What’s the Value of Going to Church Anyway?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: So this is another Return podcast. We've been on a hiatus for a while. [00:00:05] Speaker B: It's the Return of the Return. [00:00:07] Speaker A: The Return of the Return. Yeah. So Dustin has actual responsibilities known as children. We both have had a lot going on and we don't. I'm not a big believer in putting out shitty content just to put it out that I don't think that's valuable for anybody. And so I haven't wanted to just record fluff. I just wanted to wait till I had something to talk about and then talk about it. And so I think that us waiting was the right decision for both of us. But we're glad to be back doing it again. We're good. Glad to be back. And we've got a bunch of things that we're going to talk about today. We've got. I just wanted to check in first. Dustin, what have you been reading, listening to, watching? That's got your attention piqued these days. [00:00:50] Speaker B: So we are recording this and early August. And the buzz in the both literary and cinematic world is of course Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey. Yes. Which I have seen twice, one in non IMAX and the other in imax. And IMAX was for sure the superior viewing spectacle. And it's. I think Wilson, who is the most recent translator of the Odyssey, wrote a pretty scathing review of which I thought was totally unfair. [00:01:29] Speaker A: You can't be mad at someone that they didn't make your vision for what the movie is. I also think adaptation is where interesting things happen. If he just made. If he just took her book and then used it as a script and then slightly adapted it, that wouldn't be good cinema. I don't think it would be horrible. But I do think there is an. And I would be curious, your perspective. I do think there's something interesting about what she did with Odysseus, making him this guy driven by guilt and remorse, as opposed to driven by securing honor, which is more of a concept that would have been familiar to him. And so making a kind of quasi Judeo Christian Odysseus. Is that what you got when you watched it? You felt like he was more built from that milieu as opposed to the ancient Greek one? [00:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it was an ancient Greek story contextualized into a 21st century post Christian context. And for that reason alone, I think that's why people are flocking to see this movie, regardless of whether or not they've read the book. But yeah, that review was for good so far as it went. But I was like this is exactly why Rotten Tomatoes put the critics score and the popular score on at the same time. Because it's two different metrics of evaluation, I feel like. But I love that. [00:02:56] Speaker A: I think that some people like Emily Wilson is famous because she's done these kind of very well received translations. But she's not the only classicist out there. And I've read lots of great classist takes that like the movie, some that were mid about the movie, some that disliked it. And so I think there's a range. It's not like the world of classics is like Christopher Nolan blasphemed our great literary text. It's more like he made some choices. Some of them like him, some of them don't. But I think he's just trying to make something that's his own unique vision. [00:03:28] Speaker B: Yeah. How about you? What have you been reading? [00:03:32] Speaker A: So we've done a number of interviews where patristics have come up Church fathers texts. And so I somehow skipped a lot of that material in seminary. I think I went to a Protestant Presbyterian seminary. So yeah, I think you're going to read. [00:03:48] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of chronological snobbery too. [00:03:51] Speaker A: Yeah, you're going to read your Knox and your Calvin and all that kind of stuff, but you're not going to be as exposed to Gregory of Nyssa, which is what I've been reading recently. I just read his on Resurrection, which incredible is fantastic in that it's so clear eyed about the universalism that is just present throughout scripture and Christian theology. And it almost felt new even though it was old. And for me is illustrative of the fact that we are so historically illiterate, even church and outside the church that we act as if the history of Christian thought is this unifocal thing where it was just the Apostles Creed and it's just been like a defense of that every hundred years as opposed to an evolution of thought over time. And so it's just been fun to re approach the history of Christian thought with some fresh eyes outside of the context of a Christian community. That's really interesting to me. So I've enjoyed that quite a bit and it's. And I would actually recommend it for people to read because it's not totally. It's the translation I read was really straightforward. It wasn't a difficult text to read. [00:05:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. There's that whole series of those from St. Vladimir's Press that are just beautifully translated and really well done. I love everything they do. [00:05:20] Speaker A: So let's jump into some kind of current events. This one's a little less current because it happened two months ago in June. But we're going to talk a little bit about something that happened at a Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Florida. [00:05:33] Speaker B: Oh, something happened, eh? [00:05:35] Speaker A: Yeah. I'll go ahead and read from the Christianity Today article because this gives us kind of the background context. Quote A proposal by the nation's largest Protestant denomination to ban churches that have women pastors or let women preach on Sunday mornings passed overwhelmingly on Wednesday, marking the first step toward enshrining the ban in the Southern Baptist Convention's constitution. Almost three quarters, or 74.6% of local church delegates known as messengers, voted in favor of the Truth and Unity amendment during a Wednesday morning session at SBC's annual meeting, and a quarter of votes voted against the measure, which actually Quick pause for commentary. That's actually good to hear that it was. There's still 25% that had some ethical misgivings about this. Anyway, continuing quote under the denomination's rules, any change to its constitution must be approved by a two thirds majority. Sorry, my microphone switched. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky has said a ban will keep the SPC from getting too liberal. He says there's a great line that divides liberal and biblical evangelicalism. I like that contrast there. That's my commentary and you could see it on this very issue, said Mohler, who wrote and proposed the amendment to the trajectory of liberal denominations is clear ahead of the SBC meeting. Baptist Women in Ministry, which provides support and resources for women in ministry, paid for a billboard to go up in Orlando, where the SBC gathering was held defending women who teach and preach the Bible. That's interesting. So this group says women in ministry deserve affirmation, respect and the opportunity to follow God's call. We are heartbroken that they have been denied those fundamental freedoms in the process of this voice vote. And then later on in the article it says Bible teacher Beth Moore, then a Southern Baptist, tweeted about speaking at the at a church on Mother's Day in 2019, which set it off an online firestorm over the issue of women preachers and pastors. Then in 2021, Saddleback Church, one of the largest churches in the SPC, ordained several women on staff as pastors so I could continue on. There's a lot of backstory here, but essentially this is perceived or being framed as a culture war situation. Dustin, what's your initial reaction to this? [00:08:00] Speaker B: It's just sad and disappointing on so many levels. It affirms what so many People, especially young people that I know and interact with, assume about Christianity is that it's anti women. And even just the, the language of a ban right is such a bounded. Here's the line in the sand that we're here to defend. And this dichotomy of biblical versus liberal is ridiculous. But more so I think isn't surprising that the denomination that was founded in defense of slavery would make a move like this. This is part and parcel to kind of their origin story of who they are. And I don't mean that to say that in some way they are on the wrong side of history, although I think they are. Obviously that tends to be the case. That's not necessarily the kind of anchor that I would make as opposed to they are reading scripture through the lens of their cultural construct and using scripture to justify and defend their particular cultural structures and stereotypes and biases rather than being confronted by the, the biblical narrative and story and trajectory. It's highly cherry picked and selective. My church, we just did an eight week sermon series and this was like not planned. We didn't even know that the SBC was doing this until we had started the series and some of the chatter came out. But we did a whole series on women and the Bible. Not women in the Bible, but women and the Bible, tracing the grand story of the sort of equal partnership between men and women that begins on page one of the scriptures and continues through to the very end in, in ways that are incredibly, when you understand it in its cultural context, are incredibly anti hierarchy, anti patriarchy, and were incredibly subversive in their time. And so when you understand that, and it deconstructs everything that I think people have come to think that those texts mean, especially Paul in First Timothy. Timothy, I don't permit a woman to speak or First Corinthians. Women should be silent. Like when you understand what's happening in the cultural context, Paul is making a specific assertion page pastorally to a specific community for a specific reason. You're like, okay, this isn't a universalized, this is descriptive, not prescriptive. So that's where I land on it. [00:11:13] Speaker A: And you know, what was the congregational reaction when you were discussing these issues? [00:11:19] Speaker B: So the way I came to describe it, kind of in conversation with people, what I heard people saying to me was this feels to me, this conversation that we're in. It feels to me like when you are in school and you're doing a math problem and you know the answer, but you don't quite know how to show the work. This series was showing the work. So how we got there, arguing the same texts on the same grounds and coming to very different conclusions, which is that is true of Christian history, that Christians in good faith have come to different conclusions on this. But I think the approach that we took is the more faithful one to the approach of Jesus, which that matters more to me than what the reformers might think or even the patristics might think or any of that. [00:12:12] Speaker A: Yeah. As someone that grew up in the sbc, this was always attention is the role of women. And it was always skated around. There was ways they could be in leadership without being in leadership. And so it became almost semantic thing where they relied on women to do a lot of things, but as long as they framed it in a certain way that they were exactly of a certain station, which is. [00:12:37] Speaker B: Or like that Beth Moore thing. Like that Beth Moore thing. Like she got in trouble for preaching on Mother's Day, which in many SBC churches is like the one time that women are preaching from the, you know, from the platform behind the pulpit. Cause it's kind of, oh, it doesn't really count. It's Mother's Day, it's for moms. But it's this semantic thing. And apparently Al Mohler and his cronies wanted to crack down on that sort of heresy. Tongue firmly implanted in cheek. [00:13:07] Speaker A: A really stark contrast is a video that I shared with you that I found on social media. I need to do a little bit more investigation of this. I know the video is authentic, but it basically is. And I'll link to it in the description so you can watch it for yourself. It was a fascinating link to a video from Southern, what appears to be a megachurch of some kind, with a pastor who was white, had a Southern accent, and was essentially making the case that the United States is not a Christian nation. Some of the things he says in the video are, Christian nations don't massacre and genocide Native Americans. Christian nations don't have chattel slavery. Christian nations don't. Don't find ways to persecute minorities in the way that we do. Christian nations don't take away food and health care from needy children. So basically going through and really pointing out the central tension at the heart of people that believe that we live in a Christian nation, which is our actions don't really correspond to that. And. But I think it's. For me, it's a false argument because I don't think a nation can be Christian. But I appreciate that someone is stepping out and saying, like, within that context within that environment that there is a problem here and people need to rethink their terms and rethink their perspective on what the United States is because we have a lot of Christian nationalism going on. I was just reading David French, who's a conservative columnist at the New York Times, just published an article about political Christianity. And a number of the issues that he looked at is that or one of the primary issues they looked at is that increasingly faith, the ideas of faith are flowing from politics rather than going the other way. And in a past episode we discussed the concept that, that religion and politics always interact, but really ideas should be emerging from religion and influencing politics, not the other way around. But we're seeing a lot more of the reverse right now, 100%. What was your reaction to that video? Someone that does that for a living, that talks in front of people. It's pretty aggressive. [00:15:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Hats off to this guy. Maybe it was his. He looked like he was about retirement age, so maybe it was a swan song for him. The last shot across the. [00:15:32] Speaker A: Is that what your last sermon is going to sound like? [00:15:34] Speaker B: Yeah. But yeah, he immediately it confronted a bias in me where or that I like I've stereotyped white Southern men as Christian nationalists. So I was like, whoa, this is mind boggling to, to hear somebody from that background talking in this way. And yeah, he's wading into really a 1700 year old argument. Ever since Constantine made Christianity the quote unquote official religion of the Roman Empire, the. The question of church and state and how that all works out has been a battleground. Some in some eras more prominent than others. But about 25 years ago, a pastor and author named Greg Boyd wrote a book called the Myth of a Christian Nation that I think is still probably the, the best kind of articulation of reasons why a nation can't be Christian, why America isn't a Christian nation, and for all of the reasons that this guy outlines, slavery, the way we've treated and treat indigenous people on and on the. I mean just the basic history, right. People left England, which is constitutionally a Christian nation. The monarch is the head of the Church of England. Let's start there. [00:17:12] Speaker A: We were the people who were left out. For them, refugees from a Christian nation aren't going to recreate the thing that they ran away from 100% anymore, unfortunately. [00:17:24] Speaker B: Right? Unfortunately not. Yeah. [00:17:27] Speaker A: I think it's a great video to text to your family members like a week before Thanksgiving. So then when Thanksgiving rolls around, you'll have a kind of icebreaker Topic? Yeah. [00:17:39] Speaker B: Something light and easy to get into things. [00:17:42] Speaker A: I always love telling elderly family members that they're wrong. Okay, we're gonna transition to our kind of focus for today, which is a fantastic little article that I read by a philosopher at George Mason University named Rebecca Lowe. And it was on one of her substacks. She's got a couple. We'll link to it at the bottom. And the title of the article is why I Shouldn't Go To Church Anymore. So this is catnip kind of stuff for Dustin and I, because this is at the core of what this podcast is about, is just understanding why it's hard for people who maybe have an interest in religion for a myriad reasons, why it's hard for them to go back into the building. So what we're going to do is we're going to go through her main points and discuss them a little bit, and then we'll talk about what this means for us. Essentially. To summarize, she says at the jump of the article that she still. There's still a lot of reasons that she is drawn to go to church. The first one that she mentions is intellectual stimulation. For a lot of people, church on a Sunday could be the most intellectually stimulating environment they're in all week. I think a lot of ways you're exploring theological ideas at a high level, you're discussing this with peers. The history of Christian thought is one of the most complex intellectual histories we have, maybe second only to philosophy or something along those lines. And so I think it is an environment where I often felt intellectually stimulated. And it's a fun environment to push back, argue, explore ideas. And so I get where she's coming from. The second one is a second draw. For her to go back to church is something I hear from a lot of people, which is aesthetic appreciation or aesthetic experience, which is basically just this idea that it's beautiful, services are beautiful. Aesthetic experience is something I hear from a lot of people. They love the candles, they love the liturgy. They love the hymns. They love the organ of the choir. They love the robes and the vestments and the things. All that stuff is really neat and very beautiful and comes from a long tradition of this idea that God created beauty, and we want to create, recreate that in the context of the physical environment. I was just in England this summer and saw some of the most beautiful churches I've ever seen, and they left me just without words. And then the third reason why she's drawn to go back to church is moral admiration. There's aspects of religious life and moral commitments that people make that are inspiring to her. And she would like to emulate components of it, not all of it. That's still a draw for her. So those are the kind of the three main things she lists. And I think all of us can identify with at least one who have left church and no longer participate. I would say all three. For me, I think that big draws. So she starts with that and then she talks about why she left Christianity, which why she left is pretty straightforward. It's just she doesn't believe the metaphysical claims that are integral to the Christian religion. I think that's the core of it. And she does say an interesting point which I think might be worth exploring more. She's unwilling to modify her understanding of what religion is. Right. I think she's starting from. And this is maybe getting into a little bit of critique. She's starting from a place where religion is sole purpose is to support metaphysical claims and create an experience for people that involves aesthetics and all those things. But at the core of it, Christianity is a series of claims which I don't think you or I would agree with that as like a baseline definition for what Christianity is. It's a core component. But if you're just saying a religion is just a series of claims like that, that for me is something else. What do you think? [00:21:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with these are not. Christianity at its root is not a series of philosophical propositions or metaphysical metaphysical claims. And it is a, at its core, Christianity. She's right on. She's just coming at it from a different way. She is like I can't believe in the resurrection. And the reason that Christianity exists is not because of the metaphysical claim of the resurrection, but because of the historical event of the Resurrection. Right. And Christians don't believe. And this is different admittedly than how [00:22:36] Speaker A: most maybe unpack that a little bit more. [00:22:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:22:40] Speaker A: So I don't think people would necessarily see the difference between the claim and the historical event. It's just one is like a. Is a verbal encapsulation of event. [00:22:51] Speaker B: So the claim would be the verbal encapsulation of a theory. Right. Is it possible that a. A man in a physical body, in the physical universe governed by physical laws, could rise from the dead from a purely materialistic standpoint? That's how most people approach that claim. And it's like you've never seen that happen. Death bats a thousand and maybe there's resuscitation type things, but never somebody's three days dead rises from the dead is witnessed by hundreds, if not thousands of people, interacts with them physically, tangibly. And so I'm actually starting to conflate them so that there's the claim that this sort of thing could happen. And that's, I think, what she's objecting on materialist grounds. [00:23:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me now. [00:23:51] Speaker B: It makes a lot of sense. The way that the physical world, the rules of the physical world operate. Yes, that is impossible. That's why the historical event of Jesus, bodily resurrection, attested to by eyewitnesses. And there is as much historical validating evidence for the resurrection, more documentation for the validity of this historical event than perhaps any other historical event in history. If you do the research, there is a ton of stuff that validates that in the first century, Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead and that just shatters all of our categories, because that's not how the world works. And that's precisely the point. And if this did happen, which that is the basis of Christian faith is faith in this event. And that's different than a lot of people are going to talk about, because it is connected to the resurrection or to the crucifixion. Of course, you don't get resurrection without crucifixion. But. Christians don't believe what I'm arguing. I'll put it in the first person. What I'm arguing is what I don't believe Christianity to be true because the Bible says it's true. I believe Christianity is true and worthy of me giving my life to. Because Jesus rose from the dead. And this launched a movement that recreated human community en masse and Christian. And history kind of pivots around this. This event. So it creates this movement from that point. And that movement gave us the Bible, which attests to this event and the implications of it in community and human life. Yeah, with your aesthetic beauty and moral goodness and intellectual. Like what we're doing is intellectualizing about this reality. [00:26:04] Speaker A: So I'm trying. So let me mirror back to you. So just so I'm following. It seems like she's starting with philosophical priors and then checking them against this particular event and saying this never happens. So it invalidates the event. And you're saying this thing happened, which in some ways invalidates our philosophical priors. And so then we just. Yeah, so it's coming at it from. [00:26:31] Speaker B: So this is actually. Yeah, and this is actually putting what we were saying a few moments ago about Christian nationalism and the political cart being before the faithful horse or whatever. This Is the same thing in philosophical terms? [00:26:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's continue with her argument. So she talks about what draws her to church, then she talks about why she left. And then she concludes her article by talking about why the things that draw her are not sufficient at her back in a pew. And so she has a few reasons. The first is that she rightly says that you can find moral and intellectual benefits other places. I can read philosophy, I can read moral or wisdom literature and derive a lot of the same things without having to deal with the messiness of these metaphysical claims. And in a lot of respects, she's right. And the second area she pushes on is she talks about aesthetics and about the benefit because, I mean, you can find, you can go to an art museum, but there is something specific about stepping into an old church, listening to a choir in an organ, and having a moment where you smell candles, that is pretty unique to religion. And so in that way, she can't necessarily find a perfect replica of that somewhere else. But what she instead says is that she would feel uncomfortable participating in religion if she's just there for aesthetic reasons, because that is pulling away from what the purpose and the mission of the institution is, which is to perpetuate this kind of religious tradition in this community. And then the last thing that she says is that she would rather based her decision making about metaphysics and does God exist on kind of cold, calculated reasoning rather than allowing herself to be embedded in a religious community where emotions will cloud her judgment and she might quote, unquote, make. It's not a quote, unquote. She didn't say this, but make an emotional decision about something as important as whether God exists. [00:28:42] Speaker B: Yep. [00:28:42] Speaker A: So I think those are all reasonable. So let me ask you a question. I'm curious your perspective. Can you. Is it possible to just love a beauty of a tradition without believing it? Or is that like having your cake and eating it? [00:29:00] Speaker B: Is it possible? Absolutely. [00:29:02] Speaker A: Okay. [00:29:02] Speaker B: We all love traditions that we're not a part of. When you hear about a friend, friend's family's Christmas tradition and they do X, Y or Z thing, and it's beautiful and meaningful and compelling, and so you could admire it, you could even participate in it without believing. If in this hypothetical scenario that the motivating engine underneath that is this family's particular Christian faith, you can still. There's an on ramp to participating in a tradition without believing in it. In my own community, we say every Sunday, you can belong here, whether or not you ever believe here. Belief isn't necessarily contingent upon belonging in the community. [00:29:51] Speaker A: So your response to Rebecca is you could come to my church and sit there and have aesthetic moments of appreciation and we're happy to have you. [00:30:02] Speaker B: We're happy to have you and we're happy to engage in dialogue with you. If you. Let's talk about your cold, calculated reasons for not believing or your reasons, your emotional reasons for not believing, if you're so open to that. And I will read N.T. wright's Jesus and the Victory of God with you, which is the most robust historical account of the resurrection that I know. It is pure reason. I will read that with you. And if you don't walk away convinced of the historical event of the Resurrection, then that's okay. But you can't say you, you didn't. There's not, there aren't compelling enough reasons that aren't just purely emotional. [00:30:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:43] Speaker B: And on the flip side, Jonathan Heights. Oh gosh, I'm forgetting the. The subtitle is why Good People are Divided by Religion and Righteous Something. Righteous mind. Righteous mind. He talks about the emotional elephant and the rational, real writer that we. From a social, psychological standpoint, we're all walking around as basically big emotional elephants. That's what guides us through life and all of our important decision making processes. But we have a rational writer, so we make emotional decisions, but then we make ad hoc reasonable conclusions and deductions about why we did that. So we all are compelled by emotion whether we admit it or not. So the question is not are you or are you not making an emotional decision? It's, are you aware of the emotional decision that you're making? [00:31:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. That is a fallacy embedded in this, that we can separate those things out. [00:31:50] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:31:51] Speaker A: I think there's, it's. I forget the name of the book. I think it was Descartes Error that really tapped into this how we don't make decisions and less emotions involved because those things are intertwined. And so it's not I think, therefore I am, it's I think and I feel at the same time, always therefore I am. [00:32:07] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the other component to that is if you really think about it, I mean, if you think about the most emotionally rep. Repressed person that you know, how are you thinking about their rational decision making? Yeah, it's probably not somebody you're emulating. So yeah, I think I would love to. Maybe we'll send this to Rebecca Low and try and engage her in dialogue. [00:32:40] Speaker A: Try and convince. [00:32:40] Speaker B: I would, I would, Yeah, I would love that. Because I have heard all of the reasons she articulates, and I think they're. They're clearly compelling for lots of different reasons. And I have lots of empathy and understanding. If I knew her story, I'd probably get where she's coming from. If I lived her story, I might say, yeah, me too. And I think that there's another way of engaging this conversation that is beyond the intellectual or aesthetic or moral categories that obviously those play into as sort of fruit of this idea or this reality, but aren't contingent upon them per se. [00:33:24] Speaker A: It's almost like she's saying too, by being in an environment like that where she doesn't believe those things, she's affecting the mission of the community. [00:33:33] Speaker B: Right. [00:33:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So. [00:33:35] Speaker B: But in my mind, she's somehow tainting it. [00:33:37] Speaker A: Yeah. What do you make of that? Because that I get where she's coming from. If I had a community of vegans and this carnivore decided that they wanted to join it, and they're like, no, I appreciate veganism. I just. I really like hamburgers. And then they started bringing T bone steaks to some of our gatherings. Eventually I might go like, this is a gathering for vegans, and you're eating a steak in the same room and we're smelling it, and we can watch the dribble of the steak juices coming down your mouth. It's affecting our ability to function as a vegan community. So I guess that's kind of an analogy. Where's the analogy? Where does it not work? [00:34:19] Speaker B: I think what I'm hearing you articulate is what we define in our community as bounded, fuzzy, or centered people. So a bounded community would be like, we're vegan, you're carnivores. Like, never the twain shall meet. A fuzzy set community would say, everybody has to eat. It doesn't matter what you eat. We prefer to eat vegan. You can prefer to eat that. But yeah, just like whatever moral claim you have, you're welcome to just keep and keep to yourself, really. But a centered community has at its core a vision of where it's trying to go and who it's trying to become. And there's a lot of bandwidth for difference and disagreement along. Along the way as people are making their way through the outside into the. To the center of whatever the community is. In our case, it's Jesus. I'm trying to become more. More like him. And so that there's a lot of. If Christian community was based on everybody agreeing, holding the same beliefs, like, there would. That. That's why there are thousands of Christian denominations. Because if you disagree, you just form a new denomination when the assumption is we all have to agree on this view of Scripture or this view of how Jesus died, or this, that or the other. Whereas when we can rally around Jesus, life, death and resurrection, there is more margin for people to be on a directional path towards that in their particular circumstance and situation of what that looks like for them, while also being connected to the larger whole and the larger mission of what we're trying to be. So it's universal enough to capture everybody, but it's particular enough to be contextualized into yours or mine or whoever's particular circumstances. That's why, like we say, acceptance doesn't equal agreement. Like our acceptance of you in this community does not depend on your agreement with us about how we end on, like, where we land on things. And even if you, even when you disagree, because you will, you still can belong here. But just know that this is the sort of burning core of who we are and that's not going to change. [00:36:57] Speaker A: Yeah, her philosophy of religion. I think that misunderstanding is the central problem in what I'm saying here because she's created a caricature of religion and using that as a kind of justification for not participating. There's plenty of great reasons to not participate in religion. I just don't know if she's articulated any in this particular article. I think she's just articulated like a feeling of discomfort about being different in a room, which I can get that there's times I've been a pretty progressive person for a long time and there was times in high school, college, even graduate school where I'd be in a pretty conservative religious environment where I knew I thought differently than a majority of the people in the room. And that can be uncomfortable and I empathize with that. But to make the secondary jump there from there's an area of discomfort and I'm going to disrupt the mission of religion by sitting in that room like an extreme jump. And I don't think that's accurate and nor do I think that's what churches are supposed to be. So, yeah, there's just a lot of assumptions in this article that I don't agree with. But I also understand where she's coming from. If she doesn't have a background in the philosophy of religion, she would know that there's a variety of views for what the purpose and function of religion is, how thought works in religion, how variety of belief works in religion. Belief itself is a more complicated concept than she's articulating here. [00:38:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean she, she says that she has some sort of Christian background that she's deconstructed. So I'd be curious to hear about her experience. My hunch is that she grew up in a non denominational evangelical church. That would be, that was my assumption too. Yeah, but I could totally be wrong. But yeah, I think on the whole. Let me tell you where my, my, my initial reaction was to this is. A couple years ago I read this. It was a sociologist talking about how different socioeconomic groups approach food and like the three questions that, that people ask according to their different socioeconomic tier. So at the, the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder people ask is there enough, will there be enough food to go around? Then kind of middle class is how does it taste? And then the elite upper class asks how does it look? So it's about presentation. And I think there's often in elite academic spaces there's this kind of aesthetic appreciation for things. But it's, it seems to me like it's operating from that socioeconomic background. Like you're just wanting something to be presented in a particular way that has aesthetic beauty, that compels you because all of your basic needs. Needs are already, are already met and you're. Oh yeah, religion might work for people who don't have enough food on the table and want to believe that there's a God who provides for them sort of idea. [00:40:19] Speaker A: But I've surpassed all those people and [00:40:22] Speaker B: I've surpassed all those. Yeah, exactly. I see through all of that now. And, and certainly that's not like people. That's not to say that's where everybody who's deconstructing or any of that has. That's where they're landing. I just think in kind of the similar category as this article is coming from. It comes from that sort of place. And I just think that is there's actually a, I think there's actually a religious motivation underneath that there's a belief system that's operating underneath that's not evaluated, it's just assumed. And, and I think Christianity is something wholly the way of Jesus is something wholly different than what most people critique it as being. [00:41:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's a great place to end. I think in the next episode, I think it'd be fruitful for us to do a quick survey of some of the different perspectives on the philosophy of religion because that world is big and complicated and I've been dipping into it more and more these days. We've been done this podcast. I think there's a lot of assumptions people bring about what religion is that based in what their experience is. Some of that's based in concepts that they were given in Sunday school and a lot of it is more complex than people think. And so I think it'd be worthwhile for you and I to explore those and unpack. Is religion just a set of metaphysical claims? Is it just an ethical guidebook? Is it just some myth making to help people understand why there's storms and their crops didn't grow? There's a lot of different perspectives on what religion is, quote, unquote. And so I think that would be a fruitful topic for next time. Yeah, interesting article. I'll put the link in the description so you can read it for yourself, come to your own conclusions. But it's definitely thought provoking and worthwhile to read to think about these concepts at a deeper level. So yeah, there we are. [00:42:20] Speaker B: Here we go. Turn of the return. [00:42:22] Speaker A: The return of the return. We're back at a more regular schedule. Now I'm not going to promise, I'm not going to promise more. More regular, regular schedule, but regular enough that you will notice if we're not there. [00:42:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And if you've listened this far, you are a true fan. Yeah. Send us, send us your questions because we want to address those too. [00:42:44] Speaker A: And reconstruction return podcastmail.com yeah, link will be in the show notes. [00:42:49] Speaker B: Do you gift card or something? [00:42:52] Speaker A: After bribe, there's no way.