Why Christians Should Care About Bitcoin (Jordan Bush)

Jordan Bush (0:00)

Fiat currencies, they are unjust, they are fundamentally immoral because of just the nature of how they work. My sister-in-law texted me and said, hey, your niece this morning asked me, mommy, what gives a dollar its value? And my sister-in-law goes, well, the government does.

And my five-year-old niece goes, well, that just doesn't make any sense. And all God's people said, amen. And so with Bitcoin, the beauty is, I can sit here in my office in the United States.

I can be sitting here in my shorts if I were wearing such a thing. I don't need to get all dressed up, go to the bank or whatever. I can sit here in a pair of shorts, pull out my phone and transfer a million dollars to somebody else's phone in almost any country on earth.

SPEAKER_2 (0:50)

Your organization is known worldwide and we certainly appreciate every facet that you do.

SPEAKER_3 (0:55)

I do believe in what you're doing because I've seen it in my family.

SPEAKER_4 (0:58)

I'm so excited about all the things that, Robert, you guys are doing with Classical Conversations. It's been a huge blessing for our family. Grateful for the work at Classical Conversations.

Robert Bortins (1:07)

You're a leader and you have been in this movement for a long time.

SPEAKER_6 (1:10)

We love Classical Conversations. I do feel like I have a debt of gratitude to you, your family, all of CC for just the fruit that has come from CC.

SPEAKER_7 (1:22)

I appreciate all that you guys do both through this wonderful podcast and also through Classical Conversations, I am convinced is the best education resource out there. Thank you very much for all that you do for the cause of Christ and for our families and for our children. Really, really appreciate it.

Robert Bortins (1:37)

Hello everyone and welcome to another informative episode of Refining Rhetoric. Today, I'm super excited to have one of my friends on, Jordan Bush. He spent seven years as a church planning missionary and pastor in Uruguay.

What he saw on that mission field was what a broken money system and how that changes the course of one's life. He's head of development for Thank God for Bitcoin Initiatives at Brilliance Lab, a non-profit Christian innovative lab that equips Christian leaders to discover and deploy upstream solutions to hard and neglected problems. He's the founder of Thank God for Bitcoin, a media and education platform helping Christians understand and use Bitcoin for the glory of God and the good of people everywhere. He's the author of Thank God for Bitcoin, The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money, which you guys should all go buy because yours truly got to write a little part in it.

The Gospel According to Bitcoin and The Orange Umbrella, which I have on my bookshelf as well, which is a whimsical illustrated allegory for all ages about the history of money. He's a husband and father of five. So, Jordan, welcome to the show.

Jordan Bush (2:53)

Robert, man, the most expansive biography I've ever had the pleasure of hearing. So thank you.

Robert Bortins (2:59)

Yeah, they write long ones here.

Jordan Bush (3:01)

I appreciate it.

Robert Bortins (3:03)

Yeah, man. Well, it's important for people to know who you are and what your background is.

Yeah, so we've had like bad inflation here in the United States over the last five years, but it's relatively good compared to the rest of the world. So when you were in Uruguay, what kind of sparked your interest into Bitcoin? Like how did you see the unsound money really affecting people's lives?

Jordan Bush (3:33)

Yeah, so I mean, first of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. I appreciate you a lot.

My wife was doing a Homeschool Moms Book Club probably three or four months ago, and none of these ladies know that I've written a couple of books. And so we had just gotten the new edition of Thank God for Bitcoin, which you wrote the forward for. And I just said, hey, you know, Sarah was kind of, my wife was telling her about it. And so I kind of handed her the copy and she looked at it and she goes, Bortins wrote the forward? She's like, all these ladies, they love you and the work that Classical Conversations does. And so I got like a little street cred boost as a result of the proximity to you guys. But yeah, so we were, when my wife and I, we moved with our two young kids to Uruguay, to Montevideo, the capital city in 2015

I knew nothing about economics. I knew nothing about investing. I had, you know, was not a programmer developer to where I would have a natural inclination towards trying to learn about Bitcoin. I just, we were church pointing missionaries. We moved there to help plant a church in one of the most secular parts of the Western world. And so when we got there, we found that half of the people who quickly became, who were attending church were Venezuelan immigrants. So many of these people were people who had lived in just normal lives in Venezuela. Venezuela is one of the most resource rich countries in the Western world. And so a lot of some of these people were making as much as six figures a year, a few years prior. And then because of the currency debasement and the government promising the world, if they would in order to get elected, and then once they got elected, the way that they actually facilitated keeping those promises was just printing money to do so. And when you print a currency that there isn't lots of global demand for, it has a very quickly has a disastrous effect. And so it ended up making it so the currency became worthless to the point that, again, by the time a lot of these people left, they didn't even have enough money to fly out of the country. They had to walk across the border, walking long distances, and then just trying to move to other places where they could get jobs and just try to both save and provide for their own families, as well as to send some home to the rest of their families who didn't have the means to leave. So we just started ministering. We're doing normal Biblical ministry and preaching and Bible study and discipleship.