Pastor Douglas Wilson is a writer, theologian and pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. He chats to James about Satanic blood sacrifices, whether Christopher Hitchens is now burning in hell, whether or not Doug faked the scene where he sets fire to a boat with a Molotov cocktail, his favourite Psalm, whether or not - as James rudely suggests - he's a pussy, which Christian denominations performed best and worst during 'Covid'. (Spoiler alert: Calvinist presbyterian churches like Doug's punched above their weight).
You can read his writing, order his books and watch his videos at his Blog & Mablog website https://dougwils.com
And so far he hasn't been kicked off Twitter @douglaswils
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Welcome to the Gelling Pod with me, James Gelling Pod.
I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest but I really am looking forward to talking to Pastor Douglas Wilson.
Not least, we booked this months ago.
You're quite hard to get a hold of.
Yeah, yeah.
Is that because you're a sort of popular go-to if people want a sort of controversial Christian figure to speak out on a podcast?
There's been a shift.
A number of years ago, I did some but not a lot.
But now I'm doing a lot of podcasts.
It's sort of crossed over to the point where it's okay to talk to me now.
Well, yeah, it's funny.
I first came upon you on the German Warfare podcast.
You probably don't know anything about me, you being an American, and Americans don't tend to take much notice of what Brits do.
I was brought up in the Church of England, which basically means sort of what you might call a fair weather Christian, you know, a sort of cultural Christian.
So I got confirmed and I went to chapel seven days a week at my ritzy private schools and stuff.
But I didn't really do the God thing.
I think for most of my life I would have looked at somebody like you as kind of one of those Crazy right-wing American Christian figures.
Troglodytes.
Yeah!
And now I'm thinking actually, no, well, I think you and I are pretty much on the same page.
So I wonder sometimes whether you might be even a bit of a pussy.
I mean, you know, compared with where I am.
We'll come to that in a minute.
Let's test that.
Let's test that one.
I don't normally do much research for my podcast but I did actually look up a few of your things on the internet earlier on today.
I love the video you made of you sitting on the boat smoking a cigar and drinking vodka and then making a Molotov cocktail and setting fire to your boat.
What was that about?
Well, that's part of a series we've done five Novembers.
I have a practice on my blog where if I know I'm going to write something controversial, which I frequently do, I have what I call the second paragraph rule.
And the second paragraph rule is, I put all the qualifications that a sane person would put in.
Some of you will hear me saying this, but don't believe that, you know, I'm actually sane.
Well, about five years ago we decided to have what we call No Quarter November.
Where I don't make any qualifications at all.
I just say what I think, and you can deal with it however you want.
So it's no quarter November, like a no qualifications November.
And the first, we did a little video promoing this November, and we started with me sitting on a couch that was, the other end of it was on fire.
Then we moved on to, let's see, a field that was on fire.
Then we burned my truck, my pickup truck.
And then we burned the boat.
And then we burned a little studio office this last time.
So it's become something of a set piece.
What are they going to burn next year?
Well, I was impressed.
Was there any fakery involved?
Or were you sitting on the edge of a burning boat?
In that case, on the couch, the other end of the couch was burning.
In the office, it was burning.
On the boat, it was staged.
So, I threw the Molotov cocktail, just sitting on a boat in the river, and then they took the boat to a field, and burned it, and superimposed the two images.
You disappoint me.
I thought you were so badass that you were prepared to be burned alive.
But look up the truck one.
The truck was on fire when I was going in the truck.
And the field was on fire.
And the couch was on fire.
So four out of five, I was sitting near the fire.
Right.
By the way, what shall I call you?
Douglas?
Doug?
Doug is great.
Yeah.
Doug.
Yeah.
Before we go on, I'm terrible with my introductions.
Just very briefly, tell the listeners who don't know who you are and the viewers who you are and your backstory.
Sure.
My name is Douglas Wilson.
I'm the pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.
It's in the Pacific Northwest.
Idaho has a panhandle.
We're up in the panhandle of Idaho toward Canada.
And I've been pastoring this church for something like 40 plus years.
And that's my main occupation as pastor.
But I also write a great deal, write books, and write my blog.
And what sort of country is it?
Is it, I mean, do people have horses and guns and things like that?
Yes.
Gun control here in Idaho, gun control means using both hands.
And horses?
Oh yeah, there's horses.
Horses, cows, moose.
Moose coming through town.
So, yeah, it's... Doug, I'm a Christian who likes horses and guns.
Would I be happy there?
You would be... You would think you'd gone to heaven.
I think I would.
I really do, actually.
I mean, apart from the craziness, America, like my own country, is insane, isn't it?
I mean, it's been taken over by the forces of darkness, basically.
Yeah.
Everybody in charge appears to have lost their minds.
Yeah.
Because they have.
We'll come to why I suspect that I might be even more hardcore than you are in a moment.
Another thing I was looking at was the debate you did, I mean a long time ago now, 2009, with Christopher Hitchens.
Yes.
Do you remember that at all?
No, I remember that very well.
What was he like off stage?
Offstage, he was never rude to me except on stage.
That was part of his shtick.
That was part of his thing that he did.
We got along offstage, backstage, we got along famously.
We got along really well and enjoyed one another's company and had a lot of laughs together.
So it was a good relationship.
You know he's got a Christian brother called Peter?
Yes, I'm friends with Peter.
So, Peter, interestingly, obviously runs in the family, has a similar technique that he's an awful person to be on a debating platform with.
In debate he is...
He is, he grandstands, he is merciless.
Even if you're on a panel and you're notionally on the same side, he will do everything he can to undermine you.
He can't help it.
He is the scorpion on the back of the frog being thrown across the river.
He cannot help it.
I'm sure that Christopher, as he insisted on being called, was personally very charming and polite offstage, but I was looking at that debate From the perspective of now.
I mean, back then I think I might have been swayed by his charisma, his louche good looks.
But looking at it now, with what I know about the world, I see the workings of the devil.
I mean, that man was of the devil's party.
Yes.
And sometimes, sometimes people who are of the Devil's Party, who are insightful, when they get a look over the lip of the abyss, they recoil and come back.
There are people who have done a lot of damage, as Christopher most certainly did, and what we're seeing happen now is the logical outworking of Christopher's worldview.
Simply, he who says A must go to B.
And his affability in private wouldn't prevent that from happening.
It might have brought him up short.
For example, a lot of people don't know that Christopher was pro-life, and there's a scene in the Collision movie where I talk about, I bring up the life issue, and it really stung.
You could see it made him angry that atheism necessitates contempt for life.
Well, he was a better person that he was logical at that sort of point.
So you're exactly right.
His worldview led us where we are now.
Also, incidentally, I can't let it go by, Peter offstage, Peter is an affable gentleman, wonderful, easy to get along with.
He's great.
I've met Peter at parties and found him delightful.
He's got this very curmudgeonly debating presence and columnar presence.
What do you think has happened to Christopher?
Do you think he is actually in hell?
Apart from repentance, yes.
I think that he's lost.
After he was diagnosed with the cancer, I talked to my father, who's now with the Lord.
But my father is one of the most gifted evangelists I've ever encountered.
And I talked to my dad about how to approach Christopher, given this.
And he made a great suggestion, which I followed.
So what I did is I wrote Christopher a letter, which laid out the gospel tailor-made for Christopher Hitchens.
And then I attached it to an email.
And I sent the email to Christopher and said, I have no way of knowing if you open this attachment or not.
I just wanted you to have it.
And if you don't open it, you'll be really sorry because there's some really good writing in there.
He teased it a little bit, but I said, I won't know.
Basically I wanted, but I wanted you to have this.
And I laid out the gospel as plainly as I possibly could for him.
Now my father also taught me that non-believers go through three stages of their unbelief.
One of them is your atheist neighbor one day says to you, you'll never make me your kind of Christian.
Or I'll never be your kind of evangelical.
I'll never do that.
And that tells you that they've thought about it.
They're running contingency plans and they're trying to get you to lay off.
I'll never become yours.
Then the second stage is, if I ever became a Christian, Would I have to give up drinking beer?
Or if I became a Christian, would I have to become a missionary?
Or, you know, whatever.
And then the last stage is when I become a Christian.
And Christopher was at the very least to stage two.
Because there were interviews after his cancer was public, there were interviews where he was asked point-blank, are you rethinking this God business now with this cancer?
And he said, he did stage two, he said, if you ever read that Christopher Hitchens cried out to God on his deathbed, you can be assured that the cancer got to my brain, or the meds got to me, or that sort of thing.
But what he was doing, is he was preparing, he was afraid that he might do that.
Right.
He was concerned about it, concerned enough that he prepared a story for his followers.
Basically, it was the meds.
It was that sort of thing.
Yes, he was afraid that he might eventually lose his own argument.
Right.
Yeah.
That was a concern of his.
Also, there's a very good book by Larry Taunton called The Faith of Christopher Hitchens.
Taunton debated Hitch as well as I did and Taunton did, but he did a road trip with Christopher Hitchens and his thesis is, and I believe this is true, is that Christopher Hitchens wanted To get to know Christians.
But if you're in New York or Georgetown, Washington, and you start having lunches with the Archbishop, that's going to excite comment.
People are going to notice.
And so what he did, he wrote the God is Not Great book and issued a challenge to all comers.
I'll debate anybody.
He didn't release the book at a wine and cheese event in Manhattan.
I think he released it in arkansas and this is how i wound up debating him i i wound up debating him as a result of that challenge but what it enabled him to do was to hang out with all kinds of christians and and he was basically a very shrewdly camouflaged move i think i think he was i think he was interested yeah i i was going to use an analogy you probably won't approve of but he was a bit like a sort of closeted gay man who finds it
finds excuses to rub up to yeah to men in rugby scrums and things i i A closeted seeker.
A closeted questioner.
A closeted questioner.
It's weird isn't it that we Christians are enjoined and actually enjoy as well spreading the gospel.
It's one of my holy missions.
There was that weird period wasn't there where you had Christopher Hitchens on his kind of tour of God is not great and you have Richard Dawkins doing his whole God isn't real thing.
Normally it's Christians who spread the gospel but that was a sort of unusual period in history where the non-believers had this platform to evangelise in the opposite direction as it were.
Why didn't it was?
It was quite interesting because those militant atheists were the ones bringing the subject up.
They were the ones who gave us the opportunity and gave us the microphone to be able to speak the gospel.
And I think it was, at least in Christopher's case, it was because the gospel was eating him up.
There were two subjects that if they were broached, Christopher would go off like a firecracker, and they were the fatherhood of God and the substitutionary atonement of Christ.
Those two doctrines were under his skin.
Can you explain a bit more in layman's terms?
Yeah, the fatherhood of God, he persisted in representing this as sort of a cosmic North Korea, where this overbearing, domineering, tyrannical God And our response is, no, he's a father.
He's not a dictator, not a despot.
He's a father.
Fatherhood is at the heart of all that is.
But I think that Christopher had a strained relationship with his own father.
And, if you will permit me this private little theory, I think there's a PhD thesis in it for somebody, is the contribution of the English boarding school system to modern atheism.
Um, because what happens if you take the best and brightest of your young men, send them off, send them off to a boarding school without the influence of their dads, give them a first-rate education, what could go wrong?
Well, I'm a product of that system, and I have some sympathy with that argument.
I mean, it certainly put me off proper Christianity for quite some time.
I mean, the boring... Well, I think it happened with Dawkins.
I think it happened with Peter Hitchens, before he was converted later.
It happened with C.S.
Lewis.
I think... He went to my school, C.S.
Lewis.
OK.
Well, there you go.
Before my time.
Yeah, yeah, me and C.S.
Lewis.
I'm sorry, so the fatherhood of God was one of them, and the other one that he... The other one is the substitutionary atonement of Christ, which is the very heart of the Gospel.
That's the beating heart of the preached Gospel, is Christ dying for the sins of his people.
And that doctrine would set Christopher off reacting strongly to it.
And I think it's because it was getting close to home.
He felt it.
Right, but why would that particularly bother him, do you think?
Why would that sort of jar with his intellect, or whatever?
I think it jarred with his emotions.
In other words, I think he was bright enough to know, he was very clever, he was bright enough to know that this is the issue.
This is it.
This is the one thing that stands between me and God.
And he fought it with everything.
There's a powerful attracting force in the proclamation of the cross.
If you preach the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross, you're in a tractor beam being pulled.
And I think Christopher felt that more than a lot of people do.
The very idea that Christ died for our sins and redeemed us?
Yes.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, and I, if I be lifted up, I will draw all men to myself.
The crucified Savior on a tree, exerting an inexorable pull on the whole world, is, I think, a doctrine of the New Testament.
And I think it was something that Christopher felt.
Interesting.
I was listening to some of his arguments and they are so really facile.
He was very good at dressing, he was very good at sort of flirting with the audience.
All sorts of elaborate compliments to his audience's intelligence, discernment and so on.
And then once you got past the style, I mean his style was tremendous.
Gosh, I wish I could have debated like he does.
When you come down to it, it's like evolutionary theory is so obviously true.
The scientists all tell us that the universe started with Big Bang.
And you're thinking, hang on a second, Christopher.
Have you actually looked into evolutionary theory?
Are you aware that even Darwin, when he wrote The Origin of Species, was aware of these gaping holes in this theory?
Have you looked into this stuff at all?
No.
You're just regurgitating stuff you've been told by somebody else.
It was very clever.
What Christopher did was very clever hand-waving by someone who was a first-rate wit.
So when you're debating with him on stage, you have to watch your step all the time because if you make a solid point and you land a solid punch, Christopher is going to make a joke out of it and draw a laugh from the audience and all of a sudden everybody's over on the other side of the room And you're thinking to yourself, hey friend, you didn't answer the question.
Well indeed.
Apropos of nothing, can you explain to me why I've become a Christian in the last three years?
Why I've been called?
Because it's taken me a bit by surprise.
Because I see this, I've become part of this faith which Seems to put quite a high premium on things like martyrdom and suffering and the narrow gate, straight as the gate.
What have I got myself into, Douglas?
Well, one of the key things is that you didn't get yourself into it.
It's not up to us.
So, this is a sovereign God.
The sovereign God, when he summons you, it's time to come.
And so Peter, James, and John, and Andrew, are all minding their own fishing business, and Jesus comes up to them and says, come, follow me.
And when the Lord calls someone, and He uses instruments, and I'll get to that in a minute, but when the Lord calls someone, He's the one When we say, why me?
The answer to that question is not found in me.
The why me is found in the decrees and determination and good pleasure of God.
Now, if you wanted to look at secondary causes, you know, why would something like this happen to someone at your stage of life over the last two or three years?
We've seen this happening.
You might have the same language for it in the UK as we do here, but we say people are red-pilled Yes.
Okay, and they are red-pilled.
Sometimes it's theologically they're red-pilled.
Sometimes it's just politically red-pilled.
Sometimes the political red-pilling is the staging area that will take them into theological issues, where you come to realize, you know, I've been lied to my whole life.
Yes.
Man, and this is why there are things where they didn't lie to me.
I'm a heliocentrist, right?
But everything is up for grabs.
Name one major institution in Western culture that has not embarrassingly discredited itself Over the last two years.
It's the military, it's the government, it's the health services, it's the insurance companies, it's the universities, it's the police departments.
Everybody has sort of face-planted.
And there are people who are just common sense regular citizens who haven't moved with the times and they see that the emperor has no clothes.
They see, okay, all this crazy happened Why don't other people see it?
And they start asking questions.
And the central feature of totalitarianism is this.
Hard totalitarianism, soft totalitarianism, doesn't matter.
The central feature of all totalitarianism is no questions.
You may not ask questions.
You're out of line raising questions.
But there are people who wanted to raise the question anyway, and they come to you to administer a beatdown, and that just raises more questions.
Yeah, you've made me feel slightly less special because I realised that actually, you're right, this is quite a widespread phenomenon and obviously it's happening in America as well as in the UK and elsewhere, that I've been on lots of marches protesting against the lockdowns, the vaccines, that aren't even vaccines and stuff like this and I was very struck by the number of Christians on these marches, often new Christians,
Who, like me, have gone through this stage where you're red-pilled, you realise that we've been lied to and stuff.
Then you go through a black-pilled stage where you experience this nihilistic despair because you realise the extent of the corruption and evil in our world.
And then you go, hang on a second, evil?
What's the opposite of evil?
If the world is in the control of the devil temporarily by God's permission, hang on a second, that must mean there's a God as well?
Correct, absolutely.
Because if you're staring into the Nietzschean abyss, right, and you are appalled by that Nietzschean abyss, well, if there is no God, there's no reason to be appalled.
It just is.
Right?
The only way I can justify my revulsion at this Orwellian, Huxleyian mashup, which is what we've got going, the only way I can resist that is if I have a place to stand.
And I can only have a place to stand if God is love.
Yeah.
I get that.
I get that.
And I also get that God is truth and that the world is a construct of lies.
Correct.
Yeah.
The whole world lies in darkness.
Right.
Yeah.
But let me ask you something, which I've got a telegram channel and we talk about God and stuff sometimes, and what you often hear from the kind of the atheists or the New Agers is, well, look, obviously I don't trust the government or don't trust the, you know, or the establishment, but how can I trust the Bible?
How can I trust, you know, these religious authorities over the years, the church may have twisted The text, how do we know the translations are right?
What's your answer to that?
I would say you're not being radically skeptical enough yet.
You need to start with, how can I trust myself?
If I'm talking to a non-believer, I'd say there's one person where you have first-hand knowledge of how untrustworthy you are.
You know that.
And so this whole thing begins with humility.
This whole thing begins with you admitting that you yourself are untrustworthy.
Now, instead of you being the source of truth, and you get to go around testing what would be a trustworthy source of truth to depend on, you need to realize that your reason, your wisdom, your abilities, your talents are part of the system that collapsed under you.
You are part of who let you down.
Now, you say, well, what do I do then?
I'd say, look to Christ.
And you say, but I need to verify that Christ will hold me.
And I say, you're in no position to verify anything.
I'm here to tell you that Christ will take you.
Look to Christ.
Cry out to Christ.
He died on the cross.
It's a proclamation thing.
So this is, this goes back to the early fathers where Credo, Ut, and Telegram.
I believe that I might be able to understand.
I don't... Interesting.
Okay, you start with faith.
Thank you for that.
Welcome.
Thank you for explaining that.
Because, yeah, It's, I... That makes sense to me.
That makes sense to me, because my faith came before... Yes.
And then the lights came on.
Yeah.
But, so what do I say to all those people who say, look, I've really been trying to get into this, but God doesn't answer me, or, you know, it's not working yet.
Yeah, you're trying to talk to him still in test mode.
It needs to be trust mode.
Right?
Where you say, I have nowhere else to go.
It's like Peter, when Jesus says, are you going to leave me too?
And Peter says, where would he go?
You have the words of eternal life.
So I would tell someone, you must surrender first.
It's like in the Narnia stories where Jill is at that river and the lion is between her and the river.
And she wants to deal with him and argue with him.
Would you go away while I drink?
And do you eat little girls?
And he says, well, I've eaten empires and kingdoms and little girl, you know, I don't deal.
I don't negotiate.
What she has to do is simply surrender.
And someone's going to say, well, that's just fideism.
You're just taking a blind leap in the dark.
Well, it's not blind.
It's not blind.
There are good reasons for it.
And those reasons are reasons that you will come to understand.
As soon as you let go and trust me.
So... Yeah, that's really interesting.
And I do feel blessed, obviously, to have gone through this process.
Although I wasn't... I'm not strictly aware of having surrendered.
I mean, I must have done, I suppose, on some level.
Yes.
I don't think it happens unless you surrender.
Right.
But... Okay.
The thing I feel... The people I feel sort of rather sorry for
I mean, think of all those young men, and it would be mostly young men, who would have been evangelised into unbelief by Hitchens and Dawkins, and thought they were being really edgy and their intellects were being... I mean, okay, you could argue that their pride led them to this position, you know, the pride in the intellect in themselves, but why... does God not want these people to... well, obviously, he does want them to come onto his side, but what if they don't?
Is that fair?
Um, as I think it should be put this way, if life were fair, we'd all be in hell.
Right.
Okay, so here's the thing.
There's a fundamental humanist assumption which says that you line up these people, let's say ten of them, and they're all basically okay people, and then which ones believe in Jesus, well they go to heaven, and which ones don't believe in Jesus, for whatever reason, well they go to hell.
Well, it's not like that.
What it is, is you've got ten inmates on death row Do to be executed for crimes that deserve execution.
All 10 of them.
All right?
Nobody has any claim on anything.
Right.
They're all guilty.
Now let's say, in our system, a governor of a state can pardon someone.
Let's say the governor comes in and pardons three of them for reasons of state.
You know, the president wants somebody for a Dirty Dozen mission or something.
And he pardons three of them.
And they go off and do that thing.
He has done no injustice to the other seven.
That's a, that's a, you know, I was, I was accusing you of being a bit of a pussy, but actually that's quite a, that's quite a hardcore position.
Yeah.
Do you think we all get an equal chance?
Is that?
No, no, we don't.
We plainly, clearly, obviously do not.
So how do you make sense of that?
Well, the illustration I would use is that our starting point is not that of being an innocent babe in the woods.
That's not where I started.
I was sinning before I could talk.
I was sinning before I could walk.
I was born into a race of sinners.
If you look at a baby in a cradle and you ask, is this baby a talker?
Well, A, he belongs to a race of talkers, so yes.
B, he's not spoken his first word yet.
But it's in his nature to talk.
It's in his nature to walk.
All he needs is the requisite size and muscle strength.
Right?
Is it in my nature to sin?
Yes.
I'm born into a corrupt and fallen race.
Now, that is traced back to Adam and Eve, our first parents disobeyed.
When they disobeyed in the garden, the entire human race was there.
I was there, in them.
They represented me.
Not only did they represent me, but they represented me accurately.
I wouldn't have done any better than what they did.
They did not represent me inaccurately.
That means that I'm born into this sinful world, and if I receive the grace of God, it's undeserved favor.
I didn't earn it.
I don't merit it.
I don't warrant it.
It's just God's kindness.
So, the other seven who die for their own crimes, There's no injustice done.
The issue of justice comes up not with the seven who are executed, but with the three who are pardoned.
So the question is not, how could a just God send anybody to hell?
The question is, how could a just God let any of us into heaven?
And the answer to that question is the cross of Jesus Christ.
That's how he does it.
Suggest a kind of capriciousness on God's part.
Well, no, the Bible says repeatedly that God does it in accordance with His good pleasure, His good counsel, His good pleasure.
So He has reasons for doing what He does.
He's not flipping coins.
It's not a random thing.
He has reasons.
It's just that the reasons are not found in me or in my goodness.
But He has reasons.
Well, he's a very interesting character, God.
Yes, correct.
He's not a tame lion.
No.
I've noticed this, particularly reading the Old Testament, and I know that some Christians have a real problem with God of the Old Testament.
They do.
And they have had since the time of Marcion.
So this is an old this is an old problem.
There's one writer.
I really appreciate what he said.
He said the God of the Bible is no buttercup.
I've got a theory on this which I want to run by you.
I mean, obviously you're much more versed in this stuff than I am.
But I think You know that there are constant scenes where where God is really displeased with the children of Israel Because they keep going back to the they keep putting the children in the fire.
They keep building up Asherah poles and stuff and It seems to me perhaps this goes back to the serpent in the garden or perhaps it goes back to Jacob and Esau But it seems to me that there are two Parallel sort of elements in in in mankind.
There's the seed of the serpent and there's the seed of the woman Seed of the woman Yeah, but there seems to be like I mean we see it today You mentioned abortion earlier earlier on and and and Christopher Hitchens discomfort on that particular subject I think it's right.
It seems to me that we found a way of practicing human sacrifice in the modern age and Yes, that's exactly right, and we've done it in a clinically detached way, so just as in the Temple of Molech, they used to play loud instruments to cover the shrieking of the babies, we've done this in a clinical way, off-site, you know, we dispatch them and nobody has to deal with the gore, but we are just as bloodthirsty.
Well, exactly, and we know - The child trafficking, for example.
- Yes.
- It's huge, isn't it? - It's huge, right.
And so what we're dealing with is the recognition that when the anything goes does not stop with a few beer parties or a few one night stands with some attractive ladies, The Anything Goes ethos gives you the We're Margaret Republic and then what follows that.
It gives you hell holes on earth.
Well, exactly.
So this is how I understand the Old Testament God.
The Old Testament God, and obviously the Enduring God, is very clear that there are certain things he really doesn't like.
Even to the point of wanting to extirpate and destroy... I mean, the final line in Psalm 137.
the final line in Psalm 137.
Yeah.
Again, the people who believe in touchy-feely Christianity, God's like a social worker.
They don't really get that, actually, there are some things which are an abomination in the sight of God, and one of them is child sacrifice, and he ain't going to treat with kid gloves the people who do that kind of thing.
Correct.
He's not.
And I was in a debate once with an atheist, not Christopher, but he brought up the destruction of the Amalekites and that sort of thing.
And I said to him, are you saying that God can't be pro-choice?
We can kill our children, but he can't kill his?
Well, that's the thing.
So explain this to me.
Why does God favour certain people over other people?
Are there some people who are not quite human?
Oh no.
No.
So you may know this already, but just so you know the grid to put this, what cubbyholes to put all this in.
I'm a Presbyterian, I'm a Calvinist, and I'm going to talk like a Calvinist.
I believe that God sovereignly ordains whatsoever comes to pass.
Not one hair on anybody's head.
God decrees the number of hairs on a yellow dog's back.
So, I'm going to basically swallow all the reductios that you bring up.
I'm going to say, the God of the Bible chose the Jews and set them apart from all the other nations.
And He says, not because you had it together.
Not because you were so swell.
It's not because of you.
But I selected you for my good purpose, right?
And that good purpose was to illustrate for the world how God interacts with humans.
So He gave the Jews His law.
When they obeyed His law, He prospered them.
And other nations could see how the blessing of God works.
When they disobeyed His law, He would chastise them.
To the Jew first, then after that, the Gentiles.
And they could see how God, in His justice, deals with rebellious mankind.
So the Jews as the chosen people were not chosen as the favorite people.
They were like a student who's called up to the front of the classroom to do a problem on the board.
And when the student screws it up, they're humiliated in front of the whole class.
When they do it right, they are praised and honored in front of the whole class.
They're the chosen student either way.
Right?
Now, God chose the Jews in the Old Testament for His good purpose, to manifest His ways to man.
He's universalized the Church in the time of the New Covenant, so now there is a new Israel everywhere, where non-believers can look at the Christian Church and should be able to see people living out God's way of being a human being.
And they should see that and want it.
Now, if they don't, if they hate it, attack it, that's their lookout.
If they're attracted to it, then we present the Gospel to them and baptize them and teach them to read their Bibles and so on.
Where are you on what's going on now?
Do you think we're living in kind of... I know we're not supposed to know, but it feels to me quite revelation.
Okay, so I believe that we're not at the end of the world.
No, I don't think Christ is about to come.
I believe that history cycles through these patterns over and over and over again.
I believe that future historians will be looking back on our era as part of the early church.
Okay.
How early?
We say part of the early church.
Thousands of years yet to go.
Jesus told us to disciple the nations, baptize them, teach them obedience to everything I've commanded you.
And I believe that those are our marching orders.
That's the task of the Christian Church.
And I believe that the Lord is not going to come again until we've done it.
Right, okay, so this is where I might take issue with you.
Not biblically, but in terms of Where we are in the cycle, if that's what it is.
Think about this, for example.
If you were in one of Hitler's internment camps, would you be justified in thinking that the end was upon us?
Well, yeah.
If you were facing Genghis Khan's hordes coming out of the East, would you be justified in thinking this has got to be the end of the world?
Yeah.
How about the Black Death?
The Bubonic Plague?
In other words, we have gone through so many horrors, and I'm not disputing with you, the time we're in right now is a specially horrific time.
It's really awful.
So I'm not disputing that.
I'm just disputing whether or not it's that unique.
Right.
Well, look, it's certainly true that your presidents, for example, they're all in it up to the neck in evil.
I mean, genuinely, I mean, unimaginable evil.
Capital E evil.
Yes.
Yeah.
And your Supreme Court is full of paedophiles and, you know, they've got a compromise on them.
There was no justice in the legal system.
Well, I won't say there's no justice.
It's a flickering light.
We did... Roe v. Wade was overturned.
And a number of states have already outlawed abortion.
My state included.
So, it's not like there's no victories.
But they're tiny victories in the overall war, do you not think?
Oh, yeah, that's true.
So this is the thing.
It feels like that we're fighting in this spiritual Alamo, and we're having a debate among ourselves.
Is this an Alamo?
Is this like Ragnarok?
Are we fighting in Ragnarok?
But I'm with Chesterton on this, where he said the one taste of paradise on earth is to fight in a losing cause and not lose.
Yeah.
And that's where I am.
Do I believe that we're up against it?
Do I believe we're in a losing cause?
Absolutely.
Do I think we're going to lose?
No.
Yeah, I've noticed the Bible does put great premium on that.
There are lots of instances, aren't there, where people are basically, well, Sennacherib, for example.
Yeah.
You think you're going to be, there's no way you can win.
Right.
And then, but, I mean, obviously, The Christian in me takes great comfort from that, that God's got this one.
But at the same time, I'm looking at the materium, and I'm thinking, there really are, there is nobody out there.
There are no white hats either.
I mean, where are you on Trump?
Don't tell me you think Trump is any kind of hope.
I think that Trump is a piece of work, so if that's what you mean.
I also believe that he has been used by God to reveal a lot of the evil.
Okay, he's kind of catnip where the people who hate him just can't help themselves and they have shown far more of their hand.
In the way they've gone after him, then I think they would want to have done.
So, I don't think Trump is the deliverer, savior.
I don't place any hope in him that way.
But I believe that God is up to something remarkable in these tumultuous times, and the tumultuous times Trump is a part of.
Right, yeah.
No, I think I'm with you on that.
What's going on in your part of the world?
Are you finding more people?
Are you finding mysterious kind of visions are happening or are more people coming to God or what?
What have you noticed?
What we've noticed, I've heard about some of the things you've talked about, like in the Muslim world, dreams and that sort of thing.
Here, we are kind of at the terminus point for a massive refugee column.
There is a great, in the United States, there's a great resort going on where people are abandoning blue states, evacuating evacuating places like Illinois and California and New York.
And they're going to places like Tennessee, Texas, and Idaho.
And in our small community, we've had so many believers, young families relocate for the last two years.
It's pretty much been every Sunday for the last two years I meet a new family at church, and they say well.
We're here now It's like it's It's a huge refugee column and I call them reinforcements.
It really is a remarkable shuffle that's happening and that's the glaring presenting issue for us right now.
I'm not familiar with all the different churches and what's happening.
The churches that are growing in the United States are the churches that stayed open.
I can believe that.
So you stayed open throughout?
We stayed open.
Yeah, we stayed open.
And the John MacArthur's Church in California, other churches like that, that resisted the lockdowns and resisted the vaccine, resisted the masking mandates.
We had a psalm sing, a church sponsored psalm sing, where three of our people were arrested.
And their case was dropped, and then they countersued, and they just got a settlement in federal court.
They wanted a significant victory there.
So basically, the churches that resisted, that didn't fold, that didn't roll over, have been marked out by many believers who wanted shepherds who fought for the sheep.
They wanted shepherds who would actually fight with the wolf.
That's really good to hear, because I'm glad you raised that subject, because the Church of England, for example, was absolutely useless.
It wasn't just that they sort of acceded to every government diktat going, but they actually gold-plated them.
They were almost over-eager to shut down the churches.
But one of the things the Lord has given us is among these reinforcements of people coming here, there are a significant number of special operators.
You know, Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, ex-military and ex-special forces operators.
And one of them basically said, you have to understand that this whole... I've said before that the lockdowns were the beta testing for a totalitarian move.
So let's see if we command all the churches to shut down because of climate change.
How many would?
Well, now we know, right?
We know that a lot of them would.
But this is something, one of our special operators said, you have to understand, this is something the CIA and our operators do in place.
They've got a situation that they want to control, and they issue a bunch of regulations, and the regulations have to be really stupid, okay?
They can't be reasonable regulations because people will obey reasonable regulations.
But if you issue stupid regulations, you're going to find who's compliant and who's going to be trouble.
You've identified the places where there will be resistance.
So because of lockdowns and vaccines and masks, I know that we're on the map now.
To fight climate change, churches need to meet once a month.
I know that we're going to be In the crosshairs.
I know that we've identified ourselves as being a pocket of resistance.
But it goes both ways.
The sheep who want shepherds who fight, they find out who you are also.
And they come and they want to be part of that.
I've noticed this, when people are making inquiries, for example, in my Telegram channel about where a good local church is, always the tell is how the church performed during the nonsense, the craziness.
That's right.
So, just tell me about your, you had a psalm singing session.
Yeah, yeah.
So we do this normally, well like once a month, we're Presbyterian, we belong to the psalm singing tradition, where we sing metrical psalms, not exclusively, but we sing a lot of psalms.
And once a month, and we try to learn new ones and that sort of thing, so once a month we have psalm sings where we get together and work on parts.
We do four-part harmony singing in the congregation and we learn the psalms, basically.
And at Christmas time we do it out in public with Christmas carols, and then in the summer we've done it out in public in the past before, just, you know, we're singing to the Lord out in public.
And our city council did a lockdown order, a completely unnecessary lockdown order.
So we scheduled a psalm sing for City Hall, and we appeared at City Hall, a couple hundred of us appeared at City Hall, and the plan was to sing three psalms, The doxology and then we'd go home.
We were just registering our protest.
It wasn't going to escalate into anything else.
So we showed up a couple hundred and three of our people got arrested.
We sang our psalms and the doxology went home.
So then, when they arrested our people, we scheduled, I think it was two days later, another psalm singing in the same place.
So we were back two days later, and this time 500 people showed up, right?
And it was mothers, for example, mothers were making arrangements for babysitting in case they got arrested.
So we showed up to sing psalms again to protest the tyranny.
Because that's what it is.
It's tyranny.
And we're not fighting simply for our right to do what we please.
We're fighting for everybody's right to be free, to live free.
We're not just concerned about ourselves.
So I'm surprised that The town hall, where you had the psalm singing session, didn't try and lock the doors and close it?
No, we just sang outside in the parking lot.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, we met at the City Hall, and they painted little circles on the parking lot six feet apart for us to stand on, and nobody stood on them.
We all just crowded in, sang our psalms, and that's why they arrested us, because we were singing psalms close to each other, outside, without masks.
Did nobody wear masks in your services?
No.
Well, there's one gent who just started coming recently who still does.
We never prohibited masks, but we never required them, and so we met through the whole thing with no masks, whatever.
I should say, when the whole thing first hit, and nobody knew anything about what was going on, We and our governor ordered a lockdown.
We had an online service for three Sundays.
But after three Sundays, we had sort of figured out what was what was happening.
And so we went back to in-person worship without masks required or anything on the fourth Sunday.
Why do you think it is that so many Christians have failed the test of seeing through these walls.
I mean, Christians are supposed to have discernment, aren't they?
And yet so many have surrendered to this kind of, frankly, satanic tyranny.
Yeah, I would say it's because they were pretty clever with this one.
Because it was the Wuhan virus or COVID virus, nobody's ever heard of, they were able to spook people.
And I believe that a one lawful function of government is to quarantine.
So if there's a little town outside, you know, Troy, Idaho is right outside of Moscow here.
If the bubonic plague broke out in Troy, And the magistrates ordered the town to be cordoned off.
Nobody comes out.
And that kind of quarantine.
You're quarantining the infected.
I think that's a lawful thing for government to do.
I don't think that's tyranny.
The thing that was tyrannical about this is they quarantined the healthy.
Yes.
Right?
If you had no symptoms, you had no problems.
So basically, you didn't need to be exposed.
You didn't need to be symptomatic.
They quarantined everybody.
And that is an overreach.
There's no biblical authorization for that.
If you read through Leviticus, you can see when someone has a contagious disease, they put them outside the camp.
Whether or not he wanted to go.
So that by itself, so I think a lot of Christians weren't thinking carefully.
They thought, okay, quarantining, I've read something about that in my Bible, but this was a photo negative of the biblical quarantine.
Right.
I think you're overestimating the degree to which most Christians, certainly in the UK, are actually even familiar with bits like that in their Bible.
It's more that they just like... Christianity is something you do without really... They don't want to look into the detail.
They don't want to consider... I mean, isn't it a fundamental problem?
When you've got Christians cowering in the face of this This pestilence, when the deal is we're supposed to be not afraid of death.
Yeah, Christians, we've heard for a generation that Christians are supposed to be winsome and nice.
And being winsome and nice means we need to do what the man says.
And that's not true.
It's not, it's not.
Are you familiar with Andrew Tate?
Yes, I am.
I mean, I was quite disappointed that he converted to Islam recently.
Yes.
And I listened to his explanation as to why he did it.
Yeah, I heard that too.
Yeah, what did you think about that?
I think that given the data that he was going off of, the milksop Christianity, I understood and followed his line of argument.
Okay, I think it's going to, because it's false fundamentally, it's going to let him down at some point or betray him at some point.
But the thing he was shooting at, I thought he had a point.
Yeah.
So for the many who haven't seen that interview, he was essentially saying, look, I see, I look at Christian countries and I do not see them standing up for Christian values.
Whereas I look at Muslim countries and they are clearly protecting women.
They take the religion seriously.
Therefore, as a fighting man, I'm going to go for the, how did he put it?
The fighting religion.
The fighting religion, exactly.
But they're not protecting women.
What they're doing is saying, we won't let you guys abuse women your way, we're going to reserve the right to do it our way.
So basically, if you zoom out and look at church history from the time of the apostles down to the present, there have been centuries where the Christians acquitted themselves very well indeed, Over against the Muslims, right?
So, if you just look at history in 5 minute increments or 50 year increments, there's no question but that Islam currently is masculine, overall.
And, Western Christianity is effeminate, overall.
OK, that is really true.
But I think that you're just evaluating in 50-year increments.
Take it in 500-year increments and it's a different story.
But you know what?
Even three years ago I might have considered Islam to be a threat and Muslims to be the enemy within.
I've changed so much.
I don't see... I see it very much a case of us, Christians and Hindus and Muslims, etc., against this very, very tiny segment.
I call them the predator class, but they're basically Luciferians.
They're basically Moloch and Baal worshippers.
Do you see it that way?
I see them as the principal threat.
That's true.
I also see secularism on its last legs and their secular progressive liberal establishment I don't think can be sustained.
And I don't want the Saudi Arabian alternative, but it is, basically, if you had to pick which hellish landscape you wanted to be in, the future that our ruling elites have planned for us, I think, is far, far worse than a traditional Middle Eastern country.
Oh, especially if you're a man, as we both are.
I'd definitely pick being a Saudi prince rather than Klaus Schwab's... Klaus Schwab's bitch.
But do you believe, as I do I might tell you, that right now the devil is running the show?
I mean, he's pulling the strings of these guys who are...
Correct.
I believe that the diabolical occult forces are at work in all of this.
Absolutely.
But I believe that Jesus Christ is the king of the world.
Yes.
Sure.
I'm with you there.
But do you believe that the devil has a physical presence?
What's the deal with the devil?
And he's a fallen angel?
I believe so.
I believe he's a fallen seraph.
He is a creature.
I believe in a personal devil, if that's what you mean.
Yes.
I don't believe in an abstract force of evil.
I believe in a personal devil.
I believe in He is the Prince of the Power of the Air.
He has followers.
He has fallen angels that are the lake of fires prepared for the devil and his angels.
So I think he has a host of workers and soldiers and so forth who are currently very active.
And do you think he can be physically in more than one place at any given time?
No.
I believe he's a creature, and I believe that he is... One of the problems that Christians have is they make the devil into God's opposite, and God has no opposite.
He has no counterpart.
The devil's counterpart would be Michael the archangel, so it'd be Michael the archangel and the devil, but above all is God.
So I don't think we should attribute Aspects of deity to the devil.
He's not omniscient.
He's not omnipresent He doesn't know everything he can be outwitted Where are you by the way?
I mean, I don't like the schisms in in the church that there are these disagreements over things I'd much rather we were all united but The Catholics, for example, make great play of things like a prayer I rather like, the prayer to Archangel Michael.
But presumably in your church you don't go with that kind of thing.
Right.
We're Protestants.
Yeah.
And we're conservative.
Conservative Protestants who don't think the Reformation was unnecessary.
We don't think it was a bad idea.
But at the same time, if someone asked me, where was your church before the Reformation?
I would answer it by saying something like, so where was your face before you washed it?
Right.
Yeah.
So I think the Reformation brought needed reforms.
I stand by those reforms.
The reforms were necessary.
But I have a real solidarity with Boniface and Augustine and my brothers going back to the time of the Apostles.
Well, this is the thing.
I've become very interested in the Psalms.
I learn Psalms and I've got this interesting book which tells me that in the early monasteries the first task of a novice monk would be to learn the Psalter.
Yes.
So I feel very connected to the early church and it seems to me that the Psalms contain great truth.
Yeah.
Yes, it's the hymn book that God gave the Church.
So the New Testament Church was told in Ephesians and Colossians to sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
We're instructed to sing psalms, which is why in our worship services, we are Presbyterians, which is a very Scottish sort of thing to do.
Well, the Scots are psalm singers, basically.
And we sing many of, we sing historic psalms, psalms that have been set to music in the modern era.
We are a psalm singing people.
And the psalms will put iron in your blood.
The different, and if I could throw this in there, if you, the problem with much modern worship, especially in big box evangelical churches, Is the music they sing is Jesus Is My Girlfriend music.
It just sounds so true.
And if you substituted Sheila for Jesus, the song would still work?
Right.
What we've discovered, we started singing psalms maybe 20-25 years ago, and one of the things that I discovered singing psalms is that the psalmist had enemies.
And his enemies come up in the songs all the time.
You're always dealing with enemies.
When you sing the Psalms, it's a martial, combative, polemical setting.
Lord, break their teeth.
Lord, come down, break their arms.
They're plotting against my life for no good reason.
So the Psalms had enemies.
Even the 19th century hymns, and certainly 20th century Jesus music, there are virtually no enemies.
Yeah, you're right.
The first psalm I learned, obviously, was Psalm 23.
And there's this, I don't know whether you've come across it, there used to be this cheesy TV series called Songs of Praise, I think it was called, on Sunday evening, when the BBC did its sort of token religious programming.
And there was this This drippy rendition of The Lord's My Shepherd, which is sort of warbly and kind of...
It's sung to a tune called Crimmond, and I don't like it because it seems to be missing the tough element of the Psalms.
Yeah, right.
He prepares a table for me in the presence of my enemies.
And modern Christians have the New Testament, the Bible teaches us to love our enemies.
We're to pray for them, we're to bless them, we're to love our enemies.
But modern Christianity has taken that to mean we're to have no enemies.
And that is simply false.
We're to have enemies, and we're to love them, and we're to sing about them in the Psalms.
Yes.
Well, I love that line you quoted, that thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.
It's clear that what God is doing is trolling the opposition.
He's saying, look, you know, this is how I reward my people, and you're going to have to suck it up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Before we go, it's been great chatting to you, Doug.
Has there been a sort of breakdown of, in terms of the branches of the church that surrendered, that wussed out to the evil authorities during lockdown?
It was, as you say, it was a great test.
Which ones, did any particular branches punch above their weight and any of them were particularly kind of panty waist?
So, I would say most of the evangelical churches in North America capitulated or folded to one extent or another.
Most of them did.
There were a few standout exceptions that we know about.
I mentioned John MacArthur and Jeff Durbin's church in Arizona were standout churches.
Then there were other churches that didn't comply But they didn't make a scene about it.
They just didn't comply.
They went underground and didn't comply.
So I think you could reckon them as the 7,000 who haven't bowed the knee to bail.
So I'm sure that they're out there as well.
I was really pleased with the denomination that I'm a part of.
We have about a hundred churches And communion of reformed evangelical churches and overwhelmingly, 90% plus, didn't lock down, didn't comply.
It was just a really good show.
Across America?
Across America.
We've got, yeah, we've got churches all across North America and our doctrinal Heritage and tradition was such that the men leading these churches were by and large ready for this.
So you're Calvinist Presbyterian, is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
So what do you think it is about your traditions or is it your...
Calvinist...
So every personality type and doctrinal tradition has strengths and weaknesses.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
And Calvinists have the weakness of thinking that God gave us our bodies to walk our brains to church.
It tends to be scholastic or heady or very doctrinal.
So there are weaknesses that come with the Calvinist package.
But one of the strengths that comes with Calvinism is Calvinists are ornery.
And hard to manage.
John Knox.
Yeah, John Knox was not an adaptable figure.
And there's one American business tech exec who once said, nothing was ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
And in times of adversity and trial and persecution, Calvinists shine.
It's like they were born for this hour.
Napoleon once said that he would rather meet 10,000 men, well-generaled and well-viddled, than one Calvinist who thought he was doing the will of God.
Well, I'm glad you emerged well out of this.
I'm happy for your particular denomination.
It doesn't say much, it sounds like, for the evangelicals.
You seem to be hinting that maybe they haven't really got what Christianity is about.
Most of them, I think, folded in a really unfortunate way.
Is it because they've become a kind of branch of the New Age, really?
Yeah, or because they've bought into the idea that evangelical witness requires winsomeness.
They think that winsomeness is the ticket to winning people over.
And, it's not.
And briefly, what about the Catholics?
Where were they?
How did they perform?
The Catholics, in sort of the parish to parish, it was largely the same.
There were some Admirable voices in Catholic leadership.
There are Catholic intellectuals and theologians and so forth that I respect, and I've been grateful for their presence.
But the Catholics, basically, the Catholics and the Protestants, there was not a big distinction between them.
The Protestants had some good standout leaders as well, as did the Catholics.
And what about, do you have Orthodox in America?
Not a lot.
So in certain places there are Orthodox, but there really isn't a heavy population of them here.
Anyway, look, you've made me very envious, if that's not a sin, of your part of the country.
I want to come and live in Idaho and, you know, God, guns and horses.
Well, at least come and visit.
Have a look for yourself.
And one of the things we do with Brits when they come over is we take them out to a field and let them shoot.
Yeah, that's cool.
Doug, it's been great talking to you.
Thank you very much.
Tell us where people can find out more about your church and your blog.
- What about your blog?
That's important. - If you go to my blog, which is DougWills.com, D-O-U-G-W-I-L-S.com, and the name of it is Blog and Mayblog.
If you go to that blog on the front landing on the front page you can find a portal to pretty much everything I'm involved with.
That's great.
It only remains for me to thank my viewers and listeners and for your continued support.
Do please keep buying me coffees.
You can support me on Substack, on Locals.
That's a good place to support me.
Patreon, Subscribestar.
Thanks very much for watching and remember God is the right choice.
Yes.
Choose Jesus, but don't choose one of those wussy kind of new age churches because it ain't gonna do you any good.
