Progress and Progressivism: How We Got from 1776 to Today

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Andrew Wilson
our worldview or our metaphysics is pagan. But actually our moral fervor and logic is ultimately Protestant, and that is Christian. So we’re going to fuse the two together and come up with the UN Declaration of Human Rights and many other things, which of course, are not ultimately grounded in the materialist premises that the people who wrote them, yes, mainly hold.

Glen Scrivener
Hello, and welcome to post Christianity. My name is Glen Scrivener. And I’m Andrew Wilson. Together, we’re thinking about our cultural moment in historical context. And we’re trying to figure out how we got here. And what we do now. In our cultural moment, as people are wanting to say, in our first episode, we did a whistlestop tour through the history of the world, and we wound up in the year 1776. Who would have thought? Because you’ve written a wonderful book called remaking our world is that how 1776 created the post, Christian West created the post Christian West. And we had a look in our first episode about that famous edit that Benjamin Franklin did on Thomas Jefferson, where Thomas Jefferson says, Okay, we hold these truths to be self evident. But he didn’t say that he said, We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. Benjamin Franklin says, know that they are self evident. And it’s a wonderful picture of the way in which Christian ideals and profoundly Christian truths have been kind of anonymized and universalized to the point where they become invisible to us. And we hold these truths to be self evidence, when actually they’re anything but but they are the product of kind of a Christianization in the West. So my first question to you, Andrew, is, are you saying that the founding of America is, in fact, a post Christian founding in the sense that we’re talking about it?

Andrew Wilson
I was bound to lose us most of our listeners in America. But I think in many ways, yes. I mean, I think I don’t think it’s as much of an innovation as that makes it sound, I do think I’d use the language in a previous episode of Protestant paganism. And I think the Declaration of Independence is actually a very good example of that, because it’s actually even the way it was designed as a kind of combination of very deistic or unit Unitarian and Crockett heretical, Christians or would be Christians, but a lot of dentists really mingled with actually a very strong Protestant, dissenting impulse Congregationalists Baptists and the like, and Presbyterians and the two come together to make the declaration. And I do think that in a sense, it is assuming a lot of Christian ideas at the same time as saying these are now standard, and we’re going to move beyond and we are explicitly not going to look at not just in the States, but in the kind of society we build, look for explicitly religious ideas to be at the heart of it in a way that we recognize that knowledge and and shapes it around. And instead, we can say we can assume these things, and we will put them there, I don’t think it’s as much of the key innovation, in a sense, is probably the Protestant Reformation. And in a way, when you as soon as you get the Protestant Reformation, you’re probably going to end up with, in the end, a society that has to, if they decide they don’t want to be fighting all the time about religion, then you have to have some way of forming a would be neutral space. And of course, it’s not neutral. But that’s the attempt and it’s probably a more resilient, I tend to do it in America than the husband in there certainly was in Europe at the time. And and it’s last a long time. So it’s been very influential. But yes, I do think that in the sense that was a, he said, he post Christendom move. And it’s obviously not huge implications for not just America, but the rest of the world ever since.

Glen Scrivener
And there are other trajectories going on in the founding that you point to in your book in terms of there’s this the framers of the Declaration of Independence. And so we’re at that stage thinking more of your Thomas Jefferson’s and your Benjamin Franklin’s, and you Patrick Thomas Paine’s, as well on that side. And then there’s the sort of the framers of the Constitution, which are more like your John Adams, and who else would be sort of over on that.

Andrew Wilson
So it’s I think it’s actually more that you’ve got both of these emphases in both. I think, certainly the in terms of the rhetoric and the prose is obviously the declaration is very shaped by Jefferson, but And it’s sort of radical tenor is shaped by Jefferson and Payne in particular, but actually all of the founders on both sides, you got Adams in Washington and John Hancock on the one side and, and obviously Jefferson Palin and kind of Franklin Franklin’s a bit more mediated, but but you’ve got these two threads, but you’ve got a quite a sort of radical, and we need to level everybody out. Everyone’s in societies equal because they’ve never lived it out. Many of them with respect to slavery, but you have that quite strong thread, which dominates the language of the declaration. This is all all are created equal sort of thing. And then in the Constitution, you have a handout, you design a government and you have a more and more of a sense now, it’s not primarily of hierarchy, but the idea of the separation of powers means that we’re designing a state such that what the people all want is not the only thing we factor in we have to balance what the mob wants, if you like democracy in its purest form, with other requirements about how’s the house, the executive, the legislative, the judiciary, that their ways of trying to mediate and offset the power of unvarnished democracy. So the declaration is this quite radical, we’re all equal, everyone’s voice counts the same, because we’re trying to get rid of the Brits. But it only takes you know, 1112 13 years, and then you’re going to design a state. And you realize, oh, hang on, if we design a state, as if we are all equal and everything. How on earth do you build a government? How on earth do you balance the power of sort of mob rule and the worst of demagoguery? So a lot of the founding fathers are pretty anti democracy, they are very frightened by the idea. They think it’s terrible. And that creative tension, obviously, still in a way you’ve been played out? In America today?

Glen Scrivener
Yeah, yeah. Tell us more about about, you know, you got the democratizing influence on Yeah,

Andrew Wilson
I think you get it, you get it, obviously, the, it’s well explained. If you’ve seen Hamilton is a well expressed, then you have this quite strong dialectic between happens a lot in the 1790s, it really kicks off. But you’ve got some people say no to that, we’ve got to end up following what the people want. And really, that what they’re worried about is you’ve got to get to have Washington’s gonna become a king. That’s what they were. On the other hand, you’ve got people saying, from the more sort of, sort of hierarchical and let’s make sure we get the right kind of balance in our state people, particularly John Adams, but many others. And what they’re saying is that we’ve got the opposite problem, which was this is all gonna just democracy run amok. But if you see that, and fast forward it through 200 years, you can see those impulses that work in culture was to this day, to be honest. And in some ways, the 1790s, the massive pamphlet was were a form of culture war. We didn’t use language then. And I think you’re still seeing the same thing play through now where you have to balance the requirements of how much are we looking forward? How much are we looking back? How much are we trying to ensure that we are stable and resilient and unlikely to collapse in on the under the weight of our own ideals? And how much do we need to be principled and passionate for the for the values that we hold sacred and that tension is being played out? Every election, it’s not like there’s a pure instantiation of both of those on either side of the political aisle. But it’s those values of view, like the sort of democracy, but dangerous demagoguery and populism at one end, and the sort of more hierarchical solidity stability, but at the risk of preserving the current structures of privilege on the other side, you kind of Yeah, well, English people would have called Whigs at the time, doing battle with radicals. And, and of course, they didn’t really have in the same way that we do this sort of weak versus Tory or liberal versus Tory, that the sort of the radical tradition was stronger in that context. And of course, they didn’t live it through because most of those founders who were explicitly radical ideas, were still very morally conflicted on an issue like slavery and didn’t, famously Jefferson, but many others, didn’t actually live that way, in a consistent way. Because they were really saying, we hold all white people to be equal, we hold all landowners to be equal, but but even so the language they embedded in these founding documents, were always going to provide a creative tension. So actually, almost every time someone says, but the founders said, yes, that kind of rights, even though they’re expressing things that are contradictory to each other, because the founders didn’t, not only didn’t agree, but they were operating from different assumptions about the good and about God, and about the nature of history and progress and sin, which is a big, you know, how sinful Do you think people are? How do you build a state if everyone’s a rotten sinner? How optimistic and naive Are you? And you’re in your, you know, what do you think about the French Revolution? Some of them are like, this is absolutely terrible. This is what I was afraid of? Yes, this is actually pretty great. Yes. Oh, wow. So there’s a lot of tensions that are still being played out. Yeah. In, you know, Trump versus Biden, or whatever it might be. Right,

Glen Scrivener
right. And so we’ve got these tensions that you name and the tension between a kind of a Christian founding and a post Christian founding already happening. And the other tension that we’re thinking about, which is slavery, yeah, right there. You know, it’s Thomas Jefferson owning 600 slaves as he writes the Declaration of Independence. How is slavery playing out on either side of the Atlantic?

Andrew Wilson
So Britain at in that in the late 18th century, obviously, slavery has been around since forever. And it begins to be challenged. And the the first sort of strident abolitionist writers are writing sort of late 17th into the 18th centuries initially, is Quakers. It’s sort of sectarian Christian groups who were not part of the established church. And it quite quickly spreads and you end up with quite a strong, dissenting abolitionist tradition quite early. And then it goes mainstream, really. I mean, people would debate exactly but but in Britain, which is probably the first or first or most influential country to go, we are we’re going to push heavier in that direction. You sort of got 1760s and 1770s through the obviously Abolition of the Slave Trade comes in and 1807 and then slavery overall, in the early 1830s, and the but that tradition is coming through so you have people like Granville Shaw And then John Wesley, they’re very significant men in their own standing of, of church influence, but it is rich in the culture more widely. And of course, through the influence of Methodism, and popular evangelicalism, the influence of the church is much larger. In that sense, the percentage is much larger than it would be in Britain today. So you have that strong momentum in in Britain, it gets coupled. And the timing comes in, obviously, the European enlightenment is giving other reasons to oppose slavery in within the French radical intellectual tradition. And so you get these unlikely bedfellows, which of course, do also exist in the States, it’s just that in the States, there’s, so it’s so much more at stake for them, and are so much more at stake for the white, powerful folk who are basically running the country and writing all these documents that they generally there’s a lot of, well, of course, this would be better if it wasn’t here, but it is, and whoa, you know, and then you initially get that. And then of course, later, as people realize, our whole livelihood might be at stake here, in the, you know, things like, you know, the cotton gin and, you know, these sorts of technologies make you think we can make a lot of money out of this, and they begin to celebrate slavery rather than just apologize for it. And of course, that becomes a huge explosion in the US and then it in the 1860s. And that’s not just so effectively every nation has been scarred by a history on slavery or European nations have, because in the States, it was, it was on on the land, and it was abolished much later than it was in most of Western Europe, it became much more of a moral stain and with moral implications that continue today, they still do in Britain as well, they still do in other European nations. But I think without a lot of the sort of sense of pleasantness, it feels more distant. And obviously, Western European nations didn’t process post slavery in the same way either. So there wasn’t the the equivalent of a Jim Crow or whatever, that sort of just a horrible history of lynchings. And that sort of thing is far, far rarer. It’s not unknown in Western Europe, but it’s just dramatically less than it was in the US. So these two sides of the Atlantic head down quite different pods. I don’t think ultimately, that’s because of the tension I’m talking about in the declaration in the Constitution. I think that’s really because they just had a lot, it was easier for Britain, it cost Britain less right across Western European nations less to say we’re gonna abolish slavery, because in the end, the people passing the laws, I’m in the main, not the ones profiting from slavery, whereas in America, they were. And it’s, what’s that Upton Sinclair line, isn’t it? It’s very difficult to get a man to understand something, if his salary depends on him not understanding. And I think there was a lot of that, in the States is a complex issue, of course. But that’s this is sort of a summary of how the next 70 years played out.

Glen Scrivener
Yeah. And so 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade and 1833 is sort of the emancipation of the slaves in the UK. Fascinatingly, in order to export this view, of slavery, and its evil, beyond Britain, and into Catholic lands and Muslim lands, there was the use of the language of this is a crime against humanity, which I think was a very politically wise tactic to sort of say, you know, why, why is slavery, you know, wrong and the sort of Muslim Sultan’s in Morocco saying this, we’ve had this since the time of Adam, why, why, why would we not have slavery? And it was politically wise and astute to say this is a crime against humanity, which, which is a sort of phrase that has passed down to us in a number of different ways, including as as sort of the crime that Nazis were, you know, yeah. Guilty of these crimes against humanity. But it’s another example of things that began in a Christian register, in terms of the abolitionists and people like Alec Ryrie would absolutely say this. This is a Christian movement, Quakers and evangelicals and nonconformist sleeving leading the way. But this is a Christian movement that in order to be translated to a global movement, has to anonymize its Christianity, I think in in the way that it does that we are then left with an absurdity in terms of crime, a crime against humanity. Because if humanity is the guilty party, is humanity also the judge? Is humanity also the law is humanity. Also the advocate is the victim and the victim. Yeah. This case would get thrown out of court, like if this if this was the and yet it’s a it’s a it’s a way of like, with Benjamin Franklin as sacred and undeniable of bringing the standard down all the way down to our level so that it’s uncontestable Yeah, and yet to do that makes it not self evidence and, and slightly absurd, really. And I think that’s, that’s an example of ways in which people soundly Christian things become universalized and anonymized, and then invisible. Yes, says that we now take it for granted. What’s interesting is about the what now seems so obvious to us, which is the freedom of all people and people are not property. What is so obvious to us morally and is one of our firmest convictions no matter whether we’re Christian or not? It’s so difficult to think ourselves into the shoes of Thomas Jefferson with 600 slaves, we think, Well, how could he do it? But, but that just again shows how Christianized we’ve become

Andrew Wilson
he does? I think, yeah, I think Jefferson is fascinating, because he spoke against it and still did it. And that I think, there we go, and how is that is hypocrisy. I mean, it seems obviously hypocritical. But is that the best category? And then Thomas kids work on this is really fascinating. And it’s not quite the same as hypocrisy is a bit more complicated than that. But I think the general thing is not just that we can’t understand Jefferson being a hypocrite, it’s more that we kind of understand anyone wanting to own slaves, even if they weren’t hypocritical. It’s more that how did anybody ever think this was acceptable? It’s interesting that you know, when the last nation on earth to abolish slavery happened, you know, when that when was the last night on Earth to formally abolish slavery,

Glen Scrivener
it was 1970, it was exactly 200 years

Andrew Wilson
after it was abolished in Britain in 2007. And more adequately, which is absolute extraordinary event. Wow. But now, obviously, that’s to show that it takes a while for these ideas to spread, but, and effectively for them to be imposed from outside on cultures that didn’t necessarily want to go there. By effectively, force of personality and at times, force of arms and trade embargoes by Western nations. But you’re either not remotely so it’s not remotely. So they’ve been it hasn’t been self evident to most people in history that slavery is unacceptable. And and it’s gotta be said, and it wasn’t wasn’t self evident to most Christians, that slavery was unacceptable for all of that period, as well. But it is the it’s the moral logic of Christianity running amok and then getting forgotten that it is ultimately the moral logic of Christianity. But the fact that now somebody has to say, I’d like to make the case for slavery in the public square would be so unthinkable not just in Britain, but in countries that are not very, I’ve never actually been Christianized countries shows how universalized that idea has become and so there are many other examples we have. And of course, they all come through as we’ve touched on previously in the language of human rights, or the idea that there is you can have a crime against humanity, you can have a right of being a human, you often see posters up now saying every child has a right to, to play as well as to eat and to survive. And, and you sort of think, even though the way in which human beings have abstract things that must be true of them as humans, and abstract things that must not ever be done to them, because they humans derive from Christian assumptions not just about humans, but about God and about Jesus. And so yeah, I mean, we’ve touched on this a number of times from different angles, but I do think the abolition of slavery and, and the UN human rights discourse, and even just when people came in the years after the Second World War to say, how do we best describe why what has happened in Germany and, and elsewhere? is so utterly unthinkable. Yeah, without playing the God card, right? Well, we will need to transpose the same moral fervor into a secular key. Hence the familiar category of Protestant paganism, you you’re trying to we are our worldview or our metaphysics is pagan. But actually, our moral fervor and logic is ultimately Protestant and at least Christian. So we’re going to fuse the two together and come up with the UN Declaration of Human Rights and many other things, which of course, are not ultimately grounded in the materialist premises that the people who wrote them Yes, mainly hold it.

Glen Scrivener
Yes, Hell, yes. Hell, yes. Let’s okay, I’ve got I’ve got a question to ask now, actually. And it’s a question that also relates to UN Declaration of Human Rights and where we get to in the 20th century. But what do we do with conscience? What do we do with the sense that the Bible speaks of this thing? It’s it’s not a an unerring moral compass in our breast that always points towards do north. And it can’t be that because there are slaveholders who had no qualms about holding slaves. And when they write their diaries, you don’t get the sense that they’re sort of internally wrestling with this thing, and that they’ve got Jiminy Cricket on their shoulder saying you can’t do this. You’re a monster. Like they’re not. They don’t seem to be and you go back to the ancient world, and there are there are people thinking that the gladiatorial games were vulgar, but, but like, not morally horrible. Like in that sense, you’ve got that famous letter from a soldier in the first century, writing to his wife, and he’s like, I know that you’re pregnant. If, if it’s a boy, keep it if it’s a girl, kill it. I’ll be home by spring and say hello to Alexander. It’s kind of and you don’t get that sense that people are actually churned up by this moral struggle with the evil of infanticide, or bloodsports or slavery. So what is the conscience then? Oh,

Andrew Wilson
wow. So I think I think you’re right that there is no, the moral law or the sense that we are violating is, is clearly not the same. And it’s obviously not the same in all cultures that morality is understood in such radically different ways. Just as in our own culture, many people would say, there’s obviously nothing morally unacceptable about abortion or whatever. People have things that other cultures on Earth, can you think that and our culture is going well, you know, but I think they’re Nevertheless, I think, the sense of conscience, which is obviously heavily fashioned by the culture we’re in. But conscience functions as a, as a prompt, from a part of our soul or a part of our brain, you might say to another part of my brain. So you’re, it’s often you’re not living up to the standard that you yourself hold. That’s what the conscience does. It doesn’t, it doesn’t provide an abstracted code of laws. It’s more like the prosecuting lawyer or the judge who goes by your own standards, you have fallen short. And so I think it’s rather than the lawmaker, if you so to mean it plays the part in a sense, I guess, of the judiciary, rather than the legislative, it doesn’t make the laws, the laws are given to it largely by the culture it’s in. But what it does is to apply the law to the soul of the person and say, Oh, Glen, you said that and you don’t actually think that’s right. Rather than I’m from nowhere, going to give you a sort of, you know, on tablets of stone, here’s the law that you’ve broken. Now, I do think that God can speak at any way through the individual and say that is wrong, even though your culture thinks it’s right. And there’s clearly abolitionism is a good example where there are people in a culture where everybody does think it’s okay, who nevertheless take huge personal risk to confront and challenge and say, No, this is not okay. And I’m going to lose an awful lot on saying that it isn’t. But I think that that can’t be all consciences. So I think, if I use that analogy, I think it is it’s the application of and the taking of the law and applying it to the the soul of the person who knows they broken it. And that I think if you go to your Romans one and two, that’s what’s going on as you can then these things, and you yourself, do the same things. That’s how the conscience is going. Oh, you because you’re guilty by your own

Glen Scrivener
standard? Yeah, yeah. And it’s informed by revelation, and it can go wrong, and it arose, and we can see how we can have our conscience and see it, and we can consult them. And and yes, so it’s not it’s not this unknowing sense, that everyone living through slavery was always thinking, this is wrong, but we were making a lot of money. So let’s do it. It’s, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Okay. So we’re through into the 19th century, kind of the century progress. Yeah. And we’ve got some great in scare quotes, in scare quotes. Yeah, exactly. So I guess we’ve we’ve got the idea of people like Hegel, who would say, we’ve got historical progress in the dialectic and history kind of goes on like that Darwin famously in sort of biological process. Freud had a sort of an idea of, of cultural and spiritual and psychological kind of progress. And that that kind of thing. But yeah, I think marks absolutely, absolutely more of

Andrew Wilson
an economic or technical note and again, applying Hegel in into the, the concept of into matter, really?

Glen Scrivener
And do you would you say that what is making those narratives of progress very plausible, is all sorts of material circumstances?

Andrew Wilson
Absolutely. You know, so I and this is, this is the thing that if you’re, if the world you’re in, I mean, you see, there’s so many things, you see that the way that the environment and the material conditions of humanity. And sometimes the environment, literally in the sense of we’ve touched on in previous episodes of geography, and weather, and those sorts of things. But certainly, if you got if you if your machinery is doubling in its power every 10 or 15 years, you only need that for a few decades, and the dramatic expansion of material wealth, we talked about industrialization and enrichment, but those two prongs, shaped the freight, the moral frame the way that people think we are clearly getting, but it’s quite hard to deny that we’re getting better. We’re getting more educated. And we’re getting an A becomes a self fulfilling, almost like a reinforcing feedback loop. Where the more money you have, the more you can give people time and space to research things and discover things, which then leads and it did at least for about 100 250 years, I think you probably said there’s an S curve, it’s probably slowed in many areas in the last 50 or 70 years. But just it’s the obvious thing, what would a person alive in 1800 have experienced in their day to day life that by the age of by their children, or grandchildren’s time would have been unthinkably backward. And you realize, of course, the world these people live in is conditioning them economically, in terms of their levels of wealth, their machinery, their comfort, their health care, their life expectancy, their earnings, the amount of land they have, how productive it is, so many different things arose. It’s actually quite difficult for somebody who was alive in who has lived for 1810 to 1865 or whatever, not to think, Gosh, humanity’s making enormous strides in the right direction, and it’s all up towards the light now, I think what’s interesting is that the language as we’ve touched on previously, the language of Being in a world now of lights predates that economic dramatic change to the Enlightenment really. But what happens is if you’ve got a narrative that goes we are, as we’ve seen in previous episodes, we are light, and they were darkness. And since turning the lights on, we have dramatically enhanced, we’ve doubled our life expectancy or very nearly, and, and our, you know, our wealth is experiencing is exploding exponentially, then of course you do have, and at the same time, European wars on the continent of Europe, pretty much, you know, fizzle out for best part of a century. And if you have that, you start thinking, Oh, well, actually peace. I mean, I know, obviously, got a few things to cough about and splashed about, you know, I know we’re not quite at peace over there in this land, or whatever, in China or in Crimea or whatever. But generally, we’ve got increased more, we start to believe we’re morally progressing Victorians in Britain, clearly Did you know The Great American philanthropists and you know, we’ve made a lot of money, but now we’re going to invest it for the good of humanity. Couple that with educational progress, material industrial progress, you think it’s actually would actually be almost impossible to imagine how they wouldn’t have concluded, we’re just getting better and better. And people, then will you know, the endpoint of that it hits the buffers, depending on how you count, you know, some, but in the years immediately before, or maybe during World War One people start getting, I think we may, we may have omitted some important things. But in Europe, at least, I am speaking very much from a northern, you know, the weirder world we’ve been considering. You do have a period of 100 years where you think it’s very yes, if you were removed from the dark side, so you’re removed from the rapaciousness, and the greed and the resource extraction and the death and the colonialism and the slavery, if you can’t see that you’re just living in a world where you of course, you have poor people, but even those poor people are themselves over a generation getting wealthier, and maybe more educated and more better manners and cleaner and

Glen Scrivener
you’re passing reforms the whole time and all

Andrew Wilson
children can’t go up chimneys. And now, of course, you do need to provide more for the poor laws. And, and you end up with you. It’s you can see how people concluded, yeah, this is going to keep going in this direction.

Glen Scrivener
You’ve turned that corner from slavery to abolition and now Oh, my goodness,

Andrew Wilson
and many, many equivalents. So and yeah, so which is why I think those years immediately around in sort of the 1910s. You know, Titanic is often quoted as sort of almost like a bit more of a parable than as a genuine sense of, oh, gosh, we’ve we’ve completely messed this up. But World War One is a horrible shock, as it would have been to any generation, but I think particularly there because the methods, the the price of European progress, that until then, was being paid in the Belgian Congo, in making rubber or being in Southwest Africa, or whatever, and all over the sugar plantations, but they couldn’t see it, and they weren’t experiencing it. But now they can. And they think, wow, these machines we’ve developed well, the stat I quote in the book is, you know, for every mile of railway track in the world today, there are 100, ak 40, sevens. And so we’re sick, we you start to see the other side of the technology you’ve created. And obviously, classically, flew to Hiroshima and beyond. So yeah, it’s a it’s a, that that story comes to a shuddering halt. Yeah. In in the, in the really in the First World War in the years.

Glen Scrivener
So the century progress gives way to the murder century, yeah. 20th century in which more people died violently than in all the other centuries of human history put together. quite a quite a shocking thing. And in one sense, I think, with World War Two was we’ve sort of now had our successor mythology, in terms of a grand battle with evil. Yeah. And Tom Holland is always was making the point that you know, now that we’ve had the Nazis, we don’t need demons anymore. Now that we’ve got Hitler, we don’t need the devil now that we’ve had Auschwitz, we don’t need hell. Yeah. And, and there’s a certain telling of the story in which the Atlantic Charter is signed in 1941, between Roosevelt and Churchill, and and it’s, let’s go to war against this evil in the name of human rights. And, you know, they sort of explicitly kind of saying that. And it turns out that to be on the other side of human rights is to be a Nazi. And, and in a sense, I think, since World War Two, we haven’t exactly had a pollster to guide ourselves by because, you know, absent Christian faith, that that that is not our transcendent value. But we do have a pit now to avoid. Yeah, and that pit is called Auschwitz. Yeah. And so we don’t know what’s up, but but we do know what’s down. Yeah. And what’s fascinating about the UN Declaration of Human Rights, it’s like the preamble is very heavy on we’ve seen the barbarism of what happens when we do not affirm human rights, and therefore we express our faith in human rights. And again, it’s not it’s not so much and and it uses the word you know, they use the words of crimes against humanity when the Nuremberg trials and they’re convicting the Nazis and, and again, it’s bringing those standards right down to the very human level because otherwise eyes, you don’t want to be a Nazi, do you? And you know, Alec Ryrie, who have, you know, just mentioned just just sort of said, you know, our whole moral settled settlement has just become Don’t be a Nazi. And there’s a reason why Godwin’s rule is a rule on an online discussion, you know, the probability that a comparison to Hitler will be made by the end of an internet thread, you know, approaches one because, you know, it’s not so much what would Jesus do unto Jesus anymore? It’s what would Hitler do the opposite, do the opposite. How much of our moral imagination do you think has been shaped by by that as a kind of a as our new mythology?

Andrew Wilson
Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s hard to think of any area of moral reflection that hasn’t been so in that sense. It is, I entirely agree with that. I’ve never I was at it right when I first came across that idea that that was the sort of the most significant moral figure for the 21st century person is not Jesus but Adolf Hitler. And he that’s literally is the AntiChrist is the Niners in the theologic, Christian theological sense alone, I guess that that two in one Johnson’s, but moreover, this is how you define your morality, look at that, and then do the opposite. And even further, in the sense of, you know, the the way in which we think about some of the moral conflicts and anxieties today, I’m sorry, so Hitler, Hitler, personally, persecuted and mass murder Jews. So how then do we think through the rights not just a Jewish people, but of any oppressed people, and then on the grounds of effectively racism, whereas we’d say, well, Stalin killed an awful lot of his own people, but because it wasn’t motivated by racism, it was motivated by the desire to say, No, everyone’s equal Animal Farm style. It’s not as morally repugnant to us, even though actually the death count might even have been higher in communist Russia than it was it probably was. And it was in Nazi Germany. Similarly, with, you know, sexuality. And similarly with other kinds of minorities who say, actually, the last 80 years have seen the people who are being attacked by Hitler often take center stage in moral reasoning and not in an not in an entirely one sided way, either in obviously, in particularly, with the history of Israel has become much you get the left and are very confused as to what to do with the nation of Israel, in in various ways, because the sort of the narrative is, anybody who’s a victim now needs to be elevated. But then what happens if you’ve got what how do you trade those two rights against each other. But I think the moral grammar of Western reflection without the sort of effect is still fundamentally a Christian take on morality. God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the strong, that’s the shape of it. But how do you tell who’s on which side? And the answer is, well, you know, you know, little men with mustaches who want to kill everybody are on this side, and anyone who persecute the same group of people are also with him. And then these are the these are the reasons and, and I and then of course, that then gets run through the filters of sexuality and race and most other culturally hot potato issues today. And that charge gets thrown every which way. And I don’t think that’s simply a laziness in debates. It clearly is. It’s a conversation stopper. It’s a way of avoiding difficult conversations. But ultimately, it does reflect that that is the sort of moral center of gravity or the opposite, whatever the center of gravity was, like a magnet that pushes you away, that’s repulsive. And I don’t know, I think without a more explicit theism, or a more explicit appeal to Jesus is difficult to know how you would end up with a positive account of morality. So what we effectively have is the negative account of morality flipped? Yes. And I think that that is a large part of how, yeah, most of the people who I’ve interacted with on social media in the last 10 years, that’s the even if they’ve been very mature about it, that’s still ultimately how the moral frame is being motivated and where a lot of the Animus and force behind those convictions comes from.

Glen Scrivener
Yes. And it also explains why, you know, if you’re having a conversation about a Where do you think human rights come from? What’s fascinating is a number of times I’ve had conversations like that, and literally the comeback has been, why are you questioning human rights? Like, no, I just, I just want to intellectually kind of get out of it. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s it. And, and what’s fascinating is that that kind of is the preamble to the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Like you don’t want to be a Nazi, do you? Okay, well, I guess, you know, we better go for for this bulwark against the baddies. But yeah, just simply to invert to the Antichrist is not to revert you back to Christ. Unfortunately.

Andrew Wilson
And I think it’s just a riff on that. I think one of the, the was fascinating. We talked a little bit about the even sometimes the differences between America and Western Europe on the speed of cultural change, the sort of rapid rapidity of post Christendom in America being sort of a lot has happened in the last 10 years, which has been happening in Europe since the 1950s, or whatever. And, you know, various things of, you know, de churching, or just as, you know, the toxicity or apparent toxicity of Christian truth claims in the public square and so on. But one of the reasons is because I think in America The nature of the way the Cold War played out, meant that you actually had two enemies. And so you’re so we’re here, we’re liberal democracy, we’ve got the fascist there. We’ve also got the communist there. And they are also the baddies. In Western Europe, although you’re still involved in the Cold War, you the moral, the moral opposition to fascism was immeasurably greater than it wasn’t communism. And what’s happened since the end of the Cold War, is that obviously communism has faded to a sort of, you know, it feels arcane almost to talk about that. And it’s a bit more of a footnote. And so I think one of the things that almost preserved American, sort of apparent nominal Christianity for longer was, and in all sorts of ways was the Cold War, because a bit then when you take that out, you realize in my adult lifetime, how quickly it looks like America has moved, it’s almost was being held, it was something that looked more Christian, rather than simply Anti Fascist for longer because of the desire to fend off equal and opposing opposites. Yes, in the form of fascism and communism, whereas in Britain, even though people were still, you know, we’d obviously want to be like a communist. But the things that people, you know, were mainstream and political discourse in the 60s and 70s, in Britain, were a lot closer to it wasn’t anything like as reprehensible to be a communist in the 1970s as to be an avowed fascist in a country like Britain, whereas in America, they were almost seen as morally equivalent. And I think that’s made quite a big difference to the speed of post Christendom suddenly cascading upon a lot of our American brothers and sisters. Yes, quite quickly. Yeah. In Britain has just taken. Yeah, I don’t know, decades,

Glen Scrivener
yes. Because I mean, church attendance, percentage wise, peaked in America in the 1950s, whereas in Britain was in the 1850s. And we didn’t know that that’s very interesting. We were sort of, like 50%, in the 1850. Ones. Census in Britain. And in America, because of the cold war threat, there is this massive what we need to In God We Trust, which went on the money in the 1950s, you know, it wasn’t on the money before then. And so Christianity was kind of more of a bulwark against communism and that sort of thing. But other things happening in the 50s. And 60s, I guess we’ve got, we’ve got to, I mean, lots of things going on. But but there’s a civil rights movements, and there’s a sexual revolution going on. And what’s interesting to me is the way in which those two things kind of get unified in our thinking, when actually, they’re quite, they’re quite separate movements happening for quite separate reasons. There’s, yeah, help us, help us with what’s going on with the Civil Rights Movement and the sexual revolution. So

Andrew Wilson
Well, I think so the civil rights movement is obviously there is a global dimension to it. But when we talk about the Civil Rights Movement, we’re almost exclusively talking about the US in the sense of what we mean by it, and all the key figures for us. And so when we think about the Malcolm X Martin Luther King, and, and that, and that, of course, is going back really to the legacy of slavery, and well before that, and all that’s happened since as I said, the post, slate, you know, you would think in the 1860s, we’ve settled the issue, we now don’t have slides anymore, but reconstruction very quickly, it loses loses its original ideal and and turns into another means of keeping African Americans and second class citizens and worse for the next 80 odd years. 100 years. And so civil rights is very much motivated by the redress of that, and and obviously is very much as we continue with our theme is very much an explicitly Christian movement, not just in its moral logic, as we’ve said, but also in its, you know, a lot of its most foremost spokespersons and and really the appeal and even rhetoric and cadences of the Civil Rights Movement are Baptist preachers and the like. Whereas the sexual revolution was had a very different sort of pre history, in some ways it roots from not a dissimilar timespan, I think you still have the origins of both of these things. abolitionism, and what I call the first sexual revolution, bubbling away in the sort of late 18th century, and then having a sort of surge forward and in, in the West, sort of through the late 19th and early 20th century, and then obviously come into legal fruition in the 1960s and 70s. And then a more cultural normalization for everybody. In really in the last 10 or 20 years. And in many ways. Because the sexual revolution still a little bit most people were in the 1960s We’re still not going okay, there’s some people over there practicing free love and all this, but that, that isn’t how most ordinary folk were living and, and in many ways still isn’t. But people are the mainstream are always more conservative than the people on the front page of the papers. But obviously, the the logic was very different. And it was about primarily, you know, the, at best the, the liberation of women and about the equalization of, of rights, but the the journey there was was it was motivated by different different abuses. It was far more stopped start over the 150 years. And it was much more global in the sense that the similar sorts of trajectories were taking place all over the world. Whereas in the Civil Rights context, it was much the racial dynamics of the United States in part secular gave not just forced to the, as I say, to the moral imperative to do it, but even to the particular ways in which it played out and the policy implications. Second revolution was more of a global, or at least Western global phenomenon that has now obviously, in many ways has been exported globally to most parts of the world. And so I think there’s a number of important differences that even though we would, again, with a very flat Christian tell, you know, Christian influence telling us the story, there were these people who were being victimized by these people, the white patriarchy was oppressing everybody. And one by one, they all rose up and said, Nope, we’re gonna have, that’s the way it can sort of look like the same sexual minorities, women, African Americans, whoever it was, it looks like the same kind of dynamics are working in each case. But of course, that’s not the way in which those the laws that were passed, and the implications were not like that at all women in legal equality for women in something like voting came a lot earlier than it didn’t arise. But actually, the sort of pay differential might still exist today. And so it’s a much more protracted process with very different causes behind it.

Glen Scrivener
Yeah. And there’s a great difficulty when we, we conflate those two things. At that point, we just say, Well, they’re both if they’re both the same story, then there is a domineering culture, let’s say, white slave owners, and blacks who are being enslaved, and therefore liberation looks like this, and then you just transpose the story into the sexual revolution, then you’ve got heteronormativity, up here, and everybody else, and when, and we need to do the same kind of liberation. And I guess in modern cultures, it tends to be that those on the progressive left AOK, on sleep on civil rights issues and race issues. And, and they, they want to see, you know, further progress as they would they would see it in liberation of sexual minorities and that kind of thing. And those on the right, take the opposite view on both those things. And yet, it’s, it’s a far more complicated thing than that.

Andrew Wilson
It is. And I think, again, there’s, there’s plenty of people who sort of crossed party lines all the time, and they just get sort of erased from the narrative. But if you’re, you know, as, of course, no flow, like a lot of a lot of people in my church would be, who’d be saying, you know, my, my church be sort of 70%, black, and from many benefit of the church from Africa, a third of the church from the Caribbean, or black British background, a third of the church, from elsewhere in the world, a bunch of Mr. White as well, of course. But in a setting like that, where people would say, actually, on sexual ethics, I would appear to be very conservative relative to the progressive narrative of today. But on racial issues, it seems to be very progressive, right, and would seem to be sort of hyper woke in some people’s speech, you know, on one on one issue and extremely retrograde on another issue. So I might simultaneously be regarded as woke or a bigot, depending on what I was talking about. Now, that’s not unique to my church at all, it’s probably represented in every church of every person listening to this, but it’s very prominent in my community in South East London. And so you look at that from the outside and go Well, that, that just shows that the narrative is clearly being told in a in a very misleading way, in such a way as to really appropriate and swallow up into the bog, everybody who is in any way saying, historical injustice is have been committed by a group A against Group B, therefore, we need to advance the rights of Group B, which actually on the face of it is a perfectly legitimate policy platforms one, but not nobody will do. Because the issue is capital, a lot of the rights of people in group B might exist for different reasons, and might be in conflict with one another. A lot of the people in group A, were had very different motivations, very different pre histories, and also a lot of people in group B might say that actually, that is not a rights issue. That’s an issue of sin and righteousness, that’s an issue of wisdom and prudence is, in fact, there’s another victim here, my unborn child, for instance, which you haven’t considered in that and, and so on. So there’s this, it’s so much more complicated than it has been made to look. Yes. But I think again, the sort of the quite, it is quite Christian in and sort of, there’s the dark side, the light side is is quite morally black and white is just that what is black, and what is White has been transformed and subtly adjusted in the course of the last couple of generations. And it has enormous rhetorical power, because at the end, all of us want to believe that we would have been on the right side at Selma, or Soweto, or wherever it was, we want to be, I would have been marching with Martin Luther King, I wouldn’t have been firing water cannons in their faces. But today, there’s, there’s no Selma today, the equivalent of that is Stonewall or the equivalent of that is trans rights or whatever. And so I but I want to make sure I’m on the right side of that. Yeah. But of course, that narrative itself is a very, is a historical slice, which sounds like sounds plausible today because of our immediate history, but really, for much of history, and you would think even today does not reflect the complexities of most of those issues. And the table’s turned him you see that with JK Rowling isn’t with we’ve talked about no both really enjoyed Louise Perry’s work. Many examples would say Hang on a second. There’s a lot of debate about who’s actually being victimized by who here. And it’s not we’d like it to be. We’ve got Bull Connor over here and Martin Luther King over there on every issue. And it’s not remotely like that in many of them. Yeah. So yeah, it’s a fascinating impulse to make goodies and baddies, which I guess we all have, has been particularly effective in that kind of moral discourse.

Glen Scrivener
Yeah. And when you think about some of the corners that we have turned in that we would look back over hundreds of years and see a positive corner has been turned on something like blood sports and gladiatorial games that mean that that’s a very conservative thing. You know, Telemachus this, this monk sort of goes into the arena and he tries to stop these two gladiators doing their thing and he gets stoned to death by a crowd. It’s not a popular thing. Sure,

Andrew Wilson
progressive isn’t often what we were now in so progressively so totalism you know, anti prohibition, ism was a very progressive movement. Eugenics at the time was apparent to us now. But was all the all the best progressive minds of the day were opposing vaccinations for all sorts of reasons. It was a very progressive thing to do scientific racism. Yeah, like even at the start of the COVID pandemic. It’s fascinating. Yeah, the Conservatives and the progressives in February or January 2020, were opposite sides of the lockdown, masking vaccines, all those of those dates, then you would think they were if you looked at it from 2020,

Glen Scrivener
and shutting down borders, yeah, kind of flipped. Exactly. Yeah,

Andrew Wilson
of course, it was a very repressive measure. And now it’s a sort of no this is that’s what that’s what New Zealand’s do. You know, that’s

Glen Scrivener
my body. My choice. Yeah, became a slogan of the left’s you know, as regards, you know, abortion, but as looking to the right as, as regards, vaccinations, you know, so,

Andrew Wilson
again, this sort of the idea that there is an I know, I trust, everyone knows that the inexorable march of history in one direction is hopelessly shallow. But people do still talk about that. And the fact that the phrase right side of history is ever used shows that there is an appealing and actually a very Christian influenced moral logic to the idea that history is heading in the right direction. And of course, that’s just not how most of the issues we’ve touched on play out at all.

Glen Scrivener
Yeah, and especially because you look back at the banning of blood sports, for instance, that sounds like a very conservative movement, and, you know, outlawing infanticide, again, sounds like a restriction from one sense, but isn’t it the liberation of the children? Like, on what side? Is that a Progressive Conservative? Cause? Abolition of Slavery seems like a very progressive cause, I guess. And you just can’t pin down, like, on which on which side of our political spectra, would those causes be placed? Yeah. Over over history, and I guess there’s no kind of safe place on that on those political spend?

Andrew Wilson
No, there isn’t. And I think one, if I can, sorry, jump back to eighth, the 18th century for a moment, I think one of the things driving that is the French Revolution, which we haven’t really talked about, where you do have, which is where our language of left and right comes from the banks of the Senate, and where I think you do have a clear split within the, in the, in the, you know, the French Revolution, depending on how you count. But you know, the the intense phase lasts four or five years, and quite quickly evolved from a sort of quite moderate middle class balance, let’s just put it some checks and balances will keep a king when obviously, through something that would have looked actually more like what the Americans did, and what even what the British did under Cromwell, but quite quickly tended to a much more radical, self immolating movement. And I think the sense of what left and right is and how radical how opposed you are to the old, right, there’s actually almost a chronological logic to what the French Revolution has bequeath to us that effectively if I said to you, and you’ve got left and right, and you’ve got looking forwards and looking backwards, you would immediately know that left belong to looking forwards and right belong to looking backwards, even if you thought there’s no reason why that would obviously be true. You know, that’s what those terms are intended to mean. And right side of history is clearly a forward looking this is how the world will be. Exactly, of course, it is. I mean, no one on the right says you’re not on the right side of history, unless they’re doing it to troll people on the left. And I think that that is really that the sort of almost chronological logic, inelegant phrase of the French Revolution being imposed, and still using language of left rights, even though that language now is, is really sort of disintegrates a little bit really is left and right, really argue that much about the size of the state. Does anybody nation? Yeah, the issues about which people are left and right now seem very different from what they would have been. But I think that’s partly where that comes from. Because there was really, there was an entrepreneur zoom, and there is was also a progressive new world, we’re going to bring in the new thing, and we’re going to desecrate the temples and replace it with a temple of reason and not true dharma and all that sort of is now going to be a place to come and gather and worship the brilliance of the human spirit and how much we know. And even though that quickly blew itself out and turned into Napoleon, it’s still bequeath the sense that there are people in the world who look forward and who want justice and who are prepared to overthrow and kill chop people’s heads off if they get in the way of it. And that terminates in a sort of communism, kinda have direction and then you’ve got people who look backwards which you obviously want to preserve and nostalgia and keep all the old things and keep the damn the the nasty downtrodden people as downtrodden as can be, so that we can retain our privilege and that would in the modern mind put terminate in fascism. And I think that that framing still hovers in the back of our mind, even though we know that labour and conservative or Republican Democrat isn’t really about the same issue at all right? And at

Glen Scrivener
certainly at the elite level at the journalistic level, in terms of media, we sort of lean left on these things, because we don’t want to be Hitler. We don’t want to go the the fascistic routes. And we’re kind of convinced that yeah, bloodshed in the name of a classless paradise is preferable somehow to bloodshed in the name of racial purity. And so, that idea of progress,

Andrew Wilson
when you go to the magnificant, you know, he’s thrown down the mighty from their seat is equal to the hungry meat, you think that sound if that’s what you had, that you built a moral system based on that you want to be much closer to, you know, communist Russia than Nazi Germany? Clearly, I mean, they’re both bad. But so I do think that has got very deep Christian roots,

Glen Scrivener
Christian roots. And so that, and there isn’t a notion of progress in the Bible. I mean, where did Martin Luther King Jr. Get his idea that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice? Well, he got it from Theodore Parker, who was a Christian preacher who got it from the prophets, you know, essentially, and got it from the fact of resurrection, through the cross out, we come into into something that because we’ve gone down into that depth, actually, there’s a future that can be brighter than than than yesterday was. But that’s a very different arc of the moral universe. That’s down and then up. Yes. And I think were the sort of the 19th century kind of idea of progress that that sort of filters through today is it’s very much like the rainbow arc, that we can soar off into the distance, and there’s a pot of gold at the end of it. And someone like Martin Luther King, Jr, believed in the ark that went in the other way. And in a sense, he kind of embodied his own message, because they may not get there with you. He says the night before he dies, and then martyred if you like, in the case of that, so Christians do believe in a kind of progress. But but a, we do believe in a pollster that is above the party. Because it’s very easy for the party to say, we’re heading in this direction. It’s the direction of historical inevitability we’ll assess who will says the party. We do have a pollster, but we also have a path that way that is not it’s not the Great Leap Forward as Chairman Mao had, in which 10s of millions of people died in the 1950s. His you know, which should make us forever dubious of anyone’s claims to progress. But, but I guess there is progress, but the way of progress is the way down. And then on the way of sacrificial love, the greater the wave service is the wave of suffering for the way of death. And that’s what that’s what we’re called to as Christians. Let’s finish with a question. Okay, we’ve we’ve talked about left and right, and progressive and conservative and all that kind of stuff. Is this just a call for us all to be centers, dads? Boring, boring, you know, you know, let’s slightly left to center slightly right of center, you know, on the political spectrum?

Andrew Wilson
No, it absolutely isn’t. Because I think, I think moderates often end up with the worst of all worlds on a lot of these issues. Actually, I don’t want to be moderate on slavery, right? I don’t wanna be moderate on abortion, I don’t really matter on you know, whatever kind of most moral issues, there are a handful of issues I expect, where I would find myself in the middle. And, and many listeners wouldn’t be the same issues, but might find themselves in the middle and other issues. But not only you want to be in the middle of any other words, the one of the problems with saying I will perpetually try and be in the middle is that you end up simply being yanked around by whoever’s the most extreme person and this, I was introduced, whatever, five years ago to the concept of the Overton window, but the it many people may or may not know it, but the idea that you sort of polite discourse in our culture exists within a window of opinion. And that what you want to do, if you want to change opinion, is to make a statement that’s outside the current bounds that will pull the window towards you, even if no one believes what you’re saying, the whole discourse will move the center of gravity, you end up being the victim of that all the time, and people make a lunatic statement on an issue, and you have to move with them because the middle has changed. That’s not what it meant. I’m not calling for that. I’m sure you’re not. I think actually what it’s more to say is that what Christianity does is provides a radical critique of both extremes, and that it does so from convictions that sometimes both extremes are trying to draw from but have not got the the theological or metaphysical physical grounds to make. And so you find yourself simultaneously at the far left and the far right, and everywhere in between. And so as I said, I use the example of you know, working in our local church where I’d say actually, in in Britain today, and it might not be the same in every nation but in Britain today, the the central gravity of my church, which seemed to be well, well on the left on issues of race at racial justice, which seems to be well on the right on issues of sexual ethics and pro life, which seemed to be various places in between on all sorts of other public policy issues. And that’s not the you then trying to find yourself in the middle is that you’re saying No, I, I’m, we’re going to provide a radical, biblical gospel shaped critique of all the principalities and powers sometimes are trying to take us back to the past. Sometimes they’re trying to take us to a completely unthinkable and an unpredictable future. And all of those powers need to be exposed to what they are and what they’re trying to achieve. And but that will sometimes make you sound like a very right wing person wanted to make you sound like a very left wing person. And hopefully often people say, I don’t even know what that is. That’s a weird combination of so you don’t you’re opposed to war in that sense. And you’re opposed to that sort of injustice. But you’re also seemed to be very pro the rights of that group who are not part of the popular discourse, and I can’t quite place that on the map. Yeah, like we’ve touched on before you are in favor, it would seem that you’re prepared to live with martyrdom and celibacy and charity and pixie and humility and these things which don’t really fit onto the left right spectrum or whatever spectrum you kind of mentioned. So no, I don’t think we’re moderates. In that sense. I think we’re just going to provide a radical challenge to all of the all of the powers, whatever they may be pushing us to

Glen Scrivener
do. Yeah, we’re radicals. And if we sound like conservatives, at some point, it’s because we’re trying to radically conserve the Jesus revolution. And if we sound like progressives, in one sense, it’s because we want to do this other thing of death and resurrection. And, yeah, it’s a radical challenge to the political discourse of this world. I just think of Abraham, you know, back in Genesis chapter 14, he is it’s the first time that the word Hebrew was mentioned. And it means one from beyond. And you know, perhaps it means one from beyond the river. And it’s what the foreigners called the Israelites, they are, they are from out of this world. And there is Abraham, living in tents, while the rest of the culture is at war. And it’s very, he doesn’t he doesn’t fit. And sometimes he picks upside in the in the wars of his day. And sometimes he joins with the king of Sodom against the Four Kings, and he kind of enters the fray in that sense. But at the end of the day, you know, he is building the household of faiths. And he is from out of this world, and no one can kind of pin him down. So that’s that’s what Christians are. Yes. Right. Well, we better draw stumps there, which is a cricket analogy. For those who don’t know about cricket. If you don’t know about cricket, I’m very sorry for you.

Andrew Wilson
But if you don’t know about cricket, you probably haven’t lived, you know, I think you probably find are not listening to this in the first place.

Glen Scrivener
Christianity is obviously the cause of cricket. And it is.

Andrew Wilson
And I often think of that scene at the end of the beach, where Patterson Joseph stands out on the beach and says, These are the two twin pillars on which Western Civilization is built Christianity and cricket. And so we spent a lot of time talking about one of them. And it’s just anyway, sorry about the other one. I’ll try to this episode. Yeah,

Glen Scrivener
no, absolutely. And so if you have enjoyed this episode, please do give us a share on social media and give us a rating and review on your pod catcher of choice. But Andrew Wilson, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.