 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. Joining us today is Rob Schenck. He's president of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute and author of the new book, Costly Grace, an evangelical minister's rediscovery of faith, hope, and love. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Rob. Thank you. I'm honored to be with you. You frame this book around what you call your three conversions. And so the first was your conversion to Christianity from Judaism. So what drew you to Christianity in the first place? And specifically evangelical Christianity? Well, a few things. One was my religious formation was nominal. I mean, we were not observant Jews. In fact, my family had an interesting history because my mother converted to Judaism to marry my father. So Judaism was not a serious, you know, commitment really. In many ways, it was cultural and convenient. And, you know, I did have a Jewish education in the synagogue, but it wasn't serious faith for me. But I wanted that. I was looking for something deeper. And I found it in a little country Methodist church where the folks there had a very passionate faith and where I truly sensed a presence greater than my own, greater than a human presence. I mean, it was a spiritual experience for me. And when I first heard about Jesus, and I have to say honestly that up until then, Jesus was really something you said when you stubbed your toe or slammed your thumb with a hammer. I mean, it was about it. And, you know, I encountered the man of the Sermon on the Mount, which had a very profound effect on me. And in another way, it was sort of a family that had a deeper bond than I had with my own natural family. So the welcome in that community was very strong. And it was all very appealing to me. And when I gave consideration to the message that I was hearing there, I found it irresistible. And so when the invitation was given in a very, if listeners know, you know, kind of what Billy Graham used to do, extend the invitation to come and receive Christ as Savior and Lord, I responded to that invitation. It became a lifelong journey for me. And you pretty quickly decided this is what you were going to dedicate your life to, including your build a career out of this. And so you eventually ended up in politics and working on that side of things. But before that political turn, what kind of work were you doing? Well, and even in my engagement with politics, it was from the position of being a minister. And I knew very early on that that's what I would do. Really within months of my conversion, I had how old were you when you converted 17? So by the time I was 18, I knew firmly I was going to give my life in every way to the service of God. And I pursued training for ministry was ordained with the youngest member of my ordination class at age 21. And so my career was launched in the church world and service to the church. And it would only be, oh, roughly, you know, five, six years later that I had my first really political experience. And that would lead to a different dimension of ministry. In that relationship between the church, I guess broadly speaking, maybe specifically Christian churches, but and evangelicals in particular, and politics, it's kind of had an interesting relationship since you brought Billy Graham. I don't know what time zero might be that that could be for modern American life kind of the Billy Graham evangelical movement. How did you see that happening when you were in it? And what in that flow of politics did you find yourself becoming a minister and then getting involved politically? Well, it was 1984 when I attended a convention of the National Association of Evangelicals. By that time, I had found myself into various leadership positions within the evangelical world. So I had a front row seat when Ronald Reagan addressed the convention. And that was very affirming to evangelicals because he was the first sitting president to seriously address and engage evangelicals as a religious community and body. He took the leadership among evangelicals very seriously. And of course, some of our own were in his inner circle. And I was very aware of that. But, you know, Reagan had an aura. He was a magical personality. And he brought that full force to that convention. And I was really awash in presidential glow at that point. And I had never really taken, you know, religious political engagement seriously until then. But I did after that. And I would go on to work to advance his agenda. And later others who would take prominent roles, including Pat Robertson, whose campaign I worked for and helped raise money for. So that was kind of the start of it. And I call that my second conversion to Reagan Republican religion, which I would argue is distinctly different than evangelicalism. I say with a smile. Yeah. It is a little bit different, I agree. And how related was that to then to the work you did with anti-abortion? Or if I could even follow up on that. How much from your experience did the row decision was that the galvanizing force and politicizing evangelicals would you say? Very definitely. Very definitely. Very definitely. In fact, in those days, especially you couldn't speak of abortion without speaking of row. They were tied together inseparably. So every conversation included the words row and abortion. And so yes, it was the driving force, certainly for evangelicals at that stage in the mid 80s. Really the only reason we were involved in anti-abortion causes was because of row. That's what brought us in. That's what's animated us completely in those days. Of course, there were other factors and a genuine respect for the sanctity of human life, the value of human life, which I still consider to be terribly important even though I've changed my disposition on the political engagement with the question of abortion. But I think you asked about anti-abortion where it fit in all of this. That was really my entry point and the entry point into politics for virtually everybody I knew in the church world. Anyone I knew who was full throttle involved with political issues came in on the tails of the pro-life movement. A good chunk of the book is dedicated to that movement and your involvement in it and then eventually leaving it. One of the striking things reading it from the perspective of the circles that I run in, the libertarian circles, which tend to be more pro-choice. Or at least agnostic maybe. Or agnostic. But it pushed against the narrative, like the narrative, the outsider's narrative of why evangelicals, why people like you were so gung-ho about ending abortion, about overturning Grovey Wade, was that it was a social conservatism attempt to control women's bodies or something along those lines. But that never comes up in... And so was there what's the response to that view of it? Is there any truth to that concern that that gets raised by the other side? I think it was incidental to our thinking and our strategy. And I say that with a tone of criticism because we didn't give that all its due attention. We should have. Because I would argue now that that's in fact the outcome, is that you end up using government coercion to control decisions people are making with their own health, their own bodies, their destinies and so forth. It's more government control, not less. But we really... Maybe we didn't want to entertain that because it stood to contradict our otherwise conservative sensibilities. And no one really wanted to admit to that that what we're asking for here is more government control, not less, even though everything else we said was about less, not more, but not in this instance or a few others. So we didn't explore it. And maybe we treated it as a sort of collateral damage. It's kind of like a necessary evil well in this instance, it has to be. But I can't say we did a lot of reflection or philosophical exploration of that question. Do you have any idea before Roe, how much the evangelical crowd, the National Association of Evangelicals, which I'm not sure when that came into being, but... 42. Okay, so it's been around for a while. But in before Roe, there were different states that had different laws about abortion. Was that a galvanizing force before Roe, or did Roe just sort of make everyone stand out? It was Roe. It was Roe. Yeah, because it's kind of interesting where I'm just thinking about, because I have a constitutional, that's one of the things I do as a constitutional law. And in the Casey opinion, Scalia's dissent, he says, we created this problem by coming in here and saying, we figured this out and it's in the Constitution. Whatever you believe about abortion, we created this schism. We created this group that is pro-life. This is all our doing. And it's a very interesting opinion. And it sounds like that's true. Yes, exactly. And can I do a little sidebar of Justice Scalia? Because one of the more poignant moments I had late into my quasi-political career, if you will, was sitting with him with a small collection of pro-life activist leaders from around the country. And we were in a closed door session. The only reason I feel permission to tell this is because others have and he's now gone. I would never have done this without his permission, but I can't gain it now. So I'll presume it. But he warned us. He said, someone in our group asked him, when do you think this court will overturn Roe? And he snapped with anger. I can see his face. I can hear his voice now. And he said, don't you think that this body, meaning the court, is going to do your work? We're not going to solve this problem. We're only going to make it worse. You're going to solve it by changing hearts and minds. That's your task. You go out and you change hearts and minds. And that's the way we're going to cure this problem. But don't you give it to this bunch of people because we're like the monster in the basement. You keep feeding us. We'll come out and eat you alive. And I'll never forget that. Seeing his face, hearing his tone of voice, he was very agitated by the question. Wow. You mentioned, answering an earlier question, the amount of movement, the kind of less government versus more that they said that they were opposed to government intervention. But then here was an instance of asking for more government intervention. But that less versus more government, how contingent was that? So I guess to kind of clarify the question. So it doesn't seem to me, it would be hard to find that Jesus saying, you ought to be a Republican in the text. And economic theory is not a big part of, and government theory. These just aren't a big part of the gospel messages. And so was it, is there something to Christianity, to evangelical Christianity that connected it, that made it a natural fit for the kind of small government free market conservatism that say Reagan represented? Or was it that the left had also had alienated because of social issues and the right had embraced? And so then kind of the economic and the small government conservatism just naturally fell into line because that's what these guys believed. I think all of those are factors, parenthetical equations within the big formula that brought a certain outcome. So they're all kind of bracketed sub equations in there. But I know for many, of course, many evangelicals were formed in a sort of apolitical or even anti-political spiritual and religious and philosophical worldview. You take, for example, a very large segment of evangelicalism is informed by pacifist communities, the Anabaptists, the Mennonites and the Brethren and the Germanic Protestants and so forth. And they came over, I think there was a general suspicion about government, that was certainly an element because we have only one Lord and he's not Caesar. So there is a kind of general disposition of suspicion about government and particularly the most powerful forms of government, federal being, of course, in our case, the consummate. So even now among so-called conservative, I'm not even sure who is a conservative anymore. I don't even know what that term means anymore. But there's quite a bit of suspicion and yet for us, there was still a feeling that in this case, it was the federal government that had to control, not that it had to control all forms of murder, but this form. And that was tied, of course, to the idea that the founders identified the right to life as a constitutionally protected right or inferred anyway through the declaration. So it wasn't necessarily coherent, but it worked. So we were at the mid-80s and now you're working with the administration, what was your actual position in the Reagan administration at Bush? What were your main informal advisor? I was helping to craft language, certainly orchestrating events where pieces of legislation would either be promoted or signed. My real serious involvement awaited George W. Bush. That's when I really got fully engaged. Well, I started with Congress before that in 94 with the revolution when Republicans came to the fore, then that was an open invitation. So I started really in the legislative branch and then later became involved with the executive and finally spent 10 years at the Supreme Court. You mentioned the book. You say that you always kind of were drawn to missionary work and then you decided that Capitol Hill was going to be your mission, that you were going to minister on Capitol Hill. So what was it like playing that role on Capitol Hill? Yeah, well, it was exhilarating. I mean, you can hardly find a more interesting mission field on Planet Earth. Of course, it's terribly stimulating in every, you know, we have some, you know, in spite of all of the disparaging remarks made about the people in Washington, I think that government attracts some very smart people. And so, you know, it's a very intelligent informed, interesting bunch of people. More than a few had the gospel I was preaching fairly well memorized because they've visited many churches around election day. And they knew the script very well and could repeat it to me and did. I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the work. I found it very challenging. But I also saw the hypocrisy, the cynicism. I saw, you know, my fellows and I played, you know, more than once. We were played very well and very effectively. And, you know, the more cynical part of my nature, and I have a little bit of New York blood in me. So it comes out every so of those genes awaken. And I think, well, they're pretty, they're pretty clever characters. I really know how to do this. And sometimes we were willing partners in that. And I think to this day, I see many of my colleagues and longtime friends who are perfectly willing as I was to play that game. So things start changing. Some of your beliefs start changing. We're not exactly on a total narrative thing here. But when do some of you start viewing things in a different way, at least in some of your views on whether abortion or the kind of Christianity you're practicing? When does that start to enter your mind? Well, you know, somewhere in the mid 2000s, by then I'm 20 years in Washington and having played, you know, a number of roles in, you know, religion and government. And, you know, I started to see, first of all, and you may say, well, gee, he's got a keen sense of the obvious, but politicians are not skilled at handling moral or ethical questions well. And, you know, I don't say that, you know, in a totally pejorative sense. It's not their, it's not their task. That's not their job. And when, you know, generally speaking, you know, you give heart surgery to a good auto mechanic, the outcome's not going to be very good. You're taking a big risk. And I think when we ask politicians, and I would argue that judges are more politicians than we may at first wish to admit, when we ask them to take on transcendent overarching questions of right and wrong and the meaning of life and human dignity, we will get better answers on those things from other sources. And that's where I'm now seeing the wisdom of our founders in their concept of the separation of church and state, because the state quite naturally wishes to encroach on the business of the church. And the church often wants to do the same in return. And I think that's a healthy tension. But when the two fail to respect their boundaries, you end up with trouble on both sides. And that's where I am now. How do you deal with, I mean, since politicians aren't good at answering moral questions, and one of the issues there, moral questions are incredibly complex and difficult. And one of the hard things when talking about the relationship that we should have between religious belief and the policy, what government does is that we don't want government to do things that are immoral. And I mean, a lot of them would say, no, like it'd be absolutely wrong to engage in certain behavior if it's immoral. Certain policies could be immoral, so we shouldn't enact them. And if the code of morality that you have is from, say, a revealed religion or religious faith, then that doesn't change the fact that you'd think that if the government's doing action A or instituting policy A, that that still is immoral, the source of the morality doesn't change the judgment of it. But at the same time, that source of morality is controversial to say the least. It's not necessarily widely shared or it's based on metaphysical claims that might not be shared widely or whatever else. And so how do you tell someone who firmly believes in a moral code for religious reasons that because of this notion of a wall of separation, they shouldn't act out those religious principles in the policy sphere in the way that someone who arrived at moral principles for other reasons is permitted to? Well, of course, the state is not the church and the church is not the state. And you do things differently in and of the church than you do in and of the state. I mean, we do that all the time. You know, generally speaking, when people go to work on Monday morning, they don't begin with a devotional thought, prayer and a hymn. But we do do that on Sunday morning in church. So we're used to doing things, engaging in different exercises within our sacred spaces than in our secular spaces. And that's important for believers to remember and to understand that we do do this. We move between these two zones all the time in our lives. And that's important to understand that. You know, I do have to remind myself and others that we, our government structure is a republic. It's not a democracy. It's not something else. It's a republic. We elect representatives and we expect them to act in our best interests, but as the people they are. So in some cases, some people will be more informed by their religious convictions than others will. But there are limitations. You know, generally speaking, we don't ask Baptists to sing Catholic hymns. And we shouldn't demand of secular people that they pray in the way that a particular belief system might indicate or dictate. We can do that in our, in, you know, the country that we've created that our founders gave us and that we've improved on over time. I would say there are, of course, fundamentals. And one of those is the acknowledgement of a creator. It's in our birth instrument declaration of independence. But it's a funny thing because the declaration states that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights among them, meaning, of course, it's not an exhaustive list, our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But it doesn't define what happiness is in that instance. And I think sometimes religious believers, we have a kind of inclination to impose our concept of happiness on others and say, this is the only way you can achieve happiness. When in fact, that just doesn't comport with reality. It just simply doesn't. I can tell you that in my world of evangelicals, a Pentecostal will generally not be fully happy in a Baptist church. And a Baptist ain't going to be fully happy in a Pentecostal church. They find their own space to inhabit. And we do that generally very affably and understandably. You've got to come to my church because we run the pews and we jump up and down and we have a great time and we shout and sing and you've frozen chosen, you sit in your seats and you're quiet and hold your hands at your laps and we laugh with each other. We appreciate that about each other, but we often don't bring that same disposition into the public sphere. And we need to, much broader and much wider. Help an atheist to be a happy atheist. You alluded that your views on abortion also changed, or at least to some degree, or at least the political status of abortion. How did that change and around when was it when you're in the administration? Were you in the administration with Bush or? No, I was always around it. Around it, okay. Tightly. Tightly, so when you were in the Bush, yeah. I guess as an outsider being invited inside. There's only really one answer to that when I was in therapy. What a very good therapist who helped me to really come to terms with a number of things. But one was my inability really to listen deeply to the other person. And I generally approached all these questions with answers, not with more questions. And I'm married to a psychotherapist, so I got a lot of help there. That's both a blessing and a curse. It's two sides of that. I have to remind, honey, I'm your lover, not your client. But anyway, that's inside stuff. But at the same time, my wife, Cheryl, 41 years, been very, very helpful. And she's really a hero in my telling of my story in costly grace. And she and another professional really helped me to start listening effectively to others, including those who had had abortion experiences themselves. And in one case, after I got involved in a documentary film project, looking critically at the evangelical embrace of popular gun culture, the director of that film, Abigail Disney, who is a self-identified leftist political activist. She uses those terms about herself. She made the film and we struck up a very unlikely friendship over that project. And we laughed and said, up until then, we probably only would have ever met each other across a police tape somewhere on a sidewalk in America. And maybe we had. But in one instance, and I write about this in the book, I chose to listen to Abby and truly listen to her as she narrated her own personal experience with abortion and with other women who had experienced a similar course in their lives. And I just saw it differently. Up until then, I was certain that women chose abortion to get out of an uncomfortable situation for their own convenience. And that whether that was a well informed decision or not, they needed to be challenged on that. But when I listened to her, I heard another kind of human experience, and it was a very painful and very frightening one. And when I heard that, I realized had I been in her circumstance at that age, 22, frightened of her own family, I would have made the same decision she made. And that was, for me, a life-changing revelation. And this then led to the documentary and the decisions that you made after it led to a, I mean, it's the title of the book, Costly Grace, a fairly costly change in your beliefs, how you, the beliefs you articulated in public, and the kind of work that you did. Part of that, I guess, was the kind of rediscovery of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who then lends his name to your new organization. So can you tell us, I'm sure most of our audience has never heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. So who was this guy and what role did he play in this, this kind of change of heart that you had? Well, I have an elevator speech on that. That is, he was a brilliant World War II era young Lutheran pastor who was courageous enough to speak out publicly against Adolf Hitler and the rise of national socialism in Germany. So he was one of the first strongly dissenting voices within the religious community, which was very significant, much more than in this country because they had a state church. And he was actually an employee of the state. As a pastor in those days, you were paid by the federal government to do your work in Germany. So it was quite a courageous thing for him to do as a young man and he would suffer terribly. In fact, he would eventually be executed by the Nazis at Flossenberg concentration camp at age 39. So not only was he courageous, he was a brilliant intellectual academic. All I have to do is tell people that he completed his second doctoral dissertation at age 23. Okay, that says enough right there. And it was Berlin, you know, we're talking about the 1930s, one of the most rigorous intellectual environments in the world at that time. So he really was brilliant. And he left us roughly 10,000 pages of what I would say is some of the finest moral philosophy and ethical reflection of maybe the last 200 years. And we kind of missed that about him because we're so taken up with his martyrdom, if you will, that we forget that he was an intellectual and he left us a philosophical library. I mean, really, really wonderful stuff. And at the core of that was the intersection between faith and reality. What he said was God and reality, that God meets us in real situations and that many religious believers take flights of fancy to another world where everything is ideal, things don't really, you know, have to be the way they are, but they are because here we are in the real world as real human beings. And Bonhoeffer had a way of treating that question of how faith meets people in the real, in the reality of their lives. And that proved very helpful to me and gave me an appreciation, for example, for the atheist who is a gift to the believer because the atheist helps me as a believer to see my faith in a way I wouldn't otherwise. So he really was a remarkable and kind of innovative thinker. He broke new ground and he gave us a way to deal with human evolution, both individually and in social evolution, and gave me a way to deal with these new questions in my own life. So he's a big hero in my story and led to my third conversion, which was really a conversion back to where I started with the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, which he did quite a bit of writing about. Well, that you have a quote in the book that connects these two. It's very provocative, but the German Christians had traded Jesus Christ for Adolf Hitler in the church for the Nazi party. We had done something similar with Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. Indeed. Indeed. And that was really, for me, what Bonhoeffer probably helped me to do more than anything was to face the reality of our evangelical condition, which was our utter politicization. I did my doctoral work late in life. I matriculated in my program at age 50. So between 50 and 54, I did my doctoral work. I did it extensively on Bonhoeffer's work. And he really helped me to see how utterly politicized we had become and traded what he called the ultimate for the penultimate, these wonderful transcendent concepts of God and morality and right and wrong for very temporal and political short-term solutions. And really much to our detriment, we lost a lot in that transaction. And I would say we consummated that transaction much more recently with Donald Trump. That was my next question. I was just going to say the T-word. To read another very strong statement from the book, you say you've gone and you visited, you were at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland when Trump was awarded the nomination. And so you talk about you're coming back from, you're driving back from that. I think you were, you said you were so overwhelmed that you needed to drive to kind of clear your head. And thinking of it, you said that you realized that, quote, what I had been witness to in Cleveland was the final moral collapse of the politicized religion that infected me and millions of others back in the 80s when American evangelicals entered into their Faustian pact with Ronald Reagan's party. So that's an awfully strong statement and condemnation. And I guess the question is, does Trump represent a cliff that evangelical America fell off of? Or does he represent just kind of another, you know, just a more of a progression, right? So this stuff got started, as you say, with the embrace of Reagan and the GOP. But did Trump all of a sudden make this a whole lot worse? Or was it more just Trump was a sign of how bad things had already gotten? Yeah, I think he's very much the symptom of the disease and not the disease itself. I would go with your first suggestion that it's, he's more of a cliff for us. We may not be at the bottom yet. We may be holding on for dear life, you know, by our fingernails on the edge, but we're definitely dangling over and in risk of imminent demise. We may never recover our moral integrity or at least our reputation as a community, as a religious community after this, after the Trump era. So really my words, you know, in the book are really a critique of myself and my community, not really of Donald Trump. He is what he is. And, you know, everyone knew that. So I'm not really criticizing him. I'm criticizing the deal we made with him. And the deal is very simply this. Donald Trump said to evangelicals, look, this is what you've wanted all along. I will give it to you completely. You give me your laundry list. I will check off every part of it for you, but you'll give me what I want. And what I want is religious cover. And what I want is your unqualified support. And by the way, no criticism. There will be no criticism from your community. And when there is, you'll be banished. And that's already happened. Certain members of his evangelical advisory council. So this was a really bad deal made with a man, I believe, who morality and integrity and ethics does not factor in to Mr. Trump's deal making. So in a way, we sold our souls in that transaction. I would hope we can reclaim them. I'm not sure that we can. So there's a difference between not criticizing the man and fully embracing the man. And what we appear to, I mean, what it looks like from the outside over the last couple of years is more of an embrace, not just the man, but of the values that he represents, which in a lot of ways are anathema to the values that Jesus looks to represent in the Gospels. And then you see it, I mean, even to kind of a grosser degree in the, say, the embrace of, the continued embrace of like Roy Moore after the allegations about him came out. So how much of that is this kind of cynical, transactional, like we're going to do this in order to get the laundry list of things that we want? And how much of that is like a genuine cultural and kind of value shift within evangelicalism? And then how does that answer differ if you're talking about church leaders versus and politically connected members versus the base? I think that's exactly it. There's two tiers here. There are leaders and luminaries and, you know, figure influencers at the top, if you will, who are fully aware of the deal that's been made with this man. And when I speak with him privately, and I do, I have many friends who are part of that evangelical support group, if you will, around the president and are assisting him. There are others who are literally serving in the administration, people I've known for years. And when I talk with them, they will qualify, they will say, look, I know who this guy is. And I know, you know, that's, that's, we've got big problems here. But he's getting done for us what nobody else could. And for me, that's worth it. But in a way, they're holding their nose or rolling their eyes, or I think some of them are probably losing some sleep over it. But when you get down to, you know, the folks in the pews, if you will, I'm afraid that what Donald Trump has been able to do is tap into their lesser angels, the, the parts of us that, you know, bear our grievances and fears and even our envy and jealousy and, and all of that and appeals to the worst of us, not the better of us and locks into that. So in a way, kind of fosters it and, and gives it fertilizer to grow, but we're not growing, you know, healthy grains here, we're growing toxic weeds. Is there a difference on that, that kind of ground level between the, the evangelicals who are represented by say, like kind of the mega church side of things versus like the small community churches spread throughout? Is it more concentrated in one versus the other? Yeah, I do think, actually, I think that the president has deliberately sort of specialized in the mega church market because it tends to be prosperity driven. And of course, he's quite a prosperity driven individual. And in an early encounter, and I want to explore this more deeply, I just had a conversation with a mainline church leader who was present in a very early campaign period conversation with Mr. Trump at Trump Tower, where there was a small collection of mainline Protestant church leaders who met with him. And he asked them point blank, you know, what are your numbers? Give me your numbers, your membership, your dollars, how many media enterprises do you own and operate, you know, at such, sorry, but the evangelicals have got you beat. I mean, he looked at it as a market and you got a much bigger market that's better organized, certainly better funded, and has some big media enterprises connected to it on the evangelical side. And that would be why Mr. Trump chose to align with evangelicals. It was a good business deal for him in his campaign. Look, you know, he was raised in a mainline liberal Protestant denomination. What evangelicals would consider to be apostate and unfaithful and even maybe satanic. And that was his religious formation. But he made the deal and he chose, you know, in his mind the better customer to do business with. And so, you know, many at the top are doing business with him on that basis. But in the lower levels, I think we've been terribly demoralized by it. And I feel for those folks and love them dearly. I had 225,000 of them in my network of supporters for the organization I led for 30 years. And they would be overwhelmingly Trump supporters today, ardent Trump supporters. And many of them let me know that in no uncertain terms and with very colorful language normally not attendant to Christian conversation. But, you know, they let me have it. And I love them dearly. And I feel badly about what has happened. And I hope I can give frankly the rest of my life to redeeming it and maybe bringing them to a better place. Thanks for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Tess Terrible. If you enjoy free thoughts, please rate and review us on iTunes. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.