The Biggest Oversimplification in Politics with Hyrum Lewis

In this episode of Faithful Politics, Will Wright and Pastor Josh Burtram sit down with political theorist and historian Hyrum Lewis to challenge one of the most basic assumptions in American political thinking: the left-right spectrum.

Drawing from his work on The Myth of the Left and Right, Lewis explains why reducing politics to a single line fails to capture how people actually think and act. Instead of treating political identity as one fixed position, he argues for a more granular approach—one that looks at individual issues on their own terms.

The conversation moves beyond political labels into deeper questions about truth, history, and how we interpret the American founding. Lewis breaks down why both conservatives and progressives engage in preserving and changing society, and why those labels often obscure more than they clarify.

They also explore how history is used in modern political debates—especially around the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. Lewis offers a nuanced framework for understanding the founders, arguing that while Christian ideas shaped the culture, the founding itself reflects a broader and more complex intellectual tradition.

The episode closes with a practical takeaway: how to think more clearly about politics, avoid false binaries, and engage issues with more precision and humility.

Guest Bio
Hyrum Lewis is a professor of history and political theory at Brigham Young University–Idaho, where he leads the American Foundations program. His work focuses on the history of ideology and how political ideas shape culture and society. He is the co-author of The Myth of the Left and Right and the author of There Is a God: How to Respond to Atheism in the Last Days. His research challenges common assumptions about political identity and encourages a more nuanced understanding of how beliefs are formed. 

Relevant Links

• The Myth of the Left and Right by Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9780197680629
• There Is a God: How to Respond to Atheism in the Last Days by Hyrum Lewis: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781462120413

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:16

So are we mature enough as Americans, and unfortunately many of us aren't, and that's where we're having a lot of these fruitless fights, but are we mature enough as Americans to say the Constitution was inspired and good, but not perfect? And we can all play in that, as you keep saying, Josh, that more complex and more nuanced realm. It's the right place to be, even if it's not the easiest place to be.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Hey, welcome back, faithful politics listeners and watchers. I'm your political host, Will Wright, and I'm joined by my faithful host, Pastor Josh Bertram. How's it going, Josh? Doing great. Thanks, Will. And today we are joined by Hiram Lewis, who is a professor, author, and political theorist. He currently teaches at the Brigham Young University in Idaho, where he leads the American Foundations team. His research primarily focuses on the history of ideology and the intersection of political and intellectual culture. He is written, or he has written, he has written, a number of different books, one of which we just spoke to the other author of, called The Myth of the Left, The Myth of the Left and Right, which he co-authored with his brother, Verlon Lewis. And he also wrote a book called There Is a God, How to Respond to Atheism in the Last Days. And we were just so glad to have him with us today. Welcome to the show, Hiram. Well, thanks, Will and Josh. It's great to be with you guys. Yeah, it's good to be with you. And and I I I asked your brother the same question. Actually, I asked all of our guests this question. Like, like a person that wants to be in the field that you are seems like it didn't seem like like a first career choice. Like most of our guests, like when I when I talked to them, whether it's sociologists, historians, activists, I'm like, that probably wasn't your first career choice. So like what is it that got you into sort of this world of looking at the intersection of politics and culture and whatnot?

SPEAKER_02 1:59

Oh, that's a great question. You know, I do have a kind of a strange background. I started out in public accounting. I wanted to work for the FBI. So I'm in history and political theory by you know by trial and error a little bit. So I explored that realm a little bit, didn't love it, and so went back and got a PhD in history and wound up here. But these questions have always resonated with me because going back to the time I was a child, you would have people, you know, I remember my eighth-grade teacher very specifically going to the board and drawing a one-dimensional line and saying, this is the political spectrum, the Democrats are here on this spectrum, the Republicans are here on this spectrum. You go too far to the left, you become a communist, you go too far to the right, you become a fascist, and that's how it is. And I thought to myself, that's very weird. My parents are Republicans, but what do they have in common with Adolf Hitler? And I started investigating Nazism, and I realized that Hitler was a national socialist, and my parents were very far from socialists. They didn't hold any racist views, and so it just it was puzzling to me. And so the political spectrum never sat right with me. And the more research I did, the less right it sat with me until I came to the conclusion that it's probably the biggest public misunderstanding we have in the country today.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Aaron Ross Powell So if it's not left-right, and of course we've talked about this on the last one, but I but just to refresh us, if it's not left or right, and if it can't just be this linear idea of I'm gonna travel this way, then uh somehow I'm gonna get to Stalin and I'm gonna get to communist Russia, right, or or China or whatever. I travel this way, I'm gonna go get to Nazi Germany, you know, the fascist Mussolini in Italy, right? All this. And in and then the center is something nice and sunny and beautiful. And everyone loves the center, except what exactly is the center. And so if we're not to see it like a line, how are we to see it?

SPEAKER_02 3:53

Well, you know, that's one of the really common questions we get, and the answer is we should just do what we do in every other realm of life. You know, when we go to the grocery store, we just pick out groceries one by one, and we think about hey, do I want tortillas or do I want bread? Do I want peanut butter or do I want Nutella, right? We we make these kinds of choices every day. We do it on a- You got that right. I was testing you there, Joe. Yeah, that's right. But we you know, we make these kinds of granular choices all the time. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. Or when you go into the doctor's office, imagine the doctor's office say you know, your doctor saying, let's put you on the medical spectrum. You know, you would literally run for your life. That guy would be a quack. You don't put patients on a spectrum, you just say what patients have. You have a broken bone, you have a rash, you have lung cancer, you you've got an inflamed appendix, whatever it happens to be, right? We we go granular, and it works very well in every other realm of life. And there's really no reason at all we couldn't do that in politics. Instead of placing Will on a spectrum, just saying, well, he has a view about abortion. That's one issue, and he's gonna have a view about that, and that's different than his view and completely unrelated to his view about taxation of the rich or immigration policy. So we should treat policies distinct the same way that we treat illnesses distinct and groceries distinct and recreational activities distinct. I wouldn't place Josh's recreational habits on a spectrum. He would just say he likes mountain climbing, you know, and we'd we we'd talk about them individually. So that's the best answer I can give is to just do what we do in every other realm of life and disaggregate and talk specifically and granularly about politics rather than pretending politics is about one thing. Because that's what a political spectrum ultimately demands that we do, is pretend and accede to an illusion that there's only one thing in politics when clearly there's lots.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Now, I really like that. We had this guy, Larry, this guy, I mean, his very good professor, a very brilliant man, Larry Cahun, on a long time ago. I'd actually love to have him on again. He was a political scientist, and he essentially talked about the left-right, but then he talked about actually it's way more it's way more about authoritarian versus libertarian, in the sense of how much does this government want to exercise control, or how much do the people or proponents believe that control should be exercised, right? Coercive force in bringing these values. So you have to have coercive first force at some level, right, with the government. They have to have not only is that a biblical principle, right? I mean, as a Christian, the power of the sword, and yet it's also, I think, just a in general, just a good principle, right? The government needs to be able to force people to do something and comply. And yet, what do you think about that? That spectrum? Is that more helpful or is that kind of is that not helpful in thinking about these I mean you have positions on what should happen and what shouldn't happen, but it probably is more about control versus not control. Do you think? I don't know. What do you think?

SPEAKER_02 6:47

Aaron Powell Well, sure. I that that could be a useful framing, but again, it's one-dimensional and therefore it's gonna leave a lot of things out. Because when we say more or less government control, well, control about what? And everybody's gonna have different views about what government should control us to do. So there's there's Islamic fundamentalists who want the government to control us to follow Sharia law. There's you were talking about Christian nationalists who want to make more compulsory things regarding Christianity in society. There's others who want to compel us to redistribute wealth in the name of some kind of socialism. So that, you know, again, there's more dimensions than to just say, oh, everybody's on one side of this axis, they believe in control, and they're all the same. It's simply not true. There's going to be thousands and thousands of different ways you want to control people. And then the other problem with it is where do you place our parties on that spectrum? It's it's not going to work because both of our parties are authoritarian in some things and libertarian in others. They're-they're a vast mix. And because of that, you couldn't can't place the parties on a spectrum. I mean, the the Republican Party seems, at least in general rhetorically, wants less control in economic matters, but wants work more control when it comes to more control when it comes to, say, drug policy or immigration, right? So you know the axis won't allow us to place people, institutions, and so forth accurately upon it because we are all a mix of authoritarianism and libertarianism.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

I'd love for you to expand on that a little bit because one of the things that I thought was really useful in your book was sort of this, you know, the application of the terms progressive and conservative. And you in the book had sort of like listed, okay, well, yeah, like we all kind of think conservatives, you know, want to conserve money, want to conserve a traditional way of life or thinking or whatever, you know, and and Democrats want to progress. They want to move the country forward. And and and you argue in the book that both groups actually do quite a bit of conserving and progressing like themselves. Like could you could you sort of like just talk about that a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 8:46

Well, let me start by just maybe yeah, because that is probably the most common. So you know, we talk about the essentialist view of politics, there's one big thing, and everyone's going to disagree about what that one big thing is. But everybody who uses a political spectrum is assuming politics is about just one big thing that divides us. And the Republican Party has moved to the right on that one big thing, and the Democratic Party has moved to the left. So there's one big thing. Now, you ask people, what is the one big thing? You're using a political spectrum. You'll get a thousand different answers. You talk to a thousand different people, but probably the most common one that comes up is it's about change versus preservation. That's the one big thing. So if you like to conserve things and you don't like change very much, you're on the right. If you like change more, you're on the left. So that framing in and of itself is, how do I put this delicately, I mean, absurd, right? Because it assumes a whole bunch of things that are false. It assumes, first of all, that history has a direction. It doesn't. History's open. We are free beings. History is not predetermined. It depends on human choices. Second, it presumes that we can know what the direction of history is. We can't. We're very fallible humans. I mean, look at our track record of prediction as a species. We've gotten it all wrong. Nobody has ever been right. Nobody a hundred years ago predicted what life was going to be like in 2026 with any kind of an accuracy. So the even if history did have a direction, and you know, from a theological point of view, you can say, well, God is in charge and so forth, but we don't know what that is. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Absolutely. So our epistemological limitations as human means that even if history did have a direction, we wouldn't know what it is. And then the third thing is it presumes that that direction is either good or bad, depending upon your point of view. So a progressive is declaring, I'm a progressive because history has a direction, I know what that direction is, and that direction is good. A conservative supposedly is declaring history has a direction, I know what that direction is, and that direction is bad. I dispute all three of those claims. I don't think history has a direction. We certainly can't know it. And to say that everything that is happening is better or worse simply by virtue of the fact that it's happening is kind of ridiculous. And yet that's what that framing rests upon. So anybody who says themselves, I'm a conservative, I don't like change, I just want to freeze things, I'd say that's an absurd philosophical position. Changes are some changes are going to be good, some changes are going to be bad. And we have to evaluate them once again piecemeal. We can't just make a blanket statement that all change is bad. And that takes us to very bad places. You know, you may have heard of William F. Buckley Jr., smart guy, had a lot of good ideas, but he opposed civil rights legislation because it was change, and he had staked out a position as a conservative, and it led him to do very terrible things. For every Bill Buckley out there, there's somebody who said, oh, the Russian Revolution is the future and it works. And so they supported Russian communism because it was change. And they were complicit, at least rhetorically, in the slaughter of millions and millions of people. I mean, genocidal actions. So if if you take a declaration in favor of change or conservation, you are making a big mistake. We have to look at these things individually. Correct me if you guys have a different one.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

Oh no, I mean, I I'm I'm just so fascinated by this. So, you know, so so for me, you know, as a as a as a Christian, so for someone who believes, right, in an all-powerful creator, kind of like those those classical characteristics of God, he's omnipotent, he's omniscient, he's omnipresent. He has, it seems like there's some kind of uh ultimate goal that history is moving towards at least the resurrection. So for me, when I'm looking at it and I'm saying from my faith point of view, I see some it's moving in some way. Now I don't think to your point, and if you remove that faith, I'm not sure what I would think about history, to be honest with you. Like, I'm not sure. I would probably think about it as some kind of cause and effect, right? At some level, and then I would probably think, yeah, I mean, humans are making a lot of significant changes, and I would totally grant that man, you there is no guarantee that things are going to progress, right? And and again, who's determining what progress is at that point, right? And so progress to one person can be total, right? Regress to another. That's literally what you have right now within the within a you know, certain MAGA thinkers, and then people uh on the left, right? They're they're looking at this and they're thinking there are two different definitions of progress here, and mine's correct, and the other one literally thinks yours is so incorrect, it's actually going back. So I guess what I would love to hear even more from you is what is your philosophy of history? Because you know, history is so fascinating to me because every time I go to it, it's way more complicated than I ever thought. It's always historians trying to put in some kind of right um structure to this and narrative to this to make sense of it. And yet it seems like there's always counterpoints and counter narratives and and and data that's going to be countervailing against your hypothesis. And I would just love to hear, because I I I love how you're thinking, I love hearing it. What what is your philosophy of history? What do we do with history? I don't know if that makes sense. I can try to be more specific if you need.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

Well, sure. I mean, so you know, if you're talking philosophy of history from a kind of Hegelian slash Frank Fukuyama point of view, that history you know has an endpoint. Again, I would have to step back from scholarship and say, theologically, as a Christian, I believe that God has his ultimate purposes and those will not be thwarted by humans. But I believe God leaves a lot of leeway in how we act and what we do and how much misery we cause upon ourselves in the meantime until his purposes are achieved, right? So but that's a that's a theological position, not a scholarly one, because I think from a limited scholarly uh empirical point of view, right, scientific point of view, social scientific point of view, I don't think you can verify that or find it out. But if we are talking about, well, how can you verify things, what's my philosophy of history as far as what we can know historically and in a scholarly sense? Yes. I'm very much a Pauperian philosopher Karl Popper, because I think he navigated a very important middle ground, even before that middle ground you kind of he anticipated it. So you've probably heard about postmodernism, you've probably had postmodernists on your show. And it's this idea that um, you know, it's it's kind of a rewarmed skepticism. It's the idea that we can't really have knowledge because language ultimately shapes the way we think, and so different peoples are going to have different discourses, and therefore truth is ultimately contingent upon the speaker. And so, you know, kind of relativistic ideas like you have your truth and I have mine, because we speak differently, therefore we think differently. And with such different categories, can we really say there is a truth? No, there's just many truths. Well, you have the old 19th-century positives who ha took the opposite point of view. They said, no, there is a truth, it's one, I have it, I've figured it out. It's like a like a gold nugget that I can hold up and say, look what I discovered, everybody, and it's over. Once you've found the gold nugget, you have it, and you don't have to look any further. So it's this idea of kind of finality and unitary truth, and there is a truth and I have it, versus there is this no truth and nobody has it. What Popper did for us is pointed out that there's a middle ground, or I should say, an apex there, where you say there is a truth, but nobody has it. Now, if that sounds self-contradictory, it's not, because Popper's point was when we're doing social science, we are not looking to confirm things, to say, I finally have the truth. You're instead looking to falsify things, saying, okay, this theory is incorrect, and this one accounts for the data better. And so as you falsify it, you know, you kind of in an evolutionary point of view, you get closer and closer to the truth without knowing if you're ever there. So it's like, you know, the blind man and the elephant.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Sorry, getting the truth. It's about making sure you falsify, get- It's basically a massive process of elimination.

SPEAKER_02 16:30

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: That's a great way to put it. So it's not getting the truth, it's getting closer to the truth without ever knowing you're there. So we can say with great confidence that Newton was closer to the truth when it came to describing reality than was Ptolemy, and we can say with great confidence that Einstein's closer to the truth than was Newton, but Einstein himself realized that his theory wasn't final. You know, he literally, with his dying breath, we can see his hand trail off the page he was writing, trying to come up with a theory that would account for the flaws in his theory, trying to improve upon it. And that's what science is about. So even he realized his theory wasn't final, that it had its flaws, it had its errors, and we're always seeking for more truth. So the more truth approach is better than either the postmodern no truth or the positivist I have the truth approach. It's it's a third way that is more humble, but recognizes the reality of truth in ways that a lot of skeptics today wouldn't.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

You know, I I'm I'm I'm really glad that that you brought that up. And I'm especially glad that that you're you're here to talk to, because I want to ask you about like truth and storytelling, kind of in the Christian politics sort of framework, especially around this idea that America was founded as a Christian nation. And I'm I'm I'm not asking you to to verify or you know deny that that statement, but but but what I'm what what I what I found myself jumping into recently was this debate between a gentleman by the name David Barton of Wall Builders, who produces a lot of like historical content and educational materials and stuff, and then and then like a set of other historians like Warren Throckmorton, John Fia, I think is how you say his name. And and and both, both of them have a you know, a very passionate way of expressing how they view the founding of America started. I tend to side more with uh Jonathan Fia and the Warren Throckmorton side. But but but I think it's it's interesting like how how a historian would actually like interpret this history kind of through a theological lens. And I'd love for you to kind of just help help us think about like how should we do that? I mean, both either as a historian or just as a consumer of of the works that historians put out.

SPEAKER_02 18:46

Yeah, I mean, and you're you're getting to the heart of why history matters, right? Because history is identity and history is authority in many ways. And whether we like it or not, you know, we can denounce the founding and say it was racist and all these kinds of things, all we want, but ultimately it's our it's our story, as you point out, and that tradition carries a great deal of weight. And whoever can kind of claim the founders were on my side, rightly or wrongly, whoever wins that debate has won a major rhetorical victory. So you we do have to be careful and we do have to be precise on this. As I see it, I'm not sure if you guys are aware of the work of Michael Novak, he died a few years back, but he was you might want to look up. He wrote a book called On Two Wings, which I think got about to where I think is correct. So the first thing about the founders is were they, you know, you have people saying they were deists, they were deists, they were deists. That word they is so imprecise there. When we talk to founding fathers, what do you mean by they? Are we talking about everybody who signed the Declaration of Independence? Are we talking about everybody who signed the Constitution? Are we talking about everybody who was a public figure at the time of the founding? Are we talking about every Revolutionary War soldier? I mean, are they are they all founding fathers? They say, no, we have a more narrow view of that. Okay, so are we just talking about Washington and Franklin and Jefferson, just kind of the big three? Or what about Madison? Does he come in there? Does Hamilton fit? Does Adams come into play? Right. I mean, you and Sam Adams, John Adams. Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: So once we have a more expansive conception of the founding, we realize that the founding fathers' religious views were extremely diverse. They were almost as pluralistic as our views are today. I haven't found among the founders any atheists, but there were deists, which was the closest thing to atheism back then, probably at least in America. Thomas Paine was very an outspoken deist, for instance. So if we want to call him a founding father, they were there. The most prominent founders, we're talking Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, even Adams, probably Madison to a degree, not Hamilton, they were nominal Christians who were skeptical Christians, right? You know, somebody asked Franklin, do you believe Jesus was divine? And he was very old at this point, and he says, well, I'll know in a little while, won't I? You know, that was kind of the attitude. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Washington, we just don't know. He went to church every week. So was he a practicing Christian? Absolutely. He was a he was a rector in his local congregation. He gave a lot of money to the church. He was a very participant in that church. He prayed and fasted regularly, so he was very much an active Christian. But it's absent from his writings. He didn't say, you know, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ or my Savior. He didn't seem to have that personal relationship with Christ. So he was clearly an unorthodox, although practicing Christian, which is kind of interesting. Adams, we find something similar. Jefferson wasn't quite as church-going as Washington he went, but he doubted the divinity of Jesus. He had his kind of secular Bible, which he, you know, so the views are so all over the place. And then we had more kind of standard Christians, which was probably the majority of them. So if you want to say, did the country have a Christian founding, I would say they had the theology of Christianity was deeply embedded in their culture, and therefore the metaphysics of Christianity underlay their project. And so they kind of took the basis from it, the philosophy of natural rights, John Locke and the other articulators of it didn't think it made a lot of sense if you didn't believe in a God and a creator who created humans in his image with freedom, and that those things kind of rested on a Christian metaphysic. So even if they weren't all hardcore Christians, there was a maybe Judeo Christian assumption. Also, know they believed in religious freedom. Jefferson very powerfully on this. One of the three things he was most proud of was it wasn't being President of the United States. He said the three things I'm most proud of are being the author of the Declaration of Independence, the founder of the University of Virginia, and last was the author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. So as Virginians, you guys may be pleased to hear about that, that Jefferson, that was one of his big causes. So they did believe in religious freedom, and Washington spoke to Jewish people quite frequently saying, We are glad you're here. We're glad you're Americans, you contribute a great deal. So that's the way I view it, that there was a Christian metaphysic without a kind of Christian exclusivism. How's that for a little bit of an ambiguous answer?

SPEAKER_00 22:57

Oh, I mean, I don't think that's ambiguous, actually. I think that's really nuanced and careful. Because it actually makes a lot more sense than the weird idea that somehow they all got together, the and and they're all like, I don't know, filled with the Holy Spirit, like the book of Acts, and all of a sudden the Constitution comes out of that, right? It's kind of like this idea that they're there and the Holy Spirit comes down. Now they did have a prayer meeting. I do know that. The Ben Franklin of all people call it a prayer meeting. But they, you know, the idea that it was a super spiritual experience, and yet I love how you said that the metaphysic that they had, the assumptions that they had were Christian. If they weren't, right? They were Christian, right? Many of the assumptions, would you say that's safe to say? Is that accurate?

SPEAKER_02 23:47

Sure, sure. I'm okay with the way you put it.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

Yeah, so so their metaphysics, right, uh, and their assumptions about reality were heavily influenced by the Christian worldview that have been prevalent, right, and moving. And I know it's complicated uh throughout the medieval uh times and you know, early medieval, high medieval ages, into the Reformation or the Renaissance Reformation, Enlightenment, all of that. Things, you know, you can't just say one thing, the church that was then is the same church that it was now. It's just like you said, history's not that simple. And yet it's it it it feels like we have these like these views, these visions. And I think what you said is so true, so good. Like these were people that were just like us, you know, they were trying to figure things out, and not just like us in their experience of everyday life, but the core human needs and drives and everything, and they're trying to, you know, they're Christians or they grew up Christian, they're gonna have a Christian foundation and worldview, and yet just because they're a Christian doesn't mean the document was Christian, right? Because the document explicitly isn't Christian in the right, and explicitly has no religious test and and things like that, and then the First Amendment. So we have it, we have a document that is explicitly not naming Jesus Christ as opposed to say or or God as opposed to say the Articles of Confederation or some of the other constitutions of the colonies that have been started. And so I'm not an expert in that, but I just know that they're it's more complicated, right? And and I guess like thinking about the movement, right? And Christianity in America, like when I when I go through a course that's from the great courses on American history, and it's a secular course, Gettysburg University, the professor, I think Guelzo is his name, but and he and he goes through and he talks about the enlightenment. And he's literally talking about theology within a history course on America. And it sounds like I'm in a theology class. Yeah, I know you can't just cleanly separate Christianity from America. There's no way to do it.

SPEAKER_02 25:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

And yet it's oh, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

No, no. You finish. I I just had a couple thoughts whenever you're done.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, actually, I would love to hear your thoughts. I I think I'm I'm good. Because my question was going to be about kind of like how this got imported into American thinking, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that before I ask that question.

SPEAKER_02 26:15

Aaron Powell Sure. So uh and maybe this anticipates your question a little bit, the importation, because uh historians have now gotten more comp, you know, we talk about the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment. And historians have now gotten a little more precise, and they say, well, actually, it might be useful to think of the Enlightenment in terms of a bifurcation, that there were kind of two Enlightenments. So they say there was a British Enlightenment and a French or Continental Enlightenment. And what they say is that the French Enlightenment was much more secular. It was hostile to churches. So you had uh Voltaire, for instance, saying, you know, the last king will be strangled with the entrails of the last priest, right? The idea that the two wicked institutions of the monarchy and the church and these two oppressive things must die together in the name of Enlightenment. So it was it wasn't necessarily anti-religion. I mean, Voltaire was the atheist a deist, probably a deist. Most of them would seem to believe in some kind of creator, but they didn't like institutional religion, for sure. Whether they thought there was a God or not, they just thought churches as institutions are oppressive, the same way that monarchies as institutions are oppressive. The British Enlightenment was different. It it it it was pro-freedom and anti-monarchical to a degree, right? They were mostly Whigs, but it was also pro-church institutions. They thought churches did good. And so when you talk about the importation of the Enlightenment, the American Enlightenment was very much a branch or genealogically traced to that British Enlightenment. So the Founding Fathers, to a person, and except maybe Thomas Paine, again, he's a guy that went, you know, to support the French Revolution who was put in prison. He's kind of an oddball there. But almost to a person, the the Founding Fathers believed in institutions, even if they didn't believe in them. So Benjamin Franklin, I mentioned, he went to church. You can go to Philadelphia and sit in the pew, he paid for this pew to worship. But he gave money to all the churches. He gave money to the Quakers, he gave money to the Jews, he gave money to the Baptists, he believed they're all doing good things. And I'm not sure which one of them is right. You know, he didn't much know or care. He just said there is a superintendent providence, that providence answers prayers, and these churches are ways that help strengthen our link to that deity and therefore make us better people. And in as much as we require a moral society for our country to function, then inasmuch as churches strengthen that morality, then I should be strengthening those churches. So the idea that the in the institutional churches were a positive, that's very much part of the British Enlightenment, and it's something our founding fathers believed in too. Now, the second thing was you talked about, you know, how how are we to think about the Constitution because there's this idea, oh, it was given to us by God. No, it was this document with the devil, you know, kind of the William Lloyd Garrison viewed, which you still hear today that the founding was racist and the founding was evil and the founding fathers were evil. Again, it's more complicated. I try to teach my students that you have to be okay with this one truth, and that is that the Constitution, in my opinion, was inspired without being perfect, right? Say inspired by intelligence or spirit or God or whatever it will be, but it's a really remarkable document, and yet something can be inspired without being perfect. And that's why my favorite line of the whole Constitution, my favorite one, is the first line which says, We the people in order to form a more perfect union. Again, getting back to pauper, that's so pauparian. It's not about no truth or absolute truth, it's about more truth. It's not about the founding fathers were perfect or they were evil. That seems to be the fight we're having now, and it's such a dumb fight. Because the reality is the founding fathers were human like the rest of us, but they were seeking to create a more perfect union. You and I, all three of us, are trying to be more perfect people. I don't know, maybe you guys are already there, Will and Josh, but I'm certainly not. I'm trying to be a more perfect person. And so considering the Founding Fathers in that sense of seeking a more perfect union, we are engaged in the same project that they were. And so you can look back at the Constitution with reverence and say, what a remarkable inspired document, but imperfect. And they knew it was imperfect. They all said that. It's not perfect, but they all believed it was a miracle. Washington used the word to describe the miracle, excuse me, used the word miracle to describe the Constitution many, many times. So how can something, if it's miraculous, people say, well, a miracle has to be perfect? No, Washington understood that it was miraculous that they were able to make these compromises, that they were that they came up with something as good as they did, and yet it still needed work. Of course it did, right? There were a lot of things in there that immediately the Founding Fathers had to set around correcting. The Twelfth Amendment was basically a big whoops. We messed up. When we created the presidential election section uh section of this Constitution, it was not adequate for the kinds of elections we're gonna have. We didn't foresee the rise of political parties and ticket running, and so we gotta undo this. So they admitted it was perfect, uh excuse me, imperfect, and they took steps to make it more perfect even after they'd created it. So are we mature enough as Americans, and unfortunately many of us aren't, and that's where we're having a lot of these fruitless fights, but are we mature enough as Americans to say the Constitution was inspired and good, but not perfect? And we can all play in that, as you keep saying, Josh, that more complex and more nuanced realm. It's the right place to be, even if it's not the easiest place to be.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

I mean, I really, really, really love that. You know, what I was thinking is, you know, we're thinking about the left-right when we like just learning about the Constitution, learning about the way. I love the way you say that. It's inspired but not perfect. That's a great concept to use, I think. I I really, really appreciate that. I'm gonna use that actually, thinking through this as a tool to use it. I I I like that. But I want to kind of return to this idea of the of the spectrum and think here, how did we get to this point, right? We've talked about this with your brother, but I'd love to hear from your perspective, like especially like how do where do we get this left-right spectrum from? Did did we make it up? Did we import it? Um, just for our audience people who haven't heard it before, where did this come from?

SPEAKER_02 32:07

Yeah, so it all goes back to the French Revolution. I'm being a little bit hard on the French here, and I shouldn't be, because I I am a Francophile in many ways. I think the French have given a lot to the world. But as all countries, they gave some bad things to the world. And so this way of looking at politics is ultimately French in origin. As best we can tell, it goes back to the French Revolution. And so that's why we use the turd wing, you know, left-wing-right wing, is because when you talk about architecture, you talk about wings of the house or wings of the hall. So the way it worked is the General Assembly during the French Revolution started to coalesce into two factions, and those the faction that was more anti-king tended to be on one side of the hall or one wing, and the side that was more pro-king tended to coalesce on the other side of the hall, the the right wing. So you had right wing versus left wing. And so it ultimately indicated where you were in relation to the monarch. Do you want to keep the monarch right wing, or do you want to overthrow the monarch left wing? And then if you were like, well, maybe we want a more restrained monarch, you know, maybe you're in the middle, um, something like that. So this whole idea of wings is ultimately French in origin. Now, I want to emphasize this because people misunderstand what we're saying. I'm not against using spectra, right? Spectrums to model things. Spectra are very good to model unidimensional things. So we're talking about one thing. Use a spectrum all day and use it very profitably. If you're talking, for instance, about height, there's very short people on one end of a spectrum, very tall people on another, because we're talking about one thing. If you're talking about temperature, there's there's there's very hot. You got Arizona on one side, you got Minnesota on the other, right? We've got spectrum measuring temperature. And if we're talking about just the issue of monarchy, yes or no, by all means use a spectrum. But there's more issues than that. And it turned out even in France there were more issues than that. There were issues of how much do we want to use public monies to support people in poverty. There's the question of do we export our revolution or we do we keep it internal? There were military questions, foreign policy questions, domestic questions. So the king issue was just one question. Unfortunately, that spectrum took hold and people started thinking in terms of, oh, politics is always going to be about one thing. And it got revived and given new life with the Russian Revolution, because in Russia you had different factions of socialists and they started using that framework of the French Revolution and they were using the language of wings. Now the really interesting thing to me is, and and this is very easy to do thanks to modern technology, the Engram, Google function, and so forth, but you can look and see when Americans started using these terms left-wing and right-wing. And basically, if you look up the word left wing in the year 1890 or even 1900 or even 1910, it will be all about architecture, football, military, and hockey. Every single one, every newspaper article, magazine article that mentioned left-wing or right wing was talking about one of those domains of life, right? The left wing of the Army charging an enemy position, the left wing of the mansion, the right wing of the football team trying to run an end around, whatever it happened to be. It was never used in a political sense. And that's fascinating. It didn't happen until the Russian Revolution. And so then during the Russian Revolution, you have American reporters talking about the Russian Revolution, and they're saying, yeah, there's these people that call themselves left-wing in the Russian Revolution, and these other people that called themselves right wing. Well, eventually in the 1920s, Americans started applying it to domestic politics, and they started saying, our parties have wings, and there's a right wing of the Republican Party and a left-wing of the Republican Party. And that was ultimately what they meant by that was government intervention in the economy. You had people like Robert LaFollette who wanted the government much more involved, and he said, I'm on the left wing, and then you had more laissez-faire people in the Republican Party, and he called them right wing. So by the 1930s, this framework was pretty entrenched, and it's only become more entrenched over the past century.

SPEAKER_01 35:50

I love that. And then it's like when you when you layer on like the whole color scheme, it's like it just adds a whole other like dimension, like Thankscolor TV, you know? But I I I I want to talk about one of the other ideas that you pose in your book, and and and that's the social theory of ideology. You already mentioned a little bit earlier about the essentialist theory of ideology, but but in the social theory of ideology, if I'm if I'm good I'm gonna try my best to try to explain it, but but it's it's it's it's a concept basically that your your tribal identity will come before your the things you believe or whatever. So like you affix yourself to this group, eventually you'll believe, you know, X, Y, or Z or whatever. I'd I I'd love for you just to kind of one give a better definition. Two, like like give us some examples of of how you see that kind of play out in in politics. And you know, for for me personally, you know, I I wrote about this in my subsect recently where I was like, I came to the faith in 2008, started going to a church, and I started going to that church as a Democrat, but then I felt the social pressures to want to start to believe certain things, you know. Like everybody in the church knew I was a Democrat. Like that was sort of like a known known. And I was probably one of maybe, I don't know, two. I think my wife was the only other one. And and and it's like that there were there is this pull, like, okay, you need to believe this, you need to believe that, you need to believe this, you know, both politically and theologically to be a good Christian. And I and I love just to kind of have you just uh unpack that for us.

SPEAKER_02 37:24

Yeah. And let me just apologize, first of all, I think we didn't explain the social theory nearly well enough because another one of the biggest misconceptions of our book is the idea that we think that people don't have any real principles, that they just believe what their social group believes. And that's not true. There are people who, again, on individual issues, have heartfelt philosophical reasons for believing what they do. So what we were trying to explain, and what we were saying with the social theory, is we're simply trying to explain something. So there is something that requires explaining, and why do so many people believe there's only one issue in politics? I mean, are they dumb? Can't they see that this is this is ridiculous? There's lots of issues. What's going on? Why are we using the spectrum? Why are we so crazy? A doctor wouldn't use a spectrum, somebody talking about recreation wouldn't use a spectrum. Well, what's wrong with this? Well, the reason the spectrum took hold was because it explains something, something that requires explaining, and that is that issues that seem unrelated do correlate. Not very much, not as much as people think, but they do. So, for instance, if I know somebody is pro-choice on abortion, I can know with better than random accuracy, I can make a bet that they are probably more likely to favor higher taxes on the rich. Now, you say, why is that? Why what what does one have to do with the other? Now, on the face of it, nothing. I mean, uh unborn baby, women's rights, that's one issue. And then should we tax the rich at a higher rate? That's another issue. It's unrelated. And gun control. What's going on? Trevor Burrus, Sure. Gun control, immigration policy, the war in Iran, the war in Iraq, global climate change. I mean, all thousands of issues. How do they really and why do we see these issues that seem unrelated correlating? So what people posited was they are not unrelated. They are in fact related. That's why they correlate, because there's one big thing causing all the other little things. So again, change, take that as an example. If you're against change, then you'll have this set of views because somebody who has the anti-change conservative worldview, that worldview expresses itself in a thousand issues. And so that one underlying big issue will lead to thousands of little issues. That's the way that people explain it. That's the assumption on every op-ed page in this country's newspapers, of every Fox News program, every MSNBC, but that's the assumption, is that there's one big thing. There's an essence. There's one thing that politics is about that gets expressed a lot of different ways. Okay. So why do these things correlate? We're saying there's not an essence. There's not one thing. All we're saying with the social theory is it explains that correlation. So why is someone who is pro-life on abortion more likely to favor tax cuts for the rich? Our answer is because let's say you are sincerely pro-life. You're not you're not socialized into it, you believe it, you you're a Catholic, you have theological reasons, by golly, God bless you for having a view that you have philosophical and powered reasons for it, even you know, even if somebody disagrees. I mean, it's good for you. But then, with that view, if they are pro-life, they're going to start interacting with other pro-lifers. Like you say, they'll go to a church where people are pro-life, and those people are also, because they're part of that tribe, the conservative tribe, if you will, those people also have different views. And so the person who had a principled pro-life view will adopt other views for unprincipled tribal reasons. So that explains the correlation much, much better than does the idea that there's only one issue in politics. So we can be pluralists and say, yeah, there's a lot of issues in politics, but socialization can cause certain issues to correlate, even if those issues are unrelated. And therefore, since those issues are unrelated, we should treat them as such and approach issues one by one rather than pretending there's just one big issue because there's not.

SPEAKER_00 40:58

I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me because it just feels like it's what you observe when you look at people and you look at groups. It's like we start to adapt the belief of our group, right? Our in group in the tribe that we're part, whatever we want to call it. We start to adapt those beliefs because if we don't have them, we feel like we're going to be right excluded in some way. And I think that we see that. We see that in any number of ways. And the way what people say, the way they say it, examples of other people, you know, all sorts of ways that that happened. And I would love to hear from you, like thinking about the idea of religion and the religious right, and now the religious left, and how some people hear the religious left and they literally think it's an oxymoron, and yet that's been a rich history, right, of progressive Christianity. And also, right, so so it's it's it's hundreds of years old. And it's like, but anyway, I don't need to get into all that. I would just love to hear what your thoughts on the religious separation that we've seen. Where did that come from? Where somehow now you gotta be a Christian. If you're gonna be a Christian, you have to be a Republican and uh be on the right a conservative.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

Yeah. And again, that's why we are one of the reasons we are so opposed to the political spectrum, because I'm guessing that Will's experience in this church is largely driven by this misconception that politics is about one thing. And since being a Christian goes with being this on abortion and being this on gay marriage, and being this on redistribution of wealth, and being this on climate change, and being this when people package those all together, it excludes people like Will who who is a Christian and may have a different view on those things, right? Getting rid of the political spectrum and saying, there is my Christianity. And I'm not saying your Christianity doesn't have anything to do with politics, it will. I mean, that Christian worldview will inform your politics, but say that it can only inform it in one way, that's simply not true. And to say that religiosity has to be tied to this, this, and this. So we talk about the religious right today. As you say, Josh, there's an assumption out there that if you're religious, you're also going to be in favor of free markets, you're also going to be pro-war. Those three things go together. So you got George W. Bush, this right-winger, he's a religious fundamentalist, he's a he's a free market fundamentalist, and he is a fundamentalist in favor of war, and those three things go together. It's simply not true. Look at Bush's actual record. Was he a big religious believer? Yes, he was, very clear. Did he believe in going to war? Uh apparently so. Maybe he came to that view late, but he invaded Iraq and he was considered a war president. Great. But the free markets, he he moved our country very far away from free markets. He was by again, you you guys aren't going to believe this, so go look it up. He was, by the numbers, the most socialist president in American history. If we believe socialism is more government spending, George W. Bush increased government spending more than any other president in this country's history. It's objectively true, by absolute numbers or by percentage numbers. So he was a radical increase of government spending. So the idea that free markets go with being religious and go with war simply isn't true, and we can see it in the case of George W. Bush W. Bush. Now, go further back in history and it's even more stark. If you go back to the Depression, for instance, religiosity correlated with more support for Franklin Roosevelt. Now, back then, again, the political spectrum misled these people. But they thought, oh, if you're a liberal, you support Lyndon excuse me, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and therefore the South is very liberal because they supported him the most. And yet the South was also very segregationist. What did their views on segregation have to do with their support for the New Deal? Nothing. Those were two separate issues. But people can't understand the past and can't understand what was going on because they are thinking unidimensionally. You can even look overseas, the biggest civil war in the history of the world, as far as I can tell, depending how you want to define civil war, but might have been the Taiping Rebellion in China in the 1950s. It was led by a Christian theocrat, and he wanted to establish a socialist utopia. And so he started this war. So war, Christianity, socialism all going together. He was saying we are fighting a Christian battle. And what was that Christian battle? To regulate the railroads, to have the free coinage of silver, to give relief to farmers, to redistribute wealth, to do all these things that were considered socialistic at the time. So the idea that free markets go with religion, that is very, very contingent and very, very recent. Now, as somebody who's both a Christian and a supporter of free markets, I wish they went together naturally, but I have to look around and say that that's not true. And if some of my co-religionists are more socialistic than I am, I have to accept that they take a different interpretation of the scripture to arrive at that conclusion and that that's okay. And that we have to be pluralistic about that. But this tie between religion and free markets and war, we have to disaggregate these things and look at them one at a time. And I think we'd get people into the churches better if we did that and were more accommodating to those differences.

SPEAKER_01 46:32

But also like I'm a gun owner, I'm a veteran, you know, like I believe in like strong immigration policies, you know, like like so I have these thoughts that that like if I were to put just those on paper, people would assume, oh, I'm talking to a white Republican, you know, like Christian nationalist or whatever, you know, and and and it's like surprise me, it's a Democrat. So so I'm wondering, like, how do we like how do we just survive in life without naturally putting people in these, like, in these groups? Because I mean, especially like, I mean, this is an a mittermir, right? So you're gonna hear a lot of the left is this and the right is that, right? And for a certain audience, that will probably resonate a lot more than than others, because like you have to hit that amygdala. You gotta get people activated. The only way to get them activated is to get them afraid and scared, and you know, that's that's how they're gonna get mobilized. But but it's like how how like what what language can we use to describe Republicans, Democrats, right, left? I mean, if if these if these terms are are are really confusing.

SPEAKER_02 47:39

Well, let me clarify that I don't think the terms Democrat and Republican are confusing because those are real categories, those are real groups, and people really do belong to them. So, Will, if you belong to the Democratic Party, you're a Democrat, and I have no problem saying that. What I do have a hard time saying, and I wouldn't say, because it's misleading, is to say Will is on the left. That's now irrational. Because, like you just mentioned, you are living proof that our theory is true, right? You're living proof as a gun owner, as a vet, and uh I I assume not necessarily a supporter of our military's policies, but supporter of the military and things like that. You know, you're gonna have a diverse range of views that do not fit either bundle very well. And so people who tell us that the that policies naturally bundle together because they grew out of a worldview that can be modeled on an axis, you are living proof that that is not true. Okay, so your question is a very good one and a very hard one, because we humans have to have categories, right? I mean, Plato was the great expositor of this, and now we're all like, oh yeah, he was right, and nobody's improved upon Plato in 2200 years. But the idea being that we we humans, in order to function, we are categorizing beings. I mean, in the beginning was the word. That's in John 1-1, right? You guys know this better than I do, but but word, language categories, underlying logos that leads to language is what allows us to function and ultimately what makes one of the main things that makes us human. Okay, so our our problem is not with categories, because we do get that pushback. Oh, you're saying we just abolish all categories. How would we function? No. But there are good categories and bad categories, and there are better categories and worse categories. So, for instance, in the 19th century, people had these categories for medicine. They talked about the four humors, and they looked at people and they put them in different categories based on uh a four-part medical profile. You're a sanguine, you're a choleric, you're a melancholic, right? They based on these this four humors theory. And they said, well and people said, well, that's dumb. That's not how people are. Well, we have to have categories. Actually, they didn't. That categorization scheme was a bad one. They needed better categories. And as medicine progressed, they came up with a richer, more elaborate, more multidimensional set of categories that have been much more useful. So the bad framework that only said there's four categories of people based on their four types of humors, and if somebody is red in the face, well, that means they've got too much blood and we need to slice them open and let it out. You know, so every time somebody got a fever, their face would puff up because that's what happens when you get a fever. They would slice them open to try to heal them. And it killed so many people, including George Washington, right? So this was a dangerous and terrible way to think. But the the the retort from people in the 19th century was, oh, so you just want to get away with get rid of all categories? No, we just want to get rid of the bad ones. And that was a bad category scheme. So we probably should have done a better job in our book saying, what can we replace this category scheme with? That that's what people want. And I guess you know, we kind of threw up our hands and said, look, we know this categories are bad. Just because I don't, you know, if if I'm a doctor in the 19th century, I can say the four humorous theory is bad without having a better paradigm to replace it with. That's okay, right? You can point out the flaws in one theory without having another. But maybe it was incumbent upon us to think of a little better classification schema. So let me take my best stab at it. Our current categorization schema is bad because it it presumes that politics is about one thing when it's clearly not. So we just need a richer and more multidimensional categorization scheme. Now, how would that look? Well, it seems like political figures over the course of history have varied in the kinds of politics they had, and maybe we could use those people as stand-ins for those categories. So, for instance, Trumpism. The standard view of Donald Trump is totally wrong. And this is why people are talking about politics. They just don't know what they're talking about, because they're stuck in a unidimensional paradigm. They say Donald Trump has moved the Republican Party to the extreme right. This is nonsense. This is silly. You know, the size of government has grown radically under Donald Trump. He's the first Republican and president to promise not to reform entitlement programs, to not believe in cover cutting government spending. That is an unambiguous move to the left, isn't it? To which a rational person would respond, well, there's more than issues than just government spending. To which I say, Hallelujah, brother. You have just been enlightened. You have realized there's more than one issue, so why are you pretending there's one? Why are you saying there's one issue and Donald Trump has moved to the right of that one issue? Stop, stop. Instead, talk about what Trump believes in. Okay, he believes in higher tariffs. That's different. That's not a move to the right or the left. That's different than Reagan. Reagan was a free trader, right? He also believes in more restriction on immigration. That's different than what George W. Bush believed. It's not a move to the right, to the left, to anything else. It's different. He he believes, apparently he has the same views of Bush and Reagan when it comes to tax cuts, so there's an overlap. But the point being is that there is a Trump bundle of issues, which is different than the Reagan bundle of issues, which is different than the Bush bundle of issues, which is different than the Goldwater bundle of issues, which is different than the Taft. So I'm very impressed when people say, like my friend Paul Godfrey, he says, I'm a Taft Republican. What does that mean? It means somebody who is opposed to war, an anti-war Republican, that's what Taft was. He thought World War II was a bad idea, at least at first, didn't like the Korean War, right? Anti-war, but also free market. He says that's the space I inhabit. It's not right-wing, it's not left-wing, it's Taftite. That's a much better way to look at it because it was more multidimensional. If you say you're a Goldwaterite, that's going to be different than other things. So we can start perhaps labeling people according to political figures who have held a similar bundle. So I'm guessing, Will, if you looked, you could probably find politician who had a similar set of policies that you hold, and other people who hold that set of policies, and it wouldn't be placed on a unidimensional spectrum. It would be its own bundle, and there's probably like-minded people out there. You remind me of my friend Jeff Thomas. He's also a Democrat like you, but a gun owner, and holds more traditional values on religious matters. So, yeah, there's guys like you out there, but you're not going to find them by looking at a spectrum, because a spectrum cannot accommodate that complexity.

SPEAKER_01 53:30

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yes. Sadly, and this is going to disappoint a lot of my Democrat friends. I I probably find myself more like a William Buckley, which is going to upset a lot of people. But uh I think just his ability to just like be able to talk and communicate and work across the aisle, I think, uh is something really important to me.

SPEAKER_02 53:50

So I don't think that's heresy at all because Buckley himself, you know, at the end of his life, said, hey, what conservatism has become is not what I stood for. So if you're a Buckley, that doesn't make you a Trumpite, but the political spectrum says it does. It says Buckley was on the right, Trump was on the right, they're the same. They're not the same. They had radically different things. And so I don't think you should be ashamed or of that at all if you find a lot of overlap between yourself and Buckley, because it doesn't mean you agree with Trump, certainly.

SPEAKER_00 54:15

Yeah, I mean, this is this is so good. I love this stuff. And I have so many more questions. We're coming to time though, so I'm not going to be able to ask all the ones that I want to ask. Maybe we can do this again and then have another conversation about it. But I think that, like, if I'm thinking about this question of where I fall, because, you know, am I a Republican? Well, I I voted v vastly more for Republicans than any other party. I have one time voted for Democrat. I voted third party in in the last few elections. So I guess if you look at my voting record, you'd say I'm Republican. And yet I find myself very much alienated within the current Republican Party. The treatment of immigrants, the what it seems like their vision is of a hundred million deportations. I'm not sure if they're still floating that out there, but that was very clear, you know, out there on their social media and and their policy ideas, and uh any of that seems unjust. I'm very against that. It's a very bad idea to me. And just immoral and unethical in so many ways of what I've seen. I've just been very disappointed with the with what I've seen in this administration. Not even disappointed, honestly, really horrified by things I've seen. And I haven't had people be able to convince me otherwise by giving me like sending me you know legitimate things that are that are pointing me uh uh to stuff that could change my mind. But all I just say, and I'm totally open to that, I find myself very alienated, and I think that's why I feel I feel uh very much a magnetic kind of pull to the ideas that you're espousing talking about. I think that these are very unhelpful categories. I don't know what to replace them with, you know. I guess I'm a Jesus Jesusite, but I don't know what that really means, right? That's kind of like stupid, like that's kind of silly. I don't know how I can't, you know, I kind of a cop out. I think that's a Christian Sunday school answer, you know. But it's like I I really don't know though, because I I feel very disappointed. I can't imagine myself being a Democrat, and yet I've very hard to imagine being Republican right now, to be honest, because of the things I've seen and the way that it's going and the use of power that I am just not really not a fan of. And so I think that I would love to just hear your thoughts on, you know, as we're ending, this is the last question before we'll get some just practical things from you. But like, where what would you say to me? You know, you can say to me and those like me that represent me, I think I'm not alone in that feeling. What would you say to us in this ne- in for enduring and moving forward in the reality we're in right now?

SPEAKER_02 57:16

Well, that's a tough question because you know you you're you're trying to defer to me as an expert here, and I I'm sure you have much more political wisdom than I do, and I would just as soon say, Josh, what should I do? You know, you you probably have more answers, but let me just tell you kind of you know, some heuristics that I try to follow. Because I think one of the reasons the Republican Party went wrong is not because religious people belong to the Republican Party. I uh you know, I I would like to see more religiosity in both parties for obvious reasons as a Christian. I think it would make our parties better. And that's why I wouldn't I wouldn't dare to tell Will to change parties. I think my goodness, do we need Christians in the Democratic Party? And inasmuch as our parties become religiously monolithic, that's going to be bad for everybody, for both parties. We need the pluralism in the party. So Will, stay where you are. Please don't you know change. Don't say, well, gun ownership, I'm going to the Republicans, don't do it.

SPEAKER_01 58:00

I changed my political party right before this interview.

SPEAKER_02 58:03

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 58:05

Get that letter back, get it retrieved. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 58:08

Yeah. And a lot of people think that we are, you know, this idea of the myth of left and right, we're advocating that people disengage from the parties because the parties are the problem. Again, we don't uh believe that. A two-party system it can be, and I think is good for democracy, but we need more dissident within the parties. And the problem with the left-right spectrum is by saying that politics is about one thing and the Democratic Party is on the left and the Republican Party is on the right, it it tells us that everything the Democrats believe is either correct or wrong, 100 percent of it, right? Because if there's only one issue in politics and the Democrats are right about that one issue, then they're right about everything the Democratic Party believes. And that's one of the reasons you see so much partisanship. So is there a way to have a society where we say, look, let's do a way with the left-right stuff, but keep the party? Absolutely. But if we did that, we would say you have the Democratic Party that stands for a bunch of stuff, some of it good, some of it bad, a Republican Party that stands for a bunch of stuff, some of it good, some of it bad. And somebody like Will says, I tend to agree more with the Democrats, but it's a dissident Democrat. That is very healthy for the parties. And since the parties define our democracy, it's very healthy for our democracy. So people who disengage from the parties by reading our book, I I I apologize for that because they've gotten the wrong message. And just because I'm a political independent and don't belong to parties, maybe I'm not setting a very good example because I think the parties are important, and we need people promoting this message of, hey, the our party w need people within the parties promoting the message that the parties stand for a lot of different things and not all of visit correct, and introducing dissonant pluralistic voices within the parties to help them moderate, to be more pluralistic, to be more open-minded, where we see so much closedness. Now, you guys are followers of Jesus, as am I. The danger can become and has become, I think, to a degree in the Republican Party to say, if you follow Jesus, then we know exactly what policies will follow from that. Now, does that mean you say, oh, so I've got church and politics and I keep them separate? Absolutely not, right? Josh, if you are disturbed by what the Republican Party is doing because you think it's unchristian, I agree with you about that. I'm disturbed by it too. So your Christianity is going to inform you. However, you made a great point. You said, but I could be proven wrong, and I've heard other people, that's exactly the right approach to say, look, I'm trying to follow Jesus as best I can. Jesus is my moral master, he was perfect, but I'm not perfect. And this perfect man God, Jesus, who came to earth and died for our sins, he taught us things. And we try to apply that to politics as best we can, but it's hard. And we don't have the definite answer. So if I keep coming back to a theme here, it's Karl Popper, it's fallibilism. We don't know for sure. So I'm pretty sure, and I'm working to become more sure, and I'm trying to get further light and knowledge, but I don't know exactly how Jesus' the the the teachings of Jesus exactly are going to lead to which policies and being open-minded to that. Now, what I am pretty darn sure of is that Jesus' teachings would not lead to the full range of policies that are currently embraced by the Democrats or the Republicans. I'm quite sure that if Jesus were alive today and telling us, hey, let me fill you in on how I would vote, it wouldn't look like either of our parties. That's what I'm pretty sure about. But what exactly it would look like, that I'm really unsure about. So trying and being fallibilistic and humble ultimately, and I'm not very good at it. I I'm preaching something, I don't practice, I'm a hypocrite, sorry. But but but I'm not very humble, and yet we all need more humility, don't we? We all need to say, I follow Jesus, I'm trying to follow Jesus, but I don't have all the answers. And part of following Jesus is being open to correction, open to new evidence, and being humble like Jesus was. An omniscient man, being the humblest person who ever lived, is pretty amazing. And if he was omniscient and humble, gee, those of us who are stuck in mortality with all of the misleading things around us and all the biases that we are born with, how much infinitely more responsibility do we have to be humble than even Jesus, the greatest example of humility? So that might be where I would tell people to go is that just because you're a follower of Jesus does not give you all the political answers. Let's all open our minds, close our mouths, open our ears, and be a little more humble and try to arrive at the correct policies. And I applaud you guys on this show because you guys are doing exactly that.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:15

Well, I really appreciate it, Hiram. And thanks for joining us here and spending some time. How can people connect with your work? Do you have something you'd like them to look up, get involved in, a preferred vendor for the book? Just go ahead and uh give them the info you'd like to give them.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:31

Oh, sure. I'm I'm not on social media for the same reason. I'm not on cocaine, so I stay off, stay off. But um, they can find our book on Amazon. My brother Verlin, he's the one who takes one for the team. He is, does have social media to kind of promote our work. So follow Verlin's stuff. He and I think a lot alike, and you'll know what I think if you know what he thinks.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:48

Well, very good. Well, thank you so much for being on the show and spending time with us.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:53

It's been my great pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:55

Absolutely. To our viewers and our watchers, guys, thanks. I mean, listeners, thanks for coming and joining us and spending some time and make sure that you're sharing this with people who need it and make sure you're having these kinds of conversations. We're going to put links in the description. So go check all this stuff out. And until next time, guys, keep your conversations not right or left, but uh thanks and got up.