It's in the Code ep 182: “So, That’s a Warrior?”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series as part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Pleased to be with you as always, and as always, want to thank those of you who listen and support us in so many ways, and especially for this series, which is driven by you more than anything else that we do in Straight White American Jesus. The things we talk about are your ideas, your leads, your input, your feedback. So please keep that coming. Let me know what you think: danielmillerswaj@gmail.com.

Always looking for feedback on episodes, ideas for new episodes, new series, new topics. And again, when we're finished with this series on Josh Hawley's book Manhood, I'm putting together a series on questions you were not allowed to ask in church, or questions you weren't supposed to ask in church. If you've got some of those—the questions that got you in trouble, the questions that led you out, the questions that got you called in for a talking-to, as it were—let me know: danielmiller.swaj@gmail.com. Throw in the header that it's "questions you weren't supposed to ask" or something like that that alerts me that that's what you're emailing about, because I am, as always, behind in emails. But I'll respond to as many of those as I can, and really look forward to hearing the ideas that you have for questions you weren't supposed to ask. And I have a lot of great things lined up already in questions that people have sent, so please keep those coming.

I want to dive into today's topic. We are continuing, as I hinted a minute ago, Josh Hawley's book. Basically, we are looking at right-wing fever dreams about manhood and masculinity and how that will save America, and Hawley's book Manhood is our window for doing this. We're continuing through the second part of his book. Again, the book is divided into two main sections. The first part kind of lays out his broad overview of what masculinity is. The second part he gets into the specific roles that he believes men are uniquely called to play, where they express and develop these virtues of masculinity. And we are following a pattern in his book that is typical of the discourse on the right.

The absolute foundation of society, as people on the right tend to understand it, is the nuclear family formed by the marriage of one man and one woman with a primary purpose of producing children. That's a hard sentence to say. And so the first masculine roles that Hawley addresses are those of husband and father—very straightforward. And then within that right-wing imagination, in that way of thinking about society, things broaden out. So they start out with husband and father in the nuclear family, and they expand from there, which brings us to the chapter we are now considering, which examines men's role as warrior.

I have been anticipating—anticipating is not the right word—dreading this chapter for a number of reasons, and we'll get into those as we go. The chapter is bad. It's just as bad as you would think it is. It's so bad that I have struggled to order my thoughts. And I think the reason that it's so bad is actually because the concept of the warrior is something that is so prevalent in right-wing discourse that it becomes almost all-encompassing. It becomes an almost vacuous concept because it's so far-reaching, and that affects this chapter. And so it gets really hard to talk about, but I'm going to do my best.

I'm going to do my best to highlight some things. We're going to get started on that this episode. We're not going to finish it, but I want to start today by looking at some of the presuppositions about masculinity that come out in Hawley's discussion. And to do that, I want to look at what he says, obviously, but I also want to look at what he doesn't quite say, and I hope that that statement will make sense as we go along. In that context, I also have to highlight a couple things that he gets very, very wrong, and I think intentionally wrong. And again, we're looking at Hawley not because he's unique, but because he is typical of a certain discourse on the right. And this comes through very strongly here.

And then I want to highlight a theme that I think is actually going to play out as we go further into this chapter. It's a theme I think we're going to see over and over again, which is that he doesn't actually think what he says he thinks. Or maybe he thinks that he thinks what he says he thinks, but he doesn't actually think that. And that was clear as mud, just like this chapter. In other words, it turns out that by the time he actually lays out what he thinks the warrior virtues are that define masculinity, they don't feel all that warrior-y. They don't feel very much like warrior virtues. And they also don't wind up being all that distinctively masculine. And that's a theme that we've seen.

Okay, so I want to start the discussion with a topic that we've looked at in other places and other parts of Hawley's book, and that's the contrast that he draws between his view of masculinity and what he describes as the present-day Epicureans. And in this chapter, he very freely uses the terms like Epicureans and liberals and progressives completely interchangeably. I've suggested that throughout—it's very apparent in this chapter.

So after a brief illustration of a warrior, Hawley does what he typically does. He starts his chapter with this story that I think is supposed to be folksy and connect with people and whatever. He starts with a story, and then that's supposed to illustrate some of the warrior virtues. So we're going to come to what that story is later. But after he does that, he offers his usual shtick about how progressives or liberals or Epicureans hate men and masculinity, and one of their defining features is that they hate the warrior virtues that men embody.

And I think his discussion is really typical of what we find in a lot of other places on the right or in the general manosphere or what have you. But if we take a look at what he says, there's a certain evasiveness here that I think is by design and is worth noting. Hawley models how people on the right will often imply something but not quite say it explicitly. And I think the reason that they do that is so that when you come along and challenge them on it, they can say, "Whoa, hey, I never said that. I never said that. I don't know why you're saying we said that. Never said that," even though it's the clear implication of what they said. And he does that in spades in this chapter.

So here's how it works. He starts with this statement, completely typical. I'm quoting Hawley: "Today's liberals do not want men to take up the warrior virtues." End quote. Straightforward statement, very concise. But here's the key: he doesn't actually tell us anywhere in the chapter—so far, the part we're talking about today, we're not getting all the way through the chapter—he doesn't actually tell us what the so-called warrior virtues are. He doesn't come out anywhere and say, "Here are the warrior virtues and liberals hate them," or something like that.

Instead, what he does is he goes through a list of all the character traits that he says liberals, and especially the American Psychiatric Association—the APA is like his primary example here. So the modern liberals or Epicureans or progressives, the APA is like the apotheosis of this, I guess. It's not his only example, but it's his favorite. He goes on to list the kinds of character traits that the liberals say men should avoid. And his point is that they are attacking masculinity as such—that in attacking these character traits, they are attacking men. They are attacking the very idea of masculinity.

So here are some of the traits that he says liberals say that men should not have. And note all the negatives. Again, he's not offering a list of traits that he thinks men should have. He's listing a set of traits that his opponents say men shouldn't have. And these include—I'm taking this directly from his text: a proclivity for exercising strength expressed through domination over others; a proclivity for aggression; emotional stoicism and "the restriction of emotional expression"; a proneness to violence and anger that plays out in practices like bullying, assault, and/or physical or verbal aggression.

That's quite a list. Now I want to be clear—perhaps maybe especially because I am a male-identified person—I don't think that these are traits I want to foster as a part of masculine identity. I share the criticism of these traits. Again, strength expressed through domination, aggression, the restriction of emotional expression, violence and anger expressed through bullying, assault, or physical or verbal aggression—I don't think those are part of masculine identity or should be.

But here's where Hawley is tricky. He doesn't actually say—he doesn't come anywhere and say, "Here are masculine virtues. These are things that men should do. These are things that men should live. These are ways that masculinity should be expressed." But he implies it. He implies it by mocking those who say that masculinity should not be understood in those terms. This is his negative evidence, as it were, of what it is that liberals or progressives or Epicureans say about masculinity that's so problematic and so terrible. And by doing that, the implication is, this is Hawley's vision of masculinity.

But by not explicitly endorsing them—by criticizing those who criticize those virtues, or as he would saw them, or those characteristics—what he's doing is he's giving himself the cover. So if somebody says, "Whoa, Josh Hawley, I mean, you're saying that men should be aggressive, that they should dominate others, that they should be violent," he'd be like, "No, no. I don't know what you're talking about. I never said they should be violent. I never said they should be aggressive." But you're like, "Yeah, but you criticize people who said that they shouldn't be violent or shouldn't be aggressive."

So that's the shift, and that's what I want to highlight there. It's the shiftiness of the discourse, and it's the way that he implies something, doesn't quite come out and say it, but it's a way of saying it without having to say it and giving himself the cover to deny it later and so forth.

This is where we also need to insist—again, I know this has come in before, I know this is a thing I talk about a lot, but he brings it through really clearly in this chapter—the point that for him, masculinity and male identity are fixed. They are permanent, and they are biologically determined realities. They are not just about socialization. He is, in other words, what we would call a gender essentialist—that gender has innate characteristics, masculine male gender has innate characteristics, and they are fixed and biologically determined.

So he believes that there are two and only two genders and so on. We've seen this throughout, implicit. But here's what he says explicitly in this chapter. He says, "What today's Epicureans fail to consider is the possibility that manhood is real and biological." Standard discourse on the right, standard of those who deny the reality of transgender identity or gender fluidity or non-binary genders, or the idea of a general gender spectrum and so forth.

And then he goes on to say that they—the Epicureans, the liberals, the progressives—they view gender as a spectrum of choice rather than anything rooted in reality. Notice that word "reality" a couple times when he says they think that manhood is not real and biological, and they deny that it's rooted in reality. Both of those statements are falsehoods, completely typical of discourses on the right about gender and masculinity and so forth. Both false, and I want to touch on them for a few minutes because they're drawn out more specifically in this chapter than they have been before, and they're really important for understanding the dynamics and the contradictions of what Hawley is talking about.

So let's take the biology approach. And I want to first of all ignore the fact—I mean, we'll set it aside, but I guess what I'm saying is I'm not going to talk about it, but it's worth noting that here's Hawley saying it's biologically determined. And what he's actually saying is gender is real because it's biologically determined. That's his claim. You're going to hear this all the time from everybody—from, I don't know, Charlie Kirk to Josh Hawley to JD Vance to Uncle Ron, you name it.

It's worth pointing out: these are the same people who deny scientific findings on issues like climate science or vaccines or evolution or the age of the Earth or prenatal development, and on and on and on. When it comes to any of those topics, they deny science. Science is ideology. But suddenly on gender, they're the biologists.

But here's my claim, and I'm going to try to do this in 90 seconds or less. I haven't actually timed this. You can time it if you want. You can see if I do it in 90 seconds or less. Here's my claim in 90 seconds or less why the claim that gender is biologically determined doesn't work the way that people think it does, and it's not as scientific as they claim that it is.

When people want to argue on biological grounds that trans people aren't real, or that gender fluidity isn't real, or a gender spectrum isn't real, they typically appeal to chromosomes. And the logic is this: they'll be like, "Hey, it's simple. Females have two X chromosomes in the 23rd chromosome pair, and males have an XY chromosome. There's your obvious biological basis of gender. It's objective. It's biological. So any objection to the contrary is not scientific."

And this argument is not limited to religious people. Richard Dawkins makes the same argument, right? So staunch anti-religionist, he's also a transphobe who makes this argument. Here's the problem: it's not simple. That reasoning isn't simple, and it's not scientific. Here's why.

If we wanted to approach the question of gender scientifically, we couldn't just presuppose that it's determined by chromosomes, because that's what we would have to prove. But this argument presupposes that. So instead, if you weren't going to presuppose that, here's what you'd have to do: you'd have to say, "Well, let's see what people who identify as male or female have in common biologically speaking." And if we did that, sure enough, we'd find that most of the time there's a strong correlation between the 23rd pair of chromosomes and gender identity. Sure enough. But we'd also find the obvious fact that there is a small but not insignificant number of individuals for whom the 23rd pair of chromosomes clearly do not determine gender identity.

In other words, you'd find people with two X chromosomes who don't identify as female. You'd find folks with an XY chromosome who don't identify as male. It's a fact. And faced with that fact, faced with that data point, if we were really being scientific and not presupposing the answer we're supposedly looking for, we would have to conclude that chromosomes—yeah, they certainly appear to play a significant role in gender identity, but there are enough anomalous cases that they can't serve as a full explanation of gender identity. That would be a scientific response based on empirical evidence.

So people like Hawley and Dawkins and everyone else who appeal to biology saying it settles the issue of gender—they presuppose the answer that they're supposed to be looking for. It's a classic example of the fallacy known as begging the question. But the available and obvious data just doesn't support this. So those appeals to biology are not science at all. Done. I don't know if that was 90 seconds or not. It wasn't long. We could spend more time on it. Happy to get emails, or people can come to office hours, and we could talk more about that.

So that's his first point, is that it's biological. My point is it's not. There's no evidence that it is. And that brings us to his second point. He says that those who deny that biology alone determines gender—people like me, I deny that—say that it isn't rooted in reality. That's just silly. Gender identity is absolutely rooted in something real, absolutely and unequivocally. What it is rooted in is someone's experience of gender. That is the reality in which it takes shape. That isn't biology, but it's real.

And here's the other thing: I don't care what Josh Hawley or Richard Dawkins or Uncle Ron or JD Vance or anybody else tries to tell you. When you say, "Why don't you think that gender variability is real?" Oh, they'll say chromosomes, or maybe they'll cite the Bible or whatever. Those are post facto, after-the-fact justifications. The real reason why people don't accept the notion of a gender spectrum is because they haven't personally experienced it. They have not experienced questions about their own gender. They have not experienced gender variance, and so they just don't think that it's real because it's not their experience.

So they criticize or dismiss the experience of others, but their basis for doing so is their own experience. They're not arguing on the basis of science, the Bible, or anything else. Their real argument is based on experience. What's the point? The point is they are happy to take their experience as reality but then not extend that to other people whose experience is different from their own.

And this is the basis for Hawley's other ridiculous and completely typical claim that liberals "view gender as a spectrum of choice." This is another one you'll hear. Yes, people like me think that gender is a spectrum—that is, there aren't two binary genders but a broad spectrum, a broad array of gender expressions. Cool. But no one I know—folks, I study this. I live in this world. I'm involved in the transgender community. I teach gender theory. I have family members for whom this is a reality and so forth. No one I know, except anybody on the right, has ever suggested that it's a choice, or that people just change their genders at will, or what have you.

I don't know anybody who has ever advanced that argument or whose expression or experience of gender maps that out. It's a favorite right-wing account, but it's based on nothing—nothing at all—except their refusal to consider other people's experience, to listen to queer folk and so on.

So I wanted to talk about that because Hawley is a self-proclaimed gender essentialist. That's his claim. I want to counter that. I want to explain why the claim is spurious. I think it's important to do that. But that's his claim: he's a gender essentialist. There are two fixed genders. Gender is biological, and gender characteristics are innate and fixed and so forth.

So he says that gender is fixed and it's immutable, and he implies that masculinity is about aggression and dominance and strength and violence and so forth. So here's why I think this is interesting looking at that. Hawley, he says that, but that's not actually the model of masculinity he advances as the warrior model. When it comes time to give his examples of the warrior, that's not actually what a warrior looks like.

And that matters, not just because it's inconsistent—it's wildly inconsistent. He's going to say, "Here's what a warrior is," and then he's going to get to examples of warriors, and they're not that. But it's also interesting because it means that Hawley himself—and I don't think that he's alone in this, I think this is another piece, like a deeply contradictory and ironic strand within that right-wing discourse—he himself actually seems to recognize different models of masculinity.

In other words, I think you don't have to look very far, and there's evidence of it in this book, that Hawley himself seems to recognize that there could be a spectrum of masculine expression. Now he's still going to say that men are men and women are women, and there are no other genders and so forth. But Mr. Gender Essentialist, Mr. Fixed Immutable Biological Traits, seems to actually presuppose that there's a spectrum of masculine expression. And he expresses this a couple of ways in the early part of this chapter.

One, on page 113—if you're, I don't know if anybody's reading the book as we go along, but if you are, I'm on page 113—in a typical bait-and-switch move, he's done this whole thing where he has criticized the view that there's no fixed essence to masculine identity. He's already done that. He's said that the liberals think that people change identity willy-nilly and so forth. And he's already done that, that implication of what the masculine virtues are. He's mocked the liberals for not liking aggression and violence and domination and so forth. He has implied that these are the masculine virtues.

What he then goes on and says is, he says the people on the left are opposed to recognizing that the core masculine virtues are, wait for it, drive and ambition. Hmm. This is the first time in the chapter drive and ambition show up. The APA, they don't criticize drive and ambition. All those virtues that he mocks liberals and progressives and Epicureans for critiquing—aggression, dominance, violence—those aren't the same thing as drive and ambition. He's never mentioned drive and ambition at any time in this chapter. He doesn't explain to this point how drive and ambition are warrior virtues. They just appear out of nowhere.

And it's obvious to me that you can have drive and ambition without traits like aggression or dominance or violence. Is it possible to be aggressively ambitious or ambitious in a violent way, or to exercise dominance through drive and ambition? Sure. But could you have drive? Could you have ambition without aggression, dominance, and violence? Of course you could.

So in other words, when Hawley defines the warrior virtues as drive and ambition, he seems to suggest there are multiple ways of being masculine and embodying what Pete Hegseth might call a warrior ethos. There's a spectrum of masculinity. Over here, he lists aggression and dominance and violence and assault, but then he's like, "Yeah, drive and ambition." He contradicts himself. He brings in the very kind of spectrum and variability that he says isn't real.

And I don't think probably anybody listening to this is super eager to defend Josh Hawley, but in case somebody was and they said, "Well, I think you're being kind of hard on Josh. He's a senator, he's not a philosopher, he's not a gender theorist. You can't expect him to think in a complex way about these things"—I'm going to give another piece of evidence, and here it is.

This impression is strengthened if we look at the story he tells at the beginning of the chapter. Again, his chapter starts with a story, as most of his chapters do. It's a way of trying to be relatable and so forth. And so as he tells it, it's the first few pages of the chapter. His wife's family descends from the ranchers who are instrumental in helping to apprehend the outlaw known as Captain William Coe. William Coe had been a captain in the Civil War. They helped to apprehend the outlaw Captain William Coe in New Mexico in 1868.

Now I did a little internet sleuthing on this, not super in-depth research, but looking at real sites about the history of William Coe and so forth. And I think it's fair to say that Josh Hawley, or maybe his wife's family in the retelling of this story over 150 years or so, takes some liberties with the story of William Coe.

But here's his story, here's the story as he tells it. And remember, this is the story that is going to show us the warrior virtues. It's going to give us a vision of what a warrior is. His story is his wife's ancestor was a widow, Susan Murphy Sumter, and she had a son named Bud Sumter. And it is strongly implied that the two lived alone occasionally in a homestead in New Mexico. They were prey to the predations of the well-known bandit and horse thief Captain William Coe. They lived in the territory that he and his gang would maraud and steal horses and so forth, and they were occasionally subject to his predations.

And so after his hideout was destroyed by the army—the army eventually goes after William Coe, destroys this kind of desert fortress he has known as Robbers Roost. And I think they captured and hanged a number of his gang members, but he and others escaped. They're on the run, and apparently after days, he shows up at the ranch demanding to use the bunk house to sleep with some of his men. He and his men are exhausted. They're tired. They show up at the ranch and they demand to be able to sleep.

So when this happened, Bud—here is Josh Hawley's description—Bud "decided to become the man his mother needed" and embraced his calling as a warrior. So confronted with the outlaw William Coe, the warrior nature, the warrior virtues of young 14-year-old Bud Sumter are awakened, and he steps up.

So you read this, you're like, "Wow, okay, what's he gonna do? What's Bud gonna do?" Is he—I don't know. Does he take him out? Does he capture him? Does he—I don't know. I could think of all kinds of things he might do. Like, does he lock them in the bunkhouse and set it on fire? Like, I don't know what he's gonna do. I'm like, bated breath. Josh Hawley, tell us what he's gonna do.

Here it is: while the men slept, he rode for help and told the army where the outlaw was. They crashed down on the bunkhouse. He rides out stealthily, tells the army where they can catch him. And when the men all wake up, the army's there and captures them and so forth. William Coe is executed shortly thereafter.

There are some problems with this story, historical and as a warrior illustration, and I can't resist highlighting some of them. But I think it also shows the very loose way that Hawley seems to interpret the term warrior.

First, it is certainly brave. It's courageous that Bud rides and gets help. That's a big deal. It's a huge thing to do. I can't imagine doing something like that at 14. It's real, it's courageous and so forth. But I don't know if it seems like a distinctly warrior act to go and get help. I don't know. It didn't feel like something a warrior would do. It just seems like a prudent thing to do. And it is also completely unclear how this is an expression of masculinity. Surely a daughter could have done this. There's no reason why it had to be a young man who did this. So there's that.

Second, Hawley says—he wants to heighten the tension of this, he wants to heighten the significance of this—he says that what's at issue here is that had the outlaws awakened while Bud was gone, they would have executed his mother. Her life is at risk. So if that's the case, number one, isn't she the brave one in the story? Isn't she the one who's—certainly feels like, I don't know, more of—if Bud's a warrior, she feels like more of a warrior than he does. But of course, that's going to defeat the whole purpose of the story, just to show us the masculine warrior virtues.

Here's the other thing: if they were alone on the ranch, and if it is true that if Bud were gone and the people woke up, they would execute her, the simple solution is you just both go ride for help. So if they wake up, there's nobody there, and they leave. And if you get back before they wake up, you capture them. Either way, she's safe. That part of the story just doesn't make sense.

Another part that doesn't make sense, as Hawley tells it, is the fact that they want to use the bunk house—that suggests that there's more than two people on this ranch. And my understanding—I'm not a rancher, I have no familiarity with ranches, but lots of ranches need more than two people to run them. It implies that there were additional people on the ranch, ranch hands and so forth. So like, where are these people? What role are they playing? We don't know.

So his story doesn't stack up. It doesn't illustrate a warrior ethic very much. But there's another piece of it that makes it even sillier. Hawley conveniently leaves out some important information to tell this story of Warrior Bud. And I actually found this information on the Oklahoma Senate web page. I want to put this out there—it's a real source. I found real information. I'm not making this up from some left-wing thing. I did more than read Wikipedia. I don't know why the Oklahoma Senate web page talks about this, but they do.

His mom, Bud's mom, Hawley's wife's ancestor, had remarried by this point in time. So he wasn't the proverbial man of the house. So the whole "Bud decided he was going to be the man his mom needed him to be"—if you buy into the whole thing, there's already a man of the house. She has remarried. She has a husband, Bud has a stepfather, and his stepfather is actually out with the army at the time looking for these outlaws. So when Bud rides out, he's riding out not just to go get the cavalry—literally, to get the cavalry to come rescue—he's going out to find his stepdad as well.

So all kinds of the story fall apart. I don't know why Hawley doesn't point out that the cavalry, the obvious literal warriors in the story—I don't know.

Okay, what's the point? For me, it's not the historical inaccuracies. It's family lore. I'm sure that as the family tells the story, it becomes convenient to leave out the stepfather. Maybe he was a bad guy. I don't know. Whatever. That's not the point. The point for me is this is supposed to be a story that gives us a model of the warrior virtues. Everything that comes in the chapter after this is supposed to be elaborating on this.

And if that's the case, it reveals a form of warrior that is so different from anything else he describes that you're like, "Okay, like, that's a warrior? A warrior act is going and getting help?" I don't know how that's drive or ambition. Not sure. Certainly doesn't seem to be aggression or violence or domination. Seems to be a decent thing to do—go ride and get help. But how is that distinctly a warrior virtue, Josh? I don't know. How is it distinctly a masculine virtue? It's clearly not.

Once again, as with so many of his examples, when you dig down at all, what Hawley thinks is a clear and obvious example of masculinity and a warrior virtue is nothing of the kind. It undermines his argument. It waters down the concept of warrior so much. So you're kind of—what is the point of saying there's this distinctive masculine role that men play of being a warrior? And it also undermines the whole notion that there's something distinctly masculine about this anyway, which also in turn undermines all of his presuppositions about gender essentialism and so forth.

As I say, there's a lot going on in this chapter, and I've had a hard time ordering my thoughts. I hope this is making sense. We're not done with this chapter. We're going to pick it up. We're going to go further. And I really think that the theme of Hawley watering down the conception of warrior to make it fit is actually going to have the effect of undermining the singularity and distinctively masculine aspect of the warrior virtues that he wants to highlight. That's what we're going to see.

More broadly speaking, I think most masculinists, most visions of masculinity—Hawley affirms a vision of masculinity that celebrates aggression and dominance and violence, and he justifies this by saying it's a part of men's biological nature and so forth. It's like the outlandish clickbait kinds of claims that people make, or the stuff that they'll put on social media to get all the views and drive the revenue and all the other things.

But in practice, and again, this is not unique to Hawley, in practice his understanding of masculinity and warrior virtues is much more fluid than he would let on. It's much less the kind of alpha male vision of masculinity than he suggests. And the effect is that it's not really clear what's distinctly masculine about this at all. I think that's important.

What does that mean? It means that, like a lot of right-wing discourses on masculinity, all the discussion about masculinity and masculine virtues and so forth—it's actually less about masculinity than it is staking out an identity position and attacking one's enemies. What Hawley really wants to do in this book is, yes, he wants to privilege men in a patriarchal society, but he wants to attack anybody who disagrees with him, anybody who has a different vision of social reality and what American society should be, anybody who is not in Camp MAGA. That's what he wants to do, and we see this in this chapter.

As I say, we'll have more to say as we go along. We'll pick up in the next episode. I want to, though, say again, thank you for listening. To our subscribers in particular, thank you for letting us do the things that we do. If you're not a subscriber but you still support us in other ways, thank you for doing that. If a subscription is something you would consider doing, I ask you to do so. We put out a lot of content. We do a lot of things. We're trying to continue evolving and developing and responding to what people need in a time that we feel is really important for these kinds of discussions. You are the ones who help us do that. So thank you so much. Please continue doing that.

Thank you for listening. As I often say, if you're listening to this, I'm well aware you could be doing something else with your time, so thank you again. Let me know what you think. Feedback on this episode, ideas for other episodes, ideas for other series, including questions I wasn't supposed to ask in church or wasn't allowed to ask in church: danielmiller.swaj@gmail.com. Would love to hear from you. Look at the other things we do. Look for the weekly roundup, look for the interviews, look for office hours. And as always, please be well until we get a chance to talk again.