Christianity Expert: The Secular World Is Living Off Christian Ideas And The Clock Is Running Out! | Glen Scrivener

Christianity has managed to do twice what no one else has done once. It has been a Jewish and Christian thing to say that all people are created in God's image, no matter how inconvenient that might be for us. These incredibly progressive. In our mind, pieces of legislation were the sorts of things that Christians were bringing to bear on a world that is so brutal to our way of understanding. We either go for future one, two, three, or four. I think right now we're seeing all four futures. They are all happening at once and it's a mess. You're listening to the Provoke and Inspire podcast. What's up guys. This is Ben Pearce and this is Provoke and Inspire. And everything we do is about equipping you to follow Jesus in a broken world. And that means asking hard questions about the way the world actually is. My guest today is Glen Scrivener. He's a British evangelist and the author of an amazing book called The Air We Breathe, and one of the clearest thinkers working on the intersection of Christianity and Western culture today. His argument is simple, and it hits very hard. The freedoms, rights, and moral instincts that secular people are most proud of are borrowed, borrowed from worldview. They largely reject. And Glenn says, if we keep cutting the roots, we should not be surprised if the fruit disappears. For any Christian trying to make sense of the cultural moment we're living in, and who wants to engage in a relevant way with those outside of the church, this conversation is crucial. I know I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I can't wait for you to listen to the whole thing. I just want to mention how grateful I am for all of the support that this podcast has received. If this does encourage you, would you consider sharing it with one other person in your life who could also benefit from it? All right, that's it. Let's get on to the conversation with Glen Scrivener. You have said the West owes Christianity a deep moral debt, even shaping our instincts on things like slavery being obviously wrong. To a skeptic, how would you defend that claim? Whether you look at things through a Christian lens or whether you look at things through a totally secular lens. History takes a heck of a long time to unravel in all sorts of ways. But isn't it remarkable that in the medieval church, slavery melted away in western and northern Europe and then was legislated against by the thirteenth fourteenth centuries? It came back with a vengeance with the New World slavery, which was a particularly poisonous form of slavery. But it was then abolished via a preacher led movement of Quakers and evangelicals. And Christianity has managed to do twice what no one else has done once. So I guess for the most sceptical friend that I have, the first stop in a conversation is to say, do you find that remarkable at all? And do you think it's worth investigating this thing that has had this effect, because nothing else has had the effect that Christianity has had on this particular institution? And if their response is more of the soundbite variety that says, well, I thought the Bible justifies slavery. How can it possibly have its cake and eat it too? In that sense? Well, I guess it regulated this human universal back back in the Old Testament. But that Old Testament story is within a greater biblical narrative in which in the beginning there is no such thing as slavery. Uh, male and female stand on the earth as King and Queen of all creation, and they are made in God's image, and they are made to have dominion over the world. These are the truths that actually were at the heart of the abolitionist cause. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people were again and again returning to what are we as human beings? Because if you go to Plato and you say, what are human beings? He would say, well, there are gold kind of human beings and there are silver kind of human beings. And, um, there is a very stratified vision for what humanity is. And doesn't nature teach you that some are born to rule and some are born to be ruled over? And that was a very, uh, universal way of looking at the human person that, of course, some people are better at looking after themselves and others and other people, they can't get their life together. Ben. And so wouldn't it be good if the people who were good at ruling, um, helped those who are not so good at ruling? And that that was just an obvious thing to, uh, ancient civilizations. But the Bible from page one says, no, humans aren't those kinds of creatures. Most fundamentally, primarily, we are divine images. And in all the other stories of creation, um, humanity comes at the end of a quite nauseating kind of process of war and death and rape and selfishness and intrigue and squabbling. And humanity is then made at the end of that process in order to serve the gods, in order to, to be slaves. And yet page one of the Bible is out of a loving, orderly God who makes all things well. Humanity come to take centre stage as these divine images. And you know, in the other ancient Near Eastern texts, it might have been the king that was an image of God. But. But apparently in the Bible all humans are royal. All humans have this divine image. And we are born not to slave, but born to rule and to have dominion. Then there's a fall, like in the biblical narrative, and the Old Testament is expressly both in the old and the New Testament. It is expressly a non-ideal arrangement in which all kinds of things are regulated but not celebrated. So divorce, for instance, is another example of in an ideal world, everybody lives happily ever after. And there's no such thing as this thing called divorce. But God regulates this fallen thing and provides, um, rules for the structuring of this thing that is non-ideal. But, um, Jesus says in Matthew nineteen, Moses gave you those sorts of laws because your hearts were hard. And there is a non-ideal structure that is leading people towards Christians believe that in the New Testament, Jesus comes as the one who declares liberty. He is the one who brings Jubilee, where all slaves are freed and all debts are cancelled, and everybody gets to go home and there's a happily ever after. And Jesus's first sermon is that I am that kind of redeemer. I set the captives free. Liberty is here, and the New Testament is this living out, first of all, of spiritual communities in which nobody is is Lord except Jesus Himself. We are not slaves. We are brothers and sisters of one another. And slowly, as this spiritual community is lived out from the New Testament period onwards, you start to see these ripple effects out into culture. And this is the only narrative that has ever done the thing that Christianity has done, which is to have abolished, you know, slavery as an institution. And so I guess when you take the long picture, not only of of history back for the last two thousand years, but when you take the long view of the the history of Scripture itself, I think that helps you to put those slavery verses into that structure. HMM. What are some other moral badges of honor? Things that we are proud of in the West that you think we should be rightly attributing to the Judeo-Christian worldview? But maybe secular culture would be aghast at the idea that they have to give credit to Jesus for those things. You're right. There is with some of our friends, there is that sense of being aghast that Christianity could ever consider itself to be on the side of the angels. I think very baked into. It's not just the air we breathe that there are these Christianized kind of principles, the air we breathe also in the sort of post-enlightenment West is that Christianity is the bad guy, right? Right. And and that somehow the enlightenment and we're quite vague about what we think the enlightenment is, but we've got this sense that somehow, like a big Harry Potter spell, somebody came along and went enlightenment and, and somehow brought about this magical improvement in, in, you know, moral intuitions and progress. Um, I think we live with that kind of thumbnail sketch of history in our minds that there were the dark ages and then enlightenment struck and, and we can be. And at that stage I find that a very unlikely story. Um, as though we should, you know, thank some European dudes from three hundred years ago. I don't know. It feels actually quite an icky story when you press into it, but it's but it's kind of baked into us that we just we just feel like Christianity is always the bad guys. And so what I, what I try to do in the book and I'm constantly doing in my conversations is just saying, look, if, if you think it's obviously, if you think infanticide is obviously wrong, like you should, you should think Jews and Christians, you really should like, um, it was, it was Jews in the, in the time before the birth of Christ who were just dead against this almost human universal practice. Um, that the Romans would, um, get rid of unwanted children and, you know, and it was, it was just absolutely obvious that you, you know, the, the first manual of midwifery, um, that the Romans produced around in the, in the first century AD, the first chapter of what it means to be a midwife is chapter one. You've got to figure out discerning the offspring that are worth raising, right? You know, the first thing you need to do to be honest, right? Might be more crass language, but there's definitely some parallels to our current culture. But anyway, yeah, no, you're right, you're right. And as we repay, organize, we should. In one sense, we should be shocked and horrified by by egregious evil that is happening. And infanticide is back on the table with people, right? In one sense, we should be horrified. In another sense, we should not be shocked at all like it has been a Christian thing, a Jewish and Christian thing, to say that all people are created in God's image, no matter how inconvenient that might be for us. And they're very weak. But that doesn't make them less human, right? They're very dependent. That doesn't mean that they are any less in God's image. And, and so this universal human practice of getting rid of largely disabled children and infanticide has always been practiced predominantly on girls rather than boys. It's been an incredibly misogynistic practice and an ableist practice, and Jews and Christians were resolutely against this thing. And when Christians had legislative power, they were the first ever to require parents to raise their offspring. And the thing is that that was the weird thing. We now think that that's the air we breathe. Well, of course you don't go around killing babies. Who goes around killing babies? You know, I studied moral philosophy as an undergraduate. And one of one of the things that is kind of used in moral philosophy as an obvious, self-evident truth is, well, you wouldn't just kill babies, would you? Right? As testing the principle the opposite side of the Nazi Germany extreme, right? It's like the most obvious moral good right to protect children. The most obvious moral evil is Adolf Hitler. It's like those are our extreme paradigms. Yeah. And yet you go around human cultures, and anthropologists will tell you that the anthropological record, infanticide was very, very widespread. And here is one thing that has gone from absolutely unquestioned. It might. You know, people might have thought of, um, the practice of actually exposing the infant as a little bit grubby and distasteful. And you might want to get your servant to do it right. But the idea that the entire practice was wrong and that this was child murder, I mean, Jews were saying like Philo of Alexandria, who was born around about forty four B.C., he said that infanticide is obviously worse than murder because, you know, you're dealing with somebody so weak and your obligation is obviously protection rather than elimination. And and so people, the people of the book were so against this thing that everybody else thought was, was just self-evident and obvious. And now we all think it's self-evident and obvious to, to, to, to raise children. Um, there's, there's an example. Other examples like pederasty. So like adult to child sexual contact. Yikes. Is yeah, we say yikes. And whether you, whether you've ever set foot inside a church or not in the West, we all say yikes to that. Well, if you say yikes to that thank a Christian, right? You know, thank the people of the book who, who looked at this practice that was called pederasty, right? Which the Greek word just means child love your initiating younger people, usually younger boys, into ways of sex and sexuality. Um, and that was just obviously a rite of passage and, and has been obviously a rite of passage in all sorts of cultures around the world. And yet Christians and Jews did not call it pederasty, meaning child love. They called it Phytophthora, which means child destruction. And again, as soon as Christians had, um, legislative influence, it was outlawed. And actually victims of such abuse could bring their perpetrators to court, even if it was thirty years after after the offence. And so these incredibly progressive in our mind, um, kind of pieces of legislation were the sorts of things that Christians were bringing to bear on a world that is so brutal to our way of understanding, but it wasn't brutal to them. It wasn't brutal to the Romans in in their day. It's Christianity and Christian lenses that make us see these obvious evils as the evils that they are. And all sorts of progress flowed from that. Yeah. There is these axioms, these self-evident truths that are even baked into our, you know, I think of our American founding documents and the inalienable rights that we all take for granted. And yet any student of history knows that this notion, this image of God notion that is really the germinating impetus for all other quests for justice is just absolutely not present in so much of human history and also, frankly, is not guaranteed to us indefinitely. Right. And we should be legitimately afraid of the foundation of every human being made in the image of God being taken from us. That is a a loss that will not be philosophical, that'll be genocidal if we're not careful. Yeah. And, you know, so the founding documents, we hold these truths to be self-evident. Um, you know, interestingly, Thomas Jefferson, in June of seventeen seventy six, he wrote the draft of the Declaration of Independence, and he wrote, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. And it was Benjamin Franklin in an edit who said, let's get rid of the sacred thing, you know, because sacred seems to be too contestable and ideal. Instead, obviously, he he corrected it to self-evident. We hold these truths to be self-evident because he wanted to found the Republic on reason rather than revelation. We, we, you know, we don't want to get into fights about because there's different denominations and religious people, you know, what religious people are like. So Benjamin Franklin says, I know what we'll do. We will just found the Republic on self-evident reason and not on the contestable claims of, of, of religion. But the thing is, I mean, a self-evident truth is something like all triangles have three sides. All bachelors are unmarried. That's a self-evident truth. The idea that all people have inalienable rights and equality, like the only thing self-evident about that is that it's not self-evident. If it were self-evident, it would be much more widespread in human societies. But I think the American experiments and, you know, well done for keeping going for the last two hundred and fifty years. We we celebrate a quarter of a millennium of this experiment of basically saying, we hold these truths to be self-evident. Billions wouldn't. But we do. And. And if it's not grounded in something like. We have been endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, well, then what is it that's actually going to ground this thing? And, and my, my, my message to my secular friends is not that you need to take a leap of faith, right? My secular friends, they are they are six miles in the air, right? And their little legs are dangling above absolute nothingness. Because if we're trying to build a society on, everybody has inherent worth and dignity, but without the foundations that give you inherent worth and dignity. Um, man, you don't need to take a leap of faith. You, you are dangling mid-air with absolutely nothing under your feet. And what the Christian is trying to do is to say, you don't need to leap, you need to stand. And, and Jesus is the ground that you can stand on. And this whole conversation is it's baked in with all of these assumptions. And you can walk into contradictions very fast, because even the general question behind the question is what is good? Because to even judge whether human dignity is something we should be striving for presupposes a moral standard that says pursuing human dignity is good. So even this entire conversation almost cannot be had. We borrow from Judeo-Christian frameworks of morality to judge Judeo-Christian moral frameworks. So is that maybe the first place to start with someone is wait, before we even evaluate any of this. Where are you getting the idea of good from in the first place? Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. And a lot of where my friends begin is that they assume that Christianity is unequal, cruel, coercive, unenlightened, anti-science, restrictive, and regressive. Right? Just that everything else is fine. Yeah, everything else is fine. Yeah. It's a very recognizable shopping list, isn't it? Of problems that people have. And but as you say, it's quite global in, and but the reason why it's so global is because all I've done with those seven critiques is that they are a reverse of the seven values that I explore in the book. In the book, I sort of take people through equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, progress. Um, and now we think that these truths are obvious, natural, universal, they're self-evident, right? To the point where my non-Christian friend critiques the church for not believing in equality, for not believing in compassion or consent or enlightenment, science, freedom, progress. That's why they call it bigoted, coercive, cruel, unenlightened, anti, anti-science, restrictive, regressive. Because they are already standing on some particularly Christian ish ground in order to kind of throw their, uh, their missiles towards, uh, towards the church. And so, yeah, a lot of the conversation is okay, so how certain are you that there are. That there is a foundation for your belief in equality or for human rights. Like how, how, how certain are you of that? And especially how certain are you of that? If you're also telling me that your worldview is we live in a godless universe. So we live in a godless universe. We are the heirs of a brutal, a brutal evolutionary process. And we should be kind to one another at that point. I'm saying to my friend, look, I think you've got some cognitive dissonance here, and I want to ease you of your cognitive dissonance. You know, we are the heirs of a brutal evolutionary history, and society should be judged by the way it treats its weakest members. Yeah. Now pick one. And I'm often I often say to my friends, you're like secular humanist, secular humanist. Pick one. Right? You you can't you kind of can't have both. I want to frame this eventually to the believer, because I would say the majority of those listening to this will be believers. And this may be useful for them in the sense of taking great confidence in the lineage or the legacy of their beliefs, and also using this as a powerful apologetic. But I would imagine there still are skeptics who go, Glenn, the Bible, bro. Like, are you serious? You're the moral standard, right? And that's your classic atheist. And it's the comments I always get, but without getting completely pulled down that red herring. What do you say to the person who says, really? Your God of the Old Testament is your moral standard that we've all risen to? That seems a bit odd. How is my friend reading the Bible in that moment? Because there's one way you can go onto a Reddit thread, and you can find any number of verses that not only shock the non-Christian mind, but shock the Christian mind, right? They put a lump in my skeptical friend's throat and they put a lump in my throat. Um, and you've got to you've got to figure out how is anybody reading the Bible? Because. Because nobody has in the in the history of either Judaism or Christianity. We've never gone to the Bible the way that the Reddit thread goes to the Bible, which is, you know, to, to take isolated verses out of the Bible and try to come up with timeless principles from it. You know, you don't go to, you know, and God said to Noah, make an ark out of gopher wood. Oh, I, I need to go to, you know, get some masonry. Well, some people do, some people. Yeah. That's right. You know, it's it's tough. But anyway, the supply chain since the war, the supply chains are dreadful. So just can't get the gopher with these days. But yeah, like applying the Bible in that way is not the way that anyone, even an Old Testament Israelite, read the scriptures. I would want to, you know, say to my friends, like Christians, read the Bible as the story of redemption. Um, that culminates in Christ and that is lived out in the church rather than here is a grab bag of timeless moral principles because they're not timeless moral, moral principles. I mean, Jesus explicitly says, you know, Moses gave you those laws because your hearts were hard, but it's not so in the beginning, and it's not so for you now. So Matthew nineteen is really interesting. Here is Jesus himself telling us how to read the Bible. He's like, Moses gave you a bunch of stuff because your hearts were hard, not because it's the ideal, timeless, you know, moral ideal for humanity. And there has been a story that goes from Paradise down into a dreadful fall. Many of those things were regulated, but the whole point was to culminate in Christ, who is the great Redeemer. And and it's just very difficult when you put Jesus at the center of your Bible reading to read the verses the same way that the Reddit thread reads, reads those verses Because in Jesus, like if you have issues with Old Testament wars, for instance, and I think every Christian gets a lump in their throat when they read Joshua or one Samuel fifteen. I think we, we, we all, um, find it difficult to read because we, we have been taught by the one who said, put away your sword, for those who live by the sword will die by the sword. And so we go back to the Old Testament. And in these very limited instances, Israel are handed God's sword in order to execute his fearful judgment against the Canaanites. And that's part of a very, um, a very long story of Canaanite evil that's been going on for, for centuries. And the Canaanites have been involved in, you know, child burning levels of evil. And, you know, they were given four hundred years to repent, which is longer than, you know, any, any instance of of any modern just war I've ever heard of. But, but after four hundred years of being commanded to repent, Israel are put in the unique, unrepeatable position of being the bearers of the Lord's sword of justice. This is something that can never happen in New Testament times. Um, but but Israel were the bearers of, of that sword in those limited instances. And I think that's, that's the thing that is most shocking to, to a modern reader. Even if, you know, even if the secular person grants that this is a just war. Even if the secular person, um, you know, um, grants that, that there might be all sorts of reasons, uh, for violence to end evil. Even if they grant all of that, I think the most shocking thing is that an Israelite soldier had to execute that divine justice. Um, and that's something that Christians struggle with as well. And I think it's something we struggle with as well, because the New Testament commands us that we can never do that. You know, Jesus says, put away your sword. And Paul says, the only sword that you've got is the sword of the spirit. it. So you've just got to go with the Word of God. You've got to go with preaching in. Absolute non-violence. And so Christians read those Old Testament passages in in very different ways. Um, but once you read them as a story that, that tells about a non-ideal situation that is fulfilled in Christ, who is the one who takes the sword of justice into himself and rises up again to only give us peace. Who turns the other cheek to our evil, and then tells us, you are now to go and turn the other cheek to others. Um, Jesus has started that kind of, of, of movement that has been utterly for the blessing of the world. And I think that story makes sense in Jesus. What doesn't make sense is diving into Joshua and, and going to some of those, those passages and trying to say, this is what Christianity has always been about. That would be a little bit like going to Star Wars Episode four, and you dive in and you haven't seen anything of the Star Wars. Um, you know, storyline. All you see is Luke Skywalker. Like, shooting off those those lasers. It goes into the garbage chute or whatever, into the Death Star. He blows up the Death Star. And he seems to be happy about it. The moral monster. Like, who is this Luke Skywalker? What is he doing? Um, but of course, that is not the way to to watch Star Wars. It's not the way to inhabit any story. Um, there was a fearful level of violence that was actually perpetrated in Star Wars Episode four. There is a story behind that that might make sense of it. Don't judge. Don't judge the character of Luke Skywalker by episode four, judging by episode nine, right? And you still might find him wanting, but, um, yeah, Christians read scripture, um, as a story that culminates in Christ that is to be embodied in the church and lived out in the world. And from that point of view, you've got a very different document on your hands. Yeah, that'll have to be the thumbnail. Luke Skywalker is a moral monster, according to Glenn, so that'll get some very confused clicks indeed. Yeah, and it's probably tangential and a bit outside of the scope of this conversation. But to me, the argument A, it's coming usually from an emotional place, an evasive place, a place that is not genuinely seeking or if it is, it's still borrowing from some moral framework to make those judgments and from whence they came. It's still a question that is burdening the person making the accusation. I think there is tremendous power in this beautiful outworking of the Judeo-Christian worldview of Jesus coming and dying. Of course, we believe that. But then even just you map that out sociologically, historically, morally, you can see all of this through line and threads, you know, but obviously this, this apologetic has its limits. And I'd imagine if you're talking to someone, they may say to you, wow, okay, Ben, I concede Christianity produced X, Y, and Z, but now we've taken the ball and we're running with it. So thanks for thanks for what you did. There's obviously some aspects that were not so great, but we won't. We'll see the baby with the bathwater. We'll be able to separate those and we'll take it from here. What do you say to someone who has that? Very pragmatic, almost agreeable, but but clearly departing from the ultimate objective of the apologetic. Well, how's that been working for you? Um. Um, and I think just asking them, can you, can you ground your belief in, in equality, in self-evident truths? Have a go. Like without appealing to some kind of sacred truth or transcendent reality. Why is slavery wrong? Why are all people equal? Um, why shouldn't churches and states advance their ends violently? Like, let's genuinely talk about that stuff, especially because it's now becoming obvious to us that, um, there's no such thing as sanctity of life at either end, whether the unborn or whether um the elderly, um, there's just no such thing as the inherent worth and dignity of humans anymore. And we're, we're paying the price at either end of those things. Um, you know, there are seventy million abortions in the world, uh, every year. There's only sixty million deaths in the world every year. Like if you make it out of the birth canal, only sixty million deaths happen in the world. Um, we kill seventy million people in the womb, you know, and you're just like, well, how is it working out for us? Um, having a vision of life in which sacred truths are utterly contested and the only thing that counts is self-evident reason. It is. You know, heading in some in some really quite dystopian dystopian ways. And so, yeah, I guess one of the things I just want to do is not only point to the rock of Christ and the history of the church, but also the sinking sand of the world and say that actually, if we are biological survival machines clinging to an insignificant rock, hurtling through a meaningless universe towards eternal extinction, it's unclear to me how that worldview is going to pick up any kind of ball and run in any kind of good direction. HMM. Where do you see us heading? What are some of the ominous directions that are increasing departure from this foundation? Where do you see us going as a result of that? We're fracturing into lots of different directions all at once. I think one of the directions is, as you say, some people want to say we are the progressive heirs to, you know, the church's tradition. Thank you very much, church. We'll take it from here and they'll you know, the Christianity has been like the the the booster rockets. And now we're sort of getting out of the stratosphere. And we can we can shed the booster rockets and the shuttle can keep going to oblivion or wherever. Um, I think there is still that kind of, um, progressive belief that um, under our own steam, we, we can make things better that that is still happening. At the same time, there is a lot of skepticism about that progressive, um, vision, which I think has overpromised and under-delivered in the last few decades. And what I think we've seen in America and beyond has been a kind of a, you know, you could call it an anti-woke backlash. Right? Right. Yeah. Um, and that Anti-woke backlash has been pretty severe at times. And and it ranges from your Joe Rogan's who used to vote for Bernie like he voted for Bernie Sanders in twenty sixteen. He voted for Donald Trump in twenty twenty four. Right? And he's gone on a journey and he's a little bit of a yeah, he's a bit of a bellwether though, for your average, your average Joe. Right. That's that's who Joe Rogan is. And, and you know, there's nothing profoundly political or ideological ideological going on, but it's just there's a massive sense of people saying, Karen from HR can shut up. Right? Um, and Karen too, it would be Karen, you know, and, and it's kind of like in the anti-woke and I'm not, I'm not describing a Christian thing at the moment. I'm just describing, you know, movements that are happening in the culture. There's a movement happening in the culture that's just like, I'm sick of Karen from HR telling me, wagging her finger and telling me about diversity, equity and inclusion the whole time. And what's interesting about the progressive thing has become the more pharisaical position in the culture because it has had the power, right? It's more authoritarian now. So if you're a Christian thinking about Luke chapter fifteen and the older brother and the younger brother, um, I think thirty years ago you would teach the, you know, the elder brother is more, you know, the, the right wing conservative, right? And the younger brother is this libertarian who's, you know, who's just gone off for, for fun times and ended up in a pigsty. I think nowadays there's a perfectly reasonable telling of the of the parable in which the, the elder brother moralist is actually the progressive authoritarian. And actually the the person who's run off into the far country is far more the barstool conservative like who listens to Joe Rogan a lot, right? And we're at this point where there's a there's an anti-woke backlash. And that runs the gamut from people who are just mildly miffed at the progressives and people who are just quite Nietzschean, you know, like Friedrich Nietzsche and just it's all will to power. And they're sick of the virtue signalling of the progressives. And so they want to they want to tear down virtue signalling, but in the process, they probably tear down virtue as well. And that's a pretty, um, that can go some pretty dark places, right? So, so you've got the progressive utopian, you've got the kind of the anti-woke backlash is number two. Then there are then there's Islam, right. Um, in Europe and to some degree in North America, there's a, there's a robust belief in God and a robust belief in morality and a robust belief that there are rules to life. And you break those rules and they break you. And, um, Islam is an option for people in society. And then fourthly, there are people who are returning to the source, returning to Christ and saying, well, I think actually these things either depend on Jesus or they are just a castle in the air. And there's a bit of a resurgence towards people, you know, trying out church again. And it's not as though we either go for future one, two, three or four. I think right now we're seeing all four futures. They are all happening at once and it's a mess. You're bringing up the pop figure icons who are somewhat boldly admitting the positive effects and consequences of Judeo-christianity. I think have even Richard Dawkins quite famously said, yeah, I think there's some good things about being Christian. Of course, he was very quick to say that none of it is is empirically true in any sense. But there are some benefits and some values, and I think he might be freaked out by the other alternatives. The other futures that you pointed out and he's like, oh, I don't know. I kind of like this worldview that I can mock and benefit from at the same time. Yeah. Um, that being said, so I'm, I'm a follower of Jesus. I read your book, I hear this topic, I read Tom Holland's book, I read all this stuff and I'm like, yes, this is awesome. This is going to be my approach. The, the caution, though, I would imagine you would give them, is that if we're just converting them to sort of a utilitarian, oh, Christianity is beneficial. It's kind of nice because my, from my vantage point, that kind of seems where Joe Rogan has landed kind of, yeah, Christianity works and it's good and it's logical. And he's bringing on all these smart people who are giving him all the rational facts. And so it's making sense to him. Yeah. But there still seems to be a gap to repentance, conversion, surrender. How do we start with this? But again, that's God's work. But how do we get someone to recognize at least the work that God's got to do to get them across that chasm? Yeah, Yeah. No, that's that's. Thank you for asking the question because it's important. I think actual conversion and repentance happens in the context of community. It happens in the context of giving yourself, you know, faith comes by hearing and hearing through the Word of Christ says Romans chapter ten, verse seventeen. And what's happening is that Joe Rogan is going to church, and he's gone to church a heck of a lot in the last year, and he's gone to a church that preaches the Bible a heck of a lot, and he's put himself in the way of gospel preaching. And for that I give great thanks. I think it is sufficient to make somebody go, huh? I'm more of a believer than I thought. And the kind of beliefs that I've unthinkingly lived my life by are pretty Christian ish, actually. And if they're not Christian ish, they are utter rubbish. And I don't think they're utter rubbish. And, you know, Glenn has challenged me to think that human rights in a godless universe doesn't really work. I definitely believe in human rights. I'm not so sure whether this is a godless universe or not. I'm certainly more certain about the rights thing than I am about the God question. And if it's a choice between the two, I'll plump for human rights and therefore God any any day of the week. Um, church suddenly sounds a lot more plausible at that stage. What also is pointed out to the secular person is that they they are not the reasonable person that they imagined that they were, that they actually live by moral intuitions and almost you could call them faith positions. They are navigating their world already by faith, and they have been in the West indoctrinated by certain stories, and they're inhabiting certain stories and narratives. And that is what has been reinforcing their belief in the unalienable rights of all people, etc.. And so once you point all this stuff out to them, it becomes more obvious to say you have been Thinkingly shaped by a Christian ish story. Why don't you intentionally be shaped by the actual story? Um, why don't you actually dive into a Christian community in which you'll hear the good news of Jesus? And in that context, I think that's where faith starts to happen. And faith happens as they, you know, you don't think your way into a new way of living so much as you live your way into a new way of thinking in, in so many senses. And I think I have great hope for the Joe Rogan's of this world, that, um, the plausibility of church and the plausibility of, of the gospel making sense of life is just so much greater than it ever was. And it doesn't get them to faith. It does get them to church. And church is a great place for them to be and for that for that, I'm grateful. But you're absolutely right. You know, this the whole point of this is not to create more cultural Christians. And what I don't want to do is say, oh gosh, you need Jesus so that you can get what you really want, which is a functioning society. Um, no, I that's, that's not the way around. What I am doing is pointing out the ways in which society functions and doesn't function according to certain faith principles. And if we can notice this, then the real goal is for people to, to figure out the spiritual truths that underpin all of it. And it's not you. You want Jesus so that you can get the society you want. It's. Well, have a look at the society we're in so that we can point you to Jesus because yeah, you're right, he is the point of it all. Yeah. And yet there is absolutely nothing wrong about pointing to the fact that God's design works. I find that incredibly compelling when some secular sociologist comes out and says, studies indicate that loving self sacrificially is beneficial for marriage, and you're going. Hello? Yeah, right. We have known that. A great example of that is Louise Perry. So Louise, Louise Perry was, you know, a friend of mine, a friend of Tom Holland's. And and she's been on this journey and she's been saying for years, um, I think that Christianity is sociologically true. I'm trying to figure out whether it's supernaturally true. Right. And having taken that journey, she's thought to herself, well, if it were supernaturally true, you'd expect it to be sociologically true. And that gave her certainly enough reason to keep going to church and reading scripture and getting into Christian community and pulling at that thread has led her to thinking Christianity is supernaturally true. So this thing, it shouldn't stop short at the sociological, um, but pulling at the thread of the sociological has led people to the supernatural. It's awesome. Yeah. She's great. Love her book. Love to talk to her at some point. She's awesome. So what are you currently thinking about dreaming about wrestling with? What did you wake up thinking about this morning? Um, I think where this conversation has landed is is where I've been for the last few years, which is. Yeah. It's one thing to convince people of the the sociological utility of Christianity. It's another to immerse them in the actual story of Scripture. And so at the moment, we've got this online course called three, two, one. We've got thirty seven thousand people doing it online right now, and a thousand churches are doing it. And so the sort of people who listen to podcasts and are starting to think about these things, um, we're getting them from there to three, two, one to, to kind of, yeah, to look around the Christian story a little bit. And yeah, loads of people are coming from there into church and we love that flow. So we're trying to figure out how to do that and how to beef up our offering as they come to three two one dot com. Um, there's a kind of a Christianity one hundred and one. We also want to do maybe a Bible overview that has Jesus at the center, which is a lot of what we've been talking about in this conversation as well, because I think a lot of people's first step in investigating Christianity is the order a Bible from Amazon? And then they then they go to church because they don't understand Genesis. Right? Right, right. And so, you know, like reading the Bible used to be step seven in coming to faith, and now it's step one. So how do we, how do we react to that? And so, yeah, putting together some materials on the Bible that would hopefully help the seeker who, yeah, who knows nothing else, but, uh, is kind of attuned to all these things that we've been talking about in this, in this conversation. Awesome. Well, Glenn, I love it. I, uh, I've been a fan from afar. This was a privilege to have this conversation. I'm praying for you that that God continues to bless all the work that you're doing. And we'll let everyone know about all the things. Uh, but thank you. Thank you for this conversation. God bless and keep up the good work. Thank you. God bless you, too.

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