Divided by Man, United in Christ: A Conversation with Krista Bontrager and Monique Duson

Hey, welcome to That's a Good Question, the podcast where we answer questions about the Christian faith in plain language. We are a podcast of Resound Media, a place you can trust to find great resources for the Christian life and church leadership. You can always submit questions that we answer on the show to resoundmedia.cc. If you find this resource helpful, please rate and review the podcast so more people can encounter the life-changing truth of God's Word. Also, if you know somebody who can benefit from today's topic or has questions like the ones that we're answering, please share this episode with them.

My name's Jon, and today I'm here with special guests,

Krista Bontrager and Monique Doussaint, who have a great book that they wrote called Walking in Unity, Biblical Answers to Race and Racism. So today we're gonna talk about a very important and current topic, the topic of race. And I'm excited to talk about things that we hear in the world as well as how they compare to what the Bible itself says. So thanks so much, ladies, for joining us on the episode today.

Thanks for having us.

Glad to be here.

So if you don't mind, start by just telling us a little bit about the book, how you guys came together, what led you to write the book.

That's a lot.

That could be the whole podcast.

I know, right there. Well, I am Monique Dufon. I'm the president and co-founder of the Center for Biblical Unity. I was born and raised in an area called South Central Los Angeles and lived there for the first, like, 15 years of my life and then moved up to a suburb of L.A. where I spent the rest of my time. I've done work in South Africa as a missionary for four and a half years. And after the mission field, as I transitioned back home to the States, I was wondering where I was going to land and Krista and her family offered for me to come and stay with them for three months. Now, if you aren't watching this, maybe you're just listening. I will be completely blunt and open. I am black. I have nothing to hide about that. I'm an African-American. And so, Krista's not. And when she first offered for me to come and stay, you know, with her and her family, her family is all white, I was like, Jesus, like, we've never done this. Like, we've lived on the other side of the world. We've done some hard things. We've never lived with white people before. I am or I was at that time extremely pro-Black. And so the idea of me coming to live with a white family, even though we were friends, was kind of off-putting for me. I had some very different views than what I have now. And I go into some of that in our book, Walking in Unity. But I saw this as really being just these complete opposites. Our cultures were different, not just our skin colors, but the way we address the world, politically, ideologically. All of these things were very different. And so I ended up moving in with Krista for three months, and those three months carried out and turned into four years and 11 months. And during that time, we had very hard conversations on the things that I am extremely passionate about, race, justice, unity, all of those things, able to have different conversations. And the Holy Spirit had to work in her heart about things too. And, you know, as that is happening, we're able to have better, more biblically-based, Christ-centered conversations on these topics. And so before George Floyd in 2020, before the social unrest, Kristen, I thought, hey, you know what, maybe we can start like a small ministry that will help other Christians, you know, to think about some of these things from a biblical position. Maybe we can talk to pastors once, twice a year. We both were working full-time jobs, had no idea that the Center for Biblical Unity would actually take us away from those jobs and become this full-orbed ministry. But here we are today, and I would say Walking in Unity really is a book that chronicles a lot of our friendship, but not from the place of like, hey, you know, come along this fluffy journey. We are really a microcosm of what America has, and the world has been experiencing in relation to conversations around race, justice, and unity. How do we get there? And we outline what the Holy Spirit did in us, the biblical principles, and how we can truly stand from one another as brothers and sisters. Yeah, and real quick, I grew up in Southern California as well, and I'm a little older than Monique, so we're also not only just from different cultures, different ethnicities, but also a bit of different generations. And we have a very remarkable story of an unlikely friendship. But I have two grown children. I've been married to my husband, Bob, for 32 years. And my background is in theology and apologetics. I have served in that capacity for about three decades. And I also homeschooled our kids and was a stay-at-home mom for much of their childhood. And as my kids grew up, kind of at the tail end of our youngest daughter's high school years is when Monique entered our lives and came to live with our family. And it has been an interesting journey that I wasn't anticipating, but the Lord has used our story and our difficulties in our friendship to really help encourage the body of Christ and to drive us back to Scripture for these answers.

That's awesome. That's great to hear how your relationship journey led to this and most importantly like you guys shared just walking and learning more and more how to live out the biblical call to relationship. So I'd love to just start with some foundations, some definitions, things like that. Can you guys start by just telling us what is race? You wrote that chapter. Yeah so

that's the chapter that I tried to tackle and it's interesting because because historically speaking, the concept of race, of organizing humanity according to particular physical features such as melanin or hair texture, these things were not part of the human consciousness until the Enlightenment. The late 1600s, early 1700s, is where we really started seeing this idea being introduced first into the academic literature and then trickling down to the popular culture. And then in the 1800s, with the rise of Darwinism, certain ideas related to race were picked up by people who were also Darwinists. And then that is where we really started moving into things like eugenics and that sort of thing. So biblically speaking, there is no concept of race. There's no such thing as race. There's no such thing as organizing humanity according to our skin color. The way that the Bible speaks about humanity is either we are in Christ, which means we have a relationship with Jesus and we are in a covenant relationship with him and with the Father through the Son, or that we are in Adam, which means that we are not part of God's people. This is how the Bible talks. And from a New Testament perspective, all humans fall in one of those two categories. Either we are in Adam or in Christ. The Bible also speaks about what we call our common humanity, that we are created in the image of God, and then we come from different nations, different regions, we speak different languages. The Bible talks about empires such as the Assyrian Empire, Babylonian Empire, but it does not talk about race. So one of the ideas that we advocate in the book is that we need to unlearn the idea of race. If we really want to think biblically, we need to unlearn some things and renew our minds according to the principles of Scripture.

We'll be right back after this break.

Hi, I'm Elizabeth, one of the co-hosts of MomGuilt, a podcast with new episodes every Monday. MomGuilt is a podcast about the daily struggles of motherhood. Stephanie and I share real experiences of mom guilt and how we have found freedom from that guilt through the gospel. Listen to us on ReSoundMedia.cc or wherever you find podcasts. Wow.

So that's a pretty earth shattering idea that's so different from what we hear in the world today. I mean, just the way you said it, that according to the Bible, race is really not a concept. That instead, we all share a common humanity. You guys get a lot of resistance

to defining the word race that way? We haven't had a lot of pushback about it because we kind of tackle it historically. People are free to look it up and investigate it. It's just different because we have been so conditioned by the world to think about everything in terms of race first. We don't deny that people come from different family lines and different regions and different nations and different ethnicities, but the idea of organizing humans according to skin color not being a biblical concept, once we kind of point it out, people usually say, wow I've never thought about it like that before, you know, but sure. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense

I mean you go to the history you go to the Bible and we find we find the truth

So even science with that I you know, the human genome project you could look it up where it just talks about how basically race is

nearly genetically

insignificant and That there really is even from a scientific perspective just one human race.

Sure. So, if we say that the Bible says that actually human beings are all one race, how would you guys define what is commonly called racism?

That's a great question. You know, when we think about racism, one of the things I learned early on in my walks with Chris is that there is no verse that says, thou shall not be a racist, which I was like, no, of course it's in there somewhere. But when we think about racism, you know, because the idea of race as we know it today is not in the Scriptures, we need to actually thread through the Scriptures to piece together and pull out what would make up our modern day term of racism. And so we can think about things like partiality based on region of origin, ethnicity, language, nationality, hatred, slander. I started out with partiality, but it's this ethnic idolatry, the ways that we participate with people specifically because of someone's matter of providence, is what we would call it. You know, like God has providentially designed me to have as much melanin in my skin as I do. Now, if you choose to preferentially treat me, you know, a certain way, and that preference might be that I have a preference of hatred towards you. I prefer to hate you rather than to love you. Or I prefer to love you, but then hate the person who has less melanin. You know, these are things that we should not do. We're not supposed to prefer the rich over the great. I would say that we can extend that into, or the rich over the poor, the lower over the great, you know, we can extend that into these ideas of things like skin color. You know, whom I am designed and created by God is who he has designed and created me to be providentially. And I have no say into that. And so when we think about racism, we can think about ethnic idolatry, ethnic partiality, or partiality based on, you know, region of origin, slander, those types of things, biblically speaking.

Yeah. So, you know, we're talking about already defining race differently than the rest of the world does, and therefore then defining even the problem different from the way the rest of the world does. So I'm just thinking about some key concepts that we hear people talk about in the world, and I'm sure we'll run out of time before we get to talk about all of these, but I'd love to just hear some thoughts on, I mean, I've got a list here of, you know, some of the common things that we hear every day, you know, in the news, on the radio, just that are, you know, used as definitions of the problem. And I'd love to hear just kind of how the world's definition of them compares to how we think about them. So things like critical race theory, systemic racism, microaggressions, racist versus anti-racist, all these kind of things. So let's just start with critical race theory. I mean, help me understand how does that perspective, what is it and how does it differ from what you guys are explaining as the biblical perspective on race?

So when we think about critical race theory, critical race theory is a framework that comes out of the critical theory method. Right before critical race theory was critical legal studies was formed by Derrick Bell. Derrick Bell had students under him who wanted to really hone in on this issue of race and where are we seeing inequalities or inequities actually in relation to race when we look out into like the broader macro culture. Derrick Bell really looked into legal studies. You have to remember Derrick Bell is doing this in the 70s so we've just come out of the the civil rights era. Why are we still seeing such inequities, especially in the legal realm? Derrick Bell, good calls. Like, hey, he noticed something he wanted to look in and see what's going on. His mentees, Mari Matsuda and Kimberly Crenshaw, took what he was doing and definitely applied it specifically to race. They are not the only two, but they are the ones who directly studied under Derrick Bell. There were others who were also present at the founding of critical race theory. What critical race theory and the critical theory method does overall is it really breaks society up into these binary categories. And so you this this is where we hear this oppressed, oppressive language. It takes us and it puts us in our bucket and then it automatically says, well, automatically oppressive toward this minority culture, whatever that is, or this minority group. And so when we think of this in the terms of race, we are seeing there's more white people in America. So we have white people who are now oppressive toward minorities. And critical race theory is investigating and unraveling all of the ways in which the majority culture is oppressive toward minority cultures. And so as we unravel the different ways in which this oppression goes forward, there are some just automatic assumptions built into critical race theory, that racism is always at play. This is a idea that was put forward by Derrick Bell, that racism never truly goes away, but that it kind of shapeshifts and it adapts for the audience or the room that it's in. There's another way of thinking about critical race theory, another tenet would be interest convergence. That it really is when the ending of racism benefits white people, that racism will actually end. There are just a lot of assumptions embedded within the critical theory framework and within the smaller critical race theory framework that as Christians, we would say, we really need more evidence for. Simply because we might have a majority white population in America does not necessarily mean that all minorities are oppressed. Also, I would say that just because there might be inequities within our society does not mean that those inequities are based on either sinful structures or someone else's sinful racist heart. It could be because of preference. We need to do more research and diving. We need to ask more questions before we just adopt a critical theory framework? So Monique, part of her story is that she actually upheld critical race theory for a good chunk of the work that she did in social service for a couple of decades. And part of our story together is through the conversations that we had, she started to become increasingly skeptical that critical race theory as a framework was actually true, and has migrated away from that because of starting to see inconsistencies between critical race theory and the Christian faith. Yeah, if I can, I'll tackle systemic racism. Systemic racism says that, you know, inequities, they are impacted by racism, and we see the impact of this racism because of the inequities. Think about someone like Abram X. Kendi and his book, How to Be an Antiracist. He wrote this book to address the reality that there are inequities. However, the inequities are always white toward minority. We are never looking, A, to see if there's any inequity going the other way, but even before we get there, we have to ask, well, what are other possibilities? Are there any other possibilities aside from racism that could create this inequity. But because we are automatically looking at this binary approach and automatically saying that inequities are due to racism, racism is the only answer we get. And so anytime we see an inequity, we see racism. And then we are expected to step into that conversation automatically ready to fight the inequity and the racist structure. And if I'm not fighting that racist structure, that racist system, that inequity, then I am being racist according to this new definition of racism.

And again, what Monique is describing is not the view that we hold. She's simply explaining the world's common view of these things.

I appreciate you putting that in there. I don't want people thinking I think that.

So, you know, it's one of those things where the world sees a problem and they're trying to diagnose it, but they're trying to diagnose it without the light of God's Word. Right. And so, you know, in each of these systems, critical race theory, systemic racism, you know, each of these concepts, they're trying to, they're seeing problems that we would say this is a part of a fallen broken world. This is a part of sin being in the world, and they're trying to say it's this one thing. I'd love to hear, if we start talking about even solutions. So what kind of solutions then, you guys started to talk about them, what kind of solutions does the world present to this problem, and then how do our solutions to the problem look different?

So I guess I can go first. I could talk about the biblical solutions is that we're gonna have to first, as we're unlearning to categorize all humans in terms of race, and we're going to think more biblically about things, we first have to think that our common humanity, or what we call in the book our creation identity, is these are truths that are true for all humans in all times and all places. So things like being created in the image of God and this includes our value, dignity, and worth. That we have been created for a purpose to rule and to reign over God's creation, to multiply and fill the earth, to work side by side as man as male and female, that we've been created either male or female, that we have been created to worship. These are things that are true for all of us, but something has gone dreadfully wrong, and that is sin. And so I think that what we must understand is that whatever problems we have when it comes to tribalism, those are a result of the fall. And in our opinion, what we call racism today is just a form of tribalism. It's, it's, if you go to Africa and Monique's done ministry in Africa, you can have all black people in the room from different tribes and members of those tribes won't intermarry. They won't mix socially. They won't be friends. But everyone in the room is black. What's the problem? See racism is not the real problem. It's tribalism. It's bigger than just race. And we as humans have a tendency to prefer to be with our own, which isn't necessarily a sin automatically that we're raised in a particular culture and we're bound by certain cultural practices and language, shared language. That's not necessarily a sin. But when it becomes a sin is when we engage in what Monique talked about earlier of sinful partiality, of favoritism in certain situations that's unwarranted and undue. And that's where it gets tricky because we want to then try to solve the problem of partiality using the world's solutions rather than God's solution, which moves us into the gospel. That God's solution is that out of the nations, he has created a new people, a people that belong to every ethnicity, every language, but that now are united because they are a spiritual family through his work on the cross. And so then we don't have to engage in this sinful partiality or fear of intermarrying across tribes, because what's the most important thing about who I choose as a marriage partner is that we have oneness in Christ. And that then becomes the center. And so really unity begins in the house of the Lord. Ethnic unity, tribal unity. It's a different countercultural way of living that we say offers a better hope than anything the world has to offer.

Yeah, I would say that, you know, that looks very different than what the world is putting forward. I brought up Ibram Kendi earlier, and his ideas of going out and making sure that you are fighting all unjust systems, but those unjust systems are based on inequity, which isn't always a sin. Like you can have inequity, but there might not be sin present causing that inequity. You know, we are told that we should, you know, if you are a white person, you need to divest yourself of your power. We've heard that word a lot in, you know, 2020 through like 2022, and I even still hear it, you know, at times. But this idea that power somehow is bad, that if someone has more power than I do as a minority, well, that is, that's bad, that needs to be overturned, it needs to be readjusted, you know. But what is wrong with power? Like, can we have a better conversation on the way power is wielded? Because that's the biblical principle. We can have people with good power who wield their power for the good of others. The same way we see in the Bible, people who are, you know, in poverty who are not righteous. It's an attitude of the heart, not necessarily, you know, what my pocketbook is filled with or the amount of power that I hold. We, you know, we hear these ideas of justice and doing justice, but justice has been redefined. And so in order for us to understand the parts that Chris is talking about, we need to have a biblical definition of justice and not simply taking the world's definition of justice, which involves things like wealth redistribution. These aren't the ways. Diversity, equity, and inclusion. I know that's a hot, you know, term in the culture right now, but as believers, we need to understand, well, what is diversity, equity, and inclusion? And before we just shun it and say, no, it's not needed, you know, bye. Like, well, what has happened in the past? Why did people think we needed it? I am honestly, I'm not a proponent of diversity, equity and inclusion, but I am a proponent of understanding our history so that we can do better in the future. What we never want to do is correct an injustice that's happened with another injustice. So how does scripture encourage us to love our neighbor, to do justice, to walk and be sought in light in a world that is watching? I think those are some of the questions that we need to ask, but the world does it very differently. I love what you said there, it was so good.

The world tries to address it by swinging the pendulum, right, if they see an injustice over here, we're gonna try to correct it by what's actually an injustice over on the other side. Whereas what the Bible has for us is the gospel. Like you guys said, we have the real problem is sin. The real answer is Jesus and his life, death, resurrection, us putting our faith in him and receiving eternal salvation and only through him. Then we can actually find unity in this thing we call the church, the body of believers in Jesus. That's when we get to come together. I love that. Amen. So the gospel is the central solution to the problem. I'd love to talk, since you guys kind of started to bring up some policy things like DEI and other things, I'd love to just hear, do you guys have some quick off the top of your head policies that help, policies that hurt in our world when we are trying to talk about how we deal with race and racism?

Yeah, I'll start us off. And I do want to make clear, you know, in our book, Walking in Unity, we do not talk about D.E.I. or critical race theory. These are not themes that are covered in our book. But if people are curious about them, we have tons of content on our YouTube channel, our blog and that sort of thing. But we were simply focusing on laying out our model for ethnic unity and what that looks like in our book, Walking in Unity. But thinking about policy issues, one of the things that we have wrestled with, and put these in the bucket of like, just try on these ideas. These are things that we are experimenting with, having public conversations about, and thinking about. have talked about is blind applicant review, of establishing clear criteria for a job. If we're gonna hire for a position, what are the qualifications, the education, the skills, the talents that we want the person to have? Have that in writing, make an objective standard that all applicants are going to be evaluated by. And then as a hiring manager, when the applications come in, do something in your process, so that you are only evaluating applicants in that first round, by their qualifications, you know, you're not evaluating them by their names, for example, because some names might come with a certain ethnic bias. And we might disallow certain people because of just, there's some research and it's disputed as to, you know, how well established it is. But that names can be a turnoff for hiring managers, they can exclude people simply because of names, addresses, zip codes, where people live. Oh, this is an affluent area. This is an impoverished area. So do what you can in that first round of blind applicant review. We're going to evaluate people based on their qualifications. And then when they come in for their interviews, have the same questions for everybody. And that's not to say that we can't add questions, but we want to have like a baseline of these are our questions, we're going to be as fair and impartial as we can by asking the same questions to every applicant. And you know, thinking about how do we also establish a clear pathway in hiring for promotion and making sure that we are promoting people based on their achievements and we have an impartial system that it's not rigged against particular people from particular ethnicities and and we've seen this happen. And innocently sometimes, the people don't realize in Christian ministry context like, oh, actually our system is rigged to advance only these people or to not advance these people, you know, colleges. Well, we're only tenuring non-white people this year. Well, that's when you're rigging the system against particular people in an unfair way. So those are a few things to think about.

Yeah, I like that. That basic principle of impartiality. You know, that's whenever we talk about justice, historically, at least, that's kind of been what we mean, right? Is impartiality. It's one of the main... In scripture, in our country. Yes.

Yeah. It's one of the main four pillars, I would say, of God's standard of justice is impartiality. It's mentioned over and over and over in scripture. And so if you want to-

And not just for race, like you said, you know, having to do with affluency, you know, just all

these different factors, impartiality. Yeah. No, and sadly, like Krista said, we've seen, you know, the impact of partiality and, you know, not just toward or against white people, but of varying ethnicities. And so this is why impartiality is so important and why we do advocate for things like blind applications. A policy that I would say, but where she's like, we could add this, I would say we should take away diversity, equity and inclusion. Diversity, equity and inclusion. And I know, again, it's a hot button concept in the culture right now, but it is not truly acting to advance all ethnicities or all skin colors, all backgrounds. In an impartial way. In an impartial way. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, actually, if we really want to get down to the nitty-gritty of it, it really supports the queer movement. But it hides or acts like it is really meant to bring in all of these diverse, you know, skin tones and ethnicities and backgrounds. And that's not what's happening within the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement. It's not what's written in their books. It's not what the practitioners of DEI are putting forward. And that's, again, not to say 100% of all DEI practitioners, but when you read their textbooks, it's not what many people think diversity, equity, and inclusion is. And so I would say doing away with that and actually getting back to merit-based systems, doing blind applications and allowing for people's merit to speak for itself. The survey or the research that Crystal was talking about was done, gosh, it's probably been more than, the one I studied was more than 20, 25 years ago now, where there were a group of white and black sounding names, and black names were routinely left off of a list, not called back, not given any attention. You know, it's one thing when you have Suzy Smith, but it's a different thing when you have Shaquanda Johnson. And so, you know, if we're not dealing with names, then the person who shows up before you is the person that you're saying really is a good candidate.

And there is some case also to be made for godly partiality. And we want to make that clear that not all partiality is sinful. Godly partiality runs background checks and selects out people that might harm children, for example, or people who have had a history of fraud. And so if I'm going to do hiring, I'm hiring someone to come into my mother's home and help take care of her during the day while I'm at work, I want to engage in godly partiality and doing a background check, making sure that this person doesn't have prior arrests for elder abuse. So we don't want to create a setup that in being understood to say that all partiality is sinful. Now some partiality is godly and some of it is sinful when it's based or weighted in an unfair

way. You prefer your wife over you know over other women or when we think about hiring at church. That's always a good one to have, you know. You know, like we don't we don't just allow anyone to come into our pulpit. That would be a form of partiality. And so what Krista's hitting on is really important. The idea of godly partiality versus this rogue partiality is what I call it where, well, they have that skin color so I just don't like them. Or, you know, they're rich, so, or they're poor, so, you know, they have that accent.

Right, right. And that partiality going back to some kind of objective standard. Yes. You know, whether that be, you know, qualifications that you bring, experience, credentials, you know, whatever it might be, you know, not having a certain history of doing bad things, you know, exactly. Bringing those things back to those specifically. One last question I'd love to ask you before we let you go. This is an experience that I'm sure that so many of our listeners have, which is that you might be sitting at a table, whether it's with family or friends or whoever, maybe even at church, but you're sitting across the table from somebody who has a totally different viewpoint than you on this topic. How do you even begin to have a conversation with somebody that has such a different worldview? Any advice for us?

Had someone living under my roof that had a totally different point of view than I did on these issues, I have been in that situation. And I think you have to first start by engaging in generous listening and finding out like, why do people hold these beliefs? What is it about these beliefs that they think is important and valuable and needed in their own lives, potentially. And really figuring out what is this about for this person? When I first met Monique, she was fairly progressive and she had a lot of views that I totally disagreed with. She was sympathetic on two issues related to the pro-choice conversation. She was sympathetic on a number of issues that I disagreed with, not just race, but including race. And it took a lot of listening and it also took risks in asking questions and clarifying and then asking, would you mind if I share my thoughts about this or trying to sense if the other person is willing to listen and engage. And then I would also say not being afraid to stand for truth. And if you have the goal of never making the other person upset or never rocking the boat, you will fail because that's that's just not a realistic goal. You have to know that a hard conversation might happen, but try to be the person who's willing to hold on to the relationship, even if the hard conversation happens. And sometimes you might have to apologize. And that's okay. But I just always set my goal in every hard conversation I had with Monique was,

how can I win the next conversation? I would definitely say the James approach to, you know, listen much and, you know, in listening, listen to really understand, like Krista said, I want to take it a step further because trust me, as Krista has laid out all of the good things that you should do, that

wasn't always the case, people.

And we made a lot of mistakes.

There were a lot of mistakes.

Yeah. And so what you don't want to do when you have someone who's of an opposite viewpoint in front of you is wanting to just, well, let me tell you why I'm right. Let me tell you, well, this is why you're wrong. Or trying to backdoor trap them. You know, let me, if I say this and then I say that and then I say this, now it's kind of like, you know, I have them pinned in on three sides and I'm just going to close that door and then they're boxed in and they're going to see their error. That doesn't work. And it really doesn't work if you have someone who's a smart mouth anyway. Ask Christa, I'm a smart mouth. Okay? Or a hothead. And so there are ways in which you can be gracious, but there are also ways in which you can really be asking gotcha questions or your pride is really showing. And that's not helpful. One of the best things that I think I've learned in our conversations, because trust me, she was also on the other side of me as I and I'm talking to the person who I completely disagree with. One of the best things to do is to understand why do they think this. And sometimes it's just a thank you for sharing. And then you get up and you walk away. And then you can...

Or I used to say like, well, you've given me some things to think about. Let me consider that,

or let me do some more research and get back to you. Can I come back to you? Hey, here's my number. Would you be willing to have more? I would love, put yourself in the position of the student, even if you already know. Because you're not learning the framework, you're learning the person in front of you. And I think that's where we fail so often in relationship is that I want to be right, two, I know more than you about this. Three, let's just talk about the framework. When the framework may be here, but this person's reason for advancing this framework might be different. We need to learn who that person is, get into relationship. These conversations are only one had, you know, deepened in relationship. I think a really good example of this that people can watch as a public example is a recent debate or conversation between Wes Hough and Ben Carlson. No, Billy, Billy, Billy Carlson, not Ben Carlson. Carlson, yeah, I forget his name. He was a new, kind of a new ager guy. And Wes just did such a good job of being respectful and asking strategic questions and clarifying things and bringing the Christian position to the table and just doing it in such a respectful way. Now, did they get to the end and they agree? No. There's been huge fallout as a result of that conversation. Kind of broke the internet for a couple of weeks.

But I think he put forward such a great example of how to engage with somebody, even when you are coming at it from two totally different world views or positions.

I love that. Some wise advice. Appreciate it. Well, Krista and Monique, thank you so much for the conversation. Folks, if you want to find their book, Walking in Unity, Biblical Answers to Race and Racism, great book, super helpful resource. Thank you so much ladies for the conversation. Thanks for having us on. Thank you everybody for listening. Yeah, we hope you have an awesome week. You can always like, follow, and subscribe. That's a good question on resoundmedia.cc. Have an awesome week. Have an awesome week.

You can find That's a Good Question at resoundmedia.cc or wherever you listen to podcasts.