Thank you so much for your lecture. We have a number of questions. I'm going to try, if possible, to order them in a way. The first is, at one point in your book you note that moral truths are really expressions of emotional preference. Can you unpack that observation for us? Yeah, that's a point that Alistair MacIntyre, a Roman Catholic ethicist, still teaching at Notre Dame, I think. He must be about 90. That's a point that he makes first, I think, in his book, After Virtue, published around about 1980, 81. MacIntyre's basic point is that in the West now, we've reached a point where society is no longer agree on any kind of meta-narrative about what it means to be a human being. And that means that we have these discussions about ethics and morality where we think we're having a meaningful discussion. What we're actually doing is affirming our emotional preferences. So, for example, the claim that abortion is wrong really translates as I personally don't like abortion. So it's what he calls emotivism. And I think there's more than a grain of truth in that for many of us. When you think about the highly charged way in which debates surrounding the Supreme Court have gone on recently, you can see the depth of emotion that's involved in these things. And you also realize that we're at a point now where there's no constructed debate going on concerning these appointments. It's simply the assertion of power by one side over the other. That's not to say that I don't think that the recent Supreme Court appointment is a good thing. I think it's a good thing. But when you look at the dynamics of the discussion, there hasn't really been any discussion there. It tends to be two sides screaming and shouting at each other. There is no consensus now on what life means that allows us to have constructive ethical and moral debates. And I think Christians can be, we can sometimes fall prey to that without realizing it. I remember a few years ago an article written on homosexuality by a leading evangelical, leading conservative evangelical. And the title of the article was something like the yuck factor or the gag factor. And this person was essentially arguing that homosexuality is wrong because I find it disgusting. And that struck me as an interesting argument that was really very susceptible to the accusation of you just stating a taste or an emotional preference at this point. Some people find French kissing disgusting. Does it make it wrong? So that's sort of the background to that. I would also add that when you think about how we talk about morality these days, the language of right and wrong has been displaced by language of taste by and large. Somebody makes a comment, we won't say that's wrong, we'll say that was offensive. Well, some things are correct and offensive. A student could come up to me and say, you're a bald guy. I might find that offensive, but it's hard to argue with the truth factor, the element of truth there. So when we start to sit back and think about how we talk and think morally, it's interesting how much emotional preference plays into that on all sides of the discussion. So then would it be fair to say that personal feeling is absolutized and thus becomes a truth claim? Yes, and that's not to say that feelings aren't important. An example I use in class at Grove is to say, you know, if I look out the window and see an old lady being beaten up by a bunch of hooligans, if I Google, you know, is that a good or a bad thing, then we have a word for people who have to Google stuff like that. We call them sociopaths. We know there's something wrong with them. I immediately feel that something wrong is going on there, and I want to go out and help or get help for that lady. So feelings are an important part of ethics. The problem is when we detach those feelings from any overarching understanding of what it means to be a human being, when all we have is feelings, then MacIntyre's point sort of expands and becomes even more pungent that, yeah, my ethics are just my personal feelings at that particular point. Very good. In that light, in the quest for authenticity, expressive individualism focuses upon the inner feelings of an individual, yet at the same time appears to require the recognition and affirmation of the surrounding society Why is this the case? And there would appear to be an apparent inconsistency here, if society is actually said to be part of the problem. Yeah. And I think, first of all, just clarify term expressive individualism term I use in the book to me, really that that psychologized notion of the self, that I realize my humanity by realizing outwardly that which I feel inwardly. And we tend to think, expressive individuals, we tend to think, and I think we're all today expressive individuals, we tend to think of our identities as a monologue. I am who I decide to be. You see this with teenagers talking about the way they dress. They say, you know, the way I dress expresses the inner me. It expresses the authentic me. I'm dressing outwardly that which I feel myself to be inwardly. The interesting thing about teenagers, of course, is they all dress the same, which raises the question, well, is my identity really a monologue? The answer is no. Identity is not really a monologue. We think it's a monologue, but it's actually a dialogue. And I think there are sort of two... There are two things that lie at the heart of the human condition, which Christians and I think non-Christians, many non-Christians would accept, and that is we want to be free. We want to be ourselves, but we also want to belong. We want to be recognized. Most of us don't want to be ignored, rejected, repudiated by society. Think of the trivial example of you go into the school canteen and you see the cool kids sitting at a table, and you go over and sit by the cool kids, and the cool kids all get up and walk elsewhere. They've not recognized you. They've not acknowledged you as a legitimate person at that point, and you feel alienated. And that, in microcosm, is what life in general is like. We want to be free, but we also want to belong. I do think that there's that sort of dialogue or dialectic that lies at the heart of what it means to be a human being, an expressive individualism. In some ways, there's a con trick that... Like I said when I referred to Rousseau, I said, man is born free. No, he isn't. Man is actually born utterly dependent upon his parents. Just pop out the womb and your mother and father walk off and leave you, you're gonna be eaten by wild animals, you're gonna starve to death very quickly. You're utterly dependent. And the problem with the myth of expressive individualism is it cons us into believing that our freedom is most fully realized when we simply act on our inner desires where everything in the world points to the fact that that is not the case. Would it be fair to say that one of the agendas today is, in fact, the transformation of society in terms of that it would recognize those personal individual feelings, legitimize them, and thus there would need to be a transformation of the society that is hostile to it. Yeah. And again, when you go back to the idea of the psychological and the expressive individual, What was education for somebody like my grandfather? Well, he happened to leave school at 13, but in terms of the general growing up, my grandfather was required, if you like, to learn the way the world was and fit himself into it. That was how he was free and belonged. He had to learn the way the world was and fit into it. A more extreme example would be go back to the Middle Ages. Most of us, our ancestors, would have been peasant farmers. The thing about a peasant farmer is it's no good going out and sowing your crops in September and trying to reap them in January. You've got to learn the structure of the world in order to survive. And we might say the therapists of that culture were those who helped you to do that. Philip Reif has a very powerful statement about the church. And Philip Reif was a secular Jew. He carried no particular card for Christianity, but he said, you know, in the Middle Ages and earlier modern times, nobody went to church to be made to feel happy. they went to church to have their misery explained to them. One could be facetious and say the OPC has taken that very seriously. But he's making a point there that you went to church not to be affirmed in yourself, but to be transformed. And I think when you look at liturgy, for example, highly liturgical services are services that you go to as an individual and have to fit yourself into. Whereas today we talk about churches, you know, worship was great because I was able to really express myself in it. Worship was spontaneous. This is the language of the expressive individual. And when you think about, well, the therapists of the modern society, they're not the priests that explain your misery to you. They're the priests who try to make society change to accommodate you, which goes to your point. And the idea is now that it's that Rousseau idea. You're not the problem, society is. And so we need to gerrymander society so that you feel good and affirmed about yourself. You don't go to school to take an exam to come fifth and see that other kid get the prize. All must have prizes. All must be affirmed in order to be fully whole. A really tragic example I used in the book, I took it from the Boston Women's Book Health Collective, which I'd never heard of until I started to do research for the book. Rosaria Butterfield put me on to them and I spent a merry few days reading this massive book, Our Bodies, Ourselves, which is sort of the feminist bible. And there was an anecdote in that that they put forward as a positive thing and yet struck me as capturing the tragedy of the modern rootless person. They give the testimony of a lesbian woman who's been living with this other woman for 10 years. I think it was 10 years. And this other woman decides that she's a man trapped in a woman's body and transitions to being a man. That then places the first lesbian woman in a real dilemma because her friends are now telling her that she's straight because she's living with a man. But she still feels like a lesbian. And she's wrestling with this problem of, if I affirm my identity, I deny the identity of my partner. If I affirm the identity of my partner, I deny my own identity. And it was one of those testaments. I had to read it three or four times just to get my head fully around what was going on. And then at the end, she says, so in the end, I've just become comfortable with my queer identity. an identity that has no categories in some ways. And I thought that's... What was put forward in this book as being, this is great, we're all going to end up as queer, to me was a quintessentially tragic situation, that this poor woman ended up really not knowing who she was. And that goes to the heart of our identity is intimately connected to us being recognized by somebody else and being able to define ourselves in relation to somebody else. And that's why I think community is so important, because for somebody to have an identity means somebody belongs. And in order to belong, there has to be a strong community. And the church, humanly speaking, cannot compete if it isn't a strong community. Why is it so hard to see Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity, generally speaking? Well, we can say it's the sovereignty of God, and that's a sound theological argument. But practically, Well, to become a Christian, when I became a Christian from a non-Christian home, I was a middle-class white guy and I became a Christian. I'm still a middle-class white guy, getting on with my parents. If you're a Jew or you're a Muslim, you have to completely uproot yourself from your community. You lose everything that makes you you. And the church can't expect to bring people like that in unless it's prepared to provide just a strong, if not stronger, community to come to. And the same applies, I think, to LGBTQ people. They have a strong community. They do. That's why they become such a powerful political force. And we're whistling in the wind if we think that we can attract people like that if we're not a strong community. And I'm not talking seeker-sensitive here. I'm not saying we need to make ourselves attractive in that seeker-sensitive way. I'm just saying, sort of echoing the thoughts of Rosaria Butterfield in her testimony, that she left the LGBT community for Christ, assuming that she'd be joining an equally strong community, and found there wasn't much of a community to join. It's a pungent testimony, and I think is a reminder to us that the way identity is constructed comes through communities, and that places a huge burden on us. And that's biblical. By this you all may know that you're my disciples by the love you have for each other. By being a strong community. Paul in the negative says, bad company corrupts morals. You are the people you hang around with. And I think we need to, as conservative Christians, reflect long and hard on what community will look like. And that's the good news out of the bad news. Marginal people generally make strong communities. First generation immigrants make strong communities because they band together, they look after each other. I think as the church is pushed to the margins, it will force us to be more self-conscious about being a community, and that might actually be a good thing. That was certainly, humanly speaking, a big part of how the church succeeded in the second and third centuries. Maybe that's the way Maybe that's the way we can see light at the end of the tunnel today. Good. Going back to earlier part of your answer, you write in your book that it's arguable that Freud is actually a key figure in the narrative of the book. Can you give us a brief intro to Freud and why he's such a central figure to the story? Yeah. Well, Freud is... He's far more central than I even gave him credit for tonight. I only took out one strand of Freud tonight. Freud is the man who says that sexual desires are what define us as persons. As a Christian, I would disagree with that, but I would say that certainly grips the imagination. It's a very, from a human perspective, it's very attractive, because sex is a very powerful and often a very pleasurable thing, and so that's an easy sell. Sex is an easy thing to sell. So he certainly shaped the way we imagine the world, and if you want evidence of that, think of commercials. The American commercial industry was profoundly shaped in the early 20th century by a man called Edward Bernays. Edward Bernays is Freud's nephew. And he's the guy who, or one of the guys, who sees it to sell a product, don't sell it on utility, sell it on desire. You can try to sell a car by saying, buy my car, and you get from A to B faster. Or you could say, you buy my car and you'll attract beautiful women. Guess which is the more successful advertisement? So Freud is onto something when he talks about that. The other aspect of Freud that I think is important is this, and this really underlined for me the seriousness of the situation we're in as a culture at the moment. Freud, in his brilliant little essay, Civilization is Discontents, says the problem with human beings having these dark sexual desires is this, we cannot unleash them. Because if we all just act on our sexual instincts, women are going to suffer terribly, there's going to be one strong male who dominates until the next strong male comes along. It's going to be chaos. It's going to be bloody chaos. So what society does is it constructs a set of moral regulations, sexual disciplinary regulations that say this kind of behavior is not acceptable, this kind of behavior is not acceptable. That creates civilization. The pent-up sexual energy that leads to is channeled into things like art and sport and politics and various cultural activities. Downside is none of them are actually as good as just wildly acting out your desire, so always going to be a little bit unhappy. That's where the discontents come in. What I found interesting about that is that Freud is saying Civilization is really defined by what it forbids sexually, which means that as civilization moves to a point where it forbids less and less, civilization itself becomes inherently unstable. And this is Philip Reif, the figure that I was originally supposed to be writing on. Philip Reif picks up on this and says, you know, essentially, when a culture abandons a robust sexual morality, that culture is on the verge of self-destruction. That is a very ominous sign for contemporary culture because we're in a situation now where essentially the two last, we're in a situation now where sexual ethics, sexual morality is defined by consent. If it takes place between two consenting adults or more, but as long as they're all consenting, it's OK. The acts themselves have no intrinsic moral quality. The moral quality is gained from the relation of consent that exists. That is a spider's web thin support for sexual morality. When you think about it, that certainly provides no No ultimate argument against incest, because we had a case a few years ago in New York. A professor at Columbia University was engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with his adult daughter. The question becomes, why is that wrong? It's consensual. Well, you might say, well, they might have children who have congenital difficulties. No, no, they use contraception, or maybe she's been sterilized. So why is it wrong if there could be no children? You've got a real problem there. The other one, you know, incest is still basically prohibited. The other one is, you say, well, pedophilia. Pedophilia. But there's a problem there. The problem there is this, that we do not require children's consent for quite a lot of things. We vaccinate them without their consent. We could trivialize it. I used to make my kids eat their greens without their consent. We sent them to school without their consent. The law does not recognize the consent of children as absolute. It's not, we might say, a fundamental right. So that renders the prohibition against pedophilia highly unstable, which puts us in a position where there are virtually no stable taboos anymore. And Freud's view would be, that puts you that far from cultural self-destruction. And I'm inclined to think he's right, that we are reaching a situation where our sexual ethics is so tenuous that society, culture could be in real trouble at this point. So in that sense, because tastes can come and go, the reality then is pedophilia is a taboo today simply because it's not a preference that is affirmed, but down the road it in fact could be a taste that is seen to be legitimate. Yeah, and I mean we're already seeing, you know again one of the things I address in the book, the book doesn't just look at philosophical themes, the research being done on the impact of internet pornography on the way people think morally and ethically is fascinating. Watching internet pornography regularly rewires the brain. It changes the way people think about the morality of sex. If you think about the amount of pedophilia available on the web, it is plausible that one could find a situation where a sufficient number of people have had their brains rewired to think that's okay, that cultural taste changes. The recent hoo-ha about the Netflix series Cuties, That's interesting. It's hard to imagine that even being conceptualized 20 years ago. Now, is that justified pedophilia? I don't subscribe to Netflix, I have no idea. But reading the accounts of it, and I read, my primary account was reading Rod Dreher. And Rod is not a man to play down the drama. It was a fairly dramatic account, but the fact that there's even a debate about whether that is good or bad, to me is an interesting sign of potentially shifting tastes within society. Let's move to the family. Wilhelm Reich views the traditional patriarchal family as a unit of oppression. Why does he make this move? And what are the ways that we can deal with that in terms of that ideology that seems to be becoming commonplace? Yeah, well, Reich is interesting. You know, I alluded to this in the lecture, Marxists in the in the 20s and 30s, they're faced with a cluster of problems. One of them is Why did the revolution happen in Russia, which was a peasant society without a developed industrial working class, which was meant to be the class that led the revolution? Why did it happen there and not in Germany, where you have a highly developed industrial working class and they've just lost a war and are plunging into economic crisis? If you can't have a successful revolution in Germany, In 1919, you can't have a successful revolution everywhere, that's what it looks like. And then the double whammy is, and all of these working class poor people are flooding to support the Nazis and the fascists. So the question becomes, what's wrong? What have we got to do to help the working class develop a working class consciousness? And Reich and Herbert Marcuse, one of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School, really zero in on the family and say, you know, the family is, Reich actually says, the family is the authoritarian state in miniature. That's where the domineering father figure becomes the way that the child fears him and loves him. The child grows up wanting to be accepted and acknowledged by him, so learns to behave in a way that the father presses down him. So what we need to do is smash that. We've got to smash that social unit. We've got to break down the nuclear family in order to have children growing up without being, you know, turned out as cookie cutter little fascists. That actually offers, it's a particularly sort of pungent philosophical approach to something that in the book, you know, I go back to the 18th century, William Godwin, Treatise on Political Justice says, you know, we got to break the family. The monogamous family, he sees it as generating prostitution. His problems are different, but he sees family's got to go. The family is a source of evil in society. Percy B. Shelley, the same. William Blake, the same. There is this cumulative polemic against the family as something that screws up society. It's not a natural configuration. We should all be living in a kind of commune. Godwin faces the question, well, who's going to bring up the children? Is there going to be a problem? Godwin's answer is, no, everybody will bring up the children. It won't matter. You won't worry about whether it's your particular child, because everybody loves everybody in Godwin world. It's a sort of bizarre idea. But that's smashing of the nuclear family. And of course, in recent, I think they've cleaned up the website a bit, but Black Lives Matter. We went to what we stand for. It was interesting that a group primarily addressing issues of racial justice or inequality had in its agenda the smashing of the nuclear family. It becomes a sort of standard trope of radical politics. And then when you think about how that plays out, we might say, well, we're not run by Marxists in this country, but think about how The most potent debates in education in the last 40, 50 years have often focused on sex education. This stuff has sort of gone beyond the realms of New Left Marxism and become a sort of pathology of the culture in general. I was struck a few years ago, I was approached by a Roman Catholic lawyer in Philadelphia The school district where my own kids went to school, they'd graduated by this point, was becoming the first school district in Philadelphia to, or just outside Philadelphia, to introduce a transgender policy. And this guy approached me and said, you know, would you be willing to write a letter with me and front it? For reasons, there were certain reasons that he was not able to put his name to it that would have made people close to him rather vulnerable in the situation. Would I be willing to do that? I said, sure. So we drafted a letter and we focused on, I focused on a couple of things. Women's sports, it's going to destroy women's sports. And one of the things in the transgender policy the school was adopting said, if a child declares themselves to be transgender, the school is not obliged to tell the parents. picked up on that and said, you know, what you're saying here as a school district is that convictions about one's gender are fundamental to one's identity. Okay, we'll accept that for the sake of argument, we'll accept that. Then what you're saying on the back of that is the school has more right to know who the child is than the parents do. If you're saying the child can be transgender, but we're not allowed to tell the parents, what you're effectively saying is, we can know who the child is, but the parent can't, and we're not obliged to tell them. I don't do Facebook, but I sent it to the local, I thought, I'll send it to the local paper, surely they'll do some hit piece on me. You know, hate monger, you know, said, they totally ignored it. It was kind of, you know, here I am, persecute me, and they were just not interested in that. So we got a young couple who'd connected to our church, put it up on their Facebook page. put it up on your Facebook page. I stuck it up at First Things on the First Things website. I was shocked at the reactions that so few parents got the point. It was a kind of, we don't see what you're getting at. It was kind of, don't you realize that what's happening here is the family, your parental rights are being fundamentally compromised Your family is being fundamentally attenuated by this, potentially, not necessarily, but potentially, and you don't even care. That was shocking to me. That was really shocking to me. But this polemic against the family, I think it's a longstanding thing. I'm not sitting here and saying the nuclear family doesn't have any problems and that people haven't been abused in nuclear families and that it's the answer to all the world's ills, but it is interesting that it has been a constant focus of attacks since the late 18th century. Godwin's Treatise on Political Justice fascinating read for me on that front. You talk about the abandonment of the sacred order. Is there a way back from all of us, and does Christianity today offer a powerful enough antidote to these cultural realities, or has the third-world anti-culture ultimately succeeded in destroying the sacred ordering of life? Right. Well, you've used a lot of terms there that I probably need to... All in your book. Yeah. Buy the book. I use these terms that I adopt from Philip Reef, first, second, and third worlds. And the slightly confusing thing is that what Reif means by third world is not what we mean by third world. When we talk about third world, we're typically talking about the developing world, parts of Africa, parts of Asia, parts of South America. Reif is using these terms very differently. He's using these terms to refer to how societies ethically order themselves. And first worlds, he sees a sort of ancient societies where he says, you know, ethical codes there were grounded in some kind of view of the gods or of fate. And the example that one could use is Ancient Sparta. If you were growing up in Sparta and you're doing something one day and your dad comes along and says, don't do that, that's wrong. The obvious question is, well, why is it wrong, dad? Well, your dad would ultimately give you the answer. It's wrong because the oracle at Delphi gave the Spartan law code to Lycurgus, our first king, and therefore the law has a sacred origin and is justified by something beyond our immediate social arrangements. That becomes more sophisticated in what Reif calls second worlds, and second worlds would be particularly sort of Christianity, though we might say Judaism fits into this, or Islam, where law codes are justified by belief in a sovereign God. Something is ultimately wrong because it's against the will of God and that's the ultimate justification for holding to a particular moral position. Third worlds that Reif identifies, these are worlds that have got rid of any notion of the transcendent or the beyond. And therefore, the reason why morality is the way it is has to be justified purely in terms of the world itself. You cannot look to an authority beyond, you can only justify a situation on the basis of the world as it is now. What happens there is that morality becomes fundamentally unstable and subject to dramatic changes and transformations. That's English understatement. What's slightly worrying from an English perspective or catastrophically terrifying from an American perspective is Reif makes the point that no society has ever replicated itself on the basis of itself. No society has ever justified itself long-term simply on the basis of itself. It has always looked to something beyond in order to justify the social order. The social order is justified, Reeves says, by a sacred order of some kind. Freud would sort of agree. Freud would say religion's an illusion, but it did serve a good purpose. It did allow these very important taboos that kept civilization stable to be justified. Even though it's not true, it serves a practical purpose, that that's how people imagine the world. The problem is the world we live in now doesn't imagine the world that way, and therefore, why is any particular act wrong? One could take an extreme example. The most authentic human being might be the serial killer. Why is serial killing wrong? Well, you might turn around and say, well, it's wrong because it harms other people. Why is harming other people wrong? If I'm bigger and stronger than them, why shouldn't I fulfill my darkest and innermost desires by disposing of them? Well, because we think it's wrong. So it's really an argument of taste at that point. When you say serial killing is wrong, what you're actually saying is you personally find serial killing distasteful. That's okay. Don't try and make it a moral transcendent, a moral imperative for the rest of us. I mean, Nietzsche's the guy in some ways who blows the lid off this from the other direction. Nietzsche in the gay science. has the madman run into the town square and declare that God is dead for we have killed him. And the polite atheists, it's their laugh. It's a kind of, sure, he's gone. And then the madman says, but don't you know the significance of that? If you've got rid of God, if you've got rid of the sacred, then you've unhitched the earth from the sun. We are plunging eternally. Everything becomes vertiginously disorienting And Nietzsche elaborates that calling for what he calls the transvaluation of all values. Everything's up for grabs. Everything's up for grabs at that point. Can Christianity provide a strong basis for this? I don't think so. You have these theonomists knocking around on the internet in their dozens who are going to transform America. I don't think so. I think the church is a sectarian minority within the culture The changes in the culture are so deep, so long-standing, so profound, that we're not going to be able to turn them around on any macro scale. What I think we can do, and again to return to a theme I talked about earlier on, we can be the last community standing when everything plunges into chaos. We can be a disciplined community in ourselves, and that's where I think the immediate task and hope of the church lies. You, on that very point in your closing paragraph in the book, you talk about Christians needing to be good citizens. How does that relate in the light of being pilgrims on the way? Yeah, well the background to that, I'm thinking, you know, I'm a historian, although I don't offer solutions for the future as a historian, I'm always trying to think of analogies with the past. And one can draw analogies that are too naive and straightforward, because obviously there are certain things today information technology that make this world significantly different to any previous kind of world. I think that there's been an instinctive move in some Christian circles to go back to the 16th, 17th century. The theonomist seemed to have this idea if we could just go back to the sort of, the world we had in the 16th, 17th century, then everything would be okay. You have the so-called integralists on the Catholic side who are kind of the Roman Catholic equivalent of our theonomists. And they seem to want to go back to a kind of medieval. If we could just go back to the 13th century, it would be so great. As a historian, I'm hesitant to go back to any world that doesn't have flesh toilets, antibiotics, and painkillers. It ain't that great in the 13th century, I don't think. But I think both of those views are hopelessly naive, because we can't go back to the sort of confessional state model that we had in the 16th century, just can't. Technology means that's implausible now. We can't go back to the kind of Christendom model of the Middle Ages, if it ever really existed in the form. We're not all suddenly going to become Thomists and produce a unified field of knowledge and all start getting older. So where do we go to find an analogy with the present? I think the second century. When you think about the church in the second century, it was a little understood minority sect within a much larger powerful culture. It was subject to accusations of immorality. These people talk about eating flesh and blood. We have married couples calling each other brother and sister. That sounds like incest. Oh, and they're seditious as well. They say Jesus is Lord. That seems to be a blow against the dignity of Caesar. So the interesting thing about the second and the third century church is it ultimately was rather successful. It was rather successful for a whole host of reasons. But one of them, I think, was that it was a tight community. And the second thing was, I think that it developed a way of operating within the Roman Empire that was that of good citizenship. You see this in the Greek apologists in the second century when they're writing these treaties for Caesar. Who knows if Caesar ever read them, and if he did, did he take them seriously? But the burden of these treaties on the front of ethics is, leave us alone and we'll be good citizens. Leave us alone and we will be good employees. We will be those who work hard. We will be those who are honest. We will not subvert the civil order. Now there are going to be exceptions to that. If you ask us to sacrifice to Caesar as a god, we can't do that. That involves a fundamental compromise of what it means to be a Christian. But there's an awful lot of things in the Roman Empire that we can do that are perfectly consistent with Christianity, maybe even required by Christianity. And so I think that The second century may be our analogy. Now that's hard because there's a very deep-seated culture war mentality in America, particularly among Protestants. And the second century attitude is not that of culture war. And that raises the question of, well, why do American Protestants have this attitude of culture war? I think a number of observations there. We need to reflect on these and come to terms with them and act accordingly. One of the things I've noticed when I talk to Catholic friends is their attitude to the American situation is different because A, they think internationally. Their church is worldwide. I think in terms of the OPC and maybe the PCA. They think in terms of the whole world. Secondly, they don't believe that they ever owned the country and it's been taken from them. I think in America, there's a deep-seated belief among a lot of Protestants that they somehow owned the country and it's been taken from them, and they need to get it back. It truly belongs to them. And that facilitates a culture war mentality. Thirdly, I think that that sort of Protestant culture made Protestants lazy. One of the reasons why I cite a lot of Roman Catholic authors in the book is they're the people who've read and thought about these problems for much longer in much greater depth than Protestants have done. Why haven't Protestants done it? They own the country. They didn't have to think about these things, because they were the top dogs. And when you feel you're in control, you become lazy. Catholics never thought that, and so they wrestled with these issues on a much deeper level. And when you suddenly find that you don't own the country anymore, and you've been so lazy that you have no resources to address the problems you're facing, you become angry. And the rhetoric becomes that of anger. And I'm not sure that that is going to be the most helpful way of approaching the current situation. That's why I like Bannerman. Protest is not the same as war. We can protest by being a positive witness for Christ in our church communities in a way that does not have to be sort of read in tooth and claw. There are certain people out on the internet, certain Christians, and all they ever do is polemicize against the world. And I'm thinking, ultimately, what do they do? I think the language is they fire up the base. That's the political language. They don't actually win many converts to their cause, nor do they help their base particularly. They just make them more angry. One of the things we need to avoid as Christians is a root of bitterness. I try very carefully in the book to be as dispassionate as possible, not because I approve of some of the things I was writing about, but because hey, this is the hand of cards. We've been dealt at this point in time. There is no point in being bitter about it. We simply have to think about what we should do to address it. I learned that from Robbie George at Princeton. That year I was there, and you'd go into coffee on a Tuesday, and there'd be some cultural problem that had come up, and somebody would throw a hat out. I was always impressed that Robbie George's response was not, wow, let's get really angry about this. It was always, OK, this is the way it is. What are we going to do about it? What can we do that will address this, that will do something better? And I think that's a mentality that Protestants need to cultivate. And I'm talking to myself here as much as I am to anybody else. Let's try and go through a few questions here. We'll do 45 to 60 seconds to answer. Near the beginning of the lecture you mentioned that the implication of the historical development of the self means that we're all complicit. Could you expound more on this and how have we as Christians and the Church been complicit in the development of the modern self? Yeah, well, I can't do that in 60 seconds. I would say I certainly gave the example of our attitude to marriage that I think would indicate when you accept no-fault divorce, you're accepting therapeutic psychological man. I might also point to conceptions of worship that we have. where the most important thing is our expression of our emotions, the language of authenticity that we use, the language of offense rather than right or wrong. There are a whole host of things. In fact, when you look at how the world thinks about these things, there's usually a Christian corollary somewhere. It's not to say that Christians are equally guilty in this to everybody else, but to say there are potent similarities. And then above all, I would say that the most lethal punch. And I don't know how to get around this one is by and large for us religion is a choice. We choose the church we go to. We choose the church that meets our needs and we leave that church when it ceases to meet them. And maybe your need is you like rigorous doctrinal preaching. Maybe you like liturgy. Maybe you like contemporary worship. The problem is that every single aspect of our church could actually appeal to us simply because it scratches an itch that we have. The Roman Catholic model is, you go to the church in the parish where you reside. You don't get a choice. That's not a Protestant way of thinking about church at all. And then I would say, yeah, there's kind of complicity of all of us in that. Apologetically, in terms of, I think you mentioned earlier this evening that there's been a move in terms of to engage people rationally, now there's a move in terms of feeling. How should we engage folk on an individual level with the gospel, whether someone is identifying as transgender or other? I think that's extremely difficult. We were talking about this at dinner just beforehand. Again, I think the one success story I can think of is Rosaria Butterfield. And what's interesting about her testimony is that the gospel was ultimately spoken to her in a context where she had been treated with great kindness and ultimately had become a friend of a pastor and his wife. I see that as, in some ways that's a frustrating thing. I mean, I'm pretty sure a gay person could walk into a church, hear the gospel, and the Holy Spirit can use the gospel to convict that person and convert them. Don't want to deny that at all. I think probably a strategy, though, a better strategy is one built on friendships, befriending the people that come to your church, befriending the people that cross your path. Again, a striking thing about Rosario's testimony is when she was going to give this lecture and she was being trashed by every Christian in the area, one minister wrote to her and invited her to dinner and it piqued her curiosity and that was the beginning of a friendship that ultimately led to her conversion. So I think it's very difficult to tell somebody you do not accept their identity in a context where there isn't a deep friendship already there, humanly speaking. It's interesting in terms of psychologists today are talking about a pandemic of isolation and loneliness. Yeah. And that would certainly feed into, in terms of one of the ways forward. When the statistics, I think the report came out the other week that I think one in four person between 15 and 25 or something in America had suicidal thoughts in June or July of this year. I'm always, you always got to divide by 10. But even one in ten young people having suicidal thoughts speaks to something deeply wrong in our society. And the church, that's a great opportunity for the church to be a place where people can come and be welcomed and find friendship. One person here asked the question in terms of, can we get ahead and address the, in quotations, next question, or next problem before popular culture falls victim to it? Can we? Should we try? It's hard because who would have predicted the transgender moment? I mean, I remember nearly 30 years ago, one of the most stupid things I ever said, and the competition for that is pretty high. I remember being at a Bible study and somebody raised the issue of the legitimation of gay marriage. And I said, no, it's so self-evidently wrong. People will never buy that. I think the problem is that we don't know what the next thing is. And that's why, again, to go back to a point I made towards the end of the lecture, I think it's important to focus on the whole counsel of God. One can be engaged in speculation and one can be engaged in whack-a-mole. Ultimately, the answer to any of these specific problems that pops up has got to be grounded in a full grasp of the whole counsel of God. So we should not be distracted or get too worried about these things. We should be aiming to teach people the whole Christian faith so they're prepared to address them when they come along. Good. One last question before we close. Today, psychology trumps biology. Cultural amnesia is dismissive of a so-called oppressive subject of history. Where to from here? And how does biology and history rebound even aid us in being a helpful corrective? Well, I certainly think within the Christian Church, as I said at the end, adopting a more robust approach to natural law to bodily construction is helpful. To take off as a tangent on that, not so much a tangent, but I do have some hope that transgenderism will disappear at some point. Not in my lifetime, and probably not in the lifetime of my children, and tragically not without an awful lot of people suffering in the interim. But evidence is already emerging that transition is not the answer. I can easily see a situation developing in 30, 40, 50 years time where children who've been effectively used as chemistry and surgical experiments by their trendy parents and trendy doctors and gullible insurance companies sue. sue their parents, sue the doctors, and sue the insurance companies. And I've said before, this is America. When insurance companies start to have to pay out big, big settlements, you could expect public morality to start shifting. I do think that transgenderism could well be the step too far on nature. Because with the best will in the world, it doesn't matter what you do to your body, to quote Camille Palia, who's scarcely a conservative figure, but she says, every cell of your body is coded. You can chop whatever bits off you want, and you can add whatever bits you want, but every cell in your body is coded. And that's not irrelevant to who you are. So I think transgenderism could prove a step too far. As I said, the tragedy is it will only come after a lot of people are mutilated and damaged and sued. So I don't take any satisfaction in the thought of the pathway to that. But of all of the developments of the last 20, 30, 40 years, transgenderism seems to me to be taking on an awful lot of powerful enemies. and to be rebelling against nature in a way that nature may well and is in fact already biting back. We've just got to wait for that cumulative mass to build. Thank you very much. That's an extraordinarily useful book on a difficult topic. And we would love to pray for you. Is there any specific ways as you look ahead? I know that not everyone is going to be appreciative of the topic. Yeah, I pray that my house doesn't get fireballed. Any ways that we can pray for you as we close? I think, pray for me as I teach the young kids at Grove City College. Because we've got a campus of 2,500 kids, many of whom are confused about this kind of stuff. They're good kids. And pray for those of us who are teaching views that they may want to agree with but struggle with because so many of their friends disagree with them. Pray that we are wise and compassionate and thoughtful. and compelling in the way that we address these issues because one of the distinctions I make in the book is there is a difference between LGBTQ stuff as a cultural and political movement. and as it manifests itself in individuals. And you have to address those two things differently. And I'm really addressing individuals in the classroom on a daily basis. And I pray that I do so in a way that brings credit to Christ, shows love to the people I'm dealing with, even those with whom I disagree, and is compelling and persuasive in a gracious way. Good. Let's pray together. Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we thank you for our hope that lies in Christ, hope that is founded in the gospel, the gospel that is the good news of God towards sinners such as us. In this time, we do ask that you would give us wisdom, give your church at this time discernment and understanding, knowledge and insight to be able to address these particular matters, to be able to be a community that loves, that shows one's love for God and love for others. It would be a display for the world to see. Lord, we ask that we would be able to see others enfolded into that community and to know the love of God that is in Christ. We think of Carl and Katrina. We thank you for them. We thank you for them to being here tonight as well as tomorrow. We pray that you would watch over them, that you would give Carl, as he is in the classroom, much insight and wisdom, that he would teach with compassion, he would teach with the understanding of the Lord that we'd be able to address the current times in which students face themselves. What we do ask that you would be with us as we go our way tonight. We know your grace as we put our head on the pillow and arise tomorrow in your will, knowing the mercies of God that are found in Jesus. We give you great praise. Amen. Thank you very much.