Tucker on the New Religion of Trump’s America and His Mockery of Jesus Christ

America’s new civic religion is Israelism, Christianity without the New Testament, and it’s the most unforgiving faith of all. Paid partnerships: Black Rifle Coffee: Promo code "Tucker" for 30% off at https://blackriflecoffee.com Dose: Daily supplements for the systems that support you. Use code TUCKER for 35% at https://dosedaily.co/tucker Charity Mobile: A pro-life company serving pro-life customers and supporting pro-life causes for 30 years. Use promo code TUCKER to get a free phone with free activation, free shipping, and a free gift with every new line of service at https://charitymobile.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:30Tucker Carlson?

  Donald Trump is a famously irreligious man, just not that interested. Basically secular, a product of his time and place. If you doubt that, some of the funniest clips ever of Donald Trump, and this is not a criticism, they're legit funny, are him being interviewed during the 2016 campaign and asked basic questions like, "What's your favorite book of the Bible?", to which he says, with some confusion, "Well, the Bible." Maybe unaware there are component books to it. So Donald Trump is not someone who traditionally, or ever really, has weighed in on questions of faith or theology, kind of gives it a pass or smiles, "Yeah, I'm for it. I'm for it. The Bible."

• 1:13Tucker Carlson?

  But in the space of one week, Donald Trump, this same famously irreligious Donald Trump, has weighed in in pretty specific ways on matters of faith and theology and religion, publicly, in ways that are disruptive and sort of hard to understand, but worth trying to understand. So all this began about 10 days ago on Easter Sunday, early on Easter Sunday, before 9:00 a.m. on Easter Sunday, when Trump tweeted that he was planning on destroying civilian infrastructure in Iran. It was going to be Bridge and Power Plant Day, basically promising war crimes, crimes against civilians, against the population of the country. And then, in that same tweet, or "truth," he used the F-word on Easter Sunday, and

• 1:56Tucker Carlson?

  then he seemed to make fun of Islam. "Praise Allah," he said. So in one short statement of about 110 words, he seemed to give the finger to the world's two largest religions, Christianity and Islam. Hmm. That was Sunday. And then exactly one week later, also on Sunday, the Christian holy day, he attacked the Pope. The leader of the world's largest religion and largest Christian denomination and attacked him personally and said, basically, he's only Pope because of me. He's bad. The Pope is bad.

• 2:35Tucker Carlson?

  And then, later that day, maybe most interestingly, bafflingly of all, he sent out this, this meme. Take a look at this. Now, there are two on the screen. The one on the right is the one that he sent out, and it's himself, it's Donald Trump, President of the United States, dressed as Jesus, healing a man. You can see the healing power coming off of his right hand. Now, the image on the left of your screen is the original image, and it was floating around the internet. Who knows exactly where it came from, but it's been there for quite some time. The one on the right is the one the President sent out, White House Communications Officer,

• 3:17Tucker Carlson?

  whoever does this, sent out, and you'll notice that it's been changed, and the American soldier over the President's head, the President as Jesus's head, has been changed and is now, if you look very carefully, a demon, some kind of winged creature of hell. So it goes from an image that suggests, you know, healing and light, to an image that suggests, I don't know, a scene from Revelation, John's vision on the Isle of Patmos, the end times, the apocalypse, who knows? Nothing good. It suggests demonic power because there is a demon in it. So he sent that out, and then withdrew it, deleted the tweet from the internet after

• 4:00Tucker Carlson?

  an outcry, but was asked about it, and he said, "Yeah, I sent that." Didn't explain how the demon got in there. Someone at the White House put it in, didn't explain why. And he said, "I sent it out, but it wasn't me as Jesus," though, obviously, it is, "it was me as a doctor, because I heal people." Jesus, of course, basically described himself as a doctor, someone who came for the sick to heal them, which he did. So maybe a distinction without a difference, but still kind of confusing. And then today, a day later, was asked about it again, and he said, "No, no, no, I didn't, I didn't have anything to do with that. I didn't send it out." Which wasn't exactly an answer to the question, even more confusing. What was that?

• 4:44Tucker Carlson?

  And then, to make it even further mysterious, sent out this meme on Truth Social, retweeting somebody else, and it's him, Donald Trump, being, I don't know. How would you describe that? Caressed by?

• 5:05Tucker Carlson?

  Healed by? Maybe endorsed by Jesus? That's unmistakably Jesus, the Christian Messiah, the man God at the center of Christianity, with his arm around Donald Trump, basically saying, "You go, Trump. I'm on your side."

• 5:24Tucker Carlson?

  So, all of that in a little over a week. What does it mean? Because it certainly means something. This isn't so much a couple of memes. These are, these are icons, it's iconography. These are attempts to send a statement about faith. What statement is the president sending? Well, not a coherent one. Doesn't actually add up to a theology. It's mockery. He's mocking Jesus. He's making fun of Christianity. The central figure of the religion is being held up for mockery, of course.

• 6:05Tucker Carlson?

  And his description of how this got out is itself mockery, mockery of the idea of truth. One day, he says, "Yeah, I did it." Next day, he says, "No, I didn't do it." Both are on video. That's not really a lie. It's more than a lie. It's bigger than a lie. It's an attack, not just on a specific set of facts, it's an attack on the idea that there are facts. It's an attack on truth, openly. No one's hiding this.

• 6:32Tucker Carlson?

  So this was kind of dismissed after a online kerfuffle for a few hours and people were outraged and then they weren't and we've got other things to worry about, they moved on. But for sincere religious people, for Christians who care about Jesus and what's true and what's not, a lot of them went to their Bibles to try and figure out, what are we watching here? And a lot of them came up with a couple of verses that seemed to fit what we're watching. And if you are a sincere Christian or know some, maybe you got these texted to you, but we'll read them just so you know how a lot of people of faith were interpreting this.

• 7:13Tucker Carlson?

  The first is from Paul's second letter to the Thessalonians, the church is Thessalonica, chapter two, very well-known verse in which he's describing what's going to happen when Jesus comes back. And he says, "You're going to hear that Jesus is coming back. Don't believe what you hear. A bunch of things have to happen before he returns to earth, redeems the world, history ends, and you'll know that he's coming by these events. And among them will be the rise of a figure he describes as the man of lawlessness, sometimes describes as the Antichrist, but the man of lawlessness is the phrase from his second letter to the Thessalonians.

• 7:55Tucker Carlson?

  And he says this, "There will be a great rebellion against God, led by that man of lawlessness. This man, quote, "will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God. He will pose as God. He will mock other gods and put himself in their place." That's from the second letter to the Thessalonians. But that's not the first place in the Bible, Old and New Testaments, where something like this is described. Variations of this are in a number of prophecies and what Christians call the Old Testament, including those contained in the book of Daniel. The prophet Daniel described something very much like this.

• 8:40Tucker Carlson?

  At the end of history, and he's describing this period, really, as is so often described in the prophets, as punishment, punishment for faithlessness and sin. God's people are being punished for not following God. And that punishment, he describes in part in chapter 11 from the book of Daniel, predicts the coming of a king, and we're quoting now, "A king who will do as he pleases. He will exalt and magnify himself above every God, and will say unheard-of things against the God of gods. He will be successful until the time of wrath is completed, for what has been determined must take place." It's all ordained, in other words, preordained. "He will show no regard for the gods of his

• 9:22Tucker Carlson?

  ancestors, nor will he regard any God, but will exalt himself above them all." So to a lot of Christians, or people who know the Bible well and believe in it, these predictions, in both the Old and the New Testament, and there are others, seem to fit what we were watching. Here's a leader who's mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods, and exalting himself above them. Could this be the Antichrist? Well, who knows? At least, that's my conclusion. Who knows? We're also told repeatedly, in the New Testament, that you're not gonna know that Jesus will return like a thief

• 10:03Tucker Carlson?

  in the night, and you better be ready, because you can't predict it. But we're also told there are signs, and is this one of them? Well, again, unclear. This, by the way, fits the behavior of other leaders throughout history, who saw themselves in a kind of rivalry with the gods of their people, and sought to put themselves over those gods, exalt themselves above God. That's actually pretty common. That is really the definition of megalomania, and it's happened before, and will doubtless happen again. But that's clearly what this is. This is mockery of God by a temporal leader, by a man.

• 10:49Tucker Carlson?

  This is the leader of our country saying, "I will take no instruction from God." Because, as he showed in the first meme, "I am God." Okay. So that kind of raises the question, is that okay? Seems to be okay. There were no massive protests in front of the White House. There was no attempt really to do anything about this. In fact, many Republican leaders shrugged it off. Self-professed Christians shrugged off, "No big deal." You know, he's just, just true socialing. "Don't pay attention. It's just a joke. It's just a joke." What, you have no sense of humor? Mocking Jesus? Giving the finger to God? You're so uptight.

• 11:31Tucker Carlson?

  And as for his attacks on the Pope, Republican leader after Republican leader, including just hours ago, the Speaker of the House, the self-described Christian, fervent Christian, Bible scholar, joined in, attacking the Pope. So you're gonna have to wonder, is this the behavior of a Christian nation? Is the United States a Christian nation? Well, that depends how you look at it. The United States is the nation with the most Christians, over 200 million. There are more Christians in the United States than in any other country on planet Earth. So it is by that definition, a Christian nation. Of course, it's not officially Christian. Our Constitution forbids the US government from creating a state religion in the First

• 12:14Tucker Carlson?

  Amendment, in the Bill of Rights. So no, it's not officially Christian, but it is fundamentally materially Christian, because it's majority Christian, still. And once again, it's the country with the most Christians. But it's not a Christian country. And in fact, if you take three steps back, it's a nation, or it's a government anyway, that has for a long time, really, acted in opposition, explicit opposition to the interests of Christians, not just in the United States, but around the world. Our foreign policy, for example, seems to target Christians.

• 12:48Tucker Carlson?

  And this has happened consistently enough that it's probably not an accidental byproduct of the policy. It may be the point of the policy. Who knows what the intent is? But certainly a fact of every foreign policy adventure, at least since Vietnam, which in the end, this is often forgotten, left the Catholics, and there were many of them in Vietnam, in concentration camps. Didn't help the Catholics at all. Vietnam went from a Catholic country to a communist country, and that's not entirely our fault, but that is, that was the effect. That happened. The Iraq War. There were millions of Christians in Iraq when it started. There aren't now. A lot of them are dead.

• 13:31Tucker Carlson?

  Our policies in Syria, today in Lebanon, the only country in the Middle East with a Christian president, a Christian head of the military, being bombed with our bombs, dropped from our airplanes. Our munitions are being used to kill Christians. Our government is effectively sanctioning the ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon, including Christian villages, ancient Christian villages. So our foreign policy abets the murder of Christians, and not just our foreign policy, all of our policies. Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, our country as well, have all changed substantially, demographically, and become much less Christian because of immigration.

• 14:15Tucker Carlson?

  So you often hear people complain, "Oh, Europe's becoming Muslim." Yeah. Why is that? Well, because of mass migration. We've abetted it. The neocons certainly have abetted it. They've been in favor of it. They've attacked anyone who's opposed to it. Viktor Orban in Hungary, just lost the other day, the Prime Minister of Hungary, was hated by neoconservatives in Washington. Why is that? Because he pushed back against mass migration into Hungary. And he said Hungary is part of Christian Europe. It's a Christian country. It's one of the main reasons I don't want mass migration. Well, the entire foreign policy establishment in the United States decided he was an enemy for saying that.

• 14:59Tucker Carlson?

  So it's not simply that they haven't stopped the destruction of Christian Europe. They've been fully in favor of it. They're fully in favor of the war between Russia and Ukraine. Net effect, millions of dead Christian men. It's not just, again, an accidental byproduct. That may be the whole point.

• 15:17Tucker Carlson?

  So the United States government, as distinct from the people of the United States, who are still majority Christian, the United States government has been pretty aggressively anti-Christian for a very long time. Donald Trump is not the first president to give the finger to Jesus, hardly, but he is the first president to do it in public. And this has been going on long enough, and it's reaching a kind of boiling point right now, that we can begin to see the outlines of what the actual religion of the United States government is, certainly of this administration, because there always is one. There's no secular government, never has been one, never will be one. A truly secular government would

• 15:59Tucker Carlson?

  have no purpose. Its leaders would have no destiny. There'd be no real reason to continue on. It certainly wouldn't have any evangelical zeal. And our government does have evangelical zeal. We're spreading democracy and free market principles around the world, freedom or whatever. So every government is motivated by religious impulse, whether the government admits it or not, and ours certainly is. So what is the civic religion of the United States? What's the religion of the US government? What's the religion, honestly, of Donald Trump? It's not Christianity, clearly. It's Israelism. It's the defense of Israel. Now, how do you know that? Well, because the United States has set up, as its chief foreign policy,

• 16:44Tucker Carlson?

  in the defense of Israel. That's one clue. There's that. But it's much deeper than that. Who are the main enemies, as identified by the President of the United States, of his government domestically? Who are his enemies? Who does he dislike? Who does he attack? Who does he go out of his way to undermine? Well, it's people who doubt Israel, people who stand in the way of the aims of the secular government of Israel. And that would include Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massey, and the Pope. Now, how do you know that's what it is? Well, because that's the only thing they have in common. The Pope, the American

• 17:29Tucker Carlson?

  Pope, first American Pope, Pope Leo, is, in American political terms, a liberal. He is, by the way, for mass migration, shamefully so, I would say, as a non-Catholic.

• 17:42Tucker Carlson?

  But while not anti-Israel, he's not a Zionist because Catholicism doesn't recognize Zionism as part of its catechism. There are plenty of Catholics who love Israel and there are some who don't love Israel, maybe some who hate Israel, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the core tenets of Catholicism. And unlike so many other newer versions of Christianity, Catholicism has been around for thousands of years and has a very clearly articulated catechism. You know what Catholics believe or what the church believes and what it tells its members, its parishioners, its Catholics, communicants to believe. It's all written down. And unwavering support for the state of Israel is just not on the

• 18:25Tucker Carlson?

  list at all. At best, it's a faith that's agnostic toward the political fortunes of the Netanyahu government. And that's not going to change because, again, there's a structure and there is a list of beliefs, a creed written down. So it's pretty hard to force a church like that to change its views because those views are effectively set in stone and have been for a very long time. So the president's problem with Pope Leo probably has nothing to do with Pope Leo's views on crime, which may be annoying,

• 19:04Tucker Carlson?

  by the way. His views on mass migration are very hard to defend and very destructive, but that's not really the problem here. The problem is that Pope Leo criticized this war with Iran, which was waged in partnership with Israel on behalf of Israel at the instigation of Israel. And he criticized that. That's his problem. So did Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey. Thomas Massey made the mistake of criticizing Israel's lobby in the United States, AIPAC. That was his sin. Marjorie Taylor Greene didn't say a lot about AIPAC but wasn't enthusiastic about waging wars on Israel. She got attacked too. That's the only thing all three of them have in common. Thomas Massey is a pretty strict libertarian.

• 19:49Tucker Carlson?

  Marjorie Taylor Greene is what we used to call a MAGA conservative. She believed the Trump program from 2016. Hardly a liberal, totally opposed to mass migration. Tough on crime, as they used to say. Has basically every single belief in common with the Donald Trump who ran for office in 2016, 2020, and 2024. There's no daylight between them. She ran for Congress because she was inspired by Donald Trump. She was the number one Trump acolyte in the Congress. Why did they break? Over Israel. Over Israel's connection to Jeffrey Epstein and over Israel's push for the United States to join all kinds of foreign wars, particularly a war with Iran. That's why they broke.

• 20:33Tucker Carlson?

  That's the thing that split their relationship and got the president attacking her and Thomas Massey and the Pope. So what does that tell you? It tells you what the religion is. The religion is Israelism. It's the support of Israel. That's why the president is totally comfortable surrounding himself with evangelical preachers, every one of whom has one thing in common, whether they're word of faith preachers or charismatic preachers or not. That's a huge split among evangelicals. Are you charismatic or not? Do you believe that glossolalia, tongues, prophecy seeing has a role in contemporary Christian worship, church services? They're mad at each other about that. Trump probably is even aware of that distinction.

• 21:17Tucker Carlson?

  All of them are welcome as long as their faith includes unwavering support for Israel. That's the common denominator. That's the only thing that matters. And because that's the only thing that matters, the coalition, the ever shrinking, day by day shrinking coalition that supports this president is now out in force, explaining that actually the Pope and Catholics, the Catholic Church itself, which about 20 minutes ago, most people thought was conservative in that it's pro-life, for example, that used to be a tenet of conservatism before this president. It wasn't for abortion.

• 21:58Tucker Carlson?

  That the Catholic Church is somehow liberal and not just liberal, anti-Semitic. It's evil. It hates Jews. It's actually pro-Nazi. Watch Lindsey Graham make this case.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  They're religious Nazis and the Catholic Church, God bless the Catholic Church, in the 30s, you didn't really get Hitler to the Pope. You really don't get this religious Nazi regime, the Ayatollah and his henchmen. They are evil. They will kill all the Jews if we let them and the Jewish people, one Holocaust is enough.

• 22:33Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, see, the Pope doesn't really get that Nazism is evil. Catholics just somehow missed that memo. Hitler bad. They just didn't, it's been 80 years, but they just, they never really bought into the proposition that the Holocaust was bad, that murdering Jews was bad. They're probably kind of for it, actually. Now, it's interesting because a year ago, no Republican member of Congress would have dared say anything like that. First of all, that's insane. It's a slander against Catholics, saying this is a birthright lifelong Protestant, but it's just not true. It's a horrible thing to say about anybody, but as a political

• 23:15Tucker Carlson?

  matter, it would have been crazy to say that because Catholics, sincere church-going Catholics, vote Republican. In fact, the more often you go to mass, the more likely you are to vote Republican, and that's true across races, by the way. So you see all these, you know, Hispanics are voting for Trump, and he got more Hispanics to vote for him, it is true, in 2024 than any Republican maybe ever, more than Jeb Bush, speaking Spanish, married to a Mexican lady. How did he do that? Well, one of the reasons he did that is because a lot of Hispanics are very Catholic. They're Christian, they're religious, they go to mass a lot.

• 23:58Tucker Carlson?

  And because they do, because their faith, for some of them, their faith is at the center of their lives, they voted for the candidate who seemed most predisposed to their religious views. Maybe he's not a Christian or a fervent Christian, but he seemed like a man who would protect Christians, Catholic Christians included, and so they voted for him. So a year ago, no, and every Republican knows this because there's lots of polling on it, because politicians think in terms of coalitions and who's going to vote for me and why, and they know this very well. So a year ago, no Republican would ever get up on TV and say, you know, the thing about Catholics is they're kind of Nazis. But there's Lindsey Graham doing it right there.

• 24:42Tucker Carlson?

  This is a profound break, and it's a, it's a very clear window into what the actual faith is. Israel is the deal killer. Anyone who doesn't support the military aims of the modern Israeli government cannot be part of the MAGA coalition and Lindsey Graham has just told us can't be a Christian. It's amazing. But it's not just Lindsey Graham. This is everywhere today, in case you haven't seen it. Here's Patrick Bet-David on his podcast a day or two ago. Watch this.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  I don't know why Catholics, you know, have this issue with Jews. I don't know what it is. They have this, this, this, you know, I don't, listen, I get the Jews have issues with Christians, and they'll make fun, and they'll say stuff like, oh, your Jesus is gonna do, you know, they'll say, well, he was a Jew anyways, right? But then Catholics have that issue with Jews, and they, they act like, you know, they're all innocent and everything. And when you look at Catholics, the amount of centralized power they have. Centralized. If you, you know what the total Catholic population is worldwide? It's like 1, 2, 1, 3 billion. Jews are 15 million.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  15 million.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  But Jews are decentralized, meaning Catholic, Jews don't have somebody they listen to that says, "Hey, you better do this." Catholics, God forbid you say something about the Pope. They're like, "Hey, man, listen, who is that Pope figure in the Christian community? We don't have one." If I ask you right now, "Who's the Pope in the Christian community?", you don't have somebody to look at. Who is a witch pastor?

• 26:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  We don't have one.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  It's an independent network.

• 26:22Tucker Carlson?

  It's just the Bible.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  So if you look at, only Catholics and Muslims have somebody that they look at as their supreme leader, like, you know, you gotta go to somebody. But even more, it's Catholic.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  Well, there's only two theocracies in the world.

• 26:37Tucker Carlson?

  Catholicism?

• 26:38Speaker 04

  Islam. I'm sorry, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  And the Vatican.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:45Speaker 04

  Those are the two major theocracies.

• 26:48Tucker Carlson?

  So actually, the Vatican is very much like the Nazi Iranian government, the theocratic government, the mullahs, it's all basically the same. They've got the complicated dress, they hate the Jews, as Patrick Bet David just said. Catholics have a problem with the Jews, a problem with the Jews.

• 27:10Tucker Carlson?

  It's slander. It's an attack on the world's largest and oldest Christian denomination, and it's taking place openly.

• 27:24Tucker Carlson?

  And it's all coming from the same source, which is Israel. The issue is Israel. Anyone who supports the Netanyahu government, not Israel as a concept, not all Jews, no, the Netanyahu government, anyone who ratifies every decision, no matter how violent or grotesque or genocidal of the Netanyahu government, those are the good people, and anyone who doesn't is a Nazi, and by the way, their religion itself is a Nazi religion, it's inherently anti-Semitic religion. That's what they're telling you, out in the open.

• 28:01Tucker Carlson?

  And the kind of casual dismissal, the mockery, the loathing of the oldest and largest Christian church is just remarkable. Now, again, Trump is someone who, you know, has a lot of problems showing respect to other powerful figures. And this is, it's not just Trump. Most men like Trump are that way. They get along well with women because they're not threatened by women. Woman's probably not trying to like, kill you and become king. They're kind of loyal and, but other men, every other man, to a certain male personality type is a potential threat. That's why kings kill their sons.

• 28:46Tucker Carlson?

  Every man is a potential threat. And so Trump is not, on a gut level, instinctively respectful of anything or anybody. And that's one of the reasons he was a much-needed transformative political figure for so long in the United States. Because he was willing to ask questions that most people in Washington had never even thought of, out of deference to the existing system. Like, why do we have NATO? Is it really a good idea to offshore manufacturing? Is our immigration actually, our system helping the United States or hurting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? All famously the questions that Trump asked about the way we were doing things were made possible. He was able to ask those things because he doesn't have reflective respect for anybody.

• 29:30Tucker Carlson?

  Got it? And so when Trump mocks Jesus and the Pope and Christians and tweets out the F-word on Easter morning, you're kind of like, well, this is awful, but it's also kind of consistent with the Trump we know. This is just Trump turned up to 11. But what's interesting is there are certain circumstances where Trump shows sincere reverence. There are the outlines of an actual religious faith here.

• 30:04Tucker Carlson?

  And they're not what you would expect. So here, for example, is Donald Trump, the month before the last election, this is October 2024, visiting the grave of a man called Rebbe Schneerson, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who is, was, he's since passed away, the leader of a large Orthodox sect. He's Eastern European by birth, came with many of his followers to New York, to Brooklyn, and built a very successful, relatively speaking, very small center of religious thought and political power, actually. He died some years ago. There's the now president standing there.

• 30:50Tucker Carlson?

  Looks like maybe Ben Shapiro there, Howard Lutnick, wearing a kippah on his head. As you look at that, ask, is it possible to imagine Donald Trump ever mocking Rebbe Schneerson, who, by the way, and this is kind of the point, is considered by some of his followers to be the Messiah? And to be completely clear, every American is allowed to decide for himself who the Messiah is, so that is not mockery of that belief. I don't personally believe it, but one of the reasons we've been able to live with people of different faiths in this country for 250 years is we don't mock other people's religious faith unless we're absolutely forced to, unless you're trying to make me

• 31:37Tucker Carlson?

  attend your religious rituals or bow down before a god I don't consider God. Unless it comes to that, we kind of let each other have our own religious views. And that has worked. That's changing very, very fast, however. But ask yourself, can you imagine Donald Trump sending out a meme mocking Rebbe Schneerson?

• 31:57Tucker Carlson?

  And of course, under no circumstances could you imagine that because under no circumstances would that ever happen. Trump would not be allowed to do that and Trump would never even consider doing it. But sending out multiple images mocking Jesus? No problem at all. So that gives you a more precise sense of what our civic religion actually is. A civic religion, by the way, is not a conventional religion. Civic religion is a series of customs, some enshrined in law, not all, that a society, civilization, and its government observe. And it doesn't necessarily mean there's a God at the center of it. That's why it's a civic religion rather than a conventional religion.

• 32:38Tucker Carlson?

  But our civic religion is if you, again, take three steps back and just assess the country with the eyes of a visitor, a modern Tocqueville, you can see it really clearly. What are the events? Who are the people who we treat with reverence? What are you actually not allowed to make fun of? What is blasphemy in modern America? Those are the questions you ask if you are trying to understand what our operative religion is. What's the religion of our leaders? Again, it's not a conventional religion necessarily. It's not Torah Judaism, or rabbinic Judaism, or evangelical Christianity, or Catholic Christianity.

• 33:22Tucker Carlson?

  It's the actual religion, the real religion, the set of beliefs that we treat with reverence. Well, it just so happens there was a religious ceremony ongoing today in the United States Capitol, complete with very recognizable religious iconography, symbolism. You may not even have known this was happening, but it was happening today as part of an eight-day celebration of remembrance of the Holocaust. The period in 1930s and 40s where the German government, the Nazi government murdered, in addition to a lot of other people, a whole bunch of Jews.

• 34:05Tucker Carlson?

  And that ended in part because the United States sent troops to Europe, millions of troops to Europe to defeat the German government. And with the help of the Soviets, our allies at the time, we did that. And in the process of doing that, over a quarter million Americans, American men, were killed trying to stop the Nazi government from doing the evil things that it was doing. A quarter million, more than, American men died fighting the Nazis. But in today's ceremony in the Congress, there was no mention of them. There was instead this. Watch.

• 34:46Speaker 05

  Ladies and gentlemen, a museum leadership program has included more than 72,000 US military members. Through examination of the Holocaust, they gain insight into their own professional and individual responsibilities. The candle lighters are members of the United States Army Third Infantry Regiment, the Old Guard.

• 35:13Speaker 06

  I am Sergeant Ethan Otten. I remember.

• 35:27Tucker Carlson?

  That is a current, uniformed, US military member from the Old Guard, the Third Infantry Regiment, which is ever-present at our public events in Washington, saying, lighting a candle at the menorah and saying, "I remember." No explanation of, "I remember." Remember what? What are we remembering here?

• 36:10Tucker Carlson?

  And we do have a sense that it's we're not remembering the American soldiers who liberated Dachau, for example. We're not remembering the quarter million American men who joined a war they had nothing to do with inherently. It wasn't taking place in North America, it was taking place in Europe, and the dispute was over Poland and Czechoslovakia. And they sacrificed their lives to defeat the Nazi government that was murdering Jews and a lot of other people, Poles and Russians and Gypsies and Czechs and lots, lots of people, a lot of Jews as well. But they gave their lives to stop that, but we're not remembering them. We're remembering only the victims of one specific ethnicity during these eight days of remembrance, as distinct from the day of remembrance that we also have, that's

• 36:54Tucker Carlson?

  also enshrined in American law in January. So there's a total of nine days of remembrance of one group of victims in a war that killed tens of millions of people globally, tens and tens and tens of millions. The numbers are actually not even clear. So many people died. We're not exactly sure how many died, but many tens of millions died, including close to a half million Americans, over a quarter million in Europe, fighting this Nazi regime, not remembered. So that is not to disrespect the Jewish victims of the Holocaust or the Second World War, of course not. Merely to note that in this country, only one group

• 37:35Tucker Carlson?

  gets to be remembered and remembered with grave solemnity by uniformed members of our military who take no credit for ending this Holocaust. So that doesn't make any sense. I mean, if, if you didn't know the backstory in any of this, and someone wrote that down and told you, you'd be like, well, what if, that doesn't, what? And it almost seems like there's a kind of guilt implied in this, which is a little weird. There are countries where, you know, that might be appropriate. This is not one of them, because again, this was the country that helped liberate people from those camps and fought the government that built those camps. We're the good guys. What is this? It doesn't make any sense, except

• 38:20Tucker Carlson?

  when you see it in the only terms in which it makes sense, which is as a civic religion, which is what it is. And it comes complete with blasphemy laws.

• 38:33Tucker Carlson?

  Once again, if you want to know what religion matters, it's the religion that can't be mocked. So clearly, that's not Christianity. "I'm Jesus today." "No, I didn't do that." "Oh, he's your God." "Okay, I'll send a meme out with me posing as your God with a demon over my shoulders." "There's nothing you can do about it." I'm not even going to explain what that was. I don't need to, because I don't care about your faith at all. But there are certain things that are blasphemy. And at the very top of that list is something called antisemitism. Now, what exactly is antisemitism? It's one of those crimes that's a true crime in the United States.

• 39:17Tucker Carlson?

  And actual antisemitism, hating people because of their blood, is a crime. Certainly, in Christianity, that is a crime. That is wrong. You're not allowed to do that. But that is a universal crime. It applies to all people: whites, blacks, Asians, Jews. Everybody has a right to be treated as an individual, because everyone was created by God as an individual. That's the Christian understanding. It's a universalist understanding of rights. And that's the old civic religion we had. The civic religion of civil rights. Now, there was a civil rights movement, which was fraudulent. Maybe at its core, maybe its aims were not advertised honestly. Maybe there was another point to that. Just possible.

• 40:02Tucker Carlson?

  But conceptually, it's kind of hard to argue with the fact that the assumptions behind civil rights are Christian assumptions. They're Western assumptions. They're the assumptions upon which our whole civilization is built. And the core assumption is that standards, rules, apply to everyone, because every human being possesses a soul given to him by God at creation, which is not an act that men brought about, but that only God can bring about. God creates life. He endows each human being with a soul. That soul is eternal. Therefore, each individual possesses rights granted him by God, not government.

• 40:41Tucker Carlson?

  And a good government protects those rights and in so doing upholds God's law. That's Western civilization, right there. And in a kind of deluded, silly way, the civil rights movement was upholding those ideas. The term civil rights, the term human rights reflect that understanding. The rights apply to you because you're a human, as they do all human beings. But that's over. That civic religion has died and we know that it's probably been dying for a long time. Identity politics is a refutation of that. The idea that some groups have more rights than others, that's the opposite of civil rights. That's the opposite of human rights. Those aren't human rights, those are group rights. They apply to certain groups.

• 41:26Tucker Carlson?

  One bloodline is superior to another bloodline. Well, that's not what we thought we were for. That's the opposite of what we thought we were for. All of a sudden you wake up and you realize not only are we for it, the government's for it. And that's why they're able to arrest people, not who commit genocide, but people who complain about genocide. Some of us thought, stupidly, with the cattle we are, that the real lessons of World War II were every person has inalienable rights. That's what we were taught. That was a pretty common understanding in, say, the 1970s and 80s. Nazis are bad because they redlined one group and said, "These people don't have the same rights as everyone else by virtue of their blood." They were really interested in eugenics.

• 42:11Tucker Carlson?

  And they were interested in people's bloodline. "Who are you related to? We're gonna find out if you're a secret Jew." Well, that's disgusting. That's, we used to say, that's Nazi behavior. And then the next thing you know, every other federal form you get asks you what your race is. And you're thinking, "Well, why does that matter? I thought you told me it didn't matter. I thought you told me it was evil to care about that."

• 42:36Tucker Carlson?

  But you wake up in 2026 and our closest ally is using our weapons to kill and displace people because of how they were born. And not only is that okay, the only real crime is complaining about it. Well, that tells you, well, it tells you a lot of things, but it tells you, we've got a whole new set of rules. We have a whole new civic religion. And that civic religion, once again, is called Israelism. And it means that any criticism of Israel is by definition bad, and any praise of Israel is by definition virtuous, because the only truly good thing is Israel. And we know that by the actual definition, and

• 43:20Tucker Carlson?

  there is one, of antisemitism. So what is antisemitism? And if you've been called it, or if someone's ever implied it, you have a problem with the Jews. You're kind of obsessed with the Jews. Say, people who are completely obsessed with the Jews. You probably wonder, like, what are they accusing me of? Well, here it is. This is the I H R A, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, I H R A, you may hear this, the I H R A definition of antisemitism. Do you know what it is? It's on their website. It's worth looking at. Spent the morning reading it. Fascinating. So here's the actual definition of antisemitism. And by the way, this is a now globally recognized definition, enshrined in law around the world in more than 40 countries. This is the definition, and I'm quoting.

• 44:05Tucker Carlson?

  "Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews." Huh? So antisemitism is a perception. It's a feeling. Okay. I thought you're allowed to have any feeling or perception you wanted. You could look at facts and come to any conclusion you wanted. No, no, no, no. Certain perceptions are inherently immoral. They're, quote, antisemitic, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews. Oh, so you don't have to hate the Jews to be antisemitic? No. Well, that answers the question for those of us who don't hate Jews at all.

• 44:43Tucker Carlson?

  How can you be anti-Semitic if you don't hate Jews? Well, you can be, according to the official definition of it. Continuing the quote, "Rhetorical," rhetorical, meaning talking, words, speech, formerly protected no longer, "rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities." Wait a second. So antisemitism is not necessarily hatred of Jews, and it can be expressed toward non-Jews? So you don't have to hate Jews, and you don't have to express or have these perceptions, these feelings toward Jews, you can be non-Jews too? What is this?

• 45:28Tucker Carlson?

  Well, the people who wrote it at the IHRA probably anticipated this would be confusing to you, so they gave 11 examples of what antisemitism is, just so you know. Like, how do I know if I'm being antisemitic? Well, here are 11 examples. Of those 11 examples, and we did the math, 2/3 are criticism of Israel, the state of Israel, the nation, with the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bibi. Criticism of Israel in 2/3 of the examples that the IHRA gave, that's antisemitism. Including, here we go, "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis."

• 46:13Tucker Carlson?

  Oh. In other words, if you think what's happening in Gaza is genocide, well, Nazis committed genocide, now the state of Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, meaning they're trying to eliminate people on the basis of their blood, you are an antisemite. Oh, okay. You're an antisemite if you think that. It also tells us that the suggestion that Jews killed Jesus is, quote, "classic antisemitism." Classic antisemitism. So there goes the New Testament. The whole New Testament is antisemitic too. Read the Gospels, and see if they fall under that definition. They do.

• 46:54Tucker Carlson?

  Why does this matter? Well, because about 40 US states and the District of Columbia and our biggest cities, Miami, Los Angeles, have adopted this. This is their standard that they voted on and adopted. It's in the law, this standard. The one that tells you that criticism of the secular state of Israel or portions of the New Testament are, quote, "antisemitism." The government of almost 40 states in the United States, I think 39 states, 40 countries around the world, but not just countries, NGOs, sports teams, the British Soccer League, Chelsea United, all of them have adopted this standard. Now, why would a sports team adopt this standard?

• 47:38Tucker Carlson?

  Well, who knows why? Think about it for a minute. Why? Why would you declare something illegal? Oh, because you want to punish people who violate it. That's why. This happened today. Ukraine, that beacon of democracy and freedom that we've sent hundreds of billions of dollars to, just made it law today that antisemitism, in other words, criticism of Israel, is a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. Eight years in prison. How could a rational person understand that? Well, a rational person could not understand that. Why would a citizen of one country be sent to prison for criticizing the leadership of another country, a country not his own?

• 48:23Tucker Carlson?

  Why would a citizen of one country be sent to prison for having opinions about historical events that he did not participate in and that were almost a century ago? Does that make any sense? No, except in religious terms. Those are blasphemy laws, same as the old blasphemy laws. And for all the talk of how the mullahs are bad, the mullahs are bad. Well, the mullahs probably are bad. I'm not defending the mullahs, but why are we told the mullahs are bad? The mullahs are bad because they're religious extremists. They have blasphemy laws. They'll hurt you if you say certain things. Okay.

• 49:02Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that looks a lot like what we're seeing here. Almost 40 states? Now, it's interesting. The president has been, all of a sudden, it makes sense. This may be the Rosetta Stone that helps us interpret events we're watching now that are very confusing. And those would include the president advocating for re-upping FISA. Now, FISA, without getting too boring about it, is the law, which has to be voted on periodically by Congress, that allows the US government to spy on Americans, to spy on them. Now, the whole point of it is supposed to be to spy on foreigners who are threatening us, but the nature of the technology being what it is, there are cases where we pick

• 49:47Tucker Carlson?

  up communications from Americans, and in order to make that legal, we need this thing called FISA. Now, what's interesting is that the president himself was a victim of the misuse of these laws in his first term. They were used against him in what became a kind of bureaucratic attempted coup against him that we call Russiagate. And so, the president was personally very sensitive on this question. He'd been the victim of the misuse of these laws, and so, he said many times, "I'm not for that. I don't think Americans should be spied on by their own government. I don't think you pay your taxes," today's tax day, by the way, "in order to be spied on by your government when you've done nothing wrong." But we are. Everyone knows that, and this allows it to be legal.

• 50:32Tucker Carlson?

  All of a sudden, the president is advocating for this new law. He wants the Congress to allow the US government to spy on Americans. Why could that possibly be? Well, there are a couple of clues. One comes from the documents unearthed and made public, God bless him, by Ed Snowden some years ago, that showed that NSA, the National Security Agency, the largest of all of our spy agencies, turned over raw data to, can you guess? Oh, the Israeli government, that included private information about Americans. So, they sweep up all this information, the communications of American citizens, and they just turn it all over without taking private information about Americans, our

• 51:17Tucker Carlson?

  citizens, they turn it all over to a foreign government, and its intel service, to be used, God knows how.

• 51:24Tucker Carlson?

  That's one. Two is a very revealing moment in the Congress, two and a half years ago, with a man, a congressman from Ohio called Mike Turner, who at the time was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. And he was arguing, as chairman of the House Intel Committee always do, for more spying on Americans. So the House and Senate Intel Committees are supposed to provide oversight of the intelligence agencies, because you don't really know what they're doing, you don't know what their budget is, the whole thing is secret, you can't know. So your representatives on these committees oversee just to make sure that they're not violating the US Constitution or your human rights given to you by God and protected by the US government. That's the whole point. But for my lifetime,

• 52:07Tucker Carlson?

  those committees have worked in concert with the intelligence agencies to violate the civil rights of Americans. And they've almost always been run by some of the most dishonest and personally screwed up people in the entire Congress. So maybe it's not always true, but certainly in the case of Mike Turner, it is true. You know, the guy publicly accused of corruption with a chaotic personal life, that guy winds up as the chairman of an intel committee. Hmm, I wonder why? Someone who's vulnerable to control winds up in charge of oversight of the intel agencies? Okay, that's definitely Mike Turner. So anyway, Mike Turner's running this, and he's making the case to about 200 staffers on the Hill. And he said, "We gotta do this, we gotta do this." And he has a bunch of slides behind him. And one of the slides he puts up

• 52:52Tucker Carlson?

  shows people protesting the murder of civilians by the Israeli government in Gaza. Those Gaza protests. And he says, "We need this because these people are clearly taking orders from Hamas." These are like college kids who were mad about babies being murdered by the IDF. But because Mike Turner, and a lot of people like Mike Turner, because look at them and say, "You've got foreign connections. You can't have come to this conclusion on your own. You didn't just choose apostasy. You clearly were corrupted by some outside force, some foreign power. We get to spy on you." He made that case in the Congress. So how does this connect to blasphemy laws

• 53:37Tucker Carlson?

  as outlined and adopted by almost 40 states by IHRA? Really simple. If having these, quote, "perceptions" is a crime...

• 53:47Tucker Carlson?

  Then that gives the US government pretext to spy on you and then punish you. Another way of thinking about it is, almost no human action, or now perception, thought crime, is ever encoded by any legislative body without an eye toward punishing people who violate it. Why would you, why would you vote on it if you didn't intend to punish people who go against the standard you set? Well, you wouldn't. And so, the point is, this new civic religion is very much the opposite of the old civic religion, in that it doesn't protect civil rights, human inherent rights. It is the enemy of those rights.

• 54:29Tucker Carlson?

  It is the enemy of universalism, the belief that all of us were created by God and have equal moral worth. It is the enemy of that. And it's the enemy of the understanding of people that led to the Bill of Rights, which is, we have these rights given to us by God. It does not believe that, and you know that, because its first command is that you shut up, and not just shut up, but change your quote perceptions, change the thoughts in your head, change your feelings, your perceptions, your conclusions. You must change those. It is a totalitarian worldview. It is a totalitarian worldview, in that it seeks to control the totality of a person. Not just your actions.

• 55:13Tucker Carlson?

  You can't punch someone in the face because you don't like his ethnicity. Fair, fair. Everyone's for, for upholding that law. You can't have a certain perception of another person. If there's a better definition of a totalitarian aim, hard to think of what it might be. So that's our new religion. That's where Israelism gets us.

• 55:39Tucker Carlson?

  I want to end with probably the most mocked and yet clearest evangelist of this new faith is Israelism. You could say it's Christianity without the New Testament. And that would be someone, again, who's often made fun of for being dumb, or he doesn't know what he's talking about. But it's sometimes people like that that give you the clearest picture of what the people in power really are talking about. And that person would be Sean Hannity over Fox News. Not a bad guy, not a mean guy, lifelong Catholic. If you asked him, are you a Catholic? Absolutely. Yeah, I'm a Catholic. And I think he is.

• 56:20Tucker Carlson?

  Not an attacker, even a claim to understand his personal religious faith. But watch Sean Hannity, cradle Catholic, describe the Pope. This is his reaction to the President of the United States attacking the Pope, head of the Catholic Church. And here's Sean Hannity's response as a Catholic to that. Watch.

• 56:45Speaker 07

  He doesn't want any conflict anywhere. And he was talking about violence. And I'm like, have you even read the Bible? Have you read the conflicts, the wars that were that the Israeli people that were they were empowered by God to defeat their enemies? Did you never, did you ever hear the story about David slaying Goliath through the power of God with a slingshot against this massive giant? Or the conflicts and the wars of King Saul and so on and so forth? And frankly, all throughout Israel's history, they've been, you know, surrounded by enemies. But as God's chosen people, they against all odds, keep winning. Pretty amazing.

• 57:27Tucker Carlson?

  So it does take a kind of cable news mentality to say of the Pope, hey, you ever read the Bible? It's hilarious. Hey, thing about the Pope is this guy's never read the Bible. He's just the Pope.

• 57:44Tucker Carlson?

  So there's that. Okay, it's funny. But listen to the content, which is actually more interesting and less funny and little meatier than it seems at first. So the Pope is saying, "Look, I'm a Christian leader, the Christian Gospel, which I represent, however imperfectly this Pope may represent it, from my perspective imperfectly, but whatever. All Christian leaders have a duty to consult the Gospel as they think about their positions on things." That's the whole point, is the Gospel. And as a Christian leader, the leader of the biggest Christian denomination, like, I'm not for war. And maybe some wars are possibly defensible under just war theory,

• 58:24Tucker Carlson?

  which no one ever really explains. But you can imagine a war of self-defense that most Christians would feel comfortable with. Being a Christian probably doesn't necessarily mean you oppose all violence in all circumstances. Maybe it should, but in practice it doesn't. But this Pope is just saying something pretty conventional like that. Nothing crazy, actually. No name-calling, no great departure from Christian theology or ethics as people have understood it for thousands of years. And the response is, "Hey, you haven't read the Bible? There's a ton of killing in the Bible."

• 59:02Tucker Carlson?

  Israel's constantly under attack by its neighbors, the Amalekites, the Philistines, you name it, and they fight back with God's blessing, and they kill, and that's what they're supposed to be doing. Which is true, by the way. It is all in there.

• 59:19Tucker Carlson?

  But it's not in the New Testament. And for Christians, that's the difference. It's not a matter of the Old Testament being irrelevant, it's certainly not, and Christians understand it as one long story. And as Jesus famously said, "I came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, to bring it to its intended conclusion. I'm here so that the law will have its desired effect on you."

• 59:45Tucker Carlson?

  But Jesus never offers a single order to kill or hurt anybody. And there's no place in the entire New Testament, the four Gospels, the letters that follow, mostly from Paul, and the vision at the end by St. John called Revelation, there's not one page or sentence in the entire New Testament in which Jesus is recorded saying, "They're very annoying," or "They're a threat," or "They disagree with us," or "Of another faith, kill them." Not once. In fact, it's the opposite of that. In fact, it's so clearly the opposite of that, that you have to wonder who's reading the Bible and who isn't. In

• 1:00:25Tucker Carlson?

  Jesus's very first sermon, in the very first Gospel, Matthew, Matthew 5, the famous Sermon on the Mount, he addresses this really clearly. And I think anybody reading it for the first or hundredth time comes away thinking, well, a lot of things, but among them would be, Jesus is really down on violence, and he's really down on greed, very much opposed to both, because he says it really, really clearly. And not just down on violence and greed, but taking the prescriptions against those things in the Old Testament and accelerating them to a point that, shocking, really, to modern ears, to ancient ears, to any human

• 1:01:08Tucker Carlson?

  being, the demands that Jesus makes on people are shocking. He says, for example, all in Matthew 5 with reading, amazing, really, radical, not really of this world at all, which is kind of the whole point. He says, "You've been told not to kill, don't commit murder, Moses told you that. I'm telling you, don't be angry. If you curse somebody, you risk going to hell." That's what he says.

• 1:01:40Tucker Carlson?

  So you can debate what that means. Is it possible to apply that standard? Can you actually live up to that? Pretty hard. But what you can't conclude is that Jesus is in favor of dropping bombs on kids, blowing up entire apartment buildings, raping people in prisons. You can't conclude that because it's the opposite of that. And so if you have concluded that by reference to Old Testament texts, the Book of Ruth, you're espousing the tenets of religion. But it's not Christianity. It's our new religion, Israelism. That's just what it is.

• 1:02:25Tucker Carlson?

  Call it that. Call it that. Just be honest about what you're saying. Outline it for us. Give us the creed. Think of a new name for it. Give us 10 points. We can all recite them. People who don't can be punished. But tell us what the religion is. Be straightforward with us. Stop laying this head trip on us and telling us that something that's clearly anti-Christian is in fact the real Christianity, because that's just not true. And this kind of deception is making everybody crazy. Spring is the most refreshing time of year. Nothing complements it better than Black Rifle Coffee. Lots of it. It's an American company founded by veterans with conviction. They built the whole thing around a simple idea. Do it right or just don't do it. They're definitely doing it right. We know because we drink it all day long.

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• 1:05:44Tucker Carlson?

  For brewing.

• 1:05:47Tucker Carlson?

  So with that in mind, it seemed like a really good time to get a little grounding on what Christians should be thinking right now, as the President of the United States is weighing in on theological matters, and the world seems to be moving towards some great unknown, and everybody feels within him the weight of this period in history. Everyone feels it.

• 1:06:10Tucker Carlson?

  Father Josiah Trenton is an Orthodox priest and a pastor in Southern California, who we've spoken to before, who, though we're not Orthodox, seems like a really clear voice on matters of Christian faith and what the Gospels actually say. And so, we're really happy to have him back. Father, thank you very much for joining us.

• 1:06:31Speaker 10

  You know, I'm a puddle on the ground, having listened to you for the last 45 minutes. I just am a puddle on the ground. I have behind me an icon that I keep. It's an icon of Jesus, our Savior, after the resurrection from the dead. And He's gathered His disciples. It's called the Great Commission Icon. This is when He gathered His disciples and gave them the charge to go into all the world, and to preach the good news to the whole creation, baptizing everyone in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and promising to be with them, teaching,

• 1:07:12Speaker 10

  asking the disciples to teach the whole world His sacred commandments, and promising His presence.

• 1:07:19Speaker 10

  I think anyone listening to you right now is going to be massively tempted to great discouragement by the truth, the many truths you just articulated. I'm just saying this, it's Easter right now. Christ is risen.

• 1:07:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:36Speaker 10

  We celebrate this and the conquering of death. Jesus is not just a great teacher. Jesus is the Son of God, who became a man in order to face our greatest enemies.

• 1:07:54Speaker 10

  Sin, death, Satan, and to defeat them, not just a little bit, literally to crush them, and to offer us a life without fear, a life rooted in His presence now, and with a great hope that we say in the creed we're looking for, we're looking for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. This is why we can be happy, even in a complete mess, national mess that we're in, is that Christ is with us, Christ is calling us, He's awakening so many people across our land. I've been a priest for 33 years.

• 1:08:38Speaker 10

  I've never seen what's going on right now in America, the number of people sincerely engaging Jesus and His teaching and His life, and choosing to make radical alterations in their life, and to put God where He belongs in their life, which is number one. Number one, not loyalty to the nation. Loyalty to the nation is a Christian virtue in its proper place, but the loyalty that Christ asks is loyalty to the Kingdom of God, to seek that first above everything else, and to receive our life from Him. He's alive now, at the right hand of God the Father, governing the whole world and to all His enemies. All the demons are made of footstool for His feet.

• 1:09:22Speaker 10

  And then the end will come, Saint Paul says. So attaching yourself to Him by faith, becoming His, making His Kingdom your chief ambition, this is the way to peace. This is the way not to be destroyed when you see a country that you love in such chaos as we have now. We can, we can look at what's going on honestly, and even though it's so sorrowful, we can still be confident in His presence and try to serve Him and do good to our land and to benefit our land. And we don't know the future, who knows what's going to happen? We've had three years of unbelievable renewal, Christian renewal, in this land

• 1:10:05Speaker 10

  that has blown away every other movement of faith in my lifetime. I was born in 1967, I think about three or four years before you. I've never seen anything like this. So I'm just, I want to lob a bomb of hope, a hope bomb, after listening to your powerful, but very, very discouraging words.

• 1:10:27Tucker Carlson?

  Sorry, it's my dark Scandinavian soul raising its ugly head once again. I am prone to that, and I, I love your response to it. So can you just, can you give me an outline? You say this is, in 33 years of ministry, this is the most powerful moment for God among people you've seen. This is, it seems like a revival. What are you seeing that leads you to that?

• 1:10:56Speaker 10

  It has always been, I've always, as a priest, been very interested in people who are outside my parish, in my local community. We priests and pastors are always trying to build connections in our, where we are, in the dirt that God gave us to make His. And the normal year to have maybe 25 people who were signing up for a year-long catechism program to prepare themselves for baptism, that was a good year for much of my priesthood. This year, I catechized 350 people.

• 1:11:34Tucker Carlson?

  Wow.

• 1:11:35Speaker 10

  And I just, it's, it's actually such a fantastic problem, because our parish is large. We have maybe about 1,300 active parishioners, and I can't fit them all in the church. We have, we've had to really suck in, and I just baptized 115 people. Orthodox Easter was this last Sunday, and I'm used to baptizing, you know, 20, 25, something like that. So we're talking a five-fold increase in those that I received by baptism this year, and the numbers that are lining up for next year are more than double that. And, you know, I can't project that everywhere and say that's happening everywhere, but

• 1:12:20Speaker 10

  I've been looking at stats, you know, I've been looking at stats coming not just from America, but even from Western Europe. Which I, previous to this, had pretty much completely written off. Uh, what, Western Europe has just been dying, spiritually dying for a long time. I'm a fourth-generation Southern Californian, but my family's heritage is England. I was educated there, and I've gone back to England every year for the last thirty years. Uh, and always it's been, well, religiously discouraging, spiritually discouraging. Uh, but this last few years, even in places in Western Europe that, um, were not doing well and have not been doing well for decades, really, post-World War II and on,

• 1:13:04Speaker 10

  there are massive numbers, massive numbers of people being baptized and entering into catechism. It's, uh, it can't be denied.

• 1:13:14Tucker Carlson?

  That's, that's just wonderful to hear, and really the only answer. So you must get people who come to you as a priest and say, "I'm looking at everything around me, and I see the beginning of the end of history and the return of Jesus, the end times." And as noted, I mean, those famous verses from Daniel and Second Letter of Thessalonians, et cetera. And there's a lot more. It's, it's, you could certainly fit events into those structures. What do you think of that?

• 1:13:44Speaker 10

  Generations have for the last twenty centuries. So if you read the Church Fathers, uh, we, we have been trying to read our history through that eschatological lens for a very long time. That should give us some, uh, measure of discretion, not to, uh, make a one-to-one too, too, too closely, too intimately. You know, Tucker, the New Testament, the apostles are very clear that the end of the world happened already. Uh, the end times started as soon as Jesus dethroned the devil.

• 1:14:17Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:14:17Speaker 10

  As soon, as soon as he, uh, conquered death and plundered hell and opened, he gutted. Uh, he, he was crucified on Holy Friday, atoning for the sins of the whole world. He descended into hell on Holy Saturday. And when he went there, he had already really shaken hell. Uh, because just, you know, a week or so previously, he had raised his good friend Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus had been dead for four days. His sister said he already smelled. And Jesus intentionally took his time to come back to Bethany, and then to gather the Mary and Martha and the large community there around Lazarus's tomb.

• 1:15:02Speaker 10

  And then he spoke, and he said, Lazarus, come forth. And his words went through his mouth, through the earth, into the heart of hell, and empowered Lazarus and crushed Satan and the devils. They couldn't hold his soul anymore. And his soul came back into his body. He was vivified, and the Lord asked him to come out. The Lord didn't run in there and undo his grave clothes himself. He wanted it to be seen by everyone. So he said, Lazarus, come out. And Lazarus came walking out. And everyone recognized right then, the ultimate power change,

• 1:15:45Speaker 10

  the ultimate structural revolution had taken place. Death no longer was in charge. Before that, every single person, no matter how great they were, Moses, Abraham, the Buddha, Confucius, everyone that got into the ring with death was KO'd. Every single one. Didn't matter how wise they were, how righteous they were. Everyone was slaughtered. When Jesus came and started raising the dead, and especially when he did Lazarus, no one had ever raised a man four days dead.

• 1:16:28Speaker 10

  And then when he himself voluntarily submitted to death, and he was clear that death had no power over him. He said, "I have power to lay my life down, and I have power to take my life up again." He went knowingly into death, offered himself.

• 1:16:46Speaker 10

  Our liturgical hymns in the Orthodox Church for Holy Friday say that Death and Satan ate Christ because they thought that they had in their jaws a man, and they found themselves face to face with God. You called him the man God, right? That is the actual theological terms that we use in the Church. In Greek, it's called Theanthropos. Theos meaning God, anthropos meaning man. The Church Fathers put those together to describe Christ. He is the God-man. He became what he was not, a human being, without ceasing to be what he was, the co-eternal son of God. And he exists since then and forever as the God-man. And when Death ate Christ, Christ ate Death,

• 1:17:31Speaker 10

  and he crushed it. And he rose again on the third day, and he asked that that message be proclaimed by his disciples all over the world. And people who are responding to this good news and are coming into the Church, this is the ultimate solution for their terror. It's a legitimate terror. When you look around and you see so much darkness and killing, violence, it's terrifying. People are terrified. And to have Christ offer to come and be with you, to live in you, and you to live in him, and to share his life, which is sustained in Christian people by receiving Holy Communion.

• 1:18:16Speaker 10

  This is what receiving Holy Communion is. It's participating in the divine life. Christ's very body and blood sustaining us in his life until our own resurrection from the dead. This is a tremendous solution for the sorrows and terrors of our time.

• 1:18:33Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:19:16Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:19:36Speaker 00

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• 1:20:06Tucker Carlson?

  What do you make of self-described Christian leaders glorifying the violence around us? Endorsing the violence? Saying that God wants this violence? How should we feel about that?

• 1:20:20Speaker 10

  You were very articulate, brother. You were very articulate. But let me give it a little larger theological context.

• 1:20:28Tucker Carlson?

  Thank you.

• 1:20:31Speaker 10

  When violence began, not on earth, it began in the heavens amongst the angelic orders. The first act of violence and rebellion was Satan's himself.

• 1:20:45Speaker 10

  And he was cast out, together with all those angels that were in league with him, and they became what we know as demons. And then, they took their scheme of rebellion to the first human beings, right? This is described in the early chapters of Genesis in our patriarchal histories. They, uh, the Satan, the great Satan approached Adam and Eve, and tempted them viciously, and they fell. And they immediately became estranged, not just from God, but from each other. The seeds of violence erupted, and they began to blame one another. "Well, the woman you gave me," Adam says.

• 1:21:31Speaker 10

  Then they have their children, Cain and Abel, and the first act of fratricide takes place. Cain is shamed by his brother's devotion to God and his beautiful sacrifice. Cain's sacrifice to God is very cheap. The Lord tried to correct Cain. Cain was hard-hearted and uncorrectable, and killed his brother. This is the first act of violence. And the Scripture says that God approached Cain graciously, trying to help Cain to repent, and asked him what he did. And God said, "Your brother's blood is crying out to heaven."

• 1:22:13Speaker 10

  Tucker, that's one innocent person's blood. Can you imagine what tens of thousands of innocent blood? What kind of thunderous noise that makes in paradise? The Scriptures then go and describe the development of Cain's line. Cain's line produces all the leaders of earthly technologies.

• 1:22:42Speaker 10

  Abel's dead, they have another child. Adam and Eve have another child, Seth. And Seth's line is also described by Moses. And Seth's line is all about virtue and spiritual technology, I would describe. How to have a relationship with God and the world that's correct. And...

• 1:23:02Speaker 10

  The line of Cain is all about power. So for instance, one of Cain's descendants, Tubal Cain is his name. He was a great master of all metalwork and metallurgy. From which come all of the weapons. And earthly technology, especially for the development of weapons, has driven technology throughout the entire history of the human race. Look at our budget. President Trump wants a larger and larger budget so that we can develop more and more vicious weapons to dominate our enemies. We've done this with nuclear weaponry.

• 1:23:44Speaker 10

  In the world wars, we were developing more and more dangerous gases to kill the largest amount of people possible. This is technology. This is that kind of technology. And then the next thing that Moses describes in Genesis is the flood. God just can't take it anymore. It's enough. And he decides that he's gonna start over. And he makes Noah, a righteous man of faith, into a new Adam. And the thing that he said to Adam at the very beginning, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, rule it and subdue it. He said the exact same thing to Noah after the flood to make him the beginning of the human race. And Moses, in writing this, says there's one reason God flooded the earth.

• 1:24:28Speaker 10

  I often have asked people this, if they could guess, what was the one, the singular sin, mentioned by Moses that caused the Lord to literally flood the earth and to restart the human race?

• 1:24:41Tucker Carlson?

  I know. Murder.

• 1:24:44Speaker 10

  Violence.

• 1:24:47Speaker 10

  Violence. It's unique amongst evils.

• 1:24:54Tucker Carlson?

  So how could a Christian pastor glorify it?

• 1:25:07Speaker 10

  You know, Tucker, that there are many who say one thing and do another, right? This is a disease that we all have.

• 1:25:19Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, that's true.

• 1:25:20Speaker 10

  Hypocrisy is a terrible disease. And I always tell people, "Look, never, never say that you don't want to go to church, because you don't, there's a lot of hypocrites there." I said, "That's true, though. It's absolutely true." I mean, if there are, if there are people there, then you have hypocrites. And forgive me, every single one of us is.

• 1:25:43Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:44Speaker 10

  Every single, the only, the only division is not between the hypocrites and the non-hypocrites. The division is between those who know they're hypocrites, and that it's a terrible sin and disease, and they go to church to work against their hypocrisy, so that they can become people of integrity and live before the face of God and other people in love. And then there are people who have no hope, and are just resigned to it, and are very happy to talk about other people's sins, but don't want to look at themselves. That's a very dangerous place to be.

• 1:26:14Speaker 10

  So, hypocrisy is certainly a chief cause, in answer to your question. So is false teaching. So is false teaching. There is a lot of made-up theology, began in the middle of the 19th century. It got really going in the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in America, that has created this very strange

• 1:26:40Speaker 10

  theology of what unbelieving Jewish people are, non-Christian Jewish people, and their special relationship with God. It's very strange. It's, Zionism is, has no history in the Christian faith. It's not as though that there are, it's just a matter of denominational preference. No, you will see, or invade for 18 and a half centuries, to ever hear of such things. It doesn't exist. The church is very conscious of being the fulfillment of everything that took place in the Old Testament. The church is the people of God. Paul calls the church directly the new Israel. That's who we are. We are God's people.

• 1:27:21Speaker 10

  And we're made up both of Jewish people and Gentile people from every tribe, tongue, people and nation. It's not about ethnicity at all. We don't care. If you came to my parish on a typical Sunday morning, I mean, you would need a big piece of paper just to write the number of ethnicities that are there. I always tell, I've always told our people, "Look, our goal should be that the ethnic distribution of our county, we're in Riverside County, about 3 million people. I said, "The ethnic diversity there should be exactly represented in our parish." If the church is for everyone and we want everyone, which means in my county, that's 57% Hispanic, 11% African-American, about 30% Anglo. I said, "That's what it should be."

• 1:28:03Speaker 10

  If, if a church has been there and has been successful in preaching the gospel and helping people to love God, that's what it should look like.

• 1:28:12Speaker 10

  This is normal. This is our, our way of looking at, at things. We don't think that somehow the Old Testament is continuing and never came to fruition. And that somehow a temple has to be rebuilt, or the Old Testament sacrifices have to begin again, which is impossible. Or the ironic priests have to come back, or we're gonna start slaying animals. All of that was a picture of Jesus Himself. He says it Himself. He told the Pharisees, "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have life. It's these that bear witness to me." Everything in the Old Testament is a type of Christ. It's all about Him. And if you don't see that, if you think it's a standalone thing, then you're still living in types

• 1:28:56Speaker 10

  and shadows instead of fulfillment.

• 1:28:59Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:29:55Speaker 00

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• 1:30:24Speaker 11

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• 1:30:54Tucker Carlson?

  Slash Tucker. How does the, well, I'll just say, one of the most challenging themes in the Gospels for me as an American are Jesus's prescriptions against greed. Because I think that's, that's the one thing American Christians never face. Like, like money is not inherently bad, but the love of it is bad. Famously the root of all evil. What does the gospel tell us about greed? And how does that? How is that reflected in the preaching you hear from the pulpit?

• 1:31:29Speaker 10

  You know, one of the most beautiful things that Jesus accomplished when he conquered death was that he replanted on the earth the original relationship of man and woman to God that had disappeared at the fall. And that was a life of complete consecration, where the happiness of Adam and Eve was to be called God's friend. That was their greatest honor, the Church's Father says, to be called God's friend. And I just note that Jesus said that to his disciples at the end of his ministry. He said, "I no longer call you my disciples. You're my friends." That was an incredible honor. Abraham, the great patriarch, was called "the friend of God."

• 1:32:12Speaker 10

  In the New Testament, as soon as Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, remember, he was crucified, he plundered hell, he rose again on the third day. He spent forty days teaching us how to live in the new resurrection life and how to love people and evangelize the world. And then he ascended to heaven, right from the Mount of Olives. I've stood on the spot in the Holy Land in front of his eyes, the eyes of his disciples. And he sat down at the right hand of God. And then, as a coronation gift of his enthronement, he sent forth the Holy Spirit ten days later on the day of Pentecost. And the whole community of Christians, one hundred and twenty at that time in the Upper Room, were, became spirit bearers, something that in the Old Testament only and kings were.

• 1:32:58Speaker 10

  Now, this is the common patrimony of all believers, is to be able to be indwelt by the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to have the Spirit of God guiding you, such that we don't, as Christians, look for God out there. We experience God in here. He takes up his residence in baptism in the deep heart. Saint Paul even says that the Holy Spirit is in us following baptism and that he helps us to pray to God from the inside with groans that surpass words, trying to help us really relate to God as a Father.

• 1:33:35Speaker 10

  This is, this is our life. And it was only seen in the Old Testament in little glimpses. This was so radical for people that some people gave, and not a few, by the way. Some people decided that their chief ambition was going to be to serve God 100%. Not on Sundays only, right? But completely. Saint Paul describes this in his Epistle to Corinthians, 1 Corinthians, Chapter 7. He says that there's two kinds of life. He says, "I wish everyone was even as I myself am, unmarried and completely devoted to God." He said, "Nevertheless, every person has his own calling from God, one in this matter and another in that."

• 1:34:20Speaker 10

  And then he goes on to describe marriage and monastic life. These are the two ways of life for Christians since Jesus conquered our enemies and gave us the Holy Spirit. That life of complete consecration for monks and nuns was so popular in the early centuries. But by the time of Saint Athanasius the Great, this is 350 or so, right? This is one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church. His life is just absolutely, you read it and weep for its beauty. He said at that time, he was the spiritual son of the father of the desert, Saint Anthony the Great. And he said that at his time, he was also the patriarch of Alexandria. He said at his time, half of all Christians lived in the deserts.

• 1:35:05Speaker 10

  And so that they could pray eight hours a day, serve people, host people who are coming to see the... People would constantly leave the cities and go see the monks and the nuns for spiritual encouragement, for prayer, etc. That's how powerful that life is. And that life, the Church's fathers say, that life of complete consecration, which of course is just an exact imitation of Jesus's life. This is how our Lord Jesus lived, right? He didn't get married physically, he got married spiritually to the Church. He's the bridegroom of the Church, and we're all His beloved. And we live in that union, right? And especially guides Christian marriage, right? The husband tries to love his wife as Christ loves the Church. The wife tries to respect her husband as the Church respects Christ, etc.

• 1:35:48Speaker 10

  But you see, this enthroned at the heart of the Church, a certain contempt for earthly wealth.

• 1:35:56Speaker 10

  If the models are completely dispossessed for the sake of the Kingdom of God, which is a wealth that can't be taken away, modeled by the Lord Jesus Himself, who owned nothing at the time of His crucifixion, except His garment, that's it. And the monks and nuns have imitated Him to this day. Where I live in Southern California, we have a number of monasteries around us, and our people go constantly. They go in groups, they visit just for like, what can I say? A little boost, a little boost. And there's a beautiful symbiosis between the Christian family that are represented in the parishes all over the world, and churches all over the world, and then our monks and nuns, who have given themselves, sometimes in the cities.

• 1:36:40Speaker 10

  I mean, all the great cities of the Roman Empire for the first thousand years were packed with monasteries. Sometimes people think monasteries, and they think, "Oh, only in the desert." Well, I mean, there are a lot of monasteries in the desert, and I was just quoting St. Anthony's about the Egyptian desert, which was kind of a spiritual guide for the whole Christian world in the 4th century. But there are also lots of monasteries in cities. To this day, if you go to any traditionally Christian city in Europe, you're gonna find, maybe they aren't occupied anymore, especially in the West, but in Central Europe and in Eastern Europe, still, packed with monks and nuns. This tells you our attitude towards money. Greed is a tremendous temptation. The model for us is dispossession. St. John Chrysostan, one of the great church fathers, says, "For married people,

• 1:37:24Speaker 10

  possessions are justified by use." He says, "If you want to be a good Christian with regards to money and greed, then make sure that you're using your money in a beneficial way, such that it's not..." He says, "If you own a home, make it fit your life like a good shoe. And you don't want your shoe to be too tight, too small, lest it crush your toes, or too big, so that you're always tripping on it and falling down, right? Possessions are justified by use." Now, forgive me, that's not much of a popular message in America. You know, we have been famous.

• 1:38:07Speaker 10

  We have been famous for, at least since the middle of the 19th century, when Alexis de Tocqueville came here and he said he had never seen a people in the history of his travels so obsessed with money as Americans. There are of course some virtues to that if we use our money to advance the cause of beauty and to help people who are in need. But money not justified by usage will be a testimony against us on the day of judgment.

• 1:38:35Tucker Carlson?

  I agree with that. I agree with that completely. Just a quick sidebar because I can't control myself. Saint John Chrysostom, if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

• 1:38:45Speaker 10

  It's Chrysostom. In Greek it's Chrysostomos. Chrys means gold and stomat means mouth. So it's actually not his surname. People think that that's his surname, but it was an appellation that was given to him by Pope Vigilius in 553. Chrysostom died in 407. Patriarch of Constantinople, driven into exile by conflict with the emperor. You know, here it is again, right? Religious conflict. And I hope in a second that we could talk a little bit about the important connection between prophets and political power. Because those two in the scriptures always have to go together if you're going to succeed. And we terribly need that right now. But go ahead with what your question was about.

• 1:39:25Tucker Carlson?

  I just read, someone sent me a collection of his sermons and I knew nothing about Orthodoxy. I knew nothing about him and I was just so shocked by how good they were and how resonant to the modern ear they were. I mean, I just could hardly believe it. What, can you, for anyone who's made it this far, can you recommend a collection of his sermons or an introduction to him? Because what a talented preacher.

• 1:39:52Speaker 10

  Yes, he's not just a talented preacher. He's the most famous preacher in the history of the church. 2,000 years. No one is more famous than him. His collection of sermons in the Greek language is the largest in Christian history. Comparable only to Saint Augustine in Latin. So these are the predominant influences, east and west. I in fact did my PhD on Saint John Chrysostom at the University of Durham in northern England. I finished it in 2003. And I did my work and published a text called Marriage and Virginity, according to Saint John Chrysostom. That was my focus. There are many excellent books. Almost all of his works are translated into English. For someone who is just approaching him,

• 1:40:35Speaker 10

  I would say to read his most famous book, which is called On the Priesthood. And it's basically his description of what Christian worship is, what a priest is, what a pastor is. It's absolutely magnificent. He wrote it when he was a young man trying to escape ordination. He didn't want to be ordained because he had such respect for being ordained. And he's like, he literally duped one of his good friends named Basil, who was also being courted by the local bishop to be ordained. So he said, "No, you're totally worthy, and I'll do it after you, but you go first." So his friend got ordained, and then John disappeared, literally disappeared. He ended up going, he lived in ancient Antioch, right?

• 1:41:18Speaker 10

  Which is the primary city of the Roman Empire in the east. All the emperors would launch their campaigns against the Persians from there. That's kind of relevant today, isn't it?

• 1:41:29Speaker 10

  And he, just outside of the city, I visited it in 2010, it's in Turkey, southern Turkey now.

• 1:41:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:41:36Speaker 10

  It was destroyed, the city was very damaged by the terrible earthquake three years ago. Just horrible. But there was a mountain, there's a mountain about a mile outside of town, very walkable for people like John who lived in the city. And it's called Mount Silpios. And during his lifetime, about 300 monks lived in holes and caves on that mountain. And that's where he, after he escaped ordination, he went and lived there for six years. And he spent, he describes later in his famous book On the Priesthood, that how he spent his time there. He said, "When the sun was out, he studied the scriptures and he memorized them." There's something like 11,000 direct quotations in his sermons from the New Testament, and something like 6,000 from the Old Testament, all from memory.

• 1:42:22Speaker 10

  He didn't preach with notes. And his sermons were usually between 30 minutes and an hour, which is very long traditionally for a priest of the church to be preaching. And when he would conclude, the people would boo. And yeah, please don't stop, please don't stop. That's how great a preacher he was. But he spent the day studying scripture and memorizing it, and he kept vigilant night. He never laid down for six years. He tied a rope around his waist to a hook in the wall, and so that he could try to keep praying at night and take the minimum sleep he needed. Well, you know, sometimes youthful enthusiasm goes a little too far. He broke his stomach, basically, and his buddy, who would come once a week and leave bread and water at his door up on the mountain,

• 1:43:07Speaker 10

  found him completely ill, picked him up, took him back to the city in Antioch, and the bishop grabbed him and never let him go. Ordained him, he ended up becoming the cathedral preacher for 12 years in Antioch, and then they kidnapped him and went to the capital of the Roman Empire in 397 and made him patriarch of Constantinople. And he engaged in the most incredible revival there. He converted. The Easter in which he was sent into exile, he was preparing 3,000 people for baptism. Yeah, so that makes my 350, you know, that's nothing. It's nothing compared to what he was doing. He is, you can read his, you can hear his life.

• 1:43:49Speaker 10

  His life, we know in great detail. He's been a cherished saint of the church for a very long time. We have an app. It's called the Patristic Nectar app. It's on the App Store. And in there are the lives of the saints, and you can go there and listen for free to about an hour recording of his life. You'll just be absolutely amazed by this man.

• 1:44:12Tucker Carlson?

  Thank you for telling me that. So what is the connection? You said you wanted to explain the connection between prophets and political figures.

• 1:44:20Speaker 10

  You know, in the scriptures, God would send the prophets to the kings. And the king's futures, the success of a reign depended upon whether the king would listen to the prophets or not. David had his Nathan. My patron saint, the great King Josiah of Israel, had the prophet Jeremiah and the prophet Tish Olda. And they would consult, good kings would consult. So there was a shackling of power, which we know is exceedingly dangerous. Power is exceedingly dangerous. I feel very sympathetic, listening to you describe these trials that our nation is facing

• 1:45:01Speaker 10

  and our leaders, including our president, is suffering so badly and we're also suffering so badly. Power is extremely dangerous and Christians learn from the prophetic influence to use it, but kind of like this. You've got one hand on power, but you're being very careful because it can do terrible things to you. If you don't have someone helping remind you who you are, to keep your feet on the ground, that you're humble. When everybody around you is saying, "Yes, sir, yes, sir, what do you want to do, sir? You're the greatest thing that's ever happened to America." That's poison of the highest level. In our tradition, priests and bishops who are praised by the people, we consider it hatred.

• 1:45:43Tucker Carlson?

  Good for you. I love that.

• 1:45:46Speaker 10

  That doesn't mean we always succeed in hating it. And the people mean well, most of the time they mean well, but we don't accept it as something nice. We consider it a temptation. It's a temptation. No one is great, everyone is a sinner, only Christ is our salvation. The best of people only live by grace and by the love of God and forgiveness. That's it. So to start thinking ideas because you're really successful, or because you have 6 million followers, or I have a big church, come on, come on, we're nothing. We're nothing. So to have a prophet in your life is exceedingly important and to obey that prophet. You know, I was very hopeful when President Trump established, he took the Department of Faith,

• 1:46:29Speaker 10

  which I think used to be under the Vice President's office, and it had a relatively small budget. And then he made it an executive office, right? He put it on directly under him, and I think he increased the budget massively. And I have a few friends who work on different committees for him, like Archbishop Salvador Cordillón, who's the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco, and is a dear friend of mine and an incredible person, who I deeply respect. I've taken heart from that. I'm hoping that that paradigm can serve our country and that that Department of Faith can't not just be a genesis for ideas, but our presidents and our vice presidents, and forgive me, our Congress, they need their pastors in their life.

• 1:47:12Speaker 10

  They need their pastors in their life. And when we have a chaplain of the Senate, right? We have a chaplain, but that's not sufficient. I mean, he can't take care of everybody. You need someone who can tell you the truth. And your priest is the one who's going to tell you the truth. You need a priest. This is my prayer, really. I make my cross, asking God to please help our president and our vice president and all of those in power to recognize what a dangerous position they're in, to have so much power. You know, America used to be very humble about our influence, and our founding fathers considered virtue to be absolutely essential to political leadership. And we got this, of course, from George Washington, who was such an exceedingly excellent example of this himself.

• 1:47:57Speaker 10

  The idea, though, that we are now the empire of the world and we police people and we engage in conflicts all over the world and we have 200 military bases, forgive me, Tucker, this is so pompous.

• 1:48:07Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, I agree.

• 1:48:08Speaker 10

  This is so pompous, and it's so unfortunate. And there's every excuse in the world to justify it, but there's nothing humble. And I'm often called an isolationist because I say this opinion. I'm an American, and our founding fathers believed this. This is how they looked at the world. They did not think America was responsible for the world. That is so arrogant. I can't tell you.

• 1:48:35Tucker Carlson?

  How is arrogance treated in the Bible? And what's the result of it?

• 1:48:45Speaker 10

  You know, this lesson, the lesson for political leaders to to learn this, it's very hard for them. It's something else for me to learn, it's something else for you to learn it. But for these people who are in this kind of position to learn it, this is much harder. Let me, let me give you some examples. We have a certain type of saint in the history of the church that are called righteous kings, righteous kings and queens. So they're, they're saintly political rulers. Now, let me say just out of the gate that almost all of the political rulers in the history of Christianity were awful.

• 1:49:22Speaker 10

  I'm sorry.

• 1:49:23Tucker Carlson?

  No, I believe you.

• 1:49:26Speaker 10

  Almost all were awful. And so when I say, when I'm gonna list, I'll list some saints now. And then let me qualify it. So Emperor Constantine is a saint of the church. Emperor Theodosius the Great, this is 379 or so, he actually formally, Constantine legalized Christianity. Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the empire. He's called the Great, he was a spiritual son of Saint Ambrose of Milan, the famous story where power met priesthood when he had ordered the slaughter of 7,000 citizens in anger in Thessaloniki, Greece, and Ambrose put him out of communion.

• 1:50:07Speaker 10

  And he was angry and he went to the church and Ambrose met him at the door and wouldn't let him in the church. That was a definitive moment in Christian history because up till that time, no priest could do that to an emperor. He was considered all-powerful and, but he didn't. He actually did penance. He accepted not entering the church, being put out of communion, and he did penance. And that established a new relationship between the clergy in Christian history and the power structure and the politicians. That is a very important power structure. The clergy govern eternal life, right? This is a matter of the sacraments and

• 1:50:48Speaker 10

  we don't give sacraments to people who are disrespectful of and are doing great sins. It would be a terrible thing to do. And Saint Ambrose stopped him. There is Saint

• 1:50:59Speaker 10

  The incredible Justinian the Great, this is, he ruled from 527 to 565. An incredible man, incredibly talented. He actually wrote parts of the Eastern Liturgy, parts of the Orthodox Liturgy, which we still sing, come from his pen. Saint Boris of Bulgaria, this is 800s, early 800s. Saint Vladimir of the Slavic lands. Saint Stephen of Hungary. Saint Alfred the Great, who, forgive me, as an Englishman, he's the best. He is absolutely the best. You know, Winston Churchill was once asked, was called, he was called the greatest Englishman. And Churchill stopped him, he said, "No, no, no. Alfred is the greatest Englishman who has ever lived." And I say, 100%, yes.

• 1:51:41Speaker 10

  Saint Edward the Confessor, right, this is, he died in 1066. These are all incredible saints who were in positions of power. And there's a commonality between them all. All of them submitted their agendas, their policies, to their spiritual fathers. They respected the guidance of the Church. They respected the Word of God. And the priests and the bishops are responsible for preaching the Word of God. And it's very important to believe, to believe that. That is your safety net. When you're exercising power, you need that blessing to be able not be destroyed by it.

• 1:52:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:52:18Speaker 10

  As most, as most people were. And so to have that kind of relationship is important. And I would say, if I could just move it from the power that the executive holds to the power of the military, because those two are very combined right now in our country. And are each other's biggest fans.

• 1:52:41Speaker 10

  We have also in the history of the Church, a type of saint that are called military saints. These are men who were, the Church is not pacifist.

• 1:52:51Speaker 10

  The church has never been pacifist. We set standards for the proper use of force. It has to be a moral use of force. And we have incredible saints like Saint George, Saint Theodore. These are incredible warriors. We have whole lists of them. I mean, there's hundreds of military saints. What they have in common is that they conducted themselves in a military capacity, not just with skill, but with morality, with virtue. And that kind of example is very, very important for America, both in the executive, in the role of president or king, and in the role of exerciser of power, which is what our military is. And wow, do we need it more than ever right now.

• 1:53:37Tucker Carlson?

  Can you just end by... You often hear the phrase "just war doctrine", without getting in maybe the specifics of that. But in more broadly, what does it mean to act as a Christian in war?

• 1:53:59Speaker 10

  This is a very important subject. And the church has articulated, we did this within the first five centuries in a very complex way, standards for blessing. This means if the military does not pursue their objectives in a way that's respectable to the eyes of the church, respectable in Jesus's eyes, they don't get blessed. And this has become what we call the justifiable war dogma. So we have important precedences. One, it can't be an offensive war. It has to be a matter of defense. Number two, it can't involve civilians. You cannot fail to make a distinction.

• 1:54:44Speaker 10

  I find this extremely relevant today. You cannot fail to make a distinction between combatants... And civilians. Now, we know this, and the whole decimation of Gaza, which has completely violated these norms, by the way. Top to bottom, completely violated them. But, but always, they try to find a way, the justifiers of that slaughter, try to find a way to say somehow that it wasn't a violation of the principles of justifiable warfare, because they were militant, they were really militants after all. They're, they're giving shelter to the militants, to the terrorists. Certainly, some were giving merit, shelter to terrorists, no doubt. But that does not justify the raising of Gaza to the ground

• 1:55:30Speaker 10

  and treating everyone as though they are a combatant. That's completely unheard of in the history of Christianity. Now, you know, there's an incredible book, and I'd love to recommend it to you. It's by one of the greatest saints of the 20th century. A man who lived through both World War I and World War II, actually got sent to Dachau. His name is Saint Nikolai Velamiravich. He was a Serbian bishop, monk, and an incredible scholar. He had two PhDs, an Oxford PhD, a PhD from Bern. He preached in World War I, and then again in between the wars, at peace conferences, and then through World War II. He preached in all of the cathedrals of Europe and America.

• 1:56:14Speaker 10

  He was very well-known, one of the most famous clerics alive. He spent his last 10 years, unfortunately, because of the creation of Yugoslavia post-World War II, and the communists, he couldn't return to his home country. So we, as we often do in America, welcomed here, and he loved us. And he spent his last 10 years in Pennsylvania, traveling around, preaching. He preached in Harlem, he preached St. John Cathedral in New York. He preached everywhere in America. He's an unbelievable person. He wrote a book called War and the Bible. I find it particularly excellent, not just because he's an incredible, incredibly saintly man, and an incredible scholar, but he also is a person who lived through World War I and II.

• 1:56:58Speaker 10

  And is able to speak. He basically said that the 20th century was the triumph of Satan in the Christian West. And that Jesus was asked by us to leave by our behavior and that he did. And I think a lot of what we can see since 1950, the late 1950s, is the manifestation of that departure. I think he's right. I'm hoping what's going on right now is our asking Jesus to come back. I want him to come back and I want him to forgive us for what we've done. Christians killing Christians, World War I and II.

• 1:57:41Speaker 10

  The 20th century was the greatest slaughter of people in the history of the human race. And it was done mostly by Christians on other Christians. And I think the Lord left and I think Saint Nikolai is right. And he will come back because he loves all men and he's trying to redeem and save every one of us. But let's ask him to come back. Let's ask him to come back and ask for some rebuilding. We have to dig the wells like Abraham did in the past. He done all these incredible wells and then they got taken over by enemies and filled up. And then his sons had to go back and redig them. And we need to redig the wells of a more glorious history in the United States of America,

• 1:58:25Speaker 10

  where we were more humble, more reasonable and more Christian. You know, listening to your monologue earlier about the inescapability of religion in any culture. Our nation was very comfortable, Tucker, for the first 150 years of our nationhood, calling ourselves a Christian nation. Official people, presidents, Supreme Court justices. We referenced the New Testament in our Supreme Court documents for a very long time.

• 1:58:54Speaker 10

  So this idea that somehow this secular monster that has eaten us alive and has decimated our children through the horror of abortion, destroyed our families by no-fault divorce, and has left our people addicted to technology and sad and grieved that somehow this is America, I don't accept that at all.

• 1:59:15Tucker Carlson?

  I agree.

• 1:59:16Speaker 10

  I want the Lord to come back. I want us to hold on to love each other again and to become a more humble, traditional America.

• 1:59:25Tucker Carlson?

  Amen. Well, that is definitely my most fervent prayer at this point. Father Trimmer, thank you so much for spending all this time and for your wisdom. I appreciate it.

• 1:59:34Speaker 10

  God be with you, brother.

• 1:59:36Tucker Carlson?

  Amen. And thank you for joining us. We'll be back next Wednesday. See you then.