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00:03:32.000Yeah, Pagan America makes the argument that America was founded as a Christian nation and can only survive with a Christian people.
00:03:41.000In 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.
00:03:52.000And we are right now entering a post-Christian age.
00:03:55.000As we move into that post-Christian era, the America that we knew it, as we knew it, will come to an end.
00:04:02.000And instead of a republic of free citizens, we are going to be living in a pagan empire.
00:04:08.000And 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.
00:04:18.000I think I have an understanding of what paganism is or what it means, but how would you define it?
00:04:25.000Yeah, 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.
00:04:38.000What 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.
00:04:51.000And 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.
00:05:09.000In other words, they rejected transcendent truth, transcendent moral order.
00:05:15.000And that, of course, is what Christianity proclaims.
00:05:17.000And so in the pagan ethos, you have a kind of inversion of the Christian ethos.
00:05:22.000And 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.
00:05:34.000And it's this re-emergence of the pagan ethos in what I argue is a post-Christian context.
00:05:41.000So, 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.
00:05:55.000And I don't think it's a reach at all.
00:05:56.000I was just in Seattle, and I was actually thinking of you because I think it truly is a captured pagan city.
00:06:03.000You drive by some of these homes right near the university.
00:06:07.000And 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.
00:06:17.000And are these examples of the modern manifestation of what you call pagan America?
00:06:26.000One 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.
00:06:49.000The secular world where we have like a neutral public square and cold rationalism determines public policy, that was always sort of a temporary situation.
00:06:59.000And it was one that relied, in fact, on a majority Christian culture.
00:07:04.000And so as that majority Christian culture recedes and fades away, we're going to see the return of religious impulses, right?
00:07:13.000And so the trans flags that you see, that's an expression of a religious impulse.
00:07:18.000The 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.
00:07:29.000That is a religious impulse that is being expressed.
00:07:33.000And I think a fundamentally pagan one.
00:07:35.000Like 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.
00:07:48.000In 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.
00:08:05.000And 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.
00:08:47.000I think that not just America, but the entire West, Western civilization is going through a re-enchantment.
00:08:54.000And that means, for one thing, some people are being drawn back into Christianity.
00:08:59.000And we've seen a lot of high-profile converts to Catholicism recently.
00:09:03.000But 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.
00:09:18.000And so we're seeing that happen right now.
00:09:23.000And one of the reasons that secularism, like atheistic, you know, liberal secularism is collapsing is because Christianity is receding, right?
00:09:32.000Secularism itself, the whole idea of science and rationality and of a neutral public square, those are things that came out of Christian civilization.
00:09:43.000And as Christian civilization recedes, those things are going to recede too.
00:09:47.000And what's coming back in is this older way of understanding the world.
00:09:51.000And 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.
00:10:08.000And that's what we need to grapple with now looking toward the future.
00:10:12.000Yeah, again, this is an incredibly deep and profound topic.
00:10:17.000And 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?
00:10:30.000Can you just give some historical context, though?
00:10:33.000Because 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.
00:10:47.000We think of just Islam or we think of like New Age type stuff.
00:10:51.000Can you talk about how dominant paganism was at the infant stages of Christianity?
00:10:57.000It was so, sure, it was so dominant that it actually took many centuries for all of Europe to be Christianized.
00:11:04.000You 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.
00:11:19.000But it wasn't, you know, until the 9th and 10th centuries that Northern Europe was converted to Christianity, right?
00:11:27.000Scandinavia and the Nordic peoples and the Germanic peoples up there.
00:11:30.000So it took centuries of consistent, dogged work by Catholic missionaries to go out into these pagan societies and sacrifice their lives.
00:11:40.000Many, many Christians sacrificed their lives to convert pagan Europe, which was paganism was very entrenched in Europe, right?
00:11:48.000So it was a long process to convert Europe.
00:11:53.000And 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.
00:12:06.000It's these religious rites and rituals and beliefs about nature.
00:12:11.000But it's also child sacrifice, which is something great, which just happens that every pagan society had this idea of killing children.
00:12:19.000We would know nothing about that in the West, obviously.
00:12:38.000When I say only, trust me, they are the only one.
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00:13:41.000So paganism isn't just a system of religious belief, religious rituals, also a means of social control.
00:13:48.000And 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.
00:14:03.000And 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.
00:14:14.000And this was true in the Roman Empire.
00:14:15.000We 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.
00:14:24.000They didn't have recourse to sort of like court appeals.
00:14:28.000If 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.
00:14:57.000The 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.
00:15:09.000And if they didn't do that, they were going to be martyred.
00:15:12.000There had to be uniformity in the performance of the state morality.
00:15:16.000And we're starting to see that come back in our time where religion is supposed to be this totally private thing.
00:15:22.000You can think whatever you want in your church and your home.
00:15:25.000But 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.
00:15:36.000Yeah, it's inherently totalitarian at its core, which is that you must then participate in whatever pagan ritual is.
00:15:45.000So 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.
00:15:59.000Which John Adams, I believe, said that right.
00:16:01.000And you mentioned that basically the construct is set up for that.
00:16:04.000We're no longer a Christian religious, and we're no longer as moral as we were.
00:16:10.000Does that mean the Constitution is sustainable?
00:16:14.000Not with the current, not with the American people as they are.
00:16:18.000That'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.
00:16:26.000And we need to sort of wrap our minds around the implications for that.
00:16:30.000And 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.
00:16:46.000And our task is to start thinking about, first of all, our task is to accept that.
00:16:52.000Secondly, 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?
00:17:14.000And I don't want to overly politicize this, but it's hard not to.
00:17:17.000So the Congress, they do this ridiculous anti-Semitism awareness nonsense, getting rid of the First Amendment.
00:17:23.000They get rid of Fourth Amendment protections, and we call it the death of the U.S. Constitution.
00:17:27.000And it's happening, though, because the body politic is largely not moral and religious.
00:17:33.000You 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.
00:17:54.000They 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.
00:18:03.000And when we lose that kind of people, we're going to lose that society, that form of government as well.
00:18:08.000And something else is going to come in and take its place.
00:18:11.000You 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.
00:18:21.000And they demonstrate that a million different ways every week, it seems like.
00:18:26.000So we should expect more of that and we should expect it to get worse.
00:20:10.000I 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.
00:20:19.000And I talk about some of the things that we're starting to see in European Union countries and in Great Britain.
00:20:25.000And 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?
00:20:40.000So you have laws that within a certain distance of an abortion clinic, you cannot protest or say anything negative about abortion.
00:20:49.000And that includes you may not pray silently.
00:20:53.000You may not pray silently in your head within a certain distance of an abortion clinic, right?
00:20:59.000Abortion being a sort of pagan sacrament of the new pagan era.
00:21:04.000If you do that, and this has happened in the United Kingdom, the police will come.
00:21:11.000And you tell them that you are, they'll arrest you and put you in handcuffs and take you away.
00:21:18.000And 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.
00:21:31.000We talked about the public or state morality of the pagan regimes earlier.
00:21:34.000Well, you can't defy them even in your thoughts.
00:21:37.000And 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.
00:21:44.000So in your research, what is the best way to combat paganism?
00:21:50.000Obviously, it's Christianity, but tactically, how do we then go up against of crushing a pagan empire?
00:21:58.000Yeah, 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.
00:22:08.000The way tactically to fight back is to find and fight on ground you can win.
00:22:13.000And that may mean making major changes to your life.
00:22:16.000It 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.
00:22:28.000And it means not also just keeping your religious life sequestered from the public life of the community in which you live, right?
00:22:38.000So you just don't, you don't just go to church on Sunday.
00:22:41.000You don't just build up your homeschool network or your local religious community.
00:22:45.000You take your faith out into the public square and you fight for it to be in the public square.
00:22:50.000So 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.
00:23:01.000Maybe you take over the county government.
00:23:02.000Maybe you take over, help take over the state legislature.
00:23:06.000But the point is that we have to fight.
00:23:08.000We can't just hide in an arc and hope that the storm passes us by.
00:23:13.000And we have to fight knowing that we will meet and face growing persecution from a pagan society.
00:23:19.000We 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.
00:23:30.000What is it about sacrificing of children, massacring?
00:23:34.000These seems to be rituals within such worldview and ideology.
00:23:39.000Yeah, and you see it all across every pagan society, every pagan empire that's ever existed.
00:23:46.000The more advanced the pagan society was, the more surely they fell into child and human sacrifice.
00:23:54.000And part of that is what I mentioned earlier.
00:23:57.000Pagan 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.
00:24:11.000And so in order to maintain that kind of control, you have to play on and manage anxiety, fear.
00:24:20.000You have to instill fear in the populace.
00:24:22.000And so human sacrifice and especially child sacrifice is engaging in these sort of atrocities becomes a system of social control.
00:24:32.000And it was also, and this is an important part of it, there had to be unanimity about it, right?
00:24:37.000You couldn't have people protesting and pointing out that you were committing this atrocity, right?
00:24:45.000And 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?
00:24:57.000And so this is true on a society-wide scale as well.
00:25:00.000There had to be unanimous support for these pagan sacrificial rituals, and they were a means of maintaining social control.
00:25:09.000And we see it all across time and history.
00:25:11.000It doesn't matter how far, you know, forward we go into history.
00:25:15.000We saw there were pagan societies that were engaging in mass human sacrifice well into the 19th century.
00:25:22.000So time alone doesn't solve this problem.
00:25:25.000Modernity 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.
00:25:38.000There are hard times ahead, but not without hope.
00:25:41.000Christianity emerged from within the confines of a pagan empire.
00:25:46.000And you show how with courage, fortitude, and faith, it will be our duty and privilege to defend Christianity and restore its claims.
00:25:53.000I 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.
00:26:03.000But what happens when you get into polytheism?
00:26:06.000When you have multiple gods, you have multiple moralities.
00:26:09.000And you cannot have a flourishing civilization.
00:26:12.000You cannot build a flourishing civilization around such an idea set or construct.
00:26:18.000I 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?
00:26:33.000In 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.
00:26:48.000And 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?
00:26:58.000And 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.
00:27:28.000And we saw very quickly the collapse of mainline Protestantism in the 70s and 80s.
00:27:33.000And now we're beginning to see these same things infect large portions of the evangelical church.
00:27:38.000And even, I'm sorry to say, in some parts of the Catholic Church as well.
00:27:42.000And 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.
00:27:57.000I 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.
00:28:28.000We 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.
00:28:38.000And 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.
00:28:50.000But he seems to misunderstand that the cultural Christianity relies for its sustenance on real Christian faith alive and active among the people.
00:29:01.000I 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.
00:29:16.000And I think all societies are actually built on theological claims, normative and ontological claims about human nature and what is right and wrong.
00:29:26.000And we lose sight of that at our peril.
00:29:29.000You know, we think that things like freedom of speech and human rights just exist out there in the ether, untethered to Christian moral precepts.
00:29:39.000And when we lose the Christianity, we're going to lose those.
00:29:42.000Those are jewels of Christian civilization, but they cannot exist on their own.
00:29:47.000And we're starting to see that in many, many ways.
00:29:50.000It's a Christian inheritance, as Tom Holland would say, who's an agnostic.
00:29:54.000He wrote a great book called Dominion, which is a thorough book.
00:29:57.000But 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.
00:30:10.000You don't just get those ideas by thinking that the pebbles in your pocket have some sort of supernatural ability.
00:30:17.000Christianity gave us the birthright of the West.
00:30:20.000It is the birthright given by a Christian inheritance.
00:30:23.000And 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.
00:30:35.000And 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.
00:30:56.000The 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.
00:31:03.000And what I'm here to say is that they aren't going to go away.
00:31:05.000It's not going to take generations or centuries.
00:31:08.000They're going away right now in real time.
00:31:13.000The world is in flames, and biotonomics is a complete and total disaster, but it can't and won't ruin my day.
00:32:01.000Yeah, 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.
00:32:13.000And 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.
00:32:22.000And it's interesting, we talked about power earlier.
00:32:26.000Power in the pagan society, it works like this.
00:32:31.000Power is exercised by the powerful on their own behalf against the weak.
00:32:38.000Christianity 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.
00:32:51.000And that is what we saw throughout Western civilization, the development of Europe.
00:32:57.000The fundamental point that all men are created equal comes from the Christian doctrine of Imago Day, right?
00:33:04.000And so if you reject that, if you say we're going to reject Christianity, you know, Nietzsche was at least honest about this, right?
00:33:11.000The Marquis de Saud was at least honest about this.
00:33:14.000The Nazis were at least honest about this.
00:33:16.000They were honest enough to take the implications of their rejection of Christianity seriously, right?
00:33:22.000And 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.
00:33:32.000You see the left talk about, you know, marginalized voices or human rights, right?
00:33:38.000But 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?
00:33:48.000And 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.
00:34:05.000And 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.
00:34:15.000It's not the ultimate end or an aim for Christians.
00:34:18.000Do 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.
00:34:37.000I mean, are we calling, are we, is it time to rally the troops, if you will?
00:34:42.000I think it's time to let go of the idea that we can maintain this like this neutral stance, right?
00:34:48.000This idea that we're going to have a neutral public square.
00:34:51.000We're going to have neutral institutions, right?
00:34:53.000Those were luxuries that only a predominantly Christian society could afford.
00:34:58.000And we are no longer a predominantly Christian society.
00:35:01.000So now as we enter a post-Christian era, we need to contest for control of these institutions, for control of the public square.
00:35:09.000We don't want neutral institutions for the sake of neutrality.
00:35:13.000We wanted neutral institutions because we believe in things like tolerance and non-coercion as Christians.
00:35:21.000But if we're not going to have a Christian society, and we're not, then We're not interested in neutrality anymore.
00:35:29.000What 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.
00:35:54.000So I think we need to shift our way of thinking.
00:35:57.000And, you know, we're not ever going to go back.
00:35:59.000We can't go back to this notion of neutrality that like, you know, you just live your truth and I'll live my truth.
00:36:08.000And 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.