TGFB Founder Jordan Bush sits down with Pastor Douglas Wilson to talk money, economics, and why Christians (including pastors and other ministry leaders) should care. Pastor Wilson gives his thoughts on Bitcoin, including reasons he's excited about it and challenges that still lie ahead.
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Doug Wilson
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TGFB Douglas Wilson
jordan: [00:00:00] Douglas Wilson is a Christian and has pastored Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho for the past 40 plus years. He's the godfather of the classical Christian school movement, the founder of Logas Christian School, and new St. Andrews College. He's a prolific author of too many books to count, including the book "Is Christianity Good for the World?", which he authored alongside the late Christopher Hitchens. He's a social critic, a Troubler of Israel, a man of Issachar, the husband of over 45 years, to Nancy, the father, to Nate, Rebecca, and Rachel and grandfather to 17 grandchildren and a
Doug: 18. 18 now
jordan: 18. You got one more in a hopper. I almost asked you. I almost asked you, and a spiritual father to many more. Douglas Wilson. Welcome to the Thank God For Bitcoin podcast.
Track 1: Thanks for having me.
Pleasure
jordan: So I just want you to know ahead of time, when I thought about, who I could have on this podcast, you are literally number one at the top of the list. at the I don't know where we go from here, but
Doug: right.
jordan: So, I listened to a number of things that you've done and talking about economics. One of the most recent [00:01:00] things that I watched was an interview that you did with a hedge fund manager named David Bahnsen, who's the son of, of Greg Bahnsen, obviously.
He has a program with National Review called No Free Lunch, which I'd highly commend to our audience. But one of the things that you said, in that interview that I think will be a good through line for this entire conversation was this statement you said that money is the circulatory system in any body politic.
Can you explain why you believe that to be the case?
Doug: Yes. because we are not disembodied spirits because God the heavens and the earth, it is necessary for us to communicate with one another and love one, one another through media. The, you, there's no way to, you can't take a bunch of disembodied spirits and throw them into an empty vacuum and have them radiate love vibes at each other.
It just the /basically we have to, if in order for me to give [00:02:00] a gift, I've got to make the gift, I've got to wrap it. I've got to carry it in my hands, and extend it to someone else, and then they take it with their hands. Now, what money does is, it reduces the friction in that sort of transaction.
It used to be if I wanted somebody's cow or I wanted to buy a quarter of a side of beef, I had to give him 17 chickens. , right? And so that gets cumbersome. So the advantage of money is that it's portable, fungible, you can apply decimal points to it and so forth.
So what it is, is sort of clearinghouse of mutual giving and receiving. So you translate the side of beef into funds and you translate the chickens into funds, and then you just transact it that way. So if you had, if you had a brain bigger than what we've got, and you were able to see [00:03:00] all the economic transactions, you would see a large portion of what's going on.
Right. You, you would see the circula, the circulatory system of that culture in the exchanges that were made.
jordan: sure. Yeah. And so, honestly, and one, one of the things that makes me think about, um, is. Could, I mean, I think you could honestly say that money serves in, in a very real sense, a, a priestly function within a society. Like it's this thing that, that allows intercession between people. It allows, I mean, you can honestly think about the role of a priest in an economic way, right?
You have the priest. Is, is is kind of the money who'd be interceding between God and man
to give both sides of the transaction something that they both
Doug: yeah. Yeah. I use the word media,
but that's not that far removed from mediator.
jordan: yeah.
yeah.
Doug: Right? So you have a, you have a mediating, it's a mediating
function between purchasers and sellers. Gift givers and gift receivers. [00:04:00]
jordan: Yeah. Another thing. Again, there's, there's, there's so many different things that money does or, you know, different, uh, components to, to what makes up money or at least good money. One of those things is a store of value, inherent in the idea of money is that you have to do something to earn it.
You have to provide value. You're given something of value in exchange for value that you provide. And this is, this is why something like, we don't use something like sand or dirt, for, for currency because, you know, I can go and accumulate those things without any work or self denial being done at all to provide those things.
Doug: And that means, that means, that means, the money has to have a certain element of scarcity.
Um,
jordan: percent.
Doug: scar scarcity is one of the features.
jordan: Yes, absolutely.
But one of the other things that you talked about in that, uh, excellent interview with, uh, with Mr. Bahnsen, is the idea that there are, there are currencies that are, that are far beyond just money itself. there are, there are a number of different [00:05:00] currencies. And one of the things that you talked about was the idea of social capital.
Do you, could, could you kind of unpack what you mean by that term? It's not something that we're, that we think a lot about or are presented with very much.
Doug: Sure. What, what I meant by social Capital? I'll illustrate it with, a minor, illustration of it, not minor to me, but it's, and that is what dollar value could I possibly place on all the things my father taught me?
jordan: Hmm. Hmm.
Doug: Right? Um, so I get, I find myself in a situation and I think of something my dad would say, or I, I take, uh, I find myself quoting him, or Im mimicking him or imitating him in a situation. Well, I really, that really is part of my inheritance, uh, from him. But it's, it wasn't a physical in inheritance. So that's what I mean by social capital.
Now, if you zoom out to, uh, that's a very important thing to me, but it was a smaller. [00:06:00] A subset of the social capital, of religious capital, moral capital, the sorts of things that when the gospel takes root in a society and a culture, and the people have acknowledged the God of the Bible for multiple generations, there's certain things that just become part of the atmosphere. It's part of what you do.
One of my favorite illustrations of this would be the power goes out in a major city and all the drivers at a traffic light intersection, they just voluntarily turned it into a four-way stop, four-way stop sign. Uh, that that does not happen in nature. That does not happen by itself.
It's the inculcation over many generations of teaching kindergartners to stand in line. That's moral capital. You have to learn it. And upstream from all of it is the gospel.
jordan: Amen. One of the things that we've seen going back to the great financial crisis [00:07:00] in 2008, and then even more so the, it was even more heightened and more pronounced over the last three years during the whole Covid fiasco.
You see the cost of the dissolution of that social capital, what happens when that trust is broken down and you start to see the value and how it's not as, it's not anywhere near as easily replaceable or rebuildable as maybe the money itself.
40% of all of the dollars that have ever existed were created since 2020 as a result of both President Biden and Trump, printing, and doing these, airdrop handouts to everyone so that, that currency or money, you know, sorry, excuse for money, but that, that money is, is able to be created and reproduced very easily and quickly, whereas the social capital is not. So given the situation that we're in, what's our course of action?
Doug: All right. So one of the, one of the things that I'm fond of saying is that that reality is not optional. And that means in the long run, stupidity [00:08:00] never works.
So you can, you can jump off a cliff in the conviction that you can fly and if you're delusional enough, you might actually take the leap.
But at some, point in the proceedings reality meaning the rocks below will reassert itself.
And, uh, and that means that sometimes when I look at all the nonsense that's going on in clown world,
I think, what America really needs right now is a famine, because there's a lot of foolishness that is going on because of the abundance and the relative security that we have.
You can afford to throw money around because you, you think or believe that there's an endless supply of it. Uh, but there is not. There's not an, there's not an endless supply of it.
And, that's Margaret Thatcher's. Great comment. The problem with socialism is sooner or later you run out of other people's money.
And that means the people who are investing, who are taking [00:09:00] real value of their, the product, of their work, and finding places to store that wealth, they're also gonna figure out ways to hide that wealth that they've stored, to hide it from the predators.
And when the predators no longer have access to it, the party's over.
jordan: Yeah. No, a hundred percent. Another quote that you had during the same interview, you said, "Virtue reinforces the markets, and the markets ought to reinforce virtue."
I think if you ask the average Christian or the average pastor today, what his role should be, how much he should be thinking in these terms, or, thinking about the instruction that he would give to his congregation as relates to the topic of economics or, uh, markets or any of these things, they probably wouldn't, that probably wouldn't be in their top 20 things of ,
one
Doug: Okay.
jordan: top 20 things that they would be talking to their congregation about.
One of the other things that you mentioned, you said pastors should be educating themselves in basic economics. Our audience would give that a hearty amen. Why do you think it's important for Christians [00:10:00] generally and even pastors to be thinking about these things and communicating these ideas to their congregations?
Doug: I think it's, I think it's crucial because, well, there's a number of reasons, but for one, it get, it gets pastors out of their ivory tower, because what happens is the pastor's actual task is to take the word of God, which is timelessly true in every generation, and, apply it and proclaim it to the people where they are, which means that the pastor has to be bilingual. He has to understand the thought world, thought forms of the scripture, but he also has to understand what's going on in people's lives.
Alright. And what's going on in people's lives are, as, as commonly called in political campaigns are kitchen table issues.
Uh, what do I do with my job is threatened. What do I, what do I do about what HR is gonna do to me, if I continue to go to this church? What am I [00:11:00] going to do about retirement? What am I going to do about should my kids take care of me?
There's a host of questions that the Bible has answers for. In principle, the Deuteronomy says nothing about your 401k, but, the Bible does have principles that apply to your situation, and it's the pastor's responsibility to be the, interpreter between those two worlds.
So he, he can't just go into the library and study the, worldview of the ancient near East. And then give learned lectures in the library about this, this arcane subject that a handful of people in this congregation are, are interested in it. Ha. He has to preach to them where they live. How does the gospel affect your day-to-day life?
jordan: Yes. And I, I definitely think that's part of the, that is part of the risk, and that's part of the. Just a lot of what we've seen is just you, there is, there does [00:12:00] seem to be this disconnect between pastors and the people that they're ministering to because there, there's not. People speaking authoritatively or, or intelligently about the, you know, in an informed way about economics, about things like monetary policy things like, you know, just the, the ways that, um, and again, this is something we talk a lot about in, in thank for Bitcoin in, in our world is just currency devaluation.
Um, you know, how does this, what does this look like? How does it, why does this happen? Um, and, and so a big part of our, our goal, so again, we, the, the name can be deceiving. So we have the name, thank God for Bitcoin. But really what it is, is it's half of our whole goal and, and mission is basically help Christians understand why sound money matters and then help them see that Bitcoin is sound money.
One of the other things you mentioned in this regard is that this neglect of pastors speaking about these issues and being comfortable and, and bold in speaking about economic issues is somewhat of a recent thing. You mentioned that a number several hundred years ago, the Christian clergy played [00:13:00] a pretty crucial role in helping reinforce the importance of sound markets.
Can you give some examples of that?
Doug: Yeah, it'd be largely in the early first half of the 19th century.
One of the things that was very striking about the evangelical and Protestant clergy at that time is how educated they were in economics and how forcefully they argued for it in the public square.
Your listeners probably don't need to be told this, but free market economics is not the same thing as what I call crapitalism.
Crony capitalism, government being in bed with big corporations, that's not free market economics.
So these men were in the first half of the 19th century very important figures in establishing the ethos of markets and free markets in the American DNA.
It would come out in their writings, their books, sermons, that sort of thing. It was very [00:14:00] striking.
jordan: Can you give one or two examples of pastors or Christian thinkers who spoke along those lines?
Doug: Uh, I, um, it was a, I'm gonna give You a very vague,
uh, answer. it's in a, it's in a book. I can probably look it up while we're talking here.
It's a history of the American Mexican War, which occurred in the first half of the 19th century. And there's a big section on the role of evangelical Protestant clergy in that whole political setup.
So I don't have any, I don't have names on the tip of my tongue, uh, but there's this, uh, I'll have to find that book.
jordan: It's fine. We can put it in the show notes afterwards, so no worries.
Have you read the book "The Ethics of Money Production" by Yörg Guido Hülsmann?
Doug: I have not.
jordan: Okay, so he is a, he's a Roman Catholic Austrian economist. Basically the function of this book is to popularize the writings of a 15th century Catholic bishop [00:15:00] named Nicholas Oresme.
And this guy in the 14 hundreds was standing up to princes who were trying to devalue the currency by adding in more base metals into the silver and the gold. Um, and so basically what he's doing in today's parlance that would be money printing.
He's enabling the monetary supply and his own power to grow. Nicholas Oresme appealed to this very obscure old Testament passage that says, "Thou shall not steal." Uh, so and so,
Doug: Tell me more about this religion of yours.
jordan: So, for our other listeners out there that Oresme is, is a, is a great voice and, and part of, again, part of what we see our work in is, is helping Christians again translate. Because no one's gonna tell you no, no, no politician or no , no governmental authority is going to sit here and, and tell you that they're stealing from you.
Doug: Right.
jordan: they're going to hide it in all kinds of different ways, in terms that sound, highfaluting. And so as Christians, we wanna drag these things kicking and [00:16:00] screaming into the light and then help Christians see the the biblical reality, how, what the scriptures would, would call these things rather than, the ways that they're hidden by people in modern day .
Doug: Absolutely.
jordan: One of the other things that I've watched a number of times was a sermon that you did entitled "Young Men in Their Strength."
And one of the things that you talk about in that sermon is the relationship, between sex and economics.
This is something a a lot of times this is something of a taboo, and this is something that the secular world will often try to use this as a gotcha.
And so you, I love, the thing I love about this, the sermon is like, you basically completely turned that on its head and you were like, well, of course it's about, of course sex and marriage are about economics.
Everyone knows that. So can you unpack your thoughts on that idea.
Doug: Yeah, So one of the things that modern feminists did is they attacked the institution of marriage as simply a glorified form of prostitution,
right? They, they said, okay, see there, there's a financial exchange and there's a sexual exchange, and how's that different [00:17:00] from prostitution? Well, uh, the, the thing that makes it different is that your entire life is involved in it.
So, uh, what prostitution does is detach the money and the sex, and it leaves out the, the. The car seats and the minivan and the white picket fences and the lawn demo mow and the mortgage payment, it, it leaves out the, all the rest of your life. So of, course, human lives. I said earlier that money is a circulatory system of a society, and sex is certainly part of that society. So it, you can't just say, well, the circulatory system doesn't reach certain aspects of our lives. No, of course. It permeates everything. So, so what I want to argue is that sex is inherently an economic reality, and, and has economic repercussions. The child that you beget [00:18:00] must be fed. Right. The that and the food costs something, and there's no way to escape it. And so consequently, you want to make sure that you sort of face up to the implications of all this, honestly, and that you take in into account the total picture. I used to have A weekly column for a public radio station many decades ago across the border at WSU, and I got fired from that gig for what? I, for what I'm about to say.
jordan: Doug, you, you, you got fired?
Track 1: I got fired?
uh, because I said something on the air that was just, and what, but what I said on the air was, was this, and this is something I learned from the great George Gilder.
And that is that men, uh, men and women taking them together, men are dominant. Okay. And they're gonna be dominant. No matter what you do, there's nothing you can do to erase that dominance. The only thing you can do through misbegotten policies [00:19:00] is make that dominance destructive instead of constructive. Right? So you your choice is not between whether men will be dominant or not. Your choice is going to be whether men are gonna be dominant constructively, or whether they're gonna be dominant destructively.
Now, in order to enlist men into constructive dominance, there has to be some sort of an exchange, right? And marriage is a building block of all stable societies. And in order to get men to commit to marriage and in order to get women to commit to marriage, they're both giving something up.
jordan: Yeah.
Track 1: And they both need to be receiving something.
And the way the world is constructed because it's not a level playing field. The way the world is constructed in a monogamous society where marriage is honored, men are going to give up more, at least on the surface,
okay? In order to be. And, and so what society did is they said, look, [00:20:00] if you give up your free booting py, radical Viking ways, or, and, and devote yourself to one woman, take care of her, take care of the children, you beget what you have. what happens there when the man submits his sexual cycle to the woman's. Civilization happens.
jordan: Yeah,
Track 1: Um, when it goes the other way. When women submit their sexual desires and cycle to the male, uh, the fallen fallen, but male desires, what you get is the civilization building power of a motorcycle gang.
jordan: Yeah,
Track 1: It's a boatload, a boatload of vikings. So what happens is all of this is tied in with economics. If a man is given honor and respect and the right to contribute constructively and in exchange, uh, he has access to a sexually fulfilled life with [00:21:00] one woman, the end result is culture. Civilization.
jordan: One of the other things you point out in that sermon is just the idea of, we haven't taken away the transactional nature of sex. We just have put it in different forms.
So you have the premium subscription to Bumble or whatever the, the dating site is.
You know, you're, you're paying for extra access or extra privileges.
And so, it might not be your, the Yenta or something, or, or you know, your parents who are arranging marriage, but you're entrusting yourself, uh, you're entrusting yourself to others. And those others, ironically, do not have the same, all of the same, uh, incentive alignment that you did when you, when you did have, you know, people who were your, your parents or other other relatives arranging those type of transactions because, they're gonna be directly inheriting the consequences of a good or bad match.
And it makes a lot of sense, that you'd want someone who was, related to you being the one who, uh, in, in, again, in an, an ideal situation. You obviously have bad situations,
Track 1: [00:22:00] Right, right.
jordan: But all things being equal. It, it, the, the incentives tend to align more in, in that kind of a situation.
Track 1: Yes. Uh, uh, one of the things I'm fond of, uh, saying is the state that in, in a modern statist society, they want to encourage a radical individualism because because individuals are like, uh, the illustrations I use are like bbs and you put a bunch of bbs in a sack and it doesn't have any structural rigidity.
And, then they, they try to foment things like, uh, massive amounts of pornography and pot smoking and stuff, which is to pour grease into the, you know, oil into the bbs and make them even slipperier in a biblical society, the BBS form molecular connections, so a husband and a wife, and a church community and a family, a tribe, a region. And, and the more complex molecules form, [00:23:00] the more structural rigidity there is that is able to resist the state.
jordan: Yeah. And this, that definitely, that is absolutely the case. And again, this, that's something that goes as far back as Genesis three. Like you have you, in Genesis three, you have the serpent trying to empower humanity, by saying, " Take responsibility for yourself. Make these choices." And in reality, you know, their, their liberty came at the cost of enslaving themselves to him and enslaving all the rest of us with him. You could very easily make the case that, the modern secular state is of their father, the devil.
Doug: Yeah,
jordan: One of the things I would love to talk with you about is, is money and education. This is one of the points at which when I heard about New St. Andrews I was most impressed. Can can you just talk a little bit about that and the relationship between you guys, uh, and, and the state in terms of, I guess in, in terms of new St. Andrews? Yes.
Track 1: Okay. Yeah.
So, uh, we resolved when we founded New St. Andrews that we were [00:24:00] not going to take one thin dime from the state because as the old saying goes, he who takes the king's coin becomes the king's man. And there are always strings. And even if the people sponsoring the legislation for the handout promised and put in the bill, there are no strings.
There's absolutely nothing in our legal system that prevents a subsequent legislature. From coming back, coming in and, and attaching all the strings. And when they come, when they come, in five years later and attach all the strings, now your budget is dependent upon
whatever that was. Right? So what we decided that, we decided that we were going to just stay free from that in principle. So we don't we don't accept government money. We don't accept state money. We don't, have a program where the students can come on student loans. That's it. It basically, we don't investigate where somebody got their money, [00:25:00] but we don't
do any cooperative thing where we cooperate with the government in any way.
jordan: sure. Yeah. That and that, I just think that is just so powerful. Um, and in such a, a a, in the, in the bitcoin world, one of the things that's talked about is, is time preference. Are you familiar with this idea of like low time preference versus high time preference?
Low time preference is basically thinking farther into the future. So like generationally or dozens of years, whatever. And then high time preference is basically I'm making decisions for today.
And it just seems to me that that idea and that form or principle and decision making is what is driving most everybody these days is where can I get the quick dime today,
rather than stopping to take a minute and think about where's this going?
So I just think you guys are, are to be commended both for obviously honoring the Lord and then for providing, just showing the rest of the Christian world, like an option that is, especially as things get crazier and crazier, um, in clown world. You guys are are providing a different option, [00:26:00] uh, for, for Christians.
So one of the other things along the, that front, um, one of the things that you're, you know, not only do you have kids who , who love the Lord and who are out there doing things for the Lord and doing all kinds of incredible things, they went and married people who are, are, you know, pretty incredible and doing lots of things for the Lord as well.
So, your, your son-in-law, um, Ben, who I've had the, the privilege to talk with a few times, uh, about what you guys are doing out at NSA, um, you and him together. And, and there may have been somebody else involved published a document that's called, "Saving Culture by Restoring the Liberal Arts."
I read through that a number of months ago now, and found myself heartily, amening all throughout it.
You wrote "The lies and destruction we deal with today are a direct result of allowing one of the most trusted, revered, and protected parts of society our educational system to become thoroughly corrupted.
Can you articulate and just kinda lay out a little bit more?
Track 1: Yeah, Uh, one of the things that is important to note, this goes back to something you were saying earlier about, um, [00:27:00] the pandemic years, the covid
years. Uh, one of the things we've done is we have destroyed the people's trust in virtually every important institution, um, in society. The military, higher ed, the CDC, corporate America, we, we've said, okay, we're going to annihilate your trust in everything.
And, this has been very much the case in, higher education. Basically I would say the cancer that is spreading through our culture is spreading from the lymph nodes of higher ed.
That's, that's where the nonsense was first tolerated. That's where the nonsense was nurtured at the beginning. And then all the kids who are graduated from that system go out and take jobs in corporate America, go out into the military and so forth, and spread the cancer that way.
jordan: I think a lot of this comes back to, and again, this is a topic that we talk about a [00:28:00] lot, is a lot of this comes back to the fact that so much of, of higher education is so beholden to the government. They, you're at a point where they're so reliant on that government money to make things exist.
Track 1: To survive. Yeah.
jordan: to survive. Yeah.
You know, and, and then as with the inflation that we've seen, and, and I mean, there's just a number of things when you, when when inflation goes up, the way that we've seen it, you know, rise precipitously the last few years, the inflation of, of home prices, the inflation of, of everything under the sun.
You just have people who are closer and closer to that razor's edge and they have to give over, they're incentivized monetarily at least to, to continue to give over and rely more and more on, on the nanny state, big daddy government. Um, and so again, I just think you're, we're getting to a point. (we've already been there, but we're definitely at a more closer to this, this edge of you're gonna have to Christians and churches and, you know, definitely Christian schools and, and, and universities are gonna have to make tough choices [00:29:00] if they're gonna survive.
And the reality is that many of them aren't, aren't surviving, many of them are shutting down, it seems like every year that goes by I'm seeing more and more bible colleges, universities, uh, missions organizations closing down. I, I, think people are starting to see it.
But I don't know that there's very many viable options that people see as, okay, this is what we're gonna do. You guys are, are definitely providing one of those, like what would you say to someone who sees all the problems, but maybe they're like, what do we do about this?
Track 1: I would say if, if you've bought into the system the loans and the guarantees and all of that and and you're just sort of up to your neck in that, that system, and you want to survive and you want to be faithful. Right. So you, you want to be both because every compromised institution at some point made a decision that it'd be better to continue on in existence than to, than to martyrdom, than, than to be faithful. So you've got to be willing to go under faithfully.[00:30:00] But if you want to make it, if you want to shoot the moon and try to make it, and you want to be faithful, you need to start making plans now for laying off half your people. Okay? There's, there, there's absolutely no way, uh, for you to detach yourself from the government teet. You, you can't do it. Unless you're willing to pay the price and, and the price is going to be that free money or that easy money is going to stop flowing.
jordan: Another, another way that you see this fleshed out again, you attributing, you, you attributed a lot of the, the decay and a lot of the, the stuff that we're seeing, the craziness that's just become normalized in our world, putting that at the feet of a lot of these universities.
We just take for granted the foundation, the gospel foundation that our, our country largely was built on, at least, you know, again, that's, that's a whole fraught issue.
But I mean, there's so many aspects of, of America's founding that it was just, you know, these, these seeds came up in the ground of the gospel and [00:31:00] the ground of a certain vision of reality that the scriptures lay forth. We don't know what anything is. We don't know what government is. We don't know what people are. What is a church? You have all kinds of, I mean, you have like seeker friendly churches.
You have all of these kind of different things. Everything. It seems like everywhere we look, there's identity crisis all over the place because we've stopped receiving our marching orders from the Lord.
I, I I don't see any, and I think you'd be the first one to agree with me. I mean, the, the solution is you go back, you repent. You repent and you go back. You go back to, to the person who has defined the way the world is. We, we keep, we can't just
Track 1: Mm-hmm.
jordan: defining these things for ourselves out of thin air.
Track 1: Yeah, you go, go back to your father and say, I'm no longer worthy to be called your son.
Make me a servant that you, you have to go back.
Also, before I forget to the book I couldn't put my finger on earlier,
is Mission Missionaries of Republicanism
Mission. Missionaries of Republicanism. It's a religious history of the Mex Mexican-American War, and it's by John
Pin. John Pin Hiro,
p i n [00:32:00] p i n h e I r O.
But there's, there's a, a good chunk in there about the economic sav savviness of these Protestant evangelical missionaries
jordan: Oh, that's awesome, man. Thank you so
Track 1: and pastors.
jordan: Um, and pastors. That's awesome. Um, okay, so now we're going to, we got, I think we have about 15 minutes left. Um, one of the things that I, I would be remiss if we didn't talk about was Bitcoin.
Um,
so now
Track 1: about thanking, you're gonna talk about thanking God first and then thanking
God and then.
jordan: Here we are. Yes.
And so, so one of the things that we had the privilege of doing was being, uh, we, we went to Podcaster Row at the Fight Left Feast conference that you guys did in Knoxville this past October. We had just recently founded the business. We were like, okay, let's go find a, a Christian conference to go to you guys because of the similarities and, and just the shared foundations of the importance of things like sound money. And I know there's tons of people in your orbit who have read and are very appreciative of somebody like Gary North's [00:33:00] work. Um, and so we just figured, again, if we have a place where we can go and we don't have to make the two part argument that we normally have to make, you
know, normally our argument we have to show Christians is that sound money matters.
And then we have to show them that Bitcoin is sound money with you guys and your audience. We just felt these guys already believe sound money matters. We just have to show them that, you know, try to show them that, make the case that Bitcoin is sound money. Um, but so we, we arrive.
We are sitting there , we, we go in and we, we start setting up at our table and we find that we are, we are right in front of the door.
And so we find, you know, we have our giant banner that says, Thank God For Bitcoin, right in front of the door. And so we took that as a hearty sign of approval from you guys. One of the things that I found that week was that NSA accepts Bitcoin, as tuition.
Ben told me that you guys haven't had very many people, if anybody, take, take them up on that offer at this point. But the very fact that you guys were willing to offer it was something that to me was super encouraging, and super interesting.
So I don't, I'm guessing you weren't part of the decision making process, but what do you think about Bitcoin?
Track 1: Alright, so, so, uh, [00:34:00] there'd be different levels of it? So, um, one level, the math level of it, I'd be no good at all at.
jordan: Yeah.
Track 1: I'm, I don't, I don't code, I, you know, so there's that, there's that, um, I'm, aw, I'm, aware of how it works at the, at the general level and the thing that I find. Appealing about the whole thing is that it's a place to store value that the government can't print.
jordan: yeah.
Track 1: All right? So it's, it's out of, out of reach. So anybody who fig, if, if someone were to invent a way to put a computer server on the moon and , and we and people could, uh, store their savings there, I'm in favor. I'm a big, I'm a big fan of getting the state out of those sorts of things. Now there's one qualification, and that is Jesus says, don't store up treasures for yourself on earth where moth and rust [00:35:00] destroy and where thieves break in, in steel.
Now, every form of earthly wealth, uh, well I'll flip it around. No form of earthly wealth. Bitcoin included is absolutely impervious to thieves breaking in, and stealing. Uh, someone could. Come and put A gun to your head and say, what's your password? And there you, there you are. But there's a difference between having a, a reasonable prudent, you have your jewelry in the safe, in a safe that only you now have the combination to that's much safer than leaving your jewelry on the dashboard of your car and leaving the car unlocked in the sit in the city.
So basically you, I would say that people who are, investing in Bitcoin and I'll, I put scare quotes around investing people who are utilizing Bitcoin are, I think putting their resources in a safer place than most people are putting their resources.[00:36:00] So then I would divide it into two categories.
One is, am I investing in bitcoin? As though, investing in it as I would invest in the stock market where I'm trying to play the game and get a return. So investing in Bitcoin would be one thing people could do.
The other is they could just be putting savings away in Bitcoin as a hedge, as a hedge against tyranny, as a hedge against, the pirates. I'm a big fan of the hedge-against-pirates approach to Bitcoin, and I don't know enough, I don't know enough to talk about the investment side.
jordan: Yeah. A hundred percent appreciate that. And again, that, that's why we exist is like to help Christians think through, think through these issues. I will say one of the reasons why I'm, I'm, so, I, obviously I'm doing this for a job, one of the reasons that this is so important has nothing to do with, with Bitcoin in and of itself. It's got everything to do with, with a, [00:37:00] with a very particular lie that has been told for a hundred years, 1913 since the, the Federal Reserve was founded.
When you, when you go from hard currencies to fiat currencies, you have currencies that are not backed by actual work and investment. So like in the, in the case of, of a, of a currency, a place that uses gold as currency, what goes into the production of gold?
You need to go dig it up in the ground. You need to pay people to dig it up in the ground.
You need to refine it, you need to do all these things. So there's actual real world inputs that go into that go into its production. And so in biblical terms, we would refer to this as sowing and reaping.
Track 1: Mm-hmm.
jordan: God has created a world that is governed by principles of sowing and reaping.
And so the Apostle Paul goes so far as to say that God is not mocked, for what a man sows, he will also reap. So Paul says, he goes so far as to say that if you deny this foundational relationship between sowing and reaping, that this is how the world should and does work, you're mocking God.
Track 1: Yeah.
jordan: And so in my mind this is, this is a [00:38:00] big part of why fiat currency is problematic, because it fundamentally allows governments to act like they are God who is the only one who can create XnE. Hello. And so, so this is, this is where this, where the value proposition is, especially for Christians, like beyond its uses, beyond the uses of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a currency that just like gold tells the truth about the nature of the world. It is, it is, it humbles itself before the way that God has designed the world to function. Um, and so again, I, one of the, the verses that comes to mind for me would be, um, in, in Romans one, like Paul says, he talks about, you know, the, the pagans and he says they refuse to acknowledge him as God or be thankful.
Track 1: Right.
jordan: And so a big part of, of fiat currency and, and the way that it works, the way it comes into being is, is mankind refusing to acknowledge. The, the underlying reality of the world that God makes and the way that that fleshes itself out is [00:39:00] historically sound currency or harder, harder currency has been one of the checks on government, uh, uh, government tyranny.
It's been one of the checks on endless war. It's been, it, you run outta money at some point. And obviously fiat money doesn't do away with that entirely, but it increases the gap, it increases the distance between seeing the sowing and reaping.
So we see, we just basically see Bitcoin as something that is more aligned with the vision that, that God lays out for the way that the world actually is and actually works.
Track 1: That's right. And so the longer you talk about that, the happier I I get . So, so,
jordan: That makes me happy.
Track 1: so so what it boils down to is, you know, I'm gonna be 70 next year, which means that a lot of these new things are, uh, learning curve issues for me and hours in the day, because all, a lot of my time and energy was in invested in learning how to do things the old way. Uh, but I've known for many decades that [00:40:00] if I have a bunch of Federal Reserve notes, uh, it'd be stupid to put 'em under my mattress. , right?
So, so, so, what I, I've, I've known that. So what I want to do is invest those. Uh, those notes into something that keeps the rain off or some, you know, something that has actual value. And so, uh, if, if I had, um, money and time and A flexible brain, , I would have no problem in investing, investing in, or buying, uh, Bitcoin. And the, and bitcoin is the sort of thing that I'm just, okay, this is like gold. Um, it's, it's not, it's, it acknowledges how God makes the world. Now I've seen people who, uh, you know, uh, people who, uh, would argue for the power of compound interest. David Bahnsen would be an example of that.
Uh, he, he has shown, I think demonstrably so over the last generation, that gold. [00:41:00] that gold was a bad investment. Okay. You should have bought stock in thus and such instead of buying stock in gold. Well, Yeah. But, but that would jump, that's toggling back And forth between the two tracks.
Uh, because I could see buying gold, um, as an insurance policy. right? You know, I've, I've been buying insurance for all these years, and the fact that I didn't have a heart attack, doesn't mean that that insurance policy was a bad idea. I think Bahnsen could prove to my satisfaction that gold was a poor investment on the returns,
jordan: Yeah.
Track 1: but it's still a good investment as a hedge against, against government tyranny.
jordan: And I, I definitely, I had a hundred percent agree. I, I mentioned this joke to you, this, this meme, there's this meme that exists where it's, it's got two guys from the show, star Trek, and there's this woman, it's like two frames. The first frame, this woman asked them, are you two friends?
And then in the bottom, one of them answers yes. And one of them answers no. [00:42:00] So the Bitcoin guys like, we, we appreciate the gold bugs. And so we're like, yes, we're friends with them. And the gold bugs were
Track 1: Uh, no
right,
But I, but, but me looking at it from the side, I, I would say it's that other meme, uh, where Pam from the office is corporate, wants you to find the difference between these two pictures
and I, it's the same picture , the government. The government can't print gold
and the government can't print Bitcoin.
That's, they're the same picture.
jordan: Amen. We're gonna use that clip. The government can't print Bitcoin. We're gonna, we're gonna use that and run of it. Um, yeah. One of the things, and again, we got another few minutes here,
I think five or six minutes, but one of the things that, um, that again, I, I think about, I think about you guys a ton, um, and because you guys have, have been planning and making wise decisions, generational thinking decisions, many could argue, uh, because you guys are, are post-millennial.
We won't go into that today, but we, you know, there's definitely some, some, you know, virtues there, um, that I think you could tie that relationship. But one of the things [00:43:00] that, again, I, I think that you're, you're right to, to point out like Bitcoin as an investment, that's one track. Bitcoin as tyranny insurance that I think is, is increasingly becoming more and more something that Christians should be thinking about.
The thing that brought this to the, to the fore, in my mind, I, I had been hoping for something like this. while, obviously not hoping for it. And then when it happened, I literally said, praise God. And that was the Canadian trucker protest.
Track 1: Yeah.
jordan: Because what that, that revealed the naked tyranny o of the system where the reality that this was already the case.
This is already the case. If you read, you know, if you read the, the paperwork, uh, of, of, you know, when you deposit your money in a bank, the, the money ceases to belong to you.
Track 1: Yeah.
jordan: Um, and so, so one of the things that came outta the Canadian protest was, was demonstrating that the money no longer belongs to you.
You know, the, this, this money is not yours and you can be cut off from your access to it in, in a blink of an eye.
So as, as I think [00:44:00] about churches and I think about churches doing ministry, I mean, you guys in Christ Church have been saving for, I'm guessing a pretty long time to build, to build a building.
And, and so the, we are in a world today where, you know, based on one sermon that you or you know, Toby or you know, somebody else preaches, you know, you guys can be de banked at the, at the drop of a hat.
And so again, so that's, I, I know like part of the answer would be, you know, you don't store all of your, you know, money in banks and you invest in a bunch of different things and,
you know, you cross these bridges when you come to them.
Um, but that is, that is a, that is a, a, a use in a, in a lens that I think is, is helpful and that more and more Christians and churches should be using to think about what Bitcoin is and the value proposition for it that many of them are not thinking about at this point. They're still seeing the meme stock, you know, number go up, we're in for the, you know, the a hundred x gains or whatever, when, and they're missing out on that giant piece that in my mind is a gift from God, a timely gift from God, at a, at a certain [00:45:00] time and place in, in, in, you know, redemptive history.
Track 1: That's absolutely correct, because we, so why the, why the big push for electric? Vehicles so that some, so that somebody in in the headquarters can turn them
jordan: a
Track 1: you know, turn them off. So we, if we live in A time when people want to ban gas stoves or foist electric cars on us, or shut off the bank account of anybody who protests government policy in Canada, why, why not here?
Uh, um, everybody has to understand that we, we are currently living in a society that is tyrannical in principle. Alright? All the, all the, um, platform work, the staging work, has been set for the exercise or the wielding of overt tyranny. And, uh, if you're not preparing for that, if you're a church, uh, college individual and you're not preparing for it, you're not preparing for what's actually [00:46:00] going to come at you.
jordan: You're, you're not taking, you're not taking these governments, you know, governments and whoever else is involved. You're not taking them seriously when they're telling you who they are and they're telling you what they're going to do. They're showing you and you're not believing them.
I just think that's a big part. I'm gonna close with this because, um, this is something obviously I, I've been a missionary and church pointer for, um, I was a missionary and church pointer for seven years in the country of Uruguay. Um, we arrived in Uruguay. I knew very little about economics. We arrived there thinking that we were gonna minister to, very secular, European, uruguayans.
Uruguay is like this little piece of Europe, post-Christian Europe that you just kinda wedged onto South America. Um, and we get there and we're greeted. We arrive at the same time as 60,000 Venezuelan refugees. Who had their currency hyperinflated by their, by their government. And so it was during that time where the value proposition of, you know, I, I had occasion to, to, to study and to understand the effects of currency devaluation, [00:47:00] understanding the history, of, especially in Latin America since 1971 when the US dollar detached from, from the gold standard.
Um, just understanding that almost every currency in Latin America has failed three or four times. And the effect that that has on churches and church pointing, you have almo in Uruguay. Very few churches can afford to pay their pastors. Very few churches can afford their own buildings. It just has a crippling effect on, on ministry and creates an an outsized and unnatural dependence on, on outside forces, outside missionary, you know, forces in, in the United States and the UK and other places.
And so one of the things that you mentioned, you mentioned this idea of Bitcoin as something to help, facilitate the future of, of global missions. Um, I remember watching this video, you put it out and I just stood, I just sat there in my car, just slack jawed because it was literally, I believe, three weeks after we'd founded, Thank God For Bitcoin.
And you know, with that being a big part of, of what we're doing and a big part of what we're trying to help churches and [00:48:00] missions organizations, um, you know, see that, that reality and help them think through ways to, to combat it. I know you're, you're your, your understanding of Bitcoin in that regard is limited.
But can you maybe go into a little bit, kind of your thinking at this point, um, of the relationship between Bitcoin and, and missions?
Track 1: Yes. Um, so I'll just say two things here. One is, as you're selling Bitcoin to Christians, a, a lot of Christians, I think over the last two, three years have been disillusioned by the establishment that was, so I think that you're going to have a much easier sell on the theoretical theological side.
O okay. Um, what you're going, the challenge is going to be is on the practical side, because a lot of people are not investment geeks. They're not math people. They're so, so what you're wanting to do is if someone rolled out a click and go, um, Approach to Bitcoin, you know, where, uh, you know, back [00:49:00] in the day as I, as I've lived through the computer revolution, I've, I would, um, avoid the initial rollout of new software or, you know, spend less time on learning it.
And I was waiting and waiting until the developers made it more user-friendly. Okay, now, let's say, let's say you get to the point where, it's user-friendly and I've got some friends in A uh, let's say some friend. I do have friends in Ukraine, let's say, and, uh, and I want to give them some money. And I, if I can open, open up my phone.
Okay. And in 30 seconds, give them some money. Right. And I can, I can do it without, uh, spending three weeks in a seminar learning how to do it. it's, it's, it's the, the app is called How to Give Your Friends in Ukraine Some Money and Click here. Um, or, or basically any missionary, any missionary, anywhere in the world.[00:50:00]
You can, uh, you can look at your resources and you can transfer resources without go having to deal with the friction of passports, customs, uh, government regulations. Anything like that. Um, so basically you, uh, the only friction that you're dealing with is, am I making a dec? Is this a wise gift or not? And if I make the decision, yes. this would be a wise gift that would be greatly appreciated by this missionary or by these, this, uh, particular church on the ground, and I can just, I can do it. And
jordan: yeah,
Track 1: there we are. Bob's your uncle.
jordan: yeah. And, and the cool thing again for me is like, I'm like holding back to not just scream is like all of those tools exist today. Like there's, I mean, within something like Venmo, I dunno if you use that or not.
But like within Venmo, within the Cash app or PayPal, like you, you can send Bitcoin and it's literally that easy of just like either scanning a barcode or clicking, [00:51:00] you know, tapping a couple buttons like it exists.
But to your point, like there's very few Christians are, are aware of this. Very few of the missions organizations are, are aware of this in our, or basically a lot of them are starting to investigate. Um, this, i, I have a friend who's a missionary who his missions organization just approved a three year pilot program to investigate, you know, the use of Bitcoin around the world. And so there, there are some other challenges that come with it in terms of answering to, to government agencies about, you know, why you're sending, uh, you know, Bitcoin into Russia, you know, or out of Russia or into the Ukraine or whatever. Like there, there are the potential for some of those kinda questions, but in terms of the actual technology and the usability of it, it's way more usable than I think a lot of people
recognize.
So that's part of our job and our responsibility is to help Christians understand that.
Track 1: And I would say Go dog. Go dog. Go, Go, fight win
jordan: Amen. Amen. Well, pastor Wilson, thank you so much for your time. Uh, thank you again for your ministry and hopefully again, this won't be the last time
Track 1: Yeah.
jordan: have on Thank God Bitcoin
Track 1: enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
jordan: All right. Have
a great
Track 1: right. Bye.