The Michael Knowles Show - Christianity & Nationalism： Michael Knowles Interviews Theologian Douglas Wilson

00:00:00.000 She had taken purity rings, melted them down, and made a little bowling trophy model of female genitalia. 1.00

00:00:08.600 And she then presented this trophy to Gloria Steinem as an award. 0.67

00:00:14.380 And I said, basically in a piece, I said, look, these two women have reduced women to that. 1.00

00:00:21.700 So all they are saying is that they are a couple of C-words.

00:00:25.620 What I've seen is that people will gather, they'll go through all my right and right a lot, and they will gather up the few instances where I've used a jalapeno.

00:00:34.040 They gather them all up and put them on one cracker and then make a meme out of it and say, look at this bad person.

00:00:40.520 Well, I'm not going to apologize for any of that.

00:00:43.520 To hear the media talk about my guest is to think that this man is Darth Vader.

00:00:49.940 He is actually scarier than Darth Vader and a greater threat to the Republic and our whole

00:00:55.620 political order. I just know him as Doug Wilson. Doug Wilson, who is one of the leading proponents

00:01:03.500 of Christian nationalism, a pastor in Idaho, and the author of a new book, No Such Thing as Bad

00:01:08.580 Words, which I want to get to as well, because I'm very, very taken with language and how speech

00:01:13.440 relates to our identity and our salvation and everything in between. First, though,

00:01:19.940 Mr. Vader, Pastor Wilson, thank you for coming on the show.

00:01:24.180 It's great to come with you, to you, from the Death Star.

00:01:28.820 Yes.

00:01:29.460 You know, I wanted to have you on the show for a long time.

00:01:32.520 To hear about you in the media, you're maybe not public enemy number one, but you're certainly up there.

00:01:39.440 And it's because you advocate Christian nationalism, which seems to mean everything to every person.

00:01:46.120 But whatever it is, the liberals don't like it.

00:01:49.220 Right.

00:01:49.700 You seem like an amiable fella. What is Christian nationalism, and why do these guys hate you so

00:01:55.060 much? Yeah. My short form, I've got several short definitions. One is that I'm a Christian,

00:02:02.200 and I love my country. And those two realities occupy the same space in my head. I don't want

00:02:11.040 to be schizophrenic about it. So I don't want to have my Christianity in one compartment,

00:02:15.940 and my patriotism in another compartment.

00:02:19.600 I believe that, and that leads to the second short form definition,

00:02:23.760 which is Christian nationalism is the belief that Americans should stop making God angry.

00:02:30.960 Simple enough.

00:02:31.680 There's certain things we're doing.

00:02:33.020 Yeah, that kind of gets it.

00:02:34.340 So some argue that America was founded without an established church,

00:02:40.840 and they'll even go so far as to quote a private letter of Thomas Jefferson

00:02:43.800 that we have a firm separation of church and state,

00:02:46.600 which most reasonable people know is not true.

00:02:50.080 You know, we had established churches

00:02:51.660 in the various states at the time

00:02:53.180 of the ratification of the constitution.

00:02:55.520 But nevertheless, they find this scary.

00:02:58.160 They think it's like a kind of creeping theocracy.

00:03:00.920 So I'm with you.

00:03:02.120 When this term came around, I said, well, hold on.

00:03:04.240 I'm Christian and I love,

00:03:06.560 I'm not exactly a nationalist, but I love my nation.

00:03:09.280 I give two cheers for nationalism.

00:03:11.300 I'm not saying it's the be-all, end-all form of world order, but it's pretty good.

00:03:15.040 It's worked out well.

00:03:16.040 So I guess I'm a Christian nationalist.

00:03:18.260 What does that mean practically?

00:03:21.320 Well, practically, it means even if you have a nuanced definition, and I'm two-thirds of

00:03:26.640 the way there, if you oppose the secular jihad in any way, if you say the sexual revolution

00:03:34.720 was a bad deal, if you oppose surgeries for children, top and bottom surgeries for children,

00:03:43.440 if you oppose Obergefell, same-sex mirage, and you're a Christian, you will be categorized as 0.61

00:03:50.660 a Christian nationalist. There's just no escaping it. They've got this box that they want everybody

00:03:56.420 to, they want to put everybody in if we are Christians and we oppose their agenda.

00:04:04.540 If you're the occasional one-off atheist or agnostic who read a little bit too much of

00:04:10.740 Ayn Rand and you oppose some of their stuff, they will oppose you and they won't like you,

00:04:17.160 but they won't call you a Christian nationalist.

00:04:19.240 But believers, Christians, who say, my Christianity is not a private, this is not a mystery religion.

00:04:28.040 It's not a private thing.

00:04:30.060 I'm allowed to be a Christian in the public square, right?

00:04:34.760 And to speak and think that way.

00:04:38.380 And if the authorities didn't want Christianity to be functioning in the public square, they should have thought of that before they crucified Jesus there.

00:04:47.820 Checks out.

00:04:48.400 You know, for most of our nation's history, we were allowed to celebrate and have Christian services and images in the public square.

00:04:57.260 And then in recent decades, the courts have said, well, there have been challenges.

00:05:01.960 And they say, you're not allowed to do that.

00:05:03.360 You're not allowed to have a crash, for instance, at Christmas or Christmas tree even.

00:05:07.080 You know, that would be bringing too much religion into the public square. 1.00

00:05:10.820 But the courts have gotten around this by saying, no, you can have some Christian displays because they serve a secular purpose too.

00:05:18.260 And I'm really annoyed by this because I like the decision.

00:05:21.200 Yes, obviously, I want my creches in the public square and the trees and all that. 0.64

00:05:24.320 But that's not why. 0.97

00:05:26.420 That reasoning is ridiculous. 0.90

00:05:28.380 It doesn't have to be secular. 0.98

00:05:30.120 It isn't secular, first of all.

00:05:31.860 And our nation was founded broadly on Christianity.

00:05:35.380 Now, there is a wrinkle there, which is when some of my puritanical forebears came here on the Mayflower,

00:05:42.760 They also banned displays at Christmas because they thought that Christmas was too popish.

00:05:49.760 It was too Anglican, and the Anglican church was too Catholic, and so they got rid of it. 0.99

00:05:54.280 Governor Bradford famously on Christmas Day made everyone go work, and the few people he let stay home, when he came back at lunch and saw they were playing with Christmas toys, he took their toys away.

00:06:03.660 And he said, you will either sit and pray or you will get in the fields.

00:06:06.200 You know, so funny enough, there were there were bands of displays and then we had them for a long time.

00:06:12.520 And now the atheists and non-Christians want to get rid of them. 1.00

00:06:15.200 But all of that to say, what kind of Christianity are we talking about here? 0.97

00:06:19.200 Because you got in a lot of hot water when you said, well, looking in a Christian nationalist view, we would be banning all sorts of nonsense and the gay stuff and pride and all this.

00:06:28.320 And Catholic processions, you know, a Eucharistic procession or a Marian procession.

00:06:33.140 I said, well, hold on.

00:06:34.080 Wait, I'm out.

00:06:34.580 I love Christian nationalism.

00:06:37.040 I'm generally for it, but I'm Catholic and I love my Eucharistic processions.

00:06:42.080 To me, this would be part and parcel of it.

00:06:43.880 So is it, I get why Protestants would not like that, but basically how sectarian is

00:06:51.780 Christian nationalism and how broad is it or how broad can it be?

00:06:55.180 Right.

00:06:55.840 So that depends on what happens actually.

00:06:58.600 So when I was talking to when those comments came out on Dad Saves America and then got some traction, I was very pleased that Michael Brendan Doherty wrote a Catholic, wrote a piece defending me.

00:07:14.400 And Peter Williams also did the same.

00:07:17.380 He said, this is like the guy's a Protestant and he actually thinks it right now.

00:07:21.640 what I was doing was imagining an ideal republic 500 years down the road. And I was conceptually

00:07:29.660 talking about what would you do in a Protestant republic? How do you balance, how do you maximize

00:07:34.920 religious liberty and liberty of conscience, which I believe in, with the public order, the

00:07:42.060 consensus that that society has grown up around. Dougherty talked about how when the

00:07:52.040 restrictions on Catholics were being lifted in the United Kingdom, the Catholics wanted to 1.00

00:07:59.120 celebrate with the Eucharistic procession, and a liberal prime minister begged them not to,

00:08:04.260 please, please, please don't do this. So basically, politics is the art of the possible.

00:08:09.260 So in the current in the current moment, I want to stand with Catholics shoulder to shoulder against the secular Klingons. 0.97

00:08:20.360 You know, I think I think we've got bigger fish to fry at the same time when someone talks to me about, well, how do you conceptualize this?

00:08:29.620 Where is this all going? I believe that simple honesty requires me to answer the question and not to be coy.

00:08:36.480 So if I were to conceptualize an integralist Catholic country, I would not expect – I wouldn't expect to get a parade permit for my sausage parade in Lent, right?

00:08:56.060 Of course.

00:08:57.020 I didn't – when you made those comments, obviously I didn't agree with them, but I sort of respected them.

00:09:03.320 And I didn't, I know some people kind of freaked out about it. And I said, well, no, hold on. He's just being honest and he's sort of advancing this particular Protestant view. I thought Michael, Brendan Doherty's comments were pretty good on this as well.

00:09:15.220 Yeah. But that is the question then, because as a practical matter, if you want to bring Catholics along, you know, to say, look, here, we've got this battle right now in the long run where I'd like to go is this actually reminiscent of the very early American colonial era, like early 17th century kind of Protestantism.

00:09:35.380 That's where we want to go. And they'll say, well, I don't want to go there. However, it does seem to me we do have an established national religion.

00:09:41.720 It is liberal progressivism. We have a liturgical calendar with all the secular saints, whether

00:09:47.600 we're talking about Martin Luther King or Harvey Milk. We've got liturgical seasons even. I think

00:09:53.960 pride used to be a week and then a month. Now it's roughly half a year and growing. We have

00:10:00.680 prayers and hymns, the black national anthem that they're trying to add to the NFL. That's part of

00:10:06.960 the liturgy of liberalism. So we have all of these things. And if you contradict it,

00:10:11.320 you will be faced with far greater punishment than any medieval inquisition.

00:10:14.600 So I totally agree with you. There is a common enemy here and we have to band together against

00:10:22.260 it. This is what, I'm sorry, this is what we call an inescapable concept. It's not whether,

00:10:29.140 but it's not whether, but which it's not whether you're going to impose a morality. It's which

00:10:34.900 morality you're going to impose. It's not whether you have a theocracy. It's which Theo is the God

00:10:41.200 of the system. It's not whether, but which. So you're exactly right. We have an established

00:10:47.540 church. I could go downtown in any major American city and get arrested within 15 minutes

00:10:55.040 on the basis of what I was saying alone. Okay. And they wouldn't call it blasphemy laws,

00:11:02.400 but they call it hate crimes or, you know, whatever. But it functions as a blasphemy law.

00:11:09.280 All societies that cohere have restrictions on things you can say or not say. And because of 1.00

00:11:16.940 a shared consensus, nobody thinks of it as censorship. Everybody just agrees that that's

00:11:23.160 not done, right? That's not done. And then if an outlier does it, they know how to crack down on

00:11:28.700 you. So then when someone comes along and envisions a Christian republic where the standards for the

00:11:36.000 imposition are different standards, but you're doing the same thing, you're protecting a different

00:11:41.600 center, but all societies protect their center. I agree with that. I guess my only prediction,

00:11:49.600 my difference in prediction in the long run is that America will trend Catholic. And the reason 0.98

00:11:55.280 I say this is not just as a partisan or from my personal biases, but Alexei de Tocqueville

00:12:02.080 predicted this in Democracy in America in 1830. He said, it's a funny thing in America because

00:12:07.900 the Catholics give up their religion. They become kind of atheistic. He said, but a lot of Protestants 0.93

00:12:12.300 become Catholic. And he said, this doesn't even totally have to do with religion. It has to do

00:12:17.660 with democracy, that Catholicism being universal has this real democratizing element to it. So I

00:12:24.900 don't know. I mean, we'll see. Tocqueville had two predictions. He said America is ironically

00:12:30.660 either going to trend in the Catholic direction or they're going to become atheists. And

00:12:35.180 the atheist side has won for a long time, though there is a turnaround in religion now.

00:12:41.140 I am so, I'm totally with you on the point about norms and speech. And I mean, I have been

00:12:46.220 yelling this for years. All the while, even conservatives will say, we don't need standards.

00:12:51.440 We don't need norms. We just need free speech absolutism, whatever. I said, you guys, this is

00:12:55.660 so sophomoric. You know, that's not just not how societies work. So I'm very interested in your

00:13:00.520 book, No Such Thing as Bad Words. What is the thesis? Unfortunately, I don't have a copy yet,

00:13:06.020 but I've just kind of read the review of it. But what is the thesis?

00:13:11.760 So the thesis is one of the things that has gotten me into trouble is that I've spoken

00:13:17.340 with a less than perfect tenderness towards some of our secular pieties, right? And sometimes the

00:13:25.120 language I've used has been pretty rough, all right? And that language is, for pious evangelical 1.00

00:13:33.400 Christians, some of the language I've used is outside the pale. It's, okay, Christians don't 1.00

00:13:40.380 talk that way. Now, if you can give an example for people who haven't been following, we're

00:13:44.500 talking about four letter words or we're talking about just harsh diction? Okay. So both. I wrote

00:13:51.260 a number of years ago, I wrote a book called The Serrated Edge, A Serrated Edge, which had to do

00:13:57.880 with satire, lampooning, polemics, that kind of language. And I defended that. And then no such

00:14:05.800 thing as bad words is occasionally, and it's very occasionally in the midst of one of these polemical

00:14:11.720 serving up the hors d'oeuvres, I will put an occasional jalapeno on one of the crackers.

00:14:19.260 All right. And some people have said, well, okay, I agree with the people you're targeting,

00:14:25.820 but yeah, an obscenity or something that you don't usually hear a preacher say.

00:14:33.260 And so one of the things I do at the very beginning of the book is I break down in

00:14:39.160 English, there are four categories of words. There's obscenity, there's cursing, there's

00:14:45.080 vulgarity, and there's swearing. Okay. Swearing, different orders, swearing, cursing, obscenity,

00:14:51.700 and vulgarity. And the Bible prohibits all four. Okay. You can find a passage where, you know,

00:14:59.200 their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness, right? Jesus is saying, swear not at all,

00:15:06.280 neither by heaven or, you know, in vulgarity, it says, Paul says in Ephesians, not to be given

00:15:14.480 to crass joking. Colossians too. Yeah, Colossians as well. And then obscenity would be, it's shameful

00:15:24.840 to mention what the Gentiles even do in secret. So you've got, but then you can go through the Bible 0.79

00:15:29.520 and find examples of all four. Right? So, when Jesus quotes Deuteronomy in his exchange with

00:15:39.520 the devil, he says, you should serve the Lord your God and serve him only. Well, in Deuteronomy,

00:15:44.980 the verse finishes, and take your oaths in his name. You should swear. Cursing. Paul says in

00:15:51.700 Galatians, if we are an angel from heaven, preach to you a different gospel, let him be accursed. 1.00

00:15:57.460 God damn that guy. 1.00

00:16:00.740 Vulgarity. 1.00

00:16:01.680 When Isaiah says all our righteousness is as filthy rags, the Hebrew, it's referring to a used menstrual cloth. 0.94

00:16:09.460 Okay, it's vulgar and religiously taboo on top of that.

00:16:13.580 So highly offensive language. 0.83

00:16:15.780 And then obscenity, when Ezekiel goes after the idolatry of the Israelites, and he compares them lusting after the Assyrians whose genitals are like donkeys and who ejaculate like horses, that's not something that's going to be read in the scripture reading Sunday morning, likely. 0.58

00:16:36.920 It probably doesn't come up in Sunday school lessons, but it is in the Bible.

00:16:41.340 And so what I want to be, and this is me being a good Protestant, I want to be a Bible guy.

00:16:46.980 And so if I have prohibitions of all four categories, and I have examples of all four

00:16:52.260 categories, there must be a principle that enables me to discern when this would be sinful

00:16:58.960 and when it would not be sinful, when it would be righteous, when it would be unrighteous.

00:17:03.540 I freely grant that Christians ought not to be cussing like sailors.

00:17:08.600 You know, our language is to be pure, whatever's lovely, whatever's pure, whatever's noble.

00:17:14.000 I don't think Christians should. 1.00

00:17:15.760 There's a T-shirt that says, I love Jesus, but I cuss a little.

00:17:19.420 I don't think that's appropriate.

00:17:22.600 But I also believe that there are occasions when prophetic language is what I call it.

00:17:28.940 prophetic language is absolutely called for in a, in a firefight. So when in a verbal firefight,

00:17:37.960 so when Elijah is confronting the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel and the showdown where he calls

00:17:44.780 down fire from heaven, when he taunts the priests of Baal, when they're dancing around their altar

00:17:49.880 and literally he says, maybe your God's in the bathroom, pound on the door louder.

00:17:54.280 You know, he's being kind of crass there and taunting their deity.

00:18:01.020 There are times when that's appropriate.

00:18:02.880 And not only so, there are times when it's inappropriate to not be that way.

00:18:08.700 A lot of Christians feel like we have to be winsome and polite 24-7, nonstop, around the calendar.

00:18:18.840 and it never occurs to us to realize that Jesus was one of the most impolite people ever.

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00:19:36.240 This reminds me of St. Thomas Aquinas, who, contrary to the spirit of our age, which says,

00:19:42.660 You know, I think they believe that never go to bed angry is the 11th commandment or something.

00:19:47.460 You know, you just always have to be smiley, smiley all the time.

00:19:49.960 But St. Thomas takes on this question.

00:19:52.040 He says, you know, should you ever be angry?

00:19:53.600 And he says, not only should you be angry, not only is anger called for in certain circumstances,

00:19:59.800 but not to feel anger at injustice actually represents a defect.

00:20:05.700 It represents a deficiency in your character.

00:20:08.000 Something's gone wrong with you.

00:20:09.000 If you see a grave injustice and it doesn't anger you, you're missing something.

00:20:12.660 man. You can't have a smile on your face all the time. And it reminds me, too, your whole

00:20:18.020 discussion of this, which is that I love rules. I like rules. They're good. I like laws. But I

00:20:25.380 don't love legalism. You know, that's the difference. And the difference is this human

00:20:28.740 component. You know, I had a priest give an excellent homily one time where he said, you

00:20:33.900 know, people, maybe just because of how we're catechized as little kids, in Sunday school,

00:20:38.160 we learn, these are the rules, whatever. We think of sin as breaking a rule. Sin is not breaking a

00:20:45.380 rule. Sin is a violation of a relationship of grace. And our Lord gives us rules, but the rules

00:20:51.540 are there kind of as guardrails. They're there as a way to guide us on this relationship of grace.

00:20:57.640 The distinction between mortal and venial sin even, which scripturally comes from the

00:21:01.820 Johannine epistles. But it describes how there's, all sin is unrighteousness, obviously,

00:21:09.740 but some sin is mortal and some sin is not. And what's the distinction? The church's traditional

00:21:14.180 distinction is mortal sin has to be grave matter. So not trivial matter, but grave matter. It has

00:21:20.700 to be done with full knowledge and it has to be done with full consent of the will. You can't

00:21:26.300 accidentally commit a mortal sin. And the reason for this is what sin really is, is not just like

00:21:33.320 oopsie-daisy, you know, I broke a rule. Sin is turning on God. It's disobeying God. And the reason

00:21:41.620 that we should repent of our sins is not primarily because we want to go to heaven or because we

00:21:45.020 dread hell, but because we have offended God who is deserving of our love. You know, it's a lack

00:21:51.480 of charity for God to whom we owe everything. And I don't know. I mean, I think everybody kind

00:21:56.300 of views sin that way often, but maybe it's just because we learn about it when we're kids. But

00:22:00.240 obviously, you're not going to go to hell on a technicality. I think God is greater than

00:22:07.840 sending you to hell on a technicality. A lot of people think that the day of judgment

00:22:12.780 is the day when God loses all sense of proportion.

00:22:17.880 And what it actually is, is when people are condemned,

00:22:22.140 it's because they refuse to let go of their lack of a sense of proportion.

00:22:28.160 It's lack of repentance.

00:22:30.740 So the issue is why are some people lost?

00:22:34.980 It's they won't let go of their sin.

00:22:38.160 And the person who humbles himself and looks to Christ on the cross

00:22:42.420 and calls out to God, he is delivered. He is saved. And you're exactly right. Sin is,

00:22:49.880 we can describe the relationship and put house rules, you know, describe what this looks like.

00:22:56.400 But there are some people that want to post the rules on the fridge, or they want to carve them

00:23:01.040 in stone and say, they want to have a relationship with the rules instead of a relationship with

00:23:06.680 the God who gave us these rules to help us define what that relationship should look like.

00:23:13.940 And so consequently, and it's really funny going back to the bad words thing, is there are people

00:23:19.940 who say there's no justification ever for using this kind of language. One of the famous ones was

00:23:26.600 I was talking about Nadia Bowles Weber, who's a Lutheran theologian heretic lady and radical left. 1.00

00:23:34.600 And she had taken, gathered up purity rings from a bunch of ex-evangelicals. 0.54

00:23:44.200 You know, she'd gathered the purity, melted them down and made a model, a little bowling 0.99

00:23:50.640 trophy model of female genitalia. 0.95

00:23:53.320 And then, and she then presented this trophy of female genitalia to Gloria Steinem and 1.00

00:24:02.040 as an award. 0.86

00:24:03.800 and so there was uh you couldn't make it up you couldn't script it any better in hollywood i mean

00:24:09.420 these people are children and it just whatever the crassest most absurd thing to do it they will do

00:24:15.680 it and if i wrote a novel with that scene in it the editor would send it back and say

00:24:21.860 farfetched too farfetched um c.s lewis and malcolm mugridge and others said we live in a time when

00:24:28.540 satire is becoming really difficult because trying to overstate it, well, somebody's there

00:24:35.060 ahead of you doing it for real. Well, she presented this trophy to Gloria Steinem and it was an award

00:24:43.100 saying everybody's, yay, look at this empowerment and everything. And then there were some respected

00:24:49.900 theological types in the Protestant world who were giving this the softball treatment. Yes,

00:24:56.820 I have my differences with Nadia Bowles-Weber, but I share some of her concerns with purity culture, that kind of that kind of anemic reaction, that kind of anemic reaction.

00:25:07.360 And I said, basically, in a piece, I said, look, this is not my language.

00:25:13.600 This is not how I talk.

00:25:15.460 But these two women have reduced women to that. 1.00

00:25:20.280 Right.

00:25:20.580 They've reduced women to that. 1.00

00:25:22.200 So all they are saying is that they are a couple of C words.

00:25:26.160 Yeah. OK. And I said, this is this is not me saying this. This is what I'm translating for you. I'm telling you what they are claiming. Yeah, they've they're radically reductionist. Right. And so then so I was I used that word just consciously decidedly because I was opposing something that was horrific.

00:25:49.060 Yeah. Well, then a bunch of people who object to my language picked up my language and quoted me extensively.

00:25:57.320 They see what Wilson said, but they were doing the same thing.

00:26:00.780 They were they were quoting this word in order to oppose someone they thought needed to be opposed.

00:26:06.060 That is me. When I was using that language to oppose what they were they were doing.

00:26:11.560 Yeah. So this is a what I've seen is that people will gather.

00:26:15.760 they'll go through all my writing. I write a lot and they will gather up the few instances where

00:26:20.600 I've used a jalapeno. They gather them all up and put them on one cracker and then make a meme out

00:26:25.920 of it and say, look at this, look at this bad person. Well, I'm not going to apologize for any

00:26:31.000 of that. Of course, sometimes, by the way, clear language can be very helpful because clarity is

00:26:37.160 charity. And so even people will use language that is softer, not even euphemistic or not even

00:26:44.320 neutral. Language that still has a negative connotation, but they don't want to use the

00:26:48.060 really tough term, you know? And one of the distinctions for language nerds, one of the

00:26:52.660 distinctions between the two, George Orwell wrote about this beautifully in Politics in the English

00:26:55.880 Language. He said, Latinate terms, terms that come from Latin are softer. They just, they're

00:27:01.440 less evocative. And terms that come from Saxon, Germanic terms, those are much more evocative.

00:27:06.060 So I can say the female was pulchritudinous, or I can say the girl's hot, the girl's a babe. 0.98

00:27:17.400 And those phrases have semantically precisely the same value.

00:27:22.000 They have exactly the same meaning, but one is just much more evocative. 0.53

00:27:25.420 And so you could have said that these women have reduced womanhood generally to labia. 1.00

00:27:35.180 or so you could have said that yes or you could use the words you used which you don't even want

00:27:39.300 to use now because it would be inappropriate in this context but you use the word you used

00:27:42.820 and it it reveals what that woman actually did there's no you didn't change her meaning you

00:27:49.880 revealed her meaning and this reminds me of uh something chesterton said chesterton being my

00:27:55.360 favorite papist yeah um he's my number two can i get number two at least i'm never gonna be

00:28:02.020 all right well uh chesterton once said uh when you have a longer word a euphemistic word

00:28:09.540 uh and a short pithy word it's the short pithy word that condemns the sin and the euphemism

00:28:17.620 that excuses it or papers over it so beautifully put it's it's i think it's right on the money

00:28:25.780 because people don't want sin exposed, especially the sin of clown world that we're going through.

00:28:35.580 So the other illustration I used is, you know, when, you know, 20 years from now,

00:28:43.400 unless God grants us a great reformation and revival, but 20 years from now,

00:28:47.680 when there's a big halftime show at the Super Bowl, and everybody's parading through a gigantic

00:28:55.380 vulva. And that's the halftime show. And somebody says, somebody says, what is this? And then uses

00:29:04.840 that word. Somebody's got a wheel on him and say, I'll have you, sir, remember that there are ladies 0.99

00:29:09.980 present. And we are in the depths of folly. This is what the Lord pointed out when he said,

00:29:20.620 you strain at a gnat and you swallow a camel. You have no sense of proportion at all. And so the

00:29:28.300 Christians who oppose and fight and do so effectively are considered the problematic 0.95

00:29:35.680 ones. And the ones who dab around the edges and say, you know, I'll grant that what Nadia

00:29:42.040 Bowles-Weber did was not conducive with human flourishing. That's one of my favorite euphemisms.

00:29:49.660 I actually use it frequently because of how funny it is.

00:29:53.300 It's such a circumlocution.

00:29:55.560 Well, you know, I mean, this sort of thing, it's not exactly conducive to human flourishing.

00:30:01.020 And this is how our culture speaks all the time.

00:30:04.720 Not ironically, they do it earnestly, actually.

00:30:07.440 Yeah, I want preachers to get up in the pulpit and say, thus saith the Lord, hear the word

00:30:11.920 of God, ye sinners, and give it to me straight.

00:30:16.880 We are fundamentally a dishonest people. We don't want to call things by their

00:30:24.820 proper names. We don't want vocabulary to reveal what's going on.

00:30:30.580 You know, my great priest friend of mine, Father George Rutler, wonderful writer too,

00:30:34.740 very Chestertonian in his writing, though it's so particular, you might call it Rutlerian.

00:30:40.360 He makes this point. We use all these soft words. And he said, you know,

00:30:43.740 our Lord doesn't use soft words. The evangelists don't use soft words. You know, when Lazarus is

00:30:50.000 in the tomb and Christ shows up and the sisters are weeping, they don't say, you know, he has been,

00:30:57.840 he has passed away several days hence. They say the body stinketh. Okay. That kind of language

00:31:05.480 actually tells you something. It shows you the reality as it is. Totally, totally agree. Now I'm

00:31:10.540 even more excited than I previously was to get the book. No such thing as bad words,

00:31:14.940 a manifesto on taming the tongue paradoxically about when one can use these words, but also

00:31:20.620 about disciplining the tongue. Uh, pastor Wilson, you're not, you're not Darth Vader. It's very

00:31:25.560 strange. I don't. No, I work very hard, but I fail. Listen, hope is a theological virtue. We

00:31:33.260 can all hope, you know, at some point to fulfill this, this mission. Wonderful to have you with

00:31:37.780 Thank you so much for joining.

00:31:38.740 Thank you very much for the invitation.

00:31:40.380 All right, I'll look forward to the next one.

00:31:42.120 I'll see all of you next time as well.

00:31:43.520 I'm Michael Knoll.

00:31:44.020 See you next time.

The Michael Knowles Show - April 04, 2026

Christianity & Nationalism： Michael Knowles Interviews Theologian Douglas Wilson

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