Does the Bible Foretell Today’s Conflicts? — Dinesh D’Souza - SF664
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Ladies and gentlemen, Russell Franz Russell trying to bring real journalism to the American people.
Dinesh, thank you so much for joining us today.
It's a real pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
Now, in your new book, Dragon's Prophecy, you interpret scriptural allusions towards what appear to be, you know, well, I mean, I've not read your book, Dragon's Prophecy, yet, but it says here that you are saying that contemporaneous conflicts in the Middle East are connected to biblical prophecy.
Now, even, you know, me as a new Christian going through the Bible just the second time now, when I'm reading, gosh, Isaiah, when I'm reading Daniel, like there's a lot of sort of prophetic literature.
Firstly, you know, like I'm so amazed by how often I feel Christ in there.
I really didn't think I would find that, you know, when I first came to him in Old Testament literature.
But I do also think, oh my God, it's so crazy.
It's talking about sort of basically saying Gaza.
It's talking about places that are in the news today.
What is dragon's prophecy about?
And is it, you know, can you explain it for us?
Sure.
There's a book and there's a film.
The book was actually written by a fellow named Jonathan Kahn.
I made the film that goes with the book.
And I added some elements.
I added some elements in the film that are actually not in the book, notably a kind of exploration of biblical archaeology.
But let's talk about the Bible for a moment because the Bible is a very remarkable document in that it doesn't prove things, it asserts them, right?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And it raises right away in your mind all kinds of questions like who's talking?
So the Bible is a declaration of truth, but it also has this prophetic element.
And by the prophetic element, what we mean is that it seems to foreshadow or forecast things that are going to come in the future.
Obviously, as Christians, we believe that the entire Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, foreshadow Christ, right?
So the Hebrew scriptures anticipate Christ who becomes the fulfillment of those scriptures.
So what we do in this film is really very simple.
We try to look at some of the political and cultural and even the war between Israel and Hamas.
Look at it through the lens of the Bible and ask if the Bible has some interesting things to say about all this.
What does it have to say?
And primarily, what's the center of your assertion in the film?
And forgive my error earlier.
No, no.
So let's look at it.
So you have this battle with Israel and Hamas.
And according to the film and the book, it is the battle we're seeing in front of us is a kind of an eerie replay of battles that we've seen before.
So the author, Jonathan Kahn, makes the point that in ancient times, the most persistent enemy of the Israelites was the Philistines.
The Israelites fought other people, but the Philistines were there from the beginning to the end.
They were the most determined, the most fanatical.
The Bible mentions the Philistines many, many times.
Saul was involved with the Philistines.
David fought the Philistine known as Goliath, and on and on it goes.
Now, interestingly, the name Philistine is in fact connected with the name Palestinian in a very strange way.
There's no attempt to say that these are like the same people or one is the great-great-grandfather of the other.
But what we are saying is that the term Palestinian comes directly out of the name Philistine.
But not only that, there's a kind of odd similarity of tactics.
Let's look, for example, at the biblical hero called Samson.
Samson is the representative of the strength of Israel.
He is captured by the Philistines.
And where do they take him?
Well, the Bible says they take him to Gaza.
So Gaza is in the Bible.
It was one of the five cities of what was then called Philistia.
And interestingly, when Samson gets to Gaza, the Bible says that the people of Gaza said, strip him and bring him out so that he can entertain us.
And interestingly, again, after October 7th, captives who were taken to Gaza were brought out.
Some of them were stripped down to the waist.
They were paraded.
And you see all these people highly entertained, celebrating Allahu Akbar.
And so what the premise here is that what we are seeing in front of us is not just a one-off, it's not just an historical event.
To some degree, it's an event that is biblically evocative.
We have the feeling we've been there before, and the conflict is conducted in the exact same place.
I mean, Philistia is where Gaza is now located.
And so the idea here is to expand our minds and to try to think of these things not simply as events in front of us, but rather as events that are part of an unfolding of a grand biblical narrative.
That's good.
I am don't, obviously, I don't, obviously, but I don't speak Hebrew.
So I don't know what word is used in the original text for Philistia, but I did hear, but obviously there's, for an English speaker, an etymological resonance between this word Palestine and the word Philistine.
But I wonder, I thought I'd heard somewhere that the term Philistine was one of those labels that had been conjured by the opponents of the tribe rather than the tribe themselves, rather, like the word Hindu, for example, being a word that had come from sort of rivals and is sort of a very generic and initially derisory term.
Or even Welsh, you know, as someone from the UK, the word Welsh means something like them over there.
So what is the philological root of the term Philistine?
So the real issue is historical and not etymological.
And here's what I mean by that.
I'm not actually sure where the original term Philistine came from, but let's just take it that this is the term in the Bible.
It is obviously given in Hebrew.
It is then later rendered into Greek.
That's the sound of it, Philastine or Philastini.
But here's the point.
When the Romans came in, they were faced with some Jewish revolts that actually occurred over a period of about 300 years.
And the Romans became very annoyed.
And to punish the Jews, the Romans said, we are going to take the name of your ancient enemies, the Philistines, and we are going to rename your land.
So it's no longer going to be Israel or Judah.
It is going to be Palestine.
So that is the way, historically, in which the word Philistine became transported into Palestine.
And then later is picked up by Yasser Arafat.
You know, you have to fast forward 2,000 years for The Palestine Liberation Organization.
That's the connection between Philistine and Palestine.
Yes, Dinesh, thank you, thank you.
Although, of course, etymology and history will, of course, align because, in a sense, etymology is the history of words.
So, in this, they're sort of analogous disciplines.
Naturally, now, my interest is this: that whenever we are using scripture to tell a story, which I guess is all any of us are doing to some degree, we have to be cautious as to whether we are submitting very profound spiritual truths to cultural forces, even if they're powerful geopolitical ones.
And I suppose when I hear just your own brief appraisal of the subject of the film, I can see how that narrative would be very appealing towards, you know, given the nature of contemporary geopolitical conflict and how divisive Middle Eastern war is right now, that almost how much we can tell of each other, whether we say Israel versus Palestine or Israel versus Hamas or what we would talk about,
how we would describe the 20th century conflicts that led to the establishment of modern Israel, whether modern Israel and biblical Israel can be rightly regarded as the same entity, what the function of the nation state is.
And all of those questions are pretty profound.
And I've never really got anywhere with anybody of any benefit by analyzing those terms.
But one thing I will say is that my understanding of the word prophecy is that it's not about the future, it's about beyond time, that there are deeper truths that trans traverse time, that are more profound than time.
And when I'm as any sane person would, reflecting on what might be a resolution to this seemingly unending and ancient conflict, I do often consider the way that our Lord addresses his chosen people throughout the books of the Old Testament.
And it seems to me that he's pretty overall peeved, miffed, irked by the conduct of the Israelites.
And I wonder how one might interpret Yahweh's relationship with his chosen people, his disappointment, even with like, you know, the Nazarene Samson there, like how we might look at God's relationship with his chosen people and how we might be able to perhaps find common ground in this endless and detestable conflagration in that region, which seems to do nothing but divide.
And yet, somehow, don't we have to participate in finding a solution, a conclusion, a truce, a peace?
We absolutely do.
Let's begin with God, God's relationship with the Israelites.
And you also refer to the way that Jesus, for example, looks at the Jewish environment of his own time.
And you'd have to say that the relationship is troubled, is perhaps putting it mildly.
It is acerbic, confrontational, at times denunciatory on both sides, by the way.
The Israelites abandoned God.
They started worshiping the idols.
And it happens again and again and again.
I have to say, as someone who is a student of different cultures, you know, Russell, in just about every other culture and religious tradition, the religious and sacred books are very triumphalist.
You know, the heroes are great.
They never do anything wrong.
All the bad stuff is suppressed.
The Bible is so unusual in the sense that if you remove God from it, you would think that anti-Semites wrote it, right?
By that, I mean that the heroes of the Bible are almost all of them highly suspect characters.
Abraham is passing off his wife as his sister.
You know, David is engaged not just in adultery, but in effect murder by sending Bathsheba's husband to the front line.
So these are hardly, on the face of it, admirable figures.
Jesus could not have been more tempestuous about the religious authorities of his day.
And yet, I think the strange thing about the Bible is that you get the sense that the covenant is held together not on the human side so much as on the divine side.
That God is always saying, and yet I'm not giving up.
And you know, I want to destroy the earth, but and yet I'm going to get no end to the boat.
You know, I'm going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, but hey, the Israelites, you're still my people.
So you've got this very strange, fraught, antagonistic relationship.
And it has to be interpreted both on the spiritual side and on the, you could call it the earthly side.
I'm relying here on Augustine's distinction between the city of God and the city of man.
And here's my way of kind of getting out of all this: it is that I do believe, you know, when people use the phrase replacement theology, that in the city of God, the new covenant does replace the old.
Jesus does make everything new.
Once Jesus dies and is resurrected, there is no other way to heaven except through Jesus.
I think this is all Christians of all stripes believe this.
A separate question is what happens on the city of man.
So God makes certain types of land promises, for example, to Abraham.
As far as I can tell, he never takes them back.
They're not conditional promises.
And not only that, but they can't be, right?
If you and I go out and buy a piece of property, it's not conditional.
We own it forever.
We can give it to our descendants.
If it was conditional, we would never have owned it at all.
We would be like renters or lessees, but we wouldn't, in fact, own that land.
And so I think this distinction between the actual piece of land that God goes, okay, this is yours, is separate from the kind of new covenant and the new era that is spiritually inaugurated by Jesus.
That inauguration seems to explicitly, I mean, primarily, I suppose, in the book of Revelations and in some of Paul's writing, imply that there can be no lasting peace till the branch is grafted back onto the tree.
And should I wonder, therefore, our fundamental and primary efforts as Christians be the evangelical and devout attempt to bring the word and to bring the benefits of baptism to the chosen people as an absolute priority.
As Christians, should, and this is a question, should our position not be forming political alliances with Israel on the basis of what looks like geopolitical expediency, but a theological devoutness towards what appears to be God's explicit will in the very books that we're discussing now and that you're using for all of your argument.
Well, I think we have to make a distinction between what we as individuals should do and also as a church and also what nation states do.
By the way, you saw this distinction very clearly, for example, when Erica Kirk said about Charlie Kirk, you know, she says, I forgive the man that did this, right?
And then Trump, on the very same day on the very same platform, basically goes, I believe in an eye for an eye.
I'm not sure I would be that forgiving.
And I don't think, by the way, that the assassin should be given a kind of free pass because he should be held accountable to the law, right?
So we can simultaneously exercise our Christian prerogatives as individuals and at the same time insist that the state carry on its job and its duties as a state.
So I would say that if, you know, if I was a civil magistrate in charge of the United States, I would try to make political, beneficial alliances.
I would recognize I live in a dangerous world.
There are good guys and bad guys.
There are friends and there are enemies.
There may not be permanent friends or permanent enemies, but there are people who are friendly to you at a given time and for a given purpose.
So I think that that is separate from saying that you, Russell Brand, I Dinesh D'Souza, we do have the Great Commission.
We are supposed to go out and preach to the world.
We are supposed to testify Jesus.
I mean, if you look at this film, The Dragon's Prophecy, there are a lot of things that will have Jews cheering about it because it shows archaeologically the presence of the Jews and their ancestral homeland.
But the movie is explicitly Christian.
It ends with my wife Debbie and I, you know, basically splashing in the River Jordan and getting baptized with Christian music playing in the background.
So there's no effort here to withhold the evangelistic mission that we have as Christians.
And I think that is separate from our political duties and certainly our duties of statesmanship in the world.
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Yes, because now that you've touched upon the death of Charlie Kirk, one of the, you know, I met Charlie a few times, but didn't know that much about him other than he was conservative and Christian and remarkably bright and a brilliant debater and communicator.
But the sort of posthumous Charlie Kirk is, I think, whether you admired and loved Charlie Kirk or detested him, you would have to accept that the object of posthumous Charlie Kirk has become a different entity and is functioning culturally in a way that I just would not have foresaw or imagined possible, really.
And to unpack that a little, Dinesh, what I'm seeing, and Charlie Kirk is a good away as making this point as anything, I suppose, is this endless fracturing and fragmentation, these attempts to purpose and utilize Charlie Kirk's death for a number of causes.
But why I'm so blessed and pleased to bask in the light of our Lord is partly because, you know, as you said, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis have done my thinking for me.
Not that I need to disengage now, but my position where it differs from the position of Jesus Christ is a position that's not super worth contemplating.
So what I wonder is, is in this sort of complexity of this endlessly fractured and fracturing, fragmenting time that's likely to get kind of worse because of the way that the social media is unfolding, and yet the alternative is unthinkable, centralized control over social media.
Who do you want to give that authority to?
Me personally, no one other than Christ.
I feel now more than ever, we must be clear that our love of Christ can't be collapsed into a similar devoutness and dedication towards any political movement or political project.
In fact, it seems to me that our Lord, as you've already mentioned, was against Pharisaism and Babylon more than really anything else.
And I think that I feel the sense, perhaps as all Christians do, of his return.
I feel it viscerally, corporally, intimately, and personally.
And I also feel it apocalyptically that we are approaching end times because I can't imagine how much longer this Luciferian real-time Babylon could continue for Dinesh.
Now, I know you know a lot more about this than I do.
So do you feel therefore that even, as you said, that the Great Commission might now come to the very forefront and separate political projects about, well, let's just, you know, render unto Caesars.
I mean, I feel that that was a derisory.
Have your coin, have your little lump of matter.
How do you think we should be seeking to resolve tribal conflicts in this country over an object like the death of Charlie Kirk, the emergence of new polarities, even in what was for a minute a pretty tight space?
Candice Owens and the Turning Point being perhaps just the most obvious example, but Tucker Carlson and who knows who will be next to be sort of pulled out.
And the reason I suppose these two issues are somewhat connected, and then gosh, and this is a genuine question, is like, I wonder if people that obviously support and love Israel, like you, and I love Jews, and I certainly don't contest that Israel shouldn't have a homeland.
Is there an opportunity for a kind of a loving embrace to not a loving embrace?
What I'm going to say is a kind of an iteration of what's available in scripture and how that might be applicable now when it comes to orienting ourselves towards peace, both when it comes to this ongoing and endless battle that we've referred to and described in the first part of our conversation, and secondary, but in a way, somewhat significant, cultural clashes, such as the turning point Candice.
How are we going to bring about peace, given that the Prince of Peace is who we worship?
Well, I saw your questions have such a, they are so sinuous and they go in so many directions.
I'm a bit like the mosquito in the nudist colony.
I'm not sure where to begin.
There's so much to say, but let me try a few thoughts.
The first one, the first one is that the Bible will forecast certain things, like the end times.
I think we have to be very cautious because the book of Revelation is, for anyone who reads it, it's quite deliberately obscure.
It's deliberately veiled.
It's not obvious.
It doesn't read like, for example, the Gospel of Matthew, which is written in a straightforward narrative voice.
For me, I'm not into the kind of reading of the entrails.
I don't try to tell you what's going to happen like month by month or year by year.
What I will be looking for are the really big signposts.
So, the fact that the Jews who were scattered over a couple of thousand years came back, as is repeatedly predicted in the Bible and undeniably predicted thousands of years ago.
And not only that, it qualifies as one of those really great predictions because predictions are good if they're extremely unlikely, right?
If I were to tell you, toss a coin and I'm going to call heads, that's not a very good prediction because there's a 50% chance you're going to get heads anyway.
But when the Bible makes implausible predictions and they come true, you got to pay attention.
So, I pay attention and I say, Yeah, it does seem to me that we are somewhat in the last, you could call it last epoch or the last era.
How it's going to play out, I don't really, I don't really know.
Now, I also agree, you know, when you mentioned Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk was a good guy, and he was a good guy who was kind of caught in the middle.
He was caught in the middle because his organization had an older group of donors who were pro-Israel, by the way, mostly a combination of like Jews and evangelical Christians.
And then he is in an environment where younger people are a little bit more anti-Israel.
And so, Charlie was like the kind of entrepreneur trying to keep these two groups kind of together.
And so, this is an understandable kind of challenge.
I don't agree with Charlie when he says things like, you know, my donors were threatening me.
They're not threatening you.
It's not your money.
It's their money.
They don't have to give it to you.
There are many other worthwhile organizations.
If you want to keep their money, you're going to have to listen to them.
That's the nature of having a non-profit institution.
I also think that, and I was at the Charlie Kirk funeral right up there in the front.
Some of the rhetoric I think was inappropriate.
And by inappropriate, what I mean is it elevated, it almost took Charlie as a secular martyr and put him in the same zone as Jesus Christ himself.
And a number of people did that in one way or another.
Tucker did that.
You know, when Tucker said, Hey, listen, I can think of these guys and they went after Jesus for the same reason that people went after Charlie.
The answer is no.
It was not the same reason.
The Jews killed Christ for a completely different reason than Charlie Kirk was killed.
Not to mention the fact that Christ came to earth to die, which is not the same as Charlie Kirk.
And so this kind of facile analogy of Charlie and Jesus, you know, doesn't really work for me and kind of offends, but it doesn't offend me because Tucker used the word hummus.
It offends me because I think it raids the example of Jesus to make the analogy in this way.
Yes, I think comparing anyone to Christ, other than inso much as Paul says, that we might through annihilate, as John the Baptist says, and as Paul says, that through getting smaller, getting less, we may experience Christ more.
And I got to say, Dinesh, it's this sort of these mystical and personal encounters with Christ that are overwhelming me lately.
The mystery of Christ, the mystery of a present visceral, interior Christ is overwhelming me.
And I'm really like learning how to deal with that right now as best as I can.
The other thing that I want to bring to you as a fellow Christian and as an educated man is when I came to the Lord aged 50, near enough, I suppose, I was pretty counterculturally well-versed, not academically.
I'm an autodidact, but I can interpret information quickly, not necessarily correctly, but quickly, and I can assimilate information pretty quickly.
And I've read somewhat the Maharabhata, and I've read somewhat the Vedas, and I've read somewhat Sufism and a lot of philosophy.
I've impacted and compacted and consumed quite a lot.
And when I came to scripture and found that there was nothing wanting, I was kind of alarmed because I was expecting fables and fairy tales and sort of wan, diluted, ethical philosophy that I thought was going to offend me.
And when it was so awesomely psychedelic and so profound, and when you said what you said about the book of Revelations, for example, about it being opaque, I took the way that I'm experiencing, say, the comparable philosophy prophecy in e.g.,
Ezekiel or Daniel, and the obvious and presumably deliberate resonance and rhyme with Old Testament prophecy in the book of Revelation is that there is a language of symbol that must be accessed necessarily if you're going to transcend the limits of limitations of language,
not just when it comes to translation between languages, but when it comes to interpretation between the mind of God and the mind of man.
My ways are not, your ways do not conform to the patterns of this world.
So when I'm reading Revelations, when I'm reading all of the books of the Bible, I'm reading it, you know, in the order that we were given it in post-Nicene Council, and I am struck by how explicitly it says both in both Testaments, evil is in control of the world.
Most recently, in the first epistle of John, towards the end of that book, chapter five, evil is in charge of this world, he says.
And then he and then, and I think deliberately, obviously, deliberately, but interestingly, don't worship false idols.
I think we live in a culture of false idolatry.
I think all false idolatry begins in self.
This is the one area that we've touched upon in our 30-minute conversation now, Dinesh, where I am an expert: addiction.
Addiction is just extreme attachment, extreme attachment.
Everybody is overly attached.
And I would say attachment is, you know, an Eastern word that encompasses the same territory as false idolatry.
Evil is in charge of the world.
Do you agree with that?
If evil is in control of the world, does it matter whether the Lord is using Nebuchadnezzar or David or Saul?
Does it matter?
Does it matter when Christ is Lord and King?
Isn't this a time for us to absolutely ensure that we do not afford people the ability under the guise and veil of politics to engage in false idolatry and further sin?
At least in our discourse, Dinesh.
I agree completely.
And I also think that this is the radicalism of the Bible.
By that, I mean that if you go back to the culture of the ancient Greeks and you take, for example, Socrates or Aristotle, even Plato, they have a shared assumption.
And the shared assumption there is that vice equals ignorance.
In other words, the idea here in Socrates is that if you do something that's wrong, it's because you don't know better.
And that if you knew better, you wouldn't do it.
So ultimately, Socrates spends a lot of time in the intellectual task of trying to teach you what the right path is because he assumes that if you knew what it was, why would you go anyplace else?
Now, contrast this with the statement in Paul, where Paul says, the good that I would, I do not.
And the evil that I would not, that I do.
So, what Paul is saying is: you don't have to tell me what's right or wrong.
I actually know, but my will is perverted.
My will is pulling me in the wrong direction.
I am choosing to do what is bad.
And this is a much more profound idea.
And it's the idea, I think, at the root of the Bible that the great clash in the world is not between ignorance and knowledge, it's a clash between good and evil, the forces of good, the forces of evil, and ultimately a cosmic battle between God and Satan.
When I use the phrase the dragon's prophecy, the dragon is a reference to the devil.
Yes, yes.
And one can see why the classic world is used as sort of formative and foundational for contemporary materialism and atheism.
Because if what you want is for the global imperialist state to replace God as the supreme authority, and that's always been my deepest concern, is that we are through bureaucracy and technocracy, and indeed obviously technology and the utilization of technology, advancing towards global imperialism.
And these tribal conflicts, significant and serious though they are, are merely masks, cudgels, and tools to corral us into the ultimate power of what I'm assuming would be when I consider the dragon, when I consider the beast, I note this peculiar anodyne creature, this bureaucratic and sanitized creature.
I note too that C.S. Lewis, when depicting demons, uses a bureaucracy in the screw tape letters.
It's through bureaucracy that control will be asserted.
And so I feel, Dinesh, that yes, I agree with you that Paul, I think that's in Romans, isn't it?
Where he says, I can't, you know, like, what is it?
I can't manage, I cannot marshal my appetites.
What is that sin?
What is this fallenness?
What is this brokenness?
What is this tendency that I have, like Satan, to, or at least Lucifer, to demand my own dominion, to demand my own closed circuitry, which one might format neurologically, closed circuits of self.
How, other than through Christ, through his divine inward light, a light that's beyond photons, a light not visible to our limited eyes, how do you suppose, Dinesh, that we might invite this into our hearts and into our conversation?
And my intention and nascent understanding, my inchoate understanding, is this is going to be what solves the current political trajectory towards legitimizing authoritarianism through crisis.
That only through the claim that Christ Jesus is available to all of us, that our individual sovereignty is unbreachable and unimpeachable, and that we must peculiarly, given that international socialism might be regarded as one of the primary enemies of Christ, there's a kind of fraternity and brotherhood through his church that we must now achieve.
And I don't know that we can achieve it unless we're very robust in our devoutness and our zeal.
And do you agree with that, Dinesh, or is this the zeal of the newly converted you sent in me?
No, I think that if you were to ask me about what is the what is an important difference today between Christianity and Islam, I would say that Islam has not lost the force of its original revelation.
You have Muslims today of all educational levels and all over the world, and they are pretty much as serious about Islam as the Muslims were in the 8th century or the 7th century.
And you can't say that that's true of Christianity, alas, by which I mean that the force of Christianity, which shaped the West, and the West cannot be comprehended outside of that Christian dynamism that drove it for 2,000 years.
But it looks at least to a lot of outsiders, and I'm not an outsider, but to a lot of outsiders, like Christianity has become a spent force.
That yes, you got some devout believers, you got a Russell Brand, you got a pastor over here.
But as a culture, the societies of the West are not animated by the Christian spirit in the way that they used to be.
And I think we actually need to get a lot of that back.
So it's not just the fire of individual revelation, it's also the cultural fire.
You know, look, people like Columbus didn't get on a boat without having some Christian fire in them.
I don't deny that Columbus may have had, I want to be an explorer, I want to find gold.
Those motives were there too.
But there was also that kind of, let's call it, missionary zeal that comes out of genuine devoutness.
And I think that we need that today to heal our own societies, but also to resist evil in the world.
You aren't Catholic, I don't suppose, or Eastern Orthodox.
So then you must believe in the ongoing decentralization of the church and forms of Protestantism.
And I wonder if that process is at an end.
I strongly believe when I think about even confiscatory tax systems, like in Europe, naturalized American, aren't you?
So in your country, America, I feel, I know that even in the most libertarian hues, the government still plays this sort of central cultural role.
And I feel that perhaps part of the advance in evolution we might make in this fast evolving and advancing time is to assert once more that Christ and his church have to be at the very center of cultural life, that government must be minimized and that the social contract to take care of one another and to ensure fairness and to ensure reverence and stewardship of the land might once again return to the church.
But I don't envisage a centralized church, an imitation of Roman Catholicism, although I love Catholics or Eastern Orthodoxy, although what I know of Eastern Orthodoxy seems pretty mad and gorgeous to me.
What I mean is that the local church should be the heart of the community and government should be minimized where possible.
The obvious proviso, as you know, as Marx observed, is that rampant commercialized global corporatism will devour us like locusts if not opposed.
But I wonder if now we're using the very technology that threatens to destroy us, that if we might advance a spiritually ungirded church, decentralized, communitarily, enshrining the sovereignty of the individual under Christ, the family and the community, and have direct democracy wherever possible, mightn't that be a great salve towards the incessant and unending tribalism that we're discussing in various ways,
whether that's turning point Candace or Israel-Palestine?
How might we do what do you curious about ideas like that?
You know, it seems like people have been advocating in the last few minutes a kind of Protestant philosophy, but you actually haven't because within Catholicism, believe it or not, there is something called the principle of subsidiarity.
And the principle of subsidiarity basically means that things should be scattered to the winds and everything should be done as far as possible at the local level.
Now, if something cannot be done at the local level, then you do it at the state level.
But even the state level is preferable to the national level.
And the national level is preferable to the global level.
So in other words, our sympathies move in concentric circles kind of outward.
So this is, I would say, in some ways a Protestant ethic, but it's also a Catholic ethic, both.
And the only kind of minor qualification I would add is I do think that there's nothing wrong in even having a national ethic in which we are able to unapologetically assert certain Christian principles.
Let me give an example practically of what I mean because we seem to be speaking in a fairly high level.
You know, if you or I were to go to, let's say, United Arab Emirates or Qatar, and we said, we've secured funding.
We want to build 100 churches in your country.
They would say, no.
And then he would say, wait a minute, why not?
What about religious freedom?
Well, you have a lot of mosques around here.
Why can't we?
We're talking about buying private property and putting up our own churches.
And they would go, sorry, pal, this is a Muslim society.
And so we make the rules around here.
We're not saying you can't have a church.
We're just saying you can't have 100 churches because we want to have essentially a certain character and tone of the society as a whole.
And we get to say what that is.
Now, we have lost the ability in the West to do the same thing and to basically say, well, listen, we're not against religious freedom.
We're not against people following their own religion.
But the truth of it is we are a society with a kind of Christian ethic.
Call it Judeo-Christian, call it Christian.
To me, it's the same thing.
Bottom line of it is we get to establish the kind of overall tone and character of the society.
And if you don't want, you don't like it, you're not forced to come here.
But if you do come here, you need to subscribe to our system.
You need to join our club.
You need to live by our rules.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Except when earlier you said, Dinesh, that our Christianity is rather sort of lacking a priapic edge, perhaps not the 100% right word, but I wanted to have a sense of urgency.
That's a well-chosen word, my friend.
You said that mosquito nudist colony thing earlier.
You put nudity in our conversation, Dinesh.
Now, like, you're born in India and naturalized American.
I'm born in England.
And gosh, I can't envisage a time when I go back to that UK.
And I was just thinking about the impact of British colonialism on your mother country there.
And indeed, the sort of problems that occurred after the departure of the UK that I suppose probably to one degree or another continue to this day because of the, if not arbitrary, then certainly not sort of absolute nature of division of territory when undertaken by colonial or imperial or economic or even mineral interests.
I wonder if, is it fair to say that the journey of Christ's church has so often been partnered with imperial interests, probably from the conversion of Constantine onwards.
And I sometimes, before coming to our Lord, I wondered if it was this, you know, this before I came to him.
I wondered if it was the plasticity and the mobility, motility too, of Christianity that somehow contributed to its success as a global religion, but at the expense of its essence, giving us this kind of cordial, sort of diluted version of Christ's church.
And as you say, Islam doesn't have that problem.
If you meet like a white Muslim with a big beard and wearing the outfit, you know what you're dealing with.
If you meet like an African-American Muslim with a shaved head, you know what you're dealing with.
They've kind of, as you said, they've kept the sort of the verb vitality of Islam intact.
And of course, a Muslim would say because it's a superior faith, it's a more recent faith, it's better adjusted to the war, you know, the sort of martial conditions of its inception and I suppose the conflict that continues to this day.
So I wonder if part of the liberation of Christ Church might be a kind of attitude towards secularism that's assertive, in a sense, in the manner that you've just described.
That we should say, well, you know, as Charlie Kirk did, gosh, I just saw a video of it the other day, so it's the only reason I know it.
That, you know, the founding fathers of this country, America, were Christian.
But as you say, it's Christian or Judeo-Christian undergirding that's wrought whether it's the Magna Carta or the Constitution or the writing of pain or whoever.
And so what I would say is, should we as be Christians before all else, Christians before Americans, Christians before English, Christians before whatever nation?
And should we be how far should we be willing to take that?
Should we be willing to take that all the way to look, if America gets in the way of Jesus, Jesus.
If America gets in the, if England gets in the way of Jesus, Jesus is like, I'm following Jesus.
And isn't that the distinction that you've drawn between modern Islam and contemporary Christianity, the one that I've just defined, that it is a priori, that they are Muslims before they are, I don't know, Saudi or Qatari or certainly, you know, one might imagine any Muslims in Western nations.
You know, right during the Iran conflict, and the which culminated in the Trump administration dropping those bombs on the Iran, the nuclear facilities, one of the mullahs was quoted as saying, basically, we don't care about Iran.
We care about Islam.
And that is quite honestly what you're saying in a different way.
And I agree with it completely.
That even though I have no problem thinking of myself as like America first, in reality, I'm not America first.
I'm Jesus first, right?
And it's God, family, and country kind of in that order.
While I am a resolute patriot under certain conditions, I would certainly give my life for my country, which is America.
The truth of it is, I would not betray Christ for my country.
And nor should you, and nor should or would any true Christian.
So, yes, I agree that Jesus is the first priority, and all good things flow out of that.
Since the Westphalian treaty, haven't we all betrayed Christ by allowing him to be subordinate to nation?
I say this is an Englishman who loves England, you know, that the church of England, even obviously, you're a man of letters and words, even syntactically, one can feel the church beneath England in that little idiom, church of England.
You can feel the church quaking under the freight of empire and the cargo of royal might.
She or he that may have been anointed by the oils of Christ, holding a scepter that seems and wearing a crown that subordinates and enslaves him.
Certainly, I would say that one of the things that's excited me since coming to our Lord is that if people are going to use the lexicon vocabulary of Christ, if they're going to use the hermeneutics of Christianity, then we've got some interesting territory on which to operate because I feel like any Christian knows that what Christ is, is love.
He is love.
And what he is telling us again and again is to love one another and to come from a place of peace and to be willing to die for, as he died for us, for what we believe in.
And when, as the early disciples all experienced the sort of a second baptism after the death and resurrection, might this be a time that we, like the church, continually resurrected, that we experience a resurrection of devoutness, a resurrection that, like you said, of the sort of martyr mindset of the Muslim mullah that you just quoted, means that if we don't love Christ unto death, then how much do we love Christ Dinesh?
Yes, I think to me, you know, some years ago, I did a series of debates with a lot of the prominent so-called new atheists, people like your countrymen or your Christopher Hitchens and many others, the philosopher Daniel Dennett.
Wow.
And they were, and the way that these guys were portraying Christianity, they were basically saying that Christianity elevates the sort of commitment to Christ over everything else.
And it ignores all these other legitimate commitments to our country, to our family.
Now, when I first read the great work called The Pilgrim's Progress, there's a wonderful opening scene where the young pilgrim, his name is Christian, and he meets this guy called Evangelist.
And Evangelist says to Christian, fear the wrath to come.
And Christian is like, what are you talking about?
And the evangelist says, look over there, look over there.
And Christian looks, but he doesn't really see anything or he doesn't see anything all too clearly.
But his mind is made up.
And so he begins to sort of pack his things and to get ready to go on the spiritual journey.
Now, here's where the plot gets really interesting because his family and his neighbors come to him and they go, you're crazy.
You're nuts.
Are you actually going to abandon your family?
Are you going to abandon all your other commitments in life and go following some light that you don't even really see?
And then John Bunyan writes, But Christian took the index fingers of both hands and put them into his ears and rushed into the street shouting, life, life, eternal life.
The point being here that when it comes to the divine light and the priority of Christ, everything else becomes secondary, including the legitimate claims of his bleeding wife and his needy children and his neighbors.
Where are you going?
When will you be back?
Christian is like, well, I'll be back, but the most important thing for me to do right now is actually to follow the light because that's how I save my immortal soul.
And that is, I think, a priority that as Christians, we don't want to lose sight of.
Otherwise, we're just hopeless facsimiles of the soul anyway.
You know, if we are not in Christ, if we are not willing to block out the senses, shut down the olfactory distractions, then what are we anyway, other than the playthings of Satan, who, as we've said again and again in this conversation, is king of this world, as it says in all of the temptations, as it says in Revelations, as it says in the letters of John, as Paul repeatedly says, but most notably in Ephesians, he's in charge.
Satan is in charge of the world.
So that means the institutions.
Now, I'm a person that I've moved through some institutions now, Dinesh.
I've moved through institutions like Hollywood, British television, British media.
I've had some flirtations, one might say, with government and the judiciary.
And it's my, I feel it and I see it.
He is in charge.
Satan, in a thousand different ways, whether that's through flesh or whether it's through mentality, without the full armaments, without wearing the girdle of truth and the granted breastplate of righteousness, without that helmet of salvation to stop my own mind going crazy, I can't bring the good news to anyone and I can't defend myself and I can't fight in this battle.
So, I'm going to, thanks once again for giving me a praise on John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Process.
I've picked it up a couple of times, and for some reason, you know, when you try and read something you've been told to read, you're like, I need you to be better, not better, easier to read, or more rewarding more quickly.
I don't know, man.
I used to be a heroin addict.
I need quick stimulation.
I'm probably like that mosquito in the nudist colony that you described earlier.
So, I guess what I feel like is, and it's in a sense, it's the same question again and again and again.
And I know, like, I'm grateful to talk to you because some of your political documentaries have made real waves, notably, obviously, Mule.
It sounds like Dragon's prophecy is going to be an impactful film.
I just want to get beyond tribalism and quibbling, and I want to get to the place that you're describing there in Pilgrim's Process of Life, Life, Eternal Life, because I can't be a father to my children or a husband to my wife without Christ.
Without them, I'm a denizen of Satan's mad realm.
I'm just, you know, like Paul, and that's good company to be in.
I do what I don't want to do, and I won't do what I'm supposed to do.
So, and like the thing is, is here we are.
You know, we are online pundits for better or for worse.
We're in this thing, you know.
If some clip goes viral, if we say something interesting about Candace Owens and Turning Point right now, or Charlie, God rest his eternal soul, or Trump, or whoever it is in the news cycle, or Joe Rogan saying there could be an AI Christ.
I'd say that sounds like an AI antichrist myself.
You know, it could be seen by thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people.
And I feel that other than awakening in them a reverence and relation, a reverent relationship with Christ, there's not a great deal else I can offer people.
Christ is the ultimate answer, but I also think that in the Christian tradition, there are some resources that allow us to get along even in Satan's domain, which is the earth.
And we do that by holding on to some things like the natural law.
So, the natural law, I think, is the law of conscience.
It is a law that we all have as human beings.
Think of people, for example, who are not Christian.
By and large, they still have a moral compass.
In fact, we couldn't punish them for doing bad things if they didn't, because they do know internally the distinction between right and wrong.
We do have in the Hebrew scriptures the Ten Commandments.
It's probably not a complete sort of chronicle of all morality, but it's pretty good, 10 rules to live by.
And obviously, if the world lived according to the Ten Commandments, it would be a happier and more peaceful place.
And so, I think that there are ways, even in this kind of curse domain that we call the earth, for us to get along, even with some of the people who are not in our camp theologically by appealing to some of these common moral principles.
Well, yes, I mean, indeed, for a moral compass to work, it would have to be detecting and reading an irrefutable magnetic field, an absolute and universal law, the same way that a regular compass works.
And that would be the same, I suppose, as Mosaic law saying no other gods first, nothing.
Not your father, not your mother, not your reproductive organs, not no screen, not no cultural artifacts, certainly not these mad, crazy high altars and these weird antennae that detect and direct your energy so peculiarly.
Might ask a few sort of more contemporary questions.
What did you think about the Joe Rogan AI Jesus?
He sort of just said in a podcast the other day, Joe Rogan, who seems to be getting interested in Christianity, certainly, and he's going to church, I understand.
He said, like, you know, what's more virgin than AI?
Do you think that AI is more likely to take us to Christ or an Antichrist?
Well, I would say that AI is, as far as I can see, thoroughly amoral.
And by amoral, what I mean is that it is quite possible to populate AI with all the empirical knowledge in the universe, all the historical knowledge, all the commentaries that have ever been said.
And AI can process, regurgitate, interpret.
But what I'm asking you is, does AI have a conscience?
And if so, where does it come from?
It doesn't.
It can't.
And so for these reasons, I think we can use AI as a tool.
But if we are looking to AI to supply our morality, I would say we're looking in the wrong place.
Secondly, when you were having that conversation with Hitchens and Daniel Dennett et al., men that I admire, that I've not met, I've sort of spoken to Sam Harris, I've spoken to Richard Dawkins, I've spoken to many competent, confluent, and brilliant atheists.
What position do you find to be most effective when dealing with atheists?
And what scripture and what positions and what flaws, problems, and contradictions in materialism do you find are most useful, Dinesh?
I would begin by saying that I think that for some, but not all, of these eloquent atheists, that upon probing, you discover that they are wounded theists.
And by that, I mean it's not that they don't believe in God.
They have a beef.
They have a rage.
They have an issue with God.
The issue could be personal.
It could be philosophical.
They're angry with God.
And so the anger is camouflaged as unbelief.
Because in a sense, the anger by itself is if you say, okay, God, I'm against you, but I have no ability to overthrow you.
There you are sitting on your throne.
There's nothing I can do about it.
In a sense, your best revenge is just to say, I don't believe in you.
And so I want to put that on the table because in my experience, having been pretty close to some of these guys, Hitchens particularly, I often ask myself, is this really what is driving him wounded theism rather than atheism in the classic sense?
The second thing I found with a guy like Hitchens is that you had to earn his respect by making a point that he never thought of.
And if you did, he would then scratch his head and be willing to listen to you.
And so I, for example, one time I think I got through to him was he was making an argument that goes back to Sigmund Freud, where he was saying that religion is wish fulfillment.
We believe in heaven because we all want to live in adult Disneyland.
We all want a world better than the one we have now.
And so we kind of make up or conjure this imaginary world.
And I said to him, I go, well, that would in fact indeed explain the Christian idea of heaven.
I go, but how would you explain the Christian idea of hell?
I go, hell is worse than anything on earth.
Why would anybody make that one up?
And yet the Christian idea of hell has gone alongside the idea of heaven from the very beginning.
Eternal damnation is much worse than anything we could experience in this life.
So tell us why a group of people cooked up that one.
And he was like, hmm.
I don't think he had quite thought of it.
It caught him by surprise.
And I could kind of see him wrestling with it.
He may have mumbled an S-H-I-T like under his breath.
And we were kind of fast friends after that.
That's lovely.
That's reassuring because I've always admired Christopher Hitchens.
I never had the privilege of meeting him.
May God rest his soul.
Not that he would thank us for saying that.
But I also detect in phenomenal intelligence as something that is so like our Lord that it seems that it really merely needs to be turned inwards.
Dinesh D'Souza, thank you so much for joining us today.
We'll put a link in the is your is it I guess it's you a movie you can watch online, right?
It's not something people have got to get up off of their redundant blubbery and wander to a multiplex to see dragons prophecy.
They can go see dragon's prophecy or wicked 2.
It's going to be online, right?
Yeah, I'll give you the website.
It's thedragonsprophecyfilm.com.
The dragonsprophecyfilm.com.
And you can watch stream it or you could get DVDs right off that site.
I might watch it.
Mostly I like the idea of you and your wife frolicking in the Jordan.
I've never been to Israel.
I'd like to go.
Is it good?
It's well worth going because it is, well, you have to go with a kind of a mission.
And the mission we went with is we were like, we've heard about all these remarkable discoveries in biblical archaeology that thousands of years later are taking people who are only in the Bible.
They've been in the Bible for centuries.
And now they are jumping into the pages of history, like by the pathway of archaeology.
So if you go in search of that, I think you'll find it endlessly fascinating.
What's the best one?
What's the best example of someone leaping out of archaeology in a scripture?
Pontius Pilate.
So Pontius Pilate was for 2,000 years in the Bible, but he was only in the Bible.
There was no extra biblical or non-biblical verification.
A couple of other people referenced him, but they're unreliable sources.
And then while they're digging in the area called Caesarea Maritima, Caesarea by the sea, out comes a stone tablet out of the ground and written on it, Pontius Pilate, prefect of, I don't know if it's a prefect of Israel or Prefect of Judah.
But anyway, the point is it made it really clear this was Rome's man in Israel.
And in fact, it gave him the exact same title that he was assigned in the Bible.
And suddenly Pontius Pilate is now an accepted historical figure.
I could give you a dozen examples, but that's just one notable one.
That was good.
That got here.
That might have been my favorite hit out of our whole chat, which I've really, really enjoyed.
And I'm reminded of a British comedian called Frank Skinner, who was a cradle Catholic who came back to his faith later in life, said that when he was like thinking about coming back to Christianity, that he sort of like was thinking about it and reading about it.
And he eventually went and met his church to talk to a priest.
And the regular priest weren't on.
And they had some old guy there that was stepping in that was an older priest.
And I feel like Frank Skinner describes him as wearing like a hearing aid and being a little bit sort of old and maybe not fully present.
And Frank Skinner was describing all of his sort of esoteric struggles with faith and morality and the church and who knows what.
And the old guy just went, come back.
You want to come back?
Come back.
Come back.
I didn't attempt to do it intellectually at all.
I kind of like that.
It bypasses the intellect, huh?
Absolutely.
No, sometimes that's all it takes.
Yeah, thanks, man.
Thanks, Dinesh DeSouza.
Well, I wish you well with your film and thank you for making time for me today.