706: The Second Slap plus Leah Libresco Sargeant

Welcome to the Holy Post. We've all heard the stories of people raised within American evangelicalism who've been disillusioned because of abuse, scandals, or political idolatry. Some have migrated to more progressive church traditions, while others have deconstructed their faith entirely. Joshua Harris, made famous for his seminal purity book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, was in the latter category. Harris now says he is emerging from a season of overcorrection, having seen the bully energy in progressive spaces, and that he's curious about Jesus again. Then Caitlin talks to feminist author Leah Labresco Sargent about her provocative new book, The Dignity of Dependence. Also this week, new signs of hope as cities, states, and courts are resisting ice. Hey, if you haven't heard yet, Holy Post Media has launched a brand new show called Advice-ish. It's our version of an advice column where our hosts and pundits respond to your questions, conundrums, and difficult life situations. On recent episodes, we've talked about how to find a good church, when to leave a church, how to discern your calling, dealing with political divisions in your family. We even get into financial questions like how much to tithe and whether it's okay to spend money on a Disney vacation. We've called the show Advice-ish because we're honest with our advice, but there are always disclaimers. The show is what you've come to expect from everything we produce here at Holy Post Media. It's smart, fun, and always a little surprising. and it's exclusively for Holy Post Plus subscribers. So to get Advice-ish and all of the other exclusive shows and resources we produce, head over to HolyPost.com and sign up today. You'll not only join the wider Holy Poster community, but you'll be supporting our ability to make more faithful, pro-neighbor Christian content that our culture needs right now. Again, you can sign up at HolyPost.com. Here is episode 706. Hey there, welcome to the Holy Post Podcast. My name's Phil Vischer, and I'm here with a couple of dear, dear friends. Is this NPR all of a sudden? What is happening? Sky Jatani is here all the way from South Wheaton, Illinois. Hi, Sky. Hi, Phil. Hi. And Caitlin Schess is here from Central Illinois, from Central Wheaton. I was going to say, I don't even know what Central Illinois is. Central Illinois, yeah, it's Illinois' flyover. Oh, okay. About America's. Illinois is an American flyover country. Central Illinois is Illinois flyover. Oh, okay. Between what? Chicago and what other part of Illinois? St. Louis. You go to St. Louis, which is, I guess, East St. Louis, which is in Illinois. I don't know what I'm even talking about. Now it's time for the theme song. What's the news that you like the most? Who's your favorite podcast host? If it's breakfast, get your toast. It's Sky, Phil, Caitlin, and the Holy Post. Sky, Phil, Caitlin, and the Holy Post. And sometimes other people. World Relief is a longtime sponsor of the Holy Post. Last month, the unthinkable happened in Minnesota. Dozens of refugee families who fled war, violence, and religious persecution were unjustly detained, including children. These families followed every legal pathway available to them and were told they were welcome here, yet they were swiftly and without warning taken from their homes into detention. Several of the families detained were resettled by our friends at World Relief. The organization believes this could quickly spread beyond Minnesota, putting thousands of legally resettled refugees at risk of detention, including over 17,000 refugees World Relief is serving right now. What happens when a parent is detained? Everything collapses. Income disappears. Homelessness and hunger looms. Families are too afraid to leave home. Children live in constant fear. In this moment of crisis, world relief is responding. They're providing legal support, emergency housing and food, and trauma-informed care. Why am I sharing this with you? Because moments like these call for more than just moral outrage. They call for sustained, faithful action. If you're looking for a tangible way to be the hands and feet of Jesus, would you consider walking alongside refugee families through your faithful monthly partnership with World Relief. Go to worldrelief.org slash holypost to get started. That's worldrelief.org slash holypost. Holy Post is sponsored by Our Place. Unless you just pick stuff out of the ground and put it straight into your mouth, eating healthy starts with cooking healthy. Most cookware still contains harmful forever chemicals like Teflon. A single scratch on a nonstick-coated pan can release 9,000 particles of plastic. into your food and into you and your family. Our Place makes high-performance, toxin-free cookware. You can cook without worrying that the coating on your pan is going to end up in you. Plus, the cookware from Our Place is gorgeous. Great designs, awesome colors. You've got to check it out. Our Place has a four-piece cookware set that can overhaul your entire kitchen. The set includes two multifunctional always pans and two perfect pots in mini and full sizes that replace a whole stack of cookware. And buying them together saves you $150. So stop cooking with toxic cookware and upgrade to Our Place today. Visit fromourplace.com slash holypost and use code HOLYPOST for 10% off site-wide. With a 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and returns, you can experience this game-changing cookware with zero risk. That's fromourplace.com slash holypost. I consider I-80 my Mason-Dixon line. Yeah. Anything below that is kind of... Yeah, when I lived in the city, people would say, I've never been past Harlem Avenue. That's funny, apparently. It's like that old New Yorker cover where it shows how the New Yorker views the world. Indeed. Yeah, many Chicagoans do not consider themselves residents of Illinois. Right. I have told a bunch of people since I moved here that no one I know who lives here ever talks about Illinois. They talk about Chicago. They don't talk about Illinois. And I've lived in some states that are big on the state that they are. And Texas, Colorado, California, like care about the state. Some states are big on their state. They're big on their state. We are not big on our state. You can buy so many things in the shape of all those states. No. But I've never seen an Illinois pancake maker. You can get a lot of things in the shape of the city of Chicago. Or the Chicago flag is very popular. The Chicago flag I see all over the place. Or a Chicago hot dog. You can buy a lot of things in the shape of a Chicago hot dog or Mike Ditka. Mustache with sunglasses. Mike Ditka pancakes. I have no idea who that is. You know, oh, you gotta leave. You cannot live here any longer if you don't know who Mike Dicka is. The bears. Okay. Hello, folks. Hi, friends. How's it going? Are you, I, last week I promised good news this week. Some loving puppies. That's what, that's what. Where are the puppies? We're getting a new puppy. Yeah, okay. Have you settled on a name? Wait, what, it's happening? It's happening. Have you settled on a name? No, we've not. We went and saw the puppies on Saturday, though. Have you settled on a puppy? Yeah, that's good. Well, we have Pick of the Litter, and there's six of them, and there's five left. So do you have a favorite? They're too little to know the personalities yet. But yes, we have a favorite based on color and gender. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Well, that's how you pick dogs. Okay, I guess. Don't take offense to that. Jeepers. My gosh. Care about personalities, Sky? Do you have a favorite based on socioeconomic class? Not yet. Okay. Let's see which one is more entrepreneurial. We do need a name. We need a name. See which one comes in. You have some picks, though, right? We have a long list of names that no one can agree on. What goes well with Steve? Exactly. That's what I was asking. Edie. Steve and Edie. Cute. Do you remember Steve and Edie? No. Steve and Edie Gourmet. I don't remember. Gourmet. Yeah. Is that it? They were singers. Oh, yeah. I may be getting this wrong, but they were classic singers that showed up on the Johnny Carson show a zillion times, Steve and Edie. Some of the Skypod listeners, because I threw this out to them, they said we should name him Martin, like Steve Martin. Oh. Or Irwin. Irwin came up. Steve Irwin. Steve Irwin. Dusty or Dustin from Stranger Things. That's cute. Because Steve and Dustin. That's cute. Or it could be Marty, as in Steve Martin and Martin Short. Oh, Marty's a cute puppy name. Marty. It's going to be a big dog, though. Or it could just be completely grating, like Steve and Fido. Yeah, really exaggerate the weirdness of Steve. Okay, what's the good news? What's the good news, you ask? Well, last week we talked about cows and that they're learning to brush themselves so they can eventually take up arms against us. But that's not the good news this week. The good news this week is that five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos is back home in Minnesota. He was, now if you say he was abducted, people will get very angry with you. He was obviously, he was just taken into custody by babysitters, by professional armed and masked babysitters. who took great care of him all the way to Texas and then kept him there for a week, taking wonderful care of him to keep him safe from the cold in Minnesota until a judge said, you have to stop keeping him there, let him go and get him back home. Was he with a parent the whole time? Yes, his father was, yeah. So here's the deal. This all happened in his driveway. This didn't happen out in the middle of nowhere. His father was bringing him home from preschool, and Ice followed him into his driveway, and he saw them and ran out of the car. He says to yell to people that Ice was here, to warn them. Ice says he was abandoning his child. That's why he ran away from the car, which was running with his five-year-old in it. And then Ice wanted to take care of the child, so they brought him to the back door and told him to knock on the door so that his mother could come out and take care of him and not get grabbed by the masked men who were going around grabbing people. No, no, no, no, no. That's not what they were going to do. They just wanted to make sure he was okay. And when her neighbors advised her not to open the door because they were pretty sure she would get grabbed, Ice took the husband and the child because they couldn't just leave him there standing on the door of his own house. That's dangerous to be that close to your own house with your mother right inside. She would never let him in. It's like when a baby bird falls out and humans touch him, and then the smell of human is on the baby bird and the mother won't take him back. Now the smell of ice was on the baby, so mother's not going to take him back. So what choice did they have but to ship him to Texas, which is where safe children are? Anywho, an activist leftist judge said this was not done correctly. you must send him home. And he's back home now. With his father. With his father. And his brother and his mother, people said he was abandoned by his parents, and that's why ICE had to take him. His brother was there the whole time. How could he be abandoned by his parents if his father's with him? Yeah. Oh, because he was in custody. Because he ran away from the car. I know, but that's not the, whatever. Anyway, a judge ruled he and his father had to be released. The Trump administration complied. and released him. Do you think it's because they, would they have complied with this order had this story not gotten so much media attention? Yeah, I don't know. That's interesting because they have defied 96 court orders just in the month of January, just in the city of Minneapolis. Okay. That's a lot. That's a lot of defying court orders. And I assume when the administration defies a court order from a lower court, it just gets bumped up to a higher court? Again, like, are they just playing the delay game here? Like, what are the consequences when the executive branch defies the order of the legislative branch? Well, the consequence is a constitutional crisis, eventually, because obviously you can't. I mean, the federal judge, the highest ranking federal judge in Minnesota was about to call the head of ICE into court to declare him in contempt of court for for uh continuously defying court orders which would do what well ideally someone would get arrested except since the justice department is also under the same leadership nothing's going to happen exactly that's that's my point is when that's why we're we've been flirting with constitutional crisis for the last year i almost wish the crisis would just get here so we can deal with it. I don't know how you, we don't know how to deal with it. It's territory we've never been in before. My non-expert reading of the Constitution would be when you have an administration which is continually defying the authority of another branch of government, then the third branch of government steps in, which constitutionally has the authority to remove the president. Yeah, the third branch of government has already capitulated. For not upholding his constitutional oath. They have capitulated. I know, but that's a fun word. Whenever you dig deep enough into the dysfunctions of our government right now, it always comes back to the fact that Congress isn't doing anything. That Congress, particularly the Republicans in Congress right now, refuse to uphold their constitutional oath. Well, we should do something about that. Anyway, the good news is five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos is back at home with his mother and his brother and his father. Do you think he'll ever step outside the house again? And I do wonder what this experience does to a five-year-old. I'm thinking it's probably not good. No. Or his brother or his mother. Right. Yeah. That's not without consequences. Yeah. What was also interesting, I probably spent more time on Twitter in the last week than I should have. Shocker. We should stop that. Yeah. Which is what the encouraging news is. We had a big meeting here at the Holy Post last week. and someone showed me our Instagram page and all the nice comments we get on our Instagram posts. And the volume of them. Yeah, I was like, wow, a lot of people watch our clips on Instagram and they seem to like them. Maybe I should spend some time over here, but then would I lose my edge? Would I become soft and complacent? Maybe some of the edge. what was interesting on twitter was um how many christians will bend logic to defend the administration you know to defend the mistreatment of migrants um that you you have to find a way that it's you're on the good side yeah like we said last week no one wants to be on team evil yeah yeah so i mean the number of people regarding the liam conejo ramos case number of christians who said to me well what did you want them to do he'd been abandoned by his parents and they took very good care of him they even took him and got him some fast food i don't know if that's true or not but i'm not sure if that's the qualifier of taking good well i hope he was fed yes yeah yeah it was fed so i and i know that it you know that it happens on both sides Oh, there I said it. I said both sides. It's motivated reasoning. This is what happens when your loyalty to an identity surpasses your commitment to the truth. Yeah. And it's where we are all susceptible to it for sure. Yeah. So other cities are learning from Minneapolis and are preparing. Philadelphia City Council just introduced a bill. Just introduce a new beer. It's on ice. that would prohibit city agencies from working with ICE, prohibit the wearing of masks by ICE agents, prohibit local police from acting as ICE agents. You cannot freelance as an ICE agent in our town. Seattle mayor signed an executive order barring ICE from using any city-owned property. And this is interesting, directing local police to document ICE activities. So in most cities, it's independent ICE watchers. In Seattle, it's going to be the Seattle police that are ICE watching. More and more stories of misbehavior and people being mistreated, people having their cars rammed by ICE and then ICE reporting it as, no, they hit my car and that we need to arrest them for hitting my car until someone shows dash cam footage that says, no, you hit their car. So there's a lot of nonsense going on. It does feel like, though, other good news, other love and puppies. This is from the love and puppies desk that the administration is getting the impression the bad PR might be more costly than they want to pay. Yep. Perhaps in November is what we're looking at. OK, you think so? I would feel better if there were people in the administration who felt the cost to human lives and families and communities was too costly rather than just PR. We're not. That's not. As long as Stephen Miller is calling the shots, that's not going to happen. But there's encouraging. There's encouraging things in my own little community because supposedly ice is going to return to the Chicago area in the spring. It's funny because that's usually when ice melts. I know. But no, not here. Christians are training to be able to help their neighbors during what we expect as a second wave. My own little church is having a training session next week so we can learn how to be ice watchers and how to blow whistles. I've never blown a whistle before myself, so it takes some lessons, I think. I was thinking about following ice around playing the recorder. I don't know. That could be more effective, actually. And you think you can just annoy them out of West Chicago? But they can't. Can they get mad at you if you're playing music? Yeah, they can. On a recorder? Yeah. I can. I was going to say. What if I followed them around with a zither? What's a zither? It's a multi-stringed instrument that you tap with tiny hammers. I thought that was like zipper with a lisp. All right, all right, all right. That's all I really wanted to talk about that. But it's a positive story this week. I mean, it's still bad. It's still horrible and terrible and horribly bad. Yeah. But it's positive. Well, thank you, Phil, for finding that little kernel of corn in that pile of poop for us. Liam Conejo Ramos is back home with his brother and his mother. And other cities are learning from Minneapolis and saying, all right, we're going to be ready. We're going to be ready. They're not going to abuse our residents. And churches, churches in Minneapolis are doing all sorts of amazing work. their new food pantries. They're delivering groceries to people. And in many cases, it's a family where one member of the family is undocumented. And so they're not fearing all deportation. They're fearing the family being broken up. And so no one will leave the house. And that's true in our area, too. There are families that haven't been out of their houses for months now. And so people are delivering groceries or taking their kids to the doctor or to school, helping out in any way they can. A lot of people are inspired by what churches are doing, which is interesting because for a while we were really discouraged by what Christians were supporting. And now we're getting more stories of being encouraged by what some Christians are standing up for. It feels like this is what trials are supposed to do. They reveal the truth on all sides. Yeah. So do you know who Josh Harris is? Do you know who Josh Harris is? I do. Can you just tell us in a brief sentence? I think he's most famous for having written I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which people might know from the man in the cowboy hat on the cover. That's not a cowboy hat. It's like a fedora, isn't it? Well, yeah, okay, a fedora, some hat. I can't picture it. There's a man with a hat on the cover sort of like tipping his hat. It was after I had already kissed Dating Goodbye because I was married. Because you were married, yeah. When was that book published? That's a good question. I definitely read it. I'm going to say 95. 94. I'm going to say. It was 97. Oh, I was in college. I was born. I had been born by then. Yeah, he, I don't think it's totally fair to pin all of purity culture on him, but he is often the name that gets thrown around. He was a purity culture celebrity. He was a purity culture celebrity. I mean, his two brothers, twin brothers, wrote a book called Do Hard Things. Like he had family members that were very involved in like evangelical publishing, speaking, but he was the one that was very focused on the period culture. They were influencers. They were influencers. Because they weren't pastors. No. Right. And they were barely adults. I was going to say all of them published quite young Yeah Almost as young as you Almost as young as me We were talking about that earlier I was an adult Yeah. When did you get your first publishing contract? I was 23. Oh, my gosh. That's too young. I'm sorry. That's amazing. Can anyone – do we know how old – so Josh Harris probably – Harris was probably in his teens still. He was probably quite young. Yeah. Yeah. So he's probably got you beat. Yeah. But his book was not as heady as yours. Well, and his had more influence than I did. No, but only barely. Only just barely. So Josh Harris, Kissed Dating Goodbye, and then how many years later, Kissed Christianity Goodbye? Quite a few. It's only in the last few years. I mean, he, a few years ago, was involved in a documentary talking about the effects of his book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and just his talks on purity culture on a generation of evangelical teenagers. and for a while there was sort of a symbol of the deconstructing, you know, ex-evangelical type and then announced that he was no longer a Christian and getting divorced. For background, he was 22 when that book was published, which means he probably wrote it when he was 21. Yeah, or younger. Did he even have time to date before he could kiss it goodbye? Well, yeah, he didn't, which is the right thing to do. Did he never date? I think he courted. He courted. Okay. Where your parents. Your parents arrange things. There's a chaperone. And you have to have a sitting room. Or a parlor. A horse must be involved. And a carriage. A horse and a carriage, yeah. So Josh Harris posted something on Instagram, which I've just learned is a thing. Good for you. Fascinating. Posted something on Instagram, a multi-page message that has blown up a little bit and really caught our eye. On the first page, it just says, is Trump leading me back to Jesus? Hot take. Hot top. That's provocative. That's clickbaity. I clicked. What does that even mean? It says, I don't know how to say this, and it probably won't make sense, but it feels like President Trump is leading me back to Jesus. Eight years ago, when Donald Trump was first elected president, I gave him partial credit for the unraveling of my faith. Trump broke my faith. Watching the evangelical world embrace him was a moment of significant disillusionment for me. It felt like seeing behind the curtain. This is not an uncommon reaction. Like realizing what had really been driving so much of the church all along. It made everything feel compromised. In the years that followed, I went through a season of overcorrection. I can admit that now. I lived in reaction. If Trump and his supporters were for something, I was automatically against it. Not being like them became a defining force in my thinking. All right, can we pause there? Yeah. Because I think a lot of... I've seen this a lot. Yeah. And I appreciate that he's acknowledging this because a ton of people are going to resonate with this narrative. Yeah. I agree. Okay. Is that all you wanted to say? I didn't know if anyone wanted to add to that. I'm not sure you've ever interrupted with such a concise statement. I will continue. I adopted a condescending posture. I othered people. And whenever we do that, we lose some connection to our own humanity. At the same time, I started noticing the same bully energy in progressive spaces that I'd experienced in conservative ones. There was just a different orthodoxy, a different list of correct beliefs that made you righteous and acceptable. But underneath it, I felt the same fear I had felt in the church, the same anxiety that if you said the wrong thing or didn't signal hard enough, you'd be judged, labeled or pushed out. I thought I'd left a high control environment, but I had mostly just joined a new one. Now, you've brought this up before. Yeah. this idea. I love your name for it. Or did you come up with that or someone else? Me and a friend, we talked about the second slap, the idea that you get slapped once by the conservative evangelical world that you grew up in. And that slap is not, you know, just being hurt by them. It's the sense that I thought that these were the people who cared about scripture, who wanted to be faithful to Jesus. I believed them when they said they cared about those things. And then they acted in ways that made clear that that wasn't true. And then you go and you find more progressive Christians, and you find those spaces online, I think, mostly. And it feels like, oh, wait, these are the people, they're reading the prophets about wealth and poverty, and they're talking about the injustice that's happening in the world. And they're reading Revelation as this, you know, unraveling of earthly power. And they're the people who are serious with their faith, and they care about scripture. And I can put my lot in with them. And then the second slap is, oh, wait, actually, some of the same dynamics in that first group are here again. And part of the dynamic is you have to believe exactly the same things I believe or you're out. There's a kind of certainty with which all beliefs are held that make it impossible to ask questions or to make mistakes and get forgiveness. And so the second slap is not just, oh, the same dynamics are replicated in this environment as the one it came from. It's also, where are the people who actually care what scripture says and are trying to be faithful to Jesus? It feels like in different ways, both of these camps are really concerned about different kinds of power or different kinds of virtue signaling or different kinds of in-group behavior, they're not actually concerned with following Jesus. And it sounds like what Harris is saying here and what you've expressed to him, and I've certainly experienced, is that both groups have deep fear and contempt for those outside their group, right? It's about othering and demonizing the opposition. They're the bad people. Yeah, good guys and bad guys. Exactly. How do you draw the other people in your political cartoons. Yeah. What do they look like? Yeah. They look slightly less than human. Yep. Josh writes, fast forward to now, Trump has been back in office for over a year. This time, the use of power is more blatant and ruthless than ever. It's authoritarian and dissent crushing. It looks like ice raids. It looks like families being torn apart. It looks like people being detained, disappeared into systems with very little recourse. It looks like people being shot in the street. Go into the next page. And as I sit with all of this, afraid and unsettled, I find myself drawn back to the stories that shape me, the stories of the Bible, the stories of kings and prophets, of Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel, of Ahab and Elijah, of Pilate and Jesus, not as doctrine, but as story. Story is a way of making sense of the world. And when I look through that lens, I find something new. I find a fresh awe at what it takes to stand up against unchecked power. I'm seeing Jesus not as a mascot for anyone's politics, but as someone who stood alone before the bullying power of his day and refused to bow. Which brings me, he says, to the old Keith Green album cover I shared at the start of this post. And this really resonated with me because I had that album. When I saw this, I literally thought, Phil's going to get excited about the album, and I don't know anything about it. Yeah, it's the Keith Green album, No Compromise. And it's a really amazing piece of art on the cover One of the better illustrations I've ever seen on a Christian album of a Daniel-like figure standing up when everyone around him is bowing before a Nebuchadnezzar-like king. And the interesting, if you can Google that picture, Keith Green, no compromise, but Google the image. Because Josh talks about, he says, I used to stare at this album cover for hours as a kid. Everyone is bowing before the king. Everyone is face down. And maybe they bow because they believe. Maybe they bow because they're afraid. Maybe they bow because it's easier. But everyone knows that if you stand, if you refuse, if you will resist, you will be crushed, except for one man. I always assumed that man was Jesus. I think it was Daniel. But he's still standing. And what I always stared at in that picture wasn't the guy standing, but the friend next to him. If you go to the – Oh, yeah. Trying to pull him down. who's just looking in terror up at his friends saying, what are you doing? Get, you know, I care about you. Stop it. You know, and that kind of social pressure, not even negative social pressure, you idiot, but concerned social pressure from a friend to say, don't put yourself out there like this. You know, this is not going to end well for you. What if the evangelical church's blind support for Trump doesn't disprove the Christian story, but actually points to its deeper truths. What if Trump is just the latest example of the pattern of people being deceived by the false promises of earthly power? What if he's just another manifestation of the bully spirit that followers of Jesus are called to humbly resist? So, yes, I'm thinking about Jesus again. And weirdly enough, I have President Trump to thank for it. That's interesting. I find this encouraging. on one level. But I mean, I don't know Joshua Harris at all, and he's got his own journey, and I think it's got to be incredibly difficult to go on that journey so publicly because he was forced into the spotlight. Even if it is Instagram, which seems to be a friendlier place. I know, but I appreciate that he's sharing this part of his story openly because the prior parts of his story were so public and open. So it's much easier to go through this in private or with people you trust rather than in the public spotlight. the way he is. Nonetheless, what I appreciate about what he's acknowledging here is his reaction back in 2016, eight years ago, he says, and the abandonment of his faith he's now beginning to recognize may have been an overreaction because it's clear he was reacting to the particular form of evangelical Christianity he had grown up within. And that his rejection was of that. maybe it wasn't a full rejection of the actual Jesus revealed in scripture. So we might be seeing in real time a deconstruction to reconstruction? No, I hope not. Wait, reconstruction is good, right? No, it isn't. When you put your faith back together. Oh. I think, I know, this sounds strange. Okay. If you're deconstructing a false vision of Jesus, I don't believe you reconstruct a correct vision of Jesus. Okay. I believe you receive it. Yeah. Oh. You receive it. From whom? From the Holy Spirit and the scriptures the Spirit inspire. And your new group of friends. And hopefully by people who are also filled with the Holy Spirit and genuinely trying to follow Jesus. Yeah, but that's what you thought the first time. But that wasn't what he experienced. I'm not faulting him at all here. I'm just saying so many people who are, quote-unquote, deconstructing or reacting to the Christianity they grew up in are not reacting negatively to true Christianity or the true revelation of who Jesus is. They're reacting to a false form of Christianity and Jesus that I would react to as well. So I just think we have to sum, I know this is awful, and Caitlin, you can correct my theology on this, but there is a difference between those who call themselves the church and Jesus himself. Oh, yeah, that's true. And in a perfect scenario, you want the church to be an accurate reflection of Jesus. Right. Right. We've never had a perfect scenario. I know we've never had a perfect scenario. You want a perfect mirror. You want a perfect mirror. Granted, you're never going to get one. But you want one whose flaws are not so warping that it completely clouds your vision of who Jesus is. That it paints an incorrect picture. Right. And I think this is part of the reason I never really, quote unquote, deconstructed, is my faith was never in American evangelicalism. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Or maybe you just haven't had to yet because you haven't really been confronted about your malformed doctor. I've seen people on Twitter that have tried to confront you about your malformed doctor. That's true. I just feel like every time I see something broken in one form of the church or another, I'm just like, yeah, okay. Yeah, I know. It's not Jesus to me. You've always had an outsider view of American evangelicalism, which makes sense. I have always had an insider view. It is my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents. So for me, it's always a sense of much more profound disappointment. Like, oh, is this what I grew up in? Is this all we've accomplished? I assume there's an instinct to want to protect the reputations and the faith inherited from people you dearly love and care about. Yeah. I don't want to deceive. I don't want to cover up, you know, in that sense of protecting the reputation. It's like, don't let anybody know about this. Some people do go to that extreme. Yes, they do. I don't do that. But I want to talk a lot about corrective. Right. You know, like, hey, I got to do something about this because it's not supposed to be like this. as opposed to other people just saying, well, just leave. Just get out of there. Just leave. Get out of there. It's stupid. Leave. Come over here to some other. But then you risk the second slap problem. Caitlin's talking about it. Caitlin's always waiting with the second slap. I really want us to eventually talk about the story and scripture part of this, because I think that's really interesting, too. But I do think, to Sky's point, part of what is so important about this, like his line, what if the evangelicals' church blind support for Trump doesn't disprove the Christian story, but actually points to the deeper truths. To your point, Sky, it's like, one, Christians are supposed to be the ones that have a really strong sense of sinfulness of humanity. And we tell the stories every week in church of the way that God's people have messed up over and over and over again. But not us. Right. Not us. It's always someone else. But that should be. That should be a story that forms us. But I was thinking, while you two were talking about how devastating is it? how much faith are you putting in the evangelical church? A lot of the frustration I have felt towards some of the students I've had or friends I've had who would consider themselves like ex-evangelical, who've maybe left the church entirely, but have definitely left evangelicalism, is that they believed that evangelical churches lie that we were the center or sum of the church. And I just want to be like, don't give that to them. Like, that's not true. Like what has so deeply shaped my faith is learning some Christian history, even in our own country, of the faithfulness of other branches of the Christian faith that did not capitulate to political power, that actually stood up and took these stories that Joshua Harris is talking about and took them to heart and narrated their own experience of resistance through those stories. And I want to believe that the whole of the Christian church includes these deep failures of certain branches of it. I don't want to say that evangelicalism is like not part of the church or not like true Christians. I think for the most part, those are faithful Christians who at some point made a decision to really turn away from some central truths of the faith or who have been blinded by it, as he describes. And also there are these moments of great faithfulness and you have to kind of take it as a whole, but you also can't put your particular tradition, whether it's their successes or their failures as the center of the whole church, then you'll go astray. So we can't, if I decide the evangelical church has flaws, I can't run to another subset of Christianity and say, I found the one that got it all right, and now I have achieved complete self-righteousness once again. That pursuit of certainty is what gets you in trouble. Yeah. I just want to know which lunch table I can sit at where I can, in good faith, look down on every other lunch table. Oh, my gosh. But that's also I have told students I had who left evangelical churches. They went to Duke because they were like, now I'm going to do the right thing and be in the more progressive churches. And I told them so often I was like, one, if you're going to do that, great. Don't obsess still over whatever the evangelical church is doing. Like it is rotting your soul to be so critical constantly of a group that you claim to have left behind. But also in your pursuit of this like perfect, pure church, you are robbing that church of the gift of your discernment because you're not going to notice the places that they are wrong. I mean, I have felt this. We posted a clip of me talking about about progressive mainline churches and evangelical churches. And there were some people in the comments that were just like, no, like this is the church that is more faithful. This is the church that's more like Jesus. And it's like maybe on some particular thing you are seeing some faithfulness. And I want you to celebrate that. If you lose a sense that these are fallen humans that will make mistakes, that will go wrong in certain directions, usually characteristically, like there will be certain directions they keep falling into. If you lose sight of that, something really wrong can happen and your community will fall prey to it. And you won't be prepared to be honest and to repent and to lament what was been done and to be realistic going forward. OK, can I ask something? Yeah. He says, I'm seeing Jesus not as a mascot for anyone's politics, but as someone who stood alone before the bullying power of his day and refused to bow. If I'm kind of repicturing Jesus as primarily a revolutionary, haven't I then made him part of a political? Maybe. He shouldn't just be a T-shirt for a rally. Yeah, and I'm not sure I agree with the way he phrased that. Yeah, because Daniel literally refused to bow or Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to bow to the idol in the book of Daniel. But Jesus response to power was ironically to surrender himself to it, to allow it to consume him and destroy him and kill him on the cross in order to show its ultimate weakness because he triumphed over it through the resurrection. So if you merely see Jesus as a revolutionary who resists the power of the world, that's not quite the message. It's how he resists that's so critical. Because he resists through nonviolence, through surrender, through surrendering his own body. So it's a very particular form of resistance that Jesus stood for and that the Christians is called to emulate. Speaking of these stories, Caitlin, is there a danger when we say I'm not going to focus on doctrine, I'm just going to focus on the stories? Doesn't doctrine matter? There's always a danger. It's funny. I read this and thought this was so interesting because I'm writing a dissertation about, I mean, a very specific example of this. But broadly, my dissertation is like, what do we do with the fact that I think it is a good thing that we take biblical narratives and try and inhabit them to understand our own circumstances and find both the courage to act faithfully and direction as to how to act. And yet those are also way slipperier. Like you give someone a story and say, live into it. You are, you know, you're Israel that's waiting to be liberated out of Egypt or you are Daniel or you're Esther. There's something powerful about that. there have been examples in Christian history where that motivated people towards great acts of faithfulness and justice. It's also slippery. You tell someone today they're Daniel. Well, are you right about the position of relative lack of power that they have? Or are they actually Nebuchadnezzar? Are you sure you know who the Nebuchadnezzar or the Goliath is in your life? The Disney princess problem. Right. You're not the point of the whole story. But, but so I'm writing a dissertation, which I will not fully answer this question, but no one is going to read. it. No one's going to care. But just like, how do we both say we want to be able to do that? And basically, ironically, my dissertation was trying to figure out like, what are the theological kind of boundaries that can help discipline this so you don't go off the rails into something that's really not faithful. So on one hand, I would say, yes, doctrine matters. But I also I appreciate that I really liked this post in part because this is a description that sounds very similar to me of one of my favorite theologians, Karl Barth, who existed at a point in history, yeah, by his merch, existed at a point in history where he not only stood up against great political evil in Nazi Germany, but he also existed in a theological moment where he very famously said no to all these theologians that were mistreating scripture. We're not treating it as this revelation from outside of human knowledge that came to us from God. And he has this incredible little essay. It's one of his most famous called The Strange New World of the Bible. And he writes very similarly where he just sort of says, like, if you if you're looking for something specific in scripture, you will find if you are looking for boring historical details, you will find it. He doesn't say this, but you could say if you're looking for verses that support your political position, you can find it. Like whatever you are looking for, you will find. But if you go in looking for the strange new world of God, which to him is if you go in going, I will be confronted, I will be surprised. this is not going to conform to the things that I already believe And he gives this beautiful description of wandering in the desert with Israel and the burning bush and hearing the voice of God and that being a way to encounter scripture afresh. And so I appreciate this because I think anyone who is coming back to the faith or considering the faith anew, being in the stories and going, goodness, this says something that is true about the world, but it also feels outside of human knowledge. And maybe It's really it could guide me and it's really powerful. I think that's a beautiful way to start. And especially for many people who were kind of beaten over the head in evangelicalism with like know all the right things. If you know all the right theology, you'll do the right things. I think this is a good corrective to go explore these stories that have shaped Christians for a really long time. See what you discover. Expect that it will surprise you. Can you go very wrong? Yes. But also this is one of the risks of reading the Bible. Is it like you could get it wrong? But like if you are going in going, there's something beautiful and surprising here and I want to discover it. I just want to applaud that posture. I think that's a good posture to have. Yes, Guy? I was just thinking about the danger if you're a young person growing up in any particular faith community. If that's the only exposure, that community or that tradition is the only exposure to Christianity you have and then it goes sideways, this is what happens, right? So at what age or what faith development stage, when do you deliberately try to introduce people to other traditions, other doctrines, other forms of Christian faith? It depends on how angry you want their parents to be. I know. That's what's rough. And I was thinking back to my own experience and like I never – Speaking as someone who may have experience in that. Like because of the diversity of my home growing up, I was kind of a third culture kid. I always knew many people in my life who were not Christians, who were not evangelicals, who were wonderful people in many cases. So I never grew up with this illusion that evangelical Christians were the good people and everyone outside were the bad people. But beyond that, even when I was kind of faith curious as a teenager, I was reading so broadly the stories of people outside of white American evangelicalism who were followers of Jesus, whether they were Roman Catholic or from the black church tradition or other cultures or backgrounds or times. And I saw all these different examples of Christianity that did not look like suburban American white evangelicalism. And it inspired me. It gave me glimpses of who Jesus is in a way that I wasn't putting all my eggs in the evangelical basket. And I just wonder what can ministries that are trying to form the faith of younger people do to give them that experience without getting in trouble with their parents all the time? I don't know if it's possible. But how do you help someone find the truth if you don't start out by saying, my tribe has it and I'm going to give it to you? See, it's interesting that so many people were introduced to Christianity by evangelistic tract or a Billy Graham sermon, you know, not from starting with the Bible, but starting with a hyper condensed version of evangelical theology. That's it's not the stories. It's the conclusions we've drawn from the stories and distilled down to a pill, a single pill you can take. and you're a Christian. And so then there's just so much unpacking to go from that, to go from the four spiritual laws and work backwards all the way up to Jesus or even the Nicene Creed. Okay, last word goes to Caitlin. Encouraging? Yeah, that's my goal. No, no, like this. Oh, this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought you were going to be like, could you be encouraging? I was like, I could try. I think it's encouraging, yeah. And I think I hope that this I hope that this story from him encourages some people who might have had that second slap and gone. I don't know. I've been told, actually, maybe this whole thing is bad. Maybe this whole thing is evil. I hope that it prompts some people to go back and not only go to the stories of Christian history and say, like, OK, maybe he's right. Maybe it's not all American white evangelicalism. Maybe there's other things. But to his point, to go back to scripture and see surprising stories, we have to be attentive to the guiding of the Holy Spirit. But also, at the end of the day, we will get some of this wrong. And I think the failure of both of these camps to just acknowledge that whatever camp you are in is not perfect, that we will get some things wrong, that we will have to make mistakes and learn from them and try again. That's where both of them have gone wrong. That's why you get slapped both times. You can't acknowledge weakness or wrongness. And that's part of what healthy Christian communities should do for us is to say, we as a whole might get some things wrong. Like, I've become incredibly Presbyterian. There are times when I'm like, we should all be Presbyterian because the Presbyterians are right. I need to have deep relationships with people who disagree with me theologically that help not just maybe push me on some things and maybe I change my mind, but to help me remember to hold the parts of my theology that are not primary in the right place. Like, worshiping in an Episcopal church right now has been really good for me to go, there are some things about this, you know, in the way that we worship, in the theology that we have, that I wish were different. But this is a faithful church within the broad communion of saints. And I want to celebrate what they're doing here. When you talked about young people and how you possibly teach this, I think back to my church in Durham, where my dear friend Kat, who was our youth director, part of confirmation for the teenagers, not just learning doctrine that the church believed or learning about the practices that we had. But part of their training was to go to a predominantly black Baptist church and to explore some other traditions racially, but also theologically. And I think it's important not just to say, hey, there are Christians who are different from us who are doing faithful things. It helps us hold our own beliefs, even if we are going to stick with them in a different way to say, like, maybe those teenagers will stay Presbyterian. They will not become Baptists. They can't be the kind of Presbyterians to think the Baptists are just evil and doing it wrong. And hopefully the Baptists at the other church can think the same way of us. and it's not just about exposure. It's about having that internal sense that I could be wrong about this and it will not cost me my salvation if I am wrong about this and it won't cost me my community if I'm wrong about something. Oof. Oof. Tricky stuff. Tricky stuff. We can try. So be encouraged. Trump is turning people back to Christ. Exciting times we live in. Don't you think? And Liam Ramos is back home with his cute little bunny ears. Could you, Caitlin, as you're writing your dissertation, what if you published each chapter to Holy Post Plus? I think my advisor would kill me. And then you could get feedback. It could be like a community interaction. Who would subject themselves to that? I'm only an idiot. All right, go to Holy Post Plus. There's lots of fun stuff from Caitlin and Skye and others there. Esau McCauley as well. And be of good cheer. Puppies in love. We're doing okay. And Jesus has overcome the world. Jesus has overcome the world with puppies in love. See you next time. 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She argues that women's equal dignity shouldn't require women to deny biological reality or attempt to be interchangeable with men. Leah Labresco Sargent works on family policy in Washington, D.C., and she runs a substat community called Other Feminisms. Here's Caitlin's conversation with Leah Labresco Sargent. Leah, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me on. I am so excited to talk about your book, The Dignity of Dependence. The cover, if people are watching right behind your head, striking. I have had many coffee shop conversations with people about the book because it's so beautiful and has a provocative subtitle, A Feminist Manifesto. One of the things I love about this book is that it brings together political theological themes that in some corners of Christianity go together very naturally, but in many corners do not and are often separated out, even in our partisan politics. Talk a little bit to us about the path that led you towards this framing in this book right now. Sure. I would say the two core ideas of the book are that first, women's equality, both equal dignity, political equality, doesn't depend on our being interchangeable with men. And second, that dependence, not autonomy, is core to what it means to be human. I think when you put those two ideas together, you know, you get a way of valuing women as women in a world that often treats us like defective men and really sees our exposure to the needs of others as a problem to be solved, not kind of an essential ordering of the world that we have to figure out how to respond to and support. I love that. And I there's so many directions of some of the things that you said that we could go that we will go. But let's talk a little bit first about the subtitle of this book. What makes this a feminist take? And if you if you could also give us a little bit of background on your on your other feminism sub stack and kind of the larger conversation. I think many of our listeners are probably not aware of some of the, you know, other feminisms that are increasingly discussed in public right now. They might have an older view of what constitutes feminism or even a more current view, but that one that's pretty constrained by the political options that are often available to us now. I'd start by saying how I define feminism. I ran an event at my parish where I had people sign up on whether they did or didn't consider themselves a feminist and how they defined the word kind of divided by whether they identified with it. So I think it's helpful to put your cards on the table. I think feminism is about thinking about what it means to be just to women as women, rather than as generic human beings who are kind of unsexed or disembodied or as defective men, which I think is an error we can slip into if we would never endorse that idea explicitly. explicitly. And so for me, that takes a couple forms. I do use the name Other Feminisms for my sub stack to make it clear both I welcome a range of people, including people who disagree with me, because I think it's pretty clear I'm not a mainstream feminist, because my focus on what it means to be just to women and not try and solve the problem of there being women is part of my being pro-life. And that obviously does not put me in the mainstream of contemporary feminism. But part of how I think about it is I think everyone, whether you identify with the word or not, and whether you're pro-life or not, has the experience of seeing moments where women are asked to fix the problem of being women, where we are accommodated as we are. I think one example, Caroline Creada Perez has a wonderful book kind of going through these different things in the built environment, is surgeons whose mentors, women surgeons whose female mentors teach them how to use equipment in nonstandard ways. Because their surgical tools are proportioned for men's larger hands, and they can't use them as they were designed because they were never designed with women in mind. Now, I think you don't really matter whether you identify with the word feminist, whether your pro-life is irrelevant to go. So women should be welcome in the world as women. And my goal is just to apply that rule consistently over a wide range of domains. Yeah, I so appreciate that. I would love if you could give us some of the other examples you give in the book, both in this realm of kind of just generically how we live in the world and even in this realm of fertility and reproduction of how you describe the world as not made for women. Because I think people might even hear that part of it and the we sort of expect women in order to achieve equality to become functionally men or we treat them as defective men. Like you said, there's probably a lot of people that are like, I don't know anyone who thinks that or I don't know how that could be true. Give us some color to how not even just these injustices exist that might not be intentional, but do affect women disproportionately. But also, how are we and even trying to remedy those problems, often asking women to be functionally men? I think you'll find more explicit examples of them. You know, there's a woman who's a doctor who really promotes perpetual contraception. So women who are on the contraceptive pill usually have a run of placebo pills where there's breakthrough bleeding and then resume the non-placebo pills. And it gives kind of the image of a normal period, even though it's not happening in exactly the same way. Understandably, when people don't want to be pregnant, they do wonder, well, what's the point of the bleeding intermittently? But one woman has really doubled down on the idea of just take the normal pills the whole time. But she really frames it through the idea that having monthly cycles at all is kind of bad for women. Not only are there moments where you're dealing with menstrual bleeding, but a natural cycle does involve kind of ups and downs, easier and harder periods. And it'd be better, she thinks, to live within a narrower range of what normal looks like. So you might lose some of the peaks, but getting rid of the valleys would be worth it. And she really frames this through a matter of gender equality. She says, think about your daughter going to take a test. If it's a hard day in her cycle, shouldn't she have exactly what a boy has, you know, the freedom from this. And, you know, I understand what she's pitching, and I understand why it might be appealing. But I also think it's harder for Christians to sign on to, because it really starts with the idea that there's something fundamentally not good about the way women are. And as Christians, we have to add the way God has authored them. We think women and men are both touched by the fall. But that's really different than saying, you know, the main thing women do is have to transcend the tragedy of being born women. I think that comes up again and again. Yes, I so appreciate that. And I don't think we often, it might be even a little easier in the realm of fertility reproduction to think of the ways in which even whether it's medical or not, women are often given the options of, you know, if you want to have a certain kind of career or you want to have a certain kind of life, the standard that's already set for you is male version of success. And the way that you get that is by changing something about your body in some way. Talk a little bit about one of the examples you give in the book that was just so helpful for me as an example of how we just sort of assume that equality means men and women are treated the same way or should operate in the same way. Talk to us a little bit about the basketball example. I thought this was so helpful. You know, it's so funny. I saw someone on Twitter say, I really didn't expect there to be so much basketball in this book. And to be honest, as the author, I didn't either. That was kind of a surprise that emerged. But I like it because it's an example everyone has had some familiarity with. So there's been a long running controversy that's kind of settled into equilibrium for now about where the three point line should be for women's basketball in contrast to men's basketball. And the question is, should it be equal in that it's the same distance from the hoop for men and women? Or should it be equal in that it's equally hard for men and women on average to sink a three point shot from their respective lines? Because however much you train and practice, women on average are shorter than men. So the equal, equal distant line isn't really equally hard for them any more than the equal 10-foot hoop is equally hard to dunk on. And it's been really controversial. And, you know, it's a matter of inches is the adjustment they're thinking of making in either case. But what's funny is for something that's a relatively small adjustment, whether you do it or not, it's provoked really harsh language on both sides, in part because there's a real fear, and I think a grounded fear that if you paint two lines on the court and everyone can see the lines, that when people see those two lines, they go, why are there two? And you say, well, the women shoot from the closer line. People say, oh, so they play an easier game. They don't play for real the way the men do. They don't think this is equitable. They just know it's lesser. I think what's fascinating is amid all these fights, the women play with a smaller ball in the WNBA. And that's not as controversial because you don't start the game by bringing out both balls, which I think, honestly, from a bleacher seat, you'd have a little more trouble telling the difference. But you don't show everyone the difference before you start, but women get a ball that's better sized for their hands. But the lines you can see, and that's where I think you can kind of tell that this isn't about justice, it's about shame and stigma. The more visible an accommodation for women is, the less likely we are to get it. Because to show the accommodation is helpful is to concede there are some real ineradicable differences between men and women. And if you've really based your appeal to our equality on interchangeability, anytime you expose a lasting difference, you're endangering that claim. Yeah. Oh, I so appreciate that. Before we move into, you know, a lot of the book is not particularly about gender or sex. It's really about this false story that we have learned to tell about what it means to be human. And before we get into that, I've listened to some interviews you've done about the book, enjoyed so many of them. One conversation, I think it was on mere fidelity that I really enjoyed, involved a little bit of a discussion about, you know, the book is framed as there's there it is it is dignifying and it is valuable for us to be dependent because we are dependent creatures. And that relates in some significant ways to how women experience the world. And I think one of the people in that show asked you, is it true that women are uniquely dependent, that they are more dependent in some way because of their bodies or because of a spiritual or even emotional feature Or are we as women more uniquely aware of dependency or have an experience of our lives that makes us make us more focus on the areas where we forced to realize that we are dependent? I'd love to hear you talk about that a little bit before we talk about how do these examples of women help us also see it's not just that we get something wrong about women, it's we get something wrong about what it means to be human. That's right. So one way I put it is my claim is that everyone is deeply marked by dependence. So you may be more or less aware of that at different times. Now for Christians, I hope this is an uncontroversial claim, because whether you're male or female, whether you're currently strong in your body, your life is shaped by frailties or weaknesses or pain in your body, you are deeply dependent on God, for creation, for being sustained in existence, for regeneration through Christ. So that's a big dependence right there, no matter how strong you are in the eyes of the world. But for secular readers, I think that's still the case that there's going to be big moments in our life where the idea of autonomy cannot hold. And if you do take autonomy as the ideal of what it means to be the most full and flourishing human you can be, and if you take dependence as unpersoning you to the extent that you could become the licit target of violence, whether through abortion or euthanasia, then you're really setting up people to look at their lives as failures for large swaths of it. You start as an infant in the womb, you're born, you're not very particularly independent at that point. And even if you're strong, and even if you can't get pregnant, even if you're a man, these particular forms of dependence that can encroach in your autonomy won't happen to you as intimately. You'll have periods of illness. And if you love people, even though you can't gestate your own mother, your mother's needs will make a big impact on your life and will eat away at that sense of, I'm the master of what happens to me. Nothing happens but what I will that goes with autonomy. So what I really say is the question isn't, are you dependent at your core? The question is, if you're pretending to be autonomous, When are you going to get caught? Caught two ways. When will you get caught by yourself? You'll realize this isn't true, that this is a mask you have to put on for the outside world, that you can't lie to yourself about it. And when will you get caught by others? You just can't keep the lie or sustain the lie indefinitely. And I think women tend to get caught in both ways earlier. Women, because of our capacity to bear life, are aware that we are not fully our own, that we can't define completely the boundaries of who we care for and how through our will alone. But women also are more often caught out visibly, publicly by others as both being more open to dependence or being marked by dependence ourselves. But men will get caught eventually. And living a long time within the lie, passing as autonomous will make it harder to live well when you're eventually exposed as dependent. Yeah, I so appreciate that. There were so many moments reading this book when I thought, oh, this is giving language to something I have struggled to articulate in my own life and experience of, you know, many of my friends are in the thick of small children and they're going, they're looking at their life and they have been taught to view kind of their, the value of their life based on whether or not it matches up to this particular ideal that you've described of what it means to be human. That is not just career success, but is autonomy is like I have full choice to do whatever I want. And I have a level of kind of security and choice that provides that for me. And it plays out in career things, but it also plays out in economic questions and where you live and all these things. And they're frustrated by that. And it often does get framed and it often really is a difference between men and women. But I've often had the experience of looking at them and going, the men that we are looking at, who seem to be able to have this life that we are frustrated we do not have, I don't know that that's a good life for them either. I don't think they're living a full flourishing human life with complete autonomy and choice and the lack of people depending on them in their households and in ways that feel like a burden. Maybe there's something really lost there. My favorite way that you do that is in naming that this is an anthropological lie. We have said something untrue about what it means to be human. Talk to us a little bit. You've done a little bit of this already, but for people listening, help us understand maybe something that we've known our whole lives is true of how Christians think about human life, but maybe we haven't so starkly seen how it is different than the story that's often told. Give us some sense of what is the story that most of us probably grow up marinating in about what a good human life is and what is the Christian alternative to that? I think a lot of the autonomous framing is that you are the author of your life and things are valuable insofar as you made them and you chose them. And that a lot of your job is bound up in both cultivating your strength, but being anxious about your strength. And almost the same way you might be about your retirement account. Have I built up enough? Will I be able to spend it down at the rate that's required, but not run out? If I love this person, whether it's my spouse or my child, but they need more from me, am I going to have enough for them or am I going to be deficient? And I think the Christian story is very different, where we are not the authors of ourselves. We aren't the creators of our gifts. We're stewards of the things that are given to us as gift by God. So there's still a measure of responsibility. People sometimes say, well, if you're in favor of dependence, does that mean we should all just give up on doing things? There's a real sense of what you do with the talents that are handed on to you. Your strength may be passing. You may not have it forever. But in your periods of surplus, how do you make a gift of it to others. But it just does not start with the idea that we are sufficient for the responsibilities in front of us. That even in those moments where we feel like we have a sense of mastery, we're on top of what we're doing, which is obviously not how I feel with three young kids day to day, that that sense of mastery comes from things we have been given, not things we have earned. And that there will be days where if we love others, we are not enough for them. And we turn to God to ask him to lend us more strength or let us participate in his disgrace. But we don't start with the assumption we ever could or ever will be enough for all the people we love. I so appreciate that. I'd love for a minute to hear you talk about some of the more like truly policy parts of this book that are not just attending to the story that we tell that is a false story about what it means to be human, but also point out, as you did earlier with, you know, sort of the like some of the fertility things, you give some other examples in the book of like crash test dummies, like real material ways that women are disadvantaged. But you also have a section of the book where you're talking about here are ways in which our legal frameworks, not just the stories we tell, but the legislative means that constrain us, cause problems in how we think about care and how care actually gets given in people's families and homes. Talk to us a little bit about some of the policy reasons that we devalue certain forms of care or make it really hard for people to give care. So I'd say two ways of thinking about this are that when we see people who have a big care responsibility, there's sometimes the impulse of policy of like, well, how do we take this responsibility away from this person so they can be freer? And I love Eva Federkide, who's a kind of philosopher of dependency and need, who says often in those circumstances, people don't say, I want to be free of this person I love. They say, I'm not free to give a yes to them right now because it's too much for me to sustain. I want to be given what I need so that I can give a yes. So I think more often thinking about supporting caregivers rather than just privatizing or subsidizing getting care in the market. It'll vary when your large dad has intense memory care issues that may or may not be something you can do at home. But I think a lot of folks are kind of in the middle for at least some periods of her life where they'd like to be able to do more if they were free to say yes. And one way that France addresses that is that in their pension system, kind of, you know, analogous to our social security system, people get caregiver credits in the same way that paid work helps build up what you'll receive in social security. So when moms are staying home with very little kids, and they're out of the workforce, you know, they may not be getting the full amount of credit towards their pension that they would if they were working at a wage, but they're also not being zeroed out the way they are in America. And I think that's really valuable so that you're making sure you're not, you know, borrowing too intensely from your future to give care in the present. In America, in particular, there's often the tendency to treat care from the people who love you, as though it obviously costs them nothing to provide, and therefore doesn't need to be compensated, or as though it's kind of scammy to do in the first place. And so one that we think that really stands out is the SSI program. And this is a disability program for people who don't have a long work history, who don't qualify for a more generous disability program. So SSI doesn't give you that much support. But what it does that's really pernicious is that if we were sisters and I was on SSI and you bought me groceries sometime in the month, they're like, oh, let me go pick up some of the things Leah likes and drop them off. I'm not going to ask her to pay me back. She's on a really limited budget. I have to deduct the cost of the groceries, send the receipt to the government and get that much less in benefits per month. If my mom is letting me live in her spare bedroom, she has to calculate the imputed market rent for that bedroom, even though she would never take in a random order so that the government can deduct it. Because if I'm getting this free from someone, the government shouldn't have to support me. This is something that the Biden administration was going to soften a little bit so that you could get meals from your family. That was the amount of softening that we're doing. And it looks like that's getting rolled back. It's not being fully implemented as a rule. But I think that's one of the simplest, absurd things we do where we treat people's care as fundamentally suspect or kind of cheating. Yeah, that was such a helpful couple chapters of the book to realize there's not only the strength of the stories we tell that make it harder for our experience of our everyday lives to match what we believe a human good human life looks like. But there are also legislative ways in which this is is harder. Talk to us briefly about I think probably many of the people listening, probably at the very beginning thought like, I'm a feminist in the sense that I believe women are equally valuable and I care. And many people listening are probably pastors, church leaders who care about women in their churches. Talk to us about what men can do, whether it's in how they think or how they act, or if they have some level of power in an institution or a community to recognize the ways in which, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation, women experience dependency in a way that men should also, and men often do, but men often have more mechanisms to avoid. You know, I think, especially in the workplace, the best fruit of the COVID pandemic has been more room for hybrid work, telework, and flexible work. That, you know, giving people a little more room to say yes to something that someone else needs in their community makes our community stronger. It makes it easier for people to have those relationships of love, whether they're familial relationships or friend relationships. And I want to say I was the beneficiary of this today, because I usually take my piece onto the pediatrician by bike or walking. I don't have a driver's license for a variety of reasons. And it's 10 degrees with wind chill here. So my husband's work was generous. He's a teacher, but they got someone to cover giving his test in the morning so he could drop me off at the doctor. And then a friend of mine came and picked me up from the doctor. So it's those kind of little moments where you just say, okay, well, when I look at my way, my work is ordered, if I'm a boss, or if I'm running an organization, if someone has a friend who's sick, is it easy for them to find a way to help? And if it's quite hard, or it'd be a weird exemption, well, can I do something so that those small interruptions that come from someone's passing needs of, I need to bring this person's soup, I need to pick her up from the doctors, I need to go grab her prescription, like, how easy is that for someone to do where you are? And could it be 10% easier to start with? I so appreciate that. Before we get to the last question that I want to ask, Um, we said earlier, the title is the dignity of dependence. The subtitle is a feminist manifesto. We've talked about the feminist part. Let's briefly talk about the manifesto part. We've talked about kind of the main themes and arguments in the book. If it's a manifesto, I imagine there's like a little bit of, of, uh, conflict involved. Give us some sense of like, who are, whether it's people or ideas, like what are the main arguments being made and who is, you know, who stands to benefit from them that your book is interested in opposing? Well, it's funny. I really liked having the word manifesto in because, you know, to look at the cover, right, it's pink. It's got a woman carrying a baby. And I really liked the cover because one of my friends said, the baby looks heavy. So it's not just, you know, idyllic, like it takes costs or something to carry the baby. But still, when you have this kind of cover, it's easy for people to think like, oh, yeah, this is kind of just women are valuable. Like, let's think about that, you know. Maybe I'll put one of the quotes on Instagram and it will be kind of warm. And I want people to know, like, my book is saying that we've made a fundamental mistake legally and culturally about the human person. And I want us to, you know, nest stuff up to put that right. And I want to be frank that, you know, when you make this kind of error, there's big injustices that come with that. But you also build a lot of load bearing stuff on that false idea. And so trying to rework it will break some stuff as you go, as you're trying to rebuild on a firmer foundation. I think manifesto conveys, if you read this book, it's going to be a little dangerous to change your mind about stuff. You won't fit as naturally into the world you understood, because you'll see parts of it that you no longer feel comfortable living with. Yeah, I so appreciate that. And I'm curious, given that, how you have received the feedback from the book. I thought it was so interesting, both when I was looking at interviews you had done, I was looking at people who endorsed the book. There's such a range, theologically and politically of people who appreciated parts of this. And I read it and, you know, admittedly, was sort of like, how could anyone disagree? Like, it just like matched my experience and put together pieces I love so much. I'm curious who the naysayers have been or who has been disgruntled in a way that a manifesto might disgruntle someone. Well, one thing I appreciated is that at least in some cases where people push back, they did enough putting forward why they disagreed that I think both readers have a real chance to evaluate their position in mind. Yeah. And that they're leveling critiques where I'm saying something controversial, right? Rather than casting any personal aspersion. So I think the most negative mainstream review I got was in the Washington Post, where the Washington Post reviewer, Becca Rothfield, really was saying, look, like, Leah's a gender essentialist. She's saying there's some big differences between men and women, and that's going to always disadvantage women. I don't think she particularly made the strong case that I'm wrong. So in some cases, she just kind of dismissed it. She was She talks about pregnancy, but men and women both go through other hard things. You can go through cancer. So there's lots of hard physical things. How is pregnancy something that really differentiates men and women? She's posing the question. I think lots of people come into the review sympathetic with her might at that point say, wait a second. Pregnancy is quite different. Pretty big difference. I think relevantly, it's also different because unlike some of the other examples of physical suffering or hardship she's talking about, it is fundamental to who we are. You know, if cancer disappeared tomorrow, we'd all rejoice. If pregnancy disappeared tomorrow, that would be the end of us. Right. But I like that she laid her objections forward straightforwardly enough that I'd never worried about people reading their view. I said, okay, she's done a decent job painting our fundamental difference. And a reader can decide, well, what do I do with this? Yeah. Before we move on to the last question, I'm realizing based on a few things that we've said, there may be women in particular listening who are going, I'm very with Leah on, there are structural ways that women are disadvantaged. I might even really be with Leah on some of this like underlying question of what it means to be human and the stories we tell about that. But I have never been pregnant. I don't have children. Maybe I'm struggling to get pregnant or will not be able to get pregnant. Is there some, and I just wonder if the heckles are raised a little bit of, is there some description of women here that does not include me and might say something, might be a critique of the argument that it's too based on this experience that is, that only women experience and yet not all women experience. How, how would you respond to those women who might be going, I think I'm mostly with you, but there's just this, this deep part of me that, that bristles at anything that makes that connection too strong. You know, I think they'll like the basketball parts, right? Like I think there's a bunch of ways in which the kind of differences between men and women that look more like two overlapping bell curves rather than the stark difference of pregnancy still affect and shape their lives where they want to be more curious about, okay, well, how can we talk frankly about real differences without feeling like we're giving up our claim to equality, even if they don't want to center the potential for pregnancy as one of them. But I do think that that potential, whether or not it's something you desire or something you're able to achieve or not, does divide the sexes in a big way. And if I actually really like that C.S. Lewis said in a letter to his friend, Sheldon Van Auken, where Sheldon and his wife specifically avoided having children because they wanted a relationship of full equality. And they thought that pregnancy would make them too different from each other. And therefore, if they never became mother and father, they could just be partners indefinitely. And Lewis says, the experience of not being a mother or not being a father is still gendered and can't be fully shared. Whether that's a difference that you're hoping for, something that you don't want to happen to, or something that you mourn. As I said, when you guys did this, you never were able to step away from having a gendered relationship. You just took away the possibility of children. Yeah, I found that part in the book where you're referencing that really helpful. Last question, Leah. One of my favorite things about the book is your description in particular, and even some of the people that you're citing of a Jewish understanding of this. I love the way you talk about making our indebtedness, our dependence upon God as creatures, concrete. Like taking this thing that is metaphysically true of us and finding ways for it to be tangible, for it to be concrete. We've talked a lot on this show about embodied communities in the church, about seeking to care for each other in deep community. Give us some examples of how that idea might practically be responded to by people who read the book or listen? How might they go, okay, I want, let's say I'm not a father and mother of small children, or I have passed that stage of my life. How might someone who says, yeah, I actually, I want to find a way to make concrete in my life this thing I know to be true, to push back against this story that I don't believe is true in the world, but is very powerful and has shaped me inevitably. My big advice for people is that if you read this book, if you're persuaded by it, ask for help with something in the next two weeks. And I know it may feel more natural that you read it and you feel fired up to say like, well, where can I help? And if you see an opportunity, you have my permission to go for it. But the reason I put my emphasis on asking for help is I think what people often need is the testimony from their family and neighbors and friends that it's normal to ask. I was asking today for that ride from the pediatrician when everyone knows I could have called a lift. It was possible for me to do something else. And I think it's easy to feel like if it's possible to have an alternative, is it fair to ask your friends? I could have solved this problem with money. But I didn't want a stranger in 10 degree weather who was watching me try and load my car seat into the back in my neighborhood for a five minute drive. I wanted a friend to come pick me up. And so I asked. And I think those small asks, especially the ones that everyone knows you could have done without, offer a testimony of, I think this is part of what our friendship is about. It's about asking, even when you have an alternative. As you're teaching your friend, you could ask me. I love that so much. Leah, thank you for the work of this book and for taking the time today. I said this before we started recording, so I feel like I should say it now. Truly, one of my favorite books I read last year. I would highly recommend that people listening, whether there were things that they loved in the conversation or things they were like, oh, I think I might want to fight with her about that. I would just highly encourage them to read it because it's incredibly well written. It makes arguments I think we really desperately need to hear, and it puts things together that most of the time our politics tries to force into different camps. So thank you so much, Leah. Thank you so much. The Holy Post Podcast is a production of Holy Post Media, produced by Mike Strelow, editing by Seth Gorvett. Help us create more thoughtful Christian media by subscribing to Holy Post Plus at holypost.com slash plus. Also, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts so more people can discover thoughtful Christian commentary, plus ukulele and occasional butt news. Visit holypost.com for show notes, news stories, Holy Post merchandise, and much, much more.