WarRoom Battleground EP 985: Stopping The Islamification Of America
Stephen K. Bannon and guests Raymond Ibrahim and Pastor Joel Weber confront the perceived "Islamification" of America, arguing that Western vulnerability stems from a spiritual vacuum filled by materialist Christianity and demographic threats like "baby jihad." Ibrahim advocates for a militant stance against radical sects, while Weber highlights how 85% of evangelicals support dispensationalism to resist foreign influence. Ultimately, the episode urges a political alliance between traditional Catholics and evangelicals to defend cultural integrity against what they define as an existential threat from shifting global paradigms. [Automatically generated summary]
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose if that answer is to save my country this country will be saved war room here's your host stephen k band Okay, welcome.
You're in the war room on our six o'clock show, which is always very special to us.
Raymond Ibrahim joins us from Budapest.
Raymond, I know you're just back from Oxford.
And in fact, we're going to play a talk you gave there.
It doesn't take very long.
I think it's 10 or 15 minutes.
We're going to play that, and I want you to break it down for it.
It's about doormat Christianity.
The reason I want to have you on was one, obviously, you kind of shocked him in Oxford.
But you're, I believe, if not the best, one of the top two or three best writers that informs the West of this long struggle we've had with Islam.
And you've done it through a series of three books.
Talk about the books first.
I want to play the Oxford talk, and then we're going to break it down in a minute.
But in a time that we're in another Middle East war with a radical sect of Islam, the Shiite, the 12th Imam sect, In this kind of radical theology, which we've been in and out fighting for 47 years.
At the same time, I've been spending so much time in Texas in the show for good reason about the Islamic invasion.
And I've told people it's much farther advanced than I thought.
And this deals with the overwhelming victory we had on Proposition 10 to ban or prohibit, let me be specific, prohibit Sharia law in the state of Texas.
To have your counsel on this and to put it in historical perspective is always important.
So, before I play Oxford, do me a favor and just walk through your background in all three of the books.
One of them is out currently, and I want as many people as possible to buy, plus the other two.
They're fantastic, and they kind of form a trilogy.
Yeah, to understand what we're talking about today, Islam and the West and all its different iterations, most recently what's happening with Iran, I've always believed that there's been a complete vacuum in your average American and Westerner in general's knowledge of history.
And that's why so much of what we believe and accept and let get away happens because we don't understand the full context of it.
And we just think it's about, oh, you know, people are being multicultural and open minded and not bigoted.
Toward Muslims, for example.
But if you really look into the history, which is what I've been doing for about 25 years now, actually, including in those three books, which I'll summarize, if you look at the history, you'll understand that this battle has been going on from day one, literally.
And it hasn't really changed in its manifestation, at least not from the Muslim side.
The Muslims are still preaching jihad amongst each other, they're still practicing taqiyya amongst the infidel, and they're still engaged in all the various forms of jihad, which they've articulated.
Jihad, remember, just means to struggle.
And sure, its primary expression historically has been physical, a military struggle, but it also has all these different forms, which we're seeing now, including the baby jihad, which is a demographic overwhelming of the West, for example.
The only discontinuity is from the Western side.
So, whereas Muslims today are really locked, stuck, and barrel with their heritage, which comes out in all of these books, it's the West, and especially the Christians, who've completely lost touch with that long history.
So, in these books, we will see, for example, in Sword and Scimitar, we look at this long history.
That's the first book which came out in 2018.
I really focus on eight pivotal battles that changed the world forever, and they were between Christians and Muslims.
And these battles, the first one or two, saw the conquest of essentially three quarters of what was once the Christian world, which very few Westerners still understand at this point.
They still think that countries like Egypt and Syria and Turkey and North Africa.
We're just always Islamic somehow.
They don't understand that they were actually more Christian than Europe.
And they were violently annexed.
And so that there is a lesson that this could happen.
There's that famous quote I always talk about from Teddy Roosevelt, where he talks about if Christians did not fight constantly, and he mentions virtually every century against the Muslims, they would have been eliminated completely.
I'm generally seen as the Islam guy, and I talk about that big issue.
But seeing that this is a Christian revival conference and the fact that Islam and Christianity, there's something of a symbiotic relationship going on, I have to actually talk about both, because it's really all interrelated.
And so, what I'd like to start off with when I think of problems is well, what's the first thing?
What's the first premise at the problem?
And I often think that many people don't really see it or don't talk about it.
We tend to talk about symptoms.
Islam itself in the West, in Europe, in the UK, I see it as a symptom.
I don't see it as an inherent or innate problem.
And it's a symptom of essentially the weakening or the dying of Christianity in the West.
So, how did that happen?
And one of the thoughts that's been percolating in my mind and I've been thinking about and talking about quite often is the idea that one of the problems with Christianity in the modern era is that it has, in very many ways, adopted a Materialist paradigm, not unlike atheists and secularists.
And by that, I don't mean materialistic, as in covetous.
I mean it in a more philosophical sense, a materialist paradigm in the sense that all that is real, let's say from an atheist point of view, all that is real is what?
It's the material, right?
It's the physical world.
It's what I can see, feel, touch, and measure.
And all this abstract talk about your morality and your religion and all this sort of thing is usually jettisoned.
And that's one of the problems.
I fear and I think, and I see that much of Christianity in all of its manifestations in the modern era has adopted this worldview despite the theological veneer of what they say.
So, in other words, a Christian can, of course, express profound theological truisms, but at the same time, as they say, the proof is in the pudding.
And what I'm seeing is so, how is a Christian becoming a materialist paradigm in a philosophical sense?
If you look at what, if I speak To a Christian, what is the greatest evil that you can engage in?
I think a lot of people will say what an atheist would say, which is physical harm, okay?
Physically harming someone, and much worse, of course, killing someone.
And I agree, of course, those are great evils.
No one would argue that.
But unbeknownst to most Christians, that was actually more of a minor aspect of the message of Christianity, the entire ethos, the morality that was created.
And in short, before I elaborate, the problem with Materialist Christianity, which in many ways has, like I said, permeated the worldview of all Christians, is that it perfectly comports with secularism and atheism.
And that is why Christianity is still allowed to live side by side with a secular or even atheistic environment, because it also agrees.
All that we want to do is make sure no one's physically hurt, there's no violence.
But the question now becomes what happened to morality?
That was a word that used to be pivotal and important and fundamental.
To something like Christianity, where is there morality anymore?
And I'm not talking, of course, about individual Christians.
I'm sure there are many devout Christians still in the world.
But it's not something that is socially acknowledged or something much less that is socially pursued that we talk about.
Okay, so, and once one, I think, this is my realization when I think about it and how morality is not complete, is no, Western people and Christians will say they're moral, but again, it's through a materialist paradigm.
And you know that.
By simply looking at what used to be the greatest sins and the greatest evils for a society.
And all of them are, to various degrees, completely accepted by Christians today.
And all one has to do is look at the sexual mores of the West today.
And very few Christians will even argue or talk about it or even dispute it.
And they'd be, of course, scandalized to feel like they have to talk about it.
But if you look at historic Christianity, biblical Christianity, Christianity in all of its forms, something like sexual mores, sexual sins, that was one of the pinnacles and one of the most unquestioned aspects of Christianity.
So you see, this is why it is not being mentioned because, well, no one's hurting anyone.
And so that's what I mean.
That's a perfect example of how a Christian adopts the materialist worldview.
Now, there used to be something, and just to make it simple, you may have heard, I'm sure you have, of course, many Catholics and Anglicans, of the seven deadly sins, which actually very much informed the worldview of Christians in the pre modern era.
And they are, I often miss, but let's see wrath, greed, gluttony, envy, lust, sloth, and I always miss one.
Okay, that is what a Christian society thought about.
Now, these are all metaphysical, they're not material.
Okay, these were metaphysical principles.
This is what Christianity was all about.
Notice, killing is not one of the seven deadly sins.
Why?
Because it's a byproduct.
Of course, it's evil and you shouldn't do it, but it wasn't seen as a root cause.
Now, when I look at these, The seven deadly sins, which were fundamental to a Christian society, Christian, to Christendom essentially, for centuries up until actually quite recently, not only are they not something that we talk about or something we condemn, they are in fact what we now celebrate, and much of our economy is based on it.
And we call ourselves Christians, and we live with it, and we live in peace with this.
And I find that very interesting.
Pride, pride of course, is exalted.
Pride, you know, Pride Month.
Think about that.
Lust, that's everywhere you look.
It's promoted, it's glamorized.
Envy, just think social media, okay?
Gluttony, turn TV on, everything's about putting images of food, sloth.
So it's kind of amazing that to me, these are the principal issues.
These are the first things that were actually at the heart of a Christian order.
And they've just been completely so jettisoned, and very few Christians even understand this.
And that's the point.
This is so subtle and so incremental.
That, and the reason is, the best way I can put it is because Christians, one way or the other, over the decades and possibly centuries, have just adopted a very materialist worldview, which is that, yeah, we talk about the afterlife, we talk about sin, we talk about being saved, but in the end, when it comes to society, we begin and end with just not hurting people, okay?
So that's become the ultimate Christian virtue.
And it is a virtue, I'm not arguing that, but I'm trying to say there was so much more above it, which actually gave meaning to life.
Now, what happens when, uh, society, such as Western society, European society, jettisons what I'm talking about, which is essentially the metaphysical aspect of Christianity?
You can actually call it the spiritual aspect because the, the physical, um, or material aspect, um, what's the corollary is the metaphysical, the beyond, the physical.
Well, that's the spiritual.
And I just think it's funny because a lot of Christians today, when they say the word spiritual, it means some sort of abstract, fuzzy feeling.
Actually, I think, To be spiritual is to be engaged and to comprehend and try to exercise the metaphysical aspects of Christianity, the things that are beyond the physical, that are not measurable, that deal with morals and ethics and that sort of thing.
Now, when all that is jettisoned, as it has been in recent generations, a vacuum is created.
And that's, I think, where we are.
And what does nature abhor?
It abhors a vacuum.
Enter Islam.
Well, Islam, of course, is its own body of system, it's its own religion, it has its own teachings.
You know, one can be very hostile to it or critical of it.
And I'm, of course, associated with those views.
But we have to be honest, it also brings a sort of traditional worldview.
It knows what a woman is and it knows what a man is.
It's not confused about that, for example.
And it has all sorts of things that were very traditional that Europeans and Christians would have agreed with historically.
So I think that aspect, and it's confident.
So now you have a vacuum in Europe, in the West in general, because of the reasons I've outlined, dealing with the sort of slow melting away of Christianity based on these philosophical or epistemological underpinnings.
Now you have Islam coming in, and it may have all its problems, but it's still very visceral, it's down to earth, and it does offer all of these things that are filling the vacuum.
Okay, and this is why you find Western people who are turned off and find no resonance in modern secular liberal culture, and they turn to something like Islam, which on the heart of it doesn't make any sense.
I wager if those people actually had a true Christian upbringing, or according to the way I'm trying to describe it, which is actually much more fused with a metaphysical understanding, they would not find Islam appealing.
But that's what I mean.
There's a vacuum now, so that even something that is inherently inferior, in as much as it offers Something of a primordial conservative worldview that still resonates with all humans, then it becomes appealing.
And then it's all, especially in this country, it's coalescing in a very strange way.
As you all know now, there's a new blasphemy code about Islam, a new anti Islamophobia or anti Islam hostility thing.
And of course, this is just one more way to help Islam to become more empowered, more entrenched.
You can't even criticize it.
And I haven't looked as closely as I'd like to the wording, but it seems it's very fuzzy, intentionally so, and vague, so that anything, it says things like encouraging hostility, or well, who's going to decide all that?
And all of this, so the kind of Christianity that I'd like to see go away, and I'd like to see it sort of bring back a more traditional form of Christianity.
Prevailed during Christendom.
Well, what I call, let's put it this way, I've tried to coin a word, I call it doormat Christianity.
And I think this is the modern form of Christianity whereby Christians are taught, again, in keeping with what I'm saying, this materialist idea, to just be doormats.
Christianity begins and ends by you being a doormat.
You're non confrontational, you lay down, everyone walks all over you, and then you get to pat yourself on the shoulder and say, hey, look, I'm virtuous, I'm good.
It's also a way of turning a vice, cowardice, into a virtue, I think.
And that's why it's become very prevalent, what I call doormat Christianity.
Doormat Christianity is not going to stand up against Islam.
And that's what we're seeing.
In fact, that kind of Christianity, which is completely about just being passive, who do you think benefits from it most of all?
It's probably the more of an enemy you are to Christianity, the more the prevalent form of doormat Christianity works and serves perfectly to empower the opposite forces.
So I think Christians need to recapture and reclaim a sense of morality.
And a sense of the metaphysical, because otherwise you don't.
And again, I'm going back to the first premises.
These are the building blocks.
Without these, I don't believe that, let's say, the Islam problem cannot necessarily be addressed in and of itself.
You can't maintain a sort of this current culture, which with all its confusions and sort of breakaway from Christianity, and then be able to resist something like Islam.
I think it's all very interconnected.
If you go back, and you can easily see this go back a century to the way Western Europeans and Westerners thought and Christians thought.
You wouldn't have this Islam problem at all.
Even if it existed, it would immediately be solved.
So I think there's a lot of paralysis going on amongst Christians because they just feel like, like I said, the best they can do is to just be what they've been taught and bred, including, like I said, by forces that don't like Christianity.
I saw a video in the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, and as you know, Super Bowl commercials.
Super Bowl commercials tend to, they're very prominent and very mainstream.
And all it was was images of people washing people's feet.
But for some reason, all the people who were washing the feet looked like white traditional Christian people.
And all the people getting their feet washed were, well, one was a trans man.
One was obviously, it was like on a migrant border and it was an illegal migrant.
One was a woman committing an abortion or at an abortion center and people are protesting, but another woman's washing her feet.
And one was a criminal and a policeman was washing his feet.
And then it ended up by saying Jesus didn't hate, he washed feet.
And you can just see that kind of message, how it is completely geared to weakening Christianity by also making you think you're being a good Christian.
Because there's no balance.
Of course, Jesus washed feet.
That's not my argument.
But there is a balance.
Jesus also hurled tables and made a cord of whips and drove people and livestock out.
So there is a room, I believe, for, well, the Bible says so righteous indignation that is at least funneled in a proper way.
And all of that, I guess, is missing.
And in as much as People don't get that.
I think a lot of this is futile.
And I'll end it by what I call the two swords theology.
I just wrote a book that came out a few months ago.
It's called The Two Swords of Christ.
And it deals with the military orders and their battles with Islam, the Templars and the Hospitallers.
But there's a second meaning to the title.
And it's basically in Luke, where Christ says, He doesn't have a garment, sell it and buy a sword.
And the disciples say, Lord, here are two swords.
And he says, That is enough.
Now, of course, the modern day Christians, that means absolutely nothing.
It doesn't mean anything about a real sword.
But of course, there's a long and deep tradition, pre modern, especially medieval understanding, which is the two swords.
One is spiritual, which I think modern Christians still accept spiritual warfare, but one is secular warfare, okay?
And that was the whole rationale for just war.
That was the whole rationale for the Crusades, which I'm sure a lot of people think are not what they really were.
But so that kind of mentality, and again, it's not about physical, not necessarily literal, it's just about being bold and militant, at least vocally.
Because if you look back, you zoom out and see what's been going on, it's just been one incremental, slow degrade.
And no matter how many, no matter what people are saying or doing, or books or conferences, if you look at the scale, it goes down a little, it's like one step forward, three steps back.
And that's how it's been going.
So I think, in part with Christian revival and the Islam threat, Christians just need to, again, go to these first things and really recapture a sense of a morality that is above and beyond just physical considerations.
And once that is done, because like I said, it's all interconnected, the Islam question will become a lot easier to answer almost instinctively and very natively.
In the time we have left, given that we're in a kinetic war driven by, and I realize, oh, it's the nuclear weapon, it's this and that, it's this and that.
It is, at its essence, it's radical Islam.
I'm not saying that we should have gone at the time we went or how we went.
That's a discussion for another day.
But you cannot talk about what's happened in Persian Iran without getting to the core of it that this is one of the most radical, if not the most radical part of Islam, and this whole thing with the Mahdi and the Imam.
And it almost seems like people, oh my gosh, we got to go back after 9 11.
We have to go back after the Iraq War or during the Iraq War or during the time of President Trump put the travel ban in.
A lot of Westerners, like people in London, the elites in London, people in Norway, people in Sweden, people in New York City, some people in Texas, they believe if you just don't confront it and you look the other way, it's going to take care of itself and everything's going to be fine.
I'm here to disabuse you of that.
And I can point to some of the smartest people in the world and some of the best researchers and writers in the world.
They give you a historical record where that is the exact, that definitely does not work.
In fact, it will lead you to be conquered.
Raymond, in the time we have left now, given your historical perspective of their previous invasions, do we have a fighting chance, given the weak willed nature of our elites and our political systems in the Christian West, and particularly the United States of America, to combat this, to stop it, and then to reverse it, sir?
I think the West has definitely the material forces, the economy to do what needs to be done.
But as you say, the question is the will.
And I don't know because the way I see it, I see things from a very kind of zoomed out, long view with historical continuities.
And if you look even at the West, just the last 50 years, 60, 70 years, it's a continuous downhill.
And it's connected with its civilizational degradation.
It's culture, it's morals.
It's funny, I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, but the historical Islamic conquests that we know, that we were talking about in the seventh century, historians still really can't give you an answer how it happened because the Eastern Roman Empire, the Persian Sasanians were very powerful.
And no one really, how can some, just a small band of Arabs described even in Muslim sources as just having, being naked and whatever weapons they can find, how could they conquer two empires and then overrun all these massive lands?
And today's historians can't give you a good answer, but they'll come up with something and I can give you what they say.
But the Christians of the time who lived there were convinced it was God's punishment, that God had raised these people up to chastise them for their sins.
And ironically, the most influential writing is known as The Apocalypse by Pseudo Methodius, and it was published around 690 at the height of the Arab conquests.
It came out in Syriac, but it continued influencing Christians even in 1683 at the Siege of Vienna.
It was being translated and published within Vienna to explain why Christians were being attacked by the Turks.
And that one says not only because Christians had lost their way, but it was due to sexual immorality.
And it actually talked about men cross dressing, women acting like men.
Now, of course, from a secular historical point of view, that's nonsense.
That's not why, you know, Islam prevailed.
But when I look at the current situation today and I see the West is so much more powerful than Byzantium and the Persians were.
Vis-a-vis Arabia.
The West now is much more powerful vis-a-vis the Islamic world.
And yet, look at what's happening.
Muslims are overrunning Europe.
They're having their way.
Churches are allowing them to come in and proclaim the Shahada.
While, like you said, it's a one-way sort of cultural or religious dialogue.
So I'm wondering to what extent is this the punishment of God?
Because you know, centuries down the line, when the world completely changed, posterity will look back.
And this will be an even greater mystery than the original 7th century conquest.
Because all they'll know is well, we know that Europe and the West was really, really powerful.
We know that the Muslim world wasn't, and that there were migrants.
But somehow or other, they took over.
And it's really a mystery.
So I wonder if it's the same reason given by Pseudo Methodius in the apocalypse, which is, you know, complete immorality, turning away from God, highlighted and underscored, especially by sexual, gender confused type of immorality.
Dispensational Zionism Explained00:06:42
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It's uncensored, and it's where all the biggest voices in conservative media are speaking out.
Pastor Joel Weber on the show, who's the founder of Right Response Ministries.
And the reason we asked Pastor Weber to come on the show is last week, Senator Cruz shared an article.
Many people will have seen this.
It's basically lit up.
Everyone in the sector, their Twitter algorithms lit up with this.
And Senator Cruz said, read every word of this.
It's the best and most comprehensive explanation of what we're fighting.
And he, that tweet, his tweet had 3 million visualizations.
The article he was pushing out had, I think, 5 million or so visualizations.
And it basically got everyone talking about, for some corners of evangelicalism, the idea that traditional Catholics are plotting a takeover of the American state.
But that's not really what.
I want to discuss in that because what really interested me is the standing assumption, and I think this came through very clearly that the author's principal preoccupation was that American evangelicalism might be losing its grip on Zionism,
on the pro Israel state stance, which is subsumed a huge section of contemporary American evangelicalism.
And I wanted to dig into that because it wasn't always so.
And Pastor Joel Weber has been active on this issue in social media.
And I thought he would have interesting things to say, especially to our largely evangelical audience.
Pastor Weber, thank you very much indeed for coming on the show.
Tell me, if you wouldn't mind, in your own words then, about this wider debate.
Why are some dispensationalist evangelicals concerned that.
The evangelical institution, if I can use that word, the evangelical churches' grip on the narrative, the pro Zionist narrative, might be slipping.
Zionism is dispensational Zionism, I should say, it's a very modern notion.
It's not just that it's, oh, well, this is what Protestants have always believed.
No.
At this point, most people are probably aware of the Schofield Study Bible and Joseph Darby and these guys.
It came in the mid 1800s.
Dispensationalism, dispensational Zionism, is about 150 years old at this point.
Point.
And so it's very modern, whereas the Protestant Reformation tracks back for 500 years.
And so when you look at Martin Luther, you look at John Calvin, you look at Zwingli, you look at all these, Jonathan Edwards, you know, any of the Protestant reformers who outlined the Protestant position, none of them were dispensationalists.
And to break those terms down just briefly, dispensational Zionism is the idea that all of these Old Testament promises that we find in the Bible for Israel that are physical promises.
Promises about the land being recaptured or a temple being rebuilt, and these kinds of things.
Um, that these promises are meant to be understood, they've either already in a preterist meaning past, the Latin for past, they've been past fulfilled, or if there are any future instances of these promises that are still yet to be fulfilled, they have a spiritual, um, fulfillment, not a physical fulfillment.
So, all of the Catholics and all of the Protestants, until again, very recently, the last hundred.
150 years understood that whether or not Israel was a nation state in the year of our Lord 2026 or not had no bearing on whether or not biblical prophecy will be fulfilled and the return of Christ.
But somewhere along the line, there became this very wooden hermeneutic, this very literal, physical interpretation of Old Testament prophecies that essentially got evangelicals, which is a subset of Protestants, but a large subset, to believe that Christ can't actually.
Come in his final physical return, that that can't take place.
What every Christian desires and wants to see that that won't actually happen until the nation of the state of Israel has been reestablished and Israel widens in its territory, achieves hegemony, and all the boundaries.
Mike Huckabee is saying this, Ted Cruz is saying this.
The old boundaries, all the way from the river to the sea, has to belong to Israel, the Temple Mount, and a new temple actually fashioned, and then.
Will get the return of Christ.
That's not how the Protestants historically saw it.
That's certainly not how Catholics have seen it.
That is a modern innovation, but many evangelicals have fallen for it.
Protestants, evangelicals, Catholics, Orthodox, for the vast historical sweep of history, right up until about 150 years ago, they were all supersessionist, right?
Dispensationalism, it comes from the word dispensations, which are just segments of time, errors of time.
So a dispensation of 80 years or a dispensation of 200 years.
The idea of dispensationalism goes against supersessionism, is the idea of covenant, that God has been doing something and he's not doing it ad hoc, right?
It's not on the fly.
But that God, who formed the world before the foundations of the world were laid, he had a plan.
We're not on plan B.
The church is not plan B, whereas Israel, God's chosen people, is plan A, but that didn't work out.
So God paused plan A for the last 2,000 years and was working on plan B with the church, and then eventually he'll fold those things together.
Dispensationalism is the idea that God is doing a different thing in each of these dispensations, each of these eras of time.
Whereas covenant theology or supersessionism is the idea that God has had a plan from the very beginning.
And his plan with Israel under the Old Covenant, Old Testament Israel, Israel according to the flesh, is that through them he would bring about the promised seed.
And the seed is singular.
St. Paul says this in the book of Galatians.
We see this in Ephesians, multiple New Testament passages.
Paul, when he's commenting and exegeting the Abrahamic covenant from the Old Testament, Genesis chapter 12, this promised seed, he even goes out of his way verbatim to say it is not seeds, plural, but rather seed, singular.
And the seed is Christ.
So, what is the purpose of Old Covenant Israel according to the flesh in the Old Testament?
God was using them to bring about eventually the promised Messiah, to bring about the Christ.
And then, upon the completion, once we have the new covenant, we have the incarnation of Jesus Christ, his life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, and the inauguration of the new covenant and the church, then Israel, according to the flesh, Old Covenant Israel, they're not just discarded, they're warmly invited in.
The analogy or illustration that I often will use is that Old Covenant Israel, according to the flesh, was like the construction crew with scaffolding that God used for multiple millennia to build a glorious cathedral of true Israel, the church that is rooted ultimately in Christ.
He is the promised seed, He is the root of.
The root of Jesse, it's Jesus.
And then this church is to be made up of both Jews and Gentiles.
So it's not that the Jews are sent home, but they're warmly invited in.
But what evangelicals, dispensationalists, have been doing is they've basically said when the scaffolding, when the cathedral was finally completed, they said, no, the scaffolding is actually, that's the cathedral.
Leave the scaffolding up.
The cathedral is a sideshow.
That's just something that God's doing temporarily.
It's like, no, God was doing something through Israel to bring about the Messiah.
And then out of that, the new covenant is inaugurated, the church is incompleted, and God invites into this church both Jews and Gentiles to have union with Christ, his son, by grace and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
And the sad thing is that, you know, Jews still to this day, religious Jews and many ethnic Jews, Still reject Jesus as the promised Messiah, that's somewhat to be expected.
They need to, ultimately, God would have to change their hearts.
Evangelicals, a subset underneath Protestants, you have the mainline Protestants that are all gay affirming, the rainbow flags are outside of their buildings, church buildings.
Then the evangelicals tend to be the more traditionalist, traditional marriage, traditional this, that, and the other, and they vote Republican, GOP.
And so they think that whether it's America's success politically or whether it's the success of Christianity and the return of Christ, that the physical expression of Israel.
Taking over the land, holding the land, rebuilding the temple, that all this is integral for those things to take place.
Could you just give me, I'm talking about a lay of the land, could you just give me an indication, if you wouldn't mind guesstimating on this, what proportion of evangelicals are dispensationalist and which proportion would be, as a percent, supersessionist?
Yeah, for evangelicals, I would say that probably 85, 90%, an overwhelming majority.
Because within evangelicalism, again, that being a large subset of Protestantism, Most evangelicals don't really appreciate the original Protestant reformers who tended to be, they were reformed.
In their view of salvation, their view of God's sovereignty.
And so, most of them, most evangelicals, when they think of the original reformers, they think of Calvinism, like election, God choosing with salvation, those kinds of things.
And they have an aversion to that.
And so, they've kind of turned away.
It's ironic, but Protestants today have turned away from the original protest, the original Protestants, because they've been turned off by the soteriology, which is just doctrine of salvation, the emphasis of God's sovereignty.
They think that there should be more elevation.
Elevating of human free will.
And so they've turned sour on the original Protestant Reformation.
And in doing so, for salvific, soteriological reasons, they detach themselves from the history.
So most evangelicals today, they don't have a clue what Martin Luther or John Calvin or Jonathan Edwards or these guys thought about supersessionism or the future role of Israel in the eschaton.
They're just not aware, they're ignorant.
Certainly, moral virtue is of infinite, eternal value that matters most.
But there are different categories, right?
So there could be someone, there's lots of guys like this.
But there's the church, the ecclesia, but then there's the realm of politics, there's the realm of culture, there are other realms.
And so, politically and culturally, I think that supersessionist Protestants and evangelicals actually make for a very natural ally to traditional supersessionist Catholics, because what we're both seeing.
That we need to be able to have a country that is truly America first.
So I am finding myself very comfortable reaching across the aisle.
Politically and culturally, with Catholics, and saying, Look, this is not what the Bible teaches.
There's a lot of Christians who have been manipulated, thinking that they have a divine obligation politically and geopolitically, and with their money and giving and all these kinds of things to support something that the Bible doesn't actually require.
So first concentrate on the existential battles, the existential threats, and then it's the opportunity to pat one another in a fraternal way on the back.
Look our fellow combatants in the eye and say, you're going to hell.
I've always said, by the way, because I spent a lot of time in politics when I worked in the UK Parliament and in the European Parliament working with evangelicals who were very well.
Informed over their elements of their belief.
And I had no better allies working on the pro life front.
And I always said, I work best with evangelicals who will do that, who will look me in the eye and say, You're going to hell.
And the only thing I ask is the opportunity just to push back a little bit on all of my own heresies back, and then we'll have that debate.
What I can't abide is what passes for ecumenism, is where you just have the institutional leaders of the respective.
Churches who frankly don't believe a word of their own religion anyway, getting together, having these big conflags, and they put out these ridiculous statements where they say, Look how much we hold in common.
Well, of course, you hold a lot in common.
What you hold in common is that you don't believe the elements of your faith.
I think it's far more serious for people who actually do believe the elements of their faith to sit down and talk, to reach out, especially when there are these existential threats right across the West.
I was going to say, I think that was the failure of like a Billy Graham.
So if your listeners are, I still don't understand what's an evangelical, think Billy Graham.
He was the quintessential evangelical Protestant, and he would host these massive crusades and fill football stadiums.
I mean, he was a phenomenon.
He was friends with Carter, with all these different presidents, and would frequent the White House.
I mean, he was a huge, huge figure.
But the problem is that Billy Graham, who I appreciate in some respect, although I would have some disagreements, the problem is that later on, towards the latter end of his ministry, he was no longer just partnering with Catholics for, for instance, the protection of the unborn or on certain issues politically and culturally.
But he started having in his crusades, he would preach the gospel, he'd have altar calls to salvation and prayer, and he would have Catholic priests.
Down there at the stage, you know, praying.
And when he started to partner in terms of the religious aspects and not just broad, like we, you know, Catholics and Protestants, we believe in the triune God.
We believe in the incarnation.
We believe in the resurrection, all these different things.
But they started to partner on how we're saved and these kinds of things.
That's where I think he lost some credibility and where it began to get off the rails.
And so I actually appreciate what you just said, Ben, because a lot of guys aren't willing to.
To be honest about that, it sounds like you're devout in your faith and you would have sharp disagreements with me.
I would have sharp disagreements with you, but we could do something like this, this show, and have a reasonable degree of alignment.
And then at the same time, you know, if I was like, hey, I'm going to tomorrow, I'm going to become, you know, the priest of your parish, you would say, we love you, Joel, but heck no.
No, you're not qualified.
You're not, no, you don't get to be.
And I think that it's the conflating of categories.