The Eric Metaxas Show - Luke Smallbone and Calvin Robinson

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Luke Smallbone joins to talk about his role in the new film Unsung Hero and Father Calvin Robinson discusses his coming to faith story. 

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. I shouldn't tell you this, but Eric hired someone who sounds just like him to host today's show. But since I'm the announcer, they told me, so I'm telling you, don't be fooled. The real Eric's in jail. Hey, the folks, welcome. Most of you are familiar with the quadruple

Grammy-winning recording artists for King and Country. And some of you may know that they have a film out which tells their story, and I have Luke Smallbone with me to tell us the story. Luke, welcome.

Hey, man, thanks for taking the time and chat with me, man. I appreciate you. Well, it's a joy to hear that you've made. made this film that it's out. It's about, let's see, it's about family. It's about your mother. And Mother's Day just happens to be like a right about now. So for my audience, this doesn't know anything about you so that I don't do it.

Tell us. Yeah, yeah. Tell us your story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So originally born in Australia, hopefully you can still tell. My dad was a concert promoter in Australia.

and a one particular tour that he brought back to Australia, the two didn't go very well. And we lost everything that we had as a family. So he was looking for a fresh start for his career for the family. He got a job off at in Nashville, Tennessee, and he thought it would be a good idea to move his six kids to America with his wife who was six months pregnant at the time. And that's exactly what we did.

But soon after we arrived in Nashville, my dad actually lost his job. And so Australia started, well, no friends, no family. We actually ended up sleeping on beds made out of clothes. We weren't always quite sure where the next meal. was going to come from, didn't have any way for our little sister to be born in the hospital, didn't have a car, and the list went on and on. So we literally would just gather around as a family in our furnitureless living room, just stop praying for these things.

And we got to see God do some amazing, amazing miracles. And I've told that story from stage for about the last 11 or 12 years and had a bunch of people come up and say, look, you should write a book. And the truth is, I was homeschooled, so I don't read it right very well. And so I thought, you know what, maybe, maybe we can make a movie instead. And the heartbeat behind the movie is this. I believe in the power of family. I think the family is more potent and powerful today than it ever has been in the history of the world.

But we don't necessarily value it as we should. And Mother Teresa has a great quote. It's basically the thesis statement for the film. And that's this. She says, if you want to change the world, go home and love your family. Wow. I didn't know that Mother Teresa quote. If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.

Boy, that's a good one. Well, so family is at the heart of, of, your story. It's at the heart of the for king and country story. But what exactly is the story? And how does your mother fit into it? Particularly since we're celebrating Mother's Day.

Yeah, well, man, you can imagine a father who comes to a country with nothing and then loses the job that he was intending on having on arrival. Your family's in disarray in some cases. And it was our

mother who really was the to our family, you know, there's an unbelievable, our mom, there's seven kids, obviously, now there's five boys. And still to this day, if she walks into a room, you will see all five of these, these brothers, these boys, walk up and give her a kiss on the cheek, because there's such a reverence and a respect for, hey, what she had to overcome, you know, in her journey of life, but also for how she poured into us. I think that sometimes we think as parents that or just as people in general, that we have to have

a microphone, we have to have a platform to make a difference in this world. And my experience, which might be different from yours, Eric, but my experience is the people who do the invisible things well are the ones that are actually changing the world. They're the ones who have generational influence. Because through doing the invisible

things, you end up doing the things that people notice exceptionally well. And my mom, she was a one, she's still with us, obviously, but she's a wonderful person, and was a wonderful mother and in some cases changed my life and is a part of changing the world. You know, I have to say that Mother Teresa quote and everything you've just said, I mean, I know when people ask me anything about myself, at the heart of who I am, is my love for my mother and my father and their love for me.

There's just no close second. People always say, oh, it's about the Lord. It's the Lord. Well, who do you think gave us the idea of mothers and fathers? and anything that's good in them, of course it comes from him, but it doesn't mean we should forget about them. It's a beautiful thing. And you know, when you just said also made me think about,

I wrote a book, I was actually recommending it. I said, if you need a Mother's Day gift, get my book seven women, because it's about these seven great women. But one of the most amazing stories in there is Susanna Wesley. Susanna Wesley effectively homeschooled her 10 children, and was such an amazing mother. that she raised John and Charles Wesley, who obviously led the Wesleyan revival,

which absolutely changed the world. You get no William Wilberforce without the Wesleyan revival. And you could go on and on and on and on. And it's because Susanna Wesley was simply a great mother. You want to change the world, be a great parent. I mean, this is so central, and yet it can't be. it just can't be said enough. So congrats to you and those who made the film.

You're one of the producers on the film, are you not? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not for the faint of part. I don't know if you've had a book, one of your books been made into a movie yet, but let me tell you, you'll get more gray hair than I've got right now because of it, because it's a stressful endeavor.

But one way we're grateful to have told, and like I said, the power of family and what you're actually talking about is, man, it's the blood that runs through my veins. I'm extremely passionate about it. Yeah, it really is at the heart of everything. So, well, so then tell us the story then. In other words, you know, you've given us the beginning of it.

But what happens from there? I mean, here you are. I don't know, what were you, seven kids when you moved to Nashville? Yeah, seven kids. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, seven kids, you know, I obviously don't want to give away the movie. I hope that you go see it in theaters.

But maybe I'll create interest. Believe me, the more you give away, the more people will want to see it. That's the, believe me, that's the way it works. It's just the opposite. Yeah. That's right. You know, so our oldest sister, so what really happened came here, lost everything. We started mowing lawns.

I actually started mowing lawns where I was five years old. And we went and there was a record label executive. My dad's always been in music. And my oldest sister is an artist by the name of Rebecca St. James. And so before that she was Rebecca St. James, obviously, she was just a daughter. And so we went mowed people's lawns and come to find out, we started mowing at someone's It's a record label executive. And we are basically how our family got out of, you know, American poverty, which is obviously

very different than, you know, maybe African poverty or South American poverty. But American poverty was our sister became an artist. And we actually went out on the road with her and we're a road crew. So I was a, my brother, Joel and I, we were background singers for her for a number of years. Okay, so that's how it started. Your sister, your sister Rebecca St. James, she was, she was the first one. really to have success. That's right. That's right. And you and your brother were

background saying, I love this. I love this. So, and at what point did you decide to go off on you? What year was it that you decided to go off on your own with for King and Country? Yeah, well, our first record was released in 2012. How I got there, actually, I wanted to play sports growing up and I told my ACL, my junior year of high school and pretty quickly realized that was a way of God saying,

I don't want you to play sports. So I actually went to my mom, speaking of mothers, and this just tells you the type of woman she is. I said, Mom, everybody else in the family's got their thing. You know, they've got the avenue already in their life. You can already see it. You know where they're going to go. They kind of know their callings. And here I was.

There was a man who thought I was going to be doing sports or athletics, and now it's been taken from it. And she really sympathized with me. And she said, look, by the time you graduate high school, there's going to be one thing left for you to do. And sure enough, I graduate high school. and my brother Joel comes to me and says, hey man, what do you think about writing some songs and seeing on some demos and just seeing where music takes us?

And so that was the beginning of Fakhine Country. I have to ask you about the cast. Somebody said to me that Candace Cameron, is it Bure or Bure, is in the film? Bure. Yes, she is. Yeah, so we actually are very fortunate to have, I don't know if you ever watch the series Lost,

but John Locke from Lost, who's his name's Terry O'Quinn. he's in the movie Lucas Black from the Files and the N-CIS. He's in the film as well. And then Candace Cameron Beret has become a good friend of Al's actually over the years. And she's in it as well. And so, yeah, wonderful cast. And, you know, it was the two weeks ago, it was the number one, sorry, the number two film in America,

the number one inspirational film in America at box office. So it's been an extraordinary journey for us. And I think by the time we're done with this interview, Eric, I think I will have done really 300 interviews stuff for this project or something. So yeah, it's been a quite an extraordinary journey, that's for sure. The title of the film is Unsung Hero. Congratulations to you, Luke, small bone folks. Check out Unsung Hero. Luke, thank you. Remember as a kid, your parents and grandparents making you try all the vegetables on your plate or when they coax you to eat fruit instead of sweets? That's because they knew what was good for you, and it's true today than ever before. You need

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conservative commentator and parish priest in London. And he is now my guest on the Eric Metaxus show. Father Calvin Robinson, welcome back. Thank you very much, Eric. It's great to be back. How are you? Oh, gee, I'm swell. Do you have that word over there in England?

Do you say, gee, I'm swell. Gosh, I'm swell. I know you never did. We had it here for a number of decades. I think from the 20s, roughly into the 60s, people would say I'm swell. But I still say it. And I am swell. And it's swell to see you.

But there are two words one should never use. One of them is swell and the other one is lousy. And that's when Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy said, gee, tell me the swell one first. You have an interesting story. I want my audience to get to know you. Some of them already know you. But what do you tell people about yourself? I want to know really how you came to faith.

But before that... Wow. Where to start? Yeah, where to start? Well, I used to be in technology. So straight out of university, I was a computer games programmer. I used to make websites and mobile applications and that kind of stuff. I lived in a tech world.

And at some point, I realized that I needed to look for a vocation and not a job. Something changed in my early 20s where I thought, this superficial life of chasing money and getting drunk and having fun is great, but it's not everything. Surely there's more to life than this. And this started a period of exploration where, well, I think first of all, I was looking to do something more rewarding and to feel contentment rather than happiness, which of course, happiness is a state of mind, whereas contentment is a place of being. And that led me into teaching. But what I didn't realize at the time was that teaching was the start of my vocation, but not the whole of it. and I taught in Christian schools and church of England schools, and I had an encounter with Christ in the Eucharist.

Okay, that right there, I remember you said this last time you were on. This is a really, but it's very beautiful. So here you are, you're not, are you any kind of a believer at that point? I mean, I'd always believed in God. And I feel like looking back retrospectively, I can say I had a relationship with the father, but I didn't know Christ, the person. And so I met Christ the person in church. So I was open to the idea, and I'd been searching for a long time without knowing what I was searching for or who I was searching for.

You know, I'd been to different types of churches and made friends and had a nice time, but never really experienced anything. I had any kind of encounter until I found my way into a relatively high church, Anglican church. And they had the Eucharist. Their Holy Communion service was the center of their faith. And it just spoke to me in a way that nothing else ever had or has since. My whole life since then has been centered on what we've been. call the mass. And there was a beauty in that liturgy. There was a beauty in that what I now can describe as that experience with the body and blood of Christ. But at the time, I would have thought,

I don't know the theology. I don't know the literature. I don't know what's going on. But I know there's a presence here that I love and know that I want to explore more and have in my life. And that was in the Church of England, in the context of the Church of England. It was, yes. Pretty much, pretty much all of the faith out here is Church of England. But it's a different flavors. So you know, you've got your very low church evangelical, non-liturgical, a very high church, Anglo-Catholic, which is almost the same as Roman Catholic. So there's a broad depth in the Anglican Church, but this was, yeah, it was part of that. Well, this brings us to the state of the Christian faith in the UK. It seems to me that the Muslims have made tremendous

inroads in Europe and particularly in France and in England. And then you have secularism, agnosticism, atheism seems have made great inroads, culturally speaking over there. So you're a bit of an anomaly swimming against the tide. Yeah, it's a problem because we've been pushing over here secularism for so long, this idea that we can have a political neutrality and that all faiths are equal, all ideas are equal, essentially it's universalism that we've been pushing for so long. But because it has been so prominent in the public square,

what's happened is Christianity has been stripped out. So, for example, in our education system, I went into teaching, and all schools across the land should be, by law, having some kind of Christian worship, some kind of loosely Christian worship every single day. The vast majority of them no longer do. Because Christ has been pulled out of the public square, seen as, you know, uncouth or, you know, old-fashioned,

And so, of course, we have a vacuum. And as you and I both know, nature abhors a vacuum. And so that void hasn't been filled with, okay, all ideas being equal, it's being filled with one particular idea. Well, potentially, too. Wokism has had a bit of a grasp over here. But of course, wokeism destroys itself. It needs itself.

I didn't hear that. What does? Woke. Wokeism. Yeah, yeah. If you're woke today, it doesn't mean you're woke tomorrow. You know, J.K. Rowling was held up as a great feminist five minutes ago, and now she's a massive transphobe, you know, woke doesn't work, he doesn't survive.

So to fill that void more permanently, Islam has stepped in. And it's becoming a real concern in England at the moment, especially we just had elections over the last few days. And our mayor of London for a third term, don't ask me why they're allowed three terms, this Mohammed and Mayor of London has been elected back in on a block vote. And it's gotten to the point now that Brits, this is a statistic truth out of the last census of Brits, or Britons are in a minority in our capital city. And the Mohammedans are outvoting us to a point that British people don't have a voice. Did you say the Mohammedans are outvoting us?

I love the term Mohammedan. It's an old-fashioned term. The Mohammedans are outvoting. It is interesting because, look, there are different kinds. I mean, when people say the mayor of London is a Muslim, you know, you have to really ask what kind of Muslim. It's like when people said John F. Kennedy is a Catholic. Well, how Catholic is he?

He's bringing prostitutes into the White House every week. Doesn't sound that Catholic to me. So there are people who are nominally some kind of faith. There are some people who are more seriously some kind of faith. There are some people who are radically some kind of faith. So is his surname Khan? Yes, it is Khan. But I don't actually think it matters how Muslim he is or isn't, because it doesn't matter about his faith in particular.

It's the faith of the people that are voting for him, right? So we've looked at the statistics in England, and there isn't actually a block vote for many demographics in that Christians, whether they're Catholic or Protestant, vote different ways. I might vote conservative. My Christian neighbor might vote Labor, you know, the left wing party. The same with the Jews, the same with the Sikhs, the same with the Hindus. But the Mohammedans do tend to vote with one block vote. there is a massive demographic there that all vote one particular way. So that when they see that they have one of their own, so to speak, running,

they all vote for that person regardless of how faithful he is or isn't. It's a real democratic problem because it means that there's no democratic solution. Well, I guess my question is, it seems to me what they're voting for is antithetical to the idea of the United Kingdom itself. In other words, it's, you know, you can vote. you get a vote, but you can vote for the country in which you live or against it. And it seems to me that the impression I'm getting

is that a lot of these Muslims in the UK and now in the U.S., they are hostile to the sovereignty of the nation in which they live. They're not, you know, in other words, there are many here who they would rather have a caliphate. They would rather, they would chant death

to America, and yet they're living here. And this speaks to the softness and the naivetee of the West. How is it that the UK allowed this to happen demographically? To what do you put that down? You're absolutely right, and there is a hostility. And it's not even implicit. Some high-profile Mohammedans have come out since the election and said, well, if there are Britons that do not like it, they can go and live elsewhere.

In fact, excuse me, come take over our politics, take over our land, and tell us to go elsewhere. But how has it come to happen? Well, it has come to happen through our wetness, our lukewarmness, and our misunderstanding of what it means to be Christian.

We have, and always have been a Christian nation in England, and for the longest time, that meant spreading the gospel. And, of course, the British Empire was one of the greatest empires in human history. We spread hospitals,

charities, education in schools. We spread railways. We spread education as in passing the knowledge of the truth of the gospel around the world. And then we forgot that. We lost that confidence. And I think it happened over the two world wars. And that we're no longer an empire now. And so we're confused about our place in the world. And therefore, we're also confused about what we're supposed to be doing. And so we've,

we've stopped spreading the gospel. And instead we're spreading this new message of tolerance and liberalism. And again, back to universalism, this idea that we should welcome all ideas, welcome all cultures, welcome all faiths. And actually, that's not helpful. Because if we truly believe, that there is one truth, and that truth is Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, and he offers us eternal salvation, and he is the only way to heaven, then if we love these so-called people that we're saying we love and we want them to worship whatever they want, if we truly love them, we'd want them to get into heaven too, therefore we want them to know Jesus Christ too. So it's not good enough to say it's a nice thing to let people worship Muhammad or follow

Muhammad. It's not a nice thing at all. It's leading souls to domination. Well, it's one thing to have religious toleration, but this is going well beyond that. Folks, I'm talking to Father Calvin Robinson. He is speaking to us from London. I'm in New York, and we'll be right back. For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider. And when I say only, trust me, they're the only one. Glenn and the team have been great supporters of this show, which is why I am proud to partner with them. Patriot mobile offers dependable nationwide coverage, giving you the ability to access all three major networks, which means you get the same coverage you've been accustomed to without funding the

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that's N-U-T-R-A-M-E-D-I-X.com. Neutrametics.com, use the code Eric for 15% off. Again, Neutrametics, N-U-T-R-A-M-E-D-I-X.com. Neutrametics.com, use the code Eric for 15% off. Welcome back. I'm talking to Father Calvin Robinson, who is coming to us from London, which is in Merry Old England, which is across the pond from where we are in New York. So, Father Calvin Robinson, you were just talking.

about the state of affairs culturally and with regard to faith in England. And you spoke about this idea of, I guess some people have called it a lack of cultural confidence. And it seems to me that that happened in England. According to Peter Hitchens, whom I've interviewed on the subject, he wrote a great book called The Rage Against God. he puts it down to what happened as a result of World War I, that somehow England lost its way after World War I. Absolutely we did. It's because we lost our identity as a nation, and our identity as a nation was rooted in our identity in Christ.

And without one or the other, we don't know where we are. We've spent the last half a century looking to America to be our big brothers and lead the way and tell us where to go and who to do. to fight and what to do as a big brother in the playground, so to speak, and also to handle some of our battles for us. But that's not good enough for a self-sufficient nation. We need to be stronger. And you can look at that manifests in many ways. One example is that we're no longer patrol our borders. Our borders are open. People come over in dinghies from France every day. We get thousands of people crossing our borders every year illegally, and we do nothing about it other than give them a hotel, a cell phone, you know, give them clothes and comforts

and luxuries as well as state benefits and housing and free health care. We don't say, actually, we've got to protect our borders. We've got to protect our nation. Otherwise, there's no point of having a nation. We don't say we've got to look after our veterans who are on the streets, homeless, first, before we look elsewhere. We don't say, let's look at the people that we're taking in. Yes, it's good to help refugees. But the refugees in southern Sudan, northern Nigeria, Artsakh, China, who are Christians

who are being persecuted, who share our values, who share our faith. Let's get them in, rather than importing people who hate our country. culture, hate our values, and want to see the end of our way of life. We've got a real conflict of ideologies. And I do think a lot of this comes, we were talking about tolerance before. A lot of this comes to tolerance. The Christian faith says we should not tolerate evil. And, you know, throwing homosexuals off of roofs or oppressing women that they can't drive, can't be educated, or must cover themselves in all that the nick of is what we would class as evil. None of it is good. Yet we've tolerated it for far too long to the point that it's

become normalized and accepted. Well, and it goes back to the, idea that one has to know who one is and what one believes. If we don't, we're open to anything. And that's really, I mean, we have this dramatically here in the United States at this point, among the cultural elites. In the heartland, you don't see that very much. But among the cultural elites, they have a kind of hand-wringing guilt somehow. They don't know exactly about what they're guilty, but they feel guilty. And they think, well, the least we can do is let others do whatever they want to do. It really is, I mean, actually reminds me of what Angela Merkel did in Germany. It struck me that the fathomless guilt

from the genuine xenophobia and evil of the Holocaust, that that led her to let in one million strangers into Germany, as though that somehow might atone, at least partially, for what Germany did. And I thought to myself, it's utterly misplaced. It's absolutely misplaced. Just as the kind of tolerance you're talking about, it's misplaced. You're, you know, it's like giving something to someone

who will use what you've given them to take advantage of you. They don't say thank you very much. On the contrary, they say, what a sucker, how naive. I will take advantage of this sucker, and I will be in your house. I will throw you out of your house. effectively. Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing this across the continent. You are absolutely right. In France, we're seeing 70% of rapes are from these new illegal immigrants that have been swept in. We're seeing in the United Kingdom, we have a vast swath of what we call Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs, but they're not grooming gangs. They are essentially rape gangs who are taking young British girls, young working class, white girls, and grooming and raping them. And it's been covered up by the system because nobody wants to be seen as racist or xenophobic. So no one wants to address the massive problem that we're in.

reporting that people don't actually share our sets of values, which means that actually not all ideas are equal. We have to say, no, if we're going to have immigration, that's a conversation to be had. But if we are going to have immigration, we have to make sure that people are integrating into one community, that we're all together in one society that shares a set of values. Otherwise, it crumbles, it falls apart. Multiculturalism does not work. That's not to say that multi-ethnicity can't work. And there is a nuance there that people aren't willing to engage in. Well, here's a simple question. How do you pronounce the name of the town in which Christ Church, where you are minister in charge, exists?

Halston. It's in northwest London, a place called Halston. Harleston. Harleston. We do soft oars over here. Haldston. Haldesden. I suppose you guys would say Harleston.

We'd say Harleston. Harleston. Harleston. Ah, I'm going to Harleston. Haldston. So how should an American say? Harlsden, I guess. Harleston.

I'm going to Harleston. You're a minister in charge at Christchurch there. So you are in the Anglican church, but somehow affiliated with the so-called old Catholic church. Help me understand that, because that's confusing to me. I've tried to understand it myself. It's all very complicated. But essentially, I have Catholic orders,

which means that my apostolic succession is recognized by all the denominations, including Rome, which is very rare. They only recognize the East Orthodox and old Catholics. So I'm a validly ordained priest, but I serve in an Anglican parish. And Anglicanism is the tradition that I came up in. So it's a patrimony that I'm very familiar with.

And I think there's a lot of beauty in there, such as the Cramarian language, you know, these, those, thems, but also that whole heritage of English small-sea Catholicism that's very important to us. And so that's where I serve. We're going to be right back. I'm talking to Father Calvin Robinson in London. Don't go away. You might have heard Mike Lundell and My Pillo no longer have the support of their box stores or shopping channels the way they used to.

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And I asked you on the break, what was that adjective? And you said, Kranmerian, from Thomas Kramerian. Kranmerian, as if anyone in my audience would understand Kranmerian. I bet they do. Kranmer. So, yes, Thomas Kramer, who wrote the, um, the, um, the, um, the person. prayer book, and when did he do that? I don't know. The book of common prayer, so the original one was in 1549, but the most common one is from 16 and 62. But people will know Cramarian English,

because it's the old modern English. It's the oldest form of modern English. It's not medieval English. It's not old English. It is modern English, but it's the oldest form of it from the King James Bible. So anyone that knows the King James Bible knows that form. A lot of people, when they refer to Shakespearean English, they say, oh, that's old English. No, no, no. That is modern English, folks. Shakespeare, King James Bible, you know, 1600 is modern English. Chaucer is Middle English. Old English is Beowulf, which is a thousand years ago, impossible to understand. Very difficult to understand. But Cranmerian, of course, refers, as you said, to Thomas Cramer. And that is, it is beautiful. Much of it is very, very beautiful.

Well, so where you are now, you do a lot of commentary on politics, a lot of the things that we're talking about here you talk about publicly. It seems to me that in England, as in America, the folks in the heartland, the good people of the nation, would agree with you, but they're not represented by their cultural elites. I remember I was in Newcastle on Tyne about 15 or 16 years ago, wandering around, and I went into a big, beautiful, old church. And I don't remember who I was with, but we knelt and prayed. And the vicar came and spoke to us, and he had tears in his eyes. He said he could not remember anyone coming in and praying, that many people. people come in to look at the architecture. But to some extent, England has been dramatically secularized.

A lot of the churches are no longer functioning as churches. What gives you hope? What do you see? In that regard, not a lot, but I will get to the hope. In that regard, I think the problem is that the church has tried to chase the times. And, of course, the church will always be behind the times by 10 or 20 years. So it always appears old-fashioned. What the church should have done is.

look to the scriptures and said we are, the scriptures are immovable, the faith is immovable, therefore the church is immovable, come here for something different to the degeneracy, the indecency that you see around you. There is something good, there is something better. That's where you can find Jesus Christ in the church. However, it didn't do that.

So the church has become woke. The Church of England has very few years left in it, if you ask me. But where do I find hope larger than that? So the Church of England is just an institution. It's just a part of the Big Sea Church, right? And England itself is just an institution. England may fall.

Great empires have risen and fallen throughout history. The West itself may fall. But whatever comes from that has to be a new form of Christendom. It has to be centered on Christ as the cornerstone. And I believe that Orthodox Christians across denominations are coming together at this moment in time as a remnant to rekindle the flame of the faith, where it's become lukewarm and secularized and liberalized. there is a remnant of orthodoxy that's saying we must protect the faith, proclaim the faith, because society is crumbling around us. We have to be here to bring it back. It's interesting, you know, so many people usually converts to the Catholic Church,

like the late Walter Hooper, whom I've interviewed a few times, and Father Michael Ward, they postulate that C.S. Lewis, had he lived, would have become Roman Catholic. I don't think so. I'm almost sure he would have become a Pentecost. But it's interesting because this drift away from the actual faith has been happening for a very, very long time. And what you don't seem to have in the UK, which we have here in the United States, is what I would call a holy remnant of evangelicals that are right on, theologically. In other words, it seems to me that a lot of what might be described as the evangelical church in England has gone woe. Yeah, you're right. And I want to address that point on C.S. Lewis because C.S. Lewis was converted to the Christian faith by J.R. Tolkien, right? And Tolkien is obviously a Catholic, and they were good friends. The inklings together were good friends, writing together, praying together. If C.S. Lewis wanted to convert to Rome, if he wanted to swing the tie. He would have. I think it's very condescending of Roman Catholics to say, oh, given enough time, he would have come right. He was one of the greatest theologians of the modern era. C.S. Lewis's mere Christianity is a beautiful book for Catholics, evangelicals, Protestants alike. a beauty in that depth of we're just Christian. Our focus first and foremost is on Christ.

Denominations are less important. So I respect him dearly for that. And I don't think it's fair for them to say he would have converted. But in terms of England and the church in England, yeah, you're right, the evangelicals have massively gone woke. And the ones that haven't, they've gone quiet. They think we can just keep our heads down. We'll just get on with what we're doing in our little corner of the church over here. And it's not good enough. It really isn't when this apostasy, heresy, heresy, error, liberalism, left, right and center, we need people to stand firm in the faith, to boldly proclaim the faith, to remember the great commission. It's not good enough to be selfish and focus on your own inward trajectory.

We've got to, the faith is for everyone. I wrote a book which addresses much of what you've just said called Letter to the American Church. And some of my friends in London last summer was saying, we'd like to do an English version of this. And I immediately thought that Calvin Robinson, whom I had not yet met, ought to write an introduction or forward to it. Because we're talking about the same kinds of things. If you keep your head down and don't confront this, you're complicit with evil. There's just no way around it.

And I think it's interesting to me that the difference between England and the United States is that England is an officially Christian nation. We here are not. We don't have an official religion. But it's interesting how King Charles doesn't seem to be a heroic defender of the faith What are we to make? Is the dog a big fan of the kings? I realize that I may have said the wrong thing. Don't speak bad about the king. The dogs will be on your case.

Yeah, right, right. Well, no, so I'm just wondering, because it does seem to me that that's the part of the problem. I mean, his coronation was, it had these woke elements. It had different members of different faith standing around. I thought it was very strange. It did, but I'm quite a bit more optimistic about the coronation. I think at least it was an explicitly Christian service. It was one of the most watched Christian services in history.

Over 20 million people watched the coronation. I mean, how often do we get an opportunity like that to proclaim the gospel? Actually, this is a great point. I want to continue. We'll be right back talking to Father Calvin Robinson. I would henceforth Thane speak. only in the Cranmerian English. But I'm not going to go very far with that,

so I'll just have to stop. I'm talking to Father Calvin Robinson. You were just saying something positive that you thought that the coronation, King Charles's coronation, was, in fact, dramatically Christian. That's interesting. I mean, I guess I'm glad to hear that you have that view of it.

I loved it. There was an anointing, a reminder that the king, serves the people, but the king is accountable to God. So the king is not the ultimate authority in this land even. There was a Holy Communion service as part of it. And of course, there were readings from the epistles and there was reading from the gospel as well. And I think that so many eyes were tuned into that service. And that's a very rare occurrence. I think other than the conclave of a new pope or Her Majesty of the Queen's funeral, I think the coronation was probably the third most watched Christian service in modern history. And that we have to be

thankful for. Well, that is extraordinary. The roots are still there. What official concessions has the Church of England made to, you know, the wokeery? In other words, I don't know, I can't even think who the Archbishop of Canterbury is these days, but are they holding a line on things like same-sex marriage and that kind of thing? No, they're not at all. They're archbishop. Bishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is probably a bit of a liberal himself. But the policies that the bishops in general are pushing through are incredibly liberal. I had a debate at the Oxford Union, which went viral online, where there were three bishops from the Church of England saying that they want to bring in homosexual marriage into the church.

And I was as a deacon at the time arguing against it. But since then, the synod, the governing body of the Church of England, had voted in favour of same-sex unions, this idea that, oh, it's not, we won't quite call it a marriage, but we'll bless the couple in the same. It's like, you cannot bless sin. You cannot bless what God has called a porrent. It's not loving. It's not good.

And if people are living living in disordered lives, you as a shepherd should be leading them back to order of lives, back to Christ. And it's just negligence to do other, spiritual negligence to do otherwise. But the Church of England has pushed female pastors, it's an enabled divorce. It's pushed contraception onto the responsibility of the parents rather than, any sound teaching from the church, all of this, along with same six blessings, means the Church of England itself has fallen, and it's been falling for 100 years, unfortunately. And every time it makes a new pronouncement, people leave the pews.

Well, that's the irony, right? In trying to grasp relevance, it becomes increasingly irrelevant and is mostly irrelevant. I mean, it brings us to the question of how can you be a part of a government, that is accepting same-sex marriage. I mean, I have friends in the Catholic Church here that it's a huge struggle to know what to do. Do I leave? Where do I go?

What do you think? I had to leave the Church of England. I could not be a minister in a denomination that is pushing all of these heresies and errors, but I understand it's difficult for some people. But I think we have to make the choice of what's more important, standing firm in the faith or being part of the larger infrastructure. It does mean making difficult decisions. you go to Rome? Do you go to Constantinople? Is there another avenue available for ministry?

But for the layman, for the people in the pews, it's far easier. Vote with your bombs. Take your bombs off those pews. If your minister is preaching for Black Lives Matter, climate change, or homosexual marriages, leave that church and find a church with sound teaching and sound doctrine. We are singing the same song. It's a joy to hear you say these things. This is what I say. I wouldn't say vote with your bum because I don't say bum, but I'd say vote with your feet. I would say get out. Get out yesterday if you're going to a church that is complicit with these horrible things. Father Calvin Robinson, really a joy to catch up with you.

I will be in London this summer. I hope I can see you in person. God bless you. Thanks for being with us. Fantastic. God bless you too. See you soon.