00:11:22.860Think about that. Lust. That's everywhere you look. It's promoted. It's glamorized. Envy. Just think social media. Okay. Gluttony. Turn TV on. Everything's about, you know, putting images of food. Sloth.0.96
00:11:40.700So it's kind of amazing that to me, these are the principal issues. These are the first things that were actually at the heart of a Christian order. And they've just been completely so jettisoned and very few Christians even understand this. And that's the point. This is so subtle and so incremental that, um, and the reason is the best way I can put it is because Christians one way or the other over the decades and possibly centuries have just adopted a very materialist worldview, which is that.0.93
00:12:08.100yeah, we talk about the afterlife. We talk about sin. We talk about being saved. But in the end,
00:12:13.620when it comes to society, we begin and end with just not hurting people. Okay. So that's become
00:12:21.000the ultimate Christian virtue. And it is a virtue. I'm not arguing that, but I'm trying to say there
00:12:25.000was so much more above it, which actually gave meaning to life. Now, what happens when society,
00:12:33.440such as Western society, European society, jettisons what I'm talking about, which is
00:12:38.280essentially the metaphysical aspect of Christianity. You can actually call it the spiritual aspect
00:12:43.120because the physical or material aspect, what's the corollary? Is it metaphysical? The beyond
00:12:50.560the physical? Well, that's the spiritual. And I just think it's funny because a lot of Christians
00:12:54.360today, when they say the word spiritual, it means some sort of abstract, fuzzy feeling.
00:12:59.080actually i think to be spiritual is to be engaged and to comprehend and try to exercise the
00:13:05.460metaphysical aspects of christianity the things that are beyond the physical that are not measurable
00:13:10.420that deal with morals and ethics and that sort of thing now when all that is jettisoned as it has
00:13:17.080been in recent generations a vacuum is created and that's i think where we are and what does
00:13:22.480nature abhor? It abhors a vacuum. Enter Islam. Well, Islam, of course, is its own body system.
00:13:29.960It's its own religion. It has its own teachings. You know, one can be very hostile to it or critical0.63
00:13:36.420of it. And I'm, of course, associated with those views. But we have to be honest, it also brings
00:13:41.800a sort of traditional worldview. It knows what a woman is and it knows what a man is. It's not
00:13:47.360confused about that, for example. And it has all sorts of things that were very traditional that
00:13:52.400Europeans and Christians would have agreed with historically. So I think that aspect be in its
00:13:57.960confidence. So now you have a vacuum in Europe or in the West in general, because of the reasons
00:14:02.860I've outlined dealing with the sort of slow melting away of Christianity based on these
00:14:08.540philosophical or epistemological underpinnings. Now you have Islam coming in and it may have all1.00
00:14:14.760its problems and all, but it's still, it's very visceral, it's down to earth, and it does offer
00:14:19.820all of these things that are filling the vacuum, okay? And this is why you find Western people who
00:14:25.740are turned off and find no resonance in modern, secular, liberal culture, and they turn to0.64
00:14:33.400something like Islam, which on the heart of it doesn't make any sense. I wager if those people0.99
00:14:38.720actually had a true Christian upbringing, or according to the way I'm trying to describe it,
00:14:43.300which is actually much more fused with a metaphysical understanding, they would not
00:14:47.900find Islam appealing. But that's what I mean. There's a vacuum now so that even something that
00:14:53.240is inherently inferior in as much as it offers something of a primordial conservative worldview
00:14:59.820that still resonates with all humans, then it becomes appealing. And then it's all, especially
00:15:05.860in this country, it's coalescing in a very strange way. As you all know now, there's a new
00:15:11.640blasphemy code or about Islam, a new anti-Islamophobia or anti-Islam hostility thing.0.99
00:15:20.800And of course, this is just, this is that one more way to help Islam to become more empowered,0.95
00:15:26.780more entrenched. You can't even criticize it. And I haven't looked as closely as I'd like
00:15:31.060to the wording, but it seems it's very fuzzy, intentionally so, and vague so that anything,
00:15:36.700It says things like encouraging hostility or, well, who's going to decide all that?
00:15:43.280And all of this, so the kind of Christianity that I'd like to see go away,0.75
00:15:48.240and I'd like to see it sort of bring back a more traditional form of Christianity
00:15:53.880that prevailed during Christendom, well, what I call, let's put it this way,
00:15:58.780I've tried to coin a word, I call it doormat Christianity.0.83
00:16:01.900And I think this is the modern form of Christianity whereby Christians are taught,0.96
00:16:05.580again, in keeping with what I'm saying, this materialist idea, to just be doormats, okay?0.97
00:16:11.420Christianity begins and ends by you being a doormat. You're non-confrontational, you lay
00:16:15.740down, everyone walks all over you, and then you get to pat yourself on the shoulder and say, hey,
00:16:19.740look, I'm virtuous, I'm good. It's also a way of turning a vice, cowardice into a virtue, I think,
00:16:28.380and that's why it's become very prevalent, what I call doormat Christianity. Doormat Christianity0.93
00:16:33.160is not going to stand up against Islam, and that's what we're seeing. In fact, that kind of1.00
00:16:37.600Christianity, which is completely about just being passive, who do you think benefits from it0.99
00:16:43.020most of all? It's probably, the more of an enemy you are to Christianity, the more the prevalent0.88
00:16:48.560form of doormat Christianity works and serves perfectly to empower the opposite forces.0.92
00:16:56.180So I think Christians need to recapture and reclaim a sense of morality and a sense of0.98
00:17:02.560metaphysical because otherwise you don't it's and again i'm going back to the first premises1.00
00:17:07.840these are these are the building blocks without these i don't believe that let's say the islam
00:17:13.100problem cannot necessarily be addressed in and of itself you can't maintain a sort of this current0.82
00:17:18.880culture which with all its confusions and sort of break away from christianity and then be able to0.94
00:17:24.520resist something like islam i think it's all very interconnected if you go back and you can easily0.94
00:17:30.240see this. Go back a century to the way Western Europeans and Westerners thought and Christians
00:17:34.820thought, you wouldn't have this Islam problem at all. Even if it existed, it would immediately1.00
00:17:39.960be solved. So I think there's a lot of paralysis going on amongst Christians because they just1.00
00:17:46.820feel like, like I said, the best they can do is to just be what they've been taught and bred,
00:17:51.820including, like I said, by forces that don't like Christianity. I saw a video in the Super Bowl
00:17:57.880a couple years ago, and as you know, Super Bowl commercials tend to, they're very prominent and
00:18:05.660very mainstream, and all it was was images of people washing people's feet. But for some reason,
00:18:12.940all the people who were washing the feet looked like white traditional Christian people, and all
00:18:17.440the people getting their feet washed were, well, one was a trans man, one was obviously, it was
00:18:23.040like on a migrant border, and it was an illegal migrant, one was a woman committing an abortion,
00:18:27.520and, or at an abortion center and people are protesting, but another woman's washing her
00:18:31.980feet and all, and one was a criminal and a policeman was washing his feet. And then it
00:18:37.360ended up by seeing Jesus didn't hate, he washed feet. And you can just see that kind of message,
00:18:42.760how it is completely geared to weakening Christianity by also, but making you think
00:18:48.000you're being a good Christian because there's no balance. Of course, Jesus washed feet. That's not
00:18:52.540my argument, but there was a balance. Jesus also hurled tables and made a court of whips and
00:18:57.360drove people and livestock out. So there is a room, I believe, for, well, the Bible says so,
00:19:03.420righteous indignation that is at least funneled in a proper way. And all of that, I guess,
00:19:08.480is missing. And in as much as people don't get that, I think a lot of this is futile.
00:19:13.900And I'll end it by what I call the two swords theology. I just wrote a book that came out a
00:19:19.360few months ago. It's called the two swords of Christ. And it deals with the military orders
00:19:23.360and their battles with Islam, the Templars and the Hospitallers.
00:19:26.600But there's a second meaning to the title, and it's basically in Luke,
00:19:30.600where Christ says, if he doesn't have a garment, sell it and buy a sword.
00:19:34.240And the disciples say, Lord, here are two swords, and he says, that is enough.
00:19:37.840Now, of course, to modern-day Christians, that means absolutely nothing.
00:19:40.780It doesn't mean anything about a real sword.
00:19:42.800But, of course, there's a long and deep tradition, pre-modern, especially medieval,
00:19:46.740understanding, which is the two swords.
00:19:48.540One is spiritual, which I think modern Christians still accept, spiritual warfare.0.57
00:19:52.120but one is secular warfare okay and um that's that was the whole rationale for just war that
00:19:58.640was the whole rationale for um the crusades which i'm sure a lot of people think are not what they
00:20:04.540really were um but so that kind of mentality and again it's not about physical not necessarily
00:20:10.300literal it's just about being bold and militant at least vocally and in in your approach to what's
00:20:17.400happening because if you look back you zoom out and see what's been going on it's just been one
00:20:21.380incremental slow degrade. And no matter how many, uh, no matter what people are saying or doing or
00:20:27.180books or conferences, if you look at the scale, it goes down a little, it's like one step forward,
00:20:32.540three steps back. And that's how it's been going. So I think in part with Christian revival and the
00:20:38.660Islam threat, Christians just need to, again, go to these first things and really recapture a sense0.95
00:20:44.600of a morality that, uh, that is above and beyond just physical considerations. And once that is1.00
00:20:50.480done because like i said it's all interconnected the islam question will become a lot easier
00:20:55.520to answer almost instinctively and very natively in the time we have left given that we're in
00:21:04.000a kinetic war driven by and i realize oh it's the nuclear weapon it's this and that it's this and0.81
00:21:09.240that it is at its essence it's radical islam i'm not saying that we should have gone at the time0.81
00:21:15.000we went or how we went. That's a discussion for another day. But you cannot talk about
00:21:21.540what's happened in Persian Iran without getting to the core of it, that this is one of the most
00:21:28.140radical, not the most radical part of Islam in this whole thing with the Mahdi and the Imam.
00:21:34.380And it almost seems like people, oh, my gosh, we got to go back after 9-11. We have to go back
00:21:38.680after, you know, after the Iraq war or after the during the Iraq war or during the time of
00:21:44.400President Trump put the put the travel ban in.
00:22:11.280And I can point to some of the smartest people in the world and some of the best researchers and writers in the world.
00:22:16.880They give you a historical record where that is the exact that does definitely does not work.
00:22:22.680In fact, it will lead you to be conquered.
00:22:25.720Raymond, in the time we have left now, given your historical perspective of their previous invasions,0.97
00:22:31.820do we have a fighting chance given the weak willed nature of our elites and our political systems in the Christian West0.60
00:22:39.500in particularly the United States of America to combat this, to stop it, and then to reverse it,
00:22:44.980sir? I think, you know, the West has definitely the material forces, the economy to do what needs
00:22:53.420to be done. And but it's as you say, the question is the will. And I don't know, because the way I
00:23:01.620see it, I see things from a very kind of zoomed out long view with historical continuities.
00:23:07.800And if you look even at the West, just the last 50 years, 60, 70 years, it's a continuous downhill. And there's, you know, it's locked, it's connected with its civilizational degradation. Okay, it's culture, it's morals. You know, this, it's funny, I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, but the historical Islamic conquests that we know that we were talking about in the seventh century, you know, historians still really can't give you an answer how it happened, because Eastern Roman Empire, the Persian Sasanians were very
00:23:37.780very powerful. And no one really, how can some, you know, just a small band of Arabs described
00:23:43.060even in Muslim sources as just having, you know, being naked and whatever weapons they can find,0.91
00:23:47.880how could they conquer two empires and then overrun all these massive lands? And, you know,0.83
00:23:53.640today's historians can't give you a good answer, but they'll come up with something and I can
00:23:56.660give you what they say. But the Christians of the time who lived there, they were convinced it was0.81
00:24:01.500it was God's punishment that God had raised this, these people up to chastise them for
00:24:06.940their sins. And ironically, the most, the most influential writing, it's known as the Apocalypse
00:24:13.000by Pseudo Methodius. And it was published around 690 at the height of the Arab conquests. It came
00:24:18.720out in Syriac, but it continued influencing Christians. Even in 1683 at the siege of Vienna,
00:24:23.660it was being translated and published within Vienna to explain why Christians were being
00:24:28.300attacked by the Turks. And that one says not only because Christians had lost their way,
00:24:33.820but it was due to sexual immorality. And it actually talked about men cross-dressing,0.76
00:24:39.140women acting like men. And it was very, very hugely popular. Now, of course, from a secular
00:24:43.880historical point of view, that's nonsense. That's not why Islam prevailed. But when I look at the1.00
00:24:49.480current situation today and I see the West is so much more powerful than Byzantium and the Persians0.93
00:24:56.020were vis-a-vis Arabia the West now is much more powerful vis-a-vis the Islamic world and yet look1.00
00:25:02.600at what's happening Muslims are overrunning Europe they're having their way churches churches are0.99
00:25:08.280allowing them to come in and proclaim the Shahada while like you said you know it's not it's not it's0.65
00:25:13.460a one-way sort of cultural or religious dialogue so I'm wondering to what extent is this the0.89
00:25:19.580punishment of God because you know centuries down the line you know when the world completely
00:25:24.140changed posterity will look back and this will be an even greater mystery than the original0.88
00:25:29.300seventh century conquest because all they'll know is well we know that europe in the west was really
00:25:33.700really powerful we know that muslim world wasn't and that there were migrants but somehow or other
00:25:39.260they took over and it's really a mystery so i wonder if it's the same reason given by pseudomethodius0.62
00:25:44.860in the apocalypse which is you know complete immorality turning away from god highlighted
00:25:50.100and underscored, especially by sexual, gender-confused type of immorality.
00:25:59.620The dollar's convertibility into gold ended in 1971.
00:30:31.720Sign up for free and be part of the movement.
00:30:34.100I'm delighted that we've got Pastor Joel Webin on the show, who's the founder of Right Response Ministries.
00:30:40.960And the reason we asked Pastor Webin to come on the show is last week, Senator Cruz shared an article.
00:30:50.760Many people would have seen this. It's basically lit up. Everyone in the sector, their Twitter algorithms lit up with this.
00:31:00.100And Senator Cruz said, read every word of this. It's the best and most comprehensive explanation of what we're fighting.
00:31:06.960And his tweet had three million visualizations. The article he was pushing out had, I think, five million or so visualizations. And it basically got everyone talking about, for some corners of evangelicalism, the idea that traditional Catholics are plotting a takeover of the American state.
00:31:36.300But that's not really what I want to discuss in that, because what really interested me is the standing assumption, and I think this came through very clearly, that the author's principal preoccupation was that American evangelicalism might be losing its grip on Zionism, on the pro-Israel state stance,
00:32:03.500which has subsumed a huge section of contemporary American evangelicalism.
00:32:10.480And I wanted to dig into that because it wasn't always so.
00:32:14.920And Pastor Joel Webben has been active on this issue in social media.
00:32:19.460I thought he would have interesting things to say,
00:32:22.100especially to our largely evangelical audience.
00:32:25.140Pastor Webben, thank you very much indeed for coming on the show.
00:32:28.860Tell me, if you wouldn't mind, in your own words then,
00:32:33.000about this wider debate why are some dispensationalist evangelicals concerned
00:32:41.460that the evangelical institution if i can use that word the evangelical churches
00:32:48.100um grip on the narrative the pro-zionist narrative might be slipping yeah um zionism
00:32:59.520is dispensational Zionism, I should say, is it's a very modern notion. This is, it's not just that
00:33:07.920it's, oh, well, this is what Protestants have always believed. No, you know, at this point,
00:33:13.660most people are probably aware of the Schofield Study Bible, you know, and Joseph Darby and
00:33:19.220these guys that came in the mid 1800s. Dispensationalism, dispensational Zionism
00:33:26.120is about 150 years old at this point, and so it's very modern, whereas the Protestant Reformation0.87
00:33:32.020tracks back for 500 years. And so when you look at Martin Luther, you look at John Calvin,
00:33:37.140you look at Zwingli, you look at all these Jonathan Edwards, you know, any of the Protestant
00:33:41.720reformers who outlined the Protestant position, none of them were dispensationalists. And to break
00:33:49.580those terms down just briefly. Dispensational Zionism is the idea that all of these Old0.97
00:33:57.280Testament promises that we find in the Bible for Israel that are physical promises, promises about
00:34:03.680the land being recaptured or a temple being rebuilt and these kinds of things, that these
00:34:11.680promises are meant to be understood. They've either already in a preterist, meaning past,
00:34:17.460the Latin for past had been past fulfilled, or if there are any future instances of these promises
00:34:23.540that are still yet to be fulfilled, they have a spiritual fulfillment, not a physical fulfillment.
00:34:30.700So all of the Catholics and all of the Protestants until, again, very recently, the last 100,
00:34:36.840150 years, understood that whether or not Israel was a nation state in the year of our Lord 2026 or
00:34:43.260not, had no bearing on whether or not biblical prophecy will be fulfilled and the return of
00:34:51.380Christ. But somewhere along the line, there became this very wooden hermeneutic, this very
00:34:57.020literal, physical interpretation of Old Testament prophecies that essentially got evangelicals,
00:35:05.340which is a subset of Protestants, but a large subset, to believe that Christ can't actually
00:35:10.880come in his final physical return that that can't take place what every christian desires and wants
00:35:17.420to see that um that that won't actually happen until the nation of state of israel has been
00:35:23.760re-established um and israel widens in its territory achieves hegemony and all the the
00:35:30.920boundaries mike huckabee is saying this ted cruz is saying this the the old boundaries all the way
00:35:36.620from the river to the sea has to belong to israel the temple mount and a new temple actually
00:35:41.880fashioned and then we'll get the return of christ that's not how the protestants historically saw
00:35:47.260it that's certainly not how catholics have seen it that is a modern innovation uh but many
00:35:52.260evangelicals have fallen for it tell okay so first of all let's synthesize this protestants
00:36:00.500evangelicals catholics orthodox for the vast historical sweep of history
00:36:08.840right up until about 150 years ago they were all
00:36:13.380supersessionist right yes and then at around that time um of schofield and
00:36:21.560derby and all the rest of it um there was a re-evaluation of of
00:36:27.340concepts which which became under the bracket of dispensationist dispensationalist these terms
00:36:34.780these two terms very fluently used in evangelicalism are hardly heard at all uh in in in catholic
00:36:42.640debate as catholics talk to one another um but it is interesting to hear from you as an evangelical
00:38:50.960And then upon the completion, once we have the new covenant,
00:38:54.760we have the incarnation of Jesus Christ, his life, his death, his resurrection,
00:38:59.040his ascension, and the inauguration of the new covenant and the church,
00:39:03.900then Israel, according to the flesh, old covenant Israel,
00:39:07.180they're not just discarded, they're warmly invited in.
00:39:11.340But sadly, many of them, not all, but many of them chose to reject that invitation.
00:39:16.760The analogy or illustration that I often will use is that Old Covenant Israel, according to the flesh, was like the construction crew with scaffolding that God used for multiple millennia to build a glorious cathedral of true Israel, the church that is rooted ultimately in Christ.
00:39:42.180He is the promised seed. He is the root, the root of Jesse. It's Jesus. And then this church is to
00:39:49.640be made up of both Jews and Gentiles. So it's not that the Jews are sent home, but they're warmly
00:39:55.820invited in. But what evangelicals, dispensationalists have been doing is they basically said
00:40:01.280when the scaffolding, when the cathedral was finally completed, they said, no, the scaffolding
00:40:06.180is actually, that's the cathedral. Leave the scaffolding up. The cathedral is a sideshow.
00:40:11.480That's just something that God's doing temporarily.
00:40:13.620But the real show, the real exciting thing is, look at this beautiful scaffolding.
00:40:22.640It's like, no, God was doing something through Israel to bring about the Messiah.
00:40:26.820And then out of that, the new covenant is inaugurated.0.84
00:40:31.460And God invites into this church, both Jews and Gentiles, to have union with Christ, his son, by grace and by the power of the Holy Spirit.0.62
00:40:40.780And the sad thing is that Jews still to this day, religious Jews and many ethnic Jews, still reject Jesus as the promised Messiah.
00:41:17.460Evangelical is a subset underneath Protestants.0.82
00:41:20.000You have the mainline Protestants that are all gay-affirming.0.94
00:41:23.400The rainbow flags are outside of their buildings, church buildings.0.70
00:41:26.440Then the evangelicals tend to be the more traditionalist, traditional marriage,
00:41:31.280traditional this, that, and the other, and they vote Republican, GOP.
00:41:34.640The problem, though, is they've bought into dispensationalism,
00:41:37.260And so they think that whether it's America's success politically or whether it's the success of Christianity and the return of Christ, that the physical expression of Israel taking over the land, holding the land, rebuilding the temple, that all this is integral for those things to take place.
00:41:55.320could you just give me i'm talking about a lay of the land could you just give me an indication
00:42:02.620if you wouldn't mind guesstimating on this what proportion of evangelicals are dispensationalist
00:42:10.200and which proportion would be as a percent would be supersessionist yeah for evangelicals i would
00:42:17.200say that, um, probably 85, 90%, an overwhelming majority because within evangelicalism, again,
00:42:25.840that being a large subset of Protestantism, um, most evangelicals don't really appreciate the
00:42:33.000original Protestant reformers who tended to be, um, they were, they were reformed. They were
00:42:38.660Calvinist, you know, if I could use such a dirty word on the air, Calvinist, you know, um, I, I'm
00:42:44.080a Calvinist, for better or worse. There are strengths and there are weaknesses. But Jonathan
00:42:49.520Edwards and Martin Luther and John Calvin, these were the original reformers. They were all
00:42:53.760Calvinist. Most Protestants today are not. They're Arminian. Most evangelicals today are Arminian0.92
00:43:01.300in their view of salvation, their view of God's sovereignty. And so most of them, most evangelicals,
00:43:08.480when they think of the original reformers, they think of Calvinism, like election, God choosing
00:43:14.200with salvation, those kinds of things. And they have an aversion to that. And so they've kind of
00:43:19.220turned away. It's ironic, but Protestants today have turned away from the original protest,0.68
00:43:24.700the original Protestants, and because they've been turned off by the soteriology, which is just
00:43:30.160doctrine of salvation, the emphasis of God's sovereignty. They think that there should be0.91
00:44:04.340in the eschaton. They're just, they're not aware. They're ignorant. Certainly moral virtue is of
00:44:11.840infinite eternal value that matters most. But there are different categories, right? So
00:44:17.780there could be someone, there's lots of guys like this. Timothy Gordon is a great example. He does
00:44:23.900a lot of good work. He's Catholic. Dr. Taylor Marshall, he's Catholic. He does a lot of great
00:44:30.120work. Calvin Robinson is a friend and he's actually coming on our network and being a
00:44:37.480contributor and doing a show with us. That's NXR Studios, New Christian Rite Studios. This
00:44:44.400kind of been birthed out of Rite Response. Rite Response still continues, but having two
00:44:48.240organizations and all these guys are Catholic. Calvin Robinson is not Roman Catholic, but
00:44:53.400he's Catholic for all intents and purposes. And my point is the reason why we're able to
00:44:59.980unite is because there are different categories. Calvin is, for instance, is a dear friend.
00:45:08.320He's not an elder in my church, right? Evangelicals are still going to have their
00:45:13.200individual churches. And Catholics, of course, are going to have their individual churches.
00:45:16.220But there's church, the ecclesia, right? But then there's the realm of politics. There's
00:45:23.360the realm of culture. There are other realms. And so politically and culturally, I think
00:45:29.940that supersessionist Protestants, evangelicals, actually make for a very natural ally to
00:45:38.080traditional supersessionist Catholics. Because what we're both seeing is that, yes, our intramural
00:45:44.440debates about theology, it's not insignificant. It matters. We have real disagreement. And we know
00:45:49.980we're not relativists, right? We can't both be right. If we have two contrary opinions, somebody's
00:45:54.360right, somebody's wrong, all that matters. But we're realizing there's an existential threat
00:45:58.480right now, which is foreign. It's foreign influence that we need to be able to have1.00
00:46:04.900a country that is truly America first. So I am finding myself very comfortable reaching across
00:46:12.940the aisle politically and culturally with Catholics and saying, look, this is not what0.66
00:46:19.120the Bible teaches. There's a lot of Christians who've been manipulated thinking that they have
00:46:24.640a divine obligation politically and geopolitically and with their money and giving and all these
00:46:32.920kinds of things to support something that the Bible doesn't actually require. And so I think
00:46:38.100that, yes, a broad coalition on this issue, it's not only possible, Ben, but it's already well
00:46:44.820underway. It's happening. So first concentrate on the existential battles, the existential threats,
00:46:53.720and then is the opportunity to pat one another in a fraternal way on the back
00:46:59.900look out look at our look our fellow look at our fellow um look our fellow combatants in the eye
00:47:07.380and say you're going to hell um i've always said by the way because i spent like a lot of time
00:47:13.000um in politics when i worked in the uk parliament and in the european parliament working with
00:47:17.700evangelicals who were very well informed over their elements of their belief and I had no better
00:47:24.860allies working on the pro-life front and I always said I work best with with evangelicals who will
00:47:32.320do that who will look me in the eye and say you're going to hell um and the only thing I ask is the
00:47:37.340opportunity just to push back a little bit on all of my own heresies um back and then we'll have
00:47:42.700that debate um what i can't abide is is what passes for ecumenism is where you just have the
00:47:49.720institutional leaders of the respective churches who frankly don't believe a word of their own
00:47:54.680religion anyway getting together having these big conflabs and they put out these ridiculous
00:47:59.680statements um where they say look how much we we hold in common of course you hold a lot in common
00:48:04.840what you hold in common is that you don't believe the elements of your faith um i think it's far
00:48:09.220more serious for people who actually do believe the elements of their faith to sit down and talk
00:48:14.400to reach out especially when there are these existential threats right across the west
00:48:20.400i ask you pastor webin please go ahead that's i was going to say that's um i think that was the
00:48:27.420failure of like a billy graham so if if your listeners are what i still don't understand
00:48:31.140what's an evangelical think billy graham he was the quintessential evangelical protestant
00:48:37.040And he would host these massive crusades, you know, and fill football stadiums.
00:48:43.460You know, I mean, he was a phenomenon.
00:48:44.780He was, you know, friends with Carter, with all these different, you know, presidents and would frequent the White House.
00:48:51.060And I mean, he was a huge, huge figure.
00:48:54.420But the problem is that Billy Graham, who I appreciate in some respect, although I would have some disagreements.
00:48:59.880The problem is that later on, towards the latter end of his ministry, he was no longer just partnering with Catholics for, for instance, the protection of the unborn or on certain, you know, issues politically and culturally.
00:49:14.240But he started having in his crusades, he would preach the gospel.
00:49:18.440He'd have, you know, altar calls to salvation and prayer.
00:49:21.680And he would have, you know, Catholic priests down there at the stage, you know, praying.
00:49:26.560And when he started to partner in terms of the religious aspects and not just broad, like we, you know, Catholics and Protestants, we believe in the triune God, we believe in the incarnation, we believe in the resurrection, all these different things.
00:49:41.020But they started to partner on how we're saved and these kinds of things.
00:49:46.000That's where I think he lost some credibility and where it began to get off the rails.
00:49:51.020And so I actually appreciate what you just said, Ben, because a lot of guys aren't willing to be honest about that.
00:49:57.140It sounds like you're devout in your faith and you would have sharp disagreements with me.
00:50:01.020I would have sharp disagreements with you.
00:50:02.600But we could do something like this, this show, and have a reasonable degree of alignment.
00:50:08.080And then at the same time, you know, if I was like, hey, I'm going to, tomorrow I'm going to become, you know, the priest of your parish.
00:50:17.000You would say, we love you, Joel, but heck no.
00:50:21.020no you're not qualified you're not no you you don't get to be and i think that it's it's the
00:50:27.680conflating of categories where alliances that may have been well-meaning initially become
00:50:35.040compromise and so what i'm saying is catholics and protestants have real disagreements theologically
00:50:40.600but where we align to save the country politically i think is absolutely not only permissible but