The King's Hall - The Politically Incorrect Guide to Christendom

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Brian here with a big announcement from New Christendom Press.

00:00:03.860 Possibly our most important book yet is now available for pre-order.

00:00:08.300 It's called The Longhouse, How Feminism Conquered the West and Made Us All Miserable.

00:00:13.400 And in it, Eric and I take you through the dark history of feminism,

00:00:17.240 what it's done to everything from politics to church life to the economy,

00:00:21.220 and what to do about it.

00:00:23.040 Pre-order it today at newchristendompress.com slash longhouse.

00:00:26.600 And as a thank you for pre-ordering, you'll get 10% off automatically.

00:00:31.000 We'll also be signing the first thousand copies, so pick yours up today.

00:00:47.840 Despite its grandeur and expansive domain, Rome also had a dark underbelly.

00:00:52.620 Such was the case with the land beyond its Esquilin Gate, which is said to have been built sometime around the 6th century BC by the Roman king, Servius Tullius.

00:01:02.940 A few decades before the birth of Christ, this affluent region became home to Rome's first heated swimming pool, which was constructed on the Esquilin Hill.

00:01:12.080 Eventually, this area would become home to some of the wealthiest people in the world, an immense expanse of luxury villas and parks.

00:01:19.820 Yet paradoxically, from the earliest days of Rome and for many centuries,

00:01:24.160 this area outside the gate had become a place where the bodies of executed criminals and slaves were dumped.

00:01:31.280 Vultures flocked overhead in massive numbers,

00:01:34.520 feeding on the rotting flesh of the bodies piled high in a lengthy ditch.

00:01:38.860 So prominent were these scavengers that they even had a name, the birds of the Esquilin.

00:01:44.760 The area remained so foul and stench from years of rotting corpses that,

00:01:49.840 when the Romans sought to build their gardens and heated pools many years later,

00:01:53.980 laborers choked on the fumes.

00:01:56.800 Birds roamed for decades after the reclamation began.

00:02:00.640 Fragrant gardens were constructed in an attempt to mask the deeply settled odor.

00:02:05.780 The world's most exotic and aromatic plants were imported to mask this nauseating scent.

00:02:10.800 For the Romans, one of the most prominent forms of execution at places like the Esquilin Gate was crucifixion.

00:02:17.340 Of Crucifixion, author Tom Holland writes,

00:02:21.000 Even as seedlings imported from exotic lands began to be planted across the emerging parkland of the Esquilin,

00:02:27.820 these bare trees remained as a token of its sinister past.

00:02:31.820 No death was more excruciating, more contemptible than crucifixion.

00:02:36.180 To be hung naked, long in agony, swelling with ugly wheels on the shoulders and chest,

00:02:41.680 helpless to beat away the clamorous birds, such a fate, Roman intellectuals agreed,

00:02:46.100 was the worst imaginable.

00:02:48.200 This, in turn, was what rendered it so suitable a punishment for slaves,

00:02:52.380 criminals broken on implements of torture,

00:02:55.080 who were such filth to concern men of breeding and civility.

00:02:59.180 Some deaths were so vile and so squalid

00:03:02.080 that it was best to draw a veil across them entirely.

00:03:07.200 After they died a horrendous death on crosses,

00:03:09.880 the corpses of these criminals and slaves were flung into a common grave.

00:03:14.160 Oblivion would entomb them.

00:03:16.380 In Italy, undertakers dressed in red and would ring bells as they went,

00:03:20.780 dragging lifeless bodies on hooks to be tossed into ditches.

00:03:24.420 From the ancient world, we have few, if any, detailed accounts of crucifixions.

00:03:29.400 But there are four detailed accounts of crucifixion that remain.

00:03:33.080 They are contained in the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

00:03:38.180 It is hard for moderns to understand just how debasing, dishonorable, and scandalous

00:03:42.780 it was for a criminal to be executed in the manner of crucifixion, let alone for one claiming

00:03:48.180 to be the Son of God, the Anointed One, the King of Kings, and the Lord of the Cosmos

00:03:52.420 to meet such a fate.

00:03:53.460 Divinity, author Tom Holland writes, was for the greatest of the great, for victors and heroes and

00:04:01.080 kings, end quote. Shocking then that a crucified enemy of both the Jewish people and the Roman

00:04:06.640 state who claimed divinity would be the central figure in a religion that saw their hero executed

00:04:11.980 on a cross at Golgotha. This was hardly the type of origin story of a religion anyone expected to

00:04:17.280 take over the world. And yet, that is exactly what it did. Jesus' followers, who came to be known as

00:04:24.540 Christians, suffered much the same fate as their master. The chief among them, Peter, was crucified

00:04:30.100 upside down. Paul, the apostle, was beheaded under the cruel reign of Emperor Nero. The other

00:04:35.920 apostles met similar cruel fates. Like Jesus, his followers suffered deaths of great dishonor and

00:04:41.820 ignominy. Persecuted and martyred for centuries, it seemed the early church was doomed to fail.

00:04:47.940 And yet, it did not. Shockingly, just a few centuries after the death of Christ,

00:04:53.540 even the Caesars would bow the knee to Jesus. Under a recently converted Constantine in 313 AD,

00:05:00.580 Christianity became a protected religion under the Edict of Milan. The same church leaders who

00:05:05.620 bore the marks of persecution were invited into the council of the emperor. With a major status

00:05:11.280 upgrade, Christianity would continue to spread across Europe, so that in a thousand years,

00:05:16.500 virtually every kingdom in the land was Christian. Politically, ecclesiastically, and culturally,

00:05:22.620 Christianity was the dominant force that shaped every single aspect of all of life.

00:05:29.220 Around 1250 AD, Grand Duke Madingas of Lithuania was baptized into the Christian religion.

00:05:36.100 He was the last non-Christian ruling line of any relevance within the European landscape.

00:05:41.280 So complete was the transformation of Europe, and so thoroughly had its soul been reshaped by Christianity, that the European West became synonymous with Christendom, which literally means the area where Christianity rules.

00:05:56.740 Historian Peter Heather writes, quote,

00:05:59.080 A thousand years after Constantine, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers.

00:06:05.000 Christendom, the part of the world where official Christianity exercised a dominant hold on the totality of the population.

00:06:12.780 Lords and commons, rulers and ruled, all had come into existence, and that was that under the realm of Christendom.

00:06:20.100 In this telling of the Christian story, the rest of European religious history figured as little more than a footnote,

00:06:26.160 a defining coincidence between the boundaries of Europe and the region overwhelming Christian

00:06:31.140 domination had been born in the Middle Ages, and from there their religion spread triumphantly

00:06:36.580 over much of the rest of the planet in the great eras of European colonization and imperialism.

00:06:43.200 End quote. How was it, Tom Holland wondered, that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure

00:06:49.980 criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring

00:06:55.600 influence on the world. So significant was Christianity's influence on the world across

00:07:01.120 the centuries that at the surrender of Japan in 1945, a world leader would quote Psalm 9 and

00:07:07.380 give thanks to the mercy of Christ for defeating such evil. Thou hast rebuked the nations. Thou

00:07:13.380 hast destroyed the wicked. Thou hast blotted out their name forever and ever. That world leader,

00:07:19.820 It was not Harry Truman.

00:07:21.300 It wasn't Winston Churchill.

00:07:22.980 And it wasn't Charles de Gaulle.

00:07:25.140 No, it was the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek.

00:07:29.520 Though many have said that the world is de-Christianizing rapidly since the end of World War II,

00:07:35.080 we fail to recognize the ways in which every presupposition we have about society, humanity,

00:07:39.780 the world, and all of life, even today, has been bequeathed to us as an inheritance of Christendom.

00:07:46.240 Of this phenomenon, Tom Holland writes,

00:07:49.380 The relationship of Christianity to the world that gave birth to it is, then, paradoxical.

00:07:55.080 The faith is at once the most enduring legacy of classical antiquity and the index of its

00:08:00.200 utter transformation.

00:08:02.220 Formed of a great confluence of traditions, Persian and Jewish, Greek and Roman, it has

00:08:07.220 long survived the collapse of the empire from which it first emerged to become, in the words

00:08:11.660 of one Jewish scholar, the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history

00:08:17.260 of the world.

00:08:19.380 In the Middle Ages, no civilization in Eurasia was as congruent with a single dominant set of beliefs

00:08:25.380 as was the Latin West with its own distinctive form of Christianity.

00:08:31.740 Time had seen the subversive prevail.

00:08:34.820 In medieval Christendom, the bones of martyrs were treasured,

00:08:37.680 and it was the church that patrolled belief.

00:08:40.440 To be human was to be Christian, and to be Christian was to believe.

00:08:45.820 Well might the Roman church have termed itself Catholic, for it truly was universal.

00:08:50.800 There was barely a rhythm of life that it did not define.

00:08:54.500 From dawn to dusk, from midsummer to the depths of winter,

00:08:57.660 from the hour of their birth to the very last drawing of their breath,

00:09:00.980 the men and women of medieval Europe absorbed its assumptions into their bones.

00:09:06.780 End quote.

00:09:08.600 How did a small group of relatively unknown and low-status men with their crucified Lord,

00:09:14.620 but how did they capture the entire civilized world of Rome?

00:09:18.520 How did Christianity get down into the marrow of the European soul?

00:09:22.680 In this season of the King's Hall,

00:09:24.100 we will be telling the breathtaking story of Christendom and its heroes.

00:09:28.020 We'll relive the epic battles that saved the West

00:09:30.580 and charted its course into the future.

00:09:32.960 We'll tell the story of the resistance Europe mounted

00:09:35.440 against the demonic forces of Islam

00:09:37.280 and why Islam was so central to European identity for centuries.

00:09:41.880 We will relive the epic lives and feats of men like El Cid and Charles Martel, Richard

00:09:47.720 the Lionheart, Vlad Dragula, and more.

00:09:50.600 We'll also talk about the darker days of downfall and of despair, from the Song of

00:09:55.000 Roland and Charlemagne's time, to the bloody murders of the Tsar Nicholas and Romanov

00:09:59.580 families by the Bolsheviks in Russia, to the many brutalities suffered at the hands of

00:10:04.440 the Saracens, Moors, and Turks throughout the centuries.

00:10:08.280 There have always been moments in which all hope seemed lost, and we'll learn from those too.

00:10:13.880 For it is, as Chesterton once said, the one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of

00:10:18.580 God's paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle and not to lose it.

00:10:24.300 We'll consider these turning points in Western history and why they still matter for us today.

00:10:30.020 We also want to ask a series of simple but profound questions along the way.

00:10:34.940 What was Christendom in all of its glory?

00:10:38.360 Who were the men that shaped it most profoundly?

00:10:40.920 What ideas served as foundation stones for the most expansive and magnificent culture-building project in human history?

00:10:50.000 What myths and outright lies have we been told today about the world that our forefathers built?

00:10:56.320 And perhaps more importantly, why have we been told these lies?

00:11:00.740 Finally, we want to understand the foundations and the pillars and the blueprints of the first Christendom

00:11:05.980 so that we might glean practical insights for the work set before us of constructing Christendom 2.0.

00:11:13.440 Today, many claim the West is dying.

00:11:16.240 We have been told by many a wormtongue that the post-millennial vision for a world-swallowing reign of Christ

00:11:20.940 ended with the close of World War II.

00:11:23.360 We have been told that there's no hope of reawakening.

00:11:26.840 We have been told that it was the death blow for Christendom when Christian Europe fell.

00:11:32.420 And the secular humanists do have a point.

00:11:34.380 After all, the numbers really are staggering.

00:11:37.700 The Europe that Christendom built is being overrun.

00:11:40.160 Yes, perhaps intentionally flooded by immigrants, many of them Muslim.

00:11:44.500 Birth rates are not at replacement levels, and they haven't been for a long time.

00:11:48.960 Christianity is having less of an influence in the world than it once did.

00:11:52.920 The pews in many countries are empty.

00:11:55.700 Holes of parliament are filled with purple-haired she-hers.

00:11:58.720 Health departments are run by men pretending to be women.

00:12:01.520 The rule of law is perverted.

00:12:03.920 The same is happening in America.

00:12:06.600 Muslims are literally invading Europe, burning down cathedrals, and killing priests.

00:12:11.020 Our leaders allow it, which is why the death of the West is, tragically, more of a suicide than a homicide.

00:12:17.800 So much of the modern hatred of Christendom is embedded in the myths we have swallowed about the past.

00:12:23.020 In high school and college courses across America for decades,

00:12:26.700 students have been indoctrinated with the insidious lie that our fathers were ignorant, brutal, and wicked.

00:12:32.220 We are catechized to feel embarrassment about our cultural heritage.

00:12:36.440 We have been told that there was a thing such as the Dark Ages,

00:12:39.660 a hideously drab era from which Enlightenment thinkers had to save us.

00:12:43.920 We have been told that the Crusades were despotic,

00:12:47.000 pre-colonial attempts to enslave and pillage otherwise peaceful Muslims.

00:12:51.240 Our greatest legacy in the West, apparently, so we are told,

00:12:54.700 is one of bloody carnage and oppression and enslavement.

00:12:58.980 Indeed, a dark spell lays over the West.

00:13:01.500 We have been trained to instinctually despise the Western canon of literature,

00:13:05.460 its authors, and the great men who filled its pages,

00:13:08.000 from Milton and Shakespeare and Dante and Kipling to Homer and St. Augustine.

00:13:12.780 But what if the great explorers, we might ask in this season,

00:13:16.000 what if the great explorers from Columbus to Cortez

00:13:18.340 weren't actually godless genocidal maniacs, but Christian heroes.

00:13:23.240 We've been encouraged to decolonize our bookshelves.

00:13:26.700 We've been robbed of a great and rich cultural heritage

00:13:28.920 so that for many, the cultural fate of the West

00:13:31.780 seems like those slaves cast into the Roman ditch to rot.

00:13:35.900 We are doomed to face a sort of multicultural oblivion,

00:13:39.980 and we are told this is inevitable.

00:13:42.560 While here at the King's Hall in Season 3, we believe it is not.

00:13:46.400 And so our work is to rediscover the great principles and truths in men who made Christendom

00:13:50.600 great.

00:13:51.620 We will be doing the work of history in the style of Henry Cabot Lodge, who said modern

00:13:56.220 social and political agendas, which are ferociously alien to the founding principles of the West,

00:14:01.820 have been forced down our throats as a poisonous brew of radical revisionist history.

00:14:06.540 Telling the stories of our past, as it turns out, is in order of first importance.

00:14:12.200 It is also intensely practical, for history provides us with myriad lessons for living

00:14:17.340 faithfully today in light of Christ's reign and the expectations Scripture provides.

00:14:22.080 It is that same history that teaches us the long, plodding work of artisans and craftsmen,

00:14:27.000 grand visions fueling extraordinary works of art and architecture, of literature and

00:14:31.720 church renewal carried out over many, many generations.

00:14:36.160 Henry Cabot Lodge once wrote, quote,

00:14:38.300 nearly all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in the English language

00:14:42.980 is the work of shoveling off heaps of rubbish inherited from the immediate past, end quote.

00:14:49.940 And so that is our task in season three. We are clearing away the rubbish of historical revisionism.

00:14:56.500 George Grant wrote about Lodge's style of history by saying that his aim,

00:15:00.960 quote, was to preserve the practical lessons and profound legacies of Christendom

00:15:05.120 without the petty prejudices of humanistic fashion

00:15:08.340 or the parsimonious preference of Enlightenment innovations.

00:15:12.820 He goes on to say, quote,

00:15:14.980 Cabot Lodge believed that history was a series of lively adventure stories

00:15:19.020 and thus should be told without the cumbersome intrusion of arcane academic rhetoric

00:15:24.060 or truckloads of extraneous footnotes.

00:15:26.960 In fact, he believed that history was a romantic moral drama

00:15:31.560 in a world gone impersonally scientific

00:15:34.080 and thus shall be told with passion and unction and verve.

00:15:39.020 He understood only too well that the past is ever-present,

00:15:42.080 giving shape and focus to all of our lives,

00:15:44.880 simply because the past, like the future,

00:15:47.880 is part and parcel of the Christian faith.

00:15:50.740 End quote.

00:15:52.320 And so this is our task.

00:15:54.040 We are going to retell the story of Christendom

00:15:56.180 in a way that is meant to re-enchant,

00:15:58.840 to fill Christians with a vision for glory

00:16:00.900 that inspires a holy ambition

00:16:02.560 for rebuilding the walls of Christendom in our own time.

00:16:06.120 In this episode, we'll be talking about the scope and the meaning of Christendom.

00:16:10.960 Consider this our politically incorrect guide to Christendom.

00:16:14.700 From Constantine to Charlemagne and the Crusades to Gothic cathedrals,

00:16:19.660 in this episode, we want to start by talking about what Christendom was.

00:16:23.480 When did it start and when did it end?

00:16:25.760 And we want to explore some of the most common lies and myths that are told about Christendom today.

00:16:32.120 We in the West, like Theoden, king of Rohan, have been under the dark spell long enough.

00:16:38.040 It is time that we found our courage and again began fighting like brave men against the dark powers of the enemy,

00:16:43.280 which always begins by defeating his lies.

00:16:57.380 Saruman spoke.

00:16:58.600 I say, Theoden King, shall we have peace and friendship, you and I?

00:17:05.240 It is ours to command.

00:17:08.140 We will have peace, said Theoden at last, thickly and with an effort.

00:17:13.860 Several of the riders cried out gladly.

00:17:16.460 Theoden held up his hand.

00:17:18.360 Yes, we will have peace, he said now in a clear voice.

00:17:22.500 We will have peace when you and all your works have perished

00:17:26.600 and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us.

00:17:30.500 You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men's hearts.

00:17:35.140 You hold out your hand to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor.

00:17:41.560 Cruel and cold, even if your war on me was just as it was not,

00:17:46.800 for were you ten times as wise,

00:17:49.040 you would have no right to rule me in mind for your own profit as you desired.

00:17:53.580 Even so, what will you say of your torches in the Westfold, and the children that lie dead there?

00:17:59.740 And they hewed Hama's body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead.

00:18:04.780 When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanc.

00:18:12.880 So much for the house of Eorl, a lesser son of greater sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers.

00:18:19.720 Turn else with her.

00:18:21.080 But I fear your voice has lost its charm.

00:18:28.500 The King's Hall podcast exists to make self-ruled men who rule well and win the world.

00:18:39.900 Well, gentlemen, welcome to season three of the best podcast in the history of the world.

00:18:47.160 Maybe, narrator says.

00:18:49.320 it's on it's a it's one it's a candidate it's a candidate it meets the criteria it's one of the

00:18:54.700 podcast it is so therefore it could be the best it could be the best my name is eric on joined by

00:19:00.680 two of my favorite kings and also brian suave's here well because ben was i was waiting for the

00:19:07.960 insult because ben's in the room ben garrett host of the haunted cosmos podcast there you go thanks

00:19:14.960 eric uh no no i mean no just brian come back i'm kidding i just got fired i'm kidding because

00:19:21.320 what happened no actually actually to be fair as we jump into season three brian and i were

00:19:26.020 talking about this off air because i don't want to you know it's hard for me to admit publicly

00:19:30.160 the franks were some kings okay let's just be honest and they have nothing you're gonna hear

00:19:36.580 you are gonna hear so many french names followed by the most base at base to acts in christian

00:19:43.280 history that I just want I accept my your apology now I just it's just really a shame how far they

00:19:49.360 fallen huh yeah it is I agree let's retake the glory of Frenchitude French okay let's retake

00:19:56.400 it guys speaking of glory Dan Burkholder you are here with us now your people are also represented

00:20:02.560 yes for those who don't know in the Crusades for example Bohemond the Norman the Norman are the

00:20:08.640 north people yeah the northern so yep that's me dan your people uh one of your people punched a

00:20:14.740 horse in the face and died yes the horse that guy the horse guy the horse died yeah the horse died

00:20:20.140 yeah there was a messenger sent and this guy punched the horse in the face with his gauntleted

00:20:25.840 fist killed the horse and then said get him another horse and then sent him back and what a king that

00:20:30.840 was his message what a king a frenchman wouldn't have needed the gauntlet but go ahead but but we

00:20:35.840 digress so in this season uh we are we are get me a horse get me a horse i have one next door in my

00:20:44.340 yard like i promise only seven horses were injured in the filming of this episode of the king salt

00:20:50.080 podcast gentlemen we're jumping into season three we're talking about christendom i just want to

00:20:54.160 ask you right off the top how excited are you for this season oh man 10 out of 10 i'm i'm 11

00:21:00.700 out of nine wow 12 12 out of eight what so i know we've been reading a lot of stuff we're gonna we're

00:21:10.800 gonna dive into so many things this season we're covering what is christendom one of the dates all

00:21:16.020 that stuff in this episode uh but i just like what gets your what gets your zeal firing yeah so one

00:21:21.880 of the things that's been really exciting is realizing that my entire life i've been lied to

00:21:26.060 And I, we all know this. We all, if you went to public school, you were lied to about our Christian history. But as you read it, you realize the depths of the lie that they, and the things I've been trying to cover up from you about how amazing your history is. And so as I discover these truths for the first time, it just gives me further hunger to find more about my past.

00:21:49.560 Yeah, absolutely.

00:21:50.300 We read one thing, Brian, in the cold open, and I think maybe this captures part of the

00:21:54.880 sentiment that I've felt, so I want to see if it's true for you.

00:21:57.940 But Theoden, he says, you know, yeah, we are lesser sons of greater sires.

00:22:02.220 That's true.

00:22:03.240 But we can still aim at it.

00:22:04.700 We can read about it.

00:22:06.000 Do you have a sense of that as you read the histories that you think there were some great

00:22:10.180 men in our bloodlines?

00:22:12.240 Oh, yeah.

00:22:12.660 I mean, I think that if you don't walk away feeling humbled, then you haven't read it

00:22:18.400 right.

00:22:19.120 Or you were just a far more impressive person maybe than myself.

00:22:22.380 But when you read the stories of the greatness and the glory and the heights and also just the circumstances that our forefathers lived through that were – I can't even imagine being a husband, a father, a man of God in these circumstances that they lived through.

00:22:39.640 It's hard to even get your mind to contemplate a little bit of what it would have been like to be fighting for your life and for your people's lives and for the very border of your realm to not be conquered by a demon god and his hordes.

00:22:56.460 Islam.

00:22:58.940 Spoiler.

00:22:59.620 Look, I don't want to name names.

00:23:01.680 I don't want to name names.

00:23:03.140 I don't want to name names here.

00:23:04.400 But it was the Muslims.

00:23:05.700 It was the Muslims.

00:23:06.620 Um, yeah, you just walk away with a deep respect for, um, these men and also for, uh, the, the type of humility that, uh, is so lacking in modern history and historiography that modern historians have, uh, begun with these assumptions, begun with assumptions that are born of being colonized by secular humanism.

00:23:29.800 They've been colonized already. Their minds have been. And so when they approach these stories, they come at them from this position of a sneering, arrogant, deconstructing, just worldview of hell. And then they just – they fling filth all over the images of your forefathers.

00:23:55.740 Well, that's why I think it's so important, like thinking through the Henry Cabot Lodge that we read in the cold open, just about how so much of the work of history is, look, we want to tell this as a grand drama.

00:24:06.180 And so there'll be a lot of storytelling and a lot of drama, hopefully, and a lot of cool things like punching horses in faces and even cooler stuff than that, Dan.

00:24:14.520 But at the same time, what we have to do is we have to scoop the rubbish off of the histories that we've been told.

00:24:20.700 And so that's going to be a big part of this.

00:24:22.520 I do want to encourage people as well.

00:24:24.100 we've got a patron exclusive show that we're starting for this season and the name of this

00:24:30.260 brian is to me so first of all for for those who don't know we'll get into this but with the

00:24:36.080 crusades pope urban the second says you know we need to have a crusade and godfrey bouillon and

00:24:43.960 others say deus vault so that's deus vault meaning god wills it the lord wills it god

00:24:50.660 well is it so we've decided dan to call this the deus vault you see that's a play on words

00:24:57.360 i like it we're doing the deus vault um and there's going to be a lot of great content in

00:25:03.960 there so we've already done a number of interviews they will show up in this section exclusively for

00:25:09.280 patreon supporters we've talked with dr george grant we've talked with dr joe rigney dr glenn

00:25:15.080 sunshine dan one of our top interviews i think talking to glenn was insane and dan we also

00:25:21.340 interviewed one of our favorite authors of two of our favorite new books raymond ibrahim that was a

00:25:27.120 really an incredible interview i thought yeah yeah so you get early access to these through

00:25:32.020 the deus vault we're also one of the big things that people ask a lot for book lists so one of

00:25:37.000 the things that's going to be on patreon is book lists and then some more in-depth book reviews

00:25:40.980 that are going to be specific to and germane to the subject matters

00:25:44.900 that we cover in each of the episodes.

00:25:48.340 And sort of the other thing is we're going more in-depth

00:25:50.900 with historical events and people in the Deus Vault.

00:25:54.440 So, for example, in this show, in the main episode,

00:25:56.920 we'll be talking about the Notre Dame Cathedral.

00:25:58.880 How do you say that, Brian?

00:25:59.900 Notre Dame Cathedral, yeah.

00:26:01.220 De Paris.

00:26:02.500 I will never – I don't say Paris the French way because it's too far.

00:26:06.620 Paris?

00:26:06.800 Maybe it's like going to a, it's like, it's like going to Taco Bell and saying, uh, I

00:26:12.840 would like one of your tortillas.

00:26:15.180 Can I have a chalupa, which is a made up American thing.

00:26:19.020 Can I have some tacos?

00:26:20.680 Tacos.

00:26:21.120 I don't, I won't.

00:26:21.940 I'm sorry.

00:26:22.400 But yeah.

00:26:25.280 As the saying goes, gold is the money of Kings.

00:26:28.840 Silver is the money of gentlemen, but debt is the money of slaves.

00:26:32.520 if you're tired of seeing your wealth sapped by the silent theft of inflation consider adding gold

00:26:38.960 to your financial plan gold and silver have been recognized as sound money and a store of wealth

00:26:44.620 for centuries converting your savings into gold and silver will protect and preserve your wealth

00:26:50.160 so that one day you'll be able to pass down a true inheritance to your children's children

00:26:55.700 that's where our friends at alpine gold exchange come in offering zero percent buy sell spread

00:27:01.260 gold leases with up to 3.5% annual return, paid in gold by the way, and secure vaulting right here

00:27:07.540 in Utah, Alpine Gold approaches every transaction with fairness, honesty, and respect, reflecting a

00:27:14.540 strong Christian business ethic in all that they do. Head to ogden.gold today or tap the link in

00:27:20.740 the description to sign up or schedule an appointment to speak with an Alpine Gold advisor

00:27:25.020 today and see what would best serve your family. And just so you know, if you schedule a call,

00:27:29.920 you'll be speaking with Jace, Ethan, or Stu, three members of Refuge Church right here in Ogden.

00:27:35.960 Head to ogden.gold and check it out today.

00:27:42.280 Today's episode is sponsored by Premier Body Armor, your top choice for safeguarding your family.

00:27:47.680 What sets them apart? Well, Premier isn't here to convince you to wear a plate carrier around town.

00:27:52.240 Nope. They're focused on innovating armor right into your normal everyday life.

00:27:56.640 think bulletproof laptop case or lightweight armor insert that fits into your favorite bag

00:28:01.940 and stops most handgun shotgun and even rifle ammunition unlike much of the tactical industry

00:28:06.920 choosing premier body armor not only ensures that you're getting amazing armor but you'll

00:28:11.220 be doing business with family-owned christian company visit premierbodyarmor.com today and

00:28:16.000 use promo code kingshall for 10 off your order today got questions reach out to customer service

00:28:21.900 or send their president an email directly at alexatpremierbodyarmor.com

00:28:27.380 and you can speak to him yourself.

00:28:29.660 Don't wait to invest your family's security,

00:28:31.740 but reach out today to Premier Body Armor.

00:28:34.740 Don't carry a bag? No worries.

00:28:36.400 How about a moisture-wicking athletic t-shirt

00:28:38.900 with minimalist and lightweight soft armor panels built in?

00:28:43.260 Check the link in the show notes or visit premierbodyarmor.com today.

00:28:52.540 You know, there's nothing quite like a great cup of coffee in the morning.

00:28:56.840 Here at New Crescent Impress, we've really been enjoying coffee from our friends at Squirrely Joe's Coffee,

00:29:02.900 a family-owned coffee company from Illinois.

00:29:05.500 Joe and his wife, Rachel, put a ton of effort into quality roasted beans

00:29:09.440 and wholeheartedly support us in our vision to bring all of Christ to all of life.

00:29:14.880 Yes, even to that cup of coffee that's in your hands.

00:29:17.800 You can order your first batch of coffee from Squirrely Joe's by going to squirrelyjoes.com

00:29:23.640 or by clicking the link in the show notes below.

00:29:27.140 First-time customers will receive 20% off their first order, so be sure to head to their

00:29:32.360 website.

00:29:33.140 Again, that's squirrelyjoes at squirrelyjoes.com.

00:29:37.320 Let them help you in your mission while you help them in theirs.

00:29:41.240 Caffeinating the modern reformation.

00:29:47.800 in 2023 indigo sundries became one of our sponsors at the time their business was little

00:29:55.120 more than a side hobby generating a couple hundred dollars a month but because of their

00:29:58.940 partnership with us and because all of you chose to support them they've grown enough to make it

00:30:02.800 their full-time livelihood this is what happens when christians support christians our communities

00:30:06.900 are strengthened and faithful businesses thrive so if you're a christian business owner who wants

00:30:11.060 to reach thousands of like-minded people and grow your company we'd love to partner with you

00:30:15.400 Email us at advertising at newchristendompress.com.

00:30:25.000 Do you desire to be shrewd financially for the sake of your family and future generations?

00:30:30.280 Well, we know that a robust society depends on getting this right.

00:30:33.680 Success in building and passing on personal wealth.

00:30:37.260 Let's be mature, responsible leaders with the resources God expects us to turn a profit on,

00:30:42.240 to love our children and children's children well.

00:30:46.040 Joe Gerasi with Backwards Planning Financial

00:30:48.080 integrates investments, debt, insurance, tax strategies,

00:30:51.580 and legacy planning in a holistic approach,

00:30:54.220 coaching his clients to act wisely.

00:30:56.980 You can do better than you received.

00:30:59.380 You can affect your family's trajectory

00:31:01.040 and maximize your efforts to set up long-term fruitfulness.

00:31:05.300 Joe starts with your values and goals,

00:31:06.820 then provides impactful counsel

00:31:08.480 to help you form and implement your financial plan.

00:31:12.240 Click on the link in the description for Backwards Planning Financial and contact Joe today to get started.

00:31:42.240 vault. And when I say read, I mean, listen, and read, listen, you know, same difference,

00:31:46.860 maybe a manuscript. So here's the deal guys, we're going to jump in, but I kind of want to ask just

00:31:52.240 a foundational question about this whole project. Do you actually think, do you actually think that

00:31:58.240 Christendom could be rebuilt? We're talking about Christendom 2.0. We're going back to the

00:32:03.600 foundations and blueprints, but come on, you guys aren't really that audacious. Have you seen the

00:32:08.340 purple haired man eaters and the taylor swifties have you seen them eric do you actually think

00:32:13.200 eric not only can christendom be rebuilt christendom will be rebuilt i would say it's

00:32:21.520 it is being rebuilt deus volt i mean we started a company called new christendom yeah i mean

00:32:26.260 no and and this and i don't say that i don't say that as like a a a glib like yeah give us

00:32:36.100 five minutes. We're so great. Look, we're going to do this. No, but I, I do believe we're post

00:32:40.780 millennial. What's about the Lord's work? Yeah. The Lord, look, what has the Lord been able to

00:32:47.260 do in human history? I mean, look at the low points, the point at which the stone strikes

00:32:52.000 the statue and topples all the empires and then becomes a mountain that covers the world.

00:32:57.340 It's a point when the people, the covenant people of God are in rampant apostasy, tons of demons

00:33:03.460 covering the land, enslaved by a pagan people and seemingly powerless. And that's the moment

00:33:10.100 when the kingdom of God invades the world in the person of Christ and establishes this kingdom.

00:33:15.200 And Isaiah says that of the increase of that government and of peace, there'll be no end.

00:33:20.020 So to me, that's just one passage. To me, when you look at the way that God has written the story

00:33:27.420 post Acts of the Apostles into what we now call like church history, post-biblical church history,

00:33:33.460 this other, this continuation of the story God's telling, it has all of the marks of some early

00:33:40.200 acts in a really good play. That's what it says to me. So when I look back at these things,

00:33:45.740 I think that God did a similar thing in history to what he did in scripture, which is he gave us

00:33:52.320 many glorious examples, many examples of what not to do, like horrific examples of what not to do,

00:33:58.840 and many examples of how to go and in the face of seemingly insurmountable foes and odds,

00:34:03.460 to fight the good fight of the faith and even if we die to still win. So to me, I think that

00:34:10.060 Christianity, Christian expansion, Christendom, I think it's inevitable because I believe that

00:34:16.920 Christ's kingdom is inexorable. Yeah, I love it. Dave's vault. And I think a big part of it too is

00:34:23.100 we'll look at something like as we get into this, we're framing like what is Christendom

00:34:27.460 in timeframes. A lot of people will say Christendom died long ago, et cetera. But then when you think

00:34:32.740 about like again we talked about in the cold open a a man lord who was crucified and discarded

00:34:42.120 basically by everyone in that day except for 12 guys and some other disciples who went and spread

00:34:47.640 a message within 300 years that religion would consume the world and within a thousand years

00:34:54.120 every ruler in europe would be a christian to be human as tom holland said would be to be christian

00:34:59.640 I mean, that's insane vast swath of the world.

00:35:02.000 So you can't look at like the years following Christ's death and go, oh, yeah, it's inevitable.

00:35:05.480 Like people weren't saying, oh, no, look how easy and good it is.

00:35:09.000 So I think today we actually have we still have great works of Christendom all around us.

00:35:14.840 We just don't notice.

00:35:15.700 Yeah, we're blind.

00:35:16.500 And so we're going to we're going to delve into that.

00:35:18.480 Dan, I want to ask you a question.

00:35:20.440 We're starting to define what is Christendom.

00:35:22.840 So in all of your vast reading, in all of that big, large brain underneath the bald head, can you just start to unpack for us, just begin to unpack for us, like, what is Christendom?

00:35:35.980 We talk about it.

00:35:37.340 It's not just the church.

00:35:39.160 So what is it?

00:35:41.540 Yeah, it's an all-encompassing assumption of Christianity in every sphere of life.

00:35:47.380 That means ecclesiastical in government, in politics, in culture, in art, in music, in family life, in education, in everything from food to farming to, I mean, everything.

00:36:04.900 That's what Christendom is.

00:36:06.900 That's what it was defined.

00:36:08.460 That was the defining characteristics of Christendom throughout the ages is that everything was explicitly Christian and influenced by Christianity.

00:36:17.380 Now, I know that there's objections out there to like, well, Christian government, like theocracy, something like that.

00:36:24.860 Like the church is in control of everything.

00:36:28.080 Like the church is in control of the government.

00:36:29.920 Actually, that was not the case in Christendom.

00:36:32.220 The church was not like the ruler behind the ruler, you know, behind the emperor.

00:36:38.420 But the government was assumed to have Christian standards, Christian laws, and to have accountability with the church.

00:36:45.920 So that's what I would say.

00:36:47.660 I don't know if you have anything to add to that.

00:36:49.160 Yeah, no, that's really helpful.

00:36:50.140 I think it's also worth stating sort of the timeframes and the dates because this was something we were trying to wrap our minds around.

00:36:57.080 Yeah.

00:36:57.180 Like obviously I think most people are going to say like Constantine 313.

00:37:02.180 You've got the Edict of Milan.

00:37:03.660 This is really when Christianity becomes somewhat institutionalized.

00:37:07.620 The Romanization of Christianity and the Christianization of Rome.

00:37:11.100 Correct.

00:37:11.400 And this is really when people – well, a lot of people I think would think, oh, Constantine is the high point.

00:37:17.660 It's actually kind of the beginning.

00:37:19.540 Oh, yeah.

00:37:20.120 Yeah.

00:37:20.380 This is the beginning point.

00:37:21.720 And then really as you get into like 1,000, 1,100, 1,200, 1,300, 1,400 and so on, then you start to see the fruit of what was begun 1,000 years prior.

00:37:32.140 So even that I think is helpful in thinking about legacy work, that the things that were done in 300 would have ripple effects in the 1,200.

00:37:40.720 Yeah.

00:37:41.400 Well, I just wanted to add something. So I agree, you know, well, I mean, the historians that we've interviewed, people with PhDs in history, Christian history, you know, would say definitely like Constantine, that's the first formalization of Christendom.

00:37:57.060 But really, you see this in seed form when Jesus begins his ministry. So the first thing that Jesus says is the kingdom of God is at hand or the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

00:38:10.500 And then people would say, you know, that, that argue against this idea of Christendom that, well, he also says this kingdom is not of this world.

00:38:19.320 His kingdom is not of this world.

00:38:21.160 Jesus, what he did in that moment is he's calling his shot of the invasion of the kingdom of heaven into earth to the colonization of the entire globe for his glory.

00:38:31.800 And so you start to see that's the seed form. And it takes 300 years, not quite 300 years, for Christianity to become a legal religion. In the Roman world, that was really important because it meant you had representation. It meant you could be at court and also that you wouldn't be murdered for your faith.

00:38:55.300 Yeah. And so Constantine, I think, was definitely the start of that. And then, like you said, it just continues to blossom and very rapidly.

00:39:03.560 Yeah, it's also interesting, too. I think we start to think about the endpoints of Christendom. And this actually became really difficult in all of my research to tie down.

00:39:12.640 A lot of people today, tied to the post-mill discussion, will say everything ended in 1945.

00:39:19.460 Now, I will definitely say World War I and II, there was a definite destruction of Christian kingdoms.

00:39:26.060 We'll talk about in this season, the Romanovs, Tsar Nicholas.

00:39:30.580 The British Empire.

00:39:31.640 The British Empire.

00:39:32.460 All those things did definitely come crashing down in one form.

00:39:35.320 But then as you start to think about it, it's like, well, we've seen these cycles before.

00:39:39.540 Yeah.

00:39:40.540 Also, what you saw in the 20th century is Christianity eventually would outlast and topple the Soviet Union.

00:39:47.540 Which looked like a giant ravenous beast that was going to destroy the church, and then it didn't.

00:39:53.180 Yeah, just ask all the rapture writers of the time.

00:39:56.860 Right.

00:39:57.340 All the Soviet Union, they're Gog and Magog coming down.

00:40:01.380 They're going to – no, I'm sorry.

00:40:03.140 They couldn't make good enough airplanes because socialism doesn't work.

00:40:07.860 It's like using the wrong math when you're trying to go to the – it just doesn't – I'm sorry.

00:40:11.280 It doesn't work.

00:40:12.160 Yeah, and that was something too that you'll hear in the interview, but we asked George Grant, when did Christendom end?

00:40:18.440 And George was basically like, it didn't.

00:40:20.940 I mean, we're still in it.

00:40:22.500 What do you mean?

00:40:23.340 It's not over.

00:40:24.160 And I think one of the key points, just as a teaser for that interview, but one of the key points he said, the old battles don't stay won.

00:40:32.200 You have to keep fighting them.

00:40:33.620 You have to keep fighting the fight of the faith.

00:40:35.140 and then every generation is going to have it.

00:40:37.520 One of the things that I would encourage

00:40:38.800 is we're thinking about Christendom.

00:40:40.540 I was reading in Judges 3 recently

00:40:42.500 and it said the Lord left enemies in the land

00:40:45.300 because the people who had not known war

00:40:47.140 needed to learn how to fight.

00:40:49.260 And so like a mercy from our father

00:40:51.160 that like we have a target rich environment

00:40:53.520 and there's huge fights in front of us

00:40:56.220 and that's a good thing.

00:40:57.160 We need to learn how to trust the Lord,

00:40:58.980 how to fight, how to build all at the same time.

00:41:01.640 And you learn as you try to nail down this,

00:41:03.700 like when was the end?

00:41:04.440 When was the beginning?

00:41:05.140 OK, go and ask a Christian when they had just seen the entire eastern realm of Christianity toppled over the previous couple of centuries and ask them, well, when's the end of this thing?

00:41:18.600 It's easy to at points of defeat or decline to try and arbitrarily draw an ending point.

00:41:25.600 But one of the things you learn if you study just the raw nature of history is that history is full of endings.

00:41:35.140 It's full of moments where everything seems lost.

00:41:38.460 It's full of reversals.

00:41:39.580 It's full of conflict.

00:41:41.300 It's full of disunity amongst the church and infighting that's weakening us.

00:41:46.140 All of the lessons that you would need to be a good Christian today, waging the good fight of the faith today, you can learn by looking back through these histories and finding that, oh, this is not new.

00:41:58.960 This isn't the story of this great long decline where if you could just go back to the 800s, everything was great and perfect.

00:42:04.900 And they were all – everyone was on the same page in the 800s.

00:42:08.000 I'm sorry.

00:42:08.700 No, they weren't.

00:42:09.700 I actually really like living now versus the 800s because there aren't people trying to kill me and enslave my wife and children as sex slaves.

00:42:16.960 You've actually seen that meme though where it's like everything was so much better then.

00:42:20.640 It shows like a guy getting speared in the rear end.

00:42:22.820 Yeah.

00:42:23.320 You're like, uh, no.

00:42:25.580 You have to approach the history and stop trying to – what we tend to do is we read history as if we are inevitably living in about the last chapter.

00:42:35.680 So we tend to try to make a first, second, and third act of what has already happened instead of saying like, oh, this could be – this is the preamble.

00:42:44.560 Like we're still here in the – we're in chapter four or what – I don't know the book God's writing.

00:42:48.840 But here we are early on.

00:42:51.340 We're still setting up the foreshadowing for the big thing that's going to happen in chapter 17.

00:42:55.840 Like that's our job right now.

00:42:58.240 When you look back through the history, you find that it's – historians love to make clean cut eras and times and be like on this date.

00:43:07.240 All of a sudden everything was in sepia.

00:43:09.800 And then you move past this date and then it was all color.

00:43:14.200 That's not how history works though.

00:43:15.760 It's even the whole fall of the Roman Empire.

00:43:18.840 What do you mean?

00:43:20.640 That wasn't a date.

00:43:21.800 There wasn't like a moment when all of a sudden, Y2K style, Rome was just over and that was

00:43:28.320 it.

00:43:28.540 It's like, history's not that clean.

00:43:30.360 The Vandals hit Rome with an EMP and then it was over.

00:43:33.340 And it's funny because all of our wildest fears often play around those types of scenarios

00:43:39.160 when the, what you learn historically is that much more likely is that for about 200 years,

00:43:45.160 you'll have some small sins that will grow and then you'll reap devastation, but that devastation

00:43:51.340 is in slow motion over another hundred years after that. So what's good to remember about

00:43:57.480 that or the lesson to learn is that we're not just needing to prepare for one calamitous battle

00:44:03.540 where it will all be decided. That's not how history almost ever plays out. There's key

00:44:08.680 moments like tours and all these other key moments, but what you learn from looking back

00:44:13.820 over. This is like most of the time, most of the time, the things that, that led to our downfall

00:44:18.700 were some small sins that built up some infighting, some things for a couple hundred years,

00:44:24.180 and then a century of decline. And then you turn around, you're like, wow, the, the, you know,

00:44:28.840 look what happened. But, uh, I love the complexity of history. I just love it. I think it's so

00:44:35.520 encouraging because when I look at our day, I think it's very complicated and there's so many

00:44:40.180 different battles and factions, and you can be so discouraged by that and think like,

00:44:45.640 wow, look how far we've fallen.

00:44:46.480 But then you look back and you go to the 800s, the 1200s, the 1100s, you're like,

00:44:49.260 these are our people.

00:44:50.780 This is what we've been doing the whole time.

00:44:53.340 The Lord's still with us.

00:44:54.500 Well, and it seems like, Brian, part of that is we get a lot of that as Christians from

00:44:58.440 reading the Old Testament and seeing how things are cyclical, but part of it is reading where

00:45:03.400 you are in the story and then saying like, okay, well, if you're in one of the downturns,

00:45:07.440 what are the biblically what are the obedient things you can do and you know blackpilling

00:45:12.380 is not one of them no and so we have this whole range uh where we can say like we're doing i think

00:45:18.620 you can look back at christendom and you can say okay uh one of the episodes lord willing that

00:45:22.560 we'll get to is how the irish saved civilization yeah how irish monasteries saved christianity

00:45:28.680 and so we may be in one of those seasons where we build communities that preserve the faith yeah

00:45:34.140 and Christian culture, that may be what we're doing. And if that's it, then, you know, full

00:45:39.380 send. Praise be to God, full send and keeping the flame alive. That's right. But we have all these

00:45:43.480 examples from the past of how the faith was preserved. Personally, you know, I'm hoping

00:45:49.240 that there's some, you know, Dane killing somewhere, you know, Vikings. Dan's like,

00:45:53.180 what the heck? What did I do? Dan's like, I'm right here. I'm right here, guys. I'm right here.

00:45:59.360 It feels good for another people group to be criticized. That's funny because they were taken

00:46:03.420 over by christianity but you know who hasn't been yet the muhammadans the turks true the muslims

00:46:10.340 more on that more on that we just really want to talk about the thing is when you start reading

00:46:15.840 ibrahim you're like fired up i can't wait for you guys to hear some of that interview and and all

00:46:21.840 that so oh man yeah so great segue dan we're gonna jump into some of the high points main figures of

00:46:28.620 Christendom. I'll kick us off here. Just one of them that has really come up with a lot of the

00:46:33.960 historians, a lot of the research that we've looked at, but you've got Augustine and Ambrose

00:46:38.560 and things like even today when we're talking about Christian nationalism, which is I think

00:46:43.920 way too small of a concept for what Christendom actually is. It's just one small part.

00:46:48.360 But what's interesting here is ideas like just war theory, the idea behind Christendom and what

00:46:56.080 medieval Christendom would become rulers who are subservient to Christ and working alongside the

00:47:02.580 church, the fact that magistrates should be city fathers under the law of Christ. All of this is

00:47:08.240 found in Augustine, and really he gets a lot of it from Ambrose. So it really struck me that you

00:47:15.780 have really a theory, and one of the great church leaders outside the Apostle Paul, Augustine is

00:47:20.240 probably the greatest church leader of that early period, maybe any period in church history,

00:47:26.080 He, his ideas shape what the church will become, but it's just fascinating to me that it took

00:47:32.720 a long time for that to be realized.

00:47:34.820 Yeah.

00:47:35.060 Yeah.

00:47:35.260 It did take a couple hundred years for that to be realized.

00:47:39.000 The works that he accomplished are absolutely incredible, especially with the Donatists

00:47:44.780 and what's the other group that he was, um, the Manichees.

00:47:48.960 Oh yeah.

00:47:49.620 The Manichees.

00:47:50.320 Yeah.

00:47:50.440 The Manichees and the Donatists.

00:47:51.620 Cause he, he was, he was like, he was one of them.

00:47:55.020 Yeah.

00:47:55.180 for a time actually that story that he that is uh recounted where his friend he was a fellow

00:48:01.140 manichae um i don't manichaean manachian anyway he was sick he was on his deathbed and the

00:48:08.980 christians baptized him proper use of baptism the sacraments arguments aside but this this

00:48:16.140 this uh friend of augustine's was on his deathbed and he's baptized and he comes back he gets better

00:48:22.840 and augustine is like hey uh the christians they baptize you and it was like the mannekees would

00:48:28.260 make fun of the sacraments and they it was he was like gonna have a good laugh about it and

00:48:32.080 his friend's like that's not funny i'm a christian and then the guy later died but anyway sad story

00:48:39.980 and then but that sent augustine down a path of like mourning he ends up going uh to different

00:48:45.480 cities gets meets ambrose anyway that's like sets him on his trajectory yeah but the work that he

00:48:50.660 does is just absolutely incredible and you think about that time period and everything that's

00:48:54.640 happening just how fascinating it is like all right around the 300s so if i'm getting the

00:49:00.000 timeline 400s 313 is milan yes then you've got augustine the at least wikipedia if this is

00:49:09.400 correct augustine is like converted from manichaeism in 387 yeah like 300s and he dies

00:49:16.600 So it's amazing just that you have all this stuff around the 300 to 400 that's just like snowballing after years of persecution and everything else.

00:49:25.620 Yeah, with Constantine.

00:49:27.060 Yeah, exactly.

00:49:28.800 And really starts to take off.

00:49:30.940 So one of the things that's interesting here is we talk about this today, again, in the Pietist versus Christian Nationalist camp.

00:49:38.720 But it's really interesting because this stuff is not new at all.

00:49:41.060 That's one of the things we find when we read history is that Augustine dealt with all of this even long before we get to this point.

00:49:49.380 Even Augustine is a good example for us of a Christian attempting to live within his time and make sense of the story that he was in with August.

00:50:01.460 One of Augustine's big projects is to figure out the way that Christian faith relates to the learning of the past and the pagans and of the rhetoricians and of Cicero.

00:50:10.120 And he's writing the book on Christian teaching where he he gives the famous analogy of plundering the Egyptians, basically like as the an exodus, the people of God plundered the Egyptians gold when they went into the land of promise.

00:50:23.880 We can go and read Cicero and we can read these great works of Roman and Greek philosophy and their culture even and take what they stole from the Bible anyway, from God's truth and God's world, and we don't have to be scared of their learning.

00:50:42.120 We can actually approach it, critically plunder it and use it on our own.

00:50:45.060 That whole idea, like Augustine writing that, people miss how hugely important that concept is to the success of Christianity in that era, in the Christianization of Rome and the Romanization of Christianity.

00:50:59.420 Because what Christianity had to do was not try to convert the entire Roman Empire to be like the Jesus movement of the first few hundred years of Christianity, which was more organic.

00:51:10.040 It actually took over many of Rome's methods of governance, methods of hierarchy, converted many Roman elites, and then used Rome's government as a vehicle for a globalizing Christianity, for bringing the Christian faith to the whole known world.

00:51:27.940 So Augustine's instincts there, deeply important for us to understand both how those instincts shaped early Christendom, but also for us to understand the entire project of Christianity as a colonizing project.

00:51:42.800 I think it's even interesting, like with the Apostle Paul, that when you look at his story, he is so uniquely chosen by God for this work because he speaks Latin.

00:51:55.120 He's a Roman citizen.

00:51:56.360 He knows Greek.

00:51:57.900 Clearly, if you – and then, of course, Hebrew.

00:52:00.440 So he's like got these deep roots in Judaism.

00:52:04.460 He's steeped in like every major culture group that's intersecting and is able to speak to each of them in such a profound way.

00:52:11.140 Like you said, you'll see historians debating this, like, well, was Christianity Romanized or was, you know, Rome Christianized?

00:52:17.900 And it's a little bit of both.

00:52:19.180 The answer is like, yes.

00:52:20.280 Like God planned this.

00:52:21.500 And this wasn't like, oh, God was like, oh, no, like Roman ideas are getting into my thing.

00:52:27.060 God was like, yeah, by the way, I am the one who architected the history of all of the empires.

00:52:32.660 I'm really confused.

00:52:33.480 I thought Constantine invented Christianity.

00:52:35.780 Oh, well, no, no.

00:52:36.780 Here's the thing.

00:52:37.380 And there's actually like, if you look on the back of the Declaration of Independence, there's a secret map.

00:52:43.900 I'm getting the movies mixed up.

00:52:46.380 Yes.

00:52:47.460 I thought you were going to say Nicolas Cage is involved.

00:52:49.120 On the back of the Declaration, it just says, I believe in democracy.

00:52:53.340 That's actually on the back of the first scroll of Genesis.

00:52:58.280 Moses.

00:52:58.860 Yes.

00:52:59.820 It's there.

00:53:00.680 It's I believe.

00:53:01.420 I don't believe you.

00:53:02.280 I don't think you're right.

00:53:03.180 So this, Dan, this actually gets into the whole, you know, the myths and a sort of, I guess, the myth busting that we're – are we allowed to copyright?

00:53:11.140 Are we allowed to say that?

00:53:12.040 No, it was two words.

00:53:13.100 I heard two.

00:53:13.840 Yeah, that's right.

00:53:14.800 There was a space in there.

00:53:15.820 But so much of what we're talking about in this season is tearing down myths.

00:53:18.880 You mentioned Constantine.

00:53:20.400 We've mentioned him, 313 Edict of Milan.

00:53:23.740 It seems like for a long time Christian historians spoke about him as we might and, you know, there's not – you know, it's not like there's – he's faultless.

00:53:33.180 But there is certainly a great thing that he does for Christianity.

00:53:36.660 But if you read about him today, he invented Christianity.

00:53:40.540 I read one historical work, obviously from a secular pagan, but they said the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity was Constantine.

00:53:51.220 I was like, this is so ignorant.

00:53:53.640 Because he also invented the Bible.

00:53:56.020 Well, here's the thing, guys.

00:53:57.900 This is such an important instinct for us to understand as Christians looking at history.

00:54:01.640 a big point of the season is that a lot of the time, I think what many Christians have this

00:54:08.760 instinct to forget God's providential hand in ruling history. And so they kind of want to

00:54:16.260 reject in totality, everything that wasn't perfect. Oh, because you can come up for literally

00:54:24.420 any Christian figure. You can be like, well, they shouldn't have did that. And you're like,

00:54:29.620 You can fall in the other ditch where you're like, no, everything they did was perfect.

00:54:32.580 You're just not based enough.

00:54:33.960 Which?

00:54:34.680 It's a real ditch, guys.

00:54:35.700 I mean.

00:54:36.120 Sometimes we fall.

00:54:36.780 Hey, when we get to Vlad the Impaler.

00:54:37.920 I know, Eric's going to fall.

00:54:39.280 When we get to Vlad the Impaler, Eric's going to live in that ditch.

00:54:42.560 And I'm going to be over here like, but pregnant women, Eric.

00:54:46.040 Eric, are you sharpening poles?

00:54:48.640 It's just you just hear the sound of Eric sharpening.

00:54:51.040 I am the ditch.

00:54:51.640 But the other ditch is to is to look at a person like Constantine and the history surrounding him, any area of history and to say, man, well, they didn't they weren't sinless and they didn't know everything I do today, having the benefit of seventeen hundred more years of Christian faithfulness and progress.

00:55:11.820 So therefore, they're basically an arch villain of history and they must have been a fraud and they must have been fake and everything about it must be suspect.

00:55:20.660 it's like that's but we know that's not how people are well doesn't it it gets to this this you

00:55:26.440 mentioned the way of reading history but we have to read history in a way that allows for

00:55:31.060 complications yeah for nuance it's not just like somebody was completely wicked or completely

00:55:36.960 great nothing in between it's actually not how humanity works yeah and so when we we read history

00:55:42.340 what i find myself doing is actually being incredibly skeptical of anything written after

00:55:47.000 like 1900. Yeah. Because that's just our age is, you know, Constantine was a piece of garbage.

00:55:53.440 Everything he did was wicked. And when you actually look at that situation, Dan, we mentioned some of

00:55:59.960 the things that flowed after Constantine. You have some councils that really institutionalized

00:56:06.240 Christianity. There were also, he was regularly causing problems for, you know, Christians by

00:56:14.060 changing who was like in office basically of the church and and then they'd persecute i mean for

00:56:19.780 example with the erinism controversy you know um just thinking about that it was such a mess

00:56:26.140 because the emperors got involved but it was in some of the ways they did because but it's also

00:56:32.040 it got sorted out because of them i just think it's ridiculous that people would say constantine

00:56:36.740 you know invented christianity and assembled the scriptures and stuff like that when you

00:56:41.140 Actually, the Nicene Council is a really good example of this.

00:56:46.120 So Constantine, he's hearing these teachings from Arianism, and he's like,

00:56:50.640 well, it seems like there's a lot of hoopla around this.

00:56:52.720 We should probably get together and figure this out.

00:56:55.020 And so he gets the bishops together.

00:56:57.000 Like pays for all of it.

00:56:58.160 Yeah, he pays for all of it.

00:56:59.460 And then he observes, and he's like, yeah, I'll submit to whatever you guys say.

00:57:04.520 But that's the guy that invented this.

00:57:06.680 And we get the Nicene Creed from that, by the way.

00:57:08.680 which and some accounts say

00:57:10.760 he wasn't exactly pleased with the Nicene

00:57:12.680 but that's where the messy part comes in

00:57:14.620 yeah so Aryanism well it's also interesting

00:57:16.820 too and then you have afterwards

00:57:18.640 so thinking of Athanasius

00:57:20.820 particularly yeah I'm trying not to do the whole

00:57:22.740 Constantine episode right now I know Eric's like

00:57:24.620 let's keep this ball rolling this is just

00:57:26.760 one we're just sort of

00:57:28.740 touching the tip of this iceberg

00:57:30.780 this was one bullet point

00:57:32.360 in our whole thing

00:57:33.280 and we're like Constantine was right

00:57:37.420 Athanasius, five exiles in 17 years by four different emperors.

00:57:41.180 This is what I'm talking about.

00:57:42.320 Poor guy.

00:57:43.040 Poor guy.

00:57:43.760 But really what it gets to is this is how we have to read history is recognizing like our heroes can still be heroes.

00:57:50.780 They have faults.

00:57:52.720 That's fine.

00:57:53.640 Yeah, they can have clay feet and still be men that you look to.

00:57:57.000 And one of the ways that you should know that is because you – like what is the golden rule that sums up the whole Christian law?

00:58:04.580 Love your neighbor as yourself.

00:58:05.700 how do you want people to interpret you knowing all of the worst things you've ever done

00:58:10.440 especially how much of an idiot you are 100 years of theological development of christianity you

00:58:15.880 have 1500 years of theological development in your pocket and you haven't read a puritan book

00:58:22.660 but you play you know angry birds on your phone for like three years of your life

00:58:27.760 so i mean like go easy on constantine i can't even think of a different example

00:58:32.980 I don't know. We're so disconnected. We are not connected to the youth, but you know, it's like

00:58:37.220 treat them with charity and you will find that they were real people. Yeah. And that they made

00:58:44.300 decisions that are very suspect and sometimes outright egregiously wrong. There are charlatans

00:58:50.080 and frauds and whatnot. Power hungry. There's all that stuff there. Cause there's that's human

00:58:54.220 life under the sun, but that doesn't mean that there are not also great heroes that we can learn

00:59:00.900 from emulate and should not give over to this revisionism of history through the lens of secular

00:59:05.940 humanism. I think one of the best ways we can avoid believing the revisionist lies and to remove

00:59:11.180 the rubbish from the, you know, that moderns have put on our Christian heroes and on our own personal

00:59:17.840 history is by reading through a lens of charity. And so one of the things you have to ask, like

00:59:24.240 Charlemagne, we're going to talk about Charlemagne as a high point in Christendom. One of the things

00:59:28.560 that he did was there was forced conversions. Okay. Uh, and it's easy to say like, what a

00:59:34.400 tyrant, like, look at this monster, what a horrible King. But if you read through the lens

00:59:40.300 of charity, you go, why would that guy do that? Why would he lead that way? And actually ask the

00:59:47.100 questions. Why would Constantine have these issues with Arianism and why would he call Nicaea? And

00:59:52.920 why would he do this or that is actually trying to get into the time period and into the minds of

00:59:58.360 the great men and show them some charity that's a good way to honor your spiritual forefathers yeah

01:00:03.040 when it's also interesting too glenn sunshine we talked about the charlemagne with the conversions

01:00:07.300 and stuff like that and it was like yeah and then like right after he did it the church leaders were

01:00:11.400 like yeah you can't you yeah you can't do that my guy in reading them in light of the rules of their

01:00:16.920 time yeah this is a point that um rodney stark makes in the his book on the crusades god's

01:00:22.680 battalions. There are things that are generally acceptable practices of warfare. If a city

01:00:29.600 surrenders and gives terms of surrenders instead of making the enemy force besiege it and lose

01:00:34.260 their force in an all-out assault, then they will be given favorable terms. If you make them attack

01:00:40.320 the wall and lose many of their men, then a lot of you will get killed and enslaved. And that was,

01:00:46.120 whether you like it or not, we can analyze that in terms of just war theologically and practically

01:00:50.080 and politically now but those were the rules of engagement everybody played the game that way

01:00:55.120 your enemy was going to play the game that way whether you did or not and so you have to just

01:00:59.920 understand these things that you're not stepping into the 12th 11th 8th 9th 7th century and just

01:01:07.280 going to arbitrarily be able to import your sensibilities as a 21st century american

01:01:13.520 and just assume that you're correct about all that no voting nobody got to vote

01:01:19.980 It's a human right.

01:01:21.160 I mean, we're under siege.

01:01:22.120 I think we should take a poll to see if we should continue this siege.

01:01:25.000 Maybe we should surrender.

01:01:26.240 I'm kind of hungry.

01:01:27.320 I'm kind of hungry.

01:01:28.560 Anyway, yes.

01:01:30.260 Charlemagne.

01:01:30.580 And by the way, yes, we come to Charlemagne, one of the peaks.

01:01:34.660 We said that every hero has faults.

01:01:37.160 Well, then we have to talk about Charlemagne.

01:01:39.020 And I don't know.

01:01:40.140 French.

01:01:41.180 Probably.

01:01:41.760 That's his fault?

01:01:42.920 No.

01:01:44.800 Hey, guys, but I'm pretty sure that he spoke German.

01:01:47.040 So the Franks spoke like a German dialect at that time.

01:01:50.640 They actually, yes, there's a wide region here.

01:01:53.980 So Charlemagne obviously becomes the Holy Roman Emperor during his lifetime, unites really against the Anglo-Saxons, I guess, Saxon people, Germanic people, non-Christian.

01:02:06.820 And this is where Dan, we were kind of laughing, but yeah, he's like, it's Christianity or death.

01:02:13.200 I mean, that's what happens.

01:02:15.800 Pretty based.

01:02:16.180 I mean, the Bible pretty much says it, so convert or die.

01:02:20.340 These are the quotes that are going to be kind of what it is.

01:02:22.720 These are the poll quotes that certain YouTube channels are going to pull out and be like,

01:02:27.200 do you see what these guys believe?

01:02:29.060 They're just.

01:02:29.740 Yeah, I know.

01:02:30.360 How many people have you killed this week?

01:02:32.860 How much ammunition should I give them?

01:02:35.200 Wait, wait, save it for later episodes.

01:02:37.280 OK, don't shoot.

01:02:38.060 Don't shoot your whole.

01:02:38.960 That's right.

01:02:39.560 Don't don't shoot all your shots.

01:02:41.120 I meant convert to Christianity or face eternal death.

01:02:45.020 Yes.

01:02:45.420 That's actually worse.

01:02:47.240 Way worse.

01:02:48.460 So Charlemagne was a medieval emperor who ruled much of Western Europe from 768 to 814.

01:02:56.000 In 771, he became the king of the Franks, again, a Germanic tribe.

01:03:00.500 Present-day Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Western Germany.

01:03:05.000 So quite a wide swath of Europe.

01:03:08.460 Again, the question we would ask is why is this so important in the time period?

01:03:12.300 Tolkien, in many ways, there's a few kings really.

01:03:15.420 But he modeled Aragorn after Charlemagne draws a lot from this period of history and these people groups.

01:03:23.000 And it was so significant when you think about it, like the uniting of the kingdoms, of course, Charlemagne and then his grandfather, Charles the Hammer Martel.

01:03:31.780 What a name driving the Moors Muslims out of Spain.

01:03:36.200 Yeah. And of course, Charlemagne is going to do the same thing.

01:03:40.380 These guys are absolute jet gang.

01:03:42.320 I can't wait till we get to talk about some of the history of Spain.

01:03:44.800 El Cid. And the warfare between Christendom and Islam, the setbacks, the victories. It is a wild story. We're going to get some good Dave's vaults out of that.

01:03:56.700 Oh, so much. Song of Roland, et cetera, et cetera. So one of the interesting things about this, though, with Charlemagne, and then he'll set the tone for Alfred after him, short period after him, is really the things that he did with revival of education, the church, really where the modern university system before it became gay.

01:04:14.800 and corrupted came from so well i mean hey it's sweet to get back to our roots we got some

01:04:23.320 sound boards they are gay today uh but it wasn't always so begging to be taken seriously yes oh

01:04:29.160 of course just know this isn't a history podcast oh but it is it's uh what what are they what are

01:04:36.060 they uh it's a it's a history podcast with personality dan yes with personality speaking

01:04:42.840 Speaking of personality, we'll move us right along.

01:04:46.620 The Crusades.

01:04:47.720 That's a classic Eric Kahn segue.

01:04:50.100 Speaking of personality, the Crusades were another important part in the history of Christendom, wouldn't you say?

01:04:55.520 Wouldn't you say?

01:04:56.700 I mean, some real personalities.

01:04:58.320 This is where we get punching the horses in the face.

01:05:00.960 Yeah.

01:05:01.160 We get Duke Godfrey of Bouillon.

01:05:04.880 Cutting a man in half.

01:05:06.260 Oh, diagonally.

01:05:07.820 Diagonally.

01:05:08.300 It's easy to cut a man in half horizontally, like just straight across anybody who hasn't done that.

01:05:14.460 But diagonally, his sword did not break.

01:05:16.780 Get out of here.

01:05:17.460 We're talking collarbone, rib, spine, rib, rib, rib, rib, rib, part of the hip.

01:05:21.440 Godfrey would become basically the king of Jerusalem.

01:05:24.080 Spoilers.

01:05:24.740 King of Jerusalem.

01:05:26.300 But refuses the title, doesn't he?

01:05:28.040 He refuses the title.

01:05:29.020 Because who's the real?

01:05:29.980 You can't be king of Jerusalem.

01:05:31.700 No.

01:05:32.180 Come on.

01:05:33.040 Because Christ is king.

01:05:34.420 Jesus is the true and better Melchizedek, the king of Salem, the king of peace.

01:05:37.460 It's like, and then you step up and you're like, I have conquered.

01:05:40.020 I am now the king of Jerusalem.

01:05:41.160 Like, it just feels, it feels wrong.

01:05:43.320 It feels wrong.

01:05:44.120 Interestingly enough, the crusade is probably one of the most flashpoint hot button issues, really even today.

01:05:50.140 So I can remember things like 2011 campus crusade for Christ changes name to crew because the crusades were too offensive crew, which is like half of the word crusade.

01:06:01.720 anyway. The one word they thought was problematic is the word that they chose to keep in shortened

01:06:07.600 form. So we'll, we'll read. I know it's horrible. We'll read a few quotes on this in just a moment,

01:06:12.800 but a couple of myths, I guess, to, to point out here, you hear this all the time that the

01:06:18.520 crusades were a Christian invasion of Islamic territories, that it was pre-colonialist search

01:06:24.380 for wealth and lands. We hear that Islam is a mostly peaceful religion. Do we have a laugh

01:06:29.340 track we need one we need a laugh track for statements like that that is there's i think

01:06:34.540 there was a website back in the day when i was like maybe 14 it probably doesn't exist it was

01:06:39.120 like the religion of peace.com all it did was track muslim atrocities still like to this day

01:06:45.980 well we were talking to raymond ibrahim and he was like oh yeah like last month there was a muslim

01:06:51.060 in ireland who like killed like a whole classroom of like kindergartners with a knife bet you heard

01:06:56.260 about that on cnn yeah no it didn't no anyway you did hear about the rioting oh yeah the rioting

01:07:01.680 that was you know caused by probably like handcuffing him they're like how dare you the

01:07:06.240 muslims right so brian that that's the that's the myth that's what we've been told is that true and

01:07:10.720 the truth is that when you look at the history you'll find that islam from its origins built

01:07:17.180 into its religious and theological dna is in intensely brutal um war-like uh militaristically

01:07:26.500 conquest oriented religious faith that's what it is subjugating if you practice it correctly

01:07:32.680 which many muslims don't today then you will try to conquer your neighbors by violence force of

01:07:39.440 violence you will be permitted to sexually enslave women you will be permitted to do virtually

01:07:45.920 anything you want to your enemies, and that's what you will do. That's what the religion is

01:07:51.540 fundamentally on a theological level. And most of the surahs and the statements from their holy

01:07:59.400 texts that are used to say that it's a religion of peace are straightforwardly abrogated by over

01:08:04.060 a hundred later statements in the Quran and the surahs and history and theological tradition of

01:08:09.360 their religious leaders and theologians. So what we're looking at in the Islamic faith is a religion

01:08:17.540 that will either completely take over the world or eventually be eradicated. That's what it is.

01:08:24.780 Built into the DNA of the thing, unless it fundamentally changes into something that is

01:08:29.660 essentially a new religion altogether from its founding. That's what it is. You see this played

01:08:36.020 out across the Crusades. We're going to get into a lot of that. And you will learn to be sympathetic

01:08:42.320 to even the intense violence that Christians undertook in some of these eras because of what

01:08:52.440 they faced. Yeah. Well, some of us don't, but because of what they faced and the atrocities

01:09:00.800 that they faced you will learn to be sympathetic to eric and dan are both looking at me like

01:09:09.320 where's this going yes continue to uh to all-out warfare to invasionary tactics to besieging

01:09:17.000 cities to essentially many of the events of the crusades yeah and it's interesting too because i

01:09:21.900 looked this up so if you you know the crusades when were the crusades most people will say 1095

01:09:27.180 to 1291 when we and we'll get into this too uh in the next episode lord lord willing it's actually

01:09:33.220 like in the 600s when islam starts attacking yeah 600s islam is invented and then immediately

01:09:38.820 begins to conquer all of its neighbors culminating in bat in in territory skirmishes around these

01:09:44.940 because it's a christian area until very early in this i mean the religion hadn't existed for 75

01:09:50.700 years before the the first major battle between christian and islamic forces well and that tells

01:09:56.060 you something yes and this is the other thing that's interesting is that they were still in

01:10:01.500 1683 the battle of vienna that they were still fighting they're still doing that that's not

01:10:07.220 that long ago so actually the the conflict with islam is much greater than simply the

01:10:12.200 quote-unquote the crusade correct and continues today yes continues on down today imagine if in

01:10:17.460 the year 105 christians had assaulted and attempted to conquer rome like that's what

01:10:25.060 we're talking about where Islam did not exist in the year 600 yeah and then by the year 700 704 705

01:10:33.240 I can't remember Yarmouk is like one of those right in there it's all of a sudden you're they're

01:10:39.360 like and we're now going to conquer the Christian world basically the seeds of that yes that's how

01:10:45.020 different the Christian faith is from from the Islamic you see it right there in the history

01:10:48.820 are you the owner of a small business with the potential of a large net income that will likely

01:10:56.040 be subject to onerous taxation well don't wait until you begin filing your tax return for 2023

01:11:01.160 now is the right time to work with one of our sponsors defined benefit partners in some cases

01:11:07.140 they can help you legally defer taxes on 200 to 300 000 worth of business income are you desiring

01:11:13.600 to sell or buy a business but are short on the capital needed for the deal they also help

01:11:17.580 facilitate such transactions with a win-win scenario for the seller and the buyer.

01:11:21.460 Check out the links in the show notes for more information about defined benefit partners.

01:11:30.780 Our sponsor, Private Family Banking Partners, is on a mission to help Christians live out the

01:11:35.240 dominion mandate by making a stealth-like move away from the mainstream banks and into their

01:11:39.920 own privatized banking system. This innovative system is designed to guarantee uninterrupted

01:11:45.160 compound interest in tax-free growth without exposure to typical stock market risks.

01:11:50.940 To join this growing community that is already building wealth into future generations

01:11:54.840 and converting post-mill talk into post-mill action, contact Private Family Banking partner

01:12:00.580 Chuck DeLaDurante at his email, chuck at privatefamilybanking.com. Again, that's chuck

01:12:06.460 at privatefamilybanking.com. To set up an appointment and to receive a free copy of

01:12:11.480 chuck's new book protect your money now how to build multi-generational wealth outside of wall

01:12:16.040 street and avoid the coming banking meltdown go to the link in the show notes for more information

01:12:21.080 yeah one of the other interesting myths we'll talk a lot more about these by the way that is

01:12:31.120 so interesting is uh the superiority you always hear this the superiority of science and math

01:12:37.280 etc of islam eric they invented math they invented math and numbers and numbers they

01:12:43.300 invented numbers they did they're so smart uh but in fact really no i'm kidding i've read the same

01:12:51.600 books come on we've all read the same books like yeah what you end up finding out how did people

01:12:56.880 count before the muslims no they also invented zero really like if you had one coconut and i

01:13:04.580 took that coconut away you would have no idea how many coconuts you had until muhammad that was

01:13:10.440 yeah nobody knew no one knew maybe you potentially had an infinite coconut you didn't know you were

01:13:16.400 just like how many coconuts do i have how many of anything do i have i have some unknown amount

01:13:21.380 of everything because i don't know what zero is the great poets uh we're all arabic yeah shakespeare

01:13:29.380 Milton. Milton. Bill Shakespeare. T.S. Eliot. One of my favorites. Eminem. His vocabulary is more similar. Yeah, interesting. Interesting connection. So we'll get into that. Obviously, a lot of times what would happen is they would conquer Christian lands, change the names of people who are Christians to make like Muhammad al-Abdur-Kadesh or whatever. And then they're like, see, he's a Muslim.

01:13:56.600 Yeah, it would be the equivalent of finding a guy that was named, like, Peter Bradley, who had done some calculus thing at, like, the University of Oxford or something.

01:14:06.080 And then if the Chinese kidnapped him and the CCP was like, oh, yeah, his name is Zhao Jingping.

01:14:13.360 And the guy was like, yeah, so my name is Zhao Jingping.

01:14:18.040 And I've invented theoretical calculus.

01:14:22.240 Of course I'm Chinese.

01:14:23.260 I'm very Chinese, governor.

01:14:26.600 Like, that was, it's always cockney.

01:14:30.220 It's always cockney.

01:14:31.720 I can't.

01:14:33.040 I'm sorry, guys.

01:14:33.840 That is amazing.

01:14:35.360 This is why you listen to the King's Hall, guys, and not just to the audio books of all of the history books.

01:14:40.980 Yeah, this is not in the audio books.

01:14:41.940 Which you should also do.

01:14:43.160 You should do that.

01:14:44.740 Dan, I actually want to have Dan read a quote.

01:14:48.380 We're going to look at a few quotes.

01:14:49.900 Just, you know, we want to get the, you know, crusade magic, the zeal flowing through our blood here.

01:14:55.040 Okay.

01:14:55.360 Okay, in 1999, the New York Times had solemnly proposed that the Crusades were comparable to Hitler's atrocities, to the ethnic cleansing at Kosovo.

01:15:06.340 That same year, to mark the 900th anniversary of the Crusader, could you not highlight the text when I'm reading it?

01:15:12.500 Oh, I didn't know it highlighted it for you, too.

01:15:14.560 The 900th anniversary of the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem, hundreds of devout Protestants, oh boy, took part in a reconciliation walk that began in Germany and ended in the Holy Land.

01:15:29.780 Wait, we should schedule a reconciliation walk.

01:15:32.360 Along the way, the walkers wore t-shirts bearing the message, Deus vault.

01:15:37.140 No, they didn't.

01:15:38.220 No, no.

01:15:38.960 The t-shirts bearing the message, I apologize, in Arabic.

01:15:43.820 Their official statements explain the need for a Christian apology.

01:15:48.780 Also in 1999, Karen Armstrong, a former nun and a popular writer on religious themes,

01:15:56.000 proposed that crusading answered a deep need in the Christians of Europe.

01:16:00.940 Surviving, not being raped.

01:16:02.960 Yet today, most of us would unhesitantly condemn the Crusades as unchristian.

01:16:08.760 Why are you?

01:16:09.560 After all, Jesus told his followers to love their enemies.

01:16:12.340 not to exterminate them he was a pacifist and had more in common with gandhi perhaps than with pope

01:16:19.200 it's actually blasphemous in 2015 obama compared isis to crusaders and said humanity's but i can't

01:16:28.200 do an obama voice humanity's been grappling with these questions throughout i can't do it

01:16:33.080 humanity's been great yeah that wasn't that good humanity's been grappling with these questions

01:16:38.180 throughout human history unless we get on our high horses and think this like a high horse going to

01:16:44.240 the crusade because our horses were bigger and our high horses and think this is unique to some

01:16:50.920 other place remember that during the crusades and inquisition people committed terrible deeds

01:16:56.740 in the name of christ you okay obama is correct end quote end quote and here's the thing obama

01:17:04.220 is correct our horses were higher than theirs because we had to pull carriages with ours

01:17:10.140 because we had used the wheel which wasn't used in muslim areas they hadn't invented they didn't

01:17:15.380 have the wheel yet yeah when they when we would have like a frontal assault and a full charge

01:17:20.480 they said that like the horses and the the just the regimented function of the european military

01:17:26.800 would decimate the normans when they looked at their like heck no that guy punched a horse

01:17:34.140 in the face and it died i wonder if it was a muslim horse though that's actually it probably was

01:17:40.260 i don't know if i could punch a norman horse so weak yeah wow wow okay what were i don't know i

01:17:49.640 don't know the point here other than anyway just no i think here's the point yeah here's the point

01:17:55.280 it's they you've been successfully uh lied to in a way that was calculated this was intentional

01:18:02.180 in a way that was calculated to make you easily conquerable well and this is this is i think brian

01:18:08.800 i and i want you just to hit this one home this is a softball tee it up i'm ready

01:18:13.400 george orwell 1984 this is a quote whoever controls the past controls the future whoever

01:18:19.580 controls the present controls the past one of the things end quote one of the things that i said in

01:18:24.540 the cold open it's not so much the death of the west as the suicide of the west it's not a homicide

01:18:30.020 Meaning they have convinced us to hate ourselves.

01:18:34.180 Right.

01:18:34.500 Who's they?

01:18:35.580 Who is they?

01:18:36.980 That's for another episode.

01:18:38.380 Dan.

01:18:40.500 We can only talk about so many different.

01:18:42.960 It seems to beg a certain question.

01:18:46.980 Interesting.

01:18:47.220 In the words of the country song, who are they?

01:18:49.660 They're probably living in L.A.

01:18:52.500 Do you guys know that one?

01:18:53.220 I don't know that one, but I want to.

01:18:55.260 It's probably a new country song now that I think of it, and not that good.

01:18:58.600 New as of like 2008.

01:18:59.900 I don't know.

01:19:00.180 Not the same answer we're looking for.

01:19:01.460 It's not.

01:19:02.460 You were asking a question before I rudely interrupted you.

01:19:04.740 Yeah, so I just – you said it, Brian, but I want you just to say it again for the people in the back.

01:19:10.560 Yes, Orwell is correct because the way that people work is that we're not just creatures of logic input-output.

01:19:18.340 You don't just input the ones and zeros and you get out whatever program you want on that level.

01:19:23.920 unless you understand the input data to be stories and values driven by stories.

01:19:31.140 So people are shaped by their ideas of the narrative they're living in.

01:19:35.660 We act as the characters we believe ourselves to be in the stories we believe ourselves to be in.

01:19:41.900 If you can control what people think about what kind of story they're in

01:19:45.680 and what character they're playing and who the main characters are,

01:19:48.960 well, then obviously you can manipulate most people to do whatever you want.

01:19:52.920 when this is sort of one of the key themes in 1984 yeah where it's like you know five minutes

01:20:00.100 ago we were allies with this nation we've always not but we've always been we've always been at

01:20:04.620 war with east asia the way that propaganda works to neuter a people to convince a people like if

01:20:10.660 you think if you have all this self-loathing for yourself as a western christian yeah particularly

01:20:15.280 white male yeah then you're like oh no yeah we do need like we need to hire all these multicultural

01:20:20.460 people and we need to basically we need to die there was a uh a chart i saw on twitter now have

01:20:26.100 i looked up the provenance of this study and all that no blah blah blah am i going to cite it to

01:20:30.280 you scientifically no i'm going to tell you about a picture i saw on i'll believe it absolutely

01:20:33.980 without any research i already believe okay i know you do eric and that's why we're friends

01:20:38.900 it's it was a chart uh asking people of different races to essentially rate themselves their race

01:20:45.520 and other whites blacks asians and hispanics essentially and it was like left is really bad

01:20:51.200 right dot along the continue is really good and the whites pretty much rated like there was a very

01:20:56.860 narrow band where they pretty much rated everybody the same themselves slightly worse okay every other

01:21:02.620 race it was comical was like asians the asians were like oh we awesome white devil bad and it

01:21:10.120 It was like, everybody sucks.

01:21:12.220 We're amazing.

01:21:13.300 They have pride.

01:21:13.900 Everybody does that, right?

01:21:15.500 I'm not saying this is virtuous.

01:21:18.320 I'm saying that – I'm not actually saying that this is a brute virtuous thing, but I am saying what it shows is that we've been discipled.

01:21:26.620 We've talked about this in previous first season of King's Hall, that a lot of the war on whiteness is a proxy war on Christianity because of the Western Christendom and the history of Western Christendom in Europe and also the Protestant founding of America.

01:21:38.400 Many of the things in the way, standing in the way between globalism, secular humanism and world domination are white Christian Europeans and their descendants, right?

01:21:48.800 So what a chart like that shows you, if it's true, if it's actually a real chart, I believe it, is the way that the narrative has been shaped to teach people who the villain and who the hero is and what the end goal is.

01:22:03.700 So if you can control that, if you can convince Christians, for example, to believe that virtually everything Christians did until the Enlightenment came along and fixed everything was evil, you're not going to have Christians in three generations of that.

01:22:17.240 It becomes really easy to control people who have guilt and manipulate them.

01:22:22.280 So if you should be ashamed because of your skin color and because of your cultural heritage, it's just another data point like, oh, and by the way, another reason you should feel terrible about yourself is because of the Crusades and the Inquisition.

01:22:33.860 Yeah.

01:22:34.760 Yeah, here's another one.

01:22:35.960 Well, this is how we get to where we are today.

01:22:39.420 This Babylon Bee headline, which I loved recently.

01:22:42.380 It says, Nations White Liberals Wish Each Other Happy Kwanzaa.

01:22:48.180 But that's really where we are as a country.

01:22:51.500 Brian, to your point, white people, like we hate ourselves.

01:22:54.420 Some of us do.

01:22:55.180 I was going to rate myself 12 out of 10.

01:22:56.900 Come on.

01:22:59.960 Wait, are you using numbers?

01:23:01.740 So humble.

01:23:02.440 You should probably credit the Muslims.

01:23:05.020 You made a ones and zeros comment.

01:23:07.080 I was like, thanks, Muslims.

01:23:10.040 Thanks for inventing zero for us.

01:23:12.440 Before that, like they didn't invent the wheel yet, but zero.

01:23:15.520 They had zeros.

01:23:16.040 They had zeros.

01:23:16.460 They had zero. They had a lot of zeros. Yes. Yes. So all of this to say, yeah, these historical

01:23:23.120 narratives matter. If you know, we'll talk more about this in future episodes as well, I'm sure.

01:23:27.660 But really, the post 1960s critical race theory marched through the institutions has been

01:23:33.180 effective. And so that's why education, classical studies, as we're looking into them,

01:23:38.900 matter so importantly uh one of the areas moving on from the crusades to another wide period here

01:23:47.020 is the middle ages so from 476 a.d to 1450 again some of these time periods are really hard to

01:23:54.080 exactly say these are the exact dates but uh somewhere in the middle of that dan an episode

01:23:58.420 we'll be doing upcoming shortly 871 to 899 the king of all kings in the medieval period okay

01:24:06.080 king alfred

01:24:08.680 yeah king alfred under jesus yeah but king alfred what a king he would open hand slap you for

01:24:17.220 calling him the king i know he would how many kings are called the great then he'd make you

01:24:22.320 get baptized and adopt you as his godson yeah yeah actually in the history of england there's

01:24:26.640 only one great and it's alfred king alfred and he was great he was i'm super excited to talk

01:24:32.480 in that episode.

01:24:33.640 I'm writing that one.

01:24:35.100 It's going to be really good.

01:24:35.880 You really have Charles the Great.

01:24:38.100 Charlemagne.

01:24:38.700 Charlemagne.

01:24:39.260 Charlemagne.

01:24:40.340 But he wasn't English.

01:24:43.580 Well, no.

01:24:44.760 But I'm saying you have two kings that are great.

01:24:47.760 Yeah, right.

01:24:48.540 He was the Magnus.

01:24:49.520 He was the Magnus Carlson.

01:24:51.700 No.

01:24:52.340 As a chess reference.

01:24:53.800 Only Ben Garrett gets.

01:24:55.160 My guy, Ben, though.

01:24:56.320 No, I got it.

01:24:57.140 He would have been with me on that one.

01:24:58.740 Everybody knows who he is.

01:25:00.280 Okay, thank you.

01:25:01.480 Okay.

01:25:01.900 All right.

01:25:02.040 So, yes, Dan, we're going to be talking about King Alfred, some of the things that happened.

01:25:06.240 He fought my people, the Danes.

01:25:07.620 Yeah, he did.

01:25:08.180 And your people, by the way, at that time, they were bad.

01:25:11.540 They were not great people.

01:25:13.640 When you read what they would do, they were absolute liars, first of all.

01:25:18.420 Yes.

01:25:18.880 They were just, they were like toddlers asked if they had taken the candy.

01:25:22.480 Well, it's so funny.

01:25:22.920 If you watch any modern show about the Vikings, you'll see them like form up into a shield wall and go on frontal battle.

01:25:29.540 Absolutely not.

01:25:30.020 They were the biggest chickens.

01:25:32.060 They would look at the numbers and they're like, that's not worth fighting.

01:25:34.940 Let's go attack this undefended village and steal all their food and rape the women and then we'll run away.

01:25:40.980 That's what they did when they weren't doing hallucinogenic drugs and putting bear skins on and calling themselves berserkers and running totally high.

01:25:51.020 So they were either high or they were miscreants.

01:25:54.040 That's your legacy, Dan.

01:25:55.260 Yeah.

01:25:55.740 There's actually a new film about that.

01:25:57.400 The Northman.

01:25:58.260 Have you guys watched this?

01:25:59.200 No, I don't.

01:25:59.720 They were like, yeah, it's really great cultural, you know, look into, you know, who they were as a people.

01:26:04.800 And I was like, these people suck.

01:26:06.400 These people needed to be converted.

01:26:08.580 But here's the cool thing.

01:26:10.380 They were.

01:26:11.240 And they became the Normans.

01:26:12.960 Which is, I can't.

01:26:14.760 That's why I was so mad at them, like so mad at your people when I was reading about the King Alfred and his time.

01:26:21.440 Because you're like.

01:26:22.180 I feel like it's my fault.

01:26:23.420 And I was like, damn.

01:26:24.320 Manipulation.

01:26:24.860 Damn, stop it.

01:26:25.680 but then when you read

01:26:28.320 they totally redeemed themselves

01:26:30.400 in the crusades

01:26:31.440 and now we're cool

01:26:33.540 yeah we're cool

01:26:35.400 so speaking about being cool

01:26:37.620 the middle ages pretty cool

01:26:39.820 one of the myths that we read about them

01:26:42.780 frequently we're told this all the time

01:26:44.480 is that they were the dark ages Dan

01:26:46.080 would you just tell me how dark they were

01:26:48.960 yeah it was awful

01:26:49.760 people ate dirt generally

01:26:51.540 they couldn't read

01:26:52.600 they didn't have the number zero

01:26:55.300 Oh, cave paintings.

01:26:57.060 They hadn't invented the wheel.

01:26:58.800 Oh, no, wait a minute.

01:26:59.720 I'm talking about Muslims again.

01:27:03.960 No, during that time, they had the wheel.

01:27:05.800 They stole it.

01:27:07.600 But they just chose not to use it most of the time.

01:27:10.400 They were like, this isn't important.

01:27:12.700 No.

01:27:12.980 So I can't remember who it was that we were reading.

01:27:17.360 I think it was Esalen.

01:27:18.660 I was reading Esalen.

01:27:19.540 He was talking in An Idiot's Guide to Western Civilization.

01:27:22.540 civilization uh not an idiot's guy politically incorrect the politically incorrect guy i felt

01:27:28.120 like an idiot reading a lot of it but that's beside the point so me both he he was talking

01:27:32.260 about the middle ages and he said he said something that was really profound he said most of us

01:27:36.660 if we were imported into that time in the middle ages we would be uncomfortable with the amount of

01:27:43.160 light and flourishing and beauty that you would find there wow a time of absolute human flourishing

01:27:51.260 of art architecture language agriculture agriculture oh man some of their agriculture

01:27:57.600 we were talking about the horses but they developed new plows because they could eat

01:28:01.260 well people were flourishing people were thriving physically so you know minus maybe antibiotics

01:28:06.900 uh pretty incredible time period yes yeah i mean the assumption is that people died in their 30s

01:28:12.520 and they lived in dirt huts they had wooden teeth or something yeah some nonsense like that no no i

01:28:17.940 I mean, in your story that's upcoming about Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Notre

01:28:25.220 Dame, the stories of the windows.

01:28:27.060 Do you tell that in the.

01:28:28.320 Yeah, we talk about the rose windows and.

01:28:30.160 OK, but not in depth.

01:28:31.160 I mean, that story to me is really compelling that the that the window that you'll you'll

01:28:37.160 hear soon that was made in like the 1300s, the 14th century.

01:28:41.380 Yeah, the first window.

01:28:42.760 And then there were two others made in like the 17th century.

01:28:45.000 And they keep having to fix those windows.

01:28:47.940 And they look at the 1300s window and they're like, why does this one still go strong?

01:28:55.080 How did they make this thing?

01:28:57.540 Like, we don't know.

01:28:59.160 It's funny.

01:28:59.560 It's exactly like when Legolas and Gimli are going through Gondor and Gimli and they're like, well, the older stonework was better.

01:29:09.820 And a lot of the time we think the opposite, like the newer must be better.

01:29:13.200 But they literally did things that we just we don't know how to replicate.

01:29:16.860 and they did it with

01:29:18.240 like a guy with a chisel

01:29:20.420 in the woods

01:29:22.580 unbelievable

01:29:24.520 it really is crazy because

01:29:27.900 in a dirt floor hut he couldn't even read

01:29:30.060 with wooden teeth and he didn't have the number zero

01:29:31.720 he was probably 15 years old because he was going to die soon

01:29:34.060 you know what they probably imported

01:29:36.000 a muslim to do it

01:29:37.020 this episode

01:29:40.240 this episode is going to get us cancelled

01:29:42.220 somewhere

01:29:42.740 yeah come on

01:29:45.080 Somehow, some way.

01:29:46.420 The AI is getting good enough at, like, actually converting audio into what it can understand that it's only a matter of time.

01:29:53.320 We've said Muslims so many times they probably think this is a Muslim podcast.

01:29:55.480 It's going to boost it in the algorithm.

01:29:57.900 We're going to play 4D chess.

01:29:59.860 4D chess.

01:30:01.060 So one of the things that's interesting, speaking of 4D chess, we're going to talk about culture.

01:30:06.320 So, you know, one of the ways that you gauge a culture.

01:30:08.640 Yeah.

01:30:08.820 And this is very controversial today because people say, like, well, one culture isn't better than another culture.

01:30:14.320 Well, that's not true. When you look at the medieval time period and you look at the culture, the art, the literature, the poetry, the stuff that was coming out of there, and particularly architecture, Dan, we get into the 12th to 16th centuries, particularly with Gothic architecture, of which Notre Dame is one that we'll look at in just a moment.

01:30:35.180 But, I mean, breathtaking, beautiful, amazing, was supposed to be just at the forefront of what Western Christendom was.

01:30:43.500 Yeah.

01:30:44.180 And the myth, I think, is that architecture today is better.

01:30:49.440 I've seen Dallas.

01:30:50.440 I rest my case.

01:30:51.420 Yeah, it is better.

01:30:52.360 Just look at the city of Dallas, Texas.

01:30:55.300 Strip malls as far as the eye can see.

01:30:57.380 Dan brought this up because we were talking to some listeners recently.

01:31:00.660 Actually, some people who visit the church and they're like, man, you guys dunk on Dallas a lot.

01:31:04.120 we actually we actually love the people of dallas yeah we're like the restaurant by the way

01:31:08.800 phenomenal very good phenomenal but dan you actually brought up a good point about this

01:31:12.780 dallas is just a picture of everything else that was built in like 1960 to 1980 in america

01:31:18.560 yeah yeah so i mean what's going on with that yeah uh it's our preference yeah we get our

01:31:25.260 preference and our preference is cheap yes fast it is cheap and fast well and it you know what

01:31:30.320 honestly, that's not entirely true. So commercially, yes. With homes, yes. But if you

01:31:37.540 look at churches, because cathedrals are the best example of architecture in the Middle Ages,

01:31:41.780 you know, just absolutely beautiful, taking hundreds of years, generations to build these

01:31:46.100 things. And look at your local megachurch. I guarantee you it costs tens of millions, if not

01:31:53.920 more in some cases to build. And you could have built something actually beautiful instead of

01:31:59.840 the monstrosity that exists what what do you think just just curious what do you think like a modern

01:32:04.400 megachurch costs to build i think that with the last so i was a part of a church that had a

01:32:09.040 building campaign that was looking in the early 2000s of building an entirely new camp but they

01:32:14.480 have very large property and the quote was about 20 25 to 30 million dollars for this large thousand

01:32:21.680 multi-thousand person so in today's money i mean with inflation that's about 11 billion well i i

01:32:27.600 don't think yeah that's a lot but but think about this our our culture actually does build cathedrals

01:32:34.400 and one of the cathedrals is in dallas yeah and this cathedral is dallas cowboy stadium

01:32:41.460 1.3 billion yeah so i and i'm not kidding i think that we really do we do we put our money where

01:32:48.100 the value because yeah a lot of people were saying okay notre dame burns down muslims probably and

01:32:53.580 not like legitimately stay tuned but uh notre dame burns down they have to repair part of it

01:33:00.600 and the repair cost is almost a billion dollars yeah and people say wow that's crazy i think it's

01:33:06.600 just we we put our money in the things that we love oh yeah we sent 40 billion dollars to ukraine

01:33:11.900 i mean in most cities by the way are paying for these stadiums yeah it's the city who is footing

01:33:18.920 the bill right the people not jerry jones yeah so we will put our money toward things right so it

01:33:25.300 could be done i guess is my point yeah but we just don't it's a preference it's yeah you actually

01:33:29.460 prefer badness yeah let's give a little example here with uh the notre dame cathedral

01:33:34.180 the construction of the notre dame cathedral in paris which is now 850 years old is a fascinating

01:33:43.480 tale that dates back to the 12th century in the height of the age of the cathedrals.

01:33:48.660 Cathedrals were built as centerpieces of cities to portray the centrality of the church and

01:33:53.700 Christ's reign across the city. Just as the temple in Ezekiel, so culture flowed out of

01:33:59.640 this ecclesiastical center and touched every sphere of life. The building project began in

01:34:05.460 1163 AD during the reign of King Louis VII and was completed around 1345. The cathedral's

01:34:13.240 construction involved multiple phases and contributions from various architects and

01:34:17.760 builders over the years. Notre Dame stands out for its pipe organs, massive rose windows,

01:34:23.660 flying buttresses, and its immense church bells. It's the pinnacle of French Gothic architecture.

01:34:30.300 Maurice de Sully, the Bishop of Paris at the time, envisioned a grand cathedral that would

01:34:35.120 surpass the existing structures in Paris. Sully envisioned the cathedral as a representation of

01:34:41.000 the church's authority in Paris and beyond. Its towering presence and intricate design

01:34:46.360 were meant to signify the glorious reign of Christ on earth and to raise men's gaze

01:34:51.420 heavenward with awe. Sully's ambition was to create a cathedral that showcased the magnificence

01:34:57.960 of God's creation through human craftsmanship. Notre Dame's gothic design with its soaring

01:35:03.580 heights, intricate details, and beautiful stained glass windows was a testament to the faith and

01:35:09.440 devotion of its builders and an awe-inspiring embodiment of divine beauty. The construction

01:35:14.800 process was intricate and required significant effort that took hundreds of years to complete.

01:35:20.740 The builders used innovative techniques for that time, such as employing flying buttresses to

01:35:25.500 support the wall and allow for taller and thinner walls, creating more space for stained glass

01:35:30.620 windows. And structures that looked almost impossibly light and airy, yet completely made

01:35:36.540 out of stone. The cornerstone was laid in 1163 by Pope Alexander III in the presence of King

01:35:43.060 Louis VII. The construction began with the choir section and proceeded to the nave and transept.

01:35:49.420 Skilled stonemasons, carpenters, and laborers worked tirelessly for decades, passing on their

01:35:54.960 knowledge and expertise to subsequent generations of workers. The cathedral's design incorporated

01:36:00.380 elements of Gothic architecture characterized by its pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and expansive

01:36:06.340 stained glass windows. The rose windows, in particular, are renowned for their intricate

01:36:11.300 beauty and craftsmanship. The Notre Dame Cathedral faced several challenges through its construction,

01:36:18.160 including interruptions due to political and financial issues, wars, and alterations in

01:36:22.800 architectural plans. Despite these challenges, the builders kept up the work, and the cathedral

01:36:27.920 gradually took shape as one of the most magnificent examples of Gothic architecture

01:36:32.200 in the power of Christendom in the West.

01:36:34.840 Over the centuries, Notre Dame Cathedral underwent renovations, additions,

01:36:39.180 and restorations to maintain its structural integrity and preserve its beauty.

01:36:43.720 Tragically, a devastating fire broke out on the 15th of April, just a few years ago, 2019,

01:36:49.960 causing significant damage to the roof, spire, and interior of the cathedral.

01:36:55.660 Was it an accident?

01:36:57.240 The official story is that bad electrical wiring in one of the spires could have caused the fire.

01:37:03.120 Oddly enough, Al Jazeera reported that a Rwandan refugee

01:37:06.300 intentionally burned down another French cathedral in 2020,

01:37:10.360 destroying a pipe organ that was constructed in the 1600s.

01:37:14.380 The same man murdered a priest in cold blood.

01:37:17.760 Though several news outlets reported that the man was a Rwandan refugee,

01:37:21.580 they refused to use the word Muslim.

01:37:25.540 Whatever happened to the Notre Dame Cathedral and however the fire started,

01:37:29.300 it came at an interesting point in French and European history.

01:37:32.200 The influx of Muslims has created a heated cultural clash between Islam and the West,

01:37:37.800 something that is anything but new.

01:37:39.180 The Franks, dating back to Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours in 732 AD,

01:37:46.100 had long sought to repel the Muslim invaders.

01:37:49.420 Following the fire, an extensive restoration and $865 million reconstruction effort

01:37:56.780 was initiated to rebuild and restore Notre Dame to its former glory.

01:38:01.880 The restoration project aimed not only to repair the damage,

01:38:05.520 but also to ensure the preservation of this iconic symbol of Paris and Western civilization.

01:38:12.080 During restoration efforts at Notre-Dame,

01:38:14.980 archaeologists discovered two mysterious sarcophagi buried under the church's nave.

01:38:20.520 After months of research, they now know more about who was entombed in them.

01:38:25.260 One contained the remains of a priest who died in 1710.

01:38:29.000 And to learn more about that priest and his strange burial, check out our Patreon-exclusive show, The Deus Vault.

01:38:36.060 Yes, that is the real name.

01:38:37.660 The Notre Dame Cathedral stands as a testament to the dedication, craftsmanship, and artistic vision of the architects, builders, and artisans who contributed to its creation.

01:38:47.840 Making it a cherished symbol of Western Christendom, France's cultural heritage, and a marvel of architectural excellence.

01:38:55.140 Is it better than a strip mall in Dallas?

01:38:57.460 We'll let you decide.

01:38:59.000 And if you decide that Dallas is better than Notre Dame, then we can't help you.

01:39:05.440 You should probably listen to another podcast.

01:39:08.000 I would look up whatever the Obamas are doing.

01:39:10.860 That would probably be a good one.

01:39:13.380 But there's another element of glory here that we're going to explore this season, I think is important as well.

01:39:17.860 We've talked now a lot about some great developed Christian civilizations where heroes have built great cities and cathedrals and defended them with the blood of their young men and with their heroes, with swords and glory and all of that, inspiring scenes like Theoden's fight on the Pelennor Fields kind of glory.

01:39:37.580 But there's another kind of glory that Christians also ought to have that is often stolen from us, and it's the glory of the great explorers.

01:39:47.860 who were Christians, who went and explored far off lands, found new worlds.

01:39:53.380 Some things happened with some of the inhabitants of those worlds.

01:39:56.080 It gets a little fuzzy.

01:39:57.140 We'll talk about that later.

01:39:59.460 But this is the myth, though.

01:40:00.500 Everything they did was just.

01:40:01.380 I have no idea what to talk about.

01:40:02.220 The myth is that they weren't explorers who were great men,

01:40:06.140 but they were genocidal maniacs who stole the indigenous lands

01:40:09.320 of these highly developed and cultured civilizations.

01:40:12.700 And so we should change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.

01:40:17.360 That's right. And it's interesting. We'll talk about Columbus, but think about just this age of exploration that arose out of a flourishing Christian civilization.

01:40:26.660 Even things like Sir Edmund Hillary and his indigenous guide friend all think of his name.

01:40:33.440 I'm sorry. I almost said Tonto. And I know that's not right. And I know that's not politically correct.

01:40:39.100 And we strive to be politically correct on this show.

01:40:42.100 And I apologize.

01:40:42.860 And I want to just say, I apologize.

01:40:45.780 Not really.

01:40:47.360 Yeah, it was actually nothing to the Mexicans or Native Americans, whatever name that comes from.

01:40:52.280 No, they're Nepalese, and it's Tenzing Norgay.

01:40:54.940 So, you know, Native guys always come into play, but great exploration.

01:40:59.980 And you think of Everest, you think of, Dan, one of our favorite stories way down south.

01:41:06.360 Endurance.

01:41:06.800 There was a ship.

01:41:07.920 Yeah.

01:41:08.800 Endurance.

01:41:09.160 Ernest Shackleton.

01:41:10.500 Shackleton.

01:41:11.140 So from like Columbus to Shackleton, I mean, come on.

01:41:14.680 Only white Christian men are going to be answering that ad.

01:41:18.340 I'm just saying.

01:41:19.760 When you think about this.

01:41:21.100 There were probably black people on that.

01:41:22.740 I don't know.

01:41:23.340 No.

01:41:23.840 There weren't.

01:41:24.480 Little pay.

01:41:25.540 Low chance of survival.

01:41:27.180 They were like, no.

01:41:27.920 Eternal glory.

01:41:29.020 It's not going to happen.

01:41:30.580 But there's something, right, about Christian civilization that produces not only a surplus, right?

01:41:35.500 You have to have a surplus society, not a survival society, to be able to want to go do these great things.

01:41:41.960 You know, why do you climb the mountain?

01:41:42.920 Because it's there.

01:41:43.620 Right.

01:41:44.020 Right. Because this is God's earth and we want to chart it. You know, we want to do these things.

01:41:48.140 Columbus is one that is probably most hated.

01:41:51.280 Oh, he is. If you bring up Columbus in the average public university classroom and say something like, you know, I know the assignment was to talk about one of our heroes from history.

01:42:01.060 And I just I thought about it and it was going to be either Vlad the Impaler or it was going to be Christopher Columbus.

01:42:06.720 And I had to go with Columbus. They would instantly expel you from the university.

01:42:12.080 Oh, yes. Yeah, I read one headline about this. There's many, many, many throughout the decades on Columbus. But one headline read, was Columbus really that bad? No, he was worse. And he was actually right. He was looking for an alternate route to outflank the Muslims.

01:42:31.180 Yeah, so this is an argument that George Grant – we talked on – if you sign up for Patreon, you'll get to hear this interview.

01:42:38.720 But we talked to George Grant about this.

01:42:40.140 He's got a book, and he describes this, how he had actually got – somehow got a hold of Columbus's journals.

01:42:48.480 Probably not the originals.

01:42:49.900 The originals.

01:42:50.500 I choose to believe it was the originals.

01:42:52.340 But he had read through them, and he was like, yeah, no, his goal with Ferdinand and Isabella was to find a route to outflank the Muslims so that they could finish the Crusades.

01:43:03.920 And, of course, 1492.

01:43:05.820 So this is late.

01:43:06.840 Again, people are like, wait, was there still conflict with Islam in 1492?

01:43:11.300 Yes.

01:43:12.180 Yeah, I don't know if you know about the first official military conflict of the United States as a nation after the Revolutionary War.

01:43:19.700 The Barbary War.

01:43:20.340 Was with Muslims.

01:43:21.640 for doing the same thing they've been doing for like a thousand years at this point,

01:43:27.280 kidnapping, stealing, raping people, hide your wife.

01:43:31.540 I also love like Thomas Jefferson's report, by the way, back to Congress.

01:43:35.420 Yeah.

01:43:35.880 And he's basically boiled down to like, these people still suck.

01:43:39.500 It was, yeah.

01:43:40.080 If you just like put it, if you put that in a chat GPT and said,

01:43:43.620 summarize this in today's parlance, that's what it would spit back at.

01:43:47.420 It'd be like, these people are bad and they suck.

01:43:50.380 Yeah, so maybe Columbus, and, you know, we throw him in here, Cortez.

01:43:56.420 Cortez.

01:43:57.020 Cortez might be, like, if you're, yeah, if you're in Central or South America, people are probably not like, Cortez, what a hero.

01:44:03.040 But you think about—

01:44:04.240 Really? Huge miss.

01:44:05.800 Huge miss for them, not for us.

01:44:08.460 Just saying.

01:44:09.120 We're not going to say that.

01:44:10.040 But I think, yeah, just seeing what, you know, Brian, we've talked about this before.

01:44:15.600 You have a very storied ancestry with indigenous peoples.

01:44:21.080 Yeah, I do.

01:44:21.980 And so it's right and proper that their culture remained.

01:44:27.320 How wrong you are, Eric.

01:44:29.980 No, no.

01:44:31.780 That was like setting.

01:44:32.620 No, I mean, there is no malediction in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of men to explain just how bad the Native American—

01:44:44.580 I mean, the Native American culture—

01:44:46.560 So you still do powwows with your people?

01:44:48.800 No, but I'm not kidding.

01:44:50.760 People think I'm making this up when I say that I have, like, people in my family named Sunfish.

01:44:56.000 Is that real?

01:44:57.060 Yeah.

01:44:57.320 Oh, yes.

01:44:57.880 And that, like, their wild rice—

01:45:00.380 But here's the main takeaway that you have if you start to look at the indigenous Native American culture is just it was primitive.

01:45:09.840 It was primitive.

01:45:10.980 And primitive culture is extremely bloodthirsty, not a place you would want to live.

01:45:15.380 It's not idyllic.

01:45:16.780 It was absolutely horrible.

01:45:18.820 It was – it needed to be conquered and replaced with a better culture, which was Christianity.

01:45:23.960 And that's just – there's no question.

01:45:25.220 You know, the Native Americans, they knew the number zero.

01:45:27.980 They did because they would look around and go, I have zero slaves and I need some.

01:45:33.400 And then they go attack the neighboring tribe to get slaves.

01:45:37.560 Did they learn that from the Muslims?

01:45:39.000 No, they, they, that's just, they let's deepen the human heart.

01:45:42.260 I mean, it's in our, it's in the factory settings after.

01:45:44.680 According to the Mormons, they were one of the lost tribes of Judaism.

01:45:48.460 Maybe it was the Jews.

01:45:49.380 Common Mormon.

01:45:50.080 That's been proven wrong.

01:45:50.920 The DNA test.

01:45:51.680 Let's just say they changed the book of Mormon to sidestep it.

01:45:55.340 That's how definitively the preamble to the Book of Mormon.

01:45:58.920 There's like a couple of paragraphs introing it.

01:46:00.920 They literally changed one of the sentences.

01:46:02.860 So it no longer said that the Jews were the principal ancestors of these Native Americans, but we're actually just like one of them.

01:46:11.200 So they can be like, if there's any percentage.

01:46:13.240 Well, that was a huge derailment.

01:46:14.840 Man, that's really interesting.

01:46:16.300 Actually, it's a good segue.

01:46:18.320 You mentioned the Jews.

01:46:19.700 We end today's episode with a little discussion, a little teaser on the Romanovs.

01:46:24.800 I don't know if you know who killed them.

01:46:27.440 Spoiler alert, the Jews.

01:46:30.140 Bolsheviks.

01:46:30.840 Yeah.

01:46:31.180 Not good people.

01:46:32.680 It really does bring into question, as everybody's like, it really does bring into question, though.

01:46:38.920 We get into this time period.

01:46:40.180 It's very significant.

01:46:42.160 The end of Christendom.

01:46:43.800 Yeah, the end of Christendom.

01:46:44.840 Or at least, as we've said before, like definitely a downturn.

01:46:48.660 Tsar Nicholas and his family brutally killed by Bolsheviks.

01:46:54.360 And you see sort of the – many people said it's like fall of empires, the end of Christendom, World War I.

01:47:01.420 You have this really strange thing with the king of England, the Kaiser, and Tsar Nicholas are all cousins.

01:47:09.900 And they're all going to war.

01:47:11.380 Millions of people died.

01:47:12.500 Stupid, stupid war.

01:47:13.340 Millions of Protestant Christian men died.

01:47:16.280 For nothing.

01:47:16.760 Yes.

01:47:17.040 And then what comes in afterwards are Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill.

01:47:22.440 The dismantling of Christian empire and the replacement of it with secular humanist globalism, with communism, with all sorts of other isms that are deleterious.

01:47:32.180 Really what we're facing today.

01:47:34.360 Yeah, what we're facing today.

01:47:36.080 And so in many ways, whether it's an end or – I think we're too close.

01:47:40.960 We're too close to it in history.

01:47:42.720 We need a couple more centuries before we can make some analysis like that.

01:47:46.540 But certainly a watershed moment in the history of Christendom.

01:47:52.300 Yeah, it's very interesting.

01:47:53.520 Also, as I said, Sergeant Nicholas, you can get more of this on the Davis Vault.

01:47:58.120 But very interesting that the Eastern Orthodox Russian church has not left this.

01:48:03.220 I think he's actually sainted in their church.

01:48:08.360 They were like reopening investigations about the potential that it's a Jewish ritual killing.

01:48:14.080 All right.

01:48:14.460 regardless it still matters to the Russian people

01:48:17.420 when you think about it that's actually not

01:48:19.320 that long ago

01:48:20.060 it's not that long ago

01:48:22.920 no no it's not that 100 years

01:48:25.020 yeah like think about we often think about

01:48:27.340 the crusaders that captured Jerusalem

01:48:29.120 in these places as being like and they barely held on to it

01:48:31.240 for any time it was like 200

01:48:33.020 years you know

01:48:34.580 centuries that they maintained

01:48:36.600 dominance they were like oh that was you know

01:48:39.060 but then we look at events that happened at the turn

01:48:41.260 of the 19th and 20th centuries and

01:48:43.140 And we're like, oh, that was ancient history five minutes ago, five minutes, like five

01:48:48.760 minutes ago, which shows you how fast culture can turn if you own the narrative.

01:48:54.220 That's why this season is so important.

01:48:56.340 The King's Hall.

01:48:57.280 That's right.

01:48:57.480 We're going to own the narrative.

01:48:58.520 Dan, we're going to have you do the honors of closing us down with the charge.

01:49:01.860 Before we do that, we do want to encourage people to check out new christendompress.com

01:49:06.160 slash conference.

01:49:07.620 Come to our conference in Ogden, June 6th through 8th.

01:49:12.120 You can learn more about what we're doing.

01:49:14.400 We're going to be talking about multiculturalism, how great it is.

01:49:17.560 Yeah, really multiculturalism.

01:49:19.180 Yeah, that's, I mean, more or less.

01:49:21.180 Really?

01:49:21.900 That's what we're talking about?

01:49:23.000 Just quit.

01:49:23.740 We have, Stephen Wolf is going to be on hand to address multiculturalism.

01:49:28.740 I have a hunch he's going to be talking about how bad it is.

01:49:31.300 Interesting, interesting.

01:49:32.300 Yeah.

01:49:33.040 And a lot of great speakers are going to be there as well.

01:49:36.140 Again, Dr. Joe Rigney will be there.

01:49:38.740 We've got Joel Webin.

01:49:39.960 we've got Brian

01:49:41.440 Sauve

01:49:42.180 I won't tell you

01:49:43.600 how it's pronounced

01:49:44.080 don't do it

01:49:44.780 I won't do it

01:49:46.440 I won't do it

01:49:47.880 but be sure to

01:49:48.600 check that out

01:49:49.020 newchristendompress.com

01:49:50.360 slash conference

01:49:51.440 check the link

01:49:52.020 in the show notes

01:49:52.600 and finally sign up

01:49:53.740 for Patreon

01:49:54.460 where you get

01:49:55.040 access to

01:49:55.920 the Deus

01:49:56.500 Vault

01:49:57.560 Dan I turn things

01:49:58.640 over to you

01:49:59.720 for the charge

01:50:01.160 for episode one

01:50:03.180 season three

01:50:04.080 and this masterpiece

01:50:05.600 of a season

01:50:06.580 that we're

01:50:07.000 undertaking

01:50:07.720 alright

01:50:08.260 alright

01:50:08.980 it. I'll give it my best shot. All right. Do not miss your chance to blow. Opportunity comes

01:50:13.260 once in a lifetime. You can't steal from a well-known Muslim rapper like that.

01:50:17.420 There's a mighty work set before you. There's a mighty work set before you. You play a small part

01:50:22.880 in the growing of the mustard seed into a tree that covers the earth. And part of your responsibility

01:50:30.440 is to know the great deeds of your spiritual forefathers, of the kings and the priests and

01:50:36.720 the bishops and the great men and women that came before you and to uncover that history,

01:50:41.960 to encourage you, to strengthen you on the mission forward. And so there is a great work

01:50:47.860 set before us to rebuild the walls of Christendom against the secular pagans and the Muhammadans

01:50:54.120 and all other demonic religions for the love of the people to spread the good news of Jesus Christ

01:51:02.840 and to protect those that you're responsible for.

01:51:05.140 So be inspired.

01:51:06.120 Start building.

01:51:07.400 Deus Valt.

01:51:08.280 Deus Valt.

01:51:09.080 Deus Valt.

01:51:16.660 Well, in case you didn't know,

01:51:17.980 we have another King's Hall show called The After Hours,

01:51:20.540 and it's available only to our patrons.

01:51:23.200 We have a great time in The After Hours.

01:51:24.740 I play hype songs, which Brian loves.

01:51:26.760 Sometimes we even talk about Brian's cut.

01:51:28.460 We talk about recent news on X and answer listener questions.

01:51:31.440 Overall, it's a great time, so I'd encourage you to head over to patreon.com slash thekingshall

01:51:37.660 if you'd like to support the show and get some extra content.

The King's Hall - January 12, 2024

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Christendom

Episode Stats

Transcript