Transcript

In a previous episode, I talked about the empty theology of some forms of liberal Christianity that peddle absurdities like having faith in faith.

But there's another form of Christianity that is just as empty and dangerous and that's political Christianity.

You may not notice it at first because political Christians will make bold stands for the truth.

They criticize Islam even to the point of being called Islamophobes or they criticize transgender ideology to the point of being called transphobes.

It's easy to think of them as being just one of the faithful and not as merely a friendly ally, but what the world needs isn't political Christianity.

It just needs Christianity, the true faith of Christ that is found in his one holy Catholic and episodic church.

So what is political Christianity?

I've noticed this term being used by atheists like Alex O'Connor and Stephen Woodford to describe people who identify as Christians at least in some way or who believe the world needs to be Christian even though they personally don't believe the central truth claims of Christianity.

In some of these cases, a political or a cultural Christian outright denies being Christian himself.

He might be a self-professed atheist who simply misses Christianity being the foundation of our culture rather than something else like radical wokeism or an encroaching radical Islam.

For example, here's Peter Boghossian, the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists describing the bitter fruits of early 2000s new atheism.

Do you think I would It would be unfair for me to say that the new atheists perhaps cleared a path by killing God-

Yes.

again-

Yes.

Um, for these new religions to, these new quasi-religions-

Yes.

pseudo religions to flourish?

100%.

Is there, is there a link?

It's absolutely true and I think there was a Pollyanna attitude that many new atheists had that su- somehow will, will bury God, b- b- borrow, turn of phrase from Nietzsche, and everybody's going to be living in some rational paradise.

Or here's Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion calling himself a cultural Christian.

Um, so I, I've count myself a cultural Christian.

I think it would matter if we Certainly, if we substituted any alternative religion, that would be tru- truly dreadful.

The doctrines of Islam, the Hadith and the, and the Quran is fundamentally, um, hostile to women, hostile to gays.

Um, and, uh, I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, although I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith.

In politics there is a thing called horseshoe theory which says that the political spectrum isn't a straight line.

It bends like a horseshoe and the extreme ends almost meet.

Once you go far enough left and right, you see how the extremes begin to look more like each other than the political center.

Like how it's hard to tell the difference between left wing authoritarian communism and right wing authoritarian fascism.

In theology, something similar happens with far left liberal Christians and far right political Christians.

They look the same because they care more about what Christianity can do than whether Christianity is true.

I discussed this in my previous episode where I talked about atheist church pastors like Greta Vospers who write books with titles like With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe.

But there is a version of this on the right that makes the truth of Christianity subordinate to the usefulness of Christianity.

I covered this in a previous episode regarding the conversion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali from atheism to Christianity.

Since her initial explanation back in November for why she converted centered around her saying, We need the Judeo-Christian tradition to fight the formidable forces of Islam.

And as I said back then, this is not the primary reason that one should become Christian.

The primary reason is because you believe Christianity is true.

I was hoping Ali would have grown in that area more before her recent dialogue with Richard Dawkins.

But watch this excerpt where Ali makes the point that what matters most in the world is merely having a force like Christianity that can stand up to Islam and wokeism.

And the challenge of Islam and the message of Islam to western civilization can be countered and should be countered with the message of western civilization which is essentially Christian.

And in that sense, I think there are more people who agree with me, but that is on the societal level.

And then on the civilizational level, I think that every moral You, you've used yourself, uh, Richard, the, um, phrase lately that there is moral Christianity and there is cultural Christianity.

And when moral and cultural Chri- Christianity collides with moral and cultural Islam or moral and cultural Confucianism or cultural authoritarianism, um, I think then perhaps we're on the same page about that might be a way of countering it.

Yes.

But on the personal level, yes, I choose to believe in God.

And I think there we might say let's agree to disagree.

Now here's Dawkin's response.

This is all obvious nonsense.

This is all theological bullshit.

And The idea that-

Humanity is born in sin and has to be cured of sin by Jesus being crucified, Jesus being punished for all our sins.

And that is a morally very unpleasant idea.

I'm sure you must agree about that.

When Ali initially converted, I said at the time we should pray for her and give her time to grow into her new theological beliefs.

But brand-new converts should not be the public faces of the faith and this dialogue shows why.

Listen to her response and notice how the utility of Christianity is valued over the truth of Christianity.

I find that Christianity is actually obsessed with love and that the figure, the teachings of- the teaching of Christ as I see it, and again I'm a brand-new Christian, but what I am finding out, which is the opposite of growing up as a Muslim, the message of Islam, but the message of Christianity I get is that, um, it- it- it's a message of love, it's a message of redemption, and it's a story of renewal and rebirth.

And so Jesus dying, uh, and rising again for me symbolizes that story.

This sounds just like liberal Christians I highlighted in my previous episode that say things like, The empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed, or, The message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death.

Let's continue.

And in a small way, I felt like I had died and I was reborn.

And that story of redemption and, uh, rebirth, um, I think makes Christianity actually a very, very powerful story for the human condition and human existence, and the pain of suffering, but also our internal, the recognition of, um, what you call sin, but perhaps the character defects that both good and evil are there, but that both good and evil are in us.

I think those teachings in Christianity are for- far more powerful and have led to, I- I think the flourishing of Western civilization.

Ali then compared the kindness of Christians to the dangerous threats Muslims made against her as showing the importance of living in a Christian culture.

To which Richard Dawkins says

Well, I must say, I've never met a vicar that I didn't like.

I mean, they're always very, very nice people.

Yeah.

But- but nevertheless, the stuff they believe is obvious nonsense.

And- and, um, you- you have to take the whole package because w- when you talked about Jesus rising from the dead, you don't believe Jesus rose from the dead, surely.

Um, I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

You choose to believe this?

Yes.

And that is a matter of choice.

Notice how Ali phrases this, I choose to believe it.

On the one hand, it is true that at some point we have to decide and use our wills when we make an act of faith.

We make a choice to accept something as true even if there are lingering difficulties.

But on the other hand, saying, I choose to believe it, can make it sound like what matters most is the decision to believe something is true rather than the conviction that what you believe actually is true.

Now, Ali goes on to say it isn't hard for her to believe in the resurrection because God made the universe from nothing.

But Muslims also believe God made the world from nothing.

And so there has to be something else like convincing evidence that makes Christianity unique not just from atheism, but from every other religion.

Even the late atheist Antony Flew said, The evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion.

It's outstandingly different in quality and quantity.

But when you hear political Christians talk, it doesn't sound like evidence really matters to them.

In many cases, they bypass evidence and undercut our ability to talk about any historical realities of the faith.

And the prime example of this approach would be Jordan Peterson.

For example, why should I believe in God's existence instead of atheism?

Here's Peterson on Pints with Aquinas.

I don't think there is a good argument for atheism.

What's-

I think it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the world.

So it's just-

Okay.

it's- it's, uh, it's What would you say?

It's an illegal chess move.

This makes it sound like what matters are the assumptions we use when we start our reasoning, not the reasoning we use to get to our conclusions.

The Catholic Church infallibly teaches that man can use reason to know God exists.

And Saint Thomas Aquinas examined what he thought were the two best arguments for atheism, the problem of evil and the simplicity of naturalism.

So while I appreciate some of Peterson's insights regarding things like psychology, this just seems like an anti-intellectual approach to life's most important question.

Or consider this clip from Peterson's EWTN interview where the host asks him if the Christian faith is fairytale or reality.

Oh, no, it's- it's- it's Well, it's Why or?

Fairytale and reality.

There's no or there.

So the deepest fairytales are the most real, that's for sure.

Yeah, we don't understand fiction.

We don't understand what fiction means.

Fiction is a form of distillation, and I suppose at times the fictional and the real unite, and that's- that's the- that's the essence of the Christian claim, I would say.

That's the right way of thinking about, that's a way of thinking about it.

There's many ways of thinking about complex things.

Now, some people might defend Peterson here and say this is similar to how C.S. Lewis said Christianity is myth become fact.

But Lewis was very clear that evidence could show the historical reality of things like Christ's divinity, and this could be known, it wasn't just some kind of language game.But when I hear Peterson say, Well, it's fairy tale and reality, it reminds me of liberal Christians who use similar confusing language, like when William Lane Craig debated the late liberal Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong on the resurrection.

Spong had written a book called Resurrection: Myth or Reality?

But instead of arguing Jesus did not rise from the dead, Spong gives a confusing answer similar to what Peterson says.

I submitted that manuscript to my publisher, Harper Collins with the working title Resurrection: Myth and Reality.

Harper Collins changed my title and published it under the title Resurrection: Myth or Reality?

And is the story of a dead man walking out of a tomb, presumably three days after his death, physically resuscitated, is that literal language or is that language of people who are so transformed by the power of the living God that they have to create human language to communicate that experience?

Now with that clip in mind, notice what Jordan Peterson says to atheist Alex O'Conor's questions regarding Jesus' resurrection.

Let me put it this way-

Yeah.

if, if I went back in time with a Panasonic video camera and put that camera in front of the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, would the little LCD screen show a man walk out of that tomb?

I would sus- suspect yes.

So that, that is, that to me s- seems like a belief in the historical event of the resurrection, or at least of Jesus leaving the tomb, which means when somebody says, you know, Do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead?

It doesn't seem clear to me why you're not able to just say, It would seem to me, yes.

Because I have no idea what that means.

And neither did the people who saw it.

Once again, this overemphasis on phenomenological experience to ground meaning resembles how liberal Christians can't answer a simple question about the foundational elements of Christianity, like the resurrection, because they're caught in a similar maze of thinking.

Recall on my previous episode the clip where John Dominic Crossan said to William Lane Craig that it's meaningless to ask if God exists apart from human beings.

During the Jurassic Age, when there were no human beings, did God exist?

Meaningless question.

But surely that's not a meaningless question.

I mean, it's a factual question.

Was there a being who, uh, was the creator and sustainer of the universe d- during that period of time when no human beings existed?

It seems to me on your view you'd have to say no.

Well, I would probably prefer to say no because what you're doing is trying to put yourself in the position of God and ask for how is God apart from revelation, how is God apart from faith.

I don't know if you can do that.

I understand that not every theological question can be answered with a yes or no, but it can be intelligently qualified.

Like when someone asks me if Genesis 1 is true, I say it is as true as my wife's explanation to my children of where babies come from.

It's true for taking the truth that God made the universe and humans in his image and making those truths accessible to Bronze Age people.

But instead of even doing that, Jordan Peterson often criticizes those who just want to get straight answers out of him.

For example, here's atheist Sam Harris in a 2018 dialogue with Jordan Peterson.

What I fear about the way you talk about religion is that, uh, a- a- at the end of all these conversations, I'm still not sure what you believe on that point, frankly.

And if I'm not sure, no one out there is.

Well, I don't know why, I don't know why you would expect to be sure about what someone believes.

How Do you think that any one of you are capable of fully articulating what you believe?

You certainly aren't.

You are not.

That's completely ridiculous.

You're not transparent to yourself by any stretch of the imagination.

You act out all sorts of things that you can't articulate.

But how- but h- but how about a, how about a best guess?

Yeah.

And here's a recent clip where Peterson talks about the historicity of the Exodus with Alex O'Conor.

I mean, you, you spent more time in Exodus than probably any person I've ever met in person, right?

Clearly the story sort of captivates you and you think it's really important and, and, and can teach us a lot, right?

It's remarkable.

Of course.

Yeah.

It's infinitely deep story.

But I think most people speaking to you already know that you think that, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so when they ask you a question, wh- when, when they say, suddenly say to you, But do you think it really happened?

Well, what the hell does that mean?

Like even if you don't like the question, you must understand what someone's asking.

Oh, yes, a- well-

And if that's the case-

I understand mo- many of the things that they're doing simultaneously.

Then you must also understand that when you then say, It's still happening.

Yeah.

People just go, What are you talking about?

Yeah.

Well, I would say, That's not my problem.

Mm.

But it's, it's It becomes a problem when you understand that someone's asking a quite banal historical question-

Yeah, but you don't get to do that.

But why not?

Because the stories that you're dealing with aren't banal.

Now I agree with Jordan Peterson that the stories in Genesis and Exodus are not newspaper accounts.

They contain non-literal language.

So for example, the Exodus probably did not involve millions of people leaving Egypt, but at least included thousands of people who carried with them a shameful history of enslavement that no people in the ancient world would have invented when they're trying to make a claim to land somewhere else, like in the land of Canaan.

But it's not helpful, and it's in fact even detrimental to the faith to make the message of the pivotal biblical stories like the Exodus or the resurrection, to make the message more important than the fact that they really happened.

When asked if they happened, qualification should be as brief as possible, and we should remember the words of our Lord from the Sermon on the Mount, Let what you say be simply yes or no.

Anything more than this comes from evil.

But instead, Peterson over-qualifies everything.

The question, Did that happen? begs the question, what do you mean by happen?

But I worry that when those who defend political Christianity face off against those who try to show Christianity is not true, political Christians are ultimately set up for failure because only one side is asking the most relevant question when it comes to the debate.

Consider Alex O'Conor and Dinesh D'Souza's recent debate on the question, is the Bible true?

Here's part of Dinesh's opening statement.

I've never debated this topic before.

Uh, I'm not a theologian.

I wouldn't even say I'm an expert on the Bible.

So we're not off to a great start and it doesn't get any better.

D'Souza goes on to say that asking if the Bible is true is like asking if Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar is true.

It's based on history but Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has many non-historical flourishes, and Dinesh says that's also true of the Bible.

And I agree, the biblical authors use non-literal elements in their writings, like how the Gospel of Matthew skips generations and doesn't use a strictly literal genealogy.

But in the rest of Dinesh's 15 minute opening statement, he doesn't give a single argument for why we should believe the essential parts of the Bible are true.

He just says the Bible got it right, that the universe began to exist, and so that proves the Bible is true.

You know, but at best, that's a 50/50 guess.

The universe either began or it didn't.

Now, if I had to defend this topic, and I wouldn't want to do that because the topic, is the Bible true, is ridiculously broad.

But if I had to defend it, I would say that we have good historical evidence Jesus Christ rose from the dead and Jesus believed in the Old Testament, and so I trust a guy who can walk out of his own tomb.

But Dinesh D'Souza doesn't really focus on Christian apologetics.

His work focuses more on politics or political Christianity, as is evident in the books he writes which focus on topics like Obama's Rage, The Greatness of America, and The Evils of Liberalism.

What ends up happening is Christianity just becomes the most convenient way to fight these evils, and so we can just dismiss people who try to say Christianity isn't true as just not understanding the complexities of our worldview.

But you can't do that if you aren't willing to give evidence for your worldview as a whole, or if you're inconsistent about what evidence is required for.

For example, Alex calls out Dinesh for dismissing casual historical objections against the Bible while D'Souza tries to use casual historical evidence in order to prove that the Bible is true.

Notice what's happening, in my view.

Okay.

What's happening is that the Bible is a historical text and a scientific text when it needs to be, and it's not one when you don't want it to be.

So when I said a moment ago, here's a relatively mundane historical fact about the Gospels, you said, Well, the fact that some mundane historical fact should undermine Christianity is ludicrous.

But now you're telling me that a mundane historical fact is enough to buttress Christianity.

Finally, there's a strain of political Christianity that is especially insidious because it radically subordinates the truth of Christianity, that there's one triune God who died for all men because God loves all men, to an odious political goal of idolizing one particular race above others, something that Pope Pius XII condemned in his encyclical Mit branniger Sorge.

And he said that those who do this kind of idolizing of race are far from the true faith in God.

That encyclical, written in German, was smuggled into Nazi Germany since the Nazis promoted their own version of Christianity because Adolf Hitler despised real Christianity.

According to Richard Weikart in his book, Hitler's Religion, Hitler said in 1941, There is an insoluble contradiction between the Christian and a Germanic heroic worldview.

However, this contradiction cannot be resolved during the war, but after the war we must step up to solve this contradiction.

And in his diary, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis minister of propaganda wrote, The Fuhrer thinks Christianity is ripe for destruction.

That may still take a long time, but it is coming.

In a conversation with Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, who many call a white supremacist and who says that he himself coined the term alt-right, he said the following about Christianity

I'm not gonna contradict all of the, the, the white nationalist right wing or, or even, even the, you know, higher level Alain de Benoist's, uh, uh, criticisms of, of Christianity, which, which you can see in his book, uh, On Being A Pagan.

I'm not gonna contradict those.

I, I think there are problems.

But a- again, I think that's begging that issue of who we are, uh, as, as whites.

We are a spiritual people.

We need this.

And so I A- as opposed to rejecting Christianity, rejecting universalism, I think that is an absolute f- fool's errand.

That's never That's not gonna happen.

Christianity has deeply influenced who we are, it's influenced who I am.

And, and, and, in terms of rejecting a sense of the universal or what You, you might as well a- a- a- at- attempt to reject our white skin.

I mean, th- this is who we are.

Uh, we made Christianity.

A- a- as much as Christianity made us, we made Christianity.

Uh, I do think that Christianity in, in re- our religious sense does need to be radically transformed.

I think there needs to be a, a pantheon, uh, that, that honors our, our, our pagan deities and so on.

But that sense of binding us all together, that sense of the universal, that sense of forward-looking futurism and so on, we need that.

We desperately need that.

So our struggle is spiritual, there's no question.

And I don't mean spiritual in the sense of we should become Richard Dawkins and just, you know, deconstruct Christianity.

That, that's, that Again, half true is worse than a lie.

That, that leads absolutely nowhere and it's, and it's ignorant in a, in a, in a fundamental way.

We need a spiritual a- a- a- aspect to our race going forward and we need to re-transform it.

We might need to transform the r- uh, the church itself.

Pope Pius XII put it well: Whoever exalts race or the people or the state and divinizes them to an idolatrous level distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God.

He is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

But I want to end today's episode with probably the most heartbreaking clip for me, and that is Jordan Peterson's explanation for why he's not Catholic.

What is stopping you from embracing the faith of your wife?

You mean all those pesky Catholics?

I don't know if anything is stopping me.

What's holding you back?

I, I don't think anything's holding me back.

Everybody's got their own destiny, and so

Is it in yours?

Um, is it in mine?

I would say it's unlikely, but

Why do you say unlikely?

I exist on the borders of things, so why is that?

I don't know, but that's how it is.

It would be tragic if Jordan Peterson felt like he could not be Catholic because his identity rests in being the kind of person who doesn't settle for easy answers, that it rests in being the kind of person whose intellect descends into the deepest part of language or the mind or metaphysics.

His identity rests in being someone who is always on the border analyzing and not in the center embracing.

And I would say to Jordan Peterson the mysteries of the Catholic faith are so deep and vast, the mystery of who God is, of how the infinite God relates to finite creatures like us, that one can be a Catholic and spend a thousand lifetimes contemplating questions for which there are no easy answers.

But sometimes it's okay to have an easy answer.

In these interviews, it's clear that Jordan Peterson loves his wife, Tammy, who recently became Catholic.

Peterson just loves her, and the meaning of his words of love are patently obvious.

He has an easy answer to the question, Do you love your wife?

And it's okay to have an easy answer when it comes to the question, Do you love God?

It's okay to have the faith of a child and say that we love God and trust in him with the same joyful conviction a child has towards his father.

Now, it's true, as Saint Paul said, that as adults we should put away childish reasoning, but we should never lose our childish love or joy.

That's why the Lord said, Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Thank you all so much for watching today.

Please consider subscribing to this channel, liking this video, and I hope you have a very blessed day.