#807 - Alex O'Connor - Why Is Political Christianity On The Rise?

Chris Williamson
Hello friends. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Alex Oconnor. Hes a youtuber, writer and a podcaster. Christianity is nothing new but its seeing a resurgence in popularity among some unexpected groups, public intellectuals and Gen Z.

What is going on that only shortly after it was cool to be an atheist, its now cool to go to church on a Sunday again. Expect to learn whether we are actually seeing a christian revival. If the new wave of Christianity is just right wing conservatism in disguise, you can choose to believe in God. If new atheism was a failure, why there is not a current muslim revival? What happened to the gospels that were missing from the original Bible?

Whether theres two gods in the Old Testament and much more, I have to say religion, im aware more than half of the planet is religious. So if youre someone who isnt and you kind of forget that thats maybe the most important thing in tons of peoples lives around the world, that's kind of me. And I'm actually getting really interested in having these conversations. I think that it kind of helps to fill in some of the gaps that we've been talking about with this meaning crisis and people struggling and depression and community and all the rest of it. And there are lots of existing solutions that have maybe been forgotten about or criticized kind of out of existence for a lot of people that see themselves as rational.

And now there's this movement coming back around where you're sort of taking it as Christianity as a productivity strategy or as like a lifestyle. Very interesting. And Alex is the man to talk to about this. And the stories about the Old Testament and stuff are to me, fascinating. History of the Bible is so interesting.

It's just, it's story time, but it's real. It's real history, story time. It's so great. I really, really hope that you enjoyed this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex O'Connor.

Three, two, one. What's really funny? The way he's like turn the gate. It's not like someone else doing. It's not someone else going three, two, one.

Alex O'Connor
Right, right. It's like you just, you sort of like, right, you said like deep into the soul. Three, two, one. But you don't have a soul. Alex O'Connor.

Chris Williamson
Easy for me to do it. Yeah, so I'm told. Anyway. Alex O'Connor, welcome to the show. Chris will x, how are you?

I'm good, man. I'm good. Are we seeing a christian revival at the moment? What's going on? Gosh, I love this.

Alex O'Connor
This is something I've adopted, too, the sort of just straight in with the question, you know, none of this Galavan thing around. How are you? How's your day been? Tell us about yourself. You've been in Austin for a week.

Chris Williamson
I don't need to know how you are. Yeah. I mean, these fair people don't know how I am, but they also don't care. So you've struck a sort of perfect balance there. I'm writing an article about this at the moment, which should be out by the time this episode's out.

Alex O'Connor
Who knows? Not I, not this reviewer. But I'm opening with this quote from the Gospel of Thomas, the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, one of those ancient gospels that didn't make it into the New Testament and yet is filled with these wonderful and bizarre stories about Jesus. And at one point in this apocryphal gospel, he condemns some of his followers. He says, you've become like the Jews who either love the tree and hate the fruit or love the fruit and hate the tree.

Some similar imagery in the canonical gospels of, like, by their fruits you shall know them. You know, a good fruit doesn't produce bad. A good tree doesn't produce bad fruits. But interestingly here, you know, people get this criticism all the time. Like, you claim to be a Christian, but you don't really act in accordance with it.

You're nominally a Christian, but you're not displaying the radical compassion of Jesus or something like that. It's a very common criticism that you're not acting in accordance with your beliefs. But we've been seeing this strange reverse phenomenon emerging where you've got people who like the fruits but don't even believe in the existence of the tree. So usually the criticism is like, look, you love the tree, but you're not producing the right fruits. But in this case, you've got an emerging class of thinkers who are unwilling to say that they believe in the actual truth of Christianity and yet are at least Christian adjacent or sympathetic to Christianity or kind of a bit depressed about the fact that everyone isn't christian anymore.

This is your Douglas Murray's, Constantine kissens, Jordan Peterson, to some degree. Andrew Huberman, I suppose. But then he does say he actually believes in God. Right? Okay, so maybe he likes the tree, but the fruit is.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if, I don't listen to much human, but maybe his fruit is fine, is very christian. I don't really know. But in the case of these thinkers, the reason they're interesting is because people talk about them all the time in this christian revival phenomenon. I've got a friend, Justin Brierly, who just wrote a book called the surprising rebirth of belief in why new atheism grew old and secular thinkers are considering Christianity again or something like that. And it's very hopeful, but I think a bit too optimistic because the case studies it points to are the people that ive just mentioned, people like this Tom Holland, the historian who, well, as ive written this article, Tom Holland, not the actor, but in a sense an actor, because he sort of likes to pretend that Christianity is true, even though its not.

The interesting thing about these guys is that they wont say that its true. Theyre unwilling to say that its true. And they call themselves cultural christians. Richard Dawkins, arch archetypal atheist, also, I mean, recently called himself a cultural Christian. He's been doing it for years, but it got a lot of attention recently when it did on LBC, and it's kind of interesting.

So you're going to spend your entire career just lambasting this religious tradition and undercutting the truth value of it and then getting depressed when the cathedrals are empty and being turned into mosques, which is what's happening in England. You may have sort of shot yourself in the foot a little bit there, but there's nothing inconsistent, strictly speaking, with saying that you like going to Evensong, but you don't think any of it's true. So what we're seeing is an emergence of people who are more sympathetic to the christian ideal or what they perceive as the christian ideal, which is a whole other can of worms, but without actually believing in the truth of it. I mean, most believing Christians will say, if you do not believe historically, then a man called Jesus died on a cross and rose from the dead, then your faith is futile and you're still in your sins. As Saint Paul put it to the Corinthians famously.

So these people sort of can't be counted among a christian revival. But I think christians have a lot to celebrate that, at least now the culture is shifting from a sort of new atheism. Christianity is evil and terrible and wrong to, yeah, it might be wrong. We'll sort of brush that bit under the, under the carpet, but try to display the virtuous ethics of Christianity. Although in my case, they're not actually advocating for a christian ethic, they're advocating for a sort of right wing traditional conservatism, which is not the same thing.

Chris Williamson
Just to tie a bow on your previous analogy, when you talk about tree. And when you talk about fruit, what are you referring to? The tree is the belief in God, the sort of christian religion, as it were, and the fruit is the fruit of that belief. So if you're to be a good Christian, you believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And because of that, you believe in a sort of radical philosophy of forgiveness and compassion and charity and asceticism.

Alex O'Connor
And you live that life out to the best that you can in the knowledge that there will be inevitable failure that you can then apologize for. So a lot of people will say, I'm a Christian, but they do none of that. They don't go to church, they don't pray, they don't act like a Christian, they don't show any charity or compassion to their brother or sister. So what do they do? Whatever else they.

Well, they could be selfish. And of course everybody is selfish to some degree, but a Christian likes to regularly remind themselves of that and apologize for it and repent of it and make efforts to try to avoid it. But a lot of people, like if someone barges past me on the street, then I will always just think it is possible that person, their wife's going into labour and, yeah, it's like they say, don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Also, what can be attributed to somebody having some kind of excuse or justification, something that you would understand. It's like, have I not ever barged.

Chris Williamson
Past someone called the fundamental attribution error? Sure. Yeah. This is why I love you, Chris. You always have a label to perfectly stick on all of these concepts.

Alex O'Connor
It's wonderful. Yeah. I mean, if I experience that and think to myself, well, I'm going to be charitable here because, you know, but for the grace of God, there go I. I think, well, that's a very christian sentiment, Alex. You know, and if you, if you met someone who's a Christian and you said, what do you like about Christianity?

And they said, oh, I just love this figure of Jesus who would just go around forgiving people. And even when people deserve punishment, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. That's the most incredible. Like, I mean, it is just the most based part of the entire gospels. Man, that's just unbelievable.

Unfortunately, it's not in the earliest manuscripts of John, so it's probably added on at a later point. And Jesus probably never actually said that. Not that that really matters in my view. But then if somebody said that they liked that and then somebody accidentally spills a drink over them and they get up and just deck them. You'd be like, well, hold on a second.

I thought you were sort of embodying this christian ethos and they'll sort of talk the talk but won't walk the walk. And so in that case, I think they love the tree but hate the fruits. That might not be the correct interpretation of Jesus saying in the Gospel of Thomas there, but I think it's a worthwhile analogy to sort of abstract and use in the context that I'm putting forward here. Also, it makes a good opener for an article, so I'm going to do it anyway. Why is this happening?

Chris Williamson
What has occurred recently that's caused Christianity, cultural Christianity, this sort of revival of it, utilitarian Christianity, if you want to call it that, which I quite like as a term. Yeah, there are a few things for this functional, utilitarian, practical Christianity that isn't an affirmative set of truth claims, but rather a sort of protective cloak to be worn. It's more like stoicism. It's a cultural thing. Yeah, the cultural Christian.

Alex O'Connor
I mean, think of Richard Dawkins, loves going to Evensong, likes a cathedral, thinks that God doesn't exist and that the christian stories are ludicrous fantasies. This is your cultural christian. Why are they beginning to re emerge in droves? For a few reasons. First, new atheism either creates or describes this vacuum of spiritual ungroundedness.

You don't need any of this religion stuff. I know that it's obviously evolved in the human psyche for some reason. And every single human society we find doesn't matter where we look. They all have some kind of sense of the numinous, some kind of distinction between the numinous, profane, numinous, the sort of, you could say the transcendent, something that sort of sits above and beyond a little bit sort of mystical, a little bit sort of out there. You know, you ask somebody if they're religious and they say, no, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual.

And you're like, what the hell does that mean? And they're like, I just sort of believe in. I believe in, like something. It's like, well, I believe in something. I believe in this microphone.

You know, I believe it exists. But they're sort of getting at this sort of ethereal other, this something, right? And every society, wherever we look, you know, society's developed this feeling and that there's clearly something intrinsic to human nature that drives us towards this religious impulse. But the new atheists come along as the old atheist did before them. But the new atheist did it more fervently in saying, no, not only is this untrue, not only in the sort of where Sigmund Freud says that your belief in God is, I don't know, the result of some kind of childhood repression, trauma, whatever, okay?

But he's still going to think that it's an intrinsic part of the human psyche. The new atheists come along and say, well, I also think it's false, but you also don't need it. You don't need this celestial dictator telling you what to do. Oh, you only do right and wrong because you're scared of upsetting the big man in the sky. Well, that's a terrorist source for ethics.

And everyone goes, yeah, you know, damn right. Yeah, yeah. And it's sort of like a rallying cry. Like it was really. Some of these speeches, especially in the case of Christopher Hitchens, you know, they sort of make you want to stand up and give a, give a round of applause.

I mean, it's just amazing, right? And part of it is appealing to this human, this sort of like, humanity, this common humanity. Oh, like, are you not good enough yourself to sort of stand up and live a good life and all of this kind of stuff? And everyone's like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But we've seen the fruits of this as people begin to sort of throw off religion and societies begin to throw off religion, what people have perceived happening is the creation of a spiritual vacuum.

And if it is the case that human beings are naturally religious, they have an impulse towards. The most fundamental thing I think we have an impulse towards is the idea of the sacred, the idea of something which is separate and untouchable, that shouldn't be mixed with the profane, that shouldn't be, that usually has a sort of attached to it, a set of dogma about rules, what you're allowed to do with it, what you're not. And those rules aren't entirely justified by reason alone. It's sort of considered to be self evident, just this separate thing that we treat as totally sacred. So that's your God, right?

And the idea is that if you remove the gods, something else has to fulfill that place, something has to fill it in. And so the right wing conservatives will say that environmentalism, veganism, gender ideology, all of this kind of stuff has become a new religion. And although it's maybe a bit of a lazy phrasing, you know what they mean. You know, exactly the kind of thing that they're talking about. Right.

And the left will criticize, you know, nationalism as filling that role. Populism and populist leaders, people get religious about Donald Trump, which they do. It's amazing to sort of see the power and influence that that man has. It's almost spiritual. So to cut a long story short, or to append a long story with a conclusion, I should say I think what's happening is a bunch of right wing thinkers are seeing what is fulfilling the vacuum that new atheism created.

Wokeism, islamism, a few other things, which there's someone in particular that I should mention. And they're saying, I don't like this. And they're realizing that the kind of secular humanism that's promised by the new atheists just kind of isn't cutting the mustard seed, as I like to say. It's not doing it. You know?

So I recently was in New York, and I watched Richard Dawkins and Ayanne Hirsi Ali have a discussion. Ayanne Hirsi Ali was supposed to be at the meeting in Washington, DC in 2007 that created the four Horsemen of new atheism. Hitchens, Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. And it becomes this huge cultural moment. The Four Horsemen, they're still talked about today as a group.

She was supposed to be there. She was a incredibly successful new atheist writer, speaker, debater. And earlier this year, or last year, she announces in an unherd article that she's a Christian now. Whoa. Like, incredible.

Just like absolute, like headline news in this niche. Yeah, well, this is the thing. It's sort of like, how predictable was it? Well, you know, she'd been hanging out with the Jordan Petersons and stuff, and she's sort of quite, I think she's got her footing in the sort of right wing cultural space. And so it's kind of not surprising if you knew that this kind of christian revival thing was, was happening anyway.

But her entire article for Unherd, I mean, it mentioned, like, Vladimir Putin, and it talks about wokeism and China, and it talked about Islamism, and it mentioned Richard Dawkins more than it mentioned Jesus. It's the story why I'm now a Christian, I think the article was called. And it had nothing theological, no spiritual experience, no philosophical argument. Just, I'm not happy with the way that our culture is going. I'm suspicious of the rise of wokeism and Islamism in China and Russia, and Christianity is sort of our best defense against that.

So a lot of people criticized it and said, well, what do you mean, you're a Christian? Richard Dawkins response to her in his article was to say, seriously, Ayana, Christian, you're no more Christian than I am. Which is really interesting, because a lot of people look at Richard Dawkins and say he's basically a Christian. And a lot of people look at Ayan and said, she's basically an atheist. So they're both sort of making the same criticism in the opposite direction.

So they got together in New York, and I was there and I watched it. And to everyone's surprise, I think Iann did actually affirm belief in the truth claims of Christianity. So she's not just fruit, she's tree as well. It seems that that's now the case. But the interesting thing is when Dawkins, because Dawkins was ready to show up to this discussion and say, and tell her why she's not really a Christian.

Chris Williamson
Because of the tree, the lack of the tree. I know you like the stories and all of this kind of stuff, but you're not really a Christian. And it was actually at the beginning Ayanne told her story of conversion, where she really opened up about depression, suicidality, just utter despair, being not strong enough to commit suicide, but not wanting to stay alive anymore. And then she tries praying. Some therapist, after hundreds that she'd seen, tells her that she's got a spiritual poverty and she should try praying.

Alex O'Connor
And it works. And eventually she gets lifted out and she's got the thrill of life is back, and everyone's applauding because they're so happy for her. They cheered at that. And it was almost comic the way that Dawkins listens to the story and goes, well, that's very moving, Ayan, but. But do you think that Jesus was born of a virgin?

But interestingly, Ayan basically said, if I'm not mistaking her, she said that she chooses to believe these things. She chooses to believe that Jesus is born of a virgin, that he rose from the dead, which seems kind of weird and a bit obscene. How can you just choose to believe something? And a lot of people will say, well, I can't choose to believe something. You can't choose to believe that Australia doesn't exist.

It doesn't work like that. But interestingly, I began to notice that if somebody becomes convinced that Christianity is true, like through philosophical argumentation, historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus, okay, Christianity must be true. And then you hear all these moral claims that it makes about family values, gender roles stuff, and you think, well, I don't know about all of that, but I mean, I've just become so convinced that Christianity is true that it must just be that this is the moral way. And I choose to just believe that. Right.

No one really bats an eyelid. They might think it's wrong to do that, but they don't think it's illogical. They don't think it's like an illegal chess move. As Peter said, reversing the stack and going in the other direction is something where people go, hang on a second. Yeah.

So Ayanne obviously just like deeply resonates with the christian story, the christian ethic, the christian community. She said that when she was going around criticizing and mocking religion for years and years and years, Islamists would send her death threats, Christians would send her letters saying that they're praying for her, you know, and she thought that was the difference between those two religions. So it was a really interesting story from her. Something's obviously deeply resonated. So she says, well, whatever that is, that's realer than real.

That's the most important thing in my life. And so, yeah, I choose to believe the factual stuff as well. And that seems like a much more, like, intuitively it seems more illegitimate to go that way. But, you know, I think people do it in the other direction all the time. In other news, this episode is brought to you by eight sleep.

Chris Williamson
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A checkout. Is it possible to choose to believe in God? Not like naively, not like, well, try it. Try it for yourself. You don't believe in God or do you?

Alex O'Connor
Maybe you're an agnostic. I don't know what you think about this stuff, Chris. You're probably sort of, what? Agnostic? Atheist.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, agnostic. So just try it out. Like believe in God for a second. Give it a go. I don't know what that would mean.

Alex O'Connor
Right, exactly. It's sort of like, how do you even begin to, like, no, you can't do that. But what you can do is complicated by the fact that I don't believe in free will, but, you know, shelving that for a moment, like, okay, so like assuming that there is some, like libertarian free will and you can, like have authorship over your actions and choose when to raise your hand and stuff, you can choose to do things which will, which will knowingly affect your beliefs. It seems a bit disingenuous, and maybe it is, but, like, if you only read christian literature, only spoke to christian guests, and did so without going into the conversation with an attitude of, I'm going to sort of criticize and object, but, like, I'm just going to listen and learn. If you did that for like three years and only hung out with christians and went to church every day, christian worship, music, you'd probably become a Christian.

Like, it probably would happen. You did it with vegans. Yeah, I mean, but that's actually another good example is that if you, if everyone you know is vegan, everyone you know is vegan and you only listen to, like vegan speakers and they're always talking about how immoral everybody else is and all this kind of stuff, like you're going to become a vegan, chances are. So you can choose to surround yourself in a community and with certain literature that will at least sort of open you up, I suppose. So you can choose to do that.

Chris Williamson
Interestingly, as an atheist, like Ayan was or Dawkins, even though you are there in opposition, you are actually surrounding yourself a lot of the time with people who talk about religion, who think about religion, who think about the transcendent and God and ideology and dogma and stuff like that. That's right. And so a lot of people criticize me for being soft on Christianity. I accept the charge I am because I quite like Christianity. I'd call myself one of these cultural christians if I could make a bit more sense of the concept.

Alex O'Connor
I get what they're driving at. They're like, look, I like the message of Christianity. I like its ethos. I like its ethic. I like this figure of Jesus.

And I can see societal benefit for people believing in God, in religion, and having a unifying moral and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, sure. That's great. And maybe that is a result of me spending too much time with christians. Possible, you know, you lived with some for a while.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah, I lived with, with Christians and a lot of my closest, smartest friends I talked to about philosophy and definitely theology with their christians. And it's great. It's incredibly edifying.

I have a wonderful time, but it's, you know, I try to spend time with different people from different backgrounds with different ideas all the time.

But, yeah, I mean, you can choose to sort of adopt your surroundings. And the thing is that it's disingenuous in the sense that you're essentially just aesthetically deciding which worldview you want to put on. Sort of irrelevant is the truth claims that it makes, but I totally understand it, especially if you're someone like I am. If you're someone who, I mean, imagine what it's like to be actually suicidal for months, for years to literally have hit rock bottom and have nowhere else to go. And suddenly you discover this thing.

You discover this thing which after years and years of struggle with the deepest and darkest struggle that a person can go through, you get this sort of hand that you can grab hold of and it just lifts you out of this, brings you back to life. And then just as you're sort of there and thinking, oh my goodness, this is, I've been waiting for tears streaming down your face. You've got Richard Dawkins going like, yes, but do you actually believe in the virgin birth? Why do you keep bringing that bit up? Because it shows a difference in what people care about the cultural, Christians care about the ethic and the society and what it does for people.

It's sort of a sociological project, whereas for, I would say, theological christians, but also like atheist critics, it's more about the truth claims of a religious worldview. So a lot of people, you know, if you look at the comments on this discussion that they had, a lot of people will be like, oh, so Ayanne's just done a Jordan Peterson, basically. She's just sort of, sort of done this wishy washy. Well, the truth kind of doesn't really matter, by the way, this approach of like, ah, it doesn't really matter. You know, did Jesus rise from the dead?

You know, I don't really know. What I really care about is just like, how it feels, man. That's the kind of, like, attitude that would get you condemned as a heretic in the early church, you know, like, oh, you don't affirm the belief in the resurrection of Jesus. You know, it would be bad. So the reason I bring it up is because they're two different approaches.

One is, one is very left brained, one is very right brained. Honestly. It's sort of, what about the facts, the science? And the other side is sort of, what about the narrative and the sort of feeling and the ethic and the poetry? And that's the left brain in the right brain battling it out right in front of you.

Chris Williamson
Yeah. Has Christianity gone soft? We've spoken about how sort of the atheist side coming in is assessing religion, specifically Christianity, with perhaps less of a fine tooth comb, in order for christians to say with open arms, we permit you, person who does not have an active belief in God, in the resurrection of Jesus, in many of the things that are the important to faith, and you just said that would have been heretical. Is this, are both sides nerfing the bar that they need to get over one in order to believe and the other in order to accept? Maybe theres also the difference between the christian religion as practiced in the history of the christian church with a particular emphasis on modern Christian Europe and how it behaved.

Alex O'Connor
There's that kind of Christianity, and there's a kind of Christianity which is like emulating the figure of Jesus, which is, I think, the important thing. So for example, has Christianity gone soft? Well, consider the Christianity of the crusades versus the Christianity. The sort of lukewarm half people don't even believe. Like less than, like 1% of the population are going to Church of England churches.

Yeah, that's definitely gone soften. But arguably, the kind of either military or strong armed Christianity that emerges in the history of the christian church is itself an inappropriate hardening of the christian message. The figure of Jesus, christian relativity, what. Is base for Christianity and religion is always famously just used to buttress political aims. And functionally, how can we have this ideology, this dogma, to be able to drive us forward, perhaps if we wanted to invade some other countries?

Yeah. Or how can we motivate people to believe that we're on the right side here? I mean, famously, Adolf Hitler, people debate all of the time whether he was a Christian. Who knows? I mean, he was a Roman Catholic and he never renounced it.

But he wasn't acting very christian, let's say. But he did have a. The belt buckle of every nazi soldier have God, mit un's God with us written on the belt buckles. Atheists weren't allowed to join the SS, didn't want them, didn't think they could be trusted. I suppose.

Hitler says explicitly in Mein Kampf that in standing guard against the jew, I'm doing the handiwork of the Lord. So he's using this religious terminology. And a lot of people like to point out to me, like, I'll hear christians say, yeah, but he was actually an atheist. I mean, he was just pretending to be a Christian, surely? And I'm like, well, why would pretending to be a Christian make it easier for him to be a fascist?

You know what I mean? It's sort of a bit of a confusing thing because people use religion in this way. And so there's the question of, like, well, was Adolf Hitler a Christian? Right? Well, maybe he would.

Maybe if you ask him, let's say we discovered some texts or some bit of the table talk that we didn't otherwise know about, and he says, yes, I still very much believe in God and believe I'm doing a Christ's work. There's a sense in which you could say, ah, see, he was a Christian. That's what the atheist might say. But the Christian would say, I don't care what he claimed to be. Being a Christian is doing the work of the Lord.

Being a Christian is enacting the will of the Father. Right? So interestingly, maybe with that fruit, maybe you don't even need to believe in God per se to be a Christian. You just sort of need to do the will of the father. It's hard to know what counts as being a Christian, but I think sort of the two approaches that clash in this Iann Dawkins Rumble is the difference between the approach that says the thing that matters is that you live the right kind of life and have the right kind of ethics.

And the other side, which says the thing that matters is that you get the right theology, that you have the right truth, claims to me that seems a lot less human. It seems a lot less in accord with the way that Jesus spoke and behaved and acted. I mean, he's not going around, like, settling theological disputes, really. He's responding to theological disputes and people are trying to test him theologically, but he always responds to them with a sort of vague classiness that sort of transcends the dispute. It almost makes nonsense, the disputes.

So, yeah, I don't know. Okay. Has Christianity gone soft? Like, yes, politically? Like, clearly, it just doesn't have the political power anymore.

A lot of nominal christians don't really believe in what they're saying they sort of go to church because they feel like they have to, but don't actually have the same kind of passion that you'd like to see in a sort of firmly spiritually convicted christian population sort of doesn't exist, at least in Britain. I don't know about America. It's probably much more enthusiastic here, but. In Britain, the interesting thing about America. I spent Easter Sunday at Austin Ridge Bible church.

Chris Williamson
This is the first american service that I've been to. The only other time that I've been to a service recently was at Ripon Cathedral on Christmas Eve. Ripon Cathedral, Christmas Eve. 245 year old woman with a c shaped spine playing the organ, everybody singing hymns, brief talk in between. Very sort of cobwebby, classic sort of british Christmas thing.

I go to Easter Sunday, Austin Ridge Bible church. I pulled up behind a 150 grand corvette supercar that had God now as the number plate on the back. That was the first thing I went in. The lady, that was the warm up act for the main person that was giving the sermon for the day, started using religious language, and I was like, well, God, we're straight into it. And she said, guys, please, we must remember to have patience and forgiveness, and we must give grace when turning right out of the car park onto B Cave Road.

And I thought, oh, wow. Okay, this is an interesting use of sort of semi christian language here to direct traffic. And then the opening act was a six piece rock band, complete with 20 person back in choir fireworks. A full led wall that would have made my nightclub career look paltry, with the lyrics up behind so that everybody could sing along, even me, who didn't know the words. Lead singer, very charismatic, playing the guitar, dude on the drums, black guy playing saxophone, set of glasses on the.

They come up, they do an encore, they leave. Another lady comes on, introduces stuff. And then a guy comes out with a mic, and there's sort of background music that swells when it's important and kind of stays quiet when it's not. And then he leaves, and then the band comes back on and they do maybe one or two more songs. And then everyone goes outside and Starbucks coffee and stuff, and they ask for your money.

They didn't ask for my money, actually, they were rich enough. Not once was the word religion used. Not once. Nobody in that room thought of themselves as religious. They have a direct relationship with Jesus and with God.

Alex O'Connor
Oh, sure, it's all about. It's just Jesus, super, super Jesus stuff. And that. I was like, what is that? What's Christianity when you kind of rip much of the ideology side out of it, I don't even know what is that missing?

Chris Williamson
What is it that they've done? What have they taken out of what I would be more familiar with from what I would learned in society, insofar. As they're doing that, they're probably getting something right, which is that Christianity is not so much a set of truth claims, a religion, as we'd use the term today, as it is a relationship with the person. Christianity is a relationship with Jesus. That's what it is.

Alex O'Connor
So, I mean, the word religion is famously very difficult to define and also kind of doesn't exist as a concept until relatively recently in religious study and comparative religion. Because, you know, like, you find religious communities from a thousand years ago, and religion isn't this like, thing that they do. They don't have, like, work, family, religion, you know, like, get my mot. It doesn't like, box off like that. It just is permeates.

It's the air that you breathe and the water that you swim in. It sort of doesn't really make any sense. I mean, it's like a fish trying to define water, which I'm sure the fish can do, but only once you take it out of the water and sort of show it what it was swimming in before. But it wouldn't consider itself to be swimming in water. You know, I think Immanuel Kant had this image of a bird or a dove flying through the sky and sort of thinking, like, feeling the wind resistance and thinking, gosh, if only I could get rid of this wind, I could fly so much faster and I could get rid of the air.

And that's kind of what, like, people are doing with religion. If only I could get rid of this resistance. But you're sort of throwing out the baby with the holy water, so they're probably getting that right. I'm not sure about the whole megachurch situation. Having said that, I've never been to one and pretty cold.

I know people seem to be comfy. A friend of mine recently told me that he went to one of these megachurch experiences in England, actually, and was just sort of overcome with emotion, tears streaming down his face uncontrollably, like a sort of unbelievable experience. And I thought, wow, I mean, that's amazing. But then I also have a friend who we recently sort of accidentally stumbled upon, like a sort of traditional. I think it was a catholic service.

There's four guys singing some choral songs, and we were holding candles. It was a concert. They said free concert. And we went in and they gave us candles after going through the metal detectors, you know, they gave us these candles and we were sat there and there were these four guys singing this sort of latin christian music. And my friend used to be a sort of like a real american style christian, you know, and said like, wow, I've never experienced anything like that.

That was amazing. That was really amazing. And I thought, gosh, it's just because it's not what you're used to, you know, the person who's used to that will be amazed by the megachurch. The person who's used to the megachurch. Oh, my goodness.

This megachurch stuff is ridiculous, but it's sort of. Yeah, I think it's got eating one. Meal for the entirety of your life and then going, yeah, oh, my God. Cause what it shows you is that, like, you can separate out, you know, this idea of being a Christian or worshipping God from all of the trimmings that you think necessarily go with it. You know, standing in this, like, drafty old building with a bunch of elderly people going, we believe in one God, the father, and doing the nicene creed and going up and getting in queue for communion and the trembling priest putting a bit of bread on your mouth and you think, gosh, this is a bit lame.

And it is. So then you go to a megachurch and you think, oh, goodness. You can isolate the christian bit, put it in a new context, and suddenly it's amazing again. Maybe Christianity isn't so bad after all. So it's got a lot of utility for that reason.

But, yeah, I mean, my understanding of what the mass should be, of what church should be, is a meal. Jesus last supper breaks the bread, drinks the wine, says, do this in memory of me. It's the Passover meal. Well, it's the Passover meal.

In Matthew, Mark and Luke, in John's gospel, Jesus diese before the Passover meal. Maybe the other way around. Well, because John's trying to say that Jesus is the Passover lamb who's being slaughtered. And so there's a kind of biblical contradiction there as whether Jesus dies before the Passover or after the passover. That's kind of a side point.

So I think that what the mass is supposed to be, Jesus says. I mean, the whole reason the mass exists, the eucharist, is sort of the. The zenith of the mass, where you eat the bread and drink the wine, because that's what Jesus did before he died. And he said, do this in memory of me. But it was a meal.

It was a feast. And I have a feeling that in early christian communities the mass was a meal. But then they stopped doing that because it became too much about the meal. People used to just show up to like eat. I bet it wouldn't be married.

But then why not? You know, why not? Because, you know, it should be a operationally nightmare. Yeah, probably, probably. But.

So I don't think there should be like hard and fast rules exactly on how to do it. But I am a little bit suspicious of the whole, I don't know. People have made this criticism of mega churches and I don't like the money, I don't like the sort of fame, the celebrity. The fact that you used the term warm up act in a church environment just seems wholly inappropriate. But like, the criticism that's often made that it's too like, it tries to get you sort of in a state of vulnerability by using like musical tricks and stuff.

I've seen some people tweet this. It's a social media thing that crops up every now and again. People say, oh, I used to think that I really loved God and I was really into worship, but turns out I actually just liked music. It turns out I actually was just really into drums. And it's kind of a joke because they're like, oh, it was just the music.

But yeah, hold on, just take a step back and ask the same question again. Well, why does that music move you in that way? You know, sure, Coldplay can do it too, but then arguably, Coldplay are sort of approximating the same kind of spiritual openness that people are trying to achieve at church. The only difference is that when they do it at church, they then use that state to sell you God rather than sell you merchandise. You know, we'll get back to talking.

Chris Williamson
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Alex O'Connor
Oh, yeah, right. What about when you walk in now, you walk through the doors. Yeah. It's the best front end of a funnel I've ever been into. Well, look, the Vatican is a.

Is a. If you, if you go to St. Peter's Basilica, where you've been, I mean, it is just like breathtakingly huge. The sort of, the scale of the thing is enough to sort of make you like. And it's actually so big that you kind of, your eyes aren't like, you know, parallaxing properly.

So it's kind of difficult to even tell how big it is until, for anyone who's ever been there, there's writing. Big gold band that goes all the way around, and there's writing. And I was there with a priest, and I haven't verified this, but he told me that each of those letters was 2 meters tall. Yeah, I heard that on the two other. And I genuinely, I was like, I don't believe you.

I literally, I'm looking at it right now. I'm staring at it so small. It can't be too much. I don't believe you. I just don't.

And the statues on top level are built bigger than the ones on the bottom so that they look the same size. It's this strange illusion. I kind of wish they hadn't done that because it would give you a better idea of the size. But anyway. Okay.

Yeah. Amazing. Awe inspiring. But at the same time, it's designed pretty poorly from the outside. I mean, you've got Michelangelo's dome, which is like, at the back of the basilica, which you can't see from the front, which is just poor design because of the fact that you've got, like, three different architects who all had different ideas of what to do and were planning things separately, and they all just sort of got shoved together.

And so you get this great big frontier. But imagine if you could see that dome from the front. It would be spellbinding. Also, the fact that the St. Peter's was built off the back of sale of indulgences.

So the catholic church say, give us money and we'll shorten the time that you spend in purgatory and you get to heaven quicker. And they use that money to fund the building of the church. So its a little difficult to be theologically inspired when you start to realize what kind of building youre walking into and the kind of history that surrounds it. God now. Yeah, but then there is still, but then its exactly the same thing as the God now thing as the megachurch where theres, I mean, if you start thinking about it, you think, well, this isnt right, this is bad.

You might go into a megachurch and say, well, this is terrible because they're just trying to make money. And then you go into St. Peter's Basilica and you think, well, this was raised on the sale of indulgences, but there's still something amazing about it. There's still something that inspires awe and that's the important bit. I think so, yeah.

So, I mean, it's amazing place to be, but every human attempt to approximate the awe of God will necessarily be beholden to our failures as immoral creatures. Talk to me about the political dimension of this christian revival. Yeah, it's just a bunch of right wingers getting upset about Islam and woke ism, basically, in my view. I mean, Douglas Murray goes to church on Christmas and sort of likes to be, I mean, Justin Brierly talks about Douglas Murray as one of his examples of people who's sort of very like christian friendly, you know, like sort of cultural christian type. I don't know how true that is.

I haven't sort of kept up with Douglass writing on this stuff, but say it were true. It's like, why is that? Is it because Douglas has sat in a church, prayed deeply for an inward sign of the sort of true religion of the universe, or is he just upset with the way his country's going? I think it's more likely the latter.

Constantine Kissen recently called himself a cultural Christianity in like a video. And it was the same kind of thing. It's not a theological thing. You know, he'll say, I'm an atheist, but I'm a cultural christian. Russell Brand got baptized.

Russell Brand got baptized. But again, this is slightly different because he says he actually believes it. Right? Actually, I don't know. I mean, again, I haven't kept up with Russell Brand.

I don't listen to him. But presumably he'll actually believe in the resurrection of Jesus and stuff to have been actually baptized. So I think that where somebody has actually sort of developed a Christianity and a truth claim, I believe Jesus rose from the dead. I don't think that's just like, is. That not christian revival?

Yeah, I mean, sure, that would be an actual christian revival, but I don't think that the way the thing that people are pointing to and saying, but look at this upswing, I don't think that's happening as much. I don't know, I don't know what the stats are on like baptisms and stuff. It wouldn't surprise me, you know, if there's a non zero number of people who start to look at the fruits. Sure. And it is possible to ayan her sealy it and kind of go back up to the tree, you think, well, yeah, it's going to work both ways.

Yeah. In a way. Like if you can't see the tree, you can just sort of like start picking up the fruit and following the trail and it will sort of lead you to discover the tree for some people, for sure. And again, you're around the people. You're going to mass, you're going to service.

Chris Williamson
These are your new friends. They're talking about it all the time. I've got to read this, I've got to study. But someone gifted me a study Bible and I know what this is. So there's two.

I wasn't sure what your position on this was, whether you think that it's a upswing in utilitarian, functional Christianity as opposition to certain movements that a number of people have got a problem with or just conservatism wrapped in religious talking. So does it exist as a revival of conservatism with a new bow put on it or in opposition to push back against other things that people are concerned about. That was where I think it's the. Conservatives who are pushing against this stuff. So new atheism.

Alex O'Connor
What's new about new atheism? The sort of political dimension. It's as much like a movement, a sociological movement, like I say, more so than it is a theological one. And it's much more, it's the reason that new atheism found its way onto the national press. It's on Fox News, people debating in the way that now it's like, I don't know what it is in America.

Gender studies in schools or whatever. It used to be like evolution in schools. That's what you turn on the tv. In fact, imagine that, you know, like you would turn on the tv and you'd find your Tucker CArlSons and people like just going on and on and on about like evolution and God and religion and Christianity. I mean, it's amazing.

It was doing exactly what, like the, you know, the woke social justice stuff is doing now in that, in that space. So that was sort of the, like the new atheism thing, sort of. Washington was this cultural phenomenon talking about politics. It did the theology stuff a little bit as well, but it was a social movement and so. Okay, what kind of social movement was it?

Well, broadly speaking, it was left wing. It was an interesting subset of YouTube atheists who went on to be anti SJW reactionary types. But broadly speaking, the atheist community that sprung up, Christopher Hitchens, the socialist Richard Dawkins, very left wing. More recently, sort of gender critical and suspicious of islam, all that kind of stuff, which puts him more on the right. Same thing with Sam Harris.

But these guys are traditionally left wing people, right? And it's all very, you know, christian nationalism is suppressing gay rights and gay marriage and abortion and all of this kind of stuff and contraceptives and divorce laws and all of that. Right? So new atheism is, is quite left wing. So whatever space it creates culturally, the people who are going to sort of say, we don't like this, we don't like what's happening, we want to react against that, are going to be conservatives.

So in other words, it's both. I think it is in many ways a reaction against this vacuum. But the people who are reacting against that vacuum are going to be probably more or less conservatives. They used to call the Church of England was known as the Tory party at prayer. That's what they called them.

The fact that nobody is now going to Church of England churches means it feels like a sort of waste of a good label. And I think like the cultural Christianity movement could be called that. You know, the Tory party at prayer, not the Tory party, because the Tory party is probably about to cease to exist in England. Have you seen this? I think right now as we're speaking?

Yeah, it's got to be about like, you know, half past or quarter two. Yeah, it'd be like right now theres a seven party debate happening on the BBC. Nigel Farage is currently stood at a podium, probably shouting at a bunch of other people. And its amazing reform UK are two points behind the Conservatives. At the last poll I checked, I remember hearing that.

Well, look, I mean, were in store for either another sort of 1997 super Labour success or the actual sort of. It's an existential moment, as Andrew Marr has put it. For the conservative party, it's sort of amazing to see. So maybe not the Tory party at prayer, but the english right. Conservative people at prayer, at prayer, even if they don't know quite who they're praying to.

Chris Williamson
Isn't it interesting, though? One of the things I noticed since moving over to America is that there is no equivalent of the christian right in the UK, or there wasn't. Right? You know what I mean? Bible belt, like, you know, it's for God, it's country, it's patriotism.

And the constellation of beliefs kind of right. Themselves. I mean, what religion? But what religion is our prime minister? You know, and also, like, if you are like Keir Starmer, is he a Christian?

Alex O'Connor
I literally don't know. I have no idea. And if he was, I wouldn't know what kind of christian he was. And also, I don't care. And nor does any of his party and nor do any of the population.

You know, like, genuinely, it's so. It's so strange. I think our prime minister's a Hindu, as far as I'm aware, but I'm not sure how, like, religious he is in that. But can you imagine, like, it being a serious part of the conversation in Britain? Your american listeners might not be fully aware of just how absolutely ludicrous it would be to be sort of on the campaign trail and somebody asking, you know, what's your favorite Bible verse?

And when, like, Donald Trump can't think of a Bible verse, you know, what is it? He said when he was asked for his favorite Bible verse and he goes, oh, there are just too many. There are just so many. I love it all. I love them all.

That's a bit of a scandal. It's like the leader of the Republican Party doesn't know, like, in the UK, it just doesn't. So not salient. And so maybe, I think what people are sort of noticing is that the right in America is quite strong, got a presence. Do you think that this could be a potential angle for a future british political party to tap into?

I don't think they can tap into Christianity, at least not yet. I don't think it's nearly strong enough. But I think a lot of people in the UK are getting desperate because their country is going down the pan. There is no such thing as a sort of small seat conservative party because the Tory party are too left wing for the right wingers and two right wing for the left wingers. That's why they're ceasing to exist.

They've sort of fallen between two pews and they're going to possibly have to hang up the hat.

So I think people in the UK are quite sort of, especially right wingers in the UK are quite desperate. So, like, we don't have a, we don't have a movement, we don't have a home. We don't have a party we can vote for. Like, we don't, we don't have a way to get ourselves represented in parliament. So what are we going to do?

And they're sort of trying out different things. And one of these things is like, well, what if we all just become christians again? You know, maybe that will do something. But it means that if you, if you pay attention on like, twitter to the kinds of accounts, because it's not just the, the thought leaders, but also you begin to notice in the comments there's just more people. There are more people who are fervent.

There's more people with little display pictures of a crusader with the sword and the helmet on and stuff. And you realize that if there is a christian revival happening, it might be a revival of the strong armed.

We're not going to take this kind of Christianity rather than the meek and mild. I've heard you talk about the difference between strong armed Christianity and meek and mild Christianity is the reason for the. Get that in. Go on. Is the reason for the strong armed Christianity that this revival is coming in opposition to a bunch of things that seem quite aggressive, that seem quite militant, whether it be rising threat from China, Russia, Islam, gender ideology, wokeism, whatever.

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are. For those who aren't, and I shouldn't, you know, this is all hypothesizing, and I can't say that whether most people who are sort of considering Christianity again are doing so for theological or political reasons. But of the people who are doing it for political reasons, arguably, you know, the politics comes first, that their primary concern is having sort of a strong ideological. And this is the cultural christians. This is the people who will say, I don't believe in God, but I sort of like the Christianity stuff.

Like, what do you like in Christianity? Well, for many of them, they say it gives them this sort of protective layer against these ideologies that they don't like or the vacuum of no ideal. How does it give them a protective layer? Well, that's the question to ask. Right.

And I'm kind of the wrong person to ask there because I'm not sort of part of this crew. But if you did ask them, I mean, I know it's a little bit vague and a little bit difficult to pin down. But to any extent that it does offer a protective layer against ideologies you don't like, it has to be a bit more strong armed. It has to be defensive. That's my brain.

It has to put up a shield. Right. And so it really depends on who you ask. Right. But let's just hypothesize for a moment.

Chris Williamson
What is it that you get from utilitarian Christianity in opposition to secular liberalism? What does it provide you that you can't arrive at without the Christianity bit? Content. Secular. You know, secularism doesn't have content.

Alex O'Connor
Secularism is just like a sort of rule, a political rule that says that you're not allowed to, like, let religion have any sort of, any particular religion, have any hand in political affairs. You just got to sort of have a hands off approach to religion. It doesn't actually provide anything. It's not a worldview. Christianity is a worldview.

It allows you to say there are things that are right and wrong. So in a secular liberal government, you might say you have this opinion, you have this opinion. And because we're a secular liberal society, even though I think you're wrong, I think you should be in parliament, I think you should become the prime minister if that's what the people want, all of this kind of stuff. Whereas if you have an ideology that just says, no, there are right things and wrong things, and our country is one that believes in these right things, and if you believe the wrong thing, like, no, you're not going to become the prime minister, you're not going to like. So I think it sort of provides you this ability to safeguard your worldview.

Chris Williamson
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But what is it about Christianity which is particularly useful up against a woke chinese russian assault? Well, that's to me is still a bit of a mystery. It tells me that we're not insofar as people are, specifically when they're talking about political issues like China and Russia. I would ask that same question. I think the only answer you can give is that it's somehow tied to a sort of a political sort of.

Alex O'Connor
What's the word here?

What's the word? What am I looking for? I don't know. Like, I know, like a forceful restatement of your political commitments, you know, and the fact that that's tied to Christianity is a bit of a mystery to me. I don't really know.

Chris Williamson
Is it that it's something that seems more steeped in ancient western values? Yeah, so that's, that's the other thing is, is that it's like, it's, it's western. But this to me seems quite contingent. This is why I'm separating out, like Christianity as what Jesus teaches and what Christianity is, and Christianity, which is, like I said earlier, with the specific emphasis on the history of Western Europe, people think that western civilization is a result of Christianity, in fact. Yeah, I think that's what's going on here.

Alex O'Connor
So you get Tom Holland, the historian who has popularized this idea in his book Dominion, that all of western civilization is essentially christian without realizing it. So, you know, we've taken what were once non obvious, controversial, ethical contingent statements, you know, things that a lot of people thought were true, a lot of people thought were false, were quite radical, quite controversial, and theyve so successfully embedded themselves into our culture because of the rise of Christianity that we now describe them as self evident truths. You know, its just self evident that every person has worth, that slavery is wrong, all of this kind of stuff, its just self evident. And so we dont need Christianity to teach us that anymore because its self evident and Tom Hollands thesis is something like, well, what you dont realize is that its actually come from Christianity, even though you now dont realize it. So if you cut off the Christianity, you cut off the basis for this entire western ethic in the first place.

So people who care about western ethics, people who care about, well, preserving the west and preserving the western ethic might buy into this Tom Holland thesis and say, oh, okay, so I really care about western ethics and western ethics is Christian. Therefore, if I care about western ethics, I should care about Christianity and upholding Christianity. Who cares about upholding the west at the moment the political right. So particularly in Europe, you have this right wing christian sort of, you know, friendship merger. What about its usefulness as a prophylactic against wokeism?

Yeah, it's kind of the same thing. Right. Because it's still, I mean what's woke culture trying to do is trying to sort of undermine western civilization. The history of Western Europe is trying to sort of rewrite the books. He's trying to say that a lot of the west is evil and patriarchal and white and racist and all of this kind of stuff.

This is what I. What people dislike in the so called woke movement. If you ask someone like Douglas Murray, whats the big trouble with wokists? What dont you like about them? What will he tell you?

Hell say theyre undermining western civilization. So its still this sort of lets save western civilization approach. And I think that this has come at the same time as the popularisation of the thesis that western civilization is christian. Therefore to save the west, we save Christianity. Its like an equation.

Yeah, yeah sure. Well how do you mean like an equation? Like you sort of add them together? Yeah. That's how an equation usually works.

Yeah, yeah. Like as in there, they're treating them as the same, correct? Yes, you can if it is. Or the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Right?

Yeah. I don't know. It's a bit like, I'm trying to think of an example here of like where else people just sort of go a bit that they cozy up to an ideology because it sort of. I know it helps. And I don't mean that to be sort of cynical because we're not always conscious that we're doing this, but we become attracted to this ideology, become attracted to this religious tradition and think, oh yeah, like I like western civilization.

And the people who are talking about this Christianity thing, they seem to care about it. They seem to recognize that, you know, there's a lot of importance in western civilization and so they certainly find themselves becoming more attracted to it. But it's important to stress that I don't think this thesis is correct. I mean, I'm not sure. I still haven't actually read through Dominion by Tom Holland.

I really need to do that with the amount that I talk about. That's why I'm always very careful to talk about his thesis. But I think western civilization, what's it defined by? Free speech, freedom of religion, capitalist economy, you know, like, basically all of these things, which, I mean, you can say that nominal christians have, like, established these historically, but if you actually flip open the scripture, there's no way that you can describe this as Christian or Judeo Christian, especially with the Judeo part when it comes to, like, the abolition of slavery, I'm told that this is. Oh, it's essentially christian movement, the abolition of slavery.

Like, as if the Bible, which explicitly condones and teaches you how to take slaves, how to bequeath them as inheritable property to your children. If you march up to a city to attack it and you see a beautiful woman. I'm not misquoting. It says, if you see a beautiful woman among them, this is in deuteronomy. I think it's like deuteronomy 21.

But I might be wrong about that. Then you can take her as your wife. And if you to do that, then you take her home in this bizarre ritual. You shave her head, trim her fingernails, give her exactly 30 days to mourn her parents, who you might have just killed, and then you can take her as your wife. Okay, so now we're told that despite all this sort of scriptural endorsement and instruction, that, well, the abolitionist movement was essentially christian.

Oh, and the women's rights movement is all christians, all christian ethics, equally cropping up. I'm like, okay, so maybe it's the case. Maybe that God was always against slavery and always sort of pro woman and social justice and all this kind of stuff. It just took us literally thousands of years to work it out. And this just so happened to coincide with the enlightenment.

It's possible. Or maybe. Actually, no, maybe this isn't a christian message. And when I ask specifically, how is this abolitionist movement or whatever, how is it christian? It's like, well, Christianity teaches the worth of the individual emphasis on sympathizing with the victim.

This is the big thing. It's like the idea that Jesus comes down, everyone's expecting the messiah to be this great military leader who's going to liberate the Jews from roman occupation, and instead, you get this man who's poor, ascetic, and is crucified. I mean, we're so used to the crucifixion narrative that we forget how embarrassing it is and shocking it is for your messiah to die a slaves death. I mean, it's an extraordinary story. It's what makes it such an attractive one.

And so we're told, well, you know, this idea of sympathy for the victim is uniquely christian, and that's where we get the care that comes in. Social justice. Social justice movements are all about caring about the victim. Like, yeah, okay, but the Bible does explicitly tell you you're allowed to own other human beings as private property. So how do you square that one?

So in other words, Tom Holland might be right that the sort of nominally christian western ethic has built up, or the nominally christian system and religiosity has built up this western society. But it can't actually be, like, scriptural in my view. I mean, I might just be wrong about this. So it's a little bit confusing to me. That's why I find it difficult to answer the question, like, why are right wingers attracted to Christianity?

Or are they. Are they attracted to Christianity? As in, are they attracted to the message of the gospel? Or are they attracted to what the sort of christian church and christian religion has historically been able to politically provide? I wonder how much is that it provides a more stable and sophisticated sounding by virtue of how long it's been around pushback against something that in comparison, is flimsy, contemporary, less steeped in nostalgia, and less stable in that way.

Chris Williamson
If you were to create a thing that would act in opposition to super progressive, very new, very contemporary, very quickly changing, you would choose the most Lindy story that you can. What's the one that's been around for as long as possible? And, you know, we can kind of, well, forget that bit. We don't need to really worry about shaving the head and cutting the fingernails, and we don't really need to worry about the slaves and passing them down to your children and stuff like that. And I suppose that with Christianity, because it is, as Sam Harris said, it's a relatively low t religion, they're quite prepared.

It seems to me like they take less offense at people playing fast and loose with the literal interpretation. It's okay that he omitted that thing. I get the sense that the islamic faith would not be so okay with you piecemealing your way through their particular doctrine. Yeah, that's what I was about to. About to say or bring up.

Well, I mean, because you're quote, I said it first. Yeah, that's. I think Sam Harris said it first. Right. Okay.

Alex O'Connor
Yeah. I'm the middle of the human centipede between Sam and you. Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah. Why not?

Yeah. You can put it in those terms if you like. Another reason I love speaking with you, Chris. I think. Yeah.

As I like to put it, Islam is more high t and Christianity is more like high t, if you know what I mean. Like t e a. Why is there not an islamic revival? Because. Well, no, sorry, there is.

This is the other thing. This is what I was about to bring up, actually, was the fact that, like, okay, a bunch of, like, you know, our political establishment, the civil service, have just been totally taken over by this woke culture, man. And everyone's a bit like, come on, seriously? Like, really? You know, on the anniversary of D Day, we've got pride flags flying over Regent street, like, instead of the british flag.

I think that's true. Might not be true, but you get the point I'm making. People are like, oh, I'm fed up. Probably is somewhere fed up of all of this nonsense. And so you just said, like, you know, you need something that's.

That's old, tried and tested, you know, and can stand up against this. And so you get a bunch of, like, particularly, I think, disaffected young men who, you know, the, like, Islam is very attracted to them, attractive to them, because it, because it says, well, look, you don't believe in all this crap, do you? You don't believe in that. You believe in certain kinds of values. You believe that you should stand up for yourself.

You believe in gender roles. You believe in this, right? Yeah, I do, actually. It's like, well, this is. Islam can give you this and it can justify it, and it can give you the strength and the community behind you to assert those values and not have to worry about being some kind of, like, outcast or condemned because, like, we all believe the same thing as you and we're growing and we're popular and nobody wants to criticize us because we stand up for ourselves, you know?

Okay, yeah, sign me up for that. Whereas the Christians are still very much, like, sort of. Yeah, like, like you say that they're. Well, they have the message of turning the other cheek. This is the Jesus figure.

So. And their belief as well is that you will be judged eventually, not necessarily right now. Yeah. It is a different sort of message of salvation. I mean, Christianity has the sacrifice of Jesus for your sins.

Islam doesn't have that Islam doesn't believe that Jesus died on the cross again because we forget how radical it is that killing a prophet, God wouldn't allow that to happen. So the idea of Jesus dying on the cross is a total anathema to the islamic understanding of who God is because again Islam is much more sort of proud and stand up for yourself kind of thing. Having this embarrassing slave death for their prophet. It doesn't run. So Jesus doesn't die on the cross in Islam whereas in Christianity, yeah, he dies on the cross and he sort of pays your sin and all this kind of stuff.

It's a much more like I'm going to sort of throw myself on Christ. You know, woe to me and my sin and so, and that's more attractive to some and less attractive to others. But it sort of means, I think that also is why you get more like christian churches who are sort of like, oh, we're totally open and we're like pro pride and we've got a transgender priest and all of this kind of stuff. When you don't see that happening in Islam, at least not as much to the same degree. A lot of people like to.

Chris Williamson
I'm just not quite working out why that has resulted in churches, christian churches, christian belief that permits people to be more piecemeal. Well that's actually I think a slightly separate thing which is important to spell out. A lot of people say simply that Islam is like half a millennium younger in Christianity because it crops up later than Christianity and therefore Christianity has its Enlightenment revival reformation 500 years ago and Islam is like five, 6700 years behind. So it just hasn't got there yet. A lot of people do this line.

Alex O'Connor
I don't think it's right because it sort of treats Islam as a religion. Like it's sort of still baby or something and that it's not connected to the world in some way. That it's like, oh, give it 500 years and for some reason it will just happen in the same amount of time as a difficult, like maybe. But I don't think that's true. I think it's got more to do with the way that the scripture and the prophets are treated.

Like in Islam the Quran is the word of God I which has sort of existed for all time. And the Quran you hold in your hands the mushaf, the copy, the written copy is a copy of a message which is eternal. The final word of God is Quran means recitation. So it's just Muhammad receives and Muhammad is illiterate, he can't read he can't write and God sort of speaks to him in a cave and says, says write or recite or something like to that effect. And Muhammad is sort of like, well I'm illiterate, I can't do it.

And he just commands him to do it anyway. And Muhammad is so freaked out by this that I think according to some reports he considers suicide. He goes to throw himself off a cliff and then he goes home to his first wife who is the first person to encourage him that he's actually heard the word of God and that he should submit to it. So she's known as the first Muslim. She's the first person to sort of recognize the message and accept its truth.

So this word of God comes to Muhammad and is at some point, at a later point like written down, recorded and there are various copies floating around. And then Caliph Uthman he decides to put together an official codex and this is where we get our quran that we hold in our hands. But the actual message itself is eternal and comes directly from God. In Christianity unless you're speaking to a biblical fundamentalist who are quite a relatively new and quite american phenomenon, they don't treat scripture in the same way scripture is written by men, particularly the gospels. I mean the letters of Paul are letters written by a man to a bunch of churches to settle theological and practical disputes.

This isn't like the word of God in the sense that this isn't like the exact words that you're reading in the Bible are the words that came out of the prophets mouth that God put into the. It's not the same thing in Christianity. In Islam the word becomes a book. In Christianity the word becomes flesh and dwells among us. That's the opening of the gospel of John.

In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. And then later on and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. So you have the word of God being Jesus. In Islam the word of God is the Quran. And so a lot of people think the Quran in Islam is what the Bible is in Christianity.

I think that the Quran in Islam is what Jesus is in Christianity. And the gospels are more like the hadith literature in Islam which is sort of these reports of the sayings and doings of Muhammad which some are better attested than others. You know there's sort of dispute over which ones are sound, which ones aren't. But no one disputes the Quran but some of the hadiths you could say oh well this one maybe didn't happen this one did happen. We're not really sure.

But no one disputes the Quran in the same way in Christianity with the gospels. Yeah, maybe they said this, maybe they said that. Maybe that's a later interpolation. Maybe that was wrong, maybe blah, blah, blah. But no one disputes Jesus.

You couldn't have Jesus sat in front of you and argue with him about what's true in Christianity. Right? And so this is why in Islam, in Christianity if you want to say, look, I know the Bible says all that stuff about women speaking in churches, but actually Paul probably didn't write that letter and he probably didn't mean this. And that particular verse moves around our early manuscripts and maybe he didn't really say that. I mean, whatever.

And so you end up with this sort of, yeah, okay, fine. Some play in the system. Would Jesus be okay with it? Yeah, it feels like Jesus might be okay with that kind of thing and so there's a bit more room to maneuver. You can't do that with Quran.

You can't say, oh well, maybe that verse isn't true. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe that was a later interpolation because the Quran is the word of God. What's an interpolation? Oh, like a later edition.

So something that's added later into the text. So like earlier I mentioned the stoning of the adulterous woman which is probably, well, it's one of my favorite stories in the gospels where Jesus says, he who is without sin and cast the first stone because it's a religious test. Because you've got this Jesus peaceful figure and as a woman who's committed adultery and the law is quite clear that the woman should be stoned. And Jesus is just like writing in the sand and the Pharisees are like, okay, come on then, Jesus, what are you going to do here? It clearly says that she should be stoned.

That's what the law says. And he's like writing in the sand. He's kind of ignoring them. And they say, jesus, what should we do here? The law is quite clear.

We need to stone this woman and they're testing him. What's he going to do? Sure. Yeah, okay, go ahead. But he who's without sin casts the first tone.

Chris Williamson
Oh man, it's brilliant. It's awesome. It's like ethical genius. It sort of undercuts at the same time as not contradicting the truth of the law or the justice. You know, it's this brilliant moment.

Alex O'Connor
But unfortunately it's not in our earliest manuscripts. And so most scholars believe that it's a later interpolation. In other news, this episode is brought to you. Bye factor if youre too busy this summer to cook but still want to ensure that youre eating well, factor is the solution. Factors fresh, never frozen meals a dietitian approved and ready to eat in just two minutes.

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Alex O'Connor
Fascinating corpus of texts which we've only very recently, in the grand scheme of things, been able to rediscover and read for ourselves. We knew of the existence of a bunch of gospels that weren't in the New Testament because early church fathers were writing about them. We knew about the existence of the gospel of Judas, a gospel of Thomas. Fascinating. But we didn't have the texts until in 1945.

Some guy is digging in the desert and accidentally crashes into this big jar. At least this is one of the like. The stories are disputed and just, like, opens this jar at first, doesn't want to open it because he's scared there's like a demon in it. But turns out it's got a bunch of ancient manuscripts which he takes home and keeps by the fire. Where is it?

In Nakamadi, near Nakamadi, in Egypt. So Egypt has the perfect climate for the preservation of papyrus, so we're not entirely sure, but it seems that these texts were buried in this cave in the desert. And that could be because Athanasius comes up with the christian canonical New Testament, as these are the four gospels, all of the other ones, we're not going to read they're not part of our tradition, so they end up getting sort of destroyed. So they get sort of buried in the ground to either protect them because they don't want to be destroyed, or just to bury them, to sort of get rid of them. It's also possible that it was a burial site.

Some people have suggested that, like, it was some significant figure with a lot of texts to his name. When he was buried, he was buried with these texts. And so that's why some people think that the story of the discovery isn't true, because it was actually a grave robbing. Some people have thought maybe it was just a simple grave robbing, but the person who then discovers these texts doesn't want to admit that he's robbing a grave. Have these been carbon dated?

Chris Williamson
Have they been verified, authenticated? Yeah. So there's been a lot of work done on this.

Alex O'Connor
You can date the actual papyrus, but you can also, I mean, the extraordinary thing about these gospels. So I think so the gospel of Judas, for example, which is not found in that collection. It's not found in the narcomadic collections. It's found at a later point. And fascinatingly, when people began to realize what it is, there's this huge scramble because it's worth a lot of money, right?

And people are, like, trying to smuggle it. People are trying to. Because you can't just sort of take a really expensive ancient manuscripts across the border. Countries want to keep them for themselves. They want them for their museums, they want them for their researchers, but the people who find them want to sell them.

So this gospel of Judas is discovered, and it finds its way all over the place. It actually spends something like 15 years in a safety deposit box in Long island in New York, which almost destroys it because you go from humidity, the perfect climate of Egypt, to New York City. So it was just absolutely ludicrous. It's finally National Geographic who buy the gospel of Judas. They sent a bunch of scholars, I think, including Bart Ehrman, to go and verify it.

And they give them a bit of the text, but they can't give them too much because they can't just let them read it because they haven't bought it yet, but they need to give them enough to verify the text. Right. So there's carbon dating and all this kind of stuff. But also, I mean, so we carbon date the papyrus, and we know that it sort of dates. I don't know what the exact numbers are, but between, like, 80 AD and, like, 400 AD, it's like give or take like a few hundred years.

But we also know that Irenaeus writes in against heresies about the gospel of Judas, so we know that it existed and we know that this is dated to around that time. And we're like, this must be the gospel of Judas. But because Irenaeus writes about it in like, 180 AD, we know that the top end for how late it can be in 180. So there are lots of different ways to get to. You've had to triangulate.

Yep, exactly right. So you can date a text by, you know, carbon dating the papyrus, but. Also when it's been referred to, we. Can do it textually. Like, what are its textual dependents?

What does it have knowledge of? Does it have knowledge of. So a lot of people date the gospel of Mark to after 70 AD because it mentions the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. So the temple is destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and Mark's gospel mentions this. And so the secular historian looks at that and goes, well, that means it was written afterwards.

The Christian might look at it and say, well, Jesus talked. Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple because he was Jesus. It was a miracle. He knew it was going to happen. So it could be earlier.

There's theological dispute as well. Interestingly, there was one gospel, the gospel of Jesus wife, which was discovered relatively recently and was particularly famous because it was a fragment and it talked about Jesuss wife and it mentions Mary Magdalene. So the presumption is that it's describing Mary Magdalene as Jesuss wife, which has been a sort of theory, da Vinci codesque thing going on for a while. And we have this ancient, ancient papyrus and at first, scholars are sort of like. They think this might be real.

They carbon date the papyrus and it matches perfectly. Yeah. Like this is an early, ancient text. Then some red flags start being raised and the sort of final nail in the coffin. This is a forgery, we know now this is like a complete forgery.

And one of the ways to prove this is that it quotes another gospel in Aramaic. I think it might quote the Gospel of Thomas, actually, but it quotes this aramaic translation. So it's got this text that's been translated into a different language, but there's a translation error in the papyrus, on this fragment. There's an error in the translation. And there's one other place where the exact same translation error occurs, which is a typo on a website that translates this gospel into aramaic.

So it looks like the guy who's forged this bit of papyrus has used an aramaic translation of an old gospel from a website to then on old papyrus, genuinely old papyrus, and then written it out. And also the formatting of the text, where the line breaks are, all of that kind of stuff is the same as on this website, which the chances of that are just astonishingly small, especially with the typo. And so we're like, oh, okay, yeah, that's a shame. That's affordable. What is interesting in the gnostic gospels, how does it contribute?

Chris Williamson
Or what are the big reveals? Well, for a start, it tells us what christian traditions were being opposed at the time of the formation of the New Testament canon. So we're very familiar with stories of the New Testament, with stories of the resurrection and this kind of stuff. There are gnostic gospels which tell us all kinds of different things. So we know that there are communities who believe things and we get to grips.

Alex O'Connor
We can read for the first time what early christian communities believed that eventually got sort of condemned as heretical. But now from their own maths, because we knew that there are heretical sects that believe all kinds of different things, but we've only ever heard about them through the writing of their opposition. So Irenaeus against heresies is this huge volume that writes about why all of these heretical beliefs are wrong. So it tells us what people believe, but we're hearing it through a critic now. We can read it through from the horse's mouth, as it were.

And so it's all kinds of stuff in there. Some of them are older, some of them are newer, some of them are obvious sort of fakes. Some of them are a bit more interesting. The gospel of Thomas might be the most famous because it's possibly quite old. I mean, scholars have dated it.

Some scholars radically date it to really early, like 80 ad, which is around the time that the canonical gospels were being written. Some date it later, but it's still very early. It's like second century ad, so pretty early. And about half of it, I think, contain quotes. It's just a list of sayings of Jesus.

It's the so called sayings gospel. So no narrative, no crucifixion, no resurrection, none of that. Just a list of sayings from Jesus. And about half of them, I think, are also in the synoptic gospels. Half of them aren't.

And they say really weird mystic things like, if you bring out what is within you, then what is within you shall save you. But if you do not bring out that which is within you, then what you keep inside you will destroy you, or something like that, which is a bit esoteric. And weird. And you have to grapple with it and figure out what he's going to be called. There's another one in there.

And again, these are just sayings out of nowhere. It says something like, whoever comes to know the father and the mother, he shall be called the son of a prostitute and then just move on to the next one. You're about to ask me what that means. I don't know. No one knows.

It's so strange. And the most famous part of the Gospel of Thomas is the ending. The very last quote. Simon Peter goes to Jesus and says, what about Mary Magdalene? She should leave us because women are not worthy of life, meaning eternal life, christian communion.

Women aren't worthy of this. So Mary Magdalene should leave us. Now you would expect Jesus here to say, no, no, Peter, women are perfectly capable of inheriting eternal life. No, he says, I will draw her close to me to make her a man so that she can enter the kingdom of God for all women who make themselves into men will enter the kingdom of God. The gospel of Thomas.

That's where it ends. That sounds pretty woke. Yeah, it's like the earliest trans account of Mary Magdalene in particular. God knows, if you'll pardon the phrasing, what that means. I've heard all kinds of different theories.

A lot of the gnostic gospels seem to emphasize unity, bringing together, making two one and a lot of time this is framed in terms of gender. So the male and the female are to sort of unite. And so there's sort of this argument that that's sort of what's being gotten at here. But it's weird that Jesus specifies women being made into men. There's one gnostic gospel which we remember that in the genesis story, Eve is created from the rib of Adam.

Shes taken out of Adam. Its like a separation. So some of these gnostic texts sort of long for the reunification. Saying that was a terrible thing when Adam and Eve were separated seems to have this platonic influence. Have you heard that old greek fable of the original creature being this four armed, four legged, two headed creature?

And this is like the form of the human? And then they end up getting cut in half and spread across the earth. And so people will then spend their lives searching to be reunified. Very romantic story. Right?

And there might be some influence there in some of these gnostic texts where you've got this sort of separation and desire for reunification. Isn't it interesting that the biological way that humans develop is actually that every human beings female? Is that right? I don't know much about embryology. I have heard things to this effect.

Chris Williamson
That's why men have got nipples. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They start sort of developing nipples. Yeah. No, you are.

Alex O'Connor
Yeah, you're right. I haven't, man, long time since I've thought about that. I mean, that is fascinating, isn't it? I mean, it's funny as well, because. Correct.

Chris Williamson
They just got it the wrong way around. Yeah. This is the thing. It's like a lot of people, you know, I recently did this debate with Dinesh D'Souza and he asked me and we were talking about whether the Bible was true. And he said, did the universe have a beginning?

Alex O'Connor
I said, I dont know. Sure, maybe. I think it probably did. And he said, well, how did the Bible know that at best of 50 50? Guess.

Okay, whatever. But the point that I was making is that people will reinterpret things either way. I think that if the universe was infinite, theres a way of interpreting genesis to fit with that. But also what I was going to say is that had we discovered in embryology that all embryos start male and then become female, the female is sort of drawn out of that. People would go, ah, see, look at the story of Adam and Eve.

That's what it was getting at. Like, you know, we knew. Symbolic wisdom. Sort of knew. Yeah, exactly.

Right. And I think people sort of do that all the time. There's a great gnostic gospel called the testimony of truth, which is discovered in the Nagamadi library. So that's buried in like 400 AD. So it's probably like second or third century ADHD.

And the testimony of truth retells the story of Genesis. But interestingly, if you read Genesis, and I mean like the actual account of Genesis, so who are the characters in the sort of garden of Eden story? Adam. Adam, Eve, snake, snake. Who's the snake?

Chris Williamson
Devil. Right. Why do you think that? It's just sort of. Traditionally the snake is the devil.

Alex O'Connor
But the text never says that. That. The text never identifies the serpent with the devil. Interesting. The concept of the devil.

Satan the accuser didn't exist at the time of writing of Genesis. Right. This is like one of those things about did the fruit of the loom logo ever have a cornucopia in it? Yeah, yeah. A Mandela effect.

Except this time, like. Yeah, the original Mandela effect. Yeah, I suppose so. Like go, you know, go and read the text. It's just the serpent.

And we're introduced to the serpent. We're told it's Genesis three. It opens now, the serpent was more crafty than any of the beasts that the Lord has created. And so Adam and Eve are told, you can eat of any fruit of the garden, but do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die. Surely die.

Because the Hebrew, it sort of says, die twice. It's like, you will die, die, you will die a death.

And so the serpent comes in, this crafty serpent. Crafty is an important word there. The king James translates it as subtle. The word is Arum. So the snake was more subtle or crafty or shrewd than the other beasts.

And it comes to Eve and says, did God say that if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, youll die? And he goes, yeah. And he goes, youre not going to die. God just knows that if you eat that tree, youll become like him, knowing good and evil, and he doesnt want that. So Eve looks at the fruit, sees that it's good for eating, takes a bite, gives them to Adam, and what happens?

Do they die? No, what happens? Well, God tells us in the Bible, in the Genesis count, God says, now the man has become like us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and eat from the tree of life. And so he's banished from the garden of Eden.

Chris Williamson
What's the tree of life? Well, who knows the tree of life and inherit eternal life? So presumably in the way that eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil gives you the knowledge of good and evil, if you eat from tree of life, you get eternal life. And God says they must not be allowed to do that. They should have just gone for the tree of life first, which wasn't.

Alex O'Connor
Well, so there are lots of theological interpretations here, because interestingly, God doesn't say at the beginning, you must not eat the tree of life, he just says, you must not eat the tree of knowledge, good and evil. So arguably, like, if they'd Gantt charted this correctly and they'd worked out tree of life, live forever. Yeah, it's actually a really interesting part, like, what would happen if Adam and Eve eat from the tree of life first? Well, arguably. See, this is the sort of insight that you need a productivity bro to bring to the theological.

Seriously, though, it's a great question. I think that the tree of life gives you eternal life, and the idea is that Adam and Eve have eternal life in the Garden of Eden. When they're created, they're just going to live forever at the Garden of Eden, they've already got eternal life, so eating from the tree of life and that's. Been subtracted from them. Now that they know good and evil.

Exactly. You're not allowed to know good and evil and also. And also have eternal life. So then they're banished and then they're mourning. So the christian interpretation of the story is like, well, they didn't die literally, but they died in the sense that mortality entered into the world.

They died a sort of spiritual death. They became, but their immortality was taken from them. Yeah, exactly. The fact that you're not going to die now doesn't matter. You are at some point.

Yeah. There's something about knowing good and evil as a human that means that you are going to die, probably, because if you sin, the price of sin is death. And if you don't know good and evil, then you can't sin because you can't knowingly do evil. But if you know good and evil, then because we're humans and we're naturally flawed, we're always going to sin and therefore we need death. So death enters the world.

But here's the thing, right? That's one interpretation, but it is a bit of a weird story. Like, who is this serpent? Why is the serpent even in the garden in the first place? What's the serpent doing there?

And it's perfect. Eden, you know, who created this serpent? Why can't they just eat from the tree of Life afterwards? Why does God. Because God doesn't.

It's not like they literally just can't eat from the tree of life. God banishes them from the garden and then guards the gates of Eden with a cherubim, with a flaming sword. These stories are extraordinary, man. It's worth revisiting them. So this ancient gospel testimony of truth identifies it, tells you who it thinks the serpent is.

It doesn't identify it with the devil, it identifies it with Jesus Christ.

Chris Williamson
What does that mean? Jesus is the serpent, because a great deal of the gnostic tradition believes that the creator of the material world is an either evil or incompetent or lesser kind of God figure, the demiurge. So the material world is created by this evil or incompetent God. There are lots of different reasons to explain why that happened. But it's like not the Father, that Jesus refers to Jesus being like the true God comes down.

Alex O'Connor
And when Jesus says, my father in heaven, he's not talking about the creator of the material universe, because that's an evil demiurge. He's talking about the real sort of spiritual God. So the material stuff is bad and the spiritual stuff is good. Good. There's so much to it, man.

There's so much to it. So the idea is that the God of the garden of Eden, this gnostic gospel, the testimony of truth, says, like, what God is this? What God is this that sort of lies to Adam and Eve, says that they're going to die. Is a jealous God, a self admittedly jealous God doesn't want them to become like him. Why not become like gods?

You know, he doesn't want it. He's jealous. And then the serpent comes in and tells them the truth, says, like, look, you're these, like, material creatures created by this God, but there's this spiritual wisdom. There's this knowledge of good and evil that he doesn't want you to have because he's this evil God. But I'm going to give it to you.

I'm telling you the truth here. And so this gospel thinks that Jesus is bringing wisdom there. Interestingly, that word Arum, the hebrew word that means shrewd or crafty or subtle, also is translated the same word throughout the whole of proverbs as sensible or prudent. So there is a reading of Genesis that says, now the serpent was more sensible than any of the other beasts that God has created. And hes the one that comes to Eve and says, oh, like God said you were going to die if you no, no, youre not going to die.

Youre just going to be like him. And hes right. So this ancient gnostic gospel condemns this creator God of Genesis, identifies the serpent with Jesus, and says that Adam and Eve did the right thing by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So there's one way that the gnostic gospels totally upend the traditional understanding of Christianity, and you can see why it's therefore condemned. So that's fascinating.

And also this whole belief in the demiurge and the different also, to be clear, the word gnostic, a lot of scholars reject it because gnostics didn't call themselves gnostics. What is gnostic? Gnostic comes from the greek word gnosis for knowledge, because a lot of these texts are unified by the fact that you're saved through knowledge. You're not saved through the things that you do, the way you behave. It's like you've got to have the right kind of knowledge.

Whoever has the Gospel of Thomas says, whoever discovers the correct interpretation of these words shall enter the kingdom of God. It's about like getting you made them more fucking literal. It's like getting the. But you can't. You can't.

And in fact, in the canonical gospels, the gospel of Mark, you can read it. Like, there's this report that when Jesus was with the big crowds, he spoke in parables so that they wouldn't understand properly. But when he got back to the disciples, he explained everything properly. There's this idea, even in the canonical gospels, that there's, like, a public teaching of Jesus and a secret knowledge of Jesus. And so the gospel of Thomas opens.

These are the secret teachings of the living God. So this is the stuff that he. Said backstage, which Didymus, Thomas, Judas wrote down. The apostle Thomas wrote down. Whether Thomas actually wrote them, probably not.

But given the fact that secret knowledge. Given the fact that the Bible was an editorial decision, what goes in, what stays in, there's interpolations that edits are made. There's contradiction in terms of this says this thing here and doesn't say that thing there. And also, well, there's sort of play in the system that kind of probably didn't say that, so we can probably kind of get rid of that.

Chris Williamson
Where does the authority come from of that corpus and why? I has the gnostic gospels not completely upended the entire world of Christianity, given that the editorial decision is now so plainly evident, that it was just laid at the feet of flawed humans like the rest of us? Well, because, I mean, so the way that these texts are determined are through a mixture of things. So, like, apostolic succession is important, as in the sort of, the message needs to be legitimately attributed, a bit like how the hadiths of Islam are attributed. Like, if you read a hadith, it will have this entire sort of second bit which tells you the line of succession from Muhammad to the person who heard it.

Alex O'Connor
And this person heard it from this person, and this person heard it from this person, because the important thing is knowing that it comes from the right source. And so the four gospels that we have are believed to be written by either eyewitnesses, traditionally eyewitnesses, or traveling companions to eyewitnesses to the life and ministry of Jesus. So, like Matthew, the apostle Luke, the traveling companion of the apostle Paul John, traditionally associated with the beloved disciple of Jesus. So these are sort of like. They're believed to be written as close to eyewitness as you can.

Also, the theological content is important. Like, I tweeted out a thread about the Gospel of Thomas, a couple of quotes, and people misunderstood what I was doing. They thought I was somehow trying to, like, endorse it or something. I was just like, wow, look at this really weird gospel, because I just sent a podcast episode on it. So I quoted some of the more bizarre elements of the gospel of Thomas, and Michael Knowles retweeted it and said, reading this is just.

It just makes it so obvious why these texts were condemned in the first place. And he's kind of right. Like, the stuff about turning women into men and the son of a prostitute and all this kind of stuff, it's just kind of weird and doesn't seem to sort of fit in with what people would have remembered and known about Jesus at the time. And so they're sort of condemned on theological grounds as well. I don't think that these texts, I couldn't say that they more closely approximate Jesus message.

It's so clear that they just completely contradicted what the understanding of Jesus was at the time of the formation of the canon. And so they're sort of expelled for that reason, too. And you're like, oh, but now that we can read them, shouldn't that just totally upend everything? For a lot of christians, it's actually done the exact opposite. Like I say, like the Michael Knowles thing, a lot of christians are now reading these texts and going, oh, yeah, I can.

Yeah, thank goodness. I can, totally. Because if we discovered the gospel of Thomas and it was like this really close text that had, like a sort of plausible, close ethic that was a bit different or something that just denied the virgin birth but sort of nothing else, it'd be really troublesome, like, oh, goodness. Because it's, like, so wacky and so out there. Christians are like, oh, thank goodness you.

Chris Williamson
Can get rid of it all, because. Now it's totally obvious why it was condemned in the first place. Obvious. Yeah. The Gospel of Judas is a fascinating one.

Alex O'Connor
People can read this, right? The Gospel of Thomas, you can read it in, like, 20 minutes. The Gospel of Judas is much harder to read because it's just, like, really, really strange. But the beginning, it's kind of, like, eerie. It's got that da Vinci Code interest.

The disciples are praying.

Jesus sort of comes upon them praying and laughs at them. And they say, lord, why are you laughing at me?

And he says, well, I'm not laughing at you, but by doing that, you praise your God, your God, as if it's a different God. And then he pulls Judas aside and says, do you know where I've come from? And Judas goes, yeah, I know where you've come from. From. You've come from the realm of Barbalo, and I'm not fit to utter the name of the one who sent you.

It's some dungeons and dragons type stuff. It's like this fascinating act and this because the gospel of Judas is very gnostic. The realm of Barbello is this higher realm that Jesus has been sent from to save us from the sort of material creation. And when Jesus says you're worshipping your God, he's talking about the evil demiurge because they're sort of accidentally worshipping the wrong goddess. I thought Christianity just had one God.

Yeah, well, it does, but it seems like it kind of didn't always. But they wouldn't have called the gnostics, wouldn't have referred to this. And again, gnostics, too broad of a term. People who believed in the demiurgic creator wouldn't call that demiurgic creator like God. They call it like the material creator of the universe or something.

Chris Williamson
God is very why didn't God create the universe? Huh? If that was the case, why didn't God, actual God, create the universe? Again, there are lots of different ideas, and it sort of depends which text you readdez, but some people believe that there are these lower deities who sort of try to recreate the spiritual realm to govern over, and it's sort of a subpar version. That's what the material world is.

Alex O'Connor
Some people think that the demiurge is evil, and so it creates the material world to trap people, make them suffer or whatever. Some people think that it's the result of incompetence. The simulation hypothesis for theology. Yeah, basically. And by the way, Im probably botching a lot of what Im saying here.

Ive been learning a lot about this recently by speaking to people on my podcast and reading these texts and reading some of the literature around them. And hopefully, if I have botched anything too badly, people in the comments will be quick to show. Im sure that they will. I hope thats the case. But I want to emphasize that, like, this is very difficult to pin down, and I'm no expert, but at least what I hope is getting across is that this is like fascinating.

I mean, it is just incredible because even if it is all obviously just like stupid and ridiculous and the gospel of Judas is written way later and obviously as false, it's all just fascinating that this text exists and was circulating and was circulating with enough prominence that it was taken seriously by early church authorities enough to officially condemn them because they were sort of having enough influence. One of the things that we haven't spoken about with this christian revival has been a dearth of meaning in the modern world. I think so far the way that you've spoken about it is sort of functionally what does it do? What can it give people as legitimacy and their pushback against encroaching secular liberalism and authoritarianism and the east and woke and all the rest of it. How much is this revival a response to a dearth of meaning in the modern world?

Yeah, so that's the other thing which I should have mentioned earlier because take Ayan Hirsi Ali. Yeah. In her unherd article she talks about China and Russia and Islamism and whatnot. She does also mention nihilism. But if you nod at me like.

Chris Williamson
It'S, you know, it's because you rang me. Yeah, yeah. Four or five years ago while I was in the gym. And one of the first things that you said was try nihilism. Yeah.

What do you mean? I'm trying nihilism as a life philosophy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good. Try it on for size, man.

How's that going? It's alright, I guess. Yeah. Very nihilist. Nihilism sort of is like you don't really try on nihilism so much as you take off all the clothes and you're not wearing anything for a while.

Alex O'Connor
It's quite a, quite a strange phenomenon. And yeah, I don't know, I don't remember saying that to you. I don't remember where I was in my life or how tongue in cheek I was being. But you know, it's worth really very. Vegan at the time, which may have been going hand in hand.

It's worth really like taking it seriously though. Like what does it mean to live these philosophies? It's not something to just mess around with. It's not like, oh, I like this Christianity stuff. Like, yeah, sure.

What does it mean to actually be a Christian? It's not something that you can just like sort of, sort of. If you really want to be a Christian, you can't just be like, oh yeah, cool, I'm sort of on that team. Yeah, yeah, whatever. No, it's like you have to sort of radically change the way you look at the world.

You have to turn the other cheek. Do you, do you have to do that? Why can't I just do it the same way as I do with James Clear's atomic habits? James Clear's atomic habits has got four steps to embedding a habit. I often miss the fourth one.

Oh sure, yeah, it's okay if you miss it. Like you don't. Okay, maybe I misspoke. You don't have to do it, but you have to sort of try to do it. You have to be motivated to do it.

You have to give up so much of. Of the way you approach the world. You have to adopt a radical forgiveness. You sacrifice your ability, if somebody mistreats you at a bar or whatever to be like, oh, that guy's a dick. No, you can't think that.

It's not a very christian thought. You've got to be forgiven. Unless they're trying to teach gender ideology in schools. Yeah, but this is the thing. What's the christian response to that?

Well, Jesus had sort of. There were times where Jesus was angry, famously flips the tables at the temple because they've sort of turned the temple into a market and they're selling things. And he thinks this is inappropriate. So he displays anger. But generally speaking, when it comes to theological disputes, he'll know what's correct.

He'll tell you what's correct, but he won't do it in a particularly vicious way. Except the one thing he really hated was religious hypocrites. So a lot of his most stinging critiques were for the Pharisees who sort of claimed to be these religious authorities but were acting pretty poorly. How prophetic? Yeah, well, yeah, this is like everybody.

Yeah, that seems to be the idea that sort of everyone hates a hypocrite. That's the thing that Jesus and Jesus did have seeming like vitriol for a lot of these people, called them like a brood of vipers and this kind of stuff. So Jesus does do that every now and again. If you've got teachers teaching gender ideology, even if the Christian thinks this isn't very christlike, this isn't true. I think the sort of approach of anger and, I don't know, condemnation, let's say, of the person may or may not be christian, depending on how it's done.

But when you said a second ago, I know you were sort of joking, unless it's this, but that's part of it. You point out that, like, oh, well, here's a place where everyone makes an exception. Well, part of the struggle of being a Christian is trying to retain that essence of forgiveness and compassion and charity, even at the times that are most trying. I think Cs Lewis said, I forgive the unforgivable in others because God has forgiven the unforgivable in me.

Chris Williamson
Does this show how unrational and illogical humans are that we've tried to make arguments and reasoning, neat and tidy and mathematical. But becoming wise appears to be so hard on your own, even with the assistance of the scientific enlightenment and computers, that you still need to personify these lessons, that you need to couch wisdom and living a wise life inside of a broader narrative which has religion and has a guy from 2000 years ago. Or is it a case that people are saying, we've tried it the modern way, we've tried to live a life that is determined by, I know, the weather tomorrow in Venezuela, I can Uber eats things to my house and look at how fucking miserable I am? Yeah, we need to find something that's older, something that's more tried and tested, and is working on a different pathway. I don't think it's necessarily older, especially because there was a time when this message was, and it was still just as radical for people.

Alex O'Connor
But yes, the fact that it's narrative, the fact that it's storytelling and moral principle rather than scientific truth claims. The gospels don't make scientific truth claims. They tell a story. They give an account of a man's life and his moral teachings.

I think it's often condemned as this retreat of rationality, but I think it's just to do the brain thing again. It's just the reemergence of the right brain. This way of looking at the world that legitimizes poetry and art and music, that is irreducible to argument and syllogism, that in other contexts, people think it would be inappropriate to try to understand music just by looking at music theory. I mean, music theory is very useful and important, but the way to understand music is to actually listen to the song. And for a lot of religious people, they're beginning to realize that this microscope approach of trying to sort of analyze the religion for its truth claims misses something of living, stepping back and living the life.

Of course, if it does make truth claims and the truth claims are wrong, problem. Obviously it's a problem, but I think people are beginning to become more forgiving of that because they're beginning to recognize the value of narrative. Well, we spoke about this the last time we talked. I'm really fascinated with this idea of things which are literally true, but functionally false, and functionally true but literally false, or just useful instead of functionally true. And it seems that this is continuing to ramp up, up.

Chris Williamson
Look, I feel better when I have faith. I feel better when I'm a Christian. Religion is the ultimate split test. Split tested and split tested and split tested into oblivion. Working on an existing pathway that every human civilization has had in one form or another, and we have come up with a way that is pretty good at dealing with the uncertainty of the future and the fact that you're flawed and the fact that you're going to die and difficult things are going to happen.

And unfortunately, Netflix and a bit of some Ryan holiday books, those don't cut the mustard. Yeah. And insofar as they do so, Jordan Peterson has described God as the ultimate fictional character, and he does so kind of tongue in cheek. And I think what he's getting at there is the idea that good fiction approximates truth in a roundabout way. Like, a good work of fiction tells you something true, it just does it through the use of fiction.

Alex O'Connor
Did the Grinch steal Christmas? No, not really. But there's sort of an important message, symbolic truth, the so called moral of the story. Right. And the archetypal example of this is the christian scriptural canon.

These are the stories that have best approximated whatever truth is trying to be gotten at and done it in the most effective and. And surviving manner. So, yeah, I mean, it's obviously doing something, but, yeah, people want their stories to be true. The difficulty is that the specific truth claims of Christianity, like Jesus rising from the dead, for example, we can't say that didn't happen in the sort of scientific sense of, like. I mean, we're doing, like, historical science.

I mean, you can just say, well, it breaks the laws of physics, and they never break, but you don't know that it could have happened. Logically speaking, it doesn't break any laws of logic for a man to rise from the dead. If we discovered the bones of Jesus, that would be another matter. I mean, you'd be able to say, well, the truth claims aren't really important to me. I care about the narrative and all this kind of.

But you'd be like, yeah, but we have the bones of Jesus. We know that he remained dead. He did not rise from dead, didn't ascend into heaven. She's got to be undermined there. Whereas if it's a case of, like, there's this extraordinary claim which we can't prove is false, that Jesus rose from the dead.

But, like, I understand why you probably don't think it's true, but you can't prove that it's false. It sort of leaves that room for people to be attracted to the narrative and the poetry and the meaning and sort of say, well, this is a really unbelievable claim to me, but, like, I'm just sort of happy to just. To just say, yeah, sure, why not? Jesus rose from the dead. Okay.

I choose to believe it as Ayanne Hersyali did. What I was going to say about her with the nihilism question is that like, when she approaches the discussion with Richard Dawkins, we're not talking about Russia and wokeism anymore. A little bit. It comes up, but she's talking about her own depression. She's talking about her own sort of feelings of nihilism and despair and suicidality.

And that's what Christianity afforded, like a way to get out of for her. So for her, it was very much, seemingly, from what I understand of her position, a response to this personal nihilism as well. I wonder if I kind of had it in my head about that debate and the applause that people had for her when she said, and I found faith, and faith dragged me out of my problems. I wonder whether the reason, and even to me, I can feel it inside of myself when you hear a story like that from somebody who has been at a very low place and has been brought out by a thing that they believe in, and then this guy sat opposite them, starts wagging his finger about this sort of weird pannickety. But do you actually think that Jesus was born from a virgin?

Chris Williamson
And I wonder whether the applause, I presume that that didn't get applause. I'm going to guess that Richard Dawkins trying to come in litigiously, well, it. Was sort of a split audience in that, like, Dawkins and I might be misremembering. I need to watch this back. But, you know, at points he would just sort of say, he said, like, ayanne, I'm sorry, but this is bigger than, you know, comfort.

Alex O'Connor
And then your personal feelings of what brings you comfort, it's quite, quite harsh. But then you're there to have that conversation, of course. And there were a few points where he basically goes, look, I care about what's true. I don't care. I don't care about the narrative and the beauty and the me.

I care about what's true. And people. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I just wonder whether it's the ambient, meaningless, depressive, anxiety induced cultural milieu that many people feel in the modern world.

Chris Williamson
I wonder whether that makes them predisposed to see Ayan as well. Good for you. Look at how great this is for you. I'm so happy for you that this thing has happened. And who's this white guy?

Who's this old footy, doddering guy coming in, shaking his finger at you and pooing on your parade. It's a bit like the sort of the father in law at the wedding coming along and being, and like a beautiful day, you've found the person to love your life. And he goes, yeah, well, you know, he doesn't make that much, does he? You know, he could have a better job. Yeah.

Alex O'Connor
It's not, I'm not saying you're wrong. Yeah, okay, you're fine. Yeah, you're right, mate. All right, fine. You're true.

Yeah. Correct. Well done. You've sort of scored your point on the truth value, but you've like totally ruined the whole, the whole day, you know? And that's how I think a lot of people would feel about that conversation.

But look, I totally, obviously I understand. I mean, the way that I'm speaking now, I understand why people make this criticism. You can probably understand too, why people are like, I'm soft on Christianity because it seems like I'm like morally endorsing this approach. I'm not endorsing it. I'm just, I'm trying to explain what I see going on.

And what I see going on is an abandonment of care for like, propositional truth claims and an embracing of unifying narrative that sort of gives direction to people's lives. And people are more attracted to that. I'm still, the reason why I wouldn't be able to just call myself a Christian is because I don't believe that it's true. I think I'd have to believe in the truth claims. But that's because you are holding yourself to a particular standard due to the fact that you've spent the last decade immersed in it.

Chris Williamson
You are also friends with people who do have a very high bar, that they hold their own faith. I think if I was to somehow be able to get in and twiddle with the barometer or the thermostat with which you would have to pass in order for you to say, well, I'm a cultural christian. I believe in forgiveness. You go to church. You've been to church.

Like you, hymns, they're cool rock bands, they're awesome. Pyrotechnics. Love that. God corvettes, great. All of those things.

I think you would quite easily be able to, I'm sure that there's tons and tons of christian values that you think this is great. And maybe if I had a way to identify that, uh, during times when my life is difficult, I would be able to think, huh. Rather than having to axiomatically, why is it that people come up with, you need to have your values. Do you know your values? Big personal development thing.

You have values and then you have principles like, what is it that I believe in? And then operationally, how do I actually act within each of these? If that's not someone just recreating their own religion on the back end of some personal development book? I don't know what is. You wouldn't need to do that.

You don't need to come up with it from first principles because you have your operating manual that's there. It doesn't matter about believing in the thing. The problem that you have, as far as I can see, is that your criteria, your level of certainty and the depth of certainty as well, that level of conviction is greater than it is for some people who are able to bifurcate out their belief in the tree versus the tastiness and usefulness of fruit. Yeah. And there's going to be a lot more hurdles in the way of, like, to believe in the resurrection of Jesus.

Alex O'Connor
I don't just have to suddenly become convinced that there's a strong historical case for it, because I know that there is. I just know that there are a lot of objections to that as well. And so now I've got to sort of overcome those objections. Whereas for somebody else, it might not need to go that deep for them to have that conviction sort of develop within them. So I think, you know, they say God meets you where you're at, right?

Like, it's. It would be. It would be. I mean, so many people spend so much time trying to. To do theology or philosophy, and they study intricate arguments of God's existence, some of them extraordinarily complicated with, like, 50 different premises.

And there's part of you which wants to say, well, if that's what leads you to God, that itself seems like an argument against God's existence. Like, oh, yeah, so you can come to know God, but only if you're smart enough and have enough time to read through this 50 premise argument that finally concludes, yeah, that'll do it for you. That doesn't seem like the way that things would be designed, but maybe it's the case that for those who want to go digging in that depth, they'll find God there, but for those who don't, they'll find God somewhere else, such. As in, you know, it does meet you where you're at the pretty waterfall. Or in the sort of escape from the.

Escape from nihilism. So, yeah, there's that idea that, like, you'll. Wherever you look, you'll end up finding God. How much do you think this christian revival is downstream from Jordan Peterson?

Chris Williamson
Is there a first mover of the christian revival?

Alex O'Connor
Hard to say. I don't know about, because Peterson's religious. Convictions, bona fides.

They'Re so vague and so non committal that I think it would be difficult to attribute a lot of it to him. Although his friendliness to Christianity and the sort of biblical series that he does, I mean, he must have inspired so many people to revisit the biblical stories, especially exodus and Genesis. Cain and Abel. Everybody's heard of Cain and Abel. Now, I wonder if that was the case 510 years ago, before Jordan Peterson started talking about it in every single podcast he ever does.

So that's cool. But I don't know if he sort of inspired this movement. I think in the UK, Tom Holland has a lot to do with it. Even if a lot of people haven't read Tom Holland, the people who, who they listen to have, you know what I mean? So, like the actual genesis of the thought might be in that dominion thesis that seeps its way into a lot of other.

Chris Williamson
How many times have we heard the term judeo christian values? Yeah, it's a strange, it's a strange phenomenon. I mean, what are judeo christian values? I mean, like flip open the Old Testament to almost any page and tell me what you find and tell me if you think that accords with what people would proudly assert as judeo christian values of today. They seem to contradict each other.

Who else is perpetuating this wave of christian revival? It depends what you mean. So the people I mentioned earlier, so the Constant Kissons, Douglas Murrays, they're perpetuating it in the sense that they'll. I don't know if Douglas Murray would use the term cultural Christian, but say Richard Dawkins and Constantine Kissin, two guys who will both say, I don't believe it's true, but I'm a cultural Christian. So they're just asserting the value of, like, christian architecture, ethic, whatever, whatever it is, aesthetic, which for me is of course the same thing as ethic, really.

Alex O'Connor
But then on the sort of belief front, someone like Ayan Hersiali is a big player because she's a huge conversion story of someone who actually now believes in God. Russell Brand, maybe. I'm sure even if you don't listen to him, he's famous enough that the fact that he's converted is new. I don't know. Have there been any other sort of famous conversions recently that I'm missing out because also you can dispute whether this christian revival thing is happening at all.

Maybe it's just a bunch of wishful thinking. Maybe it's just a bunch of people getting excited because one or two people have converted to Christianity again. Who knows? It would be interesting, I wonder, when the next census comes out or whatever GSS data, if we're going to see some mild christian life thing coming about. Maybe you would be able to see this in a.

Chris Williamson
Maybe people won't even identify as christian, but fewer will identify as atheist or agnostic or have no belief. The last census showed for the first time, less than 50% of the population called themselves christian. Where? In England. So the big sort of every ten year census.

When was this? Do you know? This was. No, I can't remember. I think it's 2021, maybe, right?

Alex O'Connor
Yeah. So, like recently, like 2015 or something? Yeah, they do it. Yeah, something like that. And so we'll have to wait for the next one.

But it's been steadily declining. You know, Christianity has been going down, down, down. And so the project, if you look at any of the statistics, the projections are like, what the hell are you talking about? Christian revival, literally, the church is being absolutely decimated. No one is showing up for church tenants.

You know, people are calling themselves christians. It's on the down low. You know, Islam is growing, atheism is growing, you know, all of this kind of stuff. Christianity is completely depleted. And yet there's sort of.

People are just like, yeah, but I can feel it in the air. There's just something happening. And so maybe at the next census, we'll see that the rate of decline slows down. Maybe it reverses a bit, maybe it holds still and that itself would actually be quite significant.

Chris Williamson
I always think about that. How much is just Internet Degen, Edgelord, terminally online, people thinking that their particular corner, their reality sphere, is what is happening everywhere. I remember before the. What was the last general election? 2019, where it was the conservative landslide.

Alex O'Connor
Oh, yeah, sure. Maybe. I don't know. I can't remember. Anyway, I remember Stormzy tweeted out in support of Jeremy Corbyn.

Yeah, that's right. And I remember thinking, fucking hell, Stormzy. I mean that, like. And look at how many retweets it's got. That's stormzy.

Chris Williamson
And then Amber that won Love island tweeted out as well. And I thought, oh, my God, like, you know this. All of the polls are wrong. It's not going to happen. And then you realize that the Internet is not the real world.

Alex O'Connor
Yeah, it's the same thing with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. I remember when Donald Trump got elected, I must have been, what, 16 or something? And I just remember waking up and just being like, surely not. Surely not. Because you.

Just. Because everybody is. And it's the same thing with Brexit. Like, it was like, that's why people are, like, kind of suspicious of polls now, because, like, everybody was predicting that this wasn't gonna happen because. And you, again, you felt it in the air.

You're like, everyone you speak to, literally everyone you spoke to was like, oh, Brexit is this nonce? It's so ridiculous. Racist. And then it actually wins and you're like, oh, right, okay. Because, yeah, people have their little bubbles.

And I wonder how much of this, like, christian revival thing is that. I mean, christian revival, like, seriously, to the extent that, like, you know, okay, it's different in America, but in the UK, if you just pulled someone off on the street, if you went to a pub and say, hey, man, have you been feeling this christian revival? What the hell are you talking about? I mean, if you ask them, hey, you know, like, the right wing revival that's happening in the UK, they'd be like, yeah, man, it's crazy. You see how reform UK has come out of nowhere and just, like, started dominating the polls.

You're asking about christian revival? No. The fact that it doesn't have the cultural force, it might be exemplified in the fact that the sort of new right wing up and comer, reform UK, UK, who are doing everything they can to try to take the traditional right from, you know, who are now disaffected by the conservative party and bring them over to them. They haven't tried to use Christianity as a tool to do that. They haven't mentioned it again, what's.

Chris Williamson
Even though something close to 50% of England is claims to be christian, you. Would think, and presumably the 50% who claim to be christian are probably more right leaning. I don't know that for sure. But, you know, it's possible. If that's the case, why wouldn't Nigel Farage be like, yeah, we're a christian party.

Alex O'Connor
We believe in christian principles and christian values. Got 48% of England. Yeah, because it doesn't work like that. Because there isn't actually this upsurge in christian conviction that's happening in the country. Maybe we're beginning to see the.

I think Justin Brierly's idea is that we're beginning to see it sort of in the intellectual space. Some of the important thought leaders are beginning to consider Christianity and it's sort of in its infancy. And what's going to happen is those guys, a bit like the Tom Holland thing where somebody changes their mind and then enough people listen to them and it sort of seeps to down. And then eventually we might see something like the general population becoming more christian, but it's not happening yet, in my opinion. A good example of this, I think, would be Mary Iba stat, Louise Perry, Mary Harrington, Freya India, Nina Power, Helen Lewis, in some parts, too, pushing back against the sexual revolution.

Chris Williamson
And that was kind of. I mean, if you'd said that ten years ago, you'd been like, what the fuck do you mean to mean? Yeah, the sexual revolution was bad for women. What are you talking about? Whereas now you start to see this more and more in normal press, there is literally a thing called being Perry pilled.

Right. I understand the case against the sexual revolution and I broadly agree with it. That was precisely the same thing. Terminally online, Degen, Edgelord, Internet, people shitposting their way through Twitter and substack to slowly actually get to. Huh.

I think. And it would not surprise me if in ten years time, that's the sort of thing that our parents would bring up where it's like, oh, yeah, yes, I've been reading a little bit, an article in the Times about whatever, whatever. You go like, that's the same as birthright decline. George, the guy that we've been hanging out with all week, has got this great question where he says, what is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians. Brilliant.

Alex O'Connor
Yeah. And I suppose you would say birthright. Birthright decline. I think impact of hormonal birth control would be another one. Sure.

Chris Williamson
I think embryo selection and the sort of onslaught, the coming. I would have said AI 2018, 2017, but now it's. Media's got a hold of it. What would you say to that question? I'm just trying to think about that.

Ignored by the media, but will be studied by historians. I don't know. I think birth rates is not a. Not a bad. It's not a bad option, especially with how quickly that will presumably change demographics.

Alex O'Connor
I mean, yeah, like in the UK, for example, a lot of people sort of celebrate the growth of Islam and there's a big debate where the debate usually goes, Abba, look how successful we are. And then it's like, Abba, that's not because you're converting people, because you're having more kids. They are also converting people, but they're also just having more kids and so, yeah, like, people, I would imagine that that will be something that will be of sort of fascination as to why that happened. So would you say the changing demographics of the UK would be one? Yeah, sure.

But then that is in the media. I mean. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, maybe not like, maybe not like a ton, but, yeah, people. People talk about it. It comes up usually in the sense of, like, alarmism.

Usually in the sense of, like. I mean, I saw a thing today on Twitter of somebody sort of going around interviewing, like, reform UK candidates and them just sort of saying, yeah, we need to take our country back. And the sort of the clever journalists being like, from who? Well, you know, and it's that typical street interview style thing where they don't know what they're saying and they sort of say, you know, because we'll be in the minority, you know, soon, you know, whatever. And the journalist doesn't, like, doesn't deny it or whatever, just sort of, it's like, there, like, people are talking about.

Chris Williamson
It, but there's sort of gonzo style journalism that side eyes at the thing. Usually it's in the sense of sort of like, you know, get a load of these guys. But, you know, it's there, like, the presence of the fact that people think about that is, like, in the media, whereas, like, the birth rate thing. Like, I think if I didn't know you, I wouldn't even, like, think of it as a. I wouldn't even, like, be aware of it as, like, a concept.

Alex O'Connor
Right. Even as something to then, like, condemn, as alarmism or whatever. Like, you wouldn't even know it's a thing. Stephen Jay Shaw, the guy, the original dude that I brought on a year ago, as far as I'm aware, the best demographer in the world at this just redid his numbers for South Korea, which went from 0.6 to 0.5 now. And he messaged me from Korea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. The message was kind of short. When he sends long messages. When it's a long message, it's interesting. When it's a short message, it's sad.

Chris Williamson
And it was basically, I think the final sentence was, they're done. Like, Korea is completely done. Game over. Within the next hundred years, for every hundred Koreans, there will be four great grandchildren, children. Wow.

Alex O'Connor
Yeah. That's amazing, isn't it? I mean, it's just fascinating. And the fact that if we sort of have. I mean, the thing about, like, this kind of stuff is it's like maths, isn't it?

Chris Williamson
You can literally, demography is destined. This is how many kids are being. You can't make any more one year. Olds is how many people there will be. Right.

Alex O'Connor
Like we know it for a fact. And you're right, it sort of doesn't, doesn't really get a mention. And I think it's because the media, the news is daily, the news talks about what's happening now today. Right. And this stuff isn't happening now today.

It will one day. It's the most unique. Until it does, it's not going to be talked about. It's the most unique type of risk. It's not an existential risk.

Yeah. It's not in the true permanent, unrecoverable collapse, bostromian sense of the word, but it is one of the most unique kinds because it does not galvanize people to look up and see smog in the sky or forests burning or fish dead in the ocean. It doesn't galvanize people in the same way. It is a lagging measure of a lead indicator and it's just maths, man. And it's revert, whatever the opposite of an exponential, like, I don't know, but down that one.

Chris Williamson
Yeah, it goes down. It goes down but it goes down increasingly. No, there's gotta be. What's the opposite of like x, not logarithm. Introvert people are screaming it into their airpods.

A couple of mathematics people are, dude, I want to say before we, before we finish upon. It's an imponential. Yeah. Like an innie rather than an outy. I think that you're perfectly positioned at the moment, regardless of how large the breakout of the christian revival thing is, regardless of how much a threat of rising islamic population is in the UK and the US.

I think that you're really interestingly positioned. I've said this to you before, but I think that you're really interestingly positioned to blend a few different areas that I don't think many people can. So I'm genuinely, genuinely excited to see what happens next few years. I think that like just so much cool stuff and I love your stuff. I love watching your videos.

So I'm really, really excited to see what you do. Thanks, man. I'm a fan too, as you know. Yeah, it's exciting to see that potentially at least the discussion of Christianity is going to be back on the table again because I love looking at Christianity, studying Christianity, looking at the Bible and biblical scholarship and all that kind of stuff. It's really fascinating, but it's not very employable.

Alex O'Connor
I'm lucky I'm in a YouTube niche where people are interested in those kinds of debates and stuff, but it doesn't have a lot of political relevance. If this does become a more talked about thing or a movement or people are right that there is some kind of christian revival around the corner, then yeah, there will be. Are you going to be the theology consultant for Nigel Farage's new reform party? Is that what you're suggesting? I am definitely not suggesting that, but I think there'll be a lot of interesting commentary to make from the perspective of, like, well, how much of this is political and how much of this is.

How much of this is theological? I don't know. Did Nigel Farage a Christian? Does he claim to be a Christian? Wouldn't surprise me if he does.

But like we said earlier, the fact that we don't even know tells us everything we need to Americans. Americans, the UK, right? Spitting their gatorade out. Alex O'Connor, ladies and gentlemen. Where should people go?

Chris Williamson
Keep up to date with all of the things that you do. They should go, well, they should go to church, they should go to the gym. You know, they should go to the library. They'll find you in the gym all the time. Yeah, they'll probably find me in church every now and again as well.

Alex O'Connor
I'm one of them, those sort of Philip Larkin esque church. You're like a cultural fitness enthusiast. Yeah, I'm a cultural gym bro. Yeah. I don't actually believe in any of it, but I, you know, I sort of.

I'm partake every sort of, you know, I drink a protein chip. You're Jim adjacent. Yeah, I'm Jim adjacent. I'm gonna. I'm gonna start saying that.

That's going in my. Again, it's the Twitter bio every single time. It just grows and grows and grows. If they want to find my content, then within reason is the name of my podcast. I've just done a couple of episodes on the gnostic gospels and more are coming with some fascinating, awesome, interesting people.

But, yeah, I'm just Alex O'Connor everywhere else. Alexoconna.com. Hell, yeah. Appreciate you, man. Cool.

You too.

#807 - Alex O'Connor - Why Is Political Christianity On The Rise?

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1: Introduction to the Topic

2: The New Cultural Christians

3: Political Dimensions of the Revival

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