The Eric Metaxas Show - #199 - John Zmirak

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, John Zmirak joins Eric to discuss how the ideas of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud influenced modern Christianity. Zmirak argues that some churches tried to accommodate ideas they considered intellectually respectable and, in the process, began explaining away biblical miracles, reshaping Christian teaching around Marxist politics, and replacing traditional ideas about sin with Freudian psychology.Eric and John discuss Darwinism, Genesis, the Resurrection, liberation theology, Freud’s influence, and what happens when Christians become embarrassed by the supernatural claims at the heart of their faith.Earlier, Eric continues his remarkable story from Greece and shares an update on plans to excavate the site believed to contain the palace of Odysseus.⭐ ORDER NOW:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World📕: https://a.co/d/0ir3NlapTODAY'S SPONSORS:🪙 Grace Precious Metals: https://www.metaxasmetals.com/🛏️ MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: https://www.mypillow.com/☀️ Honest, fast, and free Medicare plan guidance: https://askchapter.com/metaxas/0:00 Eric Continues His Greece Story1:38 The Search For Odysseus’s Kingdom5:00 How Homer Points To Kefalonia9:21 The Palace Of Odysseus Will Finally Be Excavated12:09 Homer And The Roots Of Western Civilization22:41 John Zmirak Joins23:02 Darwin, Marx And Freud Inside The Church24:39 Why Christians Began Explaining Away Miracles27:17 How Marxism Entered Christian Churches30:22 Can Christianity Survive Without The Supernatural?34:36 Zmirak On Freud And Christian Morality38:00 Why Freud’s Ideas Survived After His Theories Fell Apart40:15 C.S. Lewis, Freud And Eric’s Unexpected Connection- - -LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/@ericmetaxas#EricMetaxas #TheEricMetaxasShow #News #PoliticsChapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan’s contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don’t directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

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we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Hey there, folks. Well, today, I'm not sure who we're talking to on the back end today because we've got a number of guests, but I wanted to continue my story about what I did on my summer vacation. Chris, you know I was in Greece. You can tell from the tan. It's still here. I can. Yeah, I think of Greece and you,

you're kind of like, you know, unfortunately, unfortunately, but unfortunately, you live very far away from Greece. You're in New York City. But, you know, your father was from there. It's kind of a place that you really identify and connect with. But it's a bit like those sea turtles, the baby sea turtles, right? They hatch on a beach somewhere, and then they go into the ocean. They're taking far away, and they spend their whole life kind of somewhere else and then just make it back there to make another baby and then die. And I think of, I'm not saying you need to die,

but I think you have to go back to the place where you're kind of from to recharge. So you definitely, you definitely needed it. Let me just say, whatever. Okay, so seriously. No, you're right, you're right. I'm a sea turtle, exactly what I was thinking. So, but the point is that I do go back to Cephalonia,

Kefalonia K-E-F-A-L-O-N-I-A I used to be spelled with a C-C-Cherphalonia Cephalonia but yeah I was just there with Suzanne and we were there with our friend Seth Ward and we're making a new documentary about the discovery of the tomb of Odysseus

and the palace of Odysseus it's insane and so I'll say again you should watch And I was there by the way when this thing kind of happened I you know I'm working on the Is Atheism Dead series with Seth Ward, and he was filming Dennis Noble, who, you know, your daughter had booked for the Socrates in the city in Oxford.

And so I was over there. We were having dinner one of the evenings. And you have a very one person kind of in the orbit of that. Overheard the story and got so excited and offered to help sort of underwrite the pre-production process. Just to be clear, this is about a month ago. Yeah. We were in Oxford, England. So this came out of nowhere.

It clicked bizarrely like you need to go to Greece. And yeah, it was kind of weird, actually. I mean, I shouldn't say it's kind of weird. It felt like God. Yeah, no, it did. And as a producer, my antenna went out, whenever anyone says, oh, I'll pay for that shoot. I'm like, what? You know, it's sort of like the EF Hypen commercial.

It's like somebody who cares about the vision, but it's just the way it lined up. I thought, this is bizarre. We weren't expecting this. So we went. And there is so much to say. First of all, there were all these spots in Cephalonia. Now, one of the ways that I've told the story of how my friends, Marcus and Hetty, in December of 1990,

got sucked into the mystery of where is Odysseus' kingdom? Where is Ithaca? Where is it? For centuries, people have said, oh, it's obvious. It's Ithaca. It's this island here. But there have been a number of theories that say, No, no, no, because archaeologists have dug there,

they found no Mycenaean ruins in what's today called Ithaca. So Heinrich Schliemann, the 19th century archaeologists, who found all these other kingdoms of written about in Homer, you know, Agamemnon's kingdom and King Nestor's kingdom and Troy. He found all these kingdoms, found no Mycenaean ruins in modern-day Ithaca. So suddenly it's a big puzzle. Why can we find all these other places written about in Homer, this other Mycenaean world, but not the kingdom of Odysseus? That should be the easiest one.

Where is it? So long story short, they find it in the south eastern corner of Cephalonia, which is not far from Ithaca. And this gets into the whole question of why did they change the names or whatever? And that's a bigger conversation. But it all makes sense. That's what so fascinating is that it really, you know when you know. then the proof is in the pudding they find the largest Mycenae-Aritum in western Greece. They find so, uh, so I don't go off on this too much longer. I'll just say,

watch the documentary. It was on PBS. You can just Google it. PBS, Odysseus returns. Morgan Freeman does the voiceover. And I was very involved in the making of that film. And we're doing an updated version. So that's why I was there. But in Cephalonia, um, there are a number of, um, there are a number of, of landmarks. And this is part of how they knew that they had figured out where Odysseus' kingdom would be. Because in Homer, it refers to Ithaca.

It mentions a few things. It mentions, for example, Mount Netiton with its waving forests. When Athena, when Odysseus has dropped off on his way after his 10-year journey home, right? He's dropped off and he's like, where am I? Athena says, don't you know where you? you are, look, there's Mount Netiton. This is the mountain of

Ithaca and there is the cave of the nymphs, this magical cave and whatever. So there are all of these place names, these things that if you read Homer carefully, you say, well, that's where Ithaca is, if it's a real place. And you kind of, you put the puzzle together. And so we did some shooting in some of these what am I trying to say? Well, in some of these spots. and one of them is the top of Mount Enos. In Greek it's spelled A-I-N-O-S.

Enos is the mountain of Cephalonia, Kefalonia, and that is the Mount Neraton referred to in Homer. But it has to be said, when you think of a Greek island, you don't think of a mountain rising a mile into the sky. this is over 5,000 feet high on a Greek island. So it is magnificent. You can see it from the mainland. One of the terms of Ithaca is, I'm trying to think of the American term, but you can see it from afar.

And it was like a landmark for mariners. So Ithaca, Cephalonia, has this mountain. So you could be far away. You could be on the mainland and you're like, boom, there it is. So all these pieces come together, but we went up to the top of Mount Enos, and I've been there many times, but it's like an alpine scene. You can't believe you're on a Greek island. It's like fir trees covered with fir trees. This is the lumber that the kingdom of Odysseus would have used. That's why he was a wealthy king. And anyway, it was so beautiful to be up there. And my father would tell me as a kid that they're wild horses all over this. mountain. It's a huge mountain, vast. And he always said they're wild horses. And I was like, wild horses roaming around the heights of, you know, that's really? And it's like everybody sort of knows that. And, you know, people have claimed they've seen them. And it's, it's, but I'd never seen one.

Well, for some reason, those wild horses in the last like four years have descended, or at least some of them have descended. And they're kind of wandering around looking for food. And so it's bizarre to see wild horses wandering around these Greek villages looking for food. But we saw them almost every day. They're beautiful. Anyway, there's so much magical about cephalonia. That's why I go on and on. Whenever I go there, I want to come and I want to tell everybody about it.

It really is just exquisitely beautiful. The beaches are, they're heavenly. They're heavenly. And then there's this personal connection, which I keep mentioning. that, you know, we have friends there. We have relatives there. Suzanne and I one day we couldn't do filming because there was a haze. And so Suzanne and I just got away and went to the Luxury.

There's a peninsula. If you look on a map, the western peninsula of Cephalonia, and there's a beach on the far side of it. And the woman who runs the restaurant there is an old family friend. If you read my book Fish Out of Water, when I describe working for a a painter in the summer when I was in college, that's this woman's dad, Jerry Ephemiatos. And so this is Dina, his daughter.

So like we go to this gorgeous beach and we go to this restaurant and here's a family friend who knew my dad and we're just hanging out. There's a lot of that there. And it really, you know, brings tears to my eyes to have friends there that, that, you know, new, I've known my family and whatever and with connections to Danbury, Connecticut. It's just powerful and beautiful and there was so much. And of course, the star of the show is my cousin Yangos, who he's in the film Odysseus Returns. You see him, he's wearing the sunglasses at some point. They got him like rowing a boat. But he's, he's an amazing figure. I mean,

I've known him since I was a little kid and he's brilliant and I love him. And so the whole thing was just it was delightful. It was absolutely delightful. And I think, I'm trying to think what I, what I, what I don't want to forget to mention, but we were all over the island. I mentioned yesterday, they have finally gotten permission to excavate the palace. Folks, do you understand how insane this is? We're talking about the palace of Odysseus. What? What? Yeah. For years, I've been infuriated that they know where it is, but that the Greek authorities, which are out of their minds, are too dumb or too sick. It's kind of like the deep state in America. Like, they're just, anything you would do, they're against it. And so they have not allowed this excavation to go, finally,

this is going to happen. This is a big deal. I'm just going to tell you, I'm going to be there. We're going to film it. It's part of this documentary we're making. But this is a very big deal. what are they going to find in the palace of Odysseus? Are there other graves? Are there other, I mean, who knows? But it is just something I've been waiting for for many years, and it's finally happening. And I guess, you know, where you there's...

Because there are a lot of people out there now that didn't really know the basics of the Odysseus story, and so there's kind of a built-in audience for this. It's really kind of amazing. Because of the Christopher Nolan film, tons of people who just it has been on their radar suddenly they kind of get it now and I think that that's you know it's it's interesting actually this is a funny story so I on the plane ride home I hate to waste any time and on the plane ride home uh I you know I'm not feeling great you know

I'm sort of exhausted and I'm looking for a film to watch and I don't know about you but I find most of the films available to watch on planes are trashy or just not worth my time, not worth God's time. It really just, you know, so I'm kind of flipping through and I'm thinking, for crying out loud, there's like a hundred and something films and there's nothing I want to watch. And then I see the 2004 Troy film with Brad Pitt is on there. Now, normally, I'm not exactly like a, you know, a fan of Brad Pitt, but I thought,

I'd like to see what they did, you know, because the story of Troy, now again, that's the story of the Iliad. The Odyssey is the story of the Odyssey. But I wanted to see the film. So there's just a couple days now. I'd never seen it before, but I watched it. And it's certainly fascinating. It's, they kind of play fast and loose with some parts of the story of the Iliad. But I guess, I should say that Homer,

this is the heart of Western civilization, right? You got the Greeks and the Jews, right? You got the Bible and you got Homer and you got that's what gave us Western civilization. And so obviously, I can't really compare Homer's Illion and Odyssey to the Bible because the Bible is written by God. It's divinely inspired. It's how I guide my life. But when you read the Illian in the Odyssey, you cannot help but be astonished. at the sophistication.

This is writing about a world 32 centuries ago, and, you know, it's debatable when exactly Ilyan Odyssey were written, but it's, you know, let's say, let's say 800 BC it was written. And the level of sophistication is amazing. It's so amazing. You can't believe that could people really have been that sophisticated to create this brilliant literature, this poetry, the story, the narrative, the complexity of it, the characters.

that long ago, 3,000 years ago, can it be? And it's like, well, yeah, it is. It's amazing. And so this is part of our patrimony as human beings. You know, we have Shakespeare, we have Milton, we have Homer, we have Dante, and, of course, at the front of everything, we have the Bible. But we're kind of responsible for this. And part of what I do in Socrates and the city is to try to get people to take that seriously. Like these are where our ideas of freedom come from.

You would not have the United States of America without this heritage of ideas and we need to know what is the heritage of the West. So at the heart of it all, the beginning of all, you have the Illy and the obviously, you have Homer. And it is, it's just powerful stuff. And so I find it, you know, it always happens to me when I go to Cephalonia,

when I go to Greece, I want to stay. Like by the time we have to leave, I finally settled in. So I got back two days ago. Our plane lands at JFK, New York City, at one in the afternoon. Suzanne and I hustle home in a taxi. I repack in 15 minutes

and then I drive to Connecticut to see my mom because I know I'm going to be traveling this week, so I want to see my mom. So the same day that I've just come home from Europe, I drive up to Connecticut, and I text a friend, of ours, Maria, and I said, hey, you want to join me and my mom? You know, we're just going to get a bite to eat like I do, and we're here, and we've just got a few friends here. And Maria's a family

friend from the Greek church, and she's, well, I can't. She goes, I'm at a Greek festival in Orange, Connecticut. It's St. Barbara's Church, where her brother goes or whatever. She goes, it'd be great if you could come, and, you know, and I'm thinking, Orange, Connecticut, that's not exactly around the corner. And I've just come from Europe to New York and from New York to Connecticut. Now from Danbury to Orange is like 45 minutes. But I thought, wait a minute. I so didn't want to leave Greece that the closest I could come would be to go to a Greek festival where it's going to be Greek music and Greek people and Greek food. So I pick up my mom and we drive to Orange, Connecticut to St. Barbara's Church.

And their festival, guess what it's called? Chris, can you guess what the festival is called? Is their Labor Day Festival, Greek Festival? What's it called? It's called? Happy Greek Week. I don't know. It's called The Odyssey.

Oh, well, there you go. It's called The Odyssey. Yeah, they're really, yeah, they're really locking in on that. That's one of those tiny confirmations to me. They're hopping on the train. So I, so my mom and I drive all the way to Orange, I've never been to St. Barbara's Greek Orthodox Church in Orange, Connecticut, even though I've heard about it many times. My father used, when, when we would drive to Yale, my father would say, yeah, there's a Greek church here.

It's, you know, because it's close to New Haven. but I'd never been before. So we get there and it was a huge Greek festival. It was amazing. And, you know, I'm touched in my heart because I just came from Greece and now here I am. Again, I'm on Greek people. There's Greek music and Greek food and whatever.

And it was just a huge blessing. And I was talking to a friend there and I mentioned the Odyssey and all this different stuff. And this is a Greek person who didn't know, anything about it. And I thought, this is where we are. We're living in a world where we become culturally illiterate. And so this is a big part of God's calling on my life is to say, hey, folks, we're

responsible for this stuff. We're responsible. We all need to know a little bit about Homer and what he wrote. We need to know about the divine comedy in Dante. We need to know about Milton and Paradise Lost. We certainly need to know Shakespeare. Obviously, we need to know the Bible. Most Christians would agree on that.

But it's not just the Bible. The Bible is God's word, but all this other stuff is part of our cultural history. And, you know, they don't have this heritage in Mogadishu or in Saudi Arabia. This is how, you know, this is how you get the West. And so I just thought, you know, how important for me to write my book about the discovery of the tomb and whatever. And so I've said many times, you should watch the third. because my book's probably not going to come out for two years, but watch the film Odysseus returns on, it's on PBS,

but you can Google it. You can probably see it for free, but I really recommend it. And Chris, you're not going to believe this. Two insane stories, because I'm all, you know,

my friends are always teasing me like, oh, Eric, you know, everybody knows you, you're a big show. It's like, no, I'm not like getting recognized wherever I go. Like,

so stop, stop huffing me up. Okay. I mean, yes, some people know me, but I'm not getting stopped, you know, as I'm walking down the street. And I was in Argestali with my cousin and Seth Ward. We were driving. We had to get something. I can't remember what we're doing. But we're going to Argussoe, which is the main town in Cephalonia. And I said to my cousin Yangos, I said, hey, you and Marcus, you're in this film, this PBS film, which is being shown all over Europe. and all the stuff, whatever. You're big shots now. You're like, you're like film stars, whatever. And, you know, I'm teasing him.

And he says to me, oh, come on, cousin. He calls me cousin. He says, come on, cousin. He goes, you're the one with the TV show, blah, blah, blah. So he's teasing me that, you know, like, I'm the celebrity. I said, oh, yeah. I said, I'm getting recognized. You know, you can see I can't walk down our Gestoli streets here without getting

recognized. Yeah, I'm being sarcastic because obviously it's ridiculous, right? Yeah. No joke. 20 minutes later, I walk into a camera shop in Argyzali. Yeah. A 70-year-old woman says, are you Eric Mataxis? This is a woman from Argusali, who I guess spent much of her life living in North Carolina,

who said she watches me on TV and can we get a picture? Wow. You've got to understand, ladies and gentlemen, you've got to understand that. Yeah. I thought this is, this is the Lord playing a joke on me. He's like trying to say, you know, hey, you never know, you never know.

But I mean, it was so, so unbelievable. I mean, Argus Tolli and Gifalena, whatever, and to say this, because when I was at this church festival in Orange, Connecticut, right before we left, a guy came up to me and said, you're Eric Metaxus, whatever, this doesn't happen to me very often. So when it does, I'm very moved. I'm like thrilled that people care about what I care about.

It's very, it just touches me. It just touches me. Okay, we're going to go to a guest. I don't know who we have, but before that, I want to remind you. If you haven't bought the Revolution book, the price is super cheap right now. Go to Amazon. If you want multiple copies, this is the time. It's not going to get cheaper.

Number one. Number two, the Bonhofer film is being relaunched in theaters. This is very important, ladies and gentlemen. It's being relaunched in theaters. It is vital that it do well. I'm asking you to tell everyone you know on social media, a link to the website. I don't have that website right now, so forgive me.

But October 3rd and 4th, it's going to be in theaters across America. And the more people who see it, I'm hoping whole churches will buy these theaters out. This is an evangelistic opportunity. If you have a friend who's not where you are theologically and you want to show them like, you know, what your faith is all about, the Bonhofer film says it in a way

that's not overly religious, that's not overly conservative. It's just beautiful. I was very involved in the making of that film, and it's important that it do well on this relaunch October 3rd and 4th. So please write that down, October 3rd and 4th. Big weekend, very important.

Okay, I'll be right back with my special guest. You've often heard me talk about the Golden Triangle of Freedom, that intersection of faith, virtue, and liberty. And for that triangle to hold, we need access to the truth. Unfortunately, the Medicare system often feels designed to obscure the truth, leaving millions on plans that don't actually fit their needs. That's why I want you to know about Chapter. Chapter is a rare breed in the health care world, a completely independent advisor that puts

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That's 571-421-1253. It's time to find the clarity you deserve. Heather, folks, I'm talking right now, or I will be talking to right now. John Zimirak. John, welcome back. Thanks, sir. I'm having some trouble with the connection still, but in any event, you wrote an article recently, and I want to talk to you about the subject of that article. Where did the article appear? What's the title?

Okay. Over at Chronicles Magazine, Best Conservative Magazine in America, I've been writing there since the early 90s. I've got a piece called Darwin or Christ choose carefully. It's an analysis of how old bad ideas that were once persuasive and became dominant in the culture that have since begun to fall apart under under more accurate scrutiny still pervade large institutions, especially our churches. I'm talking about how Carl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, three thinkers who were huge in the 19th century whose influence flowed over into the 20th century, when you actually examine their ideas carefully, especially people who are specialists in the subject, their theories fall apart. But in the churches, these ideas have gained so much influence and so much prestige

that ironically, you've got people in the pulpit taking seriously ideas that have in fact fallen apart. Now, in terms of most of the article is about Darwinism, but you and I talk about that a lot, so I don't want to carry it going too long about that, but you have a lot of Christian preachers, especially bishops and recently popes and many even evangelical leaders. William Lane Craig recently got in trouble for this. They take undirected random evolution, which is what Darwinism teaches, and that man descended from apes by a series of genetic mutations, they take that as proven science. And then they try to snip the gospel,

snip the Old Testament, snip Christian revelation to fit what they think are the proven facts of science. Because they don't want to be embarrassed. They don't want to be like class as fundamentalists. They don't want to be lumped in with snake handlers and young earth creationists and fundamentalists. So they reinterpret Christianity

in order to take out all the, miracles because they don't want to be embarrassed by it. So there's a recent book called Creation or Evolution, a Catholic dilemma that you and I talked about. The authors, they say that what the Old Testament says that man was made miraculously. Man, man, unlike the rest of creation, was made by a direct intention of God. Man was made as the image of God. Man was made from the dust of the earth and woman was made from his side. Now, all my life, I've heard priests and teachers say, well, of course we know. Genesis isn't a science textbook. So this is really just an allegory. It's just a symbol.

And so they explain away the miracle of the creation of man. Now, we believe that the whole point of the universe was the creation of man and the incarnation of Christ. If you would, explain that miracle away. What's the next thing you're going to explain away? Well, my religion teachers in high school explained away the resurrection. Well, of course, Jesus didn't die and get raised from the dead. That's impossible. He lived on in the hearts and minds of his followers, and that's what the resurrection really means. Really? That's it? Because ours, I know, Adolf Hitler lived on in the hearts and minds of his followers. And we don't call that a resurrection. So once you say, science has told us X, so we must adapt our religion to fit it, or else we'll be like the

people who imprison Galileo, you will explain away everything. And that is how Christianity goes from being a serious doctoral religion into kind of a therapeutic club for people. you know, if Jesus works for you, hey, that's awesome, you know. Yoga works for me, but if Jesus works for you, that's really cool. We can coexist, as it says on the bumper sticker on the back of my Prius. So that's how Darwinism has helped to hollow out Christianity. Marx, a lot of people don't realize how powerful and influence Marxism has been inside Christian churches. But in fact, in the 1930s, a lot of leaders,

professors from Yale and Harvard Divinity School, major figures in mainline Protestant denominations were going on pilgrimages to the Soviet Union, getting shepherded around by Stalin's henchmen, shown all the beautiful factories and the dams they were building and all the progress they were making. And they came back to America saying that the Soviet Union was the kingdom of heaven being built on earth by human hands. These ideas filtered into most of the churches. In fact, a few years ago, the former spymaster of communist Romania revealed that the KGB had developed what we call liberation theology. That is the thinly veiled Marxism redressed up in Christian clothes that was spread throughout Latin America.

And that turned the Catholic church down there largely in many ways, into a pro-Marxist organization that encouraged class struggle that said that the people of God wasn't a church, it wasn't Israel, it was the working class. And the struggle of the people of God to bring about justice on this earth

is the real meaning of Christianity. And the American Catholic bishops actually adopted some of their ideas. The U.S. Catholic bishops have this principle they call the preferential option for the poor. That means that when you judge a political question, you don't judge it on the merits on, is this fair?

Does this treat everyone appropriately? No, you judge it on how it affects the poor. So rent control seems to help the poor. Even if it's actually unfair, fairness doesn't matter. What matters is which benefits a so-called working class. And that actually got expanded. It's not just the poor now. Now it's anyone who's marginalized.

So illegal immigrants, transgender people, gay people. They are now sort of part of the proletariat. They are the marginalized people. So every political question has to be judged on how it benefits the chosen groups. I want to go back to, you know, at the heart of this, you were saying that there are people, and it's always the sophisticates, right? That they're too sophisticated. They don't want to be lumped in with, you know,

you said that the snake handlers and the young earth creationists or whatever it is. But the point is that they're trying to create this respectable Christian faith. And listen, to some extent, I appreciate that, right? Because you don't want the Christian faith to be misrepresented by people that are anti-intellectual people who accept things that are in fact preposterous.

But at some point, you know and I know that there are things in the Christian faith that are undeniably miraculous. And if you get rid of that, you've gotten rid of everything. So the resurrection is the perfect example. The claim that a corpse rose from the dead, a real corpse, an actual dead corpse, not sort of sick, not in a swoon, not, you know, in a yogic state. No, actually somebody who was genuinely dead, thoroughly dead,

actually dead, rose from the grave. That's at the heart of the Christian faith. I actually always go back, and I know I've said this in at least one of my books, that if you believe the universe was created by God, if you believe that the entire universe was created, if you believe in the big bank there, you say, who did it, God did it.

Okay, that miracle is a billion times, more difficult to believe than raising a body from the dead or the parting the red sea. That is nothing compared to creating the universe from nothing. Galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies with every atom, everything created out of nothing. You believe God created the universe? Yes. Well, that takes infinitely more faith than to believe that God could part the Red Sea or he could, you know. And I think it's fascinating. to me that there are people who don't get that. They, as you're describing,

they're trying to explain everything away in, in these naturalistic, materialistic ways. How do you get around the idea? I mean, listen, I've talked to people who don't believe Jesus cast out demons or they don't, and maybe my larger point is that this stuff crept into the mainstream, or rather mainline Protestant church in the 1920s. It comes from German higher criticism in the latter part of the 19th century.

So by the time you get to the 1920s, you have this clash between the liberals versus the fundamentalists. But we are now seeing this affecting the Catholic Church, affecting the evangelical church. There was a sermon by Pope Leo where he said Jesus didn't really multiply loaves and fishes. He convinced he got everyone to share their supplies. I think that was Pope Francis. No, no, Leo repeated it. This is a talking point on the theological left that Jesus didn't multiply loaves and fishes. No, the real miracle is that he got Jews to share their food.

That seems almost like an anti-Semitic joke. But I mean, okay, turning water into wine. How do you explain that away? Is it a metaphor? You know, it's just amazing to me how much you have to cut away to create a respectable Christianity. when I say respectable, that's in quotes because I think it's nonsense. To me, there's nothing more respectable than the truth, and we should be trying to figure out what exactly God says in the Bible.

What is true? You know, that's about as respectable as you could ever be as believing in what is true and not being embarrassed by it. When you come to truth, as our friends at the Discovery Institute show us and films like the story of everything show us, Darwinism is actually falling apart. in the hands of the scientists who try to use it, because they're finding one thing after another after another,

the evidence that Darwin cited really isn't there. The transitional species aren't there. Proteins don't accidentally mutate into new proteins because that's impossibly difficult. It's like taking computer code and scrambling it and expecting your computer to work better. It doesn't happen. And Marx, his claim to fame was as an economist,

but every Marxist accounting that has been tried has ended up in famines and failure and shortages and waste. And the third great pillar of 19th century pseudoscience, Sigmund Freud, has had an even more pernicious effect on the churches. My friend John Gravino, a Catholic philosopher, did a book called Confronting the Pope of Suspicion, where he shows how the Catholic sex abuse crisis happened. it happened because in Catholic seminaries around 1960 they replaced the Bible the theory of the fall of man and the theology of St. Augustine. They replaced those things with Freudian psychology. So we don't commit sins because we're fallen and because we're tempted. We overcome repression and fail to sublimate and we,

and we act out on our primitive drives because they're not being adequately expressed. Freud's theory of the human psyche was that everything is driven by sexual desire and the fear of death. And he viewed the human mind as being like a steam engine. And we have this steam, which is our instincts, has to be expressed somehow.

So if it doesn't have a healthy outlet, it will have an unhealthy outlet. So in the 1960s, teaching young men who are going to be priests, to disregard the Bible, the fall, the idea of human sinfulness, and instead think in terms of primitive repression and erosentanatos and the superego, they learned that when they had sinful desires, they weren't really sins. There were instincts that needed to be expressed. Once you've trained a generation of men like that, it's no surprise that some of them end up abusing boys,

abusing kids, and that they're superiors who have the same theories, instead of calling the cops and send them to prison where they belong, they send them for a few weeks of therapy. And they cover up the, they cover up the abuse. And so I have to say that what you just said about Freud reminds me that you can't have Freud without Darwin. Where Freud gets these ideas from, he's standing on the shoulders of Darwin because he's thinking about us as these meaningless, evolved creatures. So he's sort of, you know, that's where you get, people talk about your lizard brain or, you know,

they're, they're groping for models. They're groping for a way to explain us. And it's all posited on this foundation that the world is meaningless, life is meaningless, your life is meaningless, you are meaningless, you are just an aggregation of cells. And let me tell you how that happened.

It happened through these random processes. And that's all there is. And the instinct to survive, which is at the heart of blind Darwinism, that explains everything. It explains everything you do, every choice you make. It has nothing to do with good or bad. There is no good or bad. So Darwinism sets that up. That's right.

And then you get Freud. And what's funny, and this is what you're talking about in Marx, but what you get with Freud, of course, is funny because in the last 50 years, people know that All the garbage that Freud was spewing that everybody was like lapping up like crazy in the early part of the 20th century, it's all been disproven. It's all garbage. But it was so chic. Everybody was into it. I mean, everybody was talking about that. He created a new way of seeing the world.

And the crazy part is he claimed to be a scientist. He propagated theories to explain the whole human race in every. cultural context and all of human behavior. And what was his evidence? A few anecdotal interviews with upper class German speaking women in one city, Vienna. That's like I'm going to interview my friends and family and write my dissertation based on it and explain all of human behavior and history based on my personal experiences, the people I happen to know, all of them being from Queens. But it had, he wore the white lab, code of science.

Yeah. Likewise, Mark. But John, but John, when you, when you, I don't know if I've talked to you about this, but recently I read a long book by Stefan Zweig. Did we talk about this? No, no, we haven't. Well, I never read any Stefan Zweig before. Steffens Weig was a major literary figure really in the first four decades,

three decades of the 20th century. And it's so interesting because it's a little bit heartbreaking because you see this refined man trying to make sense of the world based on the lies of that time, that we're evolving towards something beautiful, we're evolving away from our baser instincts. Technology and civilization is wiping away the horrors of the past. And then, of course, he's confronted with the brutality of the Third Reich, and he and his second wife commits suicide because it's so, they're having to confront that everything they believed was not true, that it was this utopianist idea based on nothing, and that it eventually is shown for what it is because of the evil of the

Third Reich, that all these lies, and he was personal friends with Freud. And they really had this whole way of seeing the world that they were living inside a bubble and then suddenly it burst. They were living on the fumes of Christian civilization, but the tank was getting was getting empty. I couldn't recommend a really interesting film. It was called Freud's last session. Or Sigmund Freud's last session.

You don't know what you're talking about. Wait till you say that we only have two minutes. Go say quickly and then I've got to tell you the punchline. You're not going to believe it. It imagines CS Lewis spending a day with the elderly Sigmund Freud just shortly before he died of cancer. Because Freud was in England. They were in the same city.

on one occasion. It imagines a day-long conversation between C.S. Lewis and S.G. And it's one of the most interesting films I've ever seen. So apparently you have some... Okay, now. Now, get ready for this.

That film exists because of your friend, Eric Metaxus. This is the craziest thing. Listen to this. Listen to this. This is nuts. There was a professor at Harvard, a Christian, Armand Nikolai.

He was actually in the medical school there. He taught a course for years comparing the worldview of C.S. Lewis. and Sigmund Freud. It became very popular. He wrote a book about it. I don't remember the title of the book,

but he wrote a book about it that was very popular. I had him come to Socrates in the city to speak on the book. And this is like 2004 or something like that, I think. It might even been 2003, but it was wonderful. And somebody came, this was in Manhattan, of course, somebody brought a friend who was a playwright. The playwright was so captivated that he decided to write. a play called Freud's Last Session, which comes up with this idea of what if C.S. Lewis, who lived

in Oxford, visited Freud, who had moved to London to escape the Nazis. What if they spent a day talking? So this playwright, and then forgive me forgetting his name, but he writes this brilliant play, and it's wonderful. And I think I was on a plane about two years ago, and I thought, son of a gun, somebody made a film of Freud's last session. Now, the film, unfortunately, makes Anna Freud out to be this big brave lesbian and that you know that Hollywood has direct things by going in that direction. But the film is worth seeing.

It's with Matthew Witt's his face who was in the Crown. He plays C.S. Lewis. But it's very well done. And I consider it one of the... Anthony Hopkins plays Freud. I forgot. Amazing. Amazing.

But no kidding. It is one of great choices of my life that because of me, the play got written, and then now, of course, they turned it into a movie, but it's Freud's last session. And it really is valuable. And all kinds of people came to see the play in New York. I mean, Woody Allen went to see it to Cabot.

But all these sophisticated New Yorkers went to see this play, Freud's last session. So they're exposed to this. And to be exposed to C.S. Lewis in that way. It's so clever. It's so wonderful. But the film, yeah, the film is available. Freud's last session.

And before we go, we've just got a minute left, I want to remind people, folks, October 3rd and 4th, the Bonhoeffer film will be in theaters across the country. I'm begging you to go see it. It is a great film. I was involved in it. My name is not anywhere on it. I guess I was too political and they wanted to take it off.

But the film is great. Everybody should see it. It's a great opportunity to share your faith with somebody. You can bring anybody to the film. They're going to love it because it's just, a great mainstream film. But it's in theaters for two days, October 3rd and 4th, because I said we've got to do it around October 7th because the story of Bonhofer, it tells the story of what does Christian

faith look like, heroic Christian faith in the face of vicious anti-Semitism. To me, that's the story of Bonhofer. So please mark your calendars October 3rd, October 4th. It is vital that we pack out the theaters. Get your church to buy out theaters. It is just a great film. And when a film like that is made, we've got to do everything we can to support it. You've just got to drag your friends, post it on social media.

I'll be talking about it constantly. October 3rd and 4th, it's Bonhofe for the film. It's got to be theaters cross-country. John's Merrick, my friend, thank you for your time today. We'll have you back as soon as possible. Thank you. Bye. Hey there, folks.

Suzanne and I want to invite you to join us for something extraordinary. It is a Socrates in the city cruise on the Mediterranean, August 24th through September 1st, 27. That's a year from now. We'll spend eight glorious nights aboard the magnificent sea cloud spirit sailing under full canvas through Sardinia, Corsica, and Elba. But this is not your typical cruise. Throughout the voyage, I'll host special Socrates in the city conversations with world-class thinkers about faith, meaning, civilization. and, of course, the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness. And because this is an intimate ship, we'll have real time for questions, meals together,

and the kind of friendships you simply cannot create at a crowded conference. The cruise is selling quickly. The veranda suites and superior state rooms are already sold out, and all remaining prices increase by 10% on October 1st. So do sign up today at Socratesinthecity.com slash cruise. That's Socratesin the city.com slash cruise. come sail the Mediterranean with us. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life?

You know the same way you can skip an ad. I get it. I'm Siaiaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride.

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