The Charlie Kirk Show - Is America Now a Pagan Country?

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Tan the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 John Daniel Davidson joins the program talking about American paganism.

00:00:05.000 Has America become a pagan country?

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00:03:08.000 Very excited for the guest this hour.

00:03:11.000 I heard him on the Tucker Carlson podcast, and I texted Andrew immediately.

00:03:14.000 I said, get him on here.

00:03:16.000 It is John Daniel Davidson, author of the important new book, Pagan America, The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come.

00:03:24.000 That is awfully uplifting.

00:03:25.000 He's been on the program before.

00:03:26.000 And welcome back, John, to the program.

00:03:29.000 Hey, thanks for having me.

00:03:30.000 John, tell us about your new book.

00:03:32.000 Yeah, Pagan America makes the argument that America was founded as a Christian nation and can only survive with a Christian people. 0.82

00:03:41.000 In other words, the founders understood what they were doing is creating a republic of self-governing citizens, but that only a Christian people could sustain that republic. 0.95

00:03:52.000 And we are right now entering a post-Christian age. 0.96

00:03:55.000 As we move into that post-Christian era, the America that we knew it, as we knew it, will come to an end. 0.99

00:04:02.000 And instead of a republic of free citizens, we are going to be living in a pagan empire. 0.96

00:04:08.000 And that is the purpose of the book is to kind of trace the broad outlines of what that pagan society, what that pagan empire will look like.

00:04:16.000 So let's get our terms straight.

00:04:18.000 I think I have an understanding of what paganism is or what it means, but how would you define it?

00:04:25.000 Yeah, by paganism, I don't mean that there's going to be, and I say this in the book, there's not going to be a return to temples to Zeus and Apollo and, you know, these sorts of altars popping up in Times Square.

00:04:38.000 What I mean, you know, paganism in a post-Christian context, in a modern world, is going to take different forms than the paganism of the past, but it will still adhere to the pagan ethos.

00:04:51.000 And that is a radical subjectivity about reality, about human nature, about truth, because the pagans were free to divinize the here and now, to divinize natural phenomenon or events or even people.

00:05:09.000 In other words, they rejected transcendent truth, transcendent moral order.

00:05:15.000 And that, of course, is what Christianity proclaims. 0.98

00:05:17.000 And so in the pagan ethos, you have a kind of inversion of the Christian ethos. 0.52

00:05:22.000 And that's why we're seeing today a radical subjectivity creep into our public life, into almost every debate that we have over culture and politics and policy.

00:05:34.000 And it's this re-emergence of the pagan ethos in what I argue is a post-Christian context.

00:05:41.000 So, you know, when I think a pagan, I think it's a collection of earth worship, of worship of yourself, of idolatry, basically the violation of the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me.

00:05:55.000 And I don't think it's a reach at all.

00:05:56.000 I was just in Seattle, and I was actually thinking of you because I think it truly is a captured pagan city. 0.98

00:06:03.000 You drive by some of these homes right near the university.

00:06:07.000 And if it's not the trans flag, it is the this home believes that diversity is our strength and not so on and so forth with these kind of incantations.

00:06:17.000 And are these examples of the modern manifestation of what you call pagan America?

00:06:25.000 Absolutely.

00:06:26.000 One of the main points in the book is that the future, like the post-Christian future of America isn't going to be this secular, liberal utopia where we all kind of go along to get along and it's a live and let live sort of libertarian, you know, kind of society.

00:06:47.000 That is coming to an end, right?

00:06:49.000 The secular world where we have like a neutral public square and cold rationalism determines public policy, that was always sort of a temporary situation.

00:06:59.000 And it was one that relied, in fact, on a majority Christian culture.

00:07:04.000 And so as that majority Christian culture recedes and fades away, we're going to see the return of religious impulses, right? 1.00

00:07:13.000 And so the trans flags that you see, that's an expression of a religious impulse.

00:07:18.000 The pro-Hamas student protesters that we've all kind of been poking fun at for the last couple of weeks, that is not fundamentally a political ideology on display.

00:07:29.000 That is a religious impulse that is being expressed.

00:07:33.000 And I think a fundamentally pagan one.

00:07:35.000 Like these students are not Muslims for the most part, but they are enacting a kind of religious ritual and swearing fealty to really a pagan or a neo-pagan ethos.

00:07:47.000 And so, yes, you're right.

00:07:48.000 In all these different ways, you can see this expression in all these different areas of society of this return of a pagan way of understanding human nature, our relationship to one another, and how society should be organized.

00:08:02.000 So there's so much to unpack here.

00:08:05.000 And I think let's also just reiterate something that you mentioned, which is that there is this burning religious desire that is configured within all of us.

00:08:14.000 And something has to fill that void.

00:08:17.000 And traditionally, that void was Jesus Christ and a belief in the transcendent triune God.

00:08:23.000 We then say, okay, God is dead in the West and we replace it with all these other pseudo-pagan type religions. 0.98

00:08:31.000 And they are fake counterfeits of the real thing.

00:08:36.000 That pushes back against this idea of secular atheism.

00:08:40.000 Are you making the contention that America is actually becoming more religious, just not more Christian?

00:08:46.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:08:47.000 I think that not just America, but the entire West, Western civilization is going through a re-enchantment.

00:08:54.000 And that means, for one thing, some people are being drawn back into Christianity.

00:08:59.000 And we've seen a lot of high-profile converts to Catholicism recently.

00:09:03.000 But it also means something dark and disturbing because the re-enchantment of the world also involves the old gods, the pagan gods and practices, and a pagan way of thinking coming back into Western society and Western civilization.

00:09:18.000 And so we're seeing that happen right now.

00:09:21.000 Secularism isn't durable. 0.93

00:09:23.000 And one of the reasons that secularism, like atheistic, you know, liberal secularism is collapsing is because Christianity is receding, right?

00:09:32.000 Secularism itself, the whole idea of science and rationality and of a neutral public square, those are things that came out of Christian civilization.

00:09:43.000 And as Christian civilization recedes, those things are going to recede too. 1.00

00:09:47.000 And what's coming back in is this older way of understanding the world.

00:09:51.000 And we should say, and we should be clear, that what that means is as a society and a political order that's not based on like human dignity or human rights, you know, but is based on force and coercion, as all pagan societies of the past had been. 0.87

00:10:08.000 And that's what we need to grapple with now looking toward the future.

00:10:12.000 Yeah, again, this is an incredibly deep and profound topic.

00:10:17.000 And again, when people think of paganism, they think of like, okay, there's some special rock in like, you know, the woods of Germany and like that rock your ancestors would pray over, right?

00:10:28.000 And so it's easy to reject this.

00:10:30.000 Can you just give some historical context, though?

00:10:33.000 Because the Holy Roman Empire, I believe it was Constantine who like depaganized Europe because Europe was like predominantly pagan at the beginning of the advent of Christianity. 0.59

00:10:46.000 We don't even think of this now.

00:10:47.000 We think of just Islam or we think of like New Age type stuff.

00:10:51.000 Can you talk about how dominant paganism was at the infant stages of Christianity?

00:10:57.000 It was so, sure, it was so dominant that it actually took many centuries for all of Europe to be Christianized.

00:11:04.000 You know, Constantine in the fifth century, you know, or in the fourth century, you know, which was just the beginning, right, of that process, of the early church kind of converting the Roman Empire slowly and infiltrating these Roman cities.

00:11:19.000 But it wasn't, you know, until the 9th and 10th centuries that Northern Europe was converted to Christianity, right?

00:11:27.000 Scandinavia and the Nordic peoples and the Germanic peoples up there.

00:11:30.000 So it took centuries of consistent, dogged work by Catholic missionaries to go out into these pagan societies and sacrifice their lives. 0.92

00:11:40.000 Many, many Christians sacrificed their lives to convert pagan Europe, which was paganism was very entrenched in Europe, right?

00:11:48.000 So it was a long process to convert Europe.

00:11:53.000 And the other thing to say is, you know, it's true that paganism is like worshiping a tree or a sacred stone or thinking that the sun is a god or the thunder is a god, but it's that.

00:12:06.000 It's these religious rites and rituals and beliefs about nature.

00:12:11.000 But it's also child sacrifice, which is something great, which just happens that every pagan society had this idea of killing children. 0.58

00:12:19.000 We would know nothing about that in the West, obviously.

00:12:22.000 We're much better than that.

00:12:24.000 Yes.

00:12:24.000 And that gets to the other thing that paganism is, which is a system of social control.

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00:13:36.000 As a means of social control, walk us through that, please.

00:13:40.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:13:41.000 So paganism isn't just a system of religious belief, religious rituals, also a means of social control.

00:13:48.000 And that's what I was saying earlier: that all pagan societies across time and geography and cultures, they all end up taking the same form, which is some sort of a slave society where there's a ruling caste at the top and everybody else is a slave. 0.94

00:14:03.000 And this was the case where a ruling class or it includes administrators and military officials, but other words, people who sort of run things and then everybody else.

00:14:14.000 And this was true in the Roman Empire.

00:14:15.000 We tend to romanticize ancient Rome and ancient Greece, but most people in the Roman Empire were slaves and they didn't have anything like rights.

00:14:24.000 They didn't have recourse to sort of like court appeals.

00:14:28.000 If a Roman citizen, a Roman aristocrat, wanted to do something to someone who was in a lower station than he was, he could do whatever he wanted. 0.92

00:14:35.000 He could rape, murder, kill, discard. 0.99

00:14:39.000 It didn't matter. 0.99

00:14:39.000 And in fact, it was seen as a mark of his rank that he was able to do that. 0.99

00:14:44.000 So there was nothing like and has never been anything like our concept of human rights in a pagan society. 0.55

00:14:50.000 So that's one thing.

00:14:51.000 The other thing is that pagan society separated religion and morality.

00:14:56.000 They were two distinct things.

00:14:57.000 The regime didn't care what your religion was as long as you offered a pinch of incense to Caesar, which was why the Romans insisted that the Christians had to at least offer this symbolic pinch of incense to Caesar. 0.55

00:15:09.000 And if they didn't do that, they were going to be martyred.

00:15:12.000 There had to be uniformity in the performance of the state morality.

00:15:16.000 And we're starting to see that come back in our time where religion is supposed to be this totally private thing.

00:15:22.000 You can think whatever you want in your church and your home. 0.90

00:15:25.000 But when you come out into the public square, you better offer that pinch of incense to Caesar and affirm transgender ideology, affirm gay marriage, affirm abortion, or you'll be destroyed. 0.99

00:15:36.000 Yeah, it's inherently totalitarian at its core, which is that you must then participate in whatever pagan ritual is.

00:15:45.000 So you said something earlier, and it's a provocative question, and I trust that you'll answer it regardless of how it sounds, which is, you said that the Constitution is written only for a moral and religious people.

00:15:59.000 Which John Adams, I believe, said that right.

00:16:01.000 And you mentioned that basically the construct is set up for that.

00:16:04.000 We're no longer a Christian religious, and we're no longer as moral as we were.

00:16:10.000 Does that mean the Constitution is sustainable?

00:16:13.000 No, it's not.

00:16:14.000 Not with the current, not with the American people as they are. 0.99

00:16:18.000 That's sort of the point of the book, that we are living in a post-Christian era, and we're going to continue moving into that era. 0.77

00:16:26.000 And we need to sort of wrap our minds around the implications for that.

00:16:30.000 And the implications are that all of the things that we associate with our form of government and our way of life, freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, consent of the governed, all of these things are going to come to an end under a pagan post-Christian regime. 0.92

00:16:46.000 And our task is to start thinking about, first of all, our task is to accept that.

00:16:52.000 Secondly, is to start thinking about for our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, how can they be in a position to re-found the republic with a new Christian people?

00:17:03.000 That is what we have to think about.

00:17:05.000 Politics isn't going to save us.

00:17:06.000 We need to have a reconversion of the American people in order to have a refounding republic. 0.79

00:17:12.000 And I want to just get two examples.

00:17:14.000 And I don't want to overly politicize this, but it's hard not to.

00:17:17.000 So the Congress, they do this ridiculous anti-Semitism awareness nonsense, getting rid of the First Amendment.

00:17:23.000 They get rid of Fourth Amendment protections, and we call it the death of the U.S. Constitution.

00:17:27.000 And it's happening, though, because the body politic is largely not moral and religious.

00:17:33.000 You don't need vast spying powers on the American people if every person in the country believed in the Ten Commandments and that there was a God who judged their actions.

00:17:42.000 Yeah, you're absolutely right.

00:17:45.000 You don't need as much government when you have a moral and religious people.

00:17:50.000 And that's what the founders understood.

00:17:51.000 John Adams said it.

00:17:52.000 All of the other ones said it.

00:17:54.000 They said it over and over again in very clear terms that this kind of society that they had in mind was only going to be possible with a predominantly Christian people. 1.00

00:18:03.000 And when we lose that kind of people, we're going to lose that society, that form of government as well.

00:18:08.000 And something else is going to come in and take its place.

00:18:11.000 You know, for example, the left, which is very post-Christian, don't care at all about things like freedom of speech or freedom of religion.

00:18:21.000 And they demonstrate that a million different ways every week, it seems like.

00:18:26.000 So we should expect more of that and we should expect it to get worse.

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00:19:52.000 The book is Pagan America.

00:19:54.000 So let me ask, and I think this is really important.

00:19:57.000 And I'm just curious.

00:19:59.000 Can you point to any other countries currently that have been captured by paganism that might have been ahead of the curve than America?

00:20:09.000 Sure.

00:20:10.000 I think, and I talk about this in the book, we can look to Europe and to the once Christian countries of Europe in many ways to see kind of where we're going.

00:20:19.000 And I talk about some of the things that we're starting to see in European Union countries and in Great Britain.

00:20:25.000 And one that comes to mind that I discuss in the book is laws that have come on the books in recent years, both in Ireland and in Great Britain, about these speech code laws around abortion clinics, right?

00:20:40.000 So you have laws that within a certain distance of an abortion clinic, you cannot protest or say anything negative about abortion.

00:20:49.000 And that includes you may not pray silently.

00:20:53.000 You may not pray silently in your head within a certain distance of an abortion clinic, right?

00:20:59.000 Abortion being a sort of pagan sacrament of the new pagan era. 0.91

00:21:04.000 If you do that, and this has happened in the United Kingdom, the police will come.

00:21:08.000 And if they ask you, are you praying?

00:21:11.000 And you tell them that you are, they'll arrest you and put you in handcuffs and take you away.

00:21:18.000 And this is sort of, so this is the kind of society that a post-Christian order ushers in, one in which you're not even allowed your conscience freedoms, not even in your head to oppose the public morality. 0.68

00:21:31.000 We talked about the public or state morality of the pagan regimes earlier.

00:21:34.000 Well, you can't defy them even in your thoughts.

00:21:37.000 And I think that's the kind of thing we need to start wrapping our heads around because we're going to see that sort of thing come up here.

00:21:43.000 I totally agree.

00:21:44.000 So in your research, what is the best way to combat paganism?

00:21:50.000 Obviously, it's Christianity, but tactically, how do we then go up against of crushing a pagan empire? 0.85

00:21:58.000 Yeah, the main thing, you know, and this is not a book that is a council of despair, but I'm also not going to gaslight my readers and tell them these 10 steps to save America.

00:22:08.000 The way tactically to fight back is to find and fight on ground you can win.

00:22:13.000 And that may mean making major changes to your life.

00:22:16.000 It may mean moving of a blue city or a blue state and moving to an area where you can actually have an effect on the public square in that town or in that county or in that state.

00:22:28.000 And it means not also just keeping your religious life sequestered from the public life of the community in which you live, right?

00:22:38.000 So you just don't, you don't just go to church on Sunday.

00:22:41.000 You don't just build up your homeschool network or your local religious community.

00:22:45.000 You take your faith out into the public square and you fight for it to be in the public square.

00:22:50.000 So maybe that means that you run for city council or you fund someone to run for city council and you get porn out of the local libraries.

00:22:59.000 You take over the school board.

00:23:01.000 Maybe you take over the county government.

00:23:02.000 Maybe you take over, help take over the state legislature.

00:23:06.000 But the point is that we have to fight.

00:23:08.000 We can't just hide in an arc and hope that the storm passes us by.

00:23:13.000 And we have to fight knowing that we will meet and face growing persecution from a pagan society.

00:23:19.000 We mentioned this previously, but I want to emphasize this, which is the theme of child sacrifice and of the kind of patterns of a pagan country.

00:23:30.000 What is it about sacrificing of children, massacring?

00:23:34.000 These seems to be rituals within such worldview and ideology.

00:23:39.000 Yeah, and you see it all across every pagan society, every pagan empire that's ever existed.

00:23:44.000 Child sacrifice and human sacrifice.

00:23:46.000 The more advanced the pagan society was, the more surely they fell into child and human sacrifice. 0.97

00:23:54.000 And part of that is what I mentioned earlier.

00:23:57.000 Pagan societies are built on a worldview in which might makes right and force and coercion are the only sort of permanent, unchanging values around which society and a worldview is organized. 0.90

00:24:11.000 And so in order to maintain that kind of control, you have to play on and manage anxiety, fear.

00:24:20.000 You have to instill fear in the populace.

00:24:22.000 And so human sacrifice and especially child sacrifice is engaging in these sort of atrocities becomes a system of social control.

00:24:32.000 And it was also, and this is an important part of it, there had to be unanimity about it, right?

00:24:37.000 You couldn't have people protesting and pointing out that you were committing this atrocity, right?

00:24:44.000 That's a common feature.

00:24:45.000 And this has been studied in people who study warfare, when atrocities are committed in warfare, if there's any member of a unit that sort of isn't on board, he immediately becomes a problem for the whole unit, right?

00:24:57.000 And so this is true on a society-wide scale as well.

00:25:00.000 There had to be unanimous support for these pagan sacrificial rituals, and they were a means of maintaining social control.

00:25:09.000 And we see it all across time and history.

00:25:11.000 It doesn't matter how far, you know, forward we go into history.

00:25:15.000 We saw there were pagan societies that were engaging in mass human sacrifice well into the 19th century.

00:25:22.000 So time alone doesn't solve this problem.

00:25:25.000 Modernity or technology doesn't solve the problem because it's fundamentally about a worldview that's based on violence and coercion and force and the instilling of fear into the population by the ruling caste.

00:25:38.000 You're right.

00:25:38.000 There are hard times ahead, but not without hope.

00:25:41.000 Christianity emerged from within the confines of a pagan empire.

00:25:46.000 And you show how with courage, fortitude, and faith, it will be our duty and privilege to defend Christianity and restore its claims.

00:25:53.000 I think one of the advantages we have is just the lack of morality in that of a, well, I shouldn't say the, there is some morality, but morality is screwed up.

00:26:03.000 But what happens when you get into polytheism?

00:26:06.000 When you have multiple gods, you have multiple moralities.

00:26:09.000 And you cannot have a flourishing civilization.

00:26:12.000 You cannot build a flourishing civilization around such an idea set or construct.

00:26:18.000 I want to ask, in your writing of this book, in your research, how would you grade the American church, Christian leaders and pastors, and how they have been able to diagnose this and push back against this?

00:26:32.000 Not good.

00:26:33.000 In fact, Christian leaders and church leaders, and I write about this, devote a chapter of it at the beginning of the book, are largely responsible in some ways for the collapse of Christianity in America. 0.81

00:26:48.000 And part of it was embracing, you know, it was embracing the moral relativism that is at the heart of the pagan ethos and letting that into the church, right?

00:26:58.000 And we saw this in really dramatic ways in the middle of the last century, when Christians and Christian leaders began to accommodate the morality of the world, of the secular world, and even embrace the idea, you know, that we needed to be neutral or we needed to accommodate or be winsome and be tolerant of things that Christianity had historically taught were wrong and could not be tolerated and had to be called out as sin.

00:27:28.000 And we saw very quickly the collapse of mainline Protestantism in the 70s and 80s.

00:27:33.000 And now we're beginning to see these same things infect large portions of the evangelical church.

00:27:38.000 And even, I'm sorry to say, in some parts of the Catholic Church as well.

00:27:38.000 Yes.

00:27:42.000 And so at the same time that our Christian population is decreasing, the quantity is decreasing, but the quality of religious faith and a theological teaching has been declining for a long time in America.

00:27:55.000 And that's a big part of the problem.

00:27:57.000 I think it's exactly why you're seeing an ascendant paganism: a weak church allows for this bacterial infection to grow and to fester and to multiply.

00:28:07.000 And I agree.

00:28:08.000 I think politics have a role.

00:28:09.000 I think that if you don't have political power, then you can't do anything good.

00:28:12.000 However, the politics are what you get from the morality of the people.

00:28:18.000 And if the people just want to have pagan worship, can you riff on that, please?

00:28:23.000 You can't have the culture without the cult, right?

00:28:23.000 Right.

00:28:28.000 We think, you know, Richard Dawkins said recently that he didn't understand why we couldn't have cultural Christianity and that there were fewer believing Christians in his country, in Great Britain.

00:28:38.000 And that was a good thing, but he hated to see the cultural Christianity start to disappear and be replaced in the case of Great Britain in the context of that conversation by Islam. 0.97

00:28:50.000 But he seems to misunderstand that the cultural Christianity relies for its sustenance on real Christian faith alive and active among the people.

00:29:01.000 I think we've been lulled into thinking that our sort of liberal enlightenment values can subsist on their own, but they rely on what are fundamentally theological claims about man, about man's nature and how society should be organized.

00:29:16.000 And I think all societies are actually built on theological claims, normative and ontological claims about human nature and what is right and wrong.

00:29:26.000 And we lose sight of that at our peril.

00:29:29.000 You know, we think that things like freedom of speech and human rights just exist out there in the ether, untethered to Christian moral precepts.

00:29:37.000 It's totally wrong.

00:29:38.000 It's totally wrong.

00:29:39.000 And when we lose the Christianity, we're going to lose those. 1.00

00:29:42.000 Those are jewels of Christian civilization, but they cannot exist on their own.

00:29:47.000 And we're starting to see that in many, many ways.

00:29:50.000 It's a Christian inheritance, as Tom Holland would say, who's an agnostic.

00:29:54.000 He wrote a great book called Dominion, which is a thorough book.

00:29:57.000 But he even says that this idea of natural rights and free speech and private property rights, you don't get them out of the woods in Belgium when you're worshiping the river and the great Norse god of whatever nonsense.

00:30:10.000 You don't just get those ideas by thinking that the pebbles in your pocket have some sort of supernatural ability.

00:30:17.000 Christianity gave us the birthright of the West.

00:30:20.000 It is the birthright given by a Christian inheritance.

00:30:23.000 And it cannot be repeated enough because you remove Christianity from it, we're getting rid and we're squandering that 2,000-year inheritance, that 2,000-year inheritance. 0.99

00:30:35.000 And the smart people that are on it, like Tom Holland, who's not even a believer, who's just an honest historian, is like, you guys realize that all the good that you think is just normal will disappear when you get rid of the foundation that gave it to you in the first place.

00:30:51.000 Tom Holland wrote a great book.

00:30:52.000 Tom Holland was right about everything in Dominion.

00:30:55.000 And I talk about him in the book.

00:30:56.000 The only thing that he got wrong is right at the end of the book, he pulled his punches and he said, These Christian values won't go away quickly.

00:31:03.000 And what I'm here to say is that they aren't going to go away.

00:31:05.000 It's not going to take generations or centuries.

00:31:08.000 They're going away right now in real time.

00:31:13.000 The world is in flames, and biotonomics is a complete and total disaster, but it can't and won't ruin my day.

00:31:19.000 Why?

00:31:19.000 Because I start my day with a hot America first cup of blackout coffee.

00:31:24.000 It's 100% America and 0% Grift. 0.93

00:31:27.000 Blackout Coffee is 100% committed to conservative values, from sourcing the beans to the roasting process, customer support, and shipping.

00:31:34.000 They embody true American values and accept no compromise on taste or quality.

00:31:38.000 Look, you got to check out right now, blackoutcoffee.com slash Charlie or use coupon code Charlie for 20% off your first order.

00:31:44.000 That is blackoutcoffee.com slash Charlie.

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00:31:50.000 Check it out, promo code Charlie.

00:31:54.000 So, John, I'm quoting you correctly.

00:31:56.000 It's not that America will collapse, that America will become evil.

00:31:59.000 Riff on that, please.

00:32:01.000 Yeah, well, the implications for a post-Christian America is that, as I say in the book, we will have a pagan society that will be organized along pagan lines with pagan values.

00:32:13.000 And that is a society in which force alone determines what is right, and that the most powerful do what they want, and the weak have to endure it.

00:32:22.000 And it's interesting, we talked about power earlier.

00:32:26.000 Power in the pagan society, it works like this. 0.67

00:32:31.000 Power is exercised by the powerful on their own behalf against the weak.

00:32:36.000 Christianity inverted that.

00:32:38.000 Christianity said power should, it's not that Christianity destroyed power distinctions or class distinctions, but it posited that power should be deployed by the powerful on behalf of the weak.

00:32:50.000 And that was the key difference.

00:32:51.000 And that is what we saw throughout Western civilization, the development of Europe.

00:32:57.000 The fundamental point that all men are created equal comes from the Christian doctrine of Imago Day, right?

00:33:04.000 And so if you reject that, if you say we're going to reject Christianity, you know, Nietzsche was at least honest about this, right? 0.94

00:33:11.000 The Marquis de Saud was at least honest about this.

00:33:14.000 The Nazis were at least honest about this. 0.99

00:33:16.000 They were honest enough to take the implications of their rejection of Christianity seriously, right? 0.93

00:33:22.000 And so the problem we have today as a vocabulary problem is that we're still using some of the vocabulary inherited from Christianity and Western civilization.

00:33:32.000 You see the left talk about, you know, marginalized voices or human rights, right?

00:33:38.000 But they're talking at both sides of their mouth because what they're really interested in is a power dynamic in which they impose their will on people who disagree with them, right?

00:33:48.000 And so they're just paying lip service to these echoes of our Christian past when what we should expect is for that vocabulary eventually to be discarded and the naked exercise of power take its place. 0.62

00:34:01.000 And that really is what is up.

00:34:03.000 It's up again.

00:34:03.000 It's a question of power.

00:34:05.000 And power is not the most important thing for Christians because we have a different calling, which is to make the disciples of every nation on earth.

00:34:13.000 It's not political power.

00:34:15.000 It's not the ultimate end or an aim for Christians.

00:34:18.000 Do you believe it's time for us as Christians to get deeper into the arena of how power is administered politics and start to contest for these power centers and to, quite honestly, call out paganism as the great threat that it is.

00:34:37.000 I mean, are we calling, are we, is it time to rally the troops, if you will?

00:34:42.000 I think it's time to let go of the idea that we can maintain this like this neutral stance, right?

00:34:48.000 This idea that we're going to have a neutral public square.

00:34:51.000 We're going to have neutral institutions, right?

00:34:53.000 Those were luxuries that only a predominantly Christian society could afford. 1.00

00:34:58.000 And we are no longer a predominantly Christian society.

00:35:01.000 So now as we enter a post-Christian era, we need to contest for control of these institutions, for control of the public square. 0.94

00:35:09.000 We don't want neutral institutions for the sake of neutrality.

00:35:13.000 We wanted neutral institutions because we believe in things like tolerance and non-coercion as Christians.

00:35:21.000 But if we're not going to have a Christian society, and we're not, then We're not interested in neutrality anymore. 0.70

00:35:29.000 What we're interested in is having good institutions, institutions and structures in our public life, in our national life that foster human flourishing, that foster families, that foster faith and charitable organizations and Christianity out in the public square and a public square that is oriented around the truths that Christianity proclaims.

00:35:54.000 So I think we need to shift our way of thinking.

00:35:57.000 And, you know, we're not ever going to go back.

00:35:59.000 We can't go back to this notion of neutrality that like, you know, you just live your truth and I'll live my truth.

00:36:05.000 It's time to fight for the truth.

00:36:08.000 And as I said earlier, to do that, we should find and fight on ground we can win and start thinking about major changes that you might have to make in your life to make it possible to fight and hold ground.

00:36:21.000 Very good.

00:36:22.000 Well, John Daniel Davidson, excellent work, Pagan America. 1.00

00:36:25.000 Thank you so much.

00:36:26.000 Thanks for having me.

00:36:27.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:36:28.000 Email us as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.

00:36:31.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

00:36:35.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - May 09, 2024

Is America Now a Pagan Country?

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