Father Dwight Longenecker’s Beheading Hydra frames atheism as a modern Hydra—16 ideologies rooted in revolutions from the Reformation to the Sexual Revolution, with materialism as its venomous core. His journey from evangelicalism to Catholicism reveals how Anglicanism’s 500-year regression contrasts with the Church’s ancient vitality, while his "swamps of Lerna" metaphor exposes atheism’s cultural rot. Rejecting moralistic therapeutic deism, he argues Christianity’s ethical foundations—love, equality, and life-affirmation—were its historical weapon against pagan Rome, not tolerance. The solution? 16 radical remedies: tithing to crush greed, communal living to counter isolation, and subversive creativity to dismantle materialism’s hollow distractions, from Netflix binges to existential despair. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, our guest today is Father Dwight Longnecker, and I'm really interested in a book he's written.
He has been a very prolific writer about theology, apologetics, biblical commentary, and Catholic culture.
But his new book is called Beheading Hydra, a radical plan for Christians in an atheistic age.
So you can tell why I'm interested in talking to him.
Father, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for the invitation.
Glad to be here.
Before we get to talk about Beheading Hydra, I just want to, you moved from the Anglican church, where I now am, into the Catholic Church.
I'd be interested to just hear a little bit about how that journey took place.
Well, how long do you have?
Because the journey actually began as the evangelical Protestant here in the States.
And I became, while I was at college, an Anglican, and I came down with a serious illness called Anglophilia, the love of all things English.
And I had the opportunity, therefore, to go and study theology at Oxford, which for anybody with Anglophilia and loving C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien and so forth, it's kind of like Mecca is for the Muslims, you know.
So I was there for three years to study theology, and the door opened up for me to be a priest in the Anglican church, in the church in England.
And it was during my time there that I made a pilgrimage hitchhiking from England to Jerusalem, staying in monasteries all along the way.
And this got me deeper into the Catholic faith and realized that actually in Anglicanism, I had gone back to England like 500 years, but then traveling across France and Italy and Greece to the Holy Lands, it was kind of like going back in time further into the Catholic, and there I found the Catholic Church, which was the church of antiquity.
Ah, okay.
So Beheading Hydra, great title, obviously the Hydra, a multi-headed beast.
And every time you cut off one of his heads, more grow back.
Who is the Hydra that you're referring to?
Well, the Hydra, if you remember your Greek mythology, as you say, is a multi-headed beast that lives in the swamps of Lerna.
So if Washington is a swamp, then maybe there's an applicability there.
And the swamps of Lerna are the swamps.
Lerna is a fetid lake, which is at the gates of hell.
So the hydra is a beast from hell, basically, a demonic beast with multiple heads that are like serpents.
And when the hero, Hercules, cuts one off, two more grow back in its place.
So I use this image from Greek mythology to be a kind of symbol of the different forms of atheism which are in our society, all through our society, which are very insidious.
And sure enough, you cut one head off of one and two more grow back in its place.
And that's a pretty good description of the general culture going on.
I read a book recently by an atheist named Yuval Harari, who says, it's called Homo Deus.
And he says that Christianity is no longer a creative force in the world.
He admits that the Vatican was once, as he puts it, the Silicon Valley of the Middle Ages.
But he says now all that Christianity does is react.
And he says this.
He says, biologists invent the contraceptive pill and the Pope doesn't know what to do about it.
Computer scientists develop the internet and rabbis argue whether Orthodox Jews should be allowed to surf it.
Feminist thinkers call upon women to take possession of their bodies and learn.
Learned muftis debate how to confront such incendiary ideas.
Has he got a point?
Is Christianity no longer a creative force the way it was in the Middle Ages?
Well, you actually mentioned Christianity with about four other religions there.
I think he's probably talking about religion being a reactive force.
He is.
Yes.
You know, I always get a little bit leery when people talk about Catholicism or the church or Christianity in general terms, because of course, Christianity is made up of Christians and Catholicism is made up of individual Catholics.
And I would argue that when you get away from this institutional mentality about the church and about Catholicism, you find a huge amount of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit amongst individual Catholics at the local level.
I'm always for the little guy.
I'm always for what's happening at the local level and what's happening in, and I find huge sources of creativity within the Catholic Church and Christianity generally in the world today.
But perhaps not in Western culture in Europe and America so much.
But if you go to Africa and India and Asia and the Philippines, there's a huge amount of vitality and life in the Catholic Church still.
So if you're right, and I think it's hard to argue that you're not, that we now have a culture that is like this Hydra.
What are the effects that you're seeing?
What is it that makes you say that we're living in this hydra, you know, with this atheist monster running our culture?
First of all, the atheism in America today is very different from the atheism which we witnessed, if you're old enough, in communist Russia and in Eastern Europe.
When I was growing up, you know, the Soviets had closed the seminaries, closed the religious publishing houses, tried to close down the church, and they were formally explicitly an atheistic culture.
A place like North Korea is still like that.
China technically still is an atheistic culture, although they're learning to live with forms of religion.
And in America today, however, the atheism is much more subtle.
It's woven into every aspect of our society, our politics, our media, our educational system, with lots of different ideologies and philosophies which have developed over the last 500 years.
It's kind of like we're now living in the inheritance that we have from the Protestant Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Sexual Revolution, the technological revolution.
We've had all these revolutions over the last 500 years, and modern contemporary America is the beautiful result.
And so what is it about the culture, you know, specifically that you look at and you think, well, this is the result of having an atheistic culture?
Well, what I do is I go through in the book, in the first half of the book, I lay out 16 different isms or 16 different ideologies that we all take for granted in America as being true and wonderful and good.
And I show how they're essentially atheistic and how this atheism is woven in through our culture and our mentality in such a way as to as to make my claim that America is an atheistic culture.
So one of those, for instance, is materialism.
Materialism is not just going to the mall to shop until you drop.
Materialism is a philosophy.
That's a symptom of materialism.
Materialism is a philosophy that this material physical world is all there is.
There is no supernatural realm.
There's no life after death.
There's no heaven.
There's no hell.
There's no angels.
There's no demons.
All that supernatural stuff is a load of fairy tale thinking.
This physical world is all there is.
So get used to it.
Okay.
That's materialism.
And that is held by an awful lot of people in our society who wouldn't necessarily wave a flag and say, hey, I'm a materialist.
It's simply an assumption that they take about reality.
Yeah, no, I think that that is definitely true.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is a guy like Steven Pinker writes these books about how much better everything is.
We're more peaceful.
We're more healthy.
Look at all the blessings of science.
What's wrong with materialism?
Well, no, there's a lot that's good about it.
And in the book, I point out and say we all have all benefited from the great advances of science and technology and new health care and all these other things.
However, if that's all there is to life, then we all soon realize that actually we're only here for a comparatively short period of time.
And if that's all there is, it's kind of a gesture of despair.
So I'm going to live longer.
oh, that's great, but I'm not going to live forever.
I think Woody Allen's pretty good on that sort of thing, where he sort of expresses the angst of, I think in one of his films, in Love and Death, he says, it's okay living longer, but I don't want to live longer.
I want to live forever.
Right, right.
And likewise, with all the advances that we've had in technology, all the gadgets we have, you know, Netflix and iPhones and whatever else, terrific.
It makes our life wonderful.
All the health care we have, great.
But look how worried everybody is over COVID, you know?
So has it really solved our problems?
I'm not convinced, actually.
So then how do you, you know, when you use a metaphor like the Hydra, and the book again is called A Beheading Hydra, a Radical Plan for Christians in an Atheistic Age by Father Dwight Longnecker, when you use the Hydra as a metaphor, it's pretty daunting.
It's pretty daunting to think that every time we cut a head off the materialist beast, two are going to grow back.
What kinds of responses do you think we should be making?
Well, the book, my audience, I'm a Catholic priest, so my audience are Christians and essentially Catholic Christians.
So in the second half of the book, I go through and I actually give 16 remedies that Christians can do to counter this atheism.
And these are not philosophical arguments.
These are not theological arguments.
These are actually practical things you can do.
And some of them actually pinch a little.
Okay.
So my answer to materialism, for instance, is tithe.
The Christian principle of tithing is giving 10% of your income to your church or your charity.
If the symptom of materialism is greed and getting as much stuff as I can possibly get and relying only on my bank account and my pension plan and my annuities and my insurance policies, then the antidote to that is to actually say, well, actually, I'm going to pull the rug out from that mentality by giving 10% of my income to the poor, to the charities, and to my church.
So each of the answers that I create for the 16 different isms are practical things that Christians can do to live in a different way and therefore undermine this atheistic society by living what I call subversive creativity.
That's an interesting idea.
So in other words, you're not talking about changing the society.
You're talking about changing the self.
Is that fair to say?
Changing yourself, changing your community, your church, your school, your family.
And actually, there's an interesting book written by a sociologist.
I forget his name.
He's down in Texas, which is about how the Christian faith conquered the Roman Empire.
And he basically says the Roman Empire was a cruel, bitter, bloodthirsty society full of plague, fire, devastation, overpopulation, huge problems.
And Christianity comes into the middle of this.
And these are people who, even if they don't always succeed, they believe that you can love one another.
They believe that husbands should love their wives, not treat them like slaves.
They believe that women should have equal rights.
They believe that children are valued.
They should not be aborted and thrown in the trash heap or flush down the toilet after they're born.
And these Christians exist in this loving community.
And the sociologist says, by the time Christianity became the state religion of Rome, already nearly half of the population in the major cities of Rome had been converted.
But they weren't converted by an imperial edict.
They were converted by the example of Christians who were living a radically radiant kind of life of goodness, truth, and beauty.
And other people said, hey, I want what they have.
You know, I've often noticed that the media is very good at taking Christians and immediately cornering them into a place where they begin to seem small-minded and condemnatory, to counter the kinds of things that the kind of appeal that you're talking about.
I had Carl Truman on, and I know you admire him.
I admire him very much.
His book is spectacular, I think.
But I said to him, you know, there are ways in which our culture has become more tolerant as a materialist culture.
I mean, we don't arrest gay people for being gay anymore.
Many churches have women preachers where the Catholic Church doesn't.
Is there a way?
Is there a way that a materialist society is more tolerant and open than a Christian society?
Yeah, I don't know that that's true.
You know, I don't know whether you've read Tom Holland's book, Dominion.
Yes, yeah, I love it.
Yeah, I was in correspondence with Tom about his book and with Carl Truman.
And Tom basically makes the very good point that all of the virtues that we consider to be wonderful in this atheistic culture I'm talking about actually have their roots in Christianity.
So the toleration you're talking about is actually a Christian virtue.
Now, we may have been, as Christians, we may have been hypocrites and not practiced as much as we should have over the years.
That's certainly true, okay?
But it is at heart a Christian virtue.
Toleration is not something you find in the ancient pagan societies.
I was reading the Psalms the other day, and the ancient Hebrew society was not tolerant.
The psalmist is saying, thank God that you have given me the strength and the energy to crush my enemies.
I have crushed them under my feet.
I have swept up their blood.
The dogs have come and licked their blood from my city streets and the kind of stuff.
The ancient world was not a tolerant society.
Toleration was not considered to be a virtue except for Christianity, who came along and Jesus said, guess what?
You should love your enemy.
Bless those who curse you.
That is the root of toleration.
Being kind to your neighbor.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
This is a Christian virtue.
You know, I work in the field of the arts.
I've spent my life in the arts.
And one of the things that I find very frustrating is that Christian art, which used to be the greatest art in the world, I mean, it is Christian ideology that created Bach and Michelangelo and Dostoevsky.
It has now become kind of vapid, in my opinion.
I mean, Schopenhauer called it banal optimism.
Yeah.
Well, the problem with modern Christianity, which I outline in the book, is that actually the red-blooded supernatural religion, which Christianity really is, which comes face to face with the darkness of mankind and the darkness of human history and grapples with it and wrestles with it,
which I really dealt with in my book, Immortal Combat, which was the one just before this book, that kind of red-blooded, supernatural, radiant Christianity has been transformed in America into something which has been called moralistic therapeutic deism.
And that is simply moralism, a form of rules for respectability, basically, therapeutic.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism00:02:52
Christianity has become sort of like a version of Oprah Winfrey, okay?
And deism, meaning that God is out there somewhere, but he doesn't really interfere in my life.
And so modern mainstream Protestant Christianity, and I'm sorry to say a huge chunk of my own church and the Catholic church, has become no more than moralistic therapeutic deism, a kind of, as you said, a bland optimism.
Let's just be nice to one another, but let's just be tolerant to one another and nothing more than toleration, nothing more than churches become sermons where hip-hop preachers stand up and say, you know, we're here to help you with your struggling marriage, with your troublesome teens.
And if you have an addiction problem, come on Wednesday nights because we can help you with that too.
That's not Christianity.
That is kind of like, like I say, it's Oprah Winfrey with a cross, you know?
Yeah.
Well, my last question, someone comes to you and says, well, yeah, you know, I see there are a lot of problems in the world, but I've got my Netflix, you know, and I've got some dope and I've got a girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever I've got.
What do I get?
What are you offering me with a life of faith that I don't already have?
I would say, are you going to settle for that?
Is that your life?
You know, Netflix and bonking and fast food takeaways?
Is that it?
You know, and I would challenge them to say, you know, what about, who says that, you know, the vast number of mankind pass their life in a state of quiet desperation?
Was that Thoreau?
Thoreau, I think, yeah.
And Socrates, who says, you know, challenges those who live the unexamined life.
So is that all you're going to settle for?
Is that what you think your humanity is?
Here we are at what some people would call the zenith of human civilization with all these gains that you've spoken about with materialism.
And I want to say, is that what it's given us?
Who has written about the internet, for instance, and saying, here we are where the ordinary person can access the Bach, is it the B minor Mass or the Mozart clarinet concerto or what's his name, playing the third, Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto?
Here's a civilization where with your laptop, you can access all of the great art that's ever been produced and you can go through a virtual tour of the Ufizi gallery, you know, and you're going to sit there, play Candy Crush.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this is where our great materialistic society has got us.
You know, you can read Dostoevsky with that gadget that you have in your hand and you're going to use it to look at porn instead.
I mean, so this is such a great society?
I'm not sure about that.
The book is called Beheading Hydra, A Radical Plan for Christians in an Atheistic Age.