Work and the Meaning of Life

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0:00:00 – (David Bahnsen): If you believe, as I do, that in the domain of God’s kingdom are really important spheres, like family, like church, like community, but also like our professional endeavors, the one thing I would just plea to people not to do is to pit those things against one another.

0:00:32 – (Collin Hansen): Work is the Meaning of Life. Got your attention? Your identity is tied to what you do. Well, I bet I have your attention now. So argues David Bonson in his book Full Work and the Meaning of Life. Bonson is the founder, managing partner and chief investment officer of the Bonson Group, a private wealth management firm. He’s also the author of several books, including Crisis of Responsibility, Our Cultural Addiction to Blame, and how youw Can Cure It.

0:01:05 – (Collin Hansen): Let’s just go ahead, dive right in, find out more what he means. David, thank you for joining me on Gospel Bound.

0:01:10 – (David Bahnsen): Thank you so much for having me. Good to be with you.

0:01:12 – (Collijn Hansen): Why does this topic in your book Full Time animate you more than any other? That’s a big claim. You do a lot of different great things. What is it about this topic that’s so fascinating for you?

0:01:22 – (David Bahnsen): I think a lot of it is biographical, that I was raised to believe that work is important and a crucial element of a Christian’s kingdom activity. But then I also went through some things in my own life where I got a chance to experience the design God has for us and how work can be so crucial and in certain moments of our life. Personally and entering adulthood, I was a believer and was committed to the idea of all elements of this domain belonging to Christ.

0:02:11 – (David Bahnsen): I believed it, I took it seriously. But, you know, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do in my life. And the person who I most looked up to and admired and learned from and who most loved me was my father. And he passed away and I was 20 years old. So I was not only, you know, going through the traumatic event of having lost my father, which would be difficult for anybody, but I was at that age in which a lot of young men would be asking for what, what they were going to do with their life and trying to discover the, the various things that God would have for them.

0:02:53 – (David Bahnsen): And, and so these things happening at once were, were. It was a very difficult period, as you can imagine. But to kind of fast forward through many years of this, I, I really found work to be a very cathartic experience. I poured myself in, into work, I poured myself into various endeavors. And in those things I felt God giving me what I needed at that time, which was a sense of calling and a sense of purpose and I would have rather not gone through that without my dad. But the fact that I did enabled me to really discover as a young adult, a young Christian, a very key element of God’s created design for us, which is the role that work can play in producing purpose and dignity in our own lives.

0:03:56 – (David Bahnsen): Well, then, to fast forward to your question about why this book. I did not find the church’s interaction with my experience particularly positive or embracing. I found a lot of caution or concern, not so much, oh, wow, it’s great. You’ve really, you know, diverted this traumatic event and instead found purposeful work instead. There was a lot of concern. Are you sure you’re not working too hard? You know, why not take more time off? Why are you so driven? Why are you so ambitious? And.

0:04:34 – (David Bahnsen): And I think a lot of that was very well meaning. And I certainly now, as a much older person, can appreciate the heart of where a lot of it may have been coming from. But I think theologically I was forced to interact with a church, an evangelical church, in my early 20s, that I think had this issue wrong. And so it always stuck with me that those of us who had been most trained to a world and life view of Christianity might be ecclesiastically surrounded by something that when it came to vocation, when it came to professional endeavor, had a much lower view even than the theology itself would suggest of a higher view of mission and kingdom, theology and whatnot. And that disconnect had always bothered me, and it does to this day.

0:05:26 – (David Bahnsen): And so there was this sort of back of my mind feeling that one day I needed to write a book about it. And then in my late 40s now I’m in my early 50s, in the post Covid moment, I decided it was the right time. It’s no longer a message that I think just the church is struggling with, but I think even this great rugged, individualistic society of America is struggling with it as well, where a lot of people are blaming work as their problem instead of as a solution to their problem.

0:06:00 – (Collijn Hansen): Identity is a theme that comes up in this book, and I alluded to it in the introduction. You’re writing about how our identity is tied to what we do. How do you square that with a lot of the things that you’ve heard in the evangelical church as well? Especially you hear a lot of things about focusing on at the foot of the cross. We’re all level. How does that fit along with this way that you’re describing identity?

0:06:22 – (David Bahnsen): Yeah, it’s such a good question because there obviously is a theological mystery here. For those of us who believe in the sort of ethos of, of the Protestant Reformation, I do not believe we are saved by the things we do. And that includes what we do at our office or factories or classrooms or whatever the venue of our vocation and professional lives may be. When I talk about identity, I’m referring to a sort of personal category that looks into the entirety of who we are.

0:06:54 – (David Bahnsen): And salvitically, when we talk as Christians about soteriology, I am a firm believer that if we were saved by what we do, then none of us would be saved because all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and that the work of Christ on the cross is whereby our redemption is accomplished. That isn’t the category, though, that, that I’m speaking of when I talk about our identity as people.

0:07:26 – (David Bahnsen): And so I use the example in my book of allowing us to just be human for a moment, to be real. And if I say, I want you to close your eyes and picture Michael Jordan, and if there’s somebody who isn’t picturing a basketball player, I’d like to know who that person is and why they’re lying to me. Because we all picture Michael Jordan as a basketball player because there is a portion of his identity that is not only necessarily but rightly associated with this phenomenal achievement and ethos that he has.

0:08:04 – (David Bahnsen): And likewise, if we knew a person well, who was irresponsible, reckless, lazy, sleeping on the couch all day, smoking pot, playing video games, and I said, I want you to close your eyes and picture this person, we would not picture someone in a productive, active, high meritocratic context. Well, the reason is because we’re not supposed to, that there is a component of our identity that is connected to what we do, not salvitically, but in terms of this element of our human lives.

0:08:42 – (David Bahnsen): So the expression that I’m fond of, to kind of summarize it, is that I do not believe our entire identity is connected to what we do professionally. But I find it equally preposterous to say that no part of our identity is. It is a component of it, even if it is not the entirety of it.

0:09:06 – (Collijn Hansen): Another one of the phrases I started with in this introduction that stood out from the book is you say work is the meaning of life. Life. Okay, tell us more there.

0:09:16 – (David Bahnsen): And I, I try to define that in the book only in the context of what I find in Scripture, which is. So what I’m not wanting to do is, is impose my own views here. I’m trying to understand what God made us for. And so when I go back to Genesis 1 and I look to the creation account and I understand God making the world, and we know God making it for his own glory, and then God wanting us to be in communion with Him.

0:09:53 – (David Bahnsen): And I believe so much in this theological principle, the Emmanuel principle, God with us, God in relationship with us. And so what is the actual text to say as to why after he made the sun, moon and stars, the oceans, the lakes, the mountains, and after he made the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, why did he make all these good things and then turn and say, I now want to make mankind and why did he make us in his image and likeness? What does that mean that separates us from the rest of the creation and the very verses in which God contextualizes our own creation. So that’s why this is, you know, embedded in our kind of ontological purpose is that we were to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth, that we were to cultivate the earth, that we were to care for the garden.

0:10:53 – (David Bahnsen): That there was, as you read through the remainder of Genesis 1 into Genesis 2, there was this creative intent all before sin entered the world that was linked to a number of verbs that are synonyms for work. And that this notion that he would be in relationship with us as we co created with Him. He didn’t make the earth complete, he made the earth with raw materials and deputized us to go be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth. He made us as economic agents of his creation.

0:11:30 – (David Bahnsen): So myself as an economist and one who believes so much in this entrepreneurial endeavor of the human race, I believe it is tied to the very intent God had from our creation. So the problem was saying, well, he made some of us to work. Elon Musk is a really great inventor and so. And so is a great banker or a great entrepreneur. But others are just kind of, you know, they’re going to benefit from the economic productivity of others, but they’re not capable of really contributing.

0:12:04 – (David Bahnsen): I think the problem with that, besides the embedded kind of elitism and snobbishness of it, is it misses the theological point that it was a universal truth about God’s creation, that all of us were made in his image and likeness, not just a select few. And therefore all of us were made with a productive, innovative and creative capacity. We’re all individual, we all have different preferences, different giftedness.

0:12:31 – (David Bahnsen): We’re going to manifest these things differently in our own callings and lives. But I consider the percentage of God’s creation human Creation that was made not to work to be zero percent. And I consider the portion of his creation that was made in his image and likeness, per Genesis chapter one, to be 100%.

0:12:55 – (Collijn Hansen): The latest stats I’ve seen, David, are that one fourth of men who could be working are not working. What do we do to help change that?

0:13:05 – (David Bahnsen): Yeah, I’m hoping it hasn’t gotten quite that high, but the numbers have certainly been moving in that direction. And some of it depends on what age bracket you’re looking at because the prime working age is the one that’s most concerning to me, where it’s about 16% that are not working. And you might expect the number. Look, I happen to believe a lot of men are retiring too early, but at least if there was a higher percentage at someone at 65 or 71, you might assume some of it is that they’ve bought into this great American lie of retirement.

0:13:38 – (David Bahnsen): But the prime working age defies the imagination. And it is very connected to a lot of what’s happening in our own political story right now. Our social, our cultural dynamic, the so called disgruntled young men. We have the highest percentage of men living at home until they’re age 30 we’ve ever had. There is a really significant problem, and it isn’t the problem we had a hundred years ago, of unemployment, of men looking for work and not being able to find it, which is itself a huge social ill and a problem.

0:14:17 – (David Bahnsen): But it is a categorically different problem than when you have the jobs but don’t have the workers. And I think that it connects to the mariability of a lot of the men. And then that dovetails into a feedback loop. I find men to be largely employable when they are marriable, and I find them to be largely marryable when they are employable. And so there’s both a family and professional dynamic at play. And it’s either going to be a positive feedback loop or a negative one.

0:14:51 – (David Bahnsen): And for too many men, it’s roughly about 4 million that I think they’re caught in a negative feedback loop and it needs to be broken.

0:15:01 – (Collijn Hansen): Yeah, that success sequence, job, wife, kids, almost eliminates poverty altogether, controlling for involving any other factors. I was working with a think tank a number of years ago. We were focused here on the state of Alabama. What was one thing we could all focus on. If we did that one thing, it’d make the biggest difference for everything else. And it was something that everybody could. Not everybody, but we could work across coalitions on the number one thing we identified is that we were disproportionately large number of men in Alabama of working age were not working.

0:15:36 – (Collijn Hansen): And we figured that also had huge effects on family formation. And then of course, the corporate community would be very happy about that as well. I mean, everybody would benefit. The government would benefit, the tax base would benefit. Everything. We said if we could just get more of those men working, that would solve so many other problems there. So many things are downstream from that overall problem.

0:15:58 – (Collijn Hansen): We’ll come back to some of that. But I want to take one more step back and just say, even in a very personal way, not just what difference does Reformed theology make for work, but David, what difference does Reformed theology make in your work?

0:16:12 – (David Bahnsen): Well, it’s a great question. I am a very distinctly Reformed person and my own Calvinism and subsequent hyperionism is connected to more than just my view of salvation and the doctrines of grace. And when I think about a world and life view of Christianity, I think one of the most profoundly underrated components of the Reformation is how it took down the sacred secular distinction that in the priesthood of all believers and in a sort of anti dualism that both Luther and Calvin were so incredibly committed to.

0:16:55 – (David Bahnsen): You really do tear down the genesis of believing that work is itself a byproduct of the Fall, not of creation, and that there is such thing as secular vocation that is inherently inferior to the work that one may do in, let’s call it a clergy position or mission position or church, you know, calling. So in Reformed theology, this focus on the priesthood of all believers and this notion that all of this work that we’re doing is part of the kingdom, I think it allows me to fully appreciate, you know, it’s true. I subsequently, after already kind of having this basic concept down, I subsequently adopted a really full orbed Korean understanding of it and what it means for culture, you know, that our work, having been tainted by the Fall, like all of nature was because of sin, that it basically now means that if you believe God is redeeming all these things to Himself, that includes our work. But there are cultural artifacts that are not fully ruined by the Fall, but in fact are going to be restored by grace.

0:18:24 – (David Bahnsen): And I think it puts a really important spiritual dimension on the work that we do. And it’s enabled me to understand that the work we do in producing goods and services that meet the needs of humanity is not only part of God’s kingdom, but it is the part of his kingdom that he created us specifically to do in the division of labor and His Eternal plan. We have an iPhone, and we are recording this right now in video zoom technology and sitting in office buildings and whatnot.

0:19:01 – (David Bahnsen): That we’re all a byproduct of human ingenuity, human addition to the raw materials of the earth. And I do appreciate these things economically, and I do appreciate them, you know, I guess you could say even scientifically. But the Reformed perspective enables me to appreciate it theologically. And. And I believe that when folks think about what it means to be Reformed, not I really believe that there is something in this message, at tearing down that sacred secular dichotomy that is an underrated element of our reform distinctives.

0:19:41 – (Collijn Hansen): Tim Keller, another Reformed theologian here, gets credit in your acknowledgments. How did he influence you?

0:19:48 – (David Bahnsen): Well, this book that Tim wrote. Tim wrote a lot of books that influenced me a great deal or that edified me a great deal, and I’ve spoken publicly about a lot of them. But every good Endeavor was unique because at the time that I read it, I thought I had read every book in Christendom about vocational theology or calling or something that was attempting to give Christians a message about work. And there’s been plenty of books out there, and I don’t want to suggest that there were no good ones until Endeavor, because I think there were.

0:20:27 – (David Bahnsen): But it was definitely the first book I read, let alone one of a bit more high profile and whatnot that was getting to an underlying theological message and apologetic for work. And I appreciated that Tim was doing it in the context of his own pastoral ministry in New York City, and that it was rooted to certain creational distinctives. It was not merely focused on a defensive, professional ambition, but it was done in a way that really allowed for this sort of creational foundation to be there behind what we may do, including artists and including musicians and a number of other aspects of giftedness that would exist in the kingdom.

0:21:19 – (David Bahnsen): So at the time that it came out, I didn’t think that there was anything else like it. But it also was clear to me, and I talk about this in my book, that he didn’t really go directly into the subject of money in the book, where there may be propriety or impropriety around someone working harder for the purpose of more material advancement. And in conversations I had with him over the years, it was clear to me that the reason for that was intentional, that he was pastorally working with a congregation in a community that was not short on ambition.

0:22:05 – (David Bahnsen): And so the evangelical landscape of America that I was seeing and interacting with was one of people constantly Erring on the side of non ambition mediocrity.

0:22:19 – (Collijn Hansen): You talk about that in the book.

0:22:21 – (David Bahnsen): Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And so I really kind of understood the pastoral context behind what Tim emphasized and didn’t emphasize in Endeavor. And so it became a really useful book for me. It was very formative and reinforcing. And yet I also felt that there was a couple angles and approaches in my treatment of the subject that I wanted to address that Tim didn’t in that book.

0:22:49 – (Collijn Hansen): Yeah, I agree. You also have the challenge pastorally with the partiality warnings in James and things like that that make money really confusing and difficult for a lot of pastors to be able to talk about. One of the more interesting parts. My guest again here is David Bonson. We’re talking about his book Full Time Work and the Meaning of Life. You reject the false dichotomy between family and career ambition.

0:23:14 – (Collijn Hansen): And I think many people see them as a zero sum. We have limited hours. You can only spend one or the other. A lot of these dynamics are generational. I’m at the kind of front end of the millennials and the millennials. Famously, fathers spend a lot of time with their kids, much more so than some older generations. And so I think a lot of conversations I have are about with ambitious men who work hard and have a lot of responsibility in their jobs, feeling a lot of guilt about how they should be home more often or they should be doing more help there.

0:23:52 – (Collijn Hansen): I think about my own dad or I think about my father in law. There wasn’t that same guilt for them and I didn’t necessarily have that expectation. So I’m just wondering, are you saying that we shouldn’t worry as much about spending maybe even not very much time with our family or what exactly is the message you want to communicate here?

0:24:10 – (David Bahnsen): Yeah, I think that the issue I’m trying to get people to understand is first of all, it is a question of finite limitations. You mentioned time, but I would add space. I can’t be at my kids soccer practice and in the office at the same time, so I’m limited physically. And then of course the time constraint that there’s a certain amount of hours in the day, there’s a certain amount of hours needed for family responsibility, for home responsibility, and for work responsibility responsibility.

0:24:44 – (David Bahnsen): So Christians of all ages will struggle with the wisdom that goes into that asset allocation. How I’m going to divide up my time. And I believe that first of all, the default position from pulpits has largely been whenever this comes up, just err on the side of family.

0:25:03 – (Collijn Hansen): Right.

0:25:03 – (David Bahnsen): Should I go to the soccer practice or leave the office? Go to the soccer practice. They may not say it quite that way, but I think most people would be hard pressed to attend, to regularly attend evangelic pulpits and not get that impression.

0:25:17 – (Collijn Hansen): I think it is explicit. In fact, there’s also a change in practice among pastors where pastors are spending more time themselves in those activities and not missing church activities instead. So that’s, I think, shifted there as well.

0:25:32 – (David Bahnsen): I totally agree, and I have a chapter in the book about where I think a lot of the agenda that comes from the pulpits these days may very well be influenced by the fact that. That it reflects often how the pastors themselves are more and more living and operating and so forth. And again, it’s difficult because you don’t want to be guilty of a hasty generalization. And I’m well aware that there are some pastors who are nowhere near guilty of this, but I believe a lot are.

0:26:00 – (David Bahnsen): And so I do sort of appeal to the work ethic of my late father, who was the model for me in this. There are tremendous sacrifices he had to make for the family that were a byproduct of. Of what he believed about his pastoral duty and calling. And those things, in my mind, were not a sacrifice to the family. They were a gift to the family. That the imagery I have of my father being at his study, in his desk, working early in the morning every single day of his life was an inspiration to me, an influence to me, a model for me as to what kind of work worker and thinker and believer I wanted to be.

0:26:44 – (David Bahnsen): But when you talk about the generational division of this, I think it’s really important to realize that much of what we see in some of the younger generations that are leaning more into more family time and are resentful of how much time their either Gen X or baby boomer parents may have spent working. A lot of it is. I do not give the boomers all the credit for how hard they worked because I believe that they were the hardest working generation in human history and that they produced more goods and services than any generation in history.

0:27:19 – (David Bahnsen): But I believe that they often did it accompanied by a transactional spirit, that you have food on the table because I went to work all day, or worse, I went to work all day so you could have food on the table. And what I’m trying to suggest is that, yeah, you do want to go to work all day and go live out your kingdom purpose, and it will produce the food that your children eat. But you’re not doing it merely so that they will have that food.

0:27:51 – (David Bahnsen): You’re doing it because the activity you’re doing at work matters. That you are serving others through the work and you are living out your God ordained purpose. And that there is this transitive activity in our work whereby we produce some function goods or services that benefit others. And God cares about us as a worker. He cares about those being served by our work and he cares about the work in between us and the object that we are serving.

0:28:24 – (David Bahnsen): And that matters to our families. And so there is a wisdom that I think a lot of people today are looking for when they use phrases that I’m very critical of like work, life, balance. They’re looking for a formula as to how much, what time do I leave the office, how much time am I supposed to be at work? You know, what can my employer really expect of me when I’m doing at home or on vacation? And I admit that technology has made this all very difficult.

0:28:56 – (David Bahnsen): My dad worked around the clock, but he didn’t have email going off on his phone every two seconds like we do. So there are needs for boundaries and wisdom and whatnot. But what I try to suggest in the book is that rather than formulize this or believe in the myth that each day is supposed to have the same level of compartmentalization, to accept the fact that there will be days in which we are to leave the office and go deal with something with one of our kids.

0:29:28 – (David Bahnsen): And there will be days where we’re supposed to miss one of our kids events and be working late at the office on a particular project or closing a deal or whatever the case may be. And I think that we put an artificial constraint on ourselves that we operate as if they’re supposed to be this perfect compartmentalization when in fact there’s a seasonality to these things in our lives. And if you believe, as I do, that in the domain of God’s kingdom are really important spheres like family, like church, like community, but also like our professional endeavors.

0:30:09 – (David Bahnsen): The one thing I would just plea to people not to do is to pit those things against one another.

0:30:15 – (Collijn Hansen): Yeah. Oh, I appreciate that. One thing that’s a challenge I see vocationally is that some jobs lend themselves toward the extremes. Ministry is one of them. My dad is just in the process of retiring as a farmer, agriculture, similar to this. My mother was a public school teacher for a career very similar. Also they tend to attract people on the extremes. If you work too much, you’ll like any of those jobs, because they never come close to being done.

0:30:47 – (Collijn Hansen): If you don’t like to work, those jobs actually work pretty well for you too. Agriculture a little less so. But you still don’t have to go out there early in the morning all the time. Not if you don’t want to. You don’t have to make everything look nice. You don’t have to do a great job. You’ll be able to skirt by. You might get some assistance from some source or another. But one challenge I see, usually because I’m working in ministry, as I tell people, it attracts people who work too much and it attracts people who work too little.

0:31:15 – (Collijn Hansen): And they’ll often be in the same building and on the same staff. I know there’s other jobs, but it’s not like certain jobs where there’s a minimum that everybody has to rise to. More like your profession. No doubt you’ll get weeded out really quickly. Not so much in ministry. It’s a place to hide if you don’t want to work, but it’s also a place where it’s easy to do too much. That’s one thing that Tim Keller and I talked about because he was one of those guys who tended to work too much.

0:31:41 – (Collijn Hansen): Speaking of productivity, I mean, David, you are very productive. Is there a secret the rest of us can learn from what you were able to accomplish?

0:31:50 – (David Bahnsen): Well, first of all, I appreciate that. It’s a very kind compliment. I think that I benefited from the fact that I was made by God to be a mourning person. And I don’t know that everyone is necessarily naturally wired that way. So I don’t really ever wear it as a badge of honor like there’s some unique virtue in me. I’m just sort of a little fortunate that I really do enjoy the early morning hours. And I think that there’s some truth to the old cliches, you know, that there’s a quiet to the morning and there’s a stillness and the fact that the rest of the world is generally still asleep gives you a leg up to get more done. A lot of my work does involve research, reading and writing, and I’m hopeless to do any of that after about seven in the morning. So I need, because once the day gets going with meetings and markets being open and client interactions and dealing with my team and whatnot, I have a pretty crazy, chaotic day.

0:32:51 – (David Bahnsen): And so that quiet of the morning to do more concentrated reading and writing and research is really important. So that’s probably the best secret. But there’s so Many people out there that have various how to suggestions around time management. And I’ve gotten a lot better over the years just because I’m older at learning to avoid wasteful behaviors and to steward my time well. But I think another piece to this, when we talk about juxtaposing it with the type of family men we want to be.

0:33:25 – (David Bahnsen): So I’m a husband and a father. I have three children and my kids at one point were 5, 2 and 0. And now they’re 20, 18 and 15. It’s different responsibilities, different time commitments that go into it at different phases. But I really think each person benefits from being intentional about it. One one thing I did is I brought my kids to the office on Saturdays when they were little and it got gave my wife a break.

0:33:59 – (David Bahnsen): She was a stay at home mom at that time. But then I let the kids run around and play. I showed them what I was doing. I’d get them candy from the, you know, the break room and stuff. We’d turn it into kind of a fun thing and I would have taken them to either breakfast or lunch after with dad and all that kind of stuff. We made it fun. But then it also gave me a couple hours at the office and we just sort of mixed business and pleasure a little bit that way.

0:34:25 – (David Bahnsen): Well, I think too many people have this idea that they’re supposed to have a separation of church and state with their work and their home life. And I really encourage parents to talk about their work in front of their kids and as much as possible talk about it joyfully because it’s the number one thing I feel generationally we’re dealing with is so many people were raised with a negative view of work from the way that their parents talked about it.

0:34:54 – (David Bahnsen): And the curse is real. There is sweat of our brow. There are challenges and stresses that will come up. But I really hope that one thing of all the mistakes I’ve made as a parent, I hope one thing I did well was talk about work joyfully in front of my children.

0:35:14 – (Collijn Hansen): Oh, I really like that. Some jobs are also similar. Some of occasions are by default. Family affairs ministry is one of those. Public school teaching is typically one of those too, in my experience. And then farming is as well. So it’s interesting to see just as my wife and I were forming a family, the different expectations we had. I mean, I lived at my dad’s workplace. I watched my dad working. I was expected to be working with him at all times.

0:35:41 – (Collijn Hansen): My wife’s dad was a surgeon. It’s the complete opposite she can’t help with anything. She can’t go to work. When he’s home, he’s home. You’re not doing anything at home. So it’s interesting. Very different expectations that we had through that. I have just a few more questions here with David Bonson talking about full time work and the meaning of life. This is something you hit on in the book. You mentioned the COVID 19, 20, 20 background for the book, something I think that you’ve been largely vindicated by.

0:36:07 – (Collijn Hansen): Why is it so important for work to be done in person?

0:36:10 – (David Bahnsen): Well, it’s so funny that I thought I wrote a book that was going to be somewhat controversial for its practical advice and its theological message and the fact that it was somewhat hard hitting on purpose, hopefully charitably and fairly so, but hard hitting to pastors and churches about this, this message you and I have been talking about. And yet I got more feedback and pushback on the appendix of the book than I did anything in the core 10 chapters.

0:36:44 – (David Bahnsen): And the appendix was my apologetic for working in office. And so, you know, the first caveat I always give is, you’re right to contextualize this around the COVID moment. I’m not referring to people who always had a job that was tailored to being a work from home situation. And whenever someone says, I’ve been working from home for 30 years, why are you telling me I need to go into an office? I say, well, I guess I’m not talking to you then, because I’m referring to the context of the COVID moment supposedly revealing something new.

0:37:24 – (David Bahnsen): And I myself as a conservative believe sometimes things are new. But it’s a high burden that I conserve the lessons of tradition and history, unless there’s a pretty overwhelming reason not to. And people act as if this notion of us going to work and interacting with one another in person, that it just came out of nowhere, I mean, it was really, I think, a design that was tailored to the realities of a modern professional economy.

0:38:01 – (David Bahnsen): And the notion that a lot of 50 year olds and 60 year olds who were themselves mentored in person by senior people when they were in their 20s and 30s and that they now believe those 20 and 30 year olds should be working from home in their pajamas and the 50 and 60 year old now has the freedom to go work from their boat or from the golf course or from their vacation home and all this type of stuff. It’s not just at that level of economic strata either. I mean, there’s all kinds of analogies that might be different.

0:38:37 – (David Bahnsen): But my point Is that we need to take seriously the notion of collaboration being a personal activity that many jobs optimize doing so face to face. There’s a limitation to what can be done. And you’re right on the vindication side. At the time I wrote that, you still had the Apples, Amazons, Microsofts, Facebooks, Googles of the world doing very, very voluntary come to work, if at all.

0:39:16 – (Collijn Hansen): It was just Elon who was really early in that.

0:39:18 – (David Bahnsen): That’s right. And he was. And a lot of his, by the way, was also trying to tear down that socioeconomic strata because his blue collar people that worked on the assembly line didn’t have the option of working from home. And he was saying it doesn’t make sense to have the suits say they can be at home and then these other guys on the assembly line. It’s gonna create more of this divide. And I thought everyone was worried about this divide in society and let’s all kind of get up and go to work together.

0:39:50 – (David Bahnsen): And I thought Elon’s messaging on that was right. But over time, more or less, everybody has now come around. And a lot of it is for very obvious reasons. Colin the companies, their own metrics said we’re just simply getting less output when people are not there. The University of Penn, the Wharton Business School, commissioned a study that was intended to draw a different conclusion. And the researchers ended up seeing from the data that no, in fact they were wrong, that there was a significant delta between the productivity of those that were working in office versus those who were not.

0:40:32 – (David Bahnsen): So again, I really do understand that some jobs, professions, situations may be different. But the argument I make in the book is around the concept of community and collaboration and culture for my business. Our culture means everything to us. It’s a very relational business. I want younger people, older people, and not just coworkers. But even the way we interact with clients, I fear the notion that we want to put more and more people in isolation.

0:41:06 – (David Bahnsen): And I don’t think it’s good for the society. And one of the areas in what has been a postmodern decline of community, one of the areas where community has largely been upheld is in people’s work lives. And if we now start further isolating people in that component, I think it’s unhealthy. And I’m grateful to see that. My way of viewing this has largely won out a few years after Covid.

0:41:35 – (Collijn Hansen): Yeah, I’ve always worked remotely in this job for 15 years, but. And we just haven’t had the option otherwise. And especially with recruiting and Retention of employees makes a big difference. Being in different locations, the nature of the work, in serving the church, it actually helps us to be in different regions, different churches, different denominations and whatnot. However, your arguments have been extremely compelling to me because what I was blind to is the fact that everyone else, almost everybody else, has followed in my wake.

0:42:09 – (Collijn Hansen): And so they have to adjust to me as the person in charge, but I don’t. But they have not had the benefit of getting to know everybody the way I have because I was here before anybody else. So all of a sudden they’re finding it difficult. Well, how do I even understand how things work here? How do I even know who to go to? How do I even relate to people? That is way harder than we’ve made it sound in remote work.

0:42:39 – (Collijn Hansen): And those of us who are ones calling the shots are sometimes in the worst position to be able to make that decision. And you helped me to see that. I mean, even with a lot of intentionality, it still is very difficult in that environment.

0:42:53 – (David Bahnsen): Well, it’s a great example and I appreciate you sharing that because I think that it would be useful for a lot of people to go through that very exercise to the extent that someone’s remote work scenario is working well for them. Just to kind of think through what could I be missing? What have I benefited from? Because sometimes there’s a DNA in place that we take for granted that others may not have.

0:43:18 – (David Bahnsen): And you know, I remember talking to a friend of mine who’s a devout believer and a managing director at Goldman Sachs during COVID and the CEO of Goldman was pretty vocal as well about getting everyone back to work. And he was expressing his own discontent with that decision, saying, we’ve just created our best year of profits ever, our best results. Our traders with technology are all getting all this stuff done.

0:43:43 – (David Bahnsen): I said, well, when you say you’re traders, what do you mean? He explained, the trading group, they’d all work together 20 something years. The research, the interaction. I said, do you see what I’m saying? You just got done having the best year you’ve ever had remotely, because you had 15 years working together already and the next gen’s not going to have that. So there’s kind of a DNA there and you can take it for granted, but I don’t think the continuity of the business or in your case, the ministry can take it for granted.

0:44:14 – (Collijn Hansen): Yeah, I had four years at an actual newsroom and I’m going to lunch with my boss, going to lunch with his boss. That just doesn’t happen. In the same way, when I’m hiring folks from all over the place now and we maybe see each other if we can afford it, every once in a year or something like that. I wanted to sneak in a couple more big picture questions. They don’t have to be long answers, but they’re just.

0:44:39 – (Collijn Hansen): I’ve been wanting to ask you them for a long time. First, you’re not shy about voicing your political opinions. You don’t hesitate to call out any side. But this is what’s amazing to me, David. You actually maintain the same views that you used to hold. I don’t see that much today. But how do you. How do you explain that?

0:44:59 – (David Bahnsen): I’m going to answer very graciously. I do not make my living from political punditry. And I suppose there might be some people out there whose opinions have changed because they feel that their living has required them to change their opinions.

0:45:16 – (Collijn Hansen): I’ll let you keep going. But working in media is one thing I have to explain to people all the time. And when I was thinking about that, I said, well, he has money.

0:45:25 – (David Bahnsen): Yeah.

0:45:25 – (Collijn Hansen): Makes one big difference.

0:45:27 – (David Bahnsen): Yeah. I don’t take it for granted. I say a lot that there’s people whose opinions have changed. And it’s very disappointing to me and sometimes disillusioning. But I also want to try to understand either the economic dynamic that they’re in, or in some cases, the personal, emotional, psychological dynamic. I won’t use any names, but I have a couple friends I was very, very close with that are really, really hurt by some of the things that have transpired over the last 10 years.

0:46:01 – (David Bahnsen): And although I would like to think that I would never change my opinions just because of the way I was treated by other people, I think in some cases it can become a kind of normal human response. But at a high level, I do believe that if you are grounded to certain first principles, the way in which I might interpret certain matters of political policy, of economics, you know, just the cultural hotbed issues of the day.

0:46:35 – (David Bahnsen): I had a belief system. I’ve changed my mind on certain issues over the years. I try to always wrestle with things in good faith, but. But I don’t think we see a lot of that today. I don’t think that what you’re describing is so much people saying, I used to really feel strongly about issue A, but I wrestled with it, and now I feel differently. I think most of the shift has come about out of some form of partisanship and a lot of times very personal partisanship, not even around a party or an ideology, but a particular individual either, since the elephant in the room is we’re obviously talking about President Trump either out of an affinity to him or a disdain for him.

0:47:21 – (David Bahnsen): And I do, at this point, I’m almost exhausted by the idea of having to think about what I believe about President Trump before I am allowed to express what I think about an issue. And so if my belief on an issue happens to be coinciding with what he believes on a given day or doesn’t, if it’s on the opposite side of it, it’s just something I’m very willing to live with.

0:47:47 – (Collijn Hansen): Yeah, I think economics is the number one area that I see this coming up in. I had a conversation with somebody I’m close to a number of years ago, and we were arguing over something related to his business and Trump’s economic policies. And I was making a fair. A free trade argument, and he really pushed back on me. And I said, that’s really odd. And he was like, why don’t you understand this issue? Why don’t this. I said, I just have the same views that you taught me.

0:48:21 – (Collijn Hansen): You taught me these free trade views. Now, again, I’m okay with people changing their mind. I mentioned just the earlier issue where you were teaching me about working from home and things like that. That’s a sign of somebody who’s intellectually engaged. But I don’t see much of that. I just see, oh, well, this is the new party line. Like, wait a minute. No, I actually believed those things. David is actually one of the reasons I got out of politics, because I realized I was one of the only people who actually believed the stuff we were talking about.

0:48:53 – (David Bahnsen): Well, I think that’s what a lot of folks have felt a frustration in over the last few years is it’s either people that have fully changed their view or even where they haven’t changed their view. They’re willing to just sort of stay silent.

0:49:08 – (Collijn Hansen): Yeah.

0:49:08 – (David Bahnsen): If it’s. If they know it’s going to be inconvenient or unpopular. And the economics is kind of ground zero on a lot of this stuff. But. But I think. I think my own view is that my life is simpler when I just remember what I believe and act accordingly and. And try to do so with a certain amount of grace. I’m aware of how many people have the views or the disposition they have now out of resistance.

0:49:40 – (David Bahnsen): In other words, a lot of people that sometimes talk very sycophantically about President Trump. I think that their motivator is not political idolatry. But a very understandable frustration with what they had saw in the peak moments of wokeism, aggressivism. And so there’s a reactionary component to it that I understand. And yet at the same time, I want to do my best. I don’t think I’ve been perfect in it, but I want to do my best to model a resolution and a real comfort level with conviction and being willing to be on an unpopular side of an issue.

0:50:21 – (David Bahnsen): And unfortunately, there’s just far too many people. Social media makes this so much worse that they almost are unwilling to speak up until they have their finger in the wind and kind of get an idea of where their tribe is going to go. And it just. Yeah, I don’t feel comfortable doing that. But I also accept what you said. I’m in a financially secure position and I do not make my living with political punditry.

0:50:50 – (David Bahnsen): So that gives me all the more burden to be a truth teller.

0:50:55 – (Collijn Hansen): Yeah. Well, I’ll tell people every once in a while that the Gospel Coalition, our budget is not very big, and I’ve been grateful for that. I hope that changes with time. But I say I’m grateful for that because I’m not sure how we would have made it over the last 10 years. I go back to Carl Henry’s story. Carl Henry ran afoul of J. Howard Pugh. J. Howard Pugh was basically bankrolling that magazine for the first many years of its existence. They were never on the same page theologically.

0:51:23 – (Collijn Hansen): They both shared an antipathy for communism, but they did not share a common theological vision. And eventually that went sideways. So in my job, it’s something I have to think about a lot because you run afoul of the wrong people on certain issues, you get in a lot of trouble. But the only way to really be able to manage it is to stick by your convictions and trust the Lord in those cases. Because once you start chasing that wind, maybe we see what Ecclesiastes says, you never stop.

0:51:49 – (David Bahnsen): And the other thing, too, is to maintain optimism that there are other people out there besides you that are pursuing truth. And so I think there are people that I could run afoul of that it will all end okay. Because they understand that there’s a sort of good faith behind these disagreements, that when I’m taking the opposite side of an issue, it’s at least sincerely held and driven by a belief system and a desired outcome and not one who’s sort of cosplaying in the current moment.

0:52:31 – (David Bahnsen): This is the problem, I think with post liberalism and illiberalism and certainly populism at large, that it distracts from what we’re supposed to be doing in argument and in truth seeking. It’s sort of like the person who lies so much that they have to spend most of the time remembering what they’ve said before. You know, where. If we’re supposed to come now together, let’s reason together, you and I, we’re in this constant pursuit of truth as believers.

0:53:07 – (David Bahnsen): It’s difficult to do that if you have to constantly be trying to remember what it is you’re even doing, who you’re supposed to be pleasing at any given time. And so the simplification of it all is to just call balls and strikes. And you know what’s interesting for myself as a center right Reaganite political conservative who’s a big defender of free enterprise and a market economy, but also deeply rooted to Calvinistic heritage. Theologically I’m going to end up being against the political left more than I am the political right.

0:53:45 – (David Bahnsen): And yet whenever I have occasion to have to express a view that rubs one wrong way or the other the wrong way, I don’t have to try to remember what it is I’m supposed to be saying. I can just appeal to the same principles that I’ve always had. And I find that to be a really refreshing way to live one’s life.

0:54:09 – (Collijn Hansen): Well, let’s end there. My last question was gonna be how do we break the spell of constant resentment in our culture? Another thing that you talk about, but it sounds like your answer would be tell the truth.

0:54:21 – (David Bahnsen): To tell the truth. But I would add on this one. Cause it’s funny, we’ve spent all of our time today talking about my last book full time. But my very first book was called Crisis of Responsibility and the Resentment Approach to Life. Holding on to grievances. It does in my opinion lead to really bad ideological outcomes. Whether it be wokeism or critical theory or various right wing populism that gets run amok.

0:54:55 – (David Bahnsen): But it’s far more damaging personally than it is ideologically. That grievance mentality really suffocates us from a life of joy. And a lot of us have reasons to be frustrated with things. Many of us have had difficult things happen in our life. But my number one argument for overcoming a resentment approach to life is not political or even cultural. It’s personal. That our own spiritual well being and exposure to contentment and human flourishing expands when we overcome a life of grievance.

0:55:34 – (Collijn Hansen): I love that David Bonson is one of my guests on Gospel Bound. We’ve been talking about full time work and the meaning of life as well as his vocation, his other his other writings. David, thanks for taking the time.

0:55:44 – (David Bahnsen): Thanks so much Colin. Appreciate it.

0:55:54 – (Collijn Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospelbound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound Rate and review Gospel Bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time, Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.