Ep 1090 ｜ Demon Possession, Occult Obsession & the Real JD Vance ｜ Guest： Rod Dreher
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Summary
Why are so many young people today fleeing to the occult? Well, Raj Ware, the author of The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, has the answer in his new book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.
Transcript
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Why are so many young people today fleeing to the occult? Well, Raj Ware, the author of The
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Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, has the answer in his new book, Living in Wonder,
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Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. Today, so many Christians only look to the physical,
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the visible, the provable as an explanation for what happens and why. Sometimes even we Christians
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forget about the spiritual reality all around us. We forget about the enchantment that is intrinsic
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in Christianity. This book reminds us of that with some really powerful testimonies.
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Raj and I will also get into this election. He has good personal friends with J.D. Vance. He's got
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some thoughts on what is at stake this election and the spiritual reality surrounding it.
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This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to GoodRanchers.com,
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code Allie. That's GoodRanchers.com, code Allie.
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Rod, thanks so much for joining me again. It's good to have you back on the show.
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Let's start by talking about your new book. It just came out on Tuesday, Living in Wonder. What is
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It's a book about the Christian experience of wonder, of awe, as the foundation for our Christian
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faith. I wrote it, I didn't conceive of it as part of the trilogy that began with Benedict Option,
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then Live Not by Lies, but it turns out to have been that. The thing that concerns me most of all as
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a believer and as one who's engaged in the public square is whether or not the Christian church will
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be able to make it through these post-Christian times. And the Benedict Option was more about
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local church, families, homeschool, things like that. Live Not by Lies is more about persecution.
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This is about recovering the core of religious Christian experience, which is the experience of
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the living God. And I talk in the book about how we in the West lost that idea that God is everywhere
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present and fills all things and how we can get it back and why we need to get it back. I end the book
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by talking about the occult and how so many young people are moving into the occult and into psychedelic
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drugs, which is adjacent to the occult, seeking that experience of transcendence, of wonder that they
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don't think they can get in the church. We in the church have to do our very best to recover that
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sense of enchantment. And by enchantment, I don't mean, Allie Beth, the idea of sprinkling fairy dust
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and everything looks magical. No, enchantment, in the way I use it, is simply the feeling that God is
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present and that everything has meaning, that there is ultimate transcendent meaning that we can know and
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relate to. You set up the context that we're living in right now as the church, and you describe
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Christianity as a faith that's in crisis. As you just described, people are looking for something
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bigger, something deeper, something transcendent. And even if they're going to church and they're
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reading their Bible, you talk about some encounters with some young Christians where they're telling you,
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it just feels like something's missing and I just need something more. So set that up for us. What
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does it look like right now in the church? Sure. I was approached in Hungary where I live in Europe by
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an American exchange student who said, look, I'm a committed evangelical. I believe it all. I know my
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Bible, but I'm craving something more. It feels like I'm living in a spiritual desert. Can you help me?
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And it's not hard to understand why that is for so many of us Christians, especially those of my
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generation and older. The Christian experience has been mostly about learning the Bible, learning your
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catechism, going to church, being involved in public life, fighting abortion or whatever. And all of that
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is good. But if we miss the ultimate, what should be at the center of it, an experience of the living
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God, then all the rest of it can feel very dry. And I think that's what a lot of Christians are feeling
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today. The young generation, Generation Z and some of the younger millennials are falling away from the faith
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in huge numbers. But they're not saying they're becoming atheists. That's really interesting. They're
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spiritual but not religious. And as I said earlier, we find that they're going towards the occult to some
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degree or the other. And this is a crisis for the church because these young people are not wrong to want to
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sink some sort of numinous. That's a great theological word. It just means mysterious and
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transcendent experience of God because that is at the core of all true religious experience, that
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connection with Almighty God and experience of God. They can go into the wrong way easily, and that's
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happening. But that's why we in the church have to go back to our roots. If you go back to the book of
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Acts, for example, I was in Ephesus a couple years ago on a trip to the sites of the seven churches of
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Revelation. And I was standing there in Ephesus reading Acts 19 right there at the theater where
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it all happened, where the Ephesians said, great is Artemis of the Ephesians. And I noticed that when
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Paul and the others went there, the evangelists, to try to convert the city, they were converting people
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by casting out demons, by doing miraculous healings, things like that. I really do believe
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that we, today, the church is in a situation much more like the early church than at any time
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since the West went over to the Christian faith. And we're going to have to get back in touch with that.
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So by living in wonder and seeing the enchantment that is in the Christian faith, do you mean
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signs and miracles and healing? Or what does that look like?
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I do mean signs and miracles and healing and being open to that. But I also mean everyday
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enchantment, the idea that God is with us, that nothing is without meaning. Nihilism is the great
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curse of our time, the idea that nothing has meaning at all. And it's so easy to fall into when you live
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in this culture, this post-Christian, in fact, anti-Christian culture. But not everybody is going
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to have an experience of a miracle, of a sign. I tell some great stories in that book about people
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who do. My favorite story, by the way, if I can tell it, is came from a young Italian I met. He lives
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in Spain now, but 32 years old, teaches in a high school. He was raised in an atheist family in Rome,
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hardcore communist. And he, in fact, he said he was a champion blasphemer when he was in high school.
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Then he gets to college, meets some Christians, and begins thinking maybe they know something. But he
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resisted. He told me that he had started seeing around the city of Rome some guy who would look
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at him through a crowd, and he said, something's going on. One night, just before Christmas, he and
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his cousin got out of a car. They parked their car. They were going to a party. They saw a homeless
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man on the other side of the street. He looked at them. The homeless man looked at them, rose up,
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walked over, and said to him, Stefano, I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.
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I want to tell you that from this day forward, you will follow the Lord Jesus Christ. He sent me to
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tell you that you have nothing to fear. And then this homeless man started telling Stefano all of his
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sins and inner struggles. Stefano told me I started crying. And I said, are you an angel? And he just
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smiled at me. I said, well, what can I call you? He said, you can call me Felice Natale, Merry Christmas.
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Remember, this was just before Christmas. Then Felice Natale fell on his knees, raised his hands,
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and began to say the Our Father, the Lord's Prayer. After each line of the Lord's Prayer, he added these
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incredibly elaborate praises of the Holy Trinity. Then when he finished, he rose, bowed, and
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disappeared. Well, Stefano converted. And not only did he convert, but he brought his entire family,
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even his hardcore communist father, to the faith, to Christ. Now, that sort of thing is not going to
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happen to most people. But if we can meet people to whom it has happened and trust them, then it can
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strengthen our faith, our walk with Christ. But to us, to most ordinary people, we can't make
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enchantment happen. But what we can do is form ourselves from day-to-day spiritual discipline
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to be open and receptive to the Lord appearing in our lives in more ordinary ways.
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code relate. You know, within Protestantism, there is the debate between cessationism and
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continuationism. Cessationism generally meaning that you believe that speaking in tongues and the laying
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on of hands and the miracles, that that work as something that was common is past. And continuationism,
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of course, more charismatic Christians believe that all of those signs and wonders and miracles still
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and do happen today and can actually be a confirmation of someone's true Christianity and true faith. And so
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there's some debate in that. I am of the Reformed Protestant subdivision of Christianity, and something
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we care about a lot is good doctrine and understanding Scripture forward and backward, and I'm very
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appreciative of that. But I do find myself, even as someone who knows Ephesians 6, that tells us that
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the principalities are, the spiritual principalities are at play, that this is a fight, a battle between
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good and evil. I find myself negating spiritual reality sometimes when it comes to spiritual warfare
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or a spiritual explanation for things. I find myself always looking for the more practical reason for
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something, and my more maybe charismatic-leaning friends, I'll be talking to them about something,
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and they'll send me attacks, and be like, well, you know, that's probably a spiritual attack, because
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you've got this going on, and this is what you're trying to do, and Satan doesn't want that, or
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Satan hates the family, he hates marriage, and God loves these things. And so I have to be reminded
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of that. Is that part of what you're talking about, just recognizing the spiritual eternal reality that
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is always at play underneath the ordinary and seen world?
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You got it. That's exactly right. I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian. We don't believe in speaking
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in tongues and the things that our Pentecostal brothers and sisters do, but we do believe that
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there is no necessary opposition between good doctrine and these experiences. But these experiences
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have to be understood and grounded in good doctrine and in the things we know to be true doctrinally.
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That helps us discern whether or not they are real or a hallucination or of Satan. But, you know,
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I tell a story in the book about these good friends of mine. I used to live in New York City,
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and I knew this couple. I call them Nathan and Emma in the book. And they were solid Catholics,
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very conservative, involved in the pro-life movement, fancy Upper East Side people. Well,
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it turns out I had lost touch when I moved from New York. A few years ago, Nathan called me,
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and he said, listen, I've got something strange to tell you. You're going to find this hard to
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believe, but hear me out. My wife is possessed. Like, what? It's a long story, but basically,
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it turns out her grandfather back in Italy had been a high-level occultist and had brought
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a curse onto the family, a deep curse. And it had manifested through her after she tried to kill
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herself. And she went to a healing prayer service, and the demons manifested through her.
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I don't even know what that means. Manifest through her because of a curse of her grandfather.
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Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy, right? And they had never thought about this. You know,
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they were very doctrinal Catholics, but her grandfather back in Italy had offered his
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descendants to the devil for money and power, which he got, but it destroyed the rest of the family.
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In any case, in the story I tell, I went to see them once. I was in New York. I went to
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visit them, and she manifested in front of me sitting in their apartment on the priest's side.
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At one point, her husband had told me in my ear, he said, I'm going to go get lemonade at one point.
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I'm going to put in my pocket a relic of the true cross that a priest had given me,
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you know, for protection in these times. And I know you're reformed, but just hang with me.
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This priest was an exorcist. And when the guy, the husband, brought the lemonade out and set it on the
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table, the wife, Emma, was in mid-conversation with me. She dropped her head like this. When she
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looked up, her face was not her own. She looked at her husband and cursed him and said, get that
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blankety-blank thing away from me. I told you, don't bring it. You couldn't see it. It was hidden.
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She dropped her head back and looked at me. She was herself again and said, I'm so sorry. That is
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Well, I never get the chills and I do have the chills right now.
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Well, Allie Beth, that night when her husband was walking me back to my hotel, I said, man,
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how has this changed you? You know, again, Upper East Side stockbroker, you know, they don't know
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funny business. He said, now when I walk up and down the streets of Manhattan, I realize that there
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is a great spiritual battle going on all around us that we can't see, but it's there. I saw how it
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caught my wife. The good news is she was delivered, but you know how she was delivered?
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The exorcist thought at one point, wait a minute, you were baptized in Italy in 1970. There was a lot
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of funny liberal stuff going on in the Catholic church then. Let's just re-baptize you in case
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you weren't baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. They did that. Boom. 90% of it
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went away and she was delivered of the rest of it. Now, I tell you that story, but not only because
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it's true, but because it testifies to how the spiritual world really does barge into our normal,
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settled lives in ways that we aren't expecting. Again, I wouldn't have expected this family. They
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are so conservative and faithful, went to church every week, and yet this touched them.
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What are generational curses? Our charismatic and Pentecostal friends know a lot about it,
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and some of the Catholic exorcists who work are dealing with this all the time. But this is just
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part of our reality, and Alibeth is going to become a greater part of our reality as more and more people
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in Western civilization fall away from the Christian faith and embrace evil.
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Let's talk about what you've already mentioned, young people going toward the occult. When we see
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those statistics that you've already cited that young people are becoming spiritual, not irreligious
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necessarily, not atheist, but also not Christian, how much of that is accounted for by the occult
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Yeah, this is something I really learned. I'm in my mid-50s, and a man approached me in Oxford
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a couple years ago, a guy named Daniel Kim. He is an Anglican seminarian from the evangelical
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tradition, 27 years old, and he said to me, I need to let you know that the new atheism is not
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the enemy you think it is. I'm like, what do you mean? He said, your generation thinks that's the
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problem. It was the problem 10, 20 years ago, not anymore. He said, in my generation, the problem is
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the occult. Nobody, he knows, he said, has anything, any interest in new atheism, but they're all engaged
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in some degree or another with the occult. He told me that before he went to seminary, he worked in
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advertising in London. He said, I was the only Christian in my office. Well, that's no surprise,
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it's advertising, it's London. But he said, every other person there was an occultist. There were
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even two open Satanists who defined Satanism as learning to live your most fully human life.
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And he went on to say to me, Daniel Kim, the seminarian, he said, I know that I'm going to be
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dealing with this for the rest of my ministry. And I'm telling you, he said, pointing to me,
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you have got to let the church know that this is where the battle is right now, not the battles of
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20, 30, 40 years ago, but right here on the front lines. And when I tell, I've told that story as I've
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met younger people, Gen Z folks over my travels, they all shake their head, oh yeah. And then they'll
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tell stories of the people in their high school or their college, things they're doing. I just came here
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from Birmingham, Alabama. I talked to a young Baptist undergraduate who said he knows so many
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young women who are taking the Greek gods as their sort of, I don't know, sort of like what a Catholic
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would call a patron saint. Like, are you serious? He said, oh yeah, it's not just a symbolic thing,
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they really are trying to relate to the Greek gods. Birmingham, Alabama.
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Yeah, that doesn't, it doesn't really surprise me. I mean, we were raised in a time, you know, I was,
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I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s. And even some of this was alive and well then at such an
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early age, reading the magazines that tell you your astrological sign, the little power beads that were
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supposed to signify some kind of superpower that you could have if you were wearing a certain kind of
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color, even the mood rings that were supposed to tell you what mood you're in and what activities you
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should be doing based on how you're feeling that day. And of course, with the rise of social media, all of the
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personality quizzes that told you who you really were and what you should be doing in your life. There's a lot of
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God of self that we, I mean, you could say that that's been alive and well since the garden,
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but certainly this trendy narcissism that has manifested itself in a kind of spiritualism
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and witchcraft and Satanism, all of these kind of religious practices that tell you,
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you can be your own God. There is something bigger and better that you can tap into, but it's not out
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there. It's inside you and I can help you unlock that and unleash that. And once you unleash your
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inner goddess, then you will get everything you want. That's what I see. And you even see it through
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self-help and self-empowerment books. It's not blatantly satanic, or at least doesn't look like
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that. It's usually in pink and sparkly. That's just it. It's not blatantly satanic, but that's what it is.
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I have a long interview in Living in Wonder with a young man I call Jonah, who's an academic,
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highly trained in religious studies. He started out as a dissatisfied high school evangelical. He said
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that his pastor couldn't answer the questions he had. So he went out on a quest on his own,
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started reading a lot of esoteric books, and ended up as a full-blown occultist,
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worshiping the devil. He didn't think it was a devil. He thought these were the ancient gods who would
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help him. Deeply involved in psychedelic drugs, which are a huge thing now in our culture.
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Yeah. I don't know if he's working as a professor now, but he has got a PhD.
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But he said it was only when he realized, oh my God, I'm worshiping demons, that he turned from it,
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left, and became a Christian. And he gives advice in the book for pastors and families,
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things you need to know. He said, not once when I was in the occult did we see the Christian church
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as an enemy. They were totally clueless as to what was really going on. And he said, we can't
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be that way anymore. You've got to wake up. He knows it from the other side. And that's one of
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the things I hope to do with this book. This book is mostly hopeful and on the positive side. It's not
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all about the occult, but the occult is such a big part of it because it is false enchantment.
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I talked to someone in Birmingham the other day who lives in the South. She and her husband live
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in an area where there are a lot of academics and scientists. And she told me that this is
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everywhere there among the scientists. The scientists are turning to the occult. They don't call it that,
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but that's what it is. She said now in our cul-de-sac, in the old days, used to go out and sit there
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and have a fire and people would drink beer or wine and fellowship. Now they're doing that,
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but smoking marijuana and doing psychedelics. And these are scientists. She came to see me in
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Birmingham. She said, I want you to know that you're onto something. This is happening. This
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is happening among the elites. They're being dragged into this worship of the self. And they're doing it
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not only through psychedelics and drug use, but through technology. One of the crazy things I
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learned working on this book is how a lot of people in the top of the U.S. government and national
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security and defense, as well as in Silicon Valley, believe that UFOs are real. I laughed at this. I've
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laughed at this all my life, but they're like, no, no, no. You need to pay attention. They don't
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believe that they are people from or creatures from other planets. They believe these are
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extradimensional beings who are trying to contact us. And, you know, listening to all this in their
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language, their non-religious language, I'm like, they're talking about demons. And it's, I don't
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want to be like a tabloid guy talking about seeing a demon behind everything, but it was crazy to learn
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that there are people in Silicon Valley, I've confirmed this with several people who know,
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who believe that, oh yes, the higher, the aliens are really higher entities who are leading us to
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enlightenment. And they do seances to communicate with them. The Christian church used to know what
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this was, and some of us still do. We have got to be aware of this. This is not just a fringe freak
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phenomenon. This is happening right now, and we're not ready to defend ourselves.
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Yes. You know, we recently had an ex-psychic on, and we had an ex-occultist on. It was this young
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woman who believed her whole life that she was in conversation with aliens. And she was kind of a
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lonely, troubled child, and she believed that these aliens really understood her and knew her.
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And she followed these aliens her whole life into the occult and into this demonic satanic
00:25:08.960
practice. And to the point you were making earlier, she believed that she could basically
00:25:14.520
syncretize this with Christianity. She didn't really see a difference in it because they used
00:25:20.180
some Christian language like baptism and sanctification and things like that, but of course
00:25:25.440
used a perverse meaning. But eventually she was just so oppressed by these demonic forces. She was on a
00:25:33.840
ton of drugs. She was doing sex sacrifice rituals. I mean, this young woman so sad. And then finally,
00:25:41.980
one day she called out Jesus, and he saved her in a very dramatic way. And that is something that I
00:25:50.780
know in a lot of these testimonies is that it always involves a name, like involving the testimony
00:25:58.320
that you told me from the guy in Italy. You said that he told him a name that was his new name. And I've
00:26:05.240
noticed that very often the drastic testimonies involve either the person saying Jesus's name
00:26:11.480
and being delivered or someone that they didn't know somehow knowing their name. And this is, you know,
00:26:18.720
I'm coming from the Reformed evangelical perspective. And that is a key point that I see in so many of these
00:26:26.000
testimonies of people who were completely lost. Someone, some random interaction, someone locked eyes with
00:26:32.920
them and said, this is your name. What are you doing?
00:26:35.880
And it is incredible how God seems to work in that fashion.
00:26:42.560
You know, you talking about doctrine earlier, this is one of the things that got in the way of my
00:26:50.000
full conversion. I'm not doctrine personally, but intellectualism. When I was younger, a teenager in
00:26:56.760
the 80s, I grew up in South Louisiana. We were Eastern Christmas Methodists. We didn't take the
00:27:01.960
faith that seriously. You don't really have the Louisiana twang. I've got family from Louisiana, too.
00:27:10.040
I've lived away from there for a lot of time, a lot of the years. But if I go back there, give me a couple of days.
00:27:16.600
I'm code switching. But anyway, by the time I got to be 15 or so, I thought that the church wasn't for me.
00:27:23.380
I thought that Christianity was either like the white middle class at prayer, being very quiet,
00:27:29.180
don't get too excited about this, or Jimmy Swaggart, who was a big deal back then, TV evangelism.
00:27:34.740
And then when I was 17, my mother won a trip to Europe in a church raffle, a guided tour. She
00:27:40.740
didn't want to go, so she sent me because I just wanted to go to Paris and see where Hemingway lived,
00:27:45.340
see the museums. I was the only young person on a bus full of elderly American tourists. I didn't care.
00:27:50.560
Bus pulls over on the way to Paris, about an hour outside the city, to go look at an old church.
00:27:56.440
I didn't even want to get off the bus and go see this old church, but I also didn't want to just
00:28:00.040
sit there for an hour. I followed the old people in. I was overwhelmed. This was the cathedral at
00:28:05.520
Chartres, which I didn't know then, growing up late 20th century, small town south, was one of the
00:28:10.700
great treasures of Christendom. It was a medieval Gothic cathedral. I stood there, Ali Beth, and looked
00:28:16.100
around at the stones and the stained glass, and I just knew that God was real and that He wanted me.
00:28:25.100
And it was just something to do with the presence of God in this temple built to His glory. 800 years
00:28:31.360
ago, my men whose names we have lost told me that the Lord spoke to me through that and tore down all
00:28:37.520
of my objections, intellectual objections. Now, I'd love to tell you that I walked out of that church
00:28:42.740
and became a Christian. I didn't, but I walked out of there on a search. I had a lot of dying
00:28:47.060
to self to do. The end of the search came six or seven years later when, as a young journalist in
00:28:52.220
Louisiana, I was sent to interview an elderly Catholic priest who had been born in the 1890s.
00:28:57.760
He was very old then, living in a home, to talk to him about his life before he became a Catholic
00:29:04.240
priest at age 50. He had been an artist and a famous art professor. I sat down there with that old man
00:29:09.660
who was just exuding peace. It was like light coming off of him. He was almost like Yoda,
00:29:14.680
a little short man. And I just asked him about his life. He told me about two miracles, actual
00:29:21.120
miracles he had seen that brought him out of his atheism and eventually convinced him to become
00:29:27.660
a priest. I sat there and listened to that. As a journalist, that old man started crying,
00:29:33.040
telling me about these events that happened over 50 years ago. And I left that interview thinking,
00:29:38.420
Lord, I have a decision to make. I want to believe. But for me, I was telling myself it was a matter of
00:29:45.100
intellectualism. But in fact, it was a matter of the heart. I didn't have the will to make the final
00:29:50.860
sacrifice to make Jesus my Lord. But seeing that old man and knowing that he was a witness and the
00:29:58.840
witness of his life, his changed life, convinced me that I've got to change too. And that was when I
00:30:04.640
got serious about God. But it took the experience of God in beauty and shatra, and then in the
00:30:12.200
embodied, the incarnate experience of God and this believer who had changed his life radically for
00:30:17.900
Christ. It took those things to open the door to propositional doctrinal truth.
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I was thinking as you were speaking about the miracles that were performed through the apostles in the
00:31:42.420
book of Acts, and I was just reading this the other day in my morning reading, and what miracles are for.
00:31:49.340
And you could see in the response of the people that witnessed the miracles, it's to confirm the
00:31:54.180
power of God, validate the truth of the gospel, to bring people not only to a place of worship, but
00:31:59.820
a place of wonder. And then also, it opened the door for the apostles to say,
00:32:05.800
yeah, the only reason we can do this is because of this guy, Jesus of Nazareth, that you killed,
00:32:11.260
by the way. And this is how we are able to perform these miracles. And then in the next chapter,
00:32:16.720
we see that the Sadducees were so angry about these miracles because they didn't believe that
00:32:22.040
anyone could raise from the dead. And they're talking about Jesus being raised from the dead.
00:32:25.680
And they try to exactly what you're saying, posit this intellectual rebuttal to the miracles. But
00:32:32.840
that's the thing about a miracle is that there's not really an intellectual rebuttal. It really is
00:32:38.420
a matter of faith, a matter of the heart, which of course, Jesus knew that it was a matter of the
00:32:43.220
heart for everyone, but including the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
00:32:46.620
You know, this is so true about all of us. You know, a lot of times we don't want to receive
00:32:51.260
the miracle or recognize a sign, an authentic sign, because it would cause us to change our life if
00:32:56.720
it was real. Jesus dealt with this. One of my favorite stories from the gospel is when he cast
00:33:01.540
the demons out of the demoniac in the graveyard, in Gerasene, and he cast them into the swine,
00:33:08.860
right? I would have thought that the people who live there would have seen this man who had been
00:33:15.360
enslaved to demons all of his life, restored to himself. They would have welcomed Jesus. But no,
00:33:20.680
they told him, get out of here. Because what did he do? He upset the settled order of things.
00:33:26.000
That is something so deep in human nature. I tell a story in the book about a man named Tobias Wolfe.
00:33:31.420
He's a famous American novelist who related a story of when he was in his 20s, he had been raised
00:33:37.340
Catholic and was kind of still enough Catholic to want to go volunteer at Lourdes one summer
00:33:42.620
to help people who could not get into the water seeking a cure to take the waters. And he tells a story,
00:33:49.300
I won't go into the whole thing now, but how he helped a two-year-old paralyzed girl. And he was
00:33:53.380
just so overwhelmed by the suffering she had and that she bore so faithfully that he sobbed over
00:34:00.920
her. Well, on the bus back from dropping her at the airport, he realized, oh my gosh, I can see.
00:34:07.160
Now, he had really bad vision, but he was too vain to wear glasses. He was a young man.
00:34:11.160
But his vision had been healed miraculously by God over the prayers he shed out of pity and love for
00:34:18.840
this little girl he was serving. Well, he said, I felt this overwhelming need to go to the grotto
00:34:23.500
at Lourdes and pray. And just to thank God for what happened. Gets back to the dorm where he was
00:34:28.820
staying. He ran into a friend, started to tell him about it. They didn't go to the grotto to pray.
00:34:33.560
Next morning, he woke up and his vision had been restored to it where he couldn't see again.
00:34:38.040
And he said, reflecting on this years later, the truth was, I didn't want the miracle. Of course,
00:34:43.360
I wanted to see. It was a great thing. But if I had thanked God and accepted the miracle,
00:34:48.360
then I would have had to repent and change my life in ways I didn't want to do. So I denied it.
00:34:53.500
And I thought, that is so human. In my own case, on my own journey to Christ, I had seen a couple of
00:34:59.960
things that I couldn't really explain that were testimonies to God's existence. But I rationalized it
00:35:06.540
away because I didn't want to sacrifice and make Christ my Lord. I wanted to approach God on my
00:35:12.760
own terms, but it never works that way. What is the difference between believing that God can do
00:35:19.740
anything? He can work how he want to. He can perform any miracle. And the mysticism that is
00:35:25.260
constantly thinking like, okay, when I was little, I would get so paranoid. And when you're little,
00:35:30.000
the worst thing that could possibly happen, your worst fear of something happening to your parents.
00:35:34.200
And I like had this, I think I was probably six years old. I had this paranoid idea in my mind
00:35:40.440
that if I like, I don't even remember what it was. It was something completely paranoid. Like if I
00:35:45.460
moved to this, then something's going to happen to my mom and dad. And thinking that their fate
00:35:51.220
somehow depends on me and being confused about what God is telling me, what real obedience looks like
00:35:57.220
versus legalism? How do we have faith that miracles can happen without thinking, well, all of it, God's
00:36:05.740
working, God's miracle working depends on every little thing I say or do? Because I would think
00:36:11.980
that that would negate grace and would probably create a lot of paranoia and legalism.
00:36:17.860
Sure. No, that is a fantastic question. I interviewed an exorcist in Rome at the Vatican who
00:36:24.620
told me, who drew this distinction. He said, we can't make God do what we want him to do. God is
00:36:31.240
not magic. It's all grace. God will come to us and reveal himself to us in his own time for his own
00:36:37.120
reasons. In the demonic, by contrast, they will come. Every time you call them, they will come.
00:36:42.740
They're going to enslave you, but they will come. As Christians, we have to live by faith and knowing
00:36:49.600
that God can and will do these things if he wants to. But if he doesn't do it, that doesn't mean he's
00:36:55.000
not there. I remember when my younger sister was diagnosed with terminal cancer back in 2010,
00:37:00.860
I flew down from Philadelphia on the day of her diagnosis and I was lying in bed at her house that
00:37:06.240
night praying and crying for her. I felt above me a presence. I think it was an angel that conveyed to
00:37:12.400
me, she's not going to make it, but don't be afraid. This is part of God's plan. I only told
00:37:17.900
my wife that. I didn't tell anybody else. I didn't want to discourage my sister. And she, in fact,
00:37:21.780
didn't make it. But knowing that God allowed this, was allowing her suffering for some mysterious way
00:37:29.640
for his greater glory, we can only know by faith, that gave me so much peace. And I have had small
00:37:36.180
miracles in my life. I've seen things happen that exorcists have done, manifestations of the enemy,
00:37:42.840
as I mentioned earlier. But if none of that had happened, I would still believe. And that's
00:37:48.100
important to know because these miracles, these signs, whether they're signs of God's presence or
00:37:53.700
signs of the demonic, they only mean something if they lead us to Jesus Christ. There are people who
00:38:00.680
go around searching for miracles, they get caught up in speaking in tongues, or if you're Catholic,
00:38:06.520
Marian apparitions, if you're Orthodox, weeping icons. These things are great, but that's not the
00:38:11.460
core of the faith. They only mean something if they lead you to Christ.
00:38:17.620
What do you hope people get out of the book when they're done?
00:38:21.660
I want people to know that the world is not what we think it is. The world is so much darker than many
00:38:28.900
of us think, but also filled with so much more light. I want people to understand spiritual
00:38:34.800
warfare is real, but I want them also to understand that we have hope, that this world is not all there
00:38:41.280
is, that there is deep meaning, and that it is accessible to us. You know, I quote early in the
00:38:48.040
book a Harvard professor named Elaine Scarry who says, true education is not imparting information
00:38:54.340
from teacher to student. True education, rather, is preparing the students to be staring at the
00:39:00.140
right corner of the sky when a comet blazes past. Well, that's Christian enchantment. You know, I can't
00:39:06.160
tell you this is how you become enchanted. What I can do is say, here are some practices, some spiritual
00:39:12.020
disciplines, some prayer rules, things you can do to open yourself up for when the Lord manifests
00:39:18.440
himself to you and you can act on it. I just hope people, all Christians, my brothers and sisters
00:39:23.220
in Christ who are Protestant, Catholic, and my fellow Orthodox, can learn to live more authentically,
00:39:28.840
more deeply, keeping our eyes open for the comet going past, which is to say the manifestations of
00:39:34.960
our Lord. So that transcendence that we're longing for, that we're looking for, we don't have to go
00:39:42.040
outside of the Christian faith for it. It's right there. Absolutely. And, you know, that's one of the
00:39:47.180
things that I hope also comes from this book. There'll be a lot of readers who feel like their
00:39:51.780
faith is really dry and they're looking for something more. And maybe they might go to see
00:39:56.580
some New Age thing as an adjunct to their Christian walk. A, that's dangerous, and B, you don't have to
00:40:03.020
do that. I'm coming from the Eastern Christian tradition, the Orthodox tradition, where mysticism has
00:40:10.260
always been more of a central part of our faith than in the Christian West. I hope that in
00:40:17.160
my book, insofar as I bring some Eastern Christian teachings and practices, like praying the Jesus
00:40:23.680
prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me as sinner, that it can help our Western
00:40:28.960
Christians in their Christian walk so that they can learn to be stronger in the faith, learn to have
00:40:35.600
an eye open for the comet, so to speak, and also understand how to combat the spiritual darkness
00:40:42.680
that is present now and is becoming ever more present. Because we're all in this together.
00:40:49.340
I'm upfront about my Orthodox convictions, but this book is not a book of Orthodox apologetics.
00:40:55.780
It's a book, a handbook, I hope, to help open the eyes of all my fellow Christians to the mystical
00:41:05.620
Yes. Well, thank you so much for writing that, because I think, you know, I agree, and I share
00:41:12.600
your concerns about the prevalence of witchcraft and the occult and even the syncretism that we see,
00:41:19.300
and I think a lot of people are, which is why every time we talk about witchcraft or something,
00:41:23.760
the episode just seems to blow up, because people are seeing this in their lives, and it's counterfeit.
00:41:30.380
I knew, and I do know, of an Orthodox priest in my own confession who had confronted the demonic,
00:41:37.780
believed that demons were real, but got scared of it and turned away from it, even though there
00:41:42.380
was a man who needed help. And this priest was ordained to help this man and had the knowledge
00:41:49.440
and the faith to help the man, but it scared the priest because he had never encountered it.
00:41:54.260
It was only theoretical for him. We have got to get over that, all of us. It is real,
00:41:58.680
but we are children of the light. We are children of God, and we've got to know it when we see it.
00:42:03.980
Last point I want to make, when I was a Catholic for 13 years, I came to Christ first as a Catholic,
00:42:09.140
but then writing as a journalist about the abuse scandal, I lost my Catholic faith.
00:42:13.720
I had made a fundamental mistake, Allie Beth, that I think a lot of intellectual Christians would make.
00:42:18.520
I thought that as long as I had all the doctrines and the propositions straight in my head,
00:42:23.140
my faith was unassailable. Nothing could happen.
00:42:25.340
But the evil I had to confront as a journalist talking to abuse victims and going deep into that
00:42:31.500
story, it made it impossible for me to hold on to the doctrines. It was almost like holding
00:42:37.940
an iron skillet over an open fire with your bare hand. Finally, I just couldn't hold on to it anymore.
00:42:45.200
By God's grace, when I no longer could believe as a Catholic, I went to the Orthodox Church,
00:42:49.760
but I became a very different kind of Christian. I had been so triumphalist in my Catholicism and
00:42:55.180
intellectual. That was not the Catholic Church's fault. That was me. But I thought that reason was
00:43:00.660
the whole ballgame. In fact, I saw the limits of reason, and I knew that reason's important,
00:43:07.120
but ultimately, there's no substitute for a life of prayer, fasting, and repentance to draw us into
00:43:13.840
this sense of real unity with the Lord. I've been Orthodox now for almost 20 years, and I needed
00:43:21.320
that humbling. I needed to be smashed intellectually in order to open myself up to the fullness of life
00:43:27.600
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You know, you mentioned how there are government leaders who believe in aliens, the extraterrestrial,
00:44:35.200
supernatural, or taking psychedelics. And my wheels were turning as you were saying that about all of
00:44:41.120
the top academics and politicians in this country who believe the superstitious nonsense that it's
00:44:48.240
possible to be born in the wrong body. And when you break down that idea, it is very spiritual and
00:44:54.400
religious to say that basically your inner self, your inner spirit, your inner soul is who you truly
00:45:02.840
are, that this body is kind of arbitrary, it's subjective, and your true identity can be determined
00:45:10.400
by some inner god or inner goddess. Even this idea that babies are not given their rights or they
00:45:19.480
don't become human until they go through the birth canal. That's a very superstitious,
00:45:24.960
kind of supernatural idea. Progressivism, I would say, is a form of a religion, even though progressives
00:45:33.340
would say it's just secular neutrality. No, it's not. There is no neutrality.
00:45:38.880
And so we're seeing the spiritual battle manifest itself very clearly in the political realm. How are
00:45:46.160
you thinking about that battle specifically in terms of this election?
00:45:50.680
Wow. You know, I'm a conservative. I used to write for the American conservative, now write for the
00:45:55.420
European conservative. I did not vote for Trump in 2016. I didn't vote. I'm not going to vote for a
00:46:01.680
pro-choicer, but I just didn't like Trump. He surprised me by his court appointments during
00:46:08.120
his presidential term. And now I'll crawl over glass to vote for Trump, not because I have any
00:46:14.480
more respect for Trump, but because what the Democrats have done and what the never-Trumper
00:46:20.340
neocons have done are so frightening to me. You know, Trump, I was very disappointed that he's backing
00:46:27.340
away from a hard line on abortion. But I also see that post-Dobbs, the American people are not with
00:46:35.560
us pro-lifers. We have a lot of work to do of education and of conversion to do. So it doesn't
00:46:41.740
offend me that Trump is, as a politician, he's not a pastor, he's a politician, is responding to that
00:46:47.220
reality. But all I have to do to stiffen my spine on the question of abortion is look to what Kamala
00:46:52.620
Harris is going to do. She is promising to codify Roe in national law. She will force
00:46:58.780
hospitals to give abortions and so on and so forth. And that's the Equality Act. That's not just
00:47:04.540
something you're making up. That's part of the Equality Act, forcing even Catholic hospitals to
00:47:09.140
perform abortions. And we cannot, we pro-life conservatives, cannot let the perfect be the
00:47:14.620
enemy of the possible, of the good enough for now. J.D. Vance is a personal friend of mine. I was there
00:47:21.400
when he came into the Catholic Church. He invited me up for that. I believe he's a sincere pro-lifer.
00:47:27.220
But when he was selected by Donald Trump to be the vice president, I texted him and give him
00:47:33.080
congratulations. And he texted me back to say that he's never going to contradict the big guy,
00:47:38.580
Trump, which just makes sense. He's the number two. So when J.D. came out and waffled on abortion
00:47:44.880
and abortion pill and all that, I didn't like hearing that. But I also know what he's doing,
00:47:50.880
that he can't stand in opposition to his boss. So I'm not that worried about it. I know. I see
00:48:00.100
I know. You would just think that you would be able to say, look, I'm so honored that you would
00:48:06.720
choose me. When you, at first, when I thought that you said, I'm not going to contradict the
00:48:10.640
big guy, I thought you meant God. But he meant Donald Trump, which I think that we can see through
00:48:15.860
his rhetoric. And I'm not doubting that he is personally pro-life. And I really like J.D.
00:48:20.960
Vance. I've liked J.D. Vance even before he was in political office. And I think he sincerely
00:48:25.540
holds those, you know, pro-life views. But for him to basically equivocate on that and to say in a
00:48:33.360
debate, oh, on the abortion issue, Republicans just need women to trust us. What the heck does that even
00:48:38.380
mean? I don't know. It just seems like he'd be able to say, I don't want this position
00:48:42.860
enough to compromise on this life and death issue. And if that's what you're asking me to do,
00:48:52.280
Yeah. I hear you. I hear you. And I've not talked to him personally since, other than just a couple
00:48:58.740
of texts since he was selected. But I trust that should he make it through, should he make it to
00:49:06.160
the vice presidency, that'll set him up for 2028. I believe, I have faith. I may be disappointed,
00:49:12.280
but I have faith that we'll see a stronger pro-life position. The Republicans return to that.
00:49:18.080
But I also think in Donald Trump's case, I never believed he was a real pro-lifer. That's one of
00:49:23.420
the reasons I didn't vote for him. I thought he would sell us out. But whether he's fake about
00:49:28.420
pro-life or not, he gave us pro-life justices. We cannot forget that Dobbs happened. Roe was gone
00:49:35.080
because of justices that Donald Trump appointed. So I think that when Trump gets into office,
00:49:41.960
I think we're going to see, I continue to see pro-life justices appointed that come out of
00:49:46.320
the Federalist Society. And that's the thing I'm keeping my eye on, not the rhetoric, but the deeds.
00:49:52.320
Yep. And I mean, I do think that J.D. Vance was a really good pick. I think he actually is a better
00:49:57.980
representative of Trump's policies than Trump is. He's better at arguing them. He's better
00:50:03.620
at articulating them. And I think that he has done a really good job in that regard. It's not an easy
00:50:09.040
job either to be Donald Trump's running mate. No, no. You know, I read something the other day on
00:50:16.200
the Free Press, Barry Weiss's publication, where it was written by a guy named Martin Gurry,
00:50:21.140
a former CIA analyst. He's now retired. He said he had never voted for Trump, but he's doing it this
00:50:26.580
time without apology. Because in his mind, this is an election between the party that wants control
00:50:32.140
and the party that represents people who do not wish to be controlled. And he brings COVID into
00:50:37.960
this and surveillance, debanking all of it. That is what it comes down to. And I live in Europe,
00:50:44.040
right? And I see this happening in Europe. I live in Hungary, which is beaten up all the time by the
00:50:48.880
European Union because they will not open their borders for mass migration. The government of Hungary
00:50:55.520
does not support the war in Ukraine. And most recently, or most vociferously from the point
00:51:02.520
of view of the Europeans, the government of Hungary passed a law forbidding LGBT propaganda for minors,
00:51:09.000
you know, but they will not compromise on that. They're Christians. And I see this playing out in
00:51:14.340
Europe in a very intense way, but the same thing's happening in America. And I don't believe that
00:51:19.600
politics are going to save us. You know, people who look to politics to get us out of this crisis,
00:51:25.240
they're wrong. But politics does have a role to play, if only protecting the liberty of churches,
00:51:33.040
schools, and religious institutions to proclaim the gospel and to proclaim meaning. The prime
00:51:39.260
minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who's close to Trump, he said something really important a few
00:51:43.480
years ago. He said, look, as a politician, I can't give you meaning, but I can give you things.
00:51:48.620
What he meant by that was just what I said, you know, passing laws that protect religious liberty
00:51:53.980
and so on. He said, but if the institutions that I protect do not step up and do the work that
00:52:01.260
they're meant to do to bring meaning and show meaning to people, then anything I do politically
00:52:06.680
is not going to work. That's the message I hope that Christians and other conservatives take from
00:52:11.960
this election. When I wrote the Benedict Option in 2017, it was pretty despairing about politics,
00:52:18.240
and I did not say in the book, despite what you might have heard, that people should withdraw from
00:52:22.540
politics. I said in the book that we have to stay involved if only to protect religious liberty.
00:52:27.640
Since then, I've become more convinced as the woke wokeness has taken over and it's become very
00:52:33.600
militant, especially in the U.S. military. I have become less hands-off about politics.
00:52:41.980
Yeah. Right. There was a little bit of a shift, or maybe you could say whether there was a shift
00:52:47.580
from the Benedict Option to live not by lies. Like you said, the Benedict Option wasn't saying we
00:52:53.680
should just be completely disengaged, but in live not by lies, I mean, that book did so well because
00:52:59.420
it was really just a call to arms for those who believe in the truth. And if there's anything that
00:53:05.980
we can do, it is at least not lie, at least don't say that a man can become a woman. And that just
00:53:14.780
resonated with people at just the right time when it felt like, especially in 2020, that we were all
00:53:21.600
being asked to lie about, whether it was about social justice assertions that they were making,
00:53:28.720
or whether it was about gender, whether it was about abortion, whether it was about Biden's
00:53:34.380
competence. And I think your book, even the title alone kind of girded people's loins to be like,
00:53:43.280
Yeah. You know, I served in that book as a messenger for people who had come to the U.S.
00:53:47.740
from the Soviet bloc, Soviet communism, escaping communism, and who were starting to see here
00:53:53.180
in America and throughout the West more broadly, a rebirth of something that felt like communism to
00:53:59.560
them. But it was confusing to them because there are no gulags. There are no secret police.
00:54:03.460
Nevertheless, they felt that when you live in a world when you can't say what you really think
00:54:08.920
without losing your job, losing your business, losing your friends, and so forth, that is a
00:54:14.120
warning sign. And in the book, I explained what they meant by what I call soft totalitarianism.
00:54:20.620
And the second half of the book, I went throughout the former Soviet bloc talking to Christians who had
00:54:25.640
stayed behind and resisted communism, seeking their advice for what can we do today? What should we do
00:54:31.640
today? The message of utmost importance that I got from them is we have to prepare to suffer as a
00:54:39.600
church. I remember standing just off of Red Square in Moscow in the soft snow early November, talking to
00:54:45.680
a Baptist pastor, a Russian Baptist pastor. Now, the Baptists have it rough in Russia. Even for my own
00:54:51.220
people, the Orthodox persecute them, sadly. But this old man told me, you go back to America and you tell the
00:54:56.860
church that if they're not prepared to suffer, they're not going to make it through what's coming.
00:55:01.180
And that is the ultimate meaning, I think, of that book. And also, this book, the new one,
00:55:08.040
Living in Wonder, is a continuation of that because in order to have the courage to suffer,
00:55:14.200
we not only need the doctrinal convictions and the scriptural convictions, but we also need to have a firm
00:55:19.800
awareness and faith that there is something more, that God is present objectively and around us,
00:55:27.640
and he sees our suffering. There's a story I tell in Live Not By Lies that I recall in Living in Wonder
00:55:33.520
about a Russian dissident who became a Christian in the early 1970s. He came from a prominent communist
00:55:40.380
family, Alexander Ogorodnikov, and of course, the Soviets threw him in prison. And he got there into
00:55:46.500
prison, and he began converting people, witnessing to people on death row. He didn't have a death
00:55:51.400
sentence, but they wanted to make an example of him because he came from a communist family,
00:55:55.380
so they put him among the worst of the worst. He began bringing so many to Christ that they put him
00:56:01.160
in solitary confinement. They beat him. They would flood his cell with sewage at night just to torture
00:56:06.980
him. He began to lose his faith that God had a plan for him. And then he told me this story in
00:56:13.760
Moscow with tears coming down his face. He said, one night, I was awakened by an angel who showed
00:56:19.540
me a vision of an inmate from behind with his arms, his wrists cuffed, being led to his execution.
00:56:27.300
Remember, this was death row. I didn't know why this was happening. This kept happening night after
00:56:32.060
night with different inmates. And finally, he realized the Lord was showing me all of these men,
00:56:36.720
condemned murderers, were executed, but they were in paradise with the Lord because he,
00:56:41.780
Alexander, had been there to lead them to Christ. Now, this restored his faith, this mystical
00:56:47.860
experience. God didn't have to send him that, and God still would have had a reason for him to be
00:56:53.040
there. But in his mercy, the Lord sent him these angels to show that to him, and that revived him
00:56:59.480
and helped him to endure more years of prison before he was finally free.
00:57:02.900
Hmm. I think that we need those reminders from the Lord, especially in a time like now when we are
00:57:11.140
worried, understandably, about the future, about the future of the country that our children and
00:57:15.860
our grandchildren are going to live in. And I think seeking the Lord at a time when he may be found,
00:57:23.220
but also allowing ourselves to be refreshed by him and refreshing our own belief that he can work how he
00:57:31.920
wants to work and he can show us things that maybe we can't see with our, you know, with our physical
00:57:38.940
eyes and our physical sight in this temporal realm. I think that's a really beautiful reminder for now.
00:57:44.340
And we have to get out of the left brains, out of our left brains. I talk in the book about the
00:57:49.700
teachings or the research of this man, Ian McGilchrist, a British psychiatrist, who talks about how in a
00:57:55.680
healthy brain, the left brain, which is more analytical and abstract, and the right brain,
00:58:00.360
which is more intuitive and emotional, work together in tandem. But we in Western culture,
00:58:06.880
he says, have gotten so stranded in our left brain, we've come to think that the only thing
00:58:11.740
that really counts is what can be scientifically or mathematically proven, what is material.
00:58:17.040
But that is a lie. To be trapped in the left brain is a lie.
00:58:20.200
But we become so afraid of giving up control. We feel like we have to bound everything with
00:58:25.700
reason and to control it because loss of control scares us. In fact, though, if we are going to
00:58:32.160
experience God in the mystical realm, we have to give up some of that control, that desire for
00:58:37.660
control. Enchantment, in a Christian sense, can only happen when we surrender control and the idea we
00:58:44.660
have to put God in a box and just allow Him to be fully present in our lives.
00:58:50.040
Yes. Amen. Well, thank you so much, Rod. I really appreciate it. Living in Wonder is available,
00:58:54.840
I'm guessing, wherever books are sold, correct?
00:58:56.800
Wherever books are sold. Absolutely. Amazon, everywhere. And Eighth Day Books,
00:59:01.600
my favorite Christian bookstore in Wichita, Kansas. You can go online to 8daybooks.com and you can get a
00:59:07.360
signed copy exclusively through them. Please support your local Christian bookstore if you can.