Andrew Isker is the pastor of 4th Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, MN, plus the author of “Christian Nationalism” with GAB Founder Andrew Torba, and the outstanding book “The Boniface Option.”
He’s also one of the most outspoken evangelical leaders today.
I hope you enjoy our massive 4.5-hour LEGEND-TIER conversation, wherein we discussed everything ever. Including:
The Origins of Boniface Option
The Third Rail of Evangelicalism
What Paul's Writing Assumes
Church As the Caboose of Culture
The Enemy of Every Christian Parent
God's Blessing of the Barbell
The Point of the Entire Bible
And Why You're Not Angry Because You're Fat
For more information about Andrew Isker, please visit:
https://contramundumpodcast.com
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE
FULL MONOLOGUE
As many of my listeners know, I spent four years traveling overseas between 2016 and 2020. During that time, from the other side of the equator, and then the other side of the Pacific Ocean, I got to watch America go through all the convulsions of the Trump presidency from a distance.
By that time, I already understood who Trump was and who he wasn’t. He might not have had the best taste in associates, and probably had a little issue with his ego, but he certainly wasn’t “literally Hitler,” nor was he even all that orange.
But I did know that he and the millions of Americans who supported him had a sense that the country they loved and treasured was either being eaten away or was already gone. And that, for all his obvious flaws, he was courageous enough to lead people to do something about it, to the unending scorn of the media. Hence the term “the deplorables.”
So, I got to watch this process unfold in my home country while traveling through other nations like Peru, Colombia, New Zealand, Mongolia, China, India, and many others.
And while watching this, I noticed something strange. It seemed that in many of the countries I visited, their own cultures were being eaten away as well. The first sign that something was wrong struck me in September 2016, in a small rural town in a South American country, which shall remain nameless. The town was inundated with piles of plastic trash, just everywhere. The trash hadn’t been imported from America and dumped there, either. This was THEIR plastic trash, because the wrappers and packaging had Spanish words on them. Roadside stands, basically just wooden shacks, had Latin versions of the same bright-colored candy wrappers you’d find at a local Circle K or 7-11. I was literally hours outside of any major city on a local bus, in the middle of nowhere, and yet it seemed modernity had arrived long before I did.
This same pattern seemed to repeat itself wherever I went. Japan is flooded with American chain restaurants, and their own. China has fewer chains but certainly its own massive consumerism in the major cities. Get on Google Maps right now and look up the Altai Mountain range in Mongolia. It is literally in the center of the Asian continent. You cannot get more into the middle of nowhere than that, and I saw similar consumerism, though on a much smaller scale in that region. And as anyone who’s visited Thailand or Bali can tell you, parsing out authentic Thai or Balinese culture from the intensely consumerist, materialist conditions can be difficult, if not impossible.
“What is going on?” I wondered.
Sometime in 2018, it clicked: something nameless and faceless was eating these nations, from the inside out, like a rot. It presents itself as novel, convenient, comfortable, and even friendly. But it’s actually insatiable.
Most in the world look at these trends and apply them to America. They call them Westernization, or sometimes American cultural imperialism. But I was from America. And what I was watching in my home country had nothing to do with all that. In fact, Trump and MAGA were the antithesis of that phenomenon.
And the word they used to describe it was “globalism.”
So as Trump and MAGA were pushing back against globalism, I was actually traveling around the globe and could see the same phenomenon they hated firsthand in my face, in places where it shouldn’t be.
That’s when I realized that these trends have nothing to do with America or the West. They are not our traditions.
They only appear that way because whatever is eating the world ate America first.
Which brings me to my guest this week. His name is Andrew Isker, and he’s the pastor of 4th St. Evangelical Church in Waseca, MN, the co-author with Andrew Torba of Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations, and finally the author of the outstanding book, The Boniface Option.
More than any other Christian author I’ve read, Andrew has identified the phenomenon I saw with my own eyes.
He calls it Trashworld. And while he didn’t coin the term, if you ask me, he’s the one who made it stick.
In the preface of The Boniface Option, he writes, “We are already in the midst of decades of social engineering. The society we have is already an anti-human one. It is already designed to remove from you all that made life meaningful and fulfilling. It has torn you from people and place. It is designed to make you isolated, lonely, and above all else, totally docile. Throughout the pages of this book, I use the term Trashworld to describe this dystopian society.”
Now, not everyone is a big fan of Andrew Isker, but I have to tell you: he’s right. We’ve been living in American Trashworld for years. If you’re Gen Z, you might not remember a time before it. But there are places in the world that I’ve been to, where the tentacles of Trashworld are just beginning to reach, and who, at least in 2016, had far less of an ability to put up a fight. Because affluence is seductive.
And once you see that for yourself, as I have, the productive and formerly self-sustaining local cultures of the world being literally devoured by plastic, high fructose corn syrup, and consumerism, there’s only one possible response.
It’s a word that Christians don’t like very much. It makes them feel uncomfortable because it involves them getting down into their bodies and feeling themselves as material beings on a physical planet with all kinds of icky attachments to things and people that it’s far easier to spiritualize than take responsibility for, isn’t it?
The word is hate, which Merriam-Webster describes as “to express or feel extreme enmity or active hostility.” And yes to that. But here’s Isker:
“To love a thing is to inherently hate its opposite. Indifference is the absence of love, not hatred. Where love is present, you will axiomatically have hatred of the object of that love’s opposite. If the Christian has a passionate love for the truth of God’s Word, the goodness of God’s justice, and the beauty of holiness, he will necessarily have an intense hatred of lies, injustice, and sin.”
And that captures it, because as uncomfortable as it is to acknowledge, there is something hateworthy out there. I came to Christ in part because I saw that evil was real, and I couldn’t get anyone out there in the religions of the world to talk to me about it. Christianity is the only world religion that does, in any sort of credible way.
So if evil exists, can we not hate it? If you’ve seen evil devouring the nations and souls of the world, like I have, can I not hate that? And if I see it devouring my country, my culture, and the souls of my countrymen as well, can I not then hate it? How about if it almost devoured me?
Because it did. And God delivered me from that. So this is personal.
And that’s what Andrew Isker touches on, the feeling that this institutionalized, industrialized evil isn’t just eating me, but you too. And your sons and daughters. Heck, even our parents and grandparents. Are we just going to sit idly by and play nice-nice because a schoolmarm preaching hippie Jesus fortune cookie platitudes told us to?
Or are we going to be men and speak directly into this wickedness, and rip it out, or really cut it down from the trunk on up, and try for something better?
You’re about to get a marathon 4.5-hour Ren of Men classic podcast with the answer.
In our conversation, Andrew and I discussed:
The Origins of The Boniface Option
The Third Rail of Evangelicalism
What Paul's Writing Assumes
Church As the Caboose of Culture
The Enemy of Every Christian Parent
God's Blessing of the Barbell
The Point of the Entire Bible
And Why You're Not Angry Because You're Fat
If you enjoy the Renaissance of Men podcast, thank you. Please leave us a 5-star rating on Spotify, plus a 5-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And share this episode or another one of your favorites with a friend.
If you’re new to the show, welcome. I release new episodes related to Christian virtue, the culture wars, and the family every Friday.
And now for another marathon Renaissance of Men classic. 4.5 hours with the co-author of Christian Nationalism and the author of The Boniface Option. Please welcome Andrew Isker.
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