Stay Free - Russel Brand - February 11, 2025


BREAK BREAD EP. 14 - PAUL KINGSNORTH

Topics
culture war gender identity and transgenderism reality authority God raw power legitimacy confession and church authority
Hosted by
Russel Brand
Mentioned
Paul Kangor Jordan Peterson J.K. Rowling Donald Trump Byzantine Melville Russell Labour Babel Adam Noah
Sex, Power & OnlyFans: A Candid Conversation with Lily Phillips – SF534 Federal Secrets Unveiled: Trump’s Taskforce Targets JFK, Epstein, and 9-11 Files – SF536

Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

164.71

Word count

4,557

Sentence count

333

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Paul Kingsnorth is a distinguished writer, environmentalist, poet, and environmentalist who writes about globalization and cultural identity. He is an Orthodox Christian, baptized into the Romanian Orthodox Church, but I actually live in the UK, so I know one Romanian Orthodox church on Fleet Street in London. In this episode, we talk about his journey from atheist to Christian, and his views on the culture war and gender identity.

Transcript

Transcripts from "Stay Free - Russel Brand" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:01:38.000 Not always taking the Eucharist or communion, because sometimes there are ecclesiastical, liturgical, there are reasons not to.
00:01:46.000 Today's one of those days, because I'm speaking with Paul Kingsnorth, who is an Orthodox Christian, baptized into the Romanian Orthodox Church.
00:01:57.000 Seems extraordinarily particular and specific, but I actually live in the UK, so I know one Romanian Orthodox Church on Fleet Street.
00:02:05.000 I'll be interested to talk about that.
00:02:07.000 In addition to letting you know why it is that I'm so fascinated to speak with Paul, I started reading Paul's journalism during the pandemic, and it was an almost uniquely insightful take into some of the metaphysical connotations of what was happening during the pandemic.
00:02:23.000 As well as the way that many of the unfolding narratives were masking what appeared to be an ulterior desire to acquire and implement Then I learned more about Paul, and it's this quote that I like about Paul, who's a distinguished writer, environmentalist, poet, and environmentalist, and writes about globalization and cultural identity.
00:02:48.000 It's this quote that perhaps will help you understand why I'm fascinated with Paul.
00:02:52.000 After years of atheism, I went searching for the truth.
00:02:55.000 I found Buddhism, then witchcraft, and eventually Christianity, a sort of a journey that I can somewhat...
00:03:01.000 Relate to, at least.
00:03:03.000 Paul, thanks for joining us for Break Bread today.
00:03:06.000 Yeah, it's good to be here.
00:03:07.000 It's been a few years.
00:03:09.000 Yes, it has.
00:03:10.000 And, oh, Paul, man.
00:03:12.000 Like, this week I've been talking a lot about...
00:03:16.000 I'm just off the back of talking about, for example, Trump signing an executive order to protect women's sports, right?
00:03:25.000 And then, like, J.K. Rowling's sort of positive response to that.
00:03:32.000 And I feel like, isn't the cultural war in some of its most lurid manifestations an indication that we are all looking for some kind of supreme moral authority upon which to rely?
00:03:46.000 I would say probably it is.
00:03:48.000 And I wonder, in an issue like this one, how would you align the principle of compassion, tolerance, openness, I wonder how,
00:04:10.000 for example, you in your position as a Christian understand the dynamics of that particular aspect of the culture war, gender identity.
00:04:20.000 Yes, it's a big question.
00:04:22.000 It's actually a really good question because it's almost like this is a wedge issue.
00:04:25.000 This is one of the things that really exposes what I think is going on at the moment.
00:04:30.000 It's one of those rare cases where Christianity and science seem to agree, actually, come to the same conclusion.
00:04:36.000 We know biology is real.
00:04:37.000 We know men are real.
00:04:39.000 We know women are real. 0.99
00:04:40.000 We know what that means.
00:04:41.000 And then we have this thing called gender identity, which is a construct which can mean any number of different things.
00:04:46.000 And these two things have collided and been confused and sometimes been deliberately confused.
00:04:51.000 So we've had all the conflict.
00:04:53.000 My position on it, not just as a Christian, although it is a Christian position, but as...
00:04:58.000 I mean, this is how I felt before I was a Christian, is that not being a fan of Donald Trump particularly, but he's absolutely right on this, and the people who want to protect women in women's sports are absolutely right on this as well.
00:05:11.000 You have to draw a line and say, here is what physical and biological reality are, and here is what the impact of denying them is.
00:05:22.000 But it gets interesting, not just because you have the wider question of tolerance, like what do you do with people with gender dysphoria who've got real issues?
00:05:30.000 What do you do with people who identify as a different gender?
00:05:32.000 Because, you know, there's some real distress there.
00:05:34.000 But there's the bigger issue of what is reality and what is the ground that we're standing on, which is what we're coming down to, right?
00:05:42.000 And I don't just mean in terms of biological reality, because it's the reason that this has been such an enormous flame war is that it is actually...
00:05:51.000 It's a moral question.
00:05:52.000 It's a spiritual question.
00:05:53.000 It's a scientific and a biological question all at once.
00:05:57.000 And what it comes down to really is whether we are going to be able to define our own realities or not.
00:06:03.000 So the Christian position would be, to put it in Catholic Latin terms, that we are the human is the imago dei, right?
00:06:12.000 We have the image of God within us.
00:06:13.000 Everyone is a created soul.
00:06:16.000 God doesn't make mistakes.
00:06:17.000 Here we are.
00:06:18.000 We're all specific individual people.
00:06:20.000 We're men or women.
00:06:21.000 The more liberal position, the individualist position that leads to gender ideology would be you can identify yourself pretty much as whatever you want to identify yourself as because it's a social construct. 0.82
00:06:33.000 So, for example, your gender identity will override your biological sex and that's the thing that you should take seriously because you get to self-define that. 0.52
00:06:41.000 So really the question there is...
00:06:44.000 Who's defining reality?
00:06:45.000 Is it me?
00:06:45.000 Do I get to decide what I am?
00:06:47.000 Do I get to decide if I'm a man or a woman or what sex I am or maybe what race I am?
00:06:51.000 Or are these things immutable?
00:06:52.000 And if they're immutable, where do they come from?
00:06:54.000 And that's why this is such a big thing, because gender is at the kind of spear tip of the whole kind of liberal individualist project to effectively give us the opportunity to redefine reality. 0.99
00:07:08.000 So we get to decide what we are.
00:07:10.000 And in my opinion...
00:07:13.000 Transgenderism slides very easily into transhumanism because you end up with the same kind of... 0.92
00:07:18.000 You end up with the same worldview.
00:07:21.000 If I want to recreate myself, if I want to define myself differently, if I want to merge with my machines, if I want to effectively move beyond embodied reality, then I can do that because I identify as that.
00:07:35.000 And if technology can help me to be what I want to be, then that's where we go.
00:07:38.000 So as much as anything, it's a question of limits.
00:07:41.000 What are the limits?
00:07:42.000 How far can we go?
00:07:44.000 And who's defining reality here?
00:07:45.000 Is it us?
00:07:45.000 Is it God?
00:07:46.000 Is it science?
00:07:47.000 Is it nature?
00:07:48.000 Those are the big questions.
00:07:49.000 So it's right at the tip of something.
00:07:51.000 But because nobody speaks of it in these terms, we all speak of it as if it was just an issue of women's rights, for example, which is important, but actually the big thing is much deeper than that.
00:08:00.000 It's about what reality is.
00:08:02.000 Yes.
00:08:03.000 Indeed, it's an ancillary symptom of a much bigger question as you diagnosed.
00:08:10.000 The question being, what is reality?
00:08:13.000 And who among us has the authority to make such a declaration?
00:08:18.000 And would I be rightful in saying that from a Christian perspective... 0.96
00:08:25.000 None of us has the authority to make an absolute claim about the nature of reality because we are created in God's image and we are therefore creatures and inhabitants of a reality created by a supreme being rather than ourselves, authors and instigators of reality.
00:08:45.000 And isn't a requirement of new human authority precisely the annihilation?
00:08:50.000 of that supreme authority and indeed isn't that why the entire argument's taking place even if that aspect of the conversation is as you say obfuscated behind more superficial yet significant arguments about the rights of women and various other arguments that themselves by the way wouldn't I can see
00:09:22.000 now why, as you said, there's so much, why it's such a conflagratory issue, because there's a lot of energy in it, not all of which is being correctly explored or even explained.
00:09:42.000 Yeah, we're all kind of, I suppose, to a degree fascinated by that subject because it does lead back to who has authority.
00:09:51.000 What is reality is a pretty big question.
00:09:55.000 Earlier I was saying that as you interface with politics and the culture as an individual, you start to understand and recognise What might be innate or adhered but could be inculcated principles within you.
00:10:17.000 I feel like when it comes to, for example, the rather potent and significant matter of raising my children, I feel deeply protective and angry about any kind of interventionism.
00:10:33.000 I can't envisage an authority other than God's authority that would be able to adjudicate or intervene when it comes to me and my kids.
00:10:43.000 And a really obvious prosaic example of that is I feel like if I want to drive around in my car without having seatbelts on my kids, there is no external agent that has the right to intervene.
00:10:59.000 That's my...
00:11:00.000 And I would see, you know, that I would afford that same license to anybody else.
00:11:06.000 However, I do acknowledge that there are ways in which a parent could abuse their child that would require some kind of intervention.
00:11:14.000 However, what authority would that intervention be fueled by if there is no God?
00:11:23.000 Or real mandate?
00:11:26.000 Consensus derived from mandate?
00:11:29.000 And if the culture war is anything, isn't it the kind of unfolding, unfurling and disintegrating of that authority as a result of post-enlightenment values?
00:11:40.000 Whether it's take this injection, stay in your house, pay this tax, 15-minute cities now, Labour are going to...
00:11:50.000 Tax you in this way, even though they said you...
00:11:52.000 Isn't the crisis we're experiencing the loss of any supreme authority other than state authority, which is by its nature questionable?
00:12:07.000 Yeah, I think so, big time.
00:12:09.000 I mean, the question is about power, right?
00:12:11.000 So what is power?
00:12:11.000 Where does power come from?
00:12:12.000 So I think, going back to what you said before, you could look at the whole of modernity after the Enlightenment.
00:12:18.000 As an attempt to abolish God.
00:12:20.000 And since the Enlightenment is a Christian project, a European project rather, that's really an attempt to abolish the church and to abolish Christianity and to undermine it as any kind of way of seeing.
00:12:31.000 And that's not a conspiracy theory.
00:12:33.000 That's just the reality of what's happened.
00:12:34.000 Here we all are.
00:12:35.000 And the idea was we would remove this giant superstition that wasn't true, replace it with science.
00:12:41.000 Science would be the authority.
00:12:43.000 Remove all the...
00:12:44.000 Tyrannical monarchies, replace them with democracy, and then that would be the authority. 0.96
00:12:48.000 So we have the authority comes from the people, supposedly, and then from objective science.
00:12:52.000 So that's the world we're supposed to be living in.
00:12:54.000 That's the world I was brought up in.
00:12:55.000 Now, there's a few problems with that.
00:12:57.000 Firstly, in the pre-modern period, for better or for worse, the monarchies that existed, or the power centres that existed, claimed, whether it was true or not, they claimed that they derived their power from God, and they somehow represented God.
00:13:11.000 Now, there's all sorts of problems with that, but at least it's a claim.
00:13:14.000 Now we don't have that claim.
00:13:15.000 So we completely strip out the divine layer at the top where authority, at least in theory, gets its power from and brings it down to the people.
00:13:21.000 And we put the people on the top.
00:13:23.000 That's you and me.
00:13:24.000 And we say, right, OK, we're making the decisions.
00:13:26.000 In reality, as we know, we're not making the decisions.
00:13:28.000 We may get to vote every five years for a bunch of people who are the same as the other guys because it's a giant corporate oligarchy.
00:13:34.000 We don't have very much power anyway.
00:13:36.000 But even if we did, where would that power be emanating from?
00:13:40.000 And then you can look at objective science, and if you want to talk about the pandemic, we can have a good chat about how objective the science was there, but it's much wider than that.
00:13:48.000 How much of reality can science actually tell us about?
00:13:51.000 It can tell us about a small sliver of it, the material layer, but it can't tell us about anything else.
00:13:55.000 It can't give us any meaning.
00:13:56.000 So if you strip God out of the picture, there is no one at all who the power centres are actually answerable to.
00:14:03.000 So now, in the case of, say, somewhere like Britain, Where the state is...
00:14:07.000 You can look at the opinion polls on this.
00:14:09.000 People are losing faith in the state.
00:14:11.000 They're losing faith in power completely.
00:14:13.000 Whoever runs it, it's a disaster zone.
00:14:16.000 And why shouldn't they lose faith in it?
00:14:17.000 Because where does it get its authority from?
00:14:19.000 It doesn't really get it from the people because it never does what the people want.
00:14:22.000 It's endlessly clamping down on their freedom of speech and expression.
00:14:25.000 It obviously wouldn't claim to get it from God.
00:14:27.000 No one would suggest it does that.
00:14:29.000 So what legitimacy does it have?
00:14:31.000 Seems to me we're coming to a point where having...
00:14:35.000 Attempted to replace God with objective science and democracy, however flawed the previous systems were, and they were, we found that both of those things have jammed up.
00:14:47.000 Either they don't work or they don't work at this level or they've been corrupted, whatever it was.
00:14:51.000 And we look around and we say, OK, what's the source of meaning?
00:14:53.000 What's the source of power?
00:14:54.000 What's the source of truth?
00:14:55.000 And we haven't got an answer to that.
00:14:58.000 Except everyone gets to invent their own version.
00:15:00.000 Right?
00:15:01.000 So I'm my own reality.
00:15:02.000 I get to invent my own religion, my own spirituality, my own body, identity, etc.
00:15:06.000 And that's a recipe for chaos.
00:15:08.000 And so the actual question is, from where does power derive?
00:15:12.000 Where does legitimate power derive?
00:15:14.000 And if it doesn't derive from some sort of deity, some sort of God, where does it come from?
00:15:19.000 And the answer is usually it will just come from raw, brutal power.
00:15:22.000 Whoever can seize power will take it.
00:15:24.000 That's what's usually happened in human history.
00:15:27.000 I think it's quite a unique place that we're in culturally because before the modern period, everywhere on earth, whatever the different religion or culture was, every culture thought that they owed something to God or to the gods.
00:15:40.000 They thought they owed something to the realm of the divine which was real and which was intertwined with their life.
00:15:44.000 And we pretend that isn't true now.
00:15:46.000 We pretend that we can sort everything out ourselves.
00:15:49.000 And incidentally, if you want to look at the book of Genesis, that's the offer that the devil makes to Adam and Eve in the garden.
00:15:56.000 This is the offer that the snake makes to our ancestors.
00:16:00.000 He says, you don't need to listen to God.
00:16:02.000 You don't need to obey God.
00:16:03.000 You don't need to take your power from above and follow his teachings.
00:16:06.000 You can do it yourself.
00:16:07.000 You can be gods.
00:16:08.000 You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
00:16:10.000 That's the offer.
00:16:11.000 And that's what we're doing.
00:16:13.000 So, I mean, in that sense, it's literally satanic, the offer, right?
00:16:16.000 So we're in the point where we replace God's will with human will.
00:16:21.000 And so the question is, who do you follow?
00:16:23.000 Are you going to follow Christ?
00:16:25.000 Or are you going to follow yourself and your own desire?
00:16:29.000 And where does that come from anyway?
00:16:31.000 And as you say, who has legitimate power over you?
00:16:35.000 I don't think there's ever been a human society that hasn't had power wielded in some form.
00:16:39.000 But if you think the power is legitimate, you're more likely to accede to it, right?
00:16:44.000 I'll follow these rules because they seem like fair rules and I trust the rulers and that seems to be part of my community and the power is coming from above, so maybe the rules are legitimate.
00:16:52.000 Now, why should we do anything these people tell us?
00:16:54.000 We don't see where their power or authority comes from.
00:16:57.000 So I think that's a kind of cultural crisis that's spiralling out across the West.
00:17:01.000 And when people ask that question, where does this power come from and who is legitimate?
00:17:05.000 They're not finding a good answer anymore.
00:17:07.000 No, they're not.
00:17:08.000 Because of the sort of bait and switch and sort of gradual placeboing out of the divine, it's kind of as if now we've caught up to what's happened.
00:17:23.000 Okay, we're replacing God's power with the power of a mandate derived from consensus and an objective purview derived from science.
00:17:32.000 But as you rightly point out, Paul, that's precisely the offering that the serpent offers to the first man and woman. 0.80
00:17:46.000 And sometimes when you say...
00:17:48.000 That there's only a slither of reality that can be analysed by science, the material and measurable aspect of reality.
00:17:57.000 I sometimes get this slightly numinous, vertiginous sense that the claim of Scripture to be outside of time and space, I feel it somehow, that the garden is happening now.
00:18:15.000 Like Melville wrote, Noah's flood is still upon the earth.
00:18:18.000 I feel like we're making that choice now.
00:18:21.000 Like the perfect scripture is beyond allegory and beyond history.
00:18:26.000 That it's precisely within the realm of a kind of inverted commas, unknowable reality.
00:18:34.000 Unknowable at least within the limits of our human power.
00:18:38.000 Before you mentioned Genesis, I was thinking about Babel.
00:18:42.000 I was thinking that...
00:18:43.000 You know, this attempt to reach the territory and heights of God led to this kind of collapse and everyone living within their own individual ideological ecosystem, incommunicative.
00:19:02.000 And sometimes I feel, Paul, that the goal of technology, if such a broad thing were possible, were to lay claim materially to that which is only meant to be achieved ethereally, like that communication through technology is kind like that communication through technology is kind of like a telepathy, that we're trying to instantiate and manifest, transfer holy power into human hands.
00:19:31.000 But when you actually analyse it...
00:19:33.000 It isn't human hands at all.
00:19:35.000 And here's a bit of scripture I reckon.
00:19:37.000 God, I'd like your take on this.
00:19:40.000 Since becoming Christian not so long ago, April the 28th, and a journey that's not identical to yours, but somewhat comparable, pretty interested in mysticism, new age, psychedelics, psychiatry, psychology.
00:19:52.000 I'm not an academic person, but nevertheless, I've sort of looked into some areas that seem somewhat familiar from your story.
00:19:58.000 The first bit of scripture that no one pointed me to, but jumped off the page and punched me squarely in where my third eye might once have been prior to the ascent of a new...
00:20:13.000 What struck me is that it comes when the disciples are returned with gentle hubris from casting out demons and serpents when it was 72, not 12, being sent out.
00:20:32.000 And I thought, why is our Lord saying that then?
00:20:35.000 Why is he at that point saying, I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning.
00:20:39.000 You will move amongst serpents and scorpions because your names are written in heaven.
00:20:44.000 And my feeling and sense was, I am like Satan.
00:20:50.000 I want my own kingdom.
00:20:52.000 I'm like, yeah, I see what you're doing.
00:20:54.000 I could run my own thing down here.
00:20:57.000 I, Russell, do that.
00:20:58.000 And it's interesting when we're talking about the culture, we started talking about an ancillary expression of the attempt to lay claim to God's domain by the culture, i.e.
00:21:09.000 the gender identity wars.
00:21:12.000 Even something so diffuse, grand and global as that can be mapped onto my apparently subjective individual experience in so much as I want to be in charge of reality.
00:21:26.000 I want to decide.
00:21:28.000 I mean, perhaps even in my earlier example of I don't want anyone telling me what to do with my kids other than God.
00:21:34.000 And I'm negotiating that power, negotiating that power, and for it not to be a kind of, and it's weird because someone like Jordan Peterson would never acknowledge this, that when Foucault sort of equates power with violence, a lot of them post-structuralist, post-modern arguments start a lot of them post-structuralist, post-modern arguments start to sort of make sense in this context too, that there is only, power is I've got the power to force you, That's the only power it is.
00:22:02.000 But I, myself as an individual...
00:22:04.000 Flirt with that power, and I need God.
00:22:07.000 I need Christ.
00:22:08.000 Otherwise, I won't wield that power well, let alone that power amalgamated and conglomerated across hundreds of millions of people.
00:22:17.000 They're making the claim that they're wielding power on behalf of hundreds of millions of people, and now with the project of globalism that seems temporarily disrupted on behalf of an entire planet.
00:22:30.000 I wonder what you think about that verse and your own interpretation of it, how you map that, and then I suppose somewhat, Paul, the relationship between individual sovereignty and sovereignty beyond that.
00:22:43.000 Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
00:22:45.000 So the kingdom of God is within you, says Christ, and so is the devil all the time.
00:22:50.000 So you're exactly right.
00:22:52.000 So it's like the fall is happening every minute.
00:22:56.000 You're always presented with this temptation and different people are presented with it in different ways.
00:23:03.000 How much power do you want to have?
00:23:05.000 And can you do it on your own?
00:23:07.000 So certainly in the Orthodox Church, the teaching is one of the greatest mistakes you can ever make is to imagine that you're doing anything on your own.
00:23:13.000 Because you're not.
00:23:14.000 You're doing everything you do with God's permission or without God's permission.
00:23:19.000 And that's your choice all the time, which is why you always have to refer back to him.
00:23:22.000 So when you become a Christian, certainly for me, since I became a Christian, I've had this...
00:23:26.000 It's a strange thing, because in one way I feel the same as you.
00:23:29.000 I feel like only God's got authority over me.
00:23:32.000 But on the other hand, I feel like I'm paying far more attention to myself than I ever did before, because before I was a Christian, I assumed that the world was in human hands.
00:23:43.000 So I was an environmental activist, right?
00:23:45.000 So I was spending a lot of time trying to save the world, because I thought that humans were in control of it.
00:23:51.000 And in some ways we are.
00:23:53.000 We know we can do a lot of damage and we know we can do some good as well.
00:23:55.000 So we have this power.
00:23:56.000 But on the other hand, the big picture is not ours.
00:24:00.000 And once you see, oh, you know what?
00:24:03.000 This isn't about us.
00:24:04.000 We're created beings.
00:24:06.000 There's something else going on.
00:24:07.000 We're in the hands of somebody else.
00:24:09.000 Then we always have to pay attention to ourselves.
00:24:11.000 And the question then becomes, am I walking this road in the right direction?
00:24:15.000 All the time.
00:24:17.000 So another question that's interesting on authority.
00:24:20.000 It's the matter of the church.
00:24:21.000 So as you said at the beginning, I've become an Orthodox Christian.
00:24:24.000 So the Orthodox Church is really the oldest church, the oldest branch of the church.
00:24:29.000 And the Orthodox would say we are the church.
00:24:30.000 We can have that argument with Catholics forever, but it doesn't matter. 1.00
00:24:34.000 It's a very old church, and it's probably the most...
00:24:37.000 It's the strictest and most serious church.
00:24:40.000 And from the outside, it can look very literally Byzantine, because it literally is.
00:24:45.000 And very rigid and the rest of it.
00:24:47.000 But actually what it does is it acts as a container for people to walk into.
00:24:53.000 I've heard the church described as a spiritual hospital, which I really like.
00:24:55.000 So you only go there if you're sick.
00:24:57.000 You don't go there if you're a holy man.
00:24:58.000 You don't need it.
00:24:58.000 You go there if you're a sinner, right?
00:25:00.000 Jesus didn't come for the holy people.
00:25:02.000 He came for the sinners, which is most of us. 0.97
00:25:05.000 So you go to the church and the church gives you a container and it says, OK, here's what you do.
00:25:09.000 Here's how you fast.
00:25:10.000 Here's how you pray.
00:25:11.000 Come to the liturgy.
00:25:13.000 And here's how you take the Eucharist.
00:25:15.000 And here is the teaching of the Church that tells you how to take these understandings from Scripture and actually practice them in your life.
00:25:24.000 So you get a spiritual path, and the spiritual path has containers on it.
00:25:28.000 So one of the things that I find most useful and terrifying is confession.
00:25:33.000 So the sacrament of confession.
00:25:34.000 I can go to my priest before the Eucharist, and I can tell him all the things I've done since the last confession that I shouldn't have done.
00:25:41.000 Which is usually depressingly the same list of things.
00:25:44.000 It just keeps repeating itself.
00:25:46.000 But I have to stand there and kind of humiliate myself in front of God.
00:25:50.000 God knows it all already.
00:25:52.000 But here I am saying, you know what I've done?
00:25:53.000 I've done this.
00:25:54.000 And the minute I do that, I feel entirely like the burden has been lifted from me.
00:25:58.000 Like the blessing has come down upon me.
00:26:00.000 Whenever I take the Eucharist in church, I feel completely transformed.
00:26:03.000 Even if I've just been sitting, fidgeting through the liturgy for an hour.
00:26:07.000 Something will happen.
00:26:08.000 So even though the church to some people on the outside looks like this tyrannical authority, it's not that at all on the inside.
00:26:14.000 It's a structure that helps me to actually walk the path.
00:26:19.000 And that is an authority that I've chosen to recognize because I think it can help me to do that because I think that's what Christ created it for.
00:26:27.000 So I have found that really useful.
00:26:29.000 And what I do now as well is I tend to judge all the secular authorities by the Christian teaching I learn.
00:26:36.000 By the path I walk in the church and I say, well, is this a godly authority or not?
00:26:40.000 And what should be the Christian attitude to that?
00:26:43.000 I don't think we've got any godly governments in the West.
00:26:46.000 So I just try and keep as far away from them as possible.
00:26:48.000 But, you know, I still have to obey the law and do the things I have to do.
00:26:51.000 But it's not the point.
00:26:53.000 All of these things are going to dissolve away anyway.
00:26:55.000 So the authority that comes from God through the church is the one that is keeping me sane.
00:27:02.000 And actually...
00:27:03.000 Lifting, as I say, lifting a burden from me, transforming me, turning me slowly into a different person.
00:27:08.000 It's like water dripping on a rock.
00:27:10.000 You know, you become baptized, you go into the Christian life, you don't suddenly become a saint, sadly. 0.85
00:27:15.000 But if you turn around and look at where you were a year ago, and then two years ago, and then five years ago, you think, actually, something's happening here.
00:27:22.000 I am changing.
00:27:23.000 I'm being changed.
00:27:24.000 Because I've given up my authority to God, and I've said to Him, come and change me, because I need it, because I can't do it myself.
00:27:32.000 Yeah.
00:27:34.000 Hey, if you're watching us on Rumble, we're going to toggle over to Rumble Premium now.
00:27:38.000 If you're watching us on Locals, we'll always be on Locals.