Stephen K. Vance and Frank W. Walker are joined by Jenny Holland to discuss Trump's peace plan for Ukraine, the rise of evangelicalism in university, and the growing influence of Pope John Paul III. They also discuss the latest in the Joey Barton and Jeremy Vine scandals and the scandalous comments made by a BBC commentator about female football commentators.
00:06:18.400So let's start the show with some good news, which is always nice.
00:06:22.720And then we'll, as we're doing the good news with Jenny,
00:06:26.040Frank can be sharpening his blade to stick it firmly in the back of a hashtag not my Pope.
00:06:35.320Jenny, so let's go to the Washington Post of all newspapers.
00:06:38.800You are basically a resident expert now on recounting for us all these developments that are taking place on the also largely evangelical revival following Charlie Kirk's brutal public martyrdom.
00:06:55.920And we said right off, you know, the war room is a real America's voice of very, very clear about this right from the beginning, that there is going to be a revival.
00:07:05.640The story here in the in Washington Post actually refers to that to some extent.
00:07:10.860Tell us what the situation is here amongst university goers.
00:07:16.540Yeah, I mean, this is I've become your resident expert in good news.
00:07:22.620I'm always getting the good news stories.
00:07:25.120The so the Washington Post of all places is reporting from a series of a group of different universities.
00:07:31.520The same thing that we've been seeing reported in the New York Post and the free press from San Francisco to New York, even to the UK, all over among Gen Z, an increase in religious belief.
00:07:48.120This article, like most of the others, is very clearly stating that these people, these young people are looking for meaning and community.
00:07:59.380This is what is driving them into the arms of God, quite literally.
00:08:04.740The article itself is sort of a little bit all over the place.
00:08:07.980It does mention a Pew poll that states or claims that actually religious belief is going down among 18 to 24 year olds, but also a Gallup poll that says otherwise.
00:08:21.120But really, the main takeaways here are there is a surge in belief, not just in Christianity.
00:08:26.320They do mention things like wicked beliefs and stuff like that.
00:08:30.080But the schools that people were interviewed at were Notre Dame, University of Maryland, an American university, at which one student said something very poignant.
00:08:39.360And I think that really cuts to the heart of this, which is, he says, his generation.
00:08:43.300Before you do, before you do the quote, I just want to wheel back on something you said, because that's extremely important.
00:08:52.860OK, you mentioned that because these aren't contradictory.
00:08:56.660What you said is that there's a falling away from religious identity, if you will, identification amongst the youth.
00:09:05.420It was at the 18 to 24 bracket. But at the same time, and this is what I think is going to be important that I flag up for the War Room audience, is a growing intensification in faith of those that do go.
00:09:19.140And especially those coming into the church for the first time.
00:09:22.880Right at the beginning of this article, and I'll come to your quote in a moment, Jenny, right?
00:09:29.600This is abs, this, the article, as you say, is all over the place, but it does touch on some very, quite well, on some, on some actual truths of the dynamics that we're covering here on the War Room.
00:09:41.840Right, look, what is, so you have this, this, this dual opposing movement going on in the youth, falling away whole scale from religious identification, self-identification, but also a growing intensity.
00:09:57.780At the beginning of this article, it actually mentions a number of case studies of specific individual and their stories.
00:10:05.920And I just want to say that in one, the first example it gives, it says that this guy basically is doing Bible studies on Mondays and Thursdays at university, doing mass on Wednesday evenings.
00:10:22.180And it says here that his dedication to his new faith, because he was a lapsed evangelical, his dedication to his new faith might put even the most devout Catholic to shame.
00:10:33.960There is a tension, I think, and it's going to require some prudence that I don't believe the institutional church possesses on how to handle, you know, we said this on the show, we said it, Jenny, with you, we said it with Frank Walker, we said it with Liz Yore.
00:10:49.960There is an opportunity here for the institutional churches on how it receives, especially young guys, young men, young 20-year-old kids, right, who are coming in and becoming incredibly intense in their approach to the faith.
00:11:03.280And what are they going to see, right? They're going to see sort of Marxist, communist, if it's the Catholic Church, latent homosexual, and if it's evangelical, they're going to have the blue-pink hair brigade.
00:11:15.680They're going to see this, and most of them are going to run a mile because it's not what they think that they're going to find.
00:11:21.400So look, we'll come on to that later. Jenny, why don't you, because that's really important.
00:11:25.880This is an epoch-wide opportunity for those who are interested in the promulgation of Christianity that is taking place right now.
00:11:35.560It's an epoch-defining opportunity, and I don't think our institutional churches are prepared for it.
00:11:42.240They're going to know how to handle it. In fact, I think they're actively going to try.
00:11:46.960They're going to handle it so maladroitly they're going to offend people because they're going to say,
00:11:51.340so you've come in because you've been following social media and you're interested in Christianity.
00:11:55.880We're going to tell you what's Christianity, and it's basically asylum seeker, welcome, and what have you.
00:12:03.920Jenny, go on please with your quote, because I didn't mean to interrupt you for so long.
00:12:08.160No, that's fine. I think that's a very fair point, actually.
00:12:10.640I think previous stories we've heard also mention similar things.
00:12:14.980Children of lapsed, like in one case it was children of lapsed Catholics who had left because of sexual abuse scandals in the 80s and 90s,
00:12:22.720and they were disgusted by that, are refining it because the children are going not through the elite sort of institutional hierarchy of the church.
00:12:30.900I mean, my guess is, that was a guess, but my guess is a lot of these young men and women are finding it either through peers or through online,
00:12:39.780I would say influencers, but I don't mean that in a denigrating way, other religious young people who portray the faith in a sort of sincere and true way
00:12:50.220and aren't, let's quote unquote, corrupted by the hierarchical church politics.
00:12:56.500And the reason they are looking out for this, the reason they're receptive to this at all in this intensely materialistic and materialist world that is full of sin, literally,
00:13:09.100is because, as one young man said from American University, that his generation were test dummies for social media and internet.
00:13:20.820And that is leading directly to, his words, a spiritual revolution.
00:13:25.400So whilst there is so much horror, and these children have been used, or these young adults now,
00:13:30.700but when they were children, they were used as test dummies, not just for social media and internet,
00:13:35.000but for even more nefarious things like transgenderism and far left pornographic teachings in schools.
00:13:43.320These children were experimented upon, essentially, in all of these ways.
00:13:48.360The silver lining is that is leading directly, like I said earlier, to the arms of God.