Welcome to Living in the Matrix. I'm Jonathan and I'm left of center.
And I'm Rich and I tend to lean a little bit more to the right. But the bottom line is,
is together we try to look for the balance of what it means to be human in today's world.
Let's get started. Welcome to Living in the Matrix, everyone. I'm Jonathan. This is my
co-host Rich. Say hello, Rich. Afternoon, everybody. Great to be back.
It's awesome. So we have an absolute wonderful treat today. So we have Brian McLaren and Brian
is, I don't want to say he doesn't need introduction, but Brian really has been a voice
of a growing sense of theological dialogue around freedom and permission and growth.
And I've loved following his journey throughout the entire process. I've read all of his books
and Brian has a new book out called Life After Doom. And I want to dive in. Welcome, Brian.
It's wonderful to have you. Great to be with you. Thanks, Jonathan. Good to meet you. Good
to be with you, Richard. I guess Rich, right? Yeah. Rich is perfect. 100%.
So Brian, let's start with the book because I know this is a pivotal period in history. Like
there's so much in the air, which I know you can appreciate. I asked you before and I'm going to
ask it now. What is the heart of this book? Well, let me say answer by way of a story.
A lot of my friends have really been sucked into a deep, deep despair. And I have felt it too.
And I have felt it too. It's not that it hasn't touched me. I think of
a dear friend who is a leading activist. And a couple of years ago, I called him,
said, how are you doing? He said, well, he said, winning too slowly is the same thing as losing.
And so many conversations like that. I was walking with a friend in a protest,
a couple of years ago. And she said to me, I'm doing this, but I've lost hope. I don't think
we're going to do any good. And I said, well, what keeps you coming if you've lost hope? And
she said, well, it's love. It's the only thing left that I've got is love. And there are certain
things I do out of love. And I realized that more and more of us, by any measures that we have,
when we face the problems that we're dealing with, it looks like we're not playing to win anymore.
It means we're playing to not lose catastrophically. And that's just a whole new ballgame for a lot of
us. And so I was struggling with that. Other people were struggling with that. And that's,
I suppose I'm trying to help others and help myself.
Well, I think that's been a large part of your journey. Like starting with New Kind of Christian
is just been this arc of what it means to be human, experiencing spirituality. I think that's the
thing that I've always loved about your work is you gave voice to the inside of that journey.
So that's always been incredibly valuable to me. So thank you.
Well, thank you for saying that.
So what is the grand arc of this book? Like, what is the message you want to really get
out to people? Because there is a deep sense of urgency I felt in this book.
Yes. Yeah. Well, there definitely is. I mean, I felt it today. I just got an email
from a friend who is kind of in the upper echelons of dealing with climate change around the world.
And she sent me a copy of something that will be released in the next few days
that estimates the cost to the global economy. Now, look, I care about coral reefs and I care
about trees and I care about living creatures. And a lot of people don't, but most of them
care about money. And the cost of not dealing with our ecological crisis now, go forward to 2050,
is like a 20% tax added onto everything that everybody makes, increasing up to 20% by 2050.
And it may go higher after that. So you just realize that we're getting in trouble,
we're in trouble, and people tend to do one of two things in response to the trouble. They say,
it's not so bad, or it'll be easy to fix. Or they say, it's too late, and we might as well give up.
And either of those responses, either an optimistic, non-urgent response, or a
despairing despondent response, leads people to apathy. Either there's nothing we can do,
or there's nothing we need to do. The Calvinist versus the Universalist, right?
I guess you could put it that way. That's right. Well, I think that's what you did really well in
your book, is you broke down four categories. Would you give the audience a summary of those?
Because I thought that was really helpful. Well, I hope that'll be one of the main
contributions of the book, Jonathan, because I've been immersed in this literature for years.
And what I try to do is put four signposts or four milestones out on the horizon and say,
we're going to go toward one of these. And the first one I call collapse avoidance.
When I say collapse, we're talking about civilizational collapse.
Ice age level? Sixth extinction.
Sixth extinction. Yeah.
It could be that. But when we talk about civilizational collapse, we actually are talking
about what's happened to every single civilization that ever existed up till this one. We know the
Roman Empire collapsed. We know the Mayan Empire collapsed and so on. Collapse doesn't necessarily
mean the end of the world. It does mean the end of the world as we know it. So scenario one
is that we avoid collapse. Later in the book, I sort of assume everybody will think that's the
most desirable scenario. I hope people imagine a couple of unintended negative consequences
of a short term avoidance of collapse. Second is collapse rebirth. That's where a collapse happens.
We're humbled. We learn our lessons. And on the other side, we try to rebuild something
that will be much, much better. Third is collapse survival. That's where the collapse is.
We do so little to address the conditions that lead to collapse that when the collapse happens,
we survive, some number of us survive. It might be 2% or 10% or 50% of the current population,
but it's not a pretty picture. We survive, but we're not able to get anything close to what we
currently have back on the other side. And people who haven't thought about this don't realize how
easily that could happen. And then the final is collapse extinction. And there are scenarios
where, in fact, I should say this scenario is somewhat less likely than it was 20 years ago.
But we could dial up this one as a high possibility. It's not just that the human
species go extinct. We could change the planetary conditions so that a high percentage of what we
might call vertebrate life, land-based life, would be able to survive.
Life, land-based life would go extinct. So that's the four scenarios. Collapse avoidance,
collapse rebirth, collapse survival, collapse extinction.
Where do you land? I explained in the book that I don't really land.
And I should say I respect people. I think that's fair. That's a fair approach.
I respect people who they're convinced that one of these four is most likely. I don't think we know
what will happen. And so not knowing is one of the elements of our current situation that I'm
trying to live with. And the way I like to say it, Jonathan, is that I don't know what the outcome
will be, but I have decided how I want to show up. And that's what I hope other people, whatever
outcome, I hope they decide intentionally how they want to show up. As a pastor, I appreciated
your pastoral... It was funny because I've read all your books and this felt very pastoral to me.
More so, it was like a pleading. And you have this grand arc, which we'll get into later,
of just the progression of Christianity. Where do you see the big picture things kind of falling
right now? Because it almost felt like this was a sermon message that you wanted to preach to
people again. Yeah. This is probably my least religious book. It really is. It was very personal.
Well, thank you. I mean, it's personal material. I'm glad it felt that way as you read it, Jonathan.
It's my least religious book, but as I explained at the beginning of the book,
I'm a Christian. I was a pastor for 24 years. That's how I show up. That's who I am. So
that's who I am. So I hope that would show up. But it has been very tender. Over these last several
years, I get out to speak and more probably in the last 10 years than ever before in my life.
I might be speaking with a Buddhist teacher or a Sikh teacher or an atheist. And the number of
times we get to a place of deep tenderness where I'm being a pastor again. I'm glad it felt that way
because that's very much how I feel. Yeah. Jonathan, Brian, one of the things that
struck me, and by the way, I will let you know that I've stayed together with a group of friends
from up in the Sacramento area for 15 years. We were in a discipleship class. We read Millard
Erickson. We read Jesus and the Margins and More Ready Than You Realize. So one of the things that
came out of More Ready Than You Realize was this idea that there's a new way to evangelize. It's
not about ultimatums and faith and conquest and the ideas of crusades. It's more about relationships
and it's more about opportunity, conversation and dance. And it was a neat and sometimes often
controversial way of looking at things based on the old paradigms. It feels to me, help me if I'm
wrong, that we almost needed to do an Aikido maneuver on what that process was in terms of
this new paradigm. You can't be so winsome, or maybe you have to be winsome, but tell me what
you think about that approach was in terms of evangelism, but it seems so dire now that in
terms of the environment and the climate, it seems like there needs to be a different methodology in
order to kind of, does that make sense? You understand what I'm coming from?
It really does, Rich, and it's a really intelligent question. There's very disturbing research,
Rich, that the more we teach people about climate change, the less helpful it is.
There's a certain kind of turn-off factor where people, where we teach them a lot and then they
become negative. The term I use for this is bias. They have a bias, they put up barriers against
hearing anymore. So in that sense, I think, well, first of all, I think some people are incapable
of facing reality. When I say incapable, I don't mean at the core of who they are, but they've
arranged their lives so that the likelihood of them ever facing our current reality is super,
super slim. For example, if you're part of a community that won't allow you to think about
certain things, and that community means a whole lot to you, it is super hard for you to ever
consider any of the things that I'm talking about in a book like this. And by the way, that doesn't
just go for religious fundamentalists. There are economic fundamentalists who, anything that
challenges the assumptions of capitalism, it just creates these sets of alarm bells inside of them,
and they literally have to leave the room or shut the book or turn off the video or whatever it is.
But I think for a whole lot of people, we're at a place where very much like what I was saying,
and I'm more ready than you realize, people have to know we love them and aren't just trying to
recruit them for our project. People need to know that we care about them, whether or not they ever
agree with us. That's part of the mess that's what got us into the mess we're in, where we just thought
our choice was either to dominate over people or to be able to do something about it. And so
we have to either take people or reject them. The truth is, whether people agree or not,
we're stuck together on this planet. We have to learn, we have to find ways to live together. So
I think there's a lot about that book that would very much apply in this case. But I think part of
what you're picking up on, Rich, and I mentioned this later in the book, but there are horrible
consequences for letting the freight train keep rolling down the tracks at full speed.
And some people are ready to talk about those consequences for some people that will motivate
them to take corrective action. And that might sound a little different.
I think what's brilliant about that is the idea of Aikido is that you're taking energy that somebody
is spending it. Right? And what's crazy about that is that the people who really believe that their
neighbors were going to hell are looking at that saying, I'm praying for these people, they're
going to die. If I don't do this message, if I don't talk about this, the rapture is going to come,
we're all going to be swept away. They're going to be left behind and suffering. And I think the
world we live in is in such dichotomies that if we really look at it as universality, like, no,
you know what, if we do this together, if we work through this together, we are going to come to the
same place. Right? And if it's a combination of seeing anecdotal things, if it's story, if it's,
I mean, obviously, I can't believe that if you look at, like you said, the acidification, I don't
know what you call when the coral reefs are starting to die, the CO2 levels in the oceans and some
things. And unfortunately, what you end up seeing are like anomalies with a lot of snow recently in
the last two years. And those are little bumps in the road. And along the faith journey, it's not
like somebody becomes a believer and they have a couple of things where they fall back. I just see
so many parallels in terms of, if we have in our hearts, the desire for our generations beyond us
to live and prosper and to relish what we're trying to leave behind them, this doesn't just apply to
the legacy of the world. It's our spiritual legacy. It's enduring, saving our lives on the planet,
so not killing each other. There's so many angles I'd like to explore with you. And I think the
biggest spirit I'm feeling of this globe is going through is this, it's a false dichotomy.
And you've always been so good about talking about this third way, right? It's not about this or this.
What about, you know, big tent? What about this third way? And it just, it has to be inculcated
in a way that I don't know how it becomes, it almost has to be divine. There has to be a divine
that comes together and brings us and gives us a quickening, if you would. I think you might be
seeing that too. I'm seeing a lot of people feeling like there's a tension in their soul and
their heart right now, right? And they can't put a finger on it, but the more we have these dialogues
and we have more and more conversations, it's got to make a difference, right?
I mean, it sounds like the three of us are examples of that. We're all in a different place
than we were 20 years ago. So I think we're examples of that right here. Yeah, I,
something that I think helps me keep going, Rich, is when I lower my expectations of people getting
it. In other words, I try to assume most people aren't going to get it, but I'm going to keep
going anyway. And then if they get it, so much the better. You know, I actually think you could
make a case that Jesus was saying something like that in his parable of the soils, where he says,
look, some people are, it's going to bounce right off them, like a seed off hard ground. And some
people, they're going to say, oh yeah, yeah, but it won't last. And it's like he eliminates three
quarters of his audience, but basically says, I'm still willing to go for this for the one quarter
of the audience that will get it. Brian, I want to call out, because it's to Rich's point,
something in your book, you said, maybe in the end, our simplistic binaries, like good and bad,
right and wrong, wonderful and terrible have been calibrated by the habits, values and structures
of our current civilization. And I think what's happening is there's so much disequilibrium
and chaos because we know things are crumbling. That's the general vibe people are experiencing
and they're freaking out going, ah, how do we cross those divides? Yeah, I, there was a really
interesting scholar after World War II, a Canadian social psychologist who started doing research on
what he called the authoritarian personality. And he found in his research, and this research was
duplicated in a lot of other places, that about 30% of people in each culture had what he called
an authoritarian personality. And the idea was under a certain amount of stress, they are,
the way I sort of interpret it is they are so agitated by stress that when it gets to a certain
level, they look for a strong man to who they can just transfer all of their confidence to.
He will solve it. Usually it's a man, it could be a woman. And when I see folks like that,
I don't get upset with them. I don't think they can help it. Some percentage of people,
the stress gets high enough, that's the only thing their bodies and brains know how to do.
I think there's others of us who, and what's going to happen with them is certainly outside
of my control, maybe outside of any influence that I have, because I'm not creating the stress,
although I could increase the stress on those people that would actually drive them to
authoritarians even more, you know, that often is an unintended consequence of our work. But
if I say of the people who are open, how can I help them face reality enough that they take action,
but not in a way that makes them be paralyzed or despondent? You know, maybe they will be
paralyzed and despondent for a week or two, because this is a big thing for our brains to cope with.
We were trained our civilization's common sense was progress. Every day in every way,
things will get better and better. That's so deeply built into all of us. I've seen more
clearly how it's built into me, even though I would have rejected that if you told me,
I somehow ingested it anyway. So we're asking a lot of people and reality is asking a lot of
people to consider that the current train of our civilization could actually go off the track or
the bridge could blow up and they need to wake up. Brian, one of the things that you talked about in
the book is that you've, you have really immersed yourself in the community and around the data.
So I don't want to walk away by giving some tangible elements for people to grasp onto
of reality. So, cause part of that you're talking about is it's people coming to face reality.
Cause most people don't want to look at it. Cause the problem with this, this problem is you feel
powerless. Yes. So how do you get past the powerlessness and you start churning the data.
What does the data tell us? Well, the data tells us we're in trouble on several levels. One of the,
the term I use in the book is I talk about our current civilization in the, in the literature
at large, they use terms like Palti, poly crisis or multi crisis. And here's what they mean.
We've woken up to the fact that we have a problem with petroleum and coal, these fossil fuels,
that when we burn them, they produce huge amounts of profit. They use produce huge amounts of energy.
They're like cocaine for civilization. I mean, they're just phenomenal. And they give us great
power. I mean, literally because of petroleum and related products, we can fly, you know,
it's amazing the power they give us. But we found out that that carbon, when it gets into the
atmosphere, works like a greenhouse and keeps heat in. And people saw with, you know, we just had an
eclipse and people who were in the path of totality of the eclipse felt that just in the four minutes
when the sun was obscured by the moon, they felt the temperature drop, drop like five to 10 degrees
Fahrenheit. And you see the satellite images of the whole earth, like massive area was blacked out.
Like a massive area was blacked out. It's so cool. I mean, it's so amazing.
But people could feel just turn off the sun for four minutes and you have a 10 degree top,
that tells you how much heat is coming in at every second. So we're trapping heat. Now,
in my opinion, pardon this pun, but global warming is just the tip of the iceberg of the
melting iceberg, because underneath it is the deeper problem of what we could call ecological
overshoot. In general, we're taking too many resources out of the earth for the earth to
replenish. And we're pumping out too many wastes and toxins for the earth to detoxify.
We're making everybody sick. Yeah. And we're making the earth, there's less of the earth for
every succeeding generation. And this has been going on for a long time, but we accelerated it
when we found fossil fuels. Now, that's one problem in the multi-crisis. Here's another problem.
The way our economic system works is it funnels more and more wealth to a smaller and smaller
group of people who use that wealth to pay politicians to do their bidding
and to manipulate the public through both mass and social media. We've become Greece.
Yeah. We have. We've become Greece. Yeah. And so when the people with the most money have,
you know, 400 times the power or 4,000 times the power of an average person,
they can manipulate things to keep working for their advantage. And in fact, if you really want
to get cynical, there are many scenarios that it's to their advantage if a whole lot of the
rest of us die. So, you know, that funneling of power is a second part of the multi-crisis.
A third part of the multi-crisis is that our nations and individuals are amassing more and
more weapons of greater and greater kill power. So we all know about nuclear weapons. And there's
been a lot of debate about AR-15s and the like. But if you just think of it this way, if people
get upset on an individual level, on a party level having a civil war, on a national level going to
war against another nation, we have so many more weapons out there to cause so much more damage.
So you put those three together. And then let me add one more. We could add several others beyond
that, but let me add one more. Normally, our religious communities help us develop character
and virtue and wisdom to face our realities. Almost nobody looks at our religious communities
now and sees anything other than a group of sycophants playing up to rich people and powerful
politicians. Brian, when you and I met, we probably met in like 2010, sometime around there,
nuns really weren't that big of a category statistically. And now they are the largest
category. That's the divide being created is people who feel a disconnection to tradition.
And that's the problem is you rob people of traditions, of the histories, and we're in
uncharted territory. And I think we're trying to figure out how do we get out of this power dynamic
that feels like the Titanic is sinking. And when you put those four together,
when they speak of a multi-crisis, what they mean is each problem makes the other problems harder
to solve. And there's no single one that can be solved without all four of those being addressed.
And for people like me, who I was a pastor for 24 years and you guys committed Christians,
one of the places where we would like to see some leverage is in the world of faith and
spirituality and religion. We understand that many people are going in another direction,
but we're interested in getting all the willing people that we can find to say,
we've got to become part of the solution instead of part of the problem. And the irony is
the more I think about this, we will be so much better Christians if we decided to take our current
situation seriously. Brian, let me ask you a pastoral question then. What does love do in
this moment? That's kind of the question everybody's probably asking is like, I want to be true to my
faith, but man, I got to protect my family. What does love do right now? Like how does Jesus show
up? Yeah. Well, can I just say this is a place where our Christian religion thought it was doing
something good and may find out it was doing something that wasn't so good. For 30 or 40 years,
we had a focus on the family. And what that made us basically say is I care about my nuclear family
and to hell with everybody else. I just want my family to be okay. And that's understandable.
We all love our families, but it's so interesting that when Jesus said the great commandment was to
love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and he didn't say to love your family as
yourself. He said to love your neighbors yourself. And there's a lot we could talk about this, but
none of our families will have wellbeing without our communities having wellbeing. And none of our
communities will have wellbeing without the larger ecosystem having wellbeing. And so suddenly we're
at this place where we have to go and correct a wrong turn we took when we put our focus on the
family instead of our focus on the whole world that God loves, our neighbors and the earth itself,
our fellow creatures. And so I think what love requires us to do is to step back and face the
gravity of the problem. I have four adult children, but one of my children is a cancer survivor. When
he was six and a half, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Love did not mean that I would say,
oh, it can't be that bad. Don't pay attention to the doctors. Love meant I had to face every bit of
the data I could on his illness. If I cared about him, I needed reality. So I think we start there.
Love requires us to face reality. And then love requires us to become flexible and do what needs
to be done in the situation. Now in the ultimate challenge, well, I'll put it this way. When you
mentioned about what can I do for my family, in the book I include a really hideous quote from a
well-known right-wing radio personality who basically said he would be glad to kill all
of his neighbors and feed their bodies to his daughters. Someday I think his daughters will
be embarrassed that their father was like that. And he will have wished he would have been a nicer
guy to not leave his daughters such a horrible legacy. But I then quoted a friend of mine who
was asked the same thing. What should we do to prepare for hard times that are coming?
Should I get a gun? And my friend said, I'm an expert marksman. I was in the military. I was a
sharpshooter. I do not want to kill my neighbors. I would rather die with my neighbors in shared
want than kill them for my survival. You have two very different worlds depending on whether
everybody's out for himself and his nuclear family or do we actually learn to be out for each other?
Now for me to say that to some people sounds against the economy. It's anti-capitalist. And
to some it even sounds anti-American because they've defined freedom as freedom for the
individual to be selfish. And I just think those are two big mistakes.
Well, I think you can. I think that's been the test tube. Richard and I talk about this all the
time on this podcast is this feels like 40 years of we've test tube capitalism. And now we're
reaping its consequences. And we're kind of asking, like I'm a white male that works in Silicon Valley.
So I sit in the middle of it and when is someone going to begin asking some really important
questions about consequences because it feels like we're going off a cliff. And that's what
people are freaked out about. And back to your point of neighbors is at the end of the day,
I don't care what goes on in Washington. I care what happens to the people that live right around
me. Those are the people that I want to protect because those are the people I have relationships
with. And that's what people are really wanting is they're just wanting connection with the guy
next door. Not to be an enemy, but to be a friend and a neighbor. And I think you and I grew up in
a time when that was somewhat there. And I think that's almost like the vapors that are left going.
And Gen Z is now going, was it real? Was it real? Because if it was real, why have you let it go?
Yeah, I think that's what people are wondering.
Or I mean, pivot to Elon Musk version of capitalism where he kind of changes the dynamic
and says, we've got a car, we've got an infrastructure, we've got to make it very
simple. We want to try and try to make it as effective and as economic as possible. I mean,
the CEO of Ford, I think, looked at the types of things that they need to make a car and they need
all these multiple supply chains. And if they were going to make an electric vehicle, they'd
have to start from scratch because what Elon's created is one piece of software that actually
is the control center for the entire car. So he's upended the paradigm, whether it's,
I mean, Neuralink is a different story altogether. That's where we get into a little transhumanism
there. But what he's doing with Skylink or Starlink, and then what he's doing with Boring and what he's
doing with the car industry. And he's light years ahead. I think those are the kinds of
capitalistic angles that are the things we expect and we love, right? Where that's perfect competition.
I think Elon is a great example of someone who's been, Elon's not a dumb guy. That's what I love
about Elon is he's an incredibly intelligent guy on a capitalistic front from business stance,
but also from a physics standpoint. He understands the material world. And I think what the question
in being asked about Elon right now is, are we capable of handling that amount of power
as a human being? Because he's invested in everything. And I think that's the arc that
we're going back to here, Brian, is we're in uncharted territories from a pastoral sense.
How do you address that? Well, if I'm speaking, it's funny, if I'm speaking with Christians,
in some ways, this is almost harder than if I'm speaking with people who aren't familiar with
the Bible. We have both audiences too. Because one of the things I like to do with people is I like
to take them back to the Hebrew scriptures and talk to them about the vision of Abraham. I am
blessed to be a blessing. I'm not blessed to make myself first and dominate everyone else.
People don't realize that, but that call of Abraham in the book of Genesis in chapter 12 is
an anti-imperial call. I'm not blessed to control. I'm blessed to be a blessing.
So, you know, you show somebody that in the Bible. And ironically, it's very hard often for
Christians to pay attention to these things because they've been given a very, you know,
well-defined route through the Bible of verses they quote and verses they ignore and verses
they prioritize and not. The lens, yes.
Yeah, that's right. And I mean, you could just take a guided tour through the Bible and see a vision
of a different kind of world. And it seems to me that what repent, the word repent ultimately means
is not feel guilty about something. What repent means is to rethink everything, rethink your most
fundamental assumptions. And I think when people are invited to rethink their deepest assumptions.
In a safe space, right? Yeah, not at the tip of a spear, right?
Yeah. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. Rethink or you'll be punctured, right? But to rethink our deepest
assumptions, people start to be able to imagine a better world. Another world is possible.
Yeah. That's the rebirth. Brian, you have been a very large part of that human dialogue.
That's one of the things that I've always appreciated is you've had a tremendous
amount of humility about what happened to you. And but you kind of started, at least in some
frames, sort of a desire for that rethinking. I want to ask you two questions is kind of an arc
from when we we last the last time I saw you was in New Mexico at Richard Roar's place. We had that
lunch and we kind of all walked away going, wow, something just happened here in a really good way.
What has been the cost and the outcome for you taking that journey?
Well, you know, my I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist background. And then for me to
for me to move into evangelicalism was moving into a way more liberal space, right? Although
right about the same time I was moving to that space, I think evangelicals were kind of taken
over again by by fundamentalists. I mean, it's very hard to find evangelicals today who who are
distinguishable from from fundamentalists. Yes. Yeah. From the turn of the century. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. But when I crossed whatever one boundary too far, I found out that even though evangelicals
don't have a strict denominational headquarters, they have a very effective method of excommunicating
people. And so it took three or four years and I got a firsthand experience of how that happened.
And I you know, it was disturbing. It was difficult. You guys might know this name.
There was a wonderful in the best sense of the word evangelical teacher named Dallas Willard,
who was very good to me. Dallas, I consider him one of my mentors. He was very kind to me.
And one day Dallas gave me this little printout that was called a prayer for enemies. And it was
a prayer written by a Serbian Orthodox bishop where he is trying to come to terms with being
betrayed by people. And Dallas gave this to me and said, I think you're going to need this.
It is deep, slow voice. And I did. And that prayer helped me. And it.
What did you learn through that? Right. Well, I learned a couple of things, you know,
like I've always tried to be honest and I've always tried to not be at least as arrogant
as I could have been. So what that meant is I would try to say what I saw and and had come to
believe. But I would also always be open to somebody showing me I was wrong. And one of the
things that happened during my exit from evangelicalism is I found out that nobody had any
good arguments against anything I was saying. All the people had was to work within their little
framework and say this is different from our framework. Therefore, it's of the devil and it's
wrong. But when they couldn't step outside their framework to say anything to anybody who questioned
it, except that you're going to hell or whatever, if you don't go along with this here, it was very
surprising. Like I was disappointed in a way. I'd write a book and I think somebody's going to write
a really substantial critique of this book that I've got to take seriously. And it would just
again and again, it would be like, oh, not that again, you know, and and some of it was just me
spirit and a name calling and and that sort of thing. So I suppose one of the things I learned
is that you're afraid of certain people for the wrong. I was afraid of certain people for the wrong
reasons. They didn't really have an argument or a compelling counter vision to what I was saying.
They they only had, you know, to check off the box that I was different. So that's one of the things
I learned. The other thing I learned is that there's a big world outside and that that even
though some people might not have wanted to go with me, I still felt the presence of the spirit
with me. And and yeah, so I've got a great story for you. Yeah, my story is I'm a desirability
God, John Piper. Yes, Mark Driscoll up on stage for talking about the supremacy of Christ in a
postmodern world. And he referred to you as that crazy old uncle that, you know, gets a little
drunk every now and then, but you love him and you just got to kind of put up with him every now and
then. And what's so amazing about that? And in fact, I think you referred to Rob Bellas as evil
double gamer twin because they both had a Mars Hill. But what's so sad is, is that his life is
he has fallen, right? There's an entire podcast. Now he's the uncle. There's an entire podcast and
he's still the polemic, tired, sad person, which is a shame, right? Because he did have a lot of
amazing passion. And he was there for a reason caused a lot of damage. But here's what here's
where you are. And your legacy is going to be a lot different than his brand, you know. And so,
I mean, we all kind of chuckled at that up there. But, you know, and it's not about who gets the
last laugh. It's just about, you know, who continues to walk the walk and have a legacy that
continues to be above board, you know. And so I think that's, that says a lot.
Well, thank you.
Brian, to your credit, I think that's one of the things that you've maintained throughout the
entire process of, first, you just ask really good questions, but you maintain your own sense of
humanity, at least from my perspective. I know you probably went through all kinds of ups and downs,
but you held on to dignity. And I think at the end of the day, that's all anyone hopes for is just
to hold on to a sense of dignity through the experience. Like I talk to my kids all the time,
how do you get through really hard times? Is it you hold on to your sense of dignity of who you are?
Because that's the only thing that holds weight in the midst of chaos is who you really are.
And you did that very well. Because I know you got slammed hard. And you're a soft guy. You're
like, you're a lovable guy.
Well, it feels like a very long time ago now. And one of the great benefits of being excommunicated
is they don't kick you around anymore once they've kicked you out. So, but, you know, I
so much as you're saying this, I'm just remembering a moment in when I was in college. So I was
probably 20 or 21 years old and I had had this spiritual practice that someone had taught me.
They said, instead of trying to read through the whole, like I read through the whole Bible,
you know, and I had, and for many years I'd read through the whole Bible with a little three
chapters a day thing, which I, I think is a great thing. And I think that's the thing that I
am a big fan of, but somebody said, why don't you just go really deep in one passage and don't move
on to another passage until you feel you're, you know, you're satiated with that one. So I read
first Corinthians 13 and Romans 12, those two chapters every day for many years. They were my
meditation day after day after day. So first Corinthians 13 about love. And I was sitting on
outdoors at my university in between classes. And I just had one of those moments. I think all of
us experienced sometimes where I just felt God very close to me. You know, I felt, I just felt
out of the blue in some ways, you know, it just, and I, I guess I had read that story about Solomon
asking God or God asking Solomon, you know, what do you want to ask me for? You can have anything.
And I sort of felt, what do I really want is the question. And I just thought, well, I want to be a
loving person. That's what matters to Jesus. That's what matters to Paul. I want to be a loving
person. And then I thought, and like Solomon, I'd like to be a wise person. Well, I wish I would
have known, it wouldn't have made any difference, but you know, if you want to be a loving person
and a wise person, the only thing that means is you're going to have to go through pain. If you,
if you want wisdom and love with no pain, it's just doesn't work in this universe. So let me
ask you, let me ask you this, just as a fellow sojourner, was the journey of, cause I, this is
what I preach a hundred percent of the time. It's just about love. Just do love and you've got,
you got a hundred percent of it. Has the journey of love been worth it to you?
Oh my goodness. No, no question.
Because I think that's what people miss out. And that's what Gen Z doesn't understand is
we've been on this journey for a very long time. We came from solid roots. There's tremendous
deep wisdom in the gospel. And we have that when things are bad. And that's what allows you to
remain sober enough not to kill your neighbor. And we're at that period where people are really
asking what's really valuable. Is it the politics or is it this other thing called grace that Jesus
said? You know, it's like, like people are really kind of saying, can we just cut out the BS,
you know? And really that's what I loved about your whole arc, Brian, is you maintain love.
So thank you for being that example. Well, it's, it's kind of you to say,
and obviously all of us have our bad days and bad decades, but, but, but there really is a wonderful
gift. And it's really the gift that I say that I got from Jesus is that Jesus said, this thing is
about love, love God and love your neighbor. And yes, oh my goodness. It's not about like,
you don't have to fulfill religious demands. It's you get to participate in this thing called love.
And if you do, your life is going to be awesome. You're going to have to go through stuff,
but it's going, the fruit of it is so richly rewarding. And I think that's what most people
don't have is that sense of what does it mean to love? I think that's the fabric that's been ripped
out of America, to be honest. And, and you know, Jonathan, this is where, like, when I think about
a person who would be cynical about that, I think this is the tragedy that they have never been part
of a community that shared that value. I think if you're the only person who wants to live by love,
that's going to be really, really tough. But, and here's where, you know, Jesus words, if you could
just find two or three people who sort of say, that's all you need. We, we share this idea that
love is, is what really, really matters. And we're pursuing wisdom and from a heart of love,
you know, two or three is enough. Yeah. Like you say,
love is the acts of love. Love is the, and that's, it has to be experienced, right? It's not an
intellectual thought. It's not a something that you can see in a movie or even read. It's something
that has to be lived out, right? And it, and if it, and you can't live it out and solo, I mean,
you can have a relationship with God, you know, in a convent or in a monastery. And the people that
live those lives are, are living in a vibrational world where they're, they're trying to affect
the cosmos, right? You're absolutely right. You're, you're, you've nailed it. And the M. Scott Peck,
you know, talked about that in such a great book, but the idea of, it's almost the Dharma, right?
You're, you're, you're doing it day to day. This is, this is the duty. And then the outcomes come
after that, right? And that's what I love where you talked about, you're less worried about outcomes.
I recently read the Bhagavad Gita and listened to it on audio book and what an amazing inspired
sacred text, right? It's incredible, right? And the idea of don't worry about the outcomes,
be detached from those, focus on, on what you're doing now. And this is how this reminds me of the,
I don't know if it was Augusta, but it goes back to the idea of there's a bunch of starfish. They're
all looks like they're going to dry up on the sea. And he's throwing one a minute at a time. And
somebody comes up and says, Hey, what, you know, what are you going to do? Save them all? No,
but I just saved that one. Right. And I think that's the kind of mentality we need to have to
have these kinds of two or three people gathered to build on that community, to have shared growth,
right? And pain and challenge and, and then to build, right. And to build in a positive way.
Yeah. Right. Cause you talk about some of it in your book. How does the world begin addressing
these types of, these types of almost powerless ideas? How does the world begin to respond
effectively? Well, I think the process is underway. I think the process is underway.
I think there are setbacks and sometimes I think the setbacks are necessary because
the setbacks end up being self-correcting. You know, let me say it this way. If I,
I'm thinking about this, cause last night I went to the opening of the new movie, the civil war.
Oh, yeah. It's devastating. It's devastating on many, many levels. I, I,
I, yeah, it's, it's really worth it. It's worth seeing and it will stay like it's,
I'm still buzzing with it at this moment, but if you have a great nation and you have people
decide to have a civil war against each other, the civil war will be self-correcting because
both sides will destroy each other so greatly that that nation will be humbled and it, it,
you know, it will correct itself, right? You, if you choose a foolish and dangerous leader,
that leader will get you in so much trouble that, you know, you'll, you'll eventually realize,
well, that was a really, really big mistake. So these things tend to have a self-correction to
them. It's just that the price can be super, super high. And this is, we're in the situation
we're in now because a lot of people don't know this. Did you know that people figured out climate
change and made incredibly accurate predictions about climate change in the mid 1800s? But it was
a, it was suppressed, pushed aside. And, and, you know, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, data really increased.
And then in fact, you probably have heard this, but Exxon, their people sent a report to the
leaders of Exxon and said, our product will basically destroy the world if, but they knew
they were so accurate in what would happen if they kept pumping out fossil fuels. And so then
they spent millions and millions of dollars to sow misinformation and distract people and all the
rest, much like the tobacco industry did. So we're in this situation we are now because of really bad
ways that people have not gotten the message and not responded to it. And eventually things will
get bad enough that more people will pay attention. It's up to us how soon that will be and how much
pain will require to face it. And that applied to, that applies to racism. That applies to,
you know, it applies to all of the problems we face. You know, if you want to be a racist,
you have a very ugly future ahead of you. And you think it's going to make, solve your problems.
Oh, it's going to create problems for seven generations from now. So yeah.