Husband, Father, Reformed Presbyterian Pastor. Lifelong student of Theology and Philosophy. I’m the guy that did the UFO podcast for Cultish (posted 👇)
Hudson Valley, NY
Joined August 2023
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Annoying (but well meaning) tropes you hear after a day like yesterday:
“Well, our hope is not in politics”
“Our nation is under judgment”
“We need to remember, real change will only come with revival”
All of those things may be true. But a predictable election cycle also has political causes and there are political solutions moving forward.
While it’s good to always set our minds upon the things above, spiritualizing how we understand political realities can quickly turn the Gospel into a mere instrument for political and social change.
Every single one of the statements above implies that the Gospel is a political solution.
It’s time to ditch the delusion of transformationalism. Now go read William Young’s Essay on Neo-Calvinism.
westminsterconfession.org/re…
This seems like a possible prelude to a presidential resignation down the road, with JD getting ahead of it by distinguishing himself from his predecessor as he retains power for the next 2 years.
I want to not think that he’s the creation of Peter Thiel and big tech/palantir who will continue the same policies with more sophisticated “based” wrapping paper.
All that being said I’ll take it. And I’ll take JD going forward (for now).
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
I listen to a lot of people sporadically in following the news.
If you actually tune in to Fuentes’ program and listen to his monologues the kid is super smart. He has also been right about a lot of things, when everyone else was wrong—especially on how the Trump administration would actually shake out.
The clips you probably know him for are just the draw. He’s a mixture of Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, and Jon Stewart, but curtailed to proclivities of younger Millennials and Gen Z rather than Boomers-Millennials.
I’m bullish on his rising influence.
This is not an endorsement, but a statement of fact.
Colin Samul retweeted
Assurance of God's Love sermonaudio.com/sermons/1132…
Short, sweet and to the point (just 72 pages).
This little book is worth picking up.
“When I arrived at Grove City College in 2018, I asked a colleague what student rebellion at Grove City looked like. With a smile he answered, “It looks like coming from a home church that is broadly evangelical and here deciding to join Grace Anglican.” Grace Anglican Church is a congregation of the Anglican Church in North America, which worships according to the Book of Common Prayer. Many times in the years since, I have asked students why they choose to attend Grace Anglican. The answers always involve reference both to the historic liturgy and to the historic theology. In short, there is a rising generation of young people who want historical roots for both the way they worship God and the way they think about him.
This is an important development. This growing appetite among younger, thoughtful Christians for something more theologically and historically substantial gives us all the opportunity to make Protestant evangelical life much deeper, both theologically and doxologically. Since the 1950s, Reformed evangelicals in America and Europe have drawn deeply on the piety of the Puritans. Now the scholarly work has been done that allows us to draw on their theology proper and to ground it in the earlier writings of both the patristic and medieval periods. In so doing, we are simply recovering those catholic aspects of our own Reformation heritage that have been lost.”
This is an excellent overview of the Protestant Reformation by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones that gives a good account of why Protestants are still Protestant.
It’s a good refresher for those who are already Reformed and a good introduction for those who aren’t.
sermonaudio.com/sermons/1222…
Saturday white pill
The White House is posting salvation by God's grace in Jesus Christ. Massive W.
whitehouse.gov/briefings-sta…
This is an excellent overview of current views.
“There’s not a world wherein Christianity and the political order have ever been meaningfully separated, so it is good to put the ignorant quietism of fundamentalism in the rearview mirror.”
An enlightening read from @IVMiles at @_Theopolis.
theopolisinstitute.com/a-new…
Van Til often gets tied to political and ideological universalism, especially as it was manifested in the theonomic movement.
Muether’s biography demonstrates that Van Til saw his system solely as a consistent Reformed apologetic, meant to be employed by confessionally Reformed Christians, for the defense of the faith—not as a totalizing “secret decoder ring” that magically delivers answers to everything under the guise of “worldview analysis.”
“Van Til’s personal political views were a matter of speculation for his disciples. His Chicago-area upbringing indoctrinated him in conservative politics, where Dutch Calvinists were “Republicans almost to a man.” He was a life-long Republican who opposed the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson with as much zeal as he disdained the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, but the Republican Party represented the lesser of two evils for him. He shied away from cultural and political applications of his apologetic system, and he generally kept his political views private, rarely considering that he possessed wisdom to share, despite efforts of friends and associates to draw him out. His silence on church-state matters left his largely undeveloped Kuyperianism at least vulnerable to a theonomic reading and a popular association between him and Christian Reconstruction continued.”
Colin Samul retweeted
The Indestructible Seed sermonaudio.com/sermons/1019…
I’ve been waiting to comment on this.
If you actually watch any of Thiel’s lectures and interviews about the Antichrist, you will understand the angle he’s going for with the statues, and even choosing to host his lectures at Masonic Lodges.
I’m skeptical of Thiel and his influence, but he’s also deep thinker. Attending these lectures are like going to a modern day Areopagus. It exposes you to the zeitgeist and is a place to go to network.
It’s hard not to see the 1990s Dave Hunt take on this from certain individuals as being disingenuous.
Amen.
I will also add that there is another angle that is taken.
Often the woman knows that her husband is above reproach as a “nice guy,” so even claiming “spiritual abuse” due to his “headship” won’t fly.
Instead, they will say that the patriarchal standards and structures of the church (ie pressure from family and friends) forced them into picking their husband, so they didn’t have true agency.
It’s not their husband who abused them, but “the system.” Now she needs to “find her voice,” in the relationships she picks. This is usually inescapably bound to deconstruction of some form.
These are the kinds of lies being fed to women on social media—and that includes Christian women.
It’s a big reason why so many Christian women divorce their husbands for bogus things (under the guise of “spiritual abuse”).
They think they can do better (they can’t). They are being deceived by the devil and are destroying their lives and families.
It’s the duty of men to protect women from this poison. Men—protect your wives and daughters from social media. Pastors and elders—be alert for women in your churches adopting this carnal mindset.
“For to be carnally minded is death… Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God.” (Romans 8:6-7)