Reverend Hans Fiene is a Lutheran pastor, host of the channel Lutheran Satire, and a contributor to The Federalist. Hans and Inez wade through their sometimes-similar and sometimes-different perspectives on Christian nationalism, the role of religion in the public square and affairs of state, wokeness as religion, “new atheism,” therapeutism vs. theology, suffering, and more.


TRANSCRIPT

Inez Stepman:

Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. And this week is going to be a really interesting one, I think. I’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time. This week, we have on Reverend Hans Fiene. I’m trying to… Fiene.

Hans Fiene:

Fiene.

Inez Stepman:

I messed up, but I got your first name-

Hans Fiene:

You got it right the first time and then you…

Inez Stepman:

… and then forgot how I was going to say your last name. Hans Fiene, he is a Lutheran reverend. He’s a Lutheran pastor. And he’s also the creator of Lutheran Satire, which has a pretty big YouTube following. So, lots of people laughing at your theological satire over at YouTube. He’s also a contributor to The Federalist. We’ve known each other, at least virtually, for quite some time, and I thought it’d be interesting to have him on to talk about a whole slew of cultural, national, and theological issues going back and forth.

Obviously, most of you who’ve been listening to this for quite some time know that I’m an atheist, so now we have atheist versus pastor on a lot of these questions. But actually, I think we agree a lot more than we disagree about a lot of these questions. So, that’s, I think, part of what makes it interesting here. But welcome to High Noon.

Hans Fiene:

I’m very glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Inez Stepman:

So, we’re going to start off, I think, pretty heavy. I wanted to ask you about something that seems to run through a lot of the cultural conversations that we have today, and that’s this sense of the “authentic self.” I think that there’s a core of the modern ethos that we mostly live under. It’s that there is some kind of authentic self that just needs to be freed, liberated, discovered, that any kind of constriction about authentic self is necessarily a bad thing and seen as a very intrusive imposition onto the human person in some fundamental rights-based way. I think I’m not wrong in saying that you disagree with this overall concept, but how do you think that has fit into a lot of the way we think about various culture war topics or various political topics, and then also just how we think of ourselves as the human person?

Hans Fiene:

I think, a lot of times, people have a tendency when it comes to cultural changes to view the world in terms of not questioning principles or presuppositions, but rather to draw lines between what they view as acceptable and not acceptable, just based on the comfort of the moment. So, you see this a lot with the transgender stuff that’s going around today, where there are obviously a lot of people that are quite uncomfortable with the direction it’s gone, especially when aimed at children. But you don’t find a lot of people questioning the underlying assumption of who you feel in your being as your authentic self is what you should orient your entire life around.

And so, as a Christian, one of my presuppositions for looking at the world is saying, “Well, I’m not my own person. I was created by God, and He has lordship over both my body and soul, as well as my mind,” which means that the way I orient myself in life is not really in terms of pursuing my passions and then trying to hone them or filter them in a slightly different direction if I’m wanting to do something that’s not in accord with the scriptures, but rather that I would view the world vocationally rather than in a self-deterministic fashion, so that I look at where has God placed me in life, who has He given me to take care of, to protect and provide for, and then I orient my life towards that. As opposed to the idea that you just go off in your own direction and then you trust that, if you ever go too far off course, that you’ll correct yourself with your own ethical presuppositions about the world.

And so, I think this is kind of the challenge, is that when people have this view of… It’s like the way, if you listen to people, the weird things people will say about jobs. People have this line that they say all the time, even though everyone of the universe knows it’s not true, which is if you get a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Which is…. I love being a parent. There’s nothing I’ve ever done in my life that I love more than being a father to my sons. But it’s a lot of work.

I love being a pastor far more than I would love the vast majority of other jobs in the world. But it’s incredibly hard work a lot of times, in particular, because it’s high-stakes stuff. And also, people might not be good at things that they love doing. And it’s just this weird view of the world that if anything feels like labor or service, that it’s not authentic to who you truly are.

And then, of course, there’s the deeper question of, well, who said your authentic self is good? Who said that the thing that you want to be is the thing that you should be? You have to show your math on that. And I think it’s a principle that people would recognize there’s… At some point we say, “Oh, if that’s your authentic self, don’t be that way.” So, if you’re authentically attracted to children, don’t be that way. Don’t pursue those desires.

But yet, we can’t take several steps back and say, “Maybe the way we should orient society is not towards everyone pursuing their own vision of themselves, but towards an actual, somewhat-concrete of a common good,” and then saying, “In what way can I actually contribute to that?” So, I think it’s a weird way that our culture has structured itself, where on the one hand, no one universally accepts the idea that you should always pursue your passions and your desires. Everyone will always agree there’s a line where you should say, “Okay. That’s too far.” But very few people are really questioning the underlying assumption that the human existence is rooted around identifying in your soul who you are, and then somehow pursuing that in whatever way you see fit.

Inez Stepman:

Do you find that you get pushback from members of your congregation, or just, obviously, the world at large? But I’m curious how far…. Because this really seems like, as you said, it’s a background assumption of modernity. It’s something that people pick up without necessarily believing that they’re actually committing to an axiom in the sense. Do you get a lot of pushback on that point from even people who are Lutheran, or even people who are Christian, and are serious Christians?

Hans Fiene:

Yeah, to a certain extent. Like I said, the challenge with this is people don’t think about it philosophically, they think about it in terms of comfort. So, the idea that a 13-year-old girl who gets confused about who she is should be able to have hormone treatment, they’ll certainly oppose that. But the idea that you should not take a job that you might want to take, or that you might go a different direction in terms of your professional life, or form relationships that you might not otherwise form, that, to people, just seems like such an odd thing.

And I think in a lot of ways, because it’s a very American notion, very much baked into the American spirit is people come here so that they can be whatever it is that they want to be, so that they’re unhindered in their ability to start businesses and conquer new lands and discover new ideas. So, there’s obviously a lot that’s good about that. But I certainly think that the Christian world could stand to do a lot of reevaluating of this baseline assumption that being your authentic self is true.

You see this a lot when Christians will talk about worship. They’ll talk about different styles of worship, whether they go to a church that has, what we would typically call, a higher liturgy, so what people might typically associate with candles, investments, and chanting, and stuff like that versus what you see in the stereotypical evangelical model of more rock concert thing. And people will often talk about that in terms of, “Well, I go to this because I connect with this better in my own way.” As opposed to the deeper question of, well, what’s actually being said there? And is your connection based on the actual word of God and actual scripture telling you the story of salvation? Or are you just chasing a emotional reaction to something?

And I think there’s a lot in the Christian world that’s still just rooted in these assumptions about how the authentic self… Churches talk about this all the time, about having authentic worship. That’s the appeal. Which you’re never really doing if you have to tell people it’s authentic. That’s usually a good sign that you’re not meeting the mark for yourself there. But that people chasing after a sense of authenticity rather than faithful service reflects having ingested this mindset very deeply into our culture.

Inez Stepman:

I’ve recently come around to the idea, as much as I love this country, that America, the country that put a man on the moon, and America that wants to believe a sex binary doesn’t exist, have more in common with each other perhaps than a lot of people on the right would like to admit, which, again, is not to say that there aren’t enormous upsides to this kind of… The thing is, that America’s done an extraordinary number of things that were declared impossible. And at some point, it becomes part of the culture that America can do the impossible, and sometimes, the impossible actually is impossible or it’s wrong in some other way.

A lot of what you’re saying sounds, to flip to the Freudian mode here for a moment, a lot of this sounds like repression. And repression is the ultimate evil alongside judgment in modern society. If you repress your authentic desires, is this any way to live or is it come out…? Because the implication is always, one, either if you’re repressing your authentic self or your authentic desires, then one, you’re going to be living a half existence. And two, that it’s going to come out somewhere else. You’re going to explode and rage over small things because you’re repressing yourself.

Hans Fiene:

You see that quite a bit. I was tweeting about this little bit ago, and where, as a Christian who opposes gay marriage, as someone who holds to the belief that homosexual activity is sinful, one of the things I’ve often discussed with people when we’ve had these conversations is people will often say to me, “Well, would you rather that they live a lie?” Which is a weird thing to say in a lot of ways. And it’s odd, too, because the way it’s typically framed is this strange either/or choice where either a gay man marries a woman that he’s not attracted to and lives the lie and just puts on the veil and secretly is agonizing and die, or he lives the kind of life that whatever the AIDS and HIV medicine commercials are encouraging you to live. And now, I, of course, reject the idea that those are your two choices.

But what’s so odd to me is when people have made that argument is I’m sitting here going, “Well, look, if your only options are marry a lady that you’re not attracted to or monkeypox orgies, of course, you should do the first one. You’ll be much happier if you do. It will not make you happy to live a life devoted towards pursuing unnatural passions.”

Again, the strange thing is that everyone agrees with that up to a certain point. So, if you have the desire to murder people, everyone would say, “Well, you should repress that. You should not act that.” And no one would think that you’re somehow violating this sacred charge to be true to yourself if you’re not doing that.

So, now, obviously, people can disagree on whether or not certain sexual activity is where the line should be for repressing your desires. But there is a strange thing that does seem to be very prominent in our culture, that the idea that—especially with regard to sexuality, any kind of sexual behavior—that the idea that you would repress yourself is somehow unhealthy as opposed to… That’s how we make civilization work, is that the world is much better when men repress their desire to commit adultery, the world is much better when women do likewise, the world is much better when people repress the desires that don’t build a functional, healthy world, and serve the desires that make men more domesticated and honorable, that make women safer, and make children happier and better educated, and a whole host of things.

So, like I said, it’s strange that people will always draw the line of where you shouldn’t follow their passions only at the point where it makes them uncomfortable for people to follow those passions. But very rarely do folks acknowledge that you might want to actually draw that line somewhere a bit earlier, and that we ought to maybe be questioning the idea of whether or not man’s highest aim is to pursue his inner desires.

Inez Stepman:

What do you make of the argument that, I think, was most popularized by Camille Paglia, which is not only that boundaries and repression, to use that word, not only do they make civilization possible, they also make a lot of things like art and eroticism possible, that in fact, without some kind of boundary to transgress, in your words, to draw the line a little bit earlier in fact—and that seems to be very much where we’re at, just as an observer here, of the culture around us. It seems like a lot of what our culture produces lacks any kind of genuine desire or eroticism. If you look at any of those interviews with people with bizarre fetishes or conventions or whatever, a lot of them are—polyamory or what… They don’t seem, actually, to be very…. They don’t seem, actually, not only to be happy or morally upright or ordered or whatever, but they also seem to be chasing something in the same way that a drug addict is chasing the first hit.

Hans Fiene:

I think there’s something very accurate about that, that when people repress their desires, there is some societal line that you recognize that you can’t cross. And then when you take away all those boundaries, not only do you lose stability, but you do lose the beauty of human expression. I don’t listen to a ton of new music. I haven’t since I had kids, which was a common thing that happens to people. So, I don’t really know what’s current and what’s not. But I do remember, a number of years ago, hearing, I think it was a new Chris Brown song, and listening to about 20 seconds of it, and it was like someone’s pornography search had just been set to music. And I grew up in the era of gangster rap, so it’s not as though I am unexposed to parental-advisory type of music.

But even if you’re dealing with musicians back in the day who were writing about things that I would not write about, recording music that my parents wouldn’t have wanted me to listen to, there was still the cleverness of it and the cleverness of double entendres. And as you see those barriers eroded, you lose the actual artistic ability to express yourself. So, I think that aspect of things is absolutely true. And I think, too, you’re seeing a real destruction of this, especially in relationships, in young people dating. I’ve noticed this strange thing. I’m going to rant about something if that’s okay.

So, my oldest son’s in high school, and nowadays in high school, all of the girls get what’s called a promposal, which is where some guy is supposed to make a big show of and display of his affection for the girl in a public way, typically, that can be put up on social media in how he asks her to prom. And this annoys me to no end. Because girls, you get a proposal, you already had a thing, you already get a whole big thing where you get to be the center of attention, and then you get the wedding after that where you get to be the center of attention. You don’t get 10 million things. They do it for prom. They do it for homecoming. I’m sure in the next couple of years, they’ll do it for the Christmas dance, and…

Inez Stepman:

What about Sadie Hawkins? Do the girls have…

Hans Fiene:

Right.

Inez Stepman:

[inaudible 00:18:16]. The girls do it too.

Hans Fiene:

Apparently, girls will do that as well. The girls will make the signs as well for that. But I think what’s actually happening with this rise of promposal, other than it’s just part of the social media narcissism problem and that everyone wants to live online and that you see someone else getting a thing, and then you want the thing, too, but I actually think part of the reason for this is because the way people have relationships now, I just think deep in the back of these girls’ minds, they know there’s not going to actually be any romance when a guy asks you to marry him. You’ll have been living with him for two or three years, your bank accounts are joined together, your bodies are joined together, you very well may have a kid or two together, depending on your circumstances. And you’ve talked about it 10 million times. And so, when he asks, you may be slightly surprised at the context in which he asked, but it’s not like you were with someone that you didn’t know wanted to marry you.

And I think with the promposal thing, part of this is because all of these social judgments against premarital cohabitation have been erased, that the only way a girl can actually get something that feels pure and innocent is to go all the way back to high school into this some kind of puzzle-type of thing where you legitimately didn’t know a guy was going to do this and you didn’t know his interest in you. And that’s kind of the only way that you can get there. And I think that building a culture where there’s never supposed to be any judgment, where we’re eroding boundaries, the end result is you get people trying to find that actual sense of sweetness and innocence, and they can’t find it anywhere. So, they have to go back into, and pretend like they’re getting engaged, when they’re 16 years old.

Inez Stepman:

That’s interesting. We’ve been talking about these questions in terms of the self and authenticity and all this, and it strikes me that even this conversation that we’re having is we’re kind of unable to have it without therapeutic language, the psychological language that pervades everything. Do you think that therapy, psychological language, this therapeutism, if I could say that with an -ism at the end, has been in the same way that perhaps these promposals are finding an answer to not having much excitement in the proposal for marriage itself? Do you think that it’s been a replacement for theology?

Hans Fiene:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Inez Stepman:

Where do you compare, or where do you draw the line between this therapeutic understanding of if you understand yourself, if you understand your authentic self or your authentic desires, how to live a happier life? It all seems very internalized and very much in this model of the mind or the psyche being almost like a replacement of a soul in the way that we talk about it.

Hans Fiene:

It’s almost kind of a Gnosticism, where the idea is that, in this pursuit of, I suppose, in the Christian realm, what we would call holiness, and in the pop psychology realm is this completeness or the sense of being at peace with yourself, that in the psychological world, the idea is that that comes from unlocking yourself, unlocking some knowledge within yourself that enables you to be true and pure, and holy and righteous. Whereas in the Christian world, that righteousness exists outside of yourself. So, it exists in the person of Christ and the person in the work of Christ, which is given to you. And then in response to that, God calls you to lead a holy life and service of your neighbor.

So, I think a really good example of how embedded this is in culture is the way we talk to kids about what jobs they want to have when they grow up. And we ask them, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” Or, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” What do you want to be, especially, is the question. And we all know that it’s a weird thing because it’s like most people don’t end up in jobs that are soul-liberating. You know that thing where you’re at a party and you say to somebody, you go, “So, what do you do for a living?” And he goes, “Well.” And you go, “Oh, no. This is not going to be good.” And he goes, “Look, I’m a systems analyst for a particle thing.” And you’re going, “Okay. I know even you didn’t want that job because it has too many words in it. And you found something that worked for you, and you found something where you’re able to make a living for your family and presumably do an honorable job that needs to be done and makes the world better.”

And so, as a Christian, you look at that and you go, “Well, then that’s a God-pleasing thing.” In the same way that a guy who makes shoes or someone who writes poetry creates something that’s honorable and good. But the idea that the secret to life is unlocking this sense of peace within yourself by pursuing the passions that you want to pursue, to me, it’s just an unfair burden to put on people. Isn’t it more important to find meaning in your family than in your work? I certainly think that that should be. I find far more meaning in my family and in my faith than I do in any particular one aspect of my life as a pastor, even though it is a very rewarding job. … In the Christian world, we were over the target for about five minutes in talking about mental health, which was we got to the point where we said, “Hey, you know, there are people who actually have a real illness in their mind. And in the same way that having a broken leg doesn’t make you a bad or weak person, having a mind that’s not functioning the way that it should doesn’t make you a weak or a bad person. So, we shouldn’t tell people that they have weak faith if they need help in that sense.” So, we were there for about five seconds, and then people started to find righteousness in being psychologically broken. And it was almost a sense of…

There’s a comedian I heard, I don’t remember his name, but he had a great line about this. He talks about working with someone who starts immediately telling him all of his mental illnesses, all the co-worker’s mental illnesses. And the comedian says, “Oh, what do you want me to do with that?” And the guy goes, “Oh, I’m just telling you so you can work around it.” So, there’s no sense of accountability, and that retreating into this therapeutic mind turns the world into something where you get to be a victim of your own sadness. And I know you and I have talked about this before.

Another way in which I think we’ve just really gotten far off base with the way we view therapy and psychology is there’s this weird habit of turning normal human existence into a psychosis. So, for example, I’ve heard people say things like, “Oh, after my dad died, I really struggled with depression.” And you go, “No. That’s, like, you had the normal human response to suffering. You didn’t get sick with depression. You didn’t, you know, get infected with a disease. You had the normal response to that.” And there’s a weird way in which I think psychology and the therapeutic view of things really isn’t serving people well because it’s presenting human suffering as something to be … a foreign invasive bacteria that needs to be killed, rather than a cross that needs to be carried and a purifying that needs to be endured, and also, just something that’s part of the human existence.

Inez Stepman:

Do you think a secular society can endure suffering? Because this is not an obvious question to me. Stoicism, for example, is, in some sense, at least to the post-Christian world, a type of secular endurance, of suffering, or at least a pagan endurance of suffering. But do you think that that can be society-wide? Or what do you think the relationship is between our apparent inability to endure suffering or to pathologize the human condition and the fact that we are a rapidly secularizing society?

Hans Fiene:

The way I view the world is that you don’t have to be a Christian to draw moral conclusions about things or to have solutions to various problems, and suffering would certainly be one of them. So, it’s not as though if you don’t confess the Trinity, you can’t make observations that I’ve seen you make where we’re very much on the same page of things, and draw conclusions on things that, for me, from my end, are very much coming from my Christian worldview. But I suppose the question is what, then, is the source of you drawing that conclusion? What powers your worldview? And I certainly have my doubts that a secular world is going to draw any good conclusions about suffering. And it’s a complex issue.

I think, for example, when you look at, say, the euthanasia debate, and you see what’s going on in Canada. And I don’t think this really has a whole lot to do with 90-year-old people who are suffering from chronic diseases. I think the passion that motivates the pro-euthanasia side is this misplaced catharsis and misplaced empathy where you look and see someone suffering and you say, “I don’t deserve to have to do that, and I want to have the right to opt out of that if that becomes my lot in life.” Kind of in the same way that when people see suffering in poverty-stricken nations and they think birth control is always the solution to the problem, that they think having fewer poor people is the way that you solve poverty. It’s this notion of, “I shouldn’t have to have that in my world.” And I don’t know. I think part of the challenge, too, is that the secular world is you got to serve somebody, and you got to be influenced by somebody. So, if Christianity has become, in our culture, and I think it has, a negative, if the default position of the culture is to see Christianity with disdain, then the question is, well, then what’s driving your moral worldview apart from that? And it certainly seems to me, I think you see this a lot in politics, that you have all kinds of issues that don’t really seem like they ought to be leftist causes, in a historical sense. But now, it seems that so much of the political left is just, the entire policy is just determined by what’s going to anger conservative Christians. And so, it seems to me that in the secular culture, the default place that people are coming from is hostility towards the Christian faith, which means that you’re just going to naturally tilt that direction with regard to any societal problems that you see. And I think suffering is certainly one of them, where it’s, obviously, kill those who are suffering is not the proper solution to suffering. But the question is, if people who aren’t explicitly coming at things in the Christian direction, how do they figure out what they believe about these things? How do they respond to these challenges? And it just, it seems to me we’re in a place right now—I don’t know if we’ll necessarily stay there, but it seems to me we’re in a place now where so much of the secular world is really just setting itself up in opposition towards Christianity.

Inez Stepman:

What about wokeness coming from within the house? There’s the theory out there that actually places the inner seed of first enlightenment, liberalism, and then draws a straight line. I’ve been pretty open that I’m not really in this camp. But to put the argument forward to you, draws a straight line from your church’s founder, to Luther, all the way, displacing temporal or displacing actual political authority to make some of these declarative, normative, moral statements to where we are today. And then correspondingly also, just as a matter of whatever, I don’t know what the right word for this is, but observations about the sociological evolution of what we see now as wokeness in America.

It’s hard to not notice that, actually, a lot of the former WASPs, the New England Protestant culture in America, has largely dropped away the God part and has brought into this new set of what seemed very much like theological tenets. So, what is, in your view, the connection between Protestantism, if any, and this kind of ideology? And on the flip side, if there isn’t a inherent connection between these two, why do we see so many mainline Protestant churches become… As my husband, who’s a Christian, says, “When I see the sign out front of a church that says all are welcome, I know I’m not.” So…

Hans Fiene:

And you know they don’t mean that either. So, if Tucker Carlson were to hop into that church on Sunday morning, he would be asked, not so politely, to leave, generally speaking. So, I think one of the things I would say from a Lutheran perspective is, a simple way to understand Lutherans is we will… there’s a sense in which we see ourselves as Protestants but not part of Protestantism. And so, anything that has come out of liberal East Coast, Anglican or Episcopalianism from a Lutheran perspective is that’s not really our issue. That’s not really caused by us. I would say that when folks actually read Luther, if you read, for example, Luther’s commentary on the 10 Commandments in his large catechism, when he talks about the fourth commandment in particular, he has views…

Luther’s sometimes seen as the father of the separation of church and state, which is really not terribly accurate. He has a different view of the relationship between the state and the church than the Roman Catholics obviously do. But he’s not nearly in the American founding fathers’ category. And he certainly sees that the state has the responsibility to protect the church from error and heresy. But he also recognizes the state’s not always terribly great at that, which is really my position on things. I am a fan of the First Amendment, but I don’t believe in the First Amendment from a theological standpoint. I don’t believe you have a God-given right to be a heretic. I just believe that the government has repeatedly throughout history shown itself to be really bad at determining who’s a heretic and who’s not. And so, the best way the state can serve the church is to just get out of the business of heresy hunting and deciding what’s pure and what isn’t.

In terms of why wokeness has engulfed so much of Protestantism, I think there’s a couple different things you have to really look at. One of which is just you have to look at the history of various denominations. So, I’m a Lutheran pastor. I’m in a church body called the Lutheran Church Missouri-Synod, which is the second largest church body calling itself Lutheran in the United States. And we’re very much on what people would consider the theologically conservative end of things. So, we’re, from a political standpoint, very opposed to abortion, opposed to homosexuality, opposed to transgenderism, kind of all of that stuff.

Well, in various and sundry ways, you had modernism and liberalism creeping into churches for quite some time, and once certain church bodies hit a critical mass of having clergy who embraced what, I suppose, was typically called the higher critical method of interpreting the scriptures, so didn’t believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, didn’t believe it was without error, didn’t believe things, didn’t believe that Moses was a real person, didn’t believe in the physical resurrection of Christ, the virgin birth, all of these things. Once you had that theology creeping into those church bodies through the academia of their seminaries, then things were pretty much, well, over, especially depending on how the church body was structured.

My church body is quite a bit different in this regard. We’re a historical anomaly. In the ’70s, we had a big fight over the stuff and the Bible-believing laypeople won the day in the end. But I think that, ultimately, what ends up happening is if you have clergy filling up your church body who don’t actually believe this stuff is real and happened, then the question is why are they there, and what do they actually see as true and honorable and good? And I think for a lot of theological liberalism, there’s this sense of going back to, something we talked about before of authenticity, is that there’s the sense of we want to have the air of divine authenticity, but we know we don’t really have it theologically speaking.

A very weird thing to me is that super liberal church bodies always get very excited about dialoguing with the Roman Catholic Church. So, they hate everything about the Pope. They hate that the Pope is opposed to gay marriage and abortion and birth control and a whole host of other issues. And yet, they get super excited to sit down and talk with him in a way that they wouldn’t dialogue with my church body or other church bodies that hold the same positions on those particular issues as the Roman Catholic Church. And I think the simple reason for that is because the Pope gives the air of authenticity. If he’s sitting down and talking with you, if his bishops are talking with you, then that really means you’re not just pretending and playing dress-up.

And so, I think, in a lot of churches, what happened was you had people who just really had a foreign theology, who want to play dress-up and use that as an opportunity to tell themselves that they’re legitimate and they’re real, and wokeness offered them another great opportunity for them to cast everything that they were doing in a religious and honorable and divine light, that this isn’t coming from a political place, that this is really being authentically human. I think that’s how we ended up getting where we are. If you reject the idea that righteousness only comes through the blood of Jesus, that the only way to be a truly holy person is to be covered by the blood of Christ and faith, if you reject that, which so many of them do, then the question is, well, then how do you obtain righteousness?

And I think, with our culture today, we have a culture that’s hungry for righteousness but is also very lazy. So, people will try to get it in the easiest way that they possibly can, which is defending the marginalized group that nobody else defended. This is the thesis that I had for an article I wrote for The Federalist a number of years ago called Selma Envy. And it’s why you see people always trying to link their causes to the civil rights movement, which is they see how, “Oh, that’s a group of people. They’re holy. Those people who marched on Selma, especially the white people who were on board with the civil rights movement, you know, 10 years before everybody else was, those are the righteous people, and I want to be like them.” And they go, “What cause can I have?” And you go, “Hey, you can defend the rights of the unborn.” And they go, “No, no, no, no, no. That would require me to lead a very different life sexually than in the life I’m living. That would require too much work.” And so, it was, “Okay, well then, here’s gay marriage,” and you fight for that.

Well, then gay marriage gets legalized, and you don’t get as much righteousness out of defending a cause that more and more people are supporting. So, you have to go find something held with more disdain in society. So, then we moved on to the transgenderism, then we moved on to transgender kids, and I’m sure that pedophilia and polygamous relationships and incestuous relationships will be next. It’s kind of like in music, if someone’s a music hipster and you can’t listen to a band anymore once they go mainstream. There’s kind of that principle to it, is you only get righteousness by defending the marginalized. And so, we got to find the new group each and every time. And for church leaders, for people serving in churches who don’t actually believe that true righteousness comes from Christ, they’re subject to that same cult of the era, which is finding righteousness by defending the marginalized, and then choosing any group to be marginalized so that you can extract righteousness from them.

Inez Stepman:

Well, as a point of egotistical nature that I’d like to make, which is that Selma Envy’s actually my phrase that I came up with in the mid-2000s in high school.

Hans Fiene:

Okay. Well, sorry. I will say-

Inez Stepman:

And you got it from me.

Hans Fiene:

I never used the phrase in my article. It was Joy, our editor, who used it as the title. And so, maybe she picked that up with you.

Inez Stepman:

I think I was talking about it on the Federalist listserv. Anyway, I’m not mad. I like that [inaudible 00:42:12].

Hans Fiene:

No, no. You can have the term.

Inez Stepman:

But I want to slap my TM on that because I came up with that idea.

Hans Fiene:

No, you can take the money. That’s fine. And I’ll send you half the hate mails I got over it.

Inez Stepman:

No. On a more serious note, what do you think about the idea that Christianity, by its nature, elevates victimhood to some degree? You have all the commands about, or predictions that the meek will inherit the world, the turn the other cheek. Christ himself is a perfect victim in a way. In that theology, what do you think about critiques from that direction saying that inherently, Christianity has a hard time not falling for a endless series of victims because there is this merciful impulse built into the nature of what it commands?

Hans Fiene:

No, I don’t think, in terms of actual real believing Christianity, that’s the case. Because what you have in the death and resurrection of Christ, is Christ is certainly a victim in the sense that he is crucified without cause and he’s without sin. But this is the great, beautiful irony of it, is that by being a victim that he actually becomes the victor. It’s by being pierced that he ends up crushing the head of the serpent. It’s by the evil that men pour out upon him that he actually conquers this world and wins salvation for the world. And, likewise, in the Christian faith, when you talk about… You see this, for example, in the apostles, when they rejoice after they’re beaten and driven from the synagogue, they rejoice that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the Name.

There’s a very important distinction between that. There’s a big distinction between rejoicing that you were beaten or persecuted, and rejoicing that you were found worthy to be persecuted for the name of Christ. Because in the first category, it’s this weird passive righteousness that you acquire by doing nothing. I’m not going to go on a big rant about Hallmark Christmas movies, but you see this in Hallmark Christmas movies all the time that a lot of them are underdog story movies where the lady is having to defeat the fancy, mean fiancée that the guy has for some reason, or the guy has a fiancée who’s worse than Hitler. She’s the worst human being who’s ever lived. And that doesn’t make him less attractive to the heroine of the story, which is very odd to me. The heroine of the story doesn’t actually do anything to defeat the girl who wears sunglasses and a fancy fur coat. She just waits for her to be mean to her. And then the guy realizes, “Oh, it was really you all along that I should have been with.” So, in Christianity, that’s really not the way that we view righteousness.

It’s not that you are holy because someone persecuted you. It’s you’re holy and you’re righteous because you belong to Christ, and because you belong to Christ, the world will hate you as it hated him. But you can rejoice in knowing that he is victorious over the world because he’s conquered the ruler of this world in his death and resurrection.

So, there’s another step in there that I think is quite different. I think, obviously, there are churches that lean so hard on social justice that they lose that middle step and that they see any degree of suffering as this somehow must mean that these people are innocent, and they can’t draw the distinction between people suffering for their own actions or people enduring the consequences of their own sin. It doesn’t mean you have to be hardhearted towards people. So, for example, if you look at someone who’s gone through “gender reassignment surgery” so, is that person a victim?

Well, certainly if they’ve been misled by people, and certainly if they’ve been told, “This is the thing that’s going to fix you.” And, of course, it won’t. But the solution to that problem is to point them to the actual solution, in Christ, and not to leave them reeling in their status as a victim because, in doing so, you would then end up having to somehow view the thing that made them a victim as, or that to view that victimhood as righteous even if it was a self-imposed type of thing. So, I don’t think Christianity makes the world weaker.

I think, obviously, false Christianity does. I think bad churches and bad preaching make the world weaker. And they probably make the world a lot weaker than no preaching does. So, poor theologians, bad preachers will do more harm to you than an episode of Paw Patrol or whatever it is that people watch these days. That’s the only show I know because it’s what my four-year-old watches. So, we don’t let them watch the commercials anymore. And if it’s been made after 2016, it’s right out. It’s the method we have for evaluating things. So, I think there’s an important distinction there.

Inez Stepman:

We won’t get into your bad views on Westerns because that’s what my parents raised me on, older Westerns. I want to ask you what you think… Because a lot of what we’re talking about, and a lot of your critiques of the liberal Protestant churches, have been that they’re essentially engaged in a kind of LARP, and that they’re looking for some kind of true connection with the divine or whatever, but what they’re actually doing is playing dress-up. I guess my question is when you have a world where—or at least a country—where the fastest growing “religion” or religious denomination is none, and you have so many people who are disconnected from a religious tradition, what is the value of the LARP?

Because I can think of it, perhaps, in a different context, people who are not believing Christians or members of any faith. And I think, for example, Judaism has a much easier time with this, other orthopraxic religions that basically say, you know, “You should practice, you should behave as though these things are true, and perhaps a belief will come to you, perhaps it won’t. But what’s more important is how you behave than what’s in your heart.”

So, what’s the Protestant answer? And then do you think that the trad LARP that I see going on parts of the right… I mean, I have my, I have really serious doubts about whether… It doesn’t seem obvious to me as, an atheist, that you can will yourself into any of this, into belief in particular, but certainly, you can behave in a certain way. You can show up for church every Sunday, you can listen to Pastor Fiene every Sunday, but what is the value of that behavior? If I understand, that you don’t think it’s everything, but is it something?

Hans Fiene:

Yah, I suppose there’s two issues there. One of which is the question of civil righteousness, and then the other is the question of divine righteousness. So, in the church, obviously, my primary concern is divine righteousness, that my job as a pastor is to proclaim the mercy and the salvation of Christ. And I want people to believe that. And I certainly believe that when people do believe that, that they will live in a civilly righteous way, they’ll live in a way that benefits their neighbors.

So, from my perspective, I certainly would say that the problem when Christians are hypocritical and cruel and unloving is not that they are Christians, but that they’re insufficiently Christians, in the same way that when I see people talking about toxic masculinity. So, the problem is not, with toxic masculinity, is not that it’s masculine, is that it’s insufficiently masculine.

But there is obviously the sense in which you say, “well…” And I’ve had some interesting conversations with people in recent years when I was a younger pastor. You’d oftentimes find people, myself included, would lament the state of cultural Christianity. You have people that are just going through the motions, but we don’t know that they really believe this stuff. And it’s not that that’s not a problem, but we are starting to see, well, if your options are cultural Christianity or not that, you would probably prefer cultural Christianity. Because cultural Christianity means guys who… Look, I would prefer a man not commit adultery out of love for Christ, and because he sees the model of Christ’s faithfulness to his bride. But I would also prefer that he’d not commit adultery for literally any reason in a civil sense, in the same way that… I grew up in Utah when I was pretty young. And so, my neighbors, my friends, were all Mormon. And I obviously have very grave theological differences with Mormons, but they make great neighbors. They’re kind and loving, and they love kids, and they’re respectful, and they don’t want to steal from you, and things of that nature. So, there is a sense in which there’s a kind of civil righteousness that is beneficial to society.

So, now, I think my response to people would be, in the end, well, obviously, if you live outwardly according to the 10 Commandments, your life will be better. If you don’t steal from people, if you don’t commit adultery, if you don’t lie about people, if you’re not constantly motivated with greed and anger and hatred and violence, your life will be better. But that won’t benefit you in the life to come. And so, I would certainly like for you to believe that. I would certainly like for you to believe in Christ who’s behind all of the commandments. But if we’re just going to be neighbors and if that’s the only relationship that we ever have with each other, yes, it would definitely benefit me if you would still live according to those principles.

Inez Stepman:

I guess that brings us to what the proper role is of religion in society or religion in the state. There’s a huge discussion going on now about Christian nationalism on Twitter among other places. What do you think about the relationship between those two entities, and what do you think about the tension between the universality of the Christian claim to truth, I would say, and the particularity of nationalism? How would you rectify those two things? Or do you think there are too much intention?

Hans Fiene:

So, these are all really great questions. A lot of Christians have really swallowed, whole hog, this notion that the Christian faith can only properly be detached from the government, and I simply don’t see that in the scriptures at all. I don’t think the Christian faith has to be. But as I was saying before, so, again, I don’t think that you have a God-given right to be a Scientologist. That being said, I think we’ve seen throughout history that the state is not terribly good at distinguishing between true theology and false theology. So, I definitely believe God has established earthly governments to serve and benefit his church.

The question is just what’s the best system for doing that? And if we lived in a world where having a good, faithful Christian emperor or king or whatever it might be, better serve the church, then I would support that. But that’s not at all the world that we live in. This is, to me, why so many of these debates about Christian nationalism are kind of silly because they’re entirely theoretical.

So, I would love for the United States of America to be a Lutheran nation. But we’re so astoundingly far from that even being a reality, that it’s like me saying I would like for all of my grandchildren to be 6’5 and I’m 5’9. It’s just not really worth getting upset about. It’s more about the philosophical underpinnings of it. So, I certainly believe the state has the responsibility to serve Christ’s church. But as I said before, I also believe that we’ve just kind of figured out the best way for the state to do that is to stay relatively out of the equation of determining who’s a heretic and who’s not.

Likewise, I want the church to grow by means of true, sincere faith, which means that you can’t bully and cajole people into the Christian faith, that you trust that the Holy Spirit will create faith where and when it pleases him to do so, and you can’t compel people to believe something, and it doesn’t serve your church in the long run. One of my favorite things about being a pastor now, it’s so much better being a pastor now than it was 50 years ago because the only people I have in my congregation are people who actually want to be there. There’s no cultural pressure to be a Christian when you’re not really a Christian.

Now, that has negative effects on our culture in some ways, but it’s great in congregations because I don’t have anyone there who doesn’t actually believe this stuff and is there for other reasons, and so will cause problems over things. If you talk to older pastors, you’ll say, “Oh, that guy just came for 30 years and hated me and hated everyone in the congregation, and constantly complained about everyone.” And it’s a guy you want to look at and go, “Do you actually believe in Jesus though? Because you seem to hate everyone that Jesus loves. It’s kind of weird.”

So, in a lot of ways, that’s great, but I think there is the bigger question people are wrestling with is when so many of us developed our view, when the general consensus in the American mindset of the view of the separation of church and state was established, it was built on a culture that largely reflected Christian values, that in a world that largely said, “Hey, you know, all the stuff about how we should be honorable, decent, hardworking people, who don’t cheat people, who are faithful to their spouses, who take care of their children and raise them to be merciful and forgiving and kind, our secular culture mirrored a lot of those values.” But as our secular culture is becoming significantly more hostile to the Christian faith, I think it’s just caused people to have this question of, “Well, does this really work then? Can we actually have a nation if we’re entirely untethered from… if we’re entirely disconnected from the engine that’s producing the worldview that leads to a righteous society? How is that going to work? And if it’s not going to work, should we use the power of the government to impose that on people?”

To give a really good example of this, this is my views on public schools have changed so much in the past few years, in large part because of all of the wokeness that has infiltrated there, and especially on things like the gender issue. So, in your average public school, they have selected a doctrine of human identity, which is that your identity as male or female is determined by your inner gender expression. That’s the real you. That’s who you are. Well, that’s a philosophical assumption based on metaphysical beliefs, not based on data that you can look at under a microscope, anything of that nature. So, why do they get public funding for their moral presuppositions and their metaphysical presuppositions and I don’t?

And so, it’s just gotten me to the point where I just go, “Well, I don’t believe that public schools should exist, then, if this is the way it’s going to work.” Because if their default religion is antagonism towards Christianity, then I don’t know how that works, and I don’t know how you solve the problem… If that’s the direction things are going to keep going, I don’t know how you solve the problem beyond saying, “Well, maybe we need to have a bit more… We need to be a bit more explicitly Christian of a nation.” In the end, I don’t know if it’s worth the trade-off, but I certainly can see that mindset in people.

Inez Stepman:

I’m going to… And wrap up here with a few rapid-fire questions from listeners and from Twitter. I wanted to ask… Okay, so, Jay Richards from The Heritage Foundation wanted to know, and you already answered this question to some extent, but maybe make it more explicit. Is there an alternative between, what do you call, the naked public square and the confessional public square? In other words, is there a way to import a certain kind of moral baseline from Christianity without doing what you’ve referred to repeatedly as defining the heretics from the righteous?

Hans Fiene:

I think, obviously, there is, because we did it for a while. For most of our country’s history, that’s been the case with bumps along the way. So, it’s certainly possible to have a tenuous agreement where the church says, “Well, we’re not going to make anyone go to worship, and we’ll let Mormons be Mormons, and Jews be Jews, and Hindus be Hindus.” But we have to have some kind of general moral consensus as a nation, and we don’t have that anymore. And if we don’t have that, I guess, then the question is, well, is it possible to lose something that you once had? Is it possible to go back the other direction without a substantial change to the way your government functions?

In the long term, I would say yes, because the more people hate God, the fewer children they’re having, and the more people love God, the more children that they’re having, and the people who are pushing the sterility of children the most, obviously, are not having the most kids. So, in the long run, I feel confident in my side’s ability to win the demographic battle. It’s just a matter of the short term in between of how much do things fall apart in that way. And I don’t know. I wish I did.

Inez Stepman:

Here’s another question. What’s the legacy of New Atheism and the seeming collapse, I would add, of its appeal? We went through this moment, this rationalist moment where New Atheism was publishing New York Times bestsellers, all these atheist authors, the best of whom I think, by far, is Christopher Hitchens, but also Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, et cetera. So, what has happened to that sphere? They seem to have much less cultural purchase than they did even 15 years ago.

Hans Fiene:

I would say there’s the Old Testament sense of how the Babylonian or the Assyrians rise up against the people of God. And then God uses the Babylonians to crush them, but also uses them to judge his own people. And so, in some ways, you get two groups that are equally enemies of Christianity who end up enemies of each other, or one ends up swallowing up the other. And I think, I really do think wokeness has just really swallowed up New Atheism. And I’m not 100% certain as to why. Part of it is that wokeness moves so fast and it’s a much more efficient religion than New Atheism, where, with New Atheism, first of all, you had to be a little annoying and you had to read these long books and you had to… Part of it, too, was it wasn’t really trying to build anything, it was trying to tear down stuff, which is not as appealing of a movement to people.

Wokeness, for all of its farts is… All of its faults. That was a great Freudian slip I just had right there. Wokeness, for all of its faults is aimed at building something, at least ostensibly, for building a more equitable and inclusive society. And it just offers people way better sacrifices. Just, boom, put the pronouns in your profile picture, use this person, who’s now announced that she’s trans, use that person’s new name, use that person’s new pronouns. Here’s the new jargon that we use for whatever the issue might be. You see weird things of like we used to call them homeless, and now they’re unhoused persons, and stuff. Where there’s just this constant, “Here’s a new thing, here’s a new thing, here’s a new thing. You get two more righteousness points, three more righteousness points.” And so, I think it’s just, in those terms, it’s much faster and crisper and more aggressive than New Atheism was. And so, I think it’s just more appealing to people in that way. It’s very well-designed towards social media.

Inez Stepman:

I found out the one way you can go back to being homeless in New York City, instead of unhoused community members, and that’s actually to defecate on the pride flag instead of the American flag. And then go back to being a homeless in all the headline.

Hans Fiene:

And in the same way that if you are a biological female who shoots up a school filled with Christian children, then they won’t refer to you with your male pronouns that you apparently used. So, it’s okay to acknowledge this person’s not really transgender because they did something that didn’t fit the narrative.

Inez Stepman:

So, here’s a last one from Twitter. What are the virtues most lacking in men and, correspondingly, in women, in your view, in modern society?

Hans Fiene:

So, I’ve said this a lot. At some point, you should have me on to spend a whole hour talking about Hallmark Christmas movies because I have a… They are so…

Inez Stepman:

It’s difficult for me to do because I haven’t really seen any.

Hans Fiene:

Well, you got to just watch five, and then you’ll be covered. But they’re very illuminating. But I’ve said this a lot, especially in response to that, that the chief problems in our culture, that we are raising our sons to be losers and we’re raising our daughters to be narcissists. And I think that’s very much it, is that the chief problems of what we’re not seeing in men is the desire for self-sacrifice, the desire to build, the desire to lead, but rather it’s this sit back and just accept your loseriness. And I know there are a lot of honest, virtuous men who play video games, but I’m strongly in the anti-video game block. I think that this retreat from society is not a good thing for men.

So, for women, it is this astounding lack of accountability. And so, the desire to be above reproach in every scenario when you haven’t actually earned the right to be. And the extreme passive nature of things, so that, “I’m the best person in the world just simply by virtue of being who I am and existing, and anyone who doesn’t see that, that’s their problem.” So an unwillingness to… I think, in many ways, for women, the challenge in our culture today is learning to see yourself as someone worthy of honor rather than as someone who needs to go out and expect honor from the world, I guess, would be how I would put it.

Inez Stepman:

All right. And this last question is for me, and maybe ties together a lot of what we’ve been talking about for the last hour. What has the legacy of rising secularization in this country or in others really been? What, in your view, are the primary fruits of that?

Hans Fiene:

I think a lot of it is loneliness and despair. And I think what we’re really seeing now is the trying to turn despair into something righteous, that people who don’t have hope are somehow better and holier than the self-deluded people who do. You find this weird thing where you give people surveys about how good is life now, and everyone thinks the world is so much worse than it actually is. People can’t properly comprehend the countless blessings they have in front of them that previous generations would’ve given anything to have. And so, I think that’s a big part of it, is turning despair into a virtue, and the lack of the ability to find hope is something to aspire to. If I were to summarize it all down into one issue, that, I think, is what it is.

Inez Stepman:

Reverend Hans Fiene of… He’s a reverend with The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the conservative synod, I believe. There’s another one, right? LCLA, LC…

Hans Fiene:

There’s ELCA, which is the largest one. They’re kind of like the Episcopalians.

Inez Stepman:

But you can find, I think, a lot of his sermons online as well as his jokes over at Lutheran Satire on YouTube. You can find his columns at The Federalist. Is there anywhere else you want to send people to?

Hans Fiene:

Did you say my Twitter, @hansfiene?

Inez Stepman:

Yes.

Hans Fiene:

You can go there. Okay. There we go. So, that’s about it. I don’t do Instagram or all that stuff. I can’t figure out what that was, so I gave up immediately.

Inez Stepman:

Well, thank you so much for spending this hour with us on High Noon.

Hans Fiene:

My pleasure.

Inez Stepman:

And thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave. And we’ll see you next time on High Noon.