Life Together at the End of the World

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Collin Hansen
Did education give you a love of learning? A delight in the world a desire to cultivate your mind over a lifetime? Or did you learn how to pass tests to graduate and get a job, and these goals don’t need to be mutually exclusive, but they are. For many of us. Any serious attempt at reforming Christian political witness must include a vision for education and Jake meter offers such a classical vision for education but also ventures into sex, race, technology, family, the environment, and more in his new book, what are Christians for life together at the end of the world, published by IVP. For such a small book, what are Christians for offers a hint in the title of Jake’s big ambitions he sees fundamental flaws in modern conceptions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Collin Hansen
For example, he writes, The reason our moral lives are guided by the letter of the law is because that is all the revolution of the past centuries has left us with once it has destroyed nature, and rejected. God. Jake meter is editor in chief of mirror orthodoxy, a magazine covering the Christian faith in the public sphere. In this book, he offers hopeful alternatives, but not a mass scale solution. In some ways, his ambitions for a better political witness seem reasonable. He writes, this ordinary people living faithful lives together in a place bearing up under what cannot be helped, and laboring to resolve what can offer us a vision of how renewed Christian society begin. Yeah, that’s, that’s a vision that I can get behind.

Collin Hansen
And Jake joins me now on gospel bound to discuss industrialism, technology, debt, whiteness, and more. Jake, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. Now, Jake, some Christians would say Constantine as an answer to this question. In other words, say Roe v. Wade, do you identify a turning point where the inheritance that you value and that you commend in this book was, was lost in history?

Jake Meador
So I mean, I was a history major. So I’m kind of careful about kind of assigning certain cutoff points, I think, we kind of live up to the ideals of Christian witness, or we don’t, in a variety of ways, across time, but I do think one of the places where you can start to see this kind of hardened individualism that’s cut off from Christian moral reasoning, is early in the colonial era, as you have these explorers, and the history is complicated, but a lot of these explorers, they’re coming into the new world. And they ask a question that I think a lot of us ask when we encounter something unfamiliar. And here, I’m just kind of benefiting from the work of Willie Jennings.

Jake Meador
But we ask ourselves, who are we in this new place? And there’s lots of ways you can answer that question, you know, you move to a new town and you’re trying to figure out the town, what you should do is you should let the life of the town kind of inform your answer, you should let the needs of your neighbors inform your answer, you should let the role that your work plays in the welfare of the town and form your answer. And so you’re looking outward to help you understand what should I be doing. And what happens in the colonial era. Jennings argues, and I find it persuasive is people start looking inward, they look to their own ambition, their own needs, their own desire, and everything around them becomes reduced to matter. Jennings talks about the ontological density of the world being lost.

Jake Meador
And so you can find quotes from these conquistadores coming into the new world, encountering cultures and people groups and sometimes remarkable kind of cultural accomplishments in terms of wealth and various things that have been built up over time. And they don’t really see any of that they see riches that they can use to build up their own names and serve their country. And so Simone Weil, she talks about force being this way that we act on the world as if it is just matter. And it’s not made up of creatures and beings and places and these kind of rich things. It’s just stuff. And I think you see a lot of force in the modern world. And I think a lot of that does, certainly can be traced back to the origins of colonialism.

Collin Hansen
How does that overlap? Then with industrialism, which is another one of the major aspects that you talk time periods and transformations you talk about in the book.

Jake Meador
One of the books I worked from, as I was writing is called rebels against the future by a kind of tech critic named Kirkpatrick sale and it’s a history of the Luddites, and most people don’t actually know anything about the Luddites. We know the term as a kind of slur for people who don’t like technology. But what the who the Luddites were is they were Weaver’s in mostly in the English Midlands in the early 1800s, whose lives were being turned up sat down by the emergence of new technologies to create clothes and people that had worked out of their homes that had had functional home economies, sometimes going back centuries that allowed them to be with their families that allowed them to choose how they were going to work that day.

Jake Meador
And what they were going to do, we’re now being out competed by these emerging industrialists who could produce more product in shorter time, or, in fact, quicker times, thanks to these technologies. And a lot of people see that story and they just think, Oh, great, more efficiencies. But it matters, kind of who benefits from the greater efficiencies and what costs there are to these efficiencies, there’s always costs and trade offs in technological changes. And I want us to look at the trade offs and not just the benefits, the trade offs in this case where that a lot of people could no longer maintain their home economies. And they were drafted into factory work and factory work was brutal. I quote, from sale, just some examples of the kind of conditions that people were working under, where you could get docked like five to 10% of your weeks pay for in fractions like working with the window open, which I mean, we it’s farcical.

Jake Meador
But that was their world for these Luddites, and they were receiving less pay, they were working under cruel conditions, they were away from their families, or I mean, maybe their families were with them in the factories, which might have been worse, given the conditions. And so what I what I want to argue, and I also follow the lead of a historian and Christopher Dawson on this is that the way we should think about work is that it’s a means of serving our neighbors. And we evaluate our work by the role it plays within our community. And what Dawson says happens under industrialism is that work gets taken out of that communal context. And it becomes judged purely by the financial output it produces. And so there’s an utter indifference to all of the other elements that are affected social elements affected by our work, which I think you can see carrying into our own day like today, when we think about our work, we usually think of how do I make money, and we judge the quality of our work and whether the job is good or not, in large part by how much it pays us. And for a lot of people, they do that out of necessity because of cost of living.

Jake Meador
But what I want to say is that there’s some pretty significant losses when work is extracted out of homes out of neighborhoods, out of the Commonwealth, and it’s simply kind of stuck in the market. And it has all kinds of ramifications for the rest of society. But because of the way we’ve defined work, a lot of this stuff gets insulated. Because well, but the market made me do it is kind of align. Um, you see this in Christian, higher ed a lot schools that are getting rid of programs foundational to the mission of a Christian university.

Jake Meador
And their argument is, well, the market made us do it. I had this I know of a situation a Christian employer pays very poor wages to a lot of his workers. And just feels fine about it, because well, it’s the market wage. And like in one case, I had a friend whose wife was working at a grocery store to help them pay the bills. And it would not have taken a lot for that workers to have been in a better spot. But well, the market said And so there’s this kind of blindness that I think industrialism gives us when we turn to kind of the broader consequences of how we work, because it isolated work within the market and tried to extract it out of the rest of life.

Collin Hansen
And this sense, Jake, your book reminds me quite a bit of Alan nobles recent work in the sense of your focus on how these things affected women. In particular, you want to dive a little bit deeper on that.

Jake Meador
Yeah, so one of the things that then happens because of this over time, is a lot of the abuses of factory work, start kind of getting quote unquote, worked out in the west, usually they get worked out just by kind of exporting all of the problems to the colonial world. And so we can seal a lot of the worst kind of work that our way of living creates because it’s often Bangladesh or China. And we don’t have to see it. So we don’t think about it. But industrial style work extracted from the home starts to become really remunerative.

Jake Meador
For men, it becomes very enjoyable for men. I mean, think about kind of the world of like a madman, and these guys are paid extremely well. They have very cushy jobs, they go off into the city and have fun all day. It was pretty alienating for the spouses of these people that were benefiting from that system. And so what you had was you had some women were working as kind of the underclass as servants. This is especially like if you think about the the south on women of color, but then also even the women who were comparatively well to do would find themselves In these homes all day, that weren’t really thriving economies anymore with good work to do. They were kind of consumption centers.

Jake Meador
And it felt very alienating to many people. This is the whole kind of animating spirit behind Betty for Dan’s Feminine Mystique is the book opens with this scene of the kind of cliched white suburban housewife of the 60s laying in bed at night. Feeling like is this all because she theoretically has it all, but doesn’t find it very satisfying. And so this then creates this is kind of the logic that gives us the modern sexual revolution, because the way that we worked this out, was we brought in the pill, which now made it possible for women to have greater control over their own bodies so that they couldn’t get pregnant so that they wouldn’t be tied to the home. And so the argument I make in the book is that it should tell us something, that every time a new problem emerges because of this extractive violent, forceful way, we’ve developed a living in the world, every time a problem with that develops, the solution becomes well, more force, we effectively have to sterilize our own bodies to make this way of living work.

Jake Meador
And I think that’s a really sad dehumanizing thing. And we’re now starting to reap the fruit of that, as you see plummeting birth rates, especially a lot of people my age, I’m 34, a lot of millennials now are starting to kind of get to a point in life where they’re at the age where normally you’d have a few kids in the past, and they don’t have any kids, they may or may not have a job they’re very satisfied with. They’ve moved away from home, probably if they had a home growing up. And now there’s this sense of what what am I doing with my life, like, I don’t want to wake up 20 years from now and still be by myself.

Jake Meador
But I don’t know what I’m, I don’t know how to escape that fate. And so I think, because we just keep doubling down on force, we keep doubling down on this really strong, extreme individualism and kind of personal autonomy. We keep pulling ourselves further and further away from each other, because there’s not really a way to avoid doing that, when that’s your underlying value system. I mean, I thought lately of the fact that if you think about Louis is great divorce, how does he picture Hell, he pictures it as these people who have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller and more shrinking in on themselves living at enormous distances from one another. And obviously, Louis is thinking of that he’s using that as an allegory or as a way of kind of imaging what hell is like, but it’s actually not that far from the truth of how a lot of people in the West have to live today. Because of the way we have structured our society and our culture.

Collin Hansen
Well, along those lines, Jake, maybe go ahead and explain the significance that you describe in the book of the shift from family to state, from Peace to coercion, or force, as you’re talking about there.

Jake Meador
The way a lot of early reformed thinkers thought about politics, is they said, Okay, people cannot actually sustain their own life in the world, on their own. It’s not possible, you will eat food that other people grew, you will wear clothes that other people made, you will live in a house that other people made. You can’t be fully completely absolutely self reliant. It’s not possible. And so if we have to be in relationship with other people, the work of politics is structuring those relationships in ways that they are mutually beneficial, rather than parasitic where one person is just leeching off another. And so that’s kind of the the underlying idea of what politics are, according to at least the early reformed people that I’ve read.

Jake Meador
Now, within this, they would argue that the family is a unique type of community because the family will naturally reproduce itself, things like local Christian congregations, or governments or businesses. All of these things are like one day it did not exist. And then the next day, people made a decision to form this new thing together. Now it does exist, the family is different, because families will reproduce themselves naturally across time. And so there has to be like that. You start there. So just even right there, I think you can look at where we are culturally now on marriage. We’re not there anymore implicitly, in the Obergefell. ruling, what the Supreme Court is saying is that now the state says what marriage is.

Jake Meador
The older idea was that the state recognized marriage, but the state didn’t define it because marriage was this naturally occurring community that kind of arose out of the creation. And so already with something like same sex marriage, we’ve redefined the relationship between individuals and marriage in the state and In a way that has foregrounded the state, and foregrounded course of power in backgrounded, the love and affection and care that is central to the marriage relationship. So that’s big. Another thing, though, that we get when we look at marriage in this way marriage makes it particularly having children makes it very hard to maintain the idea of autonomy.

Jake Meador
I think about in the confessions, one of the more moving early passages is when Augustine is talking about how his mother cared for him before he was even aware of the fact that he was being cared for. And he cried out, and that inarticulate cry called fourth care, we enter the world only because of the care of people that go before us. And not I mean, most literally, our mothers. But I’m where I am, because of the labor of my grandparents, great grandparents and the work that they did to maintain their families and to make a certain kind of life possible for their children, you can’t maintain the idea of individual autonomy with any kind of seriousness, if you spend a few minutes thinking about the life of the family.

Jake Meador
And so when the life of the family is backgrounded, and it is now made subject to and even defined by the state. When life becomes a choice, because of rampant comfort, like widely available contraception, when all of these things happen, you’re in a way that a lot of people don’t realize, because it’s all happening beneath the surface, you’re shifting the way people imagine their place in the world in a fundamental way that is deeply against nature. And yet, because of our technology, because of our choices that we make, we figured out ways to try and kind of like obscure how unnatural all of this is into somehow kind of try to make it seem like it works, even though it doesn’t.

Collin Hansen
This would probably be a good place for me to ask Jake, why you oppose debt free living? Watch out Dave Ramsey, here comes Jake with the opposite approach. Well, I

Jake Meador
I mean, so like, if we’re talking about just being responsible with one’s finances, obviously, I have no objection there. But what I want to say is that relational debts, certainly a kind of financial debt, depending on your relationships and your dependencies, these are actually the ways that we establish relationships with one another, that we maintain our life together. I use the example in the book of a night I was in college, and I was about to graduate, I was moving six hours north was going to be the first time in my life, I lived outside of Nebraska.

Jake Meador
And I went out for a drive in the country late at night. And I mean, me being mean, being Nebraska in the winter, I managed to get stuck on the side of a gravel road. 20 miles southwest of Lincoln, be in sub zero weather. And I remember sitting in the car after I realized I I was stuck, and B could not get the car out on my own, sitting in my car trying to figure out okay, well, it’s one in the morning. And I’m 20 miles out in the country, and it’s five below zero, and I’m stuck on a gravel road. And I’m not sure what I should do. And so I thought about calling my roommates, but it was an it was New Year’s Eve. So they were still at a party. I didn’t really want to just sit in my car and wait till morning to call them because I didn’t know how cold my car would get. And so finally I like fell. I didn’t have anything else to do.

Jake Meador
So I called my parents. And if you’d like called your parents late at night, because something isn’t right. You hear the way your parents voice kind of gets really sharp really fast. Because you’re they know something’s wrong. That happens when my mom answers the phone. I she gets my dad right away. So then I’m on the phone with my dad and I tell him where I am and what’s going on. And he tells me stay there. I mean, like, where’s that gonna go, but stay there. I’ll come get you. And so about 45 minutes later, he pulled up in remember what vehicle he had, I think it was a small Camry. It’s a work car. And he gets out of his car and he looks at me. And he looks at the car. And he walks around to the back and he looks at the back of the car and he looks at me again. And he doesn’t say anything and there’s no expression of any kind. But then he was able to get the snow cleared around my wheels. And then told me to get in the car. It’s only what to do with steering wheel.

Jake Meador
And he opened the passenger side door and kind of braced himself against the frame of the car as I slowly press down the gas and I was able to get out onto the road. And then he gets he closes the passenger door comes around to me I have my driver window down and he’s like, Do you know how to get into town from here? Yeah, I’m good. And he looks at me and goes, Why don’t you follow me anyway. Follow him over way into town. But then what was really beautiful is we, we stopped at a gas station so that he, I remember why we stopped the gas station, we both get out of the car, and I tell him thank you for like the 17th time. And he said something like, Well, I had a Jeep when I was your age, and I got it stuck way worse than that. And my dad always came and taught me. And so that I mean, he was trying to make me feel better, and not feel so guilty about having him come out at two in the morning in subzero weather to dig me out on a gravel road.

Jake Meador
But I also think there’s something really profound there, I received care from my parents, all my childhood and into my young adulthood. And so now I’m a parent with a child who’s a young adult, and they need help. And so I honor my own parents, by giving my child help in the same way they gave me help. You could almost look at it as a way of fulfilling the commandment, Honor your father and mother. And so I think, because we can’t live truly autonomous lives, we’re always going to be in relationships of either being Debtor or deti. And that’s actually a good thing. Because it is just inherent in being human that we can’t sustain ourselves. And so we need the help of others. And sometimes we receive that help, and sometimes we give it but a world where we weren’t able to give an exchange, that kind of care would be a deeply inhumane place and be a very sad place. And so I think that kind of indebtedness that we incur across generations is a really beautiful and life giving thing.

Collin Hansen
Got a couple more questions, big questions here with Jacob meter, author of What are Christians for life together at the end of the world got to be my award for best subtitle of the year. Love it, Jake. All right. First, the last two big questions, I suspect that you’re in effect, you realize that your account of whiteness will be controversial, at least among some readers. I think you’ve alluded to it already, though, you didn’t describe it as whiteness earlier, one of your answers. But what makes whiteness so important to your argument, what you’re trying to accomplish in this book,

Jake Meador
I tried to purposely Be very careful and deliberate in how I use the word because I know it’s, it’s impressive, it can be very imprecise, and it can be very incendiary. And so I, I think it’s a concept that’s actually really helpful. But it’s one of those, you have to use it the right way. So the idea, the way I’m using whiteness in the book is it’s a way of talking about a vision of human maturity, it’s a way of seeing the human person as mature and complete, when they are kind of able to exert their will on the world without much need to take in, like consider the needs of others or the vulnerabilities of others, or the concerns of others, you’re able to look at the world and walk about in it and achieve what you want.

Jake Meador
Jennings talks about it as a kind of centered self, where everything around you is kind of peripheral and ontologically less than Now, here’s the tricky thing. I think people can hear that. And they think well, that’s just assigning a really arbitrary and negative meaning to the term. But the thing is, that’s the way that the word was talked about by white people. Historically, Jennings has some examples that I cite in the books from the explorers in the early colonial era. But I’ve done a lot of work on African history. And it’s all over in African history. There’s a I think I use it in the book, there’s an account of when Ghana becomes independent in 1957. Tons of people from the west go over there for the independence celebrations because Ghana was the first African colony to become an independent nation. And so Prime Minister Macmillan goes from the UK, Vice President Nixon comes from the US, actually wiretaps, some foreign dignitaries, hotel rooms while he’s there, because it’s an

Jake Meador
And he brings So Nixon brings the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and all these different documents for increment. And then a journalist from the New York Times is there. And what McMillan and Nixon and the journalist all agree on is that Ghanian independence is this kind of fulfillment and vindication of colonialism, because the Africans are finally capable of self government. And the way that an Freemantle, the journalist from The Times describes this is that it was the fulfillment of quote unquote, the white father’s work in Africa. So there was a sense in which they’re saying like these Africans are finally white like us, they can govern themselves in the same way that we can.

Jake Meador
There’s another really telling moment, this is from 50 years prior to that, or 60 years actually, when William McKinley is trying to decide what the US is going to do in the Philippines. This is after the Spanish Spanish American War is over. And the US is now effectively in control of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines because we took them from Spain in the war. And there’s this huge debate happening in the US about what we should do with these new holdings that we have. And one side is saying we should let them govern themselves. Isn’t that what we wanted? 100 plus years ago when it was us, and there was another side, Teddy Roosevelt’s side, saying, No, we need to seize these for America, we need to build our empire. They’re not capable of self government anyway. And there’s the scene that McKinley describes in his journals, where he is agonizing over this decision.

Jake Meador
McKinley was a pretty devout pious Christian. So he describes praying about what God would have him do in the Philippines in particular, and his conclusion is that the Filipinos not being white, are not yet ready to govern themselves. And so they need the guidance of America to help them kind of prepare for independence. So what’s interesting about it is that these white folks that are talking about being white, they’re not really using the term in a kind of a centralizing way. They’re using it in precisely the way Jennings talks about, it’s this kind of imagination of what it means to be a mature person capable of living well in the world. And the Filipinos who had a head of state who had a constitution had, as much as we did, when we declared independence from Britain, we’re not capable of that in McKinney’s eyes, and in his own words, their stated reason is they were not white. So it’s this thing where I’m like, if I thought Jennings was just making it up, I’d be more hostile to the use of the term.

Jake Meador
But I look at these primary sources from his family. It’s just the way Teddy Roosevelt talks. It’s the way McKinley talks. It’s the way a lot of American journalists in the 50s talk about independence in Africa, whiteness is a more complete form of the human person. And I think it’s an important thing to talk about. Because it shapes the way that we imagine ourselves even today, in some ways, I think you can have a kind of very condescending relationship to people of color, if you have this whole conversation going on in the back of your mind, even if you don’t realize it. And I think you can see that historically, even in a lot of the ways that Americans approach things like short term missions, there’s this sense of which we’re kind of like, going to these majority world places and trying to elevate people to our level of maturity by making our way of life available to them.

Jake Meador
And so I think it’s just important to talk about for that reason, but then I actually also think if whiteness is this kind of centering of the self, it’s a refusal to give nature a voice, which jetting talks about, then actually, that’s also going to be really friendly to a certain kind of natural law argument about how we imagine the human person. And so it in my mind, I think I’m still arguing with a lot of people about it. But to me, I look at that, and I’m like, okay, one of the big problems we have right now rhetorically, for the for Christians in the US, is that racial justice and LGBT plus causes get lumped together as being the same fight.

Jake Meador
But actually, if whiteness is this kind of centering of the self, and indifference to neighbor and difference to place in difference to anything outside of your kind of inner authentic self. Well, the place where that idea is being used today is to defend same sex, marriage, abortion, all of these socially progressive causes. And so I look at that, and like the underlying logic of the colonialists that was so deeply racist, seems to me extremely similar to the underlying logic of social progressives today.

Collin Hansen
And you have that actual colonialism still going on today, with money involved from Christian denominations to political groups when it comes to African Christians on sexual issues, right.

Jake Meador
Well, there was a absolutely delightful op ed, it was maybe 15 years ago, but I remember seeing it in college and just getting a kick out of it. I think it was a Ugandan cleric in the Anglican Church was in London for a gathering of the global Anglican Communion. And he wrote an editorial for the local conservative paper in London accusing all of the Church of England and Episcopalians of colonialism is they were trying to tell all conservative African Anglicans, what they need to believe and teach about sexuality and gender. And the this Bish, I think, was a bishop was like, No, we’re not doing the Colonials thing again, we’re over that stuff.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, that’s what I mean. That’s an interesting observation. Their last big question that I have here is really part of the positive vision I quoted from some of it in the introduction there but really compelling positive vision, I think a lot of the discourse that you and I have both been involved with for the last 10 to 20 years, I would say, and struggle to figure out how to build kind of a conservative notion of community with some of the more progressive notions of mission, to bring them together, it seems like those impulses to retreat, but also to advance they seem contradictory. One of the things I love about your book is that you connected them, and I could not be more convinced that they have to be connected. And so my last big question then is, why does the most daring outreach, demand a strong central community?

Jake Meador
Because Christian outreach is difficult and can’t be done well, on your own. I mean, the Christian life is difficult and can’t be done well on your own. So when your communal center is strong, you are better positioned to take risks, you’re better positioned to do hard things. Because you know, there’s going to be someone there to support you and catch you if you fail. And so when you have a really strong base to work out of, it becomes much more plausible for you to attempt seemingly crazy things in the name of reaching others for Jesus, I mean, just to use an example, I know I use this in one draft of the chapter I’m thinking of, I don’t know if that actually was in the final or not. But I have some friends that are part of a radical in a Baptist community where they, you join the community and you renounce private property, and you take a vow of poverty, invalid obedience, and it’s kind of a like, lay monastic thing. And they live in community together.

Jake Meador
They’ve got communities all over the world. They’re called the brooder house. But they had a speaker, who was from, I think, Germany originally. And he was over in the US speaking, he had written a book with their publishing house. And while he and his wife were here, one of them got really, really sick. And they were trying to figure out what they could do to take care of this couple that were over here from Germany, because they hadn’t bought traveler’s insurance before they came over. And so they didn’t want to go to the hospital, if they could help it, because he’s a writer, they don’t have tons of money. And they know how American healthcare works, you could become extremely expensive to receive very basic care.

Jake Meador
And what the Bruderhof was able to do was they had a doctor in one of their communities. And she just took off and spent like a week, staying at the hotel with this couple, monitoring them to make sure they were okay. So if they really did have to go to the hospital, they could get them there. But if they could avoid going to the hospital by having a medical professional giving them round the clock care, they could do that, and it wouldn’t cost them anything. And they were able to avoid having to have anyone get hospitalized during this whole thing. And the only cost ended up being that they were back to back home a little later, because they had to change flights while they were still recovering. But the reason they could do that is because that doctor had other doctors in the community. And she could say I need to go take care of this person for a few days.

Jake Meador
Can you guys cover for me? And they have the ability to say yes, I think what happens a lot. And it’s not just for Christians, it’s just kind of life in the society that we’ve created. A lot of people want to be able to provide care for someone close to them that needs it. But there’s nobody for them to like, go to them and say, I need to go take care have this friend or loved one, can you cover for me. And it’s okay, because there’s no margin, because everybody again, is working on their own. And so when something happens, that requires extra attention or extra care, you’re in trouble. I’m very grateful when my dad spent a month in the ICU six years ago. And when that happened, my company was very kind to me, because I remember, I mean, I was at the ICU every day for like two and a half weeks at the beginning of it all. And after the first two or three days I wrote to my boss, and I was like, I don’t know what you want to do with my PTO. But I know I’m going to be out of PTO by the end of the week.

Jake Meador
So how should we handle that? Can I just work remotely? Or what do you want? What do you want me to do? And my boss just said, I’m not going to have you use your PTO. For something like this, you take as long as you need and we will figure it out here because this is more important. So when I was in that crisis moment, I was very, very fortunate to have a very understanding accommodating humane, Christian as it happened, boss, a lot of people in that spot don’t have that situation. And so they get put in these really impossible situations. And that’s just with the basics of providing care. Now think about if you wanted to attempt a kind of libre type project today or something like that. It’s That’s just a hard life, it’s hard to do well. And if you don’t have people around you, you better hope you have freakish capacity. Like, for instance, neither Schaefer did or otherwise, you’re going to be in trouble. Because it’s too much for one person. For when you have a strong community, it’s much easier to do all sorts of outreach and care.

Collin Hansen
What’s a good example of how your book Jake defies? I think that’s a good description of you, in general defies the political divisions or camps that we described today, because somebody might hear this conversation and read your book on whiteness, and then assign you to a certain camp. But then when you actually dig deep, and you talk about your commending of these communal values? Well, in part, the reason we have to put this into place is because of what we’re facing with transformation in our culture, including on sexual issues. We’ve got to be prepared for the consequences from big tech, big business, wherever that are going to put us in compromised economic situations, we’re going to need each other in these kind of communities. And oddly enough to retain conservative, ie simply just biblical values. In these cases, we’re going to need more radical solutions. It says how I understood in part what you were trying to do, is that fair?

Jake Meador
Yeah, no, I mean, I have a friend recently who was going through some dei training with his employer and got to some parts of the policy that he just felt like he could not sign off on. And fortunately, in his case, the story ended well, he went to HR and explained his concerns why he couldn’t sign the policy, said he was willing to accommodate the concerns in XY and Z ways. And the employer was willing to keep him on based on that conversation. But I mean, actually, that’s great works in a couple of ways to describe the problem we have right now.

Jake Meador
On the one hand, if he gets fired, does he have Christian community around him to support and support him and his family. On the other hand, if Christians in the area know about that company’s policies, and see that he still works there, they might ignorantly assume that he signed off on all of it. And he’s some kind of compromiser who’s not standing on principle, and it wouldn’t be true. And so you have to have that strong trust and commitment to one another, within your Christian community to be able to survive these things, not just because of like, what if he gets fired? But also because what if a rumor starts that’s not founded in truth and needs to be corrected? That yeah, it’s it doesn’t work without that kind of community.

Collin Hansen
Well, it’s good point, my guest here. And gospel bound has been Jake meter talking about what are Christians for life together? At the end of the world. Jake, we’re gonna end here with a final three, lightning round. How do you find calm in the storm?

Jake Meador
I like to go on walks late at night around my neighborhood. And I’ve also over the pandemic, I got into doing a lot of home cocktail making. And so the loser probably be that you can I have a friend who talks about how do you connect with the real or reconnect with the real? And those are the two things I said when I was talking to him.

Collin Hansen
Harder to get stuck in the snow when you’re walking as opposed to dry?

Unknown Speaker
Yes, yeah. The like going outside and feeling that cold wind on your face? Or, like hearing the sounds and smell and smelling the different things that go along with working in the kitchen?

Collin Hansen
I like it. Second, where do you find good news today, Jake?

Unknown Speaker
Lots of places I was thinking about it, because somebody was talking about how much they lament the disunity in the church right now. And I completely get it. But there’s also a lot of Christians I feel so deeply unified with right now. And so encouraged by and a lot of them. I wasn’t even aware of them prior to the last five to six years. You know, I’ve been listening to podcasts by this Australian pastor named Mark Sayers that I found enormously helpful during the pandemic was started listening to sermons from Charlie dates that are good for my heart and my friends that the greater health just this simple Christian community that is just so consistently generous and attentive. There’s a lot of reasons for hope, if you know where to look,

Collin Hansen
I love it—that could be that could be a tagline for gospel bound. There’s a lot of reasons for hope, if you know where to look, and if you know what books to read. And that’s it. That’s the flip side. I’ve talked about it a lot of how many friends I’ve lost in the last five, six years and, and a lot of the disenchantment that I felt with people I thought I knew. But the flip side to that is I have much stronger relationships with lots of people, because I’ve seen more of their character displayed it because of the exact same things in the last five, six years. So that’s an encouragement. Last question then Jake, what’s the last great book you’ve read?

Jake Meador
I haven’t finished it yet. But I’ve been listening to angle over oppose by Wallace Stegner and have been enjoying that tremendously. He’s kind of regional fiction. He’s from the west. He taught at Stanford for ages. Wendell Berry was a student of his which is how I first came in. Okay, yeah. But I’ve really been enjoying that. I’ve been listening to a lot of kind of history and politic type books prior to that and decided I needed some fiction.

Collin Hansen
That sounds that sounds about right. Well, my guest here it’s been a ton of fun Jake meter, check out what are Christians for life together at the end of the world, and check out mere orthodoxy. Jake, thanks for taking the time to join me on gospel bound. Thank you for having me. This is fun.