Welcome to the Conversations, that Matter Podcast. My name is John Harris. It is really super

late at night right now, actually early in the morning. We're going to post this actually

in less than six hours now on Tuesday, but I wanted to get this to you.

I've been thinking about this for the last few days and really the purpose of this is just to relate to you and maybe you can

relate to me too in the comments or something but I don't have a huge points I'm

making but it I could have titled this many different things Gospel Coalition versus country music

populism versus elitism could have said maybe even Puritanism versus patriotism some of you are scratching your

heads on that one and I don't have time to explain that but there's many

different ways of approaching what I'm about to talk about but it's I don't so much want to make an argument to you as I do

want to just relay an emotion or a series of emotions because there's sadness there's anger

there's also thankfulness and joy. And they're all kind of, and there's probably more than that, but they're all wrapped up into kind of one confusing ball.

And this 4th of July just felt off, and I think many of you felt the same. and this one

4th of July just felt off and I think many of you felt the same way some of you have been feeling this way for years but this one especially probably felt the most off and I want to help dive into that a little, maybe flush that out.

Why does it feel off to you?

And we're not going to answer all those questions, but I want you to know that there's other people

who feel the same way you do.

In fact, it might even be a

majority a lot of people feel this way and I want to give you some encouragement

so we're going to start with this I saw Ryan Heffelbine the director of the Freedom Center at Liberty University he posed He

He posted this, the director of the Freedom Center at Liberty University. He posted these screenshots from Gospel Coalition and you know basically asking the question,

look, I'm not I hate idolatry but I don't conflate knowing

and following Jesus with patriotic sentiment towards this country and I've

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