Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 999: As Gen Z Rediscovers “Supernatural” Christianity, “Pope” Leo Promises More “Justice And Equality”
Aired: 2026-04-30
Duration: 48:01


=== Primal Scream of Dying Regime (12:11) ===

[00:00:02]  This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
[00:00:07]  Pray for our enemies because we're going to medieval on these people.
[00:00:12]  You're not going to have a free shot on all these networks lying about the people.
[00:00:17]  The people have had a belly full of it.
[00:00:19]  I know you don't like hearing that.
[00:00:20]  I know you're trying to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
[00:00:23]  It's going to happen.
[00:00:24]  And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
[00:00:27]  MAGA Media.
[00:00:29]  I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
[00:00:34]  Ask yourself.
[00:00:35]  What is my task and what is my purpose?
[00:00:38]  If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
[00:00:44]  War Room.
[00:00:45]  Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
[00:00:54]  Wednesday 29th of April, Anno Domini 2026.
[00:01:00]  Good evening, Harnwell here at the helm on Steve Bannon's war room.
[00:01:05]  Frank Walker out on assignment this week in the field.
[00:01:10]  So it gives us the luxury to delve into some of these things in a little more detail.
[00:01:15]  Jenny Holland, regular guest.
[00:01:19]  Jenny, you flagged up something here which I thought was absolutely fascinating.
[00:01:26]  Let's play it first and then we'll talk about it because I think it sets up everything we're going to be discussing over the course of the next hour in a funny sort of way.
[00:01:36]  Let's go for it now.
[00:01:37]  I think people assume I go to church because it's a nice, wholesome Sunday activity, but mate, I go because I think it's actually true.
[00:01:46]  Like, going to church isn't a hobby.
[00:01:48]  I ain't going because I like the vibes or I think the music's nice.
[00:01:51]  I go because I genuinely believe something supernatural happened in history.
[00:01:54]  Jesus was a real man, he was executed publicly.
[00:01:57]  That's not debated, that's history.
[00:01:59]  Then suddenly, a group of his terrified followers started going around telling everyone they're seeing him alive again.
[00:02:04]  Not like spiritually felt him, they didn't see him in the dark.
[00:02:08]  They literally spoke with him, they ate with him, they shook his hand, they went, Oh, Corey, you're back, big man.
[00:02:12]  And you've got to ask what happened, man.
[00:02:13]  Because people don't just go and get tortured and killed for something that they don't even believe to be true.
[00:02:18]  But that's what his followers done.
[00:02:20]  So, yeah, I ain't just going to church because it's nice.
[00:02:23]  My bed's nice.
[00:02:23]  I'll stay there on a Sunday morning, do you know what I mean?
[00:02:25]  I'll go because if it's real, then it changes everything.
[00:02:28]  I ain't going to church because it will turn me into a good person or it's just a nice thing to do on a Sunday.
[00:02:33]  Literally about whether it's true or not.
[00:02:38]  I think someone's been reading some C.S. Lewis.
[00:02:42]  Okay, so first thing to remark on that kind of personal cut to like a social media didn't really exist, what, 15 years ago?
[00:02:53]  But had it existed, that kind of personal monologue would have been unthinkable, I think, sort of 15 years ago from a guy in that age bracket.
[00:03:03]  It just wouldn't be done.
[00:03:05]  And now it's happening all the time.
[00:03:06]  That will tee up something we're going to discuss about the revival a little later on in the show.
[00:03:12]  But before that, Jen, I'm very grateful for you finding that and for you flagging that up.
[00:03:19]  I mean, look, I converted, what, 25 or so years ago.
[00:03:23]  I started going to church seriously, the Church of England, 30 years ago.
[00:03:28]  I think as a convert, therefore, right at the stage of conversion, we go through that stage of suddenly realizing.
[00:03:38]  For the first time, seriously.
[00:03:40]  If you're outside of practicing Christianity, it's conversion.
[00:03:44]  I think the word reversion is certainly in the Catholic sphere.
[00:03:49]  If you were baptized, say, first communion, what have you, and then you drop out from church practice and come back to it, say, late teens, early 20s, that's called reversion.
[00:04:00]  It can take place even after that, as opposed to conversion.
[00:04:03]  Reverts, they are colloquially.
[00:04:06]  But most people will pass through the stage of it's essential, actually.
[00:04:11]  Of passing that stage, just suddenly realised, well, hang on here.
[00:04:16]  Christianity isn't simply a cultural affinity.
[00:04:19]  And it's not even essentially a cultural affinity, though it is that as well.
[00:04:24]  It's a set of supernatural truth claims which are actually true.
[00:04:30]  And that's at its heart.
[00:04:32]  And I know in the things that we're going to talk about throughout the course of this hour, there's a question as to how much the.
[00:04:43]  Institutional churches, the institutional Catholic church, the institutional Protestant churches, as well, how well they're doing in transmitting that reality.
[00:04:58]  Because, as far as I'm aware, they're not doing, they're not even trying.
[00:05:01]  Certainly in the Catholic church, the bishops, cardinals, popes are going along kicking people in the back of the knees if they're trying to make that journey and basically saying, no, no, no, no, we don't want any supernatural belief.
[00:05:16]  That's crazy stuff.
[00:05:18]  We want the social activism, right?
[00:05:19]  None of your crazy, mystical nonsense.
[00:05:25]  And yet, the conversion process, the reversion process, Jenny Holland, it's taking place anyway, whether the institutional churches want it or not.
[00:05:36]  Probably in spite of the fact that they don't want it, it's taking place on social media with young guys like this speaking very frankly, word perfect as to what he was saying.
[00:05:47]  Absolutely word perfect.
[00:05:48]  Tell me why.
[00:05:49]  So that was my takeaway.
[00:05:51]  After watching that, I was particularly impressed.
[00:05:53]  Why did you flag it up for the war room then?
[00:05:57]  Well, first of all, it fits into a lot of the other stories we've covered here over the last year or so.
[00:06:06]  Young man, very secular seeming, you know, wouldn't fit the stereotype of a Christian that you and I would have grown up with in the very sort of secular Gen X youth that we had.
[00:06:21]  But a lot of the videos we've watched and a lot of the numbers we've looked at over the months, I had sort of had a thought that a lot of this, and of course we've talked about the overt, the extreme secularization, the extreme liberalism, the extreme promiscuity, the extreme materialism that is the norm now, being very demoralizing and empty for young people.
[00:06:49]  And that was driving them into faith.
[00:06:51]  But also I always sort of thought that, you know, why they're going to Catholicism in particular.
[00:06:57]  Was an element of aesthetics.
[00:06:59]  And there's nothing wrong with that.
[00:07:01]  I don't mean that as a criticism.
[00:07:02]  I understand that very much.
[00:07:04]  The Catholic Church does have the best aesthetics.
[00:07:07]  But actually, this little Instagram reel suggests that it's something far deeper.
[00:07:16]  And that is the supernatural element.
[00:07:19]  And of all of the elements, I think the two most difficult elements of true Catholicism as opposed to what the Pope was.
[00:07:28]  Might be saying, God forgive me for saying such a thing.
[00:07:31]  Me, a non catechized atheist, there's two elements that are very difficult for the modern mind, let's say, to wrap its head around.
[00:07:40]  One is the church's teaching on sexuality and sexual behavior.
[00:07:45]  And the other is the supernatural.
[00:07:48]  These are very, very big obstacles, I think, for a lot of people, I would say myself included, to overcome because it takes a lot to leap from.
[00:07:59]  The material world is what we see, and it's all atoms, and everything's explainable, and that's how we were taught, and that's just the end of the story.
[00:08:08]  Believe the science, that kind of thing.
[00:08:10]  It's hard to jump from that to Christ rose from the dead three days after being crucified and was ascended into heaven, and Mary was also assumed into heaven bodily, and all of these other and all the miracles that the church over the millennia has really.
[00:08:31]  Cultivated.
[00:08:32]  That's a very big leap to make.
[00:08:34]  I personally find that a hard leap to make.
[00:08:36]  And when I'm thinking about this, which I do a lot, I think about this a lot.
[00:08:40]  I sort of wonder, do I really have what it takes to say that I fully believe that in my bones?
[00:08:47]  Now, the fact that this young man, and from his accent and his manner, he is not a, he's just a normal guy, right?
[00:08:56]  He's just a normal young man living in England or from England, I don't know where he lives.
[00:09:01]  And he is seeing this in a very clear way that is, I think, reminiscent.
[00:09:08]  I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but I think this is reminiscent to.
[00:09:11]  You know, what monks and abbots and true holy people knew in their bones to be true, you know, in centuries past.
[00:09:22]  I think that's really, really remarkable given his presentation, given how he's coded, as the young people say.
[00:09:31]  This is really striking to me.
[00:09:33]  And then I saw that a few days ago.
[00:09:35]  And then this morning I happened upon a very interesting lecture, which I think we'll come to in a moment, about how the supernatural element of the church.
[00:09:45]  Has driven converts into the Catholic Church in the past as well.
[00:09:52]  So, this is actually a hearkening back to an ongoing characteristic and process in Catholicism.
[00:10:00]  And I think that's very heartening.
[00:10:03]  First thing, before we move on to that, I cannot endorse what you've just said enough, Jenny.
[00:10:12]  It was perfect.
[00:10:14]  For our largely American audience, our largely evangelical audience, I don't think.
[00:10:20]  They've had the issue which you're describing, and you described it extremely well.
[00:10:26]  That kind of guy, I say that kind of young guy, 20 years old, the normalcy, if you will, you would not have found that really.
[00:10:37]  I don't think in that age group, younger than that and older than that, for sure.
[00:10:43]  But in that age group itself, you really wouldn't have found that kind of thing.
[00:10:48]  Very, very thin on the ground 20, 30 years ago.
[00:10:52]  And it is remarkable.
[00:10:55]  What's happening?
[00:10:56]  It really is remarkable.
[00:10:57]  If you just told me 30 years ago, I wouldn't have believed that.
[00:11:01]  Yeah.
[00:11:02]  I mean, for him to state it so categorically and so matter of factly and with some pride, there's very big implications to that.
[00:11:12]  So, this is just one person.
[00:11:13]  I don't know who he is personally.
[00:11:14]  I follow him on Instagram, but that's it.
[00:11:18]  The implications of what he's saying are very profound because for him, that means that pure belief.
[00:11:26]  Is a type of commitment and I'd say even submission or fealty or obedience to the idea of God Himself.
[00:11:37]  And that implies in the individual believer a large level of sacrifice and a large level of reordering your life so that it works in accordance with that belief.
[00:11:52]  That's why this video is even more striking than the New York Greenwich Village Church videos, which I, again, they're great.
[00:11:59]  I love to see them.
[00:12:00]  But this guy really hones in on the thorniest part of belief and conversion in a secular modern era.

=== Obstacles to Faith and Submission (17:44) ===

[00:12:14]  I don't want to break up what you're saying now.
[00:12:17]  So let's give a shout out to the sponsor now.
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[00:14:07]  Okay, so Jenny Holland, by the way, you mentioned geographically where that guy was from.
[00:14:11]  I'm going to make a stab.
[00:14:13]  At East London.
[00:14:16]  So go on.
[00:14:17]  You were perusing a talk hosted by the Iona Institute over there on the Emerald Isle.
[00:14:29]  Talk us through the couple of clips that you pulled out to illustrate this point that you're making.
[00:14:35]  Yeah, so it was at a conference, I think last week in Dublin, I believe, like you say, organized by the Iona Institute, which is a Catholic.
[00:14:45]  Think tank, I suppose, in Ireland, in the south of Ireland.
[00:14:50]  And Melanie McDonough, who is a journalist, columnist, historian, author, was talking about her book called Converts, which came out late last year, I believe.
[00:15:00]  And I haven't actually read the book, I only heard of it for the first time this morning.
[00:15:04]  But she was presenting an article about how the 1890s movement of decadence, they were called the Decadence.
[00:15:19]  We were really captivated by Catholicism and large numbers of them converted.
[00:15:26]  Now, by decadence, by members of this sort of movement, this was an aesthetic movement that valorized beauty above all things and included people like Oscar Wilde and his longtime on off lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, both of whom converted to Catholicism.
[00:15:49]  This was very arresting to me.
[00:15:50]  I've always been interested in the story of these two men anyway.
[00:15:54]  But she went on into detail about the sort of society around them at the time, starting in the 1890s, which was sort of the apex of Victorian, secular, scientific, worshiping, industrialized society.
[00:16:10]  Now, I think we suffer from presentism a lot, meaning we think we're in an unprecedented time.
[00:16:16]  And, you know, in some ways we are.
[00:16:18]  But this lecture she gave really shows that there's nothing new under the sun.
[00:16:25]  And the late Victorians in the late 19th century were living in a similar atmosphere of sort of hyper materialism, secularism, and lack of sort of magic and faith.
[00:16:43]  And that the people like Oscar Wilde, who she says in this lecture converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, really rejected that.
[00:16:53]  And I just think it's very interesting how the.
[00:16:57]  This particular era, which we think of as very conservative and very kind of stodgy and old fashioned, was actually at the time very modern.
[00:17:09]  The Catholicism, the appeal of Catholicism continued throughout the early 20th century in England and Wales.
[00:17:17]  In fact, The Guardian reports in a review of her book that half a million people converted to Catholicism in England and Wales between 1910 and 1960, I believe.
[00:17:29]  And many of them were leading intellectuals.
[00:17:33]  The Great War, World War I, had a big effect on this.
[00:17:36]  And again, parallels to today in that post that disastrous, cataclysmic, catastrophic war that slaughtered so many millions of young men in the prime of their life, young people post World War I were extremely alienated and embittered at the elder generations that had brought about this catastrophe.
[00:18:02]  That they had really suffered from.
[00:18:05]  The old men didn't fight.
[00:18:06]  The old policymakers didn't fight.
[00:18:08]  And again, that's a very strong parallel to today.
[00:18:11]  Thankfully, it's not actual kinetic war, but we could say economic war, certainly, on the young of today.
[00:18:17]  And that alienation drove poets and novelists into Catholicism, looking again, not for ascetics, but looking for continuity and something solid to find refuge in, in a world that was full of.
[00:18:33]  Tumult and disaster.
[00:18:36]  She mentions also the Russian Revolution being a real kind of psychic break for some of these people and finding refuge in that tradition.
[00:18:47]  So, do you want to explain the first extract that we'll play?
[00:18:54]  Yes.
[00:18:54]  So, she here is talking about Evelyn Waugh, the famous writer.
[00:19:02]  And she says that.
[00:19:04]  She's quoting him essentially, and I'll just let her read out the quote.
[00:19:07]  But she's quoting Evelyn Waugh in case it's not clear from the little intro.
[00:19:11]  Waugh wrote about his motivation, which he said had nothing to do with any of the usual reasons that were adduced.
[00:19:17]  He felt that in the present phase of European history, the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism on one side and Protestantism on the other, but between Christianity and chaos.
[00:19:28]  It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests.
[00:19:38]  Christianity is essential to civilization, and Christianity exists in its most complete and vital form in the Roman Catholic Church.
[00:19:50]  Incredible, right?
[00:19:52]  It's absolutely incredible.
[00:19:54]  I mean, how many times have we said something similar?
[00:19:57]  And so, when she said that word supernatural, when she quotes Waugh as referring to the supernatural element as the foundation of this system of belief, my mind went back to the reel that I saw a few days earlier.
[00:20:11]  And I thought, ah, bingo, this is an interesting parallel.
[00:20:16]  There's something almost, let's say, providential about the fact that these two things crossed my screens within days of each other.
[00:20:25]  You know, it's sort of like more things change, more things stay the same.
[00:20:28]  Now, again, you know, I think he said that, I think he converted in 1930.
[00:20:34]  The full background is in the video.
[00:20:37]  But, you know, we're talking about the period between the two great wars.
[00:20:41]  We're talking about a period of intense modernization and secularization and a collapse.
[00:20:49]  Of empire and a collapse of almost everything.
[00:20:56]  These wars were so destructive.
[00:20:59]  And the creme de la creme of English literature was turning away from that secularization and away from that sort of metallic, brutal modernization towards the supernatural.
[00:21:17]  And it seems that this is happening again.
[00:21:22]  Let's go to the second extract because I want to tie this in now with where we are today and why I think it's such a betrayal.
[00:21:32]  Now, for Green, one of the critical things about the church was its supernatural aspect.
[00:21:37]  Nowadays, people tend to be embarrassed or shy about the supernatural element of religion.
[00:21:44]  That is to say, the idea of the God man who dies on a tree and then rises again, the idea of the devil roaming through the earth like a lion.
[00:21:52]  All of these things are part of Catholic doctrine, and for Graham Greene, there was something to be embraced and not something to be got round or to be evaded.
[00:22:03]  And it's worth pointing out, of course, that both Evelyn Waugh, whom Americans might be more familiar with, as the author of Bride's Head Revisited, right?
[00:22:12]  But also Graham Greene, both Catholic converts themselves.
[00:22:18]  Okay, so here you are going to tie all this together, and we're going to have a quick word now, or at least look at what.
[00:22:25]  Pope Leo said in his press conference flying back from Africa.
[00:22:33]  Ironically enough, no, I'll make my point.
[00:22:35]  Let's go into this now, right?
[00:22:37]  Flying back, and he gives this press conference, and he says that the unity or division of the church should not revolve around sexual matters.
[00:22:50]  I believe there are much greater and more important issues such as justice and equality.
[00:22:56]  That would all take priority before that particular issue.
[00:23:02]  Now, there will be times, you know, we could do it now, but, you know, we've got about three minutes before we have to move on.
[00:23:09]  So the Catholic Church has teachings on sexual morality because it derives them directly from the New Testament.
[00:23:17]  You can either like that or not like it, or support it or not support it, or be obedient to it or not obedient to it.
[00:23:24]  That's just not really the point of what we're talking about now.
[00:23:28]  But it is an emanation out of what Christ Himself taught in the New Testament.
[00:23:34]  These issues, however, like social justice and equality and what have you, these are political positions.
[00:23:44]  They are secular political positions of the late 20th and early 21st century.
[00:23:50]  And they're prudential issues as well, of which the church, you know, people of goodwill can choose their own path to get to the common good.
[00:24:04]  After what you've been saying over the first half of the show, Jenny, it would seem to me that ditching what the church has been teaching for 2,000 years and substituting it for basically political opinions of the day is not going to help people on their conversion path if they're looking at Christianity as a supernatural belief structure.
[00:24:32]  The vouching of the credibility of that.
[00:24:35]  Is the unchangingness of that, those sets of beliefs over the last 2000 years.
[00:24:40]  That's right.
[00:24:41]  That's what you're saying, right?
[00:24:43]  That's right.
[00:24:44]  That's exactly right.
[00:24:46]  Yeah, that article was absolutely shocking, Ben, I have to say.
[00:24:49]  And again, I am a secular person.
[00:24:51]  I have lived a secular life.
[00:24:56]  I don't feel I have a very modern outlook in all of these ways.
[00:25:02]  But for the Pope himself to say that the sexual morality upon which the family is based, Should no longer be the focus of the institutional church, flies absolutely in the face of what these thinkers and what this young Instagrammer is talking about, which is the belief is the core.
[00:25:31]  The belief requires sacrifice of the believer.
[00:25:35]  And the sacrifice is for the greater good of the community.
[00:25:39]  Now, I, as a secular person, You know, I understand and I'm happy that people can live their lives in privacy as they see fit.
[00:25:52]  But what I don't like, even though I am still a secular person, is for you to pick and choose, to have your cake and eat it too.
[00:26:00]  If you are going to live in a sort of moral sense that is against traditional church teachings, don't call yourself a Catholic.
[00:26:09]  Don't ask for the blessing.
[00:26:11]  You just live your life.
[00:26:12]  Commit to your lane, okay?
[00:26:14]  You know, you can't have it both ways.
[00:26:16]  That's always been my instinct.
[00:26:20]  And your point here is because if you do that, the incoherence between what you're proclaiming to believe and the life that you're living is going to be an inhibition to these young guys who are in their 20s sniffing out Christianity for the first time.
[00:26:39]  You know what the word is that we call the word that theology ascribes to that, right?
[00:26:45]  It's scandal.
[00:26:47]  It's scandal.
[00:26:49]  It's a scandal.
[00:26:50]  That is the true meaning of scandal.
[00:26:52]  It's putting an obstacle in others' path towards faith.
[00:26:56]  Folks, don't go away.
[00:26:57]  We will be back in two minutes.
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[00:27:32]  Welcome back.
[00:27:33]  Jenny, I was thinking early on today, considering that you are, as far as I'm concerned, one of the most insightful commentators in the world, right?
[00:27:42]  At the nexus of all these things.
[00:27:47]  Of course, coupled with your own trajectory, your philosophical, religious trajectory on these issues.
[00:27:54]  And you're not remotely.
[00:27:55]  I mean, I'm quite happy to be for people to say, Hanwell, you're just a trad.
[00:28:00]  You're a conservative, radical, conservative, radical trad.
[00:28:03]  That's not a descriptive that would be applied to you.
[00:28:10]  Not yet, Jenny, not yet.
[00:28:12]  I was thinking, but because you're such an insightful commentator on the growth, where Generation Z is at the moment, I thought of a new nickname for you, Gen Z. That's so funny.
[00:28:27]  I'll take it.
[00:28:28]  I'll take it, Ben.
[00:28:30]  It just came to me like that.
[00:28:32]  Okay, so we're going now to discuss the religious.
[00:28:36]  Well, can I just say one thing about the Leo remarks?
[00:28:41]  There's another element to this that makes it even more shocking and more deeply, deeply unwise.
[00:28:47]  The culture, which I suppose Leo is not aware of, Pope Leo is not aware of, the culture is absolutely saturated.
[00:28:55]  In excessive, I would say extreme promiscuity.
[00:28:59]  Now, that is not to say that it's being acted upon necessarily by all young people, but in terms of the content that is delivered to them on their phones, via social media, and via porn websites, it is an incessant, steady flow of, I mean, really dark debauchery, honestly.
[00:29:22]  And what young people need, and what not just young people, to be honest, I think we could all use this in terms of.
[00:29:28]  The culture that we live in and that we consume, we all need a break from sexual behavior in terms of the public sphere.
[00:29:39]  And for him to come out and say, oh, no, no, no, this is not really a matter that we should concern ourselves with, is the exact and precise opposite of the message that he needs to be sending out to these young men and women who are profoundly, many, many of whom are profoundly traumatized.

=== Refuge from Materialist Hellscape (10:38) ===

[00:29:58]  By seeing porn from very young ages.
[00:30:02]  I'm talking elementary school age.
[00:30:04]  Okay, so if you wanted to make a statement on sexual behavior, you should have been making a statement on that and how children need to be protected at all costs from the sort of perversions of adults, which is unfortunately no longer the norm, whether you're talking about radicalized teachers or just the very easy availability of very dark.
[00:30:33]  Content that all children are now exposed to.
[00:30:36]  Oh, all right.
[00:30:37]  We're going to squash the other two stories that we're going to hit today a little bit to make space for this.
[00:30:43]  It's such an important thing.
[00:30:44]  Like, you know, I think one of the greatest tragedies is the tragedy of missed opportunities, right?
[00:30:54]  Because it's avoidable.
[00:30:58]  They're unnecessary tragedies.
[00:31:00]  This guy who.
[00:31:03]  Robert Prevost, who's probably better known by his stage name, Pope Leo.
[00:31:07]  He was, correct me if I'm wrong, he was, yeah, okay, I'm being, well, I'm not being facetious, but he was the, before he was brought up into the episcopal ranks in Peru, where I think he had his, started his ecclesiastical career, he spent most of his life there in Latin America as the provincial, the head guy of the, Augustinians.
[00:31:35]  He was then called to Rome as the superior, the general.
[00:31:41]  I don't know what they call them in the Augustinians, one of the four historic mendicant orders of the Catholic Church.
[00:31:52]  Not supposedly, the Augustinians are supposed to have as their charism the thought and teaching of, to my mind, the greatest philosopher and theologian in the history of the Catholic Church, not Thomas Aquinas, but St. Augustine himself.
[00:32:09]  And there is nothing in his thought or in his declarations that would indicate any familiarity with St. Augustine whatsoever.
[00:32:19]  And I'll make the same criticism.
[00:32:22]  Of Joseph Ratzinger, better known by his stage name, Pope Benedict XVI.
[00:32:29]  I'll make the same criticism of Rowan Williams, the former arch layman of Canterbury.
[00:32:36]  All three of them publicly propelled themselves in the public sphere as great, not exponents, as greatly inspired by the writings of St. Augustine.
[00:32:49]  In none of them did you detect anything.
[00:32:52]  Even a president.
[00:32:53]  And here's the point I want to make, and this is why what you're saying is so important on the practical basis.
[00:32:59]  Saint Augustine, I think, contributed in the history of Christian thought.
[00:33:06]  Really, the idea that what we desire will form the soul.
[00:33:12]  I think his word was disfigured.
[00:33:15]  What we desire, if it is not of God, if it's not God Himself, will ultimately disfigure the soul.
[00:33:24]  And that's the problem, not just with porn, but with all the.
[00:33:27]  Distractions and temptations in modern life.
[00:33:31]  They distract us from God and they configure us to their distorted, reductive element of the human soul.
[00:33:44]  I'm amazed that he could be so blase over this.
[00:33:49]  The sexual impulse is probably the strongest impulse that human beings have to wrestle with.
[00:33:55]  If you're not aware of that and you're not.
[00:33:58]  Sufficiently armed spiritually or in prayer against that, those temptations will end up controlling you.
[00:34:04]  And that's not a, if you are controlled by your own desires, you're not freed, you're not liberated, you're enslaved.
[00:34:13]  And this is like St. Augustine 101.
[00:34:16]  Yeah.
[00:34:16]  Right?
[00:34:16]  Yeah.
[00:34:17]  And this goes ahead of the Augustinian order.
[00:34:20]  I mean, I've only read a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bit of St. Augustine.
[00:34:24]  So I feel like maybe I shouldn't even be mentioning this, but, you know, he came up with the most brilliant line I think anyone has ever said, which is, Me chased, but not yet.
[00:34:34]  I mean, am I right?
[00:34:35]  I mean, that sums up, that absolutely perfectly sums up the human condition.
[00:34:40]  That is the most true, the truest thing that I've ever heard said in my entire life.
[00:34:45]  He was also a man who had a child out of wedlock.
[00:34:47]  He was a very imperfect person.
[00:34:51]  So I think this speaks to your point.
[00:34:53]  Like, he was a searcher, he was searching for belief, and he eventually did find it, and he eventually left this incredible patrimony.
[00:35:03]  But the distance between those sort of, for lack of a better word, sort of soldiers, maybe spelled S-O-U-L, and the institutional elites is, it couldn't be vaster.
[00:35:23]  I think because the people you just mentioned, the popes and the Archbishop of Canterbury, former, they are in service to an institution, an institutional process, rather than this kernel of truth, which is the supernatural element, which that young man that we heard from at the very beginning was more wise to, more attached to than it seems.
[00:35:52]  Pope Leo himself, because if Pope Leo is issuing bureaucratic edicts, these sort of anodyne, banal platitudes about, oh, well, we should all just be nice to each other.
[00:36:05]  I mean, that is not the point.
[00:36:07]  That is not where we're at.
[00:36:08]  That is not where the young people are at.
[00:36:10]  They need refuge from a materialist, atheistic hellscape.
[00:36:15]  And listen, listen, I grew up a liberal.
[00:36:17]  I remain in many ways a liberal.
[00:36:20]  But you cannot deny, I cannot deny that the liberal worldview has failed.
[00:36:27]  To ward off against rampant immorality, and that has come at a huge consequence to our youth.
[00:36:36]  If we could dial back, which we can't, if we could dial back and tweak the secular order so that we could head off these disasters of porn consumption and childlessness and poor mental health in young people, all of these are outcomes from the secular worldview, then yeah, we would.
[00:36:58]  But if my If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.
[00:37:01]  Like, it's not, it doesn't happen.
[00:37:03]  I think what the last 20 years have shown since the advent of the iPhone, it's shown that the liberal worldview could not withstand the onslaught of sort of extreme modernity and extreme liberalism.
[00:37:20]  And that is why people are turning back to the old rock, the tradition of the Catholic faith in the traditional sense, not the modern.
[00:37:31]  Yes.
[00:37:33]  The liberal.
[00:37:34]  Experiment failed fundamentally because it goes back to the Enlightenment and it was an attempt to arrive at, I think, Christian values without Christianity through the exercise of reason.
[00:37:49]  And I think that the failure of that, which is the failure of liberalism that you're describing, is the lesson to learn it.
[00:37:57]  We, you know, half of me wants us to continue talking about this, but give me two minutes and I'll do a quick shout out to our sponsors.
[00:38:07]  Give me two minutes about this.
[00:38:09]  About this poll that the Religious News Association is talking about.
[00:38:15]  It says that worship attendance in churches is up for the first time in decades.
[00:38:21]  And by my reckoning of their numbers, and I realize that this is sort of mid COVID they're talking about, there's pretty much a 65% increase from now compared to 2020.
[00:38:33]  Just give me 90 seconds on this, Jen.
[00:38:35]  Sure.
[00:38:36]  I mean, interestingly, so this was something that Melanie McDonough mentioned in that lecture that after Vatican II, The increase in converts to Catholicism cratered.
[00:38:48]  It evaporated.
[00:38:49]  They went from, I think, 15,000 converts in 1960.
[00:38:53]  I think I'm remembering the numbers right.
[00:38:55]  In 1971 to like 5,600 or something.
[00:38:59]  And then they just kept plummeting until recently.
[00:39:03]  So, again, what are we seeing here, Ben?
[00:39:05]  We're seeing this sort of, as it's been called here in the UK, re enchantment, this idea of accepting the mystery of the faith yet again.
[00:39:15]  And we also see.
[00:39:16]  At the same time, people returning to church.
[00:39:21]  Now, I am surmising that those two things are connected.
[00:39:25]  In fact, I know in my heart that those two things are connected, but if you want to be very circumspect, you could just notice that they're happening simultaneously.
[00:39:33]  And this is what we see every week, week in and week out.
[00:39:36]  Church attendance in places like Greenwich Village, of all places, is crowded and enthusiastic, and young people are returning.
[00:39:46]  Obviously, there's still a minority.
[00:39:48]  Because, you know, these things, it's a sapling as opposed to a fully fledged forest.
[00:39:55]  But these are all connected.
[00:39:57]  These are all connected.
[00:39:59]  You can't have a moral system if you don't agree on the fundamentals.
[00:40:05]  And that's what happened when liberalism met communism, essentially.
[00:40:09]  And post 1960s, we ceased to agree on the fundamentals.
[00:40:14]  Therefore, our moral system has completely broken down.
[00:40:18]  And people are returning.
[00:40:21]  To the most tried and true moral system of the West, and that is the Catholic Church.
[00:40:29]  Okay, we're going to be back with Gen Z Holland in just 90 seconds after a quick shout out to our show sponsors.

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=== Bede's Empowering Christian Story (05:02) ===

[00:42:58]  It's totally free.
[00:42:59]  There's no pressure, no BS, just straightforward, honest help from fellow Patriots, so don't wait.
[00:43:07]  Call 845 war room right now.
[00:43:10]  That's 845 War Room.
[00:43:12]  And tell them that Steve Bannon's War Room sent you.
[00:43:18]  Jenny, we've got about three minutes left.
[00:43:20]  This is a beautiful story I liked.
[00:43:24]  I just wanted to chew it over here very quickly with you.
[00:43:28]  So, and this ties a number of themes, bizarrely, also dear to you.
[00:43:35]  Dublin.
[00:43:36]  Well, I know you're in Northern Ireland, but Dublin, Rome, you grew up in Italy.
[00:43:42]  Here, the monk, the Venerable Bede, who wrote, considered to be the father of English history, a monk sometime in the 8th century, wrote a poem that was apparently composed by an illiterate cattle herder by a monastery in the UK.
[00:44:08]  He wrote it into his text.
[00:44:11]  And this is this poem, this hymn to God.
[00:44:15]  A nine line hymn, that's what it is, is the oldest poem in the English language that still exists.
[00:44:24]  It goes back to the 600s, that is to say the 7th century, and it's about 1300 1400 years old.
[00:44:34]  Just tell us the bare essentials of what these two researchers have discovered.
[00:44:41]  Yeah, so they discovered the old, there's a couple of other copies of this or texts of this.
[00:44:47]  Poem in existence, but I think this is the only one that is all in English.
[00:44:52]  And I must be, it's Old English or Anglo Saxon.
[00:44:57]  And they actually are researchers from Trinity College Dublin, which is my alma mater.
[00:45:01]  So that's another connection to this story, tangential though.
[00:45:07]  Yeah, so this is a lovely little story.
[00:45:09]  I am very fond of a good historical tale.
[00:45:14]  Now, my knowledge of Bede is scant.
[00:45:17]  I didn't study him in school.
[00:45:19]  But the text of this, being the transcription of a poem composed by, as you said, an illiterate shepherd, was it?
[00:45:32]  Really gets to the heart of why Catholicism, Christianity, has such a powerful resonance with people all over the world because of its accessibility to the humble and the meek and the overlooked.
[00:45:51]  The powerless.
[00:45:53]  And I think this is just such a beautifully comforting and empowering element to Christianity that I personally think left wing politics has tried to co opt and invert to its own purposes, but it will never be able to withstand the sort of power that Christian messaging has because the left wing politics are all built on lies and in humanity.
[00:46:24]  Sorry, I had to get a dig in at the communists there.
[00:46:30]  You always have free shots at the commies on the warring right.
[00:46:34]  So, this guy, Cadmon is his name, was an illiterate cattle herder, couldn't read, uneducated, and he came up with this poem, the oldest extant poem in the English language.
[00:46:46]  According to the Venerable Bede, a divine apparition, a divine revelation.
[00:46:53]  The Guardian said reading it is like leaning against a cathedral door preparing to go inside.
[00:46:58]  Folks, if I can get this in, I'm going to read it to you now the nine lines.
[00:47:02]  Now we must praise to the skies the keeper of the heavenly kingdom, the might of the measurer, all he has in mind, the work of the Father of glory, of all manner of marvel, our eternal Master, the main mover.
[00:47:18]  It was he who first summed up on our behalf heaven as a roof, the holy maker.
[00:47:24]  Then this middle earth, the watcher over humankind, our eternal Master would later assign the precinct of men, the Lord Almighty.
[00:47:34]  Jenny, where do people go on social media to keep up with your superb analysis?
[00:47:40]  You can find me on X at Semper Femina 21.
[00:47:43]  You can find me on YouTube at Saving Culture from Itself.
[00:47:48]  And all my essays are on Substack at jennyeholland.substack.com.
[00:47:55]  Folks, Jenny, God bless you.
[00:47:57]  Thanks, Spencer at Real America's Voice.
[00:47:59]  We'll be back at 10 a.m. tomorrow.