#807 - Alex O'Connor - Why Is Cultural Christianity On The Rise?

25:32buttress political aims. And functionally, how can we have this ideology, this dogma, to be able to drive us forward? Perhaps if we wanted to invade some other countries? Yeah, or like how can we motivate people to believe that we're on the right side here? I mean, famously Adolf Hitler, that people debate all of the time whether he was a Christian, who knows? I mean, he was a Roman Catholic, but he never renounced it, but like, you know, he wasn't acting very Christian, let's say, but he did have the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier have got Mitt and God with us written on the belt buckles. Atheists weren't allowed to join the SS, didn't want them, didn't think they could be trusted, I suppose.

26:13Hitler says explicitly in my in the camp for in standing guard against the Jew, I'm doing the handy work of the Lord. So he's using this religious terminology and a lot of people like to point out to me like the, I'll hear Christians say, yeah, but he was actually an atheist. I mean, he was just pretending to be a Christian surely and I'm like, well, why would pretending to be a Christian make it easier for him to be a fascist? You know what I mean? It's sort of a bit of a confusing thing. Yeah, because people use religion in this way and so there's there's the question of like, well, you know, it was Adolf Hitler a Christian, right?

26:44Well, maybe he would, maybe if you ask him, let's say, you know, we discovered some text or some bit of the table talk that we didn't otherwise know about and, and Chris, and he says, yes, I, I still very much believe in God and believe in doing Christ's work. As a sense in which you could say, I'll see he was a Christian. That's what the atheist might say. But the Christian would say, I don't care what he claimed to be. Being a Christian is doing the work of the Lord. being Christian is is enacting the will of the Father, right? So interestingly, maybe without through. Maybe you don't even need to believe in God per se to be a Christian, you just sort of need to do the will of the Father.

27:18It's hard to know what counts as being a Christian, but I think sort of the two approaches that clash in this Iand orkins rumble is the difference between the approach that says the thing that matters is that you live the right kind of life and have the right kind of ethics and the other side which is the thing that matters is that you get the right theology that you have the right truth claims. To me that seems a lot less human it seems a lot less in accord with the way that Jesus spoke and behaved and acted. I mean he's not going around like settling theological disputes really you know he's responding to theological disputes and and people are trying to test him theologically, but he always responds to them with a sort of vague classiness that sort of transcends the dispute.

28:07It almost makes nonsense, the disputes.

28:13So yeah, I don't know. Okay, has Christianity gone soft? Like yes, politically, like clearly, it just doesn't have the political power anymore. A lot of nominal Christians don't really believe in what they're saying. They sort of go to church because they feel like they have to, but don't actually have the same kind of passion that you'd like to see in a sort of firmly spiritually convicted Christian population. So it doesn't exist, at least in Britain. I don't know about America. It's probably much more enthusiastic here. The interesting thing about America, I spent Easter Sunday at Austin Ridge Bible Church.

28:45This is the first American service that I've been to. The only other time that I've been to a service recently was at Ripon Cathedral on Christmas Eve. Rippin Cathedral Christmas Eve, 245 -year -old woman with a C -shaped spine playing the organ, everybody singing hymns, brief talk in between, very sort of cobwebby, classic sort of British Christmas thing. I go to Easter Sunday, Austin Ridge Bible Church. I pulled up behind a 150 -grand covet supercar that had God now as the number, yeah, on the back. That was the first thing. I went in, the lady that was the warmer packed for the main person that was giving the sermon for the day started using religious language.

29:30And I was like, oh, can't we? You know, straight into it. And she said, guys, please, we must remember to have patience and forgiveness. And we must give grace when turning right out of the car park onto B .K. Road. I thought, oh wow, okay, this is an interesting use of semi -Christian language here to direct traffic. And then the opening act was a six -piece rock band complete with 20 -person back -in -quire, fireworks, a full LED wall that would have made my nightclub career look, poultry with the lyrics behind so that everybody could sing along even me who didn't know the words. Lead singer, very charismatic, playing the guitar, dude on the drums, black guy playing saxophone, set of glasses on.

30:26They come up, they do an encore, they leave, another lady comes on, introduces stuff and then a guy comes out and with a mic and you know, there's a sort of background music that swells when it's important and kind of stays on when it's not. And then he leaves and then the band comes back on and they do maybe one or two more songs and then everyone goes outside and it's Starbucks coffee and stuff. And then they ask for your money. They didn't ask for my money actually they were rich enough. Not once was the word religion used. Not once. Nobody in that room thought of themselves as religious. They have a direct relationship with Jesus and with God.

31:00Oh sure. It's all about it's just Jesus, like super, super Jesus stuff. And that, I was like, what is that? What's Christianity when you kind of rip much of the ideology side out of it? I don't even know, is that, what is that missing? What is it that they've done? What have they taken out of what I would be more familiar with from what I would have learned in school? And so far as they're doing that, they're probably getting something right, which is that Christianity is not so much a set of truth claims, a religion as we'd used to say as it is a relationship with the person. Christianity is a relationship with Jesus.

31:37That's what it is. So the word religion is famously very difficult to define. It also kind of doesn't exist as a concept until relatively recently in religious study and comparative religion because you find religious communities from a thousand years ago. And religion isn't this thing that they do. They don't have work, family, religion, you know, like get my MOT. It doesn't, it doesn't like box off like that. It just is permeate. It's the air that you breathe and the water that you swim in. It sort of doesn't really make any sense. I mean, like it's like a fish trying to define water, which I'm sure the fish can do, but only wants you to take it out of the water and sort of show it what it was swimming in before, but it wouldn't consider itself to be swimming in water, you know.

32:32I think a man who can't have this image of a bird or a dove like flying through the sky and sort of thinking like feeling the wind resistance and thinking, gosh, if only I could get rid of this wind, I could fly through the sky and then get rid of the air. And that's kind of what what like people are doing with religion, you know, if only I could get rid of this resistance, but you're sort of throwing out the baby with the holy water. So they're probably getting that right. I'm not sure about the whole mega -church situation. Having said that, I've never been to one and pretty cool. I know he seems to come for you.

33:05A friend of mine recently told me that he went to one of these mega -church experiences in England actually and was just overcome with the motion. Tears streaming down his face, uncontrollably, like an unbelievable experience. And I thought, wow, that, I mean, that's amazing. But then I also have a friend who we recently sort of accidentally stumbled upon like a sort of traditional. I think it was a Catholic service. There's four guys singing some choral songs and we were holding candle. It was a concert. They said free concert and we went in and they gave us candles after going through the metal detectors.

33:41You know, they gave us these candles and we sat there and there was this, So these four guys singing this sort of Latin Christian music and my friend had used to be that sort of like a real American style Christian, you know, and said like, wow, I've never experienced anything like that. That was amazing. And I thought, gosh, it's just because it's not what you're to, you know, the person who's who's used to that will be amazed by the mega church. The person who's used to the mega church, but oh my goodness, this mega church stuff is ridiculous. But is it sort of yeah, I think it's got a lot of fun.

34:22Eating one meal for the entirety of your life and then going, oh my god. Yeah, because what it shows you is that like you can separate out, you know, this idea of being a Christian or worshipping God from all of the the the trimmings that you think necessarily go with it, you know, standing in this like drafty old building with a bunch of elderly people going, we believe in one God, the Father, and doing the Nicene Creed and going up and getting in queue for communion and the trembling priests putting a bit of bread on your mouth. You think, gosh, this is a bit lame. It is. Then you go to a mega church and you think, oh, goodness, you can isolate the Christian bit, put it in a new context.

35:03Suddenly, it's amazing again. Maybe Christianity isn't so bad after all. There's a lot of utility for that reason. But yeah, I mean, my understanding of what the maths should be, of what church should be, is a meal. You know, Jesus, last supper, you know, breaks the bread, drinks the wine, says, do this in memory of me. It's the Passover meal. Well, it's the Passover meal in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In John's Gospel, Jesus dies before the Passover meal, maybe the other way around because John's trying to say that Jesus is the Passover lamb who's being slaughtered. And so there's a kind of biblical contradiction there as whether Jesus dies before the Passover or after Passover.

35:48That's kind of a side point. So I think that like what the mass is supposed to be, Jesus says, you know, I mean the whole reason the mass exists, the Eucharist is the, in the sort of the zenith of the mass, it's where you eat the bread and drink the wine, because that's what Jesus did before he died and he said, do this in memory of me. But it was a meal. It was a feast. And I have a feeling that in early Christian communities, the mass was a meal, but then they stopped doing that because it became too much about the meal. People used to just show up to eat. And better ones in the area. But then why not?

36:23You know, why not? Because it should be a night market. Yeah, probably. But so I don't think there should be like, hard and fast rules, exactly on how to do it. But I am a little bit suspicious of the whole I don't know, people have made this criticism of mega churches. And I don't like the money, I don't like the sort of fame, celebrity, the fact that you used the term warm up act in a church environment just seems wholly inappropriate. But like the criticism that's often made that it's too like, well, it tries to get you sort of in a state of unrubility by using like musical tricks and stuff.

36:57I've seen some people tweet this. It's a social media thing that crops up every now and again. and people say, oh, I used to think that I really loved God, and I was really into worship, but turns out I actually just liked music. I thought that I actually was just like really into drums. And it's kind of a joke, because they're like, oh, it was just the music. But like, yeah, hold on, just take a step back and ask the same question again, well, why does that music move you in that way? Sure, cold play can do it too, but then arguably cold play are sort of approximating the same kind of spiritual openness that people are trying to achieve at church, the only differences that when they do it at church, they then use that state to sell you God rather than sell you merchandise, you know.

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38:46A checkout. Well, what about when you walk into... you've been to the Vatican? Oh, yeah. Right. What about you walking that? You walk through the doors. Yeah. It's the best front end of a funnel I've ever been into. Well, look, the Vatican is a, is it, if you, if you go to St. Peter's Basilica, wait, you've been, I mean, it is just, like, breathtakingly huge. The, the, the sort of, the scale of the thing is, is enough to sort of make you, like, and, and it's actually so big that you kind of, your eyes aren't like, you know, parallaxing properly. So it's, it's kind of difficult to even tell how big it is.

39:21until for anyone who's ever been there, there's writing. Big gold band that goes all the way around and there's writing. And I was there with a priest and I haven't verified this, but he told me that each of those letters was two meters tall. Yeah, I heard that on the two of the letters. And I genuinely, I was like, I don't believe you. I literally, I'm looking at it right now. I'm staring at it every hour. It's so small, I don't believe you. I just don't. And the statues on the top level are built bigger than the ones on the bottom so that they look the same size. This is a strange illusion. I kind of wish they hadn't done that because it would give you a better idea of the size.

39:52Anyway, okay, yeah. Amazing, awe -inspiring. But at the same time, it's designed pretty poorly from the outside. I mean, you've got Michelangelo's dome, which is like at the back of the silica, which you can't see from the front, which is just poor design, because of the fact that you've got like three different architects who will have different ideas of what to do and we're planning things separately and they all just sort of got shoved together. And so you get this great big frontier. but imagine if you could see that dome from the front, it would be spellbinding. Also, the fact that the St.

40:22Peter's was built off the back of sale of indulgences. So the Catholic Church said, give us money and we'll shorten the time that you spend in purgatory and you get to heaven quicker. And they use that money to fund the building for church. So it's a little difficult to be, you know, them, theologically inspired when you start to realize what kind of building you're walking into in the kind of history that surrounds it. God. Oh, yeah. But then there is still, but then it's exactly the same thing as the God now thing is the mega church where there's, I mean, like if you start thinking about it, you think, well, this isn't right, this is bad.

41:02You know, you might go into a mega church and say, well, this is terrible because they're just trying to make money. And then, you know, you go into St. Peter's Basilica and you think, well, this was raised on the sale of indulgences, but there's still something amazing about it. There's still something that inspires awe, and that's the important bit, I think. So yeah, so I mean, that's amazing, an amazing place to be. But like every human attempt to approximate the awe of God will necessarily be beholden to our failures as immoral creatures. Talk to me about the political dimension of this Christian revival.

41:38Yeah, it's just a bunch of right wingers getting upset about Islam and work isn't basically in my view um I mean Douglas Murray, you know Ghost Church on Christmas and sort of likes to be I mean Justin Briley talks about Douglas Murray's one of his examples of people who's sort of very like Christian friendly, you know like sort of Cultural Christian type. I don't know how true. That is I haven't sort of kept up with Douglas's Like writing on this stuff, but say it worth true. It's like why is that? Is it because Douglas has sat in a church, prayed deeply for an inward sign of the true religion of the universe, or is he just upset with the way his country is going?

42:18I think it's more likely the latter. Constantin Kissin recently called himself a cultural Christian in a video and it was the same kind of thing. It's not a theological thing. I'll say I'm an atheist but I'm a cultural Christian. Russell Brand got baptized. russle rang about ties, but again, this is slightly different because he says he actually believes it, right? Oh, actually, I don't know. I mean, I haven't, again, I haven't kept up with Russell Brand, I don't, I don't listen to him, but I presumably he'll actually believe in the resurrection of Jesus and stuff to have been actually baptized.

42:52So I think that where somebody has actually sort of developed a Christianity and a truth claim, I believe Jesus wrote in the dead, I don't think that's just like, is that not Christian revival? Yeah, I mean sure that would be an actual Christian revival, but I don't think the the thing that people are pointing to and saying but look at this up swing I don't think that's happening as much. I don't know. I don't know what the stats are on like baptisms and stuff It wouldn't surprise me, you know if there's a non -zero number of people yeah, yeah start to look at the fruits Sure, and it is possible to iron her see I leave it and kind of go back up to the tree.

43:21Yeah, you think well Yeah, it's gonna it's gonna work both ways. Yeah in a way like If you can't see the tree, you can just sort of like start picking up the fruit and following the trail and it'll sort of lead you to discover the tree. For some people for sure. And again, you're around the people, you're going to mass, you're going to service, these are your new friends. They're talking about it all the time. I've got to read this, I've got to study, but someone gifted me a study Bible. I mean, no, this is. So there's two, I wasn't sure what your position on this was. whether you think that it's a upswing in utilitarian functional Christianity, as opposition to certain movements that a number of people have got a problem with, or just conservatism wrapped in religious talking.

44:18So does it exist as a revival of conservatism with a new bow put on it? Or in opposition to push back against other things that people are concerned about? That was what I was talking about. I think it's the conservatives who are pushing out, who are pushing against this stuff. New atheism, what's new about New atheism? The sort of political dimension. You know, it's as much a movement, a sociological movement, like I say. More so than it is a theological one, and it's much more... It's the reason that New Atheism found its way onto the National Press, it's on Fox News, people debating. Now, in the way that now it's like, I don't know what it is in America, gender studies in schools or whatever.

45:04It used to be like evolution in schools. That's what you turn on the TV, in fact, I can imagine that. You know, like you would turn on the TV and you'd find your talk of Carlson's and people like just going on and on and on about like Evolution and God and religion and Christianity. I mean, it's amazing. It did it was doing exactly what like the you know the woke Social justice stuff is doing now in that in that space So that was sort of the like the new atheism thing sort of was was was this cultural phenomenon talking about politics You know, it did the ology stuff a little bit as well, but you know, it was it was social movement and And so, okay, what kind of social movement was it?

45:40Well, broadly speaking, it was left -wing. An interesting subset of like YouTube atheists who went on to be like anti -SAAW reactionary types, but broadly speaking, the atheist community that sprung up Christopher Hitchens, the socialist, Richard Dawkins, very left -wing, more recently sort of gender critical and suspicious of Islam, all that kind of stuff, which puts him on the right. same thing with Sam Harris, but these guys are like traditionally left -wing people, right? And it's all very, you know, Christian nationalism is suppressing gay rights and gay marriage and abortion and all of this kind of stuff and contraceptives and divorce laws and all of that, right?

46:20So new atheism is quite left -wing. So whatever like space it creates culturally, the people who are going to sort of say, we don't like this, we don't like what's happening, we want to react against that are going to be conservatives. So like in other words, it's both. I think it's, it is in many ways a reaction against this vacuum, but the people who are reacting against that vacuum are going to be probably more or less conservative. They used to call, the Church of England was known as the Tory Party at Prayer, put the call to them. The fact that nobody is now going to church of England churches, It means it feels like a sort of waste of a good label.

47:03And I think like the cultural Christianity movement could be called that, you know, the Tory party at prayer. Not the Tory party, because the Tory party is probably about to cease to exist in England. Have you seen this? I think right now, as we're speaking, yeah, it's got to be about like, you know, half past or quarter two. Yeah, it'd be like right now.

47:20There's a seven party debate happening on the BBC Nigel Farage is currently studying of the podium, like probably shouting at a bunch of other people. And it's amazing, like reform UK at two points behind the conservatives of the last poll I checked. I remember hearing that, well, like, I mean, we're in, we're in store for either another sort of 1997, like super labor success or the actual sort of, it's like a, it's an, it's an existential moment as Andrew Mar has put it for the, for the conservative party. It's sort of amazing to see. So maybe not the Tory party at prayer, but the English right.

47:56Servedive people at prayer. You know, at prayer, even if they don't know quite who they're praying to. Isn't it interesting though, you know, one of the things I noticed since moving over to America is that there is no equivalent of the Christian right in the UK or there wasn't, right? You know, that, you know what I mean? Bible, Bell, to you. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you know, it's for God, it's country, it's patriotism, and the constellation of beliefs kind of right themselves. I mean, what religion, but what religion is our Prime Minister, you know? And also, like, if you are like, Kirsta, I'm a see -a -christian.

48:28I literally don't know. I have no idea. And if he was, I wouldn't know what kind of Christian he was. And also, I don't care. And nor does any of his party and nor do any of the population, you know? Like, genuinely, it's so strange. I think our Prime Minister is a Hindu, as far as I'm aware. But I'm not sure how religious he is in that. But can you imagine like being a serious part of the conversation in Britain? You're American listeners might not be fully aware of just how absolutely ludicrous it would be to be sort of On the campaign trail and somebody asking, you know, what's favorite Bible verse?

49:02Yeah, and when like Donald Trump can't think of a Bible verse, you know What is it he said when he was asked for a favorite Bible verse? He goes oh there are just there's too many there Just so many I love it all I love them all That that can that's a bit of a scandal. It's like the leader of the Republican Party in the UK, it just doesn't sound that bad. So not salient. And so maybe I think what people are sort of noticing is that the right in America is quite strong, got a presence. Do you think that this could be a potential angle for a future British political party to tap into? I don't think they can tap into Christianity.

49:37At least not yet. I don't think it's nearly strong enough. But I think a lot of people in the UK are getting desperate because their country's going down the pan. And there is no such thing as a sort of small sea conserved party, because the Tory party are too left wing for the right wing isn't too right wing for the left wingers. That's why they're ceasing to exist. They've sort of fallen between two pews and they're going to possibly have to hang up the hat. So I think people in the UK are quite sort of, especially right wingers in the UK are quite desperate. So like we don't have a movement, we don't have a home, we don't have a party that we can vote for, we don't have a way to get ourselves repented in Parliament.

50:18So what are we going to do? And they're sort of trying out different things. And one of these things is like, well, what if we all just become Christians again? You know, maybe that will do something. But it means that if you pay attention on like Twitter to the kinds of a cat, because it's not just the thought leaders, but also like you begin to notice in the comments, you know, there's more people, there's just more people, there are more people who are who are fervent, there's more people with little display pictures of like a crusader, you know, with the sword and the helmet on and stuff. And you realize that if there is sort of a Christian revival happening, it might be a revival of the sort of strong armed, like we're not going to take this kind of Christianity rather than the meek and mild.

50:59I've heard you talk about the difference between strong armed Christianity and Meek and Myel Christianity is the reason for the, get that in gone, is the reason for the strong armed Christianity that this revival is coming in opposition to a bunch of things that seem quite aggressive, that seem quite militant, whether it be rising threat from China, Russia, Islam, gender ideology, wokeism, whatever. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are, for those who are, I shouldn't, you know, this is all hypothesizing and I can't say that whether most people who are sort of considering Christianity again are doing so for theological or political reasons, but of the people who are doing it for political reasons, arguably, you know, the politics comes first.

51:48Their their primary concern is having a strong ideological... And this is the cultural question. This is the people who will say, I don't believe in God, but I sort of like the Christianity stuff. Well, what do you like in Christianity? Well, for many of them they say it gives them a... It gives them this protective layer against these ideologies that they don't like, or the vacuum of no ideologies. How does it give them a protective layer? Well, that's the question to ask, right? And I'm kind of the wrong person to ask there because I'm not sort of part of this career, but if you did ask them, I mean, I know it's a little bit vague and a little bit difficult to pin down, but to any extent that it does offer a protective layer against ideologies you don't like, it has to be a bit more strong armed.

52:33It has to be defensive. It has to be up a shield, right? And so it really depends on who you ask, right? But let's just hypothesize for a moment, What is it that you get from utilitarian Christianity in opposition to secular liberalism? What does it provide you that you can't arrive at without the Christianity bit? Content.

53:02Secularism doesn't have content. Secularism is just like a sort of rule, a political rule that says that you're not allowed to, like, let religion and have any sort of, any particular origin have any hand in political affairs. You just gotta have a hands off approach to religion. It doesn't actually provide anything sort of world view. Christianity is a world view. It allows you to say there are things that are right and wrong. So in a secular liberal government, you might say you have this opinion, you have this opinion, and because we're a secular liberal society, even though I think you're wrong, I think you should be in parliament, I think you should become the prime minister, if that's what the people want, or this kind of stuff for it.

53:40If you have an ideology that just says, no, there are right things in wrong things. And our country is one that believes in these right things. And if you believe the wrong thing, like, no, you're not gonna become the prime minister. You're not gonna, like, so I think it sort of provides you this ability to safeguard your worldview. In other news this episode is brought to you by Mando. Mando, whole body deodorant will have you smelling great. It's powerful enough for the toughest body odor, but gentle enough to use everywhere on your body. You've probably heard that some deodorants have some and dodgy chemicals in that you probably don't want to be putting on your skin every single day.

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54:43You can get up to 40 % off Mando's starter pack by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to shopmando .com and using the code modern wisdom, a checkout. That's shopmando .com and modern wisdom, a checkout. So there's more structure, it's sort of buttressed in this way, but what is it about Christianity, which is particularly useful up against a woke Chinese Russian assault. Well, that's, to me, it's still a bit of a mystery. It tells me that we're not, insofar as people are, specifically when they're talking about political issues like China and Russia, I would ask that same question.

55:22I think the only answer you can give is that it's somehow tied to a sort of, a political... Yeah, like a political sort of, what's the word here?

55:42What's the word? What am I looking for? I don't know. Like a forceful restatement of your political commitments. And the fact that that's tied to Christianity is a bit of a mystery to me. I don't really know. Is it that it's something that seems more steeped in ancient Western values? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the other thing is that it's like it's Western, but this to me seems quite contingent. This is why I'm separating out like Christianity as what Jesus teaches and what Christianity is, and Christianity which is like I said earlier, specifically the specific emphasis on the history of you know, Western Europe.

56:22People think that Western civilization is a result of Christianity. That's it. In fact, yeah, I think that's what's going on here. So you get Tom Holland, the historian, who has popularized this idea in his book Dominion that all of Western civilization is essentially Christian, without realizing it. So, you know, we've taken what were once non -obvious, controversial, ethical, contingent statements, you know, things that a lot of people thought were true, a lot of people thought were false, were quite radical, quite controversial, and they've so successfully embedded themselves into our culture because of the rise of Christianity that we now describe them as self -evident truths.

57:00It's just self -evident that every person has worth, that slavery is wrong, all of this kind of stuff. It's just self -evident. And so we don't need Christianity to teach us that anymore because it's self -evident. And Tom Holland's thesis is something like, well, we don't realize it's that it's actually come from Christianity even though we now don't realize it. So if you cut off the Christianity, you cut off the basis for this entire Western ethic in the ethics, people who care about, well, preserving the West and preserving the West and Ethic might buy into this Tom Holland thesis and say, oh, okay, so I really care about West and Ethics and West and Ethics is Christian.

57:41Therefore, if I care about West and Ethics, I should care about Christianity and upholding Christianity. Who cares about upholding the West at the moment? Political right. So particularly in Europe, you have this right wing Christian sort of friendship, merger. What about its usefulness as a prophylactic against wokeism? Yeah, it's kind of the same thing, right? Because it's still, I mean, what's woke culture trying to do? It's trying to undermine Western civilization, the history of Western Europe trying to rewrite the books, trying to say that a lot of the West is evil and patriarchal and white and racist and all of this kind of stuff.

58:23This is what people dislike in the so -called woke movement. If you ask someone like Douglas Murray, what's the big trouble with locusts? What don't you like about them? What will he tell you? He'll say they're undermining Western civilization. So it's still this sort of, let's save Western civilization approach. And I think that this has come at the same time as the popularization of the thesis that Western civilization is Christian. Therefore, to save the West, we save Christians. Take an equation. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, how do you mean like an equation? Like you sort of add them together. Yeah, that's not an equation usually work.

58:59Yeah, like as in they're treating them as the same. Correct, yes. You can, if it is, or the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? Yeah, it's, it's, I don't know, it's a bit like, I'm trying to think of an example here of like where else people just sort of go a bit. They sort of, they cozy up to an ideology because it sort of, I don't know, it's, it's it helps. And I don't mean that to be sort of cynical because we're not always conscious that we're doing this, but we become attracted to this ideology, come attracted to this religious tradition and think, oh yeah, like I like Western civilization and the people who are talking about this Christianity thing, they seem to care about it, they seem to recognize that, you know, there's a lot of importance in Western civilization.

59:40So they certainly find themselves becoming more attracted to it. But it's important to stress that like, I don't think this thesis is correct. I mean, I'm not sure. I still haven't actually read through dominion by Tom Holland. I really need to do that with the amount that I talk about. That's why I'm always very careful to talk about his thesis. But I think Western civilization, what's it defined by free speech, freedom of religion, capitalists economy, you know, like basically all of these things which I mean you can say that nominal Christians have like established these historically but if you actually flip over from the scripture there's no way that you can describe this as Christian or Judeo Christian especially with the Judeo part when it comes to like the abolition of slavery I'm told that this is oh it's essentially Christian movement the abolition of slavery Like as if the Bible, which explicitly condones and teaches you how to take slaves, how to bequeath them as an inheritable property to your children, you know, if you march up to a city to attack it and you see a beautiful woman.

1:00:56I'm not misquoting. It says if you see a beautiful woman among them, this is an tutoronomy, I think 20, I think it's like tutoronomy 21, but I might be wrong about that. Then you can take her as your wife and if you want to do that then you take her home. It's bizarre ritual you shave her head, trim her fingernails, give her exactly 30 days to mourn her parents who you might have just killed and then you can take her as your wife. Okay, so now we're told that despite all this sort of scriptural endorsement and instruction that while the abolitionist movement was essentially Christian, oh and the woman's rights movement is all Christian, It's all Christian ethics, equally cropping up.

1:01:34I'm like, okay, so maybe it's the case, maybe that God was always against slavery and always sort of pro -woman and social justice and all this kind of stuff. It just took us literally thousands of years to work it out. And this just so happened to coincide with the enlightenment. It's possible. Or maybe actually, no, maybe this isn't a Christian message. And like, when I ask specifically, How is this abolitionist movement or whatever? How is it Christian? Well, Christian Ancestheach is the worth of the individual, the emphasis on sympathizing with the victim. This is the big thing. The idea that Jesus comes down, everyone's expecting the Messiah to be this great military leader who's going to liberate the Jews from Roman occupation.

1:02:21And instead you get this man who's poor, ascetic and is crucified. We're so used to the crucifixion narrative that we forget how embarrassing it is and shocking it is for your Messiah to die a slave's death. I mean, it's an extraordinary story. It's what makes it such an attractive one. And so we're told, well, you know, this this idea of, you know, um, sympathy for the victim is, is like uniquely Christian. And that's where we get like the care that comes in social justice, social justice movements are all about like caring about the victim. Like, yeah, okay. But the Bible does explicitly tell you you're allowed to own other human beings as private property.

1:03:00So how do you square that one? So in other words, Tom Holland might be right that like the sort of nominally Christian Western ethic has like built up or the normally Christian system and religiosity has built up this Western society, but it can't actually be like scriptural in my view. I mean, I might just be wrong about this, but so it's a little bit confusing to me. That's why I find it difficult to answer the question, like, you know, why are right wingers attracted to Christianity? Or are they attracted to Christianity? Is another attracted to the message of the gospel? Or are they attracted to what the sort of Christian church and Christian religion has historically been able to politically provide?

1:03:42I wonder how much is that it provides a more stable and sophisticated It's a dated sounding by virtue of how long it's been around. Pushback against something that in comparison is flimsy, contemporary, less steeped in nostalgia and less stable in that way. If you were to create a thing that would act in opposition to super progressive, very new, very contemporary, very quickly changing. You would choose the most lindy story that you can. What's the one that's been around for as long as possible? And we can kind of forget that way. We don't need to really worry about shaving the head and cutting the fingernails.

1:04:29We don't really need to worry about the slaves and passing them down to your children and stuff like that. And I suppose that with Christianity, because it is, as Sam Harris said, it's a relatively low T religion. They're quite prepared. It seems to me like they take less offense at people playing fast and loose with the literal interpretation. It's okay that he omitted that thing. I get the sense that the Islamic faith would not be so okay, would you peace -mealing your way through their particular doctrine? Yeah, that's what I was about to say. will bring up. Well, I mean, because you're quite I said it.

1:05:09Yeah, I'm sure Sam Harris said it first. Right. Yeah, I'm the middle of the human centipede between salmon you. Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, why not? Yeah, you can put it in those sounds if you'd like. And another reason I love speaking with you Chris. I think yeah, as I like to put it, Islam is more high T and Christianity is more like high T, if you're not, I mean, T, E, A. Why is there not an Islamic revival? because, well, no, sorry, there is. This is the other thing, this is what I was about to bring up, actually, was the fact that like, okay, a bunch of like, you know, our political establishment, civil service have just been totally taken over by this woke culture man, and everyone's a bit like, come on, seriously, like, really, you know, on the anniversary of D -Day, we've got pride flags flying over Regent Street, like, instead of the British flag, I think that's true, might not be true, but you get the point of making people are like, I'm fed up of all of this nonsense.

1:06:07And so you just said, you need something that's old, tried and tested, and can stand up against this. And so you get a bunch of particularly, I think, disaffected young men, who, the Islam is very attracted to them. Attracted to them because it says, well, look, you don't believe in all this crap, do you? You don't believe in it. You believe in certain kinds of values. do you believe that you should stand up for yourself? You believe in gender roles? You believe in this, right? Yeah, I do actually. So, well, this is, this one can give you this and it can justify it and it can give you the strength and the community behind you to assert those values and not have to worry about being some kind of like outcast or condemned or whatever.

1:06:47No, because like we all believe the same thing is you and we're growing and we're popular and nobody wants to criticize us because we stand up for ourselves, you know? Okay, yeah, sign me up for that. Whereas the Christians are still very much like,

1:07:01Yeah, like you say, they have the message of turning the other cheek. This is the Jesus figure. And their belief as well is that you will be judged eventually, not necessarily right now. Yeah, it is a different sort of message of salvation. I mean, Christianity has the sacrifice of Jesus for your sins. And Islam doesn't have that. Islam doesn't believe that Jesus died on the cross. again because we forget how radical it is that killing a prophet, God wouldn't allow that to happen. So the idea of Jesus dying on the cross is a total enathema to the Islamic understanding of who God is. Again, Islam is much more proud and stand up for yourself having this embarrassing slave death for their prophet.

1:07:45It doesn't run. So Jesus doesn't die on the cross in Islam. I was in Christianity, yeah, he dies on the cross and he sort of pays your sin and all this kind of stuff. It's a much more like, I'm going to sort of throw myself on Christ, you know, woe to me and my sin. And so, and that's more attractive to some and less attractive to others, but it sort of means, I think that also is why you get more like Christian churches who are sort of like, oh, we're totally open and we're like pro -pride and we've got a transgender priest and all of this kind of stuff when you don't see that happening in Islam, at least not as much to the same degree.

1:08:20A lot of people like to... I'm just not quite working out why that has resulted in Christian churches, Christian belief, that permits people to be more peace -meal. Well, that's actually a slightly separate thing, which is important to spell out. A lot of people say simply that Islam is half a millennium younger than Christianity. It crops up later than Christianity and therefore Christianity has its enlightenment revival Reformation 500 years ago and Islam is like five six seven hundred years behind so it just hasn't got there yet Right and like a lot of people do this line. I don't think it's right because it sort of treats Islam as a religion like it's sort of Still maybe or something and and then it's like it's like not connected to the world in some way that it that it's like Oh give it 500 years and for some reason it'll just happen in the same amount of time as it difficulty like me But I don't think that's true.

1:09:27I think it's it's got more to do with the way that the scripture and the and the And the prophets are treated like, in Islam, the Quran is the word of God, which has existed for all time. And the Quran you hold in your hands, the must -have, the copy. The written copy is a copy of a message which is eternal. Which is... The final word of God is Quran. Quran means recitation. So it's just, Muhammad receives... And Muhammad is illiterate, he can't read, he can't write, and God... and sort of speaks to him in a cave and says, you know, says right or recite or something like that effect. And Muhammad is sort of like, well, I'm illiterate, I can't do it.

1:10:11And he just command them to do it anyway. And Muhammad is so sort of freaked out by this that I think according to some reports, he considers suicide. He goes to like throw himself off a cliff and then he goes home to his first wife who is the first person to encourage him that he's actually heard the word of God and that, you know, he should submit to So she's known as the first Muslim. She's the first person to recognize the message and accept its truth. So this word of God comes to Muhammad and is at some point at a later point written down, recorded, and there are various copies loading around.

1:10:48And then Caliph, Uthman, he decides to put together as an official codex. And this is where we get our crown that we hold in our hands. but the actual message itself is eternal and comes directly from God. In Christianity, unless you're speaking to a biblical fundamentalist who are quite a relatively new and quite American phenomenon, they don't treat scripture in the same way. Scriptures written by men, particularly the gospels. I mean the letters of Paul are letters written by man to a bunch of churches to settle sort of theological and practical disputes. This isn't like the word of God God, in the sense that this isn't like the exact words that you're reading in the Bible are the words that came out of the prophet's mouth that God put into the, it's not the same thing.

1:11:35In Christianity, in Islam, the word becomes a book. In Christianity, the word becomes flesh and dwells among us. That's the opening of the Gospel of John, you know, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. And then later on, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. So you have the word of God being Jesus. In Islam, the word of God is the Quran. And so a lot of people think the Quran in Islam is what the Bible is in Christianity. I think that the Quran in Islam is what Jesus is in Christianity. And the gospels are more like the Hadith literature in Islam, which are sort of these reports of sayings and doings of Muhammad, which some are better attested than others.

1:12:18You know, there's sort of dispute over which ones are sound, which ones aren't, but no one disputes the Quran. But some of the Hades, you could say, oh, well, this one maybe didn't happen, this one did happen. We're not really sure. But no one disputes the Quran in the same way in Christianity with the Gospels. Yeah, maybe they said this, maybe they said that, maybe that's a later interpolation, maybe that was wrong, maybe blah, blah, blah, but no one disputes Jesus. You couldn't have Jesus out in front of you and argue with him about what's true Christianity, right? And so this is why in Islam, or in Christianity, if you want to say, look, I know the Bible says all that stuff about women speaking in churches, but actually, you know, Paul probably didn't write that letter and he probably didn't mean this and that particular verse moves around our early manuscripts and maybe he didn't really say that.

1:13:04I mean, like, whatever. And so you end up with this sort of, yeah, okay, fine. So play in the system. Would Jesus be okay with it? Yeah, it feels like Jesus might be okay with it kind of thing. And so there's a bit more room to You can't do that with Quran. You can't say, oh, well, maybe that verse isn't true. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe that was a later interpolation because the Quran is the word of God. What's an interpolation? Oh, like a later edition. There's something that's added later into the text. So like earlier I mentioned, the stoning of the adulterous woman, which is probably, well, it's one of my favorite stories in the Gospels where Jesus says he who's without sin casts the first stone.

1:13:40It's a religious test because you've got this Jesus peaceful figure and as a woman who's committed adultery and the law is quite clear that the woman should be stoned. And Jesus is just like writing in the sand and the Pharisees are like, okay, come on then Jesus, what are you going to do here? It clearly says that she should be stoned, that's what the law says and he's like writing in the sand, he's kind of ignoring them and they say, Jesus, you know, what should we do here? You know, the law is quite clear, we need to stone this woman and they're testing him. What's he going to do? And he says, sure, yeah, okay, go ahead.

1:14:07But he who's without sin casts first down. Oh, it's brilliant. It's awesome. It's like ethical genius. It's sort of undercuts at the same time as not contradicting the truth of the law or the justice. You know, it's this brilliant moment. But unfortunately, it's not in our earliest manuscripts. And so most scholars believe that it's a later interrelation. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Factor. If you're too busy, there's summer to cook, but still want to ensure that you're eating well, factor is the solution. Factors fresh, never frozen meals, a dietician approved and ready to eat in just two minutes.

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1:15:13You can get 50 % off your first box plus 20 % off your next month by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to FactorMeeals .com slash MW50 using the code MW50. a checkout that's factameals .com slash MW50 and MW50, a checkout. Plus, Nostoc Gospels, which is like the DVD extras. So at the behind the scenes vlog. The director's cut, yeah. Yeah, it is. The extended edition. The Nostoc Gospels are a fascinating corpus of texts, which we've only very recently in the grand scheme of things been able to rediscover and read for ourselves. We knew if the existence of a bunch of Gospels that weren't in the New Testament, because early church fathers were writing about them.

1:15:57We knew about the existence of a gospel of Judas, a gospel of Thomas fascinating, you know. But we didn't have the texts until in 1945, some guys digging in the desert and accidentally crashes into this big jar. At least this is one of the stories it disputed. It just opens this jar. At first, it doesn't want to open it because it's scared there's a demon in it. but turns out it's got a bunch of ancient manuscripts, which he takes home and keeps by the fire. Where is it? In Nakamadi, near Nakamadi in Egypt. So Egypt has the perfect climate for the preservation of the virus. So we're not entirely sure, but it seems that these texts were buried in this cave, in the desert.

1:16:47and that could be because Athanasius comes up with the Christian canonical New Testament. These are the four gospels. All of the other ones, we're not going to read, they're not part of our tradition, so they end up getting destroyed. They get buried in the ground to either protect them because they don't want to be destroyed or just to bury them to get rid of them. It's also possible that it was a burial site. Some people have suggested that it was some significant figure with a lot of texts to his name when he was buried, he was buried with these texts. And so that's why some people think that the story of the discovery isn't true because it was actually grave robbing.

1:17:26Some people have thought maybe it was just a simple grave robbing, but the person who then discovers these texts doesn't want to admit that he's having robbing a grave. Have these been carbon dated? Have they been verified or tenticated? So there's been a lot of work done on this.

1:17:41You can date the actual papyrus, but you can also, I mean, the extraordinary thing about these gospels, is that so I think so, the gospel of Judas for example, which is not found in that collection, it's not found in the Narcamadi collections, it's found at a later point and fascinatingly, when people began to realize what it is, there's this huge scramble because it's worth a lot of money, right? and people are trying to smuggle it, people are trying to, because you can't just take really expensive ancient manuscripts across the border. You know, countries want to keep them for themselves, they want them for their museums, they want them for their researchers, but the people who find them want to sell them.

1:18:18So this gospel of Judas is discovered and it finds its way all over the place. It actually spends something like 15 years in a safety deposit box in Long Island in New York, which like almost destroys it because you go from like the... So it was just like absolutely ludicrous. It's finally national geographic who buy the gospel of Judas. They sent a bunch of scholars, I think including Bart Irman, to go and verify it and they give them a bit of the text, but they can't give them too much because they can't just let them read it because they haven't bought it yet, but they need to give them enough to verify the text.

1:18:48So there's carbon dating and all this kind of stuff, but also, we can, so we carbon date the papyrus and we know that it sort of dates, I don't know what the exact numbers are, but between like 80 AD and like 400 AD. It's like give or take like a few hundred years. But we also know that

1:19:08that Irenaeus writes in against terraces about the Gospel of Judas. So we know that it existed and we know that this is dated to around that time and we're like this must be the Gospel of Judas. But because Irenaeus writes about it in like 180 AD, we know that the top end for how late it can be There are lots of different ways to get to... You've got to triangulate. Exactly, right. So you can date a text by carbon dating the papyrus. But also when it's been referred. Referred to, we can do it textually, like what are its textual dependence? What does it have knowledge of? Does it have knowledge of the...

1:19:40So a lot of people date the Gospel of Mark after 70 AD because it mentions the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. So the temple is destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and Mark's Gospel mentions this. And so the secular historian looks at that and goes, well, that means it was written afterwards. The Christian might look at it and say, well Jesus talked to it, Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple, because he was Jesus. It was a miracle, and it was going to happen, so it could be earlier. So there's sort of theological dispute as well. Interestingly, there was one gospel, the gospel of Jesus' wife, which was discovered relatively recently, And was particularly famous because it was a tiny, it was a fragment and it talked about Jesus' wife.

1:20:27And it mentions Mary Magdalene. So the presumption is that it's describing Mary Magdalene as Jesus' wife, which has been a sort of theory, Da Vinci code -esque thing going on for a while. And we have this ancient papyrus. And at first scholars are sort of like, they think this might be real. They carbonate the papyrus. And it matches perfectly. Yeah, like this is this is like data. This is an early ancient text Then some like red flag start being raised and the sort of final tail in the coffin