Episode 5273: WarRoom Easter Weekend Special: Descent Into Hell
Dr. Tom Williams joins Bannon's War Room to discuss his book on Christian persecution, explaining the theological concept of Christ's descent into hell as liberation for pre-Christian souls. He critiques the "post-Christian West" for suppressing truth regarding the Nashville Covenant School attack and warns that modern secularists mirror Roman intolerance against uncompromising believers. Citing statistics showing 75% of persecuted individuals are Christians, Williams urges the faithful to abandon accommodationist silence and publicly affirm their faith to survive an era of escalating hostility. [Automatically generated summary]
Okay, we're going to be joined by Dr. Tom Williams.
He's a colleague of mine from when I ran Breitbart as executive chairman.
Dr. Williams is from Rome, lives in Rome, and he's going to talk about the importance of Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, the entire Easter weekend in the Catholic community, in the Catholic faith tradition.
One of the smartest guys I know, Dr. Tom Williams, joins us next in the world.
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 and 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?
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, and 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.
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 emphasize 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 the kind of the short answer to this.
It's also something very tough for people to understand.
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 of Christian persecution, the coming Christian persecution, and the subtitles, 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 or 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 and our Marshall Taylor, all these, 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 Nashville's of the world are not going to be the exception.
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 really bigots, as Christian nationalists, as white supremacists, all the different epithets that you want to apply to Christians to make Christians out 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 them out of town, you string them up, you kill them.
And this is something that unfortunately we often look at 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, 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 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, the manifesto, I think it won't be easy.
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 there was, 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.
How did, talk to us about the first century church.
What was it about Christianity that was different?
What was it about Christianity that caused the first persecution, 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.
It was all about, it was a very tolerant state as far as it goes, in the sense that as long as you can 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 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 it, 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 emperors like Trajan.
Trajan's basically 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.
You know, if they are brought before, 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 who said, I can't do that.
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 be performative.
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 Christians said, I'm not doing that.
That light, one thing of incense in front of a statue, not just a polytheism, but a statue of Augustus Caesar or whatever emperors at the time 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.
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, welcome back.
A topic that people don't want to talk about is.
Christian persecution throughout the world.
It is getting more intense.
One of the reasons it's getting more intense is because nobody wants to address it.
It's not addressed in the pulpits, not addressed in the pulpits of the Catholic Church, certainly not addressed in the pulpits of much of the evangelical Protestant community, although there are both Catholic missionaries and evangelical ministers and ministries doing an incredible job, particularly in places like Sub Saharan Africa.
Tom Williams has written an incredible book, The Coming Christian Persecution.
We're going to continue with Dr. Tom Williams, as Dr. Tom Williams is going to explain not simply why this is important, but most importantly, that if we don't stop it now, it's only going to get worse.
The persecution of Christians throughout the world, you're seeing it in the United States.
Obviously, it's in China with the Chinese Communist Party, but I think you'll be shocked about how widespread it is.
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, that 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, why?
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.
The 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 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, hang on, but one of the reasons they don't know it is that it's not preached.
From the pulpit.
It's not preaching the evangelical church.
It's not preaching the Catholic church.
It's, you know, all you hear, and particularly in the Catholic church, some in the more mainstream Protestant 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.
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 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 to hear that either.
Because they're afraid to talk about it, or they just are 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.
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 got to do is burn a little bit of incense.
They didn't even demand that you believe it.
All you have to do is just 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 first and second century of the early church, sir.
Yes, well, that is, 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.
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?
And 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 this, 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 passe.
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 then I try to.
You know, base my life around this because these are the truths that actually give firm grounding to my existence 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 are going to get the situation that we're getting right now.
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.
He did make a couple of very interesting Facebook posts.
He's got 10 million followers, and he brought this up and said, Evil walked into that school that day.
He actually was very poetic and very stern in the way that he described the situation.
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, isn't your warning why things are going to get worse?
Isn't one of the reasons they're going to get worse because Christian leadership, if 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?
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.
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 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 Word.
This is our special every year we do this on Holy Saturday as we await Easter Sunday, the descent into hell.