them because they're good, right? And so like, they're like, It's that weird dilemma where either one you choose, you have issues you have to deal with. And so, but I was talking to him about that and he was kind of like, well, I guess the evidence is basically under determined as to what, in scripture, what he thinks as to whether or not morality is essentially like God is, whether it's grounded in God's nature or where the grounding is. Like those philosophical questions, the Bible doesn't necessarily attempt to answer them. We have, they're answering their own questions, their own ideas, the things that were important to them. And now we're kind of left to taking this data and working through it and deciding, well, I don't know, there is this dilemma or there is this, you know, ethical issue and how do we work through this and how do we take these five texts, you know, about LGBTQ? And of course, those things weren't even categories that we think of. All right. we take that data and apply it? what am I getting at? The harm issue for me has always been one because it's such a crucial part because we say we don't want part of what we don't want, part of our ethical reasoning is that when it harms others, that's when we're trying to say that that should be taboo or should be restricted, that behavior. behavior that harms others should be restricted. And of course then it gets into the definition of harm. And I love to, cause we have a lot of that going on, like what does it mean to harm our neighbor? And I guess even beyond like, even going beyond like, well obviously if we physically hurt them or bring some kind of material harm to them through our actions, their house, their stuff, their... So... kind of even moving beyond that. Like what does it mean on a deeper level to harm? And I think with that, well, I guess that's really it, because the question is just so deep in my heart of like, should I care? Like why should I care about what other people do as a Christian? I feel like I'm obligated to listen to the scriptures and understand them as best as I can, and then vote and live an ethical life according to the moral teachings of the Bible, specifically Jesus Christ, right? Everything in the Old Testament interpreted through Jesus in this new covenant. Right. How do we deal with harm? What is harm? How do we deal with it? Because people are going to say, hey, the immigrants, they're harming our country. That's why this is important, because they're harming it. The immigrants, they're harming it. That's why it's justified. It has to do with harm. So I'd love for you to just work through. You're thinking on that. Well, I guess it's probably better to be the last question because I got to go off and teach, right? But a teacher's work, never done, guys, never, ever done. Well, let me just say that. It is a through line in the Bible that we're not to harm our neighbor. In fact, there's a direct quote. Paul says, love does no harm to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. And so Paul, as he thinks about the entirety of Old Testament law, what he wants to carry through as a through line is, do not harm your neighbor. Harm is. In fact, I have a friend who's writing a book right now, a big old book in which he tries to say not harming others is the main moral through line of the Bible. harm takes as many forms as the vulnerability of the human being, right? So you can harm somebody by attacking their body. You can harm somebody by attacking their reputation. You can harm somebody by hurting their loved ones. You can harm somebody by attacking their dignity, by taking their stuff, by undermining their legal rights, by kicking them out of the country, by stripping them of their possessions, by denying them the rule of law, by throwing them into concentration camps or murdering them. Harm is on a spectrum from mild harm to the most grotesque harm. And harm matters. Here's something that I think that the liberal tradition here, again, I'm talking about not political liberalism like left, but the classic liberal tradition is, let's just say it tilts towards harms against individuals and vulnerable groups. So the concern is for historically oppressed groups, historically marginalized groups. powerless groups, those who don't have the ability to protect their own rights as well as other people do. So that's why there's, and also the great emphasis on the rights of the individual. The entire government of the country may think you're an enemy, but by God, you're going to get your day in. That is the liberal tradition. You can't just be packed up and sent off to a Salvadoran prison without due process. So we have to be concerned about every harm that threatens individuals, groups, in terms of the society as a whole. You have to watch out for claims that the society as a whole is being harmed because that tends to lead to attacks on specific groups who are blamed for the harm. The legitimate grounds for addressing undocumented immigration is violation of our immigration laws. A lot of the things that are being said about immigrants are propaganda. People are easily seduced by grandiose, grotesque claims about what this or that group is actually doing to the society as a whole. So, even, even, even undocumented immigrants or human beings with names who ought to have due process and somebody to represent their interests in court, fair hearings and the rule of law applied to them. If the concern is that they violated the law, then the law should be applied properly in terms of whatever it is that they're accused of. So could I just say that I plead with Christians to not lose their heads because charismatic politicians are are inflaming their fears. And instead, to remember that Jesus is our Lord, we have biblical norms like love, justice, and truth, and we have our obligations to our neighbors. The government is supposed to align with those obligations by treating people justly and with dignity. But if the government doesn't, then we must resist what the government is doing. Yeah, that is a very, very profound and David, thank you again for coming onto our show. Do you have any wares or product that you're trying to push right now? Now's your time. Thanks. I always send people to my website davidpgushee.com. I have a sub stack. Look me up. I think it's also David P. Gussie. It's growing a lot right now on sub stack. People are looking for help, you know, kind of help me think, help us think about stuff right now. And so they're kind of finding their way. I'm not looking for attention right now, but there's a lot of attention I choose not to have. You know what I'm saying? But people are finding their way to that sub stack. My most recent book is the one, Moral Teachings of Jesus. But for this particular conversation, you might send people to the Democracy book as well. I will definitely all those links will be in the show notes. yeah, always a pleasure to talk to you, us kind of ground ourselves in sanity a little bit. So this is really, really helpful for me and I hope it's helpful for the audience. And yeah, thanks for stopping by. And as always, keep your conversations not right or left, but up and we will see you later. and I'll put a link to my Christian ethics article in the show notes as well. Alright, see you all later. You guys have a good one. Bye bye.