Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1090 | Demon Possession, Occult Obsession & the Real JD Vance | Guest: Rod Dreher

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

Today, we sit down with author Rod Dreher to discuss his new book, "Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age," and how Christians ought to respond to miraculous things in the modern day. We also talk about how and why young people are being drawn into the occult at an alarming rate and what this could mean for future evangelism. And we get Rod's take on JD Vance's stance on abortion and the upcoming election and the spiritual battles that come with it. Buy Allie's new book, "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion": https://a.co/d/4COtBxy ---   Timecodes: (01:14) Rod Dreher interview (09:59) Continuationism vs Cessationism  (17:23) Young people in the occult (26:58) Doctrinal truth (31:42) What are miracles for?  (38:24) Response to “Living in Wonder”  (42:09) Doctrine and the limits of reason (44:37) Spiritual battles in the election ---   Today's Sponsors: Cozy Earth - Go to COZYEARTH.COM/RELATABLE to enjoy up to 40% off using the code RELATABLE. Seven Weeks - Experience the best coffee while supporting the pro-life movement with Seven Weeks Coffee; use code ALLIE at https://www.sevenweekscoffee.com to save up to 25% and help save lives. EveryLife — The only premium baby brand that is unapologetically pro-life. EveryLife offers high-performing, supremely soft diapers and wipes that protect and celebrate every precious life. Head to EveryLife.com and use promo code ALLIE10 to get 10% of your first order today! My Patriot Supply — Prepare yourself for anything with long-term emergency food storage. Get your new, lower-price Emergency Food Kit at PrepareWithAllie.com. Save $50 on your 4-Week Emergency Food Kit. --- Links: Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age by Rod Dreher https://a.co/d/8qYYNGh ---   Relevant Episodes: Ep 321 | Biblical Resistance to the Totalitarian Left | Guest: Rod Dreher https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-321-biblical-resistance-to-the-totalitarian-left/id1359249098?i=1000496918842 Ep 1058 | Ex-Witch Reveals LA’s Dark World of Sex Cults and Blood Offerings | Guest: Jac Marino Chen https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-1058-ex-witch-reveals-las-dark-world-of-sex-cults/id1359249098?i=1000666820850 Ep 1046 | Ex-Psychic on Demonic Possession & Taylor Swift | Guest: Jenn Nizza https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-1046-ex-psychic-on-demonic-possession-taylor-swift/id1359249098?i=1000664520231 ---   Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular.

This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Why are so many young people today fleeing to the occult? Well, Rod Rear, the author of The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, has the answer in his new book, living in wonder, finding mystery and meaning in a secular age. Today, so many Christians only look to the physical, the visible, the provable as an explanation for what happens and why. Sometimes even we Christians forget about the spiritual reality all around us. We forget about the enchantment that is intrinsic in Christianity. This book reminds us of that with some really powerful testimonies.

Rod and I will also get into this election. He has good personal friends with J.D. Vance. He's got some thoughts on what is at stake this election and the spiritual reality surrounding it. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com, code Alley. That's good ranchers.com code Alley. Rod, thanks so much for joining me again. It's good to have you back on the show.

Let's start by talking about your new book. It just came out on Tuesday, Living in Wonder. What is this? Why'd you write it? It's a book about the Christian experience of wonder, of awe, as the foundation for our Christian faith. You know, I wrote it as, I didn't conceive of it as part of the trilogy that began with Benedict Option, then Live Not By Lives, but it turns out to have been that. The thing that concerns me most of all as a believer and as one who's engaged in the public

square is whether or not the Christian church will be able to make it through these post-Christian times. And the Benedict option was more about local church, families, homeschool, things like that. Live Not by Lives is more about persecution. This is about recovering the core of religious Christian experience, which is the experience of the living God. And I talk in the book about how we in the West lost that idea that God is everywhere present and fills all things and how we can get it back and why we need to get it back. I end the book by talking about the occult and how so many young people are moving into the occult and into psychedelic drugs, which is adjacent to the occult, seeking that experience of transcendence, of wonder, that they don't think they can get in the church. We and the church have to do our very best to recover that sense of enchantment. And by enchantment, I don't mean, Allie Beth, the idea of sprinkling fairy dust and everything looks magical. Now, enchantment, and the way I use it is simply the feeling that God is present and that everything has meaning, that there is ultimate transcendent meaning that we can know and relate to.

You set up the context that we're living in right now as the church, and you describe Christianity as a faith that's in crisis. As you just described, people are looking for something bigger, something deeper, something transcendent. And even if they're going to church and they're reading their Bible, you talk about some encounters with some young Christians where they're telling you it just feels like something's missing and I just need something more. So set that up for us. What does it look like right now in the church? Sure. I was approached in Hungary where I live in Europe by an American exchange student who said, look, I'm a committed evangelical. I believe at all. I know my Bible, but I'm craving something more. It feels like I'm living in a spiritual desert. Can you help me? And it's not hard to understand why that is. For so many of us Christians, especially those of my generation and older, the Christian experience has been mostly about, you know, learning the Bible, learning your catechism, going to church, being involved in public

life, fighting abortion or whatever. And all of that is good. But if we miss the ultimate, what should be at the center of it, an experience of the living God, then all the rest of it can feel very dry. And I think that's what a lot of Christians are feeling today. The young generation, Generation Z and some of the younger millennials are falling away from the faith in huge numbers. But they're not saying they're becoming atheists. That's really interesting. They're spiritual, but not religious. And as I said earlier, we find that they're going towards the occult to some degree or the other. And this is a crisis for the church because these young people are not wrong to want to sink some sort of numinous. That's a great theological way.

word, it just means mysterious and transcendent experience of God, because that is at the core of all true religious experience, that connection with Almighty God and experience of God. They can go into the wrong way easily, and that's happening. But that's why we and the church have to go back to our roots. If you go back to the Book of Acts, for example, I was in Ephesus a couple years ago on a trip to the sites of the seven churches of Revelation. Now, I was standing there in Ephesus, reading Acts, 19 right there in the theater where it all happened, where the Ephesians said, great as Artemis of the Ephesians. And I noticed that when Paul and the others went there, the evangelist to try to convert the city, they were converting people by casting out

demons, by doing miraculous healings, things like that. I really do believe that we, today, the church is in a situation much more like the early church than at any time since the West went over to the Christian faith. We're going to have to get back in touch with that. So by living in wonder and seeing the enchantment that is in the Christian faith, do you mean signs and miracles and healing, or what does that look like? I do mean signs and miracles and healing and being open to that, but I also mean everyday enchantment, the idea that God is with us, that nothing is without meaning.

You know, nihilism is the great curse of our time, the idea that nothing has meaning at all. And it's so easy to fall into when you live in this culture, this post-Christian, in fact, anti-Christian culture. But not everybody is going to have an experience of a miracle, of a sign. I tell some great stories in that book about people who do. My favorite story, by the way, if I can tell it, is came from a young Italian I met. He lives in Spain now, but 32 years old, teachers on a high school. He was raised in an atheist family in Rome, hardcore communist. And he, in fact, he said he was a champion blasphemer when he was in high school.

Then he gets to college, meets some Christians, and begins thinking, maybe they know something, but he resisted. He told me that he had started seeing around the city of Rome some guy who would like look at him through a crowd and he said, something's going on. One night, just before Christmas, he and his cousin got out of a car. They parked their car. They were going to a party. They saw a homeless man on the other side of the street. He looked at him, the homeless man looked at them, rose up, walked over and said to him, Stephano, I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.

I want to tell you that from this day forward, you will follow the Lord Jesus Christ. He sent me to tell you that you have nothing to fear. And then this homeless man started telling Stefano all of his sins and inner struggles. Stefano told me, I started crying. And I said, are you an angel? And he just smiled at me. I said, well, what can I call you? He said, you can call me Felice Natale, Merry Christmas.

Remember, this was just before Christmas. Then Felici Natale fell on his knees, raised his hands, and began to say the Our Father, the Lord's Prayer. After each line of the Lord's Prayer, he added these incredibly elaborate praises of the Holy Trinity. Then when he finished, he rose, bowed, and disappeared. Well, Stefano converted, and not only did he convert, but he brought his entire family, even his hardcore communist father. to the faith, to Christ. Now, that sort of thing is not going to happen to most people. Yeah. But if we can meet people to whom it has happened and trust them, then it can strengthen our faith, our walk with Christ. But to us, to most ordinary people, we can't make enchantment

happen, but what we can do is form ourselves from day to day, spiritual discipline, to be open and receptive to the Lord appearing in our lives in more ordinary ways. Quick break for the first sponsor of the day, and that is Cozy Earth. I absolutely love Cozy Earth. All of our sheets and our towels are from Cozy Earth. I can't compromise or settle for anything else because this is the most luxurious and soft brand. Their products are amazing.

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there is the debate between cessationism and continuationism, cessationism generally meaning that you believe that speaking in tongues and the laying on of hands and the miracles that that work as something that was common is past. And continuationism, of course, more charismatic Christians believe that all of those signs and wonders and miracles still and do happen today and can actually be a confirmation of someone's true Christianity and true faith. And so there's some debate in that I am of the Reformed Protestant subdivision of Christianity and something we care about a lot is good doctrine and understanding scripture forward

and backward. And I'm very appreciative of that. But I do find myself, even as someone who knows Ephesian 6, that tells us that the principalities are the spiritual principalities are at play that this is a fight a battle between good and evil I find myself negating spiritual reality sometimes when it comes to spiritual warfare or a spiritual explanation for things I find myself always looking for the more practical reason for something and my more maybe charismatic leaning friends I'll be talking to them about something and they'll send me a text and be like well you know that's that's probably

a spiritual attack because you've got this going on and this is what you're trying to do and Satan doesn't want that or Satan hates the family. He hates marriage and God loves these things. And so I have to be reminded of that. Is that part of what you're talking about just recognizing the spiritual eternal reality that is always at play underneath the ordinary and seen world? Hey, this is Steve Deist. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase

narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. You got it. That's exactly right.

I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian. We don't believe in speaking in tongues and the things that our Pentecostal brothers and sisters do, but we do believe that there is no necessary opposition between good doctrine and these experiences. But these experiences have to be understood and grounded in good doctrine. and in the things we know to be true doctrinally, that helps us discern whether or not they are real or a hallucination or of Satan. But, you know, I tell a story in the book about these good friends of mine. I used to live in New York City, and I knew this couple, I call them Nathan and Emma in the book. And they were solid Catholics, very conservative, involved in the pro-life movement, fancy Upper East Side people.

Well, it turns out I'd lost touch when I moved from New York. A few years ago, Nathan called me, and he said, listen, I've got something strange to tell you, you're going to find this hard to believe, but hear me out. My wife is possessed. Like, what? It's a long story, but basically, it turns out her grandfather back in Italy had been a high level occultist and had brought a curse onto the family, a deep curse. And it had manifested through her after she tried to kill herself. And she went to a healing prayer service and the demons manifested through her. I ended up going to I don't even know what that means. Man assessed through her because of a curse of her grandfather. Yeah, it's crazy, right? And they had never thought about this. You know, they were very doctrinal Catholics,

but her grandfather back in Italy had offered his descendants to the devil for money and power, which he got, but it destroyed the rest of the family. Wow. In any case, and the story I tell, I went to see them once. I was in New York. I went to visit them. and she manifested in front of me sitting in their apartment. And what does that mean?

At one point, her husband had told me in my ear, he said, I'm going to go get lemonade at one point. I'm going to put in my pocket a relic of the true cross that a priest had given me, you know, for protection in these times. And I know you're reform, but just I know. I'm trying to hang with you. I'm trying to hang with you. This priest was an exorcist. And when the guy, the husband brought the lemonade out and set it on the table, the wife, Emma, was in mid-conversation with me, she dropped her head like this. When she looked up, her face was not her own. She looked at her husband and cursed him and said, get that blankety-blank thing away from me. I told you don't bring it. You couldn't see it. It was hidden. She dropped her head back

and looked at me. She was herself again and said, I'm so sorry. That is not me. I said, I know. I never get the chills and I do have the chills right now. Well, Alibeth, when that night, when her husband was walking me back to my hotel. I said, man, how has this changed you? You know, again, Upper East Side stockbroker, you know, they don't, no funny business. He said, now when I walk up and down the streets of Manhattan, I realize that there is a great spiritual battle going on all around us that we can't see, but it's there. I saw how it caught my wife. The good news is she was delivered, but you know how she was delivered? The exorcist thought at one point, wait a minute, you were baptized in Italy in 1970. There was a lot of funny liberal stuff going on in the Catholic Church then.

Let's just re-baptize you in case you weren't baptized in the name of the father, son of the Holy Spirit. They did that. Boom. 90% of it went away and she was delivered of the rest of it. Now, I tell you that story, but not only because it's true, but because it testifies to how the spiritual world really does barge into our normal, subtle lives in ways that we aren't expecting. Again, I wouldn't have expected this family. They were so conservative and faithful, went to church every week, and yet this touched them. What are generational curses? Our charismatic and Pentecostal friends know a lot about it, and some of the Catholic

exorcists who work are dealing with this all the time. But this is just part of our reality, and Alibeth is going to become a greater part of our reality as more and more people in Western civilization fall away from the Christian faith and embrace evil. Next sponsor is seven weeks coffee. I love the people that own seven weeks coffee. They are the real deal. They are so sincere.

They started seven weeks coffee so that they could not only provide awesome, great tasting, super high quality, clean coffee, but also so that they could support the pro-life movement by donating a percentage of each sale to pro-life organizations. And they've done that. They've donated over $500,000 to pro-life organizations, which is translated into saving around 5,000 little baby lives through the resources and the tools that are offered by these pregnancy centers and organizations. It's just amazing. They're called seven weeks coffee because it's seven weeks gestation.

That baby in the womb is the size of a coffee bean. Sign up for their heartbeat club. You'll get that box of coffee to your front door every month. That saves you 15% on each order when you. do that. Plus, when you use my code Allie at checkout, you get an extra 10% off. Seven Weeks Coffee.com code Alley. Let's talk about what you've already mentioned, young people going toward the occult. When we see those statistics that you've already cited that young people are becoming

spiritual, not irreligious necessarily, not atheist, but also not Christian, how much of that is accounted for by the occult and even cult-like practices. Yeah, this is something I really learned. I'm in my mid-50s, and a man approached me in Oxford a couple years ago, a guy named Daniel Kim. He is an Anglican seminarian from the evangelical tradition, 27 years old. And he said to me, I need to let you know that the new atheism is not the enemy you think it is.

I'm like, what do you mean? He said, your generation thinks that's the problem. It was the problem 10, 20 years ago. Not anymore. He said, in my generation, the problem is the occult. Nobody he knows, he said, has anything, any interest in new atheism. But they're all engaged in some degree or another with the occult. He told me that before he went to seminary, he worked in advertising in London. He said, I was the only Christian in my office. Well, that's no surprise. It's advertising. It's London. But he said, every other person there was an occultist. There were even two. open Satanist who defined Satanism as learning to live your most fully human life. And he went on to say to me, Daniel Kim, the seminarian, he said, I know that I'm going to be dealing with this for the rest of my ministry. And I'm telling you, he said pointing to me, you have got to let the church know that this is where the battle is right now, not the battles of 20, 30, 40 years ago, but right here on the front lines. And when I tell, I've told that story as I've met younger people.

people, Gen Z folks over my travels, they'll shake their head, oh yeah, and then they'll tell stories of the people in their high school or their college, things they're doing. I just came here from Birmingham, Alabama. I talked to a young Baptist undergraduate who said he knows so many young women who are taking the Greek gods as their sort of, I don't know, sort of like what a Catholic would call a patron saint. Like, are you serious? He said, oh yeah, it's not just a symbolic thing. they really are trying to relate to the Greek gods. Birmingham, Alabama. Yeah, that doesn't, it doesn't really surprise me.

I mean, we were raised in a time, you know, I was, I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, and even some of this was alive and well then at such an early age, reading the magazines that tell you your astrological sign, the little power beads that were supposed to to signify some kind of superpower that you could have if you're wearing a certain kind of color, even the mood rings that were supposed to tell you what mood you're in and what activities you should be doing based on how you're feeling that day. And of course, with the rise of social media, all of the personality quizzes that told you who you really were and what you should be doing in your life, there's a lot of God of self that we, I mean, you could say that that's been

alive and well since the garden, but certainly this trendy narcissism that has manifested itself in a kind of spiritualism and witchcraft and Satanism, all of these kind of religious practices that tell you you can be your own God. There is something bigger and better that you can tap into, but it's not out there. It's inside you. And I can help you unlock that and unleash that. and once you unleash your inner goddess, then you will get everything you want. That's what I see. And you even see it through self-help and self-empowerment books. It's not blatantly satanic, or at least doesn't look like that.

It's usually in pink and sparkly. That's just it. It's not blatantly satanic. But that's what it is. I have a long interview and living in wonder with a young man I called Jonah, who's an academic, highly trained in religious studies. He started out as a disdiscuitary. satisfied high school evangelical. He said that his pastor couldn't answer the questions he had.

So he went out on a quest on his own, started reading a lot of esoteric books, and ended up as a full-blown occultist, worshipping the devil. He didn't think it was a devil. He thought these were the ancient gods who would help him, deeply involved in psychedelic drugs, which are a huge thing now. While he was a professor, you said? Yeah, he's a, yeah, he's, I don't know if he's working as a professor now, but he has got a PhD. But he said it was only when he realized, oh, my God, I'm worshipping demons that he turned from it, left and became a Christian. And he gives advice in the book for pastors and families and things you need to know. He said, not once when I was in the occult, did we see the Christian church as an enemy? They were totally clueless as to what was really going on.

And he said, we can't be that way anymore. You've got to wake up. He knows it from the other side. And that's one of the things I hope to do with this book. This book is mostly hopeful and on the positive side. It's not all about the occult, but the occult is such a big part of it because it is false enchantment. I talked to someone in Birmingham the other day who lives in the south. She and her husband live in an area where there are a lot of academics and scientists. And she told me that this is everywhere there among the scientists. The scientists are turning to the occult. They don't call it that, but that's what it is. She said now in our cul-de-sac, in the old days, used to go out and sit there and have a fire,

and people would drink beer or wine and fellowship. Now they're doing that, but smoking marijuana and doing psychedelics. And these are scientists. Yeah. And she came to see me in Birmingham. She said, I want you to know that you're onto something. This is happening. This is happening among the elites.

They're being dragged into this worship of the self. And they're doing it not only through psychedelics and drug use, but through technology. One of the crazy things I learned working on this book is how a lot of people in the top of the U.S. government and national security and defense, as well as in Silicon Valley, believe that UFOs are real. I laughed at this. I've laughed at this all my life, but they're like, no, no, no, you need to pay attention. They don't believe that they are people from, or creatures from other planets. They believe these are extradimensional beings who are trying to contact us.

and, you know, listen to all this in their language, their non-religious language, I'm like, they're talking about demons. Yeah. And it's, I don't want to be like a tabloid guy talking about seeing a demon behind everything, but it was crazy to learn that there are people in Silicon Valley. I've confirmed this with several people who are, who know, who believe that, oh, yes, the aliens are really higher entities who are leading us to enlightenment. Yeah.

And they do seances to communicate with them. the Christian church used to know what this was, and some of us still do. We have got to be aware of this. This is not just a fringe freak phenomenon. This is happening right now, and we're not ready to defend ourselves. Yes, you know, we recently had, we had an ex-psychic on, and we had an ex-cultist on. It was this young woman who believed her whole life that she was in conversation with aliens. And she was kind of a lonely, troubled child, and she believed that these aliens really understood her and knew her. And she followed these aliens her whole life into the occult and into this demonic satanic

practice. And to the point you were making earlier, she believed that she could basically syncretize this with Christianity. She didn't really see a difference in it because they used some Christian language like baptism and sanctification and things like that. course used a perverse meaning. But eventually she was just so oppressed by these demonic forces. She was on a ton of drugs. She was doing sex sacrifice rituals. I mean, this young woman so sad. And then finally one day she called out Jesus and he saved her in a very dramatic way.

And that is something that I know in a lot of these testimonies is that it either, it always involves a name, like involving the testimony that you told me from the guy in Italy. He said that he told him a name. That was his new name. And I've noticed that very often the drastic testimonies involve either the person saying Jesus's name and being delivered or someone that they didn't know somehow knowing their name. And this is, you know, I'm coming from the Reformed evangelical perspective. And that is a key point that I see in so. many of these testimonies of people who were completely lost, someone, some random interaction, someone locked eyes with them and said, this is your name, what are you doing?

Wow. And it is incredible how God seems to work in that fashion. You know, you're talking about doctrine earlier. This is one of the things that got in the way of my full conversion. I'm not doctrine personally, but intellectualism. When I was younger, a teenager in the 80s, I grew up in South Louisiana. We were Easter and Christmas Methodist. We didn't take the faith that seriously.

You don't really have the Louisiana twing. I've got family friend Louisiana too. Maybe you've grown out of it over time. I've lived away from there for a lot of the years. But if I go back there, give me a couple of days. I'm code switching. Yeah. But anyway, by the time I got to be 15 or so, I thought that the church wasn't for me.

I thought that Christianity was either like the white middle class at prayer, being very quiet, don't get too excited about this, or Jimmy Swaggered, who was a big deal back then, TV evangelism. And then when I was 17, my mother won a trip to Europe and a church raffle, a guided tour. She didn't want to go. So she sent me because I just wanted to go to Paris and see where Hemingway lived, see the museums.

I was the only young person on a bus full of elderly American tourists. I didn't care. Bus pulls over on the way to Paris. about an hour outside the city to go look at an old church. I didn't even want to get off the bus and go see this old church, but I also didn't want to just sit there for an hour. I followed the old people in. I was overwhelmed.

This was the cathedral at Shatra, which I didn't know then, growing up late 20th century, small town south, was one of the great treasures of Christendom. It was a medieval Gothic cathedral. I stood there, Ellie Beth, and looked around at the stones and the stained glass, and I just knew that God was real, and that he wanted me. And it was just something to do with the presence of God in this temple built to his glory.

800 years ago, my men whose names we have lost told me, the Lord spoke to me through that and tore down all of my objections, intellectual objections. Now, I'd love to tell you that I walked out of that church and became a Christian. I didn't, but I walked out of there on a search. I had a lot of dying to self to do. The end of the search came six or seven years later, when, as a young journalist and Louisiana. I was sent to interview an elderly Catholic priest who had been born in the 1890s. He was very old then, living in her home, to talk to him about his life before he became a Catholic priest

at age 50. He had been an artist and a famous art professor. I sat down there with that old man who was just exuding peace. It was like light coming off of him. He was almost like Yoda, a little short man. And I just asked him about his life. He told me about two miracles, actual miracles he had seen. that brought him out of his atheism and eventually convinced him to become a priest. I sat there and listened to that. As a journalist, that old man started crying, telling me about these events that happened over 50 years ago. And I left that interview thinking, Lord, I have a decision to make. I want to believe.

But for me, it was not, I was telling myself it was a matter of intellectualism. But in fact, it was a matter of the heart. I didn't have the will to make the final sacrifice, to make Jesus. my lord and i but seeing that old man and knowing that he was a witness and the witness of his life his changed life convinced me that i've got to change too and that was when i got serious about god but it didn't it took the experience of god in beauty and shatra and then in the embodied the incarnate experience of god and this believer who had changed his life radically for christ it took those things to open the door to propositional

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apostles in the book of Acts. And I was just reading this the other day and my morning reading and what miracles are for. And you could see in the response of the people that witnessed the miracles, it's to confirm the power of God, validate the truth of the gospel, to bring people not only to a place of worship, but a place of wonder. And then also it opened the door for the apostles to say, yeah, the only reason we can do this is because of this guy, Jesus of Nazareth, that you killed, by the way. And this is how we are able to perform these miracles. And then in the next chapter, we see the Sadducees were so angry about these miracles

because they didn't believe that anyone could raise from the dead. And they're talking about Jesus being raised from the dead. and, you know, they try to exactly what you're saying, posit this intellectual rebuttal to the miracles, but that's the thing about a miracle, is that there's not really an intellectual rebuttal. It really is a matter of faith, a matter of the heart, which, of course, Jesus knew that it was a matter of the heart for everyone, but including the Pharisees and the Sadducees. You know, this is so true about all of us. You know, a lot of times we don't want to receive the miracle or recognize a sign, an authentic sign, because it would cause a, to change our life if it was real. Jesus dealt with this. One of my favorite stories from the gospel is when he cast the demons out of the demoniac in the graveyard in garrisoning,

and he cast them into the swine, right? I would have thought that the people who live there would have seen this man who had been enslaved to demons, all of his life restored to himself. They would have welcomed Jesus. But no, they told him, get out of here. Because what did he do? He upset the settled order of things. that is something so deep in human nature. I tell a story in the book about a man named Tobias Wolf. He's a famous American novelist who related a story when he was in his 20s. He had been raised Catholic and was kind of still enough Catholic to want to go volunteer at Lourdes one summer

to help people who could not get into the water seeking or cure to take the waters. And he tells a story, I won't go into the whole thing now, but how he helped a two-year-old paralyzed girl. And he was just so overwhelmed by the... the suffering she had that she bore so faithfully that he sobbed over her. Well, on the bus back from dropping her at the airport, he realized, oh, my gosh, I can see. Now, he had really bad vision, but he was too vain to wear glasses. He was a young man, but his vision had been healed by the, miraculously by God over the prayers

he shed out of pity and love for this little girl he was serving. Well, he said, I felt this overwhelming need to go to the grotto at lords and pray. and just to thank God for what happened. Gets back to the dorm where he was staying. He ran into a friend, started to tell him about it. They didn't go to the grotto to pray. Next morning, he woke up and his vision had been restored to it where you couldn't see again. And he said reflecting on this years later, the truth was, I didn't want the miracle.

Of course I wanted to see. It was a great thing. But if I had thanked God and accepted the miracle, then I would have had to repent and change my life in ways I didn't want to do. So I denied it. And I thought, that is so. so human, you know, in my own case, on my own journey to Christ, I had seen a couple of things that I couldn't really explain that were testimonies to God's existence, but I rationalized it

away because I didn't want to sacrifice and make Christ my Lord. I wanted to approach God on my own terms, but it never works that way. What is the difference between believing that God can do anything? He can work how we want to. He can perform any miracle. And the mysticism that is constantly thinking like, okay, when I was little, I would get so paranoid. And when you're little, the worst thing that could possibly happen, your worst fear of something happening to your parents. And I, like, had this, I think I was probably six years old. I had this paranoid idea in my mind that if I, like, I don't even remember what it was. It was something completely paranoid. Like, if I moved to this, then something's going to happen to my mom and dad.

And thinking that their fate somehow depends on me and being confused about. what God is telling me, what real obedience looks like versus legalism. How do we have faith that miracles can happen without thinking, well, all of it, God's working, God's miracle working, depends on every little thing I say or do, because I would think that that would negate grace and would probably create a lot of paranoia and legalism. Sure. No, that is a fantastic question. I interviewed an exorcist in Rome at the Vatican. who drew this distinction. He said, we can't make God do what we wanted to do.

God is not magic. It's all grace. God will come to us and reveal himself to us in his own time for his own reasons. In the demonic, by contrast, they will come. Every time you call them, they will come. They're going to enslave you, but they will come. As Christians, we have to live by faith. And knowing that God can and will do these things if he wants to,

but if he doesn't do it, that doesn't mean he's not there. I remember when my younger sister was diagnosed with terminal cancer back in 2010, I flew down from Philadelphia on the day of her diagnosis, and I was lying in bed at her house that night, praying and crying for her. I felt above me a presence. I think it was an angel that conveyed to me she's not going to make it, but don't be afraid. This is part of God's plan. I only told my wife that. I didn't tell anybody else. I didn't want to discourage my sister, and she, in fact, didn't make it. But knowing that God allowed this was allowing her suffering for some mysterious way for his greater glory. We can only know by faith that gave me so much peace.

And I have had small miracles in my life. I've seen things happen that exorcists have done, manifestations of the enemy, as I mentioned earlier. But if none of that had happened, I would still believe. And that's important to know because these miracles, these signs, whether they're signs of God, presence or signs of the demonic, they only mean something if they lead us to Jesus Christ. There are people who go around searching for miracles. They get caught up and speaking in tongues or if you're Catholic Marian apparitions, if you're Orthodox, weeping icons. These things are great, but that's not the core of the faith. They only mean something if they lead you to Christ.

What do you hope people get out of the book when they're done? I want people to, know that the world is not what we think it is. The world is so much darker than many of us think, but also so much filled with so much more light. I want people to understand spiritual warfare is real, but I want them also to understand that we have hope, that this world is not all there is, that there is deep meaning and that it is accessible to us. You know, I quote early in the book, a Harvard professor named Elaine Scary who says, true education is not a imparting information from teacher to student. True education, rather, is preparing the students to be staring at the right corner of the sky when a comet blazes past. Well, that's Christian enchantment.

You know, I can't tell you this is how you become enchanted. What I can do is say, here are some practices, some spiritual disciplines, some prayer rules, things you can do to open yourself up for when the Lord manifests himself to you and you can act on it. I just hope people, all Christians, my brothers and sisters in Christ who are Protestant, Catholic, and my fellow Orthodox can learn to live more authentically, more deeply, keeping our eyes open for the comet going past, which is to say the manifestations of our Lord. So that transcendence that we're longing for, that we're looking for, we don't have to go outside of the Christian faith for it.

It's right there. Absolutely. And, you know, that's one of the things that I hope also comes from this book. There'll be a lot of readers who feel like their faith is really. really dry, and they're looking for something more, and maybe they might go to see some new age thing as an adjunct to their Christian walk. A, that's dangerous, and B, you don't have to do that. I'm coming from the Eastern Christian tradition, the Orthodox tradition, where mysticism has always been more of a central part of our faith than in the Christian West. I hope that in my book,

insofar as I bring some Eastern Christian teachings and practices like praying to Jesus prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, his sinner, that it can help our Western Christians and their Christian walk so that they can learn to be stronger in the faith, learn to have an eye open for the comets, so to speak, and also understand how to combat the spiritual darkness that is present now and is becoming ever more present. because we're all in this together. You know, I'm upfront about my Orthodox convictions, but this book is not a book of Orthodox apologetics.

It's a book, a handbook, I hope, to help open the eyes of all my fellow Christians to the mystical reality that is in our faith. Yes. Well, thank you so much for writing that because I think, you know, I agree, and I share your concerns about the prevalence of witchcraft and the occult and even the syncretism that we see. And I think a lot of people are, which is why every time we talk about witchcraft or something,

the episode just seems to blow up because people are seeing this in their lives. And it's counterfeit. It's counterfeit. I knew, and I do know of an Orthodox priest in my own confession, who had confronted the demonic, believed that demons were real, but got scared of it and turned away from it, even though there was a man who needed help. and this priest was ordained to help this man and had the knowledge and the faith to help the man, but it scared the priest because he had never encountered it. It was only theoretical for him.

We have got to get over that, all of us. It is real, but we are children of the light. We are children of God, and we've got to know it when we see it. Last point I want to make when I was a Catholic for 13 years. I came to Christ first as a Catholic, but then writing as a journalist about the abuse scandal, I lost my Catholic faith. made a fundamental mistake, Ali Beth, that I think a lot of intellectual Christians would make. I thought that as long as I had all the doctrines and the propositions straight in my head, my faith was unassailable. Nothing could happen. But the evil I had to confront as a journalist talking to abuse victims and going deep into that story, it made it impossible for me to hold on

to the doctrines. It was almost like holding an iron skillet over an open fire with your bare hand. finally I just couldn't hold on to it anymore. By God's grace, when I no longer could believe as a Catholic, I went to the Orthodox Church, but I became a very different kind of Christian. I had been so triumphalist in my Catholicism and intellectual. That was not the Catholic Church's fault. That was me. But I thought that reason was the whole ballgame.

In fact, I saw the limits of reason, and I knew that reason's important, but ultimately, there's no substitute for a life of prayer, fasting, and repentance. to draw us into this sense of real unity with the Lord. I've been Orthodox now for almost 20 years, and I needed that humbling. I needed to be smashed intellectually in order to open myself up to the fullness of life in Christ. Last sponsor for the day,

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Preparewithalley.com. You know, you mentioned how there are government leaders who believe in aliens, the extraterrestrial supernatural, are taking psychedelics. And my wheels were turning as you were saying that about all of the top academics and politicians in this country who believe the superstitious, nonsense that it's possible to be born in the wrong body. And when you break down that idea, it is very spiritual and religious to say that basically your inner self, your inner spirit, your inner soul is who you truly are, that this body is kind of arbitrary, it's subjective,

and your true identity can be determined by some inner god or inner goddess. Even this idea that babies are not given their rights or they don't become human until they go through the birth canal. That's a very superstitious, kind of supernatural idea. Progressivism, I would say, is a form of a religion, even though progressives would say it's just secular neutrality. No, it's not. Right. There is no neutrality. And so we're seeing the spiritual battle manifest itself very clearly in the political realm. How are you thinking about that battle specifically in terms of this election? Wow. You know, I'm a conservative. I used to write for the American conservative, now write for the European conservative. I did not vote for Trump in 2016. I didn't vote.

I'm not going to vote for a pro-choice, but I just didn't like Trump. He surprised me by his court appointments during his presidential term, and now I'll crawl over glass to vote. for Trump, not because I have any more respect for Trump, but because what the Democrats have done and what the never-Trump or neocons have done are so frightening to me. You know, Trump, I was very disappointed that he's backing away from a hard line on abortion, but I also see that post-Dobs, the American people are not with us pro-lifers. We have a lot of work to do of education and of conversion to do. So it doesn't offend me that Trump is as a politician. He's not a pastor. He's a politician. It's

responding to that reality. But all I have to do to stiffen my spine on the question of abortion is look to what Camilla Harris is going to do. She is promising to codify Roe in national law. She will force hospitals to give abortions and so on and so forth. And that's the Equality Act. That's not just something you're making up. That's part of the Equality Act. Forcing even Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. And we cannot, we pro-life conservatives, cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the possible, of the good enough for now. J.D. Vance is a personal friend of mine. I was there when he came into the Catholic Church. He invited me up for that. I believe he's a sincere pro-lifer. But when he was selected by Donald Trump to be the vice president, I texted him and give him congratulations. And he texted me back to say that he's never going to contradict the big guy, Trump, which just makes sense. He's the number two. So when JD came out and waffled on abortion and abortion pill and all that, I didn't like hearing that.

But I also know what he's doing, that he can't get, he can't stand in opposition to his boss. So I'm not that worried about it. I know. I see you wincing, I wince too. I know. You would just think that you would be able to say, look, I'm very, I'm so honored that you would choose me. When you at first, when I thought that you said, I'm not going to contradict the big guy, I thought you meant God. But he meant Donald Trump, which I think that we can see through his rhetoric.

And I'm not doubting that he is personally pro-life. And I really like J.D. Vance. I've liked J.D. Vance even before he was in political office. And I think he sincerely holds those, you know, pro-life views. But for him to basically equivocate on that and to say in a debate, oh, on the abortion issue, Republicans just need women to trust us. What the heck does that even mean? I don't know. It just seems like he'd be able to say,

I don't want this position enough to compromise on this life and death issue. And if that's what you're asking me to do, I can't do it. I don't know. Yeah. I hear you. I hear you. And I've not talked to him personally since, other than just a couple of texts since he was selected.

But I trust that should he make it through? Should he make it to the vice presidency? that'll set him up for 2028. I believe, I have faith. I may be disappointed, but I have faith that will see a stronger pro-life position. The Republicans return to that. But I also think in Donald Trump's case, I never believed he was a real pro-lifer. That's one of the reasons I didn't vote for him. I thought he would sell us out. But whether he's fake about pro-life or not, he gave us pro-life justices. We cannot forget that Dobbs happened. Roe was gone because of justices that Donald Trump appointed. So I think that when Trump gets into office, I think we're going to see,

I continue to see pro-life justices appointed that come out of the Federalist Society. And that's the thing I'm keeping my eye on, not the rhetoric, but the deeds. Yep. And I mean, I do think that J.D. Vance was a really good pick. I think he actually is a better representative of Trump's policies than Trump is. He's better at arguing them. He's better at articulating them. And I think that he has done a really good job in that regard. It's not an easy job either to be Donald Trump's running mates. No, no. And so, you know, I read something the other day on the free press, Barry Weiss's publication, where it was written by a guy named Martin Gurry, a former CIA analyst. He's now retired. He said he had never voted for Trump, but he's doing it this time without apology because in his mind,

this is an election between the party that wants control and the party that represents people who do not which to be controlled. He brings COVID into this and surveillance, debanking all of it. That is what it comes down to. And I live in Europe, right? And I see this happening in Europe. I live in Hungary, which is beaten up all the time by the European Union because they will not open their borders for mass migration. The government of Hungary does not support the war in Ukraine. And most recently, or most vociferously, from the point of view of the Europeans, the government, of Hungary passed a law for bidding LGBT propaganda for minors, you know, but they will not compromise on that. They're Christians. Yeah. And I see this playing out in Europe in a very intense way,

but the same thing's happening in America. And I don't believe that politics are going to save us. You know, people who look to politics to get us out of this crisis, they're wrong. But politics does have a role to play, if only protecting the liberty of churches, schools, and religious institutions to proclaim the gospel and to proclaim meaning. The Prime Minister of Hungary, Victor Orban, who's close to Trump, he said something really important a few years ago. He said, look, as a politician, I can't give you meaning, but I can't give you things. What he meant by that was just what I said, you know, passing laws that protect religious liberty and so on. He said, but if the institutions that I protect do not step up and do the work that they're meant to do

to bring meaning and show meaning to people, then anything I do politically is not going to work. That's the message I hope that Christians and other conservatives take from this election. When I wrote the Benedict option in 2017, it was pretty despairing about politics. And I did not say in the book, despite what you might have heard, that people should withdraw from politics. I said in the book that we have to stay involved, if only to protect religious liberty. Since then, I've become more convinced as the woke, wokenness has taken over. and has become very militant, especially in the U.S. military, I have become less hands-off about politics. Yeah, right. There was a little bit of a shift, or maybe you could say whether there was a shift,

from the Benedict Option to Live Not by Lies. Like you said, the Benedict Option wasn't saying we should just be completely disengaged, but, and Live Not by Lies, I mean, that book did so well because it was really just a call to arms for those who believe in the truth. And if there's anything that we can do, it is at least not lie, at least don't say that a man can become a woman. And that just resonated with people at just the right time when it felt like, especially in 2020, that we were all being asked to lie about whether it was about social justice assertions that they were making or whether it was about gender, whether it was about abortion, whether it was about Biden's competence. And I think your book, even the title alone kind of girded people's loins to be like, okay, I can do that. I can at least not lie.

Yeah, you know, I served in that book as a messenger for people who had come to the U.S. from the Soviet bloc, Soviet communism, escaping communism, and who were starting to see here in America and throughout the West more broadly, a rebirth of something that felt like communism to them. But it was confusing to them because there are no gulags, there are no secret police. Nevertheless, they felt that when you live in a world, when you can't say what you really think without losing your job, losing your business, losing your friends, and so forth, that is a warning sign. And in the book, I explained what they meant by what I call soft totalitarianism.

And the second half of the book, I went throughout the former Soviet blog. talking to Christians who had stayed behind and resisted communism, seeking their advice for what can we do today? What should we do today? The utmost, the message of utmost importance that I got from them is we have to prepare to suffer as a church. I remember standing just off of Red Square in Moscow in the soft snow early November talking to a Baptist pastor, a Russian Baptist pastor. Now, the Baptists have it rough in Russia, even from my own people, the Orthodox persecute them, sadly. But this old man told me, you go back to America and you tell the church that if they're not prepared to suffer, they're not going to make it through what's coming. And that is the ultimate

meaning, I think, of that book. And also this book, The New One, Living in Wonder, is a continuation of that because in order to have the courage to suffer, we not only need the doctrinal convictions and the scriptural convictions, but we also need to have a firm awareness and faith that there is something more, that God is present objectively and around us, and he sees our suffering. There's a story I tell in Live Not by Lives that I recall in living in wonder about a Russian dissident who became a Christian in the early 1970s. He came from a prominent communist family, Alexander Ogarodnikov, and of course the Soviets threw him in prison. And he got there into prison, and he began converting people, witnessing to people on death row. He didn't have a death sentence,

but they wanted to make an example of him because he came from a communist family. So they put him among the worst of the worst. He began bringing so many to Christ that they put him in solitary confinement. They beat him. They would flood his cell with sewage at night just to torture him. He began to lose his faith that God had a plan for him. And then he told me this story in Moscow with tears coming down his face. He said, one night I was awakened by an angel who showed me a vision of an inmate

from behind with his arms, his wrist cuffed being led to his execution. Remember, this was death row. I didn't know why this was happening. This kept happening night after night with different inmates. And finally, he realized the Lord was showing me, all of these men condemned murderers were executed, but they were in paradise with the Lord because he, Alexander, had been there to lead them to Christ.

Now, this restored his faith, this mystical experience. God didn't have to send him that. and God still would have had a reason for him to be there, but in his mercy, the Lord sent him these angels to show that to him, and that revived him and helped him to endure more years of prison before he was finally freed. I think that we need those reminders from the Lord, especially in a time like now when we are worried,

understandably about the future, about the future of the country that our children and our grandchildren are going to live in. And I think seeking the Lord at a time when he may be found, but also allowing ourselves to be refreshed by him and refreshing our own belief that he can work how he wants to work and he can show us things that maybe we can't see with our, you know, with our physical eyes and our physical sight in this temporal realm. I think that's a really beautiful reminder for now. And we have to get out of the left brains, out of our left brains. I talk in the book about the teachings or the research of this man, Ian McGilchrist, a British psychiatrist, who talks about how, in a healthy brain, the left brain, which is more analytical and abstract,

and the right brain, which is more intuitive and emotional, work together in tandem. But we in Western culture, he says, have gotten so stranded in our left brain. We've come to think that the only thing that really counts is what can be scientific, or mathematically proven, what is material. But that is a lie. To be trapped in the left brain is a lie. But we become so afraid of giving up control. We feel like we have to bound everything with reason and to control it because loss of control

scares us. In fact, though, if we are going to experience God in the mystical realm, we have to give up some of that control, that desire for control. Enchantment, in a Christian sense, can only happen when we surrender control. and the idea we have to put God in a box and just allow him to be fully present in our lives. Yes, amen. Well, thank you so much, Rod. I really appreciate it.

Living in Wonder is available. I'm guessing wherever books are sold, correct? Wherever books are sold. Absolutely. Amazon, everywhere. And Eighth Day Books, my favorite Christian bookstore in Wichita, Kansas. You can go online to 8day Books.com and you can get a signed copy exclusively through them. Please support your local Christian bookstore if you can.

Yes. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.