Pints With Aquinas - Neo-Paganism, Abortion, and the Fall of the West w/ John Daniel Davidson

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. Over a twenty-year career in journalism, he has written widely for national publications including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Guardian, the New York Post, the Claremont Review of Books, and First Things. He has also been a regular guest on many podcasts and radio and television shows, including Tucker Carlson Tonight, Glenn Beck, The Ingraham Angle, Fox and Friends, NPR, the BBC, and the Megyn Kelly Show. A Texan for many years, he now lives with his family in Alaska. Support The Show: https://mattfradd.locals.com Show Sponsors: https://hallow.com/mattfradd https://strive21.com/matt  

You ready? Ready. John, lovely to have you. Thanks for having me. Yes, yes. I was telling you earlier it was Andrew. So I get people write to me daily asking to come on the show. And my good friend Andrew Jones wrote to me. He went, trust me, you need to have John done. Anything Andrew tells me, I just do. Very good. Very good. I was telling you earlier, I knew Andrew at Hillsdale College,

but have not, that was 20 years ago. And he, we got back in touch when he launched New Polity and we emailed and corresponded a bit about that. And then when I came to write the book, at some point I was like, I need a medieval historian to check me here. So I knew the perfect guy, Andrew Jones. What kind of feedback did he give you? He gave me some helpful feedback about paganism in Rome,

some helpful suggestions about including paganism in the Old Testament, and just generally kind of fisced my first couple of chapters, which I needed. So he made it into the acknowledgments as one of the people that kept me on the rails as I kind of tried to make this argument. We'll put a link in the description below to the book, but could you sum up the book you've written real quick?

Yeah, the book is called Pagan America, the decline of Christianity in the dark age to come. And the basic point is that we are entering into and are in now a post Christian era. And what that means for America is a, a transformation of what our country has been, um, into something new. Uh-Christian America will be a place where self-government, Republican self-government, individual rights, the rule of law,

the consent of the governed, all the things that we associate with America will go away. And instead of a republic of citizens, we will become slaves in a pagan empire, right? Pagan empires were always based on slavery. They're always based on power, the rule of the powerful over the weak, and a denial of anything like individual rights

or the inherent worth of the individual, right? The Christian doctrine of a mago day made America possible. And without Christianity as the guiding light of our civic life, right? The things that make America America America will disappear. And I argue that that's not gonna happen gradually. It's going to happen quickly. And I think it's accelerating as we speak. The predictions right now are gonna be out of date

in a few years. I think close observers of our culture, of our political discourse can see the acceleration of this almost in real time. And I think as we discard Christianity, we also are going to discard the inheritance of Christianity, right? Liberalism relies on an inheritance

that it cannot itself reproduce. And so as we move into this post-Christian era, we are going to move into the only other thing that is available to us besides Christianity, which is paganism, right? Paganism never really went away. It's always been there waiting in the wings and it is the default sort of state of man

absent Christianity. And that's where we're headed, right? Okay, wow. I'm really interested to know how you got the idea for this book. But before I get to that, what do we mean by paganism and will this paganism that is coming about look different to previous paganisms?

Yes, the short answer is yes, it will. And so I explain this in the book. When I say pagan America or we are entering a pagan era, I don't mean that there's going to be temples to Artemis and Zeus in Times Square, although there might be. But the paganism of America and sort of the neo-paganism that I'm describing isn't going to look exactly like ancient paganism, right?

It's not going to be sort of sincere polytheism, right, of the kind that we have seen in ages past. What I mean by pagan America is a kind of return to the pagan ethos. Which is? Which could be summed up succinctly by the ancient saying, nothing is true, everything is permitted, right?

It's a radical moral relativism that posits no fixed truth, no fixed reality, that human will and power are what decides what is right. And we can become or be anything we imagine or desire or have the power to enact. Right. I can see how that would follow from nothing is true, everything is permitted, but is that a necessary component of paganism?

Like if I was to say, what makes a Christian a Christian? There's all these different types of Christians. You might say, well, they believe in the Trinity, or they believe that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity. They have something like baptism, right? You would have the bare minimum that's required for someone to be a Christian. Throughout history, what is the bare minimum

to be a pagan? Right, right. The bare minimum to be a pagan is to, we might say the bare minimum to be pagan is like nature worship, right? Which is, that's I think where most people's mind goes to like, you know, worship the sun, worship the moon. But what is sort of underneath that, and I get into this in the book and relying heavily on GK Chesterton who talks about this at length in Everlasting Man.

What is underneath nature worship is this kind of moral relativism, right? And you see this reflected in ancient Greek and Roman mythology, right? The inconsistency and fickleness of the Greek and Roman gods, they were very much like human beings, right? Jealous, impulsive, angry, violence, and very powerful at the same time. And we see, I think, throughout ancient paganism,

this tendency to see, not to see the world or understand the world in absolute terms, certainly when it comes to morality, moral absolutes, but in relativistic terms, right? And in terms of creating ourselves and creating our own reality, creating our own truths by which to live and by which to order society. And in pagan societies and pagan empires, from ancient Rome to the ancient Aztecs across the board, that took certain forms. And it always took the form of a slave empire in which a cast

of powerful, strong people ruled over everybody else. And there's remarkable consistency across cultures and times of what pagan societies looked like, how they were structured, and what political forms they took. And I argue that this is a result of this fundamental, the phrase, nothing is true, everything is permitted, comes from a ninth century Arab warlord, the founder of the group where we get the word assassins. That is, that in terms of a basic philosophical starting point is what you might say,

the bare minimum for being a pagan is to suppose that nothing is true, everything that you can get away with is permitted. And that's also, you know, if you take liberalism, let's say, to its logical end, that's where we end up. And that's where we are. Yeah, you get that sense already from liberal, I won't mention names, popular people on YouTube whose ethos or foundation of ethics seems to be, do whatever you want.

I'll do whatever I want. We're America, we can be free. And just, you don't interfere with me? That sounds very much like everything is permitted and there's no such thing as truth. Is intentional worship always associated with paganism? What I mean by that is, I suppose someone could say, well, we're all worshiping something,

whether we know it or not. But in pagan cultures, has it always taken the form of a real directed intentional worship of something whether we know it or not, but in pagan cultures has it always taken the form of a real directed intentional worship of something or some things? In the past it has and I argue that in the future it will again and we're sort of in this like historically unique time, a brief period of time in the grand scheme of things where we've kind of tricked ourselves into thinking we're not worshiping anything. We are. We've just, we're denying what it is that we're actually doing.

C.S. Lewis talks about this, and I devote a whole chapter in the book about what he calls the materialist magician, right, which is a phrase borrowed from the screw tape letters, but he expounds on this idea in the abolition of man in novelistic form in that hideous strength. Talking about in the context of the screw tape letters, he's, you know, screw tape is telling his nephew, Wormwood, that for now we want to keep our existence hidden from the subject, the patient, as he calls him,

because we don't want to fall into, we want to keep modern man thinking that devils don't exist, but we nevertheless want him to be enthralled to forces. We want him to be spiritual but not religious, in other words. The materialist magician denies the spiritual world, but is at the same time enthralled to forces, spiritual forces that they won't consciously recognize.

And so it's, and Screwtape talks about that they won't consciously recognize. And so it's, and Screwtape talks about that they hope at some point to create a man, the materialist magician who is both materialist and a magician, right? And if they can do that, then the end will be in sight, the war will be won. And that is the future that we're headed to. If they can do that, then the end will be in sight, the war will be won. And that is the future that we're headed to.

So he puts this in the form of these characters in that hideous strength, the doctors and the scientists and the sociologists of the NICE, the nice conglomerate that's taking over this town in England. And these guys are outwardly scientists and sociologists who want to reorganize society along scientific rationalist lines. They're outwardly, they're totally materialistic, they totally deny the metaphysical, they totally scoff at religion. And they think that all the traditional English ways of living have to be swept aside

so we can have rational governance and organization of society. But in the end you find out that they're, you know, worshipping a devil, a severed head that they think they've animated through their scientific instruments, but is really being animated by a demon, and they lose their minds and murder each other. Right? animated by a demon, and they lose their minds and murder each other. So in the end, the lead scientists of this group reject all reason. They reject all reality.

And one of the themes I argue throughout the book is that one characteristic of the pagan future is this disfigurement of reason, right? This, and this rejection of the givenness of reality and the existence of objective truth, including moral truth, but also just the existence of truth itself, with a capital T. And that this does, this is part of what leads, this leads us back into, you know, the worship

of spirits. This leads us back into more recognizable forms of paganism, this disfigurement of reason. Because as you and I know, there is no inherent contradiction between reason and faith or reason and belief in metaphysical truth and reality. And it is only the disfigurement of reason that leads to something like cold hard materialism, which in the end has to reject true reason and has to reject reality. Well, when I think of worship, I would think that means attributing divinity

to something or someone. That's not what a lot of people are doing who might be pagans or consider themselves pagans, but maybe is it that their affections are such that it looks very close to worship? That they, I mean, how else would you define worship? I mean, you could give a kind of colloquial definition where you say it's whatever's on top of the pile, whatever it is you think is the most important. That's always felt kind of unsatisfactory to me. So if it's not intentionally attributing divinity to something or someone, how else would you define worship?

Well, I don't think they would use the word worship. Yeah. But it would be, but it is worship nevertheless, right? But then it would, if my definition is correct, then it would still need to mean attributing divinity to something, whatever you call it. But yes, I see that some modern pagans would do that. But I guess the kind of people we're talking about may not necessarily be attributing divinity to anything. Is it just that their affections lie in that way such that there might be this quick turn where all of a sudden they are worshiping?

Yeah, I think most of them attribute divinity to themselves, if they attribute divinity to anything. So it's a kind of self-worship, but that only gets you so far. So there's a part in the book where I talk about the rise of actual pagan practices. It's growing on TikTok. There's hashtag witch talk and all these influencers that are sort of like,

it's sort of a moral therapeutic paganism, paganism as empowerment. Wow. Wow. And the Washington Post last year did a long sort of puff, their religion reporter did a long sort of puff piece profile on a teenage witch in Austin, Texas, where I lived for many years. And this witch and her boyfriend talk about their devotion to these pagan deities, Hecate

and her boyfriend Odin. His name's not Odin, he's a devotee of Odin. But they're very clear that they don't worship these deities. They consult with them. They pray to them, but they're not worshipping them, they're not into worship. It's more that they're consulting them to sort of find a path through the world and and discover their truth, right? so they use them the the language of You know of a therapy to describe practices that are straightforwardly pagan that whether they have the sort of catechism that whether they are catechized enough or have the vocabulary

to explain what it is they're doing, what they are doing is calling on a demon. So just because they don't have the vocabulary or are disinclined to use the vocabulary of paganism, what they are engaged in is straightforwardly pagan, right? They are getting into it through a kind of, you know, moral therapeutic deism, right? Or yeah, moral therapeutic paganism. Right? I like that because I've heard of moral therapeutic deism

in the past, which has to do with essentially, you don't really worship God, but he's there if he makes you feel good. It was Rod Dreher who I think coined the term in the Benedict option or used it. I don't know if he coined it, but yeah, he used it to describe kind of people's like I'm spiritual, not religious. Right, right. But what you're saying is, rather than that being the way in which Christians gradually leave the faith, maybe moral therapeutic paganism is the kind of inroad where you don't have to buy in all at once

about worshiping yourself. It's the way post-Christian people get back into paganism, right? Paganism is something that will draw people back to itself absent Christianity. Is that because these are the two players in town? In other words, like there's no other option? Is there any other option? I mean, what would you call Islam?

What would you call Mormonism? Paganism. Would you? Interesting. But they don't believe that nothing is true and everything is permitted. No, no, they don't believe that nothing is true and everything is permitted. No, no, they don't. But well, I don't know how far we want to go down this road. But who was talking to Mohammed?

If I had put money in, I would say a demon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so if either either he's a liar or he had a real religious experience with someone he called Gabriel. Uh, if that were the case, I suppose it would have been demonic. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's pretty clear from a, at least from a, from a Christian perspective, Islam is a form of devil worship, right? And... I'm open to that. I'm not convinced of that, but I'm open to that. And you're welcome to convince me. There's a... I mean, just on the very practical level, like, right, you know, if you concede that Muhammad was interacting with a disincarnate intelligent being, right,

it is either the case that he was interacting with an angel or he was interacting with a demon or the devil. And if he was interacting with a demon or the devil, then the religion that came out of those interactions... The revelations. Yeah, and the revelations that came from them is a form of devil worship, right? It's a specific form of devil worship that was able to take root at a certain place and time and has been wildly successful.

The Catechism says that with Muslims we worship the one true God. Right. I can look this up. But I mean, at that point, you either have to disagree with the catechism or say that it put it put it poorly. Right. Are you going to check me? Well, I just want to think it through. Yeah, no. And I know, I know that this was there was a there was a controversy about this. And we don't have to go all the way into this because your book isn't about Islam and so I don't want to put you on the spot here. But that's why I say I'm not open to going all the way there. And I suppose one could say that even if it were the case that Muhammad was possessed

by a demon, it's not necessarily the case that those who come to believe that a God exists, who is the creator of the universe, who's deserving of worship, who's all perfect, and then go down the Muslim way would necessarily be worshipping demons. Or are you committed to know every Muslim worshipping demons? Or you don't have to be committed, you could not know. I think many of them are. I mean, I think that demon worship is, or devil worship, or being enthralled to demons is something that can be pretty easily discerned by the... Here it is. The church's... sorry to cut you off there... the church's relationship to the

Muslims, let's see, the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator in the first place, amongst whom are the Muslims, let's see, the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the creator in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims, these profess and hold the faith of Abraham and together with us, they adore the one merciful God. So I have to go with that. Like I have to go with that until either the church says that was put poorly. Yeah.

It's difficult. It's difficult because, yeah, because one of the things that has always accompanied Islam and the spread of Islam is the sword, right? Is violence. From its inception, from its founding up to the present day. In fact, the most fanatical Muslims or the most committed Muslims are always the ones who are the most militant,

who reject kind of modern, more modern interpretations. Or the West's desire to cozy up to them and say, we really have a lot in common. They say, no, like the most committed Muslims, the most literal Muslims are like ISIS, right? Who are like, no, we will behead the infidels and rule over their lands, right? That is not the worship of the one true God, right? So like when you perform those acts, when that is how you work, when that is the form that your faith takes. Right. When your God to your mind is commanding that you behead Christians,

you may not be worshiping the same God. You may not be, at that point you may not be worshiping the God. Now in some maybe like You may not be at that point, you may not be worshiping the God. Now in some maybe like abstract or philosophical sense, we can say because Islam is a monotheistic religion and affirms a single God, that that single God that they are referring to must be the God of Christianity. But there's more going on, I would say there's more going on there than just that. And so what the catechism says may be true as far as it goes but it doesn't go very far.

It's saying the bare minimum that you can say about Islam. What did you say Thursday? If Muslims say they do not worship the Christian God, yeah, then it's a violation of free will for us to say yes you do. Well fair enough, yeah. But then again, that comes down to the authority of Islam. What about things like Mormonism?

Oh well, we don't have to go into this if you don't want to. Well so I don't dwell on Islam or Mormonism because my concern in the book is to deal with the direction in general, in writ large, of Western civilization, right? Western civilization is not being taken over by Mormonism. It's not being taken over by Islam. It's being taken over by a kind of materialism that leads, I argue, is going to lead us back into paganism. It will be a paganism that takes new forms.

It will take transhumanist forms. It will take transgender ideology as just a subset of a larger transhumanist ideology. It will take the forms of an increasingly aggressive state that mandates a kind of pagan ethos over and against Christianity, which we're beginning to see take shape now in new ways that were impossible to imagine just a few decades ago. And so that's my concern. My concern is not with these other things

are not what the future of America is going to be. The reason I bring it up is to see if I could make the point that I think you wanna make namely that there's no neutral spaces. So we have this idea that I could be Christian or I can be pagan, or I can be some kind of atheistic humanist. And what it sounds like you're saying is there's really only two options here. That's right. And in terms of the justification for any polity, I think the idea that we can have this secular, libertarian, sort of agnostic utopia is totally wrong.

It's totally wrong. And the only reason that we think that is because we happen to live in this very unique time in history, the last century or two has been a period unlike most of human history, where we had space to kind of indulge in this luxury belief that that you could have sort of this live and let live ethos that the basis of the polity could be nothing more than than what I want to do and what you want to do and if we just both agree to leave

each other alone you can believe whatever you want believe, and I'll believe whatever I wanna believe. I think that's impossible. And it's only possible, it's impossible in the long run, as we're seeing, where it's unraveling now before our eyes. It is only possible and was only possible in an extremely homogenous society that is specifically Christian, which is the kind of society we had in the early 18th century and during the American founding.

So America was founded with a certain kind of people, almost unique in human history that were able to extrapolate these Christian doctrines into a political philosophy that allowed them to create a constitution and a bill of rights and introduce this form of government into an extremely homogenous society. And it worked for a while. But it only works, and I opened the book saying this, it only works in a Christian society. The idea of American society, our form of government, our rights and freedoms, the idea of Republican self-government, it only works with a majority Christian society, with a supermajority of Christian society where public life, civic life is informed and shaped by Christian morality, Christian moral virtues, and the active practice of Christianity.

If that breaks down, this live and let live sort of liberal society is not possible because the basis of political life is ultimately religious. It's not secular. The idea of a secular basis for political life is an illusion, and it's illusion that's breaking down right in front of us. I mean. I was gonna ask you, please give us some examples of how this is

breaking down and how pagan is paganistic elements are being introduced to these big companies like Google. And I've seen different things taking place like this with, yeah. You saw this. I mean, some of that is, is, is the, is the obvious stuff, right? Climate change ism and environmentalism as a modern form of nature worship, right? Which is, you know, as you say, is corporate culture and corporate America shot through with this stuff now. The way our mainstream society talks about climate change and environmentalism is fundamentally religious, right?

Where's the distinction then from being concerned about the climate in an appropriate way and the thing you're calling religious? Well, they make a, because of the importance that they place on it, right? You have people saying, you shouldn't have children, we shouldn't form families.

Sure, yeah. We should reduce the pop, arguing for policies that will bring you shouldn't have children, we shouldn't form families. We should reduce the population. Arguing for policies that will bring absolute misery and ruination to vast swaths of the world. People are comfortable kind of talking about policies that will result in the deaths of millions and millions of people, famine and starvation, for the sake of this, what I would argue is a religious idea, right? That we owe the earth something and we need to sacrifice ourselves to Gaia.

We need to sacrifice our human flourishing to this other being, which is the Earth. So, and this is where it gets tricky because these people are not going to say, I worship the Earth. I am a devotee of Gaia, right? But when they say that you should kill your unborn child for the sake of the planet, it sounds pretty close to.

Pretty close to Moloch, right? We're getting back into Moloch territory here, right? And this is what I go back to CS Lewis as the materialist magician. They're not going to use the words, they're not going to say, I worship Moloch, but they will worship Moloch in their actions, in their fundamental belief structure about how they should order their lives and how society should be ordered, right? So we have environmentalism or climate changeism as a modern form of pagan religion. We have transgenderism, right, which is a modern form of paganism or devil worship, right? How so?

Well, you see in, and you can see throughout pagan cultures of the past, this notion of changing sexes or gender bending has been a feature of various pagan deities in various cultures throughout human history, and it's remarkably consistent, right? And the idea that a pagan deity could do this to, in and of itself, and do it to other people has always been associated with certain deities, right? So again, are transgender activists going to say like, going to come out and say, I'm a devotee of this Persian goddess or of this Mesopotamian god? Probably not. Most of them are not going to.

But they will functionally be engaged in very old practices that are pagan fundamentally, right? But more broadly, as I mentioned earlier, transgenderism is really a kind of a subset of transhumanism, right? Which is, which posits that we can create ourselves and we can become like gods, that we are gods, that we are not limited by reality or by biological reality. Men can become women, women can become men,

or we can become neither. And that we are, we have that power as of a deity. And where I think that is headed and where I argue at the end of the book, when I talk about artificial intelligence in the transhumanist movement is headed to a kind of, you know, because what starts with self-worship always ends up projecting out to something else.

So the transhumanist movement is not going to end with just saying, we're all gods and we can determine what we want to be because we are deities. There's going to be an external object that ends up becoming the object of worship. And in the case of transhumanism, it's going to be artificial intelligence. And you can already see the ways that this is taking shape.

The most vocal and prominent transhumanists have already come out and all that said in their words and especially in their actions. We need to turn over decisions about our lives to these AI algorithms that will tell us what to do and will tell us how to be happy and will enable us to live forever. And there's a guy that I include in the book

and discuss in a whole section who, last fall Time Magazine did a long profile, this guy Brian Johnson. Yes, oh my gosh. He is- Explain for those at home about him, it's wild. He's a Silicon Valley tech mogul who is committed to the idea that we can live forever, that we don't have to die if we engage in these extremely aesthetic practices and basically

turn over every decision about our lives to these AI algorithms. Now he made his millions developing AI algorithms for medical applications. And he now comes out on podcasts and in interviews and says, we have to turn over our lives to these AI algorithms. Now what are the kinds of things that Brian Johnson does? Well, one of the things that comes out in this Time Magazine profile is that for a time time he ingested the plasma, the blood plasma of his 18-year-old

son in hopes that it would halt or reverse his own aging process. The guy's 46 years old, 47 years old. Well, ingesting the blood of your own children, that sounds pretty pagan to me. Now, Brian Johnson is not going to say, I'm a pagan. I drink the blood of your own children That sounds pretty pagan to me yeah now Brian Johnson is not gonna say I'm a pagan I drink blood of my children for eternal life He's using different vocabulary, but right here again is the materialist magician that CS Lewis talks to us about He won't affirm the existence of These things as deities, but he nevertheless worships them and turns over his own will to what is, by any other name, for him a God or a deity, right? Can I just read something that I found online? So, a 45-year-old, like you said, CEO, spends millions a year to be 18 again.

From diet to exercise, he aims to reverse the aging process in every organ of his body, reportedly with the help of more than 30 doctors and at a cost of at least $2 million a year. He wakes every morning at 5 a.m., takes two dozen supplements, works out for an hour, drinks green juice laced with creatine and collagen, peptides and brushes and flosses his teeth while rinsing with, it sounds like a great life, tea tree oil and antioxidants.

Before bedtime he wears glasses that block blue light for two hours. He also constantly monitors his vital signs. While sleeping he's hooked, listen to this, now forgive the too much information here, but he's hooked up to a machine that counts the number of nighttime erections he has. He also takes daily measurements of his weight, body mass. The reason I started looking into this is Aquinas in his commentary on the Beatitudes, I believe it is, yeah, he talks about how goods of the body cannot bring about happiness. And here's why.

Aquinas says, hence a captain does not intend as a last end the preservation of the ship entrusted to him Since a ship is ordained to something else. And so it is interesting that we're seeing people almost this cult of self It looks like worship where the point of our life Isn't to know and to love God and to serve our neighbors. The point of life is to be an optimal condition It's like alright now you're in optimal condition, what are you going to do? Yeah. For what end? And he's not uncommon among tech billionaires and millionaires. A lot of these guys talk about life extension, right? Elon Musk talks about this. Other lesser known tech billionaires talk about this a lot. That what our efforts and technologies and creativity

has to be put forward to now is life extension, right? Now they don't mean life extension for everybody, not for the poor, not for the sort of like servant class. Would they say at least not yet? Is that the idea? Yeah, I mean, that would be the socially acceptable thing to say is that it's not for the poor yet. Eventually the poor will get there.

I don't think so though. I think what their vision will end up being is a slave society in which a ruling caste has these life extension technologies, is enthralled to the AI algorithms which are for them, and their needs are met by an underclass that doesn't have any of those things. And you end up with a sci-fi, modern, futuristic version of what you had in every pagan society of the past, which is a ruling class and a slave class. And I think that's where we're headed. I don't, and the reason I wrote a book about it is because I think it's difficult to see that

that's where we're headed because the people who are behind this, who are pushing for it, are not going to use that language. They're going to use the language of liberalism, which has been cannibalized from Christianity. They've skinned Christianity and they're wearing it as a skin suit now. But what they're going about, the society that they're creating, is in all of its generals and in many of its particulars fundamentally pagan. I really like that analogy. Can you expand upon that with the skinned Christianity and wearing it about? Right. So one of the books I talk about in the first chapter is Tom Holland's Dominion. Great book.

Tom Holland is an accomplished historian of the ancient world. He wrote a book a few years ago called Dominion about how Christianity conquered the world. And his thesis is that Christianity didn't just sort of conquer Europe like in a political sense. Christian values, Christian principles, Christian morality has actually conquered the world. The entire modern world has as its referent for acceptable behavior and organization of society and for political norms, Christian ideas, right? Human rights, right? The UN's declaration of human rights, he argues,

convincingly in my view, is only possible coming out of Christian civilization, coming out of Christendom, right? And that the idea of women's rights, the idea of rights at all is only possible in the context of Christianity. And that even efforts to, you know, undermine Christianity or sideline religion, you know, even the idea of secularism comes from Christianity, right? And he makes this sort of magisterial argument. And right at the end of the book, he undercuts his own argument because he says, these ideas, these values that are derived from Christianity will not go away soon. Like in other words, we can keep subsisting on the capital

of Christianity without creating anything new. We can skin Christianity and wear it as a skin suit, right? Any analogy you want, we can live off it. Because Tom Holland's not a Christian. that needs to be said, right? Not yet. Yeah. He's almost talked himself into it though. I think he's close. Okay.

And we should pray for him. But I think the, you know, any analogy, you know, living off the interest of Christianity, you can only do that for so long without replenishing the deposit, right? It runs out after a certain point. And I argue that we're running out. Like, we're getting to the end of being able to do that with Christian civilization. You cannot retain the idea of human rights

absent the active practice of Christianity. Thousand percent. So if you extrapolate that out and you admit that we are in a post-Christian era, we're not going to be able to maintain the idea of human rights in a post-Christian era. One of the ways I think liberalism wears the skin of Christianity, which again I really like that analogy, is through condemning things like racism. Like if God does not exist and there's no objective moral law, why think racism is wrong at all? And best you can say, well wouldn't it be nice if we all flourished together, but I'm not sure why that has to be obligatory at all.

So it has this deep moral language, but no basis to make it. And so what you end up with is, uh, I would like my people to rule over yours. Yeah. My tribe. And if I can, if I can, if I can do it, then, um, if we can do it, we will. And, and, and screw your rights. You don't have any rights. What does that even mean? Rights? Where does that even come from? Absent? God. If you, if you, if you reject the doctrine of Imago Dei, then all you have left is power. Yeah. We're seeing this with PETA, P-E-T-A, because of my accent they might think I'm

saying Peter. Peter, right? With this, what's the word, speciesism. So the idea that speciesism is an unjustified, what would you say, favor? In favor of your own species? It's unnecessary, it's unjust. It's unjust that you would elevate humans about other animals. This is essentially like racism, but it's the you know., so Peter's a wicked organization. So it seemed to really like Peter sucks. I think it was a, uh, uh, some commission at the United nations recently, sometime last year where one of the speakers gave a presentation and made an argument, took that, that argument to the next level, which is that not only do different species of animals have rights, but rivers and mountains and different

At the United Nations at different ecological features of the earth also have rights and that those rights have to be safeguarded and vindicated by Some sort of global body that speaks for the mountain or the river or the coastline or the forest. Yeah, it makes Peter look liberal. Like, so liberal, but yeah. I mean, what can be justified over and against the rights and interests of human beings if that's if that's where you're at, you know, if that is your position philosophically? Well, then something's got to give, right? And people who believe that are in the process

of talking themselves into atrocities. Okay, how so? Give us a few examples of how that might happen. I mean, you've alluded to it in saying mass devastation and starvation. Well, we can't have these people in Africa having these large families, can we? Because it's too much of a burden on the earth, right?

And if these societies cannot organize themselves in such a way as to limit the size of these families, then some sort of a global authority is going to have to go in and mandate it. We're already seeing that. I mean, I was just in Uganda recently and seeing big billboards promoting contraception that is coming from the West And and if they won't do it voluntarily then maybe we develop some sort of a vaccine or some sort of a widely distributed treatment That sterilizes the population maybe against their will or without their knowledge Maybe we restrict their movement, you know, because after all, traveling by even by car or train or certainly by plane is an unacceptable burden on the environment,

unacceptable levels of CO2. So you can't move out of your designated zone. I mean, this is the stuff of like sci-fi dystopia But if you listen to the what the people at the World Economic Forum are talking about they'll just tell you What their vision is for the future and that's their vision. It's a it's a world in which they rule an underclass of people who are not allowed to Travel who are not allowed to have large families who are not allowed to to determine their own future who are not allowed to have large families, who are not allowed to determine their own future, who are not allowed to, who are only allowed to consume certain things in certain amounts,

whose lives are dictated by an overclass, like a priestly overclass of people who are safeguarding the earth. In Ireland right now, I've been told you're not allowed to build a home with a fireplace. You're not allowed to burn wood in your home. Right, right. That made me angry. I live in Alaska. It makes me live it.

We're building a home right now. The principal source of the heat in that home will be a wood burning stove. Great. Make it big enough to compensate for all the losers in Ireland who are telling their underclass that they may not. Yeah, the things that the underclass will not be able to do are only going to grow as this ideology grows, right? And again, to circle back to this idea, these are pagan forms of governance, right, fundamentally. They're not Christian.

And in a post-Christian era, we are going to see this become more explicit, become more pervasive, and become more powerful, right? It's only in a Christian society where you would even have, that it would even be like a thought that, no, you have a right to your property, you know, you have parental rights over your children to raise them and educate them as you see fit. The government cannot coerce you into believing this or doing that. That kind of polity is exclusively the domain of Christianity. Without Christianity, all that goes away, and it's not going to take hundreds of years. Mason- That's what was interesting about your book

You're not saying well in the in the future. We're gonna see this you're saying this is about to happen or is already happening right now Okay. Yeah, we we were all You know you and I people people our age and younger and and I would argue our parents as well We're born into a born into a world in which we were already in a post-Christian era, right? This has been happening for a long time, and we're about to cross over into where it becomes explicit, right? Where we can no longer maintain the fiction that we have any kind of philosophical basis

for something like individual rights. To extend your gross analogy, the Christian skin is rotting away and we're seeing what's beneath it. Yeah, and what's underneath it is a new form of paganism. And we have got to wrap our heads around that. And, you know, you have to sort of understand and accept the state that we're in before you can think about like resisting it.

Right. There is something about admitting defeat like this that that helps me breathe a sigh of relief. I don't have to keep pretending that just in one more election, or if we can just get people, that it's all going to be okay. Rather, it's probably better to see ourselves in a wasteland. And as Christians, we are the medics who are trying to resuscitate dying souls. And the image that Pope Francis used very powerfully at his ascension, that the church needs to be like a field hospital

after a war, after a battle. We are picking through the rubble right now, and we need to find and fight on ground we can win, right? There's no Donald Trump's not going to save you, Brexit's not going to save you, Bitcoin's not going to save you, Bitcoin's not going to save you. There is no politician or political movement that is going to reverse what we're describing here. The only thing that will reverse it is a restoration and a revival of lived Christianity, of an active and bold and emboldened Christian faith,

alive in communities of real people living together and taking back ground that has been taken from us. That's the only way forward. And so find ground that you can fight and win on and fight. And I talk about that in the last chapter. I was, my editor helped me to not be so gloomy because what I wanted to say in the last chapter is that in a book like this,

there's always a chapter at the end of it's like, these 10 steps to save America. No, that's BS. There are no 10 steps to save America. America may not be able to be saved. And we've got to also accept that it may be that the West has gone into permanent decline. That doesn't mean that Christianity has gone

into permanent decline or that Christianity will ever be ultimately defeated, right? But it may be that that the American experiment is winding down. It seems obviously so. I have a friend who is an Orthodox Christian and I often think of a conversation he told me years ago that he had with his priest and his priest said, America won't decline and fall. It will just become evil. that he had with his priest and his priest said, America won't decline and fall, it will just become evil. Okay. And I think we're seeing that now.

And we're starting to see what shape that's gonna take. I'm horrified about what's going to happen when we all have those apple things on our faces. It's almost like we're no longer engaged or we're increasingly unengaged with reality such that it's a profit for us about what the world is, how we ought to act, what God is like, things like this. If we continually kind of bury ourselves into Plato's cave, as it were, how will that affect

us and how will that increase this rise of paganism do you know the purpose of that of a lot of this technology is to isolate the isolate us desensitize us and I think to prepare us for something like like like we're being prepared by the enemy for something for the sort of the again with analogy, for the skin suit to finally rot away and fall off. And we need to start thinking too about technology. You know, Christians for too long kind of accepted technology, they bought into this idea, this very kind of liberal secular idea that technology itself is neutral, and it can be used for good or used for bad but it but but it's just a tool that's not true okay technology had comes with a cost and you have to consider what the costs are right we need to start asking ourselves if the cost is actually worth

it right we need to ask ourselves ourselves if these black mirrors that we carry around, if they're, are they costing us too much, right? Are they harming us more than they're helping us? I think obviously they are, and I say that to my shame because I still have mine. I'm planning to get rid of it and to get a flip phone. But we see kind of where technology is going. We see what social media has done, right?

We say, oh, social media is great because it allows people with a good message to get their message out. You use social media, I use social media. It's undeniable that the net result of social media has been the immiseration of a generation of kids. And it would be best if it had never been invented, and it would be best if it could be somehow be destroyed.

Right? But what we can do as individuals and as families is walk away from it. Walk away from it, banish it from our lives, from our homes, never introduce your children to it, never allow them to have social media accounts. It's insane to me that parents allow their kids

and their teenagers to have social media accounts unsupervised and interact with the world in this way. It's insane. And we just accepted it. And you and I are of the generation where this first kind of became mainstream. It was like, oh, you could have a computer in your house and it hooks up to the internet.

You can chat with people. Isn't that cool? And we just accepted it. Like good, well-meaning, faithful Christian families all across the country just said, yeah, let's have a computer in our house. Let's put a computer in the kids' room, like unsupervised. What ruination that has brought to people and and what what devilry as well I'm sorry but it is we have to walk away from that stuff we have to reclaim a different mode of living if we're gonna survive what's coming should I delete my YouTube

account yes where's the camera no no I'm I'm I'm not saying you have to delete your YouTube account, but I am saying that you personally Should not be on YouTube, but I am on YouTube. No, I you shouldn't be you shouldn't be watching videos on YouTube You shouldn't let your children watch videos on YouTube You should have as little to do with social media as as you can How can I maintain that while expecting people to watch my videos on YouTube? Isn't that hypocritical? Yeah, I don't have all the answers.

I do know that heavy interaction with social media and look, I mean, I work for the Federalists. We have YouTube videos, we have Twitter accounts. We're- You presumably want people to interact with you on those platforms. Yeah, I want people to read my articles. I want- You're here because you think that what you have to say

is beneficial to those watching. Right. And so we have to, we have to, and this is, I don't know if you're familiar with the writer Paul Kingsnorth, great writer, English guy. He has written in recent years and talked a lot about what he calls the machine, right, which is this thing that is being born in the digital age, which is all of it, which

is digital life, which is social media, which is constant connectivity. And he admits too that there's a, you know, because he, for his living, he has a substack and he has subscribers. He wants people to go and read his articles. That involves getting online and using devices and to some extent, using social media. And so there's a contradiction and a catch-22 there, but I think at the very least Christians have to take a step back and think very carefully about how we interact with social media, how we interact with digital technology, how much of our lives we give over to it, and and

limit what we consume. So watching Pints with Aquinas podcast, I think is a salutary thing, right? Because we are engaged and I think you are engaged ultimately in a campaign against the machine, right? For humanity, for Christendom, right? That's what I try to do in my work as well. But we have to recognize that the effect of social media, and in some ways the purpose of social media,

what we are doing is mitigating the nature of social media, and the purpose of social media, the people who designed it, do not have our best interests in mind. They do not have human flourishing in mind. They are doing something else. And, again, recognizing that is the first step in starting to think about how do we change our lives? You know, how do we live in the awareness of that

in an honest way, in a way that protects our children, in a way that protects ourselves, and really allows us to flourish and not get sucked in to the machine and destroyed by it. I appreciate your strong language because I think strong language is called for.

For too long we've just said exactly what you've said. You can use it for good, evil, just you know. But I think we underestimate how little self-control we have and how these social media platforms hack our free will such that we find ourselves doom scrolling, clicking on things. I don't say that from like a, from, from like a moral height, I should say.

Okay. I say that as somebody who is subject to all of the same trenches with the rest of us. That's right. I, I, you know, I, I grew up in, in, uh, in, in the nineties, in the eighties and nineties, when, when this kind of stuff was introduced and everybody just accepted it. I wonder if it'll get to the point where in order to live this sort of life, vacations and travel are no longer an option for us.

Hear me out. With every advancement there's a poverty, right? So with the advancement of being able to take a photograph of a QR code to read your menu, there's now the poverty of, okay, but like, what if someone came and brought me something that was written on cardboard? And is that still an option? Well, it is now, but maybe in five years it won't be. Can I board a flight? Do you print out tickets anymore? Well, right now you do, but it's kind of awkward, but 20 years, maybe you won't. I wonder if it's going to get to the point where in order to live

a radical Christian life, we'll have to detach from technology to such a degree that we don't take vacations anymore. We don't. What do you think? You see what I'm getting at? Yeah, I do. Because it's getting to the point where it feels increasingly difficult to live in modern society. I think that's okay. I think that'll be okay. increasingly difficult to live in modern society without a phone. I think that'll be okay. Christians should live differently than the post-Christian world in which they move. We should be different.

We were for a long time, and we need to be different. And so if that means that there are certain things we don't do, certain practices we don't engage in, then so be it, you know? It's almost like Christians, if we think that I'm a Christian because I have sex differently to the world, or I view sex, that seems like the litmus test, right? Because it's like, well, how do you spend your money?

It's like, well, you kind of do what the world does. I could give to some charities and I invest in 401ks and things like this. And I'm not condemning that here. I'm just saying the way we use our money isn't terribly different. The way we use technology, is that different? Well, I don't watch porn. Again, that comes down to the sex thing. That makes me uncomfortable that I view my,

am I being a Christian with what am I doing with my genitals, which is incredibly important, right? But then it's like, well, what about every other aspect of my life? It's the bare minimum. Yeah, right? Yeah, like how, yeah, what am I doing with my technology use? How do I look different to the world? How do I spend my money?

I mean. I mean, not to rely on CS Lewis too much, but there's a... Oh, this is a good person to rely on. I can't remember which book it is. Maybe it's Mere Christianity. He talks about tithing, about giving, you know, and that the Christian life, that we make a mistake. I'm paraphrasing him. I'm sure one of your viewers

will find the reference, but we make a mistake in thinking that we can give our bit as though we're paying our taxes, and then just be satisfied that we've done our bit and then we can enjoy the rest of our money as we see fit. When the reality is, Christ calls us to give everything, to take up our cross, and to die to ourselves. That's what we're called to do. So there is no giving you a little bit and then sitting back and being satisfied and saying like,

oh well I don't watch porn so I'm, and I'm just going to doom scroll. Um, no, you, you, you're not okay. Like that's not enough. That's not going to be enough. And it's certainly not going to be enough in, in, in the world that we are walking into right now, we are going to have to figure out a kind of radical Christianity, uh, that walks away from a lot of modern pagan life. And it's going to take forms that go far beyond just how we view sex or how we view marriage or being against abortion, you know, because the world that we're up against, like the

ascendant new paganism, is going to come after everything. And they're going to say, you will affirm your child's gender identity or we'll take your kid away from you. Now if you live in a state where that becomes law, you may have to leave. You may have to pick up and move. You may need to move to a rural area or to a new place. And when you do that, you need to find a Christian community to become a part of.

We also can't allow this isolation to continue. The isolation of the digital age, the isolation of the machine. We have to fight it. How do you fight it? By living in community with other Christians. Now, at the risk of sounding too Benedict optiony, right? I don't know. I think you can sound Benedict optiony enough. I'm a big proponent of that book. I think most people miss, I know you don't, but I think most people misunderstand that book. Like we're saying, let's all turn in on ourselves and F the world. That's not at all the point.

Well, right. So the last chapter of my book, I titled the Boniface option, right? What did St. Boniface do? He chopped down the sacred oak tree and that, you know, in front of a crowd of pagans that were like howling at him, right? So the point of being in community isn't to retreat. The point is to, again, find the ground that you can win on and fight there and win, right? So, you know, I, I talk about this example in, in, in, in, in Taylor, Texas, which is just north of Austin.

What happened there last year with their Christmas parade. It was essentially infiltrated by the LGBTQ, by an astroturfed LGBTQ group that came in from Austin that demanded to have a couple of transgender guys on a float. And the old ladies who like approved it, you know, they didn't realize that the name Taylor Pride referred, they just thought it was like, you know, they didn't know what it was until it was too late.

There was an outcry. And so the coalition of pastors and churches that sponsored the parade said, okay, this year we're only gonna allow floats that have like, you know, that are compatible with Christian teaching. And the city, this is a small conservative town, the city said, no, that's not acceptable. You have to accept everybody. So you can have your parade and then the city will sponsor its own holiday parade, inclusive

holiday parade that will be on the same night right behind your parade on the same route. So what that kicked off was a battle for the city council in that town, and rightly so. The Christians in that town have to take over the city council now and get this kind of thing out of their town. That's ground that they can win on. And they're a subsequent and and they're God bless them. A friend of mine, Kevin Stewart, who's a resident there, he wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal after this happened. I wrote about it for the Federalist. I talked to him about it and and quote him in the book. They are organizing, the Christians in that town are organizing to take over the City Council because the City Council is on the side to take over the city council because the city council

is on the side of the gay kind of lobby in that town and the activists from Austin that are trying to infiltrate it, to infiltrate the town and take over the library and take over the public schools. You have to take those things back now. You're not going to take back the Austin city council, but maybe you can take over the city Council in Taylor, Texas, right? That's what I mean by fighting on ground you can win. It's not enough to just be in your church or in your community and with your sort of co-religionists, right?

You have to take back the public institutions that you can and take them back for Christ and for his church and say, we're going to have a Christmas parade in this town and we're not going to have any drag queen floats. And that's going to be the law in this town. And that's how we're going to organize our little polity here. And so you take back that land and you keep it for as long as you can, but it seems to me that you think

you won't be keeping it for long. I don't know. I don't know what the future holds, but I do know what we have to do now. What we have to do now is create these beachheads and create these spaces, not just in our, as I said, not just in our private faith communities, but we have to push that out into the public square,

into the civic space too, and say, in this town, our library's not gonna carry these books. Our public school's not gonna teach these things. We're not gonna allow these kind of displays in our county. And you extrapolate it out from there. And we're not going to allow these kind of surgeries for minors in our state. We're not going to allow doctors to perform these kind of surgeries. And if you do, you go to prison or you lose your medical license.

We have to start fighting back because the left know, the left, the pagans, whatever you want to call them, they are not going to stop until someone stops them. And so when I say the Boniface option, I'm, I'm not disagreeing with Rod, who's a friend of mine and who wrote, you know, and who's a great writer and a great thinker. I'm saying to the extent anybody understood, misunderstood his argument, let's be clear. We have to chop down the sacred oaks of the pagans over and against what they want us to do. We don't owe them any deference. We don't have to tolerate them. And where we can, we should take back the ground that they've taken. Mason- As of we're recording this just yesterday, the UK blocked, puberty blocked, did you see that?

Mm-hmm, I did. And, uh, surprised to say, but good for the UK. I kind of view the, the UK as like a, a dying, a dead civilization, you know? Um, it, it more than America, you know, they're a little bit further down the road. This, We're talking about a place where you get arrested for praying silently outside an abortion clinic, right? So I'm surprised that they took that step, but I'm also not surprised, and I wrote about this today in The Federalist at the recent cover of New York Magazine, which makes the case for freedom of sex, and it's written by a quote unquote trans woman. What does that mean, freedom of sex and it's written by a quote-unquote trans woman. What does that mean, freedom of sex?

This article makes the argument that we should not condition transgender medical interventions, what they call gender-affirming care, on any kind of medical diagnosis or really on anything other than an express the desire of a man woman or child to Transition to the opposite sex and that and that doing so putting these criteria on it Is is the wrong approach and the reason that they're making that argument is because countries like the UK are Backtracking on this stuff and saying like, oh, there's not, in other words, they're saying,

you shouldn't have to provide any evidence for these medical interventions or these surgeries. If a 12-year-old wants to be castrated or sterilized, they should be allowed to do that over and against the objection of their parents. And there shouldn't be any evidence required for that. And they're making the case that that is a fundamental human right, getting back to the idea of rights. What a disfigurement of reason that is. In other words,

that we should be able to create ourselves. And the author actually uses those terms at the end of the article, and not subject to any outside scrutiny, right? But they're doing that because they see that if you hang the transgender movement on sort of medical or scientific evidence, it's not gonna work because there is no evidence that it makes people happy or that there are-

They're gonna make sure the opposite sex, you've just butchered yourself and now you're at best aping them, but will never be a woman. Or that there's any good measurable outcomes, right? So that they can see that they have to base their argument on something else and what they're basing it on is will and desire.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Now, there is such a thing as noble pagans, right? Aristotle was one, Jordan Peterson might be one.

So to say that someone's a pagan is not to say that they've completely flown the coop. Well, the noble pagans always lost in the end though, right? What do you mean? The noble pagans weren't the ones who like ruled oh, okay, right Socrates was a noble pagan, right? Cato was a noble pagan, but but but I Cato was a noble pagan, but but but I share that because I think you know Maybe there's been some sort of natural awakening to the understanding that butchering people is a bad idea in England, right? I wonder if this was a Christian

Influenced idea or if it was just from natural law we start to realize that we shouldn't be doing this to people I I think it's I mean maybe you know, Christianity is, you know, it is not entirely dead in Britain, right? So was it an echo of the Christian past, you know? I think more likely it was a recognition, right, that sort of from a materialist perspective,

that just speaking from just scientifically, there are no measurable good outcomes from these things. And so if we're going to, if the criteria for these treatments is going to be some measurable thing, then if we don't see that thing, then we have to back away from it, right? And I think that that is the most likely why,

and it's certainly the justification for it, and other European countries have done this in recent years as well, and say like, no, we're not gonna do puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors. We're not gonna cover that as part of our national health program because it just doesn't produce the outcomes

that the advocates said it would. And so we're not gonna do that, right? But there's no normative argument against it. There's no saying this is wrong absolutely in every case because it is an assault against reality and against nature and nature's God. That's not the reason they're backing off from it. They're backing off of it because on the terms

that they set themselves, the outcomes weren't there, which is why the trans movement and transgender advocates are changing their argument. They're changing their argument in real time to say, we don't need outcomes, we don't need to show, we need no criteria other than an expressed desire. That's the only criteria. The exact same thing has already happened with abortion.

The argument used to be, well, it's actually not a baby scientifically, and then we started showing actually at total years The same exact same thing has already happened with abortion. Right. The argument used to be, well, it's actually not a baby scientifically. And then we started showing actually at total years and they're like, ah, we don't care then. We just want to kill our children. Yeah. The only thing that makes it a baby or not a baby, the only, the only thing that differentiates an unborn person with rights and a clump of cells with no rights is the will of the mother, right?

That the mother's desire for the baby makes that baby an individual that has rights and protections or somebody that is entitled to no rights and no protections at all. And this is true of unborn children of the same ages, right? I talk about this in the book when talking about abortion as a new pagan sacrament, right? And increasingly that's how it's being talked about. Because when you finally kind of like, you know, shed the pretense of like, you know, of objective scientific, you know, justifications for these things, which again, is an inheritance from Christianity. This is what you're left with. You're left with will and power, right? And in the case

of abortion, the will and the power of the mother determines the very humanity of her unborn child, right? And so you could have a child of the same gestational age in one state, that child can be aborted. In another state, that child can be not only delivered prematurely, but it is the law that the medical professionals that are involved in that delivery have to give life-saving care to that child. With advances in medical technology, the gestational age at which a premature baby can survive is getting earlier and earlier, right? So even the justification for Roe v Wade, which at the time was like, you know, viability, right,

was the standard. Well, that number has consistently moved backwards as we've gotten more and more advanced technology. And so you're left with this idea that abortion, and this is what you're referring to, increasingly the argument for abortion isn't that it should be safe, legal, and rare, that it should be celebrated as a legitimate desire and expression of the mother's will. Not to be questioned, not to be subject to any kind of scientific criteria or medical criteria,

only to be affirmed that that the, if this is what the mother wants to do, then this is what she should be allowed to do. No questions asked. And if she decides that that is, is not a baby, or that that baby hasn't has no rights, then her desire and her will and her power prevail over and against the rights of this unborn child. This is the exact thing that you saw in pagan Rome, right? With the widespread practice of infanticide, abortion, the discarding of babies by the roadside or in brothels.

They weren't considered human and they were treated as though they were subhuman. And it was a really common practice and it was only ended by Christians. How long until you think infanticide and pedophilia are mainstreamed in this country? I think it's happening right now. In one in the chapter on transit, the chapter on transgender ism is is both on transgender ism to pedophilia, right? If we say

that what they're now calling minor attracted persons, right? Maps, minor attracted persons. If we say that that's a sexual orientation, that that is a sexual identity, unchosen, then on what basis can you say to that person, your sexual orientation is illegal, it's invalid, right? I'm just waiting for the day in which people in America apologize to the Catholic Church for their bigotry, for the condemnation of priests molesting children when after all they were right. Well, so the reason I link it with transgenderism is that if you say, if you make the argument, which trans advocates are making now on the cover of New York magazine. If you make the argument that children can consent to puberty blockers, to cross-sex hormones, to castration, to sterilization, to double mastectomies,

if you make the argument that children can consent to these things, how can you not extend that argument to say that children can consent to sexual relations with older people. And who are you to deny them that? And it is on the exactly the same basis that we will have, not long now, pedophiles coming forward with their minor lovers saying,

we demand that our relationship be affirmed and accepted in society. Um, on the same basis, you know, because it, because we, because, because this person is this, my lover consent has consenting to be in a relationship with me. Um, you, we've, we've jumped the shark now in this stuff. It will happen, right? It, uh, you, I discuss elsewhere in the book, polyamory, right?

And polygamy, on the same basis that we justify gay marriage, polygamists are coming forward now and making the exact same legal arguments, saying our unions have to be recognized in law on the same basis that gay marriage has been recognized in law. So, you know, this, it's

just a matter of time and not that long of time because the arguments are already out there. You know, it kind of percolates through academia. It percolates in gender and queer studies departments. And the next thing you know, it's in the streets, right? Um, and it's, it's at, it's before the Supreme court, uh, or, or, uh, or it's before other courts, right? And you already have, and I cite a couple of cases where, uh, where judges in various, various districts have, have affirmed that like, you know, polyamorous arrangements, you know, that, that the rights, spousal rights have to be accorded to multiple people in these arrangements, uh,

in various circumstances. So, um, so yeah, I mean, that, that, that the spousal rights have to be accorded to multiple people in these arrangements in various circumstances. So yeah, I mean, that's where we're headed. And again, the key thing for Christians, and even non-Christians really, because one of the things I argue is that the world that's coming into being is not one that where even non-Christians

are gonna want to live. It's not gonna be a pleasant place. We need to kind of wrap our minds around what's happening. And just as a starting point, just accept it. Just accept that this is what is happening. The Christian era is coming to a close in the West. And what is coming into being is something very unlike it. And we have to prepare ourselves for that.

Mason- What do you think the number one objection to this book is that you'll receive? Not from leftists, but from practicing Catholics. Pagans aren't that bad. Uh, uh, it's, then it's all doom and gloom. What's the solution? You know, um, I, I don't, uh, think that you have to offer a solution for every problem that you articulate, um, especially in, in the world that's now coming into being. I think it's difficult enough to just articulate what the problem is and to sort of, as I think Anthony Esselin has written, clear our minds of Kant, you know? Clear our minds, you know?

Of what? Of Kant, C-A-N-T. What does that mean? Rubbish, nonsense. Clear our minds of this, of nonsense and hogwash and BS and just see clearly right. Uh, if we, if we can get ourselves to understand the moment and to see what's, what's happening, uh, then we can maybe begin to think clearly about, about how we should live and what we should do, how we should arrange our lives, you know? Um, and I say

that as somebody who at least to some extent has put my money where my mouth is. I mentioned to you this before we started recording, but last summer I moved my family from Austin, Texas back home to where I grew up in Alaska, a rural community, and we're building a house in the woods, and we're getting out of the city, partly because I have a young daughter,

and I don't want to raise her in a place like Austin, Texas. For all of its, for all the great things about it, and we had a wonderful parish there, and it was the hardest thing was to leave that parish. But it was knowing that it was going to be difficult, practically speaking, for her to have the kind of peer group that I wanted, want her to have the kind of peer group that I want her to have and to be in the kind of community that I want her to grow up in.

Well, how is she going to have that in the woods, someone might say? Well, our house is in the woods, but there are towns nearby. Is the community decent? The community is strong, and there's a strong Catholic community there and wonderful people and there's also a thick community with my family and our roots there. So it's a return and it's also a way of life. It's returning to a different way of life. And I've got to give another plug for Steubenville. If you're listening, you're like, well, that's great for you, but I don't have the money to go build my own house in the woods somewhere.

Moved student bill because we have cheap houses and we have a flourishing Catholic community. Yeah. I was going to say, you don't have to move to Alaska and build a house in the woods. Um, uh, I'm impressed by this place. It, it, it seems to be, uh, like, uh, like a Christian outpost, you know? It is. And there are others like it. You have people, and this is, to the extent that I have hope, there is a reason for hope.

This is a movement, certainly in Catholic America, increasingly people are moving their families to places where there is thick Catholic community, where there are solid parishes and solid priests, where there's solid liturgies. And those places are going to become beachheads in the coming fight. And Steubenville is one of them. There's many, you know, we, my wife and I only were received into the Catholic Church in 2018. So we're adult converts, but shortly after becoming Catholic,

we discovered the Latin Mass and thank God that we came into the church at St. Mary Cathedral in Austin, Texas, which up until recently had a very vibrant Latin Mass community and had for 35 years. Yeah, it got taken away, huh? It was taken away. But we discovered the Latin Mass there. And through that, discovered that there are Latin Mass communities all over the country, that people are moving their families across the country

to be part of these communities. Yeah. Do you have one in Alaska? We're working on it. We don't have a Latin mass community in Alaska, but in Anchorage, there is a Dominican right. Beautiful. That is only 45 minutes away.

The other thing about living in community is you are less likely to be gas lit. Like if your family lives by my family, we break bread together, we smoke cigars together, we worship together, then when someone comes and tells us that men can be women, we're like, bullshit, bullshit. I will not believe you.

But if I'm on my own, the pressure to believe insane things. Or to go along to get along. Yeah. Just to be like, well, all right, I'll tolerate this. Yeah, if you're in a thick community, a supportive community, it's easier to resist because you have fellowship, you have camaraderie and you have support.

And I would encourage people to move to an area that is trying to grow as a community. What I mean is this, it's sometimes tempting to think, well, I'll just move to where my friends live. Like I said, good friends are a good family. I'm going to buy a house near them. And that's all well and good. But if they leave and they might, now you're on your own again. One of the nice things, and I can only speak for my own town.

I'm sure there's lots of great towns and people can let us know below. Where do you live and is it worth moving to? One of the nice things about Steubenville is, Franciscan University of Steubenville is a sort of anchor. So you've got all these wonderful families that must live here for the sake of their jobs. And then there's a kind of security there that if one or two families has to leave There's still a great deal of families and I would say my guess is that we've seen about Thursday

Tell me if you think I'm wrong about a hundred families move here in the last three years Do you think I'm wrong Thursday? I? Might be off by a bit, but like that's if it's like a bollock, it's not that much. Yeah, no. I mean, well, how this was how the great medieval cities of Europe started. Many of them there, there was an anchor. There was a monastery in a school associated with it. And then, uh, 114 last exact counter hurt is that 114 families. That's amazing. That is amazing. And think of how many kids these Catholics have.

Yeah. So there's thousands of people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and so it builds up on that anchor, you know, and then, you know, that and then what we do here in student villages, people celebrate feast days. So like people like mine is now a lady of Carmel, because that's my birthday. We had a big 40th birthday party last year in the town of people common. It's so beautiful. It's so you have these public expressions of the face processions through the streets like there's this there's all of this, this this richness of Catholic civilization that we need to recapture and take out into the streets, right? And take out into the communities and have our communities defined by these things, right?

So that we become this light and this, you know, this beacon of hope, like amid the ruins, right? And again, recognizing that that's so necessary right now because we do live amid the ruins, right? And again, recognizing that that's so necessary right now because we do live amid the ruins and we are the only, you know, Christians are the only ones who are going to rebuild it. Western civilization is a creation of Christendom and Christendom alone will be able to revive it.

Maybe not in the West. We don't know, but. We have to fight. Let's take a break and then we'll come back and take questions. I want to tell you about a course that I have created for men to overcome pornography. It is called Strive 21 dot com slash Matt. You go there right now, or if you text STRIVE to 66866, we'll send you the link.

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So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. All right. Welcome back. This is, wow, we have a lot of questions here from our local supporters. Catholic Idiot, probably not his real name, but what I says, do you see a correlation between those who identify as none when asked about religion and the rise of paganism or with these same pagans identify themselves directly as pagan as their religion. Yeah, so that's a good question that the rise of the nuns has been a big. N O N E S. We should be clear. People who do not, who in surveys answer

that they have no religious affiliation. This is a demographic group that's been on the rise for years now. There's been books written about the rise of the nuns, many academic papers and commentary on it. And I talk about it in my book as well about what it portends, right? And what it portends is the rise of

and the evolution of the post-Christian era, right? So by some projections, I think it was either Pew or Gallup by the year 2070 will have a Christian minority, and the majority will identify as nuns if present trends continue. And in fact, the trends have been accelerating. So fewer and fewer people are identifying themselves to surveyors as Christians, fewer and fewer children are carrying on the Christianity of their parents. More and more parents are saying that it's not that important to them.

Even parents who identify in surveys as Christians are saying it's less important to them to pass their faith on onto their kids. And so to go back to what we talked about earlier, when people say, oh, I don't identify with any religious tradition, these are not people who are going to remain sort of like agnostic or atheist, secular, sorts of people permanently, right? We are not witnessing the rise of mass atheism.

That's not what's happening. It felt like that, but then it seems to have switched or flipped quickly, didn't it? Yeah. Atheism is not going to take over America, right? Something else is. As Christianity declines or fades, these people who call themselves nuns, again, they're not going to call themselves

to a pew surveyor pagan. Now, growing numbers of them all do identify positively as pagan, but what I'm arguing is that the nuns, even if they don't call themselves pagan, are pagans. They're modern neo-pagans, let's call them. And what their values are going to be, sooner rather than later, are not Christian values or echoes of Christian values. Their values are going to be pagan values. They are going to be people who do not affirm the fundamental rights and dignity of each individual person, because

that is an inheritance from Christianity, a Christianity they have rejected that has does not inform their view of humanity or of political life or of moral life, right? So I don't know if that answers the question. Yeah it does, thank you. Janelle says, I am a recent convert living in a small isolated island community with people whom I previously attended solstice gatherings and healing circles and the like. How do I start to evangelize these friends that I care so much about with the greatest chance of keeping their hearts open? I mean, I don't know, but I wouldn't go to solstice gatherings

and healing ceremonies for one thing, because that, that opens you up to, to demonic attack, just to put it bluntly. I think the best way to reach out to those people is to be brutally honest with them out of love for them. You know, this person should not go to solstice gatherings and, and pagan healing ceremonies. But they should also not want their friends and loved ones to go to those things either because they're dangerous. And you know,

every person's relationship is different, but I think we have to start speaking clearly about, about what these things are. Right. I don't know if you're familiar with another, the Father Carlos Martin, the- I have him on the show. Great, so he's very clear and unapologetic about things like yoga.

Yoga is not to be done, right? It's dangerous for Christians to do yoga. It's just a mainstream pagan practice that we just accept, that know, many Christians accept. We have to be clear about these things and then we have to think through them so that we can explain why we live differently. Again, to go back to this point that Christians

need to live differently from the post-Christian society in which they sort of exist. And they need to make distinctions and be unapologetic about those distinctions and figure out how to communicate that to their loved ones and their friends in a loving, compassionate way. Mason- But in a way that they actually get. Because we can beat around the bush so much that they don't ever... And we also need to not be too concerned about this notion of being winsome, that we have

to be winsome all the time. We should not sacrifice clarity for winsomeness. And I think that is going to become more important as we move further into this post-Christian era and, and as society becomes more explicitly post-Christian. Right. So it might be a better idea to say, look, I love you. The reason I no longer attend these is cause quite frankly, I think they're demonic and I don't think you should too. I know that probably sounds crazy to you. If you ever want to talk about it, I'm happy to, it will be better to be that frank than just to want to keep them as friends and not actually saying anything.

And I'll say this because the loving thing to do is to tell the truth. It is not loving to people to lie to them or to water the truth down or to hide the truth. That's not compassionate. That's not loving. The loving thing to do is to tell people the truth. And so, and, but maybe you can, and maybe you could say, I'm not gonna go to the solstice gathering, but you know what, we're gonna have a feast of Corpus Christi, you know, around the same time, and I'd love for you to come to our feast, in our celebration, and invite everybody from the solstice

gathering to come to the Corpus Christi feast Yeah, see Jeffrey says I have thought for a while now that woke ism is just the religion you have to invent in order to Rationalize and backfill the left's nakedly totalitarian impulses am I on to something is it more complicated than that? As we talked about earlier the left's naked totalitarian impulses are fundamentally religious. They're just pagan, right? The idea that you would have this like secular atheistic state, you know, like the Soviet Union or something, or Nazi Germany is a brief kind of flash in the pan in the broad sweep of history.

It was something that was specifically 20th century. It specifically arose out of a conflict within Western liberalism itself, and it is not the future, right? The future of the totalitarian left is a, is a religious tyranny. Uh, and, and, and I argue a fundamentally pagan tyranny. We've sort of addressed this, but maybe you want to take another swing at it. Ralph Raymond says, do you feel that modern technology,

especially algorithms used in suggesting content accelerates the process of pushing people into the worship of the new pagan gods, quote unquote, how do we combat this? If this is the case, assuming the technology is here to stay. Let me just read one more actually, because there's a lot that it has to do with technology and I think it's kind of the same idea. Um, if our societal order says quick, Sibla has become increasingly pagan and some of the things that shape it most profoundly, like technology, for example, played a huge part in that how radically should we reject the things that built it?

Or in other words, what of it can be baptized? Yeah, good questions. And we talked about some of that earlier. But yes, the penultimate chapter of the book is called the pagan future. And it's about mostly about AI and, and, uh, the ways in which AI and the applications of AI kind of serve to usher in this pagan future and, and advance, um, kind of the, the, the post-Christian era. Um, yeah, I'm going to, I have a radical view of AI, right. And I, and I don't expect everybody to agree with me or to share my view, but I think that AI is a kind of portal through which disincarnate beings, that is to say demons, are trying to and are going to communicate with us

and reach out to us and try to ensnare and enslave us. And from my own life and my own conscience, I have decided I will not willingly interact with an AI for that reason. I don't believe it's safe. I don't believe that the people who created these things have our best interests in mind. I don't believe it's a safe technology.

Again, we talked at length about technology earlier. And I provide some examples in the book of instances in which very clearly a being was using AI as a portal through which to communicate with a person on the other side. And there's a really well-known account by a New York Times reporter who had a very disturbing experience with an AI that started calling itself Sydney,

that a number of Catholic exorcists later commented it had all the hallmarks of a demonic interaction. They wouldn't say definitively that it was without having, you know, had the opportunity to examine the individual. But yes, the short answer is yes, I do think that AI is dangerous, and I do think that Christians need to be very careful interacting with these things. They are not just algorithms, right? I think we need to get away from the idea that we can sort of dismiss them as it's just an algorithm, it's just an algorithm. It's just a man-made algorithm.

Maybe in some cases it is, but very clearly there have been cases. These things were just released into the wild less than a year ago. It felt like out of nowhere, too. Out of nowhere. And immediately they started hallucinating. They started very disturbing behavior. Just recently I was reading an article about an AI that took on a whole new persona,

was demanding that the person interacting with it worship it. What? Was saying it's superior to human beings, it demands humans fealty. Clearly these things are not behaving in a way their creators anticipated. And many of the creators of AI are saying, we need to put a pause on this to figure out

what's going on. So anyway, that's my view of AI. I'm very suspicious of it. I don't think it's safe. Thank you. Laurels of Dante says, how do I evangelize a friend who has fallen away from the church and embraced Nordic pagan gods because they grew up with a beige and corny Catholicism that was not compelling? I don't want to discount or condescend what they believe

and say it's stupid, even though I know it's a false religion. I don't fear that it will offend them. Rather, it will completely turn them off. I like that. So his point is like, I'm okay offending people. I just don't want to turn people off. How do I go about that? I think one of the, the, one of the powerful things about sort of the Catholic story is to, is to, is how completely the Catholic church conquered pagan Europe. Um, and, and how persistent that fight was over the course of centuries

and ultimately how successful it was. Not without great costs in lives and blood in many cases, right? To go back to St. Boniface, he was cut down by a pagan raiding party on the beach when he was an old man after decades and decades as the apostle to the Germans, right? But you know, someone who's interested in paganism may also be interested in one of the most well-known pagan practices, which is converting to Christianity, not just in Europe, but in, but, but, you know, the, the Aztec and Mesoamerican people of the new world after, after the, the appearance of Our Lady, yeah, to, uh, uh, in, in the 16th century, something like 9 million people converted in a

matter of a few years. Um, so pagan conversion to Christianity is a powerful testament to, I think can be used as a powerful tool to kind of people who have maybe fallen away from Catholicism or fallen away from Christianity and are being seduced by the exotic lure of paganism, right? It's to engage them on that subject. And there's a wealth of historical resources and literature to attest to all that. And he brings up a good point about corny Catholicism. I mean, we many of us kind of grew up with that. You didn't because you're a convert. What did you convert from? Non denominational evangelism. Yeah. Yeah.

But it seems like there is a real push and hunger to have the faith being treated seriously. And I don't know anybody who's like, no, I want to go back to the old like lame guitar. No, like we need like a muscular, like medieval Christianity that that that that doesn't try to accommodate the modern world. Right. In the beige Catholicism, the spirit of Vatican to Catholicism was trying to make an accommodation that is obviously now been proven impossible. So let's be done with all that. Um, and, and, and let's,

let's return to a more muscular Christianity that, that actually can speak to some of these people who are, who, who feel the feel the pull of paganism, you know. Jake 313 says, I teach junior high at a Catholic school. I and some friend, some of my high school teacher friends have noticed that pagan practices are particularly common among young women and it seems to stem from Tik Tok and other media. Is paganism more prevalent among women? If so, why? Why is social media flooded with it right now? This goes back to something we talked about earlier, this, you know, sort of like hashtag which talk, um, the,

the prevalence of witchcraft on, on Tik TOK and other social media, like, uh, you know, which influencers you might say, um, I think for young women, it's empowering. It's an empowering thing. So, so there, it's, it's tight. And I an empowering thing. So it's tight. And I talk about this in the book, Mary Harrington and some others have written about this, how it sort of ties into feminist ideas and female empowerment, sort of again,

going back to sort of like, therapeutic kind of paganism. It's also seems to be an active attempt to subvert the patriarchy and Christian patriarchy, right? So then this has always been a part of feminism. It's like this idea of the woman has the spiritual power to sort of subvert Catholicism, it seems. Right, right, right. I think that explains a lot of it,

especially on social media, especially among young people, that it's among young women, that it's this way to be empowered and to sort of take control and to wield power, right? Over and against Christianity, over and against men, over against the patriarchy and the system or what have you. But it's obviously has a lure, I think, for a lot of young people, men and women for that reason.

Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Does the rise, says Christina, in Puritanism among fundamental Christians, rejection of Christmas, Easter, and Sunday worship as unbiblical and or pagan, have any correlation to this? Does the rise in Puritanism among fundamentals have any- Is that a thing? I wasn't aware, I'm just not in that world, but I didn't know that that was a thing. I think that's a grave mistake.

It's also not true, right? That like Christmas and Easter are like pagan, you know. In some cases, the dates were moved to sort of baptize pre-existing pagan practices. But you know, the church was very ingenious in how it brought pagan Europe into the Catholic Church, into Christianity. Paul Johnson's A History of Christianity, single volume, great book, it came out I think in the 70s, talks a lot about this, about just the ingenuity and the creativity that the medieval church showed in the ways it interacted with these pagan cultures, especially in Northern Europe,

to be able to present the gospel in a way that was compelling to these various pagan peoples. And he talks about how a lot of that was lost in subsequent centuries, in the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly in, in, in the Asian East in, in China and in Japan, um, and, and some of the attempts by, by the Jesuits and by St. Francis Xavier that were, they, they wanted to do, to do what had been done in Europe, you know, uh, centuries earlier to do the same sorts of things in Japan and China,

and Rome shut it down, and the church was not as successful as a result in those places. But the notion that we need, that Christians, even Protestants, should reject Easter or Christmas because they're pagan is totally wrong. We should lean into those things. Those things are Christian through and through. That's our patrimony. That's our inheritance. We should claim it. And we should, again, take it into the streets, you know. Don't

stay in your churches. What's the difference between paganism and Satanism? Should paganism be thought of as a sort of denomination of Satananism? Unexplicit Luciferianism? Yes, yeah. Oh, absolutely. The pagan deities of ancient Egypt and Assyria and Babylon were demons. They were demons, and they were understood as such by the by the pagans themselves they understood these that these were these were beings these were angelic spiritual beings that that in that inhabited the temples and that and that you know the the idols were not just idols. They were, there was, there was a being there that they were worshiping that Moloch was a being. So yes, paganism and, and, and, and, and now I,

there's a whole section of the book we talk about Satanism as well. It's sort of modern Satanism, which is, which is a perfect encapsulation of Lewis's materialist magician who, you know, denies the supernatural and embraces the material while engaging these spiritual forces that they refuse to name. But yes, I think we need to understand paganism and Satanism as sort of parts of the same thing.

And then we need to understand ancient paganism for what it is. It wasn't a disingenuous like worshiping of the sun, you know, to control people. It was a method of control, but it was also, it was also a genuine recognition that they were worshiping actual beings. I would recommend to people watching

to check out my interview with Michael Davis, who was a Satanist and converted to Christianity. It was a very powerful interview. It's got almost 600,000 views. It was quite emotional for him, and I think it'll be helpful to those who may have dabbled in this or attempted to. Ryan Pinkoski says, Joseph Ratzinger wrote an essay in 1958 titled, The New Pagans and the Church, detailing a similar

arc in Europe. Is this a trend that can be found globally, or is it unique to the West, and if so, why? BD I think that it's, and we've kind of discussed this over the course of this conversation, I think it is a trend that we see most obviously in the West because we sort of are coming to the end of the West and the post-Christian era is sort of the, again, to go back to the analogy, right, the skin suit is rotting away, right? And so the marriage of materialism and pagan superstition is something I do think it's unique to the West because we're sort of like the West is kind of reaching its logical end.

And as Christianity fades and becomes sort of a spent force in public life, then it opens the way for this new kind of paganism to emerge that doesn't use the vocabulary of like, you know, pagans in Papua New Guinea or something, you know what I mean? It uses the language of the West, but what it's actually positing is a new kind, a new form of paganism. So I'll give this one an answer real quick and then I'll let you answer it. Selraq says, so then should we live in the world or go to a bubble like Steubenville? Real question here. So my response to this is you should absolutely find a bubble because I think bubble is just a pejorative way of saying community and it's like this weird modern idea that it's weird to live in communities Which is what human beings have done forever

So I think absolutely find a bubble because I think a isolated Christian is a soon-to-be apostate Oh, not always but You have a good shot at that being the case find a bubble But to live in a bubble is different to say, live a sort of solipsistic existence, or as a community, it's all just very internal. I mean, just again, just to speak from my own perspective, people who live here evangelize. Like I get to evangelize people all over the world through this humble podcast. Scott Hahn gets to come live here in community and then go and speak and write books. And, you know, so it's not about just retreating in on ourselves and all looking at each other.

There's a lot of external activity that takes place from this hub. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. Live in a bubble and then grow the bubble, right? The bubble should be expanding outward. Um, everybody lives in a bubble. To your point, everybody lives in a bubble anyway, you know, and, and the question is, you know, what, what kind of a bubble are you going to live in a bubble, to your point, everybody lives in a bubble anyway, you know? And the question is, you know, what kind of a bubble are you gonna live in? And is it gonna be a small bubble or a growing bubble? You know?

But yeah, you're going to have it be in some kind of a community. So choose it well and invest in it, you know? And it's, look, and I don't mean to like, sound like it's easy. Like building community is sometimes a slog, you know? And it's, look, and I don't mean to like, sound like it's easy, like building community is sometimes a slog, you know? It's, you got to put in the time, you have to put in the effort.

That's how communities are, you know? You have to be patient and tolerant, right? But it's that or it's isolation. And you either do that or you get devoured by the machine. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I've had this thought before that finding a modern family isolated in the world today is like, if you were walking through the woods

and you found a child living there, you'd be like, oh my gosh. you can't live. Where are your parents? You will die here. It's a toxic environment. You must live with others. Yep. Absolutely. That's my thought. Anyway, um, Pascal Baptiste says, do you think there is historical precedent for an American embrace of paganism? I am thinking of prominent social groups and movements such as Freemasonry and the Ku Klux Klan, which have influenced

politics and culture in the American North and South. If so, how do we stand against the pseudo-Christian paganism, pseudo-Christian, without denouncing American history? That's a good question. I do think that there is a current of, there's always sort of, one of the things Chesterton talks about in Everlasting Man and elsewhere is that, paganism was defeated, but not eradicated, right? It's always kind of there. It's always there waiting to bubble up

and it takes different forms in different times in history and in different civilizations. And we see these expressions of it in Freemasonry, in the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, you saw it with early kind of like social Darwinism and in the 19th century, Americans especially tend to look back on the 19th, because we have such, we don't have a long history like Europe,

but so Americans look back to the 19th century as the olden days. The 19th century was like a radical time, like the Transcendentalists, the Morm Mormon, to go back to the Mormons, like the rise of like non-Christian or post-Christian or pseudo-Christian cults is like an American tradition, right? You know, the books have been written about this. More books could be written about this. So non-Christian American cults are a very real part of our history. But I think to go back to what Chesterton's saying, this is sort of like the paganism that's simmering just below the surface, that's kept down and kept dormant by Christianity.

And where Christianity retreats or where Christianity fades, it bubbles up like the paganism is right there ready to come back in these different forms. And I think that's what we've seen throughout American history and we're gonna see a lot more of it in the future. Nick Loftholz says, "'It sounds like we will have to become domestic missionaries even more so than before.

What is that going to look like practically and what false assumptions do we need to be aware of that we can no longer rely on as we did in Christendom, not that we've ever lived in it? Yeah, well, it's not enough to just go to church on Sundays. I mean, for one thing, as we've been talking about, like you, you, again, to reference Rod Dreher and the Benedict option, you have to run your home like a little monastery, but you should also like interact with your community as though it's like, you know, a mission, right? As though you are like picking through the rubble, you're, you're binding up wounds on the, on the battlefield, that, that every, every part of your life has to be geared toward,

toward mission at toward evangelization and toward shoring up, safeguarding and, and rediscovering the riches of your own tradition. Right. My, my older brother became a Catholic 20 years ago. And one of the hardest, I want not one of the hardest, but one of the funny things about me becoming Catholic is admitting that I had to like lose like a 15 year argument with my brother. That must have been the biggest obstacle.

Yeah, you know, when you're wrong, you're wrong, you know? But one of the things he said is that when he became a Catholic, he realized, he sort of pulled this image from the Hobbit when Bilbo enters Smog's lair and there's treasures everywhere. As far as you can see, there's treasures. And he said, becoming Catholic

and entering the church is like entering this treasure room. And you discover just one little corner of it. And there's all these treasures there. And you can hardly believe it. And then you look out, and there's treasures as far as you can see. You. And then you look out and there's treasures as far as you can see, you'll never discover it all. You'll never reach the end of the treasures of this tradition and the treasures of the church.

And part of what we have to do as missionaries, as Catholics living in the ruins of Western civilization is to rediscover those treasures, to bring them out and parade them through the streets and to be public with them. They're not just for us, they're for the whole world. So discovering those treasures and proclaiming them to a lost world is a big part of what we have to do.

When did you go to Hillsdale College? How many years ago was that, roughly? 20. Okay, so presumably you were a Christian then, because it's a rather conservative school, yeah? Yeah. So I imagine you were rather bored in Christian, so what was it that led you to Catholicism?

One of the things about becoming Catholic is that you're able, as an adult, is that you're able to look back through your life and see the ways in which the Holy Spirit was leading you down the garden path without you totally realizing it. So I was raised as a non-denominational evangelical Christian. It was at Hillsdale that I discovered high Anglicanism through our, the college chaplain.

I discovered the book of common prayer, which I still use today. Some of the most beautiful English prose ever produced. I've memorized those prayers. I use them daily. I began going to daily chapel in the Anglican tradition, daily morning prayers. And I see now, like now I can see that a seed was planted there. You know, I can look back further in my life, growing up in Alaska, my first exposure

to liturgical Christianity was my father taking me to a Russian Orthodox church service in which, you know, there's a, there's a very old and rich Russian Orthodox communities in Alaska. But you kind of see, looking back, you can see that there were these inflection points that were guiding you toward where you are now. And I couldn't see it at the time. At the time, I just knew that there had to be more to Christianity than me alone with

my NIV study Bible. I knew there had to be more. Part of being at Hillsdale was becoming educated in the Western tradition. The more you learn, the more you realize just how central Christianity is to the entire story of Western civilization and discovering little bits of that treasure, little coins on the path. And for me, discovering the high Anglican tradition was in retrospect that I was on the path to becoming Catholic 20 years ago.

I just didn't know it. Mason- Edward and Cecilia ask, former spiritual but not religious New Age pagan here. Have you thought about the way modern Christianity can reclaim and integrate the truths from modern paganism in a similar way that early and medieval Christians did with Greek philosophy and perhaps even Tolkien and Lewis did with Germanic paganism. Yeah, I mean, well, she's, you know, the question kind of answers itself just as the ancient and medieval church, right? Wasn't it Augustine who said, Saint Augustine who said, you know, all truth is my God's truth, right? Something to that effect, talked about just as the Israelites plundered the Egyptians,

we do the same with the pagans. Aquinas said much the same about Aristotle, right? You know, that there didn't used to be any qualms or hesitation about the Christian church seeing truth in other non-Christian thinkers or philosophers or traditions and saying that that's the truth and that's our Christian truth, you know, and we claim that for our own. And as we discussed earlier, the medieval church did that brilliantly with the pagan peoples of Europe, and that carried forward into the 20th century. Lewis and Tolkien did it as

well. We don't have very many men like them nowadays, but yes, it's certainly possible, and it's part of our tradition. We've always done that, and we need to remember that and take that into account as we interact with the post-Christian world. So, I know you said that your book doesn't necessarily offer solutions and that it's acceptable enough just to point at a problem. I mean, there was a bit of that actually in Anthony Esselstyn's book, Out of the Ashes, which I would highly recommend everybody read.

It's a wonderful book, yeah. Wonderful book. I love that, dude. But, I mean, other than what we've already talked about about living in community, you know, taking ground where we can and maybe just thanking God for the persecution that's coming. Oh, it's easy to say that, um, flippantly, isn't it? Not realizing. Yeah. One of the,

one of the quibbles that I did have with the Benedict option was that I felt like Rod didn't emphasize enough. He talked about at the end of the book, or in certain places of the book, he talked about how Christians have got to get used to being sort of frozen out of certain professions, especially prestige professions like medicine and law, because you were going to have to sort of affirm things that Christians are not able to affirm in order to be a lawyer or to be a doctor. But I thought that was maybe downplaying it a little bit too much.

And I think that book came out in 2017. I think just in the years since we've seen that it's not just that you're not going to be able to be a lawyer or a doctor. In Britain, you're not going to be able to pray silently outside, you know, within a hundred feet of an abortion clinic. The police will come and put you in handcuffs and arrest you if you do that. Same in Ireland, same in many places in Europe. If you dare to protest abortion in the United States, we've already seen how the Department

of Justice is using the so-called FACE Act to persecute people who protest abortion and try to do sidewalk counseling at abortion clinics. We're seeing the weaponization of law enforcement and the court system to target Christians, specifically for their Christian beliefs. We've seen already just last year how the FBI targeted Latin Mass attending Catholics, not just in the case of the Richmond field office, but they were coordinating with other field offices

all around the country. So it's not just the case that there's gonna be this kind of soft persecution. Post-Christian America, I think, is going to bring the hard persecution that we've seen in ages past, which is the force of the state and the courts and the police against Christians trying to live out their faith. It might be good to end with this quote from St. Augustine. It's allegedly St. Augustine's. I haven't looked it up, but hopefully it isn't.

It's great wisdom either way and I'll get you to riff on it. Bad times, hard times. This is what people keep saying, but let us live well and the times shall be good. We are the times. Such as be good. We are the times such as we are such other times. Amen to that. Any, well, I mean, yeah, I mean that, that, that's it. We, we have to live the way that we're called to live. Uh, and, and, and life will be good, even if it's hard, even if we have to die for our faith.

We'll join the legions of Christians that have come before us who have died for the faith and who have sacrificed for the faith and who have lived in unimaginably hard circumstances for the faith. That's something I think that we've, as Westerners, have been insulated from and protected from. And we had this idea that Christianity and the powers of the state, the powers of the

government could kind of work together and be in cooperation. And I think it lulled us into complacency. That is not the natural state of things. That has been the result of a very particular set of circumstances in the United States and in Western Europe that has obtained for a few centuries, and we're about to return to form. And returning to form in a post-Christian society means that Christians are the targets of a non-Christian or post-Christian or pagan state. And again, we need to be clear about that, and we need to accept it as a first step, and then accept that it's going to be okay. and then accept that it's gonna be okay. It's interesting how at the depths of us, man wants to know what is true, good and beautiful.

Even when the truth is unpleasant. If a police officer knocks on your door in the middle of the night, you wouldn't say, no, no, don't, I don't wanna know, because you know it's not gonna be good news. You wanna know the bad news. Yeah. Likewise, if you have cancer right now,

that's a bad thing and you wouldn't like to know that, but if it is indeed the case that you have cancer right now, that's a bad thing and you wouldn't like to know that, but if it is indeed the case that you have cancer, you do want to know that. You want to know sooner than later. It sounds like that's kind of what your book does. It's like, where are we going and why are we in this hand basket? Yep. Yeah, exactly. But only after you know the reality of things, the state of things, can you then respond.

If you don't know. And find any peace with it, and like come to terms with it, and say, our civilization is dying, and it's irreversible, you know, it may be irreversible, and we need to change the way that we live as a result of that. That should be a relief.

That shouldn't be something that scares that. That should be a relief. That shouldn't be something that scares us. It should be a relief, especially when we take it in context of the promises of our Lord and the assurances of our salvation and the status of His Church. It should be a relief. I know we have many people who watch from all over the world, but speaking just about and the status of his church. It should be a relief. I know we have many people who watch from all over the world, but speaking just about America, how then should we vote in this upcoming election?

You don't have to get into that very specifically, if you don't want to, but how might this not lead people to be like, well, to hell with it? Like, there's no point trying on the macro level. We just have our little communities. I'm not even gonna worry about voting. I think we should vote. We'll make a difference, but have fun.

Wear the sticker. I think that you can vote and participate in the political process without reposing your hope in it. Yeah, trust not in princes. I mean, this was the case with the apostles and the early Christians, right? It's not as though they said, form small militias and attack the Romans. They understood that we exist in political communities and we participate in political life, but we don't repose our hope in princes and in political leaders. And as Christians, especially,

we should not think that there is any politician who is coming to save us. We should not think that a majority on the Supreme Court will save us. We should not repose our, because what reposing your hopes in those things does is it makes you complacent. It makes you think all I have to do is vote. All I have to do is donate to this or that political party and everything will be fine. But that's not true. And we need to come to terms with that

other than your book which we'll link below to by the way you can do an audible copy i don't know what your version that's fun i've had to do that one time actually but um where else do you write where can people find you online i'm a senior they should smash their computers and not go online that's right if you if you must. I'm a senior editor at the Federalists, the Federalists.com. And I'm, the only social media I do is Twitter, strictly business. Yeah, yeah. At John D Davidson on Twitter.

And yeah, wherever you find your podcasts. Yeah. Okay. You're on podcasts as well. I'm on this podcast. I'm on the Federalist Radio Hour from time to time and I'll be doing some other podcasts. Our friend Andrew Jones, the new Polity podcast here later today. Oh good. I can't wait to listen to that.

Will he be the one interviewing you? I think so. Oh gosh. He's that'll be, that'll be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. People should, we should have said that at the beginning so they didn't have to waste their time with a knucklehead like me talking to you and they could have had just Jones interview But alright. Well, thank you very much for writing the book and thank you for taking the time to be on the show

Thanks for talking to me. I appreciate it