00:00:00.000She had taken purity rings, melted them down, and made a little bowling trophy model of female genitalia.
00:00:08.600And she then presented this trophy to Gloria Steinem as an award.
00:00:14.380And I said, basically in a piece, I said, look, these two women have reduced women to that.
00:00:21.700So all they are saying is that they are a couple of C-words.
00:00:25.620What 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.
00:00:34.040They 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.
00:00:40.520Well, I'm not going to apologize for any of that.
00:00:43.520To hear the media talk about my guest is to think that this man is Darth Vader.
00:00:49.940He is actually scarier than Darth Vader and a greater threat to the Republic and our whole
00:00:55.620political order. I just know him as Doug Wilson. Doug Wilson, who is one of the leading proponents
00:01:03.500of Christian nationalism, a pastor in Idaho, and the author of a new book, No Such Thing as Bad
00:01:08.580Words, which I want to get to as well, because I'm very, very taken with language and how speech
00:01:13.440relates to our identity and our salvation and everything in between. First, though,
00:01:19.940Mr. Vader, Pastor Wilson, thank you for coming on the show.
00:01:24.180It's great to come with you, to you, from the Death Star.
00:04:38.380And 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.
00:05:31.860And our nation was founded broadly on Christianity.
00:05:35.380Now, there is a wrinkle there, which is when some of my puritanical forebears came here on the Mayflower,
00:05:42.760They also banned displays at Christmas because they thought that Christmas was too popish.
00:05:49.760It was too Anglican, and the Anglican church was too Catholic, and so they got rid of it.
00:05:54.280Governor 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.
00:06:03.660And he said, you will either sit and pray or you will get in the fields.
00:06:06.200You know, so funny enough, there were there were bands of displays and then we had them for a long time.
00:06:12.520And now the atheists and non-Christians want to get rid of them.
00:06:15.200But all of that to say, what kind of Christianity are we talking about here?
00:06:19.200Because 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.
00:06:28.320And Catholic processions, you know, a Eucharistic procession or a Marian procession.
00:06:55.840So that depends on what happens actually.
00:06:58.600So 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.
00:07:17.380He said, this is like the guy's a Protestant and he actually thinks it right now.
00:07:21.640what I was doing was imagining an ideal republic 500 years down the road. And I was conceptually
00:07:29.660talking about what would you do in a Protestant republic? How do you balance, how do you maximize
00:07:34.920religious liberty and liberty of conscience, which I believe in, with the public order, the
00:07:42.060consensus that that society has grown up around. Dougherty talked about how when the
00:07:52.040restrictions on Catholics were being lifted in the United Kingdom, the Catholics wanted to
00:07:59.120celebrate with the Eucharistic procession, and a liberal prime minister begged them not to,
00:08:04.260please, please, please don't do this. So basically, politics is the art of the possible.
00:08:09.260So in the current in the current moment, I want to stand with Catholics shoulder to shoulder against the secular Klingons.
00:08:20.360You 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?
00:08:29.620Where is this all going? I believe that simple honesty requires me to answer the question and not to be coy.
00:08:36.480So 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?
00:08:57.020I didn't – when you made those comments, obviously I didn't agree with them, but I sort of respected them.
00:09:03.320And 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.
00:09:15.220Yeah. 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.
00:09:35.380That'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.
00:09:41.720It is liberal progressivism. We have a liturgical calendar with all the secular saints, whether
00:09:47.600we're talking about Martin Luther King or Harvey Milk. We've got liturgical seasons even. I think
00:09:53.960pride used to be a week and then a month. Now it's roughly half a year and growing. We have
00:10:00.680prayers and hymns, the black national anthem that they're trying to add to the NFL. That's part of
00:10:06.960the liturgy of liberalism. So we have all of these things. And if you contradict it,
00:10:11.320you will be faced with far greater punishment than any medieval inquisition.
00:10:14.600So I totally agree with you. There is a common enemy here and we have to band together against
00:10:22.260it. This is what, I'm sorry, this is what we call an inescapable concept. It's not whether,
00:10:29.140but it's not whether, but which it's not whether you're going to impose a morality. It's which
00:10:34.900morality you're going to impose. It's not whether you have a theocracy. It's which Theo is the God
00:10:41.200of the system. It's not whether, but which. So you're exactly right. We have an established
00:10:47.540church. I could go downtown in any major American city and get arrested within 15 minutes
00:10:55.040on the basis of what I was saying alone. Okay. And they wouldn't call it blasphemy laws,
00:11:02.400but they call it hate crimes or, you know, whatever. But it functions as a blasphemy law.
00:11:09.280All societies that cohere have restrictions on things you can say or not say. And because of
00:11:16.940a shared consensus, nobody thinks of it as censorship. Everybody just agrees that that's
00:11:23.160not done, right? That's not done. And then if an outlier does it, they know how to crack down on
00:11:28.700you. So then when someone comes along and envisions a Christian republic where the standards for the
00:11:36.000imposition are different standards, but you're doing the same thing, you're protecting a different
00:11:41.600center, but all societies protect their center. I agree with that. I guess my only prediction,
00:11:49.600my difference in prediction in the long run is that America will trend Catholic. And the reason
00:11:55.280I say this is not just as a partisan or from my personal biases, but Alexei de Tocqueville
00:12:02.080predicted this in Democracy in America in 1830. He said, it's a funny thing in America because
00:12:07.900the Catholics give up their religion. They become kind of atheistic. He said, but a lot of Protestants
00:12:12.300become Catholic. And he said, this doesn't even totally have to do with religion. It has to do
00:12:17.660with democracy, that Catholicism being universal has this real democratizing element to it. So I
00:12:24.900don't know. I mean, we'll see. Tocqueville had two predictions. He said America is ironically
00:12:30.660either going to trend in the Catholic direction or they're going to become atheists. And
00:12:35.180the atheist side has won for a long time, though there is a turnaround in religion now.
00:12:41.140I am so, I'm totally with you on the point about norms and speech. And I mean, I have been
00:12:46.220yelling this for years. All the while, even conservatives will say, we don't need standards.
00:12:51.440We don't need norms. We just need free speech absolutism, whatever. I said, you guys, this is
00:12:55.660so sophomoric. You know, that's not just not how societies work. So I'm very interested in your
00:13:00.520book, No Such Thing as Bad Words. What is the thesis? Unfortunately, I don't have a copy yet,
00:13:06.020but I've just kind of read the review of it. But what is the thesis?
00:13:11.760So the thesis is one of the things that has gotten me into trouble is that I've spoken
00:13:17.340with a less than perfect tenderness towards some of our secular pieties, right? And sometimes the
00:13:25.120language I've used has been pretty rough, all right? And that language is, for pious evangelical
00:13:33.400Christians, some of the language I've used is outside the pale. It's, okay, Christians don't
00:13:40.380talk that way. Now, if you can give an example for people who haven't been following, we're
00:13:44.500talking about four letter words or we're talking about just harsh diction? Okay. So both. I wrote
00:13:51.260a number of years ago, I wrote a book called The Serrated Edge, A Serrated Edge, which had to do
00:13:57.880with satire, lampooning, polemics, that kind of language. And I defended that. And then no such
00:14:05.800thing as bad words is occasionally, and it's very occasionally in the midst of one of these polemical
00:14:11.720serving up the hors d'oeuvres, I will put an occasional jalapeno on one of the crackers.
00:14:19.260All right. And some people have said, well, okay, I agree with the people you're targeting,
00:14:25.820but yeah, an obscenity or something that you don't usually hear a preacher say.
00:14:33.260And so one of the things I do at the very beginning of the book is I break down in
00:14:39.160English, there are four categories of words. There's obscenity, there's cursing, there's
00:14:45.080vulgarity, and there's swearing. Okay. Swearing, different orders, swearing, cursing, obscenity,
00:14:51.700and vulgarity. And the Bible prohibits all four. Okay. You can find a passage where, you know,
00:14:59.200their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness, right? Jesus is saying, swear not at all,
00:15:06.280neither by heaven or, you know, in vulgarity, it says, Paul says in Ephesians, not to be given
00:15:14.480to crass joking. Colossians too. Yeah, Colossians as well. And then obscenity would be, it's shameful
00:15:24.840to mention what the Gentiles even do in secret. So you've got, but then you can go through the Bible
00:15:29.520and find examples of all four. Right? So, when Jesus quotes Deuteronomy in his exchange with
00:15:39.520the devil, he says, you should serve the Lord your God and serve him only. Well, in Deuteronomy,
00:15:44.980the verse finishes, and take your oaths in his name. You should swear. Cursing. Paul says in
00:15:51.700Galatians, if we are an angel from heaven, preach to you a different gospel, let him be accursed.
00:16:15.780And 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.
00:16:36.920It probably doesn't come up in Sunday school lessons, but it is in the Bible.
00:16:41.340And so what I want to be, and this is me being a good Protestant, I want to be a Bible guy.
00:16:46.980And so if I have prohibitions of all four categories, and I have examples of all four
00:16:52.260categories, there must be a principle that enables me to discern when this would be sinful
00:16:58.960and when it would not be sinful, when it would be righteous, when it would be unrighteous.
00:17:03.540I freely grant that Christians ought not to be cussing like sailors.
00:17:08.600You know, our language is to be pure, whatever's lovely, whatever's pure, whatever's noble.
00:24:03.800and so there was uh you couldn't make it up you couldn't script it any better in hollywood i mean
00:24:09.420these people are children and it just whatever the crassest most absurd thing to do it they will do
00:24:15.680it and if i wrote a novel with that scene in it the editor would send it back and say
00:24:21.860farfetched too farfetched um c.s lewis and malcolm mugridge and others said we live in a time when
00:24:28.540satire is becoming really difficult because trying to overstate it, well, somebody's there
00:24:35.060ahead of you doing it for real. Well, she presented this trophy to Gloria Steinem and it was an award
00:24:43.100saying everybody's, yay, look at this empowerment and everything. And then there were some respected
00:24:49.900theological types in the Protestant world who were giving this the softball treatment. Yes,
00:24:56.820I 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.
00:25:07.360And I said, basically, in a piece, I said, look, this is not my language.
00:25:22.200So all they are saying is that they are a couple of C words.
00:25:26.160Yeah. 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.
00:25:49.060Yeah. Well, then a bunch of people who object to my language picked up my language and quoted me extensively.
00:25:57.320They see what Wilson said, but they were doing the same thing.
00:26:00.780They were they were quoting this word in order to oppose someone they thought needed to be opposed.
00:26:06.060That is me. When I was using that language to oppose what they were they were doing.
00:26:11.560Yeah. So this is a what I've seen is that people will gather.
00:26:15.760they'll go through all my writing. I write a lot and they will gather up the few instances where
00:26:20.600I've used a jalapeno. They gather them all up and put them on one cracker and then make a meme out
00:26:25.920of it and say, look at this, look at this bad person. Well, I'm not going to apologize for any
00:26:31.000of that. Of course, sometimes, by the way, clear language can be very helpful because clarity is
00:26:37.160charity. And so even people will use language that is softer, not even euphemistic or not even
00:26:44.320neutral. Language that still has a negative connotation, but they don't want to use the
00:26:48.060really tough term, you know? And one of the distinctions for language nerds, one of the
00:26:52.660distinctions between the two, George Orwell wrote about this beautifully in Politics in the English
00:26:55.880Language. He said, Latinate terms, terms that come from Latin are softer. They just, they're
00:27:01.440less evocative. And terms that come from Saxon, Germanic terms, those are much more evocative.
00:27:06.060So I can say the female was pulchritudinous, or I can say the girl's hot, the girl's a babe.
00:27:17.400And those phrases have semantically precisely the same value.
00:27:22.000They have exactly the same meaning, but one is just much more evocative.
00:27:25.420And so you could have said that these women have reduced womanhood generally to labia.
00:27:35.180or so you could have said that yes or you could use the words you used which you don't even want
00:27:39.300to use now because it would be inappropriate in this context but you use the word you used
00:27:42.820and it it reveals what that woman actually did there's no you didn't change her meaning you
00:27:49.880revealed her meaning and this reminds me of uh something chesterton said chesterton being my
00:27:55.360favorite papist yeah um he's my number two can i get number two at least i'm never gonna be
00:28:02.020all right well uh chesterton once said uh when you have a longer word a euphemistic word
00:28:09.540uh and a short pithy word it's the short pithy word that condemns the sin and the euphemism
00:28:17.620that excuses it or papers over it so beautifully put it's it's i think it's right on the money
00:28:25.780because people don't want sin exposed, especially the sin of clown world that we're going through.
00:28:35.580So the other illustration I used is, you know, when, you know, 20 years from now,
00:28:43.400unless God grants us a great reformation and revival, but 20 years from now,
00:28:47.680when there's a big halftime show at the Super Bowl, and everybody's parading through a gigantic
00:28:55.380vulva. And that's the halftime show. And somebody says, somebody says, what is this? And then uses
00:29:04.840that word. Somebody's got a wheel on him and say, I'll have you, sir, remember that there are ladies
00:29:09.980present. And we are in the depths of folly. This is what the Lord pointed out when he said,
00:29:20.620you strain at a gnat and you swallow a camel. You have no sense of proportion at all. And so the
00:29:28.300Christians who oppose and fight and do so effectively are considered the problematic
00:29:35.680ones. And the ones who dab around the edges and say, you know, I'll grant that what Nadia
00:29:42.040Bowles-Weber did was not conducive with human flourishing. That's one of my favorite euphemisms.
00:29:49.660I actually use it frequently because of how funny it is.