Russell Brand lived not just a non-Christian, but actively anti-Christian lifestyle for much of his early life. Now he has undergone a dramatic transformation, gotten baptized, and become a Christian. He joined Charlie at the Student Action Summit to talk about his conversion, and how the values of Christ can empower a person to navigate through the "terrible trenches" of modern life. Russell also talks about becoming a target for censorship and denunciation in the Covid era, the decline of the UK, and more. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from thebitcoin.com studio.
My conversation with Russell Brand.
It's fun, it's lively, and it's insulting to me, but I don't take it personally.
It's a lot of fun while I lozenge with Russell Brand.
You don't know what I'm talking about.
You got to listen to this.
Russell Brand and I share lozenges next to the campfire as we reflect on the deeper things.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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I think you're going to love this conversation with a new believer, new Christian, Russell Brand.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
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Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
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Okay, everyone, let's get right to it.
Joining us is a new friend and honestly a great person and amazing Christian.
A new Christian.
You probably know him from a lot of different stuff.
Give it up for Russell Brand, everybody.
Thank you.
Hello.
Russell, great to see you.
I'm so grateful to be here.
Before we start, I'm not Gary the Guantanamo here.
Charlie, you've been avoiding me debating.
Thank you.
Wait, this is important.
It's the Guantanamo Gator.
Charlie, I want to follow up on some of the Guantanamo Gators questions.
This is good.
And why don't you debate?
He's perfectly reasonable.
Debate him now.
Why do you keep avoiding...
Do you see?
Now, Charlie, now, can I talk to you about some of your booking ideas?
And I will say, no one told me about the Guantanamo Gator.
I was not warned.
And you know, sometimes we see those videos of Floridians getting them into a trash can with wheels.
I should like to see that take place with that gentleman.
He was so honestly like he's just so reasonable.
He should have kept the conversation going.
Russell, great to see you.
Thanks for being here.
It's so lovely to see you.
So I have so much to talk about here.
Are you carrying around a Bible?
That's my Bible in one year for my daily readings.
And I thought it was very appeasite that today we've transitioned out of Acts and into Romans 1 because on our previous conversation, which was in Milwaukee at the RNC, you said to me that Romans is the Christian constitution.
This is from my friend Jay John.
I like it.
It's Old and New Testament.
It's very easy to carry around and read.
These are just some of my notes in preparation for the interview.
Note one, ensure Guantanamo Gaita present in front row.
This will distract Charlie.
You know, there's just like lots of actually notes about Rome itself and Caravaggio and stuff like that.
So yeah, I carry two Bibles, which I recognize is quite cumbersome, but I've not been Christian very long, so what do you expect?
So Russell, you have a phenomenal story, and thank you for taking time to travel to this conference.
It's terrific.
Thanks for paying me to come.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Thank you for gladly accepting.
So you were in public eye, you still are, in a non-Christian lifestyle.
Is that fair to say?
Almost anti-Christian in some ways.
Walk us through the journey as you're comfortable sharing from that lifestyle to now giving your life to Jesus Christ.
Well, you know, in a sense, we have no choice but to worship something.
And my devoutness and devotion was effortlessly directed by the culture and by my conditions.
I mean, familial and psychological as well as social towards worship and reverence of the individual, which I see as being the nexus of false idolatry, really.
As long as you're trapped in self-worshipping yourself, aspects of yourself, self-aggrandizement, pursuit of personal glory, you're very easily contained by the culture.
In a sense, I've started to recognize that the culture wants us in a state of self-centered bewilderment.
When you're in that state, you're very easy to manage and manipulate.
I really thought that I was autonomous and had a great deal of personal authority.
In fact, I would have believed in the kind of rags to riches idea that I bought.
I come from a pretty modest background and through success and endeavor and hard work and through personal excellence and ability and charm, moxie, call it what you will.
I fought against the odds to become a Hollywood star and marry Katie Perry and be on red carpets all over the place.
For a brief while I lived with the Guantanamo Gator.
It was a complicated era.
That's how I would have characterized it, Charlie.
I missed that one.
Yeah, no, I kept it quite.
I was embarrassed.
I would have characterized it as a story of personal success.
I was looking at the work of Yuval Noah Harari, the writer of Sapiens, which I've sort of found perfectly enjoyable until it became clear to me it was an atheistic trope that was geared towards directing people towards surrender and subjugation towards AI false idols.
That's what it was.
It was, wasn't it?
And I thought, oh, the reason this guy is such a popular and accredited intellectual is because his message and agenda fits very neatly into the agenda of powerful elites who determine which cultural artifacts get celebrated and popularized.
I didn't realize that at first.
And then I thought, I wonder if you were that.
I wonder if there was something about your success, Russell, that was telling the culture a story that you wanted to hear.
And then I thought about it for a while because it is, after all, my favorite subject, me.
And while I was thinking about that, I thought, oh, yeah, it was.
My personal hedonism and my sense of myself as self-actualizing through excess.
That's a story the culture likes to tell itself.
So really, you were just a useful sort of vessel or expression of a particular set of cultural ideas.
I came to Christ the way that some people do who don't have the benefit of Christianity in early life, although it happened obviously at the perfect time, through a variety of collapses in my private and public life, sort of a personal difficulty with the birth of my son,
who's sort of beautiful and incredible and doing very doing very well, but certainly was a crisis in our family for a minute and through false allegations of sexual misconduct, which gave me quite great pause for reflection on the way that I'd lived for a lot of time and the impact of that lifestyle.
And I Suppose in the midst of all that confusion, the clarity of Christ came in a way that's sort of still difficult to describe.
But most recently, I felt, Charlie, when reading, I was looking at Acts and it talked about the meeting of Paul and Peter.
So I went and checked it in Galatians, the same encounter.
And I thought, in that encounter between Paul and Peter, you've got someone who knew Christ while alive and met the resurrected Christ, as well as Paul, who has this profound, incredible vision re-encounter with him.
And I thought, and I had that kind of visceral wave of the reality and truth of the historical Christ, not just the mythic Christ that we need to use as a sort of an inner constellation for personal guidance.
But oh my God, it actually happened.
It actually happened.
And when I feel that, it brings me out of the humdrum.
It brings me out of the central and it puts me in the supernatural, where I believe we must to some degree live in the world, not of God.
Yes, and so I'm sure you tried Buddhism or you did you experiment with Eastern stuff.
What made Christianity different?
The reason I was repulsed by Christianity initially was because I felt like this is the religion of like, you know, like any ordinary American or my grandmother or my wife is accessible to everyone.
I must have something a little more esoteric, a little rarer, a little more hardcore.
A little more Gnostic.
A little more Gnostic and a little less conformist.
I felt that, you know, Christianity, and maybe there's an argument that could be had about whether institutional Christianity is used as a kind of panacea to prevent people being the radical revolutionaries that I believe our Lord would have us be.
And with things like Buddhism and Sufism, not that I'm claiming to have had a deep understanding of these faiths, just an autodidactic perusal of the books of Sufism and Hinduism and Buddhism and philosophy.
Although there were many, many truths that were discovered in them texts, at the center of those truths, Charlie, there I was still trapped in self.
When I surrendered, kind of voluntarily yet exhausted to the man Christ, the flesh Christ, I realized, oh, I wanted to be Jesus.
I wanted to be the center, the Son of God, the apex.
Yeah, I can't do miracles.
I'm not willing to be crucified.
Now, since surrendering to him, accepting him, bowing at the foot of his cross, on my knees, shoulder to shoulder with any one of you that accepts Jesus alongside me, I feel relieved, I feel unburdened, I feel empowered.
And I realize that the person that I used to be was not an error or a mistake, but part of the unfolding way, as the early Christians called it.
And I find it interesting that a lot of these ideas that I investigated, dear Charlie, like Taoism, say, have embedded in them even semantically notions that can be discovered in Christianity.
And when His Holiness the Dalai Lama gave his recent 90th birthday speech, as I sort of read, at least he posted on social media, I read through that, Charlie, and I noted that most of his significant points about Buddhism, I could, even with just a year in scripture, match with something from the gospel.
Every aspect was like, this is all in Christ.
This is all available to us in Jesus.
There is no need for anything other than Jesus Christ.
There is no need for anything but Jesus.
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Would you like a throat model?
Well, I'm fascinated by them, Charlie.
I'm fascinated.
What are you staring at when you want one?
It's not I want one.
I just want to know the story of them.
I lose my voice at these events because I speak 14 hours a day.
You fight it off with lozenges.
Well, no, the lozenges lubricate the throat to prevent you.
That's the sort of man find out.
It's very maha for the record.
I like it.
I have to have a hundred, a thousand.
Lemon eucalyptus.
It's good stuff, man.
I'm addicted.
I'm going to grind it up and inject it in my arm.
Don't do drugs, kids.
We're told all religions are the same.
Yes?
You really like it?
It's actually amazing.
It's delicious.
It's tasty, right?
Charlie, no wonder you can speak for 14 hours.
No wonder you can get Gavin Gruesome Newsome to admit that there are different genders.
You're powered by lozenges.
That's right.
He's the only one ever to mention the lozenges.
No one else has ever met.
I would expect nothing less.
That's why I thought that's what you're saying.
Oh, yeah, we're told all religions are the same.
What is the differentiator that you want the rest of the world to know about Jesus, Christ, about self?
You mentioned, I mean, for example, Buddhism, correct me if I'm wrong, Russell, is a very self-centric religion.
Yeah.
It is.
I mean, this is, sorry, you know, sometimes when you're a professional comedian, you realize that you do things that are funny, where you're not trying to be funny.
This is one of them.
I'm not even naturally trying to be funny.
For me, it seems normal that you would take the lozenge in and out like a cigarette.
Well, Charlie, your father and I, we used to lozenge together at Harvard.
George Bush and I were in the Skull and Bones Club.
We would lozenge together at Bohemian Grove.
Then who's that under the privet?
It's Alex Jones.
After my mollocrobes was Jones.
After my mollochrobes was he.
No, I mean, yeah, like Buddhism is self-buddhism is self-centered.
If you, like, I reckon the reason, the thing that I resisted about Jesus was the very thing that I needed to yield and surrender to.
I didn't, like, I was messianically infatuated with myself as the kind of center of the world.
And the culture also gives you that offering.
It's appealing that your personal identity can be the altar of false idolatry, i.e.
your sexuality, your race, or your gender.
All of those things are glorious creations of our Lord.
But when you make them the focus of your spiritual attention, of your devotion, they can't hold it.
I look at the instructions in scripture now, not just as edicts to be obeyed, but simply as suggestions that if you follow them, you will have a better time.
If you turn sex into a type of God, you're in for a rough ride.
If you turn your personal identity Into a kind of God.
You're living in an illusion.
Die on the cross with him.
The conversation I refer to between Paul and Peter, as rendered in Galatians, leads to Paul saying, I lived by a certain law, and I lived by a certain law.
The idea of self, the idea that do as, well, indeed, one of the edicts of Satanism, as espoused by Alastair Crowley, is, do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
What you want to do is God, that your own desires are God.
That by truncating, curtailing, and ceasing of your desires, you're somehow being not true to yourself, that you should be who you are.
Now, consumerism and commerce benefit if people want to fulfill their desires all the time.
Every single purchase is undergirded either by necessitation or desire.
But what I have been shown by our Lord is that the perennial ideas of Aldous Huxley, that all religions are the same, or the Campbellian ideas of the heroes with a thousand masks, or Jung's ideas about archetypes, are not untrue.
There are truths presenting themselves again and again through culture.
But there is, I believe, for some of us, maybe not for everyone, who would, how am I after like 14 months of Christianity to tell everyone that they have to do immediately what I couldn't do 15 months ago?
But it seems to me that the way of the cross, the way of the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit, is a way of bypassing and navigating your way through the terrible trenches of bewilderment strewn by a culture that wants you ignorant, bewildered, and delirious.
You need only glance at the Parisian Olympics to be aware that what they want to do is surpass and supplant the values of Christ with the values of a culture that wants you sick, ill, and weak.
There is an attack on all categories that empower people, whether that's the category of woman or the category of man.
These are empowering and holy roles that we might play.
I note since living in Florida that there's an attack on excellence, on expertise, on competence and capability.
They don't want men and women that are awakened and armed and capable of taking care of themselves.
They want us all like hopeless blobs and parasites hooked onto their system of ignorance that tells you there is no God and then tells you that it is the very God that it denies the existence of omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, wanting complete control through surveillance and data capture and observation and ultimately wants you to submit to its false idols, its false idols.
Mmm, lozenge.
Imagine that was all a campaign.
Ah, yeah, yeah.
Imagine that whole thing, Charlie, was just an elaborate advert for this brand of lozenge.
You know how like Tucker does those ziffs.
So the Zinz or whatever that's got his own one now.
It's called Alp.
So Russell, all kidding aside, when are you going to start a church?
Are you going to start it?
Are you going to try to start a ministry?
I mean, the UK could use a revival.
I'm really trying to surrender to whatever he wants.
You know, I've always been talking my whole life, so like it would be immodest, false modesty for me to say, oh, really, Charlie?
You know, I'm aware I hear myself talking.
But when I'm not sucking on a sweet, sweet lozenge of the Lord.
But I do want to participate in his ministry and mission, but because I have a tendency to appoint myself and anoint myself in certain roles, I want to be sure that it's the path he would have me walk.
And I have pretty serious challenges to surmount in the UK when it comes to my personal beliefs.
The entire government is going after Russell.
I hope you guys know that.
It's exhausting.
Yes.
But so, Russell, how is that played into your walk with Jesus?
Is it fair to say, and I'll just, I mean, I don't mean to be offensive or provocative, but that you were like brought to Christ because things started to go rather negative.
Like things started to fall apart and you realized that you had to surrender in front of the cross.
Yeah, that's sort of a pretty simple way of putting it, Charlie.
Thank you.
Good.
Charlie Kirk here.
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So you're under attack from the UK government on, I think, completely fake stuff.
And that's what, by the way, that's what they do.
Russell, they're going after Russell because he was so effective and vocal during COVID, and he was against the entire COVID narrative, right?
You were against lockdowns and you were against all that stuff.
And your lawfare started simultaneously with all of that.
Is that correct?
No, it was a little later, but I knew that it's been revealed that I was under observation from groups like Logically, AI, and CRISP, who are sort of online organizations that often work with either government agencies or government carve-outs.
You're aware of things like the Atlantic Group and various organizations that were funded by USAID or other CIA carve-out organizations.
What seems to have taken place is I provided a lot of raw material by living like an imbecile for a long, long while in a way that is not at all in accordance with the way that I've lived as a married man for the last eight years, nine years, ten years.
God, that's not going to look good for my wife.
Hold on, let me do some quick maths.
When was that baby?
I don't know, out of wedlock.
Sorry, Lord.
Eight years, but my daughter will be nine at her next birthday.
While I was single and young, I lived very promiscuously, promiscuously.
And when you live like that, I can see that it causes harm to be selfish in your sexual conduct is essentially exploitative.
But there's, in my view, a world of difference between that and forcing people to do things against their will.
That is a very, very clear and atrocious crime.
What I believe happened is that due to the popularity of much of the broadcasting that was taking place at that time, which happened sort of really organically, and almost Charlie Kirk, as a quirk, of the technological advancements of that time, like you could exist outside of centralized media and just as I was doing on YouTube, quickly garner a following of millions.
We were talking every day about Pfizer's lack of clinical trials, Moderna's relationship with the government, the inability to prove the efficacy of those medicines, the likelihood that the COVID vaccine, excuse me, COVID virus originated in a laboratory, this peculiar funding relationships between DARPA and COVID, Anthony Fauci's deception, his peculiar visits with the CIA, his relationships with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, all sorts of stuff that was available and Charlie would have been reporting on the same stuff and certainly Joe Rogan was.
I was talking about those kind of things using a variety of articles from people like Matt Taibi and Michael Schellenberger bringing together sort of narratives, but I think hopefully we were able to speak about it in a manner that was sort of funny.
For example, one of the Moderna booster shots was only ever tested on eight mouses.
And I would say, you can't give a whole population a booster on the basis of something that's only been given to eight mouses.
And all the while I'm aware that people are going, but the plural for mouse is mice.
And little tricks like that help information to land within the world.
That's the most important part of the statement.
That's absolutely vital.
Focus on the pluralization of the word mouse.
Good grammar, mass death.
Without grammar, there's no point in being vaccinated.
There's no point in surviving.
Also, I hope I was observing the unspoken narrative of COVID is this.
Check it out.
Life is so sacred and each of us so precious, the most vulnerable, no matter who you are or where you're from.
Life is a sacred gift from God.
Therefore, if there's a virus that's a threat to anybody, we must all be locked in our homes.
We must all wear masks.
We must all obey these edicts.
And if necessary, you must take these vaccines.
And if you don't, you are lacking in compassion.
You don't care about others.
The entire premise is erroneous because where else do we see our culture behaving as if life is sacred, as if we must sacrifice ourselves for one another?
Indeed, don't they mock those very values?
Don't they mock our Savior?
Don't they mock our church?
Don't they laugh at the idea that there's something more valuable than the fulfillment of self and the adornment of self?
Anyway, so during COVID, I talked about it a lot, but I was pretty loquacious and pretty non-stop about it.
The videos were doing well.
I was enjoying it, and I'm a kind of a naturally anti-establishment person, I suppose.
I didn't take the vaccine because I don't like being told what to do.
I didn't take it because they were telling me.
In fact, if they'd wanted me to take that vaccine, all they would have had to have done is leave a couple of syringes in my bedroom and tell me, under no circumstances, do not touch that no matter what.
Doesn't matter who coughs or however quietly, in whichever grocery store, don't take those.
Oh, you've already taken them.
Sir, I have taken 20 or 30 vaccines.
I don't like being told what to do.
In this way, I'm closer to the native mentality of the people of your nation than my own, because over in the UK, people seem to have happily tumbled into radicals.
Unbelievable obedient in the UK.
Unbelievable obedience.
I saw some of your appearances there on GB News and your debates there, and I thought you conducted yourself marvelously, as always.
But I am, like you, concerned about what's happening in the United Kingdom.
And however, you want to carve that up from the left or from the right from a materialist, rationalistic, atheistic, or Christian perspective.
Here's a country that is in very real danger of falling.
It is.
And so, Russell, you brought something, and I want to isolate it.
You said you don't like being told what to do.
That makes it even more incredible that you submitted to Jesus Christ and submitted to scripture.
Yeah.
Because that's a surface contradiction.
So, walk us through that.
Well, I think that might have been one of the initial obstacles because there's this sort of in pantheonism and paganism, there's this aggrandizement or acceptance and celebration of what you might call the humours or the inner deities, your warlike aspect, the Aphrodite aspect, your sensuality.
All of these things can be revered.
And I didn't want to submit to Christ.
I didn't want to surrender to Christ.
And if I'm entirely honest, Charlie, there are some days still where I don't want to bow down in total submission and surrender and recognize that my self-will is my beast.
That's exactly right.
The flesh, the world, and the mentality.
I'm continually caught in a loop of fallibility around these things.
But I can't believe it's all in scripture.
It's all in the word, but it was like the scripture coming to life somehow.
Like I felt like it is finished.
It is done.
His words on the cross.
I felt the compassion that is available through the love of his mother, through his forgiveness of us, through his acceptance of us.
The submission, I do believe that submission to a higher good.
I believe now humility before honor.
Before the idea of surrender, and still, the idea of surrendering or accepting any human authority as supreme, I find it kind of repulsive.
And I believe that there are significant institutional, if not constitutional, changes coming to your country because I believe that there is an appetite for more freedom that is growing.
But freedom cannot exist without virtue.
And so freedom will come after, and it's happening right now.
People go to church and give their life to God.
You cannot have a free society if you do not have a society that values God.
That's why continental Europe is so unfree.
It's secular.
It's interesting.
And so, you pinpoint something.
First of all, there's a great verse that I think you'll love, Romans 12, 2, which is, do not conform to the ways of this world, but instead be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Fact, check me if I got it right.
Romans 12.
I'm not fact-checking you.
I'm just.
The believer's constitution.
I consider you a kind of living Bible.
I'm not quite a living Bible, but I do take that seriously.
So, Romans 12:2, it's one of my favorite verses because you talked about your mindset.
So, that's Romans right there, I think.
Yes.
Yeah, 12:2.
All right, so this is a new international version, probably, Charlie.
So, any distinctions are likely because of the translation.
I won't nitpick that, but what do you go with?
ESV.
Yeah, that's my own.
Or New King James, one of the two.
I like ESV as well.
All right.
So, and so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you.
Let them be a living holy sacrifice, the kind he will find acceptable.
This is truly the way to worship him.
Don't copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.
Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.
It's beautiful.
I like that it starts off, Charlie, as well.
Yeah, praise the Lord.
I like that it starts off with, give your body.
That's one of the things that hit me early on through St. Paul, I think in Corinthians.
And it was somewhat by the brilliant rendering of the British pastor that I first heard use these words in a sermon, even though they're words we're all familiar with that are frequently misused, of course, sarcastically, even ironically.
Do you not know that your body is a temple?
Do you not know?
It has that prefix, do you not know that your body is a temple?
I like the gentleness of you wouldn't be doing this if you knew that your body was a temple.
I lived like someone who didn't know that their body was a temple, a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit, a place for the Lord to inhabit.
We no longer have a tabernacle that has to be carried that could go off at any time and kill everyone.
We are a living tabernacle.
We are the site of his holiness and his grace.
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Now I want to put this before you because I'm thinking of saying it when I talk in front of the audience later, which I'm a bit nervous about, Charlie.
I'm a bit nervous about talking in front of a big audience.
Okay, I do get nervous.
See this thing.
When I went to Rome the other day, I was in one of these churches.
You know, like if you ever go to Rome, you've got to go.
It's amazing.
I don't mean Rome in Florida, because there is one, is there?
Or Georgia.
I don't mean that one.
I mean, the one in the Rome.
I mean the one with Italians in it.
There's probably some in Georgia as well.
But anyway, I mean, full of them.
Brimming over everywhere you look.
One of these churches has got three Caravaggios in it of St. Matthew.
One, Caravaggio is one of my favorite sort of late Renaissance artists.
There's a lot of darkness in the way he paints and shafts of light.
They say that Francis Coppola used his image system heavily for the Godfather movies.
Anyway, there's this one image painting, beautiful, unbelievably beautiful painting of St. Matthew being appointed and anointed, like chosen, like I suppose in the show chosen when our Lord goes, oh, follow me.
I know Delafield goes, oh, he's not from Essex, but you know.
And Matthew was a tax collector, I believe.
So they say.
And in this picture, he's depicted as being sat around with a bunch of other taxpayers and near-do-wells.
And at the end of the table, rather like this one that you and I are at, Charlie, surrounded by him, look like they're playing games of chance.
I believe it's Saint Matthew at the end, although it's one of those paintings where there's some discussion over which one is Matthew.
The one I think is Matthew, when the painting's called the anointing of Matthew or the appointing of Matthew, I can't remember which, probably appointing, I suppose.
Like one of the geezers is sat at the end like that.
And I think that's the one that's Matthew, that one.
What?
Who's getting appointed?
And you will understand his reluctance to be appointed in this holy mission when you see that the next of the, they're not a triptych, but they are three paintings hung together, is Matthew with Gabriel writing his Testament and gospel.
And then the final image is Matthew being flayed, which means skinned alive for his faith and for his Christianity.
I thought, if we believed as he believed, how could it be that you could have an institution like the Vatican and not have a revolution?
If we believed as he believed, how could you have us going to church every Sunday praying, teaching our kids, reading the word, and not have the revolution?
Or at least the way made straight for the return of our Savior.
If we believed only as Paul believed, as Peter believed, as Barnabas believed, as Mary believed, as Stephen believed.
This is the church that excites and interests me.
And I know it comes at a high cost.
And I know what our Lord said to, is it Anias when Paul's on his way to Damascus?
Paul's coming.
I've chosen him.
He's going to suffer greatly for my name.
So go over there and sort his head out.
He's gone blind.
He's had a little bit of a shock on the way here.
Paraphrasing.
But what I feel is that it was a threshold that was passed, Charlie, that I was still withheld in the new age, and I still bear the scars of the new age.
I was going to ask you about that, but I wanted to be polite.
She's Durga.
Durga is a great goddess.
This is a title I've had for some years now, of course, prior to coming to the state.
I mean, why'd you decide to get a tattoo of her?
Because Durga is a, she's female goddess energy, and I have a wife and I have two daughters, and I was commemorating and celebrating the power of my wife, Laura, and of my daughters, Mabel and Peggy.
Durga, in one of her aspects, rides a tiger.
And I like the idea of my daughters and my wife being powerful, strong women who know how to marshal the energy that God gave them.
And of course, there is no God but him.
And I surrender and bow down to Christ Jesus, and I disavow all false idols.
But the false idols that concern me most are not those that emerge out of Hinduism or even Islam, although I'm sure you'll hear rhetoric here to the contrary.
No, it is the false idols that emerge from our culture, the ones that the graven images that we stare at day after day, hour after hour, the endless, endless effluvia and limitless flow of filth and pornography that denigrates and lowers us all.
It's the false idols within our culture that I fear most.
But, you know, Peter took the Jews and Paul took the Gentiles.
We're all going to get called to different missions.
And I don't claim to know very much.
I think about myself all the time and I don't understand myself yet.
So how would I know anything about anyone or anything else?
But what I would say is it's the false idols in the culture that I fear most, that want us deadened and distracted, Charlie.
I totally agree.
It's, look, modernity has made us materially wealthier, but spiritually poor.
And that is modernity.
And we are seeing a reckoning of that while people want to return to a tradition.
We only have a couple minutes.
I've got to get you on stage.
Really?
Yes.
This is just the warm-up act.
Oh, man.
I'm feeling nervous.
How many thousand?
It'll calm you down.
Give me that from my pocket.
Yes.
No, that's there.
7,000 people for you.
Oh, Charlie.
Russell, your show is called Stay Free.
Yes, I'm Rumble.
Are you, do you believe you are freer and more joyful since giving your life to Jesus?
Oh, man, there's no question.
Even with the really difficult things that happened, like being told that our baby might be born dead, being offered late-term abortion, him being born and requiring surgery when he was 12 weeks old, turning into the glorious little boy that he is now.
The reputational attacks, the exhaustion, the confronting with the things that I have done wrong in my life.
I've never been so free.
In obedience and surrender to him, there is perfect freedom.
There is no freedom out there.
There's no freedom in hedonism, in Epicureanism, in the constant devouring of concupians and endless pleasures.
There's no freedom there.
It's an illusion.
But it's a powerful illusion.
I'm not suggesting I couldn't fall for it again a thousand times.
I have to stay very close to Christ Jesus.
And to do that, I need Christians everywhere around me.
And perhaps that's what fuels my evangelism.
And so, yeah, Russell, what has worked for you?
Every believer is different.
Is it Christian music?
Is it reading the Bible?
Is it going to church?
What keeps you close to Jesus?
Because you're right.
You're constantly attacked.
By the way, Satan, I believe, has singled you out for quite a while.
And you better believe the enemy's not happy that now you're proclaiming Jesus in front of millions of people.
And, you know, we as believers believe Satan is real.
Satan is active.
Satan attacks.
Satan targets.
Satan is literally in Hebrew.
Satan means the prosecutor, the deceiver.
So all of what you are going through in the United Kingdom is a satanic attack to try to say, oh, Russell, remember that thing that happened 10 years ago?
Try to have you feel guilty and ashamed.
Remember, Satan throughout the scriptures would constantly always whisper, whether it be in the garden or elsewhere, about, oh, you need to be held back by what you once did.
But Christ sets you free.
And so, knowing that, what keeps you spiritually active and alive?
You know, of course I am cowed by what I've done, but I'm attacked for things that I have not done.
I recognize that my objectification and exploitation was wrong, and I accept the forgiveness of my Lord, and I pray for the forgiveness of people that have been negatively impacted by my selfish conduct, by my greedy deduct, by my low conduct.
I was told this by this brilliant Vietnam vet in your great nation.
Everything's a burning bush.
Everything's a burning.
See, he said it like this.
Everything's a burning bush, is how he said it.
That's how he said it.
May I ask what you mean, sir?
And he said that Moses could have encountered Yahweh at any time.
It could have happened at any time.
Take off your shoes, For you are on sacred ground, that all things are incandescent with the Lord, yet not immolated.
All of us burn with the holy light of the Holy Father.
All of us feel the living presence of the Holy Spirit, and all of us benefit from the sacrifice of Christ Jesus, and we may know eternal life in Him.
We access Him here in this moment.
Let this moment be a burning bush to all of us.
Let us comfort one another.
Let us love one another.
Let us serve one another as He has served us.
Amen.
So beautiful.
Thanks, Russell.
I'll say in closing: you have millions of people praying for you.
Thanks.
The Christian journey is not necessarily easy, but you can rest that Jesus is with you throughout every step of it.
And you'll say this: your whole thing is freedom.
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
