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July 7, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:34:30

Gavin Ashenden

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	I love Danny Paul!
	Welcome to the Dellingpod with me James Dellingpod and I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest but this is going to be really good.
	In fact I'm wondering before I introduce my guest whether this could be the first in my planned new series.
	Which might be called The Delling God, or it might be called The Delling Pod Does God.
	I haven't worked out.
	So my special guest is none other than Gavin Ashenden, making his second appearance.
	But Gavin, so much has changed since we last spoke.
	What do you think?
	Delling God?
	Delling Pod Does God?
	Well, I love Anglo-Saxon alliteration, and you probably do too, having been a literary scholar.
	But it's got to be beautiful, and I think that doesn't sound beautiful in the mouth to me.
	But it's on brand, it's got that kind of... Well, Delingpod and God?
	A little space between the... Delingpod and God.
	No, I don't think... I think the minor key is overwhelming.
	You need something more beautiful in the middle.
	Actually, no, I think I may have it.
	See, the trouble is the word odd springs to mind and we want to keep odd from Delingpole and God.
	Well out of the picture.
	I am quite odd though Gavin.
	Yeah but there's good odd and there's bad odd.
	You've got to persuade people it's good odd before you release the oddness.
	I'm just I'm just I'm just studying your mic work here because you're a professional broadcaster and I'm just wondering because you know so many of my podcasts recently I've done on um online on um oh yes yes on zoom and stuff And actually you get a better sound quality with this but it does mean I have to do the thing that I hate which is like being an engineer.
	Well you also have to have it a certain number of inches from your lips to get the optimum clarity and resonance.
	Yes.
	And it's almost like eating it.
	So if you're doing an early morning show on the BBC and you want to be intimate then serious proximity to the microphone It helps a great deal, James.
	Oh yes, that was very good.
	That was good mic work.
	Yes, so before we... I'm so looking forward to this, but before we plunge in, just remind people who don't know who Gavin Ashenden is.
	You were a BBC broadcaster, were you actually BBC?
	Yeah, well Toy Town BBC I'm afraid.
	Yes, Toy Town.
	Well I've done a lot of things.
	I thought I was going to be a lawyer originally so that's what I trained in and then I had a rather A rather unusual conversion.
	It was a provisional conversion to Christianity because I hated the idea of being trapped by something.
	I somehow had the fear of American evangelists put into me and I didn't like the idea of being caught by somebody else's ideology.
	So it made it quite difficult for me to become a Christian because I thought, you know, I'm being trapped here.
	So I provisionally became a Christian.
	And until it sort of proved to be steady ground under my feet.
	And then I became an Anglican priest and I did 10 years in parishes.
	I wasn't a very good one, really, because I wanted to read and I basically wanted to be back at a university seminar.
	So I said to God, look, I'm not a very good parish priest.
	I mean, I've done my best, but I'm better off at university.
	And quite wonderfully, I got to be a university chaplain and a senior lecturer for 25 years, which I just loved.
	It was a tricky university and it was hard work and full of aggression, but I didn't mind that because on the whole, People were aggressive because they wanted to get to the bottom of things and in that culture they saw the chaplain and the religious and the spiritual as something that needed to be shaken to see if it had anything inside it.
	So, aggression from whom?
	Oh, atheist colleagues.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So, you know, one of the world's most famous biologists would hang around the bar waiting for the chaplain to come in to have fun with him.
	And we became very good friends.
	I liked that.
	But it would be silly to pretend that most of my original encounters with my flocks, as I saw them, were not initially full of mistrust and lacked a certain amount of initial charity.
	Yeah there's somebody there's somebody on my on my telegram channel who is who is he's obviously read a lot of Christopher Hitchens or he's yeah he's very confident.
	Very evangelistically atheist.
	Evangelistically atheist and some people say you know should you keep him in the group he's you know he's constantly sort of slagging off all your all your Christian friends and I say no.
	He's great.
	I mean, number one, he's great entertainment, because he is.
	I mean, I just love the fact that he's so angry about God and stuff.
	And secondly, because I kind of think he's ripe for conversion.
	It's a terrible thing to... No, but what you're saying is he's really serious about not being made a fool of, and that's why he's crossed with you and the others, because he believes That they're being made a fool of and there's some element of profound righteousness inside him which is properly morally offended by this.
	It's just he's got the calculation wrong.
	It comes out plus instead of minus but he doesn't know that yet.
	So his motivation is great.
	I was in Jersey for five years as a vicar and if you told me that the person who would stay in touch with me most was a retired doctor Consumed with fury by religious people who writes to me every week, just like your telegram friend, saying, for goodness sake, Gavin, you can't be... Do you know what these stupid Christians are saying?
	They're saying this now.
	Explain that to me if you possibly can.
	So I say, yeah, actually, I can.
	You've just missed the right end of the stick, dear man.
	But he's the one who keeps in touch with me.
	And I think that Atheists can be our best friends sometimes.
	The people I find most difficulty with are the ones who don't give a damn in the middle, who just move through life as though there aren't any mysteries, conundrums, paradoxes that cry out to be solved and take everything as though it's kind of normal until they die and then they're shocked and a bit surprised and say, how did that happen?
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	You said something earlier on as well which I wanted to pick up on because it's quite interesting about how you were put off Christianity and it describes my own feelings before I became, you know, turned to Christ or whatever, which is... Another whatever!
	I don't know what the phrase is.
	No, no, but I think what you're saying is, the trouble is there are codes, aren't there?
	And as in politics, the kind of language you use is carefully nuanced and people say, oh he's one of us, or he's on our side, or he's got it right, or he's balanced, or he's deluded, whatever.
	It's very difficult finding the right kind of religious language that tells the truth Without making you a hostage to some group or other.
	That's it.
	And I think that's what your whatever signifies.
	Yes.
	And frankly, absolutely, whatever.
	Yes.
	But I was afeard in much the same way, I think, because a lot of men are absolutely terrified of getting married.
	Yeah.
	They think, basically, you've lost the game.
	Once you get married, and I always used to believe this, once a man agrees to get married he's lost because that is the whole purpose of women, what they do, they're out there to ensnare you, to take away your freedoms and to boss you around for the rest of your lives and that's the deal and it's unfair because what you as a man want to be doing is going around shagging and with your mates and so on.
	And then you discover, if you're lucky like I have, that actually I've really enjoyed being married.
	It's been great.
	But in the same way, the whole Christian thing, there are all Manner of different ways to Christianity.
	We've got lots of friends who've who are really in kind of, I say lots of friends, we know of people who are in hardcore religious sex where they are really kind of Constrained by various rules and and so on and then you've got you've got that whole what's it called you know that that happy clappy Blairite one what's it called
	The alpha, the alpha course.
	There is no way I'm ever, ever going to do an alpha course.
	It's very packaged, very branded.
	Some people like packaged and branded.
	But you see the thing is Gav, I'm not going to sit here and diss people who do that because that's their way.
	But there are different ways, aren't there?
	There is no one rule.
	And what I've been struck by, in my exciting new world that I'm discovering... I wanted to ask you about this, because it's so great having you here, because you are the perfect combination.
	You've got your religious credentials, but also you've got your philosophical academic credentials so you can back up your arguments, which I really like.
	It's a bit like meeting a doctor at a party and being able to tell him all your ailments and ask him about, you know, this enormous growth I've got on my left temporal testicle.
	This blemish on my soul.
	So what I've noticed is How many of the people in my telegram chat group, they're all believing Christians and they're very happy about it, but the schisms you get, the lecturettes you get from them about the right way of doing things and the wrong way of doing things, and they're very adamant about all manner of stuff.
	Tell me, why is that?
	The answer is Jason and the Argonauts but let's go back first of all because you said something very interesting and it's so interesting it'd be a shame for it to disappear in the work.
	We like tangents on the Delegates.
	Well let's join them all up and we'll make some symmetrical figure out.
	So one of the things you said was men find it very difficult, they find women difficult, they find being captured difficult and of course you're right men find love difficult because essentially there's something fairly primitive about masculinity.
	We're good at power.
	Physically, our first reflexes are, are, are, are responses to power.
	And when we grow up, we like to be strong and powerful.
	And at work, we like to be strong and powerful.
	And some women like us to be strong and powerful, and some men don't like us to be more powerful than they are.
	So power is the natural primitive currency of masculinity, I think.
	Because the problem with feminism is that it lost its trump card, which was compassionate love and sensitivity, and moved into the power stakes with men.
	And on the whole, women...
	This is terrible truth and people will be very cross with me, but let's put it out there.
	Oh, yes, please.
	Oh, let's.
	When women ape men, it is no more beautiful than when men ape women.
	And part of the problem with the gender wars we've got at the moment is we've both suffered identity crises and we've got involved in a power struggle, which is really quite ugly and doesn't do any of us any good.
	But let's go back.
	It was always the case you couldn't get men into church very easily because they were terrified of getting married.
	Not to a woman, but they were terrified of that invasion of their heart by a living God that they didn't understand, didn't know, couldn't calibrate, had no idea about.
	And basically it made them, if I may use the vernacular, shit scared.
	And they ran a long way.
	And on the whole, It usually took a massive crisis to get a man to stop and to think about being loved by God.
	Why am I here?
	Do I matter?
	Who validates my existence?
	Who forgives me?
	Who accepts my blemishes?
	Who inspires me to be a better person?
	These are all love questions and very often women fulfil the purpose of asking them for us but ultimately Women can't carry the whole can.
	They're God questions, primarily.
	Funnily enough, women, I think, partly because of the whole childbirth thing, the mystery of, you know, where the heck did this life come from?
	Partly because they don't so easily rely on brute force as we do.
	They're not so easily seduced into thinking they can manage a level of existential independence.
	And so I think, risking the stereotypical even further, women often find the spiritual conversations Basically asking the question, do I matter?
	Was I made in love, by love, for love?
	And how can I live for it?
	They find it much easier to ask these questions than men do.
	But if men don't come to that kind of, if we don't have that dialogue somewhere, and it's actually, it's easier to have it with a strong man.
	Because, you know, part of the problem is that there aren't very many masculine men in church.
	They dress up too often, lace, they become They often find the models of masculinity a little bit too far down the scale.
	High church Anglicans tend to be… Let's not go there.
	There is a tendency.
	And the problem with that is that there are very few models of masculinity, which is one of the reasons I was often drawn to C.S.
	Lewis and Tolkien and the Oxford Inklings.
	That's another tangent.
	But let's go back.
	I just wanted us to talk about being vulnerable to getting married and being vulnerable to God.
	And you were then saying, why is there so much schism?
	And I was saying Jason and the Argonauts.
	So I think the fact is, any conversation about God you have, First of all, you never get raw God.
	You only get God mediated through human experience.
	So we're a bit like human instruments and some of us like tubas and some like piccolos and some like triangles.
	Some are good instrumentationally at picking out the melody and some are not very good.
	Tubas are not very winsome with melodies.
	But you've also got the problem of evil and one of the real difficulties we have in our culture, ever since Freud in particular, But there are all kinds of other reasons.
	It's the recognition that we're in a metaphysical struggle.
	So all the great philosophers, all the great literary minds, all the great artists know about this kind of tiarkozoid in human affairs.
	But there's something in the 20th century that is terrified of trying to recognize evil.
	And what I'm getting to the point of saying is that if human beings are trying to strip down the truth about God, I'm just reminded of Jason and the Argonauts.
	There are the Argonauts, about to go for the Golden Fleece, and they're faced with a huge band of soldiers rising against them.
	And Jason is told, pick up this lump and throw it into that army of soldiers.
	And the rock hits a soldier on the head.
	And immediately he lashes out at the bloke next to him, thinking the bloke next to him has done it.
	And the bloke next to him says, you blighter, or words to that effect, and lashes him back and everyone else gets caught up and of course they've mistaken the cause of the blow.
	But the church is a bit like that, Christians are a bit like that.
	We suffer blows from sources that we haven't quite recognised and we begin to take it out on each other.
	And if we only stopped for a moment and traced where the violence came from we would be less inclined to make each other pay the price for it and begin to realise that actually the real source of the violence lies elsewhere and requires a different approach.
	Yes, well in a way you've gone at least a quarter of the way to answering something that's often raised and used against Christians.
	Which is, well, what about all the people who've died in the name?
	You know, what about the wars between Catholics and Protestants?
	What about the Crusades?
	What about all these things done in the name of the religion?
	You know, religion has killed more people than communism.
	I think I dispute that.
	Except of course it hasn't.
	I dispute that.
	And they say, what about the Inquisition?
	Do know that Obama killed more people in eight years than the Spanish Inquisition did in the whole of its history, for religious reasons.
	I heard this put the other day and I was so taken by it, I thought, I must keep that and use it.
	Because, as you quite rightly say... It is a keeper, you're right.
	It's a keeper.
	People say, you know, how can you be a Christian, how can you become a Catholic, particularly in the face of the Inquisition?
	So, Obama's bombing raids were done for philosophical and religious reasons.
	The political chemistry of the decision-making was not a religious vacuum, right?
	There was a lot of religious involved in it.
	And so for religious, philosophical and political reasons, Obama licensed the killing of his ideological enemies and killed more people in the years of his premiership presidency than the Spanish Inquisition did throughout the whole.
	Now, I'm not saying the Spanish Inquisition was a good thing.
	Far from it.
	We'll come on to that.
	I'm just saying that people make unfair and improper comparisons.
	And my sense of what one does with the whole violence issue is that Christianity is essentially a restraint.
	Some people say, Ashenden, how can you possibly be a Christian?
	You're not a very good quality human being.
	You're a restrained psychopath.
	I'd hate to meet you if you were cross on a dark night in an alley, and they'd be right.
	And I would say to them, if I hadn't become a Christian, you don't know how much damage I would have caused.
	I would not have been restrained.
	I would have pursued my enemies to the end and crushed them.
	I would never have turned the other cheek.
	I would have taken the other guy's head off.
	I wouldn't have dreamt of being patient.
	I would have won every bloody battle I'd been faced with.
	I would have been as unstoppable as I possibly could because why should I let another human being triumph over me?
	Becoming a Christian changed all that.
	And although I'm not a very good Christian and not a very good human being, I am.
	The world is so much a better place that my basic instincts have not been able to play themselves out without restraint.
	Now what's true of me is true of a lot of people.
	For example, if we go back towards the medieval period, people look at the Christian nations fighting.
	Well, so nations have always fought.
	You should try out the early Europeans, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Angles, if you want real violence.
	But one of the wonderful things that the Pope did is he severely limited the days on which people could fight.
	So there were only about 30% of the days, of a 365 days, when you were actually allowed to use violence.
	The other days were Sabbaths, holidays, feast days, festivals.
	Yes.
	And you weren't allowed to take it to your enemy.
	And I think that's a very good way of explaining not that Christianity legitimises violence, quite the opposite.
	Jesus invited us to turn the other cheek and it doesn't happen because it's so incredibly difficult.
	But one of the by-products of Christianity is a certain taming of our capacity for vengeance and violence and anger.
	And when you look at Christendom, I don't want to get into it, but let's look at Jesus and Muhammad.
	One of the things Muhammad did was he either personally or else by immediate agency chopped off the heads of about 400 Jewish prisoners.
	That was how Muhammad did his stuff.
	Look at Jesus.
	He didn't!
	He didn't, no.
	And Christianity and Islam model themselves on their founders, and one of the reasons I find Christianity so much more acceptable is that whilst I understand, having read my history carefully, where Christianity has gone off the rails, I'm deeply upset by the carpet bombing in the Second World War, and I only wish Bishop Bell, whom the Archbishop of Canterbury has allowed to be gratuitously slandered, was listened to as a prophetic figure.
	But the great thing about Christianity is it does not legitimize violence.
	And one of the great differences between Christianity and Islam, which I treasure, is that in Islam, if violence takes place, you may very well find that actually it is sanctioned either by the Qur'an or by the Hadith or by tradition or by culture.
	But in Christianity, violence is never sanctioned.
	And therefore, James, if you go out as a Christian and you do some violence to somebody, I can say to you quite properly, You're going to have to stop that and say sorry.
	And indeed, to remain a Christian, you're going to have to stop that and say sorry.
	Or you can't stay a Christian.
	Yes, the Bible is quite clear on that one, isn't it?
	Yes, it really is.
	And it's a sod, I have to say.
	I think it's about the toughest thing, having to forgive one's enemies.
	It is the toughest thing.
	I mean, we struggle with it forever.
	There are people... I can only forgive by degrees, I've discovered.
	So the very first thing is to say, OK, I give in.
	I'll try to forgive.
	And then you move from trying to forgive to making the first step of forgiveness.
	I once fell out with a colleague who hated me, trying to get me sacked.
	And we settled down to stop.
	We decided to stop taking chips out of each other.
	17 years later we found ourselves sharing a double bed in a Christian conference centre, staying in the office together and we had become friends and I thought it's taken 17 years to forgive and understand and make allowances for each other and get under each other's skin.
	I didn't know this, he told me that I reminded him of his father who was very cruel to him And so he found my mannerisms very difficult.
	He was genuinely triggered.
	I had no idea.
	It wasn't my fault, it wasn't his fault, but it was a fact.
	What, you're too operatic?
	He's been laughed, boomingly.
	But what I'm saying is that it took us 17 years to forgive each other.
	But you're absolutely right.
	The fact Christianity is completely uncompromising.
	We have to forgive our enemies.
	We have to love our enemies.
	It's about the most difficult thing anybody could ever ask us to do.
	And we need God's help to do it.
	Therefore we have to have the experience.
	If you haven't experienced being forgiven by God, You haven't had a sense of what you need to be forgiven of.
	And one of the great things in Christian life is suddenly catching a sight of your kind of moral charge sheet.
	Because you know we don't see us like other people see us, we self justify a great deal.
	But there are moments when When what the Holy Spirit does is to show us a bit more what we're like, what we're really like and frankly it's horrifying and at that point we know we need to be forgiven and when we find ourselves being given this forgiveness it's quite impossible not to give it to other people who have an equal claim on it at our hands.
	Yes.
	Let me tell you that, I don't know if I mentioned this last time, the most difficult parable for me
	is the one about the the prodigal son and I've always identified with the son that stays at home and he's mightily fucked off because the prodigal son comes back and he's been an absolute wastrel and a tosser and the loyal son has done you know he's been a good boy and he and and and he he frankly deserves the inheritance and I don't think the prodigal son deserves it at all.
	Doesn't deserve anything!
	doesn't deserve anything and he comes back and the and the dad forgives him and it's always rankled with me uh and i'm this is probably well i i probably reflects the way we all feel about this this forgiveness thing um but but see that's the reason you're pissed off with it yeah is because when you've looked at yourself you've only seen a bit of yourself you've only seen part of your narrative you've only seen the odd chapters but the
	But there's another part of you, particularly in God's eyes, that has pissed off, that has gone for easy living, comfortable... Oh yeah, well...
	Yes, you know, you're a high lever James, you know how to live well.
	You're not averse to the prodigal lifestyle.
	No, no, which is why I'm not looking forward to the terrible period where everything goes seriously shits up before we get the good bit.
	What's it called?
	You know, the horrible bit that we've got coming.
	Are you talking politically?
	No, I'm talking about end times.
	Oh, the apocalypse you're talking about.
	There's an awful sense that whatever language we use we're certainly at the close of a civilization and it may be bigger than that.
	Yes, I agree.
	But you and I have had the most wonderful life to live.
	We've lived in great stable comfort.
	Inflation frightened me a great deal and unemployment frightened me.
	Covid has not frightened me, but I do fear that the next 10 years are going to be difficult for our civilisation, partly because we're self-destructing.
	Our culture is committing suicide.
	It's having a most dreadful... it's not just an identity crisis, it's willing its own destruction and doesn't know why.
	Yes, but we're also being suicided by By the real bosses, if you like, the evil bosses.
	So we could argue about whether they're symptom or cause, but it doesn't matter.
	The fact is it's all one dynamic.
	I didn't want to go in that direction.
	Let's not!
	No, we will later on, when we get really XX rated.
	But what I wanted to talk about was the forgivers thing.
	So am I not allowed There's no way of denying this.
	If, having done such damage to the world, Bill Gates were suddenly on his deathbed to apologise and go to heaven, I would not like that and I know it's not very Christian of me but I want him to burn in hell.
	Now obviously it's not my decision but I do kind of want him to burn in hell.
	James, one of the nice things about becoming a Catholic was I was finally able to own my Dante and own purgatory.
	And a lot of Protestants get very cross with the idea of purgatory but partly because they don't understand it and they also don't understand What is inevitable and that is that the acorn of the kingdom of heaven and the church had to grow into a bigger tree and there are things that happen to a tree that are not obvious in the acorn and so of course things will develop in time and Jesus promised the Holy Spirit would teach people some really profound mysteries that they and their generation weren't capable of.
	Now the great thing about purgatory is That it's quite impossible for us to go from the kind of state of soiled morality that we all inhabit.
	Some of us more soiled than others, some of our lives are more soiled at different times than others, but nonetheless we are like glasses upon which the crud has lain for some time.
	But none of us are in Bill Gates' league, let's face it.
	Hang on, before we tell ourselves what we know about Bill Gates or we don't know, When we come to face the living God, there are going to be a whole load of things that get put right.
	So first of all we're given forgiveness because Christ has won it on the cross.
	So we've moved from a category of where we're capable of being accused to one where we're declared innocent.
	But before we can be taken down, but whilst the jury has declared us innocent in Christian terms, There's a huge act of hygiene that has to happen.
	The prisoner's been brought up from the cells.
	He's been languishing there sometimes, and frankly he stinks.
	He may be innocent, but before he's allowed out in polite company, there's going to have to be a good deal of cleaning and restoration going on.
	Now that cleaning and restoration can't happen without consent.
	C.S.
	Lewis wrote the most wonderful, almost one of the best books I've ever read, called The Great Divorce.
	So, in brackets, this is a long bracket, I'll try and come out the other end.
	In brackets, he was very cross with, who wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?
	Blake.
	He was very cross with Blake because Blake was doing a Jungian thing and saying that on a kind of moral scale, good and evil need each other as a kind of symbiotic relationship, you pick up good Turn the other side of it, it's evil, pick up evil.
	And so C.S.
	Lewis was outraged by this and said, no, morality is much more like mathematics.
	You've got to go back to where you went wrong.
	So here's quite a significant philosophical, religious, aesthetic argument that's taken place in English culture for the last two or three hundred years.
	So C.S.
	Lewis was very cross about Blake's misreading of Christian ethics.
	And so in the face of the marriage of heaven and hell, he wrote a book which is called The Great Divorce, but it's the great divorce between heaven and hell.
	And so the conceit is that you have a busload of people, and there was a medieval tradition that they were allowed one day in the year out of the refrigerium, out of purgatory.
	And they were brought to the frontiers of heaven.
	But each of them had a bit of cleaning up that they were unwilling to consent to.
	And then he does about, he has about eight or ten character types and he does a marvellously astute psychological analysis of how each of the things that we're unwilling to be sorry about or to give up stand between us and entrance into heaven.
	Now, whatever the state of Bill Gates' soul, and I don't know what it is, He's going to have to be sorry.
	And I think if you saw Bill Gates being profoundly sorry, let me give you an example.
	I suspect that all the people I've hurt in my life may present themselves to me and they may stand between me and the gate of heaven and I may have to say to them, I'm really sorry.
	I may have a long line of people to work through before I can progress because they've got a claim on my forgiveness.
	I can't just waltz into heaven having done some damage and say, well you know, God loves me so it's all okay, isn't it?
	The Catholic Church is much more realistic about the damage we've done and it may very well be that Bill Gates is simply going to have to first of all own up to any damage he's done and secondly ask for an apology, ask for forgiveness.
	That may take him some time and if you saw that happening your heart might melt a little bit and you'd say poor Blighter this is tough going.
	I can certainly see it taking, in the unlikely event that he ever shows any contrition, I would say that we're talking thousands of years.
	Thousands.
	Well the great thing about purgatory in the Catholic tradition is time isn't a problem but the will is.
	I mean one of the reasons Again, I like being a proper Catholic, is the sense that there's an immense privilege in being in time and space.
	God has given us agency, spiritual, physical, intellectual, moral agency, which is highly geared, and we can have a great deal of effect by our actions, by our prayers, by our sacrifices.
	And the problem is the moment we die, Whatever happens is there's much less traction.
	Better to get your repentance, your forgiveness, your love, your acts of charity in now, while you've got traction, than find yourself... I remember when students came to me saying they wanted to kill themselves, and I had to talk them out of it.
	First of all, I had to say, well, you know, I've thought about this myself.
	I'd read them the wonderful poem by Not Dorothy.
	Dorothy, early 20th century, very clever woman of letters, Parker, Dorothy Parker.
	Yeah.
	You know, razors pain you, rivers called cramp.
	Well, for another time.
	And I would say, you know, you want to kill yourself because you're cross and furious and hopeless and we talk about, you know, how are you going to do it?
	And the important thing was to get it out into the open and have it talked about and recognised.
	and therefore less frightening, less threatening, less powerful.
	I remember one girl, she was trained to be a lawyer, and she was very...
	Power and choice were very important for her.
	And I said to her, what happens if you get to the other side?
	She was fixated with throwing herself in front of trains.
	I said, what happens if you get to the other side?
	And you discover that you've caused the most immense damage to the train driver, and he lost his job.
	and his family went down the tubes.
	And by your act of self-destruction, you've actually caused a whole cascade of horror, human horror, that you're morally responsible for.
	And at the other side, you're without power, to put it right.
	You can't say sorry, you can't go and meet them, you can't make reparation, you're stuck.
	And the thought of being stuck to this woman who was quite concerned about her power of choice was so upsetting that she said, it'd be far better to live, wouldn't it?
	And I said, well, I think it might.
	Because whilst you live you can exercise these choices.
	But my great fear is that once we're dead, in purgatory or wherever we are, Our capacity for agency and choice is highly restricted and I think people... I once had an experience, this came to me, I used to pray in church on Saturday nights and I used to lie in front of the altar and pray and one night the floor disappeared and I thought, this is odd, what's this about?
	And this will sound surprising to you but my major concern was how do I get to the toilet?
	If I want, if I'm to wee, I'm stuck.
	Because, see, without any floor, your feet can't press it.
	It may sound a no-brainer, but it's a great surprise when it happens to you.
	You can't move.
	You can't exercise the choice to go to the toilet.
	What if your bladder was to continue filling and you still couldn't get... Yeah.
	You know, I mean, I don't want to show myself as a primitive Neanderthal, but this is my major concern.
	And the floor came back after a while, but before it did, I found myself being immensely grateful for the material world that allowed me agency and choice and became a sort of collaborator in doing things.
	And I've never taken the floor for granted ever since.
	And I'm just very aware that we have We have a lifetime, however short or long it is, of choices and the capacity of a choice but we better use our choices while we can because when death comes we will find ourselves in some place without floor and ceiling and accountable to God and goodness knows where we will be.
	What will happen if then we want to put things right and we can't put them right?
	Yes.
	I wanted to ask you, this is a really tricky one, but I think it's kind of key.
	Various of the Christians, they're quite hardcore in my group, are absolutely adamant that you can only come to salvation through Christ, so I'm with them there.
	Except, I know lovely, God-fearing Hindu people, for example, who I think live as good lives they live.
	I've picked Hinduism as just one example, but they are spiritual, they're in touch with, they do good deeds.
	This isn't hard at all, it's ever so simple.
	Oh is it?
	Tell me.
	The reason it seems hard is because we've been over-colonial in our philosophical categories.
	So if you were to say to a Hindu, Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, He'd say, well, this is all very interesting, but the way to where?
	And you say, well, to God the Father.
	Well, which God the Father, the Hindu would say?
	I'm not sure I necessarily want to go to the God the Father of the Jews.
	I may want to go somewhere else.
	So why are you assuming that Jesus is the way when there are clearly a whole series of different options?
	All you're saying when you say Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life is that if God looks like the Father, Then you can only get to him through Jesus.
	And one reason you can only get to him is because Jesus is the only person who's told us about him.
	So before we had Jesus, God was the unknowable, terrible force who came with a series of faces.
	One that was the face of Thor, one of Allah, one of polyphony, but I mean polytheism.
	If one stops taking the God of the Bible for granted, then, and you say Jesus is the way, he is indeed the way to God the Father.
	Now if you don't want God the Father, then you can pick another way to another God.
	In other words, Jesus is only the exclusive way to the Christian God.
	So the first thing you have to say is, is the Christian God the only one or are there other gods?
	So you might say, do you know, I think I'd like to believe in Gaia, in which case I don't need Jesus at all.
	And the fact that Jesus says he's the way is neither here nor there because I'm not going that way.
	So it doesn't matter.
	It only matters if you're going to the Father he showed.
	Now, if you're going towards the Father he showed, then of course he's the only way.
	Because there isn't any other route to him.
	So having established that only Jesus shows us the face of God as a prodigal father who loves us, forgives us, made us, knows us, wants us, adores us, but requires things of us that are beyond our capacity to deliver and yet will forgive us.
	If having established that's the God you're being drawn to, that's not a given, so if you want something else then you leave Jesus out of it and you You look at those other things.
	Before I came to Christianity, I decided I needed to know what Buddha taught and whether the non-god of Buddhism was actually more authentically real than Yahweh of the Judeo-Christian God.
	The answer's not obvious.
	You have to choose.
	In the end, the problem I had with Buddhism was that the thing that made my life richest were my friendships.
	And the map by which I navigated what I did was essentially based on the way I treasured human beings.
	I had some wonderful friends.
	And if I went down the Buddhist route, I would be required to detach myself from those illusions to come to a kind of full nothingness.
	And I thought, I can see the philosophical virtue in this full nothingness in which my appetites are dealt with.
	But what about my friends?
	This isn't... The MacArthur map of Buddhism didn't take into account the things that I felt truly mattered, but Christianity did.
	And so, once you've decided that personality, persons, people, relationships are actually a constituent part of the spiritual task, Then the notion that we're made in the image of God becomes quite an interesting one.
	You'd say, oh well that's consistent.
	There's a consistency.
	The reason I like these people is because they've got a bit of God in them and I'm rather attracted to that bit of God.
	There's a lot of other crud in there.
	So there's a consistency there.
	So Jesus is the only way, and nobody else can give you forgiveness, and nobody else can introduce you to your Father, because nobody else has tried.
	Nobody else has said, come to me, I'll show you the Father.
	No one has.
	So in one sense, of course he's the only way.
	But then you come to the lovely people who don't know Christianity.
	And that's ever so easy.
	St Paul makes it extremely clear.
	He says, God has given us a residual indication of who he is, of the difference between good and bad, of basic ethical value, and we all know it.
	And the extent, I mean Jordan Peterson is very good on this, he said if you deny that, you go and try working against your conscience and see how you sleep at night and the answer is you can't.
	Once your conscience kicks in, it is your internal, it doesn't work very well, it's not a good barometer, but it is a barometer.
	And we have hardwired into us the ethical circuitry that we've derived from God.
	And people who pay attention to that because they long for the designer of this circuitry.
	They long for the good, the light, the loveliness, the generous, the compassionate, the kind.
	Everyone knows what these things are.
	Some long for them more than others.
	But those who long for them, when they encounter the risen Christ at the end of time, they say, oh it's you!
	Those Christians made it so difficult for me to put these things I've longed for together with you.
	They've made it really difficult.
	But now I can see they just got in the way.
	I can see that this is you.
	And that's the problem for us as Christians, is that by the way we behave and by the way we talk and by the way we misbehave, And by our unwillingness to say the right thing at the right time, we don't build the bridge between this internal hardwired longing that all humanity has, because it's in the image of God, and this wonderful figure of Christ who bursts
	Through the back drop of the stage, to show us what God looks like in three years of the most profound, powerful wisdom and compassion, the like of which doesn't exist anywhere else in human history, literature or anything.
	I mean, it's completely mind-blowing.
	To read the Gospels and to encounter Jesus, whatever, it's hard to recover from.
	And the problem we have in our culture is that people hear about Jesus, mainly as a swear word, extraordinarily, how he's on the lips as a curse.
	Yeah, he is, isn't he?
	That's true.
	And almost nobody you read has read a Gospel.
	One of the things I did as a vicar was to say, when people said, oh, vicar, you can't believe in that kind of stuff, you must be mad, I'd say, well, Come and sit down and drink sherry, gin, tea, beer with me in my front room on Wednesday nights and let's read the Gospels together.
	Then you can tell me how mad it is when we do it, but you must read it first.
	Have you read it?
	No, I haven't read it.
	Well, come and read it with me.
	Somebody said to this little Bible reading group.
	And then people would say, this Jesus is amazing.
	I didn't know he said that.
	And then they'd say, we'd like to come to church.
	And I would say, no, you can't come to church.
	Church is much too dangerous.
	It's full of Christians.
	And they won't love you very much because they're all beginners.
	And if you go, you know, in my front room reading the Gospels, I've got some kind of agency, some kind of... control's the wrong word, but I can exercise responsibility.
	But if you go over to church there, you drop a hymn book and someone will be rude to you.
	I said, you know, you can only go over there when you realise that these people are as hungry for Jesus as you are, but they're just beginners and you mustn't expect too much of them.
	And they said, you can't stop us going to church, Vicar!
	I would say, I can!
	You know, when you go, you sign a form saying, I've got my own risk.
	And they would very often become Christians, because although the people in church were beginners, and they did make mistakes, and they did blank people sometimes and criticise them for not filling the right list up, or all the silly things that happen in organisations, there was essentially at the heart of it a longing for the living God.
	that we funny refugees on the edge of a housing estate were drawn together for, because we had encountered Jesus.
	And the people who get so cross about Jesus haven't encountered him.
	They don't know who they're talking about.
	They've never read it.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	It's clear to me that, is this going to sound insane?
	I think it's absolutely true that the The 20th century was a process where the kind of where the devil suborned the the earth even more than he has done before and and He pissed all over christianity.
	I mean he he made it he made it look He gave us Justin Welby.
	He gave us Don't get thee behind me!
	He gave us the current Pope who is an anti-Pope.
	He infiltrated the College of Cardinals with people who are frankly servants of the devil.
	Let's not beat about the bush here.
	Like me, you may not have heard of the vision of Pope Leo XIII.
	And in 1873, I think, he was...
	The accounts are a little bit muddled, but they also agree.
	He was celebrating Mass in the Vatican and he had a vision of the coming century, the 20th century, and he fainted.
	And he was carried off into a side chapel and people wondered if he'd had a stroke, or if he was going to die, and he came to and they said, you know, what's the matter, Father?
	And he said, well, I had a vision of the 20th century and it was a conversation between Jesus and the devil taking place and the devil said I can destroy your church completely and Jesus seemed to give him permission to try and the following century... Go on then if you're odd enough!
	And the following century is going to be the most terrible century for the church and for Christians and everyone must learn to pray the prayer at St Michael.
	We are engaging in the most terrible spiritual warfare Now, as it happens, the 20th century, as you're quite right, was the most diabolic century.
	to memorize and to pray the prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, which after Mass, which they did until Vatican II, you won't be surprised to hear, abolished it.
	Now, as it happens, the 20th century, as you're quite right, was the most diabolic century.
	Again, one of the things that softened me up to become a Christian was discovering Auschwitz.
	And my conviction that no human being on their own could have done that.
	There had to be some diabolic perversion at the heart of that.
	I couldn't see my German cousins who loved Goethe, Beethoven and Mozart, I couldn't see them managing the concentration camps out there.
	Out of the devices of their own imagination.
	It had to come from somewhere else.
	There had to be an extra factor.
	And I went from the concentration camps to Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag Archipelago.
	And those were the two events really that prepared me for the need to become a Christian.
	Because without being a Christian, what language of analysis do you have to deal with what happened in the 20th century?
	You know, jokingly earlier on we talked about Marxism killing more people, but I mean estimates are over 100 million people were sacrificed for If you don't have any sense of diabolic struggle, then that makes human beings devils.
	is the grandfather of wokeism that we're dealing with at the very moment.
	And if you don't have a sense of diabolic struggle, then that makes human beings devils.
	Yes.
	And I'm not willing, I don't think human beings are devils.
	I'm not willing to do that.
	I think we have the capacity to be infected by devilhood.
	And that's where we need liberating, setting free, deliverance, cleansing, turning.
	And that again, Christianity is the great antibiotic for a diseased civilization.
	We are very badly diseased.
	And if there isn't an antibiotic, we're in deep trouble.
	But there is.
	Because I was thinking, if you were the devil, And you wanted to... you saw obviously God as the as the big threat I mean if you... and you'd be thinking okay how can I weaken this religion which I don't like because it's like...
	It's bent on destroying me and rejecting me.
	And you do things like, you would write, you would infect Sydney Carter, and you would write, I am the lord of the dance, said he.
	I mean, that is the work of the devil, I'm sure.
	You know, you would, do you know, I mean, I'm afraid Gavin, maybe it's the kind of, you know, the zeal of the convert, although I'm not, I hope so because we're all in the process of turning.
	Conversion is a lifelong process.
	So to have anything to do with God requires a change of direction.
	That's converso.
	We're all conversos.
	I'm finding it very exciting and I feel quite strongly about things and I find myself taking very strong views on things like, you know,
	We used to watch songs of praise used to be on on a Sunday evening and used to have Harry Seacombe warbling and it yeah I couldn't appreciate what a fantastic voice Harry Seacombe had at the time although now I realize his reading of One Boy for Sale in Oliver is just absolutely What is it called?
	A lyric baritone?
	He's not a tenor though, is he?
	Oh yes!
	He's a tenor, is he?
	No, no, he's a wonderful tenor.
	Okay, sorry.
	Well, you know about that.
	I do, I do.
	I'm a failed tenor.
	Yes, of course, of course, yeah.
	But do you know the song I mean, Boy for Sale?
	It's just fantastic.
	Anyway, but I used to... Songs of Praise.
	In a way, Songs of Praise is probably the work of the devil as well.
	But you know that That setting of the Lord's My Shepherd that everyone loves.
	And it's horrible!
	It completely misses the point of the 23rd Psalm.
	And I know you're with me on this one.
	Christopher Booker, my dear late friend Christopher Booker, he had a great teacher at Shrewsbury.
	And one of the things the teacher did was he made them all learn poems.
	And he called poems spells.
	And in the same way, I think the Psalms are spells.
	Prayers are spells.
	It is magic.
	It's good magic.
	It's like the best magic.
	The only magic.
	And these things have enormous power.
	And I've learned, as you know, the 23rd Psalm.
	And it is just like, it's like putting on armour, it's like putting on spiritual armour, and I'm not even embarrassed to say it, it's just extraordinary.
	And it fills me, you know, where lines like, he restoreth my soul, I mean you could just dwell on that line for hours.
	Well speaking it out loud has a potency Of its own.
	Indeed, magic, of course, is not the standard.
	Magic is the perversion of what reading the Word is the standard, if you like.
	I just wanted a few things.
	First of all, in terms of Sidney Carter, Jesus told her, when the disciples were getting very excited with the notion, they suddenly discovered they could sort of kick demonic arse and they were enormously excited about this.
	That's another avenue to go down.
	But Jesus said actually, look, good and evil grow up entwined together and you're not very good at distinguishing the fact that they are entwined and enfolded.
	So be careful as you rush to judgment because most things will have virtue and vice in them.
	Sydney Carter meant well.
	I'll give you that.
	I find that the time when I get really, really very angry indeed is when I listen to Anglican, or usually it was Anglican, but it can be anybody, organists playing their stupid music.
	And this is back to that awful setting by Rutter.
	See, Rutter's not a Christian.
	And here's where it matters.
	The music has to be an act of discipleship.
	And music is so powerful.
	Look at what Mozart did with it.
	It's so powerful that if you do it for its own sake, it becomes a piece of narcissism.
	I grew up, I was a cathedral choir boy and I'm a failed opera singer.
	I sit in church sometimes and I see the assassin on the organ stool practicing his music.
	The other day I was in Mont Saint-Michel and this man was improvising cacophony and I thought, I said, you bastard!
	How dare you impose your atonal cacophony on the exquisite architectural and spiritual harmony of this place as we prepare for the miracle of the Mass?
	Who gave you the right to vomit this atonal, destructive, disordered crap into the atmosphere?
	And everyone accepts it because it's music and there's some kind of form of romantic philosophy which I don't quite understand that suggests that all art is somehow beautiful art.
	It's all holy because it's art.
	But this is absolute nonsense and nothing is that more true of music.
	Have you noticed how we've lost melody?
	All we've got left is this Pounding, hypnotic, destructive, threatening rhythm which you hear out of white vans, on beaches, in valleys, in muzak shops.
	All beauty of music has disappeared and the people who are writing music are spewing cacophony.
	And that in itself shows you how desperately far our artists have got from the source of all beauty and music.
	And I just found it so offensive in cathedrals and churches when people wrote music that had all to do with their own cleverness, and they weren't very, and nothing to do with holiness or love or vision or beauty or humility.
	None of those haunting melodies that caught you by the soul and led you on a journey of discovery.
	So yes, that ghastly rutter Rutter is awful, isn't he?
	He's terrible.
	You're the first person who's given me permission to hate Rutter and he's ubiquitous.
	They all love him.
	I think they think it's religious music.
	Oh, that's nice.
	I get flashbacks sometimes, Gavin, of the shite, there's no other word for it, the absolute shite that I used to get.
	I was in the traditional English private school system of an era where you went to chapel every weekday, twice on Sundays, Evensong and Matins, what was it? - Matins and Evensong.
	- Matins and Evensong.
	And we had congregational practice on Saturday mornings to practice the hymns.
	And our music teacher who molested the boys, - Yes, ours did too.
	Yeah, it's probably quite common.
	I can't say I was scarred by it, you know, I mean his hands... I wasn't pretty enough.
	I've never been Britian.
	But actually I don't really resent him trying to molest me in my piano lesson.
	I do very much resent the horrible music that he brought into that.
	Really horrible, kind of jaunty.
	Just going back, I'm sorry, I feel I didn't really crush enough the... Who wrote that?
	Who wrote that?
	Was that Rutter?
	I'm pleased to say that my ears closed down the moment you began.
	I didn't follow it through.
	I mean, the Vicar of Dibley is... It's the embodiment of that.
	It's Rutter.
	They've chosen Rutter for the introduction to the program.
	Is he still alive?
	Well, if he is, God bless you.
	Talking of the Vicar of Dibley, have you seen... you know she wears an inverted cross?
	Yes.
	That's not accidental, is it?
	It's not helpful.
	I mean, I've seen explanations of it, sort of apologies for it, which say that, no, there's a certain kind of Christianity, there's a tradition where you have the inverted cross and so-and-so was crucified upside down.
	I don't buy that.
	I think they're trolling us with their Satanism.
	I think rather than be rude to Dawn French, or the very clever man who wrote the script, He's not, he's one of Satan's agents, come on.
	He's a clever man and he writes entertaining scripts.
	We're back to the Wheat and Latters growing up close together.
	There is always captivating stuff in the crap, otherwise we wouldn't go near the crap.
	But what the Vicar of Dibley has done is to show us the great danger that feminism has wrought on our society.
	Now about 10 years ago perhaps, one couldn't say that without fear of being laughed out of court as a ghastly perverted misogynist but but one of the interesting things that's happened the last few years is that third wave feminism has given birth to gender dysphoria and and we now can see what what began as a perfectly respectable movement asking for a fair share of the pie who can be against that oh me well um it was a it begun uh it begun
	with a premise that was very hard to fault by itself although imaginative and thoughtful people might well have seen that the unintended consequences of the premise would be difficult which has happened yeah but but but but And so not only do we find ourselves in a culture where instead of having equality, we instead have hatred of the masculine and the feminization of the masculine.
	Instead of being stronger in who we are in our gender roles, we are utterly confused.
	There's a kind of gender dysphoria come upon the whole of society and there's a terrible, It's a terrible notion that reality is what you make up inside the extraordinary disordered imaginations of your own head, which has utterly killed any appeal to objectivity, ethically, aesthetically, in any other way.
	And essentially the Vicar of Dibley is a kind of pantomime, an attractive, clever pantomime entertainment of an idea that looked really quite attractive to begin with.
	But of which the damage has come from it has simply been utterly terrible.
	It's also the problem of capitalism.
	Capitalism consumes human beings for purposes that aren't always in our own interests.
	But the combination of feminism and capitalism has done the most dreadful damage to us.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I don't know whether there's going to be anyone who is not religious who has got this to this stage in the podcast because I mean... They'll have gone by now!
	Who do you think, sir?
	I would have thought, I mean, I would have thought the atheists would have gone, ah, fuck that, I'm not having this bollocks.
	No, no, the real atheists will be with us still because there'll be little bits of what we say that they say, wait a minute, I agree with that.
	And, you know, if only James and Gavin could cut out the middle crap!
	And so, you know, bless the reasons they're passionate atheists is because they're really committed to finding out what matters and they like the idea, you know, every so often we and they believe the same things.
	You know, the God they hate is the God I hate.
	They, you know, they have a picture of some kind of crotchety old grandfather.
	Well, that's the thing.
	This is what kind of what I was coming to.
	I just, just in case, just in case, There are any kind of atheists or kind of people, or the people in the middle, you know, who aren't Christians.
	I just want to say to them that you don't, that Christianity does not have to suck.
	It does not have to be this embarrassing thing that you feel awkward about.
	And in fact all the things I think that made many of us feel awkward about Christianity are not really the essence of Christianity.
	I went a few years ago, I've mentioned this before on my podcast but it's worth mentioning, I went to Mount Athos.
	And I didn't know it at the time it was a sign it was part of my part of my journey You know, there were so many things like like like meeting you for example, we talked about this before And it's it's fantastic having you as my kind of sort of father confessor kind of advisor figure It's been it's been really great.
	I think I think People are sent to help us aren't they?
	For sure.
	Yeah, it's been my experience and and the thing that really excites me about about Christianity is the kind of Um...
	It's real and the mystery of it and okay so I'm not allowed to use that word magic but nevertheless the extraordinary things that happen to you.
	I think we preface it with holy, holy magic.
	It's a bit like luck we shouldn't say good luck because it's a terrible it's a terrible philosophical aberration but Charles Williams used to wish people holy luck and I think you can you can redeem a concept we want to stretch out and use because there's no better one.
	Yeah okay but one thing it I'm not going to become suddenly sanctimonious.
	If there's ever a rave again and I get the chance to have some MDMA and get off my face to dance music, I'm not going to go, oh no, God says I can't do that.
	I'm not going to... I'm still not going to do the Alpha Course.
	But the thing that draws me to it, and I think you feel the same way, is this just like, for example... Okay, so I got my father-in-law's Bible, and it had these red letters in it.
	And I didn't know what the red letters were.
	I wondered if I could work out what the red letters were.
	Why some of it's red and some of it's not.
	And then I realised that everything in red is the actual verbatim transcript of what Jesus said.
	And you read this stuff.
	And it's not like the kind of Jesus, you know, we have an anchor, da da da, it's none of that, none of that stuff.
	It's this extraordinary, powerful force.
	It's almost like a kind of spiritual, psychological braille.
	The words are lifted above the surface.
	There's a kind of The stature to those words, the narrative around them, the syntax doesn't have.
	And red is the right colour to say, here's the mountain range, I'm up in the mountains again.
	You see, the intellectuals all sneer at red Bibles.
	They assume they come out of sort of under-intellectually developed American culture.
	It's a horrible, snobby thing to do.
	But what they don't understand, I've always loved red texts.
	Because it prepares me.
	The fact that the red is coming prepares me.
	Sit up, pay attention.
	You're about to go for a really exciting ride.
	Here are the Ipsissimum Verbi.
	Here are the words.
	And every one of them is like a grenade going off.
	They are quite incredible.
	I think one of the things that draws me to Christianity, which is one of the very important things you said a moment ago, Of course I've met some Christian shit.
	Of course I have.
	Sanctimonious, inauthentic people who appear to be play-acting with religion and it stinks.
	I don't like it.
	And I hope to God I've never had that effect on other people.
	I may have done, but I hope not.
	What draws me is that the most authentic people I've ever met have been serious Christians.
	There's a wonderful story about a lady who was converted.
	I watched the Borgias again, I got the video set because of this story.
	So the Borgias came out I think in the 80s and it's a most extraordinary period in European history.
	There was a little old lady who became a Catholic and was asked by her friends, because when the Borgias first came out everyone was talking about it, how can you possibly become a Christian and a Catholic?
	With the epitome of all incest, power, malevolence, horror and poison.
	Isn't that the church?
	And she said, well, clearly it was.
	But she said, what really has absolutely blown my mind is the fact the church is also Mother Teresa.
	And I'm so moved by the holiness of Mother Teresa whenever I see her, whenever I hear her, when I look at those nuns pulling despoiled babies out of dustbins and restoring, taking the image of humanity from being garbage to children who are washed, loved, educated, which of course is a kind of prototype of what Christ does to us, he lifts us out of the garbage bag.
	And then make something wonderful of us.
	So I'm so astonished that a religion can have these two things, that I think I see the Borgias for what it is.
	That's what happens when evil gets into the church, and so that reminds me I should take evil seriously.
	And Mother Teresa is what happens when Jesus gets into a person's heart, and I want to take Jesus seriously.
	So frankly the whole thing makes perfect sense.
	And for me, I've met some very interesting people, I've met some very clever People in my life, some very artistically gifted people.
	I've met some really lovely people, especially in the inner cities when I was a curate.
	Very powerful, authentic, lovely people.
	But, without exception, all the time, everywhere I've been, at all places and in all times, as the phrase goes, The ones who've really blown me away have been Christian.
	They have had something happen to them on the inside that glows.
	I once, when I was a vicar, had a murderess come to live in my parish.
	She'd blown her lover's head off with a double barrel shotgun because he'd cheated on her.
	And in prison, in Holloway, she was put away for life.
	She got cancer.
	And just before she got cancer, she found Jesus and, like us, became a convert.
	And the Home Secretary let her out to die and she came to my parish where her sister lived.
	And her name was Peggy and she was in a wheelchair.
	And whatever Peggy was like as a murderess, a lifer in Holloway, In a wheelchair, as a Christian, it was as if light shone from inside her and onto her from outside.
	In fact, somebody even said, is there a light in church?
	Has someone got a spotlight on that woman?
	Because like so many churches are, we have a theatre and a stage.
	Why is that woman glowing?
	And she did.
	She glowed.
	And I did.
	She'd probably been a bad woman.
	Who knows?
	We're back to wheat and tares again.
	But the effect of having had a living encounter with God made a very intense one.
	My bishop said, you're going to need to hear her confession before I confirm her and before she dies.
	And she put everything out to him and he forgave and cleansed everything.
	It was utterly moving.
	But you know, the world is full of Peggy's.
	Most of us have given ourselves a bit more reluctantly and rather slowly.
	But when you see the real thing happening, Well, it's gobsmacking.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	I certainly think that it doesn't have to... it just enhances you.
	It doesn't kind of... it's not like you become... So people are afraid they're going to be diminished.
	That was the fear.
	If you fall in love, if you get married, if God captures you, He's going to take away the stuff you like.
	He's going to take your personality away.
	Your sense of humour.
	Absolutely.
	Yes, that's the horror.
	And of course, one of the things I've realised is that so many of those voices that I've heard in my ear have not been the oncoming of a psychotic episode that lurks any round the corner.
	Did you ever read the books called Don Camillo?
	The Don Camillo series?
	I know of them.
	I grew up reading them when I was small and I just think he's right.
	So they're the stories by an Italian journalist, Giovanni Guadeschi, I think.
	And all of them are centred around a communist mayor, Pepponi, and a very hard-bitten Italian parish priest called Don Camillo.
	And in all the pictures, there is a good angel on one shoulder and a bad angel on the other.
	And in my teenage years and beyond, I scorned this cartoon spirituality, thinking this is just Yuckily simplistic.
	And in my old age I think that's exactly how it is.
	I need my guardian angel because I keep on getting this spewing stuff.
	Telling me lies.
	You know, God doesn't like you very much.
	You're a failure.
	You're a waste of space.
	You can't cope.
	You're a complete... You're just talking about the whole of my life up until recently.
	And for much of my time I saw this as a form of personality disorder and I thought well maybe I get a bit more therapy, maybe if I find more people to love me, maybe… No.
	But actually I've discovered, you know, it's demonic, it's real evil and real evil whispers stuff to us.
	And it takes quite a... I don't know why it takes so... I don't know why it's so difficult to see it for what it is rather than to assume it's part of me that is hateful, awful, disordered and unlovely, that I can't live with very easily.
	And I think that's where so much of the psychological disease that is rife in our society at the moment We've stopped baptising people, we've stopped catechising people, some of the bishops have closed the doors on the Eucharist, the churches have been closed, the Christianity has been diminished, ethics has been diminished, we've been killing our babies.
	And the volume of evil has been turned up and one of the consequences is this infernal muttering in people's ears has grown louder and they think therapy and pills or loud music will help but actually they're not the solution.
	No!
	Well, but you mentioned earlier on one of the reasons, one of the main reasons this has happened, it's Freud.
	Yes.
	Freud is, I mean, definitely an agent of the evil.
	Well, he was of course very cross with the Jewish God, and he was very angry indeed, and set out to draw a map of the human psyche.
	Which was really very interesting, going back again to good and evil lying close together.
	Intellectually, it was really quite interesting, and it certainly floated a lot of people's boats, so to speak.
	But the notion that the most powerful driving force within us was a form of sexualization, was in a sense a form of self-prophecy.
	Because we quite like that idea.
	We're addicted to pleasure of any kind.
	And to be given permission to understand ourselves as frustrated sexual creatures was a great license for a European society that has endured the diabolic horrors of destruction the wars have brought on us.
	But even Freudians and post-Freudians and post-Freudians and so on down know that almost everything he taught simply wasn't true.
	Not only because he faked his experiments, but because it doesn't hold up, but it's caused the most enormous damage.
	And one of the things that's caused most damage is his notion that if you hear, if you sense voices, stimuli, murmurings, This is a sign of your oncoming madness.
	It isn't a sign that the angels and the good God is trying to speak to you.
	And of course, you know, contrary wise, if you hear bad voices, this is your neurosis, your disorder, and only a psychiatrist or psychotherapist or a psychologist can help you.
	And there's a small bit of truth in those things, but majorly untruth.
	I've got a church I want to show you.
	We can actually talk for hours and I wish we had like, you know, several lifetimes to do it because people I'm sure who's lasted this long will be wishing we could go on.
	But I just wanted to... They might also be wishing we would stop.
	No, they never do that.
	They never do that.
	I wanted to ask you, wearing your kind of religious historian's hat, when do you think it was that people stopped believing the devil as a real thing?
	When do you think we lost our understanding of the numinous and that?
	I think it's the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, but mainly the Enlightenment.
	I mean, this is partly my... It's taken me a very long time to see it.
	I'm sorry I've been so thick and slow, but I can be very thick and slow sometimes.
	It was the point where, in the 16th century, this wonderful revolution that moved alchemy to chemistry, which was a very, very clever thing to do, and upon which so much medicine and good science has been based.
	Gosh, it was clever!
	But it came at a terrible price.
	We were so entranced with what we had managed to do with the material that we developed a new value system and said, well, clearly, if we're this clever with material, then the material things are all that really matter.
	And look what we can do with them.
	We can do anything with them, really.
	And we have done The most amazing thing.
	We've produced antibiotics, we've produced anaesthetics, we've got people to the moon.
	We have been very, very clever with our reordering of matter.
	But at the same time, because there's always vice and virtue in every step, there was a sudden diminishment of the awareness of the spiritual.
	There was a rage against the Catholic Church which said we are not going to give up our vision of the spiritual.
	We have always believed in the material.
	All science has in fact been promoted by the Catholic Church.
	And built on the foundation that the Catholic Church has laid, saying we are in a universe where God is waiting for us to discover him.
	He is trustworthy, he is logical, he is encounterable, he has rules of mathematics, it's safe to do experiments.
	This is a Christian vision, despite the fact that Dawkins and others don't understand it.
	But at that particular time, we moved to a point where a lot of people don't know that Newton spent two-thirds of his writing on writing about alchemy.
	He wasn't primarily a physicist, he was an alchemist.
	Two-thirds of everything he wrote was about alchemy.
	It happens to be rubbish and not worth anything, but what he did write was quite extraordinary.
	So we then moved into the 17th century Age of Deism where people said, well okay, of course there's a god, But he's not going to interfere with us.
	He's a kind of clockmaker.
	He is the principle by which all the material stuff we like happens.
	And once you move to the idea of God as a sort of genial host for the exciting world you're living and playing in, who doesn't ask anything of you but provides you with playthings and guidebooks, for science, then of course you lose sight of evil, both outside yourself and inside yourself.
	And then there was a huge reaction in the 19th century where spiritual...
	Because there is a kind of instinct inside us, and if you repress the instinct, it does burst out.
	And so, particularly with the First World War, there was a huge bursting out of people for spirituality, for some kind of incoherent and badly guided longing for the spiritual, which produced...
	Oh, what, sales and things, and what?
	Seances and more Mormonism... Arthur Conan Doyle?
	Yes, absolutely, exactly that.
	The Reformation so weakened Christianity because Protestantism, for all that it saw itself as a clean-up and renewal movement, a sort of spring-cleaning movement for a church that occasionally had fallen asleep, It became, like Anglican music, a means in itself, an end in itself.
	Protestantism should have been the means to the reforming of the Mother Church, but it got so caught up with materialism and an overconfidence in human rationality.
	Life was what you could measure, reality was only what you could measure.
	There was no mass, there was only bread, essentially.
	And so, consequently, the last four or five hundred years, we've lived this extraordinarily exciting life of material scientific discovery.
	But, as Genesis warned us, we've been quite unable to handle it.
	We've invented the atom bomb!
	The point of our genesis says, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it says to us, you may very well be able to eat this fruit, but can you handle the consequences?
	You may be able to have this intellectual and industrial and technological revolution, but can you handle the consequences?
	What are you going to do with the atom bomb?
	What are you going to do with the eco-shit that you create, filling your oceans with plastic because you can't be bothered to carry your shopping home any other way?
	Can you live with the consequences of your own cleverness?
	And the 20th century and the 21st century are reminding us that we can't.
	And therefore, if people don't go back to Christianity, What are they going to find?
	One of the things we should be doing is saying to people, you don't have to believe in Jesus, you don't have to believe in the church, by all means, if you want to have a sort of fairly ignorant reading of history, have it.
	But come up with your solution.
	We're built to find solutions.
	What is your solution to the human condition, given what we've done and been through and where we've arrived at in the 21st century?
	And if it's not as good as Christianity, then you ought to think twice.
	Yes, I sort of, I get that.
	But presumably, I mean, saying it goes back to the Enlightenment, I mean, so we're talking what, this 16th century?
	Yes.
	Essentially one could say at the beginning of the printing press is partly what did it you know that that's the that that marks it didn't do it that marks the moment.
	So what that's the 15th century?
	No well it's the 15 I see it as the 1520s I mean.
	16th okay so okay so but but most of the people around then were believing Christians weren't they or didn't they so they gave up at that point?
	Do you think it was just a sort of for show?
	No, I think it's a misreading of what happened.
	I don't think most people have ever been believing Christians.
	In the same way, would you say for example that today most people are Democrats?
	Well some are, some aren't, some would like.
	Some would like totalitarianism, some would like no government, some would like anarchy.
	If they are Democrats, they're unthinking Democrats, they're not reasoned Democrats.
	But we live in a democratic society.
	In the Middle Ages, there was authentic Christianity, perverted Christianity, and people who lived in a Christian culture.
	It was much more nuanced and multi-layered than that.
	But at the time, the other ideas, which essentially had been pagan ideas, mainly the European ideas that came from pagan religions, had given way before the beauty of Christ.
	It wasn't Swinburne, who wrote the Rise and Fall?
	The Roman Emperor Macaulay.
	Macaulay has that nasty distortion of Jesus.
	Pale Galilean who's taken all the joy out of life with your horrible breath.
	But that wasn't the case at all.
	That was a dreadful misreading of what Jesus did.
	But in a number of different philosophies emerged after the 16th century, and the most powerful of which, of course, was the utopianism that led to the French Revolution and is the springboard for Marxism and Wokeism.
	So certainly, and I would say the Masonic movement too, certainly from the middle of the 18th century, hubris in human affairs has replaced Christianity as being the driving force in European culture.
	Right, right.
	Sorry, I got distracted then by thinking about the date of the printing press and not knowing when.
	When was it?
	I don't know.
	I mean, Gutenberg.
	Well, it would have been somewhere between 1480 and 1530.
	Yes, that's what I thought.
	I thought it was the 1480s, but yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that.
	So, is that right?
	You reckon that only a tiny fraction of the populace at any one time is actually believing?
	And practising, yes.
	I mean, Christianity is extremely hard.
	Joseph Chesterton has said that wonderful thing.
	It's not that people have tried Christianity and found it wanting.
	They've tried Christianity and found it too difficult.
	And so given up on it.
	Straight is the gate.
	Yes, well it is and not many make it through.
	So there was a very powerful Christian culture dominated by the church in politics and arts and in legislation and culture and custom but not everyone consented.
	I mean even Chaucer pokes an awful lot of fun from the kind of man in the streets point of view at the church and religion and pilgrimages and other such things.
	He's not a converso is Chaucer.
	So okay let's go let's go let's go through a few historical figures and you can tell me whether you reckon they were believers or not.
	Okay.
	Okay Milton.
	Oh yes.
	Shakespeare.
	That's extremely interesting that is so well We don't know.
	Those who want to see Shakespeare as a covert Catholic have got reasons for seeing it.
	Those who want to see him as a Renaissance bisexual have got reasons for seeing it.
	Shakespeare didn't tell people.
	He channelled all the stages.
	Where Shakespeare's heart is, we don't know.
	He was just an absolute genius at understanding what the whole palette looked like.
	Yes, that undiscovered country from whose born no traveller returns.
	Well, I'm very tempted to go for the covert Catholic because it suits me but I'm perfectly well aware that I'm partly imposing it upon the evidence and partly responding to the evidence and I'm not sure it's stronger than the other ones but it might be true.
	I'll tell you who I bet weren't.
	Wordsworth.
	No, you see, Wordsworth is Anglican music.
	We're back into the romantics who worship nature.
	So, you know, this is the problem.
	Truth, we need Jonathan.
	This is the discussion about the relationship between beauty and truth and God.
	And it's a very complex one, and I certainly haven't done thinking my way through it.
	But, you know, everything has a duff side, and I fear that the English romantics had the duff side of the quest for beauty.
	They began to look upon beauty, once again, as an end in itself.
	Instead of what some of the German romantics had, they called it Sehnsucht, longing.
	And again, Lewis writes very well about this.
	What beauty is intended to do is to whet our appetite for God.
	God is all that is beautiful, all that is lovely, all that is harmonious and musical.
	And all art is intended to make us hungry for God because we're never satisfied.
	You want more of the music, more of the pictures, you want to touch them, ingest them, make them yours.
	Ultimately it takes you to the mass.
	But if in the moment you treat beauty and art as an end in itself, like a kind of drug, That you can get high on, you lose it.
	It disappears from your fingers.
	It's no longer there.
	It always has to be the longing, the zenzux, the halfway point between you and the creator of the universe.
	Maybe that's why scent is fugitive.
	So when you smell an iris and you go back and you want to recapture that first... Mind you, the same applies to coke.
	The first line is always better than the...
	But yeah, I think going back to the irises.
	I think scent and longing is a marvellous way of dealing with longing.
	Good.
	I always like having a tutorial with somebody cleverer than me.
	It reminds me of, you know, doing... But James, I'm just older than you, that's all.
	I've been around the block a bit.
	No, but you've taught in universities and, you know, I did enjoy my podcast with Roger Scruton where I felt like I was in a tutorial and I was desperately trying to impress him and aware that I felt... He was the most wonderful man.
	We could go on forever.
	No, he wasn't a Christian.
	He was always right on the edge of it.
	Oh, was he?
	No, he's just a few moments.
	Roger was the most wonderful man, the most wonderful thinker, the most wonderful values.
	He went to the Anglican Church.
	But it's absolutely clear that his God was intellect.
	And you know how you said, with a look of fear in your eyes, I'm afraid he'll take away the things I want most.
	And, of course, for Roger, the diabolic temptation would have been he'll take away that great platform of your mind, your great muscle, your great self-identification.
	If you become a Christian, you will no longer be the philosopher.
	And I think, Roger, I'm not his confessor, but my guess is... No!
	This is the problem.
	We keep sparking off each other and sparking off worrying thoughts.
	The bit where it says, you know, you cannot serve two masters, God or mammon.
	So as I take that, it means that, you know, either you choose the world or you choose God.
	But I'm not sure I want to renounce things like sex and drugs, you know.
	So the world is difficult.
	We're back to vice and virtue.
	We're back to wheat and tares.
	What we want is a world where the things that we like are God-infused.
	In other words, they lead us back to him.
	Because if they don't lead us back to him, they're going to poison us.
	It's a bit like Over eating on a badly cooked Chinese meal, you know, you end up by thinking, oh, I wish I could puke this shit out!
	And the problem with the world where it invokes our appetites for pleasure without responsibility, without leading us somewhere better, higher, newer, fresher, is that it poisons us.
	So you don't really mean it, what you mean is basically you're reiterating the temptation.
	I bet this stuff is nice to have, I'd like more of it.
	But the reality is, yes it's nice to have, but if you have more of this on the terms you're taking it, it will make you very ill indeed, you won't want it.
	And so the things that are most powerful are ones that need to be most rooted in God, including, well I think I can't speak about the drugs thing because I find I find the notion of altered conscious, altered states of reality so problematic because why would you do that when you can pray and be in the Holy Spirit?
	There's no accident it's called ecstasy but the real ecstasy comes from the presence of God.
	And what the fake ecstasy does is sell you something similar but short.
	So I think I would say you know that when you take ecstasy actually what you really want is It's this overwhelming, utterly magnificent joy that is the presence of God.
	And sex, too, is essentially... Real making love is self-giving, self-forgetting, climaxing in In an orgasm of unitive mutuality which is not about yourself, it's about both of you together in a place where you are yourselves and not yourselves.
	Now if you treat it as an end in itself, you're going to have to learn the Kama Sutra and become an expert in God knows how many positions because you're going to need variation.
	But if you see it as a means to an end and the loving that you do of the other person is in fact a combination of the meeting of two minds, the meeting of two hearts, the meeting of two souls, then the sex is beginning to become a kind of fuel for all those other things, rather than all those other things... I'm sorry, I'm treating you like a teenager, I beg your pardon.
	That'll do, I like that explanation.
	I suppose what I was asking in my characteristically flippant way but but with a you know underlying underlying seriousness is that clearly you you could if you wanted to
	Go and live on top of a pillar or you can go out into the desert as holy men have done and live in a cage and you probably would achieve the closest you can get on earth to the kind of Godhead.
	But actually, that would kind of make a nonsense of our earthly experience.
	There are good things that we can do.
	Isn't it horses for courses?
	What did you like about those monks you saw at Athos?
	Do you know what?
	I think the thing I like...
	What really matters to me and actually what attracts me to this is like it makes you based, it makes you authentic, it makes you... being true to yourself.
	Those are the things.
	So those monks had a vocation to pray and to love and to engage in the nuclear struggle for holiness that monasticism is all about.
	It is Monasticism is the engine of our civilization and we would be better if we had more monasteries.
	And Henry VIII did the most dreadful, dreadful, dreadful thing in genociding the monasteries.
	But, not losing the point, What you are called to be is the best James you possibly could.
	Now, the best James you possibly could is probably not an Eastern Orthodox monk.
	I don't see it in you.
	If you would say to me, Gavin, I've had a crisis in my life.
	I'm thinking of running off to Mount Athos and taking up the habit there.
	I'd look at you and say, you know, James, I think you'd feel cramped on Martathos.
	I might.
	I think you need horses and company and intellect and food and wine and argument.
	Yeah, I need horses.
	Horses, of course, that's not your vocation, but you could be The Most Extraordinary James.
	No, you haven't got there yet.
	If the journey of self-discovery allowed you to be who you were made to be, now I know that's not really trite, but it's not an easy thing to discover because people have expectations of us, they have projections of us, circumstances are difficult, we have good moments, bad moments, we get ill, whatever, and we have tragedies.
	But finding out who we're supposed to be without becoming solipsistic and narcissistic, but instead using our self-discovery as a way of amplifying how incredibly kind God was to make us in the first place in order to allow us to talk to him, to love him, to worship him, to sing to him, to acknowledge him, to discover him, to discover him penetrating everything.
	This is such an extraordinary journey and it's The Christian version of self-authentication is so much more fertile and directional than the existential one that we've got caught in on our own culture, where the journey to self-discovery is a form of idolatry.
	The self is God.
	This is Freud and Jung.
	But the self is not God.
	The self is the mechanism by which we can have a relationship with God.
	It's all about God.
	And he made us as a means for our discovering him.
	Right.
	We're going to stop it there, Gavin.
	That was just great.
	Like, really, I love the way we went all over the shop.
	Everyone, if you love this, of course you have.
	Of course you have.
	James, Patreon.
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