Ep. 187 - Why Won’t Anyone Talk About The Persecuted Christians？
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Summary
A study undertaken this year shows that the persecution and mass murder of Christians around the world is worse today than at any time in history, and Western governments are failing not only to stop it, but even to acknowledge it. Father George Rutler has just inaugurated the first shrine in the world dedicated to persecuted Christians at his church, which is the same church where I wed sweet, little Elisa just a month ago.
Transcript
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A study undertaken this year shows that the persecution and mass murder of Christians
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around the world is worse today than at any time in history, and Western governments are
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failing not only to stop it, but even to acknowledge it. Father George Rutler has
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just inaugurated the first shrine in the world dedicated to persecuted Christians at his church,
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which is the same church where I wed sweet little Elisa just a month ago, the Church of St. Michael
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in Hell's Kitchen. We will discuss the totally silenced Christians' plight, then the mailbag.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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This is going to be a very politically incorrect show. Not politically correct. It is a really
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strange thing right now. Even I didn't realize it, and I've been kind of tuned into these issues of
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Christian persecution in the Middle East and around the world. Right now, Christians in the world are
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the most persecuted faith group that there is. You wouldn't know that. If you talk to people in
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America or in Europe, they always talk about Islamophobia, which Andrew Klavan, I believe,
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wants to find as the irrational fear of having your head cut off. That's not politically correct.
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But that's all you hear about. You don't hear about the Christians. It's silenced. We're talking
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about how we need to bring Muslim migrants over. All we have to do is bring the Muslim migrants over.
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We bring hardly any Christian refugees over, and the Christian refugees are the ones who are being
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utterly decimated by Muslim militants throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. According to this
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study by Aid to the Church in Need, they examined Christians in China, Egypt, Eritrea, India, Iran,
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Iraq, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Turkey. Only Saudi Arabia has not
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gotten significantly worse for Christians over the last few years, and that's only because it can't
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really get much worse. It's not a thriving metropolis of Christians. The Christians have
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been almost entirely wiped out of Iraq and Syria. We know we had Ji Sung-ho on the show,
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the North Korean defector just a week or two ago, and he talked about how if you are said to be a
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Christian in North Korea, you will be executed publicly and on the spot. No questions asked.
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Gun pulled out, shoot you right in the head. This is a weird thing, and especially in the United States
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and in Europe, I think we have this sense now, especially lefties here, have this sense that,
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oh, Iraq and Syria, those are for Muslim people. That's not, the Christians aren't supposed to be
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there. Those aren't for Christian people. But of course, Syria was the home of Christianity for so
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long. All of, not all of them, but many of the early popes came out of Syria. Peter is from Bethsaida.
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Paul had his conversion. He's, you know, he had the scales over his eyes, knocked off his,
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knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus, or knocked off his, as he's going up to Damascus.
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That's not in, that's not in, you know, Rome. That's not in Tours. That's not in England.
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That's in Syria. But we have this, this idea that, you know, that that's for the Muslims. That's for
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the Muslim people. All over the Middle East and Africa, the, the, there are some summary executions
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of Christians, torture, crucifixion, all of these things. Not politically correct to say, but that's why
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we brought on my priest and good friend, Father George Rutler. Father Rutler is, how do you even
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introduce this guy? A singular figure in my reversion to Christianity. He is the pastor of
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the Church of St. Michael in New York. He's the author of, I think, 700,000 books at this point.
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He's a boxer. He's a painter. He's a terrific painter. He plays piano, plays violin. He, you know,
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he's, he's just a true Renaissance man. I asked him one time, he was very kind to display my
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political tome, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a comprehensive guide in his rectory in New York.
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And Father Rutler, I asked him, I said, how do you do all of this? How do you host TV shows and write
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your columns all the time and write books and do that and that? And he looked at me, he said, don't
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sleep. Fair enough answer. I have to take that advice. He stopped by to talk about the Christian
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persecution. And as, excuse me, as happens with him, the conversation wandered a bit. Without
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further ado, here is Father Rutler. Father Rutler, thank you so much for being here.
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Father Rutler, the last time I saw you, you were marrying me off.
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Right. Well, it was a wonderful day. I really, really enjoyed it. I estimate, roughly, I've had
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about 800 weddings. And they've, each one is like, like the first one. I, there's a lot
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of work involved in it. People don't realize that, but it's a great joy to me.
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It was so lovely. And it was so, I was so pleased that you did it and that we did it at the Church
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of St. Michael. And I know some of the viewers of the show have seen photos that I've been posting
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of it. Um, and it occurs to me right before I got married, I'm all nervous. I'm standing in the
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rectory. I actually saw this shrine, the first shrine in the world, uh, dedicated to the persecution
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of Christians. And, uh, it, it shocks me in two ways. One, uh, that there are so many persecuted
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Christians, you know, and that, uh, nobody's really talking about this. And the other, that it's the first
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shrine in the world dedicated to them. Uh, how did, how did it come about and why is nobody caring
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about the persecuted Christians? Well, first of all, I, I have a good friend and a priest
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from England, although he is actually a priest working and coordinated, as we say in canon law,
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that is he's inscribed in a diocese in, in, in Vermont, but he's been on leave now to go and work
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with the Christian emigres, uh, in, in Iraq. He works out of England, but he's back and forth to
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Iraq. He's taking some, some doc, documentary films, which are stunning. The historic center of
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Mosul, it was, it looks like Hiroshima after the bomb. And we don't see much of that. Uh, so,
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uh, he, he is raising consciousness. He, he's organized a group called the Nazarean.org. N-A-S-A-R-O-E-A-N.
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Uh, and they use the letter N, the Arabic letter, the NUM, it's called NUM in Arabic alphabet,
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Nazarean, because the, uh, Muslim countries will not allow the use of the word Christian.
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So they, they call Christians Nazareans. Jesus was from Nazareth. And, uh, these little
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badges are to raise consciousness. It's sort of like, you know, the, a lot of people in
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the second world war deliberately wore yellow stars to show their empathy for the persecuted,
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Jews. Uh, and, um, the icon we're talking about was, uh, done by, uh, an Iraqi, uh, from the
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area of Aradin, which in Arabic means, uh, or Aramaic. They speak Aramaic, which was the
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language our Lord spoke, uh, means Eden. Uh, his house and their property and everything
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were confiscated by the, uh, ISIS. So he had to take his family in, in, uh, exile to, uh,
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Lebanon. Uh, and the icon shows the, the, the Virgin Mary dressed as an Iraqi bride.
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The, uh, second question is, uh, you know, why, uh, has there been such little publicity?
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Well, first of all, it's politically incorrect because the Western culture on the whole, I
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think is very threatened by Islam, doesn't understand Islam. Uh, a lot of people, I think
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of a lot of people of naive left-wing sympathies are following, replicating the same mistake that
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was made in the 1930s by a lot of the Western intelligentsia who thought, well, Hitler is a
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kind of crackpot, but, uh, at least he's anti-Bolshevik. So the enemy of my enemy is my
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friend. And so they looked the other way about, uh, towards the, uh, Nazi atrocities, Kristallnacht.
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They thought that would be, you know, that that led to the concentration camps. We have to remember
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that a lot, a lot of the Western media, including the New York Times, ignored all the evidence on
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the concentration camps. Uh, there was a very noble Polish, uh, Catholic layman, Professor
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Jan Karski, uh, who eventually went into exile. He documented the concentration camps, what was
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going on. He came to the West. Uh, he went to London. They didn't want to hear about it in
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Whitehall. He went to, uh, Washington. He had an hour with Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin
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Roosevelt ignored him, uh, was polite, but didn't want to hear this. He met with Felix
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Frankfurter, who was the only Jewish member of the Supreme Court, uh, who just was angry.
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And he walked around the room and said, uh, you know, he couldn't believe it. And later on,
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he said, I didn't call Karski a liar. I just said that I couldn't believe him. Well, that's
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what these people are doing. A lot of these people are doing today, because to admit what's
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going on is to admit that with Islam, we're dealing with something different from what
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Western bourgeois minds think is religion. You know, we so often hear that these extremists
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are unrepresentative of the Quran. Well, read the Quran. It's right there. It's not the extremists.
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It's the more moderate Muslims, God bless them, uh, who want really to integrate into Western
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society or adopt virtues of Judeo-Christian society. Uh, they're, they're the, uh, they're
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the eccentrics. Militant Islam represents the, uh, uh, authentic interpretation of the Quran.
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And that's very politically incorrect to say, uh, but it's a, it's a fact. And to acknowledge
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that what's going on in the Middle East, where you have countries where the Christian populations
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are evaporating, right? In Bethlehem, the population, the Christian population, they're in the birthplace
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of Christ vanishing. People do not want to admit it. And I think you just like, uh, just as in the 1930s,
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you had people, you know, being, giving the past to the Nazis because they thought that they, that
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Hitler and Stalin could fight it out among, between themselves, but they didn't. We had the, we had the
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Ribbentrop pack, which upset the leftists in the West. Uh, so today we have people thinking that,
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well, yeah, the, uh, the, uh, bourgeois liberal progressivists who are anti-Judeo-Christian
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civilization, uh, they wouldn't put it that way, but they are. The way they want to, uh,
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fragment the whole Judeo-Christian moral structure, they'll say, well, all right, Islam,
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these people are kind of nutty, but, uh, they'll bring down Judeo-Christian society.
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And I think, well, again, the enemy of my enemies, my friend, but as with letting, giving Hitler a
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path, you don't understand when you do that, what a bacillus you are unleashing on the world.
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Of course that, you know, it's interesting that you, you mentioned that this, this longstanding
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conflict between Islam and the West. Hilaire Belloc, the great Catholic writer wrote about
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this in the 1930s. He said, we're at a lull right now. Uh, things are going all right,
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but within half a century or so, uh, Islam may start, uh, rising up against the West again,
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and we're going to have to deal with it. And I saw there was a study by aid to the church in need
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and the McLaughlin and associates, which showed that among American Catholics, the persecution of
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Christians in the middle East and elsewhere ranks the lowest among their list of concerns and global
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priorities ranking higher, our poverty, which I believe will always be with us. It's written
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in a book somewhere and, uh, uh, climate change, climate change is a greater priority. And it,
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I think it speaks to what you're talking about. There has been an ideological displacement or assault
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on Judeo-Christian, uh, morality and Western civilization. And that ideological assault is
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replacing it. You saw Dianne Feinstein grilling a judge, Amy Coney Barrett. And she said, you know,
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I'm worried because the dogma lives loudly within you. Uh, there, there does seem to be a real battle
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here. Um, I, you, you saw this firsthand, you you're in New York city. You've been there. You
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were an eyewitness to the September 11th terrorist attacks. Uh, you were down there at the trade center.
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Has the culture moved in any sort of better direction in the country or are we just sliding
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toward further decay? No, no, I don't, I don't, I don't think, I don't think it has are, you know,
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the difference between the theological virtue of hope, which is trusting in God, uh, and the humanistic,
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uh, quality of, of optimism. Optimism is just wishing things will be well. Hope means knowing
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things will go well if we trust in God, uh, and a long time. Yes. I say to my friends, you know,
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this, our culture now is very decadent, but as an historian, I would say, uh, we can hopefully say
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that, uh, maybe in two or 300 years, things will get better, but, but that's unless you intend to live
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that long, that's not so much of a consolation. I belong to a few, I'm part Scottish. I belong to
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Scottish societies that the Scottish tend to be, uh, you know, some of them generalization,
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a little doer, a little surly. Yeah. Yeah. But the difference between a Scottish pessimist
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and a Scottish optimist and a Scottish pessimist will say, ah, things couldn't be any worse than
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they are now. And a Scots optimist says, oh yes, they can. But I think your people are like,
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they do like the, uh, uh, the ostrich with his head in the sand. They don't want to admit what's
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going on. Europe is learning. Europe is learning, but the hard way. I think you have some heroic
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cultures, uh, where I think of, uh, Poland and, uh, and, uh, Hungary, uh, perhaps Croatia, some of the,
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those, those countries that have suffered so vividly all through history, but most dramatically
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in present, they know what they are dealing with. Others are comfortable. And you know,
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as a matter of fact, you know, the statistics was of the, all the heads of the, uh, EU countries,
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I think all the heads of the EU countries, at least six of them are childless. Wow. So, you know,
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we have, you know, demagogues and I always, I loathe it when politicians say, we're doing this for
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our children. Stop it. That's, that's demagoguery. Uh, but in Europe, it's worse because they don't
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have any children to worry about. Yeah. We're just doing it for ourselves. They love a socialist
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economy because it's fine. They, they, they, they can pass the debt on because they have,
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you know, they, they, their own, they don't have children to inherit that, uh, debt. That's going
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to, the burden's going to be on the body politic. Uh, so we can belabor the image of the decline
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and fall of Rome, but, uh, the noble Roman Republic, uh, was transformed in, into the,
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imperium. All right. You had em, noble emperors like Augustus later on, maybe, uh, Constantine,
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but most of them, well, you know, they were, they were like Bill Clinton on a bad day. And,
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and so what happened, what happened to, they didn't want, they got soft. They couldn't fight.
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And then you had the Goths, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Huns, listen to their names,
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the Vandals, and the Huns. That gives you an idea. Doesn't, doesn't sound good. Doesn't sound
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promising. It's not exactly the, it's not exactly the order of the Cincinnati. And, uh, but they
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didn't want to admit. And, uh, the other people were well-trained and they, they could find a soft
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spot and, and they moved in. And I think that's the way we are today. Uh, we, we have just, you know,
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when you have a whole culture growing, uh, misshaping this, the younger culture, uh, when
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you have that whole culture, basically their, their, their, their fondest memories are Woodstock.
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And now they're the tenured professors and deans and presidents of universities. They've,
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they've misformed the whole generation. So when an election goes, uh, contrary to what
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they thought it would be, what they were taught, it would, told it was going to be in the bubble in
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which they live, what happens? They have to go into psychiatric treatment, safe spaces and all that.
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That's right. Coloring books and puppies. Yeah. Yeah. But when the barbarian invades, there are
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no safe spaces. That is a fearful warning, certainly. And it is true. I saw this among my
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friends who were still in graduate school and college and the campuses erupted. They were so
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shocked and horrified when president Trump won. And there is this glimmer of light, I hope, in so
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much as there has been deregulation, there has been a greater protection of religious freedom, of
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individual liberty. And, and there are all of these judges. This has been the great fight all of last
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week are the judges who are not only textualist and originalist and lean conservative, but dare I say
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they're all Catholic. And this did actually raise a question to me. When you look back at American
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history, I think it was Arthur Schlesinger said that anti-Catholicism is the deepest bias in American
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history. And yet the leaders of the conservative movement have all been Catholic, it seems, or
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largely Catholic. You had Russell Kirk, you had a member of your own flock, Bill Buckley, and you have
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all of the judges on the Supreme Court. Why is that? Why does Catholicism seem to play some role in
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American conservatism? Well, well, because Catholicism is rooted in, pardon the technical
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language, a realist epistemology. That is to say, they have concrete truths. This contradicts
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relativism, subjectivism. The paramount definer of that philosophy is Thomas Aquinas. And I've noticed
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that Justice Gorsuch and now the nominee, Kavanaugh, both went to the same Jesuit prep school. Now,
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I am not going to risk my life in defense of the Jesuits because I have my great disagreements with
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them. Well, you know, Father Rutler, not to interrupt, but you know the difference between the Jesuits and
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the Dominicans, don't you? The difference, of course, is that they were both Spanish orders. They were both
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founded to combat heresy. The Dominicans to combat the Albigensians, the Jesuits to combat the Protestants.
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And when was the last time you ever heard of an Albigensian? That would be the difference.
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And bear in mind, there's a good example I was talking to you about, about culturism. Read about the
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Albigensians, what they were doing. They would have destroyed Western civilization. They had to be put
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down. They were put down harshly, but if they hadn't been destroyed, we wouldn't be here today. It's as
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simple as that. It's like, you know, if the Holy Roman, if you didn't have Andrea Doria and Juan
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Jobleski and these great Pius V, combating the Islamic, Charles Martel, even before that,
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combating the Islamic invasion of Europe, we would not be here today. But, you know, I think the
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Jesuits are a bit like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead. When she was good,
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she was very, very good. And when she was bad, she was horrid. They're very, very good
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Jesuits, but I don't know, I'm not sure if they're a dying breed or not. But there is this respect for
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classical Aristotelian Thomist reality, and that's lost in a subjective culture, which is disintegrating
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by its own lack of substance. So if you live in a subjective culture when truth is whatever you
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want it to be, what happens? You know, a boy can go into a girl's locker room and say that he's a
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girl. Fine. Why is this being promoted? I have to say, I live in New York City. I see millions of
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people here. I live on 34th Street, which is the craziest street in the universe. I have never
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encountered a transgendered. Maybe they're so well-cosmeticized that I don't recognize it. But
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why? It's such a minute percentage of the population. Why is this being promoted?
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Simply because it's another barb in Judeo-Christian, the Judeo-Christian moral structure. The retired
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head of psychiatry, Johns Hopkins, is not a witch doctor. He has said that telling a child, a boy,
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that he could be a girl or a girl, is child abuse. This is a scientific fact. In the same way,
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abortion is anti-scientific. It denies the reality of the humanity of the unborn.
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Of the unborn. But no, I just mentioned that Casey decision in Pennsylvania, that being free means
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being able to define your own concept of liberty and the meaning of the mystery of life. You know,
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that sounds like some cheap opera, sweet mystery of life. The wonderful poet Anthony Kennedy.
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Yeah. My beloved friend, Justice Scalia, really devastated that just by mockery of it. But
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who wrote those words? Justice Kennedy, who's a Catholic. So just because I'm a Catholic doesn't
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mean that they're going to be heirs, or they may be heirs, but doesn't mean that they continue to
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subscribe to a realist philosophy of the moral order. I mean, Edward Kennedy claimed to be a
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Catholic. Go down the list. In fact, it's almost an indictment of politicians to say that when they
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loudly profess that they're Catholic, there is something wrong with that.
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So there's no great consolation there. We have an interesting phenomenon now whereby a lot of the
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evangelicals have been promoting Catholic nominees for the Supreme Court because they see that there's
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a common bond there. Theologically, there are problems, but there's a common bond there in their
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belief in the integrity of Scripture, divine revelation, and objective morality. But you have
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a lot of Catholics who are Catholics in name only. The same thing, we have a lot of Jews who are Jewish
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Yeah, but I wouldn't like to have her talk to the chief rabbi about her stance on moral issues. But it's also interesting that the media now just recognizes that the Catholic Church is probably the last voice of this, of realism, moral realism. And that's why it has to be brought down.
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But you don't hear people, they'll say, well, why are there so many Catholics on the Supreme Court? Now, what would happen if somebody said, why are there so many Jews on the Supreme Court?
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The Jews are overrepresented in terms of the percentage of population. God bless them. When somebody says that, there's legitimately an odor of anti-Semitism there.
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But with Jew, Catholic, Protestant, whatever, there should not be a test of religion. And the only disappointment I had in that very nice woman, good woman, Barrett, is there anything?
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Barrett. She should have just said to that lady senator.
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The senatrix of California. She should have just, instead of trying to defend herself, said, I'm sorry, but I am a constitutionalist.
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And I will not be a subject to a religious test.
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Right, right, of course. You know, and I must tell you, Father Rutler, I'll have to let you go because I've taken up too much of your time.
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I'm already, but hearing you say that, it really makes me think that the dogma lives loudly within you.
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It really makes me echo the senatrix from California's sentiments.
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Well, the best way to handle some of these people is just to mock them.
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The devil's the prince of lies, and what withers him is to mock him.
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If we take him too seriously, then we give him strength.
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But I'm told, I am told now that there are coffee cups out that say, the dogma lives within me.
00:26:56.600
That's a good... I'll have to get it on a t-shirt or something.
00:26:59.800
You know, it's... I must say, I always... I listen to your homilies when I'm not in New York, and I can't go to the Church of St. Michael.
00:27:06.540
And people can listen to them like a podcast, which I recommend that everybody does.
00:27:11.320
And they can get your columns, your weekly column, from the Church of St. Michael and in Crisis Magazine.
00:27:16.180
By my last count, you've written about 300,000 books in your life.
00:27:24.320
Well, actually, this summer I have five coming out.
00:27:36.020
These are a collection of my pastoral columns over the last 15, 20 years.
00:27:42.480
And they're in a box set, leather-bound with silk ribbons.
00:27:47.000
And the advertisement I read, to my astonishment, celebrating the life and legacy of Father Rutler.
00:27:53.800
I'm glad to hear you're still walking around and talking.
00:27:57.780
The only thing lacking was, you know, in lieu of flowers, please send.
00:28:04.580
And then Ignatius Press is bringing out a collection of my essays.
00:28:12.940
I'm here in the part of Monatine called Hell's Kitchen, which indicates something of the culture.
00:28:30.340
But through the wonderful gift now of communications, we can reach a lot of people.
00:28:35.840
Well, I hope at some point I can match your volume of output.
00:28:39.560
You know, you have five books coming out this summer.
00:28:41.720
I had one book coming out in my entire life, and it didn't have any words in it.
00:28:50.180
Well, really, the advantage of writing a book without words is it would be very hard to be sued for plagiarism, I suppose.
00:29:01.420
I'll tell you that I thought on your, you should do an audio version of that with music by John Cage.
00:29:09.340
Perhaps you can conduct the arrangement of 433 by John Cage.
00:29:17.120
There was actually a guy who wrote an anti-Trump blank book.
00:29:22.040
And it was another blank book called Reasons to Respect Donald Trump or something like that.
00:29:27.320
And he threatened in the Washington Post to sue me for plagiarism, to which I told him I stole nothing.
00:29:37.860
I'm sure there are many masses to say and confessions to give in Hell's Kitchen.
00:29:44.380
We'll have to have you back because you are famous on this program.
00:29:47.100
I quote, and I'll use the word borrow, really, you know, the word is steal, all of your insights regularly.
00:29:54.520
So we'll have to bring you back so that you can give them directly.
00:29:57.780
Well, hello to everybody out on the wrong coast.
00:30:03.560
Father Rutler, thank you so much for being here.
00:30:05.200
And we'll talk to you soon by phone or I'll see you in New York.
00:30:09.960
We're going to have to bring Father Rutler back because I steal from him so regularly.
00:30:13.360
I so regularly, maybe I'll say borrow, lines from his columns and talking to him and listening to him.
00:30:20.520
So I'll have to bring him back and then you get the real thing.
00:30:23.740
And maybe I'll have him answer, you know, all my mailbag questions are always Catholic, too.
00:30:27.000
So I'll bring him on instead of, you know, this kind of paltry lay Catholic giving you answers.
00:30:37.040
Some of them are very important, urgent public policy questions.
00:30:40.460
But if you're not on DailyWire.com, you can't ask questions in the mailbag and you can't keep watching.
00:30:58.380
This is the Mark Duplass vintage today that I'm sipping on.
00:31:11.720
It's not, it hasn't, it hasn't really aged for a while, but something tells me it's going to age just fine.
00:31:33.820
We are, as usual, tight on time, so we'll just fly through them.
00:31:48.880
We're Americans because we have both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, but Hamilton's better.
00:31:59.700
And also, you know, when was the last time Thomas Jefferson got a popular glib musical made about him, huh?
00:32:08.240
Michael, what is this Alexander Pope quote about nature being art unknown to thee?
00:32:19.660
All nature is but art unknown to thee, all chance direction which thou canst not see, such that in the logic of the universe, as it unfolds, there is providence around us.
00:32:30.640
Things that we think are coincidences might not be coincidences, or there might be more than coincidences.
00:32:36.740
And that, I first read that on the cover of the first Ruttler book I ever read, which sort of introduced me to the guy.
00:32:44.960
It was pivotal in my reversion to Christianity from vague atheism and vague agnosticism.
00:32:50.740
And the funny thing about Pope is that he has these great lines.
00:32:57.220
Hope springs eternal in the human breast, these sort of things.
00:33:00.820
But at the end of all of his poems, there's just like grave heresy.
00:33:04.040
So he's really good line by line, and then poem by poem, don't believe as much as you would.
00:33:11.320
I use it all the time, and I do believe that that is certainly true.
00:33:17.360
Dear Michael, in the current climate, this might be a brave thing to ask and an even braver thing to answer.
00:33:23.340
Isn't abortion also a natural selection type way to eliminate liberals from our society?
00:33:29.820
I still feel it's unequivocally murder and will continue to fight for their innocent lives.
00:33:34.600
But perhaps part of the left's problem is that they're okay with killing their progeny.
00:33:42.840
So you're saying that it's murder, and then you're saying, but that's not so bad, is it?
00:33:52.320
One of the arguments that really brought me over from supporting abortion into being pro-life
00:33:56.680
was from a bioethicist I was having lunch with, and I gave all those stupid freakonomics arguments
00:34:03.040
And she said, which of these arguments is not an argument to go kill ethnic minorities
00:34:11.220
I mean, yeah, there is a sort of irony that these lefties who put all of their hope into politics
00:34:18.640
But I don't think that's something we should celebrate, you know.
00:34:42.700
At one time, Governor Mitch Daniels, I was talking to him.
00:34:49.380
We said, you know, everything's looking so bleak.
00:34:53.520
I mean, how are we ever going to defeat the forces of leftism?
00:34:57.100
And he said, well, there are two ways to do it, Michael.
00:34:59.440
You can either persuade them or you can outbreed them.
00:35:05.180
You know, we've got to be pro-life even if, I suppose, we could win more elections if we slaughtered all the lefties.
00:35:20.280
As a conservative, I have been very curious about this because of passages like, turn the other cheek.
00:35:30.800
I think there are too many pacifists in the church militant.
00:35:34.920
I think C.S. Lewis spelled this out very well in an essay, I think, called, Why I'm Not a Pacifist.
00:35:42.340
This is a very abused line of scripture, abused in particular by the political left.
00:35:48.000
To turn the other cheek is an act of moral defiance and moral dignity.
00:35:53.740
That when some man hits you or disrespects you or insults you, he degrades himself.
00:35:58.360
And he degrades himself because you won't allow yourself to be degraded.
00:36:01.520
You will allow your flesh to be mortified and for that suffering to sanctify you.
00:36:05.760
This is not an instruction to let the cruel rape the earth.
00:36:13.260
So C.S. Lewis spells it out in a few different ways.
00:36:19.680
If in the sort of lefty version of just be nice, man,
00:36:24.580
there was a great theologian who described most American churches and most American sermons and homilies as saying,
00:36:31.320
I would possibly suggest that you try to be nice.
00:36:33.840
But in that, if you're supposed to love everybody and be kind to everybody,
00:36:38.260
if person A is attacking person B, then to love person B necessarily requires doing violence to person A.
00:36:45.280
If you're going to have pacifism, peace on earth, which isn't going to happen anytime soon,
00:36:53.980
The trouble is, when you have a nation of pacifists, the barbarians come in and destroy them.
00:36:58.340
And, you know, there are, as Father Rettler said, there are no safe spaces when the barbarian invades.
00:37:10.000
And also just be aware, you know, it's that Chesterton line,
00:37:13.320
that heresy is not the promotion of vice, it's the promotion of virtue to the exclusion of all the others.
00:37:17.920
One virtue to the exclusion of all of the others.
00:37:19.840
So you might say, ah, yes, we should be really nice and meek.
00:37:30.640
What about, you know, not letting the cruel rape the earth?
00:37:35.340
And there's nothing lovely or nice or kind or compassionate about letting poor innocent people be run over.
00:37:45.180
I know you are the conductor of the Trump train.
00:37:48.240
My question is, what action of Trump would cause you to stop supporting him?
00:37:52.560
Well, Chris, I think at this point if the president were to shoot a man on Fifth Avenue,
00:38:04.400
And I don't really care what lefties think of me.
00:38:07.660
I don't really care what people at cocktail parties think of me.
00:38:10.320
I don't care what fancy people who, you know, read really old leather-bound books think of me.
00:38:17.640
And I think some people get, especially disproportionately people who are in the media, conservative and left,
00:38:24.680
they're so afraid of supporting Trump because they think they'll be thought stupid or uneducated or uncouth or, you know, not classy or not whatever.
00:38:41.920
He's doing a great job protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and property.
00:38:49.820
I mean, I suppose if he reversed his entire agenda, that would get me to not support him.
00:38:57.600
He's been much more reliable as a conservative than perhaps some of our recent Republican presidents, which is maybe surprising.
00:39:05.520
But the guy, you know, I don't put my trust in princes.
00:39:11.700
If he reversed his agenda tomorrow, then, okay, I guess we'll turn on him.
00:39:17.020
I think for some people who don't like Trump or were never Trump or whatever, they take the presidency so personally.
00:39:26.700
The president is, I don't worship the president.
00:39:32.940
As long as he's doing good things, I think that's great.
00:39:35.360
If he starts, you know, being a big liberal Democrat, we'll get a new president.
00:39:41.100
Shapiro didn't take my question for the mailbag this week, so I'll have to settle for store brand Ben.
00:39:48.400
How would you respond if a person called the Founding Fathers terrorists a la the Boston Tea Party?
00:39:53.900
I might be tutoring some kids that this person teaches in the coming school year.
00:39:57.780
What questions could I ask the kids that would give them an opportunity to form a different opinion about our Founding Fathers?
00:40:11.640
The suggestion that the Founding Fathers were terrorists is asinine, so I don't, I wouldn't even respond to it because it's so stupid.
00:40:18.640
Even the, you're referring to the Boston Tea Party as some act of terror.
00:40:23.180
When we think of acts of terror, we think of violating the Geneva Convention, right?
00:40:31.860
What the American patriots did at the Boston Tea Party is dress up like Indians and throw some tea in the harbor, not even that much tea.
00:40:45.380
By the way, the Americans, because it was a conservative revolution, they had a total respect for decorum, for law, for behaving like a gentleman, for higher virtues, for higher principles.
00:40:58.700
One time, General Washington condemned a man of his own guard to death because that man robbed some people during the war.
00:41:08.760
And he condemned that man to death because he would not be a terrorist.
00:41:15.380
He was going to fight like a gentleman because he was an upstanding man.
00:41:18.740
The men who fought for the American Revolution, who won our freedom and won our country, were some of the most upstanding men in all of history.
00:41:38.400
I've been talking about it recently with that she Guevara, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and she, she Guevara, you know, and she doesn't know any, it's not what she doesn't know that gets her into trouble.
00:41:54.280
It's what she knows for sure that just ain't so.
00:41:56.700
So when you see this on campuses, I saw this at Yale when I was there, that instead of the old math, history, English, those liberal arts would be pushed out a little bit.
00:42:05.720
And what would start to take over were critical studies departments, which are not, they're not traditional liberal arts.
00:42:14.760
So you have women's gender and sexuality studies, ethnicity, race, and migration studies.
00:42:22.760
You don't learn a lot of facts or details or names or dates.
00:42:28.760
Someone might have this narrative, this ideological narrative that the founding fathers were somehow terrorists.
00:42:34.280
One question you could ask is, what's an example of that?
00:42:47.880
Any man who voices approval at Ariana Grande's art immediately forfeits the right to criticize the manly sport of soccer or to question the masculinity of soccer fans.
00:43:01.980
Dear St. Michael, guardian angel, during last week's mailbag, someone asked about purgatory and where they could find proof in the Bible that purgatory existed.
00:43:10.960
You pointed to Mark 3.29 as a piece of evidence that purgatory exists.
00:43:15.380
You said you didn't have time in the episode to get into why blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was unforgivable.
00:43:20.360
But I was hoping you'd have time in this episode to explain why blasphemy against God or the Son of God can be forgiven, but why blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is evil and unforgivable.
00:43:29.100
It doesn't make sense to me that blasphemy against two of the Holy Trinity could be forgiven, but why it would be unforgivable to commit blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, especially since the Holy Trinity is co-equal with one another.
00:43:43.220
It's an enigmatic verse in the Bible, which is when Christ says, you'll be forgiven for blasphemy against me or my Father, but not against the Holy Spirit.
00:43:52.420
If you blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, that will not be forgiven.
00:43:56.460
It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense until you realize that it's true by nature.
00:44:03.820
There are not limits to the mercy of God, but if you deliberately refuse to accept his mercy by repenting, then you're rejecting the forgiveness of your sins and you're rejecting salvation, which is offered by the Holy Spirit.
00:44:18.460
The Holy Spirit, if you want to try to visualize it, and this is not an easy thing to do, and certainly you could never possibly do it perfectly well.
00:44:27.240
There's a story of St. Augustine trying to describe the Trinity, and he's walking along the beach, and a little kid is trying to shovel in all of the water from the ocean into one little hole.
00:44:38.140
St. Augustine says, you can't possibly do that, and then the legend goes the boy is transfigured into an angel, and he says, yeah, dummy, and you can't explain the Trinity.
00:44:47.220
But the way you can sort of try to visualize the Holy Spirit is that the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son.
00:44:53.960
So you can even see this in Genesis, in the first moments of Genesis.
00:44:57.640
The act of creation is an act of speech, and God the Father speaks the world into existence, and Christ is the Word.
00:45:05.440
And you can almost visualize it as that Word is being spoken by God.
00:45:12.020
That bond of love, that spirit, that breath, the Hebrew word is ruach, is breath or spirit, is that bond of love that proceeds from the Father and the Son, which is the bond of love between them.
00:45:21.980
So if you reject that, if you reject that advocate, that paraclete, then you are, by definition, rejecting the forgiveness of your sins, and that it can't be forgiven because you're refusing forgiveness.
00:45:39.520
I just figured that's a good question to end on on a show where half of the people talking are wearing collars and are rather sophisticated and intelligent priests.
00:45:54.060
Listen to Another Kingdom because we're getting ready for season two of Another Kingdom, and it's going to be a lot of fun.
00:46:02.700
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Senia Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay, our supervising producer Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens, edited by Jim Nickel.
00:46:26.780
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
00:46:43.280
And you can review it and turn your Image Center in under like a televise, about three durchaus.
00:46:45.980
Let's go to the Daily Wire of the Daily Wire center.