Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 1192 | Why Women Are Obsessed with True Crime | Guest: Andrew Klavan

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

Today, we sit down with author and Daily Wire host Andrew Klavan to discuss his new book, "The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness." We talk about the nature of evil in this world and how God uses even the most heinous acts to point back to Him and His goodness. We also discuss the popularity of the true crime genre, particularly among women, and explore why people are drawn to such darkness. Andrew also shares a bit of his testimony with us and how he seeks to glorify God even through the writing of his crime novels. Buy Andrew's new book, "The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness": https://a.co/d/dHqFTKg Share the Arrows 2025 is on October 11 in Dallas, Texas! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sharethearrows.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for tickets now! Buy Allie's new book, "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion": ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://a.co/d/4COtBxy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- Timecodes: (02:32) What is The Kingdom of Cain? (06:27) Andrew’s testimony (17:33) True crime fascination (31:09) Religious state of America (43:50) Takeaways from “Kingdom of Cain” --- Today's Sponsors: EveryLife — The only premium baby brand that is unapologetically pro-life. Visit everylife.com and use promo code ALLIE10 to get 10% off your first order. Good Ranchers — Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠GoodRanchers.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and subscribe to any of their boxes (but preferably the Allie Beth Stuckey Box) to get free Waygu burgers, hot dogs, bacon, or chicken wings in every box for life. Plus, you’ll get $40 off when you use code ALLIE at checkout. Patriot Mobile — go to ⁠⁠PatriotMobile.com/ALLIE⁠⁠ or call 972-PATRIOT and use promo code 'ALLIE' for a free month of service! --- Related Episodes: Ep 1143 | Wikipedia Co-Founder: Studying Hollywood Cults & Epstein Island Led Me to Christianity | Guest: Larry Sanger https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-1143-wikipedia-co-founder-studying-hollywood-cults/id1359249098?i=1000694129368 Ep 546 | When They Try to Shut You Up, Double Down | Guest: Andrew Klavan https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-546-when-they-try-to-shut-you-up-double-down-guest/id1359249098?i=1000547591098 --- 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

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That's fellowship homelones.com slash alley, term supply, see site for details, fellowship home loans, mortgage lending by the book, nationwide mortgage bankers, DBA Fellowship Home Loans, equal housing lender, NMLS, number 819-382. Why are women obsessed with true crime? And what does it say about the human heart? It turns out darkness has a lot to teach us about the light. Andrew Claven's new book, The Kingdom of Cain, is all about how darkness and depravity can point us to the source of goodness in truth, in God himself. This is a fascinating conversation. He also gets into the details of his own testimony in coming to faith, you are going to love this. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor,

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arrows. But this year, if your calendar is free, open, October 11th, you need to be there in Dallas, Texas. We've got a lineup of absolutely amazing speakers. We'll be talking about a biblical approach to holistic health, biblical motherhood, how to be a good theologian and apologist yourself. We will be led in supernatural, incredible Holy Spirit led worship by Francesca Baddicelli. If you were there last year for the acapella rendition of This Is My Father's World, like you know that was such a special moment. We are going to have more special moments like that as well as incredible teaching and equipping at Share the Arrows in 2025.

So go to ShareTheAros.com. Get your tickets while they last. There is a limited number of tickets. I don't want you to miss out and have FOMO again. Go to Share at theero's.com. Andrew, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. My first question, it's very basic. What is the kingdom of Kane?

I'm afraid this is the kingdom of Kane. It is the world in which there's so much evil, in which we're basically, as C.S. Lewis said, in enemy territory, that we're not living in most of us, I hope, surround us ourselves with nice people. But when you look out in the broader picture, there's evil kind of baked into the system of the world. And so I call this the kingdom of Kane because it's obviously not God's kingdom. it's a fallen world.

So obviously, for people who don't know, Kane is a kingdom of Kane as a reference to the first murder that we see in the Bible, the murder between brothers. And you know, I was thinking about this. I'm going to put you on the spot as I, like, play out a theological thought I had the other day and see what you think about it. So I was just thinking, actually, on Mother's Day, about how Mary, birthing Jesus, redeemed so much from the sin that we see,

starting with Eve. And I was thinking about how Kane killed Abel. So Eve's fruit that she bore killed Abel, his brother. But Jesus was killed to make us brothers. And so I know we're talking about the darkness of Kane, but the redemption that we see through Jesus being murdered after Kane was the original murderer. It's really beautiful. So there's a lot of darkness as we talk about the kingdom of Cain, but it shines light on the redemption that we see in Christ, right? I think that that's exactly right. This is kind of what the whole book is about. The killing of Able by Cain is the first thing that happens in history. Before that, there's the Garden of Eden and the fall of man, but that's kind of outside of history. That's before history begins. History

begins with Cain's murder of Abel. And it sets the pattern of so much of human life, the envy, the struggle between good and evil, the struggle between those who are acceptable to God and those who think they can become acceptable to God by removing other people, by getting other people out of their way. And that actually plays out throughout the rest of the Old Testament, almost every story includes a brother battle,

of two brothers kind of struggling for supremacy, sometimes more than two brothers, like when you have Joseph, when you have David and his brothers. These are younger brothers who rise up over the older ones, whereas Kane is an older brother who kills his younger brother. So it's almost as if nature and history are trying to work their way back to this point of a pre-lapsary and pre-fall humanity. And I think you're absolutely right. A lot of people see the, you know, Jesus is the second Adam and the sort of brother of Adam, as it were, who solves the problem,

or who opens a doorway, at least, out of history and out of this report. repeated struggle between good and evil that seems to go down the center of every human heart. I interviewed the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, and his journey to Christ is really interesting. But one of the things he said was that it was actually studying the occult. And looking deeply into the evil that we especially see broadcasted through Hollywood, that is what actually started him on the path to realizing that Jesus is true. It was that he saw so much evil that it came to his mind that, okay, if objective darkness and evil exists, then objective light and goodness must exist too. And that's something you talk about in your book

that reading these dark stories, understanding evil is actually what points us to what is good and right and true. You know, it's so interesting. That's so close to what happened to me. I mean, I had the experience when I was 19 years old. I was an atheist until I was in my 40s and I was not baptized until I was 49. So it was a long journey for me. But at 19, I would have called myself an agnostic, but I was a practicing atheist. And I was going to school at a time when the first time that people were starting to teach moral relativity, the idea that, you know, something is good for you, but something else is good for me. And who can tell? There's no absolute morality. And I read a very, very dark novel, which is one of the first novels I mentioned in Kingdom of

Kane, which was Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. He's probably the greatest Christian novelist to ever live, and it is a great, great story, but it's about an axe murder. And as I was reading this story, like I said, I'm 19 years old, I'm sitting at a desk with this paperback in my hand, and there's this horrible murder of these two women of this guy with an axe, and the second woman is afflicted. She's what we used to call retarded, and he kills her. And the scene is so pitiful that I immediately thought to myself, no, wait, there is no planet where this could be good. There's no planet where you, even if everybody on the planet said, oh, this is terrific, this is a great thing to do, it would still be evil. And from that moment on, I think

without my knowing it, the kind of prow of my soul was turned in the direction of God, because I started to understand that there was no argument by which you could say that evil and good were were relative to the point where they disappear if you don't believe in them. And the second encounter I had, which was just as important in my life, was much later on in my 30s. I became a complete atheist because of things that had happened in my life. And I started reading atheist philosophy. But I couldn't find any philosophy that made sense of my idea that there was, in fact, a moral

order. I couldn't figure out why any atheist would feel that there was a moral order, or if there was, why he would obey that moral order. And then I read one of the most evil books ever written, actually a series of books by the author of the Marquis de Sade, from whom we get the word sadist. And he was a psychopath, but he was also a very good philosopher. And he was an atheist.

And he said, look, if you're an atheist, there is no morality. If there's no God, there's no morality. And we should just follow our nature. And in nature, the strong dominate the weak. And if that gives you sexual pleasure, that's what you should do. You should rape women. You should torture people. if that gives you pleasure.

And I thought, for the first time in my life, I thought, well, there's an atheist who actually makes sense that he's right. If there is no God, there is no morality. And that vision he gave in his books was so horrific to me. I thought to myself, this is hell. This would be hell on earth,

that I stopped being an atheist, almost on the instant. I thought, well, I don't know what that, you know, that makes sense to me, and I don't want it. I'm not going there. And the only leap of faith I ever took in my long, long journey to faith was to believe, that some things are good and some things are bad.

That was it, to believe that it is better to give a beggar bread than it is to torture a child to death. That was the only leap of faith, and everything else followed from that with absolute logic. And so it was actually confronting the literature of darkness in the great work of Dostoevsky and in the insane work of the Marquis de Sade, that I started to be forced down the direction to God.

How much it must frustrate Satan that even his greatest work ends up repelling so many people right into the hands of the father. And I'm curious, you said the only leap of faith was going from, okay, right and wrong or relative to there's an objective right and wrong. What about going from there to Jesus? Because some people might say, okay, you can accept the reality of right and wrong, that there's some supernatural power who has made the rules that are somehow embedded on the human heart. But how did you go from that to Jesus is the son of God and he died for my sins and rose again three days later? Well, it started, as a matter of fact, I mean, what I started to do was to pray. And this took me a long time to get to the point where I could pray.

When I started to understand that if there was a moral world, there had to be a God, I was in such mental difficulty. I was still a young man and I was absolutely going. I was going insane. and I'm such a stubborn old cuss even then that I couldn't reach out to God because even though I saw that logically he had to exist I thought well I'm in so much misery I was suicidal

that it would just be a crutch it would just be a crutch to believe in this and so I was fortunate enough and by well it was really a miracle it was by God's grace I went into therapy and had a miraculous turnaround I've never seen it happen to anybody else I went in suicidal, and within months I had started to become absolutely joyful,

you know, absolutely put together and joyful. And it was when I was a joyful person, I could say, well, now wait, my logic still adheres. My logic still applies. And so I can now start to think about praying, and I did. I started to pray, you know, very simple prayers. And that changed my entire life. And so now I had a relationship with God. And it went on for five years of prayer.

and my life had changed so much that I finally turned to God and I said, you know, I feel kind of embarrassed that you've done so much for me through prayer. And I'm just nobody. I don't know how I can do anything for you. And it came to me almost instantaneously, well, you should be baptized. And I was driving a car through the hills of Santa Barbara at the moment. And I remember saying a lot, you've got to be kidding me. You know, it would ruin my life. You know, I mean, I have a father who once threatened to disown me.

I was born Jewish, and he said, if I ever became a Christian, he would disown me. And I had a career in Hollywood, and I thought, if I have to follow Christian rules, it's going to be very hard to write some of the scripts they want me to write. And so I knew the Bible well. I knew both Testaments very well. But I went back to the Bible and thought, why would I be baptized? You know, why I'm having a perfectly good relationship with God? Why would I be baptized?

And when I read the story, I had read it, I don't know, I had read it a million times, but always as literature. I'd always read it as literature, never with faith. And I thought, well, as an experiment, let me read this as if it really happened. Let me read this as if this were just people reporting on something they had seen. And then the whole book made sense. And I realized that it was really the only way that you could know God was in his form as a human being, because otherwise he's incomprehensible.

You can't really know God. You can't really see God. You can only see what God means as in a human being. in human terms. And so when I saw that, I was baptized. That was kind of the thing that I grasped and I was baptized. And after that, the whole thing just started to become so important and central to my life that it almost explained itself to me in its deeper levels. And as for your dad's reaction, when you did get baptized, what was that? Well, it was very sad, actually. You know, My father and I had never been close, so we'd never really gotten along.

He was a good man. He was a nice man, but he and I just somehow, we just weren't made for one another. We didn't hit it all. And by that time, I had children of my own, and he was a wonderful grandfather. And so we had made a separate piece. You know, we were at peace with one another. And I thought, oh, this is going to blow up this relationship. This is going to be a terrible thing.

But I've got to tell him, because I knew one day I'd give an interview. I didn't want to read about it in a newspaper somewhere. And so I was thinking, well, I really have to tell him before I get baptized. And he came to visit me and my mother were living in New York. I was living in California. And he came to visit us in California. And he walked in the door and he said, I've got to go home because I'm seeing double. And I almost laughed because it was a neurotic tick of his wherever, whenever he took a vacation,

he would get some hypochondriical disease and he would have to cut his vacation short. So I didn't take it seriously at all. but in fact it turned out to be his final illness. And when I realized that he was very likely going to die, I made the conscious decision not to tell him because I didn't think it would save his life. I didn't think it would turn his mind. I only thought it would break his heart.

And I did not think that that was the right thing to do. And so I never got to tell him. And I was traveling to New York to see a friend of mine who was a priest who was kind of training me for baptism. And I would go from there and I would visit my father as he deteriorated. And my father died on a... during Holy Week, a time when Holy Week and Passover were on the same week, and he died, and I remember going back to church and just feeling like I had lost my earthly father,

but found my Heavenly Father, and it was a very, very poignant and sad experience, and still sad to me to this day. Yes, of course. Was your wife a Christian at the point that you became a Christian? No. In fact, she had always said, you know, I'd like to believe, but I just can't. And I have the best wife in the world, so I think I have to put that forward. So he was never like, oh, you shouldn't do this or you shouldn't take that step or anything like that. But while at the same time this was happening, her mother passed away.

And she passed away in my wife's arms. And my wife came home and said, I saw her leave. And that was the beginning for her. And she became a Christian as well. Quick pause to tell you about every life. It is America's only pro-life diaper company. Isn't that crazy? It's just insane to say that because you would think that every diaper company would be pro-life,

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Ali 10, you'll get a 10% discount on your order. That's everylife.com code alley 10. One thing that you talk about in your book as you're discussing how evil can actually point us to the light and point us to God is today people's fascination with true crime, especially women's fascination with true crime. Maybe this is like the modern Dostoevsky, not a lot of people today are reading crime and punishment the way they used to. I had to read it in high school, but I don't know if that's still required like it used to be. But a lot of people are still fascinated with evil, whether it's scary movies or true crime. What is behind that, do you think? Well, the whole point of Kingdom of King is to take murders, real-life murders

that have been transformed into art again and again. So not just one artist, but movie makers, poets, novelists have taken these particular murders. I pick, there's really four of them in there. I pick four murders and show you how they become art, how they turn to art. And the reason that's important to me is because artists make the world beautiful. They make something beautiful even out of ugliness. So you read Macbeth and it's filled with murder and betrayal and death and all this. But the play itself is very beautiful because it actually presents you these things in that, within that moral,

order. And I think that's what people are looking for in crime, because you're absolutely right, Ali, this is something I've talked about a lot, is that it must be incredibly frustrating to the devil that even the greatest evil he can commit points the way to the sacred. And nowhere is that more true than in murder. Why is it when we see murder? We know we've hit the line. We know that's the place where you can't say, it might be right, or it might have been right at some point in time, or maybe it's right in Venezuela, but it's not right in Morocco. You know, murder is the place where everybody says, yes, that is evil. Well, why is that?

Well, it's because of the sanctity of the human person. It's because each of us has inside ourselves a consciousness that is creating a life, creating an experience, creating a unique road to God. And so continuing the work of Genesis, continuing God's creative work. I mean, God created a creation that continues to create. And when you snuff that out, nothing can make up for that. Nothing can bring that consciousness back. It's unique in this world.

It's unique. It's incredibly creative and beautiful. When you abort it in the womb, you destroy an entire life that would have been. And so I think that people turn to this because it is weirdly reassuring in a way to remind ourselves that there is something that cannot be excused. It cannot be talked away. It's a solid, spiritual thing that there is evil in the world. And I know it would be happier if we could say, you know, there is good in the world, there's love in the world.

And that's true, too. There is. But there's something about murder that is just an absolutely stark line in the sand. And I think people are fascinated by it in a way because we've lost that sense of a God, making things beautiful. I think that people would be better off if they were reading it. Dostoevsky more and maybe being titillated by true crimes a little less. I think that would be better because it's when the artist, when the mind and heart and soul of the artist engage with murder,

that we see it become something beautiful in this larger context, which is what I think God is doing with the world itself. Yes, because I think watching these true crime shows are when I was in high school, my mom and I would watch the Law and Order SVU, which is terrified. I'm like, why did we do that? but it creates a lot of anxiety. It doesn't really, especially immediately, create some sort of peace. You're not immediately transferred into thoughts about God and His goodness. You're thinking this is going to happen to me. And I think about the passage in Philippians 4.

I think it's verses 4 through 8 that, you know, God through Paul tells us to dwell on that which is lovely and pure and excellent and worthy of praise and to be filled with Thanksgiving. and to give our burdens to God in prayer. And so there is some sort of balance between looking at darkness, recognizing it for the objective evil that it is, contrast it to God's goodness, and constantly dwelling on the darkness, knowing that it's going to fill us with the kind of fear in paranoia that really isn't good for us. You know, I think there is a difference between those things.

And there are works, by the way, that, like I would say are not art, you know, pornography, immediately leaps to mind, but there are other things on the way to pornography that I think are not art and do not explain anything and do not give any experience. But I think that quote from Philippians, which gets thrown at me a lot because a lot of people write to me and say, you call yourself a Christian and yet you write these books about murder and about, you know, gangsters and evil people. And yes, I do. And I will continue to do that because I think it's really important to have faith in the world as it is. And if you take that quote from Philippians and use it like that song from Peter Pan, you know, like think of the happiest things.

It's the same as having wings. I think you have to remember that Peter Pan never grows up. And if your faith never becomes the faith of a grown-up person, it's not going to stand up very well when you come into contact with the things that really do happen in this world, not just the evil, but also the suffering, the cruelty. I mean, look, we believe in a God who was crucified. That's a deep, deep thing. very, very tragic truth, and yet the very deepest thing that God does for us is contained within

that crucifixion. And I think that, you know, one of the first things it says in Philippines is meditate and dwell on what is true. And what is true is all the beauty we experience, all the good that we experience, all the God that we experience takes place in this very dark world. And so I don't think that that quote is meant to make us fools. I don't think it's meant to make us like childlike fools who only think that good things are going to happen. This is my problem with a lot of modern Christian art because Christian art at the peak of Christianity at the time when Christianity was the dominant Western faith and was everywhere to be found. Christian art was not like that at all. When you look at the paintings of Michelangelo, when you look at the plays of Shakespeare, when you look

at the masses and funeral masses of Mozart and Bach, you're dealing with a great deal of sorrow and darkness and pain and suffering that I think Christianity was meant to address. It's not meant to be, you know, God is not the God of Never, Neverland. He's not the God of Candy Land. He's the God of this world. And your faith has to be in this world. It has to be faith in a sad world. And so I think that like, you know, just like if you, all you ever watch about romance and love

is romantic comedies, and you begin to think that that's what love is going to, to be like, you're going to be very disappointed in life because love is much more complex and deep and dark and human than a romantic comedy. And in the same way, if all you ever watch, and I don't attack these films at all, but if all you ever think about is, you know, God is not dead part 12, this time he's really not dead, you know, I think that you are actually going to have a very disappointing view of faith when you're forced to confront the true tragedies and the true suffering and the true evil that all of us at some point have to confront. And so the reason I believe in the arts is because I believe the arts convey, transform this evil and this darkness into a

source of light. And I think that that is a beautiful thing. Like I said, I think Macbeth is a beautiful play, but it's a beautiful play about very dark, very ugly things. I think that, you know, the movie Psycho is a great movie. And yet I think it's about something very dark. And I think crime and punishment, again is a dark story but but shines a light on the road forward and I and so I think that that quote you know that that verse or those verses can be misused I think that we should meditate on on truth which is also also has a beauty of its own yes and obviously God wants us to read his word and the Bible is filled with all kinds of very dark and bloody stories like the murder of cane and able and if those verses in Philippians four were meant to tell us to only

focus on temporarily happy things, happy things in the moment, then we wouldn't have all of these stories in the Bible that are very bloody and very uncomfortable. But I think we have to read the Bible in the same way that we would have to read a book or watch a movie that contain some of these dark themes as descriptive and not prescriptive. A lot of people criticize scripture by saying, oh, all these evil things happen. That must mean that God is condoning them. No, it's a description of something that happened. It's not a prescription for what people should be doing. And it sounds like what you're saying in a lot of these stories that contain murder and gangsters,

it's not prescribing evil. It is describing evil. This is what evil looks like. And I think we just have to have the right mentality when we are consuming some of those materials to draw the right lessons out of them, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I always like to tell this story when I was working in Hollywood for my sins. I love ghost stories.

I've always just loved ghost stories. And ghost stories were very popular at that time. So I was doing very well in Hollywood, writing ghost stories and selling these scripts. And when you do that, they call you in if they have something that they think is in your wheelhouse, and they pitch you their story

and ask you how you would write it. And then if they like your take on it, they hire you. And so you have these pitch meetings. And I went into a pitch meeting, and the guy said, we're going to tell you a story and we want to hear your take on it.

And I said, yeah. And he said, there's a woman, and she gets kidnapped and tortured. And I said, yeah. And they said, that's the story. And I laughed. I said, you know, I don't think I'm going to write that story because in my stories, when a woman is running away from a bad guy, I'm rooting for the woman, you know?

Yeah, of the bad guy. And I think that actually, even though I was laughing, until they threw, they almost threw me out of the room, I was like, don't let the door hit you on your way out. But even as I was laughing, I think that's true. You know, you can sort of tell when you're watching a film and you're not watching something that takes place in a moral framework, you're watching something where they're titillating you with cruelty.

And I think there are a lot of movies like that, actually. And look, they're not going to destroy you. They're not going to reach into your soul and rip your soul out or anything like that. But you just know it and you feel bad. I mean, I once read a novel that was a ghost story and I was enjoying it for about two-thirds of the way. And then suddenly it turned and I realized,

no, this guy is actually sucking me into something evil. And I threw the novel away, went to bed, woke up and thought, I got to get that thing out of the house. And I actually took the book out of the house and threw it away in the garage because I didn't want it in the house. So, yeah, of course, you can project evil if your heart is dark. But I don't think that that's what most artists are doing. I think what most artists are trying to do is get to the heart of something that they see in the world, even if they don't know it. I think many writers who have no faith that produce beautiful works that speak of God.

Because I think any time you tell the truth, you're going to speak of God. And by the way, the gospel itself is not even good news without the bad news. And like, it's hard to look at the light. It's hard to understand the light of redemption and the good news that that is. If you don't understand the really bad news of the sin and the death and the bloodiness and the brutality that it's caused, that's why heaven is something that we look forward to. Because it is something without all of this darkness. And so I think that dark light dichotomy is really important.

Actually, we see it in the very beginning, one of the first things that God does. separate the darkness from the light. Yep, absolutely. Y'all know how much I love good ranchers. I love making burgers and tacos and grilled chicken, fried chicken. I love it all. I use all of their products every week. We love their different cuts of steak. We use their bacon, multiple mornings week. I honestly don't know what the Stucky family would do without good ranchers. It gives me so much peace of mind knowing that I have a freezer full of 100% all-American meat. I really care about the American ranching and farming industry, which unfortunately has been diminished so much over the past couple decades because of unfair

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code alley. What do you think about the religious state of America right now? It does seem like moral relativism, my truth, your truth, is a popular philosophy, maybe more popular than ever before. Do you see a shift, though, happening? I don't know if it has to do with, you know, politics at all, but I'm sure, you know, it correlates somewhat with how people are feeling, thinking politically and culturally, and then how we're shifting religiously.

What's your lay of the land? Yeah, I mean, I've been predicting a very specific sort of revival for over 10 years, which is that I think there's going to be and is actually happening now. It has actually begun a revival amongst the intellectual elites. And I think that that's important because while we can get angry at our elites when they fail us and they're so often become corrupt and elitist as opposed to just elite, it is ideas trickled down just like money and I think that when the intellectuals start to understand that atheism makes no sense I think that's an important thing that's going to happen for all of us and I think

it's actually happening now I for for hundreds of years for hundreds of years the discoveries of science sort of bled the faith out of the world it wasn't that anyone disproved God or anything like that But they seem to be showing us that things don't work the way the Bible said they did. You know, that things have absolutely materialist causes, and therefore everything must be materialist. Now, most of the great scientists who invented science and most of the great scientists through life do not believe that. They almost all have believed in some kind of faith and some kind of spiritual underpinning to the world. And yet it suggested to us that everything might be pure material. That's no longer true.

Now science shows us that consciousness actually comes before matter, spirit comes before matter. And so the description of creation in the Bible makes a lot more scientific sense than this world the atheists believe in. It sort of pops up out of nowhere. There's nothing. And then suddenly there's something and it all makes sense. And human beings come along and just a great big accident. And so that doesn't really make sense anymore. And so one of the symptoms of this,

has been so many illogical, stupid, unreal things have come to pass because they made sense if there's no God. I keep telling people, you know, people say this transgenderism, how could anybody say this? You know, how could anybody say that a man can become a woman and a man and a woman are the same thing?

And I think if you don't believe in God, it makes perfect sense. If you don't believe in God, you're just a body outline. You know, you're just nothing, you're just meat. And so if I change the shape of the meat, don't I become a girl? if I change it into a girl shape.

That's why one of the murders I study in the Kingdom of Cain is this murder by Ed Gein, who tried to kill women in order to become a woman. He would dress up in their bodies. And that inspired psycho. It inspired silence of the lambs. It inspired a film called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It inspired the entire range of slasher films.

And the reason for that is that the arts so capture the conscience of the moment that they actually project into the future, that Edging murders were in the 50s, but people caught on that this was a logical progression of our atheism. This is where our atheism was going to go. Now that we've gotten here, we're saying like, wait a minute, that actually doesn't reflect reality. And I think that one of the reasons that transgenderism is such a silly but also evil thing to believe in when you start butchering children in the names of transgenderism, that is a grave, grave evil. But I think one of the reasons that has captured the imagination so much is because it's another one of those dividing lines. where you start to think, well, if that makes sense, if there's no God,

then maybe there is a God. Maybe the world makes more sense than that. And I think that that's occurring to intellectuals now. People have very high intellect, people in university settings. And I think once that happens, it will give permission to people who feel like, oh, I'm not educated. So I kind of think there's a God, but all these professors are telling me there isn't, maybe they're right and I'm wrong.

This is a very common thing. You know, I'm not an educated person, therefore I don't have any wisdom, which is simply not true. And I think that that change is coming upon us. I think the logic of atheism has run out. And I'm hoping this is true. I'm seeing its start, but we don't know which way it's going to go. We don't know if people will go back to paganism. We don't know if they'll embrace evil spiritualism.

Hopefully they will find that Christ is, in fact, the only religion that fully explains the sorts of things that we see in the world. Yeah. How do we make sense of those, some of those who profess to be Christians themselves, but I mean, certainly there are humans made in the image of God and we believe eternity has been written on the human heart, but who disagree so much about what is actually evil and what is actually good. I think about the media, for example. I know you talked about this. Recently, CNN aired a very sympathetic interview with a cartel member. And actually all of the illegal immigrants, even those that have committed very heinous crimes that have been deported. It seems that the media is covering their stories very sympathetically while casting Elon Musk and

Donald Trump as, you know, basically Nazis and equating ICE raids to, you know, Nazi raids in 1940s Germany, 1930s Germany. So like, how do we get there when we have people who call evil good and good evil? Obviously, we know it's a spiritual issue. it is a deception, but it's hard for me, honestly, to make sense of it. Well, I think one of the beauties of Christianity, I mean, one of the things that made Christianity makes so much sense to me is that I have a tragic sensibility. I look at the world and I see this world is a tragic place. Any completion and fruition is going to have to come in a life that's larger than any life we

live here. And that's one of the beautiful things about Christianity. It says to you, look, you're a broken person. You are a broken person. You are getting into heaven by the grace of God. You are hiding under the robes of God, sort of coming into heaven in his disguise. And once you realize that, first of all, it's incredibly liberating. I no longer have to pretend to be righteous.

You know, you and I don't have to look at each other. And I don't have to think like, well, if Ali does something wrong, then she's a bad person. I already know you're broken, sinful, just like me. So I don't have to prove anything to you. You don't have to prove anything to me. We have to strive to be decent people in the world, but we know that none of us is righteous, not one. If you are confused about this,

and if you think that you can project your righteousness to other people and fool them that you are a righteous person, then what you're feeling in the moment becomes more important than the facts of the case. So you look at a criminal and you say, isn't it, aren't I a wonderful person for feeling compassion on that guy? Aren't I, isn't it wonderful that I feel compassion on this gangster? And I'm not like Donald Trump, that wicked Donald Trump wants to deport this gangster. He's wicked because he doesn't feel compassion.

I feel compassion for this gangster. And that helps you politically because you don't like Donald Trump. And it helps you sort of with this crazy idea that you're a righteous person. There's only one problem with it is it forgets all the people who are being harmed by this gangster are harmed by this abortionist, the lives. the baby who can't cry out and say, please don't kill me, I'd like to have a life. The women who are raped by these traffickers,

the gangsters who do such horrible, horrible things to human beings. So you're showing, you think you're displaying your kindness, but in fact you're revealing the fact that you are not just fallen, like all of us, you're fallen and also diluted. And I think that this is a problem that some Christians fall into, that they think that finding Christ makes them a good person instead of a saved person. I think those are really two different things. And I think that is why, that's why, you know, it's really interesting.

If you get your entire religion, if you get your theology, only from the epistles, only from the rules, you know, only from people who say, don't do this or don't do that, you're missing the whole point of the Christ's story and the stories Christ tells. When you tell a story, a story is a living thing. A story doesn't say this is black and this is white. A story shows you human beings in interaction. And so when Jesus tells a parable, you can't just say, oh, that parable means this. Because they've been talking about these parables for 2,000 years, and you can still give a completely fresh original sermon about the parables. Why is that?

Well, because there's no bottom to a great story's meaning. And so that's why when Jesus says, okay, the law says, you know, stone a woman who's committed adultery. here's a woman in front of us who's committed adultery, let him who's without sin throw the first stone. He takes the rule and it dissolves. It disappears before his righteousness, before his incomprehensible goodness. When he violates the Sabbath, which was a very, very important rule, right? You do not violate the Sabbath to do good. And he says, well, the Sabbath was made for you.

It was made to shape you. It was not you. You are not made for the Sabbath. you have to follow these stringent rules if they keep you from doing what's right, if they keep you from love. And so I think that it's very, very easy for Christians and non-Christians alike, who think that they are perfectable, who think that the world is perfectible, and think that they can display righteousness, it's very, very easy for them to start to violate the precept that you should not judge. Once you start to say, you know what, I'm going to just pay

attention to my sin and I'm going to leave you and you know you can come and talk to me about your sin any time you want but I'm not going to walk around pointing my finger at you then you start to do what try to do what's good in the world and obviously what's good in the world is to put bad guys in prison so they don't hurt anybody else you don't have to hate them you don't have to you know display your virtue by cursing at them you just have to make sure that people are safe and give them any chance they have to live a life without doing harm so I think it's this delusion that the world is perfectible and that you and are perfectable that keeps people from seeing, it keeps people from calling evil, evil and

calling good good instead and gets them confused. Yes, they're very confused, I think, about what the kingdom of heaven actually is. I mean, they're trying to usher in some kind of utopia and they believe that they can actually make the kingdom of heaven here on earth, but their attempts and even like their desired outcome is very perverse. And I, you know, call it their mentality toxic empathy because it's empathy in the wrong direction, disproportionate empathy, and it also leads them to be morally and logically stupid. You ignore the people on the other side of the moral equation because all of your feelings and compassion have been directed towards this one person, the purported victim that the media hoists up. Last sponsor is Patriot Mobile. Patriot Mobile

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people at PatriotMobil. If you go to patriotmobile.com slash alley, you'll get a free month of service. That is awesome. Go to patriotmobile.com slash alley. What else do you hope people get out of the kingdom of King? Well, I would like to see Christians feel a little bit less fragile in their faith and a little bit more trusting that just exactly what you said, that no matter what the devil does, it's going to point to the sacred. The arts are one of the great sources of beauty in the world, but also one of the great reminders that the great artists, our creator, can take even of this dark world and make something beautiful beyond what we see. And that's what people are always saying to me who don't believe. How can I believe in a God who is all good and all knowing when

he permits such evil in the world. And my answer to that is not, oh, well, there has to be free will or, oh, you know, it's a fallen world, because none of that really rings true when you're actually suffering from evil or actually facing some of the dark things we have to face in this world. But the one thing that does speak to people, even in the moment of suffering, is the idea of beauty that out of this terrible world, out of this dark world, a tremendous beauty is being born and being made, more than we can understand while we see it through again. glass darkly and not face to face. And so the book, Kingdom of Kane, ends confronting what I think is one of the most beautiful

works of art in the world, which is Michelangelo's Pietà, which just shows Mary cradling the body of her dead son, Jesus Christ. And I point out, you know, this statue is so beautiful that when Michelangelo signed the contract to make it, the actual contract said, it must be the most beautiful thing ever made in marble. Michelangelo was confident enough to sign that contract, which I appreciate in him, and then delivered on it. He delivered on it.

It's the most beautiful thing any man has ever made out of marble. And you look at it and you think, gosh, this thing is incredibly beautiful, but what's a statue of? It's a statue of the saddest moment, the saddest thing that can ever happen to anybody, a mother losing her child. There is no sadder thing that happens on earth. And it's a picture, not only a sculpture, not only of that, but it's a sculpture of the saddest thing that could happen to the world, the killing of God, the crucifixion of God by people

who didn't even recognize them when he was right in front of their eyes. And so this is a sculpture of the worst thing that has ever happened or could happen. And yet it's beautiful. And the question the book ends with is if a man, if a mere man can take marble and render something beautiful out of such tragedy and such despair, what can God not make? out of the marble of eternity of this world. And so I want people to turn to the arts for beauty and to turn to beauty for truth and to understand that even in this darkness,

even in this darkness, we're not told to be joyful because things are happy. We're not told to be joyful later on when we get to heaven. We're told to be joyful now, rejoice now, rejoice evermore. And I think in the arts, we find that that is a possibility because we realize that there is a possibility that this darkness that we are living through now, this present darkness, will be made beautiful in the end.

And I think that the arts speak to that, and I would like Christians to be a little less afraid to create art that confronts darkness, and a little less afraid to confront art that confronts darkness. I think that when you have too many Christians saying, oh, naughty, naughty, you must not write about this, or, oh, no, I must not look at this, I must close my eyes because it shows something dark.

I think you develop a sort of child. Childish without being childlike. I think being childlike is a good thing, but you have this kind of childish view of the world and your faith can't stand when it confronts reality. And so that's what I'm trying to get at. I'm trying to remind us that our faith makes us strong, not fragile. Our faith makes us indestructible, not breakable. And I think that that's an important thing to remember as we go forward and not to be so afraid of either art or life. So good. Thank you so much, Andrew. I really do. encourage everyone to go out and get it, the Kingdom of Kane. Fascinating conversation, and thank you so much for sharing more of the details of your testimony. I just found that so encouraging. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ali. It's great to see you.

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