Winsome Conviction Project logo

 

When relationships are fractured and church communities are splintering, what can we do to help put an end to the divisions? Rick speaks with Patrick Miller, pastor and co-author of the book, Truth Over Tribe: Pledging Allegiance to the Lamb, not the Donkey or the Elephant, on cultural influences contributing to division and how Jesus models a way forward that we can put into practice.


Transcript

Rick Langer: I'd like to welcome y'all to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name's Rick Langer, and I'm a professor here at Biola University in the Department of Biblical Studies and Theology. I'm also the director of the Office of Faith and Learning, and the co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project. And the Winsome Conviction Project is a thing that we spend a lot of time thinking about how we talk to one another in public spaces, how we talk to one another in the church, and even how we talk to one another with friends, with family members.

And one of the delights of working on projects like this is you find out that you're not alone. There's other people who share the concerns that you share. And one of the things that's great is to sit down and talk with those folks. And that's part of what we're planning on doing today, as well as talking about some pretty pivotal issues in our culture. So my guest today is Patrick Miller, and he is one of the ... well, author of the book Truth Over Tribe, as well as one of the co-hosts of the podcast. He works along with his colleague Keith Simon. And I just have loved reading their stuff and listening a bit to the podcast. And so I'm really excited to have you joining us here today, Patrick.

Patrick Miller: It's a pleasure to be here. Excited to talk with you about the book, and I love what you're doing with your project. Like you just said, it's fun seeing people out there who we have such a profound and deep sense of alignment with. And it gives me a sense of hope for the future of the church because I think that the vast majority of Christians want to speak in a way that loves their neighbor, loves their community, loves their friends, and having those conversations is really valuable.

Rick Langer: Yeah. And it's one of the things, I feel like we've almost lost the skill of talking that way because other things are being so relentlessly modeled to us. We just become shaped by the environment that we live and walk-in. So I would love to ... We we're just talking about both having been involved in a project like this. Why don't you tell us just a bit of your backstory? How did you get interested in addressing tribalism, incivility, whatever you want to call it, and particularly, were there particular experiences, or key figures, or people who just really shaped or guided you in this?

Patrick Miller: Yeah, that's a great question. This really comes out of our experience, my co-author, Keith and I, our experience as pastors. If you just rolled back the clock 10, maybe 12 years ago, and you looked at the kinds of questions that people asked us, they would be theological, "Let's talk about baptism. Should we baptize infants or should we not?" Or maybe let's talk about predestination, or God's sovereignty, or free will. We had all of these theological questions that could be controversial. Things could get heated in those conversations. But those were the kinds of questions people wanted to ask us.

But then fast forwarding to the present, especially around 2020, those questions slowly began to change. People were far less interested in our theological convictions, and far more interested in our political positions. And so when they asked us these questions, we'd often think, well, the Bible does have something to say about our politics, about our ethics, about our values. And so we tried to speak to those things. But what we really, really quickly discovered was that people didn't want to hear what the Bible says. They wanted to hear what they were hearing on social media or TV. They were getting their views, their ethics, their politics from the sermonizing of Tucker Carlson or the scriptural pages of the New York Times. And they were really deeply offended if we didn't align with those particular perspectives. One story comes to mind, this was right after the murder of George Floyd.

Rick Langer: Oh yeah.

Patrick Miller: And we got a message that weekend from someone who's a member of our church. It was on Facebook. They said, "Hey, if you don't talk about George Floyd this morning, if you don't mourn his death, I'm going to leave the church." Now, we don't let Facebook messages determine what we do on Sunday mornings, but we had already been planning because Jesus taught us to mourn with those who mourn, and we have a lot of black church members, and they were mourning not just what happened with him, but what this represents in our country. And so we realized, hey, we do need to mourn this collectively. This is part of our liturgy. This is part of what we do as a body of Christ. And so we did that.

And then afterwards we got all of the angry emails from the other side saying, "You said that all police officers are racist and bad." And when we stopped, and we said, "Oh, no. No, we didn't say anything about police officers. We didn't call anybody a racist. We just mourned with those who mourn." And I could just tell story after story like that. But the point is, people are asking different kinds of questions. They're often political. And the way in which those questions are asked, and the way in which those conversations happen, are increasingly not very civil. They're not very kind. They're incredibly divisive. They become a means by which we can judge the other person.

Rick Langer: You mentioned that as a pastor ... And I was a pastor for 20 years, as well, so we share a little bit of heritage on that count. And I feel like there's a different ... It isn't just that we've gone from having our squabbles about theological things to having our squabbles about political things. I feel like there's a different kind of tenor, a different timbre about how the political discourse is carried forward. Have you noticed that? And if so, what do you think accounts for that?

Patrick Miller: Oh, I've definitely noticed it. Let me just be self-reflective. I have to look at my own affect, my own tenor, how I speak to people. And it has become increasingly easy to be unkind, terse, or even mocking towards people who don't share my views on political issues, or really any issues in general. To be honest, I think part of that actually has a lot to do with the fact that we spent a good portion of 2020 isolated from one another in a lockdown that caused a huge ... Wherever you stand on the lockdowns and COVID, that's really immaterial to the facts after the fact, which is that it has caused an enormous amount of depression, of anxiety, of loneliness. And when you are a depressed, anxious, and lonely person, you aren't going to be the best version of yourself. You're not going to communicate with a kind of empathy and kindness that you might have communicated with prior to COVID.

And so it's almost like we're processing this collective trauma, if you will, that's had a massive effect on how we interrelate with one another. I still have people who are coming back to church, who haven't come to church for two years, and it's the first time they've been in a large crowd of people. Well, I feel for that person, but I also understand they're probably not mentally well, and I don't say that in a mean way. We're going to walk alongside them. But when you're not used to being around people for a prolonged period of time, and your primary format of communication is online, where you can just treat people, they're just little non-existent avatars, not humans made in the image of God, it's going to change how you communicate. And again, I'm looking at myself here because I see all of these exact same patterns and temptations in my own life.

Rick Langer: I wonder, one of the things that disturbs me when I think about this fighting over politics versus fighting over theology, there's a part of me that feels like politics has, for many people, become fundamentally more important than their theology.

Patrick Miller: Yes.

Rick Langer: And I'm not trying to say they say that out loud, but when you think, where do you spend your time, and then perhaps more importantly, what triggers your emotional buttons ... Robert Roberts, I think, has this wonderful phrase about emotions, a concern based construal, that you construe the events you have based on certain concerns you have. And I feel like our political concerns on a scale of one to 10 are an 11, and our theological concerns are maybe a six or a seven.

Patrick Miller: Yeah.

Rick Langer: Has that been an experience you've had, as well?

Patrick Miller: Yeah. Again, it goes back to what I said earlier about the kinds of questions that we get asked today versus the kinds of questions we got asked just a decade ago. That's not that much time to see such a radical shift happen. And really, I think it's just the church reflecting what's happening in culture writ large. We are talking more about politics. Part of this, I think is just a function of our news and media environment. Newspapers have always had a need to fill pages. And so, that's why we have celebrities. That's why we like to talk about all the details of the horse race in Washington DC. But when you multiply the amount of pages that you have, because now it's not printed pages, it's digital pages, and you multiply the amount of voices speaking, there's a constant need to drum up more conversation about these political topics.

And what a lot of the news media organizations have discovered is that the more outraged they are, the more they can tap into your emotions of anxiety, and fear, and anger, the more likely you are to click on their piece. And if you click on their piece, then they get ad revenue from the advertisers who are advertising on that page. And if you continue to click, maybe you'll become a subscriber, and then they'll get the revenue from your digital subscription. And if you continue to be a reader, maybe you'll share it with your friends and they'll become readers, and then they can sell more ads to them and more digital subscriptions there. And so there's this entire incentive model in our new media ecosystem, which is designed to prey upon our emotions.

The New York Times has actually ... they brought in a group, and they did this internally. They measured the emotional reactions of people reading their pieces, and then using AI, they're now able to determine, looking at a specific news article, opinion piece, whatever it is, they're able to determine the emotional response that you will have. And they sell that to advertisers. They tell the advertiser, "Do you want a happy reader? Do you want an angry reader? Do you want an anxious reader?"

Rick Langer: Wow.

Patrick Miller: And this is all public, so you can go look it up on Google. I forget what it's called. There's a name for the project. But if you don't think that's driving editorial decisions where they're realizing, "Gosh, we saw more anxious and angry ads than anything else, so we better write more anxious and angry stories," well, you've lost your mind. Again, the lead guy at the New York Times has explicitly said, "The wall between business and editorial has come down. It has to in this new environment." And so I think, again, what we're seeing in the church is just a reflection of what's happening in our media landscape. And as more of us live our lives online, we're just sucked up into it.

Rick Langer: You know, I'll just mention to our listeners that you have a whole chapter in your book, Truth Over Tribe, on just what you were talking about, about this perverse incentive mechanism that you find driving the social media context and just internet clicks in general. So let me just make that as a plug. A second thing I'd like to plug is a wonderful story you told in the book about the great cinnamon roll controversy that your church became embroiled in.

Patrick Miller: Yes.

Rick Langer: And I'll save that part of it. You guys were buying cinnamon rolls for churches, or for schools and other people in your community. And suddenly this became controversial because, hey, you guys were evangelicals. Shouldn't do that. You tell the story much better in the book, and I'll let people pursue it there. But the thing that really struck me is you mentioned that part of this came up because you'd preached a sermon about human sexuality, transgender issues were part of that, and it was a thing that people reacted to probably in different levels.

But I was intrigued that you took up this policy of saying, "Hey, if you're upset with me, I'd love to meet and talk about this." And then the question you ask people is, "What do you wish I knew before I preached this sermon?" And when I read that, I thought, I just love that question. And so I'd love to have you talk a little bit about how that worked out. Why did you choose that question? Have you got any other similar questions like that that'd be good for us? Talk to me a little bit about that.

Patrick Miller: Yeah, the story you just shared, this was in 2019, October of 2019. We were preaching through the Book of Genesis, and we got to that pesky passage, Genesis 1:27-28, I think, where it talks about God making humanity in his image. And it says male and female, he created them. And because we preached through the Bible, we got to that passage, and we had a sermon talking about how God created two genders.

Now, the heart of the sermon was, this is a controversial thing to say in our cultural moment. The whole point was we need to love our transgender community. We need to show the LGBTQ community graciousness and kindness. We need to be hospitable to them. So the tone and the tenor of the sermon was not some sort of anti-trans rant. It was actually talking to people in the church and saying, "Hey, we need to love our neighbor well, whether or not they're living in accordance with biblical ethics." And so that was the tone. And I think we thought maybe that tone wasn't going to cause a controversy, but it really did. As a result of-

Rick Langer: Guess, again. It's 2021, right? [inaudible 00:12:38]

Patrick Miller: Well, it was really our first experience with what some people call cancel culture. And no, we didn't get canceled. I don't know how you cancel a church. But we had a longtime partnership with a local documentary film festival, one of the largest in the country. And for 10 years, this hyper progressive documentary film festival, and us, a conservative evangelical church, we worked together to raise funds for some of the people who were ... you could call them the stars of the movies, but they're documentaries, so they're real life people. And so, one year we helped raise funds for anti-bullying campaigns. Another year we helped raise funds for ... just all kinds of good causes. And this was an amazing partnership. So interesting, though, because everybody, both inside and outside Columbia, found it totally confusing. How are these evangelical pastors good friends with these progressive filmmakers, so much so that they can go travel to New York and do these things with one another?

There was a story in the New York Times and Christianity Today because it was just so abnormal, and it was beautiful. It was just one of the most beautiful things because here's what we agreed on. We said, "Look, we want to be a part of a community that flourishes." And we think that the fine arts help a community flourish. And we think that when you bring people from outside of the city in to enjoy our restaurants, and enjoy all the commerce, and all that, that's good for our community. And so we had a lot of alignment. Even if we didn't have alignment ideologically, we had alignment in our values. But when we preached that sermon, it caused a huge uproar. And people who weren't even a part of the film festival started calling the film festival saying, "You need to cancel your partnership with The Crossing because they're bigoted transphobes."

And unfortunately, True/False did end up making the choice to cancel the partnership with us. And in the midst of that, we had to figure out how to respond because these people were our friends. Like I said, I've traveled with some of these people. They were friends, and it was hurtful. It was painful. And we realized that in that moment, we had a choice. We could fire back and say, "Hey, they knew all along our views, so this was nothing new." We could fire back and say, "Hey, here's all of our problems with the film festival, and here's why we think you shouldn't go and be a part of it now." But we took a different tack. We, myself included, our staff team, we all got online and just wrote messages about how much we love the film festival, how good we think it is for the city, how much we hope people continue to attend, even if they don't have a partnership with us anymore.

And after the fact, the film festival director and I grabbed lunch, and he just looked at me and he goes, "Hey, I don't know how you did that, but that was a masterclass on grace and forgiveness." And I wanted to be like, "Yeah, you know how we did it? Because we're awesome, we're great. We got it all together." And I looked at him and I go, "To be honest, I'm not sure how we did it because there was a part of me that really didn't want to do that. But here's the truth. We learned from the master of grace. That's how we did it. It's because Jesus taught us to love our enemies, to bless those who persecute us. That's the only reason we did it." And when you have the sermon on the mound, that notion of blessing those who want to hurt you, turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, if that's at the core of your convictions, you're going to orient yourself towards people who disagree with you differently.

That's why we could sit down with people who were offended by the cinnamon rolls. We sent him off to all these schools. There's only one school that got offended. But they were offended because we preached that sermon, and they didn't want our cinnamon rolls because we preached that sermon. And we sat down with the principal and had a chat with him. And we could sit down with him and say, "Hey, what do you wish I knew before I preached the sermon?" Because we didn't come to him as an enemy. We came to him as a fellow human being who probably has some valuable insights, and thoughts, and ideas that we can learn from. And so if you can orient yourself towards people as people made in the image of God, who Jesus has called you to love, whatever they've done to you and however painful it's been, those questions aren't hard to find. They just bubble up from the surface.

Rick Langer: That's great. And I appreciate what you just shared at the end there about just saying, "Hey, this is a person made in the image of God. There's probably things I can learn from him. I didn't ask him beforehand. This is a new source of information. Let me be open to that input." And presumably, you're not planning on changing your viewpoint about these things, but on the other hand, are you assuming that you communicated your viewpoint perfectly? You have nothing to learn or nothing to refine. And that invitation, like you say, you come as a friend, not as an enemy.

Patrick Miller: Yes.

Rick Langer: Anyhow, love that question. And I think that'd be a great thing for us to pick up on, probably in a lot of things, not just sermons, but I could just imagine if a person's hurt by what you said, said, "I said this. Were there things that I didn't know or didn't seem to take consideration of when I said that? What did I miss?" And there's a posture of humility that I think is inviting when we do that.

Patrick Miller: Yeah, yeah. I totally agree. And I think, again, we learned that posture of humility from Jesus. I love the fact that he answers more ... sorry, he asks more questions in the gospels than he ever answers. And so many of the questions he asks, as the son of God, he could know the answer to just by looking inside of your heart. And yet, he still asks the question, he still draws the person out. And the Bible says that he grew in wisdom and grace. And so I can even imagine somehow in those conversations in his divinity, and humanity, and however those things interact, that he was even learning as he was talking to that person, and growing in his conversation with people the exact same way we do. And so again, he models for us humility. If the Son of God who knows all is going to choose to ask people questions, then I think we should ask people questions, as well.

Rick Langer: Yeah. He had a better excuse for not asking questions than we do.

Patrick Miller: Yes.

Rick Langer: So yeah, that's great. Another story you told that was intriguing to me was about a guy named Kelly Donahue, who was apparently a Jeopardy nerd, well, contestant who was exceptionally good. And after his third victory on jeopardy, he raised three fingers, which some people interpreted as a sign. Apparently this is a sign ... I know nothing about this, but a sign used by some people who are white supremacists. And all of a sudden, things went viral and things blew up. What I was intrigued by in your comment on this is the reluctance of people, once this became accused of being a white supremacist sign, the number of people who became silent and didn't have any courage to speak up and say, "Well, there's another way that this could be interpreted." Tell us a bit of that story and what you learned from that.

Patrick Miller: Yeah. So backdrop, like you said, Kelly Donahue, Jeopardy contestant. And on his third victory, holds up a really awkward looking number three. It's not the way most of us would do it. And there's a Facebook group for past contestants. And when they saw it, they knew exactly what it was. This is a white supremacist hand signal. And so they contacted Jeopardy and they said, "Hey, he's doing the signal, you need to take him off." And they didn't take him off. So then they went public and he said, "Hey, I'm not a white supremacist. I condemn all of that. I wasn't doing that." And they're like, "That's not enough." So they write a letter to the Anti-Defamation League, which is incredibly litigious. So if they can sue someone, they're probably going to sue someone.

And the ADL comes back to them and says, "Hey, we looked into this. He's not actually holding up a white supremacist sign. You're confused. This is the white supremacist sign." And by the way, he held up the number of victories every single time. So after his first victory, it was a one, after his second victory, it was a two, after his third victory, it was a three. So this is not white supremacy. But there were people who are part of that Facebook group who, from the very beginning, knew this is a witch hunt. This is not real. This guy's not a white supremacist. We're harming him. And they reached out to Kelly Donahue privately and said, "Hey, I'm really sorry about what's happening to you, and this is terrible. I really want to speak up, and I'm afraid if I speak up that the dog pile would come on me, and I can't afford that with my career, or I can't afford that with my family, or my reputation. So just know I'm supporting you. I'm just sorry I can't say anything."

And I hear that story and I think, wow, what a lack of courage, and wow, what a lack of integrity. Right? Because just stop and think about that person. What they are saying is, "My personal welfare is not only more valuable than the welfare of someone else," which is not Christlike. And I'm not saying these people are Christians, but it's not Christlike to put someone else's welfare below your own. But even more importantly than that, maybe your integrity is worth less than your reputation. You would rather be a dishonest person who doesn't say the truth than lose your reputation. And that just shows that our values, our loves, are totally out of whack.

And yet, this is really common. I have it happen all the time, even with our podcast because we talk about controversial things. People will reach out and be like, "I can't believe you talked about that. I can't believe you did this." Or they'll say, "Hey, I saw someone ripping on you on social media, and it's terrible. I just can't say anything because of the consequences for me." And I'm like, wow, we're living in this cultural moment. I don't want people to feel like they have to say everything they think, but I think there's times to be courageous. There's times to speak the truth. If we didn't, we wouldn't know that the Earth goes around the sun. Galileo would've just stayed quiet. That's not the world I want to live in. I want to live in a world full of truth, and integrity, and courage.

Rick Langer: One of the things that we talk a lot about, just with some of the things we do with the Winsome Conviction Project, is the idea of cognitive complexity. This is one of these classic things that academics come up with, the more syllables, the better kind of thing. But-

Patrick Miller: Yes.

Rick Langer: Cognitive complexity is just the idea that there might be more than one reason why a certain thing happens. And we tend to latch onto either the first thing that comes to mind or the most, for whatever reason, compelling to us thing that comes to mind is the only possible explanation. And this reminded me of that discussion where you see, "Hey, that looks like a sign." And apparently even the Anti-Defamation League said, "Well, it doesn't really look that much like that sign." But nonetheless, they saw that connection and suddenly that became the only possible explanation.

And the reason I say it that way isn't just because they came up with that explanation, but because when any others were offered, the only thought was they would be offered for malicious reasons, that you don't really care about white supremacists or things like that. And the idea that there might just be a completely different reason why a person's doing something. It seems like that is a thing that we don't want to take the time to even entertain.

Patrick Miller: Yeah, totally agree.

Rick Langer: One of the things you point out there is the need for intellectual courage or conversational courage, you might even call it, willing to just speak up about things. But there's a flip side of this that sometimes we need to figure out how to be silent or to practice intellectual humility. In other words, the courage is required when you say, "Hey, I think that's wrong," and you speak up for what you believe or what you feel or whatever. But it seems pretty important, and I think you mentioned this in a story you tell about COVID vaccines, and a person basically absent, on a scale of one to 10, I'm a 20 in terms of how convinced I am that COVID vaccines won't work. And there's this incredible lack of humility and the possibility that you might be wrong. But that does create a tension for us because on the one hand, we need to have the courage of our convictions. On the other hand, we need to practice an intellectual humility and have a certain measure of doubt about our own convictions. How do you navigate that?

Patrick Miller: Yeah, it's a fantastic question. And until you asked it, I had not put together that we had one chapter about intellectual confidence and another one about intellectual humility. So I really like it because you're capturing attention that, even in the book, I don't know if we totally clarified or leaned into. But on the fly, this is what I would say. It's all about proportionality and curiosity. So when it comes to how confident I am about whether or not I should say something, whether or not I should speak up and say the truth, that my confidence about speaking up should be in proportion to my knowledge and my expertise. Right?

So if you're just speaking up and speaking out because you read one person's tweet, and you read a bunch of racism, or patriarchy, or whatever it is into their tweet, and it was just one tweet, and you know nothing about this person. You've never read any of their other tweets before. You've never read anything that they've written. You've never engaged with them. You just saw their 140 characters, and now the truth about them.

Well, your knowledge is very, very low. Very, very low. And so, your courage to speak out and correct them should be in proportion to your knowledge. And if it's very low knowledge, that might actually be the circumstance where you don't speak out. In fact, it might be the circumstance where you show curiosity. I don't know this person, so I'm going to try to ask them a question to clarify what they're communicating and what they're saying, and make sure that I've understood them properly. And curiosity is the other half, which is, again, if we have a low level of knowledge, or even a medium level of knowledge, it's almost always better to ask questions before we make accusations.

So in the Kelly Donahue thing, the people who wanted to defend him, they didn't have to come out and say, "You guys are all wrong. This guy's not a racist. You're crazy. You're just seeing things." They could have come out and said, "Hey, I've looked at some of the tape and it seems like he's holding up his win number for every single win. And I'm wondering, do any of you think that might be the issue?" They could have asked questions, they could have shown curiosity, and not necessarily even come to is direct defense. And so that's how I try to navigate it. The reality is the amount of things that I know really, really well is very, very small. But in those areas, I think I should have some level of confidence, not cockiness, but confidence to engage in a conversation, especially when you're talking about someone else's livelihood and welfare.

Rick Langer: Yeah, it's funny. I have spoken a fair bit about gentleness, and kindness, and things like that, just saying, "Hey, this is just a Christian way to live. We don't really get the option to opt out." These are fruit of the spirit. To say, "Hey, I think I'll pass," doesn't really seem to cut it. And people are really quick. Number one, I've discovered if I want to preach an unpopular message, there's my go-to one. I can just pull that one out and I'll get people worked up.

Patrick Miller: Wow.

Rick Langer: Second thing is that the first response is, "Well, Jesus turned over the tables in the temple." And it's really interesting as you look at some of those passages describing this episode, how often, either right before or after you have these descriptions, Jesus knowing what was in their heart.

Patrick Miller: Yes.

Rick Langer: And I'm thinking he's taken a pretty radical move there, that's for sure. And I don't want to deny that happened, but it is interesting to say he really was in a position to know what was in their heart. How about you? What effort have you made to really know what's in this person's heart? And I think the answer is we tend not to want to know. Once we see the tweet, like you mentioned, it's unsavory, or unwelcome, or we lose the desire to even have a conversation with the person and to find out what's really in their heart.

Patrick Miller: Yeah, yeah. No, it's really true. I have the exact same thing happen whenever I talk about, "Hey, we should speak in accordance with the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." And you're right. It'll be like, "But Paul, but John the Baptist. But Jesus." And I take those responses really seriously because they're not totally false. But I think you hit the nail on the head. One, you are not Jesus. You cannot see into people's hearts. And so you can't have a high level of certainty that you've read the situation totally correctly.

Number two, Jesus is without sin. And so when he was angry, he had righteous anger. There's another passage, Galatians 6, where Paul calls people to correct one another, but he says to do it in a spirit of gentleness, lest you be tempted. And I think the temptation is, when you correct someone, to become angry. And you might feel righteous in your anger because hey, what they're doing really is wrong, but he understands that because we aren't Jesus, we aren't sinless, our anger is, in my opinion, more often than not tainted by sin. It is corroded and corrupted by sin. And so he says, "Look, do it in a spirit of gentleness so you're not even tempted to have unrighteous anger," because if you show them unrighteous anger, you might actually end up leading them to justify the bad behavior that they're doing.

Rick Langer: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a great point. Well, Patrick, thanks a ton for joining us for this conversation. I'm sure we'll have you back for another go round on these things, but I really do want to appreciate the insight, and also just practicing some of what you preach in terms of being willing to speak up when it isn't always easy. And love the things that you have been able to do there, and I just pray God's blessing on you as you continue to serve.

Patrick Miller: Thank you so much for having me. This has been fantastic.

Rick Langer: Well, I'd like to thank all of our listeners, as well, for joining us. We'd love to have you be a regular subscriber by joining us on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And we also encourage you to check out the WinsomeConviction.com website where we have some more resources, articles, and other information on cultivating convictions and holding them deeply, but conversing with other people in ways that honor our differences, and avoid dividing communities, because that's what we're really here all about. So thanks for joining us.