Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Tom Holland Predicts the Future (and IT'S HAPPENING) || SLP524

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Tom Holland Predicts the Future (and IT'S HAPPENING) || SLP524 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_05: What do you do when people turn around and say, yeah, okay, I'm a racist, or yeah, I'm a Nazi, or I I don't want to let refugees in, or whatever.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: Here is an AI-generated meme in which Nigel Farage is cast as Neo, Neo Farage.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: And there are accusations that are coming towards him.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: And the foremost accusation, racist.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: And he says no.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: And there's Neo Farage.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: Picking off the racist accusation just shrugs it off.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: What's interesting to me is that a week prior to this video coming out, there was a figure on the left.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: David Tennant was receiving an award, and this is what he said in his speech.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: Until we wake up and Kemi Badenox doesn't exist anymore.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_03: I don't wish L of her, I just wish her to shut up.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: So that received a great storm of criticism.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: Kemi Badenock says, Is race a relevant factor in why you singled me out, David Tennant?
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: But a typical response on David Tennant's side has been to say, oh, don't be so silly.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's got nothing to do with race.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: And so in one sense, we've got David Tennant being neo-tenant, picking up a racist accusation, flicking it away.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so the left can accuse the right of bigotry and racism.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: And the right can accuse the left of bigotry and racism.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: And we no longer have a richer story that actually weaves together what post-Christianity has torn asunder.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus, including the futures of the West.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's right, I said futures, because Tom Holland, who's often been on the channel, has often spoken of three distinct futures that might be possible moving forwards from this place.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Tom Holland is obviously somebody who is known for his history of the West, and Dominion has shown us how very Christian our moral presuppositions are.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: But sometimes he puts on a futurist hat and starts to think about where we might be heading as institutional Christianity in the West is on the decline.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: I spoke to him about this back in 2019 and he said this.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, do you worry about Western civilization going forwards if I mean certainly the church is exploding in places like China and in other places in South America and Africa, but here in the West it's on the wane.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Do you worry that these people go?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_05: I think I mean I've been thinking a lot about this.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_05: I think what's happened is Christianity was as vibrant as it has ever been, deeply held in the years of the First World War.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_05: It did not precipitate a collapse in faith of anything, it consolidated it.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_05: And in the years that followed the Second World War, again there was very, very high religious commitment.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_05: And then in the 60s it dropped off a cliff.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_05: And so the question is what you know, what happened?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_05: I think one of the things that happened was that we emerged from the experience of the war, and as people began to realize what had happened, particularly with the Holocaust, there was a kind of recalibration of our sense of what evil is.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_05: And so we no longer needed the devil because we have Hitler, we no longer needed hell because we have Auschwitz.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_05: When most people in the West want to know what is right, what is good, they look at the Nazis and they do whatever the opposite to what the Nazis did.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_05: What we're seeing is the shadow of Christianity.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_05: We look at Nazism, and the shadow that Nazism casts tells us what Christian values and ethics are.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_05: Enshrined at the heart of every Western society in the wake of the war is the utter conviction that racism is the ultimate evil and that the weak should be careful, so there should be welfare states.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_05: And these have become the um absolute foundations of the way that governments function and universities function and opinion formers function.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: So institutional Christianity in the West holds steady right up until the 60s.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in other videos, Tom talks about the 1960s in the new book that he's working on.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: He will talk about the 1960s as a new reformation and something that has been as disruptive as the 1520s were to Western civilization.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but here he's talking about the post-war effects, and the post-war effects are that after World War II, we have had our mythological battle with evil.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: And instead of thinking, what would Jesus do?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: Now we start to think, what would Hitler do and do the opposite?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so being anti-fascist has kind of replaced being Christian, um, because fascism was kind of the reverse of the two most prominent values that Christianity has taught the world, compassion and equality.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so, therefore, if Hitler is the photo-negative of Christianity, and fascism is this expression of being anti-Christ, well, what we have done is not so much return to Christ himself as the original vision of that, but we have returned to an anti-fascism that just says, okay, equality and compassion divorced from the Christian story and at times divorced from one another, become our superordinate values.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: And now the best things in the world are to have a welfare state and to look after everybody, the opposite of the Nazis.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: And the worst things to be are cruel bigots.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: To be a racist is kind of the worst epithet that you can throw at somebody.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: So cruelty and bigotry is bad on a Christian framework.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's also bad on a post-Christian framework.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: But what Tom's about to say is that as we move from a Christian framework to a post-Christian framework, the reason why racism is bad starts to be a lot more ephemeral, a lot weaker.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it starts to be a lot more based on vibes than it is based on the Christian story.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: Now you don't want to be cruel or a bigot because you don't want to be a Nazi.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: As historian Alec Ryrie says, the Western moral tradition now is basically Indiana Jones's in The Last Crusade when he just says, Nazis, I hate these guys.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: That is our moral kind of settlement in the post-war West.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: Nazis, I hate those guys, but that is a very different reason not to be racist than the Christian vision, in which Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female are all gathered together around one table in the feast of the kingdom, and that people from every nation, tribe, people, and tongue will come from East and North and South and West and sit down with Abraham in the feast of the kingdom.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that is the anti-racist vision within the Bible.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: The anti-racist vision now is based on the mythology of the Second World War, which is now out of living memory.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: And in the post-war period, while we still remember the Nazis, the epithet racist still has real bite, real purchase to it.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: But as we move on and our memories of Hitler fade, what is the force of the accusation of racism now?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's what Tom Holland will say.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_05: The worst insult that you can give anyone is to say they're a racist or a Nazi.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_05: The risk with that, which I think we're slightly seeing now, is that what do you do when people turn around and say, Yeah, okay, I'm a racist, or yeah, I'm a Nazi, or I don't want to let refugees in, or whatever.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_05: What resources then do you have to make this case and beyond kind of screaming racist?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_05: And that I think is when you start to realise just how rooted in deeply Christian assumptions these arguments actually are, and how denuded the attempt to try and make these arguments is if you don't have this mythic resonance that Christianity brings them.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_05: And I don't use mythic in it as an insult, I mean mythic in the sense that it transcends ideology, it transcends commandments, it it you know, it transcends drama that we live in.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's a yeah, it's drama.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: I suggested a word, and uh Tom Holland thought that was the apt word, yeah, drama.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so the Christian story is a drama that we inhabit, it's the strange new world of the scriptures that we immerse ourselves in.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: And as we surrender to the story, and as we surrender to church community and we live out the story week by week, day by day, embodying the narrative of Christ coming for all nations and inviting all nations at the foot of the cross to leave aside all ethnic barriers and to create a community of the spirit and not a community of the flesh, as we embody that community, we will be to some degree anti-racist, imperfectly anti-racist, because um you and I still have the flesh, even as we try to live according to the spirit.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, here is our best shot, I would say, at every nation, tribe, people, and tongue living together with the distinctions that all those nations bring, and those distinctions are great distinctions, but also with the unity that Christ gives us by the Spirit.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: That is our best shot.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: But in a post-Christian world where all you're hanging on to is don't be a Nazi, then for a while being a racist is the worst thing imaginable because you're like Hitler.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: But after a while, the effect of the mythology of World War II fades.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: And what is going to take its place if not robust, embodied Christian community and conviction?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: And Tom here says it is a disturbing sign of post-Christianity when the accusation of racist suddenly has no teeth to it anymore and people just shrug it off.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I was reminded of that on the morning of the election when across my Twitter feed came this AI-generated video by somebody who's clearly uh a Reform UK supporter, and they are casting Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform UK party, as Neo from The Matrix.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you don't know who Nigel Farage is, uh he was really the architect of the uh the Brexit campaign uh that triumphed back in 2016.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um very much a figure of the right, very much a figure who wants to control immigration, and somebody who is accused fairly routinely for being racist, um, either fairly or unfairly.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna get into that in in in this uh video.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: But here is an AI-generated meme in which Nigel Farage is cast as Neo, Neo Farage, right?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: And there are accusations that are coming towards him, and what does he do about it?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: Let's have a look.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: Keir Starmer is Agent Smith.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: And they're shooting at him all these accusations, and the foremost accusation, racist, fascist, blah, Trump, blah, blah, right?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: This is this is a reform UK kind of uh video or a s from a supporter.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: And he says no.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: And there's Neo Farage picking off the racist accusation.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: What does he do with it?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: Just shrugs it off, right?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: And then Okay, he is the one.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, Neo Farage is the one, and that was the great hope on election day for uh the Reform UK supporters, and they got four million votes.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: There he is, taking on Kirstama with his superior kung fu skills.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that's enough silliness.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but the idea that the accusations of racism can simply be brushed aside is uh an interesting phenomenon, and it's something that we're more used to seeing on the right of politics.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: So ever since Brexit, there has been a big conversation about immigration in the UK, and those who have wanted more controlled borders have had to reckon with the idea of racism.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: Are we just keeping out people who are not like us?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: And there are Christian reasons and there are post-Christian reasons to challenge a nation to be generous towards the refugee, towards the immigrants.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: The Christian reasons should be obvious.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: There's the Quartet of the Vulnerable that biblical scholars speak of when it comes especially to the Old Testament prophets and to the Psalms and even the Old Testament legislation was always looking out for these four groups widows, orphans, the poor, and the immigrant, the foreigner, the alien, the stranger, the refugee.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: Those four, the quartet of the vulnerable, were especially looked out for in the Old Covenant, and of course, Jesus Christ comes and takes the side of the marginalized and the weak and the poor, and he says to his church in Matthew 25, go and serve the least and the last and the lost, and in serving them you serve me.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's a real compassion ethic right at the heart of Christianity, Old and New Testament, and ever since then.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: So there's there's a there's a Christian reason to have compassion on the refugee.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um we'll we'll get into other arguments about immigration in a second.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: The post-Christian argument for immigration is don't be a Nazi, right?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: Instead of exiling and executing the foreigner and the stranger and the marginalized and the Romani populations and as well as the Jews, as well as homosexuals, as well as the disabled.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um we are to include them, right?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: And don't be a Nazi, right?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: And Oscar Schindler is, you know, collecting together the Jews and getting them out into safe havens.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: And don't you want to be a safe haven, right?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Don't you want to be more like Schindler than you do like Hitler?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's that's kind of the post-Christian argument that is pro-immigration.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: But on the other side, those who want to control immigration can make some excellent points that are not racist at all, right?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's a Christian argument to control immigration, just as there's a Christian argument to control hospitality.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: I think the question of immigration sits within a broader question of hospitality.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think Christians are to be hospitable to the stranger and we are to be sacrificially hospitable, go way above and beyond in terms of welcoming the stranger.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: And in our homes, we are to go way above and beyond in the welcoming of the stranger.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I think Christians really have stepped up when it comes to Ukrainian refugees, for instance, or or serving Syrian refugees when they come.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: Certainly in our town, our church has taken multiple, multiple Ukrainian refugees.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: We have a the there's a Syrian refugee cafe in our town.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of our church members are deeply involved in teaching English as a foreign language and setting up Citizens Advice Bureau type charities to help the refugees that have come, especially from Ukraine, especially from Syria.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: And many of my friends have simply taken whole families of refugees into their households in order to be radically hospitable.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: But listen, you can be radically inclusive of that one Ukrainian family and say yes to them for the sake of Jesus.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: But you've also got two teenage children who are really struggling right now, and saying yes to a second Ukrainian family might not be the most compassionate thing.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: You are called to compassion, you are called to love, you are called to sacrifice for the vulnerable.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I think everybody can understand that saying yes to one refugee family can be the Christian thing to do, and saying no to the second family is also Christian.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's not semi-Christian to only have one and not the second, right?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think there's a there's a Christian argument, absolutely, for saying for the sake of hospitality and motivated by compassion and love, there are reasons to say yes to some people, and there are reasons to say no and affirm no to some people.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: There absolutely are.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: So there is a Christian case to be made to control immigration.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: There is a Christian case to be made to stop the boats, okay?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: In in terms of small boats coming over the channel to get into England.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the trauma of those crossings is just unconscionable.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: I've got a friend who's a human rights lawyer who his whole caseload is basically unaccompanied minors from places like Syria and Afghanistan and Sudan and all over the world.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: And the the trauma of those boat crossings is something that will live with with these kids for the rest of their lives.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: And he is desperately keen to support refugees.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's his whole life's work.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: And he wants to stop the boats.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: He doesn't want to stop the boats by threatening people with deportation to Rwanda and all those sorts of things.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: But he very much on a pro-immigration side of things wants to stop the boats.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: Christians on every side of the immigration debate want to be compassionate.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_02: But then on the Nigel Farage side of things, the week before Brexit, there was this famous poster that was released, the Breaking Point poster, where there is an image of a lot of refugees making their way across Europe, making their way towards England, and, you know, presenting them as a horde that's about to invade, and we're at breaking point, we must break free of the EU and take back control.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: And this poster triggered both Christian and post-Christian reactions.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of people were highlighting the similarity to propaganda from Nazi Germany.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so Nicholas Sturgeon called it disgusting.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: Labour Party MP Ivet Cooper said, just when you thought Leave campaigners couldn't stoop any lower, they were now they're now exploiting the misery of the Syrian refugee crisis in the most dishonest and immoral way.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: But it wasn't just those on the left that felt very uneasy by this poster.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: Boris Johnson said, This is not my campaign, this is not my politics.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: Michael Gove said, when I saw that poster, I shuddered.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: George Osborne said that this is whipping up uh sentiment, and it reminded him of literature of the 1930s.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: And it also made people think of the Good Samaritan, right?
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: It made people think of the Hitler thing, it made people think of the Bible thing, right?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the Good Samaritan is a stranger and an alien, and if he was compassionate towards us, shouldn't we not be compassionate to the stranger and to the outsider and all that kind of stuff?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so immigration becomes very heated, and what we're used to is we're used to those who want to control the borders more being accused of racism, but then like Neo Farage shrugging it off and saying, Well, of course I'm not racist and flicking that away.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_02: What's interesting to me is that a week prior to this video coming out, there was a figure on the left.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: David Tennant was receiving an award for being an LGBT plus celebrity ally.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: And this is what he said in his speech.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: I suppose if I'm honest, I'm a little depressed by the fact that acknowledging that everyone has the right to be who they want to be and live their life how they want to live it, as long as they're not hurting anyone else, should merit any kind of special award or special mention because it's common sense, isn't it?
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's it is it is human decency.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: We shouldn't live in a world where that is worth remarking on.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: However, until we wake up and Kemi Badanoch doesn't exist anymore, I don't wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: So that received a great storm of criticism from lots of people, whether they're on the left or the right.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of feminists were saying, Why are you telling a woman to shut up?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then Kemi Badenok herself, uh, who was a cabinet minister and was the equalities minister in the Conservatives, she just tweeted and said, I will not shut up, I will not be silenced by men who prioritize applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology, he can't see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: So here we have some intersectional concerns.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: David Tennant is on the left, he's a celebrity, he's white, he's a male, and you might think of those in terms of the privileges that that David Tenet possesses.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: Kemi Badenock is a woman, she's gender critical, she's black.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: And interestingly, Kemi Badenock says, Well, it's interesting, David, I'm the only black woman in the cabinet.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: Why didn't you tell anyone else to shut up?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: Why didn't you tell any other gender critical feminist to shut up?
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was me, a black woman.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: Is race a relevant factor in why you singled me out, David Tennant?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then of course, back on the David Tennant side of things, um, he he hasn't responded to this.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: She has asked for uh an apology.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not aware that he has apologized.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: If he has, please do correct me in the in the comments.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: But a typical response on David Tennant's side has been to say, oh, don't be so silly.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's got nothing to do with race.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so, in one sense, we've got David Tennant being neo tenant, uh, picking up a racist accusation and kind of flicking it away.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Ah, but at this point you're thinking, aren't accusations of racism sometimes cynically leveraged and simply used to silence people you don't like?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, they are.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes they're real.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: And this is part of the breakdown of the post-Christian West, that you have a post-Christian left and a post-Christian right, and they still use some of the language of the kingdom, but they don't want the king anymore.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: And the fruits of the kingdom that Jesus has grown have become values that the culture recognizes, but those values detached from the Christian story and detached from one another simply become abstract virtues and can then become cudgels that we use to beat our political opponents with.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so the left can accuse the right of bigotry and racism, and the right can accuse the left of bigotry and racism.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: And we no longer have a richer story that actually weaves together what post-Christianity has torn asunder.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so we arrive back where Tom Holland had us.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, Thomas Thoroughgood here, media producer at Speak Life.
• 21:34
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• 21:38
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• 21:44
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• 21:49
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• 21:56
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• 22:00
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• 22:04
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• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, back to the podcast.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: One of the features we will see as we get further and further from institutional Christianity is that accusations of bigotry, of inequality, of cruelty, and of racism will have less and less purchase.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: And this interview with Tom Holland was from 2019.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think in the last five years we have seen that yes, indeed, members of the right have shrugged off accusations of racism.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: But now members of the left are shrugging off accusations of racism as well.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: And now we're all discovering that don't be a Nazi is not a sufficiently robust moral view of the world by which we can navigate the complexities of modern life.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: And all that brings me to uh an interview that I did with Tom Holland in 2022, where he lays out the three possible futures for the West.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: It was a conversation held at Oak Hill in North London, and uh Tom Holland is there, and uh Paul Vanderclay is there, and I ask him to put his futurist hat on and figure out where things are heading.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: Here's what he says.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_05: I think that there are you know there are various kinds of possibilities, and one is absolutely that uh Christianity has played its part.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_05: It's kind of like the you know the rocket booster droppers through the atmosphere, and now liberalism can just you know sail its merry way on through the inky vastness of space.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_05: You know, maybe a million.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so maybe so maybe that's fine.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_05: Or or maybe um you know, uh as basically Nietzsche argued, you can't really have uh Christian values without Christian belief.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_05: And in the long run, um, you know, if you're if you're not watering the soil, the bloom will will fade.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_05: Um and and I think and the implications of that would be very alarming.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_05: You know, and we have you know, we have seen what that might mean.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_05: We've seen what that might mean.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_05: Because we've we've we've we've fascism was all about the utter rejection, not just of institutional Christianity, as the French Revolution was and the Russian Revolution, but about the rejection of its core values, so the value that there is no Greek or Jew.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_05: Of course the Nazis completely thought there were differences between the Greek and Jew, and the and and um and the rejection of the idea that the strong have a duty of care to the weak, and that there's value in weakness, the Nazis obviously completely rejected that.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_05: And I think the shock and the horror of that was so intense that we, as a society, are now kind of living off the capital of that.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_05: But it may be that that will fade, and and and the kind of I think the kind of natural instinct of humans, which is to is to worship the strong, will will come back in, and particularly if things start to go really really wrong with the economy and with you know, I mean, go wrong than they already already is.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_05: Um we may enter very dark times from the from a Christian perspective.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: So those are the first two options.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh maybe just Christianity morphs into progressive liberationism, and that's the successor ideology, and it takes over and it sheds all of its Christian baggage and just becomes progressivism.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's one option.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: Another option is uh just a lashback against that, and nature reasserts itself, and the strong becomes worshipped.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that trans issue that was behind David Tennant's comments, uh it it exists quite interestingly on the border between uh that progressive liberationism and the reassertion of nature.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: Because what trans ideology says is it doesn't matter nature, forget biology, you can choose to identify in this completely different way that is divorced from biology.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so that that kind of represents the the very post-Christian left position.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: But there can be a simple smack down, no, shut up, you are your biology.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: Shut up, you are your biology.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: And there is no such thing as gender identity, and there can be a purely nature-based reaction to trans ideology that is not necessarily Christian, right?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of my non-Christian friends think that trans ideology just goes off the deep end, but they they do so because they think that gender identity sounds to them a lot like a soul.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: And we don't believe in souls, do we?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: Gender identity divorced from biological reality.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: That just sounds like what supernatural people believe.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not a supernaturalist.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: I've got atheist friends who are very much skeptical of trans ideology, but not for Christian reasons, not for Christian reasons at all.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it's possible to be anti-trans and not to be Christian in the slightest.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: So there is an interesting dispute between those who go more with grace and those who go more with nature.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: And this is kind of characteristic of these two positions.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: There's the progressive liberationism, what this side would call the woke, right?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's the anti-woke.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: And they kind of go back and forth, the woke and the anti-woke.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: Where has that come from?
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: That's come from Christianity.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's Tom's third option.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: We'll get to the third option in a second.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: But the reason why we split into these two camps is because Christianity has been holding together nature and grace for thousands of years.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: Christianity is all about the integration of nature and grace.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus Christ is the Word who is before all things, who took flesh and dwelt among us.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: John chapter 1, verse 14.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: So Christianity is this integration of the spirit and the flesh.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus Christ himself, the God man, integrates the world as it ought to be and the world as it actually is.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: The Christian story really begins with Adam and he's formed from the dust, but he goes the way of all flesh in selfishness and death and perishing.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: And God does not cut loose Adam and the created order in order to have a spiritual life up here.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's called Gnosticism.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: No, God doesn't do that.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_02: The second Adam, Jesus Christ, comes to take humanity to himself, to take us seriously in all our biological reality, in all our perishing reality, in all our embodiment.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: He becomes sin to take sin where it belongs and rise up bodily as the integration of God and man, spirit and flesh, heaven and earth.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: The world as the way it ought to be, and the world as it actually is.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: And Christianity has long been the integration of these two things.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: In a post-Christian society, we are cut loose, and there are there are those that go with the grace side of things, and it's it's not about my biology, it's not about natural reality, it's about the way it's it's the world as it ought to be.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it breeds a certain kind of utopianism, it's uh breeds a certain kind of belief in progress that is just very esoterically defined.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's a a belief in compassion that doesn't actually want to roll its sleeves up and actually grasp the nettle of what compassion looks like in an embodied kind of life.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: And that side of things, the so-called grace side of things, takes with it all those kinds of intuitions about compassion and empathy and progress and freedom and the individual choice to express who you most truly are within yourself.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: Doesn't matter what the world says, it's all about the soul.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: But the more that gets divorced from nature, the more the nature side of things just says, shut up.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: Okay?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: Power is what's important at the end of the day.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: And the more they preach, and and they do preach, both sides preach, but the more they preach a very utopian ideal for what progress looks like.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: In this disembodied soulish kind of realm, the more it starts to sound like Gnosticism that is very uncomfortable with the way of the flesh.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the more the nature people look on and just say no.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: Just no.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: The more the anti-woke come along and they just say no.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: And what they end up saying no to is that they just end up saying no to all compassion and equality and freedom and progress and the individual soul and all of that.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it and it does just boil down to a will to power, and they become incredibly Nietzschean.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: But the reason why option number two become very Nietzschean is very much related to the reason why option number one becomes so utopian and divorced from things.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: What do we need?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: We need the integration of nature and grace, of heaven and earth, of God and man.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: We need Jesus Christ, and that's kind of where Tom ends up going.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_05: But the third option is to make a virtue of the fact that, you know, the Nietzsche in a point that you can't really have Christian, you know, that these values are all fundamentally theological.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_05: If you want to believe in human rights, the point will come when, and I think you can see that already happening in India, say in Turkey, where people will turn around and say, What about that?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_05: You know, or the secular or anything like that.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, you know, these are just kind of mad Western imports.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_05: Um and people who want to defend that will have to start looking at the the history, the origins of these things, and that may well lead them to come back to the church.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, that's certainly the path that I've been on is you know, I I recognizing that these beliefs that are important to me, that the rocket fuel for these beliefs is not what I thought they were.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_05: And I want that rocket fuel therefore to be as strong as it possibly can be.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_05: And I I I you know, maybe I mean there's always the risk of identifying your own feelings with the broad sweep of history.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_05: So I don't want to do that.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_05: But I think I bet but it may well be that that what I'm going through is something that lots of people are going through because we're all experiencing the same kind of thing.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_05: So I I so maybe it won't maybe maybe it will, you know, maybe Christianity will die, as John Lennon said.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_05: Uh maybe it will mutate into something the worship of the strong, uh, the validation of differences between you know the abandonment of the idea that that all uh human beings have an equal value, um, or maybe the sense of strain that these values and beliefs are coming under will prompt a return to the source, yeah.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_05: Um and and a kind of recognition that actually the Christian story is the best version of all these other stories that are starting to emerge from it.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: So option three is a return to the source, a source of that vision for compassion and equality, and all the nations gather together at the table, at the feast in the kingdom.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um there is a source to all of that, and it's not what Tom Holland thought it was.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Tom Holland thought that the source for that is just simple secular humanism, just rationalist philosophy can get us there.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: It clearly can't.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus Christ has been giving us this vision for thousands of years.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe we need to return to him, and he started going back to church.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of people have started going back to church.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: So is that option three?
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the future of the West?
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_02: So what do you think?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think option A, we're gonna blast off into progressive liberationism and um David Tennant will win the day?
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um do you think we'll snap back to uh a worship of the strong and that Nietzsche will win the day?
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that Christian revival will happen?
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_02: And just as Justin Briley says, there's a surprising rebirth of belief in God and the trickle will become a flood and the church will be revived in our day.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh which is it?
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: A, B, or C?
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to know what I think?
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think option D, all of the above, all of the above is going to happen.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: All of the above is happening.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, and it's a mess, and it's going to be a mess.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_02: Will there be Christian revival in our day?
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: I can totally see that happening.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_02: I can totally see that happening, and I pray for that happening.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe we are seeing the first trickle of a future flood.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: That might be happening.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: Option C in our lifetime, Christian revival.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: Bring it on.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think Christian revival is just what Christians think might happen.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think more and more people are starting to think that we might have a return to the source.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: So, yes, will C happen?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, C will happen.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: Will option A happen?
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: Progressive liberationism, and we blast off into the stratosphere, completely divorced from nature, completely divorced from the Christian story.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, yes, that is happening.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to 2024.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and do I think option B, will there be a snapback to the default nature of the flesh in which power rules everything?
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yes, I think that is happening, and I and I think Christians need to not be naive about option B.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you are co-belligerent with option B when it comes to trans issues, and you think that certain people who are basically in option B are saying sane things about trans ideology, whereas people in option A are saying insane things about trans ideology.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: You might be right about that.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: But don't throw your lot in with option B because option B also will erode everything about human rights, right?
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: If it's just about nature, then they don't actually fundamentally have a grounding for believing in the inviolable worth and dignity of all people, of human rights, of equality, of compassion, of freedom, of progress, but they have no substantial reason for maintaining that.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: And that therefore is a very dystopian future, just as option A is a very dystopian future.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: But it will all happen together.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: It will be a mess.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think people in the UK where I'm broadcasting from will go to prison for being Christian in my lifetime.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: It might happen quite soon.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I think Christian revival can break out.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think all those things might well happen all at once.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's a mess.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: These are the futures of Christianity.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what's that saying?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a curse, you know, may you live in interesting times.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it seems like we're living in interesting times and there's curse to it, but there's also real blessing to it.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: So look, if you're a Christian listening to this, um make sure that your views on all these issues, whether it's immigration or trans issues or whatever it is, that they're fundamentally Christian.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: That they're not just um progressive left-wing post-Christian beliefs or conservative right-wing post-Christian beliefs.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: Because that's what my social media feed is full of.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure your social media is full of essentially post-Christian progressive views and post-Christian conservative views.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: What is distinctively and robustly Christian about our position on immigration, for instance?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_02: Not not just slogans, but actually robustly, biblically, let's read from Genesis to Revelation and get a real sense on how we be hospitable.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: What does that mean domestically?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: What does that mean for the church?
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: What does that mean for the state?
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_02: Let's let's think theologically about these things, not just reactively.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: Whether your reaction is just the vibe of compassion, or your reaction is the vibe of breaking point, right?
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_02: A and B are just bringing vibes to you.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: Let's make sure we're grounded in the scriptures on these things.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: Same same thing on trans.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: You you might have a vibe of thinking, okay, the trans stuff is clearly nonsense.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um but what is a biblical view of gender?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: And is gender the same as biological sex in the Bible?
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, do a study from Genesis to Revelation, see what you think.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: You won't end up in the same place as Stonewall or David Tennant, but you also might not end up in the same place as certain gender critical theorists end up either.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: You might actually have a Christian view of these things.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um we need to be very distinctively option C.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: We need to very distinctively say, I refuse the dilemma, and be a place of refuge for the burnt out A's and the burnt out B's, because C is genuinely the source of these things.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: But C, the Christian church, the scriptures, Jesus Christ is truly where life is to be found, life in all its abundance.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: So Christians drill down into the Christian thing, because I think the Christian thing is the future, even as these other two futures fight it out in the public sphere.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's if you're a Christian, if you're not a Christian, why don't you dive into the Christian story?
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: We've got a great way for you to do it.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's called 321, go to 321course.com.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: It'll ask you for your email address and a login.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's just so we can track your progress, because it's a proper course that takes you through in eight sessions the fundamentals of Christianity.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_02: It takes you through Jesus' vision for God, Jesus' vision for the world, Jesus' vision for you.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_02: See things again the way Jesus sees them, and you might just start to see you are at the source of this truly civilization building life vision.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_02: And why don't you subscribe to the channel so that we can see you on the next one?
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: God bless.