March 30, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
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| you Okay, welcome. | ||
| It is Holy Saturday, 8 April in the year of our Lord 2023. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| We do this special every year and we're very honored this year to have as our guest Dr. Tom Williams. | ||
| Dr. Williams, before I get into it, you've written this book and it's really, I want to spend a better part of the hour going through The argument in the book, because I think it is of this weekend, the holiest weekend in the Christian calendar for people to contemplate exactly where we are as a faith in the persecution directed towards the faith. | ||
| Walk us through, from a Catholic perspective, the importance of Holy Saturday. | ||
| You know people know Good Friday and the crucifixion of Christ, Holy Thursday with the Last Supper and the arrest, Gethsemane, and then you've got...but Holy Saturday kind of a lot of times gets lost in the mix and obviously with Easter. | ||
| But what's the importance of Holy Saturday and particularly this belief of Christ's descent into Hell? | ||
| Yeah there are two things, thank you Steve, and it's good to be with you on this very very holy day. | ||
| There are two traditions that go way back. | ||
| One that goes back furthest is the one you just mentioned, the idea of Christ's descent into hell. | ||
| It's a hell that's a little different than the way we understand hell today in the sense that he went to Lead out the souls of the just who had died before his coming. | ||
| It's a basic Christian belief that up till Christ redeemed the world, up to the time of his suffering on the cross, all those good and holy prophets, men and women of God, who had lived since the time of Adam, since the fall of Adam and Eve, they had not been able to go to heaven. | ||
| Heaven had not been opened to them. | ||
| A Savior was needed. | ||
| And the traditional understanding of that was that they were in hell, hell not as in condemned for all time, the way we think of hell as having been judged and found unworthy, but hell more like our understanding of limbo, the old traditional sense of kind of in a waiting place or in a place of the dead, a Gehenna-like place. | ||
| And that Jesus goes and there's a beautiful homily from the second century One of the earliest Christian texts we possess, outside of biblical texts, where the author describes Jesus talking to Adam and his conversation with him, because he is the new Adam, and inviting him to stand up and to take his rightful place. | ||
| And then all these crowds, the multitude of the just who lived in times before Christ, rejoicing in the salvation that has finally come to them. | ||
| That they are now able to enter Heaven. | ||
| How is this? | ||
| It's something that's been lost in modernity. | ||
| It's not really discussed of Holy Saturday and Christ going into, you know, going to hell to bring, I guess, the pagans or the people that were there that hadn't had the living word of Christ on earth when they existed, right? | ||
| The great philosophers and all that. | ||
| Why is it, like so many of the other teachings, and one of the powerful things about your book, is to go back and really emphasized the early church, what happened in the early church, the persecutions of the early church, to make sure we understand it, particularly that it was directed at the Christian faith. | ||
| Why with modernity have people kind of lost, has Holy Saturday in the general Christian faith overall kind of lost its place? | ||
| Well, unfortunately, Steve, I think you know that answer better than I do. | ||
| It's this kind of sunny, feel-good form of Christianity and Catholicism that is so prevalent in our day. | ||
| We only want to talk about the nice, fuzzy-feeling kind of stories and the parables and the sheep and the things that make us feel good. | ||
| It's not only Jesus' descent into hell that we don't talk about on Holy Saturday. | ||
| We don't talk about hell itself. | ||
| We don't talk about the possibility of condemnation. | ||
| We don't talk about judgment. | ||
| We don't talk about the eternal truths. | ||
| And this is, we're not doing justice to the fullness of the Christian message when we pass over these essential, central teachings of the Christian and the Catholic faith. | ||
| So I think that's kind of the short answer to this. | ||
| It's also something very tough for people to understand. | ||
| You know, again, we don't talk about hell at all, but Look, in the Apostles' Creed, what do we say? | ||
| We say, he descended into hell, right? | ||
| I mean, it's actually there, but nobody goes and explains, bothers to look, what does that even mean, right? | ||
| This idea that there was an entire human race of those who had been deemed just, whether they were, as you say, the pagan philosophers and those who were just Gentiles, if you will, but also all the Jewish patriarchs and prophets, all the Jewish holy people who had not been able to enter heaven until Christ opened it for them. | ||
| This is something absolutely remarkable and wonderful, and it is mysterious. | ||
| It's something that is very hard to understand, but it's something that is at the core of what we believe as Christians, and it's so good that you bring this back by having us talk about this on Holy Saturday. | ||
| A second thing, I'll say this just as kind of a segue so we can go back to the other as well. | ||
| Another part of the Christian tradition is a great devotion to Mary on Holy Saturday. | ||
| There's been, for many centuries, a devotion of special consolation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who knows a sorrow and an abandonment on Holy Saturday that the rest of humanity does not experience. | ||
| And the reason that Saturday has always been considered Mary's day, the day after her passion, in a way, was on Saturday and Christ's passion was on Friday. | ||
| That's why we celebrate the Immaculate Heart of Mary always on a Saturday, the day after we celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus. | ||
| It's her sharing in the passion But also in a particular way of having Jesus, her son, taken from her. | ||
| This day of mourning, this day of loss, when she experiences this desolation of soul because her beloved son Jesus has been taken from her. | ||
| She watched him suffer and die, and now he's laid in a tomb. | ||
| And so there is also that beautiful tradition of consolation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, particularly on that Saturday. | ||
| Dr. Williams, so much of your book goes back to what was it about Christianity that had the Roman state actually make it an official part of policy to persecute it. | ||
| I want to get into what the Christian message was and why it was so different. | ||
| as an organized faith. | ||
| Because I think it relates to, your message is really, and the subtitle of your book is very chilling, it's called The Coming Christian Persecution. | ||
| The Coming Christian Persecution, and the subtitle is Why Things Are Getting Worse, and How to Prepare for what is to come. | ||
| And I can tell you, and I've known Dr. Williams for a long time, is that this is an incredibly chilling book because of the intellectual rigor you bring to this topic. | ||
| The reason I wanted to do this on Holy Saturday with you is given this, what's just happened in Nashville at the Christian school. | ||
| And more and more information comes out about this. | ||
| The young woman who did it obviously planned it, planned it for a while. | ||
| She had gone to the school. | ||
| I think she was actually in counseling with the pastor, one of the senior people there. | ||
| And it looks to many people in the United States, and nobody wants to talk about it, and they certainly won't let it be talked about in the mainstream media, that this persecution of Christians is actually, we're actually entering a quite dangerous phase of it. | ||
| Particularly when the mainstream media has said, well, you know, it's Tom Williams and Steve Bannon and these Dr. Taylor Marshall. | ||
| All these people are all Christian nationalists, right? | ||
| And they're the dangers. | ||
| They're the domestic terrorists. | ||
| Walk me through why your book really, quite frankly, you give people a heads up that the Nashvilles of the world are not going to be the exception. | ||
| They're going to be the rule, sir. | ||
| Well, that is, yeah, that is the unfortunate reality. | ||
| It's not a very cheery book. | ||
| It's meant to be an honest book. | ||
| It's meant to be a book that digs in. | ||
| And also, in a way, a hopeful book in the sense that Christians are always called to live by hope, and especially when things get darkest. | ||
| But the reality is that things are simply getting worse. | ||
| And they're getting worse in a particular way, in an accelerated way, in the post-Christian West. | ||
| And it's what I find most distressing. | ||
| There have always been active persecutions among non-believers, among other religions that find Christianity intolerable, among atheist communist regimes. | ||
| This is something that we know exists, and we're, in a way, prepared for that. | ||
| What we're less prepared for, I think, is our own society, which was founded on principles of religious liberty, founded on the worship of God. | ||
| I mean, the first pilgrims who came over did so because they wanted to be able to worship in peace and freedom. | ||
| That society itself turning against Christians and using, as you say, this language to tar Christians as being the problem, as the obstacles to progress, as, you know, really as bigots, as Christian nationalists, as white supremacists, all the different epithets that you want to apply to Christians to make Christians about to be the bad guy. | ||
| And what do we do with the bad guy? | ||
| The bad guy, like the ogre in the fairy tales, has to be eliminated. | ||
| You call out your pitchforks and you chase him out of town, you string him up, you kill him. | ||
| And this is something that unfortunately We often look at it as just, this is rhetorical, but it's not just rhetorical, and it's so easy once you've kind of painted Christians in this way, Christians who take their faith seriously. | ||
| I'm not talking about the accommodated Christians who go along with the radical secularist agenda, but those who really take their faith seriously will be more and more portrayed as the enemy, and a dangerous enemy, and a dangerous enemy must be fought tooth and nail, and I think | ||
| The Covenant School in Nashville is a perfect example of this, because that rhetoric, that anti-Christian rhetoric, which sometimes gets very, very abusive and very violent among the LGBT and particularly the transgender lobby, it becomes something that the enemy has to be eliminated. | ||
| And we see examples of it. | ||
| In this case, this is not the first attack by a transgender person. | ||
| And as you noted also, the mainstream media will always go back and rewrite the narrative. | ||
| They will always paint the transgender person as the victim. | ||
| Oh, because they're so ostracized in society, because Christians have been speaking against them for so long, it's just natural. | ||
| It's just that Christians would finally get their comeuppance and that people like this would rebel against them. | ||
| Were you, we're going to go to break here in a second, were you shocked? | ||
| I guess you were not about how the media handled, because here we are, you know, last week in the nation's capital, just yards from where we do the show, there was going to be this transgender day, I think, of violence or vengeance, transgender day of vengeance. | ||
| It was canceled last week. | ||
| We've demanded that the manifesto Because she wrote a manifesto, that that be released. | ||
| They're suppressing that. | ||
| They don't want to put that out. | ||
| Were you shocked about how the coverage of this went down? | ||
| There's no mention at all about it really being a Christian school and an attack upon Christianity, sir. | ||
| Well, no, it played out like, you know, this kind of dystopian reality where everything is twisted. | ||
| At the beginning, no one wanted to say that she was transgender. | ||
| No one wanted to say that she identified as a male, as a man. | ||
| This is something that they suppressed for a while, and then it became just common knowledge. | ||
| And so that was the narrative that was given. | ||
| Weirdly, they did not refer to her as a man. | ||
| In any of these stories, for some reason, they took her biological sex as the reality, perhaps because that's the way the police report initially portrayed it, but at least that was true to the facts. | ||
| But the fact that they completely flipped on its head, they didn't want to talk about, again, the Christian school, that this was a targeted anti-Christian attack. | ||
| And that the perpetrator was transgender, and then later on, as you say, there's still this confusion as to motive. | ||
| I mean, I think the motive's fairly self-evident, but the fact that we actually have a document, a text, a manifesto, and that they won't release it. | ||
| Yes, the manifesto. | ||
| Tom, just hang on for one second. | ||
| We're taking a short commercial break. | ||
| It's our Holy Saturday special, The Descent into Hell, The Coming Christian Persecution. | ||
| Tom Williams is our guest. | ||
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He is a man of great wisdom, and a man of great courage. | |
| O come, O come, O come, and adore the sun, the moon, the king, and the star, Christ the Lord. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| It's Holy Saturday. | ||
| We are talking about the persecution of the Christians on the day in the calendar that is Christ's descent into hell before the resurrection tomorrow. | ||
| Dr. Tom Williams joins us from Rome, is the author of this new book about the coming persecution of Christians. | ||
| He's written a number of books before. | ||
| Nothing this, Tom, nothing this, I'm not saying dark, But this book grabs you, and you realize, because a lot of people would say, well, Christianity's being persecuted right now. | ||
| You actually say, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. | ||
| I want to go back to this concept, and it gets bandied about a lot, but I would like you to define it for our audience. | ||
| The post-Christian West. | ||
| What do you mean about post-Christian? | ||
| How did we get there? | ||
| Because we think of the Judeo-Christian West as a society and culture really predicated upon, you know, Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. | ||
| And, you know, how was that formed? | ||
| What did it mean? | ||
| And why do you say and can point to that we're in a post-Christian society? | ||
| Well, I think, Steve, that This is the United States. | ||
| This is Europe. | ||
| These are the former Christendom, if you will. | ||
| The societies that were built on, as you say, in a particular way, Athens and Jerusalem and Rome, especially in terms of its legal tradition, These were brought—this was the humus, if you will, in which this society grew. | ||
| It was based on a Christian understanding of the human person, on society, on the family, on the state and the relationship between the state and the individual. | ||
| These were principles that come from the Judeo-Christian tradition and that were accepted as just In the West, as a common heritage and a common sense approach to reality, this is the way the world was understood. | ||
| The world was intelligible because it was made by an intelligent being, that you could see God's footprints everywhere, His fingerprints on His creation, that man was created male and female, that the family was one man and one woman and their children, that life has value and dignity and must be defended and upheld, that people should | ||
| love their country. | ||
| St. Thomas Aquinas speaks about that. He says, the same way you love your parents, you love your country because your country gave birth to you. | ||
| He speaks of the word piety in terms of loving your country, this piety toward your country. | ||
| All these different virtues and values that were part and parcel of the Christian tradition which are now vanishing. | ||
| They're evaporating before our very eyes in a very hostile mentality, one that is anti-Christian, is post-Christian. | ||
| And for a while, I think we were sort of content to live in this post-Christian kind of miasma situation where, yeah, we kind of know where we came from, but even if we get rid of those roots, we can still live off the benefits of those basic beliefs. But now it's more and more hostile. They want to reinvent the founding of the nation. They want to reinvent the principles. They want to negate the good and make it look like everything grew out of evil and that everything needs | ||
| to be restarted in a new name. | ||
| I think it's a very, very evil and extremely dangerous project, the one that is coming now in what is not just the post-Christian West, but is becoming more and more the anti-Christian West. | ||
| Where Christianity is looked upon as the enemy, where Christians are looked upon as obstacles to progress, as people who, as one author likes to call it, are stuck in the Bronze Age with this Bronze Age Bible of myths and stories. | ||
| This very dangerous attachment to an obscurantist past and not allowing this radical secularist agenda to unfold. | ||
| And that's the kind of battle that we're headed for right now. | ||
| Talk to us about the first century church. | ||
| What was it about Christianity that was different? | ||
| What was it about Christianity that caused the great persecution and everything that led up to that? | ||
| Because in understanding that, you can then begin to understand the coming Christian persecution. | ||
| That's essentially the thesis of your book, right? | ||
| You must go back in time and understand what differentiated this from other religions, what differentiated this as a faith, to see the strong reaction of the Roman state against it leading up to the Great Persecution, sir. | ||
| The Roman Empire was all about assimilation. | ||
| It was a very tolerant state as far as it goes, in the sense that as long as you could integrate your beliefs, your belief system, your religion, into this greater pluralist Roman society, as long as you're willing also to sacrifice to the emperor and to burn incense to the emperor, as long as this is part of it, you can have your little cults and your rituals and your diverse things. | ||
| We're very open-minded, but your allegiance must first be to the state and it must be to Caesar, who is divine. | ||
| And Christians obviously could not abide by this, and it was primarily their higher allegiance to God that in the end put them in a situation of necessary conflict with the Roman state. | ||
| The other group that somehow escaped this, and scholars give an answer to why they escaped was were the Jews living within the Roman Empire. | ||
| And the reason was they would technically have been illegal as well because of their unwillingness, obviously, to sacrifice to other gods other than Yahweh. The difference was that whereas the Jews were content to kind of keep to themselves, they were not a proselytizing faith, they were not going out there to make converts, they were not preaching on the streets, they were not bringing people into the fold, the Christians were the exact opposite. | ||
| So you had Christians, and this really alarmed powers within the Roman Empire, whether they were emperors themselves or local governors at different times, the persecutions ebbed and flowed. | ||
| But the problem was so many people were converting. | ||
| Christianity was so powerful and so attractive that you had people from the very poorest to the patricians and the very wealthy. | ||
| It was something that spanned every class and every social group so that you had soldiers and you had politicians and you had artists and you had literary figures. | ||
| All being very attractive and coming into the Christian fold. | ||
| And so this was something that really caught the attention of the powers of the Roman Empire and was looked upon as something that could not be tolerated. | ||
| And again, there were times when it became extraordinarily hostile when they would hunt down Christians wherever they could find them. | ||
| At other times, even some of the more considered to be more enlightened and benevolent, the emperors like Trajan, Trajan's philosophy was—and he writes this to Pliny the Elder in a letter that we still have—he says, you know, don't hunt them down, but if there are complaints made, if you find out about them, bring them in and make sure that they are willing to sacrifice the emperor. | ||
| Make sure they're willing to abjure this higher allegiance to their god. | ||
| or they shall be prosecuted and they will be put to death. | ||
| And this is something that even under the more enlightened emperors this happened. | ||
| One of the things about the book that's very chilling is to show that some of the emperors, and it's almost like the modern world, they understand these Christians have the deep faith, but they're kind of saying, hey, all you got to do is light some incense. | ||
| All you have to do. | ||
| You don't have to give up what you really believe. | ||
| You just have to light some incense. | ||
| You just have to be performative and we'll look the other way and you can go along and lead your life. | ||
| And it's obviously more important to lead your life and have your community. | ||
| If you just do this performative and about the Christians said, I can't do that. | ||
| That isn't that is to the core of it. | ||
| It's very chilling. | ||
| Because many of the Roman emperors, many of the Roman officials make a quite modern argument, right? | ||
| They just, just be performative. | ||
| Just, just do this so that we can get past it because we're not, we're not that interested in snuffing you out. | ||
| We just want to get past this. | ||
| And what's amazing is the Christian has said, I'm not doing that. | ||
| That light one, you know, one thing of incense in front of a statue, not just a polytheism, but a statue of Augustus Caesar or whatever, you know, whatever emperors of the time. | ||
| It cuts to the core of my being. | ||
| It's very chilling that the Christians had the option and were dangled, often not all the time, but were dangled the option of just be performative and go about your business. | ||
| They said, no, that it's performative to you, but it cuts to the core of my faith and I won't do it. | ||
| And they were then and they told him, hey, you're going to have the most heinous tortures if you don't. | ||
| And they said, hey, it is what it is. | ||
| Tom Williams. | ||
| Yeah, and this, unfortunately, this is exactly what we see today. | ||
| There will always be, the great temptation for modern Christians is accommodation. | ||
| It is that willingness to do the modern equivalent of burning some incense before the statue of Caesar. | ||
| And this is something, that's why the Dick Durbin's and the Nancy Pelosi's and the Joe Biden's of this world are embraced. | ||
| By radical seculars. | ||
| This is a Christianity that they can live with. | ||
| Oh, you've got a rosary in your pocket. | ||
| You're my kind of Christian because obviously your Christian faith does not impinge upon any of your moral beliefs, any of your political stances. | ||
| It is something that doesn't change who you are. | ||
| And so we like you. | ||
| We will embrace you because you are willing to burn that incense to Caesar. | ||
| And for Christians who take their faith seriously, they are the enemy. | ||
| If you're Amy Coney Barrett and you come in and the dogma lives loudly in you, you are not acceptable. | ||
| We will not give you a place at this table. | ||
| We will do everything we can to thwart your rise here because we don't trust you, because we disqualify you because of that faith, because of that deeply held belief, because of that devotion that you feel. | ||
| You are not able to be unbiased. | ||
| You're going to be Problematic in your rulings because of that faith that you possess. | ||
| So we see how history really does repeat itself. | ||
| It is those Christians who are willing to live by their faith and take it seriously enough, they are the ones who are going to suffer for it. | ||
| And if you're willing to accommodate, if you're willing to say, hey, you know, whatever, We can't stop progress. | ||
| If this is the way society is going, let's just all get on board. | ||
| Let's get on the bus and they'll let us keep our rosaries. | ||
| You know, those are the ones who are going to do just fine. | ||
| Hang on, Tom. | ||
| We're going to take a break. | ||
| We're going to talk about, by the way, we wouldn't have had Christianity bequeathed to us as it was if the early church had been accommodationist. | ||
| They weren't. | ||
| They would not accommodate, and that led to the rise of the Judeo-Christian West. | ||
| Short break, Dr. Tom Williams on the other side. | ||
| Okay, it is Holy Saturday, 8 April in the year of our Lord 2023. | ||
| This is our annual tradition of Christ's descent into hell. | ||
| We always have a special guest that can walk us through some of the issues that the church faces. | ||
| When someone of a profound thinker as Tom Williams Actually, it takes a year or two of his life to write a book about the coming Christian persecution, why things are getting worse and how to prepare for what is to come. | ||
| First, I want to deal with how is it getting worse? | ||
| What are the signs of that? | ||
| What should we be looking for before we pivot to how do you prepare for it? | ||
| Tom, where do you think we are? | ||
| Because I think a lot of Christians are just waking up to the fact of this is serious and I think the Covenant School shooting is just the first of several things that now people can kind of tie these together to say I see something that's quite dangerous here, in particular the language that's being used, sir. | ||
| You know, the basic thesis of the book, Steve, is that the drivers of Christian persecution are intensifying. | ||
| And the traditional and historic Bastions against Christian persecution, those that uphold religious liberty, those that defend and protect Christians, are weakening. | ||
| And these two things going hand-in-hand set up a situation where things cannot but get worse. | ||
| And there's a problem which, you know, I hope this book will address this problem, will alleviate in some way this problem, the widespread ignorance as to the magnitude of the problem. | ||
| People do not realize how many Christians are actively persecuted around the world, and how this persecution, which is very bloody in many places, is becoming bloody right before our eyes. | ||
| Even in the post-Christian West, even where persecution used to mean for a Westerner, you know, a little ostracization, a little bit of ridicule in the academy, a little bit of, oh, isn't that sweet, that, you know, devout kind of benighted figure. | ||
| And now it's something that becomes more and more hostile, more and more aggressive. | ||
| And we are going to see more of this kind of violent attack because there are no voices speaking out on behalf of Christians. | ||
| Christians are considered to be A majority. | ||
| They're considered to be well-standing. | ||
| They're considered to be able to take care of themselves. | ||
| And as soon as Christians start raising their voices and say, this is not a good situation, the way that Christianity is being portrayed and the dangerous rhetoric being used, then you get the stop whining. | ||
| You know, don't be a whiner. | ||
| Don't complain about your situation. | ||
| And even among many Christians, they're held back in speaking the truth about what is going on because they don't want to look like that. | ||
| They don't want to be the one who's complaining or shining a light on that very, very problematic area. | ||
| Tell me about when you say the institutions that used to be there to prevent this are not there anymore, that this is starting to ramp up and they're not there. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Well, let's start with the Western media. | ||
| Western media simply ignores, but ignores, I don't really believe that it's because people don't know what's going on. | ||
| There's an unwillingness to investigate and there's an unwillingness to report on the reality of Christian persecution around the world. | ||
| It's something that is intentionally withheld from people. | ||
| And so we talk, I talk to people all the time, very right thinking, good people who have no concept of the reality of Christian persecution in the world. | ||
| They just do not understand how widespread it is, how violent it is, how terrible and terrifying it is in the world, because they never hear about it. | ||
| They don't happen to read, you know, websites, the Christian websites that actually investigate this, those reports that come out, which are never covered, obviously, on mainstream media. | ||
| But one of the reasons, but hang on, but one of the reasons they don't know it is that it's not preached from the pulpit. | ||
| It's not preached in the Evangelical Church. | ||
| It's not preached in the Catholic Church. | ||
| It's, you know, all you hear, and particularly in the Catholic Church, some in the more mainstream Potestant churches, is dialogue. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's dialogue. | ||
| You never hear this coming from the Vatican. | ||
| You never hear it preached on virtually any pulpit of a Catholic Church on a Sunday. | ||
| You very rarely hear it from any of the Evangelical or even the outside of the mainstream Christian preachers, unless somebody is tied to missionary work in Sub-Saharan Africa, or they're tied to missionary work in the Middle East, like in Iraq. | ||
| I mean, isn't one of the reasons we're not hearing it, it's not just the mainstream media's and the media's fault. | ||
| There's something about the church is not putting this front and center is that, hey, there's a problem here. | ||
| They're coming after us in a very organized way, whether that's in Communist China, in Sub-Saharan Africa, in eradication of the Christians in the cradle of Christianity, which is the Near East or the Middle East. | ||
| I mean, isn't one of the central things here that either because of they're afraid to talk about it or they just are they they they like their international organizations and they don't want to be out there actually defending Christianity that the more official aspects of the Christian and Catholic Church won't address this. | ||
| Well, you're absolutely right, Steve. | ||
| I think there is a very strong tendency to want to assimilate, to want to just get along, to want this brotherhood of man. | ||
| It's like John Lennon's Imagine. | ||
| It's so prevalent in mainstream Christianity, this sense of We're all the same. | ||
| The religions are all basically the same, with all different paths to God. | ||
| One's just as good as another. | ||
| Nothing should separate us. | ||
| We shouldn't be arguing about this. | ||
| We shouldn't be pointing out differences. | ||
| We shouldn't be Living out to the full who we are, we should be willing to accommodate and to bend and to fit in. | ||
| See, this is what the emperors, this is what the savvy and smart emperors, cunning emperors in the first century and second century offered up, was the accommodation. | ||
| Just be performative. | ||
| All you gotta do is burn a little bit of incense. | ||
| They didn't even demand that you believe it. | ||
| All you have to do is give me a little burn there in the dish and go about your merry way. | ||
| Isn't that exactly what's happened here with the institutional church in the 21st century? | ||
| When the church is under, as you make in the book, one of the things that's most compelling, you actually make the case that the persecution today in the 21st century is probably worse in any metric you want to look at than in the 1st and 2nd century of the early church, sir. | ||
| Yes, well, that's, I think, verifiably, statistically true. | ||
| It's just the pervasiveness of Christian persecution in the world, the fact that 75% of people who are persecuted for whatever faith they belong to happen to be Christians, that there are some 360 million Christians who live under severe persecution, in danger of their lives every day. | ||
| These are facts and figures that are so startling and so, but again, so unknown. | ||
| This is really the untold story that so many people are ignorant of. | ||
| But I agree with you, and look, you know, the Catholics in the United States, we have a whole history of this. | ||
| There's always been a temptation because Catholics were very persecuted early on as, you know, the Irish and the Polish and sometimes Germans, and they did everything in their power to make it look like, oh, I'm first an American and then I'm a Catholic, right? | ||
| This was a temptation. | ||
| It was a temptation to fit in, to assimilate, to make it Show that you're a better citizen. | ||
| Show that you're—and we got John F. Kennedy out of this, you know, the one who said, you know, I'm not—I'm first an American. | ||
| I'm going to be an American. | ||
| And this is something that there's always been a struggle in kind of the Catholic spirit in the U.S., but it's only more recently the evangelicals and the Protestants have joined in that same timidness and that same unwillingness to say, you know, I am a Christian, and I Uphold—and my allegiance to Jesus Christ is actually superior to any other allegiances I have, and it's what makes me a good citizen, what makes me a loyal patriot, is because I actually do believe, and I believe that I should be loyal to my nation. | ||
| But this is something that we're very afraid of right now. | ||
| We're so afraid of not fitting in. | ||
| We're so afraid of being considered to be obscurantist, to be considered to be less Cool than the academics who say that this is something that's very passé. | ||
| We all want to fit in, and this is the great temptation of our day, and it's why so few people are willing to stand up and be counted and just say, hey, yeah, I'm an educated person, and I am a Christian, and I believe in the creed. | ||
| I recite it on Sunday, and I believe it, and I try to, you know, base my life around this, because these are the truths that actually give But many Christians don't want to do that. | ||
| and explain reality to me. | ||
| This is what explains human existence and my personal existence in the most cogent, coherent way that I've ever seen that I can imagine. | ||
| But many Christians don't want to do that. | ||
| They want to keep that away in the little catacombs of their house. | ||
| And when they walk out on the street, they want to look like everybody else. | ||
| They don't want to be seen as somehow different because it's dangerous, it's uncomfortable to be different. | ||
| But this is the world we live in and we have to stand up or else we're going to get the situation that we're getting right now. | ||
| Did you see any, because I know you follow this and we follow it quite closely, do you remember any big names in either the institutional Protestant church or the Catholic church? | ||
| Or even come up and condemn what happened against the children at the Covenant School? Was there any outrage at all in the Christian community as far as you saw it? | ||
| One person that I saw, and I do follow this as closely as I can, Franklin Graham, whom I'm a big fan of, I think he's a worthy scion of his father, did make a couple very interesting Facebook posts. He's got 10 million followers and he brought this up and said, he said, evil walked into that school that day. He actually was very poetic and very stern in the way that he described | ||
| I mean, he hasn't gone into the whole question of this transgender in the way that the mainstream media are addressing it, but he did definitely come down very, very hard and brought up the fact that these were Christians who were killed because they were Christians. | ||
| I mean, your warning is why things are going to get worse. | ||
| Isn't one of the reasons it's going to get worse Because Christian leadership in the Catholic Church, the mainstream Protestant churches, leading evangelicals, were to basically draw a line now and say, this is going to stop on our watch. | ||
| Isn't that one of the most important things? | ||
| Isn't that the beginning of stopping it getting worse? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But part of the reason it's going to get worse is because we're just not seeing that. | ||
| And I think that Even when an isolated Christian leader or a Catholic bishop in some diocese stands up and makes a strong case, right now, those bishops are not getting support from Rome. | ||
| They're not getting support. | ||
| If you're a Protestant pastor, you're not getting support from your community. | ||
| You're not getting support from the other pastors. | ||
| You're very much alone. | ||
| You're like a Jeremiah preaching, and you're not feeling like you're getting a lot of love for that. | ||
| You're not getting a lot of support. | ||
| And I think that that is the reason. | ||
| This very tiny minority of those who are willing to speak out, we're just not seeing the kind of leadership we need right now to bring attention to the dire reality that we're living. | ||
| Tom, if you could hang on for a second. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We've got Dr. Tom Williams, who's the author of many, many books, principally about theology. | ||
| He's written this really for Crisis, Crisis Publication, The Coming Christian Persecution, with someone as deep and profound as Dr. Williams takes on about the persecution of the Christian church, particularly the subtitle, Why Things Are Getting Worse, and how to prepare for what is to come. | ||
| If you're a believing Christian, it is quite a stark book, but a must-read, and more importantly, a must-understand the argument. | ||
| Okay, we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to return in the war room. | ||
| This is our special. | ||
| Every year we do this on Holy Saturday as we await Easter Sunday, the descent into hell. | ||
| So we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We'll be back in a moment. | ||
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| Boy, it's Tom Williams. | ||
| What a guy. | ||
| Quite brilliant. | ||
| Persecution of Christians. | ||
| One thing we don't spend enough time on. | ||
| Gotta spend more. | ||
| When we get back, people, particularly people who are Catholics, I think some of the Protestant faiths have picked this up now. | ||
| The service this evening on Holy Saturday is, I think, not just the longest, it's the most intense. | ||
| I think of all the services that we have, either in Advent or around Christmas, or Ash Wednesday, even Good Friday. | ||
| The Holy Saturday is the most intense, so for all the Catholics, I'll probably start most, for most folks, later in the afternoon. | ||
| We're going to be back on Monday, and we'll be into this big time tomorrow, obviously, Resurrection Sunday, Easter Sunday. | ||
| A lot of people are obviously going to go to dawn services and then enjoy the family the rest of the day and those traditional Easter things that one does. | ||
| Monday, Congress is still not back. | ||
| They're off another week, but there'll be a lot of intensity next week, particularly on a number of topics that I don't want to get into today on this show. | ||
| Be advised, I'll be up on Ghetto over the weekend. | ||
| And of course, back here on Monday, it'll be quite intense. | ||
| We're also going to have some announcements of things that we're going to try to pull off of actually going out and doing things physically, doing the Gladiator School. | ||
| Remember, we did the force multiplier event at CPAC. | ||
| And we're going to do another force multiplier event and I'll announce that hopefully on Monday so we can get as many people there as possible. | ||
| Maybe announce a couple so we want people involved. | ||
| Once again, I really want to thank Birchgold. | ||
| Birchgold.com. | ||
| Bannon and like I said we got the fifth installment. | ||
| I'm working on the central bank digital currency. | ||
| We got the other four and I think it I think it will teach you or you begin to understand what what the meaning of the prime reserve currency is Why a stable currency is so important for a stable economy and therefore a stable country You'll get the whole history of that plus a bunch of technical details about the debt crisis and everything we have so make sure you go and Please go check that out this weekend. | ||
| That's birchgold.com slash ban. | ||
| And also, Mike Lindell, great sponsor of this company, a guy who's been through, they try to put him through hell, just like Peter Navarro. | ||
| Mike Lindell's not in prison, but of course, they're trying to bankrupt him, just like they're trying to bankrupt President Trump. | ||
| All this has a cost to it in the material world. | ||
| That's why they're trying to bankrupt President Trump, trying to put him in prison. | ||
| That's why they have Peter Navarro in prison. | ||
| While they want to bankrupt Mike Lindell, the pressure that Mike Pillow is on is incredible pressure. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| If you saw behind the scenes of what they've done to him, debank, de-platform, take his processing away, all of it, make it harder to actually make the product, cut vendors off, cut off all his access. | ||
| But when it's a spiritual war, they're going to fight in the temporal or they're going to fight in the material world and they have no constraints. | ||
| That's one of the things about a spiritual war. | ||
| The demonic opponents have no constraints and will do anything to destroy people. | ||
| That's just, you have to, that's an entry level. | ||
| Understanding you have to do if you're going to be in this fight. | ||
| That you're a combatant and they consider you an enemy combatant. | ||
| And as an enemy combatant, you have to be taken out. | ||
| You have to be suppressed. | ||
| You have to be debanked. | ||
| You have to be deplatformed. | ||
| You have to be, as Rupert Murdoch so lovely put it in that email to his staff, made a non-person. | ||
| Made a non-person, where they try to make President Trump a non-person. | ||
| I don't think it quite worked out for them, or at least it didn't work out from the way that they thought. | ||
| Really want to thank everybody. | ||
| Natalie, I want to thank Joe Allen, of course, the team at Real America's Voice, the great team in Denver, and particularly the team in Denver that puts on, helps us put on the Saturday show and the specials. | ||
| I know I'm all over those men and women all the time, but it's in a spirit Of making it better. | ||
| They are super hard workers, and with our own production team, just, I think, give an extraordinary product. | ||
| I tell people all the time, I'll match our product up against any news organization in the world. | ||
| BBC, PBS, New York Times, Washington Post, smarter, tougher, more on top of things, and able to curate. | ||
| the signal from the noise and that takes a team to do it just don't think it's me sitting up here yammering on in front of a microphone that's the that's the french porch of it all but it's a apparatus not a vast apparatus it's a relatively small uh gonzo apparatus but we're very proud of it we're very proud of what it's been able to do uh we're going to leave you this it's mozart's requiem not actually religious music but i think on one level quite Quite religious and quite spiritual. | ||
| It's the Requiem, and I think one of the most beautiful and moving pieces of music ever written in that civilization that we call the Judeo-Christian West, a civilization that's provided more thinking and art and analysis and objectivity. | ||
| It's taken man to the moon, the study of the deepest, the darkest, deepest reaches of science, the most hardest of science. | ||
| Knowledge, human knowledge. | ||
| It's a civilization to be quite proud of and to make sure that we're not there when it collapses. | ||
| Of which our sociopathic overlords want. | ||
| Because we're going to leave you with a Mozart's Requiem, some beautiful art. | ||
| Let you go about your business on Holy Saturday in the year of our Lord 2024. | ||
| We will be back. | ||
| Do a replay of this tomorrow on Real America's Voice. | ||
| We will be back on Easter Monday, live 10 a.m. | ||
| Eastern Daylight Time, when once again, you will be in the War Room. | ||
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