Well, welcome everyone to another episode of Faithfully Engaged.
Today, I've got a different kind of guest here today.
I got a really interesting story with him.
So I have Nathan Albertson today.
He is a church planter with Church of the King in Evansville, Indiana and creative director
of Warhorn Media for whom he produces and appears on several podcasts, including Sanity
at the Movies, Sound of Sanity, The Booking and the Ville.
So Nathan, it's great to have you on today.
Great to be here.
How are we doing, Johnny?
Doing great.
Yeah, kind of back behind scenes there where we're dealing with not able to hear each
other.
So it's great to actually hear you and we're going to have this conversation.
That's right.
I could have a conversation.
Johnny's eyes because if people don't know, he's got Frodo Baggins, baby blues.
There should be lifeguards just to watch and make sure that I don't dive into his eyes.
I'm a happily married conservative Christian man.
But if people only get the audio version of this, so they only know Johnny through some
sort of non-verbal or non-... You know what I'm saying?
They don't see him visually.
Then I just think that that's an important detail here because if I suddenly trail off
or something, it's because I've been hypnotized by...
I mean, I think this guy could start his counseling practice just all based on this natural attribute
that he's been given.
He barely needs to say anything, but I just want to make sure that people understand that
if they're only listening to this podcast.
I need to make that a part of my own intro.
Beware of eyes.
You should put that in the little thing that you send out to people, your email.
That's fantastic.
I love it.
So, Nathan, tell us just a little bit about your podcasting career there.
It sounds like you got your hands and quite a few projects there.
So can I tell the audience a little bit about what you do there?
Yes, sir.
I am actually more or less a professional podcaster.
You could read that blurb and people could be forgiven for thinking, oh, he's a guy on
the internet that says that about himself.
I mean, there's all kinds of guys on the internet that, I'm a creative writer.
That doesn't mean you've actually published anything.
That just means you put the words creative writer in your bio.
Obviously, anybody can start a podcast, which is one of the joys of the medium.
I'm not upset about that.
At a certain point, I was just starting one.
I want people to understand, I get paid to do this, baby.
So yeah, I work, I am the creative director for a ministry called Warhorn Media.
We exist to basically bring sanity to an insane world.
That's kind of our byline.
So we just want to exist in spaces.
Oh boy, listen to me.
We just want to exist in the spaces of basically we want to do, we do culture, we do pop culture,
we do a lot of different podcasts, we do articles, we've done some videos, stuff.
And the goal is to bring, as I say, just normalcy.
Normal isn't normal anymore.
So we just want to sort of let people bask in the joy of normal thoughts about sexuality,
about other places where the Christian witness is under attack today.
So we try not to be people that have a chip on our shoulders or anything like that.
But we do kind of want to occupy those spaces where things feel a little danger and where
people are tempted to feel insane precisely because they're sane, precisely because they're
the normal ones.
You know, they just believe what people have always believed about men and women or things
like that.
And you know, you can feel very crazy just being a Christian these days.
So I occupy that space.
Man, why do I keep saying occupy space?
I do not care for that language at all.
That's like corporate speak.
Like Bob Iger or something like that.
We're going to occupy the space.
But I occupy that space.
I don't know where that's coming from.
It's those eyes.
They're making me nervous.
You're drowning, man.
I'm drowning.
We need to send a lifeguard.
But yeah, so I am also a church planter here with our head pastor, his name, Jacob Menzel.
And he also appears on many podcasts with me.
We kind of co-founded Warhorn Media together.
So my day job is Warhorn Media, but I also preach and help out and do some counseling
and stuff like that for our church plant.
If people want to listen to my podcast, I'll just go ahead and slip a plug in there like
a real pro.
I do one called Sound of Sanity, which again just exists to bring biblical sanity to an
insane world.
The one that I'm actually most excited about right now is called Sanity at the Movies.
And the reason that I'm excited about that is because it is the best Christian movie
podcast ever made.
So pretty easy to be excited about.
It's something that's the best in its field, the Mona Lisa of Christian movie podcasts.
And by the way, when I say Christian movie podcasts, I do not mean that we review terrible
Christian movies.
We're not doing God is not dead or something like that.
Two or three or whatever.
Or yeah, any movie about like a football coach who rediscovered his faith.
We are not reviewing that.
But we just, I encourage anyone with an interest in movies or culture or the world you live
in to check that out.
We do some recent releases.
I mean, we'll be doing Flash and Oppenheimer and the new Indiana Jones and stuff like that.
But we also do long form deep dives into classic films.
I mean, could be Buster Keaton, could be Charlie Chaplin, could be The Godfather, could be
Samurai films, Kurosawa.
But we really just use the podcast as a springboard to talk about all kinds of like, we just recorded
an episode on Rocky classic film, Adrian Rocky, but it hasn't come out yet.
But we actually use it as a springboard somehow to talk about boxing and blood sports and
the way that societies from like ancient Babylon on have used and abused the masculine urge
to dominate and to defeat their enemies and the way that it's been gamified and what's
good about that, what's bad about that.
And I don't know that whether our views on that would be surprising or not surprising
to your listeners, but I thought it was interesting.
And we got there just in a little podcast, humble podcast about Rocky.
Got all the way from Babylon to Muhammad Ali.
So yeah, I encourage people to check that out.
I know I realize someone on the internet talking about movies, not really all that exciting
to just see that, but we're the best.
So can't beat that.
So there's my plug.
I got it out of the way up front.
I'm sorry to be such a crass.
No, that's great.
You know, I'm interested too, just with most of my audience is going to be of a Christian
background.
Sure.
And there's the temptation for Christians, especially in today's world, as you mentioned,
we're living in an insane world that I think it's always been insane.
But boy, here recently, we've taken it to some new levels.
And the temptation is, well, that's all bad.
Okay.
Agreed.
So let's just run away, live under a rock and just watch civilization burn and not deal
with it at all.
And what would be your response to that type of mindset to just completely withdraw and
not deal with the culture at all?
Well, you can't unless you have a rocket ship and you can breathe oxygen on Mars and your
rocket ship will get you to Mars.
You can't.
You can only say that you can, but you can't escape culture because you can't escape yourself
and you can't escape the air that you breathe and culture.
That's all culture really is.
That's all pop culture really is, is just the air that you breathe.
So I think Christians fall into a couple of basic errors when it comes to movies and
entertainment.
One thing is they, and this one was very popular back in the 80s and 90s when I was
coming of age.
They draw a line in the sand, you know, they say, we do not watch any R rated movies in
our house or we do not watch any movies made after the year 1970 in our house or whatever
it is.
We only watch public.
And that can work to a degree.
You can, you can get rid of some bad stuff that way.
And when you say leave the world, I think that's all it really ends up equating to is,
is people draw a line and they say everything on this side of the line is worldly.
Everything on this side of the line is okay.
The problem with that again is the human heart and the fact that we live in a fallen world
and guess what?
There's lots of PG 13 movies that are filthy that require discernment and there might even
be some good R rated ones, you know what I mean?
And so like I grew up in kind of a homeschooling community and people wouldn't give themselves
to any new art.
You know, I can remember a family that just didn't watch movies.
Guess what?
They had books of Renaissance paintings and you could find naked ladies in those Renaissance
painting books and you could be enticed by the naked ladies in those Renaissance painting
books.
You can read the work of Homer and it can fulfill your blood less.
I'm not saying don't read Homer.
I love Homer, but I'm just saying wickedness is all around us and what you have to do is
actually have discernment.
You can't just draw a line in the sand and say, well, okay, everything's good on this
side.
Everything's bad on that side.
If you just were to lock yourself in a bunker and it was just you and your spouse and your
kids, there would be five sinners in that bunker.
And actually, unfortunately, I mean, I could only really say this anecdotally, but I think
it's true that a lot of sexual abuse, a lot of molestation, a lot of that sort of stuff
actually springs up in very conservative communities where they're just kind of creating their
own little cult of the family or their own little cult of personality and they're trying
to shut themselves out from the world.
But if you think that that makes you holy, then it doesn't.
And a lot of times God's judgment on that can unfortunately be pretty severe and people
will think, I've removed all sexual temptation, but then they still have the sexual temptation
that's in their own heart.
I mean, you can see this throughout Christian history in the monasteries.
I mean, not to get into maybe a controversial subject, but you can look through human history
and you can see people try and shut themselves out from the world and always, always, always
they have their own human heart in there with them.
So that's one error that I've told you one of one out of three errors that I think people
make the second one that they make is they say, OK, I'm not going to do that.
I'm not going to just draw an arbitrary line in the sand.
I'm going to have discernment.
OK, so far so good.
But then they fall into what I perhaps uncharitably think of as the Gospel Coalition error.
And the Gospel, I like things that the Gospel Coalition publishes.
Don't worry.
But one thing that can kind of happen with some of their pop culture stuff is they find
a way to kind of baptize it a little bit.
Like they'll say Luke Skywalker is actually a type of Jesus Christ, you know, something
like that.
Yeah.
And, you know, he's a metaphor.
And it's like, A, I'm not sure that George Lucas would actually agree with you on that.
B, God made the world and he built a lot of Christian typology into the world.
It turns out you'd be hard pressed not to find a metaphor for Jesus.
And like here we are.
We're talking.
You're a counselor.
You talk to people.
That makes you a little bit like the great physician, Jesus Christ, who came to heal people.
We can think of a Christ like metaphor for you.
Does that necessarily mean that you're good?
No.
No, it just means we can, we can, no, I still have to use discernment about you and about
your practice, right?
But it's easy enough to sort of baptize it and say, well, he's being like Jesus.
And I find that people have a little bit of a cheap relationship sometimes with movies
and entertainment where they'll find these kinds of analogies between, you know, I mean,
I don't know that anyone's ever actually, I'm sure people have done Luke Skywalker's
Jesus, but I'll see things like that where they take a movie that is popular and they
sort of find the Christian associations in it.
And I think that that can be a little cheap sometimes.
And then there's a third error that's a corollary to the second error.
And that's among people who are even more conservative and maybe even to the right of
something like the Gospel Coalition.
And so they end up actually sort of doing the same thing, but they're just looking for
different associations, different typologies.
So they'll say, this is such a great movie about fatherhood and it has fathers and sons
relating to each other.
And it's not that a movie can't teach us something about Jesus.
It's not that a movie can't teach us about fatherhood.
It's not that I don't have movies that I respond to because I see great truth in them.
It's just that you have to not think shallowly about these things.
You have to actually ask, what are the filmmakers trying to say or the musicians or with any
kind of arts?
You have to ask, does it matter whether they would agree with what I'm pulling out of here?
You have to ask, how are they saying it through cinema, through visual language when it comes
to movies?
And those are the kinds of things that we try to answer on our podcast.
And we have great fun time doing it.
So subscribe today, listening to Anthony at the Movies Podcast.
I think what you're saying, though, is really important.
Particularly as Christians, the temptation is, I mean, anybody that's grown up in church,
there's the Sunday School Answer, it's always Jesus.
Yeah.
Luke Skywalker's Jesus.
Game over.
No more thinking.
And there is a deeper level there, like you're saying.
And what I'm about to draw, I'm not equating the medium of a movie, and I'm going to draw
this to the way that we read scripture.
Again, not the same things, but similarly, we can read scripture and, oh man, King David,
I see myself in him.
I'm reading scripture, I'm reading those Psalms.
I'm just like King David.
And there might be some truth to that.
You may have some similarities in a phase of life, but you don't want to read yourself
or your own shallow understanding into it.
What is scripture saying?
What is the meaning?
Not my meaning, what is the meaning here?
Same thing in culture.
We just don't want to go at that shallow level, actually get underneath there, actually think
about what's going on, and that takes some brain effort.
It's not just eating the popcorn and going on with your life.
Yeah, I remember early on when I was a little bit more abrasive, there are people who would
say I'm abrasive on Twitter now, which I suppose we'll talk about at a certain point.
But early on, this was around the time that the first Wonder Woman movie came out, and
there was a lot of people going back and forth about the feminism in that movie.
And there was a popular Christian sort of celebrity who said, who put out a tweet where
he just said, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to go to the theater and I'm going to eat my popcorn.
And I'm going to enjoy the movie.
And I just thought of all the responses you could have.
I mean, if you want to say, guys, it's annoying that you're reading so much into this and
making it to such a culture war when it's just a wonder.
If you want to do that, and you think that you can do that, I might not agree with you,
but that's an argument to just simply say, I'm going to intentionally disengage.
That's not an argument.
That's not helpful.
We need to be engaged.
We need to get to shut off our brains as Christians.
I think what you say about, you use the example of King David, and it's like you can go to
a sort of shallow church or hear a shallow sermon where someone will say effectively,
when we see the story of David and Goliath, it is just a story of overcoming a challenge.
I think equal and opposite to that, though, you can go to a church where they'll say,
when you see the story of King David, remember, he's a type of Christ.
So it's just this sort of theological point.
Meanwhile, everyone sitting in the pew is like, I know what a David and Goliath story
is.
It's the story of overcoming a big challenge.
You're going to tell me that the one thing that everybody, sports teams, David and Goliath
stories, you're going to tell me that's nothing.
And it's like, well, actually, we need to have the discernment and not just run to,
it's all allegory, or just reduce it to an easy little self-help parable.
Maybe there's something more there that we need to see.
And I think that can be true of our preaching, that we have those kinds of problems, that
we fall into shallow little ruts, and it can certainly be true of the way that we read
culture and read pop culture and engage with different texts and different art and stuff
like that.
So what we always say about our podcasts is we don't want to teach people what to think
necessarily.
We want to teach them how to think.
We want to teach them how to be engaged and how to actually be critically thinking about
things.
And unfortunately, not that I'm necessarily any better than anyone else, but critical
thinking is in short supply these days.
So you just have to learn how to do it.
And that's something that I constantly harp on on the podcast that I don't like to take
some of the quick pot shots on the left, not that they can't be fun.
I understand the temptation of, did you see what AOC said?
Well, Bernie's crazy.
I get it.
And don't get me wrong.
There's times I laugh at that stuff too.
But again, it's shallow.
There's not much meat there.
I find myself criticizing much more on the right, not because I agree more with the left
than the right.
No, there's very little I agree with the left on pretty much anything.
But the shallowness, the shallow response, the quick like, we're just going to fix this.
We're going to vote for this next president.
It's all going to be gone.
We're good to go.
No, this is so much deeper than that.
And two, seeing the giving up part of, oh, it doesn't matter who we vote for.
So what's the point?
And I'm sitting there looking at my kids and like, well, that's the point.
I want my kids to have something to grow for.
And I'm going to invest in them and invest in my family, including some of the politicians
I vote for.
But it's much more than that.
We can't just be at that surface level.
We got to be in it.
If you want to fight, then you need to be in it for the long call and that's not just
at the voting box.
It's, it's your life, your life in general.
Absolutely.
Well, you alerted, alluded to this earlier.
So I'm actually really curious on this because I've kind of been on the outside looking in
the middle of this fun little Twitter issue that, yeah, I'm sure wasn't as fun for you
being in the middle of it.
So most people listen to this, probably don't know what we're talking about.
So would you mind kind of setting the scene of this particular viral tweet and I guess
kind of a series of viral tweets?
And yeah, what happened?
What was the issue here?
So the reason that you're having me on is because I had a couple tweets go viral recently
and Twitter leftist sort of atheist Twitter mob came after me and, you know, I sort of
went through being canceled or whatever you want to call it.
But actually there's another story that you should hear first if you don't mind because
this is actually happened to me before on a much larger scale.
This more recent one, the one that you saw was relatively small actually compared to
the time that they really came after me, which was several years ago now.
I think I want to say it was around 2016.
So we were just getting our website, Warhorn Media up and running.
I think it had only been online for a few months and Star Wars Force Awakens had come
out.
So it was 2015 that that movie came out, if I'm remembering correctly.
And I wrote a little article called, should I say the name of the article?
Do I want people to find this?
Sure.
And so it's called Open Letter Dere.
I'm not proud of anything necessarily in the way that the article was written, but it
was an article attacking the sort of girl boss feminism of the first Star Wars, the
first of the new trilogy of Star Wars movies where Rey is just this perfect character with
no flaws.
And it was written sort of in a, I guess you'd say like a humorous kind of a way.
It was written to the character of Rey.
It was like, dear Rey.
I don't think you're behaving in a feminine manner.
Actually, this is not how biology works.
You could not simply beat up all these guys.
And this is not biblical femininity.
And I'm also addressing this letter to Sarah Connor and to all these kinds of archetypical
warrior women.
So at least in the sort of more conservative circles that I run in, they're beating up
on the idea of warrior women at this point is a pretty old, like on our movie podcast,
sometimes we don't even mention it because it's just so like, yep, there's another annoying
warrior woman character in this movie.
What do you want me to say about it?
It's just constant.
But it felt a little bit more like something that was worth responding to at the time.
And of course, it's always worth responding to, but it felt like less of a graze would
lot in terms of saying something on the internet.
So I wrote this article and published it.
And like I said, we weren't a big thing at the time.
Not that we're huge now, but we had only just launched a few months ago.
And this article went out and my friends, my family, people in our church and some other
people that were aware of us saw the article and then it went away.
Like it, that was the end of the story.
And once again, it's important to understand just basic biblical and biological facts about
sex in this article, but it would all couched in kind of this cutesy pop culture discourse
kind of thing.
And really showing off how pop culturally savvy I was, like I was making deep cut references
to movies and stuff like that.
And nothing would have come of it except for it's the internet.
And so somehow I'll never know exactly how, but this Star Trek writer of all things gets
gets the article, publishes it on Facebook and says, wow, look at this misogynist dinosaur.
Isn't it crazy that people still think like this?
And it was insane.
It was absolutely crazy.
One of the crazier things that's ever happened to me, what happened next?
It was so much bigger than what you presumably observed in the second one, which we'll get
to, I'm sorry, but you wanted to hear about this sort of thing.
And this is the really exciting one.
So we were getting hundreds, if not thousands of tweets for our company account, for my
personal account, for my pastor's account.
We were getting hundreds of malicious login attempts to our website per day, which by
the way, at the time, I think my password was like password 123, because in terms of
tech usage, I'm a thousand years old.
And so I felt pretty stupid when we're getting all these malicious login attempts.
I was getting, I want to be careful not to overhype it because in both of these cases,
you know, I wasn't swatted.
I don't know that anyone actually meant me real physical harm, but they're certainly
saying things like you should die.
And the cute thing that they liked to do in this case was they'd find pictures of, if
you're familiar with the biblical story of jail putting the tent peg through the guy's
head in the book of Judges, or if you're familiar with the apocryphal story of Judith cutting
off a dude's head, kind of a similar story in the apocrypha.
People would post those pictures and they would either say, this is biblical femininity,
bro, or they would say, this should happen to you.
And there are a lot of funny ones.
I really think, and we'll talk about the more recent one here in a minute, I assume, but
discourse has gone downhill even in a few years.
People were pretty funny in the way that they made fun of me.
It hurt, but they were creative.
They were colorful.
They would say things like Daisy Ridley, who played Ray, of course.
Daisy Ridley should bench press this fool into the sun and all this kinds of stuff.
The other thing is, somewhere in that article, I made a terrible mistake.
I wrote the words, as men, we have bodies crafted for war.
Now I'm not Arnold Schwarzenegger now, but especially back then, I had a neck beard.
I was pretty severely morbidly obese, and there were some really bad pictures of me
online.
I was in those pictures, and they just had a field day with, oh, body crafted for war.
Yeah, it looks like you've got a body crafted for lasagna and stuff like this.
And you've got a body crafted for Golden Corel, or crafted from Golden Corel.
And I've gotten in much better shape since then, and that was one of the impetuses behind
that because I was embarrassed.
I mean, they got me.
Right?
They were nice, but they had a point.
But it was insane.
It was just days of, I meant to look up the stats because I don't remember them, but I
didn't get a chance to look them up before we started.
But it was, I mean, remember, we're nobodies.
We're nobodies.
And our website was getting hundreds of thousands of hits.
This article was huge.
And it's just like every time you check into Twitter or Facebook or any of the social media
that either I or Warhorn Media were using at the time, it would just be like more stuff
and just people going insane.
And you can find articles to this day.
You could probably Google Nathan Albertson.
You can find old blog posts, you know, Nathan Albertson, misogynist, dinosaur, Nathan Albertson
doesn't understand women, Nathan Albertson.
And I was working not for Warhorn Media at the time.
I am now a full-time employee, but we didn't have the money for full-time employees back
then.
So I was working at Java.
I was a supervisor at a call center.
And the one thing that I had been very bad about was sharing the faith at that call center.
I was a much more of an internet warrior and not much of a real life talker at the time.
And so I received a good, a bit of discipline from God in that this article got to my workplace.
And people who didn't even know that I was a Christian suddenly were confronted with
this.
And the way that I found out is I went into work or I worked a full day and then the night
shift lady came in and she was going to take over.
And I said, hey, Barbara, we'll call her Barbara.
Hey, Barbara, how are you doing?
Barbara said, Nathan, I saw some very interesting things that you put on the internet.
And I was like, oh, yeah, very interesting things, Nathan.
And I was like, oh, well, you know, we could talk.
Nope.
They were very interesting things.
And then nobody at work really talked to me about it, but I knew they had all seen it
and they were all talking about it because suddenly everybody was treating me differently,
particularly the women.
And I actually did walk in and there was a girl who worked there and she was a vegan
sort of Buddhist, exactly the kind of person that would be the most triggered by this article.
And I was like, hey, how are you doing, Alexis?
And she said, Nathan, I saw your article.
And I said, oh, well, you know, I'm actually much more complicated than you would think
from just reading that article.
Would you like to talk about that?
And she kind of shook her head and said, I don't think you'd be interested in hearing
what I have to say and walked away.
And there were several relationships like that that I just never recovered.
And so I had my workplace intersect with this in a way that I did not expect.
And then I found out years later, actually, I found out.
I did not know this at the time, but my work was talking about whether they should fire
me and they convened a meeting where I was in Bloomington, India.
And at the time they actually there were managers that drove in to Indianapolis where they had
their other headquarters.
So people drove two hours or three hours just to get to this meeting where they could talk
about what are we going to do about Nathan, the sexist, misogynist threat in the workplace.
And I love all the stories in the Bible about Daniel and his three friends in Babylon where
they don't want to eat the rich food.
And they've got like a middle manager, basically, they've got the guy that's in charge of the
food and he sticks up for them.
I love any story where there's like a pagan used by God to help God's people, somebody
who is sympathetic to God's people.
In any case, I had a manager that was like that and he was at this meeting and he liked
me and he knew that I did a good job at my work.
So they're all going back and forth for like an hour.
Like what do we do about Nathan?
Should we fire him?
Do we have just cause?
And he finally says, guys, if Nathan had acted on any of these things that we suspect, like
if Nathan was a horrible sexist in the workplace, if Nathan was nasty to women in the workplace,
if any of this had actually created anything, then it made Nathan anything less than a model
employee, then we could fire him.
But this is just something that Nathan said on the internet.
It doesn't affect anything about this job.
Is Nathan not allowed to post whatever he wants on the internet?
And this was a new thought to them.
Like they went round and round and round and round and round.
And they're like, oh, oh yeah, I guess you're right.
It hasn't.
We never thought of Nathan as a sexist.
I'm not, in fact, a sexist.
I'm happy to work with women in the workplace.
I'm happy to have them over me and under me.
I mean, it's just like the things that they were assuming about me based on this article
just weren't true.
And so they were like, huh, we didn't think about it.
We never thought about that.
And so they let me keep my job.
And I only found out about that like years later, but that was crazy.
The amount of hate, the amount of people just saying you should die, people saying, you
know, like pictures of heads being cut off, like an old painting of Judith cutting off
the general, whatever's head and people saying this should happen to you.
Like the idea that it is surreal to be that hated.
Like you don't know me.
You've never met me.
You have no idea who I am.
And yet I represent everything that is evil to you.
Everything that deserves to be destroyed to you.
That is a very, very strange feeling.
And I mean, I assume we'll talk about what I learned, but one thing that I very quickly
learned is it hurts.
And you might think it wouldn't.
And actually I sort of thought that it wouldn't.
Maybe you think it would, maybe you think it wouldn't.
But it really hurts when strangers are saying you're ugly and you're fat and you deserve
to die and you represent a horrible outdated.
It's like, I sort of thought it wouldn't hurt because whatever, they don't know me and I
don't know them.
They're not actually mad at me.
They're mad at an idea that they have about me.
Like people that know me in real life, even people that disagree with me strenuously don't
want me to die and don't think that I'm an ugly troll.
So why should I be hurt by the internet?
This vague, like these names and these fake names and these profile pictures, they don't
like me.
Who cares?
Well, I care.
It hurt.
It really, really, really felt bad.
And so it took a long time for our website to recover from the negative reviews that we
got in various places where you can review websites.
We had to pull.
I was basically, our ministry was in is a ministry of that local church, which is now planted
the church that I'm working for.
But be that as it may, like I was a youth, or what was I?
I was a small group leader at the time.
They had to pull my picture.
They had to pull my phone number.
Again, I don't want to overhype it.
I'm not sure my life was actually in danger or anything like that, but it's just crazy
knowing that there's like hundreds of thousands of people out there that.
H you and that was.
The first one that happened and that was however many years, I think it was 2016.
So that was almost a decade now.
But that was my biggest time actually putting up with this kind of thing.
Wow.
Yeah, I'd no idea about that one.
Before we get into this more recent one, some people may know this, may not.
I'm not going to equate this near to Nathan's stage.
This was a very localized fire that I dealt with back in December.
So I share this example in part.
One, I mean, I know yours went kind of more just it wasn't just a small area and went
bigger, but typically you don't think of Indiana as like, oh, well, there's where all the liberals
live.
Not that I'm sure there are plenty that are there, but you think a California or Oregon
or whatever.
Rural Oklahoma, that's not where you think of.
Like that.
You think it is, you know, God's country.
There's no liberals, nothing.
You can just say you do whatever you want.
Well, and this might get into a discussion later of some other things that you've learned.
I made this blog post and also a video.
Now mind you, I actually stand by all the content of what I said.
It was basically attacking pronoun usage and just really kind of the gender ideology, transgender
type of movement.
I did not, and I will not apologize for that content whatsoever.
And I know that's really at the heart of why people got upset because you're not supposed
to say those things, particularly as a counselor, like you're supposed to gender firm and all
that stuff.
Well, I'm kind of like in your shoes there.
I'm just a nobody.
I just started Truth and Grace counseling.
It was brand spanking new and some local activist about 30 minutes away from me and a little
bit of a bigger town, like a hundred thousand.
They got ahold of that and they weren't too fond of that.
And you can see the rainbows on their profile pictures and two spirited and you know, that
you kind of knew who you were dealing with.
And something that I learned from that, again, not apologizing for the content or the message
behind it, but I realized especially if I'm going to put my name on something, I need
to go down for something that I really believe in because this blog post and video, like
it had like Elon Musk on it.
It was right when he took over Twitter and it was it was it was cutesy.
Kind of like like yours was, it was not meant to be taken as super serious.
I said something in there, that kind of reminded me of men built for war that said something
like I clearly a masculine male can say I'm a female or whatever.
And again, it was a bit kind of tongue in cheek.
And I take things sarcastically.
And of course, the internet doesn't doesn't always do a good job of that.
So anyways, there's some of these local activists, they are ticked, you should lose your license,
all that good stuff.
So I ended up tweaking the blog post, it's still up there, but it's very much more clinical
type of language.
And that's one I would not apologize for that one.
I think the structure is good.
If that makes me lose my license, then please take it.
I don't want it at that point.
But I learned that like, if I'm going to do some of these things, I don't know when if
or when something might take off, but if it does, am I going to stand behind it?
Am I going to?
I know it can't be perfect on everything, but I need to be cautious with the structure
of how things are.
Because I know that may not be why they're going to hate it, but they're going to use
it against me.
And I'm wondering with you, particularly on this first one with that first article, which
you had no idea was going to go to that degree.
Do you feel similarly that, hey, I could have structured this differently?
Like what kind of your postmortem thoughts on the article itself?
What did you learn from that?
Well, I certainly learned that one of the weird things about the internet is that it's
for everybody unless you are, well, I thought I was writing to my audience and I was writing
to my audience.
I wasn't writing primarily a piece meant to proselytize or to explain something to someone
who didn't already agree with me.
It was basically just the, I hope the good kind of preaching to the choir, like, hey
guys, like let's, let's remember that we have the truth on their side.
Now that being said, well, A, that being said, that's not what happened.
A bunch of people that had no context for it got ahold of it.
And that is just one of the weird things about social media and about the internet.
And one of the, I don't want to say necessarily a bad thing, but just, you just always have
to remember.
If you don't, if you're writing for your Aunt Bertha, your old biology teacher might
also see it and your old biology and teacher and Aunt Bertha would never naturally talk
to each other or be in the same space.
You would not sell them an idea the same way, but they might, if you just post something
on Facebook, they're both there.
If you just post something on TikTok or whatever the kids are using these days, they might
both see it.
For some reason, your old biology teacher is on TikTok in this analogy.
So that was, that was good.
Now on the other hand, I think I sort of learned, I always thought that I was the kind of person
that could structure things in such a way that pagans would like them, that I could
reach people by meeting them halfway, by being really savvy about my approach, by showing
that I was one of them.
So I think in my mind, what I thought is, well, when people read this article, they'll
see all the references.
They'll see that I'm a movie guy, that I'm a pop culture guy.
Actually, I'm a better pop culture guy than they are.
I know more references than they do.
And somehow having that stuff in there will perfume anything that they don't like.
And it turns out in 2 Corinthians 2, the apostle Paul says, we are the aroma of Christ
to God, among those who are being saved.
And for those who are being, who are perishing, we are the aroma of death.
People didn't care about any of my cutesy stuff.
They didn't care about any of my meeting them halfway.
They didn't care about any of that.
All they smelled was the aroma of death.
All they sensed was God's judgment.
I mean, if you read Romans 1 and you see that everyone has the truth of God somewhere, written
on their heart, and people live in rebellion against that, and people felt violated.
They felt slapped in the face by me standing for God's truth.
I mean, they took it really personally, and it just didn't matter.
I mean, if anybody, let me just be self-aggrandizing for a second.
If anybody was going to be able to say, hey, guys, we all speak the same language, but I
want to kind of sneak some truth into my speaking of the same language, I would have been able
to do it.
I mean, I was such a pop culture guy, such a movie guy, and I really tried to do it,
and it did not work.
So am I therefore arguing that somebody listening to this should go to their workplace and just
set themselves on fire and say everything as terribly as possible?
And if they see someone who has pronouns in their bio, they should tell that person, you
know, they're going to hell.
No, no, no, no.
None of that.
We need to be wise.
We need to be discerning.
We need to be kind.
We need to be gentle.
These are all real things.
But we should, as we do that, we do need to remember that Christ said, if they hated me,
they'll hate you.
And the apostle Paul said, we're the aroma of death to people that are perishing.
And so I will talk to young people, young men in particular.
You know, my beat is pop culture.
So I'll talk to young men who are like, I've got to see the latest Quentin Tarantino movie
or whatever, because then I can talk to people and we can have a dialogue.
And then I can share Jesus with them.
And I was just like, dude, if you're not sharing Jesus with them now, you're not going to suddenly
have the courage because you've accumulated some points with Quentin Tarantino.
And I'm just here to tell you, like the second you bring God's law into it, they ain't going
to be impressed that you know your Quentin Tarantino.
They're just not.
I realize I'm wildly generalizing here, but it has been my experience that at some point
we just have to tell the truth to people.
And again, I want to be very clear that does not mean we have license to just be jerks.
It does not mean we carry God hates fags signs like that church did.
That was evil.
That was mean spirited, cruel.
We do not do that.
But on the other hand, again, we can't create like a camouflage that'll let us sneak the
truth into the camp.
I really wanted to do that.
I really resented growing up in a conservative, like I said, homeschool community where people
just hated pop culture as a matter of course.
And I wanted to be the guy that could, you know, marry those two things.
And it's not, you know, I now do a movie podcast and other things for a living.
So I guess in some sense I did, but you can't do subterfuge truth.
It just, it doesn't work that way.
So I don't know if that even answers your question.
No, I think it's a great, it's a great food for thought there that, again, that discernment,
that wisdom needs to be there.
I think that's something that I really learned in my own little small journey.
And I'm actually really grateful that that happened to the degree that it did because
it was a very small, like it was ugly.
But we're talking dozens of people.
Thousands of pretty miserable people.
And it stayed there.
And I was actually really grateful it was that size instead of the hundreds, thousands.
I mean, you learned a lot, but that's a whole lot more intensive.
And I was very grateful that I didn't get to that degree.
Well, I should say, before we, I'm sorry to interrupt, I should say before we get too
far afield, I think your listeners will already be able to hear that there are things I regret
about the way that I wrote that article that, you know, as long as I'm going to, like you
said, as long as I'm going to go down, I might as well go down for something good and for
something that really represents and for something that's not just like sort of casually tossing
things off.
I do think it would have been better if my article was structured and strategic and kind
and good in a way that it perhaps wasn't.
If I brought more maturity to it, I just don't think that that necessarily would have made
a difference to my critics, as we'll call them.
It made a difference to me.
It made, and it made a difference to the Christians that were watching me and it would have made,
you know, it's always better to do well than to do poorly.
So, yeah, anyway.
But Porteck in there that, yeah, if you had the perfect article and it was just structured
beautifully, they're still going to hate you.
That's just the reality that you have to get to, that they hate you because they hate
God.
Yeah.
I think a lot of people want to avoid that truth because it's not a very pleasant truth.
And because they like things, you know, if you're a movie guy, it's like, well, maybe
I can use my movie lore to reach somebody or, you know, yeah, you could make friends with
somebody and go see a movie.
There are ways you could do it, but you're not going to ever escape from just having
to actually stand with Jesus for Jesus and for obedience to Jesus.
And people aren't going to like that necessarily.
Yeah.
No, I think that is a truth that we have to know and be willing to deal with that up front.
Now not everyone's going to have a viral article or whatever, but you might have a family member
that hates you.
You might have a co-worker and that's hard too.
Yeah.
You have to come to terms with that.
There's no, and it kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier of just with stuff
and culture.
There's no quick Jesus answer that's just going to get you through that.
Yeah.
You got to go deeper and there's no out.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Got to use your mind.
Got to have the Holy Spirit working in your heart.
I think this transitions well and I'm curious of with kind of this context of this past
bigger experience into this one that happened just a few months ago or whatever it was.
So yeah, kind of tell us about this latest Twitter adventure that you had.
Well, okay.
So I was off of Twitter.
I did not actually get off of Twitter then, but Twitter became increasingly an unpleasant
place, especially for somebody like me.
And I don't love social media.
I don't have a intrinsic philosophical problem with social media, which we can talk about
at some point if you want, but I have no reason particularly to be on social media.
I'm just, you know, I don't know whether I'm a millennial or Gen X or whatever, but
I'm just past the age of really needing to use it for not my job.
But maybe that's not true.
I don't know.
But in any case, I was off of Twitter for several years because, and then I thought,
you know, I work for social media company is my job to promote these podcasts.
It is my job to promote these things.
I should be on Twitter, especially with Elon taking it over.
It felt like there was going to be more space and less censorship.
And I just liked what he was, I don't love everything that Elon does or everything that
he's done with Twitter, but I liked, I thought I felt like the algorithm was kinder in terms
of people actually even seeing my stuff.
And so I was like, I'm going to get back on and I'm going to start using this.
And this was only maybe less than a year ago.
It got on there and started tweeting again and I pre-program my tweets and I write them
in advance and, you know, maybe spend an afternoon.
What are some nuggets of wisdom?
What are some provocative things?
What are some funny things?
I mean, I have files of, I've been doing creative content work for a long time.
So I have files of jokes and files of insights and stuff like that.
I'm the kind of guy that organizes things into not actual notebooks, but digital notebooks.
So I just grab stuff and I tweet it.
And I'm not going to pretend like there's always great discernment in that.
Like I want there to be, but also it's like, I've got an afternoon.
I need to make this intentionally grabby and sort of a little bit provocative, but also
not too much and, you know, I'm always trying to walk that line.
Anyway, with all that as a mea culpa, because, you know, I'm sort of thinking like your listeners
might be like, well, you had this one experience, so how could he be dumb enough to have a second
one?
But anyway, I wrote these tweets that got me in some hot water and the first one tells
a literal truth in a provocative way.
So when I was getting married, I had a list of four things that I was looking for.
And I wanted somebody that I was attracted to.
Obviously anyone who tells you they don't want that is selling something to quote the
princess, right?
I wanted someone who believed in biblical femininity, someone who would who understood
that I was looking for an Ephesians five wife that she wouldn't be surprised by the word
obedience or anything like that.
Again, if you're a biblical Christian, that's obvious.
I wanted somebody who was willing to learn and grow and be teachable.
That's what I always look for from hiring an employee.
If I'm choosing a friend, like you don't want somebody that's the best version of themselves
that they'll ever be because that person's not going anywhere.
They're stuck.
They're proud.
You want somebody that is interested in growth and change and becoming better.
You want somebody with the humility to see their own flaws.
That's just like, why would you hang out with anyone else if you had a choice, right?
So those are the kind of the things that I had in mind when I hit the dating scene.
And I thought, hey, I'll do a tweet about that.
And then I admittedly, and perhaps not wisely, perhaps not wisely, I don't know.
But I wrote it in a way that's more provocative, I think, than what I just said.
I'll just read the tweet.
The tweet is, quote, when I started looking for a wife, I wanted one who was pretty, who
would be obedient and teachable, who thought I was funny.
Oh, yeah, I also thought that I should marry somebody who thought I was funny, which might
sound sort of proud and self-aggrandizing.
But it's like, what do you want me to do?
Marry somebody who doesn't think I'm funny?
You want to be miserable?
All I do is make jokes.
That's my personality.
If I marry somebody who doesn't like my jokes, I'm just going to be sad.
So if there's not enough women and I have to choose one, and there's one with godly characteristics
who doesn't think I'm funny, of course I'll marry her.
But if there's enough fish in the sea, why not find somebody who is going to appreciate
my sense of humor?
I mean, come on.
I mean, I actually had a friend say to me, well, Nathan, you shouldn't look first.
There's someone who thinks you're funny.
Whatever.
Let's not over-spiritualize this dude.
Actually, I was with a pastor at the time and he said to my friend, hey, whatever, let's
not over-spiritualize this dude.
So anyway, I wrote the following tweet.
Quote, when I started looking for a wife, I wanted one who was pretty, who would be
obedient and teachable, who thought I was funny.
I felt embarrassed by that list.
And in some ways, I'm tempted to feel embarrassed by that list, but I shouldn't.
Those are good things to want.
Now I just, before even reading the tweet, unquote, by the way, I gave you a little
window into my thought process about actually getting married and to some of the tension
and neuroses that I felt about that thought process.
Like, hey, babe, I'm hoping you will obey me.
Who wants to be that guy?
But I would encourage young men who are looking for wives to look for things like that, to
look for a godly woman.
And so that's all I really meant.
But I did word it in a provocative way.
And then around that same time, I wrote another tweet, which I don't really feel bad about
this one.
I don't know.
It says, you can spot a rebellious woman, read feminist, just by the way, she walks
and dances and stands and goes through doorways.
Her body language always says, quote, I don't need anybody, unquote, it's very unattractive.
Now you cannot always spot a rebellious woman, by the way, that she goes through doorways.
I am well aware of that.
However, in this medium of pithiness that we call Twitter, you engage in hyperbole, as
a matter of course, hyperbole is a good rhetorical strategy sometimes, or at least a venerable
one.
And I was engaging in hyperbole, which if anyone doesn't know, that just means exaggeration.
So I'm making a point.
I'm saying you can kind of tell who hates God just by looking at them, which is true,
if you have eyes to see.
Not always true, not 100% true.
Certainly there's many nice, lovely, wonderful pagans out there who I believe will go to
hell if they don't repent and believe in Jesus, but they're cool to hang out with.
I'm well aware of that.
In any case, I sent this tweet.
And I, again, I'm not sure how these things work, but somehow in this case, I think I
am, I think that there is a person who is online, who simply looks for tweets like this
to show to the mob and to try and get, like, in the Frankenstein movie, it's like the little
boy or the woman or somebody that's in the French Revolution movie, the person that's
running ahead and says, Hey, mob, come this way.
There's the monster.
Get him.
Bring your torches and pitchforks and stuff.
So somebody found these tweets.
They tweeted them.
Again, most of my audience is conservative as Christian isn't going to be super surprised
by any of this.
Maybe some of it they'll think is provocative.
Maybe some of them that they won't.
But by these tweets had already gone by, they'd gotten whatever likes and retweets and all
that that they were going to get.
And then this mob found them and descended on me.
Like I said, it wasn't anything like as bad as the other one.
This one probably lasted for a little over a weekend, but they were mocking those tweets.
I will say interestingly, you heard me say earlier that people were pretty colorful
and funny in the way that they made fun of me the first time.
I don't know if discourses changed or if I just attracted the wrong kinds of people
this time, but it was all very boring and repetitive and just made me feel like, man,
when people hate God and they hate God's truth, it just sort of saps them dry or maybe you
could make some grandiose statement about internet culture and where it's taking us.
I don't know.
But the point is, it was really boring.
It was just like the same stuff.
So for the doorway one, people would say like make jokes about going through doorways and
just kind of do the most literal reading and then mock the most literal reading as if that's
a valid criticism.
And for the wife one, they really centered in on the word teachable.
And they said, Nathan, what you're really looking for is a dog.
And I got pictures of dogs and hundreds of dog tweets.
But then I did also get, you should die.
And I got people talking about, can we call CPS on this guy, which is pretty disturbing.
I mean, I don't know why.
Hey, if you met me and my wife, we wouldn't strike you as normal or provocative or anything,
such as the boring married couple, pretty happy one, I think by God's grace.
You don't know me, but somehow you've extrapolated from this obviously intentionally provocative
tweet, like even assuming the worst of the tweet, you've decided you need to have my
house and my children.
It's just kind of awful.
So again, I'm hesitant to overhype these things.
I'm hesitant to say persecution, although I suppose that word does apply to these instances.
But in this particular case, that felt like persecution.
That felt pretty nasty, like the whole CPS thing.
It's like, come on, guys.
You disagree with somebody.
And so you want to think of a way to destroy his life.
So that felt nasty.
Now the fun part about this is that JK Rawling actually got a hold of the walking through
the door tweet and she responded to it.
I want to say compared to most of my critics, a pretty classy way.
For one thing, she took a screenshot and she removed my name.
So she didn't send anyone else after me, which is really nice and she did not have to do
that.
She wanted her power to send a much larger mob after me and maybe I'd be saying, this
is the worst one that's ever happened to me, but she did not do that.
And she actually had a pretty funny response.
Remember, I say you can tell a feminist, by the way, she walks through the door and it's
not very attractive.
And so JK Rawling says sarcastically, quote, you may scoff, but my own husband's interest
in me was first awakened by watching me ricochet haphazardly off a door frame for half an hour
before he came to assist me.
So that's a pretty sick burn, you know?
And it is making fun of what's hyperbolic about my tweet.
Obviously, demure women know how to make it through a door just as well as harpies.
So you got me, JK Rawling.
Good job.
That was fun.
I mean, I will always have that.
I will always be able to say that JK Rawling made fun of one of my tweets, which is pretty
great.
She did a, what do you call it, a davra cadavera?
Was the killing curse in Harry Potter?
Well, she's not a part of Harry Potter anymore, so she can't do anything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's true.
Talk about a woman who's experienced cancel culture, poor JK Rawling.
I like JK Rawling.
I like, I like Harry Potter just fine, although it was a little after, slightly after my time.
I remember the younger kids reading it and I read it and I enjoyed it.
But in any case, super fun to have been attacked and attacked fairly successfully by JK Rawling
herself.
Now, the other maybe interesting point of comparison just before I'm done with this
part of the story is something has either shifted in, well, I don't know.
I don't know whether I can make any broad statements about culture or about my standing
or about anything else.
I don't know why this happened, but the first time with the open letter to Ray, the really
big one, the thing that was actually most disheartening was that nobody defended me.
Nobody stepped in between me and the mob.
Nobody.
And I do mean nobody.
I had people reach out privately and say, I'm sorry, you are experiencing this, but nobody
who wasn't a workmate or somebody that was part of our organization did anything.
And I think, I mean, if I was going to make a statement about this, I'd say, I don't know.
Maybe we just all have more handles for what cancel culture is.
We have a term cancel culture.
We know the mob goes after people and we don't like it by and large.
It's just people don't like when they see this is happening now and they see the flimsiness
of it.
I don't know.
In any case, this time, lots of people on Twitter did stand up for me and argue with
people.
It's pretty senseless trying to argue with a Twitter mob, like a real mob.
All they want to do is destroy.
They don't want to hear arguments.
They don't care.
They're not interested.
But I mean, even assuming the best about them, they're not interested.
That's not what they're there for.
But in any case, lots of people actually stood up for me.
I felt much less alone.
I felt very lonely the first time.
I had that existential feeling that this is way too grandiose of a metaphor.
But Elijah, when he's hiding out in the caves and he says, I'm the only one left to serve
you, God.
God says, no, actually, there's whatever the number is.
There's lots of other people that have not bowed the need to bail.
Well, the first time I felt like I was the only one who hadn't bowed the need to bail,
which is, again, way too self-aggrandizing of a metaphor.
But I did feel pretty lonely this time I did not.
So that was nice.
And maybe that's one of the reasons I'm saying that the first one felt so much worse.
But in any case, that's the story.
That's interesting there on that last part.
I think that's probably a bit of encouragement for audience out there that's concerned.
I know, like you said, cancel culture is kind of a household term at this point of, oh,
my gosh, I don't want to be that person.
I don't want to lose my job, all that.
Of course, that's still a concern.
I'm not going to act like that doesn't happen to people.
But it seems to have lost some of its just nastiness that absolutely nobody will be around
me.
There's enough people that are aware of it.
And like you're saying that it's a nasty thing that, yeah, there's still danger, but you
might be more likely to have people that are there on your side, kind of like your old
boss that was like, but yeah, Nathan's not doing anything.
Yeah, more of those people on the internet, but also in your real life to be able to stand
up.
Now, obviously, there's going to be a lot of nasty people on the other side.
But I do think that's a bit of encouragement, especially on Twitter, which, again, is a
good thing.
It's not a perfect place, but it's better than it was a couple years ago.
So as much as what we shared earlier of trying to craft your things online in a good manner,
you want things to be, you want to defend something that's good.
At the same hand, especially for these tweets, like, I mean, you're going to proofread every
single tweet, you know, like you can't make every tweet a perfect thing.
So not living in an amount of fear of like, oh my gosh, if I say men are men and women
are women, I'm going to lose everything.
It could, I guess, I'm not going to say that impossible, but self-censorship seems to be
probably a bigger problem for many people than the actual censorship.
Did you agree with that?
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true.
I mean, I think one thing that's probably changed is that there are many people, pagans,
Christians, left, right, whatever, who are just tired of the monolithic nature of what
happens in our mainstream media a lot of times, of what seems to happen in the world.
You know, it's just whether you agree with, like when you go to see Buzz Lightyear or
whatever, and there's a lesbian couple in there, whether you agree with that or you
think it's horrible or anything in between, it's annoying that they're pretending like
there's no argument to be made there.
Like they've just already won.
And I think in many ways, Donald Trump is not a good man.
But one thing that did happen in 2016 that I think a lot of conservatives really appreciated
was just having the feeling that, oh, it's not a feta complete.
They have not just already won.
There's still an argument to be had, and I'll use my favorite phrase, we can still occupy
space.
We don't have to just go and retreat to the hills yet.
We can just still say, hey, I don't agree with trans stuff.
And actually, I've got most of human history on my side, and there's no particular reason
for me to feel weird about that.
I don't have to be aggressively angry about it on the other hand either.
But I can just assert that I'm the normal one.
And I think that that has changed to some degree, and it's been good.
There's still a lot that's, I don't like this word very much, it's too overused.
There's still a lot that's toxic about culture and about the nature of discourse these days.
But I think a lot of people are just tired of what is toxic about it, which is a good
thing.
No, I definitely think that's a good point that certainly in Christian circles, truth
is, well, if it's not, it needs to be at the top of your priority.
We need to fight for truth.
But you're seeing that in some of the culture at large, which is a very good thing.
Not saying that everybody that's trying to fight for truth, some of the transgender stuff
and everything, not saying that they're all Christian, but that does show that our culture,
kind of they use this fight type of language there.
That's not completely over, that we've not completely lost all semblance of truth as
much as that seems like is the case sometimes.
God's given us enough grace that we're not done yet.
So let's not act like we are.
And even if we are all the way down, like that's not our call.
So just make the best of the life you have in front of you.
And if you're going to go down, go down swinging and go down with a great story.
Don't go down just kind of cowering in fear that that's, we're all going to die, but I'd
rather you die with a pretty cool story.
You get to die with JK Rowland roast in you.
That's pretty cool.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, and in addition to everything you're saying, which is great, we just, one
of the ways that we quote unquote win is by simply asserting, Hey, look at me.
I believe that a wife should submit to her husband.
Now look at my marriage.
It's actually very recognizable.
We're not monsters.
My wife is not bowing to me.
She's not calling me sir.
I'm not beating her.
She's very happy.
And certainly tells me what she thinks and she certainly puts her foot down and all kind
of like, like, look, we are in a, in a complex dance that is a married relationship and it's
a complex dance that you could recognize and that your parents had and that you have if
you're in a relationship.
And I happen to believe something and I happen to just be normal.
And so I think many Christians just live in this kind of with a perpetual sort of chip
on their shoulder.
Like they feel like they're odd and so therefore they act odd.
And that's where you get some of the cosplaying Christians that are like, I believe that my,
my wife should submit.
So she's going to wear a dress like she's from little house on the prairie.
And you get people acting weird precisely because they kind of already feel defeated.
And so they're like, okay, well, I guess I'm weird.
I'll own it.
I'm weird.
And it's like, I think just strategically speaking, it's better to say, I have these
beliefs that you guys are all acting like are weird, but actually I'm just a dude.
Look at me.
Yeah.
Look at this.
It's not that weird.
We have kids.
We teach our kids to obey us.
Our kids are happy, whatever.
Like, you know, I think, I think that's really, that's really important.
And it goes back to something you hit on earlier of unfortunately it, and I don't have any
stats on this, but just anecdotally, there seems to be too much, too much smoke.
So there's probably fire of some of these more conservative, more homeschool families,
which to be, you know, transparent, I'm conservative, we're homeschooling our kids.
I'm not saying that's bad, but particularly more old school where there, there was some
of that hush, hush, sexual abuse, don't say anything, living in fear.
And it's just because, oh, we're doing the right thing by being conservative and homeschooling.
And then that's it.
Like battles won.
It's all over.
And you're not actually living a joyful life.
You're not following God's commands.
You're just thinking you already want it and you have it.
And that piece there, again, not saying that, oh, people see how great our kids are and
our lives are.
Well, therefore they're going to come to Jesus.
But it is some good evidence there of, yeah, like we're not all monsters.
And I actually was thinking of this when you're talking earlier, I'd forgotten about it.
I don't remember what you had posted.
Actually, it was something along the lines of about your views on spanking of like, hey,
great thing about spanking is you spank them and it's over.
You don't have to make a big scene or whatever, which I thought was a great critique again
on some of the far, far right people that's like, boy, I spank my kids 50 times a day.
They're going to learn to respect me.
And it's almost kind of that cosplay type of analogy had there.
I said something along the lines of, and it was like, it was almost verbatim.
I tried to make it like a literal quote to my daughter that was acting up at the lunch
table and I wanted to eat my lunch.
Like, I don't want to discipline you.
And the thing that, and I said something like some of your friends were catching up with
me because it was like a residual of some of the tweets that you got some of the haters.
And I said something like, honey, I don't want to have to spank you.
And I said it wasn't a threat.
And legitimately it wasn't.
It was like, I want to eat my lunch.
Right.
Just leave me alone.
And they take that of, oh, you're abusing your daughter.
She's going to grow up to hate you.
She's going to have all these scars and say, well, I need to be obedient and just nonsense
things.
And not that I'm going to convince them of anything, but I do know that I put my daughter
to go take a nap after that and she says I love you and she hugs me and that's great.
Like I don't have to prove that to anybody.
I have it.
I know I'm not a perfect father, but I have this authentic real relationship and that's
what you need to really invest in.
Not trying to do things to win points, but do it because it's good.
And that's going to exude from you, exude from your kids, exude from your wife.
Don't try to win those internet points just to win internet points.
It's not going to get you much.
Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely true.
I mean, like I said, I'm doing internet stuff because it is the nature of my job, but a
lot of people that I see that are on there that are just there to be a culture warrior.
I mean, I just, I don't want to be too reductive about this.
I think there can be some good things about that, but it's like, go outside.
Like smell the roses.
Is there, is this battle actually happening in your family, in your extended family, in
your workplace?
Do you know anyone that represents the extreme negative point of view that you're fighting
against or are you just fighting these weird abstract internet battles and attracting the
most trollish sort of opposition when instead you could be loving your neighbor and doing
a hundred times more good for the gospel?
And I engage in culture polemic.
I like many people that do.
I am not totally against it, but I do see an immature version of it that's out there.
Yeah.
Kind of getting towards just wrapping things up here, just trying to get some takeaways
for the audience, especially with some of your experience, both in the podcasting world
and kind of having the mob against you.
What would you say are some kind of take a home, take home some real practical things
the audience could do to do what you're mentioning of engaging in the culture, but not just to
fight these big wars and win internet tough, tough points or whatever.
What are some practical ways that you can engage in the culture, but in a very healthy
and biblical way?
Well, I am a great believer in the local church and in real Christian community.
There at an old pastor and mentor, he used to say, there's no such thing as a lone ranger
Christian and it is absolutely true.
If you're just on the internet, guns a blazing and then you don't go to church, I have no
respect for you.
If you can't actually partake of Christ's bride in a real localized way, if you don't
have Christian friends, if you're not part of a real community, then if you can't do
the 101 stuff, then why should I trust you to do the 300 level or the 400 level stuff?
And if you're doing it without accountability, the good thing is I've been lucky enough or
blessed enough to be in a job where I have a boss and he can say, no, Nathan, don't
tweet that.
That's too much.
People edited my article for better or worse.
Maybe at the end of the day, we look back and say, we didn't catch everything, but I
was part of a Christian community, which actually came directly out of my church and there were
people to encourage me, there were people to rebuke me, there were people to provide
accountability and you need that.
And you need to not sort of give into the cultural myth of found family and just surround
yourself with the people that you like or the people that you feel like get you, the
people that are going to tell you, no, that article is great.
That tweet is great.
You need to be part of a church where there's people with bad teeth and people of a different
socio-economic class than you and people with different backgrounds.
The wonderful thing about a local body is that you're not actually going to like everybody
and there's going to be some of your rough edges will be worn off and some of their rough
edges will be worn off and God works through the church.
Who is the great church father who said you cannot have God for your father without having
the church for your mother?
So this doesn't directly answer your question, but it is foundational.
If someone is not interested in simply reading their Bible and simply loving their wife,
loving their husband, taking care of their kids, going to church, I have zero interest
in anything that they have to say about the broader culture.
None.
I don't care what gifts they have of rhetoric, what gifts of insight, what gifts of discernment.
If you cannot do the basic stuff, it's like if you go to a church and nobody's friendly,
nobody shakes your hand, you're not going to go back there.
It doesn't matter what their doctrine is like.
If they can't do kindness, then you really don't care what they say about the sovereignty
of God.
It's not that the sovereignty of God isn't important.
It's not that doctrine isn't important, but if they can't do 101, you're not going to
be real interested in their 400 level stuff.
And so I think the most important thing that anyone can do is go to church and then sort
of coming out of that, love their local community, love, go to things, be part of things, have
friends, have neighbors.
Don't just be.
I'm not an anti-internet guy.
I work.
I literally get paid to work in new media.
I'm a new media guy.
I'm a podcaster for crying out loud.
But I'm telling you, if your only thing is podcasts, listening to them, creating them,
if you're just a content creator, then you're not living the life that God made you to live
as one of His body.
You have to be part of the body and you have to love the people where you're at.
It may be much more important for your wife to bake that pie and then you have to trudge
over to the family that just moved in and say, hey, we baked you a pie and it's an awkward,
terrible conversation.
And then you invite them to church and you feel stupid inviting them to church because
you don't have a good lead in.
And if your wife is like my wife, then she's very upfront about it.
And I'm like, I still want to find a way to package it.
But she's just like, you should come to our church.
But doing that, so much more important than the most awesome tweet.
I mean, internet, I like the, again, I don't want to sound defensive about this, but I
like Twitter, I like these things, but they're designed to flatter you.
They're designed to make you feel like you're getting likes and hits and they want you to
get enough, not so much serotonin that you're done.
And I don't know how serotonin work, you probably do with your feel, but just using
the pop culture way that serotonin works.
They want you to get enough serotonin that you don't give up and you're just happy, but
enough that you keep coming back.
So they want you to feel like you're getting engagement and like you're making a difference.
But usually you're not.
So be part of life.
That is the first thing.
And then when you engage, when you do these things, do it with accountability.
Do it with discernment.
Do it with people who can tell you, no, that's dumb or no, you know what?
Actually it wouldn't be wise to go.
We know your work now has this policy about LGBT, but we actually think it's more important
that you support your family right now than that you make a big statement and go down
in flames at your workplace.
Or we think as your pastors and elders, we've prayed, we've thought, we've discerned.
We think you're actually in a really good position to take a stand right now.
In other words, there's some strategy to this.
It's not just like you're sinning if you don't say the truth here and you're successful if
you say it here.
There's some strategy.
There's some discernment.
There's some times of life that are better than others.
There's some stations of life that are better than others to do things.
And those are decisions that are really hard to make unilaterally.
You need people who could hold you accountable.
And then finally, I've learned that attention is addicting and negative attention is addictive
too.
For all of the times where I've had these mobs after me, there is a part of me that doesn't
want to just block, that doesn't want it to go away.
There's a part of me that's gleeful about people knowing my name even when they're hating
it.
There's a part of me that, call it masochistic, but a part of me that's like, yeah, punch
me at least you're acknowledging that I'm alive.
And that could be addictive and that could be hugely destructive.
And obviously we all see this on the internet all the time where people just get addicted
to negative attention and they keep being more and more provocative and saying things
in the most provocative way, being rhetorically unwise just because, not because they actually
want to help people, but because they want to get attention.
When you become that person, you can inspire followers that way, but you won't actually
be inspiring, you won't actually be giving them anything.
What you'll be doing is finding people whose essences you can drain kind of empirically.
We've all probably worked for people like this, for a boss who, it's actually about
him and it's about what he can take from you.
It's about him making you the best you that you can be for the company or whatever it is.
If you become the kind of person that just exists to provoke, that just exists for attention,
then yeah, sure, maybe God can use a random Twitter, blog post or podcast or something
that you do.
God's in the business of using terrible things in his service, but you won't actually be
helping anybody by and large.
You'll just be sucking other people dry, just looking for followers, looking for, you know,
for proselytes.
I'll say one other thing.
I said that was my last one, but here's my absolute last one.
You got to just be wise.
Let me just say something about social media.
You need to know what social media you're using, what it exists to do, what works on
it, what doesn't work, who's in charge of it.
You can't go to Facebook and do the same thing that you can go to Twitter that you can do
to TikTok that you can do to Instagram.
They all exist for different purposes.
They all have different algorithms.
They all have different people running them.
I think actually the most useful way to think of them is I am walking into the town square
and I want to make myself heard.
How many people are in this town square?
Is it the kind of town square with a cork board where you can post, I want guitar lessons?
Or is it the kind of place where you can get up on a soapbox and declaim your views and
people will want to listen?
Or is it the kind of place where if you do that, it'll just be noise and everyone will
ignore you.
You need to know who's the mayor of this town?
What does he want?
Why are people coming into the town square?
What are they there to buy?
What are they there to sell?
Just think of it that way and I think it can discipline you.
One of the reasons that I don't feel that bad about my provocative tweets is because I'm
not actually on Twitter primarily to win people's hearts.
I am there to advertise podcasts and things that I do which I think are much more helpful
than my tweets.
Things that I hope will be a help to people.
I'm there primarily to attract conservative Christians to come and check out my stuff.
To my audiences, I'm using a brand that works for me as a whatever I am millennial Gen Xer,
one that was designed for my kind of people with my frame of reference.
I'm going there and I'm saying, hey, look at me.
You think I'm funny?
You think I'm neat?
You think I'm interesting?
Well, then come check out the stuff that actually matters.
What I'm not trying to do is change anybody's heart or mind through Twitter.
And so there's a sense in which I'm very intentionally preaching to the choir and I don't feel shame
about that.
That's what if I was just in my life preaching to the choir, that'd be bad.
But Twitter is a place where I go for five minutes a day to preach to the choir and say,
hey, choir, you want to learn how to be a better choir?
Come listen to my podcasts or whatever.
But if you're the kind of person that's going to write a tweet about spanking in order to
change someone's mind or write a blog post or whatever, that's fine.
If you're the kind of person that wants to make someone say, oh, that's an interesting
thought about spanking.
I should see, I should go deeper.
That's another kind of thing.
I'm not saying which one's better, which one's good.
I'm just saying know the difference, know which one you're doing and do it well.
So that's a lot.
I hope there's some helpful stuff in there.
I think there's a lot of helpful things, as I'm sure you would agree with, if on those
kind of takeaways, if you are a Christian, honestly, if you're not a Christian, but especially
if you're a Christian, there's just no excuse to not be a part of a church.
Yeah.
There just isn't.
You can tell me, oh, I don't like the church I go into.
Oh, there's this problem.
And you're probably right.
So your option is to either gut it out, try to make your church better through however
you can state what's going wrong or volunteering things.
You can do that.
You can go find another church or you can go be a part of planning a church elsewhere
or something like that moving.
There are no other options.
There's not the, I'll just go check something online for a year or two and then we'll get
to something else.
No, you got to be a part of a church that tired of hearing those type of excuses.
So the other stuff on, go ahead.
Well, I just, I really think like there's not a good church in my area, Johnny.
Well, at the end of the, if that's A, is it really not true or that there, is it really
true that there's not a good church in your area or is it just that you don't like the
music here?
You don't have a slight discus here or they wear ties and you prefer to wear sweater vests,
whatever.
There's all those kinds of things that we just need to overcome.
And then if there's really not a good church in your area, your soul, your soul, the soul
of your wife, the soul of your husband, the soul of your children, so much more important
than the benefits you're getting from your Fortune 500 company.
I mean, move.
Move.
If you really tell me there is nothing, then what I'm going to tell you is your responsibility
is to not live where you live.
If, I'm not sure I believe you when you say there's nothing, but granting that, find a
church so important.
1000%.
I agree with that completely.
I've been in situations where I've been not, not that there's no good churches, but yeah,
this isn't the healthiest situation.
I get it.
I get those things happen.
We're all messy people, but that is such a rare occurrence, especially in Oklahoma,
I would assume, in Indiana, but really anywhere in this country, very, very rare.
Like you said, if that is legitimately the case, I guarantee you you can find a church
somewhere.
And shoot, use the internet if you need to.
Find a pastor that you really respect and ask them, do you have a tool?
Do you know somebody nearby?
It's imperative and it is not an option.
It's an option to interact on Twitter or to listen to podcasts or whatever.
That is not.
If you're going to be a follower of Christ, you have to be in a church.
That's it.
Can I just say one more thing about that?
I'm sorry to keep interrupting.
I don't know how you smell and your pastor does.
And when he gets up, there is, and he speaks to you, God works through the preaching of
the word in a way that God simply does not through a podcast.
And I am a brilliant podcaster.
Listen to my podcast, subscribe, share, five stars, everything.
I love podcasts.
I love what you're doing.
Johnny, I'm just saying, like that can't be, that that is not, that's like a supplement.
It's not the meal.
It cannot be the meal for people.
Yes.
Absolutely.
So I'm really glad that you let it off with that.
And again, the other things you mentioned, fantastic.
Obviously, we both agree with podcasting and I think it's a great medium.
I love listening to podcasts when I'm mowing the lawn and going for a run or whatever, like
driving in the car.
There's fantastic things about podcasts.
It is not the church.
It just, it isn't, it will never.
And honestly, even the podcast of listening to John MacArthur or whoever that is preaching
an old RC Sproul sermon or something, like those are great too.
You should listen to those that's not the same as being in church.
You're going to have a pastor that's going to have far less speaking ability probably
in your local community, but they're going to be more important to you.
You absolutely have to.
So right.
John MacArthur, however wonderful he is, he's not the man that God has entrusted your soul
with.
Yes.
Unless you happen to go to his church.
Absolutely.
So yes, definitely please take that home.
I think that's probably a good idea to bring that home on maybe not every single episode,
bring that up, but often enough, you cannot be listening to even great voices on podcast
or even said, even great pastors and think that's the same thing as being in a body.
It's just not great.
Well that being said, I know you did a great job of pitching yourself earlier.
Let's let you have one more chance to pitch yourself and where people can find you.
Well folks, you can follow me at Twitter on at Nathan Albertson, of course, see wonderfully
provocative tweets about all kinds of things taken down those pagans with the sword of
justice.
That's me, brother.
They don't stand a chance.
I am your hero.
Give me your money.
But goat.
Just kidding.
You can follow me at Twitter at Nathan Albertson, but more importantly, as I said, I really
love the movie podcast that we're doing, Sanity at the Movies.
I encourage you to listen to that.
Even if you're not a big movie guy or gal, you're going to hear a lot of just general
truth and all in an incredibly fun package.
So Sanity at the Movies also Sound of Sanity, which is more broadly dealing with culture.
We've got a podcast called The Booking, which is on a bit of a hiatus right now, but we
talk about great literature.
At some point, we're going to record our four-hour episode on Anna Karenina, the greatest novel
by the greatest novelist of all time.
But we've got a big backlog of episodes on the great works of literature.
If you like that kind of thing, you can also listen to Chip and Lance, our children's
podcast.
It's like a story kind of podcast with characters and hilarious comedy and stuff like that.
You can also listen to The Vill, which is a drama fictional podcast.
These are close to my heart.
But if you just want an entry point into my wonderful work, you've been so inspired by
everything that you've heard on this podcast today, and you're just like, I want to hear
more of that guy.
He's my hero.
I never have to go to church again.
Go to listen to Sound of Sanity or Sanity at the Movies would be your first stops.
So there you go.
Is that a good enough pitch?
That's perfect.
You nailed it.
Everybody's not there right now.
I'm very disappointed in you.
That's a great pitch there.
Did I mention you're a bad person if you don't hear all that?
Terrible.
Man.
Well, you better be there right now.
I mean, seriously, if you're driving your car, you better pull off and get there right
now.
Are you still listening to this podcast when you could be listening to mine?
Get off.
No, no, no.
First you'll listen to Truth and Grace, Counseling Podcast.
Or no, sorry, Faithfully Engaged.
Faithfully Engaged.
Yeah.
First you finish your whole, every episode, the whole back catalog of Faithfully Engaged
and then, and only then, you're like, ah, no, my life is over.
I have no more good podcasts to listen to.
You go listen to Sound of Sanity or Sanity at the Movies.
And once again, don't have to be a big movie person to listen to our movie podcast.
Just have to want the best content on the internet.
Perfect.
You nailed it.
Well, Nathan, it's been great, great conversations here.
I think the audience really has a lot to glean from.
They got a lot of homework to do as far as podcast listening to, to get to.
But I really appreciate you being on today.
Hey, it's been a joy.
Thank you, Johnny.
All right.
Well, guys, I hope you, I hope you enjoy this conversation.
I'll catch you on the next episode.