The Eric Metaxas Show - Melanie Phillips (continued)

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Melanie Phillips: How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It

Welcome to the Eric Metaxos show. It's the show featuring Go Go Go the Chimp. Nothing like a chimp to liven up the radio show. Easy there. Go, go, go, go. No, go, go. Hey there, folks. It's Friday, the 11th of July.

And this summer on Fridays, I think we're often going to do Socrates in the City Fridays. I'm working on a book. And we've got some awesome Socrates in the City content. So we thought maybe we can run them. So today we're going to run one. I have to tell you, I keep meeting these amazing people. Melanie Phillips, I interviewed her. It's got to be around two months ago almost, I think, here in New York for Socrates

in the city conversation. She's a British author. She's absolutely brilliant and delightful. And as you'll see in the beginning of my conversation with her, which we're going to air in a moment, she's incredibly funny. I didn't see it coming when I was talking to her before. we sat down for the conversation. She was extremely serious and British.

And then when we sat down, we really had some fun. But it's also a very important conversation. The book that Melanie Phillips has written, which we discuss, which you hear in a minute, is called The Builders Stone, how Jews and Christians built the West,

how Jews and Christians built the West and how only they can save it. So it's really fascinating. But Melanie Phillips has become one of my favorite people. In fact, I like her so much that recently we did a new thing. We're going to be doing these things called Socrates and the city dialogues where I'm not involved at all. We just find two wonderful people and let them have a dialogue. And I could take a nap or rest or go fishing or what have you.

So we recently did this in England because Melanie Phillips lives most of the time in England. We paired her up with the great Mary Harrington. Some of you know Mary Harrington. She's herself superb. And they had a delightful conversation. So we're going to be airing that in the weeks ahead. But Melanie Phillips is just the best of the best. So right now we're going to play my conversation with Melanie Phillips on the subject of her book,

The Builders Stone, how Jews and Christians built the West and how only they can save it. You're in for a treat. And here it is. I'm looking at the Guardian and Assad the father caused the killing of between 10 and 40,000 of his, I think they were Muslim Brotherhood enemies

in the course of about two weeks and this was a story on the forum pages and page whatever and it was just a story and there was no comment but Israel was in Lebanon and if it killed three Palestinians

it was a front-page splash and it was a furious editorial and outraged op-eds and I thought in all my innocence because I was a different person then I thought why have we got a double standard I was an editorial writer and I went into the editorial meeting

one day and I said why do we have a double standard and they all looked at me. They all looked at me and I realized I'd crossed a line but I didn't know what the line was. And they said what do you mean?

Of course we have a double standard. We in the West and we consider you to be part of that. I had become you in the space of less than a minute. I thought I was part of we. Yeah. I became you.

We do you, the honour of assuming that you are like us. And I realised they were talking about me as a Jew. We assume that you are like us and we all, therefore, share the same values. We are brought up to believe in respect for every human life, human rights, all that. And if you're in the developing world, you're not brought up to believe any of that. So we can't judge them by our standards. That's racism. Right.

Yeah. And I said, what are you talking about? Ironically, that was racism. Yeah. And they said, why are you so upset? You say that you're more moral than us. I became the Jew. I crossed a line.

Yeah. And nothing was ever the same again. And from that moment, they regarded me as less than properly British. Yeah. I was born and bred in London. I had never wished to live anywhere other than Britain. And I was, from that moment, I was not properly British. I was so upset, to put it mildly, by this and by what I saw and heard coming out of the woodwork, as it were,

because it wasn't just the Israelis are killing innocence deliberately and willfully in Lebanon. It was, you Jews, to us personally, you Jews, you all stick together. I mean, it was rampant anti-Semitism of the old kind, which came like from nowhere. Anyway, I was so upset I wrote a play about this. I've never been that upset. The play was put on at a fringe theatre,

and some of my colleagues at The Guardian came to see it. What was the name of the play? It was called Traitors. And it wasn't a very good play, but it was mine. And it was put on. And my colleagues came to see it. And they said to me, my goodness, Melanie,

what kind of people would have said this kind of thing to you? And it was them. They themselves. Anyway, the whole thing then sort of calmed down. Levin finally finished. I went back to, you know, doing my thing at the Guardian. Nothing was ever the same again. I moved for various reasons from being an editorial writer

to a kind of middle management person I was in charge on the news desk and then I became an op-ed columnist and the second column I wrote the first op-ed I wrote was supremely tedious and a colleague said to me this is really boring that you're not an editorial writer anymore

you don't have to be sort of fair we want to know what you think Bad mistake. We've all known what really gets you going. And it seems to me, said this colleague. I had young children at the time, and I've obviously been complaining that something was going badly wrong with schooling.

He said, you're going on wrong about something going badly wrong with schooling. Right about that. So I thought, oh, okay, right, if they're interested, oh, fine. So I wrote, I wrote a column which said, Mrs. Thatcher was the prime minister. I wrote a column which said, something's going, I mean, I'm, I'm, I encapsulate in a few words.

Something's going very badly wrong with education. It's not Mrs. Stach's fault. There's something going wrong with teaching. The world fell in on me. And from that moment on, it was my descent into infamy. Because I went through one subject after another, education, family, nation, multiculturalism, the whole lot. And I lost all my friends.

People stopped talking to me at the tea trolley going around. the rudimentary email system we had which was like you know little gossipy things messages stopped completely stopped I was basically sent into internal exile I learned a great deal from this

a great deal it was very very very instructive I stuck it out for the best part of ten years and then when they started denouncing me the Guardian bought the Observer which is a Sunday paper and they started denouncing me

and I moved to the observer. When I wrote this column about education, I became overnight. They came in, that morning, they came in, my colleagues came in and said, have you gone mad? I want to remind you of our friends at the Herzog Foundation,

are you rethinking your child's educational path? Are you wondering if their current school truly supports your family's values? Well, you should be, and if you are, you're not alone, and the Herzog Foundation is here to help. We trust the Herzog Foundation. They are the go-to resource. If you're interested in homeschooling, if you're thinking about it, is that possible for us as a family? What does that look like? If you're interested in quality

quite genuinely Christ-centered K-12 education, if you're interested in a combination, The Herzog Foundation is the place to go. Hertzog Foundation.com. They really are there to help you, to help you answer questions, to help you figure this out. And to stay updated on the latest developments in education that offers real-time news and insights

to keep you informed and empowered. You can visit reidlion.com. And there's all kinds of stuff there. So we recommend that highly. Mike Lindell and my pillow, employees want to thank you, my listeners, for all your continued support. Mike has a passion to help everyone get the best sleep of their life. He didn't stop by creating the best pillow. He created the best bed sheets ever. Yes, Mike is offering the best deal on his percale bedsheets. You can get a set

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code Eric. Order online at balance of nature.com. Use discount code Eric to get 40% off this week only. Hey folks, it's a special Socrates in the city Friday on the Eric Metaxus show. And today we're playing my scintillating conversation with the scintillating Melanie Phillips based on her book, The Builders Stone, how Jews and Christians built the West and how only they can save it. We continue with that right now. So I became right wing overnight.

Then I became very right wing. Then I became ultra-right wing. Then I became far-right. then I became hard right. And then I became the Jew, and I became a mad, Likudnik, warmongering, Zionist Jew, right wing. And then I became an extreme far-right,

neo-Nazi, warmongering, Likudnik, Zionist, Jewish lunatic. And then they ran out of adjectives. And then it kind of freed me, Because once you get that label and you're still writing somewhere, somehow, there's not much they can say about you. So it was a long process because, you know, and I do know how the left thinks in this respect, because I was part of that. And it really does, I think, have the key to much of what we've all been living through. I want to just pause for a minute because I want to.

I want to ask you, were you raised as a religious Jew or at what point in this experience did that become central? Because we haven't said it here, but I asked you before we were talking, because when you, in your book, you know, put the locus in a sense of the West at, as coming out of Israel and the Bible. and so and so forth. At what point were you always religious as a Jew? Because many people, of course, say, I'm Jewish or I'm this or I'm that,

but it's not really a religious assertion. It's more an ethnic assertion. Well, the words religion and faith are understood quite differently in Judaism than they are in non-Judaism. And I'll explain that in a moment. How I was raised was fairly typical of the Jewish community in Britain at the time.

This was the 50s when I was born and the 60s when I was growing up. It was my parents were both Jewish from time backwards. I mean, my grandparents and great-grandparents came from Poland and Russia, typical immigrant trajectory of Jews in Britain. And my parents were, they belonged to a convention Orthodox synagogue, but they didn't go to synagogue very often. They went to a synagogue mainly on the major festivals of the year. They did not observe the requirements, the religious requirements of the Sabbath. We were kosher at home and out to a, you know, reasonably kosher. There are

different standards. Well, that's still fairly serious. It's fairly serious, yeah. Was there a point more recently where it became more serious? Yeah, so that's how I was brought up, and that obtained for many, many years. And then for a variety of reasons, both personal and ideological, I changed. Part of it was it sort of came out of all the work I was doing, all the sort of research and reading and thinking I was doing about what happened to the West, in the course of which I thought a lot about religion. and the place of religion in the West.

And now that what people don't really understand, and I know this may sound rather strange, but if you think about religion as faith, that is a very un-Jewish thing to think. Judaism does not do dogma, it does doing. And a lot of Jewish people do stuff, which is religious in origin, And of course, you know, the origin of those fairly arcane, very arcane rules and regulations are, you know, the belief that this was given to Moses who brought the law down.

And that's the law mediated through great rabbis of the past who interpreted these laws. And they interpret the words of the Hebrew Bible. it's all a matter of interpretation. It's not, you know, this is what the words are, that's what it means. On the contrary, there's a tremendous argument over the centuries. But basically, it's a religion of doing. And a lot of Jews are, they're not really believers in the sense that many Christians would think of belief. They don't really think about it.

What matters is the doing, because it connects us all. to a way of life in a tradition which keeps a people alive. And the point about Judaism is this, that I think of it as a kind of three-legged stool. It is a fusion of, the three-legged stool, the three legs of the stool are religion, peoplehood, and land.

The essence of Judaism is that it is understood by religious people a divinely mandated duty to live in the land of Israel in accordance with precepts handed down by Moses from the Almighty and to live a good life in that land and to serve as an example to the rest of the world as to how to live in a civilized and good fashion

that makes you elevate yourself above an animal to be spiritual, to be good, to try and better yourself, and to improve the life of others. And that has to be done in the land. As a light unto the nations. Yes. So it's a fusion.

People don't understand this. It's a fusion of the religion, the people in the land. Now, you can certainly be a Jew without being somebody who believes in anything at all. You can be a Jew that doesn't ever want to go and live in Israel and is not a conventional Zionist. It doesn't make you less of a Jew. But if you try and separate any of those elements out,

you are attacking not just Jews or not just Israel, you're attacking Judaism itself, because it's a fusion of those three things. But the provenance of it all for you is God. In other words, it's not just... Ultimately. You're not just being pragmatic. You're not saying, well, if we do these things, we'll survive.

Yeah. But everybody has, you know, everyone's left to their own interpretation of all this. So you can, you know, you can be completely committed to following some, most, all of these very arcane practices without actually thinking necessarily about what you believe. You just do it. Yeah. No, it sounds rather counterintuitive and rather strange. No.

And you're absolutely right that at the heart of it, is a belief system. Well, why would you do any of these things if it was just some arbitrary? Whether you're consciously, whether you're thinking of it in the moment is immaterial. The whole idea of it comes from God. God has given you these ideas.

God exists. Because in your book, when you talk about, I mean, the subtitle of the book, The Builder Stone, is how Jews and Christians built the West and why only they can save it, you're postulating this eternal order of things. that you're saying that this is, you didn't realize you were postulating

an eternal order of things in the book, that when you say that this is, you know, this is true, this is the good, the true, the beautiful, this is right, this is wrong, and there's a reason we want to save the West, and there's a way to do it.

It's not just pragmatism, as I was saying. I certainly didn't set out to argue to argue for the existence of God or the basis of faith. I did set out to argue that. One of the points I make explicitly in the book is that I hope that what I'm saying in the book will appeal to people of no faith as well as people of faith.

Because it's true? No, because it's the basis of all that we hold dear. What's the difference? The difference is, well, I suppose at the heart of this is you have to actually accept that there is such a thing as objective truth, otherwise you go down the rabbit hole of relativism and so on. That is true.

But you don't have to sort of say, I'm certainly not saying that people should become believers in Christianity or certainly not Judaism or anything else. I'm saying that people who are agnostic, atheistic, secular, or of different religions, can all surely, well, hopefully, unite around the fact that without acknowledging

the authority of the biblical concepts in the West, that that's where our values come from, and that if you try and destroy the, if you try and replace the Bible with some sort of a belief in the secular religion of universalism you will destroy those values

Hey there folks, since it's Friday we thought we would do something different we're playing a recent conversation I had with the amazing Melanie Phillips she was my guest at Socrates in the city we had such a delightful conversation I wanted to play it here it's based on our book The Builders Stone how Jews and Christians built the West

and how only they can save it. We continue with that right now. I mean, I've met countless numbers of people who have no faith at all, but they understand that. And they all are desperate to keep the values alive, and they understand, you know, that they are rooted in the Bible, and you can't disavow that.

It's not that they necessarily will sit down and say, well, yes, I believe the Bible is true. I mean, it's not my business to tell people to say that. I'm saying something a bit different, In order for the West to survive, it has to understand where these values come from and it has to stop attacking religion and it has to encourage people to uphold those values and to celebrate the role that religion has played, Christian religion and Judaism have played in the greatness of the West, which people never acknowledge.

I mean, well, they may do here. They certainly don't know in Britain. They don't celebrate it. they're ashamed of it. They're ashamed of the West. They're ashamed of the nation. They're ashamed of those values. They don't celebrate them.

So to celebrate them, you have to say what they are. And you have to say where they come from. And, you know, if people find, you know, religious belief, religious faith, religious observance through that, that's great. But I don't expect people to do that. I just want people to appreciate and to celebrate the basic. of the West and I would like Christianity to be stronger than it is in the sense that I again I'm talking really from the British point of view it may be different here I think here it's kind of eroding around the edges but in Britain it's kind of collapsed and the

church has been in the forefront of the collapse the church has been the kind of social justice church for decades well Tom Holland has a chapter near the end of his book Dominion where he talks about this idea that we're sort of talking about now, that the seeds of its own destruction are within the West, within Christianity. But I would argue that it's where Christianity

bends away from actual Christianity, and that what's happened with the progressives is they insist, no, no, no, that's Christian faith, when I would argue that it's not. Well, to be honest, I mean, this is sort of above my pay grade, really, about whether it's a turning away or not. Where would you say this self-flageating tendency of white Western liberals to be perpetually guilty? Where does that come from?

This is not a geography question. I mean, I would say, I mean, you can have many, you know, we can all really, I think, a light on different answers to that question. But I would say, and I think I've said it in the book, that to me, the most significant watershed in this dismal trajectory was the Holocaust. because I think the Holocaust did something really terrible to the West in that the Holocaust, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust didn't happen in some benighted

Godforsaken part of the world. It arose out of what was really the apex of high Western culture. You know, Germany was considered, you know, the acme of reason rationality, the development of philosophy and art and literature and all those great things. And they produced this.

And I think this does something terrible to the West because the West not explicitly but kind of innately believed that we did this. Okay, we weren't Germany. We the West weren't Germany. But our culture, our civilization, that's what this produced. Is that accurate? I mean, I can argue both sides of that. In some ways, that's not the case.

In other words, to equate the Nazis with Goet and Schiller and Bach, that's really not right. Why not? Well, because I would say that the national socialist philosophy is an aberration. You know, they sent, you know, they played Mozart, whatever it was, as an accompaniment to the people going into the gas chambers. That's how cultured they were. They were all in favor of Goethe and Schiller and all the rest of it.

They were very proud of it. You know, that's what they were. They weren't so proud of Mendelssohn. Okay. Well, I'm just saying that it's probably not the place to have this part of the conversation, but I guess the point is taken that you're making that somehow the West... I believe that's what the West felt. And certainly it is a matter of fact that out of Germany came what was called the Frankfurt School,

which I think went to America, various Marxist philosophers and thinkers, who said explicitly, this is what we were telling you all the time. There is something really rotten about the West. We need to remake it. And everybody went, yeah, okay. Whereas previously they would have said, these guys are. kind of off the wall. They said, oh, yeah, we can't really defend that. And then there were other kinds of demoralization that I think took place, particularly like in Britain. Britain lost an empire

around this time. It emerged from the war, having won the war against fascism, but bankrupt and in debt to in debt to America. And the British elites said, it's over. We can't survive anymore as a nation. We have to, you know, and that's why they joined eventually what, they joined what eventually became the EU, the precursor to the EU, because they said we can't manage ourselves as an independent nation anymore. They kind of lost the plot really big time. Hey folks, it's a special Socrates in the city Friday on the Eric Mattaxas show, and today we're playing my scintillating conversation with the scintillating Melanie Phillips based on her book, The Builder's stone, how Jews and Christians built the West and how only they can save it. We continue with that

right now. And I think, I mean, I wasn't, you know, I was born in 1951, but I think what happened was that because of this like demoralization, you know, this is what happened at the heart of Western culture. We are now bankrupt and we've lost an empire. Like, what are we going to do? And then in came these ideas, which said, make a new world. And that, they were vulnerable to that. Peter Hitchens says that all of this happened in England after the first war. But I guess in some ways it doesn't matter. Well, there was a tremendous loss of faith after the First World War. You know, where was God in the trenches?

This terrible slaughter. And a loss of belief in authority, the authority of government, the authority generally. And that was certainly a great demoralizing. but I think that, you know, a kind of death blow was delivered by the Holocaust. So really, it seems to me that what we're talking about, at least in part, is a loss of cultural confidence. Yes. In other words, this idea of being in any way patriotic, proud of one's nation, of one's culture

came to be associated with the hyper-trophied version of it. in national socialist pride in the Third Reich. Sorry, what was associated with it? Well, that any patriotism, what used to be thought a good thing, suddenly was now associated with the worst version of it in modern history. So this is how the thinking went and goes. It sounds ridiculous.

But the nation leads to nationalism. Nationalism led to Hitler. Yeah. So to avoid another Hitler, you get rid of the nation. Yeah. Uh-huh. Or you get rid of all kinds of patriotism, and then you have to ask. So patriotism is nationalism.

What does that mean? Right. Exactly. Which is certainly a distinctly progressive idea. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, so patriotism is next to Nazism, basically.

Yeah. I mean, that's what we're told. Right. If you're patriotic, you're far right. Right. Amazing. Yeah. So what are we supposed to be?

Well, we're supposed to be, you know, it's John Lennon's Imagine. That's what we're supposed to be. You know, it's sort of burned into the soul of all of us for a certain generation. Imagine there is no world, there's no religion, no religion, because religion is really bad, because religion divides you. There should be no country, because countries divide you. There should be no particular. It's all the brotherhood of man. Yeah.

And so there is nothing to fight or die for. And this is the mantra of the modern liberal. Nothing to fight or die for. How many times have I heard this? War solves nothing. Excuse me? Yeah. What does it?

What do those people think happen in 1940? War solves nothing. So every conflict is to be resolved by negotiation, compromise, peace processes. What you must never do is war because that means dead people. Yeah. So in a conflict between God and the devil, you split the difference. Yeah. That's where we're at.

Well, so you are inescapably asserting the idea of an objective good, objective truth, and the idea that the progressives can't abide that idea. Correct. It's deeply upsetting to them. Yes. Yes. I think, I mean, yes, I think that is absolutely fundamental. If there's no such thing as objective truth, there's no such thing as a lie. If there's no such thing as a lie, because it's all a matter of opinion, then you believe the lies.

There's no such thing as truth. Yeah, but you believe the lies. So lies are truth and truth are lies. That's exactly what we're living through. So we've described the horror of it all. and we only have five minutes to dig ourselves out of this abyss. So I guess my question is, are you at all sanguine about the future of the West or whether the West has a future?

I'm just a little ray of sunshine. You wouldn't have written the book if you didn't think that there were reasons to hope that we might get this right. I do. Look, I said in the book, I don't know whether the West wants to survive. And I don't know whether it can survive. You know, can a society which has degraded itself to this extent recover? I don't know. I've left these questions unanswered. I believe they are unanswerable.

What I have said is that if the West wants to survive, I believe it can pull itself back from the brink, and this is how it can do it. What it has to do is, well, there are many things it has to do. I have said in the book that, and this comes back to the builder's story, and this comes back to the builder's zone that the Jewish people and the experience of the Jewish people and Judaism has a great deal to offer the West in terms of cultural survival because the unique selling point of the Jewish people is cultural survival. Every single culture that's tried to destroy the Jews has disappeared and the Jews despite terrible losses over the centuries have survived and thrived and so much so they've actually reinvented their own historic homeland in the state of Israel,

which has become a powerhouse in the region. So the Jewish people can actually tell the West or give advice to the West, not on the basis of any kind of superiority, you know, what we think is better than what you think. And not that. But we know how you do cultural survival. We know how you keep the cultural shore on the road, and we can help you if you just listen to us, instead of disdaining us and trying to tell us that we are bad and evil and wrong and stupid and all rest of it,

listen to what we have to tell you, because not least because your values that you are trying to keep going are ours. We're all on the same page. And the crucial point is this, that what is the, there are many aspects of, Jewish cultural survival, which I think can help the West. But what is the essence of the secret source of Jewish cultural resilience? It's so important to understand this. The single most important thing is that the Jewish people love what they are.

They love Judaism. They love their culture. They love it so much they want it to survive. and they have fought and died for it. Hey, folks, it's a special Socrates in the City Friday on the Eric Metaxus show, and today we're playing my scintillating conversation with the scintillating Melanie Phillips

based on her book, The Builders Stone, how Jews and Christians built the West, and how only they can save it. We continue with that right now. They are explicitly and in their own terms going into battle with, as they describe it, the ghosts of their own. ancestors behind them. They feel that they are in the line of all those generations that came before

them who fought and died, or didn't even fought, they just died, but they tried to keep the people alive because it was worth it, because they valued it, because they believed it stood for great things. Israel is bucking the trend of the West. The West is literally dying out. It's not reproducing itself. Israel is bucking the trend as a Western nation. It's having between three and four children per woman. Why? Because they want their culture and their people and their nation to live on into the future

because they believe in it, because they love it. And you have to love what you represent in order for it to survive. The West no long, well, people, you know, individuals, millions, millions actually get what we're talking about. But the elites don't love themselves. They don't love what they are. They don't love a nation. They actually say it's despicable.

We don't like it. Now, if you don't like it, you'll die. So the West is now coming back to Londondonistan. The West is facing a death cult, a death cult in Islamism, the predatory Islamism which wants to Islamize the world. It's a death cult for two reasons. First of all, they tell us every five seconds. We're going to win because we love.

death and you love life. So you're weak and we can win this against you. And secondly, it's a death cult because they want the West to die. You have to love yourself in order to want to live. That is the key of Jewish survival. Two words, choose life. And there are so many people in Western elites that don't understand what that means and don't even accept it. So I am optimistic. It comes from spending most of my time in Israel. It's a seriously insane place because, you know, it's riven by people, by terrible arguments the whole time,

and always will be. Jews are the most quarrelsome people on earth. Even the Almighty said, I can't stand these people. And yet... And yet they stick together, as we've been told. Well, it's true, because it's, all Jews have each other's back. All Jews ultimately are

in it together to survive. So there is this amazing feeling in Israel for the last 18 months has been through this hell. There isn't a household, it's a very small country, there isn't a household which is not deeply affected and traumatized by this. The trauma is off the scale.

Grief, mourning, terrible anxiety. You know, your kids are at the front. I mean, some people that I know, they have five, six, seven, boys in harm's way and some of them are coming back dead and some of them are coming back limbless and the trauma of these families is indescribable and yet the sense of optimism and happiness in that society is unbelievable a sense that whatever we're living through

however terrible it is and more terrible things may be coming down the pike No one's unrealistic. But whatever it is that's coming, we're going to survive this. We're going to survive it for two reasons. First of all, we have no option. We have nowhere else to go. And secondly, because we want to survive. We want to live because we value it.

And we're going to win it. We're going to survive. We're going to survive. We're going to thrive. That sense of optimism, I mean, it's just transformed the way I see the world. Because I realize that if you actually believe in what you represent as being good and true and wonderful and worth fighting and dying for,

you will survive and you will win. And if you don't believe that, then you won't. And that has transformed the way I see the world.