What’s The Real Truth About Religion? - Alex O’Connor

Alex O’Connor is a YouTuber, writer and a podcaster. Christianity is nothing new. But it's seeing a resurgence in popularity among some unexpected groups - public intellectuals and Gen Z. What is going on that only shortly after it was cool to be an atheist, it's now cool to go to church on a Sunday again? Expect to learn whether we are actually seeing a Christian revival, if the new wave of Christianity is just right wing conservatism in disguise, whether you can ‘choose’ to believe in God, if new atheism was a failure, why there is not a current muslim revival, what happened to the gospels that were missing from the original bible, whether there's two Gods in the Old Testament and much more... - 0:00 Are We Seeing a Christian Revival? 07:53 What’s Causing the Rise of Cultural Christianity? 18:46 Is it Possible to Choose to Believe in God? 23:48 Has Christianity Gone Too Soft? 38:49 Experience of Visiting the Vatican 43:49 Is the Rise in Religion Just a Conservative Movement? 57:59 Christianity as a Prophylactic Against Woke 1:05:33 Why Isn’t There an Islamic Revival? 1:15:31 The Gnostic Gospels 1:27:28 The Gnostic Version of Genesis 1:35:47 Why the Bible is Compiled As it is 1:42:13 Christianity’s Antidote to the Meaning Crisis 1:52:40 Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Debate With Dawkins 1:59:59 The Figureheads of the Christian Revival 2:06:44 Important Things Ignored by the Media 2:11:24 Where to Find Alex - Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get up to 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get up to 40% off Mando’s Starter Pack at https://ShopMando.com (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 50% off your first Factor Meals box at https://factormeals.com/MW50 (discount automatically applied) - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Three, two, one. What?

• 0:03Alex O'Connor?

  It's really funny the way he's like, you're the only person that does it.

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  Turn the game face on.

• 0:07Alex O'Connor?

  It's not like someone else doing, it's not someone else going, three, two, one, right, right? It's like you just, you're sort of like, right, you said like deep into the soul. Three, two, one.

• 0:16Chris Williamson?

  But you don't have a soul, so it's easy for me to do it.

• 0:20Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, so I'm told anyway.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  Alex O'Connor, welcome to the show.

• 0:23Alex O'Connor?

  Chris Will X, how are you?

• 0:25Chris Williamson?

  Good, man, I'm good. Are we seeing a Christian revival at the moment? What's going on?

• 0:30Alex O'Connor?

  Gosh, I love this. This is something I've adopted too, the sort of just straight in with the question, you know, none of this, none of this gallivanting around. How are you? How's your day been? Tell us about yourself.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  You've been in Austin for a week, I don't need to know how you are.

• 0:42Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I mean, these, these fair people don't know how I am, but they also don't care. So you've struck a sort of perfect balance there.

• 0:50Alex O'Connor?

  I, I'm writing an article about this at the moment, which should be out by the time this episode's out, who knows? Not, not I, not this reviewer, but I'm opening with this quote from the Gospel of Thomas, the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. One of those ancient gospels that didn't make it into the New Testament and yet is filled with these wonderful and bizarre stories about Jesus. And at one point in this apocryphal gospel, he condemns some of his followers. He says, you've become like the Jews who either love the tree and hate the fruit, or love the fruit and hate the tree. Some similar imagery in the canonical gospels of like, by their fruits you shall know them. You know, a good fruit doesn't produce bad, a good tree doesn't produce bad fruits.

• 1:34Alex O'Connor?

  But interestingly here, you know, people get this criticism all the time, like you claim to be a Christian, but you don't really act in accordance with it. You're like nominally a Christian, but you know, you're not displaying the sort of radical compassion of Jesus or something like that. It's a very common criticism that you're not acting in accordance with your beliefs.

• 1:52Alex O'Connor?

  But we've been seeing this strange reverse phenomenon emerging where you've got people who like the fruits but don't even believe in the existence of the tree. So usually the criticism is like, look, you love the tree, but you're not producing the right fruits. But in this case, you've got an emerging class of thinkers who are unwilling to say that they believe in the actual truth of Christianity and yet are at least Christian adjacent or sympathetic to Christianity or kind of a bit depressed about the fact that everyone isn't Christian anymore. This is your Douglas Murray's, Konstantin Kissens, Jordan Peterson to some degree.

• 2:30Chris Williamson?

  Andrew Huberman?

• 2:31Alex O'Connor?

  I suppose, but then he does say he actually believes in God, right?

• 2:34Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So maybe he likes the tree, but the fruit is...

• 2:37Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know if he, I mean, I don't listen to much Huberman, but maybe his fruit is, is, is, is, is fine, is very Christian. I don't really know. But, but in, in the case of these thinkers, the reason they're interesting is because people talk about them all the time in this Christian revival phenomenon. I've got a friend, Justin Briely, who just wrote a book called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again, or something like that. And it's very hopeful, but I think a bit too optimistic because the case studies it points to are the people that I've just mentioned, people like this. Tom Holland, the historian who, well, as I, as I write in this article, Tom Holland, not the actor, but in a sense, an actor, because he sort of likes to pretend that Christianity is true, even though it's not.

• 3:22Alex O'Connor?

  The interesting thing about these guys is that they won't say that it's true. They're unwilling to say that it's true and they call themselves cultural Christians. Richard Dawkins, you know, arch archetypal atheist, also, I mean, recently called himself a cultural Christian. He's been doing it for years, but it got a lot of attention recently when it did on, on, on LBC. And it's kind of interesting, you know? So, so you're going to spend your entire career just lambasting this religious tradition and undercutting the truth value of it and then getting depressed when the cathedrals are empty and being turned into mosques, which is what's happening in England, like... You may have sort of shot yourself in the foot a little bit there, but it's there's nothing inconsistent, strictly speaking, with saying that you like going to even song,

• 4:04Alex O'Connor?

  but you don't think any of it's true. So what we're seeing is an emergence of people who are more sympathetic to the Christian ideal, or what they perceive as the Christian ideal, which is a whole nother can of worms, but without actually believing in the truth of it. I mean, most believing Christians will say, if you do not believe historically that a man called Jesus died on a cross and rose from the dead, then your faith is futile and you're still in your sins, as St. Paul put it to the Corinthians famously. So these people sort of can't be counted among a Christian revival, but I think Christians have a lot to celebrate that at least now the culture is shifting from a sort of new atheism, Christianity is evil and terrible and wrong to, yeah, I might be wrong, we'll

• 4:46Alex O'Connor?

  sort of brush that bit under the carpet, but try to display the virtuous ethics of Christianity. Although in my case, they're not actually advocating for a Christian ethic, they're advocating for a sort of right wing, traditional conservatism, which is not the same thing.

• 5:00Chris Williamson?

  Just to tie a bow on your previous analogy, when you talk about tree and when you talk about fruit, what are you referring to?

• 5:08Alex O'Connor?

  The tree is the belief in God, the sort of Christian religion, as it were, and the fruit is the fruit of that belief. So if you're to be a good Christian, you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and because of that, you believe in a sort of radical philosophy of forgiveness and compassion and charity and asceticism, and you live that life out to the best that you can in the knowledge that there will be inevitable failure that you can then apologize for. So a lot of people will say, I'm a Christian, but they do none of that. They don't go to church, they don't pray, they don't act like a Christian, they don't show any charity or compassion to their brother or sister.

• 5:46Chris Williamson?

  So what do they do?

• 5:47Alex O'Connor?

  Or whatever else. They, well, they could be selfish. And of course, everybody is selfish to some degree, but a Christian likes to regularly remind themselves of that and apologize for it and repent of it and make efforts to try to avoid it. But a lot of people, you know, like if someone barges past me on the street.

• 6:07Alex O'Connor?

  Then I will always just think it is it is possible that person that you know their wife's going into labour and and yeah, it's like they say, don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity like also what can be attributed to somebody having some kind of excuse or justification, something that you would understand. It's like, have I not ever barged past someone?

• 6:28Chris Williamson?

  Called the fundamental attribution error.

• 6:30Alex O'Connor?

  Sure. Yeah, that is this is why I love you because you always have a have a have a label to to perfectly stick on all of these concepts. It's wonderful. Um, yeah, I mean, I if I experienced that and think to myself, well, I'm going to be charitable here because, you know, but for the grace of God, there go I. I think, well, that's a very Christian sentiment, Alex, you know. And if you if you met someone who's a Christian and you said, what do you like about Christianity? And they said, oh, I just love this figure of Jesus who would just go around forgiving people. And even when people deserved punishment, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. That's the most incredible like that. I mean, it is just the most based part of the entire gospels, man. That's just unbelievable. Unfortunately, it's not in the earliest manuscripts of John. So it's probably added on at a later point and Jesus probably never actually said that.

• 7:16Alex O'Connor?

  Not that that really matters in my view. But then if somebody said that they liked that and then, you know, somebody like accidentally spilled a drink over them and they get up and just like deck them, you'd be like, well, hold on a second. I thought you were sort of embodying this Christian ethos. And they'll sort of talk the talk but won't walk the walk. And so in that case, I think they love the tree but hate the fruits. That might not be the correct interpretation of Jesus's saying in the Gospel of Thomas there. But I think it's a worthwhile analogy to to sort of abstract and and use in the context that I'm I'm putting forward here. Also, it makes a good opener for a for an article. So I'm going to do it anyway.

• 7:52Chris Williamson?

  Why is this happening? What has occurred recently that's caused Christianity, cultural Christianity, this sort of revival of it, utilitarian Christianity, if you want to call it that? Which I quite like as a term.

• 8:06Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, there are there are a few things for this, you know, functional, utilitarian, practical Christianity that isn't an affirmative set of. Truth claims, but rather a sort of protective cloak to be worn. It's more like Stoicism. It's a cultural thing, yeah. The cultural Christian, I mean, think of Richard Dawkins. Loves going to even song, likes a cathedral, thinks that God doesn't exist and that the Christian stories are ludicrous fantasies. This is your cultural Christian. Why are they beginning to re-emerge in droves? For a few reasons. First, new atheism either creates or describes this vacuum of, of, you know, spiritual ungroundedness. You don't need any of this religion stuff. I know that it's obviously evolved in the human psyche for some reason.

• 8:53Alex O'Connor?

  And every single human society we find, doesn't matter where we look, they all have some kind of sense of the numinous, some kind of distinction between the sacred and the profane. Numinous, the sort of, you could say the transcendent, the something that sort of sits above and beyond, a little bit sort of mystical, a little bit sort of out there. You know, when you ask somebody if they're religious and they say, "No, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." And you're like, "What the hell does that mean?" And they're like, "I just sort of believe in, I believe in like something." It's like, "Well, I believe in something. I believe in this microphone, you know, I believe it exists." But they're sort of getting at this, this sort of ethereal other, this something, right? And every society, wherever we look, you know, society's developed this feeling. And that there's clearly something intrinsic to human nature that drives us towards this religious impulse.

• 9:35Alex O'Connor?

  But the new atheists come along, as the old atheists did before them, but the new atheists did it more fervently in saying, "No, not only is this untrue, not only in the sort of, you know, where Sigmund Freud says that your belief in God is, I don't know, the result of some kind of childhood repression, trauma, whatever." Okay, like, but he's still going to think that it's an intrinsic part of the human psyche. All right, the new atheists come along and say, "Well, I also think it's false, but you also don't need it." You know, you don't need this celestial dictator telling you what to do. "Oh, you only do right and wrong because you're scared of upsetting the, the big man in the sky." Well, that's a terrible source for ethics. And everyone goes, "Yeah, you know, damn right, yeah." Yeah, and it's sort of like a rallying cry. Like, it was really, some of these speeches, especially in the case of Christopher Hitchens,

• 10:19Alex O'Connor?

  you know, they, they sort of make you want to stand up and give a, give a round of applause. I mean, it's just amazing, right? And part of it is appealing to this, this human.

• 10:32Alex O'Connor?

  This sort of like humanity, this common humanity, oh, like, are you not good enough yourself to to sort of stand up and and live a good life and all of this kind of stuff? And everyone's like, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But we've seen the fruits of this as people begin to sort of throw off religion and societies begin to throw off religion. What people have perceived happening is the creation of a spiritual vacuum. And if it is the case that human beings are naturally religious, they have a an impulse towards. The the most fundamental thing I think we have an impulse toward is the idea of the sacred. The idea of something which is separate and untouchable, that that shouldn't be mixed with the profane. That shouldn't be um. That that usually has a sort of attached to it a set of dogma.

• 11:16Alex O'Connor?

  Uh, about rules, what you're allowed to do with it, what you're not, and and those rules aren't entirely justified by reason alone. It's sort of considered to be self evident, just this, this separate thing that we treat as as totally sacred. So that's that's your god, right? And the idea is that if you remove the god, something else has to fulfill that. Uh, that place, something has to fill it in. And so the the right wing conservatives will say that environmentalism, veganism, um, gender ideology, all of this kind of stuff has become a new religion. And although it's maybe a bit of a lazy phrasing, you know what they mean? You know exactly the kind of thing that they're talking about, right? And um, the left will criticize, you know, nationalism as filling that role.

• 11:57Alex O'Connor?

  Um, you know, populism and populist leaders, people get religious about Donald Trump, which they do. It's it's amazing. To to sort of see the the power and influence that that that man has, it's it's almost spiritual, you know? Um, so to cut a long story short or to append a long story with a conclusion, I should say, um.

• 12:21Alex O'Connor?

  I think what's happening is a bunch of right wing thinkers are seeing what is fulfilling the vacuum that new atheism created. Wokeism, Islamism, um, few other things, which it's, it's, there's someone in particular that I should mention, but, and they're saying, I don't like this. And they're realizing that the kind of secular humanism that's promised by the new atheists just kind of isn't cutting the mustard seed, as I like to say. It's, um, it's not doing it, you know? So I recently was in New York and I watched Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi-Ali have a discussion. Ayaan Hirsi-Ali was supposed to be at the meeting in Washington DC in two thousand and seven that created the four horsemen of neo atheism. Hitchens, Dawkins,

• 13:06Alex O'Connor?

  Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. And it becomes this huge cultural moment, the four horsemen. They're still talked about today as a group. She was supposed to be there. She was a incredibly successful neo atheist writer, speaker, debater. And earlier this year or last year, she announces in an unheard article that she's a Christian now. Well, like incredible, just, just like absolute, like headline news in this, in this niche. Utah. Yeah. Well, this is, this is the thing. It's sort of like, how predictable was it? Well, you know, she'd been hanging out with the Jordan Petersons and stuff and she's sort of quite, I think, she's got a footing in the sort of right wing cultural space. And so it's kind of not surprising if you knew that this kind of Christian revival

• 13:50Alex O'Connor?

  thing was, was happening anyway. Um, but her entire article for unheard, I mean, it mentioned like Vladimir Putin and it talks about wokeism and China and it talked about Islamism and it's, it mentioned Richard Dawkins more than it mentioned Jesus. It's the story, Why I'm Now a Christian, I think the article was called. And it had nothing theological, no spiritual experience, no, no philosophical argument, just, you know, I'm not happy with the way that, that our culture is going, you know, I'm suspicious of the, the rise of wokeism and Islamism in China and Russia and Christianity is sort of our best defense against that. So a lot of people criticized it and said, well, what do you mean you're

• 14:32Alex O'Connor?

  a Christian? Richard Dawkins' response to her was, in his article was to say, seriously, Ayaan, a Christian? You're no more Christian than I am. Which was really interesting because a lot of people look at Richard Dawkins and say, he's basically a Christian. And a lot of people look at Ayaan and said, she's basically an atheist. So they're both sort of making the same criticism in, in the opposite direction. So they got together in New York and I was there and I watched it and. To everyone's surprise, I think, Ayaan did actually affirm belief in the truth claims of Christianity.

• 15:03Chris Williamson?

  So she's not just fruit, she's tree as well?

• 15:05Alex O'Connor?

  It seems that that's now the case, but the interesting thing is when Dawkins, because Dawkins was ready to show up to this discussion and say, and tell her why she's not really a Christian.

• 15:13Chris Williamson?

  Because of the tree, the lack of the tree.

• 15:15Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, you know, I know you like the, the, the stories and all of this kind of stuff, but like, you're not really a Christian. And it was, it was actually at the beginning, Ayaan told her story of conversion where she really opened up about depression, suicidality, just utter despair, being not strong enough to commit suicide, but not wanting to stay alive anymore. And then she tries praying, you know, some, some therapist after hundreds that she'd seen tells her that she's got like a spiritual poverty and she should try praying and it works, right? And eventually she gets sort of lifted out and she's got this, her, her sort of, her, the thrill of life is back, you know, and everyone's applauding because they're so happy for her. They, they cheered at that, you know? And it was almost comic, the way that Dawkins listens to the story and goes, well, that's very moving, Ayaan, but, but do you think that Jesus was born of a virgin?

• 15:59Alex O'Connor?

  You know, but interestingly, Ayaan basically said, if I'm not mistaking her, she said that she chooses to believe these things. She chooses to believe that Jesus is born of a virgin, that he rose from the dead, which seems kind of weird and a bit obscene. How can you just choose to believe something? And a lot of people will say, well, I can't, I can't choose to believe something. You can't choose to believe that Australia doesn't exist. It doesn't work like that. But interestingly, I began to notice that if somebody becomes convinced that Christianity is true, like through philosophical argumentation, historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus, okay, Christianity must be true. And then you hear all these moral claims that it makes about family values, gender roles, stuff. And you think, well,

• 16:39Alex O'Connor?

  I don't know about all of that, but I'm, I mean, I've just become so convinced that Christianity is true that like, it must just be that this is the moral way. And I, I choose to just believe that, right? No one really bats an eyelid. They might think it's, it's wrong to do that, but they don't think it's like illogical. They don't think it's like a, a sort of an illegal chess move, as Peter said.

• 16:55Chris Williamson?

  Reversing the stack and going in the other direction is something where people go, hang on a second.

• 16:59Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. So, so Ayaan obviously just like deeply resonates with the Christian story, the Christian ethic, the Christian community. She said that when she was going around criticizing and mocking religion for years and years and years.

• 17:13Alex O'Connor?

  Islamists would send her death threats. Christians would send her letters saying that they're praying for her, you know. And, and she thought that was the difference between those, those two religions. Um, so it was a really interesting story from her. So something's obviously deeply resonated. So she says, well, whatever that is, that's, that's realer than real. That's the most important thing in my life. And so, yeah, I choose to believe the factual stuff as well. And that seems like a much more like intuitively, it seems more illegitimate to go that way. But, you know, I think people do it in the other direction all the time.

• 17:39Chris Williamson?

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• 18:24Chris Williamson?

  Best of all, they ship to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia. Right now, you can get $350 off the Pod4 Ultra by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to eightsleep.com/modernd wisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Is it possible to choose to believe in God?

• 18:50Alex O'Connor?

  Not like naively, not like, well, try it, try it for yourself. You don't believe in God, or do you? Maybe you're an agnostic. I don't know what you, what you, what you think about this stuff, Chris. You're probably sort of what agnostic atheist?

• 19:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, agnostic.

• 19:03Alex O'Connor?

  So just try it out, like believe in God for, for a second, give it a go.

• 19:07Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what that would mean.

• 19:08Alex O'Connor?

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

• 19:53Chris Williamson?

  You did it with vegans.

• 19:55Alex O'Connor?

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

• 20:16Chris Williamson?

  I suppose.

• 20:17Alex O'Connor?

  So you can choose to do that.

• 20:18Chris Williamson?

  Interestingly, as an atheist like I am was, or Dawkins, even though you are there in opposition, you are actually surrounding yourself a lot of the time with people who talk about religion, who think about religion, who think about the transcendent and God and ideology and dogma and stuff like that.

• 20:34Alex O'Connor?

  That's right. And so a lot of people criticize me for being soft on Christianity.

• 20:40Alex O'Connor?

  I accept the charge. I am, because I quite like Christianity. You know, I'd call myself one of these cultural Christians if I could make a bit more sense of the concept. Like, I get what they're driving at. They're like, look, I like the message of Christianity. I like its ethos. I like its ethic. I like this figure of Jesus. And I can see societal benefit for people believing in God and religion and having a unifying moral and all this kind of stuff. Like, yeah, sure, that's great. And maybe that is a result of me spending too much time with Christians. It's possible, you know.

• 21:07Chris Williamson?

  You lived with some for a while.

• 21:09Alex O'Connor?

  That's right. Yeah, yeah, I lived with Christians and a lot of my closest, smartest friends that I talked to about philosophy and definitely theology with their Christians. And it's great. It's incredibly edifying. Have a wonderful time. But it's, you know, I try to spend time with, with different people from different backgrounds with different ideas all the time.

• 21:33Alex O'Connor?

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

• 22:14Alex O'Connor?

  You get this sort of hand that you can grab hold of, and it just lifts you out of this, brings you back to life, you know? And then, just as you're sort of there and thinking, oh, my goodness, this is, I've been waiting for you, tears streaming down your face. You've got Richard Dawkins going like, yes, but do you actually believe in the virgin birth? Why do you keep bringing that bit up? Because it shows a difference in what people care about. The cultural Christians care about the the the ethic and the society and what it does for people. It's sort of a sociological project. Whereas for, um, I would say theological Christians, but also like atheist critics, it's more about the truth claims of a religious worldview. So a lot of people, you know, if you look at the comments on this discussion that they had,

• 22:56Alex O'Connor?

  a lot of people will be like, oh, so Ian's just done a Jordan Peterson, basically. She's just sort of sort of done this wishy washy, well, the truth kind of doesn't really matter. By the way, this approach of like, it doesn't really matter, you know, did Jesus rise from the dead? Uh, you know, I don't really know. What I really care about is just like how it feels, man. It's a kind of like attitude that would get you condemned as a heretic in the early church. You know, like, oh, you don't affirm the belief in the resurrection of Jesus, you know? It it would be bad. So the reason I bring it up is because they're two different approaches. One is, one is very left brained, one is very right brained. You know, honestly, like, like the, it's sort of, what about the the the facts, the science? You know, um, the other side is sort of what about the narrative and the sort of feeling

• 23:41Alex O'Connor?

  and the ethic and the poetry? And that that's the left brain and the right brain battling it out right in front of you. Yeah.

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  Has Christianity gone soft? We've spoken about how sort of the atheist side coming in is assessing religion, specifically Christianity, with perhaps less of a fine-tooth comb. In order for Christians to say, with open arms, we permit you, person who does not have an active belief in God,

• 24:10Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Chris Williamson?

  in the resurrection of Jesus, in many of the things that are important to faith. And you just said that would have been heretical.

• 24:20Chris Williamson?

  Is this a both sides nerfing the bar that they need to get over? One in order to believe and the other in order to accept?

• 24:28Alex O'Connor?

  Maybe. There's also the difference between like the Christian religion as practiced in the history of the Christian church with a particular emphasis on like modern Christian Europe and how it behaved.

• 24:42Alex O'Connor?

  There's that kind of Christianity and there's the kind of Christianity which is like emulating the figure of Jesus, which is, I think, the important thing. So, for example, has Christianity gone soft? Well, consider the Christianity of the Crusades versus the Christianity, the sort of lukewarm half, people don't even believe like less than like 1% of the the population are going to Church of England churches, you know? Like, yeah, that's definitely gone soft. But arguably, the kind of either military or strong-armed Christianity that emerges in the history of the Christian church is itself an inappropriate hardening of the Christian message. The figure of Jesus.

• 25:22Chris Williamson?

  It's like Christian relativity. Like, what is base?

• 25:25Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, exactly. And and religion is always famously just used to buttress political aims and campaigns.

• 25:35Chris Williamson?

  How can we have this ideology, this document, to be able to drive us forward? Perhaps if we wanted to invade some other country.

• 25:41Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, or like, how can we motivate people to believe that we're on the right side here? I mean, famously Adolf Hitler, that people debate all of the time whether he was a Christian. Who knows? I mean, he was a Roman Catholic, but he and he never renounced it. But like, you know, he wasn't acting very Christian, let's say. But he did have the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier have Gott mit uns, God with us, written on the written on the belt buckles. Atheists weren't allowed to join the SS. Didn't want them, didn't think they could be trusted, I suppose. Hitler says explicitly in Mein Kampf that in standing guard against the Jew, I'm doing the handiwork of the Lord. So he's using this religious terminology and a lot of people like to point out to me like the, I'll hear Christians say, yeah, but he was actually an atheist.

• 26:25Alex O'Connor?

  I mean, he was just pretending to be a Christian, surely. And I'm like, well, why would pretending to be a Christian make it easier for him to be a fascist? You know what I mean? It's, it's sort of a bit of a confusing thing. Yeah, because people use religion in this way. And so there's, there's the question of like, well, you know, was Adolf Hitler a Christian? Right? Well, maybe he would, maybe if you ask him, let's say, you know, we discovered some, some texts or some bit of the table talk that, that we didn't otherwise know about and, and Christian, and he says, yes, I'm, I still very much believe in God and believe I'm doing Christ's work. There's a sense in which you could say, ah, see, he was a Christian. That's what the atheist might say. But the Christian would say, I don't care what he claimed to be. Being a Christian is doing the work of the Lord. Being a Christian is, is, is enacting the will of the Father. Right?

• 27:11Alex O'Connor?

  So interestingly, maybe

• 27:11Alex O'Connor?

  Free with that fruit. Maybe you don't even need to believe in God per se to be a Christian. You just sort of need to do the will of the Father. It's hard to know what, what counts as being a Christian. But I think sort of the two approaches that clash in this Ian Dawkins, you know,

• 27:29Alex O'Connor?

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

• 28:11Alex O'Connor?

  So.

• 28:13Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I don't know. Okay, has Christianity gone soft? Like, yes, politically, like, clearly it doesn't, it just doesn't have the political power anymore. A lot of nominal Christians don't really believe in what they're saying. They sort of go to church because they feel like they have to, but don't actually have the same kind of passion that you'd like to see in a, in a, in a sort of firmly spiritually convicted Christian population. Sort of doesn't exist, at least in Britain. I don't know about America. It's probably much more enthusiastic here, but in Britain.

• 28:40Chris Williamson?

  The interesting thing about America, I spent Easter Sunday at Austin Ridge Bible Church. This is the first American service that I've been to. The only other time that I've been to a service recently was at Ripon Cathedral on Christmas Eve. Ripon Cathedral, Christmas Eve, 245 year old woman with a C shaped spine playing the organ, everybody singing hymns, brief talk in between, very sort of cobwebby, classic sort of British Christmas thing. I go to Easter Sunday, Austin Ridge Bible Church. I pulled up behind a 150 grand Corvette supercar that had God Now as the number plate on the back. That was the first

• 29:22Chris Williamson?

  thing. I went in, the lady that was the warm up act for the main person that was giving the sermon for the day, started using religious language. And I was like, oh, can't we, you know, straight into it. And she said, guys, please, we must remember to have patience and forgiveness, and we must give grace. When turning right out of the car park onto B Cave Road, and I thought, oh, wow, okay, this is an interesting use of sort of semi-Christian language here to direct traffic. And then the opening act was a six piece rock band, complete with 20 person backing choir.

• 30:06Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Chris Williamson?

  Fireworks, a full LED wall that would have made my nightclub career look paltry, with the lyrics up behind so that everybody could sing along, even me who didn't know the words. Lead singer, very charismatic, playing the guitar, dude on the drums, black guy playing saxophone, set of glasses on.

• 30:26Chris Williamson?

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

• 30:45Alex O'Connor?

  And then they ask for your money.

• 30:47Chris Williamson?

  They didn't ask for my money, actually, they were rich enough.

• 30:49Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Chris Williamson?

  Um, not once was the word religion used, not once. Nobody in that room thought of themselves as religious.

• 30:57Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Chris Williamson?

  They have a direct relationship with Jesus and with God.

• 31:00Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, sure.

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  It's all about, it's just Jesus, Jesus, like super, super Jesus stuff. Uh, and that, I was like, what is that? What's Christianity when you kind of rip much of the ideology side out of it? I don't even know, is that, what is that missing? What is it that they've done? What have they taken out of what I would be more familiar with from what I would have learned in school?

• 31:23Alex O'Connor?

  Insofar as they're doing that, they're probably getting something right, which is that Christianity is not so much a set of truth claims, a religion as we'd use the term today, as it is a relationship with the person. Christianity is a relationship with Jesus. That's what it is. Um, so, I mean, the word religion is famously very difficult to define. Uh, and also kind of doesn't exist as a concept until relatively recently in like religious study and comparative religion because, you know, like you, you find religious communities from a thousand years ago and religion isn't this like thing that they do.

• 32:03Alex O'Connor?

  They don't have like work, family, religion, you know, like get my MOT. It doesn't, it doesn't like box off like that. It just is.

• 32:14Chris Williamson?

  Permeates.

• 32:15Alex O'Connor?

  It's, it's the air that you breathe and the water that you swim in. It sort of doesn't really make any sense. I mean, like it's like a fish trying to define water, which I'm sure the fish can do, but only once you take it out of the water and sort of show it what it was swimming in before. But it wouldn't consider itself to be swimming in water, you know? Um, I, I think Emmanuel Kant had this image of a, of a, of a bird or a dove like flying through the sky and sort of thinking, like feeling the, the wind resistance and thinking, gosh, if only I could get rid of this wind, I could fly so fast and I could get rid of the air. And that's kind of what, what like people are doing with religion, you know? If only I could, if only I could get rid of this, this resistance, but you're sort of throwing out the baby with the holy water.

• 32:56Alex O'Connor?

  So they're probably getting that right. I'm not sure about the whole megachurch situation. Having said that, I've never been to one and

• 33:02Chris Williamson?

  Pretty cool.

• 33:03Alex O'Connor?

  I know people who

• 33:03Chris Williamson?

  Seats were comfy.

• 33:04Alex O'Connor?

  I've had a, you know, a friend of mine recently told me that he went to one of these like megachurch experiences in in England, actually, and was just sort of overcome with emotion. Tears streaming down his face uncontrollably, like a like a sort of unbelievable experience. And I thought, wow, that, I mean, that's, that's amazing. But then I've, I also have a friend who we recently sort of accidentally stumbled upon like a sort of traditional, I think it was a Catholic service. There's four guys singing some choral songs and we were holding candles. It was a concert. They said free concert and we went in and they gave us candles after going through the metal detectors, you know. They gave us these candles and we were sat there and there was this, there were these four guys singing this, this

• 33:47Alex O'Connor?

  sort of Latin Christian music. And my friend had used to be a sort of

• 33:58Alex O'Connor?

  like a, like a real American style Christian, uh, Christian, you know, and said, like, wow, I've never experienced anything like that. That was ama- like, just, that was really amazing. And I thought, gosh, it's just because you, it's, it's not what you're used to, you know, the person who's, who's used to that will be amazed by the megachurch. The person who's used to the megachurch, oh my goodness, this megachurch stuff is ridiculous, but it's, it's sort of. Yeah, I think it's got

• 34:22Chris Williamson?

  Eating one meal for the entirety of your life and then going, oh my god.

• 34:25Alex O'Connor?

  Because, because what it shows you is that, like, you, you can separate out, you know, this idea of being a Christian or worshiping God from all of the, the, the trimmings that you think necessarily go with it, you know, standing in this like drafty old building with a bunch of elderly people going, we believe in one God, the Father, and like doing the Nicene Creed. And like, and going up and getting in queue for communion and the sort of the, the trembling priests, like putting a bit of bread on your, on your, on your mouth and you think, gosh, this is, this is a bit lame. Um, and it is. So then you go to like a megachurch and you think, oh goodness, right? Like you can isolate the Christian bit, put it in a new context and suddenly it's amazing again. Maybe Christianity isn't so bad after all. So it's got a lot of utility for that reason. Um, but.

• 35:11Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I mean, my my understanding of what the mass should be of what church should be is a meal. Um, you know, Jesus, Last Supper, you know, breaks the bread, drinks the wine, says, do this in memory of me. It's it's the Passover meal. Well, it's the Passover meal in uh in the in Matthew, Mark and Luke. In John's Gospel, Jesus dies uh before the Passover meal, uh maybe the other way around. Because well, because John's trying to say that Jesus is the Passover Lamb who's being slaughtered. And so there's a kind of biblical contradiction there as whether Jesus dies before the Passover or after the Passover. Um, that's kind of a side point. Um, so I think that like what the mass is supposed to be, Jesus says, you know.

• 35:55Alex O'Connor?

  I mean, the whole reason the mass exists, the Eucharist is the in the sort of the the Zenith of the mass. It's where you eat the bread and drink the wine, because that's what Jesus did before he died. And he said, do this in memory of me. But it was a meal. It was a it was a feast. And I have a feeling that in early Christian communities, the mass was a was a meal. But then they stopped doing that because it became too much about the meal. People used to just show up to like eat and drink and be merry. But then why not? You know, why not? Because, you know, it should be a joy to get together. Yeah, probably, probably. Um, but so I I don't think there should be like hard and fast rules exactly on how to do it. But I am a little bit suspicious of the whole. I don't know. Do you know, people have made this criticism of mega churches and I don't like the money.

• 36:39Alex O'Connor?

  I don't like the sort of fame, celebrity, the fact that you use the term warm up act in a in a church environment just seems wholly inappropriate. Um, but like the criticism that's often that's often made that it's too like, um. Well, it tries to get you sort of in a state of vulnerability by using like musical tricks and stuff. I I've seen some some people tweet this. It's a social media thing that that crops up every now and again. People say, oh, I used to think that I I really like loved God and I was like really into like worship. But it turns out I actually just liked, you know, music. Oh, it turns out I actually was just like really into drums. And it's kind of a joke because they're like, oh, it was it was just the music.

• 37:18Alex O'Connor?

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

• 37:42Chris Williamson?

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• 38:25Chris Williamson?

  free. If you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back. And they ship internationally. You can get a 20% discount site wide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to livemomentous.com/mordenwisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Well, what about when you walk into, you've been to the Vatican?

• 38:52Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:52Chris Williamson?

  Right? What about when you walk in there? You walk through the doors?

• 38:55Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  It's the best front end of a funnel I've ever been into.

• 38:59Alex O'Connor?

  Well, look, the Vatican is a, is a, if you, if you go to St. Peter's Basilica, where you've been, I mean, it is just like breathtakingly huge. The, the, the sort of, the scale of the thing is enough to sort of make you like, and it's actually so big that you kind of, your eyes aren't like, you know, parallaxing properly. So it's kind of difficult to even tell how big it is until. For anyone who's ever been, there's writing, big gold band that goes all the way around and there's writing. And I was there with a priest and I haven't verified this, but he told me that each of those letters was two metres tall. Yeah, I heard that on the tour. The letters and I genuinely, I was like, I don't, I don't believe you. I literally, I'm looking at it right now, I'm staring at it. It's so small, it can't be two metres. I don't believe you, I just don't.

• 39:42Alex O'Connor?

  And the, the statues on the top level are built bigger than the ones on the bottom so that they look the same size. This is a strange illusion. I kind of wish they hadn't done that because it would give you a better idea of the size. But anyway, okay, yeah, amazing or inspiring, but at the same time, it's designed pretty poorly. From the outside, I mean, you've got Michelangelo's dome, which is like at the back of the basilica, which you can't see from the front, which is just poor design because of the fact that you've got like three different architects who all had different ideas of what to do. And we're planning things separately and they all just sort of got shoved together. And so you get this, this great big frontier, but imagine if you could see that dome from the front, it would be spellbinding. Also, the fact that the St Peter's was built off the back of sale of indulgences.

• 40:28Alex O'Connor?

  So the Catholic Church, they give us money and we'll shorten the time that you spend in purgatory and you get to heaven quicker. And they use that money to fund the building for church. So it's a little difficult to be, you know, theologically inspired when you start to realise what kind of building you're walking into and the kind of history that, that surrounds it. God now. Yeah, I mean, but then there is still, but then it's exactly the same thing as the, the God now thing is the mega church where there's, I mean, like if you start thinking about it, you think, well, this isn't right, this is bad, you know, you might go into a mega church and say, well, this is terrible because they're just trying to make money. And then, you know, you go into St Peter's Basilica and you think, well, this was raised on the sale of indulgences.

• 41:10Alex O'Connor?

  But there's still something amazing about it. There's still something that, that inspires awe and that's the, that's the important bit.

• 41:17Alex O'Connor?

  I think so. So, so, yeah. So, I mean, that's, I mean, it's amazing, an amazing place to be.

• 41:22Alex O'Connor?

  But like every human attempt to approximate the awe of God will necessarily be beholden to our failures as immoral creatures.

• 41:34Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the political dimension of this Christian revival.

• 41:38Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, it's just a bunch of right wingers getting upset about Islam and wokeism, basically, in my view. I mean, Douglas Murray, you know, goes to church on Christmas and sort of likes to be, I mean, Justin Brierley talks about Douglas Murray is one of his examples of people who's sort of very like Christian friendly, you know, like sort of cultural Christian type. I don't know how true that is. I haven't sort of kept up with Douglas's like writing on this stuff, but say it were true. It's like, why is that? Is it because Douglas has sat in a church, prayed deeply, you know, for an inward sign of like the sort of true religion of the universe? Or is he just upset with the way his country's going? I think

• 42:18Alex O'Connor?

  it's more likely the latter. Konstantin Kissin recently called himself a cultural Christian in like a video and it was the same kind of thing. Like it's not a theological thing, you know, he'll say, I'm an atheist, but I'm a cultural Christian.

• 42:33Chris Williamson?

  Russell Brand got baptized?

• 42:34Alex O'Connor?

  Russell Brand got baptized, but again, this is this is slightly different because he says he actually believes it, right? Oh, actually, I don't know. I mean, I haven't, I again, I haven't kept up with Russell Brand. I don't, I don't listen to him, but I presumably he'll actually believe in the resurrection of Jesus and stuff to have been actually baptized. So I think that where somebody has actually sort of developed a Christianity and a truth claim, I believe Jesus rose from the dead. I don't think that's just like

• 42:59Chris Williamson?

  Is that not Christian revival?

• 43:01Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I mean, sure, that would be an actual Christian revival, but I don't think that the way the thing that people are pointing to and saying, but look at this upswing. I don't think that's happening as much. I don't know. I don't know what the stats are on like baptisms and stuff.

• 43:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, it wouldn't surprise me, you know, if there's a non-zero number of people

• 43:14Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:15Chris Williamson?

  who start to look at the fruits.

• 43:16Alex O'Connor?

  Sure.

• 43:17Chris Williamson?

  And it is possible to ayahn Hershey Aliet and kind of go back up to the tree.

• 43:21Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Chris Williamson?

  You think, well, yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna work both ways.

• 43:25Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, in a way.

• 43:28Alex O'Connor?

  Like, if you can't see the tree, you can just sort of like start picking up the fruit and following the trail and it will sort of lead you to discover the tree.

• 43:36Chris Williamson?

  For some people, for sure. And again, you're around the people, you're going to mass, you're going to service, these are your new friends, they're talking about it all the time, I gotta read this, I gotta study, but someone gifted me a study Bible, I know what this is. So, there's two, I wasn't sure what your position on this was, whether you think that it's a upswing in utilitarian functional Christianity as opposition to certain movements that a number of people have got a problem with, or just conservatism wrapped in religious talking. So, is it, does it exist as a revival of conservatism with

• 44:21Chris Williamson?

  a new bow put on it, or in opposition to push back against other things that people are concerned about? That was where I was.

• 44:28Alex O'Connor?

  I think it's the conservatives who are pushing out, who are pushing against this stuff, right? Like, so, new atheism, what's new about new atheism? The sort of political dimension, you know, it's as much like a movement, a sociological movement, like I say, more so than it is a theological one. And it's much more, it's the reason that new atheism found its way onto like, the national press, it's on Fox News, you know, people debating it now, in the way that now it's like, you know, I don't know what it is in America, like, you know, gender studies in schools or whatever, it used to be like evolution in schools. That's what you turn on the TV. In fact, like, imagine that, you know, like, you would turn on the TV and you'd find your Tucker Carlson's and people

• 45:10Alex O'Connor?

  like, just going on and on and on about like, evolution and God and religion and Christianity. I mean, it's amazing. It was doing exactly what like, the, you know, the woke social justice stuff is doing now in that, in that space.

• 45:25Alex O'Connor?

  So that was sort of the like the new atheism thing sort of was was was this cultural phenomenon, talking about politics, you know, it did the theology stuff a little bit as well, but you know, it was it was social movement. And so, okay, what kind of social movement was it? Well, broadly speaking, it was left wing. It's an interesting subset of like YouTube atheists who went on to be like anti SJW reactionary types, but broadly speaking, the atheist community that sprung up, Christopher Hitchens, the socialist, Richard Dawkins, very left wing, more recently, sort of gender critical and, you know, suspicious of Islam, all that kind of stuff, which puts him on the on the on the right. Same thing with Sam Harris, but

• 46:06Alex O'Connor?

  these guys are like traditionally left wing people, right? And it's all very, you know, Christian nationalism is suppressing gay rights and gay marriage and abortion and all of this kind of stuff and contraceptives and divorce laws and all of that, right? So new atheism is is quite left wing. So whatever like space it creates culturally, the people who are going to sort of say, we don't like this, we don't like what's happening, we want to react against that are going to be conservatives. So like, in other words, it's like it's both. I think it's it is in many ways a reaction against this vacuum, but the people who are reacting against that vacuum are going to be probably

• 46:46Alex O'Connor?

  more or less conservatives. They used to call, the Church of England was was known as the Tory party at prayer, is what they called them. The fact that the fact that nobody is now going to Church of England churches means it feels like a sort of waste of a good label. And I think like the cultural Christianity movement could be called that, you know, the Tory party at prayer, not the Tory party, because the Tory party is probably about to cease to exist in England. Have you seen this? I think right now, as we're speaking, yeah, it's got to be about like, you know, half past or quarter to, yeah, it would be like right now.

• 47:20Alex O'Connor?

  There's a seven party debate happening on the BBC. Nigel Farage is currently stood at a podium, like probably shouting at a bunch of other people. And it's amazing, like Reform UK are two points behind the Conservatives at the last poll I checked.

• 47:35Alex O'Connor?

  I remember hearing that, well, like, I mean, we're in, we're in store for either another sort of 1997, like super Labour success, or the actual sort of, it's like, it's an existential moment, as Andrew Marr has put it, for the, for the, for the Conservative Party. It's sort of amazing to see. So maybe not the Tory party at prayer, but the English right.

• 47:56Chris Williamson?

  Conservative people at prayer.

• 47:56Alex O'Connor?

  You know, at prayer, even if they don't know quite who they're praying to.

• 48:00Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting though, you know, one of the things I noticed since moving over to America is that there is no equivalent of the Christian right in the UK, or there wasn't, right? You know, that, you know what I mean? Bible belty.

• 48:11Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:12Chris Williamson?

  Like, you know, it's for God, it's country, it's patriotism, and the constellation of beliefs kind of write themselves.

• 48:20Alex O'Connor?

  I mean, what religion, oh, what religion is our Prime Minister, you know? And also, like, if you are, like, Keir Starmer, is he a Christian? I literally don't know. I have no idea. And if he was, I wouldn't know what kind of Christian he was. And also, I don't care, and nor does any of his party, and nor do any of the, the population, you know? Like, genuinely, it's so, it's so strange. I think our Prime Minister's a Hindu, as far as I'm aware, but I'm not sure how, like, religious he is in, in that. But can you imagine, like, it being a serious part of the conversation in Britain? Your, your American listeners might not be fully aware of just how absolutely ludicrous it would be to be sort of on the campaign trail and somebody asking, you know, what's your favourite Bible verse? You know, and, and when, like, Donald Trump can't think of a Bible verse, you know,

• 49:05Alex O'Connor?

  what is it he said when he was asked for his favourite Bible verse? And he goes, oh, there are just, there are just too many, there are just so many. I love it all, I love them all. That that can, that's a bit of a scandal. It's like the leader of the Republican Party.

• 49:16Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't know his favourite bible.

• 49:18Alex O'Connor?

  You know, like in the UK, it just, it just doesn't.

• 49:19Chris Williamson?

  So not salient.

• 49:20Alex O'Connor?

  And and so maybe I think people that are sort of noticing is that the the right in America is quite, it's quite strong, got a presence.

• 49:29Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that, do you think that this could be a potential angle for a future British political party to tap into?

• 49:35Alex O'Connor?

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

• 49:57Alex O'Connor?

  And and they're gonna, they're gonna possibly, you know, have to, have to hang up the hat.

• 50:05Alex O'Connor?

  So I think people in the UK are quite sort of, especially right wingers in the UK are quite desperate. So like, we don't have a, we don't have a movement. We don't have a home. We don't have a party that we can vote for. Like, we don't, we don't have a way to get ourselves represented in Parliament. So what are we going to do? And they're sort of trying out different things. And one of these things is like, well, what if we all just become Christians again, you know? Maybe that will do something. But it means that if you, if you pay attention on like Twitter to the kinds of a cat, because it's not just the, the thought leaders, but also like you begin to notice in the comments, you know, there's more, there's just more people. There are more people who are, who are fervent. There's more people with little display pictures of like a crusader, you know, with the, with the with the, with the sword and the, and the helmet on and stuff. And you realize that if there is sort of a Christian revival happening, it might be

• 50:50Alex O'Connor?

  a revival of the sort of strong armed.

• 50:54Alex O'Connor?

  Like, we're not gonna take this kind of Christianity rather than the meek and mild.

• 50:59Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you talk about the difference between strong armed Christianity and meek and mild Christianity.

• 51:05Chris Williamson?

  Is the reason for the, get that in, go on. Is the reason for the strong armed Christianity that this revival is coming in opposition to a bunch of things that seem quite aggressive, that seem quite militant, whether it be rising threat from China, Russia, Islam, gender ideology, wokeism, whatever?

• 51:27Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 51:30Alex O'Connor?

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

• 52:04Alex O'Connor?

  Well, for many of them, they say it gives them a, it gives them this, this sort of protective layer against these ideologies that they don't like, or the vacuum of no ideology.

• 52:14Chris Williamson?

  How does it give them a protective layer?

• 52:16Alex O'Connor?

  Well, that's the question to ask, right? And I'm kind of the wrong person to ask there because I'm not sort of part of this crew, but if you did ask them, I mean, I know, it's a little bit vague and a little bit difficult to pin down, but it, to any extent that it does offer a protective layer against ideologies you don't like, it has to be a bit more strong armed, it has to be defensive, it has to put up a shield, right? And so it really depends on who you ask, right?

• 52:39Chris Williamson?

  But let's just hypothesize for a moment, what is it that you get from utilitarian Christianity in opposition to secular liberalism? What does it provide you that you can't arrive at without the Christianity bit?

• 52:58Alex O'Connor?

  Content. Secular, you know, secularism doesn't have content. Secularism is just like a sort of rule, a political rule that says that you're not allowed to like, let religion have any sort of, any particular religion have any hand in like political affairs. You've just got to sort of have a hands-off approach to religion, right? It doesn't actually provide anything, it's not a worldview. Christianity is a worldview, it allows you to say, there are things that are right and wrong, right? So in like a, like a secular liberal government, you might say, you have this opinion, you have this opinion, and because we're a secular liberal society, even though I think you're wrong, I think you should be in parliament, I think you should become the prime minister, if that's what the people want, all of this kind of stuff. Whereas if you have an

• 53:40Alex O'Connor?

  ideology that just says, no, there are right things and wrong things, and our country is one that believes in these right things, and if you believe the wrong thing, like, no, you know, you're not going to become the prime minister, you're not going to, like, so I think it sort of provides you this ability to Safeguard your worldview.

• 53:55Chris Williamson?

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• 54:38Chris Williamson?

  Also, they ship internationally and offer free US shipping on orders over $25. You can get up to 40% off Mando's starter pack by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to shopmando.com and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's shop M A N D O dot com and modern wisdom at checkout. So there's more structure and sort of buttressed in this way. But what is it about Christianity which is particularly useful up against a woke Chinese Russian assault?

• 55:09Alex O'Connor?

  Well, that's, that's to me is still a bit of a mystery. It tells me that we're not, insofar as people are specifically when they're talking about political issues like, like China and Russia. I would ask that same question. I think the only answer you can give is that it's somehow tied to a sort of a political.

• 55:31Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, like a political.

• 55:36Alex O'Connor?

  Sort of, what's the word here? Like, like.

• 55:42Alex O'Connor?

  What's, what's the word? What am I looking for?

• 55:44Chris Williamson?

  I don't know.

• 55:44Alex O'Connor?

  Like.

• 55:47Alex O'Connor?

  I know, like a forceful restatement of your political commitments, you know?

• 55:54Alex O'Connor?

  And the fact that that's tied to Christianity is a bit of a mystery to me. I don't really know.

• 55:58Chris Williamson?

  Is it that it's something that seems more steeped in ancient Western values?

• 56:04Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, so that's the other thing, is that it's like, it's Western, but this to me seems quite contingent. This is why I'm separating out like Christianity as what Jesus teaches and what Christianity is. And Christianity, which is like, like I said earlier, with the specific emphasis on the history of, you know, Western Europe.

• 56:22Alex O'Connor?

  People think that Western civilization is a result of Christianity. That's, in fact, yeah, I think that's what's going on here. So you get Tom Holland, the historian, who has popularized this idea in his book Dominion, that all of Western civilization is essentially Christian without realizing it. So, you know, we've taken what were once non-obvious, controversial, ethical contingent statements, you know, things that a lot of people thought were true, a lot of people thought were false, were quite radical, quite controversial. And they've so successfully embedded themselves into our culture because of the rise of Christianity, that we now describe them as self-evident truths, you know? It's just self-evident that every person has worth, that, you know, slavery is wrong, all of this kind of stuff.

• 57:06Alex O'Connor?

  It's just self-evident. And so we don't need Christianity to teach us that anymore because it's self-evident. And Tom Holland's thesis is something like, well, what you don't realize is that it's actually come from Christianity, even though you now don't realize it. So if you cut off the Christianity, you cut off the basis for this entire Western ethic in the first place. So people who care about Western ethics, people who care about, well, preserving the West and preserving the Western ethic, might buy into this Tom Holland thesis and say, oh, okay. So I really care about Western ethics and Western ethics is Christian. Therefore, if I care about Western ethics, I should care about Christianity and upholding Christianity. Who cares about upholding the West at the moment? The political right.

• 57:48Alex O'Connor?

  So particularly in Europe, you have this right-wing, Christian sort of, you know, friendship, merger.

• 57:58Chris Williamson?

  What about its usefulness as a prophylactic against wokeism?

• 58:03Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, it's kind of the same thing, right? Because it's still, it's still, I mean, what's woke culture trying to do? It's trying to sort of undermine Western civilization, you know, the history of Western Europe is trying to sort of rewrite the books, trying to say that a lot of, a lot of the West is evil and patriarchal and white and racist and all of this kind of stuff. This is, this is what like people dislike in the so-called woke movement. If you ask someone like Douglas Murray, you know, what, what, what's the big trouble with wokeists? What don't you like about them? What will he tell you? He'll say they're undermining Western civilization. So it's still this sort of let's save Western civilization approach. And I think that this has come at the same time as the popularization of the thesis that Western civilization is Christian, therefore to save the West, we save Christianity.

• 58:48Chris Williamson?

  It's like an equation.

• 58:49Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, how do you mean like an equation? Like you sort of add them together?

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's how an equation usually works.

• 58:59Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah. Yeah. Like as in they're treating them as the same.

• 59:01Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yes. That you can, if it is, or the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? Like.

• 59:07Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, it's, it's, I don't know, it's a bit like, I'm trying to think of an example here of like where else people just sort of go a bit, they sort of, they cozy up to an ideology because it's sort of, I know, it helps. And I don't mean that to be sort of cynical because we're not always conscious that we're doing this, but we become attracted to this ideology, become attracted to this religious tradition and think, oh yeah, like I like Western civilization and the people who are talking about this Christianity thing, they seem to care about it. They seem to recognize that, you know, there's a lot of importance in Western civilization. So they suddenly find themselves becoming more attracted to it. But for the, it's important to stress that like, I don't think this thesis is correct.

• 59:51Alex O'Connor?

  I mean, I'm not, I'm not sure, you know, I still haven't actually read through Dominion by Tom Holland. I really need to do that with the amount that I talk about. That's why I'm always very careful to, to talk about his thesis. But like, I think Western civilization, you know, what's it defined by? Free speech, freedom of religion, capitalist economy, you know, like basically all of these things which, I mean, you can say that nominal Christians have like established these historically, but if you actually flip open the scripture. There's no way that you can describe this as Christian or Judeo-Christian, especially with the Judeo part when it comes to like the abolition of slavery. I'm told that this is, oh, it's essentially a Christian movement, the abolition of slavery,

• 1:00:34Alex O'Connor?

  like as if, as if the Bible, which explicitly condones and teaches you how to take slaves, how to bequeath them as inheritable property to your children. You know, if you, if you march up to a city to attack it and you see a beautiful woman, I'm not misquoting, if it says, if you see a beautiful woman among them, this is in Tutoronomy, I think 20, I think it's like Tutoronomy 21, but I might be wrong about that. Then you can take her as your wife. And if you want to do that, then you take her home. It's bizarre ritual. You shave her head, trim her fingernails, give her exactly 30 days to mourn her parents, who you might have just killed, and then you can take her as your wife.

• 1:01:17Alex O'Connor?

  Okay, so now we're told that despite all this sort of scriptural endorsement and instruction, that, well, the abolitionist movement was essentially Christian. Oh, and the women's rights movement is all Christian, it's all Christian ethics secretly cropping up. I'm like, okay, so maybe it's the case, maybe that God was always against slavery and always sort of pro-woman and social justice and all this kind of stuff. It just took us literally thousands of years to work it out. And this just so happened to coincide with the Enlightenment. It's possible. Or maybe actually, no, maybe this isn't a Christian message.

• 1:01:59Alex O'Connor?

  And like when I, when I ask specifically, how is this abolitionist movement or whatever? How is it Christian? It's like, well, Christianity teaches the worth of the individual, the emphasis on sympathizing with the victim. This is the big thing. It's like the idea that Jesus comes down, everyone's expecting the Messiah to be this great military leader who's going to, you know, liberate the Jews from Roman occupation. And instead you get this man who's like poor, ascetic and is crucified. I mean, we're so used to the crucifixion narrative that we forget how embarrassing it is and shocking it is for your Messiah to die a slave's death. I mean, it's, it's an extraordinary story. It's what makes it such an attractive one. And so we're told, well, you know, this, this idea of, you know,

• 1:02:45Alex O'Connor?

  Sympathy for the victim is is like uniquely Christian and that's where we get like the care that comes in social justice. Social justice movements are all about like caring about the victim. Like, yeah, okay. But the Bible does explicitly tell you you're allowed to own other human beings as private property. So how do you square that one? So in other words, Tom Holland might be right that like the sort of nominally Christian Western ethic has like built up, or the nominally Christian sort of system and religiosity has built up this Western society, but it can't actually be like scriptural, in my view. I mean, I might just be wrong about this, but but so it's a little bit confusing to me. That's why I find it difficult to answer the question like, you know, why are right wingers attracted

• 1:03:28Alex O'Connor?

  to Christianity? Or are they? Are they attracted to Christianity? As in, are they attracted to the message of the gospel? Or are they attracted to what the sort of Christian church and Christian religion has historically been able to politically provide?

• 1:03:41Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I wonder how much is that it provides a more stable and sophisticated sounding by virtue of how long it's been around, pushback against something that in comparison is flimsy, contemporary, less steeped in nostalgia and and less stable in that way. Like, if you were to create a thing that would act in opposition to super progressive, very new, very contemporary, very quickly changing, you would choose the most Lindy story that you can. What's the one that's been around for as long as possible? And, you know, we

• 1:04:24Chris Williamson?

  can kind of forget that bit. We don't need to really worry about shaving the head and cutting the fingernails. We don't really need to worry about the slaves and passing them down to your children and stuff like that. And I suppose that with Christianity, because it is, as Sam Harris said, it's a relatively low T religion, they're quite prepared. It seems to me like they take less offence at people.

• 1:04:47Chris Williamson?

  Um, playing fast and loose.

• 1:04:49Alex O'Connor?

  Yep.

• 1:04:50Chris Williamson?

  With the literal interpretation, it's, ah, it's okay that he omitted that thing. I get the sense that the Islamic faith would not be so okay with you piecemealing your way through their particular doctrine.

• 1:05:03Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, it's what I was about to, about to say or bring up.

• 1:05:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean.

• 1:05:07Alex O'Connor?

  Because you're quite.

• 1:05:07Chris Williamson?

  I said it.

• 1:05:08Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, that's right. Oh, I think Sam Harris said it first.

• 1:05:11Chris Williamson?

  Right, fuck.

• 1:05:12Alex O'Connor?

  The, yeah.

• 1:05:13Chris Williamson?

  I'm the middle of the human centipede between Sam and you.

• 1:05:16Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, why not? Yeah, you can put it in those sounds if you like. Another, another reason I love speaking with you, Chris.

• 1:05:22Alex O'Connor?

  I think, yeah, as, as I like to put it, Islam is more high T and Christianity is more like high T, if you know what I mean, like T E A.

• 1:05:32Chris Williamson?

  Why is there not an Islamic revival?

• 1:05:34Alex O'Connor?

  Because, um, well, no, sorry, there is, is, is, this is the other thing I, this is what I was about to bring up, actually, was, was the fact that like, okay, a bunch of like, you know, our political establishment, civil service have just been totally taken over by this woke culture, man. Um, and everyone's a bit like, come on, seriously? Like, really? You know, on, on the anniversary of D-Day, we've got pride flags flying over Regent Street, like, instead of the British flag. I think that's true, might not be true, but you get the point I'm making. People are like, ah, I'm fed up.

• 1:06:05Chris Williamson?

  Probably is somewhere.

• 1:06:05Alex O'Connor?

  Fed up of all of this nonsense. And so you've just said, like, you know, you need something that's, that's old, tried and tested, you know, and can stand up against this. And so you get a bunch of like, particularly, I think, disaffected young men, who, you know, the, like, Islam is very attractive to them, attractive to them, because it, because it says, well, look, you don't believe in all this crap, do you? You don't believe in that. You believe in, you believe in certain kinds of values. You believe that you should stand up for yourself. You believe in gender roles. You believe in this, right? But yeah, I do, actually. It's like, well, this is, Islam can give you this, and it can justify it, and it can give you the, the strength and the community behind you to assert those values and not have to worry about being some kind of like outcast or condemned or whatever.

• 1:06:47Alex O'Connor?

  No, because like, we, we all believe the same thing as you, and we're growing, and we're popular, and nobody wants to criticize us because we stand up for ourselves, you know? Okay, yeah, sign me up for that. Whereas the Christians are still very much like.

• 1:07:00Alex O'Connor?

  Sort of, yeah, like you say, that they, they're, they're, well, they have the message of turning the other cheek.

• 1:07:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Alex O'Connor?

  This is the Jesus figure, so.

• 1:07:07Chris Williamson?

  And their belief as well is that you will be judged eventually, not necessarily right now.

• 1:07:13Alex O'Connor?

  Yeah, it's, it is a different sort of message of, of salvation. I mean, Christianity has the sacrifice of Jesus for your sins and then Islam doesn't have that. Islam doesn't believe that, that Jesus died on the cross. Again, because we forget how radical it is that killing a prophet, like God wouldn't allow that to happen. So the idea of Jesus dying on the cross is a, is a, is a total anathema to the, to the Islamic understanding of who God is. And because again, Islam is much more sort of like proud and stand up for yourself kind of thing, having, having this, this embarrassing slave death for their prophet, like it doesn't run. So Jesus doesn't die on the, on the cross in, in Islam.

• 1:07:51Alex O'Connor?

  Whereas in Christianity, yeah, he dies on the cross and he sort of pays your sin and all this kind of stuff. It's a much more like, I'm gonna sort of throw myself on Christ, you know, woe to me and my sin.

• 1:08:02Alex O'Connor?

  And so, and that's more attractive to some and less attractive to others, but it, it, it sort of means, I think that also is why you get more like Christian churches who are sort of like, oh, we're totally open and we're like pro pride and we've got a transgender priests and all of this kind of stuff. When you don't see that happening in Islam, at least not as much to the same degree. A lot of people like.

• 1:08:21Chris Williamson?

  I'm not, I'm just not quite working out why that has resulted in churches, Christian churches, or Christian belief that permits people to be more piecemeal.

• 1:08:33Alex O'Connor?

  Because, well, that's actually, I think, a slightly separate thing, which is, which is important to, to spell out. A lot of people say simply that Islam is like, you know, uh, half a millennium younger in Christianity. Because it sort of, it crops up later than Christianity and therefore Christianity, you know, has its sort of Enlightenment revival, reformation 500 years ago and Islam is like five, six, 700 years behind. So it just hasn't got there yet, right? And, and like a lot of people do this line, I don't think it's right because it, it sort of treats Islam as a religion like it's sort of still. A baby or something.

• 1:09:16Alex O'Connor?

  And, and that it's like, it's like not connected to the world in some way that it, that it's like, oh, give it 500 years and for some reason it will just happen in the same amount of time as a difficult, like maybe, but I, I don't think that's true. I think it's, it's got more to do with the way that the scripture and the, and the, and the prophets are treated like. In Islam, the Quran is the word of God, which has sort of existed for all time. Um, and you know, the Quran you, you, you hold in, in your hands, the mushaf, the, the copy, um, the written copy is, is a copy of a message which is eternal, right? Which is. The final word of God as well. Quran means recitation. So it's just, you know, Mohammed receives and Mohammed is illiterate.

• 1:09:57Alex O'Connor?

  He can't read, he can't write and, and God, um, sort of speaks to him in, in a cave and says, you know, says write or recite or, or do something like to that effect. And Mohammed is sort of like, well, I'm, I'm illiterate. I can't, I can't do it. And he just commands him to do it anyway. And Mohammed is, is so sort of freaked out by this that I think according to some reports, he considers suicide. He goes to like throw himself off a cliff and then he goes home to his first wife, who is the first person to encourage him that he's actually heard the word of God and that, you know, he should submit to it. So she's known as like the first Muslim. She's the first person to sort of, you know, recognize the message and, and accept its truth.

• 1:10:37Alex O'Connor?

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

• 1:11:22Alex O'Connor?

  This isn't like the word of God in the sense that this isn't like, the exact words that you're reading in the Bible are the words that came out of the prophet's mouth that God, you know, put into the, it's not the same thing. In Christianity, in Islam, the word becomes a book. In Christianity, the word becomes flesh and dwells among us. That's the opening of the Gospel of John, you know. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. And then later on, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. So you have the word of God being Jesus. In Islam, the word of God is the Quran. And so a lot of people think the Quran in Islam is what the Bible is in Christianity.

• 1:12:05Alex O'Connor?

  I think that the Quran in Islam is what Jesus is in Christianity. And the Gospels are more like the Hadith literature in Islam, which is sort of these reports of the sayings and doings of Muhammad, which some are better attested than others. You know, there's sort of dispute over which ones are sound, which ones aren't, but no one disputes the Quran. But some of the Hadith, you could say, oh, well, this one maybe didn't happen. This one did happen. We're not really sure. But no one disputes the Quran. In the same way, in Christianity with the Gospels, yeah, maybe they said this, maybe they said that, maybe that's a later interpolation, maybe that was wrong, maybe blah, blah, blah. But no one disputes Jesus. You couldn't have Jesus out in front of you and argue with him about what's true in Christianity, right?

• 1:12:45Alex O'Connor?

  And so this is why in Islam, or in Christianity, if you want to say, look, I know the Bible says all that stuff about women speaking in churches, but actually, you know, Paul probably didn't write that letter and he probably didn't mean this. And that particular verse moves around our early manuscripts and maybe he didn't really say that, I mean, like whatever. And so you end up with this sort of, yeah, okay, fine.

• 1:13:06Chris Williamson?

  Some play in the system.

• 1:13:07Alex O'Connor?

  Would Jesus be okay with it? Yeah, it feels like Jesus might be okay with it kind of thing. And so there's a bit more room to maneuver. You can't do that with Quran. You can't say, oh, well, maybe that verse isn't true. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe that was, you know, a later interpolation because the Quran is the word of God.

• 1:13:20Chris Williamson?

  What's an interpolation?

• 1:13:22Alex O'Connor?

  Oh, like a later addition. So something that's added later into the text. So like earlier, I mentioned.

• 1:13:30Alex O'Connor?

  The stoning of the adulterous woman, which is my probably, well, it's one of my favorite stories in the in the gospels, where Jesus says, he who's without sin casts the first stone. Because it's a religious test, because you've got this Jesus peaceful figure. And as a woman who's committed adultery, and the law's quite clear that the woman should be stoned. And Jesus is just like writing in the sand. And the Pharisees are like, okay, come on, then, Jesus, what are you going to do here? It clearly says that she should be stoned. That's what the law says. And he's like writing in the sand. He's kind of ignoring them. And they say, Jesus, you know, what should we do here? You know, the law's quite clear, we need to stone this woman. And they're testing him. What's he going to do? And he says, sure, yeah, okay, go ahead. But he who's without sin casts the first stone. Oh, man, it's brilliant. It's awesome. It's like ethical genius. It's

• 1:14:13Alex O'Connor?

  sort of undercuts, at the same time as not contradicting the the truth of the law, or the justice, you know, it's this brilliant moment. But unfortunately, it's not in our earliest manuscripts. And so most scholars believe that it's it's a later interpretation.

• 1:14:28Chris Williamson?

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• 1:15:12Chris Williamson?

  sat in the fridge. You can get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to factormeals.com/mw50 and using the code MW50 at checkout. That's factormeals.com/mw50 and MW50 at checkout. Plus, Gnostic Gospels, which is like the DVD extras, sort of the behind the scenes vlog.

• 1:15:36Alex O'Connor?

  The director's cut, yeah.

• 1:15:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is. The extended edition.

• 1:15:39Alex O'Connor?

  The Gnostic Gospels are a fascinating corpus of texts, which

• 1:15:45Alex O'Connor?

  We've only very recently, in the grand scheme of things, been able to rediscover and read for ourselves. We knew of the existence of a bunch of Gospels that weren't in the New Testament, because early church fathers were writing about them. We knew about the existence of a Gospel of Judas, a Gospel of Thomas. Fascinating, you know. But we didn't have the texts until in 1945. Some guy is digging in the desert and accidentally crashes into this big jar. At least, this is one of the, like, the stories are disputed. And just like, opens this jar. At first, doesn't want to open it because he's scared there's like a demon in it. But turns out, it's got a bunch of ancient manuscripts, which he takes home and keeps by the fire. Where is it?

• 1:16:28Alex O'Connor?

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

• 1:17:10Alex O'Connor?

  it was a burial site. Some people have suggested that like, it's, it was some significant figure with a lot of, you know, a lot of texts to his name when he was buried, he was buried with these texts. And so that's why some people think that the story of the discovery isn't true, because it was actually grave robbing. Some people have thought, maybe it was just a simple grave robbing. But the person who then discovers these texts doesn't want to admit that he's robbing a grave. Have these been carbon dated? Have they been verified, authenticated? Yep. So there's been, there's been a lot of work done on this. We, you can, you can date the actual papyrus, but you can also, I mean, the extraordinary thing about these Gospels is, so I think, so the Gospel of Judas, for example, which is not found

• 1:17:50Alex O'Connor?

  in that collection, it's not found in the Nakamadi collections, it's, is found at a, at a later point. And fascinatingly, when people began to realize what it is, there's this huge scramble, because it's worth a lot of money, right?

• 1:18:04Alex O'Connor?

  People are like trying to smuggle it. People are trying to, uh, cause, cause you can't just sort of take really expensive ancient manuscripts across the border. You know, countries want to keep them for themselves. They want them for their museums. They want them for their researchers. Uh, but the people who find them want to sell them. So this Gospel of Judas is discovered. And it finds its way all over the place. It actually spends something like 15 years in a safety deposit box in Long Island in New York. Which like almost destroys it because you go from like Humidity. The perfect climate of, of Egypt to like New York City. So it was just like absolutely ludicrous. It's finally National Geographic. Who buy the Gospel of Judas. They sent a bunch of scholars, I think, including Bart Ehrman to go and like verify it and they give them a bit of the text, but they can't give them too much because they can't just let them read it because they haven't bought it yet.

• 1:18:46Alex O'Connor?

  But they need to give them enough to like verify the text, right? So there's carbon dating and all this kind of stuff, but also I mean, we can, we can, so we carbon date the, the papyrus. And we know that it sort of dates, you know, I, I don't know what the exact numbers are, but between like 80 AD and like 400 AD. It's like give or take like a few hundred years, but we also know that, um, that, uh, Irenaeus writes in Against Heresies about the Gospel of Judas. So we know that it existed. And we know that this is dated to around that time. And we're like, this must be the Gospel of Judas, but because Irenaeus writes about it in like 180 AD. We know that the top end for how late it can be. So there are lots of different ways to get to You've had to triangulate.

• 1:19:28Alex O'Connor?

  Yep, exactly. Right. So you can date the text by, you know, carbon dating the papyrus. But also when it's been referred. Referred to, we can do it textually, like what are its textual dependents? What, what does it have knowledge of? You know, does it have knowledge of the, the, so a lot of people date the Gospel of Mark after 70 AD. Because it mentions the, the, the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. So the temple is destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and Mark's gospel mentions this. And so the secular historian looks at that and goes, well.

• 1:19:58Alex O'Connor?

  That means it was written afterwards. The Christian might look at it and say, well, Jesus talked, Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple because he was Jesus. It was a miracle. He knew it was going to happen, so it could be earlier. You know, so, so there's, there's sort of theological dispute as well. Interestingly, there was one gospel, um, the gospel of Jesus's wife, which was discovered relatively recently and was, was particularly famous because it was this tiny, it was a fragment and it talked about Jesus's wife. And it mentions Mary Magdalene. So the presumption is that it's, it's describing Mary Magdalene as Jesus's wife, which has been a sort of theory, Da Vinci Code-esque thing going on for a while. And we have this ancient, ancient papyrus. At first scholars are sort of like, they think this might be, they think this might be real.

• 1:20:42Alex O'Connor?

  They carbon date the papyrus and it, it's, it matches perfectly. Yeah. Like this is, this is like data, this is an early ancient text. Then some like red flags start being raised and the, the sort of final nail in the coffin. Mr. President, my company formed me of the explosion on our rig.

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