The John-Henry Westen Show - How the sexual revolution destroyed the family and upended Christian culture

00:00:00.000 I think the reason so many Christians feel gaslit is when we're like, hey, that's not the way things

00:00:04.000 were, that's changed, that's different. We get accused of being reactionary, for noticing what

00:00:08.940 is going on. These things need to be called out, and that all these little culture wars that seem

00:00:13.400 disconnected are actually the result of the replacing of one value system with another.

00:00:18.280 Hello, my friends. Have you ever wondered to yourself, how in the world did we arrive at this

00:00:31.280 place? How in the world did we get to a place where we are mutilating young kids, where by the time

00:00:37.700 they're five, we're giving them these drugs that will not enable them to live as adults sexually

00:00:44.220 at all, and doing that in the name of helping them and loving them, and if we don't do that,

00:00:50.820 the kids are taken away from you because you're abusing them. How in the world did we get here?

00:00:56.700 How did we get to a place where we're killing a million children a year, and we're calling that

00:01:01.440 a right and a good, and those who oppose it are jailed? How did we get here? Well, How We Got

00:01:10.860 here is a new book out by Jonathan Van Maren, whom LifeSite fans know very well since the Jonathan

00:01:15.740 Van Maren show runs at LifeSite News every week, and he is also the spokesman and main attraction for

00:01:24.260 the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, probably one of the most influential pro-life groups in the

00:01:31.700 nation. In fact, they are so influential that they go coast to coast in Canada arguing for life

00:01:37.700 in a way that very few others do. They dare to say what most won't, and they're effective as anything.

00:01:44.700 They're attractive to young people, and they're just stunning. In his latest book, Jonathan goes

00:01:49.940 not only through how we got here, but also what we need to do from here in order to get to a cultural

00:01:59.980 restoration. You're going to want to stay tuned to this episode of the John Henry Weston Show

00:02:03.400 with our guest, Jonathan Van Maren. We are on the brink of global war, maybe even nuclear war.

00:02:11.620 This could be the beginning of the long-foretold chastisement in which the living will envy the dead.

00:02:18.620 Our only hope is Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, and people hearing the truth of Jesus Christ.

00:02:26.840 And that's what LifeSite News is for. It's keeping Christ in the culture. It's bringing you the truth

00:02:33.760 about the news, always. But the odds are against us. If you want to play your part, then head over

00:02:40.400 to give.lifesitenews.com and support our Christmas campaign today. Thank you, and God bless you.

00:02:47.400 Jonathan, so good to be with you.

00:02:49.120 Great to be here.

00:02:49.680 Well, let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father,

00:02:54.440 and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

00:02:58.460 Jonathan, you have done another great work. In fact, this is, what, your sixth book now?

00:03:03.240 What I love about you is you're an incredible activist. Like, you give activists a new name

00:03:09.500 because you are out all the time, which is really, really beautiful. By way of you telling a little

00:03:14.740 bit about yourself to people, you still have a family. You're a young man still with a young

00:03:19.340 family. How do you make that work? Because there's a lot of us in this movement, and it's

00:03:23.580 tough. What do you do?

00:03:25.180 Well, they're with me on this trip. Awesome.

00:03:27.240 And so we've taken them with us on a lot of places. And now one of the things about a schedule

00:03:32.520 where you're on the road a lot, you're speaking a lot, is when you're back, you can also just

00:03:35.640 carve out the time. And so when I'm laying out my schedule, I prioritize my family first

00:03:40.000 and foremost, because I think there was, I forget who said this. He said, you can't save the

00:03:44.020 family. You can only try to save your family. And so they have to be your first priority.

00:03:47.700 Beautiful. And you're a deep man of faith. Tell us about your faith.

00:03:50.800 So I grew up in a Christian home. I was introduced to all of the concepts now that I seek to defend

00:03:56.440 in the culture. While I was at home, I was surrounded by just really, really stalwart

00:04:02.040 role models who would be embarrassed to hear me saying this. But they are, and they shaped

00:04:06.520 my character. I always say that anything that I've done right is because of the example

00:04:10.120 and influence of my parents. And anything I've done wrong is when I didn't follow the example

00:04:14.240 and influence of my parents. And so it's one of the really simple stories. And it's one

00:04:18.040 of the things I get into the book as well as intergenerational religious families are

00:04:21.620 really essential. Those are what are under attack in our culture. But that is actually

00:04:25.240 the vessel in which faith flourishes.

00:04:27.460 Everyone who reads the title of your book, How We Got Here, will be like, wow, how did we

00:04:32.100 get here? Because it's insane. But they're also going to want to know, how do we get out?

00:04:36.500 But let's start with how we got here. Give us that in a nutshell. How did, this is crazy.

00:04:42.660 By now, this is a place where nobody believed we could get to, not even, people didn't even

00:04:48.120 envisage what we're going through right now. No, no. That is the craziest thing. And the

00:04:52.220 title of the book comes from the fact that I've been asked that questions more times

00:04:55.060 than I can count. How did we get here? You mentioned earlier talking about the transitioning

00:05:00.380 of children. If you had told me 10 years ago, and I've seen horrifying things, as have

00:05:04.280 you. We work in the pro-life movement. You think you can't be shocked. But transitioning 0.98

00:05:07.460 kids, like you couldn't even come up with that. And what's really important for people

00:05:11.840 to understand is that we got here because a series of intellectuals and revolutionaries

00:05:17.040 actually laid the intellectual architecture. They influenced the culture, and they brought

00:05:21.540 about the sexual revolution. And the sexual revolution transformed virtually every Western

00:05:26.660 culture in the West. And now the West is seeking to bring those values to the developing world.

00:05:32.020 And I think the reason the history is so important is not because names and dates are really important

00:05:36.360 for everybody to realize. But because it destroys the myth of progress, so many people look at

00:05:41.580 where we are and they have the sense of inevitability that this is just the way cultures go. Cultures

00:05:45.900 rise, cultures fall, and we seem to be on the downswing at the moment. But it's important

00:05:50.240 to identify the people who brought us to this point so we can respond to their ideas, we can

00:05:55.300 recognize their influences, we can root those influences out, and then combat those influences

00:06:00.120 in our family. So it's people like Margaret Mead, people like Alfred Kinsey, who will be more

00:06:04.280 familiar to many of your viewers. People like John Money, people like Magnus Hirschfeld.

00:06:08.860 These people began seeding ideas into the culture 50 years ago, 100 years ago. And now we're seeing

00:06:14.120 the fruition of those ideas exploding onto the surface of our society. It is a revolution. And each of the

00:06:20.580 individual things in our culture that we refer to as culture wars, right? Okay, now there's LGBT 0.99

00:06:25.220 activism in country music. Now we've got to use our preferred pronouns. And now we see people who are

00:06:32.540 male dressed in female garb on the plane. And we look at all these tiny changes. And I think the 0.65

00:06:38.140 reason so many Christians feel gaslit is when we're like, hey, that's not the way things were.

00:06:43.420 That's changed. That's different. We get accused of being reactionary. We get accused of a backlash

00:06:47.820 or igniting a culture war for noticing what is going on. And so I'm hoping that by reading the

00:06:53.900 history, people can feel emboldened to recognize that we got here for specific reasons, that these

00:06:58.760 things need to be called out. And that all these little culture wars that seem disconnected are

00:07:04.000 actually the result of the replacing of one value system with another. A value system based on

00:07:10.060 scriptural revelation. Every Western country, whether Catholic or Protestant, was rooted in some

00:07:14.880 fundamental shared principles to the principles of sexual revolution. And we see this playing out

00:07:19.660 every day in our parliament, in our courts, and in our culture. And all these little culture wars are

00:07:25.120 just manifestations of this huge value shift, this transfer that we see going on.

00:07:30.480 So that's interesting. I think there's a general opinion that, you know, times just flow and we

00:07:36.780 just go with the flow and there's people who felt this way. And so they got gained the ascendancy and

00:07:43.340 then, you know, that's how it happened. So you're telling me, no, no, no, this was an actual plan. This was

00:07:48.040 a developed project. We got to have one example of that because that, because for the most part,

00:07:52.940 people, I think, think that, you know, they just, you know, I had an idea one day and it's good and

00:07:58.460 people identify with that. And yeah, we've been treating the gays badly and we just got to. So 0.99

00:08:03.780 how did we actually get that? Interesting that you ended that by saying, yeah, we treated, you know,

00:08:07.340 we treated gay people badly. That's weaponized empathy, right? Because they essentially exploit 1.00

00:08:12.420 your good and just feelings about not wanting other people to suffer and say, well, now you have to

00:08:16.860 sign on to this entire agenda that includes the sorts of things you mentioned previously.

00:08:19.880 There's many examples I could give. I'm going to give one because the example is both familiar, but

00:08:24.760 there are aspects to this example that most people are unaware of. And that would be the example of

00:08:29.160 Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who started off as a zoologist studying gall wasps. And then he went into the field

00:08:34.560 of sexology. This would be in the early 1940s. He got together a team and he produced the two Kinsey

00:08:39.600 reports, one in 48 and the second in 53, human sexuality in the human male and sexuality in the human

00:08:45.200 female. And he claimed to reveal what everybody in America was actually up to. And he claimed that

00:08:50.420 95%, 95% of Americans were by the standards of the law in 1948, sex offenders. The vast majority of

00:08:58.480 them were unfaithful to their wives, used prostitutes, were unchaste prior to marriage. He said between 10 and

00:09:06.160 37% of males engaged in homosexual behavior, which is the number of the gay rights movement used

00:09:11.580 four years, despite the fact that even in 2016, the number of people who identified on the entire

00:09:17.520 alphabet spectrum was still at 3%. So things weren't as bad in an era where you have parades celebrating

00:09:23.220 the behavior, as he said they were just after World War II, when we were seeing a religious boomlet in 0.98

00:09:28.140 almost every church-going community. And there's so many aspects to the Kinsey story. Of course, he

00:09:33.500 mainstreamed this idea that sexuality begins at birth. And that's because he facilitated the abuse of over

00:09:40.120 2,000 children. And that data was carefully tabulated in his book. You can take it out of

00:09:44.340 the library and look it up for yourself. But table 34, if you're table 34, I almost didn't believe it

00:09:50.380 when I first read about this. And so I got the book myself found table 34, truly chilling stuff. But to

00:09:56.080 give an idea of how one guy, so why would this professor make such an impact on the culture is one

00:10:01.660 of the major slogans of the 1960s is don't trust anybody over 30. A lot of listeners will remember that

00:10:07.860 there was, you know, make love, not war. It is forbidden to forbid was the French slogan. And

00:10:11.840 then don't trust anybody over 30. Now, keep in mind that the Kinsey reports were accepted as

00:10:16.680 science. And so we needed to follow the data, we needed to follow the science. Even, you know,

00:10:21.740 great Catholics like, you know, William F. Buckley accepted the results as true, but just said,

00:10:26.980 even if nobody's following the law of God, the law of God remains the law of God, but accepted that

00:10:30.960 this was true. And so what kind of impact do you think it would have when the American public,

00:10:37.000 writ large, accepts this idea that 95% of people in that country are sex offenders at a point where

00:10:44.420 American church attendance across all denominations is at its peak. An entire generation of young people

00:10:49.940 were told and believed that everybody was lying to them, that most of their pastors and priests

00:10:55.380 were sex offenders, that a huge percentage of their parents were. Even if, let's say, the churches

00:11:00.520 were slightly better, even if you're saying half of the people telling you to live a chaste life,

00:11:03.720 follow God's law, go to church, they're all lying to you. And so it was Kinsey who actually created a

00:11:10.080 sense of malaise. When you see these revolts in the 1960s, they didn't explode out of nowhere.

00:11:15.000 You see Berkeley and the Paris riots in 68. These people were groomed to revolt by intellectuals,

00:11:19.680 and their mistrust of the generation of people who taught them Christian values was based on the 0.95

00:11:24.920 idea that they were told all those people were lying hypocrites and were still living with the 0.96

00:11:28.700 consequences today. It's stunning because in Kinsey's example, he paid a pedophile to do the 0.97

00:11:35.560 abuse of children as tabulated, and it's horrific. Also, though, he, in terms of his study, did it at

00:11:43.160 the prison. So give us a little bit more of that, how he falsified the so-called research.

00:11:49.960 So if we're going to get into detail, Kinsey presented himself as a very normal sort of middle-class

00:11:54.860 Republican and a very normal heterosexual marriage. The reality is that he was a voracious bisexual who 1.00

00:12:00.560 was shooting illegal porno movies in his attic. He was working with Wardell Pomeroy, who we don't 0.97

00:12:05.880 have time to get into him, but suffice it to say he was a pervert, and that's putting it kindly, 0.97

00:12:09.440 actually. And when he embarked on this project, he was actually seeking to persuade the American public 0.90

00:12:15.940 that normal wasn't normal, and that we needed a new definition of normal. And so it's really

00:12:21.440 interesting. So as you say, to get his research on the common sexual behavior of Americans,

00:12:26.960 he went to prisons. He interviewed hundreds of sexual psychopaths. He went to the New York 0.93

00:12:32.840 gay underground. In fact, so few ordinary American women would talk to him about their sex lives,

00:12:38.500 surprisingly, that he reclassified prostitutes and anyone who had cohabited with a male for six months

00:12:44.180 as Susie Homemaker in his data. Even that didn't give him the results he wanted, so he junked three 0.87

00:12:49.840 quarters of his own data. And if you want to know how bad it is, the Kinsey Institute at the University

00:12:55.200 of Indiana holds all of his research for the purposes of continuing his work. They won't

00:13:00.100 release most of their files, most notably the data that created Table 34. And so he did what many of

00:13:06.340 these sexual revolutionaries did, is he created data and he created science to reach the conclusion 1.00

00:13:11.480 that he gave in one pithy sentence in front of the cameras, where he said,

00:13:14.920 unless we are going to imprison 95% of the American male population, it is time that we changed our 0.87

00:13:20.780 laws. That was his conclusion. So out of falsehood and lies, out of worse abuse, comes a seed to plant

00:13:31.320 which results in just a horrific culture change. It's so hard to believe, yet the evidence is there.

00:13:40.180 For that, I think a lot of credit is due to Judith Reisman, who was the one who discovered Table 34

00:13:46.740 as a student of Kinsey's, and then was persecuted for her. She's passed away recently, but...

00:13:51.720 She was on the My Life Site podcast before she passed away.

00:13:54.380 Indeed. Real hero, but suffered for pointing this out, but actually went all over the world to try

00:14:01.120 and expose this. Undoing the stuff that was done, I could use other words, is very challenging, though.

00:14:09.840 How are you doing some of that?

00:14:11.540 What I'm seeking to do, especially with this book, is to empower Christian communities to recognize the

00:14:17.800 lies they're faced with. Because in 2024, you are faced with lies every single day, and we are othered

00:14:23.520 all the time, including by our Prime Minister, right? He says that being pro-life is un-Canadian. His

00:14:28.540 words, not mine. He says opposing the LGBT agenda is un-Canadian, that we're all somehow foreign

00:14:34.040 American far-right imports. Well, I was born in Seattle, so maybe I am a far-right American import. 0.70

00:14:39.540 But the point still stands. I think that a lot of people, when faced at college, at university,

00:14:44.360 in the culture, in their workplace, by the entertainment that they watch, the mainstream

00:14:48.820 culture has become anti-Christian. And as a result, we need to recognize, no, we can trace our genealogy.

00:14:55.220 And let's look at their genealogy now. So how did we get drag queen story time? Wait a second. It

00:14:59.520 keeps on ending up with pedophiles. It ends up with Hugh Hefner, who called himself Kinsey's

00:15:04.200 pamphleteer. Kinsey was the one who inspired him to start Playboy, which turned into the porn

00:15:08.260 epidemic that we see now, sweeping both the culture and the church. And one of the greatest

00:15:13.820 tools the LGBT activists and the abortion activists have at their disposal is this myth of 0.68

00:15:18.860 progress, this myth of inevitability. Like, you can't fight us. This is, we are on a historical

00:15:23.720 march, which is why at all of their marches, they have wrong side of history, right? You're at the

00:15:27.440 wrong side of history. Like, I'll take 2,000 years over 30. Like, I don't know which side that they

00:15:31.300 claim to be on. But this, it is a really powerful myth. It's something that we need to respond to so

00:15:36.520 that people have the context for where we are. Basically say, on the back of the book, that what

00:15:41.220 I'm trying to do here is giving people a cultural map and saying, you are here. So they know how we

00:15:45.700 ended up here. And they have the courage to recognize that when somebody spouts off some idea

00:15:49.760 about the necessity of sex education, that comes from Alfred Kinsey. That comes from John Money.

00:15:55.260 Not only is it good that you oppose that, but we should. The whole thing needs to be thrown out.

00:15:59.960 It has rotten and poisonous roots. And we should be able to lay that out. And a lot of people,

00:16:04.880 I do think we're in a very weird period now. It's kind of a pregnant widow moment. The old age has 1.00

00:16:09.620 ended and the new age has not yet been born. And we're in this middle period now where we don't know

00:16:13.960 what the West is going to look like next. And this does provide us an opportunity to speak truth to

00:16:19.500 people who increasingly recognize that they've been lied to, that the establishments have their

00:16:23.660 own interests, and that there's nothing that we are told very frequently by a Justin Trudeau,

00:16:29.340 by a Keir Starmer in the UK, by a Joe Biden or whoever was actually writing his lines.

00:16:35.360 We can't believe what they're saying. And people recognize that things are going wrong. Ordinary

00:16:39.560 sane people are saying, oh, wait a second, I signed on to Pride. And now they're talking about

00:16:43.740 castrating little kids. So what went wrong and where? And we can say, don't pull back to LGB.

00:16:48.680 Let's walk this all the way back. I find that people are really open to these conversations.

00:16:53.640 For US residents, creating will has never been easier. Thanks to My Legacy Will,

00:16:58.200 an online platform free of charge. You can now create your own will and choose to include

00:17:04.220 LifeSite News in it. Specify where your funeral will take place, the number of masses to be offered

00:17:09.460 for your soul, and how your estate will be distributed. We would be deeply grateful if you

00:17:14.940 remembered LifeSite News in your will. Visit MyLegacyWill.com slash LifeSiteNews. Thank you

00:17:21.980 for your support and may God bless you.

00:17:24.860 Very interesting. Now, one guy doing one study, that's even if he's evil as heck, that's not going

00:17:31.400 to affect everybody. How is this moving forward? In fact, there's all sorts of, there's not only Kinsey

00:17:37.540 studies. There's all sorts of studies that also do that, but it's related also to funding. Because

00:17:46.560 we watched with a lot of the research right now, one of the things I think the whole wide world

00:17:51.280 realizes now is the whole pharmaceutical industry is run by moneyed interests. And there's a lot of

00:17:56.880 money in it. We just saw Gates saying how his investment into vaccine is turned back 20-fold.

00:18:02.640 Wait a minute, what? Moneyed interests with these foundations also played a part. Do they play a

00:18:08.840 part in this? Yeah, very much so. So two responses to that. First, the people who funded the Kinsey

00:18:15.040 Reports, it's the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. And they funded all kinds of stuff at

00:18:19.800 the same time. So it was both their families, but also a lot of people working in their organizations

00:18:25.400 who specifically wanted to join their organizations in order to choose who got the grants.

00:18:29.240 So there's that. Another thing people need to realize about data is that polling is usually not

00:18:34.800 taken to reveal public opinion. It's taken to shape public opinion because people have a herd instinct

00:18:39.120 and they don't want to be the only guy on their street who doesn't sign on to X. And so just to give

00:18:45.840 you an example, right now, they're trying to push for the legalization of assisted suicide in the

00:18:50.600 United Kingdom. So Canada serving as sort of a cautionary tale, a canary on the coal mine. We'll see how

00:18:55.020 that goes. Maybe we'll know by the time this show airs. But what's really interesting is that the

00:19:00.000 number one thing dying with dignity and the MPs pushing this, like Kim Ledbetter, are saying is

00:19:04.180 between 60 and 79 percent of the UK public support is the government must move. And so a response poll

00:19:10.680 was done just first asking them if they supported it and then telling them three things about what was

00:19:16.940 actually going to happen if the bill was passed. And guess what percentage that dropped to after they

00:19:21.320 found out? Three things. 11 percent. 11 percent. So this poll, you know, between 60 and 79 percent is

00:19:29.860 garbage. But the reason they took that poll was not to gauge public opinion. It was to shape public 0.98

00:19:35.200 opinion. When people were actually given the information, it plummeted, which it teaches two

00:19:39.600 things. One, do not trust data that you're blindly handed because this data is being commissioned by

00:19:44.340 people with an agenda. Second of all, we should be hugely encouraged by the fact that when people are

00:19:49.180 given some really basic information, they can change their mind, which places the task. This is

00:19:53.720 where the activism comes in, is reaching out to people and getting that real information in front

00:19:57.420 of their eyes. One of the things with what you do in particular is CCBR has been criticized a lot for,

00:20:05.320 but also incredibly effective for. You do put out what happens. And with the abortion thing, you show

00:20:13.580 the photos, the pictures, the reality of abortion in a way that you're criticized for. What do you

00:20:19.520 think is really the basis of that criticism? I know there's good arguments for it. What's the

00:20:23.060 other's opinion? Even pro-life people say, oh, you shouldn't do that. Pro-life people don't do it

00:20:27.320 for two reasons. One of them is it's people in good faith who think, oh, it seems kind of mean.

00:20:34.920 Again, it's exploited empathy because abortion activists, whenever a pro-lifer says, I don't really

00:20:38.900 support that. See, even your people don't really like this tactic. And their empathy is exploited

00:20:43.680 in favor of covering up the truth about abortion. So there are plenty of people in good faith who

00:20:48.920 are just like, well, I'm just, does this hurt or does this help? And I have all the time in the

00:20:52.400 world for those people. I'll answer all of their questions. I'll lay out our stories. I'll show them

00:20:56.180 baby pictures. I'll explain why we do it. And then there's other people, and we see this a lot.

00:21:00.760 It's like, well, I'm a Christian, but I'm not like those Christians over there. And at a time where 0.99

00:21:04.380 we're all being forced to draw our lines, where there's plenty of, you know, formerly Christian 1.00

00:21:08.620 churches with pride flags outside. I believe that the day is coming and it very, very soon will

00:21:13.800 arrive in every Western country where every church is going to be forced to kind of make a decision

00:21:17.600 about where they stand on these issues. And a lot of those people don't want, they want to be pro-life,

00:21:22.880 but they don't want to be anti-abortion. They don't ever want to be negative. But do you know what?

00:21:26.460 The abolitionists just weren't just happy and healthy slave families. They were anti-slavery. And I'm not

00:21:31.920 just pro happy and healthy babies. I'm very specifically anti-suctioning them to death because I've been

00:21:37.080 through dumpsters behind clinics. I've held baby body parts in my hands. And it is an experience

00:21:41.820 that will radicalize you forever because it teaches you that abortion is not about a what,

00:21:47.620 it is about a who. And if we ever forget that abortion is about a who as pro-lifers,

00:21:52.360 then we've already lost the argument. Because if we're not talking about the murder of children

00:21:57.080 created in God's image, then who cares that I'm wasting my life if that's not what we're talking about.

00:22:02.120 You said something there. It might seem off topic, but it's not. It's very,

00:22:05.000 very important. This is crucial because we're dealing with a divisiveness that's intentionally

00:22:11.820 caused, but it's everywhere among good people. And that really, I mean, I've seen it unfortunately

00:22:20.060 in what I've been doing for almost three decades now, but the need to actually sit down with one

00:22:25.720 another in vivo and explain and talk to one another before we spout off on some social media

00:22:31.880 somewhere. I'm not like him. What a radical, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we're doing this

00:22:35.900 mostly to those on our side. It's stunning. I'd love to hear your take on that.

00:22:41.220 Well, yeah, you're getting at the heart of something is the left always sort of bands

00:22:44.160 together and they're willing to recognize we need to take back increments. And we seem to do the sort

00:22:48.240 of Mexican, the circular Mexican firing squad very, very often where we're judging people for their

00:22:52.900 level of commitment here or there. I divide everything into two sets of questions. Are these good faith

00:22:57.600 questions or bad faith questions? And there are a lot of good people who are understandably

00:23:01.640 confused because we live in an incredibly confusing age, right? The one, the one philosopher I quote in

00:23:06.320 the book calls it liquid modernity. Everything seems up for grabs, right? All boundaries are being

00:23:10.360 taken down and we're being caught by a flood of this. A lot of older Christian people have their kids go 1.00

00:23:14.540 off to university, come back and confront them with questions that they don't know how to answer

00:23:17.680 because these things didn't exist when they were young. And so people who have good faith

00:23:21.440 questions, I have like, well, we need to sit down. We need to walk through these things. We need to

00:23:25.760 recognize that we are really all in this together. On the other side, though, you have bad faith

00:23:29.480 questions. And the purposes of those questions are to move the ball in the other direction.

00:23:34.400 And so there will be people who say what the church needs to do is to understand that, you know,

00:23:39.640 same sex attracted people have often been badly treated. We need to understand this

00:23:43.280 in order to react to them in a pastoral and Christian fashion. Agreed. But who is saying that 0.52

00:23:49.220 matters, right? Because there are people who are going to be saying that, but their version of pastoral

00:23:53.480 care is going to be pushing in the direction of bit by bit, trying to change things, to hollow out

00:24:00.020 rules, and to push us towards normalization and then acceptance. But there's other people who are

00:24:05.700 saying this because, no, I recognize that God's law is God's law. On the other hand, like, it is true

00:24:10.660 that we need to be Christ-like, that we need to have compassion, that we need to have empathy.

00:24:14.620 And so on that side, I always say, well, who is asking the question? And we don't need to name names.

00:24:18.700 You cover many of these specific people on LifeSite. You write about them a lot yourself.

00:24:23.560 And so we all know who we're talking about, but that's really important. If it's, you know,

00:24:27.020 the lady next door who's saying, what about this? You know what? Let's sit down. Let's have a cup 0.67

00:24:30.240 of coffee. Let's talk for an hour. If it's, you know, a specific person who's in pastoral ministry

00:24:35.020 and is supposed to be projecting clarity and isn't, that's a completely different question.

00:24:38.540 One of the things that everybody's wondering is, okay, now what? We know we're in the worst

00:24:44.740 time. We, well, at least we've never seen this before. Yes. We got here through these

00:24:50.600 machinations, which is covered in here. You need to read it and find out, but it's in a lot

00:24:55.020 of different areas. It's not only in science. It's not only in finance. It's also in, which

00:24:59.720 you might call it, well, it's academia of all sorts, psychology as well. But where do we go from

00:25:05.420 here? Like, is it completely hopeless right now? Even, but it does seem there's some hope.

00:25:09.740 Like, I mean, we just saw this, like a revolution in the United States with the rejection. The stats

00:25:17.580 show one of the major issues was the very issue that's so avant-garde right now. The trans issue

00:25:24.260 was one of the issues that drove people away from Kamala Harris. Yes. So it seems like there's hope

00:25:29.880 on one hand, but on the other hand, even Trump is pushing the IVF and the LGBT agenda and abortion,

00:25:36.560 at least in early stages. Where are we at and how do we do anything?

00:25:40.300 There's a couple of answers to that question. I think the first one, and I cover this in the

00:25:43.580 last chapter of the book, that's really important, is that a lot of people look at, say, activists

00:25:48.460 or journalists like yourself and think, I got to be doing that or I'm not changing the world.

00:25:52.160 But one of the number one things we need to recognize is that the culture that we refer

00:25:57.020 to, the mainstream culture, is essentially dead and it's rotting and it's infecting everybody

00:26:01.780 else. And we're not going to retake that culture. What we need to do is preserve the

00:26:05.560 culture that mainstream culture replaced. That is what we need to preserve. Like the

00:26:10.060 monks did in Skellig Michael. You know, we need to create these communities that function

00:26:13.520 as arcs where we take responsibility for our kids' education, whether that's homeschooling,

00:26:17.380 classical schooling, a private Christian school that's not part of the state system. We can't 0.87

00:26:21.440 send our kids off to the pagans to teach all week and then expect them to come home as 0.76

00:26:25.520 Christians. It's not realistic in today's day and age. And it's also dangerous considering 1.00

00:26:29.260 the gender ideology in schools. And we need to recognize that communities need to be

00:26:33.080 physical. That we need to have communities where we're covering education, where places

00:26:37.580 where Christians can get together, that they can actually speak with each other, have community 0.70

00:26:42.140 together, have community events together, where they can band together and ensure the

00:26:46.020 protection of the elderly and the vulnerable. And our euthanasia regime in Canada may be coming

00:26:49.980 to other countries as well. There's a series of things that we need to do. And I think that

00:26:54.160 giving up on taking back the mainstream culture is one of those things. So that's one of the

00:26:57.880 things that I'll say about Daily Wire. They'll often say, we're going to take back

00:27:00.480 the culture. And I'm like, well, the culture is dead. If you're talking about, you know,

00:27:03.880 recovering the previous culture, you know, now I'm listening. Like Anthony Eslin said,

00:27:09.480 you know, the classics are the great unused artillery of the culture wars. We don't have

00:27:13.380 to recreate a culture. We can just go back and pick up the one that we abandoned and work

00:27:17.440 from there. To give a little bit of a glimmer of hope, which we're seeing so many interesting

00:27:23.180 things going on in this liquid modernity period that we're in, is we talked about how the ideas

00:27:27.480 of people like Magnus Hirschfeld, who first put forward the idea that gender needed to break out

00:27:31.980 of the binary. And everybody thought he was insane for like 80 years. And now, lo and behold,

00:27:36.360 your kids are learning Magnus Hirschfeld at school 100 years after he's been dead.

00:27:40.160 We're seeing all of these questions being asked by people who were once part of the new atheist

00:27:44.240 movement that kind of shaped my university experience, because they're recognizing that the

00:27:49.280 branch they've been sawing off so vigorously for so long is starting to crack. And they don't like

00:27:53.940 what the alternative looks like. So you've got Richard Dawkins trying to pretend he's a cultural

00:27:57.660 Christian, right? Which, you know, if things weren't so bad, I'd get schadenfreude. I don't

00:28:01.700 have it because things are really bad. But when Dawkins is noticing it, you know, okay, things are not

00:28:05.920 going well. I interviewed Neil Ferguson, one of the world's most renowned historians. And he said,

00:28:11.520 like, I struggle. I got brought up in an atheist home. I struggle to accept Christian premises, 0.52

00:28:16.720 but people need to go back to church. We need to reacquaint ourselves with these value systems.

00:28:20.120 It's the foundation of society. His wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, recently announced that she's becoming

00:28:25.420 a Christian again. She hasn't even picked her denomination. She's still figuring it out. 0.78

00:28:28.880 But she says, like, I believe in the crucifixion, the resurrection, substitutionary atonement.

00:28:34.300 You've got Charles Murray, who was sort of like crucified for his book, The Bell Curve. He's one of

00:28:39.080 the scientists who got ostracized from the academy. He, again, he's an agnostic, but he says,

00:28:44.560 short of a religious revival, America won't survive. Douglas Murray is now calling himself

00:28:49.080 a Christian atheist. So the way I put it in the book is we're at this period now where there is

00:28:54.260 now a lot of intellectuals who hated Christianity five minutes ago, and were very vocal about it,

00:28:59.000 who are willing to say, we need Christianity. And I wonder how far we are from some of them,

00:29:04.460 like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, saying, actually, we need Christ. Because they're recognizing that this was

00:29:09.260 the social glue that held it all together. And they're recognizing that if I've got a pick between

00:29:12.860 Magnus Hirschfeld and Augustine, maybe Augustine's the better way to go.

00:29:17.220 So we don't know. They're planting seeds now. We are in a time of fascinating discussions,

00:29:22.400 right? You know, Jordan Peterson, we who wrestle with God. I wish he'd stop wrestling.

00:29:27.260 Because when you stop fighting is actually when, you know, when you discover the truth.

00:29:32.300 But we'll see. We'll see. There's a lot of interesting signs of growth. And, you know,

00:29:37.200 rotting empires make good fertilizer for a revival in the long term.

00:29:40.560 Indeed. I think what you said about the small Christian communities, if you can call it that,

00:29:45.500 because that's what it's called in Africa. Africa has this thriving thing. You find these

00:29:53.460 pockets of faith and they're real sincere. You go to mass in Africa or to a church service,

00:29:58.640 and there's tons of people and there's tons of men and young kids. Now, they have many more young

00:30:02.880 kids than we do. But there's also this vibrant faith that's just not, for the most part, seen.

00:30:10.440 And I've been to a number of countries in Africa where it's fairly similar, not South Africa. That's

00:30:15.420 different. But in, you know, Kenya and Rwanda and Tanzania, there is this beautiful faith.

00:30:25.920 Yes.

00:30:26.360 And I asked a few of the bishops there, I said,

00:30:28.500 what is this? We don't have this at home. And a few of them said to me the same things,

00:30:35.180 small Christian communities. And it's almost exactly what you described. They actually bring

00:30:40.580 it down. Not only is it a church unit or that's too broad. For them, it's like 10 families. And

00:30:46.600 they work within that 10 families. They support one another. They make sure they're getting the

00:30:50.540 right education there. The church still has a strong education foundation. But they do basically

00:30:55.780 healthcare for them. They make sure the widows are taken care of. This is basically back to what

00:31:01.560 you read in the early Bible about how they supported one another. That kind of thing.

00:31:05.960 Do you see that ever kind of catching hold here?

00:31:10.260 I think more and more it is. And I profile a few of those communities in the last chapter of the

00:31:15.840 book. I think like Barry's Bay is a good example. You've got a college. You've got a lot of families.

00:31:20.760 You know, when there's an event, people just show up from across the church. There's a lot of big

00:31:24.180 families still. Everybody's committed to teaching their kids, teaching their kids themselves or making

00:31:28.220 sure they get a genuine education, not state education. I actually covered Steubenville as well.

00:31:34.760 There's all kinds of interesting projects where people are, you know, one thing that I noticed

00:31:37.880 there, they rented a big shop downtown. It was like $5 a month for anybody to use this shop. So

00:31:42.380 it's a communal area. People can use practical skills. Somebody from the community can come in

00:31:46.980 and they're around all these people who have Christian beliefs and you get the opportunity to

00:31:50.680 talk with them, which is something Aaron Wren calls pre-evangelization. It's just they see what

00:31:55.000 you're doing and think, oh, I'm attracted to that. So we do see these communities popping up. And I

00:31:59.440 think that Rod Dreher probably started talking about this first, but he was describing something

00:32:04.220 that had been happening for a long time. And so I do have a lot of optimism that these communities

00:32:09.940 not only exist, but are increasingly the model that people are looking at. And, you know, there was a

00:32:15.400 study that came out from Laurier University a couple of years ago that the only growing churches in

00:32:19.780 Canada are traditionalist churches. Because why bother to get up early on a Sunday morning if it's just

00:32:24.120 going to be, you know, Pastor What's-Her-Face talking about the LGBT thing, right? Then you

00:32:29.560 might as well just go to Pride in June instead. So I do think that the new model very much is that

00:32:35.540 people know that it's necessary. They know that they need that kind of security and they know they

00:32:39.720 need that kind of community. I think those communities are going to end up being the future.

00:32:43.660 And one of the reasons it's so important, I think, to have these communities to educate our kids

00:32:47.760 ourselves for years, and you've probably been hearing this for years too, right? Like,

00:32:50.760 we have more kids than them, so they're going to die off and the future belongs to the 1.00

00:32:53.540 religious. Because we have lots of kids and they don't. And we didn't recognize too often 0.54

00:32:58.140 that if we sent our kids off to state schools or state universities, there's two ways you can grow

00:33:03.460 your group, right? One is by reproduction and the other one is by evangelization. And we need to

00:33:07.640 recognize that essentially these are sexual evangelicals and that they can steal their kids 0.99

00:33:13.900 that way. I remember talking at a pro-life conference recently to a Catholic mom of nine

00:33:17.580 kids. Two of her kids identify as transgender. Because, you know, between the internet and 1.00

00:33:23.020 school, they got access to her kids. And so we need to be so incredibly careful that our

00:33:27.520 communities grow, especially because we need to retain our own members.

00:33:31.080 Last word, because I think it's not only for kids, but it's also for ourselves, both for

00:33:37.100 maintaining the faith, but also for friendships that are same.

00:33:41.320 So there's a couple of things. The first thing is, like Anthony Eslin said, the classics are the

00:33:45.640 great unused artillery of the culture wars. There's a lot of talk about we need to rebuild this

00:33:49.500 culture. We need to create a subculture. Like we got a lot of stuff already that we need to

00:33:54.180 re-familiarize ourself with. We need to train our brains off of TikTok and YouTube and all these

00:33:59.340 things that we all struggle with to one extent or another. For me, it's Twitter because I'm a

00:34:02.400 political junkie. And retrain our brains to sit down and engage with the great heritage that we

00:34:07.340 actually have. We were given an inheritance and we can pick that inheritance back up and re-engage

00:34:12.720 with that. I think that's so important. And then I think when it comes to the instinct to argue and

00:34:17.880 to debate with people, I want to emphasize that I understand that instinct because when it feels

00:34:23.420 like everything that we treasure is under attack, the instinct to anything that looks like compromise,

00:34:28.780 anything that looks like caving, anything that looks like a one millimeter in the wrong direction,

00:34:34.040 because we're almost, we got PTSD from 20 years of rapid cultural change. It's like slam the door

00:34:39.880 on that guy's fingers, right? Call it out immediately. But instead, I think we need the discernment to

00:34:44.760 recognize the difference between questions asked in good faith by people who just genuinely want to

00:34:50.600 know the truth and don't have an agenda with those who are asking questions in bad faith for the

00:34:54.980 purposes of furthering their own agenda. And we need to, we just need to recognize that a lot of

00:34:59.500 times we get really angry at people. And this is not to say that we're not arguing about things that

00:35:03.420 are worth arguing about, but the way we argue about those things and the way we approach those

00:35:07.180 conversations should be shaped by how that person is coming to us. Whereas then there's other people,

00:35:11.920 if they have an agenda, those people need to be called out because I think I, this is something I

00:35:16.760 follow in my own writing. When I'm talking to somebody on the street, who's really upset and very

00:35:20.960 pro-abortion, I talked to her very differently than Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of

00:35:25.640 Canada, whose job is to defend, you know, abortion all day long. She needs to be treated like somebody 1.00

00:35:30.980 who's championing the murder of children. This other person needs to be treated as a wounded person

00:35:35.920 who's been groomed by a culture of death and instead needs for us to engage with her with charity and

00:35:40.500 compassion. Absolutely beautiful. Jonathan Van Maren, keep up your amazing work. Thank you so

00:35:44.920 much. God bless you, my friend. How We Got Here by Jonathan Van Maren. You can pick it up wherever

00:35:50.020 good books are sold. God bless you. And we'll see you again next time.

00:35:57.960 Aloha, everyone. This is Jason Jones for Lifeside News. We hope you enjoyed this video. For more content

00:36:03.880 like this, check the link in the description. You can also connect with us on social media to stay up

00:36:10.540 to date with the latest news on life, faith, family, and freedom. Thanks for watching and may God bless you.

The John-Henry Westen Show - December 19, 2024

How the sexual revolution destroyed the family and upended Christian culture

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript