Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Top Historians CLASH on Islam: What's Really Going On? || SLP641

Transcript

Top Historians CLASH on Islam: What's Really Going On? || SLP641 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Shots fired, Dominic Sandbrook coming in hot at Tom Holland, his co-presenter on the Rest is History podcast.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Check this out.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_04: A final word for your co-host, Tom Holland, who said to a podcast that in his view, Islam is uniquely indigestible for a secular mindset.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_04: Would you disagree with him if he said that to you?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_04: I would, yeah, he knows that it's I think that's total rubbish.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I think that's total tush.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_04: I think he's completely bananas about his Islam stuff.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_04: I'm looking forward to that episode.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_04: Can we have that episode?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_04: That would be cracking.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's hilarious.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: They are great friends, which is what makes the Restus History podcast such an enjoyable listen.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: But because they're such good friends, Dominic Sandbrook doesn't mind throwing shade at Tom Holland.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: He knows that he can take it.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: In this video, I want to show you why, yes, Dominic Sandbrook might not have Islam right, but I don't think he has Tom Holland right, and I don't think he has secularism right.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the real issue in this video.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: My name's Glenn Scrivener, where from Speak Life we like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to try on a pair of Jesus spectacles at least every now and again, why don't you give the channel a subscribe?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now Dominic Sandbrook has copped a lot of flack for this little 30-second clip, but I want to set this in context because Tom Swarbrick, the radio announcer, I think has taken Tom Holland completely out of context and in the final 30 seconds of an interview kind of set Dominic Sandbrook up for a gotcha moment.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: In this video, we're going to go to the podcast in which Tom Holland says these things.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll see that Tom Holland is not saying what Dominic Sandbrook is taking him to be saying here.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Let's have a look at the original podcast and see where this whole thing came from.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: But moving on, Tom, one of the other great religions that I think we are incredibly uneducated about, and I speak for myself above anyone else here in the Western world, particularly, is Islam.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: And it's becoming a bigger conversation politically and societally because of immigration policy, because the number of Muslim followers is followers of Islam in the Western world is growing.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I'd love to know more about how that religion came into being, what are its core values, what are its principles.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned some of them already, but can you expand on that?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_03: Could I could I could I just before before I do that, just put Islam in the context of the kind of the Christian story as manifested in the present West.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: Because I think that's important to understand why there are tensions between Islam and Western secular liberalism and why there is such a reluctance to acknowledge this on the part of um enthusiasts for secular liberalism.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: Because essentially what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept of the secular.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_03: And this is it goes right the way back to um ultimately, I mean, you can trace it to the story of um Jesus being asked whether taxes should be paid to Caesar.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: You know, he's famously asked for a coin, and there's the picture of Caesar, and he says, Whose head is this?
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_03: And he says, Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God, what is God's.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: And so so that sense that there is um you're talking about the separation of what the Americans call church and state.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: And they call that and and we call it here church and state.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: The notion of church and state, there isn't synagogue and state, there isn't mosque and state, it's church and state.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um and in the West, that's because it this notion of there being two rival orders gets enshrined by the towering theological genius in the Latin church, Augustine um great in in North Africa in the late fourth, early fifth century um AD.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then Tom Holland does what Tom Holland does best is tell the history story of from Augustine onwards, but there's a there's a story of history that gives us this sense of the secular on the one hand and the religious on the other, and we get to hear.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: So there you have the you know, as the Roman Empire falls, this notion of there being an order of the seculum, the order of religious and over the course of medieval history, this becomes institutionalized.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: And it going into the kind of the Reformation and into modernity, it mutates to become this idea that there is this space called the secular, which is kind of neutral, it's separated from what has come to be called religion.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: And this is a mad idea.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: No other culture has ever had this idea.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: So so when you read about you know ancient Greek religion, they did they had no concept of religion, and they certainly had no concept of religion as being something that is separate from the kind of the the everything else.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's you know, the the relationship of people to the gods is like the the jinn in a tonic.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_03: You can't separate out the jinn and the tonic.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: What what what Christianity does is to say, yeah, you can have jinn and here's the tonic and you can separate them out.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's the madness of of the way that we conceptualize the world in the West.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_03: And Islam that has no concept that you can separate this out?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: You see, that's the context in which we need to have conversations about Islam because it's it's Christianity and then the Christianized West that has the mad idea that religion is just one part of life that is separate and separable.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: The rest of the world has not done things in this way.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's what Francis Foster gets to later on in the interview.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: He says, has anyone else set up society in this secular religious way that the West now takes for granted?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Here's Tom's answer.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_05: Surely aren't we the only society that has ever thought we can divulge culture and religion?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_05: Yes.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_05: And is that not arrogant?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is arrogant.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: We are the only culture that thinks that we can get away with a notion of the transcendent of the sacred.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that's just true anthropologically.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: We just can't find another civilization that thinks of religion the way that we think of religion, that has a word for religion that is the same as what a modern Westerner thinks of when they think of religion.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: We are the strange ones, but we don't think of ourselves as strange.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: We think of ourselves as obviously pursuing uh uh a universal vision for life.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And if other people see things differently, they just need to catch up with us, us mad ones.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so we are these secularists devouring every other culture and civilization, and we come across something like Islam, and it is uniquely indigestible to the secular desire to devour everything else and press everything else into our secularist mindset.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: This might be the most hopeful trend that nobody is talking about.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Last year we introduced someone to Jesus for less than a fiver, and we need your help to do it again in 2026.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard the reports?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: People are searching for Jesus again.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: When they look, they often find stuff that is confusing, shallow, or downright misleading.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: So we created 321, a free online introduction to Christianity that meets seekers where they are.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: In just the past two years, 36,000 people have signed up online and over 10,000 people have done it in person.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: But the best part?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Lives are changing.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: I just love hearing stories like Sarah's.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: She wanted to check out Christianity, but all the options in her online search came with a price tag.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: This did not seem right to her, so she did something strange.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: She prayed, and the very next morning she came across the 321 advert.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: She took the course and encountered Christ, the one who loves her and has saved her from the pit.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: And here is the crazy part.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: It cost just four pounds to show her that ad.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: To put it another way, for every 40 pounds of online advertising, we find ten Sarahs.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it cost four pounds to get it in front of Sarah.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And stories like Sarah are happening again and again because this generation is more open than we think.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: The soil is ready.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: But moments like this don't stay open forever.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: So this Easter, we are asking 100 people to step in and help us to reach more seekers like Sarah.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: If it only costs four pounds to show Sarah the ad that led her to Jesus, just think what you could make possible with£20 a month.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Many more people could encounter Jesus through your generosity.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: And this Easter, every gift is being doubled for the first year.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: So if this story moves you, this is your moment to help someone else find the hope that they are already searching for.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is a moment to sow in faith and trust God for the harvest.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Will you be one of the hundred?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Will you give for gospel growth?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: If you give before Easter Monday, your donation will be doubled by a match funder for the first year.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: So your twenty pounds would be worth 40 pounds.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Visit speaklife.org.uk slash growth to give now.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's speaklife.org.uk slash growth.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, and God bless.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's what Tom Holland is saying, and it gels very much with Kevin Flatt, who is the author of the book Secularization, Social Order and World History.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: He was recently on Paul Vanderklee's channel talking about the difference between what we take as normal, which is that religion is this separate, separable and dispensable feature of social life, and the way that everybody else thinks about it.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: He says that all other cultures have a sacred social order.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: There is the sacred that is pre-political, pre-social, you can't do anything about it.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: There are these supra-human forces out there in the world.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: We do not make up the ordering of the sacred.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: The sacred is a given.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: We have to order ourselves to it.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then there is the social order, which conforms itself to the sacred order.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is the way that all other cultures order their societies with a sacred social order.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's a wonderful interview on Paul Vanderklay's channel where Kevin Flatt talks about the sacred social order and talks about how weird userners are to conceive of society in different ways.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about it here and he gives a sensational analogy.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Check it out.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I use sacred as a stand-in for this idea that there's something above us that we need to correspond to.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then social is meant to capture, like, yes, it encompasses individual lives and things that we do in private.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's part of sacred social order.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: But it's really meant to put the emphasis on this is a this is a blueprint for society, for all of our relationships, for all of our institutions.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a narrow domain of life.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this is how the term really differs from the way we use the term religion.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's like uh, you know, religion is like an app on your phone.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's like one of the things you can do with your phone, right?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: You might, you know, you've got YouTube on your phone, so you can listen to Paul Vanderclay.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that's one of the things you do with your phone.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's like one aspect of what your phone can do.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Sacred social order is like the operating system of your phone, it sets the structure within which all of the apps operate.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so likewise, you know, when we say religion, we mean like, well, it's certain things that you do at home or in a church.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it's kind of certain the circumscribed area of life.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and everything else is not religion.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Sacred social order is the blueprint or the structure for the whole thing.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, for the activities that we would regard as religious activities like worshiping the gods, but also for governing, for the economy, for education, for the handing on of cultural traditions, for the calendar, for how we think about our orientation in space, even again, city planning.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, all of these things are addressed by sacred social order.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just confined to what we would recognize in the modern West as religion.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: In the modern West, we think of religion as one app that you might download or might not.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Every other culture thinks about a sacred social order, which is much more like the operating system than it is like any one app.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we live in the West with this mad idea that there is a neutral operating system, and some people can download the religion app.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: Most people can probably get away without having the app, and we enforce our operating system onto every other culture and people group.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: But we run into problems when we have robust communities that really do believe in a sacred social order.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the secular mindset cannot just gobble up these people who have a very thick sense of what their religion means.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: But we can't even understand their religion because we think about it as just a very important app on their operating system, as though they've got a neutral operating system and just a really popular app called Islam.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: The secular mindset cannot understand the Muslim who takes their religion so very seriously that their religion is being treated like it's the only app in town.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we just don't understand a Muslim who thinks that their religion has all sorts of direct implications for politics and education and economics and town planning and everything else.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: And we think that's a kind of an illegitimate thing for a single app to achieve.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so a key issue in us failing to understand Islam is because we've got entirely the wrong mindset in approaching it.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what's hidden within the secular assumption is that their operating system is merely neutral when in fact, baked into the whole secular project are all kinds of sacred truths that are undeclared.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: And this, I think, is behind what Tom Holland says when he eventually gets to his indigestible comment.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's have a look at that now.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: Is there a unique challenge for Islam to you call it Protestantize itself, which is to start to develop an interpretation that's more compatible with modern reality for a number of reasons, one of them being the Quran is the literal word of God and the last word of God.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: This is the kind of the problem.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: You can't have a reformation if this is this is it, right?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: Like you can't challenge any of that.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_03: I think Islam is uniquely indigestible for a secular mindset.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and people don't want to admit that in a way because um there's a default assumption that secular civilization can swallow anything up.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_03: There's a kind of arrogance there.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_03: That secular civilization of the secular civilization of the West is such a broad tent that everyone can be brought into it.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Did you catch that?
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Tom Holland's quote here is at least as much about secularism as it is about Islam.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not really about a distaste for Islam, it's actually about the arrogant, devouring mindset of the secularist.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: Tom Holland here is mainly wanting to change your mind, not about Islam, he's mainly wanting you, dear secularist, dear Westerner, he's mainly wanting to change your mind about the religious assumptions that you already carry.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: Just listen to what he says.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: But Islam is at least as sophisticated a civilization as as the civilization of the Christian West, um, and a very ancient one, uh, and for most of its existence has been much, much more powerful than the Christian world.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Do you notice that, Thomas Warbrick?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Do you notice that, Dominic Sandbrook?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: That actually the context of what Tom Holland is saying is actually to talk about how venerable a tradition Islam is, and how normal Islam is compared to the ways that other civilizations have conceived of the sacred and the secular.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Tom Holland has plenty to say about Islam as well, but he's largely talking about us Westerners and our secularist default.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Just hear him out.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: Therefore, the idea that that it should accommodate itself to what liberal secularists think it should do isn't a given.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_03: So Muslims in in, say, in a country like Britain have freedom of religion.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_03: But there are lots of Muslims who do not see Islam as a religion because they see religion as a Christian category.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: Islam is much more than a religion.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's something that saturates every aspect of existence, and therefore they don't necessarily want that.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: They want to live in a world where you know, as as has traditionally been the case, Islam is everywhere.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: But that is obviously something that the liberal state is not prepared to offer.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_03: So there are limits to what secularism and liberalism can and will offer.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: So where's what's the obvious question is, and I mean it's probably an unfair question to ask a historian, but we where is this going?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not I'm not a prophet, unlike Muhammad.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um I don't think he thinks that Muhammad is a prophet, just just just saying my guess is that that um that that Islam, rather in the way that um uh Judaism has done, will accommodate itself to the host society.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: I mean that's traditionally what happens, but that there will always be kickback because of what makes Islam distinctive.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: And also, obviously, the more Muslims there are, the more weight their voices will have.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: And so the more under pressure the the kind of the secular assumptions of the West will come.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't quite know, I don't know where that will go.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Where will that go?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, eventually in the conversation, Tom Holland sets out four different futures.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's a future in which we blast off to a kind of a secular utopian vision in which we have jettisoned Christian commitments entirely and blast off into the woke stratosphere.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's a second future which is an anti-woke backlash against that.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: And to some degree we've seen the woke thing, and to some degree we've seen the anti-woke thing.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: There is thirdly the possibility of some kind of Christian revival.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what Tom Holland says about that.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I suppose a third possibility is that people will return to the source and say, well, actually, maybe I am Christian, maybe I, you know, maybe I should take this a bit more seriously than I have been.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_03: And there are kind of things, I think, tentative signs that that might be happening.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a robust and indigestible Islam that's going on at the same time.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, which of these four futures will we head towards?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Constantine Kisson reacts like this.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: You're gonna get some fascists, uh, you're gonna get the eyes of Islam, you're gonna get these woke idiots running around ruining everything.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: And what was the other one?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, the resurgence of Christianity.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's the one I'm most happy.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think we are we are living through a great choke point.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Did you notice that's the one I'm most happy with, the resurgence of Christianity, and uh Constantine has been going to church a little bit uh since this interview has aired, and and we'll see where that goes.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: But hopefully, at least in this interview, we have shown what Tom Holland's comments are really about.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: They are not really about the distaste that Tom Holland might have for Islam, they are actually about the ravening, devouring desires of secularism to press everything else into its mold, and they come up against true believers in certain Muslims, and their desire to press everything into the secularist mold comes a cropper.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: That is partly to do with what Islam is like.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: It is also very much to do with what secularism is like as well.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you might not like Islam, you might not like the utopian ideals of the secularist, you might not like the anti-woke backlash either.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what about that other option?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: What about a resurgence of Christian faith?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: What about going back to church?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Tom's been doing it, Constantine's been doing it.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um are you doing it?
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Are you getting back to church?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe one way to figure out whether that's the kind of option you might want to head towards is to go to 321course.com.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is our Christianity 101 that assumes no prior knowledge.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Over eight sessions we show you life according to Jesus.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus' vision for God and his threeness, his vision for the world and its two-ness, his vision for you and your oneness.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think the Christian vision for God, the world, and you really is at the heart of the answer to all these things.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you check it out at 321course.com?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: And if you've got this far in the video, surely it deserves a like and a share around the place and do subscribe us so that we can catch you on the next one.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: God bless.