00:11:40.640But unbeknownst to most Christians, that was actually more of a minor aspect of the message of Christianity,
00:11:47.660the entire ethos, the morality that was created.
00:11:52.340And in short, before I elaborate, the problem with materialist Christianity, which in many ways has, like I said, permeated the worldview of all Christians, is that it perfectly comports with secularism and atheism.
00:12:03.500And that is why Christianity is still allowed to live side by side with a secular or even atheistic environment, because it also agrees.
00:12:14.120All that we want to do is make sure no one's physically hurt. There's no violence.
00:12:17.940But the question now becomes, what happened to morality?
00:12:21.060That was a word that used to be pivotal and important and fundamental to something like Christianity.
00:12:26.900Where is what is their morality anymore?
00:12:29.100And I'm not talking, of course, about individual Christians.
00:12:31.340I'm sure there are many devout Christians still in the world, but it's not something that is socially acknowledged or something much less that is socially pursued that we talk about.
00:12:41.400Okay, so, and once one, I think, this is my realization, when I think about it, and how
00:12:48.080morality is not, Western people and Christians will say they're moral, but again, it's through
00:12:54.280a materialist paradigm, and you know that by simply looking at what used to be the greatest
00:12:59.460sins and the greatest evils for a society, and all of them are, to various degrees, completely
00:13:05.500accepted by Christians today, and all one has to do is look at the sexual mores of the
00:13:12.340West today, and very few Christians will even argue or talk about it or even dispute it,
00:13:18.160and they'd be, of course, scandalized to feel like they have to talk about it, but if you
00:13:22.340look at historic Christianity, biblical Christianity, Christianity in all of its forms, something
00:13:28.000like sexual mores, sexual sins, that was one of the pinnacles and one of the most unquestioned
00:13:33.460aspects of Christianity. So you see, this is why, why is it not being mentioned? Because, well,
00:13:38.500no one's hurting anyone. And so that's what I mean. That's a perfect example of how a Christian
00:13:43.260adopts the materialist worldview. Now there used to be something, and just to make it simple,
00:13:50.400you may have heard, I'm sure you have, of course, many Catholics, Anglicans of the seven deadly
00:13:55.180sins, which actually very much informed the worldview of Christians in the pre-modern era.
00:14:00.980and they are i often miss but let's see uh wrath greed gluttony envy lust um sloth and i always
00:14:11.660miss one pride oh yeah the worst one yeah i know the root of them all yeah you're right okay
00:14:20.400so think about those seven things now okay that is what a christian society thought about now
00:14:26.000these are all metaphysical they're not material okay these were metaphysical principles
00:14:31.120This is what Christianity was all about.
00:14:33.540Notice, killing is not one of the seven deadly sins.
00:14:43.120Now, when I look at these, the seven deadly sins, which were fundamental to a Christian
00:14:47.180society, to Christendom essentially for centuries up until actually quite recently, not only
00:14:55.960are they not something that we talk about or something we condemn, they are in fact
00:15:00.200what we now celebrate and a bunch of our economy is based on it. And we call ourselves Christians
00:15:06.280and we live with it and we live in peace with this. And I find that very interesting. Pride,
00:15:11.120pride of course is exalted. Pride, you know, pride month. Think about that. Lust, that's
00:15:17.100everywhere you look. It's, it's, it's promoted. It's, it's, um, glamorized envy. Just think social
00:15:24.440media. Okay. Gluttony, turn TV on, everything's about, you know, putting images of food,
00:15:31.880sloth. So it's kind of amazing that to me, these are the principal issues. These are the first
00:15:36.980things that were actually at the heart of a Christian order. And they've just been completely
00:15:42.000so jettisoned and very few Christians even understand this. And that's the point. This is
00:15:46.500so subtle and so incremental that, and the reason is the best way I can put it is because Christians
00:15:52.920one way or the other, over the decades and possibly centuries, have just adopted a very
00:15:57.620materialist worldview, which is that, yeah, we talk about the afterlife, we talk about sin,
00:16:03.040we talk about being saved, but in the end, when it comes to society, we begin and end with just
00:16:09.440not hurting people, okay? So that's become the ultimate Christian virtue, and it is a virtue,
00:16:14.820I'm not arguing that, but I'm trying to say there was so much more above it, which actually gave
00:16:19.560meaning to life. Now, what happens when society, such as Western society, European society,
00:16:28.300jettisons what I'm talking about, which is essentially the metaphysical aspect of Christianity?
00:16:33.000You can actually call it the spiritual aspect because the physical or material aspect,
00:16:39.360what's the corollary? Is it metaphysical, the beyond the physical? Well, that's the spiritual.
00:16:44.420And I just think it's funny because a lot of Christians today, when they say the word
00:16:46.940spiritual. It means some sort of abstract, fuzzy feeling. Actually, I think to be spiritual is to
00:16:53.780be engaged and to comprehend and try to exercise the metaphysical aspects of Christianity, the
00:16:59.580things that are beyond the physical, that are not measurable, that deal with morals and ethics and
00:17:05.220that sort of thing. Now, when all that is jettisoned, as it has been in recent generations,
00:17:11.080a vacuum is created. And that's, I think, where we are. And what does nature abhor? It abhors a
00:17:15.860vacuum. Enter Islam. Well, Islam, of course, is its own body of system. It's its own religion.
00:17:22.980It has its own teachings. You know, one can be very hostile to it or critical of it. And I'm,
00:17:28.980of course, associated with those views. But we have to be honest, it also brings a sort of
00:17:34.440traditional worldview. It knows what a woman is and it knows what a man is. It's not confused about
00:17:39.800that, for example. And it has all sorts of things that were very traditional that Europeans and
00:17:45.100Christians would have agreed with historically. So I think that aspect, and it's confident.
00:17:50.520So now you have a vacuum in Europe, in the West in general, because of the reasons I've outlined
00:17:55.800dealing with the sort of slow melting away of Christianity based on these philosophical
00:18:00.840or epistemological underpinnings. Now you have Islam coming in and it may have all its problems
00:18:07.040and all, but it's still, it's very visceral, it's down to earth, and it does offer all of these
00:18:12.340things that are filling the vacuum, okay? And this is why you find Western people who are turned off
00:18:18.240and find no resonance in modern, secular, liberal culture, and they turn to something like Islam,
00:18:26.080which on the heart of it doesn't make any sense. I wager if those people actually had a true
00:18:31.300Christian upbringing, or according to the way I'm trying to describe it, which is actually much more
00:18:36.400fused with a metaphysical understanding, they would not find Islam appealing. But that's what
00:18:41.580I mean there's a vacuum now so that even something that is inherently inferior in as much as it offers
00:18:47.760something of a primordial conservative worldview that still resonates with all humans then it
00:18:54.160becomes appealing and then it's all especially in this country it's coalescing in a very strange
00:19:01.060way as you all know now that there's a new blasphemy code or about Islam a new anti-Islam
00:19:08.780or anti-islam hostility thing and of course this is just this is that one more way to help islam
00:19:17.000to become more empowered more entrenched you can't even criticize it and i haven't looked as closely
00:19:22.220as i'd like to the wording but it seems it's very fuzzy intentionally so and vague so that anything
00:19:28.400in it says things like encouraging hostility or well who's going to decide all that and um all of
00:19:36.020this. So the kind of Christianity that I'd like to see go away, and I'd like to see it sort of
00:19:41.980bring back a more traditional form of Christianity that prevailed during Christendom. Well, what I
00:19:49.540call, let's put it this way, I've tried to coin a word, I call it doormat Christianity. And I think
00:19:54.040this is the modern form of Christianity, whereby Christians are taught, again, in keeping with what
00:19:59.260I'm saying, this materialist idea, to just be doormats. Christianity begins and ends by you
00:20:04.920being a doormat. You're non-confrontational, you lay down, everyone walks all over you, and then
00:20:09.400you get to pat yourself on the shoulder and say, hey, look, I'm virtuous, I'm good. It's also a way
00:20:14.120to make, it's a way of turning a vice, cowardice into a virtue, I think, and that's why it's become
00:20:20.980very prevalent, what I call doormat Christianity. Doormat Christianity is not going to stand up
00:20:25.840against Islam, and that's what we're seeing. In fact, that kind of Christianity, which is
00:20:30.880completely about just being passive who do you think benefits from it most of all it's probably
00:20:36.560the more of an enemy you are to christianity the more the prevalent form of doormat christianity
00:20:42.060works and serves perfectly to empower the opposite um forces so i think christians need to recapture
00:20:50.820and reclaim a sense of morality and a sense of the metaphysical because otherwise you don't it's
00:20:57.620again I'm going back to the first premises these are these are the building
00:21:00.920blocks without these I don't believe that let's say the Islam problem cannot
00:21:05.420necessarily be addressed in and of itself you can't maintain a sort of this
00:21:10.220current culture which with all its confusions and sort of break away from
00:21:14.060Christianity and then be able to resist something like Islam I think it's all
00:21:18.740very interconnected if you go back and you can easily see this go back a
00:21:22.700century to the way Western Europeans and Westerners thought and Christians
00:21:26.540thought, you wouldn't have this Islam problem at all. Even if it existed, it would immediately
00:21:31.660be solved. So I think there's a lot of paralysis going on amongst Christians because they just
00:21:38.520feel like, like I said, the best they can do is to just be what they've been taught and bred,
00:21:43.520including, like I said, by forces that don't like Christianity. I saw a video in the Super Bowl
00:21:49.580a couple of years ago. And as you know, Super Bowl commercials, Super Bowl commercials tend to,
00:21:55.940They're very prominent and very mainstream.
00:21:58.940And all it was was images of people washing people's feet.
00:22:03.440But for some reason, all the people who were washing the feet looked like white, traditional Christian people.
00:22:08.840And all the people getting their feet washed were, well, one was a trans man.
00:22:13.160One was obviously, it was like on a migrant border and it was an illegal migrant.
00:22:17.740One was a woman committing an abortion or at an abortion center.
00:22:21.680And people are protesting, but another woman's washing her feet.
00:22:24.760And one was a criminal and a policeman was washing his feet.
00:22:28.660And then it ended up by saying Jesus didn't hate, he washed feet.
00:22:32.480And you can just see that kind of message, how it is completely geared to weakening Christianity by also, but making you think you're being a good Christian.
00:31:23.480When Islam roared out of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, what, in the 7th century?
00:31:32.600For those 100 years, the great cultures, ancient cultures, and many of them had accepted Christianity, Egypt and Syria being the two most significant, because the church was a desert church in those early years.
00:31:46.280You had Egypt, Syria, Babylon, which is modern-day Iraq, Persia, another ancient society had been at war with the Roman Empire forever, and then Spain.
00:31:58.400You had – and then eventually the Orthodox part of it, Constantinople, all that.
00:32:03.080You had Byzantine culture, which was really the Roman East.
00:32:08.620Unbelievable track record of overwhelming these societies and taking over their cultures.
00:32:17.260No, they were either Zoroastrian, as the Persians were, or they had very deep roots in Christianity, North Africa.
00:32:23.700I tell people all the time, St. Augustine, really, I think probably the greatest intellect we had in the early church, I think, was Berber.
00:32:44.520And you really went to Oxford, which was set up, Cambridge and Oxford were set up as great centers of learning for Christianity when they were set up.
00:32:54.120And you really hammered them on doormat Christianity.
00:32:57.720Just explain to our audience what that means after they heard your talk.
00:33:02.680And why did you come up with that topic to go to Oxford and really to throw down on?
00:33:08.800Well, I think what they wanted was for me to primarily talk about Islam, and I did.
00:33:12.620But, you know, I don't think it's useful to talk about Islam without the full context and understanding the vacuum within Christian civilization, which Islam is filling.
00:33:22.380And so I decided to address the topic of doormat Christianity, by which I mean, again, this idea, this, you know, that a real Christian is, you know, just completely passive, always turns the other cheek, never judges, is never confrontational, just is a doormat.
00:33:39.220and you know the temptation of that sort of interpretation is of course there's verses in
00:33:43.500the bible that would seem to support that sort of thing but there's also other verses and
00:33:48.440anecdotes from the new testament including jesus's life that don't and i find it interesting why does
00:33:53.940it why do why do christians always like to focus on one without the other the same jesus who said
00:33:59.320turn the other cheek didn't turn the other cheek when he was when he was actually slapped he
00:34:03.920questioned and was confrontational with the person, the soldier who slapped him. And he also,
00:34:08.960he engaged in violence. I think hurling tables and making a court of whips and whipping both
00:34:16.320cattle and humans out of a temple is a violent expression. So I just feel that Christians need
00:34:22.580to recapture and get a balance, a harmony. Okay. What is a heresy? A heresy is when you really
00:34:27.240focus on one aspect of the faith and to the exclusion of everything else. And I believe that
00:34:33.020to a great extent is what doormat Christianity has become. And that is why the greatest civilization
00:34:38.260born of Christian mores and ethos, the West, is completely crumbling because of this social
00:34:44.640paralysis that it's been infected by, which makes Christians think that all I have to do is
00:34:50.360just pray and wait and listen to God and just do nothing and it'll get better. Well, that's kind of
00:34:57.120what's been going on for decades. And look where the West is. Look where Europe is right now.
00:35:02.440Like I said, Islam hasn't changed. It's been doing what it's been doing, swallowing up. If it managed to swallow up the older, as you were mentioning, Egypt and Syria and North Africa and all these nations that were the heart of the Christian world, this is where the theology was coming from.
00:35:19.960this is where the church fathers were coming from and they were christian for centuries and if they
00:35:24.260were able to be conquered and swallowed up do you think and europe we know it was the final bastion
00:35:29.580it's called the west for a reason it was the final western appendage of christendom that still
00:35:34.980didn't get conquered and portions of it did for long periods of time such as spain and the balkans
00:35:40.600the mediterranean islands so people have forgotten all this history and the muslim impetus has not
00:35:46.740changed whatsoever. But the West and Christians have completely dropped their guard and they don't
00:35:52.540feel like they can ever engage in violence or even be confrontational. We're at a point where
00:35:57.980Christians don't even have to engage in violence. That's the whole point. But it's going to get to
00:36:02.660the point where if they don't do anything, it will be a matter of life or death, survival of the
00:36:08.540fittest. But Christians can't even get to the point where they're assertive and confrontational
00:36:14.300about their own particular beliefs vis-a-vis the other let's say islam and they always
00:36:19.580you know these churches in your in england that i visited they frequently invite muslim imams to come
00:36:25.960and proclaim quranic verses often the ones that are antithetical to christianity and no muslim
00:36:32.320would ever do that okay and and so it's it's that divide have you ever heard okay have you ever
00:36:37.760heard when you talk about when you talk about this interfaith dialogue have you ever heard
00:36:42.200You're an expert. Have you ever heard of anywhere in the Muslim world where they've invited a Christian cleric, a Catholic priest or a Christian pastor into a mosque to claim the word of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, sir?
00:36:58.660I've never heard. I don't necessarily discount it because there could be some fringe, you know, small mosque that is trying to make, you know, win brownie points with some Westerner.
00:37:08.020But on a large scale level, the way we see it, the way Christians do it.
00:37:12.980But Raymond, if that had happened, if that had happened, the Muslim world, they'd be beheaded as apostates.
00:37:20.460The one thing about the Muslim world, whether it's Sunni or Shia, they self-police.
00:37:36.960with you yeah one way i want to go back in history though with your writings and your books and if
00:37:43.880we get a chance while we talk guys put the covers of the books back up um as it blew through persia
00:37:51.060and it blew through egypt and it blew through north africa and it blew through syria and it
00:37:55.980blew through babylon you know the tigers and euphrates and then started to blow through the
00:38:01.020orthodox part roaring out of saudi arabia it was stopped really in in places like vienna and places
00:38:09.060like tours uh which people don't realize how deep into deep into france that was and then eventually
00:38:16.160it was uh reversed in spain and spain wanted back and as soon as spain wanted back they started the
00:38:23.320exploration of the new world all of really modern history is tied to this its antecedents are tied
00:38:29.200into this struggle between the Christian West and Islam.
00:38:34.640But in reading your books, whether I'm talking about different sieges or, you know, in the
00:38:39.740Mediterranean islands or in the Balkans or up in Europe, it was a confrontation.
00:38:46.320If you had not confronted it with not just military power, but the internal fortification
00:38:55.660and formation of a religion that, that informed you informed in your formation, told you that
00:39:04.160you must fight for this, that you cannot surrender. If you surrender on this, then you're really not
00:39:09.640a Christian. You're really not a believer in Christ. And the, the, what it gave the inner
00:39:14.800energy of people is throughout your books. And I think that's the most, the two most important
00:39:20.560lessons i think that are lost here is how these cultures and societies were very developed that
00:39:28.560they took over and had deep religious practices particularly in persia as persia with uh with
00:39:34.360what the myth the mythos religion and then zarasterism uh also up in syria had turned had
00:39:40.520basically started to convert to christianity but they had other religions too same with egypt
00:39:44.480Egypt has an ancient religious faith, but it also had many—I think you're of Egyptian descent—it also had a big Christian community.
00:39:54.780Until it was confronted by the Christian West in places like from Vienna to Tours, and then later in Spain, until it was confronted, it was overwhelming everything.
00:40:08.900And so the two lessons is—and they kind of teach a warrior's philosophy.
00:40:13.120I think that's why so many young men are attracted to Islam.
00:40:23.460The warrior ethos is so embedded within Islam, and that makes it, has made it originally in its origins, and in the now, very attractive to men.
00:40:33.040Including Western men who grow up being told they have to be women, essentially, and emasculated or doormat Christians.
00:40:41.680But little do they know that their own Christian tradition has a very rich tradition of standing up and fighting back, okay, the concept of just war.
00:40:53.940All those, you know, you discussed all those battles and Vienna and Tours and it goes on.
00:40:59.500Even the United States of America, think about it.
00:41:01.640This is how this was a constant thing.
00:41:03.900You know, even the United States of America's very first war as a nation was with Muslims who were acting and speaking just like ISIS, the Barbary pirates of North Africa who were kidnapping American sailors and holding and enslaving them and doing all sorts of vile things to them.
00:41:21.540and when when Jefferson and Adams finally met with the Barbary ambassador and they said can't
00:41:27.820we just be friends well you know we did we did nothing to you you can have your religion we'll
00:41:31.580just trade and he just said according to our prophet Muhammad according to the Quran you are
00:41:36.840the infidel you are the enemy it's our job to lay in wait and plunder you and enslave you and so
00:41:41.780forth okay so even America's very first experience as a nation put aside all those other you know
00:41:48.080what we were talking about, Vienna and all these major battles. And, you know, you also made a good
00:41:52.300point about, it's true, the entire exploration age, as it's called, was also a reflection of
00:41:58.600this nonstop, constant struggle coming primarily from Islam. Christopher Columbus, and even before
00:42:05.840him, the Portuguese, Prince Henry, for example, the reason they were trying to navigate and go
00:42:10.200around Africa was always in the context of the crusade against Islam, including to recapture
00:42:16.180the Holy Land from Muslims. This would be in the 1400s, Prince Henry, for example. But then even
00:42:22.600later, Columbus, remember, Isabella and Ferdinand were avowed crusaders against Islam in Spain.
00:42:30.860And they were the culmination of the Reconquista and getting rid of Islam after having dealt with
00:42:37.560it for seven, eight centuries. And why did they get Columbus in their employ? It was in the context
00:42:44.040of continuing the crusade. Now we've evicted them. Now we have to go back to the Holy War.
00:42:48.540And the reason they had to sail is because Christians could not travel by land to the east
00:42:53.460because that was where the Muslims, the Ottomans and the Mamluks in Egypt. And once you enter
00:42:58.920there, you're killed or enslaved immediately. So that's why they were looking for different
00:43:04.040passages. So it's amazing when you think about the very history of the founding, the existence
00:43:09.200of the West is so heavily shaped by Islam in a negative way, in a violent way. One historian
00:43:16.500says Islam was a violent midwife that gave birth to the West. Henry Perrin said the dark ages and
00:43:23.360the rise of feudalism and Charlemagne would have been impossible without Muhammad. You know,
00:43:28.500they're very intertwined, but not in a good way. And yet that's all been lost on so many Westerners,
00:43:34.480which is why I wrote these books, you know, to document all this and bring it back.
00:43:38.540But it's so lost on Westerners who've been, you know, believing that Islam is peace.
00:43:44.100And, you know, John Esposito, the professor from Georgetown, he says five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed between Muslims and Christians
00:43:53.300until an imperial papal power play led to a series of so-called holy wars, which have left the legacy of enduring mistrust.
00:44:00.920So basically those centuries we're talking about when Muslims conquered the old Christian world and Persia, and we didn't even talk about further east conquering India and Pakistan, of course, were our Indians who became Muslims after about 80 million of them were killed between 1100 and 1500 and further east and into sub-Saharan Africa, of course, where now we're seeing Muslims slaughtering and engaged in genocide against Christians.
00:44:28.480And so all this is just, you know, yesterday was yesterday, the day before was combat combat Islamophobia day, according to the U.N.
00:44:37.580OK, that's what we're talking about. Not not this.
00:44:40.780No, this is ridiculous. Can we in the time we have left, given that we're in a kinetic war driven by and I realize, oh, it's the nuclear weapon.
00:44:52.100It's this and that it's this and that it is at its essence. It's radical Islam.
00:44:57.060I'm not saying that we should have gone at the time we went or how we went.
00:45:03.880But you cannot talk about what's happened in Persian Iran without getting to the core of it,
00:45:10.440that this is one of the most radical, not the most radical part of Islam in this whole thing with the Mahdi and the Imam.
00:45:18.460It almost seems like people, oh, my gosh, we got to go back after 9-11.
00:45:21.800We have to go back after, you know, after the Iraq war or after the during the Iraq war or during the time of President Trump put the put the travel ban in.
00:45:31.480We have to go back and study it. Yes, you have to, because a lot of Westerners like people in London, the elites in London, people in Norway, people in Sweden, people in New York City, some people in Texas.
00:45:44.860They believe if you just don't confront it and you look the other way, it's going to take care of itself and everything is going to be fine.