00:18:06.700Well, the whole point of Kingdom of King is to take murders, real life murders,
00:18:11.120that have been transformed into art again and again.
00:18:13.740So not just one artist, but movie makers, poets, novelists have taken these particular murders.
00:18:21.020I pick, there's really four of them in there.
00:18:23.220I pick four murders and show you how they become art, how they turn to art.
00:18:27.640And the reason that's important to me is because artists make the world beautiful.
00:18:32.180They make something beautiful even out of ugliness.
00:18:34.400So you read Macbeth and it's filled with murder and betrayal and death and all this.
00:18:39.400But the play itself is very beautiful because it actually presents you these things within that moral order.
00:18:47.580And I think that's what people are looking for in crime because you're absolutely right, Ali.
00:18:51.820This is something I've talked about a lot is that it must be incredibly frustrating to the devil that even the greatest evil he can commit points the way to the sacred.
00:19:02.260And nowhere is that more true than in murder.
00:19:06.220Why is it when we see murder, we know we've hit the line.
00:19:09.740We know that's the place where you can't say, it might be right or it might have been right at some point in time.
00:19:15.520Or maybe it's right in Venezuela, but it's not right in Morocco.
00:19:18.780You know, murder is the place where everybody says, yes, that is evil.
00:19:24.880Well, it's because of the sanctity of the human person.
00:19:27.180It's because each of us has inside ourselves a consciousness that is creating a life, creating an experience, creating a unique road to God.
00:19:39.300And so continuing the work of Genesis, continuing God's creative work.
00:19:44.200I mean, God created a creation that continues to create.
00:19:48.140And when you snuff that out, nothing can make up for that.
00:19:51.160Nothing can bring that consciousness back.
00:19:57.080It's incredibly creative and beautiful.
00:19:59.320When you abort it in the womb, you destroy an entire life that would have been.
00:20:03.580And so I think that people turn to this because it is weirdly reassuring in a way to remind ourselves that there is something that cannot be excused.
00:20:27.020But there's something about murder that is just an absolutely stark line in the sand.
00:20:32.220And I think people are fascinated by it in a way because we've lost that sense of a God making things beautiful.
00:20:40.800I think that people would be better off if they were reading Dostoevsky more and maybe being titillated by true crimes a little less.
00:20:48.400I think that would be better because it's when the artist, when the mind and heart and soul of the artist engage with murder, that we see it become something beautiful in this larger context, which is what I think God is doing with the world itself.
00:21:00.480Yes, because I think watching these true crime shows or when I was in high school, my mom and I would watch the Law and Order SVU, which is terrifying.
00:21:13.020It doesn't really especially immediately create some sort of peace.
00:21:17.760You're not immediately transferred into thoughts about God and his goodness.
00:21:22.100You're thinking this is going to happen to me.
00:21:24.460And I think about the passage in Philippians 4, I think it's verses 4 through 8, that, you know, God through Paul tells us to dwell on that which is lovely and pure and excellent and worthy of praise and to be filled with thanksgiving and to give our burdens to God in prayer.
00:21:42.180And so there is some sort of balance between looking at darkness, recognizing it for the objective evil that it is, contrast it to God's goodness, and constantly dwelling on the darkness, knowing that it's going to fill us with the kind of fear and paranoia that really isn't good for us.
00:22:01.480You know, I think there is a difference between those things.
00:22:04.180And there are works, by the way, that like I would say are not art, you know, pornography immediately leaps to mind, but there are other things on the way to pornography that I think are not art and do not explain anything and do not give any experience.
00:22:17.200But I think that quote from Philippians, which gets thrown at me a lot because a lot of people write to me and say, you call yourself a Christian and yet you write these books about murder and about, you know, gangsters and evil people.
00:22:27.120And yes, I do. And I will continue to do that because I think it's really important to have faith in the world as it is.
00:22:34.820And if you take that quote from Philippians and use it like that song from Peter Pan, you know, like think of the happiest things.
00:22:43.220It's the same as having wings. I think you have to remember that Peter Pan never grows up.
00:22:46.520And if your faith never becomes the faith of a grown up person, it's not going to stand up very well when you come into contact with the things that really do happen in this world, not just the evil, but also the suffering, the cruelty.
00:23:02.440I mean, look, we believe in a God who was crucified. That's a deep, deep thing.
00:23:07.880That's a very, very tragic truth. And yet the very deepest thing that God does for us is contained within that crucifixion.
00:23:16.720And I think that, you know, one of the first things it says in Philippians is meditate and dwell on what is true.
00:23:22.840And what is true is all the beauty we experience, all the good that we experience, all the God that we experience takes place in this very dark world.
00:23:31.580And so I don't think that that quote is meant to make us fools.
00:23:35.180I don't think it's meant to make us like childlike fools who only think that good things are going to happen.
00:23:40.440This is my problem with a lot of modern Christian art, because Christian art at the peak of Christianity, at the time when Christianity was the dominant Western faith and was everywhere to be found, Christian art was not like that at all.
00:23:52.100When you look at the times when you look at the times when you look at the masses and funeral masses of Mozart and Bach, you're dealing with a great deal of sorrow and darkness and pain and suffering that I think Christianity was meant to address.
00:24:13.260It's not meant to be, you know, God is not the God of Never Neverland.
00:24:20.160And your faith has to be in this world.
00:24:22.720It has to be the faith in a sad world.
00:24:25.720And so I think that like, you know, just like if you, all you ever watch about romance and love is romantic comedies, and you begin to think that that's what love is going to be like,
00:24:37.300you're going to be very disappointed in life because love is much more complex and deep and dark and human than a romantic comedy.
00:24:44.860And in the same way, if all you ever watch, and I don't attack these films at all, but if all you ever think about is, you know, God is not dead part 12, this time he's really not dead.
00:24:55.100You know, I think that you are actually going to have a very disappointing view of faith when you're forced to confront the true tragedies and the true suffering and the true evil that all of us at some point have to confront.
00:25:07.800And so the reason I believe in the arts is because I believe the arts convey, transform this evil and this darkness into a source of light.
00:25:16.880And I think that that is a beautiful thing.
00:25:19.420Like I said, I think Macbeth is a beautiful play, but it's a beautiful play about very dark, very ugly things.
00:25:25.100I think that, you know, the movie Psycho is a great movie, and yet I think it's about something very dark.
00:25:31.220And I think Crime and Punishment, again, is a dark story, but shines a light on the road forward.
00:25:37.660And so I think that quote, you know, that verse or those verses can be misused.
00:25:44.100I think that we should meditate on truth, which also has a beauty of its own.
00:25:48.540Yes. And obviously, God wants us to read his word, and the Bible is filled with all kinds of very dark and bloody stories, like the murder of Cain and Abel.
00:25:58.580And if those verses in Philippians 4 were meant to tell us to only focus on temporally happy things, happy things in the moment, then we wouldn't have all of these stories in the Bible that are very bloody and very uncomfortable.
00:26:13.100But I think we have to read the Bible in the same way that we would have to read a book or watch a movie that contains some of these dark themes as descriptive and not prescriptive.
00:26:24.340A lot of people criticize Scripture by saying, oh, all these evil things happen.
00:26:28.300That must mean that God is condoning them.
00:26:30.600No, it's a description of something that happened.
00:26:33.100It's not a prescription for what people should be doing.
00:26:36.480And it sounds like what you're saying in a lot of these stories that contain murder and gangsters, it's not prescribing evil.
00:26:46.760And I think we just have to have the right mentality when we are consuming some of those materials to draw the right lessons out of them, right?
00:27:01.980I've always just loved ghost stories, and ghost stories were very popular at that time.
00:27:04.940And so I was doing very well in Hollywood, writing ghost stories and selling these scripts.
00:27:09.040And when you do that, they call you in if they have something that they think is in your wheelhouse, and they pitch you their story and ask you how you would write it.
00:27:18.160And then if they like your take on it, they hire you.
00:27:37.700I said, you know, I don't think I'm going to write that story because in my stories, when a woman is running away from a bad guy, I'm rooting for the woman, you know?
00:27:46.840And I think that actually, even though I was laughing until they almost threw me out of the room, I was like, don't let the door hit you on your way out.
00:27:53.980But even as I was laughing, I think that's true.
00:27:56.060You know, you can sort of tell when you're watching a film and you're not watching something that takes place in a moral framework.
00:28:03.100You're watching something where they're titillating you with cruelty.
00:28:07.340And I think there are a lot of movies like that, actually.
00:28:10.000And look, they're not going to destroy you.
00:28:11.800They're not going to reach into your soul and rip your soul out or anything like that.
00:28:14.580But you just know it and you feel bad.
00:28:16.320I mean, I once read a novel that was a ghost story and I was enjoying it for about two-thirds of the way.
00:28:20.780And then suddenly it turned and I realized, no, this guy is actually sucking me into something evil.
00:28:25.800And I threw the novel away, went to bed, woke up and thought, I got to get that thing out of the house.
00:28:31.720And I actually took the book out of the house and threw it away in the garage because I didn't want it in the house.
00:28:36.440So, yeah, you know, of course you can project evil if your heart is dark.
00:28:42.180But I don't think that that's what most artists are doing.
00:28:44.420I think what most artists are trying to do is get to the heart of something that they see in the world, even if they don't know it.
00:28:50.060I think many writers who have no faith have produced beautiful works that speak of God.
00:28:54.400Because I think any time you tell the truth, you're going to speak of God.
00:28:57.240And by the way, the gospel itself is not even good news without the bad news.
00:29:03.740And like, it's hard to look at the light.
00:29:05.660It's hard to understand the light of redemption and the good news that that is if you don't understand the really bad news of the sin and the death and the bloodiness and the brutality that it's caused.
00:29:15.480That's why heaven is something that we look forward to, because it is something without all of this darkness.
00:29:21.940And so I think that dark-light dichotomy is really important.
00:29:24.800Actually, we see it in the very beginning.
00:29:26.680One of the first things that God does is separate the darkness from the light.
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00:31:06.840What do you think about the religious state of America right now?
00:31:11.040It does seem like moral relativism, my truth, your truth, is a popular philosophy, maybe more popular than ever before.
00:31:20.720Do you see a shift, though, happening?
00:31:23.600I don't know if it has to do with, you know, politics at all, but I'm sure, you know, it correlates somewhat with how people are feeling, thinking politically and culturally and then how we're shifting religiously.
00:31:36.880Yeah, I mean, I've been predicting a very specific sort of revival for over 10 years, which is that I think there's going to be and is actually happening now.
00:31:47.260It has actually begun a revival amongst the intellectual elites.
00:31:53.800And I think that that's important because while we can get angry at our elites when they fail us and they so often become corrupt and elitist as opposed to just elite, it is ideas trickle down just like money.
00:32:05.740And I think that when the intellectuals start to understand that atheism makes no sense, I think that's an important thing that's going to happen for all of us.
00:32:16.300And I think it's actually happening now.
00:32:17.820For hundreds of years, for hundreds of years, the discoveries of science sort of bled the faith out of the world.
00:32:29.100It wasn't that anyone disproved God or anything like that, but they seem to be showing us that things don't work the way the Bible said they did.
00:32:37.420You know, that things have absolutely materialist causes and therefore everything must be materialist.
00:32:42.740Now, most of the great scientists who invented science and most of the great scientists through life do not believe that.
00:32:48.760They almost all have believed in some kind of faith and some kind of spiritual underpinning to the world.
00:32:54.260And yet it's suggested to us that everything might be pure material.
00:33:06.360And so the description of creation in the Bible makes a lot more scientific sense than this world the atheists believe in that sort of pops up out of nowhere.
00:33:16.320There's nothing and then suddenly there's something and it all makes sense and human beings come along and just a great big accident.
00:33:22.760And so that doesn't really make sense anymore.
00:33:24.760And so one of the symptoms of this has been so many illogical, stupid, unreal things have come to pass because they made sense if there's no God.
00:33:40.060I keep telling people, you know, people say this transgenderism, how could anybody say this?
00:33:44.460You know, how could anybody say that a man can become a woman and a man and a woman are the same thing?
00:33:48.300And I think if you don't believe in God, it makes perfect sense.
00:33:50.760If you don't believe in God, you're just a body outline.
00:34:12.880It inspired a film called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
00:34:15.440It inspired the entire range of slasher films.
00:34:19.320And the reason for that is that the arts so capture the conscience of the moment that they actually project into the future.
00:34:28.140The Ed Gein murders were in the 50s, but people caught on that this was a logical progression of our atheism.
00:34:33.620This is where our atheism was going to go.
00:34:35.720Now that we've gotten here, we're saying like, wait a minute, that actually doesn't reflect reality.
00:34:40.400And I think that one of the reasons that transgenderism is such a silly but also evil thing to believe in when you start butchering children in the names of transgenderism, that is a grave, grave evil.
00:34:51.780But I think one of the reasons that has captured the imagination so much is because it's another one of those dividing lines where you start to think, well, if that makes sense, if there's no God, then maybe there is a God.
00:35:03.540Maybe the world makes more sense than that.
00:35:05.760And I think that that's occurring to intellectuals now, people of very high intellect, people in university settings.
00:35:12.960And I think once that happens, it will give permission to people who feel like, oh, I'm not educated, so I kind of think there's a God, but all these professors are telling me there isn't.
00:35:56.860How do we make sense of those, some of those who profess to be Christians themselves, but I mean, certainly there are humans made in the image of God, and we believe eternity has been written on the human heart, but who disagree so much about what is actually evil and what is actually good.
00:36:14.800I think about the media, for example, I know you talked about this recently, CNN aired a very sympathetic interview with a cartel member and actually all of the illegal immigrants, even those that have committed very heinous crimes that have been deported.
00:36:28.740It seems that the media is covering their stories very sympathetically while casting Elon Musk and Donald Trump as, you know, basically Nazis and equating ICE raids to, you know, Nazi raids in 1940s Germany, 1930s Germany.
00:36:46.080So, like, how do we get there when we have people who call evil good and good evil?
00:36:52.720Obviously, we know it's a spiritual issue.
00:36:54.920It is a deception, but it's hard for me, honestly, to make sense of it.
00:37:02.000Well, I think one of the beauties of Christianity, I mean, one of the things that made Christianity make so much sense to me is that I have a tragic sensibility.
00:37:10.060I look at the world and I see this world as a tragic place.
00:37:13.140Any completion and fruition is going to have to come in a life that's larger than any life we live here.
00:37:20.420And that's one of the beautiful things about Christianity is it says to you, look, you're a broken person.
00:37:29.240You are getting into heaven by the grace of God.
00:37:31.580You are hiding under the robes of God, sort of coming into heaven in his disguise.
00:37:36.460And once you realize that, first of all, it's incredibly liberating.
00:37:40.580I no longer have to pretend to be righteous.
00:37:42.920You know, I know, you know, you and I don't have to look at each other and I don't have to think like, well, if Ali does something wrong, then she's a bad person.
00:37:48.960I already know you're broken, sinful, just like me, you know, so I don't have to prove anything to you.
00:37:53.360You don't have to prove anything to me.
00:37:54.460We have to strive to be decent people in the world.
00:37:57.900But we know that none of us is righteous, not one.
00:38:00.480If you are confused about this and if you think that you can project your righteousness to other people and fool them that you are a righteous person,
00:38:11.720then what you're feeling in the moment becomes more important than the facts of the case.
00:38:16.200So you look at a criminal and you say, isn't it, aren't I a wonderful person for feeling compassion on that guy?
00:38:24.660Aren't I, isn't it wonderful that I feel compassion on this gangster?
00:38:29.460And I'm not like Donald Trump, that wicked Donald Trump who wants to deport this gangster.
00:38:33.720He's wicked because he doesn't feel compassion.
00:38:58.420The women who are raped by these traffickers, the gangsters who do such horrible, horrible things to human beings.
00:39:05.900So you're showing, you think you're displaying your kindness, but in fact, you're revealing the fact that you are not just fallen like all of us, you're fallen and also deluded.
00:39:17.440And I think that this is a problem that some Christians fall into, that they think that finding Christ makes them a good person instead of a saved person.
00:39:27.120I think those are really two different things.
00:39:28.960And I think that is why, that's why, you know, it's really interesting.
00:39:33.420If you get your entire religion, if you get your theology only from the epistles, only from the rules, you know, only from people who say don't do this or don't do that, you're missing the whole point of the Christ story and the stories Christ tells.
00:39:47.920When you tell a story, a story is a living thing.
00:39:50.500A story doesn't say this is black and this is white.
00:39:53.260A story shows you human beings in interaction.
00:39:55.980And so when Jesus tells a parable, you can't just say, oh, that parable means this, because they've been talking about these parables for 2,000 years and you can still give a completely fresh original sermon about the parables.
00:40:46.380You know, it's not, you are not made for the Sabbath that you have to follow these stringent rules.
00:40:50.580If they keep you from doing what's right, if they keep you from love.
00:40:54.180And so I think that it's very, very easy for Christians and non-Christians alike who think that they are perfectible, who think that the world is perfectible and think that they can display righteousness.
00:41:04.760It's very, very easy for them to start to violate the precept that you should not judge.
00:41:13.340Once you start to say, you know what, I'm going to just pay attention to my sin and I'm going to leave you.
00:41:18.440And, you know, you can come and talk to me about your sin anytime you want, but I'm not going to walk around pointing my finger at you.
00:41:23.380Then you start to do what, try to do what's good in the world.
00:41:26.800And obviously what's good in the world is to put bad guys in prison so they don't hurt anybody else.
00:41:32.380You don't have to, you know, display your virtue by cursing at them.
00:41:35.780You just have to make sure that people are safe and give them any chance they have to live a life without doing harm.
00:41:41.200So I think it's this delusion that the world is perfectible and that you and I are perfectible that keeps people from seeing, that keeps people from calling evil evil and calling good good instead and gets them confused.
00:41:55.480Yes, they're very confused, I think, about what the kingdom of heaven actually is.
00:42:01.120I mean, they're trying to usher in some kind of utopia and they believe that they can actually make the kingdom of heaven here on earth.
00:42:07.080But their attempts and even, like, their desired outcome is very perverse.
00:42:11.820And I, you know, call it their mentality toxic empathy because it's empathy in the wrong direction, disproportionate empathy, and it also leads them to be morally and logically stupid.
00:42:25.640You ignore the people on the other side of the moral equation because all of your feelings and compassion have been directed towards this one person, the purported victim that the media hoists up.
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00:43:41.760What else do you hope people get out of the kingdom of Cain?
00:43:45.260Well, I would like to see Christians feel a little bit less fragile in their faith and a little bit more trusting that just exactly what you said, that no matter what the devil does, it's going to point to the sacred.
00:43:59.760The arts are one of the great sources of beauty in the world, but also one of the great reminders that the great artists, our creator, can take even of this dark world and make something beautiful beyond what we see.
00:44:14.320And that's what people are always saying to me who don't believe.
00:44:17.080How can I believe in a God who is all good and all knowing when he permits such evil in the world?
00:44:21.860And my answer to that is not, oh, well, there has to be free will or, oh, you know, it's a fallen world because none of that really rings true when you're actually suffering from evil or actually facing some of the dark things we have to face in this world.
00:44:34.840But the one thing that does speak to people, even in the moment of suffering, is the idea of beauty, that out of this terrible world, out of this dark world, a tremendous beauty is being born and being made, more than we can understand while we see it through a glass darkly and not face to face.
00:44:52.180And so the book Kingdom of Cain ends confronting what I think is one of the most beautiful works of art in the world, which is Michelangelo's Pieta, which just shows Mary cradling the body of her dead son, Jesus Christ.
00:45:08.360And I point out, you know, this statue is so beautiful that when Michelangelo signed the contract to make it, the actual contract said it must be the most beautiful thing ever made in marble.
00:45:19.820And Michelangelo was confident enough to sign that contract, which I appreciate in him, and then delivered on it.
00:45:26.480He delivered on it. It's the most beautiful thing any man has ever made out of marble.
00:45:30.300And you look at it and you think, gosh, this thing is incredibly beautiful, but what's it a statue of?
00:45:35.500It's a statue of the saddest moment, the saddest thing that can ever happen to anybody, a mother losing her child.
00:45:42.160There is no sadder thing that happens on earth.
00:45:44.600And it's a picture, not only a sculpture, not only of that, but it's a sculpture of the saddest thing that could happen to the world, the killing of God, the crucifixion of God by people who didn't even recognize him when he was right in front of their eyes.
00:45:57.640And so this is a sculpture of the worst thing that has ever happened or could happen, and yet it's beautiful.
00:46:05.800And the question the book ends with is, if a man, if a mere man can take marble and render something beautiful out of such tragedy and such despair,
00:46:17.340what can God not make out of the marble of eternity of this world?
00:46:21.880And so I want people to turn to the arts for beauty and to turn to beauty for truth and to understand that even in this darkness, even in this darkness, we're not told to be joyful because things are happy.
00:46:34.280We're not told to be joyful later on when we get to heaven.
00:46:37.240We're told to be joyful now, rejoice now, rejoice evermore.
00:46:40.800And I think in the arts, we find that that is a possibility because we realize that there is a possibility that this darkness that we are living through now, this present darkness, will be made beautiful in the end.
00:46:52.880And I think that the arts speak to that, and I would like Christians to be a little less afraid to create art that confronts darkness and a little less afraid to confront art that confronts darkness.
00:47:03.920I think that when you have too many Christians saying, oh, naughty, naughty, you must not write about this, or, oh, no, I must not look at this, I must close my eyes because it shows something dark.
00:47:14.200I think you develop a sort of childish, without being childlike, I think being childlike is a good thing, but you have this kind of childish view of the world and your faith can't stand when it confronts reality.
00:47:26.740And so that's what I'm trying to get at it. I'm trying to remind us that our faith makes us strong, not fragile. Our faith makes us indestructible, not breakable.
00:47:37.800And I think that that's an important thing to remember as we go forward and not to be so afraid of either art or life.
00:47:45.120So good. Thank you so much, Andrew. I really do encourage everyone to go out and get it. The Kingdom of Cain. Fascinating conversation.
00:47:51.860And thank you so much for sharing more of the details of your testimony. I just found that so encouraging. Thank you so much.
00:48:05.360Okay, to close this out, just a reminder, please subscribe to blazetv.com slash Ali.
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