Bannon's War Room - Episode 5273： WarRoom Easter Weekend Special： Descent Into Hell

00:00:00.000 Okay, we're going to be joined by Dr. Tom Williams. He's a colleague of mine

00:00:07.840 from when I ran Breitbart as executive chairman. Dr. Williams is from Rome, lives in Rome,

00:00:15.640 and he's going to talk about the importance of Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, the entire

00:00:21.480 Easter weekend in the Catholic community and the Catholic faith tradition. One of the smartest

00:00:27.120 guys I know. Dr. Tom Williams joins us next in the world. Dr. Williams, before I get into it,

00:00:31.880 you've written this book, and it's really, I want to spend a better part of the hour going through

00:00:36.720 the argument in the book, because I think it is of this weekend, the holiest weekend in the

00:00:42.220 Christian calendar for people to contemplate exactly where we are as a faith in the persecution

00:00:48.020 directed towards the faith. Walk us through, from a Catholic perspective, the importance of Holy

00:00:55.520 Saturday. You know, people know Good Friday and the crucifixion of Christ, Holy Thursday 0.88

00:01:01.420 with the Last Supper and the rest, Gethsemane, and then you've got, but Holy Saturday kind

00:01:07.140 of a lot of times gets lost in the mix, and obviously with Easter. But what's the importance

00:01:13.900 of Holy Saturday, and particularly this belief of Christ's descent into hell?

00:01:19.640 Yeah, there are two things. Thank you, Steve, and it's good to be with you on this very,

00:01:23.660 very holy day. There are two traditions that go way back. One that goes back furthest is the one

00:01:30.220 you just mentioned, the idea of Christ's descent into hell. It's a hell that's a little different

00:01:36.960 than the way we understand hell today, in the sense that he went to lead out the souls of the 0.65

00:01:44.360 just who had died before his coming. It's a basic Christian belief that up till Christ redeemed the

00:01:51.200 world up to the time of his suffering on the cross, all those good and holy prophets, men and

00:01:56.740 women of God who had lived since the time of Adam, since the fall of Adam and Eve, they had not been

00:02:03.740 able to go to heaven. Heaven had not been opened to them. A savior was needed. And the traditional

00:02:11.420 understanding of that was that they were in hell, hell not as in condemned for all time, the way we

00:02:17.900 We think of hell as having been judged and found unworthy, but hell more like our understanding of limbo, the old traditional sense of kind of in a waiting place or in a place of the dead, a Gehenna-like place.

00:02:33.760 And that Jesus goes, and there's a beautiful homily from the second century, one of the earliest Christian texts we possess outside of biblical texts, where the author describes Jesus talking to Adam and his conversation with him, because he is the new Adam, and inviting him to stand up and to take his rightful place.

00:02:57.340 And then all these crowds, the multitude of the just who lived in times before Christ, rejoicing in the salvation that has finally come to them, that they are now able to enter heaven.

00:03:09.820 how is this it's something that's been been lost in in modernity it's not really discussed of

00:03:18.040 holy saturday and and and christ going into you know going to hell to to bring i guess the pagans 0.63

00:03:25.100 or the people that were there that hadn't had the uh the living word of christ on earth when they

00:03:30.580 existed right the great philosophers and all that why is it like so many other teachings and one of

00:03:36.320 powerful things about your book is to go back and really emphasize the early church, what happened

00:03:43.500 in the early church, the persecutions of the early church, to make sure we understand it,

00:03:48.720 particularly that it was directed at the Christian faith. Why, with modernity, have people kind of

00:03:54.020 lost, has Holy Saturday, in the general Christian faith overall, kind of lost its place?

00:04:00.400 well unfortunately steve i i think you know that answer better than i do it's it's this kind of

00:04:06.840 sunny feel-good form of christianity and catholicism that is so prevalent in our day

00:04:11.760 we only want to talk about the nice fuzzy feeling kind of stories and the parables and the sheep and

00:04:17.620 you know and the things that make us feel good uh it's not only jesus's descent into hell that

00:04:23.080 we don't talk about on holy saturday we don't talk about hell itself we don't talk about the

00:04:27.200 possibility of condemnation. We don't talk about judgment. We don't talk about the eternal truths.

00:04:32.040 And this is, we're not doing justice to the fullness of the Christian message when we pass

00:04:38.060 over these essential, central teachings of the Christian and the Catholic faith. So I think

00:04:44.160 that's the kind of the short answer to this. It's also something very tough for people to understand.

00:04:50.020 You know, again, we don't talk about hell at all, but look, in the Apostles' Creed,

00:04:54.280 what do we say? We say he descended into hell, right? I mean, it's actually there, but nobody

00:04:59.600 goes and explains, bothers to look, what does that even mean, right? This idea that there was

00:05:05.440 an entire human race of those who had been deemed just, whether they were, as you say,

00:05:10.940 the pagan philosophers and those who were just Gentiles, if you will, but also all the Jewish

00:05:17.480 patriarchs and prophets, all the Jewish holy people who had not been able to enter heaven

00:05:23.040 until Christ opened it for them. This is something absolutely remarkable and wonderful,

00:05:28.580 and it is mysterious. It's something that is very hard to understand, but it's something that is

00:05:34.500 at the core of what we believe as Christians, and it's so good that you bring this back

00:05:38.640 by having us talk about this on Holy Saturday. A second thing, I'll say this just as kind of a

00:05:44.760 segue so we can go back to the other as well. Another part of the Christian tradition is

00:05:50.420 a great devotion to Mary on Holy Saturday. There's been, for many centuries, a devotion of

00:05:59.300 special consolation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who knows a sorrow and an abandonment

00:06:05.440 on Holy Saturday that the rest of humanity does not experience. And the reason that

00:06:12.360 Saturday has always been considered Mary's day, the day after her passion, in a way,

00:06:18.860 was on Saturday, and Christ's passion was on Friday. That's why we celebrate the Immaculate

00:06:24.520 Heart of Mary always on a Saturday, the day after we celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

00:06:29.420 It's her sharing in the passion, but also in a particular way of having Jesus, her son,

00:06:35.600 taken from her. This day of mourning, this day of loss, when she experiences this desolation of soul

00:06:44.300 because her beloved son, Jesus, has been taken from her.

00:06:47.780 She watched him suffer and die, and now he's laid in a tomb.

00:06:51.100 And so there is also that beautiful tradition of consolation to the Blessed Virgin Mary,

00:06:56.880 particularly on that Saturday.

00:07:01.400 Dr. Williams, so much of your book goes back to what was it about Christianity

00:07:08.960 that what was about Christianity that had that had the Roman state actually make it an official

00:07:17.020 part of policy to to to persecuted. I want to get into what the Christian message message was and

00:07:22.680 why it was so different as an organized faith, because I think it relates to your message is

00:07:28.780 really in the subtitle of your book is very chilling. It's called the coming Christian 1.00

00:07:33.480 persecution, the coming Christian persecution, and the

00:07:37.100 why things are getting worse, and how to prepare

00:07:41.100 for what is to come. And I can tell you, and I've known

00:07:45.380 Dr. Williams for a long time, is that this is an incredibly chilling book because of

00:07:49.420 the intellectual rigor you bring to this topic. The

00:07:53.360 reason I wanted to do this on Holy Saturday with you is given this, what's

00:07:57.300 just happened in Nashville at the Christian school.

00:08:01.780 And more and more information comes out about this.

00:08:04.640 The young woman who did it obviously planned it, planned it for a while.

00:08:08.720 She had gone to the school.

00:08:10.420 I think she was actually in counseling with the pastor, one of the senior people there.

00:08:15.340 And it looks to many people in the United States, and nobody wants to talk about it,

00:08:20.720 and they certainly won't let it be talked about in the mainstream media,

00:08:23.600 that this persecution of Christians is actually—we're actually entering a quite dangerous phase of it,

00:08:29.940 particularly when the mainstream media has said, well, you know, it's Tom Williams and Steve Bannon and and these Dr.

00:08:37.080 Martin Taylor Marshall and Marshall Taylor, all these all these people are all Christian nationalists.

00:08:43.520 Right. And they're the dangers. They're the domestic terrorists.

00:08:47.000 Walk me through why your book really, quite frankly, you give people a heads up that the Nashvilles of the world are not going to be the exception.

00:08:56.120 They're going to be the rule, sir.

00:08:57.540 Well, that is, yeah, that is the unfortunate reality. It's not a very cheery book. It's meant

00:09:03.980 to be an honest book. It's meant to be a book that digs in, and also in a way a hopeful book

00:09:10.320 in the sense that Christians are always called to live by hope, and especially when things get

00:09:14.060 darkest. But the reality is that things are simply getting worse, and they're getting worse

00:09:20.440 in a particular way, in an accelerated way, in the post-Christian West, and it's what I find 0.95

00:09:25.740 most distressing. There have always been active persecutions among non-believers, among other

00:09:31.560 religions that find Christianity intolerable, among atheist communist regimes. This is something 1.00

00:09:38.300 that we know exists, and we're in a way prepared for that. What we're less prepared for, I think,

00:09:44.220 is our own society, which was founded on principles of religious liberty, founded on the worship of

00:09:49.520 God. I mean, the first pilgrims who came over did so because they wanted to be able to worship in

00:09:53.780 peace and freedom. That society itself turning against Christians and using, as you say, this

00:10:00.420 language to tar Christians as being the problem, as the obstacles to progress, as, you know, really

00:10:07.660 as bigots, as Christian nationalists, as white supremacists, all the different epithets that 0.82

00:10:12.920 you want to apply to Christians to make Christians out to be the bad guy. And what do we do with the 0.98

00:10:18.580 bad guy? The bad guy, like the ogre in the fairy tales, has to be eliminated. You call out your

00:10:23.580 pitchforks, and you chase them out of town, you string them up, you kill them. And this is 1.00

00:10:28.320 something that unfortunately we often look at as just, this is rhetorical, but it's not just

00:10:35.800 rhetorical. And it's so easy once you've kind of painted Christians in this way, Christians who

00:10:41.500 take their faith seriously, I'm not talking about the accommodated Christians who go along with the 1.00

00:10:47.140 radical secularist agenda, but those who really take their faith seriously will be more and more

00:10:52.220 portrayed as the enemy. And a dangerous enemy, and a dangerous enemy must be fought tooth and

00:10:59.480 nail. And I think the Covenant School in Nashville is a perfect example of this, because that rhetoric,

00:11:06.220 that anti-Christian rhetoric, which sometimes gets very, very abusive and very violent

00:11:10.340 among the LGBT and particularly the transgender lobby, it becomes something that the enemy has 0.98

00:11:19.280 to be eliminated. And we see examples of it. In this case, this is not the first attack by a 0.71

00:11:24.900 transgender person. And as you noted also, the mainstream media will always go back and rewrite

00:11:30.120 the narrative. They will always paint the transgender person as the victim. Oh, because

00:11:36.000 they're so ostracized in society, because Christians have been speaking against them for so long. It's

00:11:42.060 just natural. It's just that Christians would finally get their comeuppance and that people 1.00

00:11:47.240 like this would rebel against them.

00:11:50.780 Were you, we're going to go to break here in a second.

00:11:53.560 Were you shocked?

00:11:54.900 I guess you were not about how the media handled, because here we are, you know, last week in

00:12:00.880 the nation's capital, just yards from where we do the show, there was going to be this

00:12:06.860 transgender day, I think, of violence or vengeance, transgender day of vengeance. 1.00

00:12:12.540 It was canceled last week.

00:12:13.720 And we've demanded that the manifesto, because she wrote a manifesto, that that be released.

00:12:20.240 They're suppressing that.

00:12:21.140 They don't want to put that out.

00:12:22.880 Were you shocked about how the coverage of this went down?

00:12:26.660 There's no mention at all about it really being a Christian school and an attack upon Christianity, sir.

00:12:32.420 Well, no, it's it played out like, you know, this kind of dystopian reality where everything is twisted.

00:12:39.800 At the beginning, no one wanted to say that she was transgender.

00:12:43.720 No one wanted to say that she identified as a male, as a man.

00:12:47.800 This is something that they suppressed for a while, and then it became just common knowledge, and so that was the narrative that was given.

00:12:55.080 Weirdly, they did not refer to her as a man.

00:12:58.680 In any of these stories, for some reason, they took her biological sex as the reality, perhaps because that's the way the police report initially portrayed it, but at least that was true to the facts.

00:13:11.720 But the fact that they completely flipped on its head, they didn't want to talk about, again, the Christian school, that there was a targeted anti-Christian attack, and that the perpetrator was transgender.

00:13:25.460 And then later on, as you say, there's still this confusion as to motive.

00:13:29.080 I mean, I think the motive's fairly self-evident.

00:13:31.980 But the fact that we actually have a document, a text, a manifesto, and that they won't be easy.

00:13:37.160 Yes, a manifesto.

00:13:39.460 Tom, just hang on for one second.

00:13:41.100 We're going to take a short commercial break.

00:13:42.920 It's our Holy Saturday special, The Descent into Hell,

00:13:46.000 The Coming Christian Persecution. 0.92

00:13:47.760 Tom Williams is our guest.

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00:16:07.780 okay welcome back it's holy saturday we are talking about the persecution of the christians

00:16:21.100 on the day in the calendar that is christ descent into hell before the um before the resurrection

00:16:29.120 tomorrow dr tom williams joins us from rome uh is uh the author of this new book about the coming

00:16:34.840 persecution of christians written a number of books before nothing this uh tom nothing this

00:16:41.420 i'm not saying dark but this book grabs you and you realize because a lot of people would say

00:16:48.240 well christianity is being persecuted right now you actually say well you ain't seen nothing yet

00:16:52.820 i want to go back to this concept and it gets bandied about a lot but i would like you to to

00:16:58.000 define it for our audience. The post-Christian 0.96

00:17:02.260 West. What do you mean about post-Christian?

00:17:06.300 How did we get there? Because we think of the Judeo-Christian West 0.53

00:17:09.540 as a society and culture really predicated upon

00:17:14.200 Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome.

00:17:20.220 How was that formed? What did it mean?

00:17:22.100 And why do you say, and can point to, that we're in a post-Christian

00:17:25.960 society?

00:17:28.000 Well, I think, Steve, that this is the United States, this is Europe. These are the former 0.96

00:17:35.060 Christendom, if you will. The societies that were built on, as you say, in a particular way,

00:17:42.320 Athens and Jerusalem and Rome, and especially in terms of its legal tradition, these were brought

00:17:48.400 this was the humus, if you will, in which this society grew. It was based on a Christian 1.00

00:17:55.160 understanding of the human person, on society, on the family, on the state, and the relationship

00:18:00.580 between the state and the individual. These were principles that come from the Judeo-Christian

00:18:06.000 tradition and that were accepted as just, in the West, as a common heritage and a common-sense

00:18:14.140 approach to reality. This is the way the world was understood. The world was intelligible because

00:18:19.940 it was made by an intelligent being, that there was—you could see God's footprints

00:18:26.340 everywhere, His fingerprints on His creation, that man was created male and female, that

00:18:34.100 the family was one man and one woman and their children, that life has value and dignity

00:18:41.700 and must be defended and upheld, that people should love their country.

00:18:47.220 And St. Thomas Aquinas speaks about that. He said, the same way you love your parents,

00:18:52.640 you love your country because your country gave birth to you. He speaks of the word

00:18:57.720 piety in terms of loving your country, this piety toward your country, all these different

00:19:03.460 virtues and values that were part and parcel of the Christian tradition, which are now

00:19:08.320 vanishing. They're evaporating before our very eyes in a very hostile mentality,

00:19:15.240 one that is anti-Christian, is post-Christian. And for a while, I think we were sort of content

00:19:20.860 to live in this post-Christian kind of miasma situation where, yeah, we kind of know where 0.88

00:19:26.740 we came from, but even if we get rid of those roots, we can still live off the benefits of 0.98

00:19:33.460 those basic beliefs. But now it's more and more hostile. They want to reinvent the founding of

00:19:39.180 the nation. They want to reinvent the principles. They want to negate the good and make it look

00:19:44.760 like everything grew out of evil and that everything needs to be restarted in a new

00:19:50.200 name. I think it's a very, very evil and extremely dangerous project, the one that is coming now

00:19:57.580 in what is not just the post-Christian West, but is becoming more and more the anti-Christian West,

00:20:04.920 where Christianity is looked upon as the enemy, where Christians are looked upon

00:20:08.540 as obstacles to progress, as people who, as one author likes to call it,

00:20:14.700 are stuck in the Bronze Age with this Bronze Age Bible of myths and stories, 0.80

00:20:20.680 this very dangerous attachment to an obscurantist past

00:20:24.860 and not allowing this radical secularist agenda to unfold.

00:20:30.800 And that's the kind of battle that we're headed for right now.

00:20:34.020 how did uh talk to us about the first century church what was it about christianity that was

00:20:42.100 different what was about christianity that caused the first persecute the great persecution and

00:20:47.740 everything that led up to that because in understanding that you can then begin to

00:20:52.520 understand the coming christian persecution that's essentially the thesis of your book right

00:20:57.040 you must go back in time and understand what differentiated this from other religions what

00:21:01.880 differentiated this as a faith to see the strong reaction of the Roman state against it leading up

00:21:09.040 to the great persecution, sir? The Roman Empire was all about assimilation. It was a very tolerant

00:21:17.460 state as far as it goes, in the sense that as long as you can integrate your beliefs, your belief

00:21:22.900 system, your religion, into this greater pluralist Roman society, as long as you're willing also to

00:21:31.660 sacrifice to the emperor and to burn incense to the emperor. As long as this is part of it,

00:21:36.500 you can have your little cults and your rituals and your diverse things. We're very open-minded,

00:21:43.320 but your allegiance must first be to the state, and it must be to Caesar, who is divine.

00:21:48.760 And Christians obviously could not abide by this. And it was primarily their higher allegiance to 1.00

00:21:56.800 God that, in the end, put them in a situation of necessary conflict with the Roman state.

00:22:02.800 The other group that somehow escaped this, and scholars give an answer to why they escaped

00:22:09.100 it, were the Jews living within the Roman Empire.

00:22:12.760 And the reason was, they would technically have been illegal as well because of their

00:22:17.840 unwillingness, obviously, to sacrifice to other gods other than Yahweh.

00:22:22.340 The difference was that whereas the Jews were content to kind of keep to themselves, 0.94

00:22:28.700 they were not a proselytizing faith.

00:22:31.400 They were not going out there to make converts.

00:22:33.440 They were not preaching on the streets.

00:22:35.680 They were not bringing people into the fold.

00:22:38.460 The Christians were the exact opposite. 0.99

00:22:41.360 So you had Christians, and this really alarmed powers within the Roman Empire,

00:22:46.380 whether they were emperors themselves or local governors at different times.

00:22:49.740 the persecutions ebbed and flowed.

00:22:53.040 But the problem was, so many people were converting.

00:22:56.880 Christianity was so powerful and so attractive that you had people from the very poorest 1.00

00:23:01.980 to the patricians and the very wealthy.

00:23:05.420 It was something that spanned every class and every social group, so that you had soldiers

00:23:12.660 and you had politicians and you had artists and you had literary figures, all being very

00:23:19.420 attractive and coming into the Christian fold. And so this was something that really caught 1.00

00:23:24.340 the attention of the powers of the Roman Empire and was looked upon as something that could

00:23:30.120 not be tolerated. And, again, there were times when it became extraordinarily hostile, when

00:23:35.660 they would hunt down Christians wherever they could find them. 0.99

00:23:39.780 At other times, even some of the more considered to be more enlightened and benevolent,

00:23:44.200 the emperor is like Trajan. Trajan's philosophy was, and he writes this to Pliny the Elder in a

00:23:52.960 letter that we still have, he says, don't hunt them down. But if there are complaints made,

00:24:00.220 if you find out about them, bring them in and make sure that they are willing to sacrifice the

00:24:05.260 emperor. Make sure they're willing to abjure this higher allegiance to their god, or they shall be

00:24:10.740 prosecuted, and they will be put to death. And this is something that even

00:24:14.800 under the more enlightened emperors this happened.

00:24:18.420 One of the things about the book that's very chilling is to show that some of the

00:24:22.640 emperors, and it's almost like the modern world, they understand these Christians

00:24:26.760 have the deep faith, but they're kind of saying, hey, all you've got to do is light some

00:24:30.860 incense. You don't have to give up what you really believe. You just have to light some

00:24:34.680 incense. You just have to be performative, and we'll look the other

00:24:38.740 way and you can go along and lead your life. And it's obviously more important to lead your life

00:24:42.540 and have your community if you just do this performative. And about the Christians have 0.87

00:24:47.260 said, I can't do that. That is to the core of it. It's very chilling because many of the Roman 1.00

00:24:53.120 emperors, many of the Roman officials make a quite modern argument, right? They just be

00:24:59.120 performative. Just do this so that we can get past it because we're not that interested in

00:25:04.500 and snuffing you out. We just want to get past this. And what's amazing is the Christian has 0.99

00:25:09.900 said, I'm not doing that. That light one thing of incense in front of a statue, not just the

00:25:17.560 polytheism, but a statue of Augustus Caesar or whatever, you know, whatever emperors at the time

00:25:24.440 cuts to the core of my being. It's very chilling that the Christians had the option and were 1.00

00:25:29.440 dangled often, not all the time, but dangled the option of just be performative and go about your

00:25:34.420 business. They said, no, that it's performative to you, but it cuts to the core of my faith and

00:25:39.880 I won't do it. And they were then, and they told him, hey, you're going to have the most

00:25:43.760 heinous tortures if you don't. And they said, hey, it is what it is. Tom Williams.

00:25:50.720 Yeah. And this, unfortunately, this is exactly what we see today. There will always be the great

00:25:55.860 temptation for modern Christians is accommodation. It is that willingness to do the modern equivalent 0.86

00:26:03.960 of burning some incense before the statue of Caesar. And this is something, that's why

00:26:09.480 the Dick Durbins and the Nancy Pelosi's and the Joe Biden's of this world are embraced

00:26:15.500 by radical secularists. This is a Christianity that they can live with. Oh, you've got a rosary 0.88

00:26:20.340 in your pocket. You're my kind of Christian because obviously your Christian faith does

00:26:24.960 not impinge upon any of your moral beliefs, any of your political stances. It is something that

00:26:30.540 doesn't change who you are. And so we like you. We will embrace you because you are willing to

00:26:36.280 burn that incense to Caesar. And for Christians who take their faith seriously, they are the 0.99

00:26:41.880 enemy. If you're Amy Coney Barrett and you come in and the dogma lives loudly in you,

00:26:47.700 you are not acceptable. We will not give you a place at this table. We will do everything we

00:26:52.320 can to thwart your rise here because we don't trust you, because we disqualify you because

00:27:00.180 of that faith, because of that deeply held belief, because of that devotion that you

00:27:04.100 feel.

00:27:04.560 You're not able to be unbiased.

00:27:06.300 You're going to be problematic in your rulings because of that faith that you possess.

00:27:12.780 So we see how history really does repeat itself.

00:27:17.120 It is those Christians who are willing to live by their faith and take it seriously

00:27:20.460 enough, they are the ones who are going to suffer for it.

00:27:23.180 And if you're willing to accommodate, if you're willing to say, hey, whatever, we can't stop

00:27:28.520 progress.

00:27:28.920 If this is the way society is going, let's just all get on board.

00:27:32.120 Let's get on the bus and they'll let us keep our rosaries. 0.62

00:27:35.360 You know, those are the ones who are going to do just fine.

00:27:40.040 Hang on, Tom, we're going to take a break.

00:27:42.920 We're going to talk about, by the way, we wouldn't have had Christianity bequeathed to us as it was if the early church had been accommodationist.

00:27:52.720 They weren't. They would not accommodate.

00:27:55.060 And that led to the rise of the Judeo-Christian West. 0.88

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00:31:04.520 Okay, welcome back.

00:31:05.780 A topic that people don't want to talk about is Christian persecution throughout the world.

00:31:13.360 It is getting more intense.

00:31:15.900 And one of the reasons it's getting more intense is because nobody wants to address it.

00:31:21.400 It's not addressed in the pulpits, not addressed in the pulpits of the Catholic Church, certainly

00:31:26.000 not addressed in the pulpits of much of the evangelical Protestant community, although

00:31:30.580 there are both Catholic missionaries and evangelical ministers and ministries doing an incredible job

00:31:38.120 in particularly places like sub-Saharan Africa. Tom Williams has written an incredible book,

00:31:44.480 The Coming Christian Persecution. We'll continue with Dr. Tom Williams, as Dr. Tom Williams is

00:31:50.460 going to explain. Not simply why this is important, but most importantly, that if we don't

00:31:58.080 stop it now. It's only going to get worse. The persecution of Christians throughout the world,

00:32:04.020 you're seeing it in the United States. Obviously, it's in China with the Chinese Communist Party,

00:32:09.360 but I think you'll be shocked about how widespread it is. Dr. Tom Williams,

00:32:14.220 the coming Christian persecution. The drivers of Christian persecution 0.98

00:32:17.940 are intensifying. And the traditional and historic bastions against Christian persecution,

00:32:25.320 Those that uphold religious liberty, those that defend and protect Christians are weakening. 0.92

00:32:32.460 And these two things going hand in hand set up a situation where things cannot but get worse.

00:32:40.320 And there's a problem which, you know, I hope this book will address this problem, will alleviate in some way this problem,

00:32:46.080 the widespread ignorance as to the magnitude of the problem.

00:32:49.920 People do not realize how many Christians are actively persecuted around the world.

00:32:55.320 And how this persecution, which is very bloody in many places, is becoming bloody right before our eyes, even in the post-Christian West, even where persecution used to mean for a Westerner, you know, a little ostracization, a little bit of ridicule in the academy, a little bit of, oh, isn't that sweet, that, you know, devout kind of benighted figure.

00:33:17.540 And now it's something that becomes more and more hostile, more and more aggressive.

00:33:22.400 And we are going to see more of this kind of violent attack because there are no voices speaking out on behalf of Christians. 0.78

00:33:29.760 Christians are considered to be a majority.

00:33:32.900 They're considered to be wellstanding.

00:33:35.100 They're considered to be able to take care of themselves.

00:33:37.860 And as soon as Christians start raising their voices and say, this is not a good situation,

00:33:42.140 the way that Christianity is being portrayed and the dangerous rhetoric being used,

00:33:47.460 then you get the stop whining. 0.71

00:33:49.680 You know, don't be a whiner. 0.90

00:33:51.180 Don't complain about your situation.

00:33:52.760 And even among many Christians, they're held back in speaking the truth about what is going on

00:33:57.940 because they don't want to look like that.

00:34:00.100 They don't want to be the one who's complaining or shining a light on that very, very problematic area.

00:34:08.240 Tell me about when you say the institutions that used to be there to prevent this.

00:34:12.140 are not there anymore, that this is starting to ramp up, and they're not there. What do you mean

00:34:16.740 by that? Well, let's start with the Western media. The Western media simply ignores,

00:34:22.980 but ignores, I don't really believe that it's because people don't know what's going on.

00:34:28.540 There's an unwillingness to investigate, and there's an unwillingness to report

00:34:32.620 on the reality of Christian persecution around the world. It's something that

00:34:36.280 is intentionally withheld from people. And so we talk, I talk to people all the time,

00:34:41.580 very right-thinking, good people who have no concept of the reality of Christian persecution

00:34:48.000 in the world. They just do not understand how widespread it is, how violent it is,

00:34:53.500 how terrible and terrifying it is in the world, because they never hear about it.

00:34:58.440 They don't happen to read, you know, websites, the Christian website that actually

00:35:03.180 investigate this, those reports that come out, which are never covered, obviously, on

00:35:08.760 mainstream media.

00:35:09.600 But one of the reasons, but hang on, but one of the reasons they don't know it is that

00:35:13.900 it's not preached from the pulpit.

00:35:16.560 It's not preached in the evangelical church.

00:35:18.300 It's not preached in the Catholic church.

00:35:20.180 It's, you know, all you hear, and particularly the Catholic church, some in the more mainstream

00:35:24.220 Protestant church, is dialogue, right?

00:35:26.680 Is dialogue.

00:35:27.800 You never hear this coming from the Vatican.

00:35:29.520 You never hear it preached on virtually any pulpit of a Catholic church on a Sunday.

00:35:35.040 You very rarely hear it from any of the evangelical or even the outside of the mainstream Christian preachers, unless somebody is tied to missionary work in sub-Saharan Africa or they're tied to missionary work in the Middle East, like in Iraq.

00:35:52.280 I mean, is it one of the reasons we're not hearing it?

00:35:55.120 It's not just the mainstream media is in the media's fault.

00:35:59.040 There's something about the church is not putting this front and center is that, hey, there's a problem here.

00:36:05.000 They're coming after us in a very organized way, whether that is in communist China, in sub-Saharan Africa, in eradication of the Christians in the cradle of Christianity, which is the Near East or the Middle East.

00:36:18.120 I mean, isn't one of the central things to hear that either because of they're afraid to talk about it or they just are they they they they like their international organizations and they don't want to be out there actually defending Christianity, that the more official aspects of the Christian and Catholic Church won't address this.

00:36:37.920 Well, you're absolutely right, Steve. I think there is a very strong tendency to want to assimilate, to want to just get along, to want to say this brotherhood of man. It's like John Lennon's Imagine.

00:36:52.220 Everybody, it's so prevalent in mainstream Christianity, this sense of, you know, we're all the same.

00:37:00.440 The religions are all basically, they're all different paths to God. 1.00

00:37:04.720 One's just as good as another.

00:37:07.040 Nothing should separate us.

00:37:08.500 Nothing, we shouldn't be arguing about this.

00:37:10.380 We shouldn't be, you know, pointing out differences.

00:37:13.720 We shouldn't be living out to the full who we are.

00:37:17.540 We should be willing to accommodate and to bend and to fit in.

00:37:20.880 See, this is what the emperors – this is what the savvy and smart emperors, cunning emperors in the first century and second century offered up was the accommodation.

00:37:32.600 Just be performative.

00:37:33.680 All you got to do is burn a little bit of incense.

00:37:35.920 You don't even – they didn't even demand that you believe it.

00:37:39.200 All you have to do is just give me a little burn there in the dish and go about your merry way. 0.92

00:37:43.840 Isn't that exactly what's happened here with the institutional church in the 21st century when the church is under – as you make in the book one of the things that's most compelling, you actually make the case that the persecution today in the 21st century is probably worse in any metric you want to look at than in the 1st and 2nd century of the early church, sir.

00:38:07.060 Yes, well, that's, I think, verifiably, statistically true. It's just the pervasiveness

00:38:15.400 of Christian persecution in the world, the fact that 75% of people who are persecuted for whatever

00:38:20.540 faith they belong to happen to be Christians, that there are some 360 million Christians who

00:38:26.140 live under severe persecution, in danger of their lives every day. These are facts and figures that

00:38:32.100 are that are so startling and so but again so uh unknown uh this is really the untold story

00:38:38.740 that so many people are ignorant of but i agree with you and look you know the catholic catholics

00:38:43.420 in the in the united states we have a whole history of this there's always been a temptation

00:38:47.480 because catholics were very persecuted early on as as you know the irish and the polish and the

00:38:52.940 and sometimes germans and they did everything their power to make it look like oh i'm first

00:38:58.720 an American and then I'm a Catholic, right? This was a temptation. It was a temptation to fit in,

00:39:03.760 to assimilate, to make it show that you're a better citizen, show that you're in this. We

00:39:08.060 got John F. Kennedy out of this, you know, the one who said, you know, I'm not, I'm first an

00:39:12.540 American. I'm going to be an American. And this is something that there's always been a struggle

00:39:16.980 in kind of the Catholic spirit in the U.S. But it's only more recently the evangelicals and the

00:39:21.560 Protestants have joined in that same timidness and that same unwillingness to say, you know,

00:39:27.180 I am a Christian and I uphold and my allegiance to Jesus Christ is actually superior to any other

00:39:33.900 allegiance as I have. And it's what makes me a good citizen. What makes me a loyal patriot is

00:39:39.160 because I actually do believe and I believe that I should be loyal to my nation. But this is

00:39:45.180 something that we're very afraid of right now. We're so afraid of not fitting in. We're so afraid

00:39:49.880 of being considered to be obscurantist, to be considered to be, you know, less cool than the

00:39:57.200 academics who say that this is something that's very passe. We all want to fit in. And this is

00:40:02.280 the great temptation of our day. And it's why so few people are willing to stand up and be counted

00:40:07.220 and just say, hey, yeah, I'm an educated person and I am a Christian and I believe in the creed.

00:40:13.760 I recite it on Sunday and I believe it. And I try to, you know, base my life around this because

00:40:18.840 these are the truths that actually give firm grounding to my existence and explain reality

00:40:24.720 to me. This is what explains human existence and my personal existence in the most cogent,

00:40:30.180 coherent way that I've ever seen that I can imagine. But many Christians don't want to do 0.99

00:40:35.120 that. They want to keep that away in the little catacombs of their house. And when they walk out

00:40:40.320 on the street, they want to look like everybody else. They don't want to be seen as somehow

00:40:44.600 different, because it's dangerous, it's uncomfortable to be different. But this is

00:40:50.700 the world we live in, and we have to stand up, or else we're going to get the situation that

00:40:55.340 we're getting right now. Did you see any, because I know you follow this, and we follow it quite

00:41:01.360 closely, do you remember any big names in either the institutional Protestant Church or the Catholic

00:41:08.760 church, or even come up and condemn what happened against the children at the Covenant School? Was

00:41:15.640 there any outrage at all in the Christian community as far as you saw it?

00:41:19.560 One person that I saw, and I do follow this as closely as I can, Franklin Graham,

00:41:25.980 whom I'm a big fan of, I think he's a worthy scion of his father, did make a couple very

00:41:34.780 interesting Facebook post. He's got 10 million followers, and he brought this up and said that

00:41:39.820 was, he said, evil walked into that school that day. He actually was very poetic and very stern

00:41:47.420 in the way that he described the situation. I mean, he hasn't gone into the whole question of

00:41:54.320 this transgender in the way that the mainstream media are addressing it, but he did definitely

00:42:00.100 come down very, very hard and brought up the fact that these were Christians who were killed

00:42:04.420 because they were Christians.

00:42:08.060 I mean, your warning is why things are going to get worse.

00:42:12.140 Isn't one of the reasons it's going to get worse

00:42:13.940 because Christian leadership in the Catholic Church,

00:42:19.420 the mainstream Protestant churches, leading evangelicals,

00:42:22.180 were to basically draw a line now and say,

00:42:25.280 this is going to stop on our watch.

00:42:27.480 Isn't that one of the most important things?

00:42:29.300 Isn't that the beginning of stopping it getting worse?

00:42:33.540 Absolutely.

00:42:34.420 Um, but part of the reason it's going to get worse is because we're just not seeing that.

00:42:38.820 And I think that even when an, an isolated Christian leader or a Catholic bishop in some

00:42:44.440 diocese stands up and makes, you know, makes a strong case right now, uh, those bishops are not

00:42:50.740 getting support from Rome. They're not getting support. If you're a Protestant pastor, you're 0.53

00:42:55.080 not getting support from your community. You're not getting support from the other pastors.

00:42:58.480 You're very much alone. You're like a Jeremiah, uh, preaching and you're not feeling like you're

00:43:04.300 getting a lot of love for that. You're not getting a lot of support. And I think that that is the

00:43:08.240 reason this very tiny minority of those who are willing to speak out,

00:43:12.140 we're just not seeing the kind of leadership we need right now to bring attention

00:43:16.240 to the dire reality that we're living.

00:43:20.920 Tom, if you could hang on for a second, we're going to take a short commercial break.

00:43:24.340 We've got Dr. Tom Williams, who's the author of many, many books,

00:43:28.080 principally about theology. He's written this really for Crisis

00:43:31.920 publication, The Coming Christian Persecution, with someone as deep and profound as Dr. Williams

00:43:40.240 takes on about the persecution of the Christian church, particularly the subtitle, Why Things

00:43:46.160 Are Getting Worse, and How to Prepare for What Is to Come. If you're a believing Christian, 0.99

00:43:53.260 it is quite a stark book, but a must-read, and more importantly, a must-understand the argument.

00:43:59.840 Okay, we're going to take a short commercial break.

00:44:01.920 We're going to return in the war room.

00:44:03.520 This is our special every year we do this on Holy Saturday

00:44:08.280 as we await Easter Sunday, the descent into hell.

00:44:14.860 So we're going to take a short commercial break.

00:44:16.340 We'll be back in a moment.

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Bannon's War Room - April 04, 2026

Episode 5273： WarRoom Easter Weekend Special： Descent Into Hell

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