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In this thought-provoking episode, we sit down with Josh Abbotoy to explore the complex relationship between Protestant Christianity and American civic life.

Josh also shares insights from his article "We Are Going to Win: The Christian Education Movement is Working," highlighting the growing momentum of Christian education and its potential to reshape American society.

Want to dive deeper into the topics we discuss today? Visit https://americanreformer.org/ to learn more about these cultural initiatives through articles and podcast episodes by Josh and his team.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Josh Abbotoy. I hope I said that right. I haven't actually heard it pronounced. Is that right, Josh?

Josh Abbotoy:
You did. Yeah, that's spot on.

Marlin Detweiler:
Josh has a career in the real estate investment world but is involved in something called the American Reformer, something that he started. But before we jump into that and what American Reformer is doing, tell us a little bit about yourself so that we know a little bit more who we're hearing from, your education, your family, and your career.

Josh Abbotoy:
Certainly. I was blessed to grow up in a Christian household. Actually, my parents met in Berkeley, California, in the 80s at Calvary Chapel Church. My mom was in the radical movements out there and came to the Lord, actually adjacent to the Jesus people movements and all of this.

My parents were always sort of crunchy conservatives. As long as I can remember, I was homeschooled all the way through. I grew up in church, lived most of my life in different places, but most of it has been in Tennessee on a hobby farm. I received a wonderful education.

I went to a small Southern Baptist college, Union University in Jackson, for undergrad. After that, I did a luxury master's degree at Catholic University. I was actually thinking about going into the academy. I was in the PhD program, had funding, but left the program, in part because I had the prospect of kids on the horizon.

But I’d also say even in those early days in 2009, 2010, I was seeing the effects of critical theory strangling what I expected to be a relatively safe discipline, reading old medieval sources, Greek sources, and such. The critical theory that was already dominant in the field was one of the big factors that pushed me away. Ultimately, I went to law school.

I went to Harvard Law School, graduated in 2015. I went and worked in the oil and gas business in Houston, Texas, working for private equity and folks like that, essentially going almost the opposite direction that you could. Law is fine. Law is extremely logical, especially at the high end when you're doing complex contract negotiation and such.

It's actually a very interesting logical exercise. I did that and started working my way into the business world from the law angle. From the big law firm, I went in-house to a portfolio company of JP Morgan's infrastructure investment fund, and I led deal work there.

So negotiating large transactions and such, and then ultimately partnered with New Founding three years ago and have done a number of things with them, but most recently launched a real estate private equity fund, which I'm running out here in Tennessee. Along the way, with my business partner Nate Fisher, I co-founded American Reformer.

This is a nonprofit that was born in 2021. It was born after a year in which there was widespread dissatisfaction among the laity in how institutional leaders within the church responded to a number of very tough cultural tests presented in 2020. You could talk about the pandemic, the summer of Floyd, and all of the related flare-ups.

You could even talk about the contested election. It was a time when we thought that evangelical leadership, Protestant leadership, was lacking in a lot of the highest places of power and culturally significant institutions. We wanted to change that. We wanted to create an organization that would help elevate a new generation of leaders for the church.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Wonderful. One thing that I'm curious about, take a moment to tell us a little bit about your family.

Josh Abbotoy:
Yes. I was married right after undergraduate, so I was married as a young master's student at Catholic University. We had our first baby in law school. Today, I have four children. My oldest is ten. We currently homeschool them. I love classical education, and I'm seriously considering that for the future. But, yeah, I have four wonderful kids.

Marlin Detweiler:
Classical education happens at home as much as it does anywhere else.

Josh Abbotoy:
Well, we've certainly gleaned a lot from various resources on how to instill a love for the classics and critical thinking and such.

Marlin Detweiler:
Very good. So American Reformer was formed as a way of addressing some cultural concerns. Maybe the best place to start is to start at the end. What does success look like for the organization? What would you say makes it having accomplished what you set out to accomplish?

Josh Abbotoy:
Success would look like Protestant Christians exercising political and cultural leadership, especially on the political right. When we co-founded American Reformer, we saw some wonderful organizations doing great work. For example, Heritage and Kevin Roberts. Or if we even look at the Supreme Court, we see some wonderful justices, all of whom are Catholic. We want to elevate good Protestant voices in the public square for leadership.

We think that's necessary for helping to seek national renewal in America, given its Protestant history and legacy. We believe the conservative movement really needs to be led by Protestants who have a message and theological understanding that resonates with the broadest portion of the country.

So, you know, success would look like a new generation of leaders, leading institutions doing public thinking and then rising through elite ranks into important roles in American society.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. That is interesting. And as you probably know, at Veritas, we are a Protestant organization. We're reformed. The overwhelming number of families that connect with us and are in our online school and buy our curriculum are Protestant. But you're making a case that's a little different than one that I've ever thought through before.

And I'd love for you to unpack that a little bit more. Why is that? Help us understand at a principled, maybe even kind of bullet point level, why the distinctively Protestant community needs to establish a level of prominence in cultural leadership.

Josh Abbotoy:
Yeah. Well, the Protestants, if we just look at sort of the basic demographics of this country, the Protestant Christians make up the biggest voting faction, you know, of the right. And of course, that observation leads into a lot of other things. You've got the Southern Baptist Convention, these other evangelical bohemians that retain a sort of social standing and engagement in American civic society that's widely distributed, and they have numbers that even the Catholics cannot compete with.

And, of course, if you look at polling on the behavior of Protestants relative to main lines or Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, you'll see that the Protestant Christians in America are the backbone. They are the demographic foundation that really is keeping America relatively sane.

They're the bulwark against increasing insanity. And so we think, given that fact, we need people in leadership who understand how to work with Protestants. And then, just to talk about some particulars, in the Catholic world, there's been a lot of intellectual agitation on the question of post liberalism.

I think those are very interesting debates. Right. So you have Patrick Deneen writes the book, Why Liberalism Failed. Very important; people should go read it. But amongst certain quarters of the conservative intelligentsia, there's increased skepticism about the founding and even seeing the founding as an outgrowth of the Reformation, which is itself an outgrowth of modernity and things that all need to be rejected hook, line and sinker.

And so I think that we can say as Protestants, we can be involved in the post liberalism discourse, but we can also say, no, America is a Protestant project from its founding. That does mean it's different than other pre-modern Christendom societies, and there were some really good things about that.

We can defend the founding in a way that I think is different than many modern Catholic intellectuals would want to. And it's a way that resonates with the people who vote and the people who create American culture at scale.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Well, that's a very interesting thought and something I hadn't really thought through as much as I probably should, and that is something for us to consider. We've got the sheer volume and number of people, and they need to be provided direction. And I suspect there's some ideological reasons that you would say that, too, that come out of the founding.

But let me go a little different direction here with that. So if what we need is a recovery of that leadership of that largest conservative bloc of people, what would you say the reason is that it has lost its influence or it has faltered? My sense is anytime we see a problem, we need to know what we're looking for as a solution, which you've articulated.

But now tell me how we got where we are. Why did the problem exist? Because that helps us correct path as well.

Josh Abbotoy:
There's lots of interesting work done on this question. My personal view is that the liberal-fundamentalist split in the 1920s decapitated Protestants, by which I mean most of the elites went along with the mainline into theological liberalism. They retained some power through the 1960s and then totally cratered as the WASP establishment and the elites in the northeast simply failed.

And the theological liberalism, of course, leads to impotent churches that lose people, it turns out, if you don't have believers who really believe that they're meeting to worship.

Marlin Detweiler:
Reason to be there, and eventually they figure that out.

Josh Abbotoy:
Yes. So I think the theological explanations are a huge part of that story. And so we have the fundamentalists, and they hold fast to the truths of Scripture and the gospel, but they are definitely a downscale, downmarket movement that is situated in the backwoods at the more fringes of society.

So I think that's the big reason. Meanwhile, the Catholics in America have always been, especially at the elite levels, they operate like a very well-organized minority group. They look out for each other's interests, and this is really crucial. They don't have the stark elite versus grassroots divide that we see amongst Protestants.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. There is far more fracturing within the Protestant opposed to the post-Reformation Protestant church than there is in Catholicism, for sure. And of course, the reasons are fairly obvious. The Catholic Church is fairly monolithic in its governance and has been one of the reasons why it's remained together where Protestants have been fractured.

And I assume that that would contribute to a lack of cohesive leadership and to the fact that there are a lot of voices and a lot of perspectives, and maybe that results in infighting.

Josh Abbotoy:
Yeah, I think that's right. I do think that's right. And I would say some of the largest faithful denominations, I think they have room to grow. I'm a Southern Baptist myself, and this is the largest Protestant denomination in the country. It has 13 million people. It has very vast resources and is the de facto mainline in much of the southeast.

So if you go to small towns in the southeast. First Baptist Church on Main Street is Southern Baptist, and they still hold to Orthodox positions. I think we need to see a renewal in denominations like that to have more public-mindedness.

This doesn’t mean every pastor needs to become a politician, certainly not. But they need to instill in their members this vision that, as Christian men, and perhaps particularly for laymen, men who are not pastors, they have a vocation to serve the public square, to mind Main Street, and also have a mind for future generations.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's really good. We're going to run out of time, and there are other things I want to cover, but we could make a couple of episodes out of just that topic. Now, wokeness has become a popular term, and of course, we've seen it in public education, but also in private education. Talk to me first about how you all see what you're doing at American Reformer to inform that phenomenon, I’m not sure what to call it. And how you’re shining light on it in an effort to see righteousness prevail.

Josh Abbotoy:
Yes. We really see wokeness as a canary in the coal mine. We don’t want to be merely anti-woke, because being merely anti-woke is reactionary and negative.

Marlin Detweiler:
You kill the contrary, you don't have anything other than problems. Yes.

Josh Abbotoy:
Yes, exactly. So I understand wokeness to be something of a successor religion to Christianity in America. Some of the excesses we see in public—you really saw this during the George Floyd riots—have a quasi-religious fervor. It’s in some ways a heresy of Christianity.

It’s taking concepts of guilt and innocence and creating new types of rituals around it but with a very different moral framework at its fundamental premises. I highly recommend the book American Awakening by Josh Mitchell. He’s a political philosophy professor at Georgetown, actually a good, staunch conservative Protestant, and a great voice.

In my view, wokeness is a quasi-religious movement that is actually a competitor to Christianity and somewhat parasitic of Christian concepts in strange ways. Of course, we oppose wokeness in Christian institutions. It’s in Christian institutions in large part because Christian institutions are not islands.

They have to do business with all these different sets of constituencies. They have students, like a school has students and parents; it has vendors, donors, and maybe board members who work at Goldman Sachs, and they’re worried about headline risk, which translates into pressure on the institution. As we’ve moved into an era where wokeness is becoming more the consensus public orthodoxy, it’s getting a lot harder for Christian institutions plugged into these constituencies to maintain their mission.

So, take the example of the board member. When I worked at a big law firm, I would have been very reticent to be a public board member of certain organizations I wanted to be involved with because of the headline risk. And if I had been a board member, I would have constantly pushed that organization to be very careful and not too out front about its beliefs. This is a strategy question for Christians in America.

Marlin Detweiler:
Exactly. We’re talking about serious strategic considerations. If I’m a board member of a Christian institution that feels it needs to be friendly at some level to woke thinking for whatever reason, I know that doesn’t end well.

Josh Abbotoy:
But that’s why we have the strategy, and I followed this. A lot of people my generation did. We had the James Davison Hunter faithful presence model in mind. There’s a huge generation of talented, high-performing Christians who pursued elite credentials and got into elite institutions. I think a lot of them haven’t compromised.

It’s not that they’ve personally compromised, but at scale, it’s a question of resource allocation. All these people are natural board members or leaders for Christian institutions, but they face severe pressure points because, again, the public orthodoxy is now wokeness. So in various ways, they’re pressured to kind of mute and soft-pedal Christian distinctiveness.

This means Christian institutions need to get savvier about what it does to their organization if they put the CEO of a Fortune 500 company on their board and what kind of pressures that brings. I think these institutions are waking up to that.

Marlin Detweiler:
There’s nothing wrong with being patient when we don’t know all the implications. I hear wisdom in what you’re saying. I expect you would agree that anyone in a larger organization forced into leadership with certain parameters can expect that the likelihood of it ending well is slim.

Some people in our audience know this, but my wife Lori, my partner in business, and I have been married for 43 years. She was a Division One sprinter in college, slightly before Title IX. She likes to talk about how she had to be in the gym at 5 a.m. so the guys could have it at 6:30 or 7 because they needed to be out of the way ahead of time.

But one thing she and I have discussed is the issue of men saying they’re women and participating in women’s sports. We concluded quickly that the answer was to say we’re not going to run. We can’t compete; it’s not reasonable competition, so we’ll simply say, “That’s not for us.” Get it cleaned up and then we’ll come back.

We see that happening more, and I expect by the end of 2025, we’ll see a lot of it. Either the sport won’t exist, or it will exist in a way that’s reasonable and respects the differences.

It's, you know, there's just no way that in certain sports, men and women can compete fairly. And if somebody is physiologically a man claiming to be a woman, it won't work.

Josh Abbotoy:
Absolutely. And I think that's such an excessive expression of wokeness. Right. But it's illustrative of the core conceit, which is really this hubristic attempt to escape all given this of human nature. If you're, you know, we as conservatives, particularly as Christians, believe there's such a thing as human nature embedded with a teleology and orientation towards certain ends.

We believe that there's a blueprint out there embedded in us as creatures that God put in us. That is the roadmap for the well-lived life. And the left and its corresponding woke religion has really elevated this idea of the individual who can escape any unchosen condition they happen to be born into.

So, oh, you don't like the way your body is? It doesn't correspond to some changing, fluid conception of gender. You can change it. And, you know, I do think some of the momentum on that is receding simply because it's so insane. So, you know, I'm maybe a little bit more, and I'm somewhat optimistic that the tides will turn on that particular question. But yeah, the core problem will continue.

Marlin Detweiler:
So you don't think that receding will have a trickle-down effect and a reversal in a broader way?

Josh Abbotoy:
Not without some more fundamental changes. I think the core conceit remains is this idea that the expressive individual must be able to overcome any sort of unchosen aspect of their nature. And so it's a black eye. It's a reversal, perhaps on one little flare point.

But unless we do real work reversing some of the bedrock assumptions that drive post-modern American society, there will be other flare points.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, interesting. I hate to do this, but we're going to change topics again a little bit. But it brings us into an area that's obviously very closely related. You wrote an article that I found wonderfully on point and very much in affinity to what we do. And I couldn't agree with you more.

The article is titled We Are Going to Win: The Christian Education Movement is Working. Tell me, what inspired you to write that, what you've learned about areas of Christian education, specifically what's happening in classical Christian education, because we see it in spades. I think I'm getting a lot of data from what I do in seeing how it will influence culture in a very significant way, so much so that it affects our mission, which is restoring culture to Christ, one young heart and mind at a time.

Tell me what your thoughts are and what you've observed that caused you to write that.

Josh Abbotoy:
So it's deeply personal for me. I've long been annoyed when I see some high profile defections, people who received some type of a Christian education and then they change their minds, they change course and use some high profile defection. They write a breathless tell-all memoir, and it's national news.

And I've always really disliked that because I think those people are extreme outliers. Okay.

Marlin Detweiler:
They are.

Josh Abbotoy:
On the other hand, I'm the product of Christian education. I'm deeply grateful to parents who sacrificed a lot to give it to me. My wife and I are sacrificing a lot for our children to give it to them. All of our friends are in the same position. And, you know, looking at the broader social landscape, I've concluded, you know, what's happening is really, well, there's two things.

One, the left in elite circles is increasingly perceiving Christian education as a serious political threat to its social goals. And that's, I think, appropriate threat detection. I think that's absolutely right. Is an increasing threat like, Amen. May it be so. And then correspond with this is why there's demand for these tell-all memoirs and these attempts that are there attempts to demoralize Christian parents and it's really insidious because sometimes you even see it in the church.

I mean, I in part wrote in reaction to a piece in Christianity Today, that sort of made the argument that, oh, you should send your kids to public school. And if you send them to Christian school, it may not make much of a difference. I think that's completely wrongheaded. You know, and it's particularly tough because, you know, look, there's a lot of Christians who make serious sacrifices for Christian higher education, you know, like, there's a lot of I know, I know a lot of blue collar people who work double shifts and this sort of thing to be able to afford classical Christian schools, you know, or like, there's a lot of homeschooling families that are just working themselves to the bone.

And I wanted to say to them, you know, that matters. Like that's, you know, what you are doing works. And it could be part of national renewal, like, it's that scale. So, you know, there's various different estimates.

I use sort of a back of the envelope, let's call it 5 million kids who are being homeschooled or in some form of Christian education, a lot of classical Christian, an ed in there, that's roughly 10% of the forthcoming generation. You know, that's a big demographic slice.

Marlin Detweiler:
And when you start then accounting for the number of children that they will have compared to their counterparts, it becomes 2 or 3 times that very quickly.

Josh Abbotoy:
Yes. I mean, you dig into the fertility rates and it's night and day. Generally speaking, America is well below replacement right now. And the Christian education people, they're extreme outliers on fertility. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. That's wonderful. Well, this has been incredible. Let me just encourage our listeners and the people watching us to look for that article and to learn a bit more about American Reformer, and to enjoy what you're doing, because I think you have got some wonderful insights and will prove to be a wonderful contributor to a reformation and a restoration of things that truly need to be reformed and restored.

So thank you, Josh, thanks for what you're doing.

Josh Abbotoy:
Thank you so much, Marlin.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, great to have you here. Folks, thanks again for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education.