Confronting Christian Nationalism – Part 2 with Rev. Dr. David Rice

We’re continuing our conversation with Rev. Dr. David Rice about confronting Christian nationalism—a topic we’re diving into because of the ways that it can deeply affect our faith, our communities, and how we engage with one another in this shifting cultural and political landscape.

In our last episode, David shared his personal story—how his upbringing, ministry experiences, and cultural shifts shaped his understanding of faith and politics. We explored the unique challenges pastors face in addressing these issues from the pulpit and the tension of being accused of getting “too political” when speaking out about national concerns. If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, we encourage you to go back and catch up on that conversation first.

In this episode, we’ll dig deeper into:

• What Christian nationalism is and why it’s a critical issue for people of faith,
• Our collective longing for control—something humanity has wrestled with since the very beginning—and how this longing fuels Christian nationalism,
• And how we can thoughtfully engage with our friends, neighbors, and fellow believers in conversations about these challenging issues.

We hope our conversation with David sparks some new thoughts or insights into how power is being used, where our faith fits into these conversations, and how we can move forward in meaningful, compassionate ways.

About Our Guest:

Rev. Dr. David Rice is BJC’s digital strategist, leading online engagement for the organization and its Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign.

BJC is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that brings people together to tackle today’s serious threats to religious liberty, including the targeting of religious minorities, the rise of Christian nationalism, and the politicization of houses of worship.

Ordained in the American Baptist Churches USA, Rice joined BJC’s staff in 2024 after previously serving in rural parish ministry and starting his own communications consulting firm.

Rice earned a Doctor of Ministry degree in missiology and organizational leadership from Western Theological Seminary and a Master of Divinity degree from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. His undergraduate degree is from Huntington University, where he studied youth ministry and Bible.

Rice, who has lived on the West Coast and in the UK, now lives in Michigan with his family. He enjoys cycling, gardening, cross-country skiing, sourdough bread baking, traveling, and Arsenal football.

Episode Transcript:

Dan: So tell us a little bit about where you are now and then we’ll move into a conversation on what your heart is addressing with regard to this category called Christian Nationalism.

David: Yeah, thanks. Sure. So I left my last pastoral role at the church I was at in the spring of 2022. For a couple of years, did a variety of work in a few different lanes, having to do with marketing communications. Started my own company doing that. Also did a lot of spiritual leadership coaching with pastors all over the country. So it made me sort of intimately aware that even if the context that these pastors are in were quite different than mine, even ideologically, it was still really difficult to be a pastor post-2021. It had already been really difficult pre-2021, that things just got harder and harder for many pastors. The pastors that fared the best, if I’m honest in my experience of working with pastors were in communities where they were either very ideologically to the right or very ideologically to the left where everyone sort of saw the world and drew the same conclusions as everyone else in the community. Those pastors, they weren’t doing fine, but they were doing much better than others because their worldview aligned and their news sources were the same.

Dan: The bubble, the bubble works.

David: The bubble, the bubble is wonderful. It’s great for a season. So yeah, we had the immense privilege of we moved to England for a while. I was a visiting pastor at an Anglican seminary at Oxford University. That to me was really remarkably healing to be among folks, many of whom called themselves conservative evangelicals but for whom they didn’t have any of the baggage around politics that conservative evangelicals do in America. So that was very good for me to go back to some of my roots and be with British people in the Church of England who theologically were quite conservative, but they just had a very different outlook politically, than evangelicals do in America. They hadn’t faced the same forces, the same divisive kind of propaganda I would say these days that American evangelicals have faced. And there’s this sense within the Church of England, in fact, and from friends who are listening part of Church of England, I’m sure I’m getting some of this wrong, but there’s this sense within the Church of England that we are going to take different positions and views on virtually every position, but we’re going to stay united as a church. And that being embedded in the ethos of the church, I think creates space for people to hold differences. Now I know on the ground it’s still very complicated and they’re dealing with their own divisive issues right now, but that was very different than what I’ve experienced in a lot of evangelical streams here in America. So we came back to the States and then in 2024 I started working for an organization called the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty or BJC for short. BJC is a nearly 90-year-old organization based in Washington D.C. that really does advocacy work in front of the Supreme Court and in front of Congress on issues related to religious liberty and the separation of church and state as people of faith. And so historically, starting in the 1930s, BJC was closely aligned with the Southern Baptist Convention when the Southern Baptist Convention had their strong rightward turn, they disassociate it from BJC. So these days over the last 40 years, BJC represents about a dozen different Baptist denominations that are moderate to progressive theologically. So very ethnically diverse denominations, wide swath of Baptist like in the US. About five years ago in the wake of the horrible, horrendous mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, our organization did what we always do, which is convene roundtable discussions with other faith leaders and sort of an interfaith climate and ask our Jewish and our Muslim friends, what can we do to address what is happening on the far right when it comes to extremism and violence And what we got back. So I’m told I wasn’t a part of the org then, but what I’m told is what we heard back from them was, you need to address your own house. If we do this work, we will be targeted by extremists. So we need to take the lead on this. This is not our problem to fix. This is your problem to address and to fix. And so born out of that, the leadership of BJC at the time, and many of those folks are still at BJC, we started an initiative called the Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign. And what it started as was simply a pretty middle of the road theological statement, here’s what it means to be a faithful Christian. Everyone is made in the image of God. Political power is not the gospel and it can corrupt our hearts, things like that. And so we latched on, we started promoting this in 2019, a lot of denominational leaders, mostly in mainline spaces signed on, so the Episcopal Church, evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the denominational leaders, some of our co-signers and co-sponsors. And five years later we have over 40,000 Christians that have signed the statement as saying, Christian nationalism is not faithful Christianity, it is not the gospel. There are other ways to live out our faith rather than getting caught up with politics in this way. So why don’t I take just a quick moment and try to define Christian nationalism. That seems important.

Dan: We were about to say, knock on that door.

David: Yeah, beat you to it. So here’s one of the primary ways we define it. Christian nationalism is a political ideology and it’s a cultural framework that tries to merge American and Christian identities. It suggests that in order to be a real American, one has to be a Christian and more specifically a certain type of Christian, usually with fundamentalist Christian beliefs and practices. So it seeks to merge a Christian identity, which I think a lot of Christians are somewhat familiar with what that means, let’s say the fruits of the spirits or the Sermon on the Mount, right? The ways in which scripture shapes our identity and our imagination about what it looks like in the real world to move into the neighborhood as Peterson says in his translation in John 1, move into the neighborhood and sort of be the presence of Christ in our communities. It seeks to merge that with being, having a particular kind of political ideology, which usually is far right and very fundamentalist from a theological perspective. And so when these two things merge together, it kind of baptizes this far right ideology in Christian language and Christian symbols. I think the lowest hanging fruit example of this is on January 6th, 2021, you had these young men break into the Senate chamber in Washington DC in the US Capitol and pray a very sort of extemporaneous prayer that to my ears, sounded like any prayer I would hear save for the, we just ransacked Congress parts that I would hear in any evangelical church in America. It was clear to me that to some extent these were my people, but obviously I recognize the severe difference between how I would’ve behaved on that day and how they did the symbols of the cross, the symbols of the Christian flag, the people holding Bibles while storming the Capitol and looking on to other compatriots, beating police officers with poles and batons. There was such a dissonance and disconnect, I think for many Christian people trying to make sense of how was our faith hijacked to justify this behavior? And that’s what Christian nationalism does. It distorts sort of in many ways, like a pretty middle of the road understanding of what it means to be a person of faith, to be a Christian in American society. It distorts it for political power and then that distortion turns into messaging that has just enough scripture references, just enough nods to the biblical text, just enough theological words to win people over. And I’ll stop there for now, but that’s basically how Christian nationalism works and what it is.

Dan: Well in that sense, a nation state United States of America is equivalent if not identical to the kingdom of God. And that as the reflection in some sense of the “new Israel” we are God’s favored nation. And to put it bluntly favorite nation, and therefore in the context of the merger it makes, again, I’m not agreeing, but it makes sense that if you hold that you are now operating in some ways, like our founding fathers who actually did perceive the new Jerusalem being America and used the notion of the war against the Canaanites used the notion of taking over the land as actually a Christian notion. So operating in some ways, like again, Pope Nicholas the V who had a, let’s just say encyclical saying, “we grant you by these present documents with our apostolic authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, subjugate, the Saracens and Pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ, wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, countries, principalities and other property, and to reduce those persons into perpetual servitude.” That’s an idea that actually began the colonization of what we know to be the Americas. So when we address the issue of Christian nationalism, we’re talking about centuries of a certain philosophical theological understanding that we have the right in this case as white people to decimate and destroy anyone who keeps us from being able to acquire lands, to profit from them, and in many ways support those who sent us. And that is often the European nations. So colonialism and the nature of we’re a Christian nation, this is a complicated category with a lot of, shall we say, nuance and complexity. So can you help us engage where all that seems to apply with regard to power?

David: Yeah, I can try. It’s very complicated and it’s complex. I think to keep it very simple, within the ideology of Christian nationalism, Christianity is a useful means toward a political end. There are sincere believers within these streams who genuinely believe some of the things you said, Dan, that America is a Christian nation, that America is God’s chosen nation. They read themselves, their story and their understanding of America in Paul’s letters in the New Testament, they read themselves into the text. I worked with this regularly as a pastor to try to help people untangle our American and Christian identities, like I mentioned previously, they’re so tangled together for so many people, and I think particularly most of my lifetime, I was born in 1981, that’s been the dominant kind of messaging from the religious right, is that America is a Christian nation, that the founding fathers were Christians just like us, and that it is our birthright. In fact we’re entitled, these are extreme views of Christian nationalistic ideology that we’re entitled to rule over the rest of society because we’re God’s chosen people. I do want to pause for one second and just briefly mention Christian nationalistic ideology is a spectrum. It’s not monolithic. There’s great research on this by folks like Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry in their book, Taking America Back for God. They are sociologists of religion. So this exists on a spectrum. Just because someone might believe that America has a Christian foundation as a country doesn’t mean they looked upon what happened January 6th and thought this is the right course of action to take. So folks have very different takes and understandings of what it means to be a Christian within America, and it’s an ideological spectrum.

Rachael: Well, I just want to add too, because you kind of put words to this merging of identities. So it’s not like, oh, there’s a distinct Christian identity and a distinct American identity, and then they come together. There is a collapsing of the two. And what actually becomes very clarified in something like January 6th is part of what is clear about this ideology is there’s actually, and you put words to this, David, a very certain type of person who gets to claim this identity, primarily European, certainly heterosexual, cisgender. Again, fitting in these elements of purity that are coming out of these papal ideologies and documents, the manifest destiny, the doctrine of discovery, very clear on who gets to claim these identities. And we see this playing out at every turn, even if really good hearted people will say, no, no, no, I don’t think that only white people are really Christian and entitled to the United States of America. But it’s like the policies, the laws, the dismantling of laws that actually help make a way for more people to have access to the privileges and rights of this country or that make a movement toward a kind of reparation or repair or restoration that you’ve talked about. And I think it goes back to what you were trying to do in your congregation. It becomes very troubling to people if something of their identity that they’ve adopted that’s been, in some ways they’ve been socialized into is actually anti-Christian, is actually anti-gospel. It’s the same way, what you’re saying, Dan, it’s on the spectrum. One could say the Ku Klux Klan was a Christian nationalist organization because they used Christian symbols and European privilege, European-American privilege to say, this is who gets to belong. This is who gets to have access, and we actually will enact violence to make sure that we maintain a certain order or structure or domination. Again, this misuse and abuse of power that is wedded with Christian imagery, Christian ideology, Christian philosophy in a way that is such a distortion that you actually have adopted a gospel that you can’t see is so unlike the gospel that is actually found in the text. You mentioned the Sermon on the Mount, and I’ve heard from many pastors in 2024 that they will teach from the Sermon on the mount and people will actually get upset and offended and be like, this is woke ideology. And it’s like, Jesus’, these are actions from Jesus’s words spoken in the gospel in the text. So I just say that more just owning the complexity is not so much what it is and what’s revealed. I think the complexity is and what it exposes and what then needs to be untangled and how much of an existential crisis that can bring when it feels like your faith foundation is being shaken. And that like what I’ve noticed with people I love, beloved people very close to me who I think I would say are more Christian nationalists than they are Christian but don’t know it and have been discipled by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and a certain form of kind of propaganda I would say, and I know this will actually piss some people off who are listening, but I still am going to say it because again, it solidifies an identity that you see what happens if you step outside of it. And this is where I think spiritual abuse comes into play because part of what happens is people don’t want to be scapegoated in the way they’re being invited to scapegoat the other, whoever the enemy is, whoever the common enemy is. And I was thinking to even what you said about in the ’80’s and ’90’s, you would’ve invited your enemy in because that’s what Christians do. And I think Christian nationalism has taken a kind of hold in a lot of spaces that I don’t even think people would imagine doing that anymore, that you would actually invite your enemy to a service to bring honor, even though you maybe don’t think they deserve it or you’re hoping they get saved in a certain way. So hopefully I didn’t take us on too much of a tangent.

David: No, it’s fine.

Rachael: But I was just thinking about what you guys were saying.

David: To be really concrete. I think one of the themes behind a Christian nationalistic ideology is Christian people who simply believe if we’re in power, we’ll do it better. It’s a conflated understanding or an inflated understanding that with God on our side, we will enact as society that is good and beautiful and true. I wish that were true. I desperately wish that were true. And yet it doesn’t take long to look through history to just see that Christians get it just as wrong as everyone else. We are just as complicit in abusing power and harming vulnerable people as everyone else. And so I think history shows us quite clearly that when Christian people attain political power and then convince themselves that they can do it better, it leaves their power unchecked because they believe God has inspired them. God is on their side, so therefore whatever they do is ordained by God. And that is very dangerous territory to be wading into and stepping into. I think power requires an immense amount of humility to exercise it well, knowing that with a misstep is so easy, even inevitable. And knowing that if you don’t surround yourself when you’re in power with people who will disagree with you and tell you that you’re wrong and don’t submit to those folks, you are in danger of abusing your power from day one. And that’s what concerns me so much about the move toward an authoritarian ideology, which is what Christian nationalists and the extreme generally want, is they want a strong man. I mean, I remember exploring this in Roy Barsness’ classes in our first year at Mars Hill graduate school, Rachael, Christian, evangelical Christians want a strong man to come in and make things right. And it is a different gospel. Doesn’t mean every American evangelical wants this, but generally speaking, we want an authoritarian figure that will just tell us what to do, that will remind us that we’re on the right side of things, that we are the good ones. And that’s we look for. And that’s why when American Christian nationalists hear, powerful people say, I alone can fix it. There’s something within our hearts and how we have been discipled that is attracted to that because we really want that to be true. We desperately want to believe that someone can come in and make everything right. And so it’s a misappropriated desire and hope in a person that is not Jesus. It’s believing the kingdom of God can come without God. That’s one of my big concerns.

Rachael: And I think what you’re saying is I noticed that tendency in myself, even if I have different political views, still wanting the strong man, and I think even the people in Jesus’s time thought Jesus was going to be the strong man. And when Jesus gave up his life as a way to expose the powers and principalities of this world and to be in solidarity and to make a way and to become the ultimate scapegoat that was so like, this is not what we want. This is not the way we want to go. We don’t want to follow you in this way. We want you to come back and take over and punish the people that need to be punished and make things right in this way. So it’s like of course, that tendency to want to turn to a kind of worldly power and that false belief that if it’s just aligned with the right beliefs, it won’t twist you more than you can twist it. And so it’s in our story, it’s a tale as old as time.

Dan: But you see in Acts 1, even the same question, are you now going to establish your kingdom. And the notion that he has to resolve the issue with the political force of Rome, you have to free us from the bondage and oppression ultimately of this secular institution and system. And that’s what I see often with regard to national Christian nationalists, is that the fight is against secularism, and therefore, part of the argument is we’re victims of this secular culture and we’re letting the homosexuals, we’re letting perverts, we’re letting people who devour literally physically kill and devour children run our lives. The Democratic party isn’t merely our opponent, they are evil, therefore, to any degree to which you compromise, that you work in any kind of collaboration with these secular godless people who are out to destroy America… Again, I think what Christian nationalism wants is the savior that the disciples assumed he was. And that is one who would create revolt with Rome in a militaristic way, which is why again, so much of the language of Christian nationalism is fight, fight, fight… malice. And in that sense, deception, propaganda justified because the ends in this case fully justify the means of distortion and in many ways vilification of other human beings that you may differ with. So in some ways, this feels like in one sense the kind of beginning assumptions that the disciples made as to what a savior, what a messiah would actually bring, and we’re back to fighting that war. We’re back to fighting the war of the war as to what is the gospel and the issue of, I’m a victim of this secular culture, I need a strong man or woman who will rectify all the godless laws that have come into being, and then your word of the presumption that we’ll be able to take the story of scripture, 70% story, and then create an actual framework legally and institutionally, you go, well, the 30 years war was actually the basis of a lot of why people came to America. Because when you bring religion into religion, faith into faith, an effort to define what it is that the gospel is, Christian love is one of the strongest form of hatreds that can operate. And in that, let me just kind knock on the door of how do you engage this with people? We’re trying to name and maybe befuddling others by our efforts. But when you’re engaging people, and this is, thank God you’re calling out, how now?

David: Well, I think the most effective way is to argue with people in the comments section and social media posts. Kidding.

Rachael: But the impulse to do it just is there. But obviously I’m with you.

David: Yeah, I mean for most folks, so I’ll just speak from my own experience. My friends who I would say are in this ideological camp deeply, arguing is mostly not helpful. There’s certain things when it comes to provable, easily provable facts that at times can be. Most folks are scared, they’re afraid, they at times are lonely and isolated. Not everyone that falls into this under the banner of Christian nationalists, but they’re certainly afraid and they’re looking for things that they can put their hope and their trust in. I think the remarkable thing for Christian people is that we have this story that is all about placing our hope and our trust in God rather than in strong men or women or political ideologies. And it’s not an invitation to disengage from the world, but it’s the sense, I mean, it really connects us, in my view, tethers us back to the beginning of the story that’s told in the gospels on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Because in that moment with the death of Jesus on Good Friday and stretching into holy Saturday, everything was lost. There was no hope, right? Those earliest disciples didn’t think Saturday morning, you guys know what’s coming, right? This is going to be a good one. They thought it was done. They thought they were fools. I gave my life to this man. I’ve done this for years, and now I have to figure out what to do next. So the resurrection is so surprising and startling for people, and that to me tethers us as it has for 2000 years, Christians, back to the beginning of this gospel story, that it really is about the movement of God. And so my hope for people who identify somewhere on the spectrum of Christian nationalists is that there will be a moment, and this did happen for some people on January 6th, 2021. That was a bridge too far. My hunch is that it will happen for a variety of people over the next four years with various policies that are put into place and actions that are taken, not rhetoric, but actions. I hope I’m wrong about that, but that’s my hunch. That certain folks will see I tethered my heart to this, and it was the wrong place in which to put my heart and my trust and my hope, and the good news from a Christian perspective is that God is always inviting us back to place our hope and our trust in God. That is the movement and activity of God. That’s the only story. I know that makes sense here. So although we could talk about issues of social justice, we could talk about protecting vulnerable people. All of these things matter immensely. And I believe Christians are called to wade into in significant ways. The reality is, for many folks in the ideological kind of hellscape of Christian nationalism, some of them, there will come a point where their world falls apart and they need a Christian story to be brought back into. That’s what the church does. And so that’s why the church needs to keep inviting people into the story. For some people, and from my opinion, from my perspective, we know this, say in 1940’s, Germany, some people will still hold onto the ship as it sinks and takes them underwater. They will not come out from that, and there will need to be a metaphorical death and a rebirth for them to ever get somewhere new. So that’s why I say arguing doesn’t matter. These are not rational positions for people. They’re very emotional positions, and they’re usually based on fear. Because as I know growing up in the evangelical world, living my entire existence in the wake of the religious right, the propaganda is strong, and the propaganda is designed to keep people terrified. It terrifies people. And so when the solutions are presented, strong man, authoritarianism, God is on our side, the secular liberals are the enemy, et cetera, et cetera. It makes rational sense to people. So in one sense, there are practical things that we can do, and these are things we’re working on in my day job with Christians Against Christian Nationals. But as a pastor and as a Christian, ultimately the work of God has the final say. And there will come a moment in a year or a hundred years where this ideology crumbles. But the church must remain to continue to invite people into the gospel story. That’s what the church does. So I believe also the church should be on the front lines of resisting Christian nationalism and protecting vulnerable people in the meantime, but always inviting people back into the goodness of God. In this story that we have been a part of for 2000 years. We just get to be the bearers and the stewards of the story while we’re here right now. And that’s it. So we solved it, and that’s it. We’re good.

Dan: No, no, no. It’s so brilliantly well said. But I think of it in the category, particularly as a therapist and what we do in the Narrative Focused Trauma Care, we’re inviting people to look at their families and to see, oh, there is profound brokenness. And often, unless it’s outright evil, there’s stunning beauty. Can we hold the complexity, a brokenness and beauty, and to be able to say, our constitution, our Bill of Rights, America is a beautiful place and broken. And if you look at manifest destiny and the assumptions underlying it, that literally was profoundly destructive to an entire vast people groups. And then to talk about our own version of the, “we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal”. What men? Well, white landowners. And then when you begin to go, well, all right, there is some sentiment even in the words that’s stunning and deeply broken. And so as we begin to mess with naming, and what I find is that in the few conversations I’ve had with what I’d call full-fledged Christian nationalists, the inability to hold reality as both broken and beautiful with regard to not only their own lives, their families, but also the United States of America, that seems to be the place where can we hold this ambivalence? But as you put it so well, when you are afraid and you’ve been given propaganda of fear over generations, you’re literally traumatizing people and then saying, this is the safe ideology that will allow trauma to be resolved. You can come to a grounding, you can come to a settling. You’re with the right people. All the structures we know with regard to trauma, in terms of fragmentation, into a deepened sense of hopelessness and isolation, all that. And then to be able to say the process, the strong man really is a form of trying to resolve trauma. And with that, I get it. And yet we’re talking about a destruction ultimately of what we know, of what I would claim to be the gospel I have bound my heart to.

David: Yes, it’s a different gospel than the gospel of Jesus Christ, but it’s another gospel. And I understand why it’s so alluring to people. There is an allure about safety and security, reduce ambiguity. We’re the good guys, they are the bad guys. All of that makes sense to me psychologically. So we put out some content on our social channels today from a psychologist around how to have hard conversations with people. And there are times where the conversation just isn’t fruitful. And so you need to stop having it. And so sometimes that’s okay. Rational engagement around ideas isn’t always possible. But I do believe, I don’t how else to be in the world, and this is someone, I would say I’m deeply skeptical of many Christian claims if I’m perfectly honest. And yet I do believe there are points in people’s lives where for whom their worlds fall apart and they will look for something else. And the way that we invite them back into God’s story and God moving in and out of their lives, weeding things together, I think can be helpful for them in the long run. That’s why, at least in the organization I work for, we don’t condemn people who hold to this ideology. We actually don’t even call them Christian nationalists. We talk about the ideology of Christian nationalism because we believe people are really caught up in it for all kinds of reasons that make a lot of sense. But we need, and one organization can’t do this right? We need the church to be the kinds of place and the kinds of people that can receive folks on the other end of this. When Germany fell to the allied forces in 1945, in the ensuing years, there wasn’t a massive turn of the German populace that said, wow, we got it wrong. And yet the government had to be rebuilt in Germany with many high level Nazi party officials. Now, I want to state really clearly, I don’t really equate Christian nationalism with the German socialist party of the 1930’s and 40’s. So if that’s what you’re getting upset about right now, please just take a breath. But just for the analogy to work, it’s just folks get embedded in these ideologies in really deep and meaningful ways. They don’t just come out of them overnight. Most people, it’s a process. It’s a slow undoing. There’s an immense amount of shame in admitting that you devoted yourself to something with so much meaning and purpose and you got it wrong. I mean, that is so heavy, a price to bear, which is why most folks resist it at all costs and why it’s so easy to continue to hate your enemies, who would’ve told you all along you were wrong. So most people don’t change in transformational ways through a message of shaming. There needs to be a message of invitation and a message of hope. And so to me, again, this is what the church is and can be and should be equipping ourselves to do.

Dan: And there’s a price, and you good friend paid that price and the loss of a job. And the reality is that I think I went back as we were preparing to have this conversation and just reread portions of Galatians. And Paul writes such warm words to every church except the church at Galatia. And you think about the warm, incredible words he writes to the Corinthians and we’re talking about, they are more than a hot mess. It’s just he’s having to deal with incest in the context of the church in a hundred of the things. But he’s still so warm toward that, not Galatia, because as he says very soon into the letter, who has bewitched you, who has brought you to this other gospel? And again, I don’t hear incrimination, accusation, judgment. What it is, is in this sense, a father to his children, inviting them into the freedom of what the gospel holds. The gospel is not a power play. If anything, it is the opposite. So in the realities you’ve invited us to engage, at least for me, I have to keep coming back to where I feel victimized, where I want judgment, where I’m afraid. And indeed, just addressing this not to create a prophecy, but I think for any of us who begin to address this, given that there is a very strong strain of this infecting the body of Christ, there’s going to be a pushback, personally, corporately, to challenge in some ways as one Christian nationalist put it to me, he said, you are more of an enemy than those whom I hate. Because you are in one sense, challenging the very core of what I believe to be the gospel. So we’re in a gospel fight. We’ve always been in a gospel fight. And again, the way we fight is not by believing that we fight against flesh and blood, and that our fight has the weapon fundamentally of a heart like Jesus to love. So I’m so grateful for your life, David. So grateful that you have joined us. And again, if anybody wants your address to show up and create havoc, they’re not going to get it from me.

David: Well, I appreciate that, Dan. Ditto. Yeah, it was an honor to be on and join you all. Thank you so much. Yeah,

Rachael: Yeah. Thank you.