Homebrewed Christianity

Combat Theology

Interview with Matt Moorman for Tripp Fuller’s Homebrewed Christianity podcast on August 18, 2015.

AI Generated Transcript

Today on the podcast, you hear from Logan and you hear from Matt from the Centurions Guild. These are veterans reflecting on war, peace and its costs on human lives theologically. So buckle your seat belt. But first, let me tell you that this podcast this week is sponsored by Subverting the Norm. The conference, November 5th, the seventh in Springfield, Missouri. That's right. At Drury University. This event sponsored by Phillips Theological Seminary Friends of the podcast, is bringing together this third, Subverting the Norm, theologians and activist and church practitioners to reflect on politics and postmodern theology in church practice. So if you're church practitioner, if you're a theologian, if you are an activist, all of those people will be present, active in reflecting together about theory, practice, postmodernity. And I would love for you to join us. So head on over to subverting the norm dot com or come the homebrewed click through. You'll find out when you go and get your ticket. Use the code. HBC STM That's right, HBC SDM, you'll get the best discount possible. Then we'll know you're coming. And if you use the code, I will buy you a pint at Mother's Brewing Company with all the other deacons that are in the hill. Thousands more than that one that has got more than a pint with me. Know that Jack Hutto is going to be there. Just Katherine Keller is going to be there. Alton Pollard, who have not seen in a long time, but I remember him, was inspired by him back in the day when he was at Wake Forest University. He's going to be there. There is just so much exciting stuff happening. It's subverting the norm would be ridiculous to visit. This is the event you want to go to. You should go. And when you go in, it's awesome. I'll tell you what. No, you're going to get to hear about my brand new book at that event. I'm going to talk about the brand new book, Jesus The Guide to Jesus. Liar, Lunatic, Lord are just freaking awesome. It's going to come out right Then you'll be able to get the book. You'll be able to hear about the book and get to talk about Jesus. Jack Caputo's brand new book, Confessions of a Postmodern Philosopher. It comes out, Then you'll be able to get that. We're going to talk about it because we got a podcast and then Jack and I are doing a pre-game November 4th, a one day event from noon on. And what is it when philosophers talk about gods, if you want like an extra 6 hours philosophical reflection about when philosophers talk about God, and then to go out and have some dinner and drinks with Jack Caputo and I take a selfie with Jack Kabuto, then sign up for the theology nerd boot camp, the bridge game when philosophers talk about God, boom. So as head on into the podcast and as I do just want to say thank you to Matt Isaac from the Centurions Guild.

It was awesome. It was awesome and head on over the website and get some free content, get some downloads and connect to them. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It was a wonderful conversation. And Matt, as you'll find out, is a high school friend of mine you may or may not hear about some really sweet stuff in high school, but we listen to podcasts. More than that, you'll hear some really amazing stories and be challenged to think about the issues of war, peace. It's cost on the ground, reflecting on the real lived experience of our soldiers and those they interact with. It's a powerful, powerful conversation. Yep. So just now heads up. A few things are going real soon. The great God debacle, the God debacle is going to be happening in October. That's right. So be prepared. Lauren Schulze versus Phillip Clayton talking about God and science. We have another live podcast coming out at the beginning of October. It's going to be the Los Angeles around Peter Rollins Soapbox event. So that's going to be there. We got a live podcast with Juergen Maltman in November at the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta. We have some beginnings in September of some amazing classes and things that if you are a member of the homebrewed community, you get access to the if you remember the homebrew community, if you're an elder or your bishop. Then in September we started a yearlong class epic reads with Philip Clayton, first book of Crucified God. First, the first session introduced Crucified God thought of you and Waltman. Then you have a couple of weeks. Then we come back and we walk through the text Crucify God. It's an epic read The Epic Read Class Phillip Clayton, The nine yearlong Class We're going to Reason Mormon. Elizabeth Johnson. Plato. Augustine Johnson. Marino. Whitehead Boone. Anyway, join the Homebrewed Christianity community to join the nerdery. It's going to be a new class on postmodern spirituality coming up. There's going to be one on, but I can't tell you everything now. All right, look, there's a lot going on. So head on over at Holmberg, Christine Ecom, you'll find out more. Sign up for the newsletter as the easiest way to keep up with it. Make sure you use the code APB and when you sign up for the event in the horn. But buckle your theological safety belts, friends, because Logan, Isaac. Matt. Mormon Centurions Guild right now. Poe

Hello, Homebrewed Christianity listeners. Today you're going to get to meet two people, one of which is known me for a long time. Matt Mormon and he can verify that I have always been as awesome as you think I've been. And my friend Logan, his friend Logan, Isaac, who they are here, they are part of the Centurions Guild, which we're going to hear a lot about. But before we jump in, I just want to tell Matt, thank you. It's always cool to get to reconnect with with friends and especially if there's a reason to have them on the podcast. So how was how's North Carolina? North Carolina is is actually the temperature wise? Quite nice right now. It's a bit overcast, so I'm enjoying that non, you know, 130 degrees with 150% humidity. That's that's nice. I feel like summers are just a way to work on contemplative prayer in North Carolina. It's kind of a they slowly let you purify yourself as you get closer to hell or at least Satan's armpit or you're already in hell. You just don't know yet. Oh, well, I'm not the one sitting at Duke University, but we don't need to discuss just how near you are to the Devils. But so let's let's. Let's jump in. I want to hear how you two met. The moment Matt met you, Logan, he started Talk to me about you. And it really connected just as the onlooker friend. Lots of little different conversations. Matt's been having over the years and experiences. And so it's always good to get to hear the story of how another person blessed my friend. And you all are working together to work with other vets and stuff like that. So tell us how you all ended up connecting. Sure. So there's the Moral Monday protests last year. I think they're still ongoing, but we had one big march and I just committed to myself and two friends. Like if I have a monday open, I'm going to do it. I was working most Mondays and it's one Monday, July or no, it was probably later February, February, February. Yes, there was one of one of the marches and I had coordinated with some other vets, friends of mine that were coming from out of town through an anti-war organization by the name of Iraq Veterans Against the War. And so I'm there with a couple of my friends through I VFW and Matt and a couple other guys that that just came up to the the march and saw this big anti-war veteran signs. They just joined us and so on that on that march is when we kind of got to know one another. And then we followed up and over the last year and a half or so, we just kept in touch about how the church talks about war and Christian and Christianity and what to do with the fact that we've served in the military, but that military service is too often reduced in public discourse to either wars. So the pacifist claim of like, if you're a Christian, you must be in the military or the patriot claim of like, well, all all Christians are soldier and all soldiers are Christians. We both have had experiences that complicate that, that formula. So it's been kind of exploring the different ways that we formed our faith. Yes. So maybe one thing that might help is for for you to say a bit about how you came to faith or how your faith was a part of your decision, or to enter the military or to go to war biographically. How how do you all process your own kind of faith journey and getting into the military, having now, you know, looked back after you've left and are advocating things that most vets probably don't get wonderfully comfortable with? How do you tell those two stories? Yeah, I mean, our stories are quite different, as are everyone's stories, really. I grew up in a typical mainline mainline liberal tradition. My grandfather was a Navy chaplain. You know, that really shaped me and so I grew up in one sense, quite comfortable with the notions of being a Christian and being even leaning towards the pacifist, you know, side of the spectrum, but also with military service. And and, you know, you it's funny because I remember in college used to call me the pastor's with a gun, you know, And that was it was a term of endearment. Yes, it was. It was in there was you know, it was it's interesting kind of looking back on that, because my you know, coming from a mainline liberal tradition, I didn't have a moment of conversion really in life. I've had moments where I as I've grown and my faith some challenge. One of those was the Bible city that we were in in high school. I think for me I always had attention and I did Navy ROTC my freshman year at NC State and and that was 2001. And, you know, September when it happened that that year. And so I was right in the mix of both having lots of friends who knew nothing about the military and and who were engaging in theology in church and and then also being a part of this organization where I had to hear a lot of breastfeeding and a lot of anger and pain and a lot of the stuff I think a lot of us had had to listen to in kind of around that time. And so for me, there was always a tension between these two things and trying to understand that for me it was a personal journey, I think, in taking on, you know, And then I ended up quitting at the end of my freshman year and enlisting in the Air Force Reserve. That's that's how I served. And and for me, it was trying to understand that, you know, how those two things are are connected. And if I'm going to talk about Empire, I think right around that time I read that it was just a revolution in trying to understand my my complicity, my, you know, how I participate in Empire and also how I can subvert that. And and maybe there was a way to be in the military and do that. And maybe maybe there was me like exploring those two things. Yeah. So I think, again, my story only differs fundamentally in that when I was growing up there wasn't a big tension. I parent, well, my mom and dad have my dad's an agnostic. My mom is probably something very close to an agnostic, but she goes to church when I'm at home and always has. So when I went to youth group, I was assigned shoplifting and my sense was like, church is what you do because you've done something or after you've done something wrong. And then youth group, it was just kind of it was a social event that you hear about stories from the Bible. But for the most part, I mean, the same kind of relationships it just in, you know, on Wednesday night, as they do during the days of the week, like at school. So I was never really impressed. I did want to get more education. So in 2000, I enlisted for the G.I. Bill and I saw junior high enough. I got to choose whatever I wanted and I only chose for it. But now it was the fire support specialist because I had the most money. But the title is kind of ambiguous. A lot of people think it's a firefighter was actually artillery them. And so I went through I was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as a paratrooper when the towers fell. And I think a lot of us there just kind of we fell into the nationalist kind of tendencies of vengeance for 911 as opposed to maybe more temperate kind of motivations.

But I didn't end up deploying with Fort Bragg at my two year mark. I re-enlisted to go to Hawaii, and I deployed from from Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, on line two. And it wasn't till I was in Iraq and shortly after coming home that I was thinking about combat in terms of my faith because I grew up in Orange County, California, and faith there is like everything else, it's it's very superficial. And so faith was something that I put on when it was when I was called for, when it benefited me. But then in combat, you, I learned that some things are very important and some things are real and some things are not important at all and are really just Holden Caulfield Written the click written by J.D. Salinger, the character produced in World War Two in Europe. He was producing characters for Catcher in the Rye while he was a soldier and in Europe. And there were things that are important and real, and there are things that were phony and just not worthy of my time and attention. And my faith came under the microscope and I wanted I wanted to not be a phony. And so I remember thinking explicitly to myself as an art, as a Ford Observer for the artillery, working in infantry units. I could not I would be a hypocrite to do that and also be reading and allowing the scriptures to shape my life. And so I there was a clear choice that I knew I had to make. And so I wanted to go with this Christian faith thing was and I found very quickly that the call to love one's enemy was mutually exclusive of my responsibility, professional responsibility, of calling for indirect fire assets. However, I was at the first book, first theological book I read, I read John Yoder's. What would you do if we basically take the claim that Christian realists make or the argument the Christian realist world will argue to pacifists, What would you do with wife or endanger kids, grandmother, whatever. And you're kind of deconstructs it and shows how illogical it is. But I read that in uniform loading vehicles onto a boat to go back to Iraq. So I got into some pessimist circles and in them I heard I was told that being a Christian in the military is inherently mutually exclusive, like by simply by being in the military, you're violating your Christian convictions that soldiers are much more proximate to evil, if not the embodiment of the evil, then I just need to recognize that. But on the other hand, as I said, like I could not reconcile loving my enemies with calling for fire. So there's got to be a middle ground. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to find people who were able to assist me in finding that middle ground and finding the men between two excesses. And so that's how I found myself. Then when people have that kind of encounter, I feel like, you know, with the age at which the three of us experienced 911, like I was a sophomore in Boys Creek, not too far from you. Logan I was going back on weekends to watch, met wonderfully gifted pop punk band play shows and the and having conversations with a lot of the soldiers that were students at Campbell to the leaders on all the Christian campus groups. Because, you know, I tried out Jesus, all my friends and and I felt like we were always pigeonholed where you had to take some kind of absolutist position. And I wonder how much of that just is the fact that from 18 to 25, there's only really allowed to be one universe and it's the one that you're in and your identity so attached to being in the right place, be it a pacifist. And I'm like hardcore pacifists, like surpasses, I'm going to destroy everything you love about yourself if you don't agree with me. And I'm I'm a I'm a United States citizen and I love Jesus. And you want to know if you didn't love me, you would be a Nazi or a muslim because we killed people. And you must hate Jesus if you don't, you know, like and it's like the time. All the anxiety and energy of 911 happened, Everyone ran to some corner and those of us in draftable ages with some conscience go, Oh my God. They ask the question what you were asking. Like, Well, what's really real? What's really important? And I felt like so often we were pushed to have some absolutist position and then defend it. And what you're just both describing in different ways is this desire to raise the question and actually talk and engage across difference. And I think that maybe now we're having the I don't know where the tensions gone down enough or we've lived with it long enough to ask questions we couldn't have asked then because of just the heat. Yeah, and it's tragic that that we have that this happens after the dust is settled. But I think like we talk about the experience is much more persuasive than logic at times. And one of the things that that so as I began, like figuring out what it is that I believed and then what I should do was in connecting with and talking to other Christian soldiers, some of whom were radically pacifist, went to become conscientious objectors and others that, you know what but Jesus on the rifle or the scope and like run off to war. But we we I had the benefit of being able to sit with folks like myself long enough to help me understand who I was being called to be and what it might mean to be a Christian soldier. A Very quickly I came across the stories of other figures in history, and not just in our own age. I discovered the history of the saints and hagiography. It was not long after I decided, so long story short, I felt that I could not be an artillery. Then, as a Christian, I thought that that does violate our Christian convictions, that we're that we're called to have. But I don't think that the military as an institution is inherently anything. I mean, an institution is what you make of it. And so and I frankly, I didn't want to turn I didn't want to depart from friends with whom I had shared an incredible bond. People that you train with in the military, like I have friends from high school that I'm super close to, but I don't share the same connection with them than I do with the guys I was in the military. So I, I started reading the regulations and I discovered that as an enlisted man, I could still technically be a non-combatant on paper, in reality is another story. But I applied in June or May or June of 26 to be a non-combatant conscientious objector. We'd already come down on orders That meant effectively I was asking to return to war with my unit, but I told them I could not, as a Christian, carry a firearm. And then the cookie crumbled. I was forced out of my unit in violation of the regulations, and I was made to watch them deploy without me in August of 2006. And then I was eventually discharged honorably in November of that year during what would have and could have been my second deployment. So I applied to be a C.O. or a non-combatant C.O., but it never took. So I was just just discharged regularly. I found my story to be very much similar to stories like Matt's stories of the Saints, like Martin of Tours. I discovered shortly after they they tolerate empire and they tolerate patriotism, nationalism to an extent. But there's there's often a threshold. And many of the earliest soldier saints were military martyrs because they would tell Caesar or they would tell the recruiter or the equivalent the the proconsul. One of them next to Northern Africa was supposed to be measured for the seal, kind of like basically dog tags. And maximum says, no, I'm a Christian, I can't I can't fight. And the proconsul says, well, you know, it's adventurous life. All the other guys are doing it. Why don't you do it? He said, I'm sorry. I'm I'm a Christian. It's not permitted that I fight. And so he's beheaded in front of his own father. And then just a few years later, Martin comes along who's named after the God of war. And he wants to be a Christian, but neither of his parents are. And so it's it's looked down upon. He joins the military. He's good looking and he's strong. And so he's put in basically the equivalent of Secret Service and the Praetorian Guard. And what's different with Martin is that he he joins the military does not refuse as a lot of the other soldiers saints had before him. And he protects the life of Caesar. He has no problem with that. In fact, it's when he's up in northern France and in the winter and he finds a freezing beggar. And so that is known for is cutting his cloak in half. And this sheepskin cloak was signifies his rank and his proximity to Caesar cut it in half, gives it to a freezing beggar that night. He has a dream of Jesus before this heavenly host saying to them, Here is Martin. He's not even baptized with with me. Next day he runs off. He's baptized pacifists, including his biographer, narrated that as he does this thing is baptized, he gets out. But the history that his biography attaches to his departure when he goes before the Caesar Julius him at the Battle of Worms and in Germany seen as modern day Strasbourg. So eventually comes to the field of battle for the first time and tells Caesar, Just like Maximilian, I'm a soldier, I can't fight. I'm very sorry. And so for all intents and purposes, he would have been killed because everybody else had been up until that point. But Caesar puts him in jail, A peace treaty is negotiated and he's released. So he's the first soldier saint to have been to have confessed the faith, expecting martyrdom, but not having received it. So he becomes a bishop eventually. But all these stories helped me understand how my story fit as a Christian soldier in the story of God, in ways that, you know, these propositions that between just war or pacifism were helpful. But not nearly as illustrative as finding my story as it relates to other Christian soldiers. And the story of God is revealed in Scripture. In the last few thousand years of church tradition. So when when you get approached by someone who who is a soldier, very much a Christian, and they'll, you know, they're ready to quote Bible verses at you for a while. And what is it like to have a conversation with someone who doesn't have the sense of disturbance or where their conscience isn't pricked by this? They just this is this is just how it is like I have friends and family members who served in the military, who look at you, look at you and you ask a lot of the same questions, raise these issues. And they're like, well, I don't get what your problem is like. I'm not the one. I don't. I'm just following orders. That's what you do If you're in the military when you make the decision, if you don't want to follow orders or you don't want the benefits of being in our country, that kind of thing, then you don't vote different. But don't tell me like I'm supposed to act different when I'm doing what I'm doing. And if you don't like it and want to deny it, that's fine. But you're still paying taxes for it. So what's the big difference between like, how are we not just like some leftist liberal hippie, wonky wonks who just want to pretend the world is a lot different than it is, but benefit from people who can love Jesus and recognize that this violent system is better than the other option. The other options warlords and raping and pillaging and blah blah, blah. Like how do these conversations like, how do you begin these type of conversations? Because I know lots of military people who, if you ask me, like, are there kind of like stage of moral development? They could be a wonderfully loving person to those they've identified as, you know, the people there to care for belong with, and they're undisturbed by those questions, if that makes sense. I think so. I found because it disturbed me, I found that there's always ways to be disturbed, particularly in scriptural terms.

So I, I think I'm a pacifist, but I have a lot of hesitations with the way pacifist will often read scripture to some pacifist. Kind of all those three bulldoze through x ten. And Cornelius is a devout, God fearing man who, as a Roman soldier never leaves the military first Gentile baptized into the church without having technically there's an Ethiopian unit that comes before Cornelius, but as a unit, you wouldn't have had to have been circumcised. So Cornelius is the first person just Google it if you're confused.

So that is there is contrasting images that you get, particularly in terms of Christian soldiers on the one hand, we have this in training, a great faith in Matthew eight and Luke seven, I think, who is was applauded by Jesus for having greater faith in all of Israel. And unfortunately, I think that that is often misinterpreted by patriots to say, well, he's a soldier, obviously, like that's his main identifying feature. But as a soldier, he has absolute authority over the Jews and he gives it up and it indicates his humility before this this indigenous miracle worker, like I remember being in Iraq, I remember precisely how much authority I would give to indigenous people, to the Iraqis, like they didn't have authority. So for this person to say, Lord, I, I'm not worthy to take you under my roof, but only say the word and my servant. So the old like those words weren't coming out of my mouth in Iraq, they never would have. So that this person should not be judged by their martial membership. It's their it's their humility. And it happens that it's that it's exercised by this person who would have been seen as an outside hitter. But on the other hand, like we have this like John's passion, John, especially, is really critical of the soldiers. It is the soldiers who crucify these is the soldiers who mock and slap and beat and curse. But what do you do with this, this figure that embodies both characters as well? I mean, that just makes a good story to have characters. You want to see somebody who's capable of evil as well as good. I mean, Atticus Finch, Harper Lee just released his new book, Radicals comes out as a very unsavory character. But that to me, that's that's the indication of a very good story that we need to read very carefully and well and appreciate not just the character's moral complexity, but our own. So there's always a way to disturb people on both sides of the aisle. I mean, I could I think. Yeah, And it's funny because, you know, for me, I, I look, you know, being a long time listener of I'm very happy and I do I find myself being quite compelled by some of the criticisms made within radical theology. And so, you know, going back to like Bonhoeffer's initial questioning, well, here is a guy who is, you know, questioning everything at the same time. And for a lot of us, I think looking back on Bonhoeffer, I think he's been claimed by so many disparate groups of people, but we hold him up, you basically being a modern day saint for his his actions, for his writings and what his life was. But he was a guy who was part of the, you know, the other the the German military intelligence unit. I mean, he attempted well, if he didn't if he wasn't active, he was certainly complicit in assassination attempts against Hitler. So, I mean, and by the way, I think that's a lot of people pull that and say, see, he was okay with violence. And I don't I don't know if that was I don't I don't think you could say that about up. But it's more whatever people might say about him, whether he was a pacifist, whether he was a you know, a patriot who was perfectly okay with guns. I think whatever you want to say about it, it's more complex than that. And I think that's what we're getting at. That's one of the deaths where we're getting at. We're we're kind of wanting to say whatever side of the spectrum you fall in, being able to say it's more complex. The the world in life. It's more complex than that. And I think there's something to be said for let's all start with where we are and then where we kind of submit ourselves to that criticism to to whether I'm a pacifist and I'm totally against the military in and any forms of violence at all, or whether I'm like a Christian patriot. And I'm like, for me, serving in the military and being a good follower of Jesus is the one in the same thing, you know? So I think I think you're right. I think having that humility and particularly allowing that criticism within yourself, with your own understandings of what it is. Yeah, I think goes back to your point about like when we're 18, 25, we want a flat moral universe. The problem with that is that that's just not reality. And thankfully that's that's similarly not the scripture that we, that we share. Yeah. As Christians. So it troubles me that soldiers are the ones that kill Jesus. But in Catholic and Orthodox traditions, the Matthew and Mark, where there is the soldier is one that's pierced these two sides and another possibly another that then confesses to him, Son of God, before any apostle does Catholic in Orthodox churches, name that name those two people as one person, give them a name, Longinus Longinus has one of the four pillars surrounding Saint Peter's altar in Rome. And so Regina's to me, represents the incredible complexity of the story of Christian soldiers that we we simply cannot flatten them into one or the other. So when you when you're starting something like the Centurions Guild and you're working with different veterans groups, when you get back, like what are the complexities for returning vets who are politically active and also also advocating for a much more compassionate, caring reception than vets had after Vietnam? Because I think that's one of the places where, I mean, Matt knows the Fuller family. My grandpa was the chief master sergeant of the Air Force, and Hiram Fuller said that he had a hard time understanding Christian pacifists because they were the worst critics of soldiers coming back who just had their number called. And that's one of the things that yeah, go ahead. So I think part of what we're so what we're experiencing today, I think our generation saw all that stuff in Vietnam and people coming back and being just crapped on for things that they had no control over, like the soldier is not part of the soldiers not responsible for how the war ends. Soldiers, particularly when they're drafted, are essentially just cogs in a wheel. And that was actually a horrible reality. You got you get drafted, you go to training on your own, you go fly to Vietnam on your own. You're part of a unit you've never met for 12 months. You come back on your own and you come back to society that projected you. And so now I think we've swung depends on the other way where we want to. We want to make amends for that social reality by instead of spending on soldiers, now we almost drown them in positive affirmation. When you say thank you to a vet, it assigns positive moral value to their experience, and that may be justified, but it also bulldozes over the traumatic experiences that war inherently is. You know, that you can't get away from the fact that war leaves a moral mark on you. And so what I've tried to do is to caution pastors and other ministers away from saying from assigning moral value, positive or negative. So ways that we can just say thank you, welcome, welcome home, because it is good to be back. It's not as bad as it was in Vietnam. They're deploying entire brigades instead of individuals. I think that's actually a step forward. But on the other hand, the instant in churches, say on Memorial Day or Veteran's Day to invite people to stand, sometimes you're inviting people. You're asking people to recognize a service that for them was morally complicated that may have included in voluntarily killing noncombatants. The the example I give, which isn't my own, but what which was relayed to me in convoy is I was a convoy driver from my platoon sergeant, for whatever reason, had to have me driving. And we were told over and over and over again in convoys, you don't stop, you don't drop food. And so you see these starving kids on the side of the road and you already are you feel horrible for not being able to feed them. But you you set up false hopes that someone's going to come along and feed them every day. Furthermore, if they jump in front of your convoy, you can't stop because it may be a trap, it may be some kind of diversion. So your speed is in your head to keep going, keep going. One young man kept going when a kid jumped in front of his his Humvee and he had to in a split second, he had to decide between the child in front of his vehicle with the nine soldiers geared up in the back of his truck. And he had to make very difficult choices and live with the rest of his life. And on the one hand, maybe he did the right thing by preserving the lives of nine men in the back of the truck. But maybe there's no right answer. Maybe there is not a right moral answer in war and that you have to sit with these abuses ambiguities and listen over time to veterans share their stories on their own terms, instead of trying to project or put our narrative on to them of of their their monsters or their heroes. I think the danger that does is that by typecasting them as one or the other, they don't get to they don't get to self define. And it's much easier to have the memories that we have for those of us been to combat and call it call ourselves monsters than it is to believe that we're heroes given some experiences we have. So that's another reason that the middle ground is really important to us. Mm hmm. I wonder, how did you respond? Like, I know the culturally American Sniper raised a lot of these issues, and I was always amazed at how different people saw the movie completely differently. You know, either is like a a perfect affirmation of of what's going on to the best kind of explanation of the complexities of the guilt and things to to a sympathy film for nationalism like it's so how does a film like that that obviously was complicated enough to raise a million different things and one that became essentially like the mirror for all of us to throw our our junk up at because, you know, it made us able to look at something that I don't think many people have looked at. Right. Like you. That story you just told, not one we look at, there's hardly a way you could imagine someone choosing to go to war lightly, knowing this means thousands of our soldiers are going to make those decisions and have to live with them. Yeah, like so. So. So how? Like with something like American Sniper do you or begin a conversation that like, brings that complexity around rather than become the ideological goalposts for your opinion?

Yeah, I think the story of the American Sniper movie and the book and the whole constellation of stories around it, that there's as much about Chris Kyle as it was about the guy who killed them as the guy who killed them was also that who clearly struggled with psyche and combat trauma, and particularly as the church we wish we bear with those who are suffering. And Chris Kyle suffered. He had PTSD. He was beginning to recover. But so the guy that took his life, like, what do we do with that as Christians, as the church? How do we wrestle with the fact that the church has resources that help us think about that kind of complexity in terms of like Chris Kyle himself? I think, yeah, I think we want to make him one thing or the other, and that just gets at this, you know, this flat moral universe. Again. Chris Kyle, was this PTSD. That's not something you get over as quickly as I hear the movie suggested. I haven't seen it yet. I'm I'm only hesitant to say it because of the graphic scenes regarding PTSD of my own, but I am committed to seeing it. I want to know the story of that Christian soldier and how and whether and to what extent it fits in with the story of salvation, history and maybe a difficult fit. I mean, Joan of Arc is canonized, as is Maximilian's vessel. I think it's important that the church thinks about how we go about making saints big S and little s, you know, canonized saints. Those are the people that we we name as examples for our for our lives. And I don't think being a sniper is exemplary in terms of the story of salvation history. But I think that soldiers with trauma and how we think about them and how we construct theologies about war or peace, those rights should be determinative. I don't think that we should be drawing abstract propositions from from the air to suggest, oh, well, in order to justify war, in order to justify soldiering, this is what we need to think. I think that that is the purpose of the stories is actually much richer than that. Mm hmm. In and of good. Matt Well, I was just going to say one of the one of the things we talked about is this last conference and, and one thing that Logan and I talked about a lot and I talked about it with other people is how the church goes about understanding friend and foe, like who's enemy, who's friend. And and I think the way we talk about it, it could also be one way, the way the church describes this like we talked about, you know, praying for you know, praying for our vets in our service members on like Veterans Day, like around that, which is something that a lot of churches engage in. Even, you know, mainline liberal churches do this. And it's just something it's like usually it's like a line that's like thrown in and, you know, to it like a corporate prayer or whatever. But what does it look like to also then pray for, you know, Iraqi and Afghanistani? Yeah. Or, or terrorists or terrorists. Yeah. Or, you know, like, I mean, I think included being able to include all these people and not as like I think sometimes you get that in like a, a super like hippie, like church, like the one, you know, I'm, I'm going to be going to you can get in it feels like a slap in the face to our own members, you know, like, like it's a way of saying that and praying for it where it's like, well, screw you guys, because these, you know, we're these people over here. Look how involved we are. We pray for Osama bin Laden. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. But I think there's maybe a way to do that where you don't have to fall on either side. And that's up to the church, to each church to kind of wrestle with. And how do you begin how do you begin to do that? Well, think harming anyone? Yeah, well, one of the things that that made me think of is a situation at one of the church, the church I recently finished working at, and it was a rather large UCC church in California. So it in and you know, the discussion around the presence of the American flag had come up off and on and and what was so interesting is this time when the conversation around came up, the it came up not because some super enlightened peacenik was like, well let's have every flag of every country in the sanctuary or let's put the U.N. flag with it. But it was a vet who was returning, struggling with PTSD. And he said, I can't come up to the communion table when that's there. And he's like, I love my country. And if I get called back again, I'll serve. He he he just he's like, I can't do that. And communion at the same time. And and what was crazy. Was he? I, you know, I share this church leadership that powerful Let's move it will are you sure we should do that now now all of a sudden, like they're about not the person who just served who's coming back and should be welcomed to Christ table to try to figure out what just happened. But the person who hasn't served in a long time or has never served, and how their ideology might feel if it got moved. And to me like that moment, like just flipped the way we need to think as a church on its head, because the questions around symbols and language and what we do in our prayers and who we pray for, don't pray for again, like they get complicated when you actually have the conversation with the people in the room who are who are who represent the flag elsewhere. So I wonder to me what you mentioned this before we started talking that about combat theology and could you say a bit about that? Because I feel like there are so many questions that we waste time arguing about in church council meetings and that that don't make sense when a some reasonably informed person about the experience of actual war in combat begins to frame it because we would we protect our ideologies more than we protect reality. And our patriotism tends to be the how and what patriotism truly looks like tends to be what we're really protecting. Yeah, well, the idea for combat theology, just as a as a phrase similar to Christian soldier, like Christian soldier can be heard two very different ways. In conservative circles. It's redundant. I mean, yes, soldiers are Christians, Christians are soldiers, fine. But for pacifists, it's, you know, that is a mutually exclusive phrase that that is not appropriate to combat theology grew out of my growing sense that what we call theology about war is too often abstract and impersonal. Mm hmm. I sat through, I don't know how many classes at Duke, and it's at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where I just came from, where we talk about war and it's about proportionality. Last resort. But for Christians, war is about dismembered bodies, widows and orphans. They're about particularities. It's combat is is specific and personal, and it's flesh and blood. So I what I want to do, what Transfield is hopefully going to be doing is helping the church craft a marshall hermeneutic, you know, a way to interpret scripture and culture in a way that that embodies the middle ground between these the the scale between patriot and pacifist, because they're both appropriate parts of the spectrum, but they command inordinate and amounts of attention. I think a lot of theologians are very good, they're very helpful resources. But I think we should notice how many theologies are being written by by vets in terms of war. And I think if we believe what we believe about narration and embodiment and incarnation, we we should be constructing. Archaeology is about war based on the experiences of soldiers, not putting logical conclusions and propositions on to the experience of soldiers. And so that's what combat theology is about. It's about learning what it means to be specific and particular and personal as opposed to generic and, and universalizing theology. So so what are some general responses when you're kind of introducing this idea to the how or was he in Mafia? Oh, oh, I didn't know that was I I've heard rumors I don't think. Okay. Yeah, I, I tried to tell I tried to tell him that, that, you know, I was like I was like, you know, it was our duty to do people. I'm a just so the listeners know, I'm at Union Presbyterian Seminary and and dukes just right down the road from me. I live in Raleigh and and you know there's a listening trip for a while now and just hearing other people there's there's a there's a bit of an aura here at Duke, you know, surrounding our war. So anyway, well, we it's Duke. I thought it was the Mennonite Mafia. And so it's actually kind of it's it's interesting. So I was introduced to this idea of a mennonite mafia, which were a lot of law students, students at Duke and maybe it's our was in in that it's in effect at Horowitz's methodology has produced and that was a bunch of Mennonites at Duke who rode motorcycles and kind of looked down their noses that people came into class in uniform. Wait a minute. Mennonites that rode motorcycles? Yeah, Mennonites with motorcycles. Yeah. Is there a picture of this? No, that's why I wasn't sure if that was just, like, something that we talked about internally or if it's. But it may be some overlap. So I would. I want a picture of, of these and would go great with the post for this podcast. Yeah. I can imagine it though. I've the whole episode of hundred right there. Oh man. Motorcycles, Mennonites on motorcycles. All right. Sorry I that just brought a little smile to my face. Like, I wish they did something like that. But now they now, now it's been verified multiple attestation. I might I might be questioning your dreams, but it has come to me in particular for student vets at Duke. It's come to imply this a certain kind of a certain kind of belligerence, theological belligerence that disregards and I won't say this of how I see myself, but I think there is an instinct within pacifist circles to suggest, well, no military inherently evil or wrong or whatever, and therefore has nothing credible to contribute to the test of theology. I think that's absolutely wrongheaded. But it has had a practical effect. The Duke, near where I was here from 2010 to 2013, there were no less than two student vets mentioned, one in particular because I was closer with him. He had deployed, been discharged honorably. That started classes at Duke in a six month window and he was uncomfortable worshiping with Muslims, which we would sometimes do with a muslim center. And people caught wind of it and accused them of being intolerant. But it wasn't some logical thing. It was an it was an embodied experiential reaction within six months of being shot at by people that for the military are primarily narrated as this is, this is Islam, this is Muslim people as opposed to terrorists or opposed to radical whatever. And so he left because he felt that as a just warrior, he was he was looked down upon and his viewpoint was respected. And so the middle ground that I've tried to represent, I feel as though I've had to kind of fight an uphill battle in against not just our Washingtons or whatever, but also against patriots in the mainstream that suggest, well, pacifism has nothing to say because I probably lean more pacifist than I do any other way. But I think that our methodologies are very important. Stanley does carry himself and produce literature that does seem kind of belligerent. I don't think that what we need in terms in contemporary Christian culture, where we have a suicide of veterans that reaches 22 every day, one every 65 minutes, we don't need a bull in a china shop. We need theologians of grace that can speak to the middle ground, that can gently and reverently think through what it means to be a Christian soldier yesterday, today and tomorrow. And that's what's in terms of all this trying to be. We're trying to think through in narrative form, which is the Duke School of Theology, what it means that Christian faith and military service at times intersect. They are they are not absolutely mutually exclusive there. There is some overlap. And we want to find where that overlap sits. And we want to speak with people who are caught up in that overlap in ways that they can understand in ways that will not project our theological anxieties on them. So one way that we do that is we we recycle military language. And this was common in the early church, Evangelion, I mean, gospel, all these, all these Latin words were recycled by the church to mean very different things. So we have a newsletter. It's an trans guild that we call change of command and then change of command in our newsletter. If you go to some trans billboard, these last resources, you'll find that we have all of our newsletters on script and in our little logo. You can see in the EP it's a U-turn, and in there you can read Magnolia. And a change of command ceremony in the military is when one commander is changing places with the next incoming commander, and it taps the flag that the unit died on the flag. They both hold it for a second. Change of command ceremony. Once that I eyewitness, there's always this really weird pause where they would both hold the gate on like look at one another. Very awkward. But it says something about this pregnant pause that we live in today. Where God's kingdom is inaugurated has has come in the body and person of Jesus Christ. And yet we still are waiting for our earthly commander to let go of the flag. And so we're caught up in this middle ground that we want to respect and think through more critically. And stories And the phenomenon of Christian soldiers is a very fruitful way that we found to think about this kind of stuff. To have you tell me, which I was talking to a friend the other day, who he does a lot with helping churches, especially evangelical ones that kind of passed on liturgy, rites of passage and ritual. He's talking about putting together a post-war ritual for when soldiers come back. And what is it like to be reintroduced to the congregation because he's, you know, over a region for a mainline denomination and pastors regularly go, right, like, what do we what do we do? Like we either have the come now join the prophetic critique of the war or the hooray, we're glad you're home thing. What is a way or some ways you could imagine churches affirming the ambiguity, intensity of that type of experience and period of life and and in how do you affirm the person and say, bring your questions here, let us support you. That kind of. Yeah, I think it begins with that affirmation. Like Edward wrote War in the Soul, and he focuses in that book on Native American rituals. And I think that's I don't want to co-opt another culture's rituals without a lot of due diligence. But he does. He talks about bracing just like that ritual is is something that we're losing touch with in our culture, even in the church. And he and Karl Marlantes, who wrote what it's like to go to war, both propose that even in conduct, what if we had rituals that that undo the dehumanization that boot camp and combat usually entail? Some might look like at the end of a major fight, you go out and you bury the dead enemy and enemy beside enemy and recognize that that this really is something that is necessarily evil, but we don't have to lose our humanity over it. Marlantes also writes about he describes a mass for the dead that he finds helpful in the Catholic Church. But in terms of, like nondenominational or low church perspectives, I think there's a way that you can think through. So I think part of it begins with affirming those parts of someone's story that are that are morally right. And that's that's why the Soldier Saints have helped me. We can pass out we can separate protection from aggression. Protection is willing to give its life. Aggression is usually taking life. And there are parts of children that are defensive. There are parts that are offensive. And so I think that begins by identifying or differentiating between what's good about them and what's bad and highlighting what's good and mourning lamenting what's bad. And that includes something like confession, even if that's talking with a trusted friend, some kind of religious authority in your life over a beer about what you did. Because words have power. And the problem with violence is that it creates a silence. There's a young man locally that I think for the first time was able to tell someone me what it was like for him to kill somebody in Iraq. And he told me because of that noise in Iraq. And so we share a certain camaraderie that he doesn't share with his priest or pastor. He talked to me about after he had killed someone. They had a they had a gun. They were aiming it at them. He was sure of it, no doubt in his mind. As soon as he killed them, he felt the sense of elation because he had one. He kept his buddies from being hurt. They're taken out somebody who clearly represented a threat. But then within milliseconds, he felt the most crushing sense of shame you ever felt, because no matter how you cut it, you're taking the life of another human being, even if it's necessary. And so we have to be able to look at war for conservatives. We have to be able to look at war and identify those parts which are evil and which are morally corruptive and lament those things that we can call them necessary. That's fine, but don't ever call them good. You'll never call war blanketly good, because that's just not the history. That's not the witness of the church, but the stuff that's good. We should not overlook either. And we shouldn't emphasize too much. We don't make them heroes, but we figure out this was the beauty of the early Catholic catechists and priest that the Summa of Thomas and all the penitential that were aimed at priests taking confession so that they could say they could listen to someone and say, you did this, you didn't do that. This is the extent of that sin. And they had hierarchies and taxonomies of sin instead of like this either or You're either you're totally evil or you're totally innocent, which I think we get in the Protestant culture of our day. So I think I think that's what's most important to identifying the good from the bad and taking those seriously for what they are. The bad we lament and the good we we we support and respect. There were there are two other topics that I thought about, and I wonder what you think One is when it goes to men, young men, especially ones that aren't going to have be making significant amount of money. It's something that's successful currently, right? Some the markets deem that their skill or ability is worthwhile. You get meaning, purpose, value, career, all that kind of stuff. The the military, because of the market's kind of reduction over life, giving vocations is an option for people who are essentially masculine men without that, our economy no longer validates. Right. Blue collar labor is not a a single family income like I, i as a i was a student minister for 15 years, either teenagers or college students. And the number of people that I saw turn to the military, not out of a sense of a vocation or calling, but because they were a young man who wanted to do something, their mom, their preacher, their friend said, yes, you're somebody. I wonder how much of this how much of it is of what you're dealing with also contains a critique towards just the way kind of in a in our contemporary culture and economy men masculinity, this hyper desire of what happens when hormones go crazy and in dudes doesn't have a place, it can have a healthy outlet valve how they can't have a place in the system and that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Like so. And I think Logan and I both fall into this category somewhat, but there's what we call the economic draft in a sense. For me it was I mean, I think of them an awful lot of money. I was in school state, I was screwing around, messing up. I need to do something. I need to take a break. And I wanted to do something that was structured and frankly, that give me money for school and hence the Air Force Reserve. They gave me an awful lot of money. I think Logan's story is kind of similar, maybe. And so I think you're right like that. It's a huge issue. And I think any conversation that the church has and we talked about this explicitly the other day, really focused on this at one point talking about the structural there's there's the personal experience of military service members who are at war and the moral implications therein. But there's also if you're going to say that you care, like, for instance, like at a a Patriot Church is what we call it, you might hear the slogan you support the troops. And it's like this nameless. Like like, what does that mean? It's completely hypothetical. It's not embodied in the least bit. And what it turns ends up being is like thinking, yeah, thinking service members do not so and, and like I told a story about how I mean it's funny because we laughed about this the other day I told a story about how I was going on to a drill weekend. I was in uniform and already my meals are being paid for by by the government. I was I was in the drill again.

And I, like, leave this small barbecue place in eastern North Carolina, one that I stopped that frequently. And and and I went to go pay my bill. And they were like, oh, no, the guy who came before you paid it already. And I was like, in the you know, so on the one hand mean, obviously, like I want to accept gifts that are given to me. So but at the same time, I was like, well, first of all, he's already paid for it because, you know, his tax dollars and all that stuff.

But then second thing I was like, is that like if I really needed that kind of support, that kind of like economic support and whatever like that, like to me that was just, I mean, someone paying for your meal and then like, I mean, on the one hand it is a nice thing, but on the other hand is that is that real support? Is that really supporting you? Like if you really care about the troops, you know, then yes, care about them personally, but also men. We have to care about the circumstances that led to me or anyone else joining the military first of all, that we felt it necessary or or a good option or maybe the only viable option. And secondly, we have to deal with like the, you know, the polity ex around the geopolitics surrounding why this particular conflict was necessary to begin with, why, you know, so I think any any kind of conversation that the church is having about how to minister to and accept and include and learn from military members in veterans. You also have to talk about the structural social stuff. And that's I mean, really, that's like that's my my big thing. So in my focus, thinking about political theology, like, you know, we have to talk about economics, we have to talk about it, because the truth is, in Southwest Philadelphia, where I worked for a year as a social worker, you had a drug dealer on the corner, a drug dealer on this corner, a recruiter on this corner, a drug dealer in this corner. And it's like and there is this sense. It's like, Man, those are my two kids. Yeah, that's it. Those are my two in which it how? I mean, what is the Mennonite Mafia think if those are the two you're picking from. Right. Like that's why I think a bit of it is a bit of the angst for especially upper middle class, overeducated Christians is like they've never had that like set down on someone and said, So here's here the options. And like the more times I talk to students, especially ones in rural North Carolina or in an inner city Los Angeles, where the options are, well, I have to join the Junior Police Academy or ROTC now. Otherwise I'm going to have to join a gang and then I'm going to have this job. And that means it's an illegal one. Or I can go ahead and sign up to be a part of police, military or something like that. And there just aren't other options available to them. And it seems to me that one of the things the church could do is, is one, to address the systemic issues around that, but also recognize that there are a lot there. There are group of men with lots of energy and angst and identity issues that the system is no longer giving a healthy place to find their vocation and serve and find other options for them. There's no need that the only place you can get an education and spend four years community building and learning to have structured relationships involves a gun like it could also involve distributing food or education and things like that. But I think that's one of the mistakes that I've encountered with pacifists, is that they assume that the military is one homogenous thing where in fact there's four different branches, however many specialties within each branch. That's why that's another reason why I have some difficulty with the whole support. The troops thing is, though, that the troops identify as something at all like coherent, but like for me. So my difficulty is that I still don't want to be a hypocrite and I just complete it, right? Well, it just completes my third degree on the G.I. Bill. So I, I cannot look anybody in the eye who comes to me and says, I want to go to college and this is my best option. I cannot say don't do it because I just did it. But I think the the other problem that that we face, like you said, that these young men want to do something with meaning. And we put so much meaning into the military and there's a lot of money there. So you've got two big reasons to join. I was approached actually at a mennonite convention in 2012 in Pittsburgh. I gave myself and others interns Guild member gave a talk at one of the youth meetings, you know, maybe a couple hundred people. And I was approached by several young men in the course of 24 hours, each of which each of whom said to me, You know, I want to protect and defend and I want to do something with adventure. And my congregation, well, feels like they'll disown me if I join the military. And so that on the one hand, that real to me that that pacifist communities don't always carry over the stories and the reasons for their being pacifist in ways that young people can understand. But secondly, it made me think like, oh man, what should I tell this person? Because I literally just told them, don't go in the military because I'm a hypocrite. I thought to myself, Well, you want adventure, You don't want a weapon I said, Well, become a firefighter. You jump out of airplanes if you want. You don't have to have a weapon. You get to be in a place of danger. People love you. Women want to sleep with you. There's lots of those jobs in California. Yeah, Yeah, exactly. It's not like that anytime soon. Yeah, but we can be creative thinking about ways to make men and young women feel vocationally fulfilled in the church and elsewhere. But I think that's a really important question. Like, what do we do with people who want to have lives of meaning? But the military seems like the only option. Mm hmm. So the last question I thought it was really how does your conversation and experience as a Christian soldier, a Christian or vet and this kind of thing, how do what kind of advice would you give for soldiers who are relating to non-Christians? Right. Like where you talked about of is centralizing Islam as the enemy when there are thousands of Muslim soldiers in the United States military, part of the the Bill of Rights. And one of the things I think is pretty cool we do is no matter who, whatever your religion or lack of religion, you get the support of your own clergy. Like no matter you are like things like that.

The there's a sense that structurally the military actually recognizes the diversity and plurality of religion with a dignity that a lot of the soldiers have expressed when talking to me that isn't there on the ground. So what is it like to be a soldier in a pluralist army? But so much of Christian? Yeah, I for me, for me is the the I think because because I very much have been in a world of many, if not most of my friends not being religiously affiliated at all, you know, being in kind of a artsy kind of crowd, you know, and, and so I think for me, a lot of my identity, friction that came was it might have I might have experienced just as much between just being a Christian and being in that environment. I think there's something that we can learn as Christians and how we appropriate and if I can call this the various uniforms we wear in life, the various kind of scenarios and groups that we find ourselves in, I think in terms of we're specifically talking about military service. And so it's interesting because, you know, I found that in the military, more so than many realms of society, you're quite you you're you're you're forced to be in a very pluralistic way and quite intimately in my if I'm a student at some college, it's easy for me to get into my own cultural ghetto to only hang out with people that kind of believe similar things to me. Believe, you know, in four and a half point Calvinist Bible study, right? If you go all the way on the fifth, it's still got that L cut out anyways. So like you, I think you have it's, it's interesting when you're talking about being a Christian military member and so you're talking about having a moral voice. I mean, really, that's a lot of what we're doing and having some kind of if you can call it witness to how how we relate to the military, how we can maybe do the military better, do it in a better way, in a more and more, you know, maybe conscientious way, if I could use that term. And and I to me, it seems like we just need more of that. We need more of that from the church. Because if aren't in the church, if you're religiously unaffiliated, which I think more and more that's what's happening. But also if you're a muslim, if you're a Jew, you have assumptions about what it means to be a Christian, a Christian soldier. You know, I mean, there are a lot of assumptions. And I think to be able to say, no, actually, you know, this is what it looks like for me. And I am a Christian and a military service member or a veteran or whatever. So I think that's one thing. I think it's when we use that word witness, I mean, that's such a complicated term, but I think you can have this really profound kind of story that you tell and that you show and and that, you know, you know, I think that could really significant to both the church and and to the military. It can really help to shape shape. The military changed the military changed the church in some profound ways. So I struggle with the interfaith thing just because I don't think it's a strength of mine. I feel so certainly has its way of saying the call for modest proposal for peace and said that the Christians of the world stop killing one another and outsiders. That sounded incredibly tribalistic like it don't look like that. But what he wanted to relate is like, if we can't get this right, nothing else will be coherent. Like, let's begin here and, let the rest of it follow. That's why I think the Golden Rule is it's helpful like we do to other people, what we would have do unto ourselves.

But more importantly, and maybe more specifically, like we we do not know who we are apart from humanity, Christianity does not exist in a vacuum any more than I do. And so if the rest of the world is looking at a Christian nation and saying, you're belligerent, you're overbearing, you're violent, then that says something about what we actually are.

And it was helpful for me when I was in Iraq.

I was I was an outsider because I was an artilleryman within an infantry unit and because I was the red haired stepchild when it came time to house the interpreter, he was placed with me. And so for six or seven months, whenever we were in one location, I would I would bunk up with the interpreter. And it was interesting listening to him, and I don't know if I had any expectations beforehand of Muslims or Iraqis, but as it was humanizing to hear, like he went to university, he had a degree in engineering. He worked as a carpenter for a little while before he became an interpreter. And I started thinking one of things I started thinking in combat that made me start questioning the structure and the structure of meaning that we give to war. I started wondering, Oh man, what would be life like if, like the Chinese had invaded America and I was enlisted as a Chinese interpreter and I'm walking around watching Chinese people shoot as Americans? Like how how shit. Like, imagine that for a second. And that's why I think like the community thing is important we need to listen to our our neighbors and faith. I mean, if the church is being these things, we need to take that for what it is and just consider how it is that we fail to be Christians. One of my favorite passages, I hate favorite passages, but I have one one of a couple and that's that. You know, the world will know Christians by their love. I don't always know I'm a Christian. I'll trust that when people tell me that I'm loving them, that somehow I'm in line with what it means to be a Christian. And that was one of those things that made me that forced me to think about violence and my part in it both directly. I could not be an artillery man, but also indirectly, I have to recognize that I'm complicit in the system and I have to think creatively about ways to interrupt that system in whatever ways I can.

I don't I don't know if that's interfaith or not. I mean, it makes it make sense to me why and and like, I mean, I feel like the even the story about the translator is one of those where your own experience and things helps reframe the way we'd even want to address and think through the questions theologically. Normally they're just so abstract. So yeah, thank you tons for joining us and staying on on the line. And Matt, it's always good to see your face. Yeah, sorry we didn't get into any any high school stories. Well, we'll have to do that again another time. But next time.

Oh, awesome. Thank you so much, Logan. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been really good listening and chatting.