Can conservatism — even sincere, well-intentioned social conservatism — actually conserve anything if it is severed from Christ? That is the provocative question at the heart of this episode of Out of the Question, as Andrea Schwartz welcomes Mike Groenewold, a writer and board member of Freedom Defence Canada, who has been deeply shaped by the writings of R.J. Rushdoony and the tradition of Christian Reconstruction.

Mike traces his journey from a Dutch-immigrant Christian Reformed upbringing in western Canada, through years of missionary work and vocational restlessness, to a transformative encounter with the biblical world-and-life view — first through Dr. Glenn Martin's teaching that "God applies to all of life," and eventually through Rushdoony's *Institutes of Biblical Law*, which he describes as the most serious engagement with God's law-word he had ever encountered. That intellectual and spiritual foundation now fuels his writing at Freedom Defence Canada, where he is pressing a pointed thesis: a Christless conservatism will accomplish nothing. Without the crown rights of Jesus over every sphere, conservatism becomes a hollow shell — unable to define what it conserves, unable to withstand the evils of the age, and ultimately unable to offer genuine hope.

The conversation ranges across adoption and providence, the sacred-secular divide that plagues evangelicalism, the call to be ambassadors rather than accommodators, and why faithfulness — not measurable success — is the standard by which Christians ought to evaluate their work. Whether you are in Canada, the United States, or anywhere the church is tempted to retreat from cultural engagement, this episode offers a bracing reminder that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, and our task is simply to bear witness to that truth.

From 45s to streaming, music has always shaped culture. In this episode, we explore how song lyrics reflect and influence worldviews — from the hopeful folk songs of the '60s to today's darker themes. We discuss why words matter more than the beat, the deep heritage of ancient Christian hymns, and how believers can think critically about the music they consume. Plus: what would dominion-oriented music look like today?

If Christ is truly King of kings and Lord of lords, why does so much of the modern church operate as though His reign is deferred, limited, or irrelevant to the world beyond personal piety? When Chalcedon's founder R.J. Rushdoony wrote that "the church could not hope in time to rule the world if it could not rule itself," critics objected not to the church's failure at self-governance but to the very idea that Christians have any business exercising dominion in the world at all. That reaction reveals just how deeply the Great Christian Surrender has taken root.

In this episode, Andrea Schwartz and Chalcedon vice president Martin Selbrede unpack his essay "The Great Christian Surrender" from the July 2026 issue of *Arise and Build*. Selbrede argues that the church has embraced defeat through multiple avenues — deferring Christ's kingship to a future return, restricting His lordship to the spiritual realm, or attempting to advance the kingdom through humanistic power grabs. Each of these errors discounts the omnipotent work of the Holy Spirit and replaces the biblical model of faithful obedience with either passive resignation or worldly power politics. Drawing on Zechariah's vision of smiths and artisans who quietly confound the enemies of God, the example of John Cotton in New England, and the Puritan unleashing of the priesthood of all believers, Selbrede makes the case that kingdom advancement comes not by might or political power but by the Spirit working through faithful families and individuals who refuse to limit the Holy One of Israel.

The conversation presses into what it means to be "more than conquerors" — not merely defeating opponents but transforming former enemies into willing citizens of Christ's kingdom through conversion. This is a call to reject the council of despair preached from too many pulpits and to take up the proper weapons of reconstruction: faithfulness to God's Word, generational investment, and confidence in the Spirit's world-transforming power. Listen and be challenged to ask whether you are conquering or surrendering.

Is sharing the gospel primarily a matter of technique and theological sophistication, or is it rooted in an urgent conviction that God places within His people? Many sincere believers disqualify themselves from evangelism, claiming they lack the training or temperament. But what if the most effective witnesses are simply those who know the authority of Scripture and refuse to apologize for it?

In this episode, Andrea Schwartz talks with Josh, one half of the social media couple behind "Free Indeed," about how he and his wife Tatiana use short-form video to teach Scripture unapologetically to audiences with little to no biblical background. Josh shares his journey as a pastor's kid who wrestled through a season of prodigal living, and how his wife — who came to faith with no religious background, reading Genesis through Leviticus — became one of the most dedicated students of God's Word he knows. Together they discuss how the internet functions much like the Roman roads did for the early church: a tool that can be used for evil, but also a providential means for the spread of the gospel. The conversation moves naturally into parenting, the danger of prioritizing external compliance over heart-level faithfulness, and why the law was never designed to save but to reveal God's standard.

Whether you're a parent concerned about raising covenant children, a believer hesitant about evangelism, or someone thinking through how technology serves the Kingdom, this episode offers practical wisdom grounded in biblical conviction. Listen and be encouraged that faithfulness — not polish — is what God uses.

What happens to a civilization when its people no longer have roots? When families relocate for career advancement, when high-density housing developments replace forests and familiar neighborhoods, and when the very concept of "home" is reduced to wherever the next paycheck takes you — something essential to human society is being lost. In this episode of Out of the Question, Andrea Schwartz and Charles Roberts explore the accelerating destruction of localism and what it means for Christians who take seriously the biblical structure of family, community, and civil government.

The conversation traces a sobering historical pattern: from the Roman and Babylonian practice of uprooting conquered peoples to break their loyalties, to the post-Civil War centralization that transformed a voluntary union of sovereign states into a consolidated national identity, to today's globalist agenda that seeks to erase distinct peoples, cultures, and — above all — any vestige of biblically grounded Christian civilization. Roberts and Schwartz argue that this isn't accidental. The erosion of local identity serves both ideological ends (the replacement of God's law with statist authority) and financial ones (developers and planners who profit from population churn without regard for the communities they displace). The biblical model, by contrast, emphasizes rootedness: God gave Abraham a promised land as a permanent home, organized Israel in layers of local self-government, and commissioned His people to disciple distinct nations — not to dissolve them into a managed global monoculture.

The episode is a call to re-engage with the local — to know your mayor, attend your city council meetings, strengthen your family as the foundational institution of society, and resist the comfortable assumption that centralized authority is inevitable. Drawing on R.J. Rushdoony's works *The Nature of the American System* and *This Independent Republic*, Schwartz and Roberts offer both a historical framework and a practical challenge: if Christians won't build and defend local community under the lordship of Christ, someone else will gladly fill the vacuum. Listen and consider what faithfulness looks like where you actually live.

What actually makes someone qualified to teach, write, counsel, or advance the kingdom of God? In a culture obsessed with credentials and certifications, many Christians find themselves paralyzed — convinced they need one more degree, one more course, or someone else's permission before they can act on the callings God has placed before them. This episode of Out of the Question tackles the question head-on: Is the credentialing system always the biblical model, or has it become a barrier to obedience?

Andrea and Charles trace the issue from multiple angles — the autodidactic genius of R.J. Rushdoony, who was better read than many of his university-educated peers before he ever entered college; the example of Van Til endorsing Rushdoony's summation of presuppositional apologetics despite Rushdoony never having formally studied under him; and the biblical precedent of fishermen-turned-apostles and figures like Esther and Joseph who stepped into unprecedented roles without prior training. Andrea shares her own journey from homeschool mother to author, CD producer, and podcast host — none of which came through formal credentialing, but all of which emerged from need, desire, and faithful development. The hosts argue that the Great Commission is a summons, not a suggestion, and that the Holy Spirit credentials those who respond to it.

If you've ever felt the fire to teach, write, or serve the kingdom but have been waiting for someone to declare you "qualified," this conversation will challenge your assumptions. The hosts don't dismiss the value of training — they distinguish between genuine competence and the idol of institutional gatekeeping. Listen and consider: What summons have you been ignoring?

James 4:1 asks a question most Christians apply only to personal quarrels: "From whence come wars and fightings among you?" But what if that same diagnostic — that conflicts are rooted in sinful passions and lusts — applies not just to family disputes but to the wars between nations that have defined the modern era? In this episode of Out of the Question, Andrea Schwartz and Pastor Charles Roberts argue that Christians who refuse to apply biblical categories to geopolitical conflict are left defenseless against manufactured narratives and engineered crises.

The conversation traces a pattern from the interpersonal to the international: just as a parent asks "who instigated this?" when children fight, so Scripture demands we ask who benefits when nations go to war. Drawing on historical examples — from the circumstances surrounding Pearl Harbor to the pretexts for Germany's invasion of Poland, to the uncomfortable reality that the same financial interests often fund opposing sides of a conflict — Schwartz and Roberts make the case that wars redistribute wealth and power in predictable ways, and that those who profit from conflict have every incentive to perpetuate it. The problem, they argue, is not merely ignorance but a truncated theology that reduces the Bible to a personal salvation manual and cedes public life to autonomous human reasoning.

The episode challenges listeners to move beyond both naive patriotism and cynical resignation. If Psalm 2 tells us that rulers conspire together against the Lord, and Psalm 127 tells us that unless the Lord builds the house the laborers work in vain, then the Christian's responsibility is not to retreat into pietism but to bring every institution — family, church, and state — under the governance of God's law. Listeners are pointed to Rushdoony's commentary on James, his *Christianity and the State*, and the *Faith in Action* and *Informed Faith* essay collections as resources for thinking more deeply. This is a conversation for anyone ready to ask the questions behind the questions.

God's love is not unconditional, and pretending otherwise has gutted the church. Andrea Schwartz sits down with Mark Rushdoony to trace how the modern gospel of unconditional love and unconditional forgiveness collapses into antinomianism, manipulative altar calls, and a Christianity with no kingdom and no game plan. They press into covenant as a relationship on God's terms, the abandoned doctrine of repentance, the prophets' indictment of social injustice as covenant-breaking, and why the church cannot expect blessing while it actively rejects God's law. Theonomy, they argue, is the unavoidable issue. Don't miss this conversation.

unconditional love, antinomianism, theonomy, covenant theology, biblical law, repentance, Mark Rushdoony, Chalcedon, Arminianism, Christian worldview, biblical ethics, kingdom of God

Is "God Loves You" the Whole Story? Ep. 391 (guest Mark Rushdoony)

Job's three friends were eloquent, well-intentioned, and theologically active — and God was angry with every word they spoke. Their error was not ignorance of true facts but the misuse of true facts: they assembled correct observations into false conclusions, diagnosed their sufferer through a theology too small to contain the real God, and offered comfort that the text calls worthless. Job named them physicians of no value. This episode begins there and asks whether the same diagnosis applies to the counselors — personal, ecclesiastical, and civil — that surround us today.

Chalcedon Vice President Martin Selbrede joins host Andrea Schwartz to discuss his essay "Physicians of No Value," published in the May 2026 Chalcedon Foundation newsletter. The conversation moves from the personal dynamics of biblical counsel to the sweeping failure of civil and economic institutions to diagnose and treat man's actual condition. The error in both cases is identical: defining man's problems as metaphysical rather than moral. When the root cause is misidentified as structural, racial, political, or systemic rather than as sin, every proposed remedy worsens the patient. Price controls, psychological reductionism, the doctrine of selective depravity — these are all band-aids on compound fractures.

R.J. Rushdoony stands in this episode as the model of what a physician of value looks like: one who correctly identifies sin as the diagnosis, traces it to its moral root, and prescribes the return to God's law as the only course of treatment with any historical precedent of success. For those weary of watching institutions and churches reach for the wrong remedies, this conversation names the problem at the level where it actually lives.

The Ascension of Christ is observed on the church calendar forty days after Easter, yet for most evangelicals it passes with barely a mention. What does it mean that the risen Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father — and why does it matter whether we believe he rules from there now or only after some future return? This episode, recorded on Ascension Day 2026, takes up a doctrine that has been quietly evacuated of its meaning in much of modern Christianity, leaving behind an impoverished understanding of Christ's authority, the church's mission, and the future of the world.

Host Andrea Schwartz and Pastor Charles Roberts argue that the neglect of the Ascension is not an innocent oversight. When Christ declared "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," he was not describing a future state — he was announcing a present fact. The Ascension is the installment of the King: his session at the Father's right hand is active, continuous, and comprehensive. The eschatology of defeat so common in popular evangelicalism — the expectation that the church should shrink rather than advance, that things must get worse before a rescue — is directly traceable to a loss of this doctrine and its implications.

For those who understand Christian Reconstruction, the Ascension is the theological foundation of everything: there are no crown rights to proclaim, no Great Commission to obey, no civilization to build — without a reigning King. This episode calls Christians to recover what earlier generations knew: that Christ ascended not to escape the world but to rule it, and that his church has been commissioned to make that rule visible in every area of life.