Candice and George Farmer talk about how they met, how they first met, and how they ended up getting engaged after just 18 days of being a couple. Candice also talks about how her family and friends initially reacted to the news of their engagement.
00:02:32.060I mean, my parents were pretty, they, again, were like a bit kind of like, okay, this is very crazy, very odd, but sort of we'll go along with it and see where this goes.
00:02:46.260I think that was a big game changer for a lot of people because when they meet you, they're always as in awe as I was when I first met you.
00:02:58.380And after a while, I think everyone realized that it was real, you know, and that was the really big hurdle to get over was that everyone initially thought, is this crazy?
00:03:06.060Is this just, you know, like a fire flung romance?
00:03:10.100And then it was like, okay, this is actually real.
00:03:16.560The mood sort of moved to acceptance and people got on board and then they realized how great you were.
00:03:21.700And then everyone was pretty happy about it.
00:03:23.020Did you have any friend who, unbeknownst to me, was like, listen, mate, as they say in the UK, listen, mate, you are making a really bad decision, the worst decision possibly of your life?
00:03:37.900Is that a credit to them or a discredit to them?
00:03:40.360Yeah, probably, I think it's a credit to them.
00:03:43.100Yeah, I mean, I think our best, my best man, Nick, who you obviously know very well, his original reaction was, you're crazy and this is never going to happen.
00:03:58.820Like on the first night that we first met, people were very...
00:04:03.640When I went back from that night, I was like, okay, you know, there's this girl, very interesting, like this could go somewhere, all that kind of stuff.
00:04:10.980And his initial reaction was, you're completely insane.
00:04:15.120But then by, you know, come January, come February, come March of the next year, which was 2019, when we got married, it was like, yeah, this is happening and this is good.
00:04:58.860And then one of the donors to Turning Point USA was telling him it would be very bad for my brand.
00:05:05.760And that really stuck with me that one of the donors said, it would be very bad for your brand for you to like not marry a black guy from the projects or something like that.
00:05:52.660Well, I like to joke with you and you know that I tell you this joke.
00:05:55.400So really, this is just for the audience, but I like to joke that there are many different women I'm married to because I'm never quite sure who I'm going to get in one day.
00:06:04.100So it's like someday I'm going to get one personality and the next day it's this personality.
00:06:08.540And then you've got your investigative journalist hat on and then you've got your mother's hat on and then you've got your Catholic hat on.
00:06:16.280So there's a few hats that you're wearing at any one point in time.
00:06:27.580It's also been a tremendous challenge.
00:06:29.400And I think personally to you, because you're so different from the environment that you're now stuck into, which is to say, you are an Englishman.
00:06:39.460You like to retreat, sort of read your texts, a quiet place with a cigar.
00:08:38.080But England as a whole, like is very beautiful country.
00:08:40.360I mean, it's filled with beautiful, you know, history, tradition, churches, culture, the universities, the ancient universities like Oxbridge, Durham, you know, they're wonderful places to visit.
00:08:56.800But it is in danger of kind of slipping into that like European psychosis of just becoming a beautiful museum, you know, and there's no like, there's nothing invigorating about it.
00:09:10.180It's like, you actually need to have something which is growing and producing goods and making society work, you know, and kind of, it's slipping.
00:09:18.280Yeah, I think you've definitely made me appreciate a lot of those aspects of American culture because there is something about England that is quite parochial.
00:09:25.640And it seems like it's never changing, which is beautiful in many ways, but also sometimes not because you want things to change, not necessarily to give up traditions, not necessarily to give up beauty and architecture and taking your time to make things, which I think America could learn from.
00:09:42.960But definitely, I think in terms of their willingness to confront certain issues, I would probably say, I find the English to be incredibly polite, which I think can be very frustrating.
00:09:55.720I would imagine can be very frustrating for people that live there.
00:09:57.820So for you, coming to America, moving your entire life here after being a person that's born and raised in London, and has lived in this sort of quiet, sleepy, melancholic culture, what has been the biggest change or culture shock?
00:10:49.940What would I say is the biggest culture shock in general, though?
00:10:52.040I would say that there is definitely an aspect of what I just mentioned, which is kind of that willingness to get up and change things and do things, which is really powerful in America.
00:11:04.260Like, that is definitely the, that is one of the biggest culture shocks.
00:11:07.220Like, and there are other people who have said the same thing.
00:11:09.860There is, you know, I was reading something the other day where somebody who previously lived in Germany moved to America.
00:11:16.420And they basically said, before I moved to America, my parent, my father worked in a nonprofit and my mother worked for the federal government of Germany.
00:11:25.460And so no one in my life and no one that I really knew in my life had ever worked in a for-profit business.
00:11:30.240Like, everyone had either been subsidized by other people or subsidized by the state.
00:11:34.120And so when you move to America, like, for me, that was one of the hugest things.
00:11:37.100Like, you just kind of move over here.
00:11:38.640There's people just doing things the whole time.
00:11:40.840And it is a, it is a culture of activity and entrepreneurial spirit.
00:11:46.740And so that, for me, was a huge eye-opener when I moved here.
00:11:51.140I would also say that the other big thing, which has kind of faded in my acknowledgement of how revolutionary it is in some ways, is just because it's now, I'm now part of that culture in America.
00:12:05.580So I've become less receptive to how big it is.
00:12:09.120But I remember how big it is when I go back to the UK is faith.
00:12:13.140Because in America, faith is a default.
00:12:17.480It's almost, it's, it's almost something which people open with in conversations, particularly, obviously, where we live in Tennessee, you will come across people the whole time saying, what church do you go to?
00:12:30.960And I was listening to a faith-based podcast, or I was reading the Bible or something like that.
00:12:37.460And in Britain, I would argue it is one of the most advanced secular cultures in the world.
00:12:44.460And you talk about faith in the public domain in Britain, and people look at you as if you've got five heads.
00:12:51.240And it's really just very demoralizing.
00:12:55.440It's quite, it's quite hostile, really, to actually organized faith.
00:13:00.440And there's a difference between continental Europe and the UK.
00:13:04.960Continental Europe has predominantly been Catholic.
00:13:06.740And there's much more of a kind of hardcore Catholicism in places like France and Spain.
00:13:15.120Obviously, Italy is completely separate, because that's where the home of the church is.
00:13:18.380But, you know, you've got these countries in Europe where there's kind of a hardcore Catholic movement.
00:13:23.060And so if you say, like, I go to mass every day, or I, you know, take my faith life seriously, and you said to one of those people, they would be very receptive to that.
00:13:30.940And there's a whole branch of society which is kind of built around preserving the faith.
00:13:35.700But in Britain, the Anglican Church, which is the state church, is very, is very liberal.
00:13:44.620And as a result, most people have, most of British society have no real faith life.
00:13:50.840And so faith in the public domain is just not something talked about.
00:13:54.260And so over here, you come over here, it's amazingly refreshing to be in America, where people are so open, not just to the idea of talking about faith, but so open to learning about faith, so open to talk that conversion experiences happen the whole time over here, whereas they're kind of rare in the UK.
00:14:15.320But yeah, that's probably one of the biggest culture shocks, I'd say.
00:14:17.760Yeah, that's interesting, because it's a bit of a paradox when you consider the fact that if you could attribute the beauty and the timelessness and the inspiration of Europe to anything, it would be Christianity.
00:14:28.840And so to hear so many people say that they've abandoned those roots, it's just, it's interesting how they've landed upon that.
00:14:35.660But that's a perfect segue, because obviously one of the biggest questions that we get about you, or the most frequent questions that we get about you, is about your faith.
00:14:43.060Not exactly a usual scenario for someone to leave the Anglican Church and become a Catholic, least of all, when they were actually raised with a strong faith.
00:14:57.560So I guess, can you just speak a little bit to your faith journey?
00:15:01.020Speaking about your household, how you were raised, whether your parents had faith, have faith.
00:15:05.980And then let's get into your decision to, we say in America, study theology.
00:15:13.240You would say to read theology in the UK, at Oxford.
00:15:18.140Yeah, so I mean, my parents are both evangelical Christians.
00:15:24.080And as you know, my sisters are also, like, they have a mixed faith life.
00:15:31.120One of them is very devout, the other one is not.
00:15:32.740I was raised in a home which is still to this day, like, my parents' house would be very built around the Bible, would be very built around a daily prayer life, a weekly church attendance.
00:15:47.120Like, that would be something that is just Bible studies, like, very regular, involved in the church.
00:15:52.480Faith was a huge part of our life growing up.
00:15:54.360And so, you quickly became aware of that in England, just going back to my previous answer about how secular it is, because when you say that you go to church on Sunday in the UK, that is not normal.
00:16:06.480And so, as a result, by the time that you're cognizant of kind of having that discussion with your peers at a very young age, like 7, 8, 9, 10, at a boys' school in London, you become very aware that faith is different.
00:16:18.940And that, for me, was probably the starting block, because then what happened was I started to become more interested in why I was different.
00:16:30.660Like, I started to become more interested in why my family had a faith life, had a religious life, versus the rest of the kind of secular schoolboys who didn't.
00:16:41.260And so, for me, that kind of started a long journey of becoming quite interested in theology and faith.
00:16:48.440By the time that I was 12, 13, 14, I was very aware that faith was a huge part of how I saw the world.
00:17:05.600I mean, if you are brought up in a faith-filled home, you will realize that faith, religion, has a huge impact on the way people are shaped.
00:17:17.300And that was equally as being played out in the UK during my formative years by radical Islam, as it was being played out by my own faith formation in Christianity.
00:17:30.380Because, at the end of the Cold War, of course, we had this great 10-year window where historians and philosophers, famously Francis Fukuyama, said,
00:19:16.280And so you've had the churches in Europe, whether it be the Catholic Church or the Protestant churches, they have stripped themselves of true theology.
00:19:27.540And the Catholic Church in Europe is as guilty as this of anyone else.
00:19:31.880You've had this progressive, weak, wishy-washy, liberal gospel being preached by, you know, every pastor under the sun.
00:19:41.800And then you've got this religion, which crops up, which shows affirmative action, absolute strength.
00:19:51.360You know, these are the tenets which appeal to young men, particularly in Europe and, of course, in the Middle East.
00:20:00.300But, you know, predominantly in Europe, a lot of the radicalism within Europe is now homegrown.
00:20:08.880And so this is the key, you know, driving force is the fact that theology, like Christianity in Europe, has been stripped of its actual truth, its eternal truth.
00:20:20.800And that's not to say that, OK, you know, there would be no conversion to Islam if Christianity was standing on its own two feet.
00:20:27.540But it's definitely the case that if you look at the UK, for example, you've got this progressive, weak, Anglican church, which is basically saying that, you know, left-wing politics is good.
00:20:40.020And, you know, the predominant role of the church is to care about the environment and, you know, all this kind of nonsense.
00:20:45.880And actually, of course, people don't just they don't just want a social gospel.
00:20:51.260They want eternal truth and they want real faith.
00:20:55.220They want to be told, this is how you should live your life, right?
00:21:17.600But he similarly said I pressed him on why he left Christianity and the answer he gave, which was very interesting for me to consider, was he basically said Christianity became weak and Christians don't defend themselves.
00:21:30.800They allow people to disrespect Jesus Christ.
00:21:33.200And how are people supposed to be drawn to something that has been weak and obviously startling, upsetting to hear.
00:21:40.620But he is echoing, I think, what you are what you are speaking to, which is that there there does need to be a return to a truer faith.
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00:23:19.760It was, I sort of thought about history at one point, but it was quite clear to me, I think, that theology was the answer.
00:23:28.460You know, I was very interested in it.
00:23:29.900As I said, I was just very, very interested in it.
00:23:31.900I, by the time I was 15, I had begun the conversion experience that I then went through for the next five years to Catholicism, which culminated in me converting when I was at Oxford.
00:23:42.060Let's not, let's slow this part down because this is, this is pretty big, obviously, especially as, like I said, someone raised Anglican.
00:23:50.360So you're at Oxford, you're studying theology, what moved you as an evangelical to the Catholic faith, which I imagine you were raised with a different understanding, a different perspective.
00:24:05.060Evangelicals do tend to hold a lot of, I would say, strong feelings against the Catholic faith, both here and abroad.
00:24:14.460That is, some evangelicals would say that.
00:24:17.240But it, yes, of course, I mean, it was, I was brought up in a home where I think it was viewed with suspicion at best.
00:24:28.340Although, you know, to give my parents credit where it was due, they had always basically said that it was a personal relationship with Jesus, which mattered more than anything else.
00:24:38.220And so, you know, my dad has frequent examples of Catholics he had spoken to who he definitely knew had personal relationships with Jesus.
00:24:47.680But generally speaking, the Catholic Church was perceived of as nominal, like nominalism, where people just went, they didn't really understand where they went.
00:24:56.640And filled with superstition was the two phrases that were kind of stuck out.
00:25:01.860Henry VIII may have had something to do with that.
00:25:04.400Well, for the, the corruption of the Catholic Church in England was started with him, for sure.
00:25:11.500But it, the persecution, actually, I should say.
00:25:15.040But basically, you know, smells and bells was a phrase that frequently stuck around in my head from when I was growing up, because that was how the Catholic Church was perceived.
00:25:24.040But for me, in part, there was kind of a numbers component to it.
00:25:30.880And this is just something which I think is how my brain works.
00:25:33.800But I didn't really understand how we could be saying that before 1517, we just had this big kind of black hole of Christianity from the time of the apostles until Luther crops up.
00:25:48.200And so for me, that was like, OK, well, what's going on?
00:25:50.540Like, there must be some living faith in this 1500 year window, even if you want to call it like a 1200 year, 1300 year window, because for the first 200 years, you have the kind of apostolic age.
00:26:02.040So, you know, what's going on in that period?
00:26:04.900And for me, that was like, well, we're not just going to write off this entire period of history.
00:26:09.160And I'm also I do like to challenge ideas and concepts and just figure out what's going on.
00:26:15.160And for me, I was like, OK, well, you've got doctors of the church.
00:26:19.640You've got some of the greatest minds ever, like Thomas Aquinas ever in human history, who occupy this period, as well as countless popes who whose writings have been imbibed and kind of consumed by Western civilization since.
00:26:36.980So what's happening with these guys? Like, are they Christians? Are they not Christians?
00:26:41.920And so that was really kind of where it began for me.
00:26:44.520That was the early church. The first 700 years was what I then went on to study.
00:26:51.200But that was kind of really where I began my inquiry was like, this doesn't make any sense.
00:26:56.180I just don't believe that there are no Christians here.
00:27:01.300And so that was kind of where I started.
00:27:03.040And I had this great priest at school who was actually an Anglican priest, but he ended up becoming a Catholic as well.
00:27:10.780But he was very good at rebutting many of the preconceived ideas that I had about Catholicism.
00:27:18.940And so he started to really kind of challenge me on a lot of my positions.
00:27:22.960And that was kind of where it all began.
00:27:24.660Okay. Was there a singular moment that you can recall in your mind where you went, this is it, I'm going to, I'm actually going to convert to the Catholic faith?
00:27:36.920I mean, there was a moment, I remember the first time that I went into a Catholic church with the, there were two, I guess there were two moments probably.
00:27:49.520There was once where I was in a Dominican monastery in Croatia, where I very much felt that there was a calling, you know, it was in some ways it was, I know this is a weird thing to say, but it was kind of the silence of the place.
00:28:07.820You know, I just felt, you know, I just felt, I'm drawn to silence, I think you know that.
00:28:19.240It's like the early church fathers who were the desert fathers have always had an appeal to me because they, they wanted to lead this contemplative life studying the Lord, like in silence.
00:28:31.440And so for me, it was something about the silence of this church, which I just found very kind of inspiring, overwhelming in some ways.
00:28:41.900I think I was about, I must've been about 15 or 16 at that time.
00:28:45.980And then there was another moment, which was the first time that I went into a church and that was in London, Westminster Cathedral.
00:28:50.860And I sat at the back and I prayed a rosary for the first time in my life.
00:28:56.280And I didn't really know what I was doing, but I, I, I just wanted to make that first step.
00:29:01.440And then when I did that, I, and I played before, prayed before the blessed sacrament, which was also a huge kind of, for me, that was something which I had really begun to appreciate.
00:30:39.640So, um, I think they kind of knew that it was coming because I kept on talking about the Catholic church and I sort of started talking a lot about that.
00:30:48.900And I was talking more and more and more about it.
00:30:50.860And I think they kind of figured something was going on.
00:30:54.160Um, but then when it actually happened, I didn't tell them and then they confronted me about it later on.
00:30:59.480So now that you're in America and I think a lot of, there's a lot of faith discussion happening now.
00:31:04.100What would you say your perspective is?
00:31:07.360Cause this is something that you and I discussed there.
00:31:23.160And one of the things that I had kind of spoken to you about was even evangelicalism faith is so different.
00:31:28.060Like when I think of your parents who are evangelicals compared to evangelicals in America, it just feels different.
00:31:35.420You know, it just feels very different.
00:31:36.760So what would you say are some of the differences that you can speak to in, I guess, whether it's religion, faith or another topic, um, when it comes to politics across the pond, as opposed to here on a variety of subjects, abortion, faith.
00:31:50.180Yeah, I mean, faith obviously is one that I've spoken about already.
00:31:56.640I mean, abortion is something which is an interesting one because again, abortion is not really discussed in the UK.
00:32:04.100It's kind of a settled topic, um, which over here it is very much not.
00:32:10.060I mean, the funny part is, is that the perspective of many Brits to America and, you know, I'm sure there'll be people in the comments who will be like, I'm British and I disagree with you on this.
00:32:19.000But generally speaking, the perspective of Britain is that America is kind of a bit crazy, you know, and, and Europe as a whole, Europeans tend to, you know, and I don't agree with this, but this is often the way they tend to look down their noses quite a bit at American culture.
00:32:36.600Like, um, Europeans think of themselves as quite highfalutin, you know, and they're kind of like, you know, sort of Americans are crazy Americans.
00:32:45.200Um, but of course, really what that actually is a reflection of is the freedom of the intellectual mind, right?
00:32:51.460And actually the reason that they say it's crazy is because Americans have this great inquisitive attitude to things.
00:33:00.060They are willing to challenge and that confrontational attitude then reflects itself in the way that they debate topics.
00:33:07.140So abortion, like take that as an example, Americans are not willing to just those who are pro-life and even those who are pro-choice, neither side are just willing to accept the standardized norm.
00:33:19.820They are, they are prepared to fight for whatever they believe.
00:33:23.900And that is the same on other topics such as vaccines, for example, which I know is something that you and I talked about when we first got married.
00:33:30.160But, you know, in Britain, the vaccine schedule is just accepted by everybody and nobody really talks about it.
00:33:36.020It's, you know, I think I, I give the illustration that when we first got married, you sort of asked what I thought about it.
00:33:40.320And I, my answer was kind of like, well, it's the same as sort of what I think about Tuesdays, you know, just as I go, it happens.