Thomas Williams, a former priest turned Breitbart Rome correspondent and author of The Coming Christian Persecution, warns that global Christian persecution—already brutal in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—is escalating in the West, with U.S. hostility shifting from ridicule to FBI surveillance of Latin Mass attendees and abortion clinic protesters. He blames a progressive agenda for severing Christianity’s moral roots from human rights, downgrading religious liberty to align with LGBTQ protections while framing faith as discriminatory. Criticizing Pope Francis for legitimizing China’s state-controlled church and equating Islamic terrorism with Christian violence, Williams predicts worsening persecution unless believers reclaim moral clarity, support persecuted Christians, and fight for religious freedom as a cornerstone of society. His call to action urges a "purified" Church, inspired by Benedict XVI’s vision of salt-like faithfulness. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, many religions are oppressed and harassed around the world, and it's not a contest to see who can get hurt the most.
But I think it's really important to remember, especially in a big Christian country like this one, that in many places, Christianity is the most, being a Christian is the most dangerous thing you can be.
There's a new book out called The Coming Christian Persecution by Thomas Williams.
He's an American theologian teaching at St. John's University, and he serves as Breitbart's Rome correspondent.
Thomas, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Andrew, it's great to be able to talk with you.
It's a dire, kind of a sad and sober topic, but an important one.
Yeah, it's a scary one.
Before we get to the book, The Coming Christian Persecution, I want to ask you one question about your own personal story, because when I went to look you up, you were repeatedly referred to as a disgraced priest who had been a priest and you were no longer.
And so I looked your story up.
And to be honest with you, I mean, we make mistakes.
We all are sinners and we fall.
But I thought you handled your situation with enormous courage and honesty.
And I just would like to give you a chance to address it before we talk about that.
Can you explain to the audience what happened?
Sure.
I mean, I messed up in a big way.
I broke my vow of celibacy.
I fell in love with a woman.
We had a child who has Down syndrome.
So I left the priesthood.
We got married and we're married and we're raising the child who's actually now 20 years old.
He's a young man.
And yeah, I just did what I thought at that moment was the responsible thing to do and tried to man up, if you will, to what I had done.
But it was a real mistake.
I'm not trying to whitewash that either.
And I don't think because of that, you have to question all celibacy rules.
I don't use that as kind of a lever to try to blame institutions.
It was my own mistake, and I'm trying to make good with it.
Yeah, listen, like I said, everybody makes mistakes.
Not everybody owns up to it and does the right thing.
So you're not disgraced here, I'll tell you that.
Thank you.
So let me ask you, you're Bright Bart's man in Rome, and you've written a book on the coming persecution.
And where are we now with this?
When you say the coming persecution, is Christianity highly persecuted or is it still fairly strong and safe in places?
Well, it's a great question because obviously the title suggests that it's a future thing, but actually it's a present thing.
The reason that I used coming in the title is because I firmly believe that things are getting worse.
So what we're going to be seeing in the next 10 or 20 years is worse than what we're actually experiencing now.
But things are very dire in lots of parts of the world right now today.
And if you go around the world in a number of nations in Africa, number of nations in Asia, the Middle East, we're very familiar with the last seven years or so with the rise of the Islamic State and all that happened there.
But also, I think particularly your viewers and your listeners are very familiar with what's going on in the United States right now in the West, the post-Christian West, where we see an accelerated persecution of Christians, something that starts in a very, you know, it starts as ridicule.
It starts as, you know, just kind of pushing people off, ostracization, if you will.
But then there's a demonization.
Then there's, oh, you're a bunch of bigots.
You're haters.
You are part of the problem.
You're obstructing progress.
You don't like women.
You don't like gays, whatever it might be.
And then all of a sudden, to paint Christians as the enemy, there's only one step between that and much more active hostility.
As we're starting to see in places as well, both in terms of aggression and in terms of government persecution.
Look at the FBI and its targeting of Latin mass goers or people who protest and pray outside abortion clinics, et cetera.
So I guess the first question I would like to ask is, how did we get here?
Because in my lifetime, this was a very safely, sturdily Christian country.
So how did that fall apart so fast?
And then why do you think it's going to get worse?
Well, it is, I think, scary.
It honestly bothers me more to see what's happening in the West than in places where Christian persecution is kind of a historical fact.
It's something we can look at.
It's terrible.
It's real.
But at least it's understandable in a way.
In the West, it's very scary because this was the great bastion of religious liberty.
This was the Christian West.
This was Christendom until not that long ago, as you say.
And Christians were assumed to be good citizens, solid citizens, trustworthy.
You wanted them.
It wasn't a situation we have now, like we have now, where if you are up for a district court and you happen to be a member of the Knights of Columbus, you're going to get grilled and raped over the coals specifically because of your religious affiliation.
Or as Dianne Feinstein said to Amy Coney Barrett, the dogma lives loudly in you.
This kind of overtly religious baiting of people and the suggestion that you are not going to be a good citizen.
You are not going to be able to adjudicate in an unbiased way because of these strongly held religious beliefs.
And that is a flip-flop from where we were even 20, 25 years ago.
You know, there's a line in the Brothers Karamazov where the atheist, I think it's the atheist brother says, you know, if you stop believing in God and immortality, not only will morality go away, it will actually reverse and the things that were once evil will be good.
It does seem to me like that's happening a little bit here.
Why are we losing that fight?
I think we're losing the fight because there has been, I think, since, at least since the 60s, a very strong progressive agenda, a very patient one, but that's been building block by block, first with the education.
I remember even as a kid, watching what was happening, especially in public schools and attempts to control the curriculum, rewrite history, to rewrite the situation also historically between different peoples and different belief systems, and kind of an undermining both of the American project and of the Christianity that kind of was the backbone of that project.
Even among the founders who were more deist, they assumed a Christian worldview about a creator God, a good world, brotherhood of man.
Even these ideas, the Enlightenment ideas of human rights, fraternity, and equality and things, these were all based fundamentally on a Christian worldview.
These were not based on some ancient Chinese worldview.
These were not based on some atheist worldview.
These were Christian concepts.
And now I think what they've tried to do is unmoor those concepts from their real grounding to be able to cut free the Christian aspect, because Christianity fundamentally is seen as holding back the project.
In other words, we don't necessarily fully embrace gay marriage.
We embrace gay people.
We don't believe in doing wrong to people, but we don't think that that's God's plan for mankind.
We don't embrace the culture of death.
We believe in the inviolable dignity of unborn children.
I mean, there are a lot of things that are looked upon now as, no, those are the last bastions.
And that's why they call us obscurantists.
They say that we have a Bronze Age morality based on this ancient book that really needs to be updated.
And I think that that project has gained momentum over the years.
So it's now that idea of tolerance makes Christianity look intolerant because we won't budge on fundamental issues.
Again, it's not a question of hate, as you and I both know very well, but it's easy to paint as hate the fact that you won't budge on fundamental moral concepts.
So why do you think it's going to get worse?
I mean, why do you look at that situation and think this is we're on the downhill slide?
The reason is I think that the two fundamental aspects, the drivers of Christian persecution worldwide and in the West in a particular way, are growing stronger by the day.
And the traditional defenses and the traditional those who actually stood up for the ideas of religious liberty and the value of Christianity are getting weaker by the day.
And so those two things together spell out to me that the situation is simply going to continue to get worse.
And we've seen it, again, as I say, in a very, very accelerated way in the last few years.
Part of it has to do also with the downgrading of religious liberty, which was always considered America's first freedom.
This idea, it's there in our First Amendment of the Constitution.
Religious Liberty Under Threat00:05:33
It was something that was considered to be special and apart, the inviolability of religious faith, by the way, both in private and in public practice, in being able to speak and to live according to religious belief.
And now, first of all, it was downgraded to be on the same level as other human rights.
So if you're talking about LGBTQ rights and you're talking about religious liberty or conscience rights, we're going to first put them on the same level.
And then we're going to start saying, well, you're actually using this idea of religious liberty as kind of a tool to discriminate.
You're using as an excuse, a justification for your discrimination.
So actually that right loses value.
It actually is less of a right because you're using it in an evil way.
And this is the way, at least, that I see this unfolding.
And once you've done that, you undermine and you make it look like this is just a tool for doing bad things.
And then people, it sounds more and more suspicious every time you invoke religious freedom for anything else you're doing.
So you're covering Rome and the Vatican for Breitbart.
Your stuff is good, by the way.
I really enjoy it.
I highly recommend it to people.
Also, the book, The Coming Christian Persecution, Why Things Are Getting Worse and What You Can Do About It, which is I want to get to in a sec.
When you look at Rome, when you look at the Catholic Church, which is such a mighty voice for Christianity, really of all kinds, what are you seeing right now?
Is it standing firm?
Is it weakening?
Where do you feel they are?
No, unfortunately, it's a really tough beat for me right now, I have to say, covering the Vatican, covering the Pope.
You know, I don't dig into motives and don't dig into people's consciences, but I can just say that externally in terms of policy decisions and in terms of particularly things like with China, I think the Pope has been terrible on these issues.
And I think that he undermines the church's position by, for example, not standing with the underground church in China, by making it look like the Patriotic Association, which we know is state-run, which has always been contrary to Rome, is something on a par with that ancient church, the underground church that's always been faithful to Rome and to the Pope.
Now, these are very, very dangerous things.
And I think that this Pope has played a little fast and loose with some of these basic principles.
And he wants to be accepted.
He is very progressive, I think, in his worldview.
And so I think that he ⁇ the same is true, honestly, with the question of radical Islam.
He said a few years ago, and he's repeated now on several occasions, there's no such thing as Islamic terrorism.
And we know that there is.
And he said that, well, if we talk about Islamic terrorism, we have to talk about Christian terrorism because they both exist.
And, you know, where you can find, I mean, Christians do a lot of bad things, but usually they don't do it in the name of Jesus.
You don't get people saying, praise be Jesus Christ, as they slit somebody's throat on a beach.
It just doesn't happen.
It's not part of the world that we live in, at least not right now.
And if you want to go back and say, well, you did terrible things back in the Crusades or back in the wars of religion, whatever, this is not about history right now.
This is about the world we live in and the way people are behaving and recognizing calling out the reality that is.
The subtitle of your book, The Coming Christian Persecution is Why Things Are Getting Worse and What You Can Do About It.
Pope Benedict had this great line where he said, where he kind of envisioned a church getting smaller, kind of pulling in on itself to get the faithful basically into a cluster and then moving out again.
Is that what you see?
What can you do about this?
Well, that was, yeah, that was a great analogy.
That was, he used that in his book, Salt of the Earth.
And he really believed that the salt is never the majority.
You don't eat like bars of salt.
It's a little bit adds a lot of flavor.
And he really believed that a more purified, radicalized church where people are true believers and live out the faith would do more for the world, the transformation of the world than just a numbers game where you've got masses of people who barely practice, barely know what they believe and why.
That's certainly, I think, part of it.
Although even when Benedict said that, and I don't think he was saying this is our project, it was more forecasting where he thought things were going.
So I don't think we should try to be sloughing off numbers or driving people out, just recognizing this is very probably the way that things are going to be looking.
I think other things, and what I really get at in the book is it's a call for living out Christian virtues, things like courage, things that have been forgotten, memory, looking back to the martyrs, looking back to the example of those who shed their blood for Christ in past centuries.
And all the different virtues that come into play in persecution.
And I think also the other very, very important thing that Christians have to do is stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder with their persecuted brothers and sisters.
Maybe you don't feel it.
Maybe I don't feel it in our day-to-day life.
Maybe it doesn't impinge too much on our existence, but there are many who do.
Do we pray for them?
Do we make known their plight and their situation?
Are we with them?
And I think that finally we have to be champions and warriors for religious freedom.
We have to bring it back to the forefront as something which is really, really important, that everyone should have the ability everywhere in the world to be able to worship God as they understand that to be, you know, according to that faith.
And this isn't obviously a pass or a license to do horrible things.
I'm not talking about biting off the heads of bats.
But to be able to live and worship in a way that serves the common good and that that is a basic fundamental human right.
Religious Freedom Rediscovered00:00:15
And again, America's first liberty.
And I think that that needs to be rediscovered.
The book is The Coming Christian Persecution, Why Things Are Getting Worse and What You Can Can Do About It.
Thomas Williams, thank you.
I really have enjoyed your work and I appreciate your coming on.