Paleo Protestant Pudcast

With the beginning of a new academic year, Pucast co-hosts, Anglican Miles Smith, Lutheran Korey Maas, and Presbyterian D. G. Hart talk about their understanding of vocation as historians and the degree to which Christian faith makes a difference for teaching and research. The new core curriculum at Covenant College comes up a few times but does not receive the attention it deserves. One of the co-hosts also brings up the case of Christian executioners and whether scholarship is any easier to Christianize than carrying out capital punishment. Don't worry. The conversation is tame, no reason to hide the women and children.

Listeners will not hear a lot of church commentary on this recording because the co-hosts, Anglican Miles Smith, Lutheran Korey Maas, and Presbyterian D. G. Hart let their hair down (those who have it) to talk about summer activities and a little ecclesiastical news. Because it is 2026, topics included how we observed July Fourth, whether we saw and enjoyed Christopher Nolan's summer hit movie, "The Odyssey," and why Roman Catholic countries were in the finals of the World Cup championship. To keep the pudcast serious, the co-hosts also discussed news about clergy shortages in our respective communions and the challenges of encouraging young men to consider a calling to the ministry of word and sacrament. Inspiration for that non-fun part of the episode came from this article.

This topic is one that is on the surface too political for confessionalism Protestantism (which is more about church life than society). But Christian nationalism is not only trending but a natural for confessional communions, for two reasons. The first is that Lutherans, Anglicans, and Presbyterians all grew up in Christian "nations"; our churches began during a period of European history sometimes called confessional because each state sponsored a church that had its own confession. The second good reason is that the Presbyterian Church in America, a confessional Protestant communion, produced a report on Christian nationalism.

With the topic fair game for confessional Protestants, co-hosts, Anglican Miles Smith, Lutheran Korey Maas, and Presbyterian D. G. Hart discussed the PCA's preliminary report (received for study at the recent General Assembly). But the pudcasters did so with the added twist of discussing Miles Smith's response to the report. In what might have appeared to be a hunt without any Lutheran dogs, Korey Maas had plenty to say not only because of Miles Smith's early departure from the recording.

Among the subtopics discussed were natural law, the magistrate's basis for punishing evil and rewarding good conduct, and the church's capacity to speak on political matters.

Listeners will be very surprised to learn - spoiler alert - that the pudcasters answered every single question that anyone has about Christian nationalism. (Disclaimer for Christian nationalists who struggle with humor: this last sentence is a joke.)

The co-hosts, Anglican Miles Smith, Lutheran Korey Maas, and Presbyterian D. G. Hart return after a long semester to talk about eschatology among Lutherans, Anglicans, and Presbyterians. Some listeners may be surprised to learn that amillennialism is the ho-hum mainstream view among Lutherans (compared to Presbyterians where it generates much excitement and zealous adherence). Among Protestants of British descent, Anglicans and Presbyterians, attitudes toward the conversion of Jews and the creation of Israel may explain the pre- and post-mill variants.

Later in the conversation the topic shifts to the eschatology of Christian Nationalists thanks to an article from forty years ago that compared the apocalyptic pre-millennialism of Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth to the rise of a catastrophism among environmentalists. That article by Michael Barkun, appeared in the Fall 1983 issue of Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal under the title, "Divided Apocalypse: Thinking about the End in Contemporary America." In the article, when Barkun describes two strategies among secular apocalypticists, he could have been describing tendencies among today's Christian nationalists. He wrote:

"The human desire for a morally ordered world is powerful; when apparently unmerited suffering occurs, explanations are generated which presuppose that the suffering has moral significance. . . . In the absence of a coherent explanation for unmerited suffering, secular apocalular apocalypticists tend to adopt two strategies. On the one hand, they may ascribe the suffering to the machinations of small but powerful groups, whose control of economic, military, or other resources permits them to place the fate of others in jeopardy.... On the other hand, world destruction may be viewed as the unintended consequence of human actions that are ill-informed, ill-timed, or inept. According to this view, the victims of world destruction are at least partially to blame for their fate, since had they behaved differently, they might have prevented it."

It is a fascinating article if only because it took the temperature of Christian and secular millennialism from forty years ago. The other reason for reading it is to consider Christian nationalism, not from whether it's amill or post-mill. The real question is the degree to which Chrisitan nationalism implicitly traffics in the catastrophism that has pervaded American activism, journalism, and social media for the last decade.

The pudcast returns with consideration of confessional Protestant piety in relation to the purity culture that ran in evangelical circles during the 1990s and 2000s. The co-hosts, Anglican Miles Smith, Lutheran Korey Maas, and Presbyterian D. G. Hart discuss in particular two recent defenses of an evangelical subculture that developed in reaction to a society that pastors and parents thought was hostile to serious Christian devotion. Trevin Wax's "We Were Jesus Freaks" and Samuel D. James' "The New Purity Culture" not only defend a form of separation from the cultural mainstream (without becoming Amish), but document a form of piety that ran strong in certain sectors of evangelicalism and may or may not dovetail with Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Anglican forms of devotion.

Don't let that click bait fool you. Confessional Protestants have been in the news -- not for being named in the Epstein files. A Lutheran Church Missouri Synod district president has been charged with possessing child pornography, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland resigned for failing to protect church members from abuse, and Presbyterians in the United States have excommunicated a minister for holding to and promoting kinism. And you thought Anglicans had it rough.

The co-hosts, Anglican Miles Smith, Lutheran Korey Maas, and Presbyterian D. G. Hart put their heads together virtually to discuss and comment on these regretable developments.

Listeners beware. Jeffrey Epstein is never mentioned.

We were down a man this time. Our Anglican co-host, Miles Smith, was on the road which left Korey Maas (Lutheran) and D. G. Hart (Presbyterian) trying to maintain pudcasting standards. We had help from our colleague in the English Department, Jason Peters, who grew up Christian Reformed and switched to Eastern Orthodoxy. We talked about the various strands of Orthodoxy in America, what the appeal may be to young men, and why confessional Protestants realign with the Orthodox Church.

For perspective on the current appeal of Orthodoxy, see this piece from the New York Times. The movement of some Lutherans into Orthodoxy about twenty-five years ago was related to the so-called Finnish interpretation of Luther.

As always, we depend heavily on the production abilities of the great Southern Presbyterian, @presbycast.

This discussion among the co-hosts, Korey Maas (Lutheran), Miles Smith (Anglican), and D. G. Hart (Presbyterian), has almost nothing to do with Thanksgiving but it does resume the last one about the Anglican Church in North America. Miles Smith provides an update on the ongoing efforts to resolve conflict over allegations of sexual misconduct by Archbishop Steve Wood. He also comments on the Matthew Wilcoxen proposal for reforming ACNA. Disputes in the Presbyterian Church in America over women as deaconesses and or shepherdesses opened a window on the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod led by Korey Maas.

All of this may sound like too much detail. But if you believe God is in the details, you should be fine.

The bumper music for this episode, chosen by our Presbyterian producer, comes from the 1964 comic rendition of an Anglican homily by Alan Bennett ("My Brother Esau, Beyond the Fringe"). The subject discussed by pudcast co-hosts, Korey Maas (Lutheran), Miles Smith (Anglican), and D. G. Hart (Presbyterian) may be the same -- Anglicanism -- but the approach is not comedic. Anglicans around the world have been in the news, from the appointment of a new (and female) archbishop of Canterbury, to the decision by a prominent Baptist historical theologian to join ACNA.

All the recent news deserves way more than roughly 55 minutes of banter. But with the help of our resident Anglican, Miles Smith, we learned about the choppy water in which the bishops, clergy, and laity find themselves.

A recent article announced a shift, some call it vibe, others a mood, that is making Christianity more acceptable or less appealing than it used to be in Aaron Renn's "negative world." This is related to a question of what influence churches have on a society and its culture. Aaron Renn interviewed several leaders among the effort to take back the mainline Protestant denominations (from a fall that everyone acknowledges but does not necessarily measure). One of the reasons for looking to these churches instead of the Presbyterian Church in America, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, or the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, is that the mainline denominations have more status than the sideline alternatives, and therefore are more likely to promote Christianity beyond the church to the culture more generally.

The pudcast co-hosts, Korey Maas (Lutheran), Miles Smith (Anglican), and D. G. Hart (Presbyterian) discuss these matters, even with some attention to the church's influence on the Roman empire and much later on American society during the early national period. In the latter case, Ross Douthat's comments in an interview (read in the recording) about low-church Protestantism's influence on America are yet another aspect of Christianity's cultural influence.