Better Than Christian Nationalism: A Case for Christian Culturalism (Episode 161)

Christ the King and the Local Church

To the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it. The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy.

Christ is king. You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

One of us is drinking black, hot coffee, and one of us is drinking iced pumpkin spice latte. I'm not gonna say who is who. I'm just gonna say one of us is, yeah.

You know, there is a good point here that I'll go ahead and take note of the fact that the guy with the bigger beard.

Is drinking the black coffee. There's a correlation there, right? There probably is. Yeah. Is my beard shrinking right now? It's just a comparison, yeah. Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. Great to have my friend and no stranger, actually, to the podcast, Jacob Tanner.

I am your host, Alan Nelson. I am one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church in Arkansas. Love the technology we have today that we can be so far apart, miles-wise, but able to connect and hopefully have a profitable discussion.

The First Great Awakening and the American Revolution

Let's think about the state of our nation. We think about the desire. You know, we had a prayer meeting last night at our church, and one of the things we prayed for, we prayed for our nation, prayed for our leaders.

We prayed for revival. Maybe this will just jump off the deep end, but I kind of have this theory, and I'm not the only one, I don't think, but I kind of have this theory in my mind of a pretty close correlation between the First Great Awakening and the American Revolution, that God's preparation of his people really happened during the preaching of Whitefield and Edwards and even the Wesley brothers, and that's really, the heyday of that's like, what, 1740-ish in the colonies, and then it's no coincidence that officially we mark the date as 1776, but of course, we know the American Revolution rolled on until, what was it, 1780-what?

It was the 80s, I know that. Yorktown. So anyway, anyway, all that to say, well, let's just throw that out to you. You think I'm onto something there,.

Or do you agree with that? What's your thoughts? Oh yeah, 100%. So the American Revolution was heavily influenced by Protestant preaching, and the preaching of George Whitefield in particular, I think, and Edwards, as you said.

Both of those men were essential to what was going to come next, and one of the major reasons I would argue for that is because when they were preaching, they were effectively saying, Christ is the king that we must submit to, and in Christ, we have true liberty, and without the liberty of Christ, we have nothing at all.

There are obviously some direct correlations then to what the American Revolution was about, and of course, one of the big issues was you don't wanna be taxed and not have representation, right? But ultimately, what they're looking for is liberty.

Protestant Freedom and the Christian Heritage of America

On top of that, though, you have this longstanding tradition for about 150 years, until the revolution actually kicks off, where you have Protestants, you have Puritans, you have Pilgrims, and eventually, of course, you have the Covenanters from Scotland, you have Anglicans, you have the Quakers, you have all of these different groups coming together in America, and what they're aiming to do is they're aiming to escape the religious persecution of having a sort of monarch that is over you that insists upon this very particular brand of Christianity and they're saying, no, we agree that we should all be Christians, but we're disagreeing on things like ecclesiology, and we wanna have freedom to worship God as we believe that we should worship Him.

So if we feel we are bound in our conscience to worship God in this way, we should be free to do so, and specifically in regards to England, they felt that they shouldn't be required to have or need a license to preach.

So they didn't feel they needed to be ordained within the English church, the Anglican church. They felt like they didn't need to follow the common book of prayer that had been presented to them. They felt like they should be able to preach extemporaneously and pray extemporaneously.

So for 150 years, this was a pretty big deal where people were leaving Europe, coming to the new world because they wanted that freedom. And then of course, there is the whole other concept of they truly believed that they were a city upon a hill and that God had designated them to go forth and to take dominion of the new world for the glory of God.

So this was Christendom spreading across the ocean into this totally new world that they had been unaware of 200 years prior, and it was this amazing time. But I would argue that not only did men like Whitefield and Edwards and the Wesley brothers have this huge influence on the revolution, so too did all of the guys that came before, especially in the 17th century, 1620, you've got the Mayflower compact, 1630, you've got John Winthrop preaching aboard a ship as they're sailing for the new world.

And we can talk about all of those things, but again, there is a heavy, heavy influence of Christianity upon the American revolution, so much so that at one point, and it wasn't just Presbyterians, by the way, I'll throw this out there, but at one point, the American revolution was referred to as the Presbyterian revolt by those who were back in England.

So heavy dose of Christianity was already in the mix even before the American revolution came to be.

Yeah, I think that's phenomenal. I think that's something you said, I just wanna make a comment, it's like, and we just don't have time to chase down this rabbit trail, but if you can't understand the revolution and all the things surrounding the Christian influence without going centuries back in England, and so understanding even, I'm not just talking about in the 1500s when King Henry VIII splits from Rome, but even before that, and finally

But we could add Spain too,. Christopher Columbus, which, did you go to public school, I forget, or were you homeschooled? I was homeschooled. I went to public school, yes. Okay, just out of curiosity, what did you hear about Christopher Columbus when you were in public school?

So I graduated high school in 04. So I was, I think, probably right on the cusp of being right before a lot of the wokeness and Christopher Columbus evil, because we were like, Christopher Columbus is great, you know, this is, you know, and like Columbus Day, because now people call it what, indigenous people's day or whatever.

Indigenous people's day. So I was just right before all of that. So we still heard good things, you know, about Columbus. 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Yeah, my teaching experience was not like that at all. I graduated in 2012, but I was eventually homeschooled, but I grew up in New York, and initially, you know, they probably would, eventually I'm sure they would have changed that little rhyme there to like 1492, Columbus cut Indians in two or something like that.

Because they would tell us, like he was this horrible colonizer that came. And one of the stories I remember specifically being taught in school was about how he would test the sharpness of his blade upon the Native Americans, and he would have his men hold them, and he would cut them in half.

And I was like, wow, that's horrible. Yeah, this is a terrible guy. Well, as I grow up, I'm homeschooled, and I start reading more about Columbus. I find out a lot of that's modern mythology. A lot of that's totally made up.

And when Columbus even comes from Spain, because we often don't talk about Spain in all of this, and you know, to be sure, they are definitely a Roman Catholic nation. But when Columbus comes, he thinks that what he is doing is he's helping Christendom.

He is planting a flag for Christ, not just for kings and queens of Spain. He's doing it for Christ. And he has this profound idea that when he meets the Native Americans, who he thinks are Indians, that they're gonna be shared the gospel with, and they're going to be saved.

So even back then. And then we can go further back to Leif Erikson, who was a Viking. I never learned this in school, but Leif Erikson was a Christian, and he was probably the first true Christian missionary to America as we know it today.

And there's some pretty good influences, and there's even archeological discoveries that point to the fact that he was influencing the Natives with Christianity. He was sharing the gospel with them. So this goes really far back, you're right.

Church and State in the Founding Era

So, you know, we'll go,.

We're just gonna keep jumping back and forth. Our founding fathers, what would you think that their assessment of the state of our nation today, in terms of the way that many Americans view separation of church and state, kind of a melting pot of all sorts of religions, or no religion, or whatever, you know, whatever you want.

Like, what do you think, what do you think if you were able to talk to them and say, hey, in 250 years, this is how society is gonna view separation of church and state? And he's saying, what do you think their response would be?

That they've totally misunderstood.

What they were going for. So here's one of the most important things that I think anybody can understand. It's that when they talked about separation of church and state, it wasn't that they were to be totally divorced from one another.

It wasn't that they had no connection together. Instead, and this is kind of like reading modern day vernacular back into it. But when you think of something like Kuyperian sphere theory, where you have different spheres of the world, they all kind of overlap with each other.

So you have the home and it's got its own function, and it's got its own authority. And that overlaps a little bit with the church, which has its own function and its own authority, which overlaps with the state, which has its own function and its own authority.

That's much closer to how the founding fathers viewed it. But you have to keep in mind that some of the founding fathers, think of like a guy like John Witherspoon, for example. He was a minister who signed the Declaration of Independence.

And Witherspoon, when he was preaching during the American revolution, he went so, so this is a true founding father. Like there's no debate about this. He went so far as to say during some of his sermons that if you were not a Christian, you were an enemy to the country.

You were an enemy to the United States of America because you needed to be a Christian if you were going to be here in this land. And then you have George Washington. A lot of people try to be like Washington was a deist or he was an unorthodox Christian.

None of that's true. Washington was very orthodox. He was an Anglican. And of course, when you're in the midst of a revolution fighting for independence, and you're suddenly severed from the country who operates the church that you are a member of, there's gonna be some issues.

For example, as far as we know, Washington went quite a while without taking the Lord's Supper. A lot of people try to use that against him. And they say, there you go, he wasn't legit. No, if you read his journals, if you read the things that he was writing, if you hear some of the speeches he made, take his Thanksgiving Day speech, for example, I think it was like October 3rd, 1788.

I should have it here somewhere. Thanksgiving Proclamation. In it, he says, it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and to humbly implore his protection and favor.

It's the duty of all nations to do this, he says. So these guys are not saying we need to be separated from Christ in our government. They're not saying we need to be neutral in our policies, our legislation, or our politics.

What they are saying is that we need to be a Christian nation, but we need to be a Christian nation that is not controlled by the state. The state wields the sword to enforce biblical justice, of course, but the state cannot control or dictate, for example, whether a church is going to be Baptist or Congregationalist or Presbyterian or Anglican or any other number of things.

They said, this is for Christians, right? But the state cannot dictate what denomination or what ecclesiological preferences your church is going to hold to.

The Limits of a Top-Down Christian Political Program

Yeah, there's sort of a, and this is why I go back to the Great Awakening, but there's sort of an idea that I think misses a key point. There's sort of idea today that we need to seize power. Like, if we could just seize power and establish Christian Sabbath laws and those sorts of things, then we would turn the country around, you know?

And it's sort of this top-down approach. Whereas at the founding, that's why I mentioned about the Great Awakening, there is already a Christian culture because there are so many people, like, I don't remember the numbers, but like 10 of the people during the Great Awakening, 10 of the population became regenerate, you know?

Which, like, that doesn't sound like a lot, but that's a lot. I mean, think about, you know, what, is there 330 million or something today? 300, I mean, like 30 million people becoming Christians, like in a couple of years in our nation right now, that would be huge, you know?

I mean, actual, like true Christians. So I think that, I think one of the missing pieces in some of the discussions today is this idea of like, we're gonna have this top-down approach and that's gonna fix our nation, which that I completely reject.

If that's what people mean by Christian nationalism, and I think some of them do, then I would have to reject that label for myself. Oh, 100%.

I think you and I are similar because we've talked about this a little bit outside of this, in that, at least for me personally, there was a time where I embraced the Christian nationalist label. Having not read all of the literature from all of the different people, one of my main issues with the Christian nationalist label at this point is that it doesn't really identify anything.

So you can use it in a pejorative sense, right? There are those who are liberals, atheists, the Democratic Party, they'll say that if you're a Republican, if you're a conservative, you are a Christian nationalist, and they mean it in a nasty sense, like it's supposed to insult you.

There are others who talk about Christian nationalism and they're like, I just want a Christian nation, man. I want everyone to be Christian, which is where I'm at, and that's where I would have embraced the label.

But there are others, like you said, that really, they favor that top-down approach. And this would be what I refer to as the more Wolfian strand of Christian nationalism. So Stephen Wolf wrote his book on this, which I have a lot of disagreements with him in his approach and a lot of what he says, but this is one of the things that he advocates for and a lot of his followers advocate for, that we need to basically, even if we got rid of our constitutional republic altogether, and if we instead elected a Christian prince, a monarch, an emperor to rule over us, they say that would be favorable because then he could affect this top-down approach.

There's several problems with it though. One of them is that when they talk about Christian princes, they also seem to like to talk about Hitler a bit, and that's not a good example of what a Christian prince should be.

But then the other issue with this is, historically, whenever you've had that top-down approach, when you have had state-sanctioned Christianity and enforcement of this, I mean, maybe sometimes it works to some extent where you have genuine Christian conversions take place, but a lot of the time it ends up with dead orthodoxy where they just go through the motions.

The nation becomes lukewarm because they're forced into it, but the state is controlling it. So there's no true gospel preaching. Even the ministers that are becoming ministers are licensed, not because they are called by God, not because they have any actual qualifications for the role or because they have any sort of talent that God has given them for the role.

It's usually they're licensed because they have some sort of favor given to them by whatever that monarch is. So it just wouldn't work, long-term, maybe short-term. If you had a true, genuine Christian believer that would become some sort of ruler or emperor, maybe through his preaching the gospel or proclaiming the gospel, maybe there would be genuine conversions.

We see stuff like this happen with King Alfred as he fights against the Vikings as they're invading his land. And he does force conversions after the Vikings lose to him, right? But in some of those forced conversions, as far as we can tell, historically actually worked.

And why would that happen? I don't know. God is sovereign. God's grace is far greater than we can possibly understand. But by and large, I think that that is a total misunderstanding of how God converts sinners and how he disciples nations or how he calls us to do so.

From the Post-War Consensus to Racialism

Did you read Return of the Strong Gods by R .R. Reno?

Yeah, I don't know if I read all of it. I think I read part of it. I read it on a plane.

I don't remember it that much. No, it's basically, that's what a lot of people, which by the way, I would recommend the book. It's helpful. But that's the one where he really talks about the post-war consensus.

Oh, right, right, yep. Yeah, and so I think his principles, I think he's right. I would say maybe one critique of the book is it's almost a bit overstated. I joked with some guys, do you see the post-war consensus in the room with you right now?

So you wanna label everything, but it's helpful to understand the history from World War II. And the reason I wanna say this is because I know some people will be like, well, you've got Hitler wrong. It's like, hold on.

Post-war consensus, eliminating identity and such to just sort of get the identity of your nation and the idea to eliminate World War, another World War. And even I think there probably is some truth, could have been exaggerated, but I 100 believe the Holocaust happened.

I believe it was wicked, terrible. I don't believe Hitler is anywhere even close to a, I mean, it's just the fact that we're even talking about, it just baffles me. But the whole point is you wanna move from the RR Reno, return of the strong gods, post-war consensus to, oh yeah, well, Hitler was really a good guy.

And Yeah, and it's, you can't do it. Historically, it's impossible to do. That's right. Because it's not like we're so far removed that we are suddenly missing primary sources. You can go read Hitler's speeches, right?

You can listen to some of Hitler's speeches. There are videos that show you some of the things the Nazis were actually doing. There are prime, so it's not just other people writing about this. There are primary sources that show you how wicked and vile they were.

On top of that, we know 100 with clarity and certainty, Hitler hated Christ. He hated Christianity, but he loved the occult. He absolutely loved it. And as weird as it may sound, he actually invested some money into these different occult projects, trying to figure out if there was any way that he could gain power through occultic artifacts or through rituals or through basically witchcraft.

And this all becomes a very, very clear example of how you cannot look to Hitler as any example of being a Christian whatsoever. On top of that, the Nazi party was all about separation, segregation, and elimination of other ethnicities and ethnic groups.

And this is one of the big problems when you deal with Christian nationalism. Some of them veer off into more nationalistic tendencies than they are any strand of Christian whatsoever.

Yes, good observation, yes.

The Volk, Ethnicity, and White Supremacist Nationalism

What I mean by that is, again, let me use Stephen Wolff as the example. I mean, he's the one who wrote the book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, right? In his book, he uses some German language, and actually I don't really know how to pronounce most German words, so I'm probably gonna butcher this for listeners, but he has this quote in the book where he's talking about a Christian philosopher who was correct in saying that the Volk is a family writ large.

This is an apt description, not because everyone is a cousin by blood, but because one's kin lived here with the extended families of others for generations, leaving behind a trace of themselves and their cooperation and their great works and sacrifices.

Blood relations matter for your ethnicity because your kin have belonged to this people on this land, to this nation and this place, and so they bind you to that people and place, creating a common, and this is the German word, Volksgeist.

Now, the problem with that word is if you know anything about World War II, Nazism, German philosophy that led to the rise of Nazism, that was a word that they actually employed to talk about the superiority of the white race, the Aryan race in particular.

And what becomes even more problematic is as you read through Wolff's book, you eventually get to a point where he says, this is on page like 288. He says that this encourages and channels the boldness and spirit of youth while elevating the old and venerating the dead.

He's talking about a Christian prince, by the way, in acting that top-down change. So this Christian prince silences the social mammies and countenances the Spartan bootstrapper. He loves and enacts justice.

He worships God and calls his people to do the same. As an embodiment of the people, now keep in mind that whole Volksgeist thing, as an embodiment of the people, he is the best of the people, which also, by the way, relates to Nietzsche's Superman language.

I don't know if Wolff intended this or not, but anyway, as an embodiment of the people, he is the best of the people, a man reflecting both their image and God's image, signifying that they are gods and that they live in and for him.

With martial virtue, resolve, and thumos, he fights foreign aggressors, sacrificing himself for his people's good, and he establishes peace with other nations. Now, some of it sounds good, right? Peace with other, who doesn't want peace with other nations?

Yeah, yeah. And worshiping God and telling his people, yeah, I love that. But then you start to think about what he's saying. He's a man that reflects the image of his people. Well, what does that mean?

Well, go back to Volksgeist. It means reflecting the ethnicity of his people, not just the culture, the ethnicity, the look, the way his people look physically. It signifies that they are God. So we're talking about the West.

We're talking about Western Christianity. So we're talking about white people. So in Wolff's view, what this Christian prince does is he doesn't just enforce peace and fight for his nation and tell people to be Christian.

This Christian prince actually preserves the ethnicity of his people by preventing foreign invaders. So it's more than just, I'm gonna fight a war against people that wanna destroy my nation. It's more, I'm gonna fight against even the immigrants who wanna come to my nation who look different than I do because I want to protect the common Volksgeist.

And this isn't just like me saying, well, he's trajecting in that direction. A lot of the Wolffian Christian nationalists will go so far as to say, black people are inferior to white people, white people are superior culturally, intellectually in our ability to build, in our ability to create.

And so some of them will say, we need to either get rid of black people altogether from the nation, just deport them en masse, right? Just get rid of them. Or some of them who are extremely racist, and this wouldn't necessarily be the Wolffian strand as much as it's like the crazy Cori Mala strand where they're like, we need to just kill everyone who's not white.

And there's obviously a difference there. One of those is supremely racist. The other one is segregationalist and separatist, but they're horrible ideologies that are anti-Christ because if you think about it, the great call or the great promise, I suppose, of Revelation chapter seven is that we're gonna be gathered before the throne of God from every tribe, language, people, nation will all be there to worship God because as it turns out, our citizenship in heaven trumps whatever sort of national identity we have here on earth.

So Wolff would say, and I've heard others say this, the very verse that you just quoted, they would say, see, that's proof that we should keep the nations distinct now because one day we'll all... So what would you say to that?

The Kingdom of God and the Reconciliation of the Nations

Can I go post-mill here for a second? Caveat, this is all Jacob Tanner now, his post-mill run.

Go ahead. Alan is not post-mill, but are you okay if I do it on your show for a moment? Yes, yes, yeah. Okay, so I would go to Isaiah chapter 11, right? Isaiah chapter 11, verses six through nine say this.

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the whole of the cobra and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Now, I believe obviously we could apply that to the new earth and new heavens, right? And I think there is a sense in which, yeah, obviously we should expect that sort of peace to reign when God makes all things new.

But I also think there's a sense in which there's some poetic language being used here to explain an overall world peace that takes place before the return of Christ. So again, this is a post-millennial view.

But the language that I think is really important here is they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. So I believe that what happens as the gospel goes forth and more and more are added to the kingdom of God, more and more are saved and great commission, more and more people are discipled, therefore nations are discipled.

We are basically being gathered together into the one kingdom of God. So the kingdom of God is not of this world. It doesn't have natural origins. It has supernatural origins. If you think back to Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel chapter two, that Daniel then interprets, Daniel explains to him, hey, you had this dream about a rock cut out from the side of a mountain and no human hand did it.

And that rock takes down the giant statue. So it destroys the kingdoms of this world. And then the rock grows into this great mountain and it fills the entire world. It fills the entire earth and it endures forever.

That's the kingdom of God. And that kingdom of God, which has a supernatural origin, fills the entire earth. So do nations go away before the new heavens and new earth come? I don't think so. But I think that what does happen is because we have such perfect peace with our neighbors, there's a sort of Christianizing of these things that takes place.

The nations really just amount to physical borders. And the ethnic people that are inside, that stops mattering. It's not that ethnicity isn't important, of course it is, but it stops mattering as much as, hey, this person belongs to Christ.

This person over here in Kenya who looks nothing like me is my brother in Christ. And I have so much in common with him. And even though we belong to different nations, we belong to the one kingdom of God, which has filled and permeated this earth.

And I could go on and on, but I think that ultimately, the idea of physical nations at that point is no longer that they're separated by cultural differences or ethnic differences. The only true difference is land, where we actually are, where the borders exist.

And why do those borders exist? Because the borders themselves are natural, but ultimately in the new earth, I believe those are going to go away completely, right? So there will just be the one, one nation of Christ, the one kingdom of God.

I've always found your post-millennialism closer to Edwards, you know? And so obviously I'm not post-mill. I would even, I don't think you would agree with this, but I would even just say like in the 1689, 26 three says that Christ always has had and ever shall have a kingdom in this world to the end thereof, such as believe in him and make profession of his name.

So I would say the church is the kingdom, but the point that you're making about borders and, you know, nations. So I think it's important because I think some of these guys, sadly have gotten to this point where it's like, can your children marry someone of a different ethnicity?

And they're actually, some of them would actually say no. Some of them would say, well, yes, but it's not the best. You know, it's not the best. It's not optimal. And I just find that so fascinating. You know, I don't find that from the scriptures.

Christian Marriage and Ethnic Reconciliation

I don't think, so you get the other side maybe where it's like, okay, so, oh, sorry, real quick. There is this overreaction. So you can only hear for so long, white people bad, white people bad, white people bad, white people racist, white people horrible, white people have ruined the country.

So that's what you hear in our culture the last, what? You know, maybe not 50 Since I was a kid, really, yeah. Yeah, 30, 40 years, maybe, you know? And so it's like, okay. And it's really heightened around the Obama era and all that.

So the response has been then, let's just take this, no, white people are not bad all the way to white people are superior, right?

And this, by the way, has always been the overreaction. You can even look to Germany for this again. I actually take a historical position, which some would disagree with, but some do agree with me, that the rise of Nazism happened because of how far we beat Germany into the ground and made them repay for everything.

And like we defeated the German spirit is ultimately what happened. Well, how do you come back from that? You come back from that by saying, well, no, we're not horrible, horrible people. We may have made some mistakes along the way, but actually Germany has produced some good things.

And then ultimately, as the corrections continue to take place, you over-correct and you end up at this point where you say, hey, we're the best. And what we need is this superior Aryan race over everything.

And that's, I think, what has happened within America.

Yeah, no, yeah, that's good. So it's like, I think you have kind of a, you know, it's trying to fight this from every side. Like you kind of have the wokeness on one side, which is this idea that unless my child, unless my child marries someone of a different ethnicity, then I am, then I'm a terrible person.

But then you have And by the way, we can add here. There are times where it's unwise to marry somebody of a different ethnicity. For example, if my son were to come to me when he's older and he's like, hey, I've met this beautiful girl over in Japan or Kenya, I don't care where, anywhere.

But she doesn't speak a lick of English and I don't speak her language at all. What do you think, dad? I would say, I don't think that's a good idea, man. I think that's a pretty poor idea because you don't know the language, you don't know the culture.

It's just not gonna work out. Is she even a Christian? How can you know if you can't communicate with her?

Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Marrying someone just for the cultural virtue, like say, well, I'm gonna marry someone from a different ethnicity just to show how virtuous I am. No, that's a terrible idea, that's wrong.

That's ungodly, that's unwise. You're setting yourself up for absolute failure. So that, we'd both be like, nah. But on the other side, it's like, well, I met this godly young lady, we have a lot of the same interests.

She's black, I'm white, she's Hispanic, I'm white, I'm black, she's Japanese, whatever. What's your counsel for me? I'm like, well, but first and foremost, like you guys, first and foremost, it's a requirement.

You both love Christ, you're both a Christian. And some of the other differences to whatever extent, it's, there may be less and more or less hardship or whatever, but it's like, there's no barrier there.

I don't even have a second guess on that.

We're acknowledging the fact there may be hardship. I remember a few years ago, a friend of mine, a white guy married a black girl. Now in Pennsylvania, that is a pretty big deal because there's not a lot of black people in our specific area or in our communities.

So for a white guy to marry a black girl, there's going to be trials, there's going to be hardships. That said, they love Christ, they love one another. What does hinder them? I think that they're gonna be able to weather whatever storm may come.

And there have been storms, there have been issues, but God is faithful. So in a situation like that, yeah, the most important thing is that they both love Christ. And if they love Christ, they love one another.

I don't know what hinders them other than knowing there will be trials because of the world that we live in, but they're not impossible.

That's right. One other comment I would make about that is there is differences between people of the same ethnicity. You know, my son is engaged. He's gonna be married in November. And he's gonna marry this lady from a godly Christian family.

Pastor is a friend of mine. They're great. But our families, now that we're really, really similar, but even in that, our families are different. We have some different traditions and different things we do and different ideas about things.