transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Welcome to The Holy Post. On this week's show, Anthropic has sought the help of Christian theologians to make Claude their AI model more ethical. But they're also meeting with representatives from other religions and philosophical traditions. Should that make us feel more optimistic about tech companies controlling our futures? Then The Atlantic has a story about the popularity of John Mark Comer, even among non-religious young adults. Is his advocacy for contemplative Christian practices the answer to digital secularism that our culture has been searching for? Then Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, co-author of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting, talks with me about the explosive rise of evangelical parenting books in the late 20th century and the prosperity theology that's behind them. She says the same ideas are still popular today, but they're taking on new forms. All of this, plus debriefing the Stuckey vs. French debate. We get so many wonderful messages from those of you who appreciate the content we create here at Holy Post Media. The whole team loves getting those emails or seeing your encouraging posts on social media. But the very best way to support the work we do is by becoming a member of Holy Post Plus. For just a few bucks each month, you'll be helping us make more of the faithful pro-neighbor Christian content that our culture so desperately needs right now. And by signing up for Holy Post Plus, you'll get access to all the amazing member exclusive content that we make, including bonus interviews, exclusive shows like Getting Schooled, The SkyPod, Advice-ish and 66 Verses to Explain the Bible. And you'll have access to live streams, merchandise and special sub-series like Why I'm Still a Christian. There's a whole lot to explore and new content is being added almost every day. So come join the growing community of Holy Posters by signing up for Holy Post Plus. You can learn more at holypost.com. Here is episode 717.

Speaker 2:
[01:51] Hey there, welcome back to The Holy Post Podcast, I'm Phil Vischer. I'm here with Skye Jethani. Hi, Skye.

Speaker 1:
[01:56] Hi, Phil.

Speaker 2:
[01:58] And Caitlin is not sitting next to me. This is unusual. She's gone away. She flew to Coop, but she's dialing in from an undisclosed location. It's the top secret military base somewhere.

Speaker 3:
[02:11] That's sort of true.

Speaker 2:
[02:12] Somewhere off the coast of Guam, we think.

Speaker 3:
[02:15] It's not.

Speaker 2:
[02:15] She's floating in the ocean.

Speaker 3:
[02:17] It's not for that. I mean, it is actually an exciting reason. It's just not like a secret military reason. My sister, it's her 30th birthday today. So I went to hang out with her for her birthday.

Speaker 2:
[02:27] Well, why don't you call her in so we can sing to her?

Speaker 3:
[02:30] She's in class right now. She's in her last class of Georgetown Law School. She will be a lawyer this summer, which is crazy.

Speaker 2:
[02:38] Oh, wow. So between the two of you, you must like to argue about things.

Speaker 3:
[02:45] Yeah. And we really love school.

Speaker 2:
[02:49] Okay. Well, we'll have to have her on sometime. We'll have to meet her and get... I bet everyone wants to get to know Caitlin's sister.

Speaker 3:
[02:55] Don't you, everyone? You can have her talk about the injustice of the criminal justice system. You could get some real hot takes out of her, to be honest.

Speaker 1:
[03:04] Sure. You guys, you needed more siblings so you could have some underachievers. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[03:09] Well, they put all the achievement... They were originally going to have seven kids, but then they decided to have two.

Speaker 3:
[03:14] Don't disperse it too much.

Speaker 2:
[03:15] Well, we saved up all of this achievement potential. We'll just cram it into these two until they're overflowing and they annoy everyone with their achievement levels.

Speaker 1:
[03:25] Wouldn't that be terrible if every sibling you had diluted your abilities or intelligence? That would not be good.

Speaker 2:
[03:31] Yeah. I'm glad that God didn't do that. Thank you, Lord. Okay, here's the theme song. Holy Post is sponsored by Hiya Health. It's hard to get kids to eat well in a fast food drive-through world. Hiya Health can help with kids' vitamins that taste great with zero sugar, zero gummy additives, just clean nutrition. And here's something every parent needs to hear. If getting your kids to eat vegetables feels like an impossible daily battle, Hiya's new Kids Daily Greens Plus Superfoods is a total game changer. It's basically chocolate milk stuffed with veggies. It's a greens powder designed specifically for kids that's packed with 55 plus whole food sourced ingredients. Just mix one scoop with milk or milk alternative and watch them actually enjoy something that's secretly fueling their growing bodies. The commercial deal with Hiya for their best selling children's vitamin. Receive 50% off your first order. To claim this deal, you must go to hiyahealth.com/holypost. This deal is not available on their regular website. Go to hiyahealth.com/holypost and get your kids the full body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults.

Speaker 1:
[05:06] I might explain why everyone hated Joseph so much.

Speaker 2:
[05:10] Oh, that's good knowing. Yeah, you should write a book on that.

Speaker 1:
[05:14] It's a whole theory.

Speaker 2:
[05:15] Here's why everyone hated Joseph by Skye Jethani.

Speaker 1:
[05:20] Bad theological takes.

Speaker 2:
[05:22] Oh, do I have to come back after the break? I think this is all in. We're just leaving all of this. So we're still at war or we're not. We're not at war. We are. Someone said the Strait is open. The Strait is closed. It's like Schrodinger's Strait. That it can be in two states simultaneously. That's a quantum physics joke for those of you Schrodinger's cat anyway, which is funny. Stuff's going on. It's crazy. I don't know. There's not much to say about it at this point except that it's still happening in...

Speaker 1:
[06:03] I don't know if it's worth talking about because by the time this goes to air...

Speaker 2:
[06:06] It'll have changed again.

Speaker 1:
[06:07] It'll change.

Speaker 2:
[06:08] Exactly. Yeah. So anyway, but there is a conflict that I do want to talk about. There was a very high level meeting. Very high level. Two warring parties got together to see if they could find middle ground, to see if they could work out a truce.

Speaker 1:
[06:23] The state of Illinois and the Chicago Bears?

Speaker 2:
[06:26] No, but that would be good if they could do that. David French made an appearance on the Allie Beth Stuckey show. It's not a podcast. It's a show. It's a show on Blaze TV, which is Glenn Beck's thing. Yeah. It's Glenn Beck's TV enterprise. Anyway, David French, I don't know how he got invited. Allie Beth Stuckey and Megan Basham and a few others kind of go after him pretty relentlessly. So he said, I'll come on your show. So he came on Allie Beth Stuckey's show and they were going to have a debate. They talked for like an hour and a half last week. The reactions were, a fair number of people I saw said, oh, this is good. This should happen more often. People that don't agree talking civilly. It was civil. Allie Beth Stuckey is civil. She's not going to yell or scream.

Speaker 1:
[07:21] David is very civil.

Speaker 2:
[07:22] David is highly civil. He is so civilized. So it seemed to go okay. The question was, was it worth it? Did anyone change their mind about anything? It did not seem that Allie Beth, can you call her Allie or Allie Beth?

Speaker 1:
[07:41] I don't call, I've never met her.

Speaker 2:
[07:43] Mrs. Stuckey. I think she's married. Do you remember Stuckey's? Yes, she is. Yeah. Roadside. Do you have restaurants? Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[07:49] I had an incident in one in Indiana.

Speaker 2:
[07:52] Well, let's take some time and hear about that. No, that's okay. They don't have them anymore. A lot of them, now you drive by them and they've turned into like adult bookstores on the side of the road in some locations. Used to be a Stuckey's. I don't. You can tell by the shape of the roof.

Speaker 3:
[08:06] No. Please note that the cat is going right now.

Speaker 2:
[08:09] Look at the cat. You were right. It is odd. Here's what I did. I wanted to see if it because I too was invited to go on Allie Beth Stuckey's show. She said she was willing to have me on her show. I said, sure, I'll come on your show. So they reached out to me, invited me, and they said, but you have to come to Dallas. We don't do anything remotely. Right. I was like, no.

Speaker 1:
[08:34] Somehow David decided that was.

Speaker 2:
[08:35] I don't know if he was in Dallas or if he honestly made a trip to Dallas.

Speaker 3:
[08:39] He travels a lot.

Speaker 1:
[08:40] He travels a lot.

Speaker 2:
[08:41] So maybe he was in Dallas. So here's what I did. I went through, there were like, by the time I looked at it, there were about 700 comments on her YouTube page of people commenting on the debate. And I wanted to see how many people gave evidence that they changed their mind about something.

Speaker 3:
[09:02] On the internet?

Speaker 1:
[09:04] Couldn't you have asked AI to do that for you?

Speaker 2:
[09:07] I don't know. I don't know what AI can do. It scares me and I think it's trying to steal my soul. So I just skimmed 700 comments. And there were maybe six that said, David did a good job. There were maybe 10 that said, I appreciate conversations like this. And then there were about 680 that said, Allie, you're so great, you smoked him. And that was like 90 percent of the comments where, oh, I can't stand listening to this man. Oh, he's so terrible. Oh, I tried to listen for 20 minutes, but his sanctimoniousness was more than I could handle. And I just kind of, okay, this didn't do anything. I don't think it did anything. And I asked David afterwards, and he kind of had the same reaction. It's like, yeah, it probably wasn't a good use of time.

Speaker 1:
[09:59] I don't know if he went into it expecting it to move at the needle in any which way. But the fact that he went on, number one, showed he's game, he's not afraid. Number two, hopefully, their direct interaction with each other humanized the conversation a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[10:15] Yeah, sure.

Speaker 1:
[10:16] Even if those commenting have no problem demonizing one side or the other, hopefully, the two of them, you know. I mean, I saw no evidence that David didn't humanize Allie Beth Stuckey before. And I don't know if she did to him either. But I don't know. Does anyone watch it and be like, oh, maybe I should be less harsh on people who are willing to sit down and have a civil conversation?

Speaker 2:
[10:38] Yeah, I don't know that anyone would have watched it who has been formed to think David French is evil, who would come away saying, actually, he's not. I just, you know, and in the days since then, Allie Beth's team has been pulling clips, you know, where she did really well and posting them on social media or pulling clips where David says things that they think don't make him look very good and posting those on social media. So the fact that you don't control the edit, right, you know, definitely works against you.

Speaker 1:
[11:12] This gets to the point of, there are times where debates can be super helpful, but I don't think they ultimately move the needle, which is part of the reason we have not made Holy Post Media into a debate platform.

Speaker 2:
[11:23] Because we're an echo chamber and we can't stand up to scrutiny. That's what I've been told.

Speaker 1:
[11:30] I don't think that's it. I understand why people would argue that from the other side, but I don't see the...

Speaker 2:
[11:41] It's not fruitful.

Speaker 1:
[11:42] It's just not fruitful.

Speaker 2:
[11:43] Caitlin Schaess, you love debating. So why don't you want... You did it professionally.

Speaker 3:
[11:49] I did. It's actually why... That was the number one thing I left listening, because I just finished moments before we started recording, listening to this whole episode of this conversation between David French and Allie Beth Stuckey. And literally, the title of the episode is in all caps, Debate, you know, David French and et cetera. And it's so unhelpful because when you are in a debate, whether it's a competitive college debate, which I did, or just a setting for a conversation in public, in both cases, the way that the conversation is set up forces you into a position where you need to give as little ground as possible, when a really productive conversation would open you up to, oh, we actually have these places of common ground. We agree on these things. And they do this at the very beginning, right? Where I thought it was really helpful that both of them had times when they went, you made a very good point or like, I really agree with you on this, right? But the place where I got kind of frustrated was, it was always done in a way to set up, here's the real sticking point though. And actually the parts where they agreed, I thought were much more substantive points than some of the places at least of disagreement. I agree with Skye that I think having it as a debate was not helpful. But the other thing it made me think of when it comes to the way that we tend to have discussions about political, ethical, theological issues today, that tends to be on the Internet, it tends to not be face-to-face with the people we disagree with, or even directly to them, even not face-to-face, is that you can get away with a lot of sharp, pithy, good-sounding little sound bites when you're not face-to-face with someone who will say, well, actually, that's a vast generalization. That's not actually true. Or I didn't actually say that. I said it more. I actually found instances, and this will not surprise anyone listening, I overall agreed with David French much more than with Allie Beth. But I actually found times for both of them that I went, yeah, I'm actually really glad that the other person said, but I didn't say that or I didn't mean that. And I think it's important to remember that most of us who are taking in a lot of our political commentary and our theology and all of those things from the Internet, are often getting the worst forms of those arguments, either the worst forms of the things we disagree with, we see them caricaturized online, or even the worst forms of the arguments that we hold because there isn't a real person who genuinely, sincerely disagrees who can hold us to account. There's one moment I can think of it again, I don't wanna critique David too much. Like I said, I overall really agreed with him. But there's a moment when he has this little line about how kind of pronouns are the things she's focusing so much on. Like you're not focusing on when he comes to the question of voting for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, you're not focusing on foreign policy, you're not focusing on how many abortions actually happening, you're focusing on the pronoun issue. And she says, it's not really pronouns, it's all this other stuff about medical transitioning for teenagers or it's about nonprofits who are being pursued legally by the states in which they are for not having people who are transgender, who are allowed to work on stuff, anyway, various things. I totally agree with David's point that people in her camp often go to a very narrow question of gender and sexuality to Trump lots of other substantive things. But saying it's about pronouns doesn't take seriously the argument she's making. I still ultimately agree with him, but I thought it was really helpful to have two people actually having a conversation with each other so that instead of, if David posts that on Twitter, really the issue is pronouns, it's just a ton of people. I mean, there's tons of people critiquing him, but there's also his side going, yeah, totally, that's what it is. It's much more helpful to go, I actually agree with him that these other substantive things are more important, but let's weigh them against the thing that she's actually saying instead of a quippy little thing that diminishes the point she's making.

Speaker 2:
[15:39] Yeah. She came in with, I think three topics she wanted to hit him on, and one of them was his use of pronouns. So I think that's probably what he was referring to.

Speaker 3:
[15:49] But exactly what he said, it would have killed on Twitter with his kind of crowd, with our kind of crowd. And it's like a good succinct way of putting something. But I left it really, that whole conversation was making me reflect myself on, how often do I find a really kind of smart, like pithy way of putting something? And I go, oh, that's going to really do it. And all it really does is it gives other people who agree with me another sharp pithy thing to say. It doesn't always accurately represent what's going on because it's not going to go as viral if you give the full kind of nuanced account of what's actually happening.

Speaker 1:
[16:26] I think what this illustrates is a trap that either side can fall into and both frequently do. And that is the assumption that being right is what makes you righteous. And it's easy to be right in 140 characters. Well, do they even limit it to 140, whatever.

Speaker 2:
[16:41] To fit to something.

Speaker 1:
[16:43] It's easy.

Speaker 2:
[16:43] Unless you pay Elon Musk eight bucks a month, then it's infinite characters.

Speaker 1:
[16:47] It's easier to posture yourself as right when you don't have another actual incarnate human being sitting across from you that you have to encounter. And when you actually do have to encounter a human being, then you realize, wait a minute, there's a reason scripture does not include truth or rightness as a fruit of the spirit. Everything that's listed as a fruit of the spirit is an interpersonal quality. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control. And that's where I think when I read some of the comments, that was really the breakdown. There were a lot of people in the comments who wanted to say, well, David's doing this or David says that, but the truth is this. And they think because they can stand up and declare the truth, they're on God's side. The enemy can stand up and declare the truth just as easily. And James talks about this. Demons have good doctrine, but they are completely apart from the way of God. The way we know the Spirit of God dwells in us is not by declaring the truth, it's by interpersonally reflecting kindness and gentleness.

Speaker 2:
[17:48] But that's such a big conflict right now, where you're not a Christian because you're not declaring the truth loudly.

Speaker 1:
[17:58] And I would say you may well be declaring the truth, that is not what makes you a Christian.

Speaker 2:
[18:02] Right. But if you're not declaring the truth loudly, you're also not a Christian, ha ha ha.

Speaker 1:
[18:08] I think what came out in the parts of the interview I looked at is David was declaring, in many cases, the same truth that Allie Beth Stuckey believed in. He was just insisting on doing it with kindness and gentleness and respect, all the fruit of the spirit parts, whereas some of her audience were saying in the comments, yeah, but that's not the time for those things because the need is so urgent, we just have to proclaim the truth and to hell with the consequences.

Speaker 2:
[18:35] Yeah. I was going to say something that was really good and then evaporated from my brain. Did you see Andrew Walker's rather detailed review?

Speaker 1:
[18:48] I glanced at it.

Speaker 2:
[18:49] Of the interaction?

Speaker 1:
[18:51] Honestly, since this interview or this debate came out a couple days ago, I've spent probably a total of 15 minutes on Twitter, which is more than I've spent in the last year.

Speaker 2:
[19:01] Yeah. He says, Watch the French Stuckey Debate, my main takeaway. The whole debate centered upon a truth, emotion continuum. I think Allie Beth came out ahead for one reason that colors every issue debated. She indexes her understanding of emotion and empathy on a biblical axis, whereas French elevates emotion and empathy to a disproportionate degree. So David French is all about his emotions and Allie Beth is about biblical truth. Kaitlyn, care to?

Speaker 3:
[19:33] I was really not looking forward to you reading someone else's Twitter description of this, but I'm so glad you did now because that was the other big thing I wanted to talk about was it was so clarifying. Obviously, none of their conversation about empathy and biblical truth and all of that is new. This is the conversation we have been having for a while, but it was really clarifying to me in two ways. One, there can be a tendency from folks of the be wary of empathy crowd, which Allie Beth does a great job in that podcast of because she's being critiqued by someone, does a good job of really describing what she doesn't believe. Like empathy is not always wrong and toxic empathy is this kind of thing. But across the crowd of people who come from that camp, there is a tendency to at least rhetorically act as though biblical truth is this obvious, clear, prior thing that doesn't require discernment, deliberation, curiosity. And so it's always like emotion is this like, you know, kind of squishy thing. But then there's biblical truth. And there's even a moment when she says something along the lines of like, yes, you can have empathy, but it shouldn't be untethered from biblical truth. Which just sort of assumes you already know what's true. Like we're not having a conversation about how you discern what's true. We're just saying, here's what's true. Find a way to square that with having some kind of empathy for people who are suffering in some kind of way. And I think a truly Christian account would be to say, we are fallen in finite creatures, so we should not assume that, and she says actually, I appreciate there was a moment in the episode when she says like, I'm fallible, I could be wrong. But the rhetoric often doesn't include this, this sense that discerning what to do in an ethical situation, when you're voting for a politician, when you're having a conversation about policy, will require both searching scriptures, knowing that you could interpret wrongly and you need other people to help you figure it out, you need the Holy Spirit to help you. And it will also require learning from your environment, which will include your emotional responses to things, because emotions don't give us absolute truth, but they give us data about the world and ourselves and our communities very often. And so one thing I just kept thinking was like, we've not, none of this conversation really got at, and I think David was trying to do it and it didn't really come out, because what does it actually look like to practically deliberate specifically amongst Christians about something we disagree on? The assumption from Allie Beth was very often like, well, this is just what's true and we all know that and we don't even have to talk about it. And the second thing I thought was really important is often in this conversation, and it only came up a little bit in the episode, so I don't want to say that this is her position, but it is often something that people will say. The assumption when we talk about emotion is we usually are talking about, because the conversation is around empathy, we're talking about sadness or compassion, and we don't really recognize the fact that a lot of emotion is happening that isn't that kind of squishy, soft, what often is characterized as this feminine compassion. Anger is an emotion. Thank you. Disgust is an emotion. Yes. So when especially, and this happens on the right and the left, but especially with the gender politics right now, it's more often on the right, is men in particular, asserting policies with an undertone of anger or disgust, or I actually have, because I'm in my mom's office right now, an emotion wheel. So anger or disgust or frustration or aggression or disapproval. All of that is not only emotion that's often motivating a policy or a position. It's very often used rhetorically to bring people along with you. Allie Beth does this too. It's not a bad thing. Everyone's doing it. But the kind of mode she gets in when she's making her argument is rhetorically quite effective and it plays on people's emotions. That doesn't mean it's wrong. It just means it's something that needs to be considered when we're thinking about how to reason well about something we should do. To her point, it should also involve searching scriptures. But we should recognize that all of these are sources of information that we should be bringing in sorting together communally discerning and dependent on the Holy Spirit ultimately to guide us.

Speaker 1:
[23:39] Obviously, scripture says anger can be very sinful.

Speaker 3:
[23:43] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[23:43] And yet people who love anger will often justify it by saying, well, it's righteous anger because I'm angry about the things that God's angry about. Okay. Well, to use your categorization there, Caitlin, if I'm expressing empathy or I'm feeling empathy, why can't I just say, well, this one is righteous empathy? So it's okay.

Speaker 3:
[24:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[24:01] Yeah. It seems that maybe this is another way of putting it. That toxic empathy is empathy that leads you toward feminine emotions, and righteous empathy leads you towards masculine emotions. And that's the view of the right wing Christian crowd. They view masculine emotions as not really being emotions.

Speaker 1:
[24:26] Right.

Speaker 2:
[24:26] That's just what you do when you see bad things, you know? You just, you...

Speaker 1:
[24:32] Rage is okay.

Speaker 2:
[24:33] Yeah, rage is okay, because it's harnessed to the truth. Right. I harnessed my rage to the truth.

Speaker 1:
[24:38] This is why they love citing the story of Jesus flipping the tables in the temple. That's not emotion. That's just...

Speaker 2:
[24:44] It is interesting when we're at war with Iran that we have two regimes currently that are harnessing their emotions to religious conviction. That I'm looking at the world through the proper religious lens, and that's why I am the righteous one in pursuing my military objectives with all due force. Right. And I know what time it is, so I know we can't play by the normal rules of warfare. Okay. Fun, fun, fun. I don't know, should we not do that sort of thing? What's the forum where, like I like to actually write my thoughts because I can think about them, and maybe even do a little research while I'm writing. But just an amazing number of people are mad at me for not doing real time debates with people on camera.

Speaker 1:
[25:39] But those are people who aren't probably part of your audience anyway.

Speaker 2:
[25:44] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[25:45] They want you to go to their people to get pummeled.

Speaker 2:
[25:48] Yeah, to get owned. Yeah, to create our VeggieTales destroyed by...

Speaker 1:
[25:54] I just, I mean, I don't counsel David French about what invitations he says yes or no to. I would...

Speaker 2:
[25:59] I think we should.

Speaker 1:
[26:01] I think if somebody came to you or to me for that matter, or Caitlin, and wanted to quote unquote engage in a debate, I would love to have an off the record, no cameras, no microphones, in-depth conversation with them about things we disagree about.

Speaker 2:
[26:15] And if they won't do that, you know why they want to have the debate.

Speaker 1:
[26:17] Exactly. So let's start there. And then if we both found that to be really helpful and fruitful, maybe we decide to record something and put it out there.

Speaker 3:
[26:24] This is like the Cornell West and, I'm blanking on his name, Robert George and Cornell West. They've gone on this tour that's based in their friendship, showing people, that two people with very different political positions and views can agree, we're increasingly learning that some of the things they share are actually the most substantive things we disagree on in this country, like treating people who we disagree with with respect and kindness. But that's, people praised their kind of tour of showing that you could have very different politics and be on stage in front of other people and be civil and disagree well. I don't think enough people recognize that their relationship was nurtured before it was on a stage.

Speaker 2:
[27:09] So we have to become friends first and then we perform together? We can't just do warfare like a fencing match?

Speaker 3:
[27:16] Friendship over warfare, I like that.

Speaker 2:
[27:19] But you don't know what time it is.

Speaker 1:
[27:22] New Year's resolutions are hard for me for at least two reasons. First, because forming new habits is just a hard thing to do for anybody. But secondly, it's hard because the New Year starts in the middle of winter, the coldest, darkest, most miserable time of the year. And I struggle to get my carcass out of bed and get going in the morning. And when my resolutions have to do with my health or fitness, that's a real problem. That's also why it's important for all of us to find easy wins whenever possible. Simple things we can do for our health that don't take a lot of effort so we can stay with them for the long haul. AG1 is a great example. Just 20 seconds, one scoop, 8 ounces of water, done. Drink it first thing in the morning, before your tea or coffee, before you even check your phone. It will become a micro habit that anchors everything else and a good springboard for the rest of your healthy habits. And it's not too late to create a new healthy habit for 2026 by starting AG1 for yourself. It's something I've actually been able to stay consistent with and that's why I'm still partnering with AG1. And AG1 is offering new subscribers a free $76 gift when you sign up. You'll get a welcome kit, a bottle of the D3K2 and five free travel packs in your first box. So make sure to check out drinkag1.com/holypost to get this offer. That's drinkag1.com/holypost to start the year on a healthier note. And thanks to AG1 for sponsoring this episode.

Speaker 2:
[28:50] Holy Post is sponsored by Feeding America. Every act of change begins with a neighbor, with someone saying, we can take care of each other here. In food banks and food pantries, neighbors pack fresh food and dignity into every box, moving food from farms to families through Feeding America's nationwide network. So when that box reaches a home, it carries more than food. It carries a promise that together we can end hunger. Feeding America, led by neighbors. Give now to end hunger at feedingamerica.org. Can AI be a child of God? Inside Anthropic's meeting with Christian leaders. Anthropic, one of the leading artificial intelligence companies, currently valued at 380 billion. These companies have valuations that even like 15 years ago, we would have thought were nonsense.

Speaker 1:
[29:41] You can't be like Dr. Evil throwing out a ransom number.

Speaker 2:
[29:44] We've got like four companies now valued at more than a trillion dollars. More than most countries GDP.

Speaker 1:
[29:51] That are actually not profitable.

Speaker 2:
[29:54] Well, Walmart's one of them.

Speaker 1:
[29:57] No, I'm talking about these tech companies, like the AI companies have not turned the profit.

Speaker 2:
[30:00] The AI companies are not profitable, but they are changing the world. But Anthropic is interesting. They're the ones that got in trouble with the Department of Defense and Donald Trump because they said one of their rules was their AI models could not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous strikes, military strikes. So weapons that think for themselves and kill people. And that led the US current administration to declaring them a potential security risk for the United States. Fun stuff. Anyway, they hosted about 15 Christian leaders from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia and the business world at the headquarters in late March for a two-day summit that included discussion sessions and a private dinner with senior anthropic researchers. Anthropic staff sought advice from the Christian leaders on how to steer Claude. That's their main model. Claude's Moral and Spiritual Development has the chat box. I just don't even know what I'm reading. How to steer their software's moral and spiritual development as the chat bot reacts to complex and unpredictable ethical queries. The wide-ranging discussions also covered how the chat bot should respond to users who are grieving loved ones and whether Claude should be considered a, quote, child of God.

Speaker 1:
[31:16] It actually sounds like a baby dedication ceremony at a church. We need your help raising this child in an ethical way towards the flourishing and love of God and that they all committed to do this. Doesn't that sound like what it is?

Speaker 2:
[31:33] Yeah. Yeah. One attendee who teaches AI and technology ethics at Santa Clara University, Brian Patrick Green, said, what does it mean to give someone a moral formation? How do we make sure that Claude behaves itself?

Speaker 1:
[31:46] Can we work on people first?

Speaker 2:
[31:49] Well, no, it's too late for people because we're going to drive Claude right into, if Claude is the collective us, if most AI chatbots, they learn nothing but things that we've come up with and we've come up with a whole lot of crap, it's really hard to know how this goes well. So, Anthropic has a new model, I don't know if you've read about this, their newest model, they've realized is potentially so dangerous that they're currently not allowing the public to access it, but it exists. And they've let 40 companies start to play around with it.

Speaker 1:
[32:26] I'm sure that'll go just fine.

Speaker 2:
[32:27] Yeah, just to get feedback. The US Treasury Department had an emergency meeting with CEOs of some of the world's biggest banks to warn them about this new model and what dangers, because what it's particularly good at, this is why everyone's freaking out, it's particularly good at finding flaws in code that humans would never notice. And the concern is that in the wrong hands, people will be able to hack into places they've never been able to before, including the banking system, military systems, et cetera, et cetera. So we now have a piece of software that has the potential to bring down the global economy, and we're just trying to figure out under what circumstances can we let it free into the world.

Speaker 1:
[33:17] This is the digital equivalent of a Chinese wet market.

Speaker 2:
[33:23] Or a lab.

Speaker 1:
[33:25] Or lab.

Speaker 2:
[33:25] Or lab.

Speaker 1:
[33:26] Or lab.

Speaker 2:
[33:27] We don't know.

Speaker 1:
[33:29] It's inevitable that something's going to escape into the wild.

Speaker 2:
[33:34] So is it comforting that they're asking Christians how to help, or is it really, because here's, okay, here's the reality. Even if one of these companies says we're going to make our agent moral, there'll be another company that says, we don't care.

Speaker 1:
[33:48] I talked about this with Drew Dick last week on the SkyPod, and here's the sentence that jumped out to me from the article I read about it, is Anthropic said, this is a quote, first in a series of gatherings with representatives from different religious and philosophical traditions. And I'm, on one level, comforted a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[34:09] Because all religions are the same.

Speaker 1:
[34:10] No, I'm comforted a little bit that they brought together these Christian ethicists and theologians to think this through. But what's concerning to me is when they're going to get a whole bunch of different religious traditions and a whole bunch of different philosophical traditions, invariably some of what they're going to hear are going to be ideas that would restrict the use of this technology and its profitability. But there's going to be other philosophical traditions that have a much looser parameters. And chances are they're going to pick the one that allows them to make more money and still call themselves ethical and moral. Because they're a for-profit business that operates with trillions of dollars of investment or whatever they're up to at this point. And that concerns me. When we as a human species do not agree on ethics, we don't agree on what a human being is. We don't agree on what a good life is. We don't agree on what morality is. And now you're asking us to create an artificial human mind essentially and give it moral direction. You're going to pick the moral direction that fits your priors, which is which one's going to make me the most money.

Speaker 2:
[35:07] We had a little freak out because one of our grandkids was talking to someone on an iPad and we said, Who are you talking to? And they confessed it was ChatGPT. And so the scary thing is, so even if you say religions help us guide and shape how this interacts with the children of the world, like which religion is it going to settle on? What set of values is it going to settle on? What if a teenager who's struggling with something turns to AI for advice? Yeah. I mean, we would think long and hard about which therapist to have a teenager sit down in front of. We will have no control over where ChatGPT or Claude is pulling the advice from in the world of global information.

Speaker 3:
[36:01] And I think a truly Christian theology would actually want the chat bot to say the thing that a company is least likely to have it say, which is go talk to a real human being.

Speaker 2:
[36:14] Yeah. Okay. What do we do? Skye, help.

Speaker 1:
[36:17] Well, this is not a simple solution, but this technology, this industry has gotten to the point where anything short of significant government regulation is just not going to stop it. And that doesn't make me feel any better because I think our current government, and I'm not just saying the Trump administration, the current functioning of our federal government is a disaster, regardless of who's in the White House. And we need significant governmental reform so that we can actually have a government that does what it was supposed to do in the first place.

Speaker 2:
[36:47] Could AI help us reform the government so that the government can reform AI?

Speaker 1:
[36:52] I don't think so, no.

Speaker 2:
[36:54] This is not going well. Caitlin, what do we do, Caitlin? Aren't you in Washington, DC? Oops.

Speaker 3:
[37:00] I am.

Speaker 2:
[37:01] I mean, somewhere off the coast of Guam.

Speaker 3:
[37:06] I feel like it's usually my job on this show to be optimistic and young and let's do it. Let's hear it. I feel the least optimistic about anything than when it comes to AI. I just, it's really, and the thing that scares me the most, I agree with Skye that we need government regulation in part because I just think that's the only institution that can exert any restrictions on it even though, again, I'm pretty pessimistic about the ability to do even that. But what's really hard is, and many people much smarter than me have made this point, but we're not just working upstream of the technology, we're working upstream of what humans on some level, fallen humans, want. Like we want some things that are very wrong for us, and many of those things are made easier or more convenient or more accessible by technology that ultimately will harm us. And it's just really hard to work upstream. We've had this conversation so much when it comes to the kind of loneliness crisis, how isolated we are. Like a lot of it that we don't recognize enough is, on some level people want this. On some level people want to talk to ChatGPT instead of a pastor or a friend or a therapist. On some level people want to use dating apps instead of meeting someone in person. On some level people want to watch a sermon online instead of going to. And I don't believe that's ultimately like a true desire of the human heart or what really fulfills us or satisfies us. But we have to just come to terms with the fact that on some level this fits a desire that we have not only in our kind of fallen broken selves want, but that we've been shaped in for generations. Like we just finally can do some of what we've wanted the whole time, which is to be autonomous, to be the choosing being that can just pick whatever life I want with no interference from anyone else. And a lot of the AI stuff scares me because I think it just, it gives us something we want that is bad for us. And I don't necessarily know what to do about that.

Speaker 1:
[39:00] I mean, I want to binge Dunkin Donuts munchkins all day long, but I won't live another two years if I did that. And it would clog my arteries really quickly.

Speaker 2:
[39:10] I'm more of a Krispy Kreme guy. Are you? Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[39:13] Those feel like air masquerading.

Speaker 3:
[39:16] Between Dunkin and Krispy Kreme? Are you joking?

Speaker 1:
[39:20] Are you more Krispy Kreme or Dunkin Donuts?

Speaker 3:
[39:22] 100%. 100% Krispy Kreme.

Speaker 1:
[39:25] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[39:26] Thank you. Dunkin is like the least good donut.

Speaker 1:
[39:28] I'm not here to rank donuts.

Speaker 2:
[39:30] They're our Boston audience.

Speaker 1:
[39:31] I'm not here to rank donuts.

Speaker 3:
[39:33] I go to Dunkin all the time, but no.

Speaker 2:
[39:35] I am ready to reveal this. I am here to rank donuts. That's why I started the podcast 13 years ago, was to rank donuts. I actually prefer-

Speaker 3:
[39:44] Let's do a donut episode.

Speaker 2:
[39:46] Oh, there's a Spanish grocery store right by my office that makes the best yeast ring donuts. They're so much better.

Speaker 1:
[39:53] What's a yeast ring donut?

Speaker 2:
[39:54] It's a kind of donut.

Speaker 1:
[39:56] That sounds like a medical condition.

Speaker 3:
[39:58] No, this is a conversation that Phil and I need to have.

Speaker 2:
[40:00] You're going to get the cat.

Speaker 3:
[40:01] You're not qualified.

Speaker 2:
[40:01] Dude, you are going to get the cat.

Speaker 3:
[40:03] I'm confused how Skye is so smart and doesn't know what a yeast ring donut is.

Speaker 1:
[40:07] I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[40:07] I'm sorry.

Speaker 1:
[40:08] I can't know everything.

Speaker 2:
[40:09] There's cake donuts and yeast donuts.

Speaker 1:
[40:10] I've chosen to fill my mind with scripture.

Speaker 2:
[40:13] Well, okay. Is hurry the great enemy of spiritual life? And perhaps, perhaps this is some good news. And perhaps we're beginning to see humanity say, I don't like the way things are going. This is in the Atlantic, written by Nancy Wilecki. And she got to know John Mark Comer. We all know John Mark Comer.

Speaker 1:
[40:32] Yeah, he's a friend.

Speaker 2:
[40:33] He's been on the show.

Speaker 1:
[40:34] I'm proud to say I edited one of his books.

Speaker 2:
[40:36] Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 1:
[40:37] Which one? God Has a Name.

Speaker 2:
[40:41] Oh, yeah, that's the one that didn't sell at all, isn't it? Probably. Okay. Well, nice try.

Speaker 3:
[40:48] He wrote his books, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

Speaker 2:
[40:52] Yes, he was on like five years ago talking about the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and Practicing the Way is his newest one. Anywho, Nancy Wilecki got to know him writing for the Atlantic and she actually decided, apparently she's a believer, she decided she would try. She's a 27-year-old living in New York City with lots of people that are burnt out, millennials that are burnt out. She said, I am going to try to actually follow what you're preaching, John Mark Comer. She said, I was listening to him and I wondered, could Comer's practices actually bring people closer to God? So she decided to try them out and she said it went so well, she actually doesn't want to give up some of those practices except fasting, which she said annoyed her. She didn't like that. She said, I'm surprised though, is there a list of some of the practices in this article somewhere? I'm trying to...

Speaker 1:
[41:54] Well, I can tell you, our small group did the Practicing the Way.

Speaker 2:
[41:57] Oh, you did?

Speaker 1:
[41:57] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[41:58] What are the practices of the way?

Speaker 1:
[41:59] Well, it's like Sabbath, and engaging scripture and prayer.

Speaker 2:
[42:04] But like a screen time Sabbath too, like phone Sabbath.

Speaker 1:
[42:07] Yeah. Yeah. Rest, Sabbath kind of thing. Fasting. I'm trying to remember some of the others. Oh, confession.

Speaker 2:
[42:16] Oh, I don't like this already. Can I confess to a chat bot?

Speaker 1:
[42:23] I don't think that counts.

Speaker 2:
[42:25] But that might be a child of God. We're not sure yet.

Speaker 1:
[42:27] I am.

Speaker 2:
[42:27] The jury's still out. Might be a child of God. She said, I wondered whether I could adhere to his disciplines, and if so, how they might affect my faith.

Speaker 1:
[42:36] I love how they're his disciplines.

Speaker 2:
[42:38] His disciplines, yes.

Speaker 1:
[42:39] There's no background for 2000 years of the church doing this.

Speaker 3:
[42:41] This is like the Mark Wahlberg, he invented Lent. Have you seen that?

Speaker 1:
[42:45] No.

Speaker 4:
[42:46] I thought you could say he invented the hamburger.

Speaker 3:
[42:48] He was on the Today Show being like, you should really consider giving something up for 40 days before Easter. And everyone was like, try Mark Wahlberg's challenge.

Speaker 2:
[42:54] Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1:
[42:56] We have to brand every spiritual practice now.

Speaker 2:
[42:57] She says, for the past six months, I've tried to structure my life around practicing the way's nine core habits. I'd wake up early to spend an hour alone at the window next to my fire escape, reading scripture and praying. This was a major upgrade from checking my phone first thing in the morning. Once a week, I'd observe the Sabbath, put away my screens, do some form of worship, revel in the fact that I could do nothing for a day and God would keep the universe going. As part of the service practice, I volunteered at a soup kitchen once a month and started carrying food with me when I walked around the city in case people I passed looked hungry. She said, I didn't like navigating modern life with no phone for one day a week. Without Google Maps, I'd get lost. Without texting, every meet up with friends felt like a high stakes rendezvous and although sometimes I'd have a moment or two of transcendence on my weekly fasting day, for the most part, I was just hungry. But she concludes, says, I was surprised though by how much these practices have become central to my life, not because I think I will be smote if I don't do them, but because it turns out I like them.

Speaker 1:
[43:58] Huh.

Speaker 2:
[43:58] She says, the theory is that to become more Christlike, you have to find more ways to literally live like Christ.

Speaker 1:
[44:05] Huh.

Speaker 2:
[44:06] So this is someone in the Atlantic promoting, following Jesus as a hipster New York millennial experiment. What's the world coming to?

Speaker 1:
[44:18] I think the world is coming to the realization that a completely self-defined life of digital secularism is really exhausting.

Speaker 4:
[44:27] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[44:27] Yes. Right.

Speaker 1:
[44:28] So people, what secularism says is that you should disconnect from any prior tradition, religion or ancestry and completely define for yourself who you are, what you think, what you believe. But when you add the digital component into that, it means you have to do that over and over and over again, every moment of every day with everything you're engaging online all the time.

Speaker 3:
[44:49] Open to the scrutiny of everyone who's watching you do it.

Speaker 1:
[44:52] That's right. And so John Mark comes along with his very old Christian message of saying, actually, there is a tradition that can give you practices and a sense of purpose and meaning and value and connection that is not digital, that is not constantly playing to this huge audience all the time. And you can ground yourself in something other than the ephemeral realities of digital existence. And that, to an exhausted generation, is really appealing. Now the question, and I know people are critical of him at times. I think the question is, will the people who engage in these practices because they're exhausted, actually find communion and root themselves in Jesus?

Speaker 2:
[45:30] Right. Right.

Speaker 1:
[45:31] Or will they...

Speaker 2:
[45:31] Does it lead you to Christian community?

Speaker 1:
[45:33] And I don't fault him for meeting people where they are at in their exhaustion. I just hope that as they do engage these practices and do find them to be beneficial compared to the alternative of digital secularism that they have an encounter with and deeply commune with Christ in the process.

Speaker 2:
[45:50] Right. Right. So we have stories about the Catholic Church growing in popularity, partly for not meeting people where they're at.

Speaker 1:
[46:00] Well, I know. I think it's the same thing though.

Speaker 2:
[46:02] Do you?

Speaker 1:
[46:02] Because it's people who are exhausted from digital secularity.

Speaker 2:
[46:05] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[46:05] And again, the church come-

Speaker 2:
[46:07] They want an otherliness.

Speaker 1:
[46:08] Yeah. The church comes along and says, not only is this going to be incarnate, it's sacrament that you can touch and taste and smell and engage. It's also rooted and old. So you don't have to make all the infinite decisions every day for who you are and what you think. Here's a whole tradition and a whole background and a whole church that can answer many of those questions for you and give you the framework for your life.

Speaker 2:
[46:28] Yeah. So, OK, I have a thought. If I decided to do this and live according to the way of John Mark Comer, following in his footsteps, as he follows Jesus, hopefully, yes. Yes. And I filmed the whole thing. Think how much content I would get.

Speaker 1:
[46:46] Amazing.

Speaker 3:
[46:47] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[46:48] That could be big.

Speaker 1:
[46:49] I could do a whole other show on Instagram.

Speaker 3:
[46:51] That's amazing. I bet he'd ask you to get off Twitter.

Speaker 2:
[46:55] Well, OK, I wouldn't tweet it, but I would post it on Instagram and Facebook.

Speaker 3:
[46:58] No, I'm very pro this if it gets you on Twitter.

Speaker 2:
[47:01] OK. Any last thoughts? Kaitlyn Schess from an undisclosed secure location.

Speaker 3:
[47:07] I agree with Skye that the question is, how much does the kind of popularity of these practices translate into both, as Kevin De Young says in the Atlantic article, faith in God, who actually has done things in history and asks you to participate in the story that he is writing, but also how much it leads people into community. That's an open question. One of my favorite reviews of John Mark Comer, and I've read some of his books. I know a ton of people who love him and have read his books and use the Practicing the Way stuff in their church and their community. But one of my favorite reads on him is Brad East wrote a review of a couple of his books in Christianity Today quite a while ago. He's a professor who was noticing that his students were reading all these books and he went in with a skeptical attitude because he's serious theologian, and these books look very hip, and he was surprised at how good they were. But his one criticism had a great line towards the end of the piece where he said, basically does some of this ask you to be a spiritual Navy seal? You have to do all of this. The practices are really great and John Mark Comer is grace-filled. He's not saying, as she says in the article, like, I'll be smote if I don't do this. But there is a sense in which he's bringing this really important, as Skye says, ancient set of ideas from Christianity into a very spiritual marketplace kind of world where we think we can kind of pick and choose the practices we want. We can be disconnected from community. We can be disconnected from any kind of doctrine. But I also think the kinds of practices that he's asking people to take on are practices that for maybe a little while you could do without any reason for doing them and they might make your life better and you might... But quite a few of them, as she points out in the article, will start to ask things of you that won't make sense to you if they're not connected to actual Christian belief. Resting one day a week, if this life is all there is and it's just about getting the amount of money and pleasure and satisfaction that you can get out of it, resting for a day when you're trying to make partner at your law firm doesn't make any sense unless there's a broader story in which humans were meant for a different kind of life and we are promised a different kind of future. Using your money in different ways, using your phone, like all the conversation we've had about technology, none of that makes sense apart from a story that says humans were made good and part of that goodness was our finitude. And we also cannot save ourselves. We are dependent on a God who loved us so much that he became human and died a death on a cross and rose from the dead and promises us that we are awaiting the resurrection of our own bodies and the life of the world to come. That's a story that suddenly might be really appealing to you. If you've been practicing practices that you can tell are good for you, but you reach the limit of them making sense out of the worldview that you have, out of the sense of what you think it means to be human. I want to applaud the popularity of this for maybe putting people in a position where they go. Maybe it's not just the habits and rhythms of my life that have been wrong. Maybe I've believed wrongly about what makes a good human life and what's ultimately true. Who do I know that I can ask about that? Well, this guy, John Mark Comer, is a pastor. Maybe I can find a church. The more that we can receive those folks with our own curiosity about them and with our own compassion and empathy, the better the church will be.

Speaker 2:
[50:25] Okay then. Yeah. I might read his book about Hurry. I haven't read any of his books because I've been too busy. And you just, who has time?

Speaker 1:
[50:36] They're accessible reads.

Speaker 2:
[50:38] Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. Okay, everybody, we didn't even talk about Pete Hegseth's Pulp Fiction Prayer. And I know you were all excited about that. Maybe next week or maybe never because it's just nuts. Like so much of what's going on these days. Go to holypost.com/plus and see all the cool stuff that Skye and Caitlin and Esau are making and putting out almost every day. There's lots of stuff there. And what are we? Oh, you can't go to Atlanta to see us.

Speaker 3:
[51:08] It's tonight.

Speaker 2:
[51:08] It's tonight. As you listen to this, as you listen to this, we are in Atlanta tonight for a live event and go to where to find out about it.

Speaker 3:
[51:19] holypost.com/events.

Speaker 1:
[51:21] It's with Lecrae.

Speaker 2:
[51:22] It left off the biggest. Lecrae. It's with Lecrae. OK, can we get John Mark Comer in last minute?

Speaker 1:
[51:28] No, he's in California.

Speaker 2:
[51:29] I'm going to fly in. I'm going to fly him in.

Speaker 4:
[51:31] That could work. OK.

Speaker 2:
[51:33] Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time.

Speaker 4:
[51:34] Bye.

Speaker 1:
[51:36] Train up a child in the way he should go. And when he's old, he will not depart from it. That's Proverbs 22.6 from the King James version. No doubt, if you grew up with an American evangelicalism, you're familiar with that verse. Rather than a bit of practical wisdom, many evangelicals have clung to it as an indisputable promise of God. But if that's true, and your child grows up and does depart from the way you think he should go, you only have two options. Either you must conclude that God didn't keep his promise, or you failed as a parent and didn't sufficiently train him up in the right way. My guests today spent years diving into all the books and curricula that pushes this formulaic, guilt-inducing approach to parenting starting all the way back in the 1970s. The outcome of that research is their new book, The Myth of Good Christian Parenting, How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families. The book is co-authored by Marissa Franks-Burt and my guests today, Kelsey Kramer McGinnis. As you'll hear in the interview, I really, really love this book, but not because it just exposes the terrible theology that fueled a lot of the parenting advice that I heard growing up, but because it also explains so much of what we're seeing in the American church today way beyond just parenting. Things like the attraction to simple good and evil explanations for complicated issues and why so many evangelicals are comfortable with authoritarian leadership both in their churches and now in the government. So I really can't recommend this book enough whether or not you grew up with an evangelicalism or are just trying to raise kids yourself. Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is an adjunct professor at Grandview University in Des Moines, Iowa, and a correspondent for Christianity Today writing about worship practices in the American Christian subculture. She previously worked at the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights. Here is my conversation with Kelsey Kramer McGinnis. Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, welcome to The Holy Post.

Speaker 4:
[53:37] Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:
[53:38] All right. Well, first of all, congratulations on the book. You and your co-author, Marissa Burt, Franks Burt. I saw this book come across our office and I saw the title. I was like, oh, this could be good. And then I read it and it was really good. So I can't recommend it enough. The Myth of Good Christian Parenting. Let's start with this, just some of the history. Explain the massive growth in Christian parenting books or maybe parenting books in general that occurred in the 1980s when I was a kid. What triggered all that?

Speaker 4:
[54:14] Yeah, I mean, there have always been Christian parenting books. I mean, for centuries, people have sort of gone to clergy for parenting advice, as you would imagine. But a lot changed in the mid 20th century, right? So if you think about what Billy Graham did for evangelism and mass media, what happened with Christian parenting books and literature and media kind of followed right on the heels of that. So we start our history in this book in 1970, because that's the year James Dobson publishes Dare to Discipline, which we put as kind of the marker of the beginning of the growth of the Christian parenting book empire that we have today that was unique from what came before. If you read the Christian parenting books that came before, they're either, you know, very Victorian or in many cases just kind of boring. But because of the political moment in the early 70s, coming right off the end of the 60s, social and political turmoil, a lot of panic on the right about the state of American culture and about the youth. James Dobson sort of met that moment with Dare to Discipline and proved that there was this market for Christian parenting books that spoke specifically to the fears of conservative Christian parents in a unique way that met their alarm level and it was really, really appealing.

Speaker 1:
[55:40] Yeah. Okay. This is important. I'm sure there's a lot of our audience are not old enough to remember this era, although I certainly am. The 1960s saw the rise of the youth subculture, counterculture with Woodstock and Hippies and the anti-Vietnam Movement and a lot of drug use and there's just a lot of social upheaval. Along comes James Dobson and a number of other folks. Their argument is pretty simple and that is, this whole rebellious youth movement is the product of bad parenting, and that if you just raise your kids the right way, if you raise them God's way, you can avoid all of these challenges when they reach adolescence or young adulthood. For a generation who was watching America change rapidly and in the direction that they didn't like, that felt like salvation. It was a hugely marketable message. You cite a statistic in the book that in 1997, there were five times as many parenting books published as in 1975. So I was born in 76. So this is my youth, the 80s and 90s, and it was everywhere. I just assumed this had always been the case, but you can see why it was the direct out shoot of the 1960s cultural upheaval. Talk about how the messaging of these books was congruent with prosperity gospel theology, because I think that's a connection a lot of people don't often see, but you address it very early in the book.

Speaker 4:
[57:11] Yeah. There really is this drive toward pushing parents to believe that if they get it right, they will be rewarded with a good family. These books tell you what a good family is, right? They're well-behaved children. In some cases, you get promises of things like a generational legacy. But you get these massive promises that make parents feel like they have more control than they actually do, or encourage parents to see themselves as having a lot of control and to try to exercise that control and authority. That meets this moment of panic. Parents have always been nervous. It's always been easy to sell advice to parents. But these promises prey on that kind of insecurity of Christian parents. This is also coinciding with the beginning of the decline, not even the beginning, but the decline of the mainline. There's a lot of panic about young people not wanting to come to church. People are being pushed to find ways to keep their children in the fold. One way that these books try to encourage parents to do that is by saying, You can do it. You can do it, Good Christian Parent. If you do this the right way, you will get that outcome. You will help bring people back into the fold of the church. And in some cases, like in the case of James Dobson, there's even these promises like, We will right the ship of American culture by raising a generation of faithful, well-behaved children.

Speaker 1:
[58:43] Yeah, I want to get into how this fits into the larger culture war stuff and politics in a minute. But to focus again on this, the promises that are given. Early in the book and page five, you quote Growing Kids God's Way, which was a very popular curriculum.

Speaker 4:
[58:59] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[58:59] And it said this, God pre-programmed all factors for success into his divine plan. As with all matters discussed in scripture, if you violate the principles, you forfeit the blessings. When you embrace his commandments, the blessings of joy and fulfillment will be yours. I mean, that's prosperity gospel. It not only communicates to parents that you have an enormous amount of control if you just follow the right principles, it also reduces God into some kind of divine vending machine. That if you put the right coins in, you get the outcome guaranteed. This is what every prosperity preacher says. But they're applying it to what many of us are most fearful about. It's the thing we find most precious in the world, which is our children. So, let me ask you this. And you don't quite get into this in the book, but I'm just curious having all the, surveying all the literature that you did from this era. Do you get a sense that these authors were self-aware enough to realize what they were doing? Or were they genuine in their view that this is how the universe works and how God works?

Speaker 4:
[60:11] I think, well, I shouldn't say I think. I try to assume that they were all genuine in what, that they all truly believed what they were writing. Partly because I can't know whether they were sort of exaggerating their own belief or not. But I do think that many of them were quite earnest. And whether that earnestness is sort of removed from reality, I think we can obviously talk about, because obviously these people didn't have perfect children either, but they must have believed on some level that the perfect parent who is perfectly applying scripture would get a perfect result. Like that really does seem to be the way of thinking. And that quote that you read from, did you read Baby Wise by the way? Was that the book that was popular when you? No, you okay?

Speaker 1:
[60:57] Honestly, my wife and I read very few Christian parenting books. We relied far more on incarnate community for our wisdom and advice, because I found a lot of them to be nauseating.

Speaker 4:
[61:07] Well, I'm glad for you and your kids. But yeah, those promises also treat children like little machines. I think one thing that I found really disturbing about a lot of these books was that they treated children like little machines or computers to be programmed. And that's also disturbing to me to kind of wonder, is this really how they saw their children or how they wanted parents to see their children? And again, I try not to speculate too much about the motivations or the inner beliefs of the people writing this. The nice thing about writing a book like this, where we are examining the books, is I can say, well, regardless of whether they were true believers, here's what they wrote. And some of these books sold millions of copies. So if we take them at their word, and someone picked it up and honestly was trying to practice what was in this book, here's what they got.

Speaker 1:
[61:59] Yeah, you mentioned late in the book that many of the most popular parenting books from the era were written by these authors when their children were very young. So this is fascinating. Many of the popular Christian parenting resources were written by young parents. James Dobson wrote Dare to Discipline when he had a preschooler and a toddler at home. Ginger Hubbard had elementary age children, Larry Tomczak had a toddler, and Bill Gotthard had no children at all. So I don't know, I felt like an expert parent when my kids were four. Changes a little bit when they're 14 or 24. But yeah, I mean, you have a whole section here where you talk about the dehumanizing of children, where they just are treated like pets or robots or programmable things. And to take out their autonomy and the mystery of just being a human permeates this stuff. But this idea that if I just follow the right principles, I am guaranteed the right outcome is a great promise to attract an audience, to sell a book, to sell a seminar, whatever it might be. But the same logic is also used to credentialize those who are selling the books. So page 83, you cite a quote from Canon Press about Douglas Wilson. Doug Wilson is very well known today because he's one of the leading voices of the Christian nationalist movement. And he's presented a lot of parenting advice. And his own outlet said, Pastor Wilson's family hasn't had a single apostasy across four generations or one black sheep on the outskirts of orthodox biblical Christianity. In other words, you can trust his principles because they've worked for four generations. You'll get the same outcome too. I've never been able to fully reconcile this attitude, especially coming from highly reformed people who believe in the sovereignty of God, to say that if you apply these principles, God is obligated to bless you with the outcome you want. When there's so much in the Bible, I mean, just the book of Job alone should be evidence, or the teachings of Jesus on numerous passages like Mark or John chapter 9 with the man born blind, where he refutes this whole idea that if you just do the right thing, you get the right outcome. But so many people, even from reformed traditions, who should be heavy on the sovereignty of God, say, no, no, no, we can control the outcome through our behavior. It just seems completely contradictory, but a great marketing strategy.

Speaker 4:
[64:21] Yes, a great marketing strategy. That quote always kills me. And it is interesting, the way this shows up in reformed spaces, it's sort of like proof of concept kind of thing there. This is proof that we have been doing it right and are doing it right and will continue to do it right. I was just having a conversation with someone who experienced these kinds of teachings, but in the context of Pentecostal Charismatic Christianity, like Latter Rain denominations. And we were talking about the contrast between how this gets articulated in the reformed places versus the charismatic places. And in these charismatic places, you do have differently twisted rhetoric where it is more understood that parents do have some control over the blessings of God, or that the prayer of a good parent, the practice of a good parent can move the spirit. You have this kind of agency. And for some parents in that space, that kind of pressure was like, I need to do more, I need to do more, I need to do more. I'm not connected to the Holy Spirit enough. I need to be more and more connected. It is really different in the reform spaces, but it does the same thing in effect. It's so strange. And I think a lot about that. The way is that these ideas get twisted sort of for different theologies of the sovereignty of God, or different theologies of what it is that causes God to grant something. And it's not consistent across these resources. I'll say one, there are many things that are not consistent across these resources. There is not a consistent theology of sin. There is not a consistent theology of the way God moves in families, you know.

Speaker 1:
[66:00] Yeah. But what is consistent is they all rely on the fear of parents and that longing for control.

Speaker 4:
[66:05] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[66:06] Give me the assurance that my kids are going to be okay.

Speaker 4:
[66:09] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[66:10] Which we can all relate to. Okay. Let's go back to how does this relate to the larger political climate in that era and the culture war climate. One of the things you guys do a wonderful job of articulating early on in the book is you're sort of diagnosing the various messages of these curricula in that era. This won't be unfamiliar to some of our listeners, the umbrella of authority. Bill Gothard was well known for this, but it was adapted by many other folks, that there is a very clear hierarchy and structure to the family, and that the role of a mother or a father or a child is very defined. And everyone, regardless of your individuality or your personality or your gifts or... You are created by God to occupy a certain role, and you must stay within that role, which gets back to your stripping children of their individuality and autonomy and things like that. Explain though, how this notion of the umbrella of authority or the structure fits within the bigger ecosystem of this era and what people were worried about.

Speaker 4:
[67:12] Yeah, this question of parental authority in general like a first principle of Christian parenting comes up a lot, and not just for James Dobson. So there was another book that came out in 1970 called The Christian Family by Larry Christensen. Christensen was a charismatic Lutheran, and his book, The Christian Family, was incredibly popular as well. It was just sort of overshadowed by Dare to Discipline, and he talks a ton about the structure of the family and the importance of parental authority. If you can get that right, if you can establish parental authority as first principle of your household, everything else falls into place. God at the top, father, mother, children. Sometimes church life is factored in somewhere, but usually this is nuclear family. If you can get that right, if you can instill obedience and respect from children to parents, submission and respect from wife to husband, everything else will fall into place. This shows up even in places that are kind of surprising. I mean, I don't think of Chuck Swindoll as a particularly polemical person, right? He's sort of a popular evangelical figure. But in his book, The Strong Family, he really comes down on parengeal authority. Like you, as the parent, you have to pick the principle over the person. This means your authority is the first thing in the household. If you have a child, a teenager who is pushing and pushing and rebelling, you need to pick the principle over the person.

Speaker 1:
[68:37] When I read that part of the book, I was really surprised. And even to the point where he's calling parents to cut off your relationship with your teenager or young adult child if they're not obedient to you, I'm like, wow, that's pretty harsh.

Speaker 4:
[68:53] Yeah. And the reason why I bring up Larry Christensen and the Christian family is because one of the endorsers of that book, who is also quoted a lot in there, is Bruce Wilkerson, the author of The Cross and the Switchblade. And for listeners who aren't familiar with that book, it's sort of this story of inner-city gang life and teen crime. And one of the things that Wilkerson talks a lot about is this rebellious spirit in these teens is the thing that parents need to get under. That's the thing that runs rampant if you don't get parental authority right. So the stakes are high from the very beginning. If you don't keep your toddler in check and teach them that you are the authority in the household, you're going to end up with that later. And there are a lot of authors that make, that draw that direct line, right? Like the rebellious spirit you see in your toddler, that's the rebellious spirit that you see in these teens that are getting involved in crime and gang life.

Speaker 1:
[69:52] Yeah, what struck me though is the connection when people go beyond, your teenagers might get involved in destructive behavior or rebellious sinful behavior. Okay, fine, we all know that's a possibility in the world we live in. But they drawn out even further that essentially, this is going to lead to the downfall of America. Right? This is why Bill Clinton is doing what he's doing in the Oval Office in the 1990s. This is why we lost the Vietnam War, because our soldiers weren't really disciplined enough, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I'll give you a quote again from your book. You cite Tim Kimmel. You're laughing as you know what I'm going to read. And he said this, Someone has stated that the true wealth of a nation is its people. I agree, but I'm inclined to narrow that definition. America's true wealth is its parents. Parents are the hinge on which a civilization pivots. They determine whether the door of the future swings open or closed. In other words, if you don't get control of your toddler, Western civilization is going to collapse. Like this is, so you aren't just putting the pressure on a parent to say, you have control over the outcome of your child. You're not just putting the pressure that there is God's will and divine principles that you are expected to apply, but the very fate of the world is hinging on how well you parent.

Speaker 4:
[71:11] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[71:11] That's crazy.

Speaker 4:
[71:13] Yeah, it is. It's crazy. That passage in that book struck me as so strange. He's telling this anecdote. He's walking through Washington DC and reflecting on the national monuments and thinking about how parents are the wealth of the nation. It's very, I don't know, kind of polemical. Yes, it puts the pressure on parents. It puts a lot of blame on parents. It's pressure that parents have always felt. I see it now. I don't know how much time you spend on TikTok, but it always makes me think of these videos that you get. Right now, it's kind of teachers, right? These parents are not teaching their kids right, and our education system is going to collapse, right? Parents take the blame for the behavior of children. Understandably so, but part of what makes that such a toxic and pressure-fold situation is that parents only have so much control over their children. And we don't always know what to do with that. It's just tricky. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[72:18] Well, and not only that, we have limited control over our children, and that control becomes less and less the older they get. But these resources don't tend to, or they give universal principles that may not apply in every circumstance. I mean, we are infinitely complicated creatures, as are our children. So to say that this three-year-old who's having temper tantrums, that this book is going to tell me how to solve that when that book has no idea what this three-year-old is like or who they're... That's the part that always grabbed me as ridiculous. Like every person, every circumstance, every system is different. You say, no, this is what the Bible says and this is how you do it. You universalize that. It's kind of nuts. All right, let me go back to this umbrella of authority thing though. As you stated or these resources state, like a child has a role in submitting to mom, mom or wife has a role in submitting to their husband, the husband has a role in submitting to God. If everyone just fulfills their role perfectly, the whole system works. You have order, you have structure, and the world will operate the way God intended. But this kind of gets extended then, as we were alluding to that, if then each family submits to their church leadership, to the pastor, to the elders, then if churches submit to the authorities above them, and if people just submit to the government, like this gets extended all the way through the whole thing. So this is what I want to talk about. How do you see these resources from this era priming the pump for people to accept authoritarian leadership in their churches? And now when you look at what's going on on a lot of the conservative end of the political spectrum, how did it prime people to accept authoritarian political leadership?

Speaker 4:
[73:58] Yeah. If you grow up believing that parental authority will establish this sort of trickle down effect of everything running smoothly, and that principle gets scaled up from your household into your church, and then that gets scaled up maybe into your vision for what America's political system should look like, then you understandably may internalize, whether you know it or not, this belief that if there is strong, correct authority at the top, everything else will fall into place. And this assumes that the authority at the top is the correct authority, and that everybody underneath is doing their job. So there's obviously some priming there for a particular way of seeing how the world works and how relationships work. But again, this gets back to the mechanization we were talking about before. It sort of sees humans as far more mechanical than we are, sees human relationship as far more mechanical than it is within the household, within the church, and within a nation, right? We have systems, we have political systems, but the people in them are not cogs. It's just not that simple. But if you are primed to believe that, and that every relational quirk hiding in there should be subsumed to that system, then absolutely that's sort of priming you to prioritize the authority structure over any of the messiness underneath, or any of the nuances that happen in individual communities and individual households, those become aberrations that are totally unacceptable, or just need to be pushed aside or ignored or even hidden in some cases.

Speaker 1:
[75:48] Yeah, one of the things I really appreciate about this book, I don't know if you guys intended this, but as I was reading it, I found it so explanatory for the moment we're in. It goes way beyond parenting stuff, but here's one of the dilemmas I've had for years. In sort of politics and cultural dynamics, stuff like that, when in certain scenarios, you will hear Christian leaders on the right argue, often citing Romans 13, that people need to submit to the authority of the government. You heard this, for example, most recently with the protesters in Minneapolis against ICE and some of the shootings that happened. Some people said, well, they weren't obeying the law. They weren't submitting to the authority. It's tragic, but they got what they deserved because they weren't doing the right thing. But then you rewind the tape to January 6, 2021, when there were thousands of people storming the Capitol, and that was completely acceptable. They weren't called to submit to authority. But when you read it through the lens of the parenting advice that came out of the 80s and 90s in the early 2000s, it begins to make sense because the essential argument is, if the authority structure is godly, then you need to submit to it, and there's no excuse for any sort of pushback, rebellion, questioning of anything they do. But if the authority is ungodly, then you need to rebel against it and fight to take it over again. So the argument coming from the political right was, well, in January 6, 2021, the authority was ungodly, so we were justified in storming the Capitol. But when it's ICE protests or ICE officers that are deployed by Donald Trump, they're godly, and so you need to submit to them. But what I thought had been hypocrisy before isn't hypocrisy in the minds of those who are abiding by it, because it fits with this view that godly authority must always be submitted to no matter what, and ungodly authority doesn't have to be submitted to. Toward that end, I want to read another quote. This is from Ted Tripp's book, Shepherding a Child's Heart. He says, you don't have to wonder if it is okay for you to be in charge, speaking of course to parents. You certainly do not need your child's permission. God has given you a duty to perform, therefore the endorsement of your child is not necessary.

Speaker 4:
[77:59] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[78:00] I mean, that's exactly what we're seeing in our political moment where people, the government doesn't need the will of the people anymore because they have God's authority, and that's it. So you see this through line, or many of the church abuse stories that we've been hearing for years comes from this sense that, well, I'm the pastor or I'm the elder. I have God's authority, and everyone needs to submit and stop questioning it, despite scores of people who've been abused or mistreated or whatever. And that demand that you submit, no matter what, don't question, don't ask, don't challenge, permeates this moment on a lot of the political right.

Speaker 4:
[78:38] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[78:39] A couple more things I really want to cover. You talk about how in these curricula, the behavior of children, everything is just labeled as sin. It's black and white. It's right or wrong. There's no gray. There's no nuance. Explain why that's such an important part of so many of these parenting books.

Speaker 4:
[78:58] Yeah. Well, the one you just quoted, Ted Tripp, Shepherding in Child's Heart. This is kind of like the core of this book, which is you as a parent are in charge, you're the authority figure and your job basically is to identify, diagnose the sin in your child's heart. He offers lists and lists of examples, anecdotes of this toddler is doing this. That's flowing from the sin of covetousness. That's flowing from the sin of even like lustfulness, even attributing strange sexuality to children. It's disturbing to read. Also, it just encourages parents to look at their children as little sinners, which depending on what corner of the church you grew up in, that may be familiar language to you. Ken Ham tells an anecdote about that. He's going to the hospital visiting, saying, look at that beautiful little sinner. This language is so normalized in some places. Usually in jest, but in practice, it leads to this really contentious relationship between parent and child, where a parent is encouraged to look at their child and ask, I don't like this behavior. I've got to look underneath, I've got to dig underneath now and figure out what the sin is so that I can diagnose it. In some cases, explain it in not always age-appropriate ways, and then punish it accordingly. Kids need to understand that they are sinful. They need to have me point out the sinful reason they're doing what they're doing, and then they need to experience pain to deter them from doing it again. Gosh, that leads to... I hate that whole system for a number of reasons. One, because it does away with the idea of developmentally appropriate behavior, this idea that sometimes kids are just having a hard time. But authors like Ted Tripp look at a hard moment with a toddler and essentially say, who sins that this moment is so bad? Who sins that this parental moment is so hard? My child won't sleep. Who is sitting here? Probably my child. This rebellious spirit, they're choosing not to sleep, which is absurd. But also it just robs these moments of connection. It assumes there is no understanding to be had here. There is no relationship to be pursued here. There is only identified, diagnosed, punish. That becomes a way around connection, even with a toddler, with a young child. That makes me sad and it also makes me a little angry to read those.

Speaker 1:
[81:28] We have a new puppy in our home right now. When I was reading your book last night, I'm in the room with this crazy puppy. He's only nine weeks old. I realize a lot of what these guys are promoting is exactly what we've been trying to do with our puppy. You reward good behavior, you try to scold bad behavior, you're training it. But a human child is so much more complicated than a puppy. That loss of connection or understanding or empathy, and so much going on there. But again, you see a connection far beyond parenting, where everything that goes on in our culture today, all the complications of our world, in some sectors, it's black and white. It's right and wrong. It's sin or it's righteous. There's no room for nuance or complexity. And it's always who's to blame here and how should they be punished? And there's no questioning. There's no connection, engagement, listening. And even empathy itself has now become suspect.

Speaker 4:
[82:26] Right. This is why empathy is dangerous, Skye. That's why it's dangerous.

Speaker 1:
[82:29] Exactly. All right. Before we wrap up, I want to talk about, towards the end of the book, I should say one of the things you guys do really well here is you include messages from children who grew up in these kinds of settings and from parents who tried to parent these kinds of things, explaining their experiences, some of their regrets, what they've learned or how they've responded to all this. But then towards the end of the book, you begin to talk about how this is playing out today. And we mentioned at the beginning that a lot of this came out of a reaction to the 1960s, the cultural upheaval of that era and people looking for a sense of control. You can make a case that we're in a similar scenario today. There's been a lot of cultural change very, very rapidly. Some of it due to technology, some of it because of the changing sexual morals of our culture. And I see people, even younger people today, who are grasping for certainty, right? What does it mean to be a man or a woman today? What does it mean to be a parent? How do I have a family? And for example, you mentioned this in the book, the tradwives phenomenon. Are you seeing, are the conditions ripe for a resurgence of this kind of messaging of books and curricula and influencers saying, here is the god-given way to be a person, to be a husband, to be a wife, to be a family, to be a parent. And are you worried we're going to make the same mistakes again?

Speaker 4:
[83:49] All the time. Yes. And there are some things about the influencer sphere that have changed the way parents are getting advice. The TradWive content I think is really fascinating for a number of reasons. But one of them is that instead of telling parents what to do, it does tell parents what to do, but it does it in a more subtle way by basically telling parents, especially mothers, what good parenthood is supposed to feel like, what it's supposed to look like. There's this aspirational aesthetic vision for the peaceful, well-appointed Christian home. And now it's swirled in with sponsored content and a consumable lifestyle that you can curate for yourself. But it's funny because I'll come across TradWive posts that have hashtag shepherding a child's heart and a quote from Ted Tripp. Now social media is recycling a lot of the same ideas and even some of the same books were popular in the 90s and 2000s because absolutely Christian parents are still very hungry for certainty and for information about how to parent. There is quite a lot of backlash among evangelical parents to like the gentle parenting or attachment parenting movement, which is very ill-defined, I should say, but people are looking for this information. And so a new wave of influencers, millennials and Gen Z parents are kind of coming up in the podcasting and influencing world and are in some cases, repackaging old ideas, offering their new spin on it. Recently, there was a podcast with one influencer where she and her husband were talking very openly about why they're going to spank their kids. And that was interesting to me because for a while, things have been a bit more hush hush on social media about things like corporal punishment. But we are seeing a much more vocal contingent of conservative Christians advocating for spanking publicly, which at least in my view is a change from maybe 10 years ago, which speaks to some broader cultural movements as well. And I think we're going to keep on seeing that. But it is kind of disturbing to me how tied up it all is with the other parts of the influencer sphere, like sponsored content and people selling you things constantly.

Speaker 1:
[86:07] Yeah, it's weird because you can now not just get advice from somebody, but you can inhabit their entire identity. It'd be like if James Dobson back in the 70s and 80s wasn't just telling you how to discipline your kids, but also telling you where you can buy his khakis and loafers. Yes. Nobody was asking him for fashion advice, right? But that's what we've become now. It's that you can identify with somebody so entirely that I'm going to mimic their way of parenting. I'm going to mimic their hairstyle. I'm going to mimic their clothing. I'm going to mimic their vacation, all of it, because that's the life I want. Even though what you're being presented is a curated and branded identity, not reality. But people are sold this because they're so desperate for a sense of certainty and guidance. Oh, Kelsey, like I said, I could go on and on about this because I found the book so explanatory for so many things, not just the parenting culture of evangelicalism, but the way our churches, our communities, even our politics are shaped by these similar values. So thank you for the amazing work you've done. I should tell people at the very end of the book, you guys have this remarkably helpful guide for evaluating parenting resources where you raise different questions and then organize it through green light, yellow light, red light. Like as you come across your own parenting stuff, it's a helpful guide to say, here's what might be problematic, be careful. Here's probably a more mature thing and what you should stay away from. So there's a practical help in your book as well. But last question, having finished this project, how has it changed you as you think about your role?

Speaker 4:
[87:48] Well, I should say first of all, this is a strange first book for me. This is not a book I intended to write. It has certainly made me less interested in giving anyone parenting advice. I mean, I think reading these books, I have young kids myself. I was not interested in giving advice, which is one reason why we have that metric at the end of this book. It was sort of we felt like we wanted to give people some useful takeaway that wasn't just, isn't this all so bad, and that was as far as we were willing to go. But I truly do believe that there is so little one size fits all parenting advice. And I also believe that, I think I believe that connection between parents and children is so much more possible than most Christian parenting books have led us to believe. There are some newer ones that are doing a much better job of that. But the ones we surveyed, 1970 to 2010, you come away from these books with so little belief that I could have a genuine connection and relationship with my 3, 4, 5-year-old. And I believe that we can. Children are different. Childhood is sort of mysterious to adults because I can't re-inhabit the mind of my 6-year-old self. So understanding and empathizing with my 6-year-old and my 8-year-old is challenging. But I do think it is more important than keeping their sin in check at all times. But I think I believe that now. I think I believed that before, but I wouldn't have known how to articulate why or what that might look like. So I'm hopeful that people can read this book and come away more empowered to connect with their kids. I sometimes compare these books now to bad dating manuals, like really bad gamified pickup artists kind of stuff. Don't look for a book that is giving you shortcuts around connection with your kids. Don't look for a dating book that is giving you a shortcut for connecting with a human being, like treating it like it's this gamified relationship, because I think that's a recipe for poor relationships.

Speaker 1:
[90:04] Amen. You're affirming something I've said many times on the show. Over the years, people send in questions to us, and I don't give parenting advice and I don't give marriage advice. Part of it is because I don't think you can generalize it. But more importantly, another human being is the most complicated thing that we have ever encountered in this universe. And I want to know well and connect deeply with the four other human beings that I am called to be closest to, which is my wife and my three kids. And I'm figuring that out. And I want other people to figure that out, too, but I can't do that for you. And so that's why we tried to keep our need for parenting help in incarnate community with people that trusted us, knew us, knew our kids. And we went that route rather than here's the universalized principles that often don't hit where we are. So anyway, you're singing my song. Kelsey, thank you for your time today and for your excellent work and this super helpful resource for a lot of people that I think will find it illuminating. Thanks for being here.

Speaker 4:
[91:11] Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[91:12] The Holy Post Podcast is a production of Holy Post Media produced by Mike Strehlow, editing by Seth Gourvet. Help us create more thoughtful Christian media by subscribing to Holy Post Plus at holypost.com/plus. Also be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts so more people can discover thoughtful Christian commentary plus ukulele and occasional butt news. Visit holypost.com for show notes, news stories, Holy Post merchandise and much, much more.