Why Advent Hope Matters When the Culture Feels Like It’s Collapsing | Nathan and Cameron
Nathan (00:01)
Hello and welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm your co-host, Nathan Rittenhouse.
Cameron (00:04)
and I'm your cohost Cameron McAllister. Is our culture in a death spiral or is that just overplayed? Are things really that bad or are we kind of just make, is this much ado about nothing? Well, that's what we talk about in this episode and we take it as an occasion to discuss hope, Christian hope in particular. This will be helpful to you. Fasten your seat belts because it's a little bit dark for the first 20 minutes, but then we do steer it in what we believe to be a genuinely
Hopeful direction. Like, share, and subscribe. And as always, if you'd like to support our work, you can do that by going to www.toltogether.com.
Nathan (00:07)
Well, Cameron, it's a adventy time of year. Maybe your church has a little wreath with some candles or something, or you're reading a devotional or you have a chocolate advent tradition or some other marker of marking off the time, looking forward to the double return of Christ. but I want to kind of lean into the question of how do we live realistically with hope? And, and it's the difficulty of getting that balance right. That I think makes us an odd.
the two of us odd in that we, seem to be more optimistic in some categories than most people and way more pessimistic in some categories than other people. And people don't quite know what to do with this. And I think it is our, our practical outworking of trying to realistically and honestly look at the world around us and do a podcast that's about Christian hope. So I that's just like, this is us having therapy with each other to re-clarify and everybody listening along to work through what are we talking about when we talk about hope?
Cameron (00:41)
Got it. Yeah.
Nathan (01:06)
in the, in the Christmas season. The way that may be helpful to frame this, to push into it is there was an article that I ran across and it didn't sit quite right with me, ⁓ by David French. And oftentimes his articles are a little something in there for me, but he's saying, ⁓ the article is titled, what happens when you don't believe we're living in a death spiral, cultural death spiral. And he would say that the, the more conservative, ⁓ young MAGA right.
critique of his type of evangelicalism is that it doesn't acknowledge the difficulty of the times in which we're living. And so he's saying he's pushing back against this idea that, you know, everything's dead and dying and has fallen apart. And he quotes Matt Walsh. I think many of our listeners will be familiar with who that is. And Matt Walsh wrote, it's an empirical fact that basically everything in our day-to-day lives has gotten worse over the years. The quality of everything, food, clothing, entertainment,
Cameron (01:54)
.
Nathan (02:03)
air travel, roads, traffic, infrastructure, housing, etc. has declined in observable ways. And I think that the common sense and feeling ⁓ probably for a large sector of the United States or maybe the modern West is that that is true. That there are new difficulties in just talking to a customer service person or going into a store and ordering or buying a product or ordering something online or the speed of
And to a certain degree, can say, hey, these are all first world problems, ⁓ but there is a difference in them. But here's where the disconnect seems to follow is that French would say, well, Walsh's statements are not empirically observable. Look, Americans are living longer lives, enjoying higher medium wages. They live in larger, more luxurious homes. They have more civil liberties. They have more access to justice than even in the recent past. So basically, what are people complaining about?
I'm guessing Cameron that you think there's a disconnect in the conversation of what we're talking about that's happening between those two opinions. Can you help us see how these might be different?
Cameron (03:16)
On the ground, most people don't share David French's sentiments. And I think it would be, that would be true across the political aisle. I think most people...
Nathan (03:25)
Yeah, I don't think this is a Republican
thing.
Cameron (03:29)
Yes. So I think there's a general sense that things are bad right now and that they are getting worse. You said several years ago, and this has never left me, that one way to measure this is just to see how people look at the future. And it's true that as recently as 50 years ago, people were generally fairly sanguine about the future, excited about it.
Nathan (03:47)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (03:56)
They thought we've got a lot of challenges facing us. There are always challenges, unique challenges facing every human beings in every era of history. But we thought by and large, we're up to the task of facing those challenges. Overwhelmingly, if you talk to people, that is not the case nowadays. And even if you look at some of the movies we're watching, the stories we're telling ourselves, I was just talking to you about House of Dynamite.
Nathan (04:17)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (04:25)
Catherine Bigelow's new movie on Netflix. mean, suddenly, you know, we're thinking about nuclear apocalypse scenarios again. People are pretty negative about the future. I think a lot of people, oh boy, you're good at that. Do it. I'm just kidding. Yeah.
Nathan (04:36)
Well, hang on, let me make it worse. Can I make it worse? So, cause you're, cause you're, I see your despair and raise you, um, the,
sense in which it's like, when you were first talking about people's optimism of the future, think of imagine two kids who, know, are getting ready for school and they know they have a math test. And one of the kids, one of the children feels pretty prepared. They've studied, they know the types of questions that are going to be on the test.
And they're kind of looking forward to it. Like they're a little bit nervous. Like we don't know quite what's going to happen, but I've, I'm prepared. I've got my pencil sharpened. Let's do this thing. Verse the kid who like doesn't have a clue what's going on. There's an anxiety about it. I don't think that's the analogy anymore. I think the analogy is so it's neither of those kids. It's now the kid who's preparing for a test who doesn't even know what the questions are going to be or what the category is.
That seems to be more the way in which people are feeling of like, have no clue even what we need to know or do for the future in order to make sense of anything. And so there's kind of a, we can't prepare for the metrics or we can't prepare for the questions because we don't even know what they are. And that's a different feeling ⁓ than whether or not you've prepared for the test.
Cameron (05:50)
And also, I think it's pretty easy to even from an empirical standpoint, that word always raises my eyebrows, because people can use it in some pretty interesting ways. you can, I think, counter French's argument quite easily there. can say, well, look at the socioeconomic factors right now. mean, first of all, younger people, we talked a lot about this. Most younger people don't expect to ever own a home.
crippling student debt. Also, look at the psychology of the nation, which is, there are also measurable data on this. Depression levels are surging. Suicide is very high, especially among young men. None of these are indicators of a healthy culture. And David French, just to speak about him specifically, has been backed into this corner a few times. And in this case, is backing himself into the corner.
I remember all the way back, we talked about his debates with Sorab Amari. And obviously you and I have our differences with Sorab Amari. Neither Nathan nor I would call ourselves integralists. But I do think that there were certain moments where Sorab had some good points. Basically when he said, David, I think you're downplaying some of the very real issues that we're dealing with in our culture. It matters not just of
Nathan (06:56)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (07:18)
You've got matters of moral degeneracy that are very widespread and not only accepted, but celebrated. That's a problem. You have, you know, all of these other basically indicators of serious spiritual and moral unrest, which are real. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan (07:34)
Okay, but time out.
French, to be fair, preempts that in this article and says, okay, when we're looking at the moral trajectory here, so talking about larger, more luxurious homes as an economic category, what about the moral thing? So he then quotes Kevin Williamson, who has this sentence, more drag queens? Sure, but fewer slaves. The moral trajectory of Western civilization is not entirely in the direction of failure, you know.
And there's something about that sentence that just doesn't work at all for me of, first of all, let's tease that out because drag queens are not like, you know, a serious, you know, I'm not something I'm deeply terrified of first of all, but then not slavery seems like a very low moral, like I'm pretty sure everybody agrees that not having slavery is a fantastic thing. And we're not comparing 2025 to 1725. People are comparing 2025.
Cameron (08:05)
Yeah. Let's tease that out because that's important. Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (08:31)
to the year 2000 or maybe 98 in which there weren't slaves probably in the country that you're listening to this in. So it seems like a weird metric to be like, well, know, our moral trajectory here isn't totally bad. Look, we don't have slaves anymore. Fantastic. Let's all applaud that and agree that everybody applauds that and then come up with a different metric for how we might want to talk about moral progress.
Cameron (08:34)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
What would, it would be interesting to think about what some indicators of a more healthy turn in our society would look like. When you ask questions like that, you begin to sort of tease out what people think, what people's vision for the good is. And that's, I find that's a more difficult conversation for people because they're used to, hey, here's what I'm against. Here's what needs to go away. Yes, okay, but what would it look like if things were otherwise?
Nathan (09:16)
Mm-hmm.
Okay. Can I get, can I have sort to guess at that? So, so I think if you reflect back through your most, difficult social interactions, know, you're at the DMV or whatever, and think through what's happening there of, of the unpleasantness of the experience is not necessarily the structure. It's the attitude of the personality of the person that you're engaging with. And so when you have an underlying culture where everybody's just low key irritated all of the time,
Cameron (09:28)
What would a better America right now look like to you? Yeah, I'd love to hear it.
Nathan (09:58)
I was in a place buying a replacement part for a chainsaw clutch. And the entire time that I was there, it was clear that I was irritating the guy who owned the business.
I'm not like, I'm here to give you money to give me a part. how am I an inconvenience to you that you have to turn away from your... Sorry to... You will have to look away from your computer screen in order to do this transaction with me. And I recognize that's going to irritate you, but I'm going to compensate you in the traditional way of purchasing something by giving you money for the thing that your sign says you provide. Now, so that's not like a structural meltdown in the supply chain.
Cameron (10:19)
Sorry to
Nathan (10:40)
That's a human personal, like I was talking to my brother about this, like go to a middle school basketball game. Everybody's irritated. Even the team that is winning is mad at the refs. Like it's just a wild, like everybody is that. And so it's not, it's weird. And that is like, well, you know, the TSA agent, like, no, it's not that it's that. So when you ask the question, what would the cultural shift look like? It might be a little bit more Chick-fil-A.
You know, it's a pleasure doing business with you. ⁓ and I sort of mean that tongue in cheek, but sort of don't of like happy people, even in difficult situations can make a, an experience much more pleasant and irritated people in a good system. Always make it an irritating experience. So the human factor I think is a cultural indicator is what I'm saying.
Cameron (11:28)
Would it be fair to
human factor, would it be fair to say Nathan, that if people were more present, it would be a world of difference. You're describing situations where people don't want to be interrupted from their own private diversions. I think, I think that's a significant part of it. I mean, we've, we've, we've been conditioning ourselves into the state for years and years and years. And now it's made much worse by a smartphone.
Nathan (11:48)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (12:00)
And you hate to always belabor that point, but that's a salient feature here. So often when I'm walking, my experiences are the same as yours, although I'm not replacing parts on a chainsaw, but if I'm walking into a gym or trying to pick up a pizza or something like that, those are more my sort of suburban errands. If I'm in those situations, I am repeatedly encountering people who are also irritated at my presence, but they're irritated because I'm distracting them from a conversation that they're having with somebody else on the device or from something that they're watching on their device.
And those same devices who isn't there. they're not, they don't, and it's not that they have a, I don't take it personally. It's not personal. It's not personal. I mean, the outworkings are personal, but it's not a personal thing. But this is increasingly everybody. You think of, was Sherry Turkle's phrase alone together, which kind of captured that dynamic. Yes, Turkle, several people together, all on different devices. But what that does is it's robbing you of human presence. And it's also.
Nathan (12:30)
You're interrupting somebody who isn't there.
Yeah, Turkle.
Cameron (13:00)
when it comes to the service industry, practically, if you're robbed of human presence, you're gonna feel that. So I was in a restaurant recently and it was such an amazing experience because it was such the exception. The person who was serving us was so engaged, she was very present and I don't think I ever saw a phone in her hands. And what was remarkable about that was that it was such an exception. It's not usually the way. So we're describing.
Nathan (13:24)
Mm-hmm. Right. yo- but you will eat there again because
of that. I will not buy chainsaw parts at the same place because of that. So, I mean it-
Cameron (13:30)
And we're. Sure.
A society where people are present once again, a society where people have an increase that you see the erosion. mean, we can name, we can continue to name some of the maladies that come about from this. There is also a consequent erosion of social skills that comes along with this. Again, if you're a person who does most of your transactions with other human beings, transaction, what a hideous word to use in conjunction with human relationships. But let's face it, if you're doing that.
Nathan (13:52)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (14:05)
then it's going to be more difficult for face-to-face, eye contact, communication, once just a basic necessity of life. The ability to do that well is becoming more rare. So I think we want many of us, whether we can articulate it or not, or whether we think to articulate it or not, we want a society, we want a culture where people are present, where we're together once again, and we get that kind of attention.
Nathan (14:28)
Okay, well, okay.
I think that's fair analysis, but we're living in the transition to the time in which humans aren't necessary. So, I could have bought my part online. Well, but I could have bought my part online. And I was like, you know what? I should support this. I wasn't even close to where I live. I was in a totally different state and was just driving. Yeah, it looks like a family-run business. go in there. Yeah, so I'm like, I could get this online, but you know what? This will be faster. I'll stop in here and support somebody who has a brick and mortar store.
Cameron (14:39)
So we're being told. That's true. Yeah, that's true.
Nathan (15:00)
I don't have to do that. You don't actually have to have, like, I mean, and even in a lot of, you don't have to have somebody come take your order at a restaurant. You can order on the app and have delivered to your table. mean, so this is the tension of you delivered to your house. Yeah. Why, why, why even go out? ⁓ okay. So we're getting a little bit off topic here, but we're just ranting about, think attention that everybody who's listening to this can nod and think through.
Cameron (15:14)
You can have it delivered to your house. Yeah, of course, yeah.
Nathan (15:26)
An experience in the past month that has been like that where you're like, my goodness, why does this like I'm not asking for you to perform a open heart surgery. All I want is for you to give me a receipt all the way down to the flip side of like, you know what? That was a great experience. I enjoyed talking to that person. So is the human a burden to us or are they a blessing to us? That's the
Cameron (15:42)
Well, Nathan-
I mean, two words that come to mind here as I think about this, and this is just the on the ground experience for so many of us. And so this is where, know, David French's words might ring a bit hollow. I often, the two words that come to mind are, you know, just deserted and exhausted. And what's interesting about that is this is much more pronounced since COVID, since the lockdowns. Things have never really, they haven't stabilized since then. And stabilization is going to take a long time, you know.
Nathan (16:07)
Hmm.
Cameron (16:15)
When you have an event that has a global impact like that, you don't just bounce back immediately. I grasp that. But on a social level, even though there are people in the stores again, there are people out on the streets, you walk into so many of these establishments and there's an odd feeling of desertion in the sense that there's nobody who's really invested or engaged. And then there's just that, yeah, that sense of exhaustion. Everything feels run down. Everybody feels it's worn out. America feels very exhausted. ⁓
Nathan (16:41)
It's it's a lack of spunk. It's a lack of spunk.
So we're, we're fun. You know what it's like to be awake and getting something done verse to feel refreshed and like really put your energy into it. And so it feels culturally. So this is why it's weird to complain about it. Cause like, okay, maybe your TSA line was long and the people around you were a little grumpy, but you still got to get on a plane and fly a distance in an incredibly small amount of time compared to most humans in the world and in history.
Cameron (16:53)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (17:09)
It's a little first world problem, but it does lack the the excitement or the energy or the ⁓
There is there's a vitality factor that I think people are but okay, so then in the in But in the context of that mood, let's then throw in ⁓ cancer
Cameron (17:18)
vitality.
Yeah, no, it's real. That's a mood though. It's harder to measure that in some ways. That's a mood we're describing, yeah.
Nathan (17:35)
I mean, we can make a huge list here of like actual life altering crippling brokenness.
loss of jobs, spouse, death in all forms. So when you, ⁓ when you throw these real and legitimate, like categories of despair into an already, ⁓ weakened culture, just, there's no momentum to sustain us through like the hurdles and the potholes in life, ⁓ in the same way. So.
Have we painted the picture dark enough yet? guess is the... So there's a deep culture sense that then the things that have historically happened to all humans seem like they slow us, us down more because we don't really have... Yeah, I think momentum is the right word there to pull us through some of these ⁓ sad things that happen.
Cameron (18:36)
Yeah, I think it'd be fair to say that many people are just in survival mode. You ask them about the future, the future. I'm just trying to survive today. I'm trying to get through the week. I'm trying to get through the month. I'm trying to get through 2025. I think that's people, people are exhausted and depleted. And I think despair in many ways, we can come up with some very grand kind of tragic descriptions of it, but on a practical level.
Lack of energy is a good way of putting it. I always think of, there's a poet, Steve Turner, he has a poem called Depression, and the poem goes like this, came here to write a poem about depression, got fed up and left. And I think that in some ways very practically captures that mood. And I think that that, to a significant degree, captures the cultural mood in the West in many ways.
Nathan (19:30)
Mm-hmm.
There's an old, ⁓ I don't think we use it medically as much. It's an archaic medical term, as thin as the Nia, which is a, an overall lethargy or weakness. ⁓ of just a, yeah, can't quite get it together. ⁓ so let's, mean, so do we go Steve Turner and be like, we started off to do a podcast on hope. Couldn't pull it off. And so we quit. We got fed up and left.
Cameron (19:58)
got fed up and left.
Nathan (20:00)
We're 20 minutes into this whole so maybe we should
Cameron (20:01)
Well,
let's ask the relevant question here though as we are, two Christian people here and we're in the Advent season. It's a great time. This is a podcast dedicated to hope. You might not believe it if you've been listening so far, but just hang with us. But I think the circumstances we've described are really...
Nathan (20:19)
You
Cameron (20:27)
They're helpful and they're conducive to talking now realistically about hope. I'll just say, I want to say first of all, it should be very clear by this point that hope is not the same thing as optimism, though the two are often conflated. So there are a couple of ways to tease that out, but there is no easy formula here. I've kind of, I've despaired of an easy formula for describing.
Hope is a theological virtue, but I think there are some very constructive, helpful ways we can come at it. But I would just, I would say that some of the one observation I found really helpful from a number of profound thinkers is that optimism is just basically the Blythe expectation that things will work out in the end. But hope in sharp distinction to that doesn't ask, will this work? It asks, is this the right thing to do?
And in terms of the Christian life, the question is not, course, will this work in cultural terms? Spoiler alert, it won't. But is it the right thing to do? Because I mean, the Christian way is, of course, I don't want to downplay it. It's a way of joy and ultimately of redemption and reconciliation, but it involves taking up one's cross and dying to self.
Nathan (21:51)
So
let's create, let's.
Cameron (21:53)
Those are not typically activities
that we associate with hope. If you think hope is optimism, anyway.
Nathan (21:58)
So, a friend of mine, let's put a Christmas spin on this, friend of mine stopped by yesterday actually and said, if you think about this peace on earth, goodwill toward men, the angels proclaim this in Luke through the shepherds at the birth of Jesus, and we share that. Did that proclamation fail? Because clearly, after the birth of Christ, there was not peace on the entirety of the earth and goodwill toward all people. Was that a promise that didn't materialize? Where is this peace?
⁓ and the answer is later in the teaching of Jesus, you know, my peace I give you, but not as the world gives you. And so it's a piece that is in the context of the brokenness. It's a hope that is in the context of the suffering. It's, it's, it's, it's within the reality that we're facing that we have this thing, which then becomes actual, the actual foundation for apologetics, giving the reason for the hope that we have with gentleness and respect in the context of our
willingness to roll up our sleeves and be involved in and accept the reality of the brokenness of the world around us. And so when Jesus says, give you my peace, as the world gives you, like, yeah, think like, I mean, he got crucified. Look what happened to all of his followers. It's a pretty different vision of peace. so I think there are ways in which, okay, if I'm dependent on humanity to sort out all of my problems, ⁓ that is an optimism that is ill founded.
Let's just leave it at that. If I'm looking at the political process and procedure in order to stabilize my concept of hope for the future, that's also not a fantastic one. Economics. I, but I, cause I think Cameron, what the silver lining in all of this might be is that when you look at, ⁓ maybe the medical world or scientific optimism in general to the economics, ⁓ politics, these are all, they are, they, do function as
sources of hope for us. just, think in the last five years, they've been shown not to be good foundations for our hope. so suddenly religious thought as a, mean, kind of imagine a horse race where all of the other horses fall down and the church is still moving. ⁓ There's an element of that that I'm sensing of people say, Hey, you know what? These other things are not horses that are going to make the distance. And that Christianity uniquely
Cameron (24:10)
Hmm.
Nathan (24:21)
recontextualizes the purpose of hope and peace and joy as a within the difficulty of the world as we have it for now. And that for now is a very important part of that, that propels it forward. Because I was thinking about this actually earlier this morning, like the pre-Jesus political vision or future vision and hope for the Jews was the coming Messiah, which was a much more conquer and inherit the land, hold the Holy land.
be a people kind of vision. And so, when Peter is writing about ⁓ the enthusiasm there, like in the beginning of 1 Peter, praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And then goes on to talk about an inheritance that can't perish, or fade. There is this sense in which ⁓ Christianity contextualizes the chaos by widening the angle lens.
to say, at the big picture here. And then resurrection in the context of death becomes the foundation for hope into this bigger story in a way that does not deny the brutality of death, doesn't deny the difficulty of the existence with which we live, gives us a bigger picture, which then enables us to have peace even in the midst of our chaos. And so there's a depth and a richness here, not just into the future vision,
but the implications of that future vision into the way in which we inhabit the the advent, the the Perusia, the return, the longing for the coming and the fulfillment there. so waiting with legitimate hope based off of something that has already happened in the past is a very different way to be situated in reality than a context in which like, well, everything's just wearing out and falling apart.
Cameron (25:47)
Mm-hmm.
Yes. And you described the widening of the lens. Christian hope is a principled sense of expectation that is inspired by and animated by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So that's the living hope aspect. And on the basis of that living hope, the hope predicated on the person of Jesus Christ, who is God, then you're able to have an eternal perspective. Eternal perspective.
is absolutely vital, especially when you're living in dark times. And we are living in dark times. So it is hard. It's a discipline and you don't do it alone. Once again, you need God, his word and his people to cultivate and sustain an eternal perspective because everything around you, especially now in the modern world, everything militates against that. Everything will try to rip you back.
Nathan (26:47)
It's hard though.
Cameron (27:11)
to the world and say, hey, this is reality. Just look at the world around you. This is all it is. Leaking gutters, dilapidated businesses, canceled flights, crashing economies, mass shootings, kids killing their parents. What's going on in Palestine? What's going on in Israel? What's going on in Russia? Looming disaster, looming world wars. That's real. That's all there is. Even Christians get pulled into this, but it's not. But it's a spiritual discipline.
on certain days to recognize that that is not all that there is, that there is an eternal perspective and that this is God's good world.
Nathan (27:51)
You think even like the way in which not just Jesus talking about human fragility, but then even Paul and like the images of our way outwardly our bodies are wasting away ⁓ that we live in tents, jars of clay, all this super fragile imagery for what it is that the little, you know, human flesh packet is. There's a sense in which we are not, we are not ⁓ yet
Cameron (28:03)
Hmm.
Nathan (28:21)
perfected for our habitat. The sense that we feel that there's something wrong with the world is exactly what the New Testament says you should feel because something isn't quite right. But we have this body, this rewilling from God. ⁓ And so all of this happens in order that God's power might be, actually, I talked about asthenia. That's the word when Paul says, but in my weakness, he is strong. I'm strong through what he's doing in my asthenia. ⁓
There's a there's a strength that comes from the fact that God is sustaining us as he prepares us for a future thing in order to highlight the goodness and the glory of what it is that he's ⁓ bringing about in unexpected ways. I think the difficulty of this, I've been sort of processing this on Sunday mornings, you you have the peace, the hope, the joy, the love. It's very hard to have. can't, I don't think you can have any of the, like you can't have three of them or you can't have
Like they, it's a composite. They all fit together. There is no such thing as love without peace or hope without joy or like they all, it's sort of like dissecting a frog. Unfortunately, you have to kill it to take it apart. I feel like I do. So, so, so there's a, there's a sense in which we like, it's good for us to sit down and to talk about it and analyze it. But at the end of the day, love, joy, peace, hope, all of that isn't something to intellectually know.
Cameron (29:22)
I've only got two fruits of the spirit. Yeah, the other one's not happening.
But one thing-
Nathan (29:39)
There is an experiential element that should manifest itself in our lives in a way that is contagious. ⁓ That is possible and that is the calling of our moment.
Cameron (29:54)
Yeah, and it doesn't mean that, here are two things that it doesn't mean. If you're animated by Christian hope, it doesn't mean that you pretend like things are better than they are. Because I see Christian, and I'm not saying this is what David French is doing, but it doesn't mean that you, if you're a person animated by genuine hope, you are able to look around you.
And if things are bad, can say, no, things are bad. This is pretty grim. This culture certainly from just a pure cultural standpoint does seem to be in a death spiral in terms of morale, in terms of the spiritual outworkings of this culture. That's real. But you can also say in that same sentence, and God is good and he is on his throne and all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. And it's not fantasy.
Nathan (30:48)
Okay, but you.
But you made a very Christian pivot there because I think people would say we're in a death spiral and it's the feminist. They're the ones who it is the drag queens and the whatever else that are destroying our culture and on and on and on the list goes, and we just need political and legal change. Yeah. And so the pivot that you did there though, is to acknowledge there are difficult things happening in the world around us. And the solution to them is not just to throw more wood on the fire as the world burns, but to say,
Cameron (31:03)
⁓ Yeah, here's the here's the villain insert villain. Yep.
Nathan (31:21)
Maybe there's an entirely different category in which we should be framing this.
Cameron (31:25)
Well, and also let's you set me up to offend absolutely everybody. So I'm going to do it. It's not the drag queens. It's not the feminists. It's not the progressive. It's not the fascist. It's not that, I on and on we go down the list of all the cultural villains. It's all of us. Okay. Look, Advent is also a time of, there's a penitential aspect to Advent as well.
Nathan (31:32)
You
Cameron (31:54)
We're waiting the Lord, but we're also recognizing his authority. And in terms of what's going on in the death spiral right now, death spiral of the United States, it's animated by an amazing radical level of selfishness. Now we can use words like individualism and we can talk about technology, it's just, America is animated by greed, hedonism, and selfishness, has been for a long time. And we're all part of that culture.
Nathan (32:17)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (32:20)
This is a message that's very hard to sell to people who have bought into any kind of political hope. Because if you've bought into a purely political hope, here's the way to test whether you have or not, whether you self-identify as a Christian, where your hope really lies. If you think that politics ultimately is where we're going to get our solutions, where our deliverance will come, then your hope has been located in a political sphere. So if you're doing that, you have to find the villain, the enemy.
But if you're looking at this in Christian terms, you have to also, I mean, you have to have the humility and the recognition that, hey, if I'm in a culture that's in a death spiral, if I'm in a culture that's in steep decline, I'm numbered in that decline. I am part of that culture. I'm not standing apart from it on some spiritual mountaintop. Now, if I'm a Christian, ideally speaking, I am set apart, but I'm still a fallen human being. I've done my share of contributing.
to that culture, God forgive me. I think always of the prophets, you know, famous words, father forgive me for I'm a man of unclean lips from a people of unclean lips. If you're an American, you live in America, how true is that of us? Okay, so there needs to be some ownership here.
Nathan (33:36)
But there is a.
But there's a way to do both because you think of Jeremiah, hey, you keep this up, we're going into exile. And he preached that message all the way into exile. So he was implicated in the people, but he was pointing to a future vision and a ⁓ longer term, more full picture of what was happening there. in order to be prophetic within a culture, you have to be implicated within it.
in order to speak to it. So there's a sense in which, we are numbered within it, but we can live differently from it in a way that tells a better story that takes more with us into a bigger vision of that. So, yeah.
Cameron (34:14)
Of course, both are true. Just
don't fall into the temptation of saying, God, I'm so grateful I'm not like these drag queens over there.
Nathan (34:26)
The one of the aha moments that I had actually thinking about it for the first time with one of my kids last night, we were talking about self-control is that so you can, you can think, you can think of self-control as like, I'm not going to eat this many cookies after dinner this evening before I go to bed. That's one form of self-control, but actually self-control also in, in its purest form of practice necessitates that we think about other people.
So it's very hard to practice true self-control in isolation. You have to think about self-control in light of if I don't do this, this enables this other person to do this, or this allows me to do this for this other person, or I'm thinking about somebody other than myself. ⁓ And so the selflessness is a byproduct of genuine training in self-control. And I think that would be one of the things that we can each practically work on as we think about when I am part of something, does it go better?
Do I socially lubricate the situations in which am I in am I able to think about other people's needs and and meet them and and maybe even ⁓ Forbid step back from my own rights. I do have the right to stare at my phone in the public space I'm an American but do I have the ⁓ The wherewithal to say I'm gonna put this in my pocket and strike up a conversation just the the way in which we want to think like what Cameron is saying here is so practical about Thinking about starting with ourselves here
working out from there is the one thing that you maybe you're called to a high level a form of social change Great may God give you wisdom to be faithful doing that but you are for sure called to an individual familial communal Transformation that God wants to work starting in your own heart And so the the thing of it is you're quoting from Psalm 51 there about I'm a man of unclean lips or or Isaiah and then you think of I was thinking of David then creating me a clean heart and then on the other end
And then I will teach transgressors your way. And so there's always an Isaiahic purification that happens from God and then a call into mission. And so if we're just looking at the penitential destructive side of that, then not really receiving forgiveness, really experiencing the peace of Christ, and then being called into mission on the other side of that, then we're not appropriately acting as Christians in the world around us. And if we act like everything is just fine, then we're also not appropriately acting like Christians because we're not calling out.
brokenness when we see it appropriately.
fine line.
Cameron (36:57)
It is a fine line and it's really worth praying about and thinking about, especially in the Advent season. So we hope this has been also, we hope this has been strangely uplifting in a good way as we've the last, yes, in the last 15 minutes, I think we tried to move in a more hopeful direction, but a genuinely hopeful direction. again, I think hope is a misunderstood virtue.
Nathan (37:09)
I hope this has been helpful.
Cameron (37:25)
in our culture especially and Christians, we have a wonderful opportunity to restore to the world a proper vision of hope. That's something to lean into this Advent season. You've been listening to Thinking Out Loud, a podcast where we think out loud about current events and Christian hope.