From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity & the Dark Age to Come

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

In recent years there’s been an increase in Americans turning their backs on Christianity, leaving many people of faith to wonder why? And is there anything Christians can do to rebuild the moral beliefs and social trust that once existed so strongly throughout America?   Senior Editor at The Federalist and author of the new book, 'Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and The Dark Age To Come,' John Daniel Davidson joins Sean and Rachel to discuss why Americans' relationship with Christianity has changed so drastically in the last decade and how the gradual move away from religion will inevitably do harm to society. Follow Sean & Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy along with my co-host for the podcast, my partner in life, and my wife,

Rachel Campos Duffy. Sean, it's great to be back and And today we have a real friend of the show. We've had John Daniel Davidson on many times. He is the senior editor of The Federalist, and he just wrote my new favorite book. It's very dark, though. It's called Pagan America, The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. John, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. Hey, thanks for having me. So what's interesting is a lot of people write books like this and they try and give you hope.

I've seen no hope. I'm like halfway through. You got to get to the final chapter. No, it's true. These kinds of books often will have a chapter at the end that's like these 10 steps to save America. And I've always been a little bit annoyed by that. This book doesn't do that. There are no 10 easy steps to save America. There's no politician or political movement that's going to reverse the post-Christian era that we're now entering. It's been a long time in the coming. We were all born into a country and a civilization that was becoming post-Christian.

And this is a fight that is going to take our children and our grandchildren to finish. We won't see the end of it. So as Christians, we have hope, but we need to first be realistic about the problem, and then we can have hope and talk about what to do about it and how to prepare ourselves. And really, the purpose of the book is to get Christians to wrap their minds around what's happening. So, let's talk about the problem, John. Lay the problem out for us that you lay out in part, I mean, in far more detail, I know, in the book. But what's going on? What is the problem we face now as Americans? The problem we face as Americans is that America was founded as a predominantly Christian country. The founders had a certain kind of people in mind when they devised

our republican system of self-government. And the kind of people they had in mind was a christian people which is what we had at the time of the founding and through most of our history as a country most americans were christians and not just cultural christians right but actual believing christians who practiced the faith and who passed it on to their kids and who brought it out into the public square christianity influenced policy, it influenced public culture, it influenced every aspect of American life. And that was how the founders intended it to be. They didn't imagine that you could sustain a republic like ours with an irreligious or atheist or pagan people. And they said as much over and over again. And what I'm arguing in the book is that we have entered now definitively a post-Christian era, and there's

only one alternative to Christianity, and that's paganism. And we're seeing a resurgence of paganism now in a modern, sort of post-modern, I would say, context. So, it's going to take different forms in the paganism of the past, but it will be no less pagan for all that. And we need to sort of get rid of the idea that Christians can sort of go along to get along like they have for the past couple of decades and generations, and that there's, you know's going to be things like tolerance and free speech and individual rights. Those are luxury goods that only a Christian society can afford. As we become a post-Christian society, we're going to lose those things.

Yeah, so what's really great about the book is you sort of lay out all of these gifts that Christianity has given humankind in terms of freedom and equality, imago Dei, the idea that we're in, you know, we are in Christ's image, right? We're the image of God. And that alone, you know, was transformative for the world. And everybody was just like, you know, the image of God, then you have this more equal society. One of the things that I thought you illuminated really well was that we've let progressives, secularists sort of rewrite our founding to a big degree. And so one of the ways they've done that is, you lay out, is this idea of

separation from church and state, like somehow the government was good and was protecting us from religion when actually it was the opposite. Like it was set up so the government couldn't infringe on people of faith. And because we've sort of allowed that lie to kind of take root, we're in this place now where we believe the first version. Absolutely. That's a great way of putting it. a federal government, a kind of federal superstructure that they created to bring together and to govern in one nation, all of these states and communities that were very religious, where the public square was not neutral in the states themselves. Many of the states at the time of the writing and ratification of the Constitution had established churches. That is to say, they taxed people to support an officially endorsed state church. Now, the founders in the First Amendment said that we're not going to do that on the federal level.

We're not going to have establishment of religion. But the states did. And, you know and long after the First Amendment was ratified. And so that wasn't seen to be a fundamental conflict between the federal government and the state governments or a betrayal of the Constitution and the First Amendment. They understood that Christianity and outward expressions of Christian faith in public pronouncements, in monuments, in education, in public policy, were going to be a normal part of life in America. And they were for a really long time. So we've got it exactly backwards. The original line from Thomas Jefferson's letter,

you know, calling for a wall of separation between the church and state, it's exactly as you say, it was to protect the churches from encroachment by the government, not to protect people from the influence of religion. The founders would have thought that was crazy. Of course, religion should influence the people. Of course, religion should have a big part of shaping public life in a constitutional republic. And the fact that we've lost that, and we lost it at a time in the middle of the last century when this idea of sort of atheistic, materialist secularism and a kind of libertarian or live and let live liberalism was ascendant, it was a huge mistake and has really accelerated our descent into paganism and the decline of Christianity.

Yeah, so John, there was a time that the world actually lived without Christianity. It was a pagan world. And you can say we're on the path back to a pagan America. What can we learn from the past and paganism without Christianity as to what's going to come in the future? What does America have to look forward to if this trend continues, which it appears that it's going to? I see us in strategic retreat. Christians and conservatives are making advances. They continually lose.

It's just by how much are they losing? Yeah, exactly. are making advances they continually lose it's just by how much are they losing yeah exactly when i say that paganism is returning i don't mean that we're going to have a sudden uh you know uh explosion of temples to zeus and apollo and odin or that you know we're going to have a sudden popularity of witchcraft although which although that is happening that is happening. And I talk about that in the book, a kind of moral therapeutic witchcraft as it happens. But we are going to see paganism come into the modern post-Christian world in new forms. Right. That are more amenable to the modern mind. And part of this is a vocabulary problem. Right. Because modern people are not going to talk about the gods in the same way that pre-modern

and pre-Christian pagan peoples did. But what I mean by paganism in this book, and I talk about how pagan societies work and what the pagan ethos is, and it can be summed up succinctly in the phrase, nothing is true, everything is permitted. In other words, pagan societies rejected transcendental claims about man and the universe and God. They rejected the idea of transcendent moral universal truths. Their societies and their cosmology was based upon an ability to divinize the here and now, to assign divine or godlike status to things and people, natural

phenomenon, even proclaiming in the case of the Roman Empire, a kind of god band in the Caesar, right? That was very different than what Christianity proclaimed, which is that all men are created in the likeness and image of God. And therefore, it's incumbent upon societies, upon kings and kingdoms to recognize that all people have basic rights, that you cannot compel or coerce people into belief. And that, you know, there's huge implications for that in the way that society is ordered. And this wasn't something that was invented during the Enlightenment. I go back in the book and talk about how the idea of human rights was articulated very early on in Christian Europe and was developed over centuries. And so these are the kinds of things.

This is why it was only the encounter with Christianity that broke the pagan stranglehold on the world and broke these pagan empires, you know, across vast expanses of time and space and culture. that posits, instead of universal moral truths as the guiding light for society, the exertion of will and power and coercion as the principles upon which society should be organized. That's right. Christianity afforded protections to the weak that we never saw before it arrived. And so I think what you do in the book that I thought was so interesting, before it arrived. And so I think what you do in the book that I thought was so interesting, you talk about, you lay out a lot of the different pagan, really, atrocities. You know, the child sacrifice, the way the Romans would abandon babies that were weak or deformed and just lay them on heaps of garbage

or throw them down ravines. And it was Christians who, you know, went and rescued those babies. And the reason is what you said was Imago Dei, that in other words, the baby, the unwanted baby was as valuable in the eyes of the Christian as the emperor himself. Yes. And so it's so funny, because I went to go speak at, I'd read your book and it so inspired me, John. I really, I mean, I really hope people read this book because it connects a lot of dots, really important for people like Sean and I who are, you know, out there trying to, you know, sort of explain, you know, all the crazy stuff going on. And it's so helpful to have this background. I,

I just, I went to go speak to a pro-life group and I, and I just read all this stuff. And I was like, just want you guys to know we Christians have a really long history of saving babies. Yeah. And this was crazy. This was madness to the pagan world that they could not understand why you would save these babies. They could not understand why you would treat slaves with dignity or that you would object to something like the Colosseum and the gladiatorial games, which was a form of human sacrifice in the Roman Empire. And in fact, in the pagan worldview, because the pagan ethos is that might makes right, it is not a sin or an atrocity for you to subjugate a neighboring people who are weaker than you and

take all their stuff and enslave them and slaughter them or to exploit them. It's a virtue. If you have the power to do that for your people, for your empire, for your tribe, then you actually should do that. And you are accorded great honor and status and you're a, you're a morally virtuous person for doing that. And even the abandonment of the babies was considered, I mean, it was a good for the household to the empire, get rid of the weak.

And so it was, it was totally revolutionary that, you know, Christians came along and said, no, that's not the way things should be. And it sort of laid the foundation for, you know all the rights that we afford to people just because they they are in the image of even if you look at world war one world war two that a christian nation um that wins uh one

and two doesn't amass uh all the territory that they conquered in the war. They actually bury their dead on foreign lands and then go back home. Again, more powerful, but doesn't consume the vanquished. Yeah, exactly. That never would have happened in the pagan world. Only a Christian civilization does that. And so the reason I go into this at length is to say, if you get rid of Christianity, if you kick it to the curb, if you say we don't want Christianity to sort of shape and form the public square and public life in this country, then you are going to eventually lose the accoutrement of Christianity. You are going to lose the benefits of Christian civilization. You don't get the culture without the cult if you know what i mean and so this idea that you know richard dawkins made uh you know it went viral the other day the famous atheist by saying you complaining about how

they were celebrating ramadan in britain and he thinks britain is a is a christian country or culturally christian country and he's a cultural christian he's not a believing christ, and he thinks Britain is a Christian country or culturally Christian country, and he's a cultural Christian. He's not a believing Christian. And he said that the number of believing Christians in Britain is going down, and he thinks that's a good thing. But we are a culturally Christian country, he said. And he said, I like cathedrals, and I like old hymns, and I like beautiful parish churches and uh and so you know i think christian christian civilization is a good thing but he doesn't seem to realize he's sawing off the branch that he's sitting on he spent his whole life his whole professional career denigrating

and downgrading and attacking christianity and then he thinks he's going to be able to enjoy the benefits of christian civilization what does he think is going to happen to all those cathedrals? In Britain, they're going to be turned into mosques, right? Or concert halls or apartments. So the point is, you don't get all of these wonderful things about Western civilization, like free speech and human rights and government by consent, if you don't keep the religion alive among the people from whence all these things came. We'll be back with much more after this.

Help turn off hesitation, turn off doubt, turn off fears. With your support, the YMCA of Greater Toronto helps people turn off whatever's holding them back so they can let their potential shine, help turn on confidence and connections and possibilities. From youth shelters to job training, mental health counseling and beyond, the YMCA offers hundreds of programs that empower people to shine their brightest. See our charity's impact at ymcagta.org slash charity. I really appreciate it in the book as well, John, that you did lay out a lot of the way the world was before Christians. I don't really think we appreciate that. One of the areas that I was really grateful, I'm Mexican-American, and I hate hearing Mexicans and white academics romanticize the Aztecs. I'm always very grateful that Cortez and St. Juan Diego and all the people who Christianize, you know, Mexico,

because I'm so glad I don't live in that pagan culture that that that we're in. And I think people appreciate just how demonic the aztecs were um and and just how gross they were and that the cortez and the spaniards were i think traumatized by what they saw i don't think they'd ever seen anything like that before and they wanted to stamp it out and thank god they did yeah i talk about this in the book. And I really believe this, that Cortez should be to Mexico what George Washington is to the United States. Like he should be celebrated as the father of modern Mexico that saved the Mexican people from the tyranny of the Aztecs and broke the pagan stranglehold over that land. You know, he could have done it differently. Cortez could have just accepted the gold from Montezuma. He could have looked the other way. He could have done it differently. Cortez could have just accepted the gold from

Montezuma. He could have looked the other way. He could have taken a payoff and lesser men in his position undoubtedly would have. But he the only way to understand Cortez's actions and sort of, you know, the logical sequence of events that played out was that he was motivated by something other than gold he was motivated by a sincere Catholic belief that the Aztec regime was wicked and demonic and it had to be wiped off the face of the Earth and that's what he did at great personal cost um you know and and with some brilliant tactical decisions but there's no other way to explain his actions, that he saw what the Aztec regime was. And it was a regime that was built on industrial-scale human sacrifice,

including child sacrifice. And they recognized it, Cortes and his men, as the devilry that it was. And they were determined to stamp it out as the devilry that it was. And they were determined to stamp it out from the moment they encountered it. And to claim that land, to claim those people for Christianity. And that's exactly what they

did. And thank God that they did. I wouldn't be a Christian. By the way, I think Patrick helped to stamp out paganism in Ireland. So Sean... Well, it's funny you said christian uh by the way i think patrick you know helped to stamp out paganism and yes in ireland so shot we're going back and forth it is our well it's funny you said our daughter is in europe and she was so depressed in ireland because well she first of all she loved ireland but she said no one's in the churches it's empty and that many of the churches in other parts of europe that she

was at in spain i believe they were was at, in Spain, I believe, they were charging to get in like it was a museum. They're clearly not used. But it's interesting, John. We were there, Rachel and I were there in Ireland 20 years ago. And we went to Mass on Sunday. And it was interesting. No, the church packed up.

Like a minute before Mass, like no one was there. And all of a sudden, like from nowhere, all these people. It was so aged though i think came in well but there are people went to church yeah and 20 years later she's there and she's like no one is uh at mass but so john this is depressing he's saying christianity can save us no i know but but i i think what he's also saying is we have some dark years or decades ahead of us um and so if you're able to look into your crystal ball what does it look like how are questions going to live um because

i think i've said this a number of times we're going to look back and go remember the good old days of 2024 when we only had dei and transgender and well we went back on how quick it was in in in 2010 we were like those those days were not so bad compared to now. Yeah, so what do you think it's going to look like? What are we going to have to go through as Christians before it actually starts to get better? Yeah, things are moving quickly. You know, one of the things that I try to push back on is this idea that, you know, even if we lose Christianity, we'll still keep sort of the forms of Christian civilization,

that those will somehow persist and endure cut off from their sources of vitality. That's obviously not going to happen. We're going to lose those things. And it's not going to take centuries or generations. We're losing them right now. Like we can actually see it unfolding. And I try to pull out some really stark examples of that in the book. But I think we need to be prepared to lose really basic things that we've taken for granted as Americans, like the idea that, you know, we all have we can't get in trouble for opposing abortion or opposing transgenderism or or even opposing gay marriage those are things if you look over to europe which you know in many cases is kind of like looking into the future you'll you'll get arrested in great britain if you pray silently outside an abortion clinic, like within 100 yards of an abortion clinic. They have these like these like pro abortion safety zones around the abortion clinics where even if you're just one person standing on the sidewalk, silently praying for the people

who work at the abortion clinic and the women and the children there, the cops will come and arrest you and if and put you in handcuffs and carry you off to jail if you pray silently to yourself, just to God. Now, that to me is a pretty stark example of a new kind of persecution of Christians under a neo-pagan regime. And that's the kind of thing I think we need to be prepared for. If we're not prepared for it, we're not going to understand what's happening, and we're not going to have sort of come up with a plan about what we're going to do when that happens. And so,

we can't really have hope for the future until we accept what the future is going to be. And I don't think there's any mistaking it now. you're not going to be able to be a Christian without cost in America. It's going to cost you something. And for a long time in this country, it didn't cost you anything. In fact, even if you were just a nominal Christian, it conferred on you a kind of social respectability. That's all over. We need to be prepared and we need to prepare our children to be social pariahs and to pay a cost for their faith and especially pay a cost when they carry their faith out into the public square, which I argue is absolutely necessary for future generations. We cannot just build little arcs and try to ride out the storm in our little homeschool communities and our church communities. Yes, we need to build those things up, but then we need to take our faith into the streets. We need to retake our city councils,

retake our school boards. We need to have our Catholic saint processions through the streets of our downtowns. That is the only way to survive. That's what the ancient Christians did, and we have to rediscover that way of living our faith. If I could just add one more right that's being lost. Yes, freedom of speech. Yes, freedom to worship. But our property rights are being lost. You have people who buy a home and a squatter comes in and all of a sudden the squatter has more rights than the homeowner who's paying a mortgage on a million dollar mortgage or paying the property taxes and some other dude is sleeping in your bed and using a restroom in your house. Those are going away as well. And I think it's a really good point to think about what's coming and to harden yourself and your family

to prepare yourself, to strengthen yourself for what you're going to have to endure as a Christian. Yeah. Property rights is another one of those things, you know, that only, it only makes sense in a Christian context, right? You only have property rights because you have a right to your property and a property in your right, as the founder said, which is to say, you can't just take things from people by force, right? That's the pagan way. That's the way of coercion and will and power. And a society that's based on that is one that consists generally, and this is true of all pagan societies, of a ruling class and an

underclass or a slave class, which is why advanced pagan societies always ended up taking the same form they were slave empires and i think it's pretty easy to see the ways in which the western world is you know hollowing out the middle class and devolving into a two-cast society where you have the managerial elite and super wealthy that they work for and then you have everybody else and they don't want us to have property and they don't want us to to really have even like uh political rights they don't want us to have free speech they want us to just do what we're told be consumers and fall in line i i keep trying to get to the bottom like in my mind like who is directing all this like why i mean so i mean i get like you know i get that we've devolved from you know our christian morality and ethos unless people are going to church of

course that's part of it but i i keep when when i hear you describe what this future looks like it looks like exactly what the world economic form wants yes it is it's exactly what they want. They don't want a, you know, a Christian society is a society that that takes as its starting point the equality of all people. Right. And so you end up with with robust checks and balances on power because power has to be diffused and it has to be shared and you have to have compromises. That's not the world that these billionaires in the world economic forum want they want to be in control and uh you know so so it's it's it's a great temptation right uh and it has always been there and this is one reason you know why paganism never goes away because it preys on these weaknesses in human nature for for power and control over other people and really you know it goes back to the lie in the garden that you will be like a god you know that you will be

powerful and that you will not you will not surely die and there's a whole bunch of avenues to get into there as well in the transhumanist and transgender movement uh the the hope of cheating death and you know the life extension that the Silicon Valley tech billionaires talk about all the time right now. But yes, the World Economic Forum wants a modern form of paganism, and that's what they're trying to do. And it's amazing to your point, Rachel, when you listen to what they say in their own presentations, they actually don't pull their punches. They just explain what it is that they want to do. And I'm still trying to figure out if I was in Congress, I want to know, are we funding this stuff? I mean, like, it's just so crazy. Are we funding the WF? Because

they literally want to enslave our minds. I want to talk a little bit about because we talked about, you know, the child sacrifice part of it. I we're at 64 i think 64 million children who have died um through abortion since night 64 million since 1972 um you know there's a lot of parallels here too where i mean we sanitize it um we've exterminate just as the Romans abandoned to the wolves, you know, any child who was they deemed defective. I mean, 90, 90 percent of any child who has a diagnosis of of Down syndrome is being exterminated. I mean, we're really not my parent. No, we're not. And I talk about abortion and euthanasia as new forms of child sacrifice in the emerging pagan cults. And one of the things that you see with paganism is a kind of disfigurement and a

distortion of reason, right? As Christians, we know that reason and faith go together. They're complementary. Our faith and reason work together to reveal things that are true about about god and about man and the created order paganism does not cohere in the way that christianity does because again it's based on will and force and coercion and so one of the things that you've seen over the past 40 years or so is a is a dramatic change in the justification for abortion. We went from, at the time of Roe v. Wade was decided, saying that abortion was not even the taking of a human life. This is just a clump of cells. It's no different than getting an appendectomy or something like that. It's not a human being. It's not the taking of a life.

It's just it's not a human being. It's not the taking of a life. Well, medical technology advanced so quickly that that explanation had to be discarded because it didn't make any sense anymore. And so in the 90s, we get this formulation of safe, legal and rare that we recognize that abortion is unfortunate. But we don't want to talk too much about the humanity of the unborn child, because at this point we kind of think that we have to keep abortion around, you know, in order for women to be equal and to vindicate the rights of women. And now instead of grappling with the humanity of the unborn and grappling with the moral weight of abortion, instead we were, we decided that abortion was a positive good.

It was nothing to apologize for. We are not going to acknowledge the humanity of the child because we're going to base the humanity on the child on one thing, not on science or reason or what our technology tells us about fetal viability. We're going to base it on the will of the mother. If the mother wants the child, then the child has all the rights and protections that any child does. If the mother doesn't want the child, then the child has no rights and no protections and can be totally discarded with no consequences. And so you have this insane week, right? Strong over the week. That's totally exactly. Exactly. The mother in this case has all the power. The unborn child has none. And the abortion industry has all the power and the unborn child has none. So you have this insane, totally unscientific, totally unreasonable scenario in our country today where two unborn children of the same gestational ages could be born in two different states prematurely. One of them will be afforded all of the medical technology to save their life.

The other one will be killed with impunity. There's no scientific gestational difference between these two children. The only thing that determines whether or not they have any rights is the exercise of the will of the mother. That is what I mean by a pagan ethos coming into our society. You have people arguing for this. They don't even try to apologize for it. They embrace it. They're proud of it. This is the world that they want.

And this is the world that's coming into being. And the barbarity with which the Aztecs, for example, killed a baby, no different than us tearing them apart limb by limb. But we just do it inside of the womb and we never see it and so somehow we're able to see it did it um yeah and the public view here we just do it a lot of people see it really yeah in these clinics we'll sanitize it a little bit and make it more uh appealing to the public as a large so john i wanted this i want to talk to you about kind of and again i know it's really important what you've done in the book, which is to lay out what's happening, lay out what's coming and coming in really stark, clear, crisp terminology.

But I also, though I'm depressed about what's happening, I'm also hopeful and I try to plan myself. And I always talk about preparing your own family, right? So I always go like, listen, I can't change the world, but I can change my family. I'm going to raise good Christian kids to the best of my ability. And if everyone does that, we can save America. I think you're seeing people do different things, whether they're taking their kids out of the public school system

and they're moving them to a Catholic school or they're taking their kids out of the public school system and they're moving them to a catholic school or they're homeschooling um you see people even homesteading trying to get some separation from the control that comes from the system at large being reliant on a grocery store and the rules that are going to come in with whether it's meat or dairy you have to eat bugs what kind of What kind of vegetables do I get? People are making, I think, different decisions because they may not be able to say it crisply like you have in the book, but they have a gut feeling that something is wrong

and something is happening. And so all that you've thought about this, what are you doing to protect yourself and your family? And what should other people think about? What do they do to preserve? Again, if you're going to win this eventually, you have to preserve the faith. You have to preserve the family, which means you have to preserve life as well. So you can continue to live on and forge the battle.

What do you do and what should we do to accomplish that? How many kids do you have? I have one daughter. She's a toddler. One of the things that we did was last summer, move our family from Austin, Texas back home to where I grew up in Alaska. And we're building a log house on a big piece of property in the woods with cows and chickens and goats. So we're homesteading, right? And a big part of that was that we did not want to raise our daughter in a large city, a large leftist city like Austin, partly because we knew that her peer group would not be what we wanted it to be like in the neighborhood um and and we didn't want uh to be subject to the kinds of political controls that everybody in in large cities are now subject to because you know we went through covid while we were there

as well and that was a big eye-opener for people as well uh and you're right people are starting to wake up more it's a minority and i think it will always be a minority of people. But but more of them are waking up to the need to sort of take charge of their family and take charge even of like the sources of their food and their own security. Security, they're pulling their kids out of public school. COVID, again, was a big eye opener for people. They realized the garbage their kids were being taught and how much their kids weren't being taught anything. And so there's an explosion in homeschooling. There's an explosion in private schools, in charter schools, in private school pods where a couple of families get together and just have a little school on their own.

These are all great developments. We need also people to invest heavily in their local church community and get deeply involved in their churches and build thick communities. And then from that basis, take the faith out into their towns and their public squares, wherever they live. and this is a key point you have to find ground that you can fight and win on right and maybe that means moving across the continent that's what i did i think that i can i can there's ground back home in

alaska where i can fight and and actually notch victories but i wasn't gonna i didn't have that ground in aust. So there has to be you know, there does have to be tactical retreats, as you say, but for the purpose of fighting and winning elsewhere. We'll have more of this conversation after this. Welcome to the business. Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore and Jon Hamm star in a new Paramount Plus original series. The world has already convinced itself that you are evil and I am evil for providing them the one thing they interact with every day. You're all right.

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Landman, new series now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus. So, John, before we let you go, I think that your book lays out what's at stake, where we're going, what it's going to look like. But I think for me, when I read it, when I read it, when I came across what I feel is at the root of the problem, is that we have allowed these progressives to rewrite Christian history. That if we actually knew our Christian history, we would be so proud of it. And we would never let them do what they've done, which is they've made us feel embarrassed about the conquistadors.

They've made us feel embarrassed about the Christian missionaries who opened schools and did so much to to to educate people, to bring them to Christ, to get them out of these pagan religions that were in so many ways brutal and violent and committed so many atrocities, we would have such a greater appreciation for our art and our architecture. And I just think that like our Christian art and architecture, I think that's really at the core of it. When I was reading it, I knew so much of this, but I just feel like we're always on the defense about our heritage as Christians. And I think that's part of the problem. Yeah, it's time to stop apologizing for Christendom. Christendom gave the world Western civilization. And we need to be really clear about that. And Western civilization isn't something to apologize for. And it's not a time to get weak in the knees or go mealy-mouthed. And, you know, I'm sorry to say, but as a Catholic, you know, Pope Francis has not been

very good about this. He likes to apologize for the conquistadors and for the missionaries and for the colonial endeavors that brought Christianity to pagan peoples. We should not apologize for that. And part of it means, you know, learning our own history and passing it on to our children in a more comprehensive way than we have in the past. We can't assume that, you know, our kids are going to learn this stuff in school. We have to take charge of that.

And then we have to educate ourselves and be ready to answer for the questions about how the faith spread and what it did and really also what it threw down, you know, that's such a key point. Sometimes I was, I mean, I'm crazy, but you look at what happened in Mexico, right, with Juan Diego, and it never dies out. Our Lady always comes back, it seems, to remind a population, a hemisphere, a world of what her son actually did for them. And maybe, I wonder if our lady's watching and going, it might be time for me to revisit the Americas. We might need a new apparition here. Come on down.

Yes, it's a great point, Sean. I mean, like, she, you know, the whole hemisphere, yeah, you're right. She continues to come back at unique times to remind all of us. And it reinvigorates the faith. I don't think there's any coincidence about the fact that the Fatima operations happened during World War I when the world was being turned upside down and the ancient Catholic empires were about to fall. the ancient catholic empires were about to fall and this new kind of modern secular world was coming into being and communism was coming into being fascism was emerging and that was the moment when our lady appeared at fatima and uh and i think that's not a coincidence because that was the end in some ways of christendom. And it was the beginning of this,

this segue period, this transitional period where we kind of thought, you know, secularism and atheistic liberalism and atheistic communism and materialist skepticism was going to kind of be the future. And now we see that that was was just in that was just an intermediary stage and that out of the atheistic secular in the future of america and the future of the west isn't secular atheism it's it's this combination of of materialism and spiritualism that's being embraced all over the world right now and it's very dangerous because that is a portal through which paganism can you explain that because that is the new paganism isn't it like it's also it's also like this whole climate you know religion but there's this other thing can

you explain that yeah this you hear people talking all the time nowadays about how we have to follow the science and then what they do has nothing to do with the science at all. So they pay lip service to the idea of like objective, cold, hard, rationalist facts. But then the basis for actions or for policies have to do with these ephemeral things like identity and equity and realizing, you know, my inner truth and live and my own lived experience. And so there's this melding of the spiritual and the secular or materialist. C.S. Lewis talked about this, and I describe this in the book in some detail. He called this the emergence of the materialist magician in the Screwtape Letters. Screwtape Letters, of course, was an epistolatory novel, two demons corresponding

with one another about their human subject that they're trying to sort of ensnare. And the one demon asks the other if we should remain hidden or reveal ourselves. And Screwtape, the senior demon, he says that our policy for now is to remain hidden, because if we reveal ourselves, then we can make no skeptics and we can make no materialists. And if we keep hidden, then we can maintain sort of this materialist ideology and human beings will remain closed to the idea of God. hope that in the future, a new combination can be achieved and a new man can emerge, what he calls the materialist magician, who retains a closed mind when it comes to God, but is open to spiritual forces that he doesn't worship, but serves and recognizes. And he said, if we can create this materialist magician, then the end of the war will be in sight. And I think we're seeing this materialist magician emerge then the end of the war will be in sight. And I think we're

seeing this materialist magician emerge now in a new pagan era. Yeah, there's no question about that. And yeah, it is a big trick of the devil to make you think he doesn't exist. But then there's all these different, different forms. Wow, you know, I have to tell you, this book is fantastic. I cannot recommend it more. Um, it is pagan America and it is, it is excellent. It is well-researched. It, it, it gives you great, you know, it's, it's a good read. It's fascinating. You did just a really great job with it, John.

I just, um, I, I can't tell you it's, it's, it's a big book and I don't want to put it down. So I'll just, one other quick note, note, John, we actually bought the book. We gave you cash because it came a couple of days ago and Rachel, she gets it first. So she's been blasting through it. But it was money well spent in the Duffy household. I think we got it. I think we shared your profits with Jeff Bezos at Amazon. That's OK. He's part of the new pagan world. That's right.

Pagan America, the decline of Christianity and the dark age to come. I'm sorry that we had to, yeah, we have to involve Jeff in this fight here. But Jeff did help a little bit. The pagan gods helped get this book in our hands a little bit. Well, you know, one of the great traditions in Christianity is using the pagans' weapons against them, so I'm happy to do it.

You're so right about that. Well, we appreciate you writing the book and joining us at the kitchen table. You've done it numerous times, and it's always such a smart, thoughtful, insightful conversation. And i think this is also what the what the country needs is to think about to know what's coming and to know they're

not crazy and to to see it for what it is and to fight it every way they can but also prepare for maybe a long winter um and if it's not their generation that comes out or their kids generation but they're as you mentioned their great grandkids might be fighting to get out of this paganism back to Christianity. We've given them the tools that are necessary to continue to pass the ideas down generation by generation. And hopefully spring will come again. But you've got to know what you're dealing with to actually fight it. You got to know what you're dealing with. And it's a good, positive and hopeful note to end on is that the only thing that ever broke the stranglehold of the pagan empires was their encounter with Christianity.

And that is going to be true again. Out of the new pagan order, a stronger, more forceful Christianity is going to emerge that will break the new pagan empire, just like it broke the old. Amen to that. Like, that does make me feel a lot more hopeful. And again, this is a great book for parents. If you're not informed, your kids are not going to get this in school. They're not going to understand these stories. You really need to educate yourself. I was just going to say to you really quick, you know, my mother was really good, good for me, John, because, you know, when I was starting to get all the stories about the conquistadors, my father is Mexican-American, but my my mother is from Spain. And so, A, I was here. I knew the stories of what the communists had done during the Spanish Civil War. So I knew what communism was, and I knew how bad it was. But also the black legend, the lies that were told, the romanticization of the Aztecs

and so many of these brutal tribes and empires. And I always felt like I was alone in being glad that Cortez beat that out. And your book reinforced that. So thank you. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me on. I always enjoy talking to you guys. Likewise.

Take care, John. Thanks, John. Bye-bye. Well, that was interesting. A little depressing. But hopeful, I think, actually. And I think he's got the right prescription. It's not like, you know, yeah, he does talk about how we need to, you know, take over school boards.

But ultimately, if you really synthesize the prescription, you know, it's Christianity. It's a robust, confident Christianity that will overcome this paganism. And, you know, that's why it was so interesting to look at the story, Sean, that he told. I mean, that the Roman Empire eventually became a Christian empire. You know, think about what the Christians went through before that happened. The martyrs. The martyrs, the way they were treated. I mean, all of this. And then eventually the way Christianity, you know, became the foundation of Western civilization and all the rights and all the good things.

So I do think it's so that's why we talk. We just had an episode on on classical education and why it matters. steeping our kids in the philosophies of, you know, Thomas Aquinas and all the things, the art, the architecture, all the good things about Christian history and our heritage. And then we wonder why they've fallen for the revisionism of the progressives. And again, you have documents like the Constitution that protect these rights that came from Christianity. But those are just words on paper, unless you have people who understand them, why we have them, and are willing to fight to defend them. So the Constitution and those rights mean nothing unless you believe in them and the culture believes in them. And they don't today. Well, unless you believe your rights come from God.

And in order to think your rights come from God, you've got to kind of believe in them and the culture believes in them and they don't today well unless you believe your rights come from god and in order to think your rights come from god you gotta kind of believe in god in god and you know and by the way the other way they're trying to to rewrite things is they're trying to make us think that like okay granted all the founding fathers had different levels of christianity you know different different you know some were more you know faithful than others you know more religious than others, you know, some were more, you know, faithful than others, you know, more religious than others, but they're trying to create this idea that they were all these, like, yeah, they, they, they studied, you know, you know, these, these great works, the Bible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they were so smart. They didn't actually believe any of

that stuff. And, and, right. And that's what they're trying to and john does a good does a really good job there are other people who have taken this topic on but john does this in his book you know really kind of you know pushing back on that narrative which is false and really showing just how much these men were not just influenced but were formed by Christianity. And just because some of them were more religious than others doesn't mean they thought, like, this was all magic and silly and dumb. That's not true. And he kind of goes through that.

I think he's done a real service. It's interesting, though. You do have, you bring up babies, right? In Christianity, going back, you know, over a thousand years has protected the most vulnerable because they're made in God's. Two thousand years. Yeah. Right. But you have to reconcile in America and around the world.

Christians had slaves. In America, we had slavery. Right. So Christians, it was Christianity that freed the slaves. I know. Absolutely. It was Christianity that ended slavery. But it was also Christians freed the slaves. I know. Absolutely. It was Christianity that ended slavery. But it was also Christians that participated in slavery as well.

But they were plenty, at that time, there were plenty and as many Christians who were against what was happening and realized that it was not Christian. I bring that up because I think that's a point that some listening could make. Yeah. I bring it up because you're right. It was allowed. It was happening around the world um and it was christians the devout christians who stood up and said this has to end the abolitionists were christians they were preachers they were yeah they were ministers um absolutely it was a christian movement and and um yeah and so anyway

i look at this and go you know what uh and by the way, the civil rights movement was a Christian movement led by Christian. So going back to what we're saying, we have so much to be proud of and we really need to reclaim that. And and and not the false version that is talked about by the pagans, but the actual true version that's accurate to history of what Christians have actually done. true version that's accurate to history of what Christians have actually done. But again, I was, again, I was, this gets me in my little tinfoil hat on, but it's always about thinking, knowing, and preparing yourself and your family and the people that you love to go, you know what, we're going to do the best we can to get ourselves fit and ready for the fight that we have.

I liked what he said. I liked what he said. I liked what he said when he said, you have to prepare your kids to basically endure persecution. Right. They've got, if they're going to be Christians and they're going to carry the torch until we get to that, that springtime that you talk about,

Sean, this, you know, this, this, this new robust Christianity. We're going to walk through fire first. We're already seeing Christians being persecuted.

You see the, you know, he talked about in England, you can't pray in front of an abortion clinic. You can't do it here either. And we've got the FBI, you know, busting into the homes of pro-life peaceful activists and terrifying them and they're hauling them away, you know, busting into the homes of pro-life peaceful activists and terrifying them and they're hauling them away to, you know, terrifying their children. We have, you know, pro-lifers who are, you know, facing really stiff sentences, 11 years in jail for praying in front

of abortion clinic. And then people who violate the FACE Act, which also includes, you know, And then people who violate the FACE Act, which also includes, you know, you can't the second part of the FACE Act says you can't interfere with someone's right to exercise their their First Amendment right to express their faith and their religion. You know, and then we had St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Gaza protesters bust in and intimidate everyone there. Nobody there is going to get prosecuted for life. First, to be clear, those those who came out, you're right. You're right on that point. So the Hamas sympathizers that came in to St. Patrick's, they've been charged with state charges, not the FACE Act, not federal charges. Not the FACE Act, yes. And their class A misdemeanors.

I'm not sure in New York what that is, but it's. Oh, they'll get off. It's imprisonment less than a year. They won't see the inside of a jail cell where the the Christians that were just praying outside of the abortion clinic can get up to 10 and a half years. Yeah, they had the book thrown at them and they have thousands of hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines. They're destroying their lives. And this is this. This is the kind of persecution that Christians will face as we go through this period of time until we get to the other side.

And so we prepare for spring as we sit in the fall, right? In the winter. Yeah. Of what's happening. It's going to get worse before it gets better. Well, listen, I appreciate John Daniel Davidson for joining us. And again, for writing such a smart, well-researched book that lays out the history of Christianity and what Christianity brought to the world, which is a reminder of why it's so important

to fight for it and sacrifice for it, because it gives everybody a way better life and a way freer life and a more, I want to talk about equality, more equality in a society. Yeah. Thank you all for joining us. We appreciate that. If you like our podcast, you can always rate, review, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts.

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