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Feb. 11, 2025 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

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BREAK BREAD EP. 14 - PAUL KINGSNORTH

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	Not always taking the Eucharist or communion, because sometimes there are ecclesiastical, liturgical, there are reasons not to.
	Today's one of those days, because I'm speaking with Paul Kingsnorth, who is an Orthodox Christian, baptized into the Romanian Orthodox Church.
	Seems extraordinarily particular and specific, but I actually live in the UK, so I know one Romanian Orthodox Church on Fleet Street.
	I'll be interested to talk about that.
	In addition to letting you know why it is that I'm so fascinated to speak with Paul, I started reading Paul's journalism during the pandemic, and it was an almost uniquely insightful take into some of the metaphysical connotations of what was happening during the pandemic.
	As well as the way that many of the unfolding narratives were masking what appeared to be an ulterior desire to acquire and implement Then I learned more about Paul, and it's this quote that I like about Paul, who's a distinguished writer, environmentalist, poet, and environmentalist, and writes about globalization and cultural identity.
	It's this quote that perhaps will help you understand why I'm fascinated with Paul.
	After years of atheism, I went searching for the truth.
	I found Buddhism, then witchcraft, and eventually Christianity, a sort of a journey that I can somewhat...
	Relate to, at least.
	Paul, thanks for joining us for Break Bread today.
	Yeah, it's good to be here.
	It's been a few years.
	Yes, it has.
	And, oh, Paul, man.
	Like, this week I've been talking a lot about...
	I'm just off the back of talking about, for example, Trump signing an executive order to protect women's sports, right?
	And then, like, J.K. Rowling's sort of positive response to that.
	And I feel like, isn't the cultural war in some of its most lurid manifestations an indication that we are all looking for some kind of supreme moral authority upon which to rely?
	I would say probably it is.
	And I wonder, in an issue like this one, how would you align the principle of compassion, tolerance, openness, I wonder how,
	for example, you in your position as a Christian understand the dynamics of that particular aspect of the culture war, gender identity.
	Yes, it's a big question.
	It's actually a really good question because it's almost like this is a wedge issue.
	This is one of the things that really exposes what I think is going on at the moment.
	It's one of those rare cases where Christianity and science seem to agree, actually, come to the same conclusion.
	We know biology is real.
	We know men are real.
	We know women are real.
	We know what that means.
	And then we have this thing called gender identity, which is a construct which can mean any number of different things.
	And these two things have collided and been confused and sometimes been deliberately confused.
	So we've had all the conflict.
	My position on it, not just as a Christian, although it is a Christian position, but as...
	I mean, this is how I felt before I was a Christian, is that not being a fan of Donald Trump particularly, but he's absolutely right on this, and the people who want to protect women in women's sports are absolutely right on this as well.
	You have to draw a line and say, here is what physical and biological reality are, and here is what the impact of denying them is.
	But it gets interesting, not just because you have the wider question of tolerance, like what do you do with people with gender dysphoria who've got real issues?
	What do you do with people who identify as a different gender?
	Because, you know, there's some real distress there.
	But there's the bigger issue of what is reality and what is the ground that we're standing on, which is what we're coming down to, right?
	And I don't just mean in terms of biological reality, because it's the reason that this has been such an enormous flame war is that it is actually...
	It's a moral question.
	It's a spiritual question.
	It's a scientific and a biological question all at once.
	And what it comes down to really is whether we are going to be able to define our own realities or not.
	So the Christian position would be, to put it in Catholic Latin terms, that we are the human is the imago dei, right?
	We have the image of God within us.
	Everyone is a created soul.
	God doesn't make mistakes.
	Here we are.
	We're all specific individual people.
	We're men or women.
	The more liberal position, the individualist position that leads to gender ideology would be you can identify yourself pretty much as whatever you want to identify yourself as because it's a social construct.
	So, for example, your gender identity will override your biological sex and that's the thing that you should take seriously because you get to self-define that.
	So really the question there is...
	Who's defining reality?
	Is it me?
	Do I get to decide what I am?
	Do I get to decide if I'm a man or a woman or what sex I am or maybe what race I am?
	Or are these things immutable?
	And if they're immutable, where do they come from?
	And that's why this is such a big thing, because gender is at the kind of spear tip of the whole kind of liberal individualist project to effectively give us the opportunity to redefine reality.
	So we get to decide what we are.
	And in my opinion...
	Transgenderism slides very easily into transhumanism because you end up with the same kind of...
	You end up with the same worldview.
	If I want to recreate myself, if I want to define myself differently, if I want to merge with my machines, if I want to effectively move beyond embodied reality, then I can do that because I identify as that.
	And if technology can help me to be what I want to be, then that's where we go.
	So as much as anything, it's a question of limits.
	What are the limits?
	How far can we go?
	And who's defining reality here?
	Is it us?
	Is it God?
	Is it science?
	Is it nature?
	Those are the big questions.
	So it's right at the tip of something.
	But because nobody speaks of it in these terms, we all speak of it as if it was just an issue of women's rights, for example, which is important, but actually the big thing is much deeper than that.
	It's about what reality is.
	Yes.
	Indeed, it's an ancillary symptom of a much bigger question as you diagnosed.
	The question being, what is reality?
	And who among us has the authority to make such a declaration?
	And would I be rightful in saying that from a Christian perspective...
	None of us has the authority to make an absolute claim about the nature of reality because we are created in God's image and we are therefore creatures and inhabitants of a reality created by a supreme being rather than ourselves, authors and instigators of reality.
	And isn't a requirement of new human authority precisely the annihilation?
	of that supreme authority and indeed isn't that why the entire argument's taking place even if that aspect of the conversation is as you say obfuscated behind more superficial yet significant arguments about the rights of women and various other arguments that themselves by the way wouldn't I can see
	now why, as you said, there's so much, why it's such a conflagratory issue, because there's a lot of energy in it, not all of which is being correctly explored or even explained.
	Yeah, we're all kind of, I suppose, to a degree fascinated by that subject because it does lead back to who has authority.
	What is reality is a pretty big question.
	Earlier I was saying that as you interface with politics and the culture as an individual, you start to understand and recognise What might be innate or adhered but could be inculcated principles within you.
	I feel like when it comes to, for example, the rather potent and significant matter of raising my children, I feel deeply protective and angry about any kind of interventionism.
	I can't envisage an authority other than God's authority that would be able to adjudicate or intervene when it comes to me and my kids.
	And a really obvious prosaic example of that is I feel like if I want to drive around in my car without having seatbelts on my kids, there is no external agent that has the right to intervene.
	That's my...
	And I would see, you know, that I would afford that same license to anybody else.
	However, I do acknowledge that there are ways in which a parent could abuse their child that would require some kind of intervention.
	However, what authority would that intervention be fueled by if there is no God?
	Or real mandate?
	Consensus derived from mandate?
	And if the culture war is anything, isn't it the kind of unfolding, unfurling and disintegrating of that authority as a result of post-enlightenment values?
	Whether it's take this injection, stay in your house, pay this tax, 15-minute cities now, Labour are going to...
	Tax you in this way, even though they said you...
	Isn't the crisis we're experiencing the loss of any supreme authority other than state authority, which is by its nature questionable?
	Yeah, I think so, big time.
	I mean, the question is about power, right?
	So what is power?
	Where does power come from?
	So I think, going back to what you said before, you could look at the whole of modernity after the Enlightenment.
	As an attempt to abolish God.
	And since the Enlightenment is a Christian project, a European project rather, that's really an attempt to abolish the church and to abolish Christianity and to undermine it as any kind of way of seeing.
	And that's not a conspiracy theory.
	That's just the reality of what's happened.
	Here we all are.
	And the idea was we would remove this giant superstition that wasn't true, replace it with science.
	Science would be the authority.
	Remove all the...
	Tyrannical monarchies, replace them with democracy, and then that would be the authority.
	So we have the authority comes from the people, supposedly, and then from objective science.
	So that's the world we're supposed to be living in.
	That's the world I was brought up in.
	Now, there's a few problems with that.
	Firstly, in the pre-modern period, for better or for worse, the monarchies that existed, or the power centres that existed, claimed, whether it was true or not, they claimed that they derived their power from God, and they somehow represented God.
	Now, there's all sorts of problems with that, but at least it's a claim.
	Now we don't have that claim.
	So we completely strip out the divine layer at the top where authority, at least in theory, gets its power from and brings it down to the people.
	And we put the people on the top.
	That's you and me.
	And we say, right, OK, we're making the decisions.
	In reality, as we know, we're not making the decisions.
	We may get to vote every five years for a bunch of people who are the same as the other guys because it's a giant corporate oligarchy.
	We don't have very much power anyway.
	But even if we did, where would that power be emanating from?
	And then you can look at objective science, and if you want to talk about the pandemic, we can have a good chat about how objective the science was there, but it's much wider than that.
	How much of reality can science actually tell us about?
	It can tell us about a small sliver of it, the material layer, but it can't tell us about anything else.
	It can't give us any meaning.
	So if you strip God out of the picture, there is no one at all who the power centres are actually answerable to.
	So now, in the case of, say, somewhere like Britain, Where the state is...
	You can look at the opinion polls on this.
	People are losing faith in the state.
	They're losing faith in power completely.
	Whoever runs it, it's a disaster zone.
	And why shouldn't they lose faith in it?
	Because where does it get its authority from?
	It doesn't really get it from the people because it never does what the people want.
	It's endlessly clamping down on their freedom of speech and expression.
	It obviously wouldn't claim to get it from God.
	No one would suggest it does that.
	So what legitimacy does it have?
	Seems to me we're coming to a point where having...
	Attempted to replace God with objective science and democracy, however flawed the previous systems were, and they were, we found that both of those things have jammed up.
	Either they don't work or they don't work at this level or they've been corrupted, whatever it was.
	And we look around and we say, OK, what's the source of meaning?
	What's the source of power?
	What's the source of truth?
	And we haven't got an answer to that.
	Except everyone gets to invent their own version.
	Right?
	So I'm my own reality.
	I get to invent my own religion, my own spirituality, my own body, identity, etc.
	And that's a recipe for chaos.
	And so the actual question is, from where does power derive?
	Where does legitimate power derive?
	And if it doesn't derive from some sort of deity, some sort of God, where does it come from?
	And the answer is usually it will just come from raw, brutal power.
	Whoever can seize power will take it.
	That's what's usually happened in human history.
	I think it's quite a unique place that we're in culturally because before the modern period, everywhere on earth, whatever the different religion or culture was, every culture thought that they owed something to God or to the gods.
	They thought they owed something to the realm of the divine which was real and which was intertwined with their life.
	And we pretend that isn't true now.
	We pretend that we can sort everything out ourselves.
	And incidentally, if you want to look at the book of Genesis, that's the offer that the devil makes to Adam and Eve in the garden.
	This is the offer that the snake makes to our ancestors.
	He says, you don't need to listen to God.
	You don't need to obey God.
	You don't need to take your power from above and follow his teachings.
	You can do it yourself.
	You can be gods.
	You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
	That's the offer.
	And that's what we're doing.
	So, I mean, in that sense, it's literally satanic, the offer, right?
	So we're in the point where we replace God's will with human will.
	And so the question is, who do you follow?
	Are you going to follow Christ?
	Or are you going to follow yourself and your own desire?
	And where does that come from anyway?
	And as you say, who has legitimate power over you?
	I don't think there's ever been a human society that hasn't had power wielded in some form.
	But if you think the power is legitimate, you're more likely to accede to it, right?
	I'll follow these rules because they seem like fair rules and I trust the rulers and that seems to be part of my community and the power is coming from above, so maybe the rules are legitimate.
	Now, why should we do anything these people tell us?
	We don't see where their power or authority comes from.
	So I think that's a kind of cultural crisis that's spiralling out across the West.
	And when people ask that question, where does this power come from and who is legitimate?
	They're not finding a good answer anymore.
	No, they're not.
	Because of the sort of bait and switch and sort of gradual placeboing out of the divine, it's kind of as if now we've caught up to what's happened.
	Okay, we're replacing God's power with the power of a mandate derived from consensus and an objective purview derived from science.
	But as you rightly point out, Paul, that's precisely the offering that the serpent offers to the first man and woman.
	And sometimes when you say...
	That there's only a slither of reality that can be analysed by science, the material and measurable aspect of reality.
	I sometimes get this slightly numinous, vertiginous sense that the claim of Scripture to be outside of time and space, I feel it somehow, that the garden is happening now.
	Like Melville wrote, Noah's flood is still upon the earth.
	I feel like we're making that choice now.
	Like the perfect scripture is beyond allegory and beyond history.
	That it's precisely within the realm of a kind of inverted commas, unknowable reality.
	Unknowable at least within the limits of our human power.
	Before you mentioned Genesis, I was thinking about Babel.
	I was thinking that...
	You know, this attempt to reach the territory and heights of God led to this kind of collapse and everyone living within their own individual ideological ecosystem, incommunicative.
	And sometimes I feel, Paul, that the goal of technology, if such a broad thing were possible, were to lay claim materially to that which is only meant to be achieved ethereally, like that communication through technology is kind like that communication through technology is kind of like a telepathy, that we're trying to instantiate and manifest, transfer holy power into human hands.
	But when you actually analyse it...
	It isn't human hands at all.
	And here's a bit of scripture I reckon.
	God, I'd like your take on this.
	Since becoming Christian not so long ago, April the 28th, and a journey that's not identical to yours, but somewhat comparable, pretty interested in mysticism, new age, psychedelics, psychiatry, psychology.
	I'm not an academic person, but nevertheless, I've sort of looked into some areas that seem somewhat familiar from your story.
	The first bit of scripture that no one pointed me to, but jumped off the page and punched me squarely in where my third eye might once have been prior to the ascent of a new...
	What struck me is that it comes when the disciples are returned with gentle hubris from casting out demons and serpents when it was 72, not 12, being sent out.
	And I thought, why is our Lord saying that then?
	Why is he at that point saying, I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning.
	You will move amongst serpents and scorpions because your names are written in heaven.
	And my feeling and sense was, I am like Satan.
	I want my own kingdom.
	I'm like, yeah, I see what you're doing.
	I could run my own thing down here.
	I, Russell, do that.
	And it's interesting when we're talking about the culture, we started talking about an ancillary expression of the attempt to lay claim to God's domain by the culture, i.e.
	the gender identity wars.
	Even something so diffuse, grand and global as that can be mapped onto my apparently subjective individual experience in so much as I want to be in charge of reality.
	I want to decide.
	I mean, perhaps even in my earlier example of I don't want anyone telling me what to do with my kids other than God.
	And I'm negotiating that power, negotiating that power, and for it not to be a kind of, and it's weird because someone like Jordan Peterson would never acknowledge this, that when Foucault sort of equates power with violence, a lot of them post-structuralist, post-modern arguments start a lot of them post-structuralist, post-modern arguments start to sort of make sense in this context too, that there is only, power is I've got the power to force you, That's the only power it is.
	But I, myself as an individual...
	Flirt with that power, and I need God.
	I need Christ.
	Otherwise, I won't wield that power well, let alone that power amalgamated and conglomerated across hundreds of millions of people.
	They're making the claim that they're wielding power on behalf of hundreds of millions of people, and now with the project of globalism that seems temporarily disrupted on behalf of an entire planet.
	I wonder what you think about that verse and your own interpretation of it, how you map that, and then I suppose somewhat, Paul, the relationship between individual sovereignty and sovereignty beyond that.
	Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
	So the kingdom of God is within you, says Christ, and so is the devil all the time.
	So you're exactly right.
	So it's like the fall is happening every minute.
	You're always presented with this temptation and different people are presented with it in different ways.
	How much power do you want to have?
	And can you do it on your own?
	So certainly in the Orthodox Church, the teaching is one of the greatest mistakes you can ever make is to imagine that you're doing anything on your own.
	Because you're not.
	You're doing everything you do with God's permission or without God's permission.
	And that's your choice all the time, which is why you always have to refer back to him.
	So when you become a Christian, certainly for me, since I became a Christian, I've had this...
	It's a strange thing, because in one way I feel the same as you.
	I feel like only God's got authority over me.
	But on the other hand, I feel like I'm paying far more attention to myself than I ever did before, because before I was a Christian, I assumed that the world was in human hands.
	So I was an environmental activist, right?
	So I was spending a lot of time trying to save the world, because I thought that humans were in control of it.
	And in some ways we are.
	We know we can do a lot of damage and we know we can do some good as well.
	So we have this power.
	But on the other hand, the big picture is not ours.
	And once you see, oh, you know what?
	This isn't about us.
	We're created beings.
	There's something else going on.
	We're in the hands of somebody else.
	Then we always have to pay attention to ourselves.
	And the question then becomes, am I walking this road in the right direction?
	All the time.
	So another question that's interesting on authority.
	It's the matter of the church.
	So as you said at the beginning, I've become an Orthodox Christian.
	So the Orthodox Church is really the oldest church, the oldest branch of the church.
	And the Orthodox would say we are the church.
	We can have that argument with Catholics forever, but it doesn't matter.
	It's a very old church, and it's probably the most...
	It's the strictest and most serious church.
	And from the outside, it can look very literally Byzantine, because it literally is.
	And very rigid and the rest of it.
	But actually what it does is it acts as a container for people to walk into.
	I've heard the church described as a spiritual hospital, which I really like.
	So you only go there if you're sick.
	You don't go there if you're a holy man.
	You don't need it.
	You go there if you're a sinner, right?
	Jesus didn't come for the holy people.
	He came for the sinners, which is most of us.
	So you go to the church and the church gives you a container and it says, OK, here's what you do.
	Here's how you fast.
	Here's how you pray.
	Come to the liturgy.
	And here's how you take the Eucharist.
	And here is the teaching of the Church that tells you how to take these understandings from Scripture and actually practice them in your life.
	So you get a spiritual path, and the spiritual path has containers on it.
	So one of the things that I find most useful and terrifying is confession.
	So the sacrament of confession.
	I can go to my priest before the Eucharist, and I can tell him all the things I've done since the last confession that I shouldn't have done.
	Which is usually depressingly the same list of things.
	It just keeps repeating itself.
	But I have to stand there and kind of humiliate myself in front of God.
	God knows it all already.
	But here I am saying, you know what I've done?
	I've done this.
	And the minute I do that, I feel entirely like the burden has been lifted from me.
	Like the blessing has come down upon me.
	Whenever I take the Eucharist in church, I feel completely transformed.
	Even if I've just been sitting, fidgeting through the liturgy for an hour.
	Something will happen.
	So even though the church to some people on the outside looks like this tyrannical authority, it's not that at all on the inside.
	It's a structure that helps me to actually walk the path.
	And that is an authority that I've chosen to recognize because I think it can help me to do that because I think that's what Christ created it for.
	So I have found that really useful.
	And what I do now as well is I tend to judge all the secular authorities by the Christian teaching I learn.
	By the path I walk in the church and I say, well, is this a godly authority or not?
	And what should be the Christian attitude to that?
	I don't think we've got any godly governments in the West.
	So I just try and keep as far away from them as possible.
	But, you know, I still have to obey the law and do the things I have to do.
	But it's not the point.
	All of these things are going to dissolve away anyway.
	So the authority that comes from God through the church is the one that is keeping me sane.
	And actually...
	Lifting, as I say, lifting a burden from me, transforming me, turning me slowly into a different person.
	It's like water dripping on a rock.
	You know, you become baptized, you go into the Christian life, you don't suddenly become a saint, sadly.
	But if you turn around and look at where you were a year ago, and then two years ago, and then five years ago, you think, actually, something's happening here.
	I am changing.
	I'm being changed.
	Because I've given up my authority to God, and I've said to Him, come and change me, because I need it, because I can't do it myself.
	Yeah.
	Hey, if you're watching us on Rumble, we're going to toggle over to Rumble Premium now.
	If you're watching us on Locals, we'll always be on Locals.

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